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Vampires have always been immortal but why is it that they keep getting younger – and hotter? Think about it. The movie’s first notable bloodsucker was Max Schreck as Count Orlock in the German silent classic Nosferatu (1922). Coincidentally, Schreck is the German word for “terror”, but it was the actor’s real name....
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Talking about Psycho, which celebrates its 50 anniversary next year, Alfred Hitchcock remarked how he was engaged in “the game with the audience”: “I was directing the viewers. You might say I was playing them, like an organ.” A funny kind of game, you might think. Perhaps it’s a stretch to link the Austrian...
A month or two back, when rumours first suggested that the mighty Coen brothers had a remake of the late 60s western True Grit in their sights, the obvious question was this: who could possibly take on the role of the ornery one-eyed cowboy Rooster Cogburn, the part that won John Wayne his Oscar? Clint Eastwood, perhaps – but hadn’t...
“First love burns brightest”, claims the poster for Jane Campion’s Bright Star, but brightest is not synonymous with best. Yeah, it’s vivid, and brilliant, and it makes you feel all aglow, but that’s just on the good days. It can also burn you right up – and probably will – leaving a smouldering pile of...
If Terry Gilliam didn’t make movies, what would he be? An artist and a cartoonist, certainly – he says he’s always drawn, and he made a living at it in the early 1960s. But just supposing we took away his pencil? Maybe it’s a knock-on from the antique traveling theatre at the heart of his latest film, The Imaginarium of...
Well, they’ve finally done it. Fifteen years since the studio’s first feature, and on movie number ten, Pixar has gone and made a picture about ordinary people. Not toys, not bugs, not monsters, not fish, not superheroes, not rats, not robots… Just people. And what do you know, the results are every bit as funny, wise, charming...
Ricky Gervais is back on the big screen this week with The Invention of Lying. The premise – in case you’ve missed the ads – is that in a world where everyone automatically speaks the truth, our Ricky is about to tell it like it isn’t. This is his second starring role in a Hollywood comedy, after last year’s Ghost...
Tom Charity reports on the latest from the Coens and Clooney at a star-studded Toronto International Film Festival "I like Cannes," director Jon Amiel teased, introducing opening night attraction Creation to a momentarily slighted Toronto audience. "Palm trees... the Riviera... I do like Cannes. And Venice. Berlin. But I LOVE Toronto!" It was...
Departures: that seems like a good starting point for a discussion of Sam Mendes, the British director of Away We Go, Revolutionary Road, and The Road to Perdition… Mendes has made five films in ten years, each very different, and yet all of them concerned, one way or another, with roads not taken, sudden shifts in direction, and the...
Fifteen Oscar nominations in 30 years! It’s no wonder that Meryl Streep takes award ceremonies in her stride these days. Seeing as how she’s lost on no less than 13 of those occasions she’d have to be a gibbering wreck if she took them too seriously. My first prediction for the Oscars 2010 is that la Streep will add another...
Love him or loathe him (and there are plenty of people in both camps), there is no question that The Boat That Rocked writer-director Richard Curtis is among the most influential figures in the British cultural scene. Cynics can’t abide his romantic, often sentimental vision of middle class England, and increasingly it seems like the...
The name of Pedro Almodóvar’s production company is El Deseo: Desire films. It’s a quality much in evidence in the vividly carnal, erotic, outrageous and anguished melodramas in which he specializes. Desire – a word that contains lust, love, venality, revenge and ambition – propels his characters as they careen from crisis
In Inglourious Basterds Quentin Tarantino has declared war, and you can be sure that he means it. Now, we like a good anti-war film as well as the next guy: Schindler’s List, The Thin Red Line, All Quiet on the Western Front, The Deer Hunter… These are classics for a reason. But let’s be honest, sometimes it’s more fun to...
First Michael Jackson and now John Hughes. For those of us who were still growing up in the 1980s this summer is a rude reminder that we’re all getting older, and faster than we thought. Hughes – who died from a heart-attack last week at the age of 59 – can’t really be compared to Jackson in terms of fame or artistry. Most
This is the fourth time we’ve put together the Girl Power list, and we’ve made some changes this year. Crucially, we’ve followed the pattern established by our similar list of up–and-coming actors and pushed the age limit up from 25 to 30. That way, we reckon, we’re not boosting starlets and discriminating against...
Steve Buscemi seems intent on cornering the market in rodents. He’s already played a rat, a weasel, a mink, and whatever manner of creature Randall Boggs may have been in Monsters, Inc. Add to that menagerie “Bucky” in this week’s G Force, a shiftless hamster who hordes nuts from his cage-mates, implausibly denies he’
We’re roughly half way through the year, which seems like a good time to step back from the weekly onslaught of summer blockbusters and take stock of how 009 is shaping up. In a year dominated by economic meltdown, the movies have looked recession-proof – especially after the stellar box-office performance of Harry Potter here, there...
Nine years isn’t a long time in the grand scheme of things, but for 19-year-old Daniel Radcliffe it’s half a lifetime. He’s done a lot of growing up since Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone (filmed in 2000 and released a year later). Back then he was just about the perfect Potter: he couldn’t act, but he didn
Sacha Baron Cohen is at it again. Last time the merry prankster unleashed a movie Borat seemed to upset just about every group imaginable, from southern rednecks to born again Christians, Jews, Muslims, gays, women, and most of all Kazakhs… While many gays are hip to Baron-Cohen’s subversive tactics, there’s still a good deal of
With Johnny Depp shooting from the hip as John Dillinger in Michael Mann’s eagerly awaited Public Enemies, we consider the popular appeal of the all-American gangster… American Gangsters “The gangster is the ‘no’ to the great American ‘yes’ which is stamped so big over our official culture,” wrote...
“Meet Your Ancestors” says the poster to Year One over portraits of a hammily ironic Jack Black and a typically bewildered Michael Cera. Black is bearded and even hairier than usual. With his shoulder length blond wig Cera rather like Garth in Wayne’s World and decidedly feminine. The joke is on us, genetically speaking. You...
In honour of Optimus Prime, Bumblebee, Jazz, Megatron et al (in case you hadn't noticed, Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen hits cinemas any day now), LOVEFiLM presents a roll-call of our favourite robots. Also androids. Cyborgs. Replicants. And mecha… Any dynamic, semi-autonomous machines, basically. The movies have given us quite a few...
