Film
Jasper Rees
The second annual Freedom to Create Prize, which was presented in the Victoria and Albert Museum in London last night, has been won by Mohsen Makhmalbaf. The internationally renowned and prolific Iranian filmmaker, 52, downed tools earlier this year to become an official mouthpiece outside Iran for the presidential candidate Mir-Mossein Mousavi.Makhmalbaf dedicated his award to Iran’s Green Movement and its spiritual leader, Grand Ayatollah Hossein-Ali Montazeri. “People of my country are killed, imprisoned, tortured and raped just for their votes," he said. "Each award I receive gives me an Read more ...
Matt Wolf
London builds on its metrosexual status in Mr Right, a dreary gay-themed indie in which the metropolis by default becomes the star. There's nary a homophobe in sight - not to mention a traffic snarl-up or tube strike - in brother-sister filmmaking team David and Jacqui Morris's view of the capital, which looks giddy and rife with possibilities throughout. Shame, then, about the script.I suspect the film itself would come across as suffocatingly banal and solipsistic under any circumstances, but doubly so at a time when the London theatre is dealing with so many of these issues in infinitely Read more ...
Jasper Rees
A filmgoing acquaintance has personally drafted a set of guidelines to increase her chances of a good time at the cinema. It’s a fairly hardline set of strictures. No sequels, for one. Not to mention the ban on cartoons. And in the most random cull, she will see no film with a two-word title in which the first word is “The”. It’s by no means a foolproof system. She gets to miss The Godfather on rule three and The Godfather 2 on rule one. The Godfather 3 is additionally outlawed under rule two. Maybe it’s just that elongated time of year again that gently coaxes out the curmudgeon in one. But Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Low-budget horror movie, comprising supposedly "found" video footage depicting freaky supernatural events... it's Blair Witch 2! Indeed, writer/director Oren Peli has taken discount film-making to new extremes, using his own home in San Diego as his sole location, restricting the cast to five (I can't even remember the "Girl on Internet" mentioned in the cast list), and bringing the piece home for a ridiculous $15,000.Thanks to some cunning marketing, including special midnight screenings (so spooky!) and some viral internet action, Paranormal Activity's earnings have already breached Read more ...
Veronica Lee
How do you make a road movie set in several European countries for just £1million? Set it inside your lead character’s head and use strikingly inventive visual imagery to conjure a world full of the weird and wonderful, that’s how. And if the previous sentence rings a bell for The Mighty Boosh fans, it’s because Paul King, the BBC television comedy’s director, wrote and directed Bunny and the Bull, his first feature. He shot the film entirely in studios in London and Nottingham, and he tells the story with the kind of richly detailed, dreamlike shots that Boosh fans will instantly recognise. Read more ...
theartsdesk
This month's survey of the latest films released on DVD assesses the work of directors old and new, male and female. Cinema's great early romantic Frank Borzage is available in a box set. The work of French auteur Claire Denis and American maverick Gus Van Sant are assessed. There is also an Austro-Hungarian flavour, with Sacha Baron Cohen's Brüno on the one hand and Márta Mészáros's classic 1984 study of communism, Diary for My Children, on the other. British releases include Duncan Jones's debut Moon and Shane Meadows's mockumentary Le Donk and Scor-zay-zee. Hollywood supplies this month's Read more ...
anne.billson
They're back! Bella Swan and Edward Cullen (otherwise known as Kristen Stewart and Robert Pattinson) are once again smooching on a screen near you. I turned up one hour early for a showing of the new Twilight movie, and the damn thing was already sold out. Which suggests the film will do every bit as well as, if not better than, its predecessor, which made $383 million worldwide.Look on the bright side - maybe this will persuade studio executives they don't need to aim every single movie at adolescent males. The adolescent female market can be every bit as lucrative. What do young women want Read more ...
hilary.whitney
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." Cottrell Boyce and I are chatting in the distinctly unglamorous surroundings of a café on the concourse of Euston station. Cottrell Boyce is on his way back to Liverpool, where he has lived for most of Read more ...
sheila.johnston
If you stick with the Coen Brothers' new film until the end of the final credit crawl, you will notice the legend, in small print, "No Jews were harmed in the making of this motion picture." I wouldn't be so sure: they certainly put their hero through the trials of Job. With a title like that, it ought to be a comedy, but the Coens customarily keep a protective, ironic distance from their fictional creations, and so you never really quite know where you stand with them. Still, A Serious Man may be their most personal, most revealing movie yet.It opens, disorientingly, in a lonely, snowbound Read more ...
ash.smyth
The Regal Cinema is a charming old place. At 300 rupees for a box seat (£1.50 on a good day for the SLR), you can put your feet up, sip your Fanta in style and, peeping through the plush velour curtains that separate you from both hoi polloi and screen (if not from the nouveaux in box 9), get a disconcertingly exact idea of how the place must have felt when the young Queen Elizabeth II sat in this very seat, shortly after the place was built for her.There’s a new anthem now, of course, but you still have to stand up. Then you get the trailers for "Coming" movies (no rash promises as to when, Read more ...
sheila.johnston
Something has just happened to make Clint Eastwood's day. We refer, of course, not to the fact that he was yesterday made a Commander of the French Legion of Honour in Paris by President Sarkozky, but to the publication of Clint Eastwood, Icon, a gorgeous assembly of artwork from around the world commemorating an incredibly long-lived career.Armed with an enthusiastic and ingenuous preface by David Frangioni, the mad-keen American collector-fan whose devotion to duty over the years has made this book possible, it encompasses posters, door panels, standees (the larger-than-life-size cut-out Read more ...
joe.muggs
It's genuinely sad that last night's proceedings are not higher on the cultural agenda and that the gleaming new Kings Place auditorium was only half full. But as one of the participants pointed out, 50 years on from C P Snow's Two Cultures, there is still an arts establishment for whom sci-fi means Star Trek, and the ludicrous guff of Independence Day touches more of a nerve than Arthur C Clarke's visionary treatment of the same subject-matter in Childhood's End. The event, the last in a series of science discussions organised by Nature magazine, all began very sensibly with a laying out Read more ...