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Showing posts with the label Film | The Guardian

‘David Lynch altered our brains’: fellow directors, friends and fans remember a titan of cinema

His unique, twisted visions shocked and seduced generations of filmgoers. Paul Schrader, Abel Ferrara, Coralie Fargeat and more pay tribute • Ranked: David Lynch’s films and TV shows • Cigarettes were Lynch’s magic wand – and his undoing Paul Schrader, director Continue reading... from Film | The Guardian https://ift.tt/GMHZC9Q via IFTTT

‘David Lynch altered our brains’: fellow directors, friends and fans remember a titan of cinema

His unique, twisted visions shocked and seduced generations of filmgoers. Paul Schrader, Abel Ferrara, Coralie Fargeat and more pay tribute • Ranked: David Lynch’s films and TV shows • Cigarettes were Lynch’s magic wand – and his undoing Paul Schrader, director Continue reading... from Film | The Guardian https://ift.tt/GMHZC9Q via IFTTT

Trump names Mel Gibson, Jon Voight and Sylvester Stallone as Hollywood ‘special ambassadors’

Duties remain unclear for the three actors, who are Trump supporters and are no strangers to controversy Donald Trump has tapped three of his longstanding celebrity supporters – Mel Gibson, Jon Voight and Sylvester Stallone – to purportedly make Hollywood “stronger than ever before” as “special ambassadors” to the movie capital. The president-elect announced the new appointments, whose duties remain unclear, on Truth Social on Thursday, four days before his inauguration. “It is my honor to announce Jon Voight, Mel Gibson, and Sylvester Stallone, to be Special Ambassadors to a great but very troubled place, Hollywood, California,” he wrote. Continue reading... from Film | The Guardian https://ift.tt/E7ULzir via IFTTT

Justin Baldoni sues Blake Lively and Ryan Reynolds for $400m

It Ends With Us director accuses Hollywood power couple of seeking to ‘destroy’ him with false claims in latest filing Justin Baldoni has sued Blake Lively and Ryan Reynolds, claiming that the couple hijacked the production of It Ends With Us , the hit summer 2024 film he directed and sought to “destroy” him with false allegations of sexual harassment. In the suit, filed in the southern district of New York, Baldoni and his publicists accuse the couple of civil extortion, defamation and invasion of privacy, to the tune of $400m in damages. Continue reading... from Film | The Guardian https://ift.tt/pzlmwsQ via IFTTT

One of Them Days review – Keke Palmer and SZA take a bumpy but fun ride

The stars shine in bright and boisterous new buddy comedy, executive produced by Issa Rae, that only stumbles when it leans into cartoon I will be the first to say: I miss Insecure, which left a dynamic duo-sized hole in the TV landscape since it concluded in December 2021. Issa Rae’s era-shaping series was about many things – the Black community in south Los Angeles, the diversity pablums of the 2010s, millennial dating, for starters – but at its core, it was a seminal portrait of longstanding, complex female friendship in one’s late 20s, the kind forged by time, ridiculous escapades and plenty of meaty conflict for viewers to hash out at the proverbial water cooler. The shadow of the erstwhile HBO series looms large over One of Them Days, a boisterous new buddy comedy executive produced by Rae and penned by the former show writer Syreeta Singleton. Also set in south Los Angeles – albeit on one sweltering, no-good first of the month, when the rent is due and tenancy is in flux – One...

William Tell review – limbs fly as Claes Bang’s medieval hero rallies a Swiss army

A classy cast plays it straight in this enjoyably daft action epic about the crossbow sharpshooter forced to shoot an apple from his son’s head Nick Hamm lets rip with some gonzo Game of Thrones craziness in his retelling of the William Tell myth with a blue-chip cast. Limbs get chopped off in a style I haven’t seen since the days of Monty Python’s Black Knight. It’s the story of the 14th-century Swiss folk hero and crossbow artist, a peaceful farmer and huntsman who has endured continual tyranny and humiliation at the hands of his Austrian Habsburg masters, and finally rises up against them on a coward-of-the-county basis; the flashpoint being made to shoot an apple from his son’s head for the sneering amusement of the Habsburg nobleman Gessler. It’s adapted by Hamm from the 1804 play by Schiller (not many action movies can boast that), but gives Tell a Muslim wife and adopted son that Schiller didn’t imagine; a flashback reveals this to be the result of Tell’s experiences in the Cr...