Thank heavens for Emma Thompson! The House of Lords may fall. Our MPs may act like lemmings, and poor old Susan Boyle is surely the British cultural icon we deserve… but as this week’s cinema release Last Chance Harvey proves, Emma Thompson prevails, a comforting reminder of Empire and order, a Britain where quality, common sense and...
It’s not the oldest franchise in town, and certainly not the most prolific (it can’t compete with Friday the 13th, for example), but The Terminator series is the only one that has pursued an on-going millennial dialogue between the twentieth and the early twenty first century. In James Cameron’s 1984 original, the Terminator and
“From my point of view, Ben Stiller is probably the most naturalistic comedic actor working,” claims director Shawn Levy, on the set of Night at the Museum: Battle of the Smithsonian, his big budget sequel to the runaway 2006 comedy smash. “He can do big goofy characters like Zoolander, but in movies like Night of the Museum and
Summer comes earlier every year, at least at the multiplex. The arrival of Wolverine and JJ Abrams' all-star new-look Star Trek makes it official: blockbuster season is upon us. The menu may not vary much from year to year: big budget tentpole pictures backed up with laughs, spills and thrills. Yet every year has a different flavour, and as far...
How do you solve a problem like Hugh Jackman? Tall (6’3), muscular and good-looking, he’s anyone’s idea of a leading man. People magazine named him “Sexiest Man Alive” last year (as opposed to all those sexy dead guys?). He hosted the Academy Awards in February, the first time a mere actor was given that honour in a...
What’s black and white and folding soon? As a journalist, I have to say it doesn’t strike me as very funny, but newspapers are in big trouble everywhere faced with the brave new world wide web. The situation is particularly critical in the US, where the industry is structured very differently to our own, and where many cities are in...
Paul Rudd and the Apatownies You know you’ve arrived when you’re asked to pose for Vanity Fair magazine – along with a trio of near-naked lovelies – and you’re allowed to keep your clothes on. The image – photographed by the legendary Annie Liebovitz – was a reprise of her earlier cover shoot for the same
Richard Curtis revives memories of the early days of the Swingin’ Sixties in his raucous new comedy, The Boat that Rocked, a fictionalised celebration of pirate radio stations like Radio Caroline set in 1963. Rock-n-roll was still in the first flush of youth, and despite Beatlemania the BBC was doing its level best to ignore it. Young...
Good news! Joaquin Phoenix hasn't lost his mind. He isn't hooked on hard drugs (as far as we know). And he isn't about to give up acting for hip-hop. He's only joking. That's my conclusion after belatedly watching the star's notorious appearance with David Letterman on The Tonight Show in February in its entirety. Like most of us, I had assumed...
Who let the dogs loose? This year already we've seen Beverly Hills Chihuahua, Hotel for Dogs and Bolt, all aimed primarily at the pre-teen crowd. This week sees the release of Marley and Me, with Owen Wilson, Jennifer Aniston and a tearaway Labrador with the appetite of a giant goat (not sure who the target audience is for this, possibly other...
"Who will watch the Watchmen?" Alan Moore leaves that teasing little worry from Juvenal dangling at the end of his epochal mid 80s comic book (that's what we called them then). It's not a concern for the studio folks, I would assume, judging by the size of their marketing budget. On that basis more or less everyone old enough to get in (the film...
Imagine you're a Hollywood casting agent. The director is looking to fill a supporting role in a horror movie primarily aimed at the late teen market. The part is small, but pivotal: a learned rabbi whom the heroine (played by Odette Yustman, from Cloverfield) turns to in her darkest hour. Who you gonna call...? If a vision of Gary Oldman...
Dooley Wilson was wrong. A kiss is never just a kiss. If it's caught on camera and projected on a screen the size of a house, that's doubly true. The famous American critic Pauline Kael called one of her books "Kiss Kiss Bang Bang". If I remember rightly I think she used it in reference to James Bond, but as Kael knew full well, the phrase sums...
Brad Pitt has been getting rave reviews for his curious rejuvenation as Benjamin Button – and rightly so. But it is not a one-man show. If David Fincher's epic is so moving, it derives a good part of that emotion from the unusual love story at its heart and from another virtuoso Cate Blanchett performance. Young Benjamin meets Daisy when...
She may be our best movie actress right now, but Kate Winslet has outed herself as a complete luvvie over the course of this awards season. It started with her matching set of over-the-top thank you speeches at the Golden Globes. Sure, it must be nice to be named both best actress (Revolutionary Road) and supporting actress (The Reader) of the...
"And the award goes to..." How to get nominated Kirk Lazarus: "Everybody knows you never go full retard... Check it out. Dustin Hoffman, Rain Man, look retarded, act retarded, not retarded. Counted toothpicks, cheated cards. Autistic, sho'. Not retarded. You know Tom Hanks, Forrest Gump. Slow, yes. Retarded, maybe. Braces on his legs. But he...
Mickey and the Comeback Kings They say that success tastes twice as sweet the second time around. Certainly there is something special about a comeback, and not just for the guy in the spotlight – it's something we all celebrate and savour. There are several notable comebacks in the offing this year, including Debra Winger, playing Anne...
Christmas has been and gone, the nights are still long and it's cold outside. Sometimes January can make it seems like there's nothing to look forward to, but don't despair because we've put together this handy little guide to the best films and festivals coming your way in 2009.
2008: The Best and the Worst It’s been a rocky old year, no two ways about it, and the quality of the movies has been every bit as up and down as the stock market. Just look at the year’s two Coen Brothers’ movies to see what I mean: on the one hand, the superb thriller No Country for Old Men, arguably their best movie for a...
The other day I watched our three-year-old’s stage début, typecast already as a wise man. The performance wasn’t all it might have been, to be honest. He seemed more interested in feeding straw to Baby Jesus than joining in any of the carols. Until, that is, a rousing rendition of "Santa Claus is Coming to Town" triggered his inner...
