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The Oscar winner plays a soldier turned world leader forced to fight back in Amazon’s simple, serviceable star vehicle Released just three months after the inauguration, geopolitical action thriller G20 was always going to have unavoidable resonance. While the shoot ended back in March last year, there must have been points during the post-production process when those involved wondered if their film – a rousing story of a Black female president taking charge – would coincide with a similar, albeit less schlocky, real world victory. But it wasn’t to be and instead the film has landed on Amazon at a far less inspiring time for America when a president has decided to destroy rather than save his country. Any links to be made from fiction to fact push Trump’s agenda closer to that of the bad guys, who aim to tank the global economy and stop a perceived US overspend of foreign aid. While there are moments that might unintentionally insist us to make the connection (lead villain expressin...

A startling novelty 30 years ago, the film’s now antique effects and strange anti-Orwell farmyard tale feel dated, but is still a quaintly comfortable place to visit Thirty years ago, a non-Disney talking-animal adventure became a big movie talking point. Babe, adapted from Dick King-Smith’s children’s book The Sheep-Pig, features an adorable piglet who is rescued from a brutally realistic-looking agribusiness breeding shed as his mum and siblings are taken off to be slaughtered; it is then rehomed in a quaintly old-fashioned farm with lots of different animals, situated in an uncanny-valley landscape of rolling green hills which looks like Olde England but where everyone speaks in an American accent. The lead human is grumpy cap-wearing Farmer Hoggett, played by James Cromwell, later to be hard-faced Captain Dudley Smith in LA Confidential and Prince Philip in Stephen Frears’ film The Queen. The little piglet does his best to fit in and finds his destiny when it looks as if he could ...

Faith-based entertainment is booming, thanks to a ready-made audience and the backing of the American right. The TV series The Chosen, with Jonathan Roumie playing Christ, claims to have reached more than a quarter of a billion viewers. And this is just the tip of the iceberg … If you’re looking for your own personal Jesus this Easter, you’ve never had it so good. Faith‑based entertainment is booming like never before, offering up myriad new screen Messiahs and resurrecting a few old ones. But if there’s a Christ for our times, it is surely Jonathan Roumie, the Irish-Arab-American star of the smash-hit biblical TV series The Chosen. Nine years ago, Roumie was just another struggling actor in Los Angeles, desperately seeking his big break. He was also a practising Catholic. One morning, as Roumie tells it, he prayed for divine intervention: “I literally said: ‘God, you take this from me. It’s in your hands now. It’s not up to me.’” Three months later, he was cast as Jesus in The Chose...

As a sober Australian man, I’ve battled the bottle and I’ve battled the boys. As Ted Kotcheff’s 1971 film knows, there’s no victory in either Get our weekend culture and lifestyle email Wake in Fright, the 1971 film-cum-anthropological study by Ted Kotcheff understands Australian men, it understands Australia’s drinking culture, and it understands the way those two things intersect – which is to say it understands games. Dick-measuring contests, arm-wrestling bouts, two-up, binge-drinking: Australian masculinity is a series of ongoing games with the promise that if you complete all of these contests you will be the winner – the mannest man. Of course, it’s an illusion: Australian men never really escape the playground rules of the handball court, which turn a swathe of casual interactions into high-stakes opportunities to prove ourselves. Continue reading... from Film | The Guardian https://ift.tt/jlNBdR4 via IFTTT

Prospect of seeing 1977 version of film on big screen had become holy grail for fans The force is finally with Star Wars fans long frustrated by director George’s Lucas’s alterations to the iconic space opera, with a rare screening of the original cut of the film in London this summer. The 1977 theatrical version of the film , in which Han Solo shot first and Jabba the Hutt was only mentioned by name, will be shown twice on the opening night of the British Film Institute (BFI)’s Film on Film festival on 12 June. Continue reading... from Film | The Guardian https://ift.tt/uJqZEL0 via IFTTT

