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Lack of diversity in film industry costs Hollywood big money, report finds
19 minutes ago
Films with higher rates of diversity tend to have higher box office numbers and that analysts consistently underestimate black audiences
The absence of black faces among acting nominees at this year’s Academy Awards has highlighted a troubling issue for the movie business: that the lack of diversity on screen is not just bad for its reputation. It’s also bad for its business.
The 2015 Hollywood Diversity Report, published by UCLA’s Ralph J Bunche Center, said that while minorities account for more than half of frequent Us moviegoers, minority representation in films has dipped since 2013. That year is widely regarded as a “breakout year” for black representation in film with 12 Years a Slave and The Butler.
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- Edward Helmore
How to be Single - video review
3 hours ago
Xan Brooks, Catherine Shoard and Benjamin Lee review How to be Single, a rom-com starring Dakota Johnson as a freshly separated New Yorker who must be taught the rules of the dating game by her more experienced friends. Also starring Rebel Wilson, Alison Brie and Leslie Mann, How to be Single is released in UK cinemas on Friday 19 February
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- Xan Brooks, Benjamin Lee, Catherine Shoard, Tom Silverstone, Ian Anderson and Andrea Salvatici
Freeheld - video review
3 hours ago
Xan Brooks, Benjamin Lee and Catherine Shoard review Freeheld, based on the true story of Laurel Hester, a New Jersey police detective who fought to have her pension transferred to her domestic partner after she contracted terminal cancer. Starring Julianne Moore as Hester and Ellen Page as her partner, Stacie Andree, Freeheld is released in the UK on Friday 18 February
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- Xan Brooks, Catherine Shoard, Benjamin Lee, Tom Silverstone, Ian Anderson and Andrea Salvatici
The Guardian film show: How to be Single, Freeheld, Bone Tomahawk and Chronic - video reviews
3 hours ago
Catherine Shoard and Benjamin Lee join Xan Brooks to review the latest cinema releases. This week the team are roaming the New York dating scene with the rom-com How to be Single; losing their grip as they take in lousy cancer drama Freeheld; flying full pelt with grisly western Bone Tomahawk; and celebrating a serious, sensitive take on end-of-life care as Tim Roth plays a palliative nurse in Chronic
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- Xan Brooks, Catherine Shoard, Benjamin Lee, Tom Silverstone, Ian Anderson and Andrea Salvatici
George Gaynes obituary
3 hours ago
Actor who delighted audiences as the twittish Commandant Lassard in Police Academy
The actor George Gaynes, who has died aged 98, gave warm, sparkling performances in two 1980s comedy hits. In Sydney Pollack’s Tootsie (1982), he played John Van Horn, a lecherous old ham known to his colleagues on a daytime TV soap opera as “the Tongue”. Breath-freshener at the ready, he tries his luck with a new female cast member, not realising that she is in fact a male performer (played by Dustin Hoffman) in drag. Pauline Kael of the New Yorker magazine called Gaynes’s work in the film “a small comic triumph” and said: “Once you’ve laughed at him, even the sight of him triggers more laughs.”
Two years later he played Commandant Lassard in Police Academy, about a ragtag assortment of trainee cops who triumph against the odds. Gaynes portrayed Lassard as a lovable twit with »
- Ryan Gilbey
The wilderness sweeping the Oscars speaks to America’s sense of dread
4 hours ago
The Revenant, The Martian, Mad Max: Fury Road and even The Big Short all reflect an end-of-days mood in both the natural and political world
So it looks as though The Revenant might win it all – I can see the gold statuettes in a row, presiding over that vast, reckless wilderness, like the pale, amber sunlight that lurks in the distance behind the film’s final battle between Hugh Glass and John Fitzgerald. And I’m delighted, in the schoolboy way that I long to see Leicester City win the Premier League. The Revenant deserves it: it is the grandest, wildest and most ambitious, demanding and far-reaching film of the year, as well as the most beautiful and cinematic, and the one that insists, amid the wilderness of CGI, there can still be movies that go to the back of beyond, for the real thing. Come on, The Revenant; come on, »
- David Thomson
Will Deadpool lead to a deluge of hard-r comic book movies?
