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Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice takes steep fall at Us box office
5 hours ago
The superhero film fell a steep 68% in its second weekend in Us theaters, according to studio estimates, but remained in first place over Zootopia
Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice fell by a steep 68% in its second weekend in Us movie theaters according to comScore estimates released on Sunday. The superhero film earned an estimated $52.4m over the weekend, easily besting the modest new openers like God’s Not Dead 2 and Meet the Blacks.
Related: ‘A stink bucket of disappointment’ – the most savage Batman v Superman reviews
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- Associated Press in Los Angeles
Jacques Audiard: ‘I wanted to give migrants a name, a shape… a violence of their own’
16 hours ago
The award-winning French director Jacques Audiard talks about his love of westerns, the trouble with CGI and his new film, Dheepan, the story of Tamil refugees on a tough Parisian housing estate
So you’re a film director and your latest work wins the Palme d’Or in Cannes – what do you do with your trophy? Place it, in all its leafy glory, in prime position on your living room mantelpiece? Hide it in a bank vault? Let it grace your producer’s office? In a spirit of idle inquiry, I ask French director Jacques Audiard. He half turns and casually waves his hand at the cafe behind him. “My awards are all over there in the drinks cabinet.”
Related: Cannes 2015: Jacques Audiard's Dheepan surprise winner of Palme d'Or
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- Jonathan Romney
Black Mountain Poets review – half-cocked comedy
17 hours ago
Neither the jabs at literary types nor the ensemble jokes quite come off in this caper about two women trying to pass themselves off as poets
This oddball bucolic romp has Alice Lowe and Dolly Wells as two sisters, con artists on the run who pose as acclaimed poets and hide out at a literary retreat in Wales’s Black Mountains. Shot in five days and improvised from an outline by director Adams (Benny and Jolene), it’s a ramshackle, low-key affair. Lowe excelled in a rather blacker back-to-nature comedy, Ben Wheatley’s Sightseers, while Tom Cullen was great in Andrew Haigh’s Weekend – but none of the ensemble interplay quite gels here. Jokes about pretentious poetic types are half-cocked – even Lowe’s impassioned recital of a Tesco receipt seems more like a rough run-through for a gag – and the main comic premise, three women getting in a rivalrously undignified »
- Jonathan Romney
Anguish review – painfully tame
17 hours ago
A standard-issue demonic possession tale with a touch of the Trisha about it
If ever a film failed to live up to its title… mild impatience, more like it. Anguish is essentially a tame bumps-and-thumps possession story with a rather folksy, melodramatic foundation. A mother and daughter move to a new home only to find themselves haunted by the spirit of a troubled girl who died after a row with her mother. The absolute nadir comes when the two mums are discussing the dead girl, and one of them says: “She just wants closure!” It’s more like a daytime-tv relationship show than a proper chiller. But young lead Ryan Simpkins, who plays haunted heroine Tess, has a grungy ordinariness about her that’s highly watchable.
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- Jonathan Romney
Victoria review – an authentic piece of cinematic magic
17 hours ago
One seamless shot follows a young woman through the dark underbelly of Berlin, in a unique thriller that uses its technical trickery to mesmerising effect
Years ago, I was watching a 1950s British drama about a woman led astray by a dashing roué. It included a whirlwind montage of highlights from their wild, cosmopolitan affair: boxing matches, popping magnums, roulette wheels, flights to Paris and the glamour of the Moulin Rouge… At which point a friend nudged me and whispered: “Now that’s what I call a crammed night out.”
