Film Features
Bob Rafelson (1933-2022): New Hollywood's raging bullTuesday, 26 July 2022
Bob Rafelson finally exiled himself, unable any longer to countenance the consuming nature of his filmmaking. As director, producer and writer in the Sixties and Seventies, he had helped create both New Hollywood’s fabled moment of auteur freedom and its greatest star, Jack Nicholson, in films such as Easy Rider and Five Easy Pieces. Read more... |
theartsdesk at Tallinn's Black Nights Film Festival - still crazy after all these yearsThursday, 02 December 2021
Film festival chiefs the world over have been having a tricky time navigating the pandemic, juggling ever-changing Covid rules with an industry desperate to return to normal. Yet it’s no surprise that Estonia’s Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival (PÖFF to the locals) has managed better than most. Read more... |
Helen McCrory: 'If there's one interesting thing about acting it's trying to lose your ego'Monday, 19 April 2021
Each generation is given an actress who can do everything – be intimate with the camera but also coat a back wall in honey from 100 paces. There was Judi Dench, and then there was Imelda Staunton, both loved by all. Read more... |
Filmmaker Darius Marder: 'Deafness is a culture. That's not being PC'Saturday, 03 April 2021
Sound of Metal has been a long time coming. Director and writer Darius Marder faced years of delays ranging from casting changes to the whole world shutting down. Was it worth the wait? Well, six Academy Award nominations including Best Film certainly suggest it was. Read more... |
Filmmaker Frank Marshall: 'People don’t understand what geniuses The Bee Gees were'Tuesday, 08 December 2020
Frank Marshall might not be the biggest household name, but his footprint on Hollywood is unrivalled. He has produced hits ranging from Indiana Jones and Back to the Future to Jason Bourne and Jurassic World. He also takes occasional forays into directing, such as the madcap Arachnophobia and cannibalistic rugby tale Alive. Read more... |
Filmmaker Bassam Tariq: 'Great cinema doesn't need to be perfect - embrace the imperfections'Tuesday, 27 October 2020
After Bassam Tariq's feature debut These Birds Walk was released at SXSW 2013, things seemed to slow down. The documentary about a runaway boy in Pakistan garnered strong reviews, but soon Tariq was working in a New York butchers pondering his career. Read more... |
Directors Ian Bonhôte and Peter Ettedgui: 'The disability community is the world community'Tuesday, 25 August 2020
In 2018, directors Ian Bonhôte and Peter Ettedgui burst onto the documentary scene with McQueen, a visually stunning study of British fashion designer Alexander McQueen. Acclaim and offers followed, but no-one could have predicted the subject of their second feature. Read more... |
Ennio Morricone 1928-2020: A lost afternoon in his apartment in RomeTuesday, 07 July 2020
Ennio Morricone was a genius, or as close to that description as makes no odds. If we mean someone who created a unique body of work, one that changed culture, had a distincive style and was massively influential, then Morricone fitted the bill. theartsdesk's Joe Muggs was discussing today on Facebook and Mixmag his influence on dubstep and Jamaican music, for example. Read more... |
Ian Holm, British film's best supporting actorSaturday, 20 June 2020
Ian Holm was once in his local cinema on High Street Kensington, enquiring at the ticket office about concessions for people who appeared in the film they wished to see. The unlucky vendor failed to make the connection between the short customer with full beard and the clean-shaven priest in the sci-fi caper showing on Screen Four upstairs. He had to make an internal call to the manager. "There's someone here who says he's in The Fifth Element. Wants a discount." "Oh yeah. Read more... |
Larry Kramer: 'I think anger is a wonderful useful emotion'Thursday, 28 May 2020
Larry Kramer, who has died at the age of 84, was the Solzhenitsyn of AIDS who indomitably reported from the gay gulags of Manhattan’s quarantined wards and revolving-door hospices. “I felt very much like a journalist who realises that he has been given the story of his life,” he told me when I met him. Read more... |