Top 50 DVDs of the Year 2008 Looking back on the DVD releases of the last 12 months, the first thing that hits you is the sheer range and diversity of titles. In fact when we first talked about doing a list of the best DVDs, the idea was for a top ten. (Original, I know.) It didn't take long to realise that wasn't going to cut it. We all have our
"Based on a true story," says the marketing for Clint Eastwood’s latest film, Changeling. That’s an odd selling point for a product based on the power of fantasy, but it’s a line we hear all the time. It’s hard to imagine anyone boasting about the opposite – based on an untrue story – though most of them are,...
Let's try to take the measure of Sir Ridley Scott, who might now be described as Britain's most senior filmmaker, an elder statesman who might be forgiven for putting his feet up and puffing on that favourite cigar in his Provencal retreat. Seventy years old, he's showing no signs of slowing down. In fact quite the opposite – he made ten...
Kevin Smith must be the cleanest filmmaker in America – he’s always in hot water. The convenience store graduate who made Clerks, Dogma and now Zack and Miri Make a Porno has spent so much time with the US censors – the MPAA – they should give him his own office. Or failing that, his own orifice (he’d probably prefer
All the Presidents Men In one scary poll last week American voters picked a gun-toting, Kazak-kicking grump with a female VP as their ultimate President. The good news is that James Marshall is only make-believe. As far as we know the actor who played him, Harrison Ford, has no plans to stand for the job in real life, and there isn’t even...
Autumn Preview Best of Britain: Quantum of Solace, Hunger and Of Time and the City (Oct 31) Halloween is usually set aside for fright merchants. But not this year. The date is marked in red, white and blue and bound to be dominated by the return of Bond, James Bond, in Quantum of Solace. What do we know about this one? Daniel Craig may be dressed
Ever since the Beatles, the ultimate test for any British pop star is to break big in the United States. If you can make it there you can make it anywhere (but why would you? You've already made it!). It's the same story for film stars, writers, directors and comedians. And it's not just because that's where the money is – though that...
This week, acting legends Robert De Niro and Al Pacino square off in the cop thriller Righteous Kill. It's the third time they've shared a credit, although in The Godfather Part II they were never on screen at the same time (De Niro played Don Vito, Michael's father, in flashbacks), and in Heat, their characters only met once, in the famous coffeeshop scene. Sadly, Righteous Kill is no Heat. Not by a long chalk. They play veteran NYPD homicide detectives, Turk and Rooster, devoted partners whose trust is undermined when the evidence suggests the serial killer they're after may be a psychopathic vigilante cop.
"The 80s was the best ever…" enthuses Marisa Tomei in Darren Aronofsky’s The Wrestler . Mickey Rourke agrees: "Yeah. I hated the 90s." Sure he did. For a while there in the 80s Mickey was the coolest actor on the planet, a fashion plate Brando for the era of The Face . And in the 90s he was, what? Washed up. Well, Rourke’s drift
Guy Ritchie's career may be more checkered than a chessboard, but he does have a knack for London lowlife. Back when Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels first came out – ten years ago last week – one of his producers went so far as to imply he was a bit of a villain himself. When I reported it to Ritchie, he blushed. It might not be...
There's something in the air. The whiff of change? Or maybe just rank hypocrisy. In a recent study by the US National Institute of Drug Abuse, 42 percent of Americans said they had used marijuana, and 16 percent had tried cocaine - a statistic that would include both President Bush and Barack Obama. (Though John McCain has no record of drug abuse,
Here's something you don't see every day: a rootsy forest god who grows like bindweed on steroids to terrorise downtown Brooklyn, then collapses into an eerily beautiful floral mulch. Or how about an elfin king whose twiggy antlers grow out of his head to suggest an organic crown? The Angel of Death is a blind old crone who unfurls her imperious...
This week Working Title’s teen culture clash movie Wild Child gives UK moviegoers the opportunity to become better acquainted with rising star Emma Roberts, playing the polar opposite of the Beverly Hills High straitlaced square in she was in Nancy Drew. Roberts has her fans, I’m sure, but for the time being she remains more famous as
You can't compete with the greatest show on earth, but you can complement it. Over the next two and a half weeks the world will be glued to events in Beijing, as the fittest, strongest, fastest men and women on the planet Go for Gold. In the US, the NBC network is promising a staggering 3,600 hours of coverage, on TV and across the internet -...
Remember when David Duchovny and Gillian Anderson were the hottest couple on TV? It was only a decade ago - a mere blink of an eye in rerun years. Ten years before them, it was Bruce Willis and Cybill Shepherd (remember Moonlighting?). Back in the mists of the late 1970s, I guess their closest counterparts were probably Stefanie Powers and Robert
It’s only July, but 2008 already seems destined to go down as a great year for bad guys. Javier Bardem won an Oscar for the coin-flipping angel of death Anton Chigurh in No Country For Old Men. So did Daniel Day-Lewis, the ultimate anti-hero – a cold-blooded oilman in PT Anderson’s There Will Be Blood. Ralph Fiennes – Lord
We're halfway through 2008. The movie calendar tends to be loaded with “prestige” films at the beginning and end of the year – one Friday in February gave us There Will Be Blood, Juno, and The Diving Bell and the Butterfly (not forgetting The Ugly Duckling and Me!). But instead of the usual late spring and summertime sag, this...
If Mamma Mia! is a smash hit no one in Europe will be surprised. But in the US it’s far from a foregone conclusion. Yes, the musical was a Broadway sensation, just as it was everywhere else in the world (they say more than 30 million theatergoers have seen the show), and yes, Meryl Streep could conceivably notch up another Oscar nomination...
Is kung fu making a comeback? It certainly seems possible with the success of Kung Fu Panda (released this week) and The Forbidden Kingdom (next week) in the US. Both are affectionate tributes to the exciting, dynamic Hong Kong-style martial arts film that flourished in 1970s, 80s and early 90s. Jackie Chan has a role in both, and Jet Li does...
Plastic surgeons report that the face (and presumably the bod) most women would like to see when they look in the mirror belongs to Angelina Jolie. It's a safe bet their partners are okay with that. In a Channel Four show last year Jolie topped a list of the 100 Greatest Sex Symbols (Brad Pitt was fifth, and Lara Croft sixth). These things offer...