William Tell review – limbs fly as Claes Bang’s medieval hero rallies a Swiss army

A classy cast plays it straight in this enjoyably daft action epic about the crossbow sharpshooter forced to shoot an apple from his son’s head Nick Hamm lets rip with some gonzo Game of Thrones craziness in his retelling of the William Tell myth with a blue-chip cast. Limbs get chopped off in a style I haven’t seen since the days of Monty Python’s Black Knight. It’s the story of the 14th-century Swiss folk hero and crossbow artist, a peaceful farmer and huntsman who has endured continual tyranny and humiliation at the hands of his Austrian Habsburg masters, and finally rises up against them on a coward-of-the-county basis; the flashpoint being made to shoot an apple from his son’s head for the sneering amusement of the Habsburg nobleman Gessler. It’s adapted by Hamm from the 1804 play by Schiller (not many action movies can boast that), but gives Tell a Muslim wife and adopted son that Schiller didn’t imagine; a flashback reveals this to be the result of Tell’s experiences in the Cr...

‘A kitten on heat with a racy physique’: the mystery of the bloodcurdling cat screech used in hundred of movies

From Babe to Pet Sematary to Toy Story, the same furious yowl crops up in film after film. So who was the cat and who made the recording? We solve the enigma of the ‘Wilhelm Miaow’ There is a movie star you’ve never heard of, but whom you’ve almost certainly heard . She’s in Toy Story and Babe, How the Grinch Stole Christmas and Home Alone 3 . You can catch her in Les Misérables. And if you’re a fan of being frightened, she’s also in End of Days and Pet Sematary . Once you’re familiar with her work, you start to hear her everywhere. Picture the scene: a frustrated character flings something, possibly a boot, off-camera. Perhaps we hear a bin lid clattering to the ground, and then it comes: the sound of a shocked cat screeching ferociously. You may have heard of the Wilhelm Scream . In the 1953 western The Charge at Feather River , a character named Private Wilhelm loudly yelled “Argh!” after being shot in the thigh with an arrow. This yell subsequently became an overused sound eff...

‘Long way to go’ on gender parity in film and TV industry, Bafta chair says

Sara Putt cites lack of access and retention in an increasingly precarious industry There is still a “long way to go” to achieve gender parity in the film and television industry, Sara Putt, the chair of Bafta has said, before the nominees’ announcement this week. The talent agent and producer, who took over as chair of Bafta in 2023, said the low representation of women in the awards’ most prestigious categories was reflective of a lack of access to and retention in an industry that has become increasingly precarious. Continue reading... from Film | The Guardian https://ift.tt/bsXDME9 via IFTTT

Magic Beach: how the beloved picture book became a spell-binding animation

Alison Lester’s 90s bestseller now has a big-screen adaptation from the director of The Dry, featuring 10 animated adventures by 10 different artists Two and a half hours south-east of Melbourne, in Walkerville South, lies one of Australia’s most beloved beaches. For the last 35 years it has enchanted children as the setting of Alison Lester ’s bestselling picture book, Magic Beach – so, when it came to a film adaptation, an on-location shoot was a no-brainer. “It casts a spell over you down there,” says the film’s director, Robert Connolly. While he was filming a scene, he recalls, one of the producer, Kate Laurie, “tapped me on the shoulder and said ‘that way’. We spun the camera around … and a pod of dolphins passed.” Continue reading... from Film | The Guardian https://ift.tt/lKY1sRS via IFTTT

Den of Thieves 2: Pantera review – Gerard Butler’s fun, flirty action bromance sequel

There’s an intriguing chemistry between the actor and the charming O’Shea Jackson Jr in another brash yet hugely entertaining Heat-aping thriller Aside from numbering among its fans the esteemed German arthouse stalwart Christian Petzold , 2018’s cops-and-robbbers potboiler Den of Thieves made a name for itself by doing a far more convincing impression of Michael Mann’s cinema than the many that have tried. Its daunting two-hour-twenty length leavened by the most playful, unpredictable performance of Gerard Butler’s career, it earned every one of those minutes on merit of its scrupulously detail-oriented approach to the heist, with a focus on the nitty-gritty of process that made Mann’s masterpiece Heat both credible and engrossing. The magic-hour moments of pensiveness on a pristine Angeleno beach may have laid the homage on a little thick, but first-time feature director Christian Gudegast had the moves to back it up, his muscular film-making style serving the pleasures of its genr...