4 hours ago
Despite its adults-only rating, the film has been a smash – a sure sign that we can expect more sex, violence and swearing in the next crop of superhero movies
It’s won rave reviews. It’s managed to please fans of the source material while also wooing newcomers – the Koboyashi Maru of balancing acts. It’s meta. Clever. Bizarrely, it also assumes a speck of intelligence in its audience. It’s violent. Crude. Profane. It’s has actual pegging in it. And, despite all of this, it’s smashed all box office records for an R-rated film. Deadpool has, by all accounts, been a huge success: $300m taken in its first week on a comparatively modest $58m budget (the flabby, loud and much less enjoyable Avengers: Age of Ultron cost almost five times that). These are good numbers, however you look at them. There’s clearly a market at the »
- Luke Holland
Chronic - video review
5 hours ago
Xan Brooks, Benjamin Lee and Catherine Shoard review Michel Franco’s drama about a veteran palliative care nurse (Tim Roth) who tends to three patients with terminal illnesses as they come to the end of their lives. Chronic, which won Franco the best screenplay award at last year’s Cannes film festival, is released in the UK on Friday
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- Xan Brooks, Catherine Shoard, Benjamin Lee, Tom Silverstone, Ian Anderson and Andrea Salvatici
Chronic director Michel Franco: ‘How can we understand life without thinking about dying?’
5 hours ago
The director’s new film, about a nurse’s relationship with his terminally ill patients, was inspired by meeting his own dying grandmother’s carer. He explains how it led him – and star Tim Roth – into the strange world of end-of-life care
You might die alone. In pain, frightened and confused. If you’re wealthy, you could be lucky enough to go when a private nurse is nearby. They’ll know how your body needs adjusting, what medication, at this point, will help you most. The luckiest of you might have family there too. But they will likely be absolutely clueless.
Now we’ve got that out of the way, Chronic, Mexican writer-director Michel Franco’s subdued drama about end-of-life care, will be much easier to talk about. It administers all of these hard truths, but does so matter-of-factly. It stars Tim Roth as a palliative nurse who, over the course of the film, »
- Henry Barnes
Chronic review – a cool, calm look at death and the naked human body
6 hours ago
Tim Roth gives possibly the performance of his career in this transgressive and candid film, playing a home care nurse who confronts our mortality head on
Death, like love, is all around. That is something to take away from this difficult, sombre, intimately disturbing and upsetting drama: a movie which breaks what is still culture’s last taboo, and shows the approach of death in all its unthinkable indignity and banality, all its existential anti-climax – and in what feels like real time. It wonders about the professional carer, someone in the pietà business. How often have I complained about the Hollywood prettification of terminal illness? How often have I demanded a movie which tries showing what it is actually like? Now such a film is actually here … and it’s all but unbearable.
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- Peter Bradshaw
Darth Vader may have been cut from Star Wars: The Force Awakens
8 hours ago
New book detailing story of Daisy Ridley’s Rey suggests scene at Maz Kanata’s castle originally featured the Sith Lord battling Luke Skywalker
A longstanding rumour that Star Wars: The Force Awakens was originally due to feature Darth Vader and Luke Skywalker battling with lightsabers in a flashback scene appears to have been confirmed in a new book.
A key sequence in Jj Abrams’s blockbuster space opera reboot featured lead character Rey (Daisy Ridley) experiencing visions of the past – the segue has been dubbed the “Forceback” by fans – including Kylo Ren’s attack on Skywalker’s Jedi Academy and herself as a young child.
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- Ben Child
Why Spotlight should win best picture at the 2016 Oscars – video
9 hours ago
Each day before the Academy Awards ceremony on 28 February, one of our critics cheerleads for one of the best picture Oscar nominees. Here, Andrew Pulver makes the case for Spotlight, the true story of the Boston Globe’s investigation that exposed cases of widespread and systemic child sex abuse by Roman Catholic priests
Read Peter Bradshaw’s Guardian review of SpotlightMore in our series of Oscar hustings videos
Come to a Guardian film show Oscars special - live! Continue reading »
- Andrew Pulver and Tom Silverstone
The Commune review – home is where the hurt is
9 hours ago
Trine Dyrholm powers a tense Vinterberg film set in 1970s Copenhagen, where a couple’s experiment in group living reveals faultlines in their own relationship
An emotional and intensely focused lead performance from Trine Dyrholm carries this new movie from Danish director and Dogme 95 veteran Thomas Vinterberg, shot on HD digital video.
Related: Ten to watch at the Berlin film festival 2016
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- Peter Bradshaw in Berlin
Iñárritu's 'bad decision' and Tim Roth's comeback – the Dailies podcast
9 hours ago
The Guardian film team’s roundup of Thursday’s movie news
Your daily update of the latest news and reviews from the Guardian film team. Now showing: Alejandro González Iñárritu admits he did something ‘irresponsible’ while making The Revenant (but it this just more hype?); why Colin Firth’s latest film is a stinker; and which films to go and watch this weekend.
Follow us on Twitter (GuardianFilm, Henry, Ben, Catherine and producer Rowan) and check out our Facebook page. Comment on the show below.