"Boring, complacent and criminally lucky to have got away with everything so far." That was David Thomson's scathing verdict on Ben Affleck in his "Biographical Dictionary of Film" in 2004. It was Ben's "annus horribilis": the year that his planned wedding to J-Lo fell apart. The year that saw him bounce back from the mortifying Gigli debacle...
Here's something you may not know about Harrison Ford: in 1968 he was a struggling young actor (youngish - he was 26) when the French director Jacques Demy picked him to star in his first Hollywood movie, Model Shop. Demy was on a roll: his delightful musicals The Umbrellas of Cherbourg and The Young Girls of Rochefort were among the most popular
Tony Blair was still PM. Tom Cruise hadn't flipped out, Martin Scorsese hadn't won the Oscar and Nick Park was working on something called "Wallace & Gromit and the Great Vegetable Plot". It seems like only yesterday, but the very first LOVEFiLM weekly newsletter went out at the beginning of May 2004, and four years later we're celebrating our...
In the movie biz, summer starts in May and peters out at the end of July. (Perhaps in deference to the Olympics, August seems to have been reserved for comedies this year, with Mike Myers' The Love Guru taking on Adam Sandler as a Mossad agent turned hair stylist in Judd Apatow's You Don't Mess With the Zohan.) Apparently the adult audience who...
"You're talking about counting cards?!" Jim Sturgess deduces as he's inducted into a very different kind of math club in the movie 21. When? Every weekend. Where? Smug smiles from Kevin Spacey, Kate Bosworth and the gang… Welcome to Sin City! Just a couple of years younger than Hollywood, 225 miles to the West, Las Vegas seems to exert a magnetic
This week moviegoers might be experiencing déjà vu all over again. There's the American version of the 2003 Japanese chiller One Missed Call to contend with. Michael Haneke unleashes his English language version of Funny Games, a facsimile of his controversial 1997 Austrian film, but with Hollywood movie stars like Naomi Watts, Tim Roth and...
People talk about "courageous" performances all the time, though it's doubtful that actors are really any braver than, say, firemen, policemen or nurses. Still, it must have taken some guts for Owen Wilson to stand up and present an Oscar this year. A worldwide audience of up to a billion people flashing back to headlines about the star's suicide
What's up, doc? In honour of the holidays we're pulling on our bunny ears, nibbling on a carrot and taking the measure of our favourite movie rabbits (with a hare or two thrown in). First, a little history: Easter bunnies have been with us longer than you might think. The word "Easter" derives from "Eastre", a Saxon pagan goddess. Eastre, or...
Brian De Palma is in hot water. Again. For a director who often seems more interested in form than content and who has devoted the bulk of his career to making mainstream entertainment for the Hollywood studios, it's surprising how regularly he upsets people. Even his fans have a love-hate relationship with this prodigiously gifted but perverse...
"She says turn on the light, otherwise it can't be seen/She's got cheekbones like geometry and eyes like sin" - Perfect Skin, by Lloyd Cole Nicole Kidman has a way of turning men's brains to mush. Critics go ga-ga for her: this was the woman who inspired that famous "theatrical Viagra" review when she starred in The Blue Room in the West End....
LOVEFiLM's lowdown on the main contenders for Oscar glory on Sunday night… Best Picture No Country For Old Men It's obvious that critics have been pining for a good Coen brothers' movie; the reviews for this lean Texas thriller were rapturous. Exciting to watch but grave in tone, it should have broad appeal to Academy voters if they're not turned
The movies have always been a valuable source of information for impressionable young minds eager to discover the secrets of the opposite sex, and, even more importantly, how to attract them. With Valentine's coming up and romance in the air, we thought it was high time to collect the best insights Hollywood has to offer on finding your perfect...
Great performances come in all shapes and sizes, but there is nothing as thrilling as an actor bigging it up, striving for the epic, and pulling it off. The risks are obvious: larger-than-life can easily translate as ham, and the one can be mistaken for the other. Some of the most acclaimed performances from the past - by Laurence Oliver, or...
Inconvenient Truth "This town has no business having a film festival," my friend Jessica said to me the other day. A Sundance virgin, she was struggling to comprehend why what seems to be New York's entire film industry and a good part of LA's too should decide to decamp to Park City, Utah every January. It's cold, inconvenient and by general...
The term "movie brats" was coined in the 1970s to describe the likes of Martin Scorsese, Brian De Palma and Steven Spielberg - the first generation of filmmakers that had grown up weaned on movies and TV. It fits the Coen brothers just as well. A Coen film filters life through the lens of old movies, many of them made well before they were born:...
It's a quirk of the movie business - and of the industry's insistence that films of any substance can only be released in the winter Oscar period - that actors increasingly seem to come up with not one but a couple of significant performances within the space of weeks. This year, Cate Blanchett has a shot at Academy Award nominations for Best...
It's going to be another big, BIG year for movies, and box office wise, they won't come much bigger than Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, set for release 22 May. With new installments from Harry Potter (November), Narnia (May), Batman (July) and James Bond (November), the industry is confident of record-breaking returns....
Is The Golden Compass a Christmas movie? Novelist Philip Pullman would probably be appalled at the idea. Despite quisling spin from the movie's stars, the book is very clearly an attack on religion, and (to a lesser degree) the film is too. A Church of England atheist, as he puts it, Pullman imagines a society in thrall to a powerful theological...
A couple of years ago, Esquire magazine asked Martin Scorsese to nominate the "next Scorsese", ie the most promising filmmaker of the younger generation. Marty's vote went to Wes Anderson on the strength of his first two films: Bottle Rocket (straight to video here!) and Rushmore, a curious comedy about a precocious 15-year-old who's the king of...
American Gangster : as Russell Crowe commented the other day, it's amazing nobody came up with the title before now; the two words fit together snug as a .45 in your fist. America didn't invent crime or corruption, and there are some terrific British, Japanese and Hong Kong gangster movies. But it was in America that capitalism was held up as a...
"Everybody's a mad scientist, and life is their lab. We're all trying to experiment to find a way to live, to solve problems, to fend off madness and chaos." - David Cronenberg David Cronenberg has come a long way since he started work on his first feature, Orgy of the Blood Parasites , 33-years ago. Set in a tower block where residents are...
