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Jj Abrams: the man who boldly goes… | profile
5 hours ago
The director has covered most genres in his wildly successful work in the cinema and on TV. But it is as king of the blockbuster that he will reign with the release of the new Star Trek, before he turns his talents to the latest Star Wars movie
Hollywood loves to categorise people. As every actor and director knows, it is all too easy to get pigeonholed on the back of a single successful film or an early role taken purely to pay the bills. Inside many daytime soap stars are Shakespeareans longing to play Hamlet. Perhaps some of the best action film directors, in their dark moments of the soul, will be kept awake at night by a gnawing urge to direct a low-budget independent film of deep artistic worth.
This is, after all, the industry that developed the star system, whose scripts are ruthlessly fine-tuned to appeal to »
- Paul Harris
9/11 taboo over
5 hours ago
Twelve years after the terror attacks, directors are daring to film the Capitol in flames
It has been a long time coming but American moviegoers are now ready to watch the White House being blown up again.
Twelve years after the 11 September terrorist attacks, and long after audiences shed a similar reticence about viewing New York being destroyed, at least three major films will now feature America's most famous address being attacked, shot up, set on fire or taken over by terrorists.
None of the destruction is subtle, or limited to the White House. A trailer for the coming blockbuster White House Down features dramatic scenes of the entire Capitol building exploding, Air Force One being shot out of the sky by a rocket, and then – almost as an afterthought – a shot of the White House bursting into rubble and flames. That follows on from the current box-office hit Olympus Has Fallen, »
- Paul Harris
Spring Breakers – review
5 hours ago
The beach party film featuring bikini-clad girls and beefcake guys became a B-movie Californian genre in the 1960s and ultimately led up to TV's vacuous Baywatch. It's generally thought to have been launched in 1960 with MGM's highly popular Where the Boys Are, based on a sober, sociological novel by Glendon Swarthout about a quartet of female midwestern students spending their spring break in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. It had a title song by Connie Francis and was produced by the prolific Joe Pasternak, now best remembered for saying of Esther Williams, "Wet she was a star."
Camille Paglia regards Where the Boys Are as a significant and truthful comment on changing social and sexual mores in the 1960s, and Harmony Korine's brash homage to Pasternak's film has attracted similar, if rather more equivocal tributes. Korine made his name as screenwriter on Larry Clark's dubious 1995 film Kids about the spread »
- Philip French
A Late Quartet – review
5 hours ago
Fine performances enliven a moving drama about a group of classical musicians whose uneasy harmony is put at risk by illness
Musical groups, coming together, working harmoniously, splitting up, reuniting, provide one of the great metaphors for human activity. In the cinema we encounter them in such different forms as the real-life bandleaders Jimmy and Tommy Dorsey feuding and going their different ways in The Fabulous Dorseys; Bing Crosby's inner-city priest reforming delinquents as a choir in Going My Way; Fellini's allegorical Orchestra Rehearsal presenting Italy as a musical rabble that can only function when submitting to a firm conductor; or Dustin Hoffman's recent Quartet, which sees elderly singers burying old differences to recreate their celebrated quartet from Rigoletto.
A Late Quartet, written and directed by the American documentarian Yaron Silberman, is a major contribution to this continuing cycle. A subtle, intelligent picture with a suitably resonant title, »
- Philip French
The Servant
5 hours ago
(Joseph Losey, 1963, StudioCanal, 15)
Half a century ago, British cinema had a great year. John Schlesinger's Billy Liar, Tony Richardson's Tom Jones and Lindsay Anderson's This Sporting Life took local film-makers into radically different directions. Two resident Americans – the self-exiled Stanley Kubrick and the McCarthy refugee Joseph Losey – established themselves as world figures. Kubrick made Dr Strangelove (though its release was postponed to 1964 due to the Kennedy assassination). Losey, after a difficult period, often working under pseudonyms, had three films released: the dazzling Hammer thriller The Damned, the Franco-Italian psycho-drama Eve (both shown in versions re-edited by their producers) and the complex, fully achieved The Servant.
