Film Features
theartsdesk in Berlin: The 60th BerlinaleSunday, 21 February 2010
The Palme d'Or at Cannes makes headlines. The Golden Bear in Berlin tends not to, and few films that win in competition at the German capital's annual film festival, the Berlinale, go on to command global clout, though that's no general reflection on the quality of entries. Read more... |
Simon Gray's A Month in the Country rescuedFriday, 19 February 2010
The late, lamented Simon Gray is best known for penning a string of black comedies for the West End stage such as Butley and Otherwise Engaged, but he also wrote prodigiously for the screen, mainly for the BBC's equally lamented Play for Today slot. Read more... |
Interview: Liz Mermin on HorsesThursday, 28 January 2010
Whoever first made the observation - some say Winston Churchill, others Ronald Reagan - there is something about the outside of a horse that is good for the inside of a man, and a woman. On stage these noble beasts have inspired some highly successful plays, including Peter Schaffer's Equus, recently revived with Daniel Radcliffe, and War Horse, still living up to its name in the West End after over two years (panto horses probably don't count). In cinema, the legacy is more... Read more... |
theartsdesk Masterclass: Jacques Audiard on A ProphetSaturday, 23 January 2010
Jacques Audiard's A Prophet arrives in Britain laden with plaudits (Best Film at the London Film Festival, Grand Jury Prize in Cannes and a fistful of superlative reviews). Here, in the first of a series of illustrated masterclasses, in which leading directors introduce clips from their work, Audiard reveals the secrets of how he shot two of A Prophet's memorable scenes. Read more... |
Interview: Andy Serkis on playing Ian DuryWednesday, 06 January 2010
The career of Andy Serkis tends to point in one direction: darkness visible. Onstage, more recently on screen, he has inhabited a series of characters for whom violence is second nature. His Bill Sikes was utterly deranged, though a pussycat next to his Ian Brady in Longford (pictured below), whose ghastly charisma he seemed intuitively to understand. Serkis’s performance-captured Gollum gave global audiences the creeps. Read more... |
theartsdesk in Artvin: A Film Festival on WheelsSunday, 20 December 2009
"Where?" you ask. In the extreme north-east of Turkey, wedged in between the Black Sea, the Georgian and Armenian borders and the snow-capped Pontic Mountains, the hardscrabble town of Artvin clings tenaciously to a near-vertical hillside. Population: 25,000. Hotels: a handful, all rustic. Distance from the small coastal airport of Trabzon: three hours up a precipitous road. Nearest cinema: 50 miles. In short, the perfect spot for an international film festival. Read more... |
theartsdesk in the Ruhr: The European Film AwardsSunday, 13 December 2009
The 22nd European Film Awards closed last night with Michael Haneke’s The White Ribbon winning Best Director, Screenwriter and Film. Tahar Rahim was Best Actor for his breakthrough performance as a French-Algerian initiate into a prison’s brutal underworld in Jacques Audiard’s A Prophet, while the absent Kate Winslet won Best Actress for The Reader.... Read more... |
Christian McKay: Me and Orson WellesTuesday, 01 December 2009
"I must apologise for talking ten to the dozen," begins Christian McKay with a confidential air. "I do it when I'm nervous. I'm a rookie - I've never done this before. The stars get media training, but I thought, ‘I'm a naturally gregarious person and I'd rather be an open book'." It can't last, one thinks ruefully. Read more... |
Interview: Anne-Marie Duff plays Margot FonteynFriday, 27 November 2009
Anne-Marie Duff doesn't really resemble Margot Fonteyn. Blonde, fresh-faced and blue-eyed, she has nothing of the exotic, olive, Latin complexion that Fonteyn inherited from her Brazilian grandfather. And she never learned ballet, even if, with her long, lean frame and elegant swan neck, she looks more like a dancer than the rather more compact Peggy Hookham of Reigate (as Fonteyn started out in life). Read more... |
Frank Cottrell BoyceThursday, 19 November 2009
Award-winning screenwriter and children’s author Frank Cottrell Boyce, whose credits include Hilary and Jackie and 24 Hour Party People, always knew he’d be a writer. “I imagined myself in a bungalow in the Hollywood Hills, furiously typing away while someone shoved cigarettes in my mouth and I shouted, ‘Match me, Sydney!’ Or writing bits and pieces for The Paris Review." |
Sheffield Doc/Fest: the wrapMonday, 09 November 2009
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.... Read more... |
Filming Woodstock: Fact, Fiction, FantasySaturday, 07 November 2009
The most famous rock festival in history celebrated its 40th anniversary this summer in an orgy of nostalgia. Read more... |
Actress Carey Mulligan, Emotionally SpeakingTuesday, 13 October 2009
“You’ve no idea how boring everything was before I met you.” As written by Nick Hornby and spoken by Carey Mulligan in An Education, these words of gratitude come after a moment of stillness in which Jenny, Mulligan’s character, reflects on her experience as a 16-year-old schoolgirl taken on a social joyride by a 35-ish hustler, David (Peter Sarsga Read more... |
Front Row ConfidentialFriday, 02 October 2009
Your friends never learn. No matter how many times you tell them you don't look on going to the cinema as a social activity, they still insist on dragging you along with them. And even though you've told them a hundred times that, after a hard day's writing about Béla Tarr the only film you can even consider watching afterwards is District 9, they still call up and say things like, "Hey, let's go and see the latest Michael Haneke," or, "What do you say to Hunger?" or, "How... Read more... |
Football and Film: United or Damned?Wednesday, 23 September 2009
There’s a new British film coming soon called Dead Man Running. It features the rapper 50 Cent (aka Curtis “No Relation of the King of Pop” Jackson) as an American loan shark who, suffering in the financial downturn, visits these shores to lean somewhat heavily on a couple of defaulters. The film includes the obligatory flavourings for this sort of cheerful low-life caper: a dog track, and Danny Dyer. Read more... |
Sam Mendes back on the (American) roadWednesday, 16 September 2009Away We Go is the name of Sam Mendes's fifth film, released in Britain this week. But the title could also serve as the buccaneering mantra of a Cambridge-educated Englishman whose career continues to shed any whiff of his home country. On stage or screen, the director is continually drawn to stories culled from across the Atlantic, where he now lives. And why not? If you had directed a first film called American Beauty that would lead to five Oscars and America eating out of... Read more... |
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