Who knew a comeback was on the cards? The last time anybody checked, Michelle Pfeiffer was an A-list star, commanding around $10 million a picture, topping People magazine's 50 Most Beautiful People list (her sixth and final appearance was in 1999). Then she just faded from view, so quietly it took a while for anyone to notice. But five years is...
It was in Breakfast of Champions that Kurt Vonnegut imagined life on a planet devoid of all plants and animals save humanoids. These humanoids took pleasure in (to our minds) an exotic, even aberrant form of pornography. It wasn't the sexual act that repelled and transfixed them. It was images of food and eating. For an hour and a half, the movie
Movie stardom is well and good, but sometimes it seems like what film stars really want to do is front a band. While Will Smith is a bone fide pop star, and Billy Bob Thornton, Jamie Foxx, Juliette Lewis and Bruce Willis each have an album or two to their credit, Russell Crowe, Keanu Reeves and Johnny Depp have all foisted the frustrated rock n...
After that long, mildly hot and often ridiculously damp summer, the next couple of months promise a return to normal conditions - cold and wet - but at least we're going to see more varied fare at the multiplex. October brings us The London Film Festival (Oct 17-Nov 1), headed up by David Cronenberg's gangster thriller, Eastern Promises . This is
"So how much is that pass worth, anyway?" The homeless guy on the corner wanted to know, pointing to the festival badge hung around my neck. A passport to press showings from 8.45am through to the small hours of the morning, I'd say it was priceless - or at any rate, free to accredited critics. If I were Colin Farrell, maybe I would have given...
The shoot-out. As both Shoot Em Up and 3:10 to Yuma demonstrate this week, this is one of those dramatic situations that's essentially cinematic. Writers, painters and playwrights might convey something of the tension and excitement, but none of them can compete with the full-blown experience of the expertly staged movie gunfight. That said, it...
Who will be Hollywood's next generation of male movie stars? This time last year we ran through the Top 20 actresses under 25. Perhaps surprisingly, many of them were significantly more established than their male counterparts: actresses like Keira Knightley, Kirsten Dunst and Scarlett Johansson have been top-lining a wide variety of big movies...
Kathy Jones. It doesn't have quite the same ring to it does it? The girl from Mumbles, West Glamorgan, took 'Zeta' from her paternal grandmother's Christian name. Her maternal grandmother was Catherine Fair, which sounds like a heroine from a lost Thomas Hardy novel, and must be considered altogether too on-the-nose. Practically 'per-fic' in...
Hollywood has a new King of Comedy. Chances are, even if you vaguely know the name, you wouldn't recognise the face. Judd Apatow isn't a performer, but as a writer, director and producer, he has fingers in many pies. You almost certainly saw The 40 Year Old Virgin, which he cowrote with Steve Carrel and which he also directed. His second film,...
Declassified: Our Favourite Spies There's something very sexy about a spy. The fantasy of putting your life on the line for your country, with a get-out-of-jail free card for recompense; that license to kill, and steal, and lie, and to hell with traffic regulations too! Most of us have probably fantasized about it at one time or another, but I...
'I'm not naïve, I'm superficial,' Woody Harrelson declares in Paul Schrader's new film, The Walker. Some people would suggest the actor has it the wrong way round. After all, he first planted himself in the public eye playing the dumbest jock on television in eight seasons of the sitcom Cheers. I've met Harrelson twice. The first time he was...
Several actors have played God over the years, including Graham Chapman, Charlton Heston, George Burns, Alanis Morissette, and even Groucho Marx. (Danny Boyle and Andrew Macdonald tried to cast Sean Connery as the Almighty in A Life Less Ordinary but he was having none of it.) No one has played Him Upstairs with more genial simplicity and grace...
There's nothing new about toy movies per se. There's nothing automatically wrong with them either. Just look at Toy Story. It's true that we might prefer the action figures to be inspired by the movies rather than the other way round, but in a world where more than 6000 7-11 stores across North America have transformed themselves into Kwik-E-Marts
The kid looks like he can't believe it, and at the same time, like he knows he's the shit; there's no-one can touch him. He's 22, with long, wavy 1976 hair and an ear-to-ear grin, and he's telling the man with the microphone about his first lead role in a feature film, which will be out next year. 'It's called Saturday Night Fever, and it's gonna
Now that school's out for summer, and Harry Potter and chums are growing up, we thought it was about time to turn the tables and file a report card on the teaching staff at Hogwarts. Daniel Radcliffe, Emma Watson and Rupert Grint are beginning to branch out for themselves into the Muggles' world. If they're serious about making the grade in...
Action Movies: 'Lights… Camera… Action!' According to the Oxford English Dictionary filmmakers have been urging their performers to… you know… 'do something' at least since 1914. Not every director says it. Some delegate. Others prefer a simple 'Okay,' or 'Go', or 'When you're ready'. There's a story that the great B-movie director Sam Fuller...
'We'll always have Paris,' Humphrey Bogart assured Ingrid Bergman in Casablanca, and the movies make it so. The cinema preserves the present, recreates the past, and imagines the future. When a city inspires as many moviemakers as Paris has for over a century, films become as much a part of its character and charm as its buildings, its museums...
For a game that's been kicking around for nearly two hundred years, it's amazing how poker has boomed over the last decade. In 2002, there were 631 players in the World Series of Poker. Last year, there were more than 8000. And that's just the tip of the iceberg. The profusion of online gaming sites and the introduction of the hole card camera (al
Could Doug Jones become a movie star? It seems unlikely. In a business in which name recognition is everything and your face is your fortune, Jones has worked steadily for ten years in high profile film and TV shows - including CSI, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Men in Black II, Adaptation and Hellboy - but it's doubtful one-in-twenty could point him
It's been six years since Brad Pitt first played Rusty Ryan in Ocean's 11. He was in his late 30s then and he'd been a star for a decade - ever since giving Geena Davis the ride of her life in Thelma and Louise. (How different things might have been if William Baldwin hadn't turned down that role - it's still one of the indelible moments in Pitt's
We're nearly six months and more than 180 new films in to 2007, and most cinema releases from the winter are now winding their way on to DVD (this week alone brings us Dreamgirls, Blood Diamond, Bobby and The Fountain). Meanwhile across the channel, Stephen Frears and chums have been dishing out the gongs at Cannes to films we probably won't be...