Influenced by Marx and Brecht, The Servant was the first part of a trilogy scripted by Harold Pinter about class warfare, sexual conflict and struggles for power in 20th-century Britain, involving a whole society from the working class to the aristocracy.
Exquisitely made »
- Philip French
Mark Kermode's DVD round-up
5 hours ago
What Richard Did; The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey; Mission to Lars; TinkerBell and the Secret of the Wings
The Irish director Lenny Abrahamson really is a remarkable film-maker. His debut feature, Adam & Paul, updated the existential black comedy of Beckett's Waiting for Godot, with two addicts scraping their way through the underbelly of Dublin to grimly comic effect. Garage built upon the acting promise of its predecessor as Abrahamson drew exceptional performances from an ensemble cast including Pat Shortt and Anne-Marie Duff. Both films are eclipsed, however, by What Richard Did (2012, Artificial Eye, 15), a tale of youth, privilege, denial and tragedy that confirms Abrahamson as both a major cinematic talent and a distinctive directorial voice.
Adapted by screenwriter Malcolm Campbell from Kevin Power's book Bad Day in Blackrock (which drew inspiration from real-life events still fresh in the minds of many), this deceptively low-key drama centres on Richard Karlsen (Jack Reynor), a handsome, »
- Mark Kermode
Ian McCulloch's cultural highlights
5 hours ago
From Classic FM to Spiral, Ian McCulloch reveals his cultural picks of the moment
Best known as the frontman of post-punk rockers Echo & the Bunnymen, Ian McCulloch was born and raised in Liverpool and formed the band in 1978. Their 1980 debut album, Crocodiles, garnered both critical admiration and chart success and McCulloch was nicknamed "Mac the Mouth" by the press for his outspoken comments aimed at the likes of Bono and the Smiths. The Bunnymen released four more albums, including 1984's Ocean Rain which spawned singles such as The Killing Moon and Silver, but in 1988 McCulloch quit to go solo, releasing two albums under his own name before taking a break from recording. In the mid-1990s he resumed his creative relationship with the band but continued to work on his own material, recently featuring on Some Kind of Nothingness by Manic Street Preachers. Holy Ghosts, a double CD combining orchestral »
- Gemma Kappala-Ramsamy
Mike Birbiglia's worst nightmare
5 hours ago
When comedian Mike Birbiglia gets anxious, he starts sleepwalking. Now, as he stars in a film about his condition, he recalls the dramatic night he turned into the Incredible Hulk…
It's 20 January 2005, and I'm in Walla Walla, Washington – which is a place. I'm staying at a hotel called La Quinta Inn. It's 1am and I'm lying in bed. But I'm not going to sleep because I'm an insomniac. I'm sitting up in my bed with my laptop warming my thighs. I'm Googling myself. I'm watching the news. And I'm eating a pizza. At the same time.
And I fall asleep.
I have a dream that there is a guided missile headed towards my room and there are all these military personnel in the room.
I jump out of bed and say: "What's the plan?"
And the general in charge turns to me and says: "The missile co-ordinates are set specifically on you. »
Matt Damon: man of the people
5 hours ago
Nobody does the everyman better than Matt Damon. His common touch has made him one of the world's most bankable stars. He tells Tim Lewis about offending Barack Obama, his love for Ben Affleck and marrying outside the Hollywood elite
'I got the fortunes of heaven
in diamonds and gold
I got all the bonds baby
that the bank could hold'
'Ain't Got You' – Bruce Springsteen
In 1987, when Bruce Springsteen wrote the song "Ain't Got You", he was the biggest rock star in the world. He had vast estates in New Jersey and Beverly Hills, and he had not long returned from a honeymoon at Gianni Versace's villa in Lake Como. "Ain't Got You" was Springsteen's attempt to make a self-aware nod to his outrageous fortune, the Rembrandts on his walls, and how he had come a long way from his working-class upbringing.