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- Presented by Benjamin Lee with Henry Barnes and produced by Rowan Slaney
Alejandro González Iñárritu: I made 'irresponsible decisions' on The Revenant shoot
9 hours ago
Mexican film-maker, whose production for the Oscars favourite has been called a ‘living hell’, insists opting to shoot in remote, freezing Canada was entirely justified by film’s acclaim
Alejandro González Iñárritu has admitted to making “bad” and “irresponsible” decisions as director of The Revenant, the acclaimed yet controversial western starring Leonardo DiCaprio that is widely expected to be the best-performing film at next week’s Oscars.
Determined to film only in natural light and with minimal use of CGI, the Mexican film-maker shot his grim 19th-century frontier epic in sub-zero conditions – at one point, the temperature unexpectedly dropped to -25C (-13F) – in remote parts of Canada. The shoot has been described as a “living hell” by whistleblowers, with actors subjected to extended delays and multiple crew members quitting under brutal conditions.
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- Ben Child
New Australian sci-fi series Cleverman premieres at Berlin film festival – video
19 hours ago
Uncle Jimmy (Jack Charles) and Koen West (Hunter Page-Lochard) star in a trailer scene for the new series, Cleverman. The sci-fi show, which has an 80% Indigenous cast, is set in the near future, where a species from ancient mythology must live among humans and battle for survival in a world that wants to silence, exploit and destroy them. It will screen on ABC later this year.
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- Guardian Staff
Zero Days review – a disturbing portrait of malware as the future of war
23 hours ago
Alex Gibney’s new documentary argues that cyber-attacks are the next big thing in war, offering not just the ability to spy, but to launch a complete offensive
The title of Alex Gibney’s new documentary about cyberwarfare has something apocalyptic about it: a digital version of the Book Of Revelations, perhaps. It’s actually a technical term relating to a sophisticated piece of weapons-grade malware developed in the last decade by the Us and Israeli security services: it can begin to replicate itself immediately on being implanted. Analysts nicknamed it “Stuxnet”, though the intelligence officers themselves gave their baby the creepy codename “Olympic Games”.
Related: White House seeks its first ever chief information security officer
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- Peter Bradshaw in Berlin
Police Academy's George Gaynes made silliness an artform
17 February 2016 11:40 AM, PST
As the father on Punky Brewster and the doddering police commander Eric Lassard, famous for a scene in which he attempts to make a speech while being orally pleasured, the actor always threw himself into the material
Versatile character actor George Gaynes died in his daughter’s home in North Bend, Washington, at age 98 on Monday, leaving behind an enormous body of work that stretched across numerous sitcoms, made-for-tv movies, features films, theater and even opera productions all around the world.
Gaynes is probably best known for his film and television work in the 1980s – as an adoptive father on Punky Brewster, doddering police commandant Eric Lassard in seven Police Academy films, and a seasoned soap opera star besotted with Dustin Hoffman’s alter ego in 1984’s Tootsie.
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- Thomas Batten
How Harry Potter helped Rbs expelliarmus the taxman
17 February 2016 10:41 AM, PST
A new investigation reveals how a string of ‘sale and leaseback’ deals with Hollywood saved the Royal Bank of Scotland over £1bn
Once again, the tax-credit system that the UK introduced to boost – theoretically – the domestic film industry has triggered controversy, after it was revealed that the Royal Bank of Scotland (Rbs) had benefitted by over £1bn after setting up a string of deals with Hollywood studios.
An investigation by news agency Bloomberg has found that between 1998 and 2007 Rbs invested in at least 20 blockbuster movies, including two Harry Potters, Batman Begins and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, which allowed it to defer or avoid tax payments through the system originally set up in 1997. Rbs have said that their activities were entirely within the rules. Law changes in 2006 saw the end of the bank’s activities in the sector. Bloomberg claim that at least 10 deals have been investigated by tax authorities. »
- Andrew Pulver
Saoirse Ronan to star in adaptation of Ian McEwan's On Chesil Beach
17 February 2016 10:05 AM, PST
Ronan, who was nominated for an Oscar for her role in the 2007 adaptation of McEwan’s Atonement, is to star in film of author’s Booker-shortlisted novel
Saoirse Ronan, Oscar nominated for her role in 50s-set romance Brooklyn at the Academy Awards next week, is to star in an adaptation of Ian McEwan’s 2007 book, On Chesil Beach.
The novel, which was shortlisted for the Booker prize, takes place in 1962, during a young couple’s honeymoon in Dorset. It will mark Ronan’s second McEwan adaptation before the age of 22, following Joe Wright’s Atonement, which won Ronan her first Oscar nomination.
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- Catherine Shoard
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