'It's all about choices,' Jerry Bruckheimer likes to say. Film producers aren't exactly household names, and most people wouldn't be able to pick Bruckheimer out of police line up, but you'll recognise the lightning bolt on a desert highway that kicks off a Bruckheimer movie: blockbusters like the Pirates of the Caribbean trilogy, Armageddon, Con
The UK release of David Fincher's latest film, Zodiac, was delayed a couple of months so that it could compete for the Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival (the rules say that a film can only have shown in its home territory to be eligible). I imagine it will be a serious contender for some sort of recognition from Stephen Frears' jury, but...
The zombies are back in town. In fact they probably feel at home by now. 28 Weeks Later is the third major British zombie movie in five years - with Shaun of the Dead and 28 Days Later before that, this is fast becoming a local specialty - like gastropubs and Richard Branson cameos. The Undead have never had it so good. Admittedly there are those
The sun is teasing out those darling buds; the air echoes with the crack of willow against leather, while swallows reenact the Battle of Britain over woody glades and hedgerows… It must be blockbuster season again. This summer three is the magic number: Spider-Man III is first off the bat (this Friday), Pirates of the Caribbean 3: At World's End...
I went to film school with Shane Meadows. Not really, but a few years ago I did do a one-day film-making course in Nottingham that Shane supervised. He showed us which end of the camera to look through, split us into groups of three, and gave us a couple of hours to come up with a script and go out and shoot it. I'd like to report that my team...
As you may know, this week has been declared National Ryan Gosling Week, so if you're not yet up to speed on the most exciting movie actor under 30, now is the time to catch up. The Goss on Gosling 1. He was brought up a Mormon in Ontario, Canada, although his mother later divorced and renounced the religion. 2. His first acting gig was as a...
Things are working out for Mark Wahlberg. His last three movies have done very nicely, thanks, at the box office, with decent reviews to match. Entourage, the HBO show he helped put together, and which is based on his own experience as an up-and-comer in Hollywood, is still riding high in the ratings. And then he took a supporting role to work...
Compile a list of the best British movies of the 1990s, there is every reason to think that Trainspotting would be up there in the top three. Indeed, in 1999, when the British Film Institute polled film-makers and scholars for the top 100 Brit films ever, Trainspotting was the only 90s movie to make the Top 20 (it came in at 10). I remember the...
The biggest film industry in the world isn't the one we write about here week in, week out. For eighty years, Indian cinema has dominated its own domestic market - it currently attracts a billion ticket buyers every three months, 95 percent of the local audience. On top of that, Indian films are at least as popular as Hollywood pictures across...
The best James Bond we never had (he did play 006 in Steve Martin's The Pink Panther) Clive Owen is the kind of movie star who makes British filmmakers look rather small. He's done some interesting work at home, but he's flourished in the big stuff – in the pulp paradise of Shoot Em Up, the dystopian allegory Children of Men and the heist...
'Why the hell are people going to see 300?' a friend emailed me the other day, just as news was breaking that US audiences had propelled it to the top of the box office charts. A programmer at a small art house cinema, my friend has just suffered through another slack week after only a dozen or so customers turned out for a not very challenging...
The producers of Factory Girl, which opens in cinemas this Friday, did one smart thing. They found a genuine twenty-first century It Girl (Sienna 'Drugs are f*** loads of fun' Miller) to play a 1960s variety (Edie 'Sex and speed. Wow' Sedgwick). But what is 'It', and who else has got 'It'? Sienna herself is not much help ('I've never understood...
Back in 1997, George Clooney was still a TV heartthrob first, a movie star second. He had just made a $100 million blockbuster - Batman & Robin - but he knew it sucked. He headlined a couple of competent A-list pictures, One Fine Day and The Peacemaker, but neither of them was better than average. 'I was being held to a higher yardstick, and I...
In the age of celebrity, there are few stories as irresistible as the self-destruction of a creative artist. Whether it's Britney taking clippers to her hair, Whitney turning her multi-million dollar home into a crack den, or the bad joke that was Anna Nicole Smith's short life, the headlines are as lurid as the lawyers will allow, and we all...
After last year's upset win for Crash, this year is shaping up to be another very tight race. The nominations are split far and wide - Dreamgirls, the film with the most nominations has been overlooked for Best Picture and Best Director, a turn of events which surprised most of us (not that I'm complaining). The various critics' awards spread the
Say what you like about chemistry - you can't bottle it. We're all looking for Mr or Ms Right (if only for a night). And the movies is traditionally a good place to start: quality time in the dark, just you and your date, Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie. We like to imagine that great on-screen chemistry will rub off on us, somehow. And sometimes...
Nothing is certain in this life but death, taxes and Helen Mirren's BAFTA win for The Queen. This has been an annus mirabilis for Britain's sexiest septuagenarian, and the members of the British Academy are not about to rain on her parade. The Oscar is so close she can probably smell it. So far, let's see: she won an Emmy and a Golden Globe for...
Last week, we got the Oscar nominations. This week, not coincidentally, the hotly-tipped, dramatically snubbed Dreamgirls makes its way into UK cinemas. With the race wide open, events like BAFTA on February 11th become more influential than usual, and the Dreamgirls people must have been hoping to ride the momentum from the Golden Globes (such...
Leonardo DiCaprio aspires to greatness. Most actors dream the dream, but Leo lives it. Sure, he's been lucky. Since the billion dollar bonanza Titanic, he hasn't had to worry about anything so mundane as proving his box-office worth. He commands top dollar, no matter that he hasn't appeared in a bone fide blockbuster since. If James Cameron's...
Thirty years ago, the first Rocky movie came out of nowhere like the urban fairytale it was. Sylvester Stallone was a bit part player, a big slab of meat with a crooked mouth who played purse-snatchers and mafia hoods. He wrote the screenplay, an old time boxing picture like they used to make, refused to give it up unless they let him play the...
In The Pursuit of Happyness Will Smith does something new. He struggles. And that might be the one thing that doesn't come naturally to him. This is one of those people who makes everything look easy. He's tall (6'2), athletic and handsome, but then you could say the same for any number of movie stars - Colin Farrell, say, or Ben Affleck - and...