Before he released it, Springsteen played »
- Tim Lewis
Home – review
5 hours ago
Home is the slow, unremarkable directorial debut of an actor who had prominent roles in several early films by Turkey's most prominent director, Nuri Bilge Ceylan. Its protagonist is Dogan, an architect experiencing a mid-life crisis who's told by a senior colleague to dispel his depression by revisiting his native northern Turkey, taking with him a camera to photograph the landscape and document it for environmentalists. Rather poor advice for him and us. Dogan visits his married sister for the first time in 15 years, has an encounter with suspicious local officials who are on the lookout for terrorists, drops in at a fish farm and meets a somewhat worldly imam. His brother-in-law tells him to accept the necessity of change, but Dogan, not surprisingly, finds the place somewhat run-down, its Greek inhabitants now gone and the local streams (referred to in the inadequate subtitles as "brooks") despoiled by hydroelectric schemes. »
- Philip French
Papadopoulos & Sons – review
5 hours ago
Written and directed by a Greek Cypriot, this flat, feelgood family story transposes the cliches of Zorba the Greek to the present day. The dull Alan Bates character becomes Harry, an anglicised Greek Cypriot multi-millionaire (Stephen Dillane) bankrupted by the current economic crisis; Anthony Quinn's Zorba becomes Spiros, his ebullient older brother and embodiment of the life-force (Georges Corraface). The widowed Harry and his three kids are rescued when they reopen the family fish-and-chips bar, make friends with the Turkish family running a kebab shop across the street, discover their eastern Mediterranean roots, turn their backs on capitalism and start dancing to the strains of a Mikis Theodorakis song in a suburban London street.
ComedyDramaPhilip French
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- Philip French
Thursday Till Sunday – review
5 hours ago
This promising debut is a deceptively uneventful Chilean road movie in which the break-up of a middle-class marriage is seen through the eyes of the sensitive 10-year-old Lucía as she accompanies her parents and seven-year-old brother on a long weekend drive north from Santiago. There are warning shots when they steal some fruit overhanging a garden fence, a meeting with two girl hitchhikers, a stopover at a dreary motel, a family reunion at a dusty camp site, and a devastating night in the desert. The takes are long, static and not always rewarding, but Santi Ahumada's performance as Lucía has the qualities we used to associate with Italian neo-realism.
DramaWorld cinemaPhilip French
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- Philip French
Dark Skies – review
5 hours ago
Best known as a special effects expert on horror and sci-fi films, Scott Stewart's is a moderately effective supernatural tale, an allegory for our anxious times in which a suburban American family appears to be targeted by some malign force that is, as we used to say, "not of this world". It seems that aliens pick on households with problems, and Dad has lost his job as an architect, Mom is having troubles in the real-estate business, and one of their teenage sons is watching porn and keeping bad company.
HorrorDramaPhilip French
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- Philip French
The War of the Worlds Alive on Stage! – review
5 hours ago
Jeff Wayne's rock music version of Hg Wells's 1898 novel brought together at the O2 arena in Greenwich a giant widescreen, a 45-piece orchestra energetically conducted by Wayne, five on-stage actors and Liam Neeson as narrator in holograph form (a novel way to telephone in a performance). It was filmed there last December, and the resultant documentary record may be a useful aide-memoire to those who saw it but it's not much of a film.
MusicalJason DonovanDramaDocumentaryPhilip French
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- Philip French
The Odd Life of Timothy Green – review
5 hours ago
This painfully sentimental, would-be magical tale centres on a small-town couple (the husband works in a pencil factory, his wife is a tour guide at a pencil museum) whose desperate prayers to be parents are answered one stormy night when a lovable 12-year-old climbs out of a hole in the garden and greets them as Mom and Dad. The only magical aspect is the golden glow provided by cinematographer John Toll.
DramaPhilip French
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- Philip French
Was Stephen King right to hate The Shining?