The young heroine of the German film Victoria really does have a busy night on the town – a mere few hours that take in flirtation, peril, dancefloor euphoria, an impromptu piano recital and, to cap it all, some reckless criminality. What’s more, director Sebastian Schipper gets it all into a taut 140 minutes – and one single continuous shot. But, more than a technical prodigy, »
- Jonathan Romney
Martyrs review – grubby, unappetising horror
17 hours ago
This Us remake of a bloody French original has little to offer but soulless grimness
I haven’t seen the original 2008 French film Martyrs, so I can’t say whether this Us remake is any more graceful or gruesome. But it’s deeply unappetising – insipid for much of its length, before soullessly revelling in the agony for its final stretch. A young girl escapes from captivity and torture; years later, she tracks down her captors, along with her sceptical best friend, only to get caught up in more grimness. It’s hard to see why anyone would want to spend two years of their life making movies like this: you imagine directors the Goetz brothers saying, “We need to have a meeting with the effects department: that mouth clamp in the final reel doesn’t look nearly painful enough.” I suspect it’s relatively tame as this horror sub-genre goes, »
- Jonathan Romney
Eddie the Eagle review – keep calm and carry on ski-jumping
17 hours ago
Dexter Fletcher’s film celebrates doughty British spirit in this classy, comic tale of a true-life sporting underdog
The true story of Britain’s unlikely ski-jumping hero Eddie “the Eagle” Edwards is pitched as an archetypal ugly duckling, triumph-against-the-odds heartwarmer – a comic Chariots of Fire on the piste, or Billy Elliot on a steep diagonal. Kingsman: The Secret Service’s’s Taron Egerton is the NHS-spectacled, milk-drinking “plucky plasterer” who stole the show at the 1988 Calgary Winter Olympics with his creditable jumps and his comical flapping-bird gestures – living proof of Emily Dickinson’s dictum, “‘Hope’ is the thing with feathers”.
Not so much a movie, more a morale-boosting initiative
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- Jonathan Romney
Papusza review – ponderous tale of a Polish poet
18 hours ago
This biopic of Romany poet Bronislawa Wajs features a little too much landscape and not enough life
If you like artfully crafted old-school black-and-white cinematography, of the sort that distinguished Pawel Pawlikowski’s Ida, you may well be enraptured by Polish film Papusza. It’s fabulously shot by Krzysztof Ptak, with any number of gorgeous landscape tableaux; I could have stared and stared at the opening shot alone. But visuals apart, this biopic is frustratingly slack. It’s the story of poet Bronislawa Wajs – Aka Papusza, meaning “doll” – who became a celebrated figure in Poland while living a life of exclusion. Early on, we see her released from imprisonment for stealing a chicken and rushed to a concert hall to attend an oratorio based on her verse.
The film skips non-chronologically through her life, including episodes from childhood, days on the road as a young woman and a frustratingly cursory »
- Jonathan Romney
Battle Mountain: Graeme Obree’s Story – eccentric pedal power
18 hours ago
David Street’s account of the Scottish cyclist’s attempt at the land-speed record engages without quite capturing the man
Director David Street wields his own camera on this no-nonsense documentary about cycling hero Graeme Obree. It’s a celebration of British maverick eccentricity, showing the Scottish cyclist, at 47, preparing himself to compete in the human-powered land speed record in Nevada in 2013. What he’s riding – and what we see him developing at some length, in his kitchen and elsewhere – isn’t your average bike, more a kind of hard, coffin-like pod that Obree rides while totally enclosed, face down. Constituent parts, in the R&D phase at least, include some old rollerblades and part of a used saucepan.
Street doesn’t quite make a gripping narrative out of Obree’s mission, and as a character study, the film seems to reveal its subject in accidental flashes, rather than by »
- Jonathan Romney
Sunset Song; Grandma; The Forbidden Room; Kill Your Friends; Show Me a Hero; Of Good Report – review
18 hours ago
Terence Davies wilts in the great outdoors in Sunset Song while Lily Tomlin gives great grouch in Paul Weitz’s Grandma
Terence Davies has always made films melancholically embedded in the past, yet has never quite fitted the heritage cinema mould: even when adapting Wharton and Rattigan, his period pieces had an elegiac poetry all their own. Newly prolific of late – A Quiet Passion, his dismayingly stodgy Emily Dickinson biopic, recently played Berlin – he seems to have stiffened. Sunset Song (Metrodome, 15), a grandly pictorial adaptation of Lewis Grassic Gibbon’s Scots farmland saga, is awash with enough magic-hour cornfield vistas to make his similarly stately namesake, Malick, golden-green with envy. For a director associated principally with delicate, darkened interiority, this is a fully composed foray into epic form.