It's always misleading to look ahead to the next 12 months of cinema from the perspective of late December/early January 1st... For better or worse the Academy Awards dominate movie release schedules for the Hollywood studios - the Oscar nominations are announced Jan 23 and the awards are February 25 . The BAFTAs are presented Feb 11 - which...
Film in 2006? It was the worst of times. It was the best of times. You couldn't ask for a better illustration of the highs and lows than the two movies released Friday 22 December: Clint Eastwood's Flags of our Fathers is one of the best, a sober, melancholy, meticulously researched WWII movie with clear contemporary parallels. Zoom - which I...
This season, the new black is black. Going into the Academy Awards period it's clearer than ever there has been a sea-change in the status of African-Americans in Hollywood movies. The Academy's history is self-evidently shameful. When Denzel Washington won the Best Supporting Actor for his performance in Glory in 1989, he became only the third...
On a chilly weekend in mid-November a diminutive tap-happy penguin by the name of Mumble beat out James Bond for the number one spot at the US box office, the margin almost as close as a hanging chad. Neither production had reason to be glum: both took in a whopping $41 million over the course of just three days. Business as usual for Bond,...
Dustin Hoffman used to take himself very seriously indeed. There are a couple of stories in screenwriter William Goldman's classic book Adventures in the Screen Trade about the way Hoffman behaved on the set of Marathon Man which are the stuff of showbiz legend. The more notorious of the two involves his treatment of Sir Laurence Olivier, who was
Hollywoodland marks the return of an archetypal movie hero. He trades under many names: Gumshoe; sleuth; shamus; snoop; private eye; private investigator; private dick… 'P.I.' for short. Despite the nomenclature the job description doesn't much vary. In real life, it mostly involves waiting and watching. In the movies, it's about sticking your...
Almost all the attention this time out is fixed (quite rightly) on Daniel Craig, the new 'bleeding' Bond. But spare a thought for the mercurial Danish actor Mads Mikkelsen who has some pretty big shoes to fill as Le Chiffre, the latest Bond baddie - and they've saddled him with asthma to make it that much harder. No less a personage than Orson...
As someone points out in the course of Christopher Nolan's terrific new film The Prestige , it's not enough for a magician to make something disappear. You have to bring it back to get the applause. Think about that for a second. Does the magic itself disturb us too much? In making a vanished object re-materialise, the entertainer is tipping us...
The hottest ticket at this year's Toronto Film Festival starred a 35-year-old Englishman from Staines whose previous attempt at a solo movie didn't even get a cinema release in the US. In fact before this summer, his most successful film role consisted of voicing a Lemur called Julien in the animated kids' movie Madagascar . It's doubtful more...
What a difference a year makes. Back in June 2005 Russell Crowe was facing a self-inflicted publicity meltdown and even possible jail time after throwing a telephone at a New York hotel concierge. It wasn't the first time he'd been involved in a violent fracas. A year earlier he'd got into a scrap with his own stunt man during the filming...
Autumn traditionally brings us harvest festivals and what my old Sunday school teacher used to call 'mellow fruitfulness', and I suppose you could extend that image to the movies too. The season gets underway with important film festivals at Venice and Toronto. There's a new extravaganza this year at Rome, and next week the London Film Festival...
This week we take a look at some of the coolest dudes in cinema in our Kings of Cool feature PLUS A Scanner Darkly reviewed, an exclusive preview of the hottest films to look out for at the Edinburgh Film Festival, an exclusive interview with up-and-coming director Dan Reed.
There are bigger movie stars. (Even around the girth.) There are better actors. There are even funnier funny men (take a bow, Will Ferrell - and look out for Talledega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby if you don't believe me). But when this decade stops to take a peek at itself in the collective mirror that is the movie screen, won't it be Jack...
If one TV show defined the 1980s, it would have to be Miami Vice. Sure, cop shows are dime a dozen, always have been, always will be. But this wasn't exactly Inspector Morse. Legend has it that the original concept came to just two words - 'MTV cops'. Writer Anthony Yerkovich and executive producer Michael Mann didn't so much flesh out the idea,...
When fans debate the best car movies ever made, the discussion usually comes down to car chases and the usual suspects: Bullitt (look out for the VW Steve McQueen passes three times!); Ronin; The French Connection; The Matrix Reloaded; Mad Max; The Fast and the Furious; and my personal favourite, To Live and Die in LA. Once the chase theme is...
Last week I received an email on the subject of Keira Knightley from one of the producers of The Hole, quite understandably aggrieved that I'd neglected to mention it in my newsletter. He admitted to some pride for having spotted her promise from a screen test. Industry movers and shakers may be best placed for it, but it's something all film-love
It must be summer: another week, another blockbuster hits the fans. But of course Superman Returns is more than just another blockbuster… we're talking about the granddaddy of all superheroes, top dog in the Justice League. Created by two teenagers in 1932 (though he wasn't published until 1938), Superman was the inspiration for Batman, and pre-da
The first reviews are in on the eagerly awaited Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest , and it sounds like it delivers everything the fans were hoping for. Dead Man's Chest is the second instalment of three (the third was shot back to back, Lord of the Rings style, though it won't be released until next summer). But if the buzz is to be...
Do movies make a difference? Aside from allowing us to while away a happy hour or two - can they also make the world a better place? Ken Loach's Cathy Come Home (technically a piece of TV) is one example of a film that had a direct effect on policy. The 1933 drama I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang so scandalized the public that many states...
Ken Loach turned 70 last Saturday, five days before the release of his latest (19th) feature, The Wind That Shakes the Barley, and a month after he won the Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival with the same film. An artistic achievement at least on a par with winning the European Cup (it's the first time a Brit has won since Mike Leigh's...
This week we're celebrating the world cup with our very own World Cup Substitutes Game vote for your favourite film now!
Talk about one-way traffic: Somehow I can't see Orlando Bloom being drafted into Sven's squad as a last minute replacement for Wayne Rooney - but it's surprising how many sports stars go the other way and get a shot at acting in multi-million dollar movies. As a rule, these athletes know as much about screen craft as Bloom knows about lifting the
In Michel Gondry's new movie, The Science of Sleep, which opens here in June, Gael Garcia Bernal designs an unusual calendar: each month commemorates the anniversary of a human tragedy or a natural catastrophe - a plane crashing, a ship going down, a volcano erupting. He calls it a 'disasterology calendar'. Not surprisingly, his boss is...