Oscars 2020: a 'Parasite' love-in caps a night of firstsMonday, 10 February 2020
The 92nd Academy Awards saved its surprises for a final stretch that saw Parasite make history as the first foreign language film ever to win the Oscar for Best Picture, pipping to the post the presumptive favourite, the World War One drama 1917 (pictured below). Read more... |
'Shakespeare is mistakenly considered something for the elite': director Claire McCarthy on 'Ophelia'Tuesday, 19 November 2019
Ophelia is one of Shakespeare's most enduring characters in both literature and art, and yet her part in Hamlet is limited to few lines and fewer motivations. Based on Lisa Klein's novel, the new film Ophelia challenges this interpretation. Read more... |
10th Odessa International Film Festival review - exquisite gay love stories and visionary new musicSaturday, 27 July 2019
Odessa, the so-called "pearl of the Black Sea", is a Ukrainian city full of lovely 19th-century Italianate architecture and sandy beaches, with a reputation, even in Soviet times, for a certain bohemian sense of freedom. Read more... |
theartsdesk Q&A: documentary maker Karen Stokkendal PoulsenFriday, 26 July 2019
For a time, Aung San Suu Kyi enjoyed a heroic status on the international stage perhaps surpassed only by Nelson Mandela. The politician won a Nobel peace prize for her non-violent struggle for democracy and human rights in her country, Myanmar (formerly Burma), endured almost 20 years of house arrest, then played a leading role as her country moved towards so-called democracy. Read more... |
Ewa Banaszkiewicz and Mateusz Dymek: 'Is our film porny?'Wednesday, 17 July 2019
Spoiler alert: About sixty-four minutes into our debut feature film, one of the main female characters undresses for the camera. Alicja is being filmed by the other protagonist, a young American documentarian named Katie. Read more... |
Franco Zeffirelli: 'I had this feeling that I was special'Saturday, 15 June 2019
"I am amazed to be still alive. Two hours of medieval torment.” Franco Zeffirelli - who has died at the age of 96 - had spent the day having a lumbar injection to treat a sciatic nerve. You could hear the bafflement in his heavily accented English. Read more... |
Pages
latest in today
Help to give theartsdesk a future!
It all started on 09/09/09. That memorable date, September 9 2009, marked the debut of theartsdesk.com.
It followed some...
Mary, Queen of Scots, English National Opera review - heroic...
Genius doesn't always tally with equal opportunities, to paraphrase Doris Lessing. Opera houses have a duty to put on new works by women composers...
Music Reissues Weekly: Sharks - Car Crash Supergroup
Sharks were formed in 1972 by bassist Andy Fraser after he left Free. There were two albums, line-up changes and ripples which resonated after the...
Fat Dog, Chalk, Brighton review - a frenetic techno-rock jug...
Ro first saw Fat Dog, before anyone had heard of them, at the Windmill in Brixton in front of a crowd of about 25 people. Their manic energy blew...
Sidorova, Philharmonia, Alsop, Royal Festival Hall review –...
George Gershwin called one of his early classic songs, first created by Fred and Adele Astaire, “Fascinating Rhythm”. It was that mesmeric pull...
More Life, Royal Court review - posthuman tragedy fails to c...
I always advocate in favour of more sci-fi plays, and over the past decade there have been a gratifying number of them. But one essential element...
Album: Park Jiha - All Living Things
Park Jiha is a super-talented and gloriously inspired Korean multi-instrumentalist. Her new album follows Philos (2018) and The Gleam...
Captain America: Brave New World review - talking loud, sayi...
In his first weeks in office, Harrison Ford’s US president survives an assassination attempt inside the White House, goes to war with Japan and...
Three Sisters, Sam Wanamaker Playhouse review - Chekhov...
Russia.
It’s impossible to be ambivalent towards that word, that country, indeed that idea, one so very similar to...
MacMillan's Ordo Virtutum, BBC Singers, Jeannin, Milton...
Does any living composer write better for choirs, or more demandingly when circumstances allow, than James MacMillan? Admirable as it is to have...