Peppery and unbending as ever, Lily Tomlin could animate any old dreck
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- Guy Lodge
Ran review – Kurosawa’s masterful epic reissued
18 hours ago
The Japanese film-maker’s adaptation of King Lear is still visually and dramatically breathtaking
This 1985 film was the last proper epic from Japanese maestro Akira Kurosawa, and it’s a magisterial achievement. An adaptation of King Lear, rereleased in a splendid 4K restoration, it tells the story of Lord Hidetora (Tatsuya Nakadai), an elderly warlord with a history of ruthless slaughter, who entrusts his domain to three sons, rather than daughters, their individual battle regalia – red, yellow and blue – giving the film a striking colour coordination. The increasingly livid, ghostly Noh-style makeup worn by Nakadai highlights the theatricality, as does a somewhat Brechtian performance from Peter (just Peter) as an androgynous fool.
Kurosawa’s deployment of huge armies in vast landscapes displays a pre-digital mastery that we can only gasp at today, and the castle siege sequence – arrows flying, blood flowing, stage crimson – is all the more magnificent for the »
- Jonathan Romney
Ian McKellen’s favourite Shakespeare roles on film
18 hours ago
To launch the BFI’s celebration of Shakespeare on film, and a global tour of the Bard’s movie adaptations, the veteran star picks the best screen performances, from Judi Dench to Laurence Olivier
It is 400 years since Shakespeare died and, as part of the festivities, Ian McKellen is spearheading a selection of Shakespearean films at the BFI in London that will tour 110 countries, including Cuba, Iraq, Russia and the Us, in the most extensive film programme ever undertaken. We will be able to revel in Franco Zeffirelli’s Romeo & Juliet (were star-crossed lovers ever more swooningly starry?), in Akira Kurosawa’s Ran – a compelling Japanese reinvention of King Lear – and salute a masterly, and remastered, Richard III, which will be presented live on stage for a UK-wide simulcast starring McKellen himself.
Related: The 10 best modern takes on Shakespeare – in pictures
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- Kate Kellaway
Racism warning on remake of Jungle Book film
2 April 2016 4:05 PM, PDT
Disney’s new live-action version of the 1967 film will have to take great care not to cause offence, critics say
Disney is bringing back The Jungle Book in a live-action remake, but worries over racial stereotyping that plagued the 1967 cartoon original are already making critics fret.
The film, which premieres in Los Angeles tomorrow, has a stellar cast, including Idris Elba as Shere Khan, Bill Murray as Baloo, Scarlett Johansson as Kaa, Lupito Nyong’o as wolfmother Raksha, and newcomer Neel Sethi as Mowgli. Director Jon Favreau promises a film that relies heavily on author Rudyard Kipling’s “strong mythic stuff”. But both Kipling’s book, which was written from a British colonialist perspective, and Disney’s animated adaptation have long been criticised for their racist overtones, and critics warn that it will take more than talking animals and other visual effects to avoid offence.
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- Edward Helmore New York
Murky Malaysian money trail that funded The Wolf of Wall Street – report
2 April 2016 12:43 PM, PDT
The FBI reportedly believes that $100m of the Leonardo DiCaprio-starring film’s budget came from a Malaysian state fund for local economic development
Sources within the FBI have confirmed to the Wall Street Journal that more than $100m of the production budget for Martin Scorsese’s The Wolf of Wall Street came from a Malaysian state fund connected to a scandal that has damaged a senior Goldman Sachs banker and led investigators to examine the lifestyle of a notorious New York playboy.
According to the Journal, FBI investigators believe much of the cash used to make the Leonardo DiCaprio-starring film was never intended for the movie business. Instead, it originated with 1Mdb, a Malaysian state fund meant to boost local economic development.
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- Edward Helmore
Vaxxed: an expert view on controversial film about vaccines and autism
2 April 2016 11:37 AM, PDT
Pediatrician Dr Philip Larussa says Andrew Wakefield’s film acts as if his research had not been revealed as fraudulent and he had not lost his medical license
Film premieres in New York despite scientists’ outcryVaxxed review: One-sided film leaves the elephant in the room
Dr Philip Larussa is a professor of pediatric medicine at Columbia University Medical Center. He specializes in infectious diseases and immunization, and recently served on the National Vaccine Advisory Committee for the federal government.
