thu 31/10/2024

Film Buzz

The Hurt Locker wins the Best Picture Oscar

Sheila Johnston

Kathryn Bigelow made Hollywood history last night at the 82nd Academy Awards by becoming the first woman to be named Best Director for The Hurt Locker, which also won for Best Picture. Her brilliant, low-budget Iraq war drama was the big winner at the ceremony, bagging six statuettes as against three Oscars for the co-favourite, Avatar, the sci-fi extravaganza directed by Bigelow's ex-husband James Cameron. The four acting awards were utterly unsurprising and it was a lean...

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Bafta interviews and reviews

theartsdesk

Read theartsdesk's reviews and interviews for the British Academy of Film and Television Arts award-winners.

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High-Def Hell in The Pacific

Adam Sweeting

Take cover! The Pacific is the new 10-part World War Two epic from executive producers Steven Spielberg and Tom Hanks, a follow-up to their 2001 series Band of Brothers. It was commissioned by HBO, who will premiere it in the States on March 14, and comes to Sky Movies HD in the UK over Easter.

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Mad Man mystery of A Single Man

Adam Sweeting

A tiny incidental pleasure in a movie that could use a few more of them is the Mystery Telephone Voice in Tom Ford’s directorial debut, A Single Man. It’s the moment when college professor George Falconer (Colin Firth) gets some… er… very bad news over the phone.

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Film has world premieres in Romford, Greenwich, Bethnal Green, Feltham....

Sheila Johnston Emma Thompson in Nanny McPhee

The Mayor of London, Boris Johnson, today announced a new initiative, London Film Day. Sunday 21 March will see 15 simultaneous world premieres at suburban cinemas across the capital from Wood Green and Wandsworth to (stretching the definition of London somewhat) Romford and Croydon. The film in question is admittedly one for families more than cinephiles: Nanny McPhee and the Big Bang, the second comedy scripted by Emma Thompson from the Nurse Matilda books. Thompson also...

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An eruption of pop-up cinemas

Sheila Johnston

Pop-up cinemas, like restaurants, shops and galleries, are, well, popping up all over the place these days, but one of the pioneers has been Secret Cinema. This outfit claims, grandly, to have been "revolutionising the traditional cinematic experience" ever since December 2007 and its Facebook page boasts over 26,000 fans. It would seem that the secret is out.

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Raspberry ripples and Oscar oddities

Sheila Johnston

Although the UK Film Council lost no time in firing out the usual self-congratulatory press release, it has been a thin year for British nominees at this year's Oscars. And, as Kim Newman, my colleague from the London...

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Eric Rohmer 1920-2010

Sheila Johnston

Eric Rohmer, who died yesterday in Paris aged 89, was famed for elegant, literate, yet profoundly romantic and erotic dramas such as La Collectionneuse, My Night With Maud and Claire's Knee; and for a style that helped define the French Nouvelle Vague and that he pursued with distinction in some 50 films over the next half century (his last, The Romance of Astrea and Celadon was made two years ago).

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theartsdesk an essential site of 2009: BBC Radio 5 Live

theartsdesk

radio 5theartsdesk received a New Year's gift last night when we were given a significant accolade from BBC Radio 5 Live. In Web 2009 with Helen and Olly, the station's podcasters and self-styled "internet obsessives" Helen Zaltzman and Olly Mann recognised theartsdesk as one of the five "essential sites of 20...

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Boxing Day Bloat: theartsdesk recommends

theartsdesk

The morning after the day before has dawned. If you're not inclined to join the shopping queues, theartsdesk is happy to suggest alternatives. Our writers recommend all sorts of cultural things you could get up to in the next week.

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British Independent Film Awards

Sheila Johnston

Sir Michael Caine and Daniel Day Lewis were the headline honorees at the 12th British Independent Film Awards in London last night, while Moon, an ultra low-budget sci-fi movie directed by Duncan Jones, David Bowie's son, was named Best Film. The full list of nominees and...

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Jeremy Deller on The Posters Came From The Walls

joe Muggs

"Depeche Mode," says Jeremy Deller, "have always been seen as a bit naff in this country, at least in the media. They could never shake off the image of their earliest Top Of The Pops appearances, so no matter how musically exploratory they got, they tended to be seen as this jumped-up rather silly pop band.

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Freedom to Create Prize 2009: Filmmaker wins

Jasper Rees Freedom to Create Prize 2009 winner Mohsen Makhmalbaf

The second annual Freedom to Create Prize, which was presented in the Victoria and Albert Museum in London last night, has been won by Mohsen Makhmalbaf. The internationally renowned and prolific Iranian filmmaker, 52, downed tools earlier this year to become an official mouthpiece outside Iran for the presidential candidate Mir-Mossein Mousavi.

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theartsdesk in Colombo: Sri Lankan sports wannabes go global

ASH Smyth

The Regal Cinema is a charming old place. At 300 rupees for a box seat (£1.50 on a good day for the SLR), you can put your feet up, sip your Fanta in style and, peeping through the plush velour curtains that separate you from both hoi polloi and screen (if not from the nouveaux in box 9), get a disconcertingly exact idea of how the place must have felt when the young Queen Elizabeth II sat in this very seat, shortly after the place was built for her.

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The Nature Autumn '09 Debate: Science in Cinema

joe Muggs Presenter, writer, blogger and science/media consultant Gia Milinovich

It's genuinely sad that last night's proceedings are not higher on the cultural agenda and that the gleaming new Kings Place auditorium was only half full.  But as one of the participants pointed out, 50 years on from C P Snow's Two Cultures, there is still an arts establishment for whom sci-fi means Star Trek, and the ludicrous guff of ...

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Sheffield Doc/Fest: the wrap

Sheila Johnston

Upon emerging from Sheffield railway station, one of the first things you clap eyes on is Andrew Motion’s 2007 poem What If? unfurling down the side of one of the university tower blocks and gleaming faintly in the last of the autumn sun. With its exhortation to “greet and understand what lies ahead... The lives which wait as yet unseen, unread,” it’s not a bad incidental epigram for a festival of documentary film-making whose trailer was inspired by the city’s cosmopolitan identity....

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