‘Every day is 24 hours of panic to just get out the door’: Jesse Eisenberg on self-indulgence, candid aunts and his Oscar-tipped Holocaust comedy

The writer-director of A Real Pain and co-stars Kieran Culkin, Jennifer Grey and Will Sharpe talk about being overcome by generational trauma while making Oscar season’s funniest film Jesse Eisenberg and Kieran Culkin are in complete agreement. People being more open about everyday anguish is a good thing. Absolutely. One hundred per cent. Not them, though. They will continue to button up. “I know my pain is unexceptional,” says Eisenberg, words clattering out of him like a runaway train, “so I don’t feel the need to burden everybody with it. I have OCD and general anxiety disorder and bad things happen to me, but I’ll never talk about them because I don’t want that kind of attention.” Continue reading... from Film | The Guardian https://ift.tt/gVDrwKJ via IFTTT

Bank of Dave 2: The Loan Ranger review – Rory Kinnear files a solid return as the bloke from Burnley

The businessman with a heart takes on crooked payday lenders in this predictable sequel that gets by on its heartfelt performances It won no prizes for subtlety, but cheerful, victory-of-the-underdog comedy Bank of Dave featured a stonking lead performance by Rory Kinnear as Dave Fishwick. He’s the Burnley businessman who made millions selling vans then took a stand against fatcat bankers by opening his own community bank, the Bank of Dave, in 2011. Now Kinnear is back for a sequel, this time taking on crooked payday lenders . Like the first film, Bank of Dave 2 is predictable and cliché-ridden but gets by on likable, heartfelt performances, and the knowledge that in real life some of this stuff actually happened. The film picks up two years after the original. The “Bank of Dave” on the high street in Burnley is still going strong – lending to ordinary people who struggle to secure loans from bigger banks. Dave is outraged to discover the sharp practices of payday lenders targeting...

Malcolm Le Grice obituary

Explorer of the properties of film whose work was seen on Channel 4 and taken up by Tate Modern In 1970 Malcolm Le Grice made the seven-minute film Berlin Horse . There is no narrative: original 8mm footage of a horse led around a yard in circles is looped and transformed by adding pure spectrum colour filters through the film step-printer in the London Film-makers’ Co-op (LFMC) workshop. It is accompanied by a soundtrack that Brian Eno had made from guitar chords, with a delay pattern that parallels the visual loops, echoing the use of loops by the US minimalist composers Philip Glass and Steve Reich. Shown at LFMC screenings and film festivals, it went on to make a mark in popular culture through inspiring the look of, and being occasionally glimpsed in, the music video for Catch the Sun by the indie band Doves. Both can be found on YouTube. Continue reading... from Film | The Guardian https://ift.tt/xMW3R07 via IFTTT

From F1 to Mickey 17: the 2025 films Guardian writers are most excited about

New films from Paul Thomas Anderson and Kelly Reichardt with stars including George Clooney, Michaela Coel and Cate Blanchett will premiere this year Jim Jarmusch prefers to work at an unhurried pace, but perhaps it’s no coincidence that his longest inter-picture hiatus has followed the most tepidly reviewed release of his career. Soon, it will have been six years since his low-key zombie comedy The Dead Don’t Die was met with a resounding shrug at Cannes, and it would seem that the coolest cucumber in American independent cinema will respond by paring down to basics. No more fun and games with genre, just a “very subtle”, “very quiet”, “funny”, and “sad” family affair gathering Cate Blanchett, Charlotte Rampling, Adam Driver, Tom Waits and a pink-haired Vicky Krieps around the dinner table. But if it’s going to be anything like his last film dealing with parents and children – the hangdog, allegorical Broken Flowers – then we can still expect the rhyming repetitions, eclectic grab ba...