Related: Controversial Vaxxed film premieres in New York despite scientists' outcry
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- Jessica Glenza in New York
Vaxxed review – one-sided film leaves the elephant in the room
2 April 2016 10:42 AM, PDT
The anti-vaccination documentary, pulled from the Tribeca film festival but screened in New York on Friday, offers a biased look at a controversial topic
Controversial film premieres despite scientists’ outcryQ&A: an expert’s view on the Wakefield fim
Despite continued notices by leading medical journals that there is no connection between vaccinations and autism, some persist in claiming that one exists. Adding fuel to this fire is the controversial documentary Vaxxed: From Cover-Up to Catastrophe, making its theatrical debut in New York this week.
Whereas other conspiracies are easily shrugged off, the fact this revolves around protecting children has given the film more attention, even though the research behind it has been thoroughly debunked.
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- Jordan Hoffman
‘It has to be hot. It has to be creative’: Don Cheadle on his 10-year quest to play Miles Davis
2 April 2016 4:00 AM, PDT
The actor on why the jazz great is a role close to his heart, early typecasting and the trouble with Twitter
Don Cheadle seems as if he’s at the end of his rope, metaphorically speaking. We’re in the Spare Room, a hybrid bar and bowling alley in the upper levels of the historic Hollywood Roosevelt hotel in Los Angeles. It’s a classic mid-century establishment, full of character and intimations of film noir mystery. Cheadle’s just completed a photoshoot in which he has tried on all manner of jackets and waistcoats. He can’t wait to get out of the costumes and return to the business of being himself.
We settle into a quiet corner of the bar as he tells me about his new film Miles Ahead, a biopic about Miles Davis’s five-year hiatus from making music and his subsequent comeback. The film took 10 years »
- Dave Schilling
Martyrs: straight to DVD is a gruesome fate for this pointless, embarrassing remake
2 April 2016 1:00 AM, PDT
The reboot of Pascal Laugier’s ultra-violent Gallic thriller goes straight to DVD and it’s not hard to see why
The words “straight to DVD” don’t carry the same stigma they once did. In an era when Hollywood is running scared from an online platform whose name is a contraction of the words “internet” and “flicks”, the hierarchical model of film distribution – with cinema at the top and physical media at the bottom – is starting to feel like an anachronism. That said, every now and then a film debuts on DVD that seems to have fallen so far from grace that it’s hard not to see its arrival on the format as something of a failure. A new remake of the French cult classic Martyrs is one such example.
Ten years ago, Paris had taken Tokyo’s title as the global centre of edgy horror cinema, and »
- Charlie Lyne
George Clooney: Hello! completely fabricated their exclusive interview with me
1 April 2016 10:21 AM, PDT
Magazine apologises and says piece - in which actor supposedly discusses his marriage - was bought from ‘respectable’ third party
George Clooney has said that Hello! magazine “completely fabricated” an interview with him which they billed as “exclusive”.
In a statement issued on Friday, the actor said, “I have not given an interview to Hello Magazine and the quotes attributed to me are not accurate.”
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- Catherine Shoard
The Afc Wimbledon film seems like a curveball – actually it's an open goal
1 April 2016 8:37 AM, PDT
Wronged by their football club, ‘a bunch of middle-aged people with absolutely no athletic talent’ started a rival team, and in nine years took it to League Two glory. No wonder someone wants to make their story into a movie
It’s all come down to one final penalty kick. If the club captain and terrace hero can put the ball past the goalkeeper our heroes achieve their aim; a nine-year odyssey reduced to a single moment of condensed tension. A club formed by disgruntled fans who had their team taken away from them are on the verge of completing the most implausible comeback in football history. One tight camera shot follows the blue shirted figure as he runs up.
The player eschews all subtlety and simply leathers the ball as hard as he can. The net billows, the player wheels away in triumph and several thousand fans go completely bonkers. »
- Charlie Talbot
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