Time is running out for Jennifer Aniston. Right now, she can still command column inches like nobody's business. A couple of hours before my official audience with the star at January's Sundance Film Festival I pick up some supplies from the local supermarket, and there she is staring back at me at the check out, looking harassed and dejected,...
Tom Hanks once said 'I've made over 20 movies. Five of them are good,' a modest self-assessment back in the mid 1990s. Now that he's made over 30, what do you reckon would make his personal top ten? We know he won the Oscars for Philadelphia and Forrest Gump, so those would have to make his list. And Philadelphia represented some kind of liberal...
See the LOVEFiLM Summer Top 10 The next four months will be critical for Hollywood - or at least for the people who run it. After last year's prolonged box office slump the studios have upped the ante, spending more money on more big movies than ever before. But does bigger mean better? And now that the studio heads are on the collective block,...
A Tory peer once told me how he'd spent an evening talking to a young American in the House of Commons about politics and this and that, and after a while had thought to ask him what it was that he did. The man had given him a strange look and told him he made movies. 'Oh,' said the peer. 'And what is that you do in the movies?' Another bemused...
The first time we see Bruce Willis in 16 Blocks , he looks like he hasn't slept in about a year and a half. He's old and grey. Not just his hair - what there is of it - but his skin. There are vampires with a better tan. He's limping, and his first instinct when left to babysit a corpse is to sniff out the hooch in the dead guy's kitchen. When he
There are obvious historical and political explanations for the decline of the western. But how on earth did Hollywood let the musical fall out of fashion? I mean, it's not like music itself ever went out of style. One of the happier characteristics of the human race is our propensity for banging objects together to make a joyful sound - and...
We are in at the beginning of something new. First there was the coming of sound. Then there was colour. In the 1950s TV took off. In the late 1970s/early 80s it was VHS. What's happening in these first years of the twenty first century is as radical a change as the movie industry has known since Al Jolson's jazz singer promised 'You ain't heard...
They say you should write what you know, and writer-director Noah Baumbach has certainly taken that advice to heart in The Squid and the Whale. No, he's not a marine biologist (although his last writing credit was The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou) and there's nothing fishy about this movie, which is both remarkably funny and uncomfortably...
On Inside Man and Firewall It used to be that you could just walk into a bank, hand the teller a note - like Woody Allen in Take the Money and Run: 'I have a gun…' - and make your withdrawal in double quick time. As long as you've found a reliable vehicle and a good parking spot (unlike George Clooney in Out of Sight) you're free and clear, and...
Say what you like about Christopher Walken, but the man got rhythm. James Cagney was a hoofer first, a gangster afterwards, and Walken is cut from the same cloth. Yup, the most colourful heavy in American movies trained as a dancer. Legend has it he received his diploma from The Children's Professional Theatre from Gypsy Rose Lee herself. He...
There's no shortage of hype about what a prescient, provocative, politically charged movie is V for Vendetta. And it's true that Alan Moore and David Lloyd's 1989 comic was ahead of its time. But when producer Joel Silver, comic book artist David Lloyd and actress Natalie Portman put in an appearance at San Diego's Comic Con last year - along...
When it comes to cinema, the West comes in all shapes and sizes. It's amazingly agile for a genre that's supposedly been dead these past 25 years. The Western is America's foundation myth - and while the genre's popularity waxes and wanes as the way we feel about America changes, it remains a potent touchstone for filmmakers, providing a timeless
The sure things, the dark horses, and the movies that Oscar forgot. We've been talking a lot about the Academy Awards over the last few weeks - too much perhaps, for an institution that turns art into a horse race, and divides artists into winners and losers. (Losers like Martin Scorsese, Alfred Hitchcock, David Lynch, Stanley Kubrick, Sam...
Anyone recall who won the Oscar for Best Actor in 1993? Was it Clint Eastwood (Unforgiven); Robert Downey Jr (Chaplin); Denzel Washington (Malcolm X); Stephen Rea ( The Crying Game ); or Al Pacino (Scent of a Woman)? I'll give you a clue. This year's favourite for the prize was fifth billed in the same film - though at the time he was just plain...
'You like to watch?' - Shirley Maclaine to Peter Sellers in Being There A friend and colleague of mine will swear 'til he's blue in the face that the most erotic moment in movies occurs in the Jean Vigo movie L'Atalante (1934), when two young newlyweds toss and turn in separate beds after a quarrel. I kind of know what he means, but at the same...
Revenge is a dish best served cold, according to the Klingon proverb. Unfortunately it doesn't often work out that way in real life. Just last week there was the case of a motorist who chucked a burger out of his window - only for a cyclist to pick it up and throw it back in. The motorist then throws his coffee on the cyclist, who scratches his...
Three hundred and 11 films were eligible for consideration this year, but when the Oscar nominations are announced tomorrow (Tuesday 31st January) that list will be whittled down to about a dozen titles, with five nominees in each category. At this stage it would be a major upset if Brokeback Mountain didn't pick up the most nominations. I'm...
This year we're getting two films about the events of September 11th 2001 from Oliver Stone and Paul Greengrass, but Steven Spielberg has gone the smart route by steering clear of that emotive topic and finding a parallel in the Palestinian terrorist attack on the Israeli Olympic team during the Munich games of 1972. (Eagle-eyed viewers will spot
While movie director often seems like a glamorous job, we tend to forget that most directors spend most of their time trying to secure the money to get their movies made. And failing… Take the case of director Anand Tucker, who graduated from British TV films to big screen features in 1998 with the outstanding Hilary and Jackie, starring Emily...
Watching the trailer for Jarhead the other day I found myself momentarily persuaded that this might be the incisive, what-the-heck-are-we-doing-here? account of the Allies' misadventures in the Gulf the world has been waiting for. Jarhead the Trailer looked like it wanted to do for Iraq what MASH did for Vietnam, Apocalypse Now did for Vietnam,...
See the rest of this week's newsletter features Every year it seems the film release schedule becomes more front-loaded with interesting titles, while from the spring through autumn you might as well let your brain go on holiday. Still, for the next couple of months we can make believe we're in for a bumper year - make the most of it! Brokeback...