Goggins and Affleck play Donnie and Joe Emerson, whose album wins acclaim decades after it was made, but it’s rather a mono drama Newcomer-fans of Walton Goggins, sharing gifs of his stunned expression in The White Lotus, might want a look at this interesting but flawed movie: a heartfelt but frustratingly ponderous true-life story from the music world in which Goggins stars with Casey Affleck. Donnie and Joe Emerson were two brothers from Washington State who self-recorded an album in their teen years in 1978 called Dreamin’ Wild; it bombed, leaving crippling debts for their poor dad (played by Beau Bridges), who’d taken out bank loans to build them a log-cabin recording studio – but the record is then rediscovered 30 years later by vinyl hipster connoisseurs who can hardly believe the Emerson boys’ untutored rock genius. The film insightfully shows how this deferred fame is not all good news; it has come too late for them really to enjoy it and Donnie (Affleck) has grown into a pri...

The famous author tells his son and their cat the story of Jesus in this mixed-bag family animation, voiced by an impressive cast This syrupy cartoon account of the life of Jesus (voiced by Oscar Isaac) is narrated, with consummate weirdness, by Charles Dickens (Kenneth Branagh). It’s in fact based on a story Dickens wrote for his children (and wasn’t published until 1934, decades after his death). The idea is that Dickens is telling the story of the New Testament to his young son Walter (Roman Griffin Davis) and Walter’s impish cat, explaining to the King Arthur-obsessed Walter how Jesus was the real King of Kings and all that. And so we see Walter and Charles, in their mid-19th-century garb, wandering through scenes of JC’s life nearly two thousand years earlier, from the nativity to the crucifixion – much like Scrooge and his spectral buddies in A Christmas Carol as they wander through past, present and future Christmases. It rather drags out what is already a pretty long running ...

Arash Rakhsha’s documentary follows two Kurdish friends just about getting by smuggling goods across the mountains In an immersive and sweeping debut feature, Kurdish film-maker Arash Rakhsha portrays the plight of his people with sheer cinematic poetry. Shot over six years, the film closely follows Hamid and Yasser, two Kurdish friends who work side by side as kolbars , smugglers of untaxed household goods across the Iran-Iraq border. Coloured in icy shades of blue, their lives are filled with terrifying dangers, yet there’s also space for warmth and camaraderie amid the fog of precariousness. Getting paid per kilogram, the pair haul heavy loads on their backs through treacherous terrain. One moment they are wading upstream, the next they are hiking through the steep, snowbound ranges of the Zagros mountains. The kolbars also rely on mules for transport, though this means they are easier to detect by the border patrols. Landmines – active souvenirs from the Iran-Iraq war – are also...

Murderous unicorns run amok in Alex Scharfman’s gory American horror that gleefully embraces a lo-fi aesthetic but lacks sufficient bite What if unicorns were badass? What if, rather than the twee, sparkly fairy creatures that distribute magic and glittery microplastic at kids’ themed birthday parties, unicorns were fearsome beasts with deranged amber eyes, huge tombstone teeth that could sever a man’s arm, and horns covered in the entrails of their victims like flesh pennants? It’s an appetising central premise. And this Paul Rudd and Jenna Ortega-starring horror comedy, produced by the achingly hip boutique studio A24, certainly delivers on the grisly, torso-skewering gore. Maybe the jokes could have been sharper, but at least the unicorns’ horns make their point. Killer unicorns are not an entirely novel concept. The ultraviolent 2022 cult feature animation Unicorn Wars – described by its director as “ Bambi meets Apocalypse Now meets the Bible” – pitted unicorns against teddy ...

