Interviews
Demetrios Matheou
In the summer of 2005, Robert Redford, who died this week, attended the Karlovy Vary Film Festival in the Czech Republic, to collect a life achievement award. And his appearance in front of the media coincided with a startling news story that was rippling around the world. Just a week before, Mark Felt, a former deputy director of the FBI, admitted that he was the mysterious Deep Throat – the anonymous source who, in the 1970s, had offered Washington Post reporters information about Watergate, the conspiracy that would lead to the fall of President Richard Nixon. This Read more ...
Pamela Jahn
You won't find Sam Riley lying at the pool in a holiday resort – unless it's for work. "I'd rather stay home to be honest", says the Berlin-based Yorkshireman, who plays a washed-up tennis player turned coach living on the Canary island of Fuerteventura in Jan-Ole Gerster's slow-burning psychological thriller Islands. "I'm sure it's great to drop the kids off for a while and enjoy some peace and quiet. But my idea of relaxation is quite different."No surprise there. Riley, 45, might have become a well-known actor, but, in his heart, he's always been a rock star. At least that's the Read more ...
Pamela Jahn
If she decided to run for election, Suranne Jones would probably stand a good chance of winning. The Chadderton-born actress and producer has been a driving figure in British television ever since she became known for playing Karen McDonald on Coronation Street (2000 and 2004). Her vigorous presence and fearless nature made her a force to be reckoned with right from the start.She was widely celebrated for her performance in Unforgiven (2009), written by Sally Wainwright, who would become a frequent collaborator. However, it was the combination of Jones's detective role in Scott & Read more ...
Pamela Jahn
The German actor Leonie Benesch has an issue with erratic pacing in films. "I find it awful when a character talks and then there's a two-second pause before the dialogue continues," she says.Benesch's portrayal of a committed night nurse working in an understaffed hospital in Petra Volpe's Late Shift doesn't allow for such awkward silences. The taut medical drama plays out as a nerve-wracking thriller.The Guildhall-trained Benesch is probably best known to British audiences for co-starring with David Tennant in the Around the World in 80 Days miniseries and for playing Read more ...
Pamela Jahn
"First love is always both terrible and wonderful at the same time", says the 60-year-Norwegian dramatist-novelist-director Dag Johan Haugerud, whose new film Oslo Stories: Dreams is all about the most beautiful and painful feeling in the world. Taking the top prize at this year's Berlin film festival, Haugerud's drama is no singular achievement but one-third of a loose trilogy that non-judgmentally explores the complexities of human relationships, sexual identity, and romantic and not-so-romantic love and passion. Each film presents characters troubled in some way by their inner selves Read more ...
Pamela Jahn
To get Lars Eidinger "right", one must take him cloven hoof and all. He's intense, unconventional, and driven – but by what, exactly? Self-hatred, he says. Complacency, his critics say. The truth probably lies somewhere in between. But if two things are certain, it's that his performance as an emotionally withdrawn conductor in Matthias Glasner's Dying confirms him as one of the finest German actors of his generation, and that he has a sublime talent for character-building.In the film, which is divided into five chapters, Glasner explores his personal relationship with his mother. Yet the Read more ...
Pamela Jahn
Over a decade ago, a handful of Greek filmmakers set out to reinvent the national cinema amid the country's social and economic decline. Athina Rachel Tsangari was one of the the most gifted.Her second feature Attenberg (2010), about a 23-year-old virgin who doesn't want sex or like people, was an accentric marvel. Shortly afterward, Tsangari co-produced her friend Yorgos Lanthimos's Alps. Whereas Lanthimos has since made himself comfortable in Hollywood, Tsangari has taken a different route. She recently travelled to the Inner Hebrides archipelago off the northwest coast of Read more ...
Pamela Jahn
Having played Sherlock Holmes’s politically involved older brother Mycroft in the BBC’s hit crime series Sherlock, Mark Gatiss may not be an obvious candidate to now follow in the footsteps of the famous detective. But with his new murder mystery series Bookish, set in London in the aftermath of World War Two, the creator, writer and star of the six-part show has finally become a sleuth himself.“The period is very unusual,” he says over Zoom from Rimini, where the historic crime drama had its world premiere at the inaugural edition of the Italian Global Series Festival. “ Read more ...
Rachel Halliburton
“I still can’t believe that some pseudo-critics continue to accuse me of having murdered tango,” Astor Piazzolla once declared. “They have it backward. They should look at me as the saviour of tango. I performed plastic surgery on it.”Thirty-three years after his death, and 70 years after he created the “new tango” – fusing the sensual dance form with such disparate elements as New York jazz, Buenos Aires dirt and baroque counterpoint – admirers including Yo-Yo Ma and Daniel Barenboim continue to hail Piazzolla’s transformative influence. Hence the anticipation around the forthcoming Read more ...
Pamela Jahn
Emma Mackey might have had her breakthrough role as a teenage tough cookie in Netflix's hit Series Sex Education (2019-20223), but there is also a disarming softness in her; a balanced mix of femininity and subtly fierce determination that made her the perfect choice as Emily Brontë in Frances O'Connor's 2022 biopic about the author’s journey to womanhood.In the same year, the French-British actor starred in Death on the Nile, the second of Kenneth Branagh’s Hercule Poirot mysteries. She is currently filming a fantasy drama with JJ Abrams. But what pushes Mackey back into the centre of Read more ...
Pamela Jahn
Andreas Dresen directs socially engaged realist films that invariably relay personal and political messages; the result can be tough but is usually tender at heart.His Dogme 95-influenced Grill Point (2002), winner of the Silver Bear in Berlin, follows two couples in crisis. Cloud 9 (2008) and Stopped on Track (2011), both Cannes prize-winners, addressed sex in old age and dying respectively. Gundermann (2018) is a biopic of the East German singer-songwriter and Stasi informant Gerhard Gundermann. The real-life Guantánamo drama Rabiye Kurnaz vs George W Bush (2022) depicts the eponymous Read more ...