The Brutalist is anointed – but key hopefuls locked out at curveball Golden Globes | Peter Bradshaw

Brady Corbet’s meaty drama looks likely to become this year’s Oppenheimer but the acting categories were full of the unexpected Full list of Golden Globes 2025 winners In the end, these Globes surprised us, uncontroversially rewarding obvious quality in some categories but passing over other huge achievements like Payal Kapadia’s All We Imagine As Light or Timothée Chalamet’s performance as Bob Dylan . (And entirely ignoring RaMell Ross’s masterly Nickel Boys still hurts.) The megamusical Wicked , which had been winning hearts and minds and various levels of grudging and ungrudging acceptance ( including from your correspondent ) did not walk off with the award for best musical or comedy as we all expected, instead sent away with the Globe for “cinematic achievement”, the rather strange award instituted to acknowledge box office whoppers (including those in the now dowdy superhero genre) which otherwise get critical noses turned up at them, and for which the box office numbers th...

Street Trash review – grisly remake of cult horror sends exploding corpses to South Africa

A gang of homeless misfits fight for survival in this dull reboot of the 1987 American horror film This is less a remake than an echo of the 1987 American cult horror flick of the same title. As in the previous film, it contains lashings of melted flesh courtesy of practical effects, and a plot engine wherein evil powers are trying to kill off the homeless. This time though the action has been transposed from urban America to a dystopian Cape Town, South Africa, where there is seemingly no middle class: just propertied rich folk making jokes about crypto currency over their phones … and everyone else. The grubby majority live on the streets, picking through trash to survive. Assorted gangs get into internecine squabbles with each other when it’s pretty obvious the real foes are the rich. That goes especially for Mayor Mostert (Warrick Grier, a cackle and a hoot) who has devised an airborne poison that liquifies people after an especially icky prelude in which they grow brightly colou...

Demi Moore’s stellar second act: how the star was finally given her due at 62

Body-horror movie The Substance has finally given Moore the acclaim she has worked for – after 45 years of being recognised for anything but her acting Maybe she was just acting, but Demi Moore seemed genuinely surprised to win a Golden Globe on Sunday night. “I’m just in shock right now,” she gasped. “I’ve been doing this a long time, like over 45 years, and this is the first time I’ve won anything as an actor.” It’s an odd thing to hear from a woman who has been one of the most famous actors on the planet for much of that 45 years. It reflects the fact that Moore has often been recognised for everything except her acting: her beauty, body, dress sense, salary, box office and love life. All of which makes her rehabilitation and recognition truly satisfying. In her acceptance speech, she spoke of having been branded a “popcorn actress” by a producer 30 years ago – commercially successful but unworthy of acclaim. No wonder she closed her speech celebrating the award “as a marker of m...

The Brutalist, Emilia Pérez and Shōgun triumph at the Golden Globes

The low-budget immigration saga and the Netflix crime musical picked up major film wins while the historical epic dominated television awards The full list of winners In pictures: the red carpet The Brutalist, Emilia Pérez and Shōgun won big at the 82nd Golden Globes, the unofficial kick-off to this year’s awards season. The low-budget epic The Brutalist , a drama telling the story of a Holocaust survivor turned immigrant architect in the US, won three awards: best film in the drama category, best actor for Adrien Brody and best director for the actor-turned-film-maker Brady Corbet. At the end of his speech, Corbet paid tribute to the film-maker Jeff Baena, who died this week . Continue reading... from Film | The Guardian https://ift.tt/d8Vy9np via IFTTT

Golden Globes 2025: the full list of winners

All the winners from the 82nd Golden Globes ceremony from both film and television Golden Globes 2025 – live updates In pictures: Golden Globes red carpet Anora Challengers Emilia Pérez – WINNER A Real Pain The Substance Wicked Continue reading... from Film | The Guardian https://ift.tt/erOugb5 via IFTTT

Golden Globes 2025: the winners, the losers, the red carpet – live!

This year’s awards season kicks off with big screen frontrunners such as The Brutalist, Wicked and Conclave, while on the small screen, Shōgun and The Bear lead the way Golden Globes 2025: who will win and who should win the film awards? Speaking of the menswear, what better place to start than with The Bear actor and chef Matty Matheson? He has been lighting up red carpets not only with his looks but his poses, too. The cream and white is a brave choice ahead of a sit-down dinner, the trousers that look like they haven’t met an iron are very much on-trend and the arms spread wide are bringing the kind of energy we hope is a sign of things to come this year. Cate Blanchett has walked more red carpets than most people have had hot dinners – at past Golden Globes she has worn everything from custom Mary Katrantzou to Givenchy couture, Alexander McQueen and Jean Paul Gaultier. This outfit speaks to her Hollywood credentials – confident and seemingly riffing on the Oscars statuette. ...