Writer and director behind Taxi Driver and American Gigolo accused by former employee in lawsuit Paul Schrader , the writer of Taxi Driver and director of American Gigolo, has been accused in a lawsuit of sexually assaulting his former personal assistant, firing her when she wouldn’t acquiesce to advances and reneging on a settlement that was meant to keep the allegations confidential. The former assistant, identified in court documents as Jane Doe, sued the filmmaker and his production company on Thursday. She is seeking a judge’s order to enforce the agreement after Schrader said he couldn’t go through with it. The terms, including a monetary payment, were not disclosed. Continue reading... from Film | The Guardian https://ift.tt/0oE8qGa via IFTTT

The recent Bridget Jones sequel, a big hit at the UK box office, celebrates the romance between its middle-aged star and her gen-Z lover, but from Babygirl to The Mother, how do women on screen with younger partners usually fare? At this admittedly early stage of 2025, with all the noisy blockbusters of summer still ahead of us, the UK’s box-office report tells a nostalgic story. The year’s highest-grossing new release, raking in more than double its nearest rival, Captain America , is Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy – a sequel in which its American distributors had so little confidence that they booted it straight to streaming. Brits who missed it in cinemas can finally access it on VOD this week. The film itself is something of a pleasant surprise too: a tender-hearted, flannel-cosy romcom – easily the best in the series since the first, 2001’s Bridget Jones’s Diary – now suffused with the gentle melancholy of middle age. Age, of course, is a critical concern of this instalmen...

A man’s inability to feel pain comes in handy in this extravagantly gory bank heist caper Risk-averse San Diego assistant bank manager Nathan Caine (Jack Quaid) lives a cautious, cotton wool-wrapped life. It’s not that he’s afraid of getting hurt. Quite the opposite, since a rare genetic abnormality means he’s unable to feel pain. Rather, Nathan is concerned that because of his sensory quirk he risks inadvertently injuring himself. When the girl of his dreams, sparky fellow bank employee Sherry (Amber Midthunder), is abducted during a heist, and Nathan embarks on an off-the-cuff rescue mission, his unusual condition suddenly comes in handy. While Nathan may feel no pain, the audience certainly does: this is an amped-up, cartoonish blitzkrieg of ultraviolence and – fair warning – a bit of an endurance test if deep-fried fingers and snapped bones give you the ick. Directors Robert Olsen and Dan Berk take a sadistic glee in dreaming up extravagant horrors to inflict on their irrepressib...

Ruaridh Mollica is very good as Max, a freelance writer with a secret app life in prostitution, but Mikko Mäkelä’s film is not clear enough about his motivations Sex work as a window into human nature is a longstanding theme in cinema, from Kenji Mizoguchi’s Street of Shame to Chantal Akerman’s Jeanne Dielman, and onwards. It is intensified here by the fact that the protagonist Max (Ruaridh Mollica), who mines his side-hustle escort work for material, is also a writer. But this uneasy, self-regarding sophomore effort by Finnish-British director Mikko Mäkelä, never fully distancing itself from the narcissistic prism of artistic creation, only fleetingly makes contact with flesh-and-blood human truths. By day, Max is a freelance hotshot for London’s trendy Wall magazine; he has just bagged himself a sweet assignment to interview Bret Easton Ellis. By night he is “Sebastian”, a hot commodity on an app called DreamyGuys. Typically servicing the older gentleman, he turns his experiences...

Full-throttle star turns from Jack Black and Jennifer Coolidge raise laughs but don’t help the perfunctory plotting in this screen take on the game franchise If you’re not familiar with Minecraft as a game then this film, notionally a big screen version of same, won’t necessarily solve that. Minecraft, even more than most computer games, is what you make of it, an experience generated by the player. So in a way, the idea of making a film set in the Minecraft world is counterintuitive, because it can never replicate what is good about Minecraft, it can only tell you what is good about Minecraft. In addition to that, this comedy-fantasy takes aspects of the Minecraft world and uses them as building blocks in a rollicking adventure suitable for almost all ages, giving Jack Black and Jason Momoa carte blanche to wild out and be deeply silly. Your affection for and/or tolerance of this latter prospect will dictate to a large extent your enjoyment of this film. Black plays Steve, a crafter...