21 hours ago
Hollywood has always played fast and loose with books – risking the author's wrath by changing plot and characters wholesale. Joe Dunthorne looks back on some memorable film cheats
At book readings, Stephen King sometimes tells a story about his "only preproduction discussion" for the 1980 film adaptation of The Shining. At seven in the morning, King was shaving in the bathroom when his wife ran in to tell him there was a call from London, it was Stanley Kubrick. Just the mention of the director's name was shock enough that when King went to the phone, he had a line of blood running down one cheek and the other was still white with foam. The first thing Kubrick said – and it's worth noting that King's growly impersonation makes him sound like a swamp creature – was: "I think stories of the supernatural are fundamentally optimistic, don't you? If there are ghosts then that means we survive death. »
- Joe Dunthorne
This week's new DVD & Blu-ray
23 hours ago
Scanners | The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey | The House In Nighmare Park | The Servant | Dead End Drive-in
From Sam Raimi to Peter Jackson, horror has always been a great way for directors to get a career start: as long as they provide marketable gore, they can pretty much make whatever they want. David Cronenberg used the tactic too, but his early films are perhaps closer to science fiction.
Scanners was his big breakthrough success. It fulfilled the basic horror requirements with little more than a single image – the exploding head – but it was such a strong image that it sparked a trend in the early 80s. Scanners are misfits with telekinetic powers who don't fit into society. A scanner underground network is waging war against multinational ConSec, whose reckless drug testing on pregnant women caused these aberrations (playing the rebels' leader is Michael Ironside, a never-unemployed actor with the ideal »
- Phelim O'Neill
This week's new film events
23 hours ago
From Page To Screen | Bradford International Film Festival | Belfast International Film Festival | Italian Film Festival
From Page To Screen, Bridport
Curated by novelist Joe Dunthorne, this festival of literary adaptations takes in everything from Patricia Highsmith thrillers (Plein Soleil, Strangers On A Train) to comic-book films American Splendor and Ghost World, and films based on plays, like new vampire flick Byzantium, which comes with a masterclass from producer Stephen Woolley. Dunthorne introduces Richard Ayoade's adaptation of his own Submarine, and its key influence The Graduate, and there's a special screening of Kubrick's The Shining at the precarious, disused Burton Cliff Hotel.
Various venues, Wed to 14 Apr
Bradford International Film Festival
Bradford is rarely the first city that springs to mind when you think of British cinema, but it's home to our National Media Museum and is a Unesco City of Film, no less. And its festival is an embarrassment »
- Steve Rose
This week's new films
23 hours ago
Spring Breakers | A Late Quartet | The Expatriate | Thursday Till Sunday | Dark Skies | The Odd Life Of Timothy Green | Papdopoulos & Sons | All Things To All Men | Home
Spring Breakers (18)
(Harmony Korine, 2012, Us) Selena Gomez, James Franco, Gucci Mane. 94 mins
The new American dream/nightmare of the endless beach party is both celebrated and satirised in Korine's woozy Florida tale. The story is fittingly loose – four naive teens turn to criminal means to fund their hedonism – but it's more of an experience: a dubstep-tracked collage of neon, Day-Glo and tanned flesh, all facilitated by Franco's fantastically watchable gangsta rapper.
A Late Quartet (15)
(Yaron Zilberman, 2012, Us) Christopher Walken, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Catherine Keener. 106 mins
A respected New York string quartet is struck by an excess of issues here: terminal illness, infidelity, professional jealousy, you name it. Without the distinguished cast, its highbrow melodramas would seem ludicrous.
The Expatriate (15)
(Philipp Stölzl, 2012, Us/Bel/Can/UK) Aaron Eckhart, »
- Steve Rose
Roger Ebert obituary
5 April 2013 4:08 PM, PDT
Chicago film critic with a worldwide appeal
For 46 years Roger Ebert, who has died aged 70 after suffering from cancer, wrote on films for the Chicago Sun-Times, and did not want to stop. The one thing he welcomed when announcing a "leave of presence" earlier this week was the realisation of a fantasy: "reviewing only the movies I want to review".
His following in the English-speaking world was unrivalled. He and Gene Siskel, his co-host on At the Movies on television, had a street named after them – Siskel and Ebert Way – near the CBS Studios in Chicago where they worked together. In 1975, Ebert became the first film critic to win a Pulitzer prize for criticism.
He has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, and received honorary degrees from various institutions of learning. In 2007, Forbes magazine named Ebert "the most powerful pundit in America".
Why all the accolades? As a race, »
- Ronald Bergan
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