Film Features
theartsdesk Q&A: Claude Barras and Céline Sciamma on My Life as a CourgetteSaturday, 03 June 2017
If one were to stop at the title, My Life as a Courgette – from the French Ma vie de Courgette and unsurprisingly renamed for those insular Americans as My Life As a Zucchini – could be too easily dismissed as a juvenile or childlike frivolity. And that would be to under-estimate this French-Swiss, Oscar-nominated, stop-motion... Read more... |
theartsdesk at The Hospital ClubWednesday, 03 May 2017
The Arts Desk is delighted to announce a new partnership with The Hospital Club in Covent Garden. There are plenty of private members club in central London, but The Hospital Club is uniquely a creative hub with its own television studio, gallery and performance space, which for certain events are open to non-members. Read more... |
theartsdesk in Panama: Latin heatMonday, 17 April 2017
It’s a close, steamy evening in Panama City. A short walk out of the Casco Viejo, or old quarter, leads to the coastal belt – a rush of highway with an accompanying, exhaust-flogged pedestrian walkway that hugs the Bay of Panama. It’s an inauspicious route, too close to traffic and the pungent smells of the city’s fish market, but I’m drawn towards the far-off sounds of an unlikely cinema congregation. Read more... |
Oscars 2017: Moonlight and La La Land go toe to toeMonday, 27 February 2017
If only the recent American election had been similarly rectified. That was surely the thought on many people’s lips as the 89th Academy Awards ended in confusion with the news that the evening’s expected winner, La La Land, had in fact lost to Moonlight – an upset immediately amplified by easily the biggest cock-up in Oscar history. Read more... |
Listed: How I Do Love TheeTuesday, 14 February 2017
Love is in the air. Today, men and women and boys and girls will be pondering how to say it with roses and cards and candlelit dinners: those three words that contain multitudes. As the old strip cartoon never quite got round to saying, love is... the human condition, which is why a good quantity of the culture we review on this site has to do with it. To help you get into the mood for romancing, we have asked our... Read more... |
John Hurt: 'If I’ve been anything I’ve been adventurous'Saturday, 28 January 2017
John Hurt, who has died at the age of 77, belonged to that great generation of British thespians who started in the 1960s and eventually, one by one, ended up knighted: Michael Gambon, Albert Finney, Ian McKellen, Anthony Hopkins, Ian Holm, Nigel Hawthorne, Derek Jacobi. Of them all, Hurt was the outsider. It’s impossible to imagine an alien springing from any midriff but his. Read more... |
On the road with Bob Dylan: the mother of all rockumentariesWednesday, 12 October 2016
Dont Look Back is the Ur-rockumentary, the template for hundreds of hand-held rock tour films, a source of inspiration as well as a model to aspire to. Read more... |
First Person: The Juilliard ExperimentMonday, 26 September 2016
When the French painter Fabienne Verdier told me she’d been invited to explore the relationship between painting and music at the world-famous Juilliard School in New York, I knew straight away that this unusual residency should be documented. Read more... |
theartsdesk in Odessa: Films and post-truth in the new UkraineThursday, 04 August 2016
With Ukraine embroiled in conflict and a currency crisis the Odessa International Film Festival does not have the budget to bring in big stars. In any case, most of those pampered A-listers would have been nervous to go to what they or their advisers would have assumed to be a conflict zone. Read more... |
theartsdesk at the Edinburgh International Film Festival 2016Saturday, 25 June 2016
Even without any particular pomp or focus for celebration, the 70th Edinburgh International Film Festival has felt like a particularly strong and broad-ranging one, with a programme so big it was a struggle to take it all in. Read more... |
Edinburgh celebrates British filmsThursday, 23 June 2016
The Edinburgh film Festival’s signature prize, named after one of its most celebrated directors, is the Michael Powell Award for best British feature film. The dozen up for the award this year have included a Scottish love-triangle road movie, a dystopian drama, an adaptation of Macbeth, and a Welsh language thriller involving identical twins. Where once British film was a predictable affair, rooted in costume drama and social realism, it appears to be happily diverse at present. Read more... |
The Edinburgh International Film Festival tees off with golfing dramaFriday, 17 June 2016
To anyone who says that you can’t make a great film about golf, a film which is funny, sexy, and rousing, I have just two words; sadly, for those who attended the opening night of the Edinburgh Film Festival this week, those words are Tin Cup. Read more... |
First Person: 'I am one of only three percent'Thursday, 12 May 2016
Last week a report was published by Directors UK laying out the cold facts of a trend that a lot of us knew had been going on for a long time - if you are a man you are six times more likely to make a feature film than a woman. The needle hasn’t moved for the last 10 years. Read more... |
Who was St Clair Bayfield?Thursday, 05 May 2016
This week Stephen Frears's film about Florence Foster Jenkins opens. It will bring to the widest attention yet the story of a New York socialite who couldn’t sing and yet did sing, infamously, to a packed Carnegie Hall at the age of 76 in 1944. Meryl Streep plays her as only Meryl Streep can. But what of the man without whom her story would have been impossible? Read more... |
First Person: Couple in a HoleSaturday, 02 April 2016
A man and a woman live in a hole in a forest. We don’t know how they got there, though a homespun ceremony they perform suggests some kind of loss. She has difficulty leaving the hole, while he, a creature of the forest, ranges freely, foraging for food, steering clear of the rest of humanity until an emergency forces him to visit a nearby town. We realise, though the couple are British, that we’re in France. A local farmer recognises the man and the story begins to unfold. Read more... |
First Person: 'It's all about deception'Thursday, 10 March 2016
I’ve been working on two projects over the last four years and like buses they’ve arrived on British screens at the same time. On the surface they seem very different. My adaptation of John Le Carré’s The Night Manager is a huge epic sprawling espionage drama that spans six episodes and several years, moving from the Egypt of the Arab Spring to London, Spain, Turkey and beyond. Read more... |
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