Letter signed by 700 members offers support to Hamdan Ballal after initial statement had failed to name director The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences has apologised after criticism for its failure to support the detained Palestinian Oscar winner Hamdan Ballal. Almost 700 voting members, including multiple A-list actors, signed a letter apologising for not directly acknowledging Ballal and the film by name. Continue reading... from Film | The Guardian https://ift.tt/HXQCJBi via IFTTT

Known for his roles in Batman Forever, Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, and Tombstone, the prolific actor’s cause of death was pneumonia Remembering Val Kilmer: an ethereally handsome actor who evolved into droll self-awareness A life in pictures Val Kilmer, the actor best known for his roles in Top Gun, Batman Forever and The Doors, has died at the age of 65. His daughter Mercedes told the New York Times that the cause of death was pneumonia. Kilmer was diagnosed with throat cancer in 2014 and later recovered, after treatment with chemotherapy and trachea surgery that had reduced his ability to speak and breathe. Continue reading... from Film | The Guardian https://ift.tt/jbRflG0 via IFTTT

Live-action animated film starring John Cena and Will Forte will hit cinemas in 2026, after it was controversially shelved in favour of a $30m tax write-down For once, things are working out for Wile E Coyote. The film Coyote vs Acme, which stars John Cena and Will Forte acting alongside beloved Looney Tunes cartoon characters, will finally be released to the public, almost two years after the completed film was shelved by Warner Bros as part of a tax write-off . Continue reading... from Film | The Guardian https://ift.tt/KGhMu8L via IFTTT

Though the narrative goes the long way round, there are plenty of strong performances and good ideas to keep this journey interesting Although this British horror flick gets a little muddy in strictly narrative terms with its tricky shifts in viewpoint, it’s rich enough in ideas and strong performances as well as running a blessedly crisp 88 minutes, that any flaws are easily forgiven. The story starts with Anne (Synnove Karlsen, outstanding in a demanding yet slightly underwritten role) waking from a frightening dream and going to join her boyfriend Patrick (Luke Norris) for dinner with another couple, Ryan (George Bukhari) and Jessica (Tessa Parr). The snappy banter between the foursome, which instantly and economically establishes that Patrick is an outright asshole who doesn’t deserve quiet, circumspect Anne, suddenly chills when it’s revealed the two are engaged. Jessica, for one, doesn’t approve, for reasons only revealed later. Nevertheless, Anne and Patrick depart in the titu...

New arrivals sit in drab spaces and are learn how to fit in, in a film that quietly addresses the costs of integration to minority groups Thomas Fürhapter’s documentary sheds light on the challenges of adjusting to a new culture as it follows a series of “integration classes” offered to immigrants in Vienna. The film opens in the nondescript corridors of an administrative building, which lead into sun-filled but impersonal meeting rooms where these sessions take place. As the participants discuss their worries and uncertainties, these colourless spaces transform into sites of passion and community. Conducted in multiple languages, the seminars grapple with culturally specific issues faced by different minority groups. Topics of discussion range from Austrian ways of greeting, to more serious concerns such as racism and domestic abuse. In talking about the present and the future, people also reveal pieces of their past: some moved to Austria for love, others fled the horrors of war. D...

The Oscar‑winning director of The Artist spent five years creating The Most Precious of Cargoes. He talks about why he would never have made it as a live action movie When the acclaimed French film-maker Michel Hazanavicius was approached by his parents’ best friend, the author and playwright Jean-Claude Grumberg, to adapt his fairytale The Most Precious of Cargoes (2019) into an animated film, he hesitated. The short book is a fable about the Holocaust, and the extraordinary acts of kindness that people are capable of. Although moved by it, Hazanavicius was initially reluctant: he had never made an animated film, and he thought he would never make a film about the Holocaust. The grandson of eastern European immigrants who came to France from Lithuania and Poland in the 1920s, Hazanavicius, 58, had felt that the subject was not his to tell. “It was more my grandparents’ and my parents’ story, not mine,” he says, speaking from his home in the 10th arrondissement, Paris, the sunlight s...