Film Features

Opinion: Is acting now just for the privileged?

Jasper Rees Thursday, 25 April 2013

Knock knock. Who's there? Eamonn. Eamonn who? Eamonn Etonian. There's an Eamonn at No 10, an Eamonn is Mayor of London, an Eamonn is even Archbishop of Canterbury. Oh, and Eamonns are third and - for three more months - fourth in line to the throne. Recently Eton has started to dominate British film, television and theatre. In 2012 one Eamonn won an Emmy, another was given a Bafta and a third played a Shakespearean king on the BBC.

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Sundance London 2013: Preview

Emma Simmonds Monday, 22 April 2013

Bringing some much needed sunshine streaming into what has, so far, been a hit and miss spring is this year's Sundance London, which takes place from 25 - 28 April at The O2. Sundance is, of course, a name most associated with Robert Redford, President and Founder of the Sundance Institute which supports fledgling filmmakers and runs the Utah-based festival.

theartsdesk in Istanbul: City on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown?

Sheila Johnston Sunday, 21 April 2013

Late on a spring Friday evening, İstiklal Caddesi, the main shopping thoroughfare in Istanbul’s Beyoğlu district, exudes all the delicious traditional Turkish aromas: roasting chestnuts, fierce black coffee, döner grills and simit, İstanbul’s bagel, still selling like hot cakes way after midnight. Most of all, though, milling with the crowd, you are struck by something else, something less familiar these days, in Europe anyway: the smell of money.

Canal Dreams: the Panama Film Festival

Demetrios Matheou Sunday, 21 April 2013

Cannes, that irresistible feeding frenzy of film, is just around the corner. But 6,000 miles away in Panama City a film festival has just concluded that, for entirely different reasons, is equally significant. Panama isn’t known for its film output – it's made just one fiction feature in more than 60 years – and while America may have relinquished its control of the canal, the grip of its cultural colonialism has proven much more difficult to loosen.

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Richard Griffiths, 1947-2013

Jasper Rees Friday, 29 March 2013

Richard Griffiths, who has died at the age of 65 from complications during heart surgery, will be remembered above all for three performances, two on screen and one onstage. In Withnail & I (1987), he embodied in Uncle Monty a predatory homosexual who, according to the film’s director Bruce Robinson, was based on Franco Zeffirelli. Many years later Griffiths found himself playing a character parked on the same spectrum in Alan Bennett’s The History Boys (2005).

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Ben Affleck: from Bennifer to Renaissance Man

Adam Sweeting Monday, 04 March 2013

"There are no second acts in American lives," said F Scott Fitzgerald, but he had failed to include Ben Affleck in his calculations. "This is a second act for me," announced Affleck, as he collected the Best Director award for his work on Argo at the recent BAFTAs in London, "and you're giving me that and this industry has given me that.

Oscars 2013: Best Actor/Actress/Director

Emma Simmonds Saturday, 23 February 2013

Given the quantity of uncertain outcomes, this year's Academy Awards guarantee excitement, and there's nothing better than an Oscars ceremony filled with surprises. Furthermore, the selection of films nominated this year are of a rare vintage.

Oscars 2013: Best Picture/Foreign Language Film/Animated Film

Matt Wolf Friday, 22 February 2013

Time is drawing nigh to mark those Oscar ballots, but what movie should one vote for as the year's best? While odds-makers have been busily touting one title over another, the less-vaunted fact about this year's shortlist is that relatively few stinkers have made the cut.

Oscars 2013: Best Screenplays/Supporting Actor/Actress

Karen Krizanovich Thursday, 21 February 2013

Frank Capra called the Oscars “the most valuable, but least expensive, item of world-wide public relations ever invented by any industry”. They are, like it or not, the film awards against which all others are judged - even to the point that other countries’ film awards are scheduled in relation to the ceremony. Despite being the accepted mark of excellence, the Oscars are not a meritocracy.

Oscars 2013: The Spielberg Story

theartsdesk Wednesday, 20 February 2013

Whether Lincoln can pip frontrunner Argo to this year's Best Picture gong is in the hands of the Academy, but its 12 nominations are a notable achievement in director Steven Spielberg's extraordinary career. It's sometimes been easy to dismiss Spielberg as a sentimentalist, an entertainer first and an artist second but his films are pure cinema, and for every work of groundbreaking spectacle he's delivered something equally as thought-provoking.

Oscars 2013: Casting a vote for political films

Demetrios Matheou Tuesday, 19 February 2013

An intriguing aspect of this year’s battle for Oscar was the early assurance with which pundits placed Lincoln as their favourite for best film. Steven Spielberg's frontrunner merits recognition; what surprises is that no one has noted the significance if it were actually to win. For despite Hollywood’s long history of fine political films, in over 80 years only one has ever won the prize.

Oscars 2013: Daniel Day-Lewis

Nick Hasted Monday, 18 February 2013

A week from now he could be the all-time Oscar king. If Daniel Day-Lewis’s performance in Lincoln wins him a third Best Actor award, it will send him clear of a thoroughbred field of nine past double-winners, Jack Nicholson, Spencer Tracy and Dustin Hoffman among them. Those other nine were all American.

BAFTAs 2013: Argo, Skyfall and Day-Lewis trump Les Mis

Emma Simmonds Monday, 11 February 2013

Presented a clear fortnight ahead of the Oscars, while the BAFTAs might have little, if any, bearing on the decision making there, they at least provide an opportunity for the Brits to have a go at the glitz and glamour before award fatigue sets in. With treacherous weather an inauspicious portent, how the night would go was anyone's guess - for, as the ceremony began, only Daniel Day-Lewis and Anne Hathaway were clear favourites in their respective categories.

Montgomery Clift: The Right Profile

Ronald Bergan Monday, 04 February 2013

Both on screen and off, Montgomery Clift was sensitive, hesitant, introspective, self-destructive and often tortured. A personality that expressed itself on film as if afraid of what the camera would reveal. There were at least three faces of Clift. The early public one of the dark, romantic, handsome star of the fan magazines; the face of extraordinary beauty marred after a car accident in 1956, and the private face of drink, drugs and a series of unloving homosexual encounters.

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10 Questions for Director Pablo Larraín

Demetrios Matheou Monday, 04 February 2013

Often it takes a generation or two before a country can address its dark days on films; Hitler didn’t feature in a central role in a German film until Downfall, in 2004. This timorousness was certainly the case in Chile, where in the immediate years following the end of General Pinochet’s dictatorship, in 1990, the local cinema was dominated by sex comedies.

theartsdesk at the London Comedy Film Festival 2013

Emma Simmonds Thursday, 31 January 2013

Proving that laughter is the only sure-fire cure for the January blues, this year's London Comedy Film Festival took place over four days from Thursday 24^th to Sunday 27^th January. Known commonly and affectionately as LOCO, it once again showcased the best of comedy filmmaking from around the world, lined-up alongside a range of imaginative events - a programme seemingly designed to give the most depressing month of the year a well deserved kick up the arse.