film directors
Jasper Rees
The name will never trip off the public tongue. Millions watch his work - most recently his superb realisation of Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall. But there is no hall of fame for television directors. It’s only on the big screen that they get to be big shots. The difference with Peter Kosminsky (b 1956) is, although it’s the title he takes in the credits, he's not really just a director. In the last 25 years he has researched, storyboarded and painstakingly cajoled into existence a body of work which, for sheer linearity of purpose, stands comparison with, say, Anthony Powell’s 12-volume portrait Read more ...
theartsdesk
Summer's here, which can only mean Hollywood blockbusters. But it's not all Spider-Man, talking apes and World War Two with platoons of thespians fighting on the beaches. There's comedy, a saucy menage-à-trois, a film about golf and even a ghost story. It's called A Ghost Story. We hereby bring you sneak peeks of the season's finest and more titles anticipated in the autumn (and hey, the trailer might even be the best part).AUGUSTThe Odyssey. Director: Jérôme Salle, starring Lambert Wilson, Pierre Niney and Audrey Tautou. Jacques Cousteau: le movie. Released 18 AugFinal Portrait. Read more ...
Thomas Barrie
Gareth Tunley, director of the psychological drama The Ghoul, and Alice Lowe, one of its stars, are a duo with eclectic tastes. They share a background in comedy, but cite everything from punk to surrealism and the occult as influences on Tunley’s directorial debut, which was produced by Ben Wheatley.Genre nods, mental illness, the underlying suggestion of magic and an unreliable protagonist set the tone of the film, which follows the life of a detective who goes into therapy to try to uncover the secret of a seemingly impossible double murder, before revelations begin to suggest his life may Read more ...
Nick Hasted
“I would love it,” Lola (Barbara Sukowa) sighs, warned of a world without morality. “My problem is that they don’t let me in to take part.” In Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s 1981, 1950s-set reworking of Sternberg’s Dietrich-creating Weimar classic The Blue Angel, the original’s voracious femme fatale becomes a wistful, drunkenly mercurial, not unkind sexual businesswoman. She’s the emblem of 1950s West Germany, ready to be bought and sold to get ahead, and put a difficult past behind her.Fassbinder turned the lush Technicolor palette of Douglas Sirk’s 1950s “women’s” melodramas feverish for a Read more ...
David Kettle
"You drink coffee, you smoke cigarettes, and you paint. And that’s it." So goes David Lynch’s memorable description of what he calls "the art life" in Jon Nguyen’s frank and engaging documentary. It’s a life that Lynch imagined himself living as a student and a young man – surrounded by the detritus of a disorderly studio, working all hours at his latest visual creation. And for some of his early life, at least, it’s exactly the life that Lynch lived.It’s this early period in Lynch’s creative life that’s the subject of Nguyen’s film, charting his childhood and student years as a driven, Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Maurice Hatton’s 1978 Long Shot comes with the subtitle “A film about filmmaking”, a nod at what has practically become a cinematic sub-category in itself. But while other directors have used the genre for philosophical or aesthetic rumination, Hatton’s subject is far more immediate and down-to-earth – the perilous business of just trying to get a movie made.Specifically, an independent movie: Long Shot is a glorious satire on the sheer rigmarole of attempting to stitch a deal together. It’s set against the backdrop of the 1977 Edinburgh Film Festival, which gives rich extra atmosphere, and Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
A well-known internet sales site currently offers seven previous home cinema editions of The Bird With the Crystal Plumage. Some are DVD or Blu-ray only, others are on both formats – increasing the amount of packages on offer. Only a brave company would enter such a crowded market with another version of the film to take the total to eight. Yet, here we are with a new dual format DVD/ Blu-ray edition.Despite the spiffy packaging – including a limited-run configuration with a 60-page booklet, a poster and postcards – and fresh extras – including a new interview with director Dario Argento, a Read more ...
Nick Hasted
After Eyes Without a Face, came this. Georges Franju is largely known for the grisly, surreal horror of his second feature, about a mad surgeon grafting stalked young women’s faces onto his disfigured wife. His all but forgotten follow-up, Spotlight On a Murderer (1961), is a breezy lark by comparison. It relocates the Agatha Christie-style country house mystery to a Breton chateau, where a complicated inheritance causes the corrupt de Kerloguen family to revert to murderous type. Its flightiness is tethered by Franju’s elegance and wit, and his mostly young cast’s charm.This could easily be Read more ...
David Nice
Hitting the essence of a Fellini masterpiece in a different medium is no easy task. Try and reproduce his elusive brand of poetic melancholy and you'll fail; best to transfer the characters to a different medium, as the musical Sweet Charity did in moving the action of Le notte di Cabiria from Rome and environs to New York. The film version even managed to find in Shirley MacLaine an equivalent to the unpredictable charm of Giulietta Masina, Fellini's wife, a great actor. But no one can really rival Masina’s most compelling role, the waif Gelsomina sold to a travelling strong man in La Strada Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
The two words cut to the chase. The cast play, or actually are, maniacs. There are lots of them. Multiple Maniacs also nods to the title of Herschell Gordon Lewis’ 1964 proto-gore movie Two Thousand Maniacs! John Waters’ 1970 second full-length film also borrows from Ingmar Bergman’s Sawdust and Tinsel and Tod Browning’s’ Freaks as well as demonstrating a fondness for John Cassavetes’ affected naturalism. And yet this was, and remains, a film like no other.That the black-and-white Multiple Maniacs is perverse is a given, but seeing it with fresh eyes rams home its aberrance and wilfulness. Read more ...
Nick Hasted
It’s strange to think that Sean Connery is still out there somewhere, aged 86. But this 17-year-old Gus Van Sant cousin to the director’s Good Will Hunting remains the great Scot’s penultimate film (Sam Mendes pulled back from the Skyfall cameo that should have been). His brawn, brusque charm and impatient street-wisdom are undiminished as the J.D. Salinger-like William Forrester, who wrote a generation-defining novel, but now lives as a secretive recluse in a locked Bronx apartment. This Oscar-winning role joins Playing By Heart (1998) in reviving Connery’s range, away from the wry old-time Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Gurinder Chadha is still best-known for directing a low-budget comedy set in Hounslow about two girls who just want to play football. Bend It Like Beckham (2002) introduced Keira Knightley and in 2015 became a stage musical that lured Asian audiences to the West End. While she also explored British Asian culture in Bride and Prejudice (2004) and It’s a Wonderful Afterlife (2010), in her new film she abandons light comedy to address the biggest and most decisive moment in Britain’s relationship with India.Viceroy’s House is set in 1947 at the moment Lord Mountbatten arrived in Delhi to oversee Read more ...