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11 articles
If Sean Parker has his way, opening night for movies will be in your living room
1 hour ago
Napster founder, backed by Steven Spielberg and Peter Jackson, is pushing Screening Room: a plan to release films in theatres and at home on the same day – for a price
A gathering this week of Hollywood stars, studio bosses and cinema owners will climax with “big screen achievement awards”, but the focus will probably not be on achievements or awards – or even the big screen.
Most of the attention at CinemaCon, an annual film industry jamboree, will instead be on a controversial plan to enhance the small screen by beaming new film releases into homes on the same day they open in cinemas.
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- Rory Carroll in Los Angeles
Ballerina in The Red Shoes was wrongfooted by return to early hit | Brief letters
7 hours ago
The Red Shoes | Palestine in 1947 | Online trolls | Doonesbury | Train delays | Mixed-up seasons
The Red Shoes is not about “a ballerina forced to choose between ambition and love” (Report, 6 April). It’s about a ballerina forced to choose between being the protege of a controlling ballet impresario who considers marriage a betrayal of art, and her own artistic and personal freedom. She doesn’t cease to dance when she marries, though she is forced to give up the stardom bestowed on her by Lermontov. Her downfall comes when she gives up her independence to return to the source of her early fame.
Olney, Buckinghamshire
• Karl Sabbagh (Letters, 11 April) may be right to correct Giles Fraser’s account of the Sykes-Picot agreement, but in asserting that Palestine did not gain its independence he ignores the fact that Egypt and Jordan occupied Gaza and the West Bank in 1947 when these areas »
- Letters
MTV's exclusive movie trailers: five things we learned
8 hours ago
Margot Robbie’s Harley Quinn is stealing hearts and scenes in Suicide Squad, Eddie Redmayne’s Newt Scamander has something in common with Harry Potter, and Team Cap looks like a tight unit in the new Captain America
We’re told the highlight of this weekend’s MTV Awards was Rebel Wilson enthusiastically reprising her smooch with Adam DeVine from Pitch Perfect 2 after winning the coveted “best kiss” prize. But there was also the small matter of new trailers for three of this year’s most heavily anticipated films: the much-hyped Suicide Squad, the Harry Potter prequel Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them and the latest Marvel superhero flick Civil War. Here are five takeways that left us all breathless and flustered.
Oh my. @MTV #MovieAwards https://t.co/NhAhIywCZz pic.twitter.com/deIy6imkC4
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- Ben Child
‘Why aren’t we earning enough to live?’ – how The Divide lays bare global inequality
9 hours ago
The documentary film reveals the toxic social divisions caused by low pay for Us and UK workers
Janet, a Walmart shop assistant in Louisiana, is so visibly stressed by working in a very understaffed store that a customer tells her she looks as if she’s going have a heart attack. Rochelle, a care worker in Newcastle, is miserable that her hours are so long that she can’t get home to put her children to bed. She also wishes she was better paid so that she didn’t owe £4,000 in catalogue bills, from buying clothes and shoes on credit for her children. Leah, a KFC worker from Richmond, Virginia, works six days a week, but is still behind on her rent and juggles calls from debt-recovery companies. Everyone in Katharine Round’s new documentary, The Divide, is struggling, trying to improve their lives; everyone is feeling the pressure. This »
- Amelia Gentleman
Everything is possible – five things we learned at the Apichatpong Weerasethakul all-nighter
9 hours ago
A retrospective celebrating the Thai director at Tate Modern, London, opened with a 14-hour screening of his films. It revealed him as a tireless creator like no other
A few years ago, a career retrospective of Louise Bourgeois displayed her enormous statues of spiders alongside smaller artefacts such as her woven figures. Her parents were weavers by trade and the spider is a weaver of webs: the whole exhibition uncovered fascinating connections in her work but also showed her constantly busying herself with the act of creation. The Apichatpong Weerasethakul all-nighter did this, too: presenting him as a true artist with a rich and varied body of work, whose short films and experimental commissions return to and refine the same themes as in his feature films. The event reinforced a sense of him as a tireless creator.
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- Caspar Salmon
The end has no end: Kingsman 2 and the franchises cheating death
9 hours ago
A new poster for the Kingsman sequel suggests that Colin Firth might be coming back from the dead, something Charlize Theron has just done in The Huntsman: Winter’s War – but when did films turn into soaps?
Warning: this article contains spoilers.
It wasn’t hard to piss off Annie Wilkes. Things that annoyed Misery’s psychotic bookworm included, but were not limited to: swearing, bad parking etiquette and people she’d kidnapped wanting to leave. But arguably her most understandable grievance was with far-fetched plotting.
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- Benjamin Lee
Melissa McCarthy is The Boss of box office and Dheepan reviewed – the Dailies podcast
14 hours ago
The Guardian film team’s roundup of Monday’s movie news
Your daily update of the latest news and reviews from the Guardian film team. Now showing: despite hateful reviews, Melissa McCarthy’s latest film The Boss has been yet another hit for the star but what’s the secret behind her success? Plus we review Jacques Audiard’s powerful new drama Dheepan.
Follow us on Twitter (GuardianFilm, Henry, Ben, Catherine, Andrew 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
Zootropolis fans in China flock to buy rare £2,000 fennec foxes
14 hours ago
Inspired by a character in the hit Disney animation, parents are forking out for the protected Saharan species despite its unsuitability as a pet
Chinese fans of Disney animated smash hit Zootropolis are flocking to buy rare fennec foxes, despite the miniature African species being unsuitable as pets, reports the La Times.
Zootropolis, titled Zootopia in the Us, is the story of a city populated by talking animals. One of the central characters is a wily con-artist red fox, whose sidekick Finnick is a fennec. The species, which is native to the Sahara, is known for its nocturnal habits and unusually large ears.
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- Ben Child
Melissa McCarthy fights off critics, Batman and Superman to top Us box office
14 hours ago
The star’s critically loathed comedy The Boss takes the top spot dethroning Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice after just two weeks at No 1
The Melissa McCarthy-led comedy The Boss dethroned Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice to take the No 1 spot at the Us box office last weekend with an estimated opening of $23.48m (£16.53m).
The Boss, directed by McCarthy’s husband Ben Falcone, triumphed despite failing to pick up the kind of positive reviews that usually greet the actor’s collaborations with Paul Feig. The film, starring the Bridesmaids actor as a former business heavyweight struggling to rebuild her life after completing a jail sentence for insider trading, has a rating of just 17% on the review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes and was labelled an “unfunny, chaotic mess of ludicrous plotting and tone-deaf set-pieces” by Jordan Hoffman in the Guardian.
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- Ben Child
The rundown on Samuel Beckett and Buster Keaton's tribute to silent chase comedies
16 hours ago
A new documentary reveals the fascinating story behind Samuel Beckett’s sole foray into cinema, a conceptual chase film that bamboozled its star Buster Keaton
Some movie genres are perennial. From the Keystone Kops to Mad Max: Fury Road, chase films have kept the cameras turning. When future Nobel laureate Samuel Beckett made his one and only film in the mid-1960s, he structured it both as a chase film and as a homage to the earliest years of cinema. However, you won’t be surprised to learn that the resulting work, Film, is far more complex, strange and intellectual than its slapstick forebears.
Ross Lipman’s documentary Notfilm, which is enjoying a limited run in cinemas before being released on Blu-ray next year, explores the history of Film (1966) – how a lauded playwright collaborated with two very distinct silent-era talents to make this mysterious movie. In this philosophical chase film, »
- Pamela Hutchinson
Eye In the Sky: an indictment of drones or just a wishy-washy liberal war movie?
17 hours ago
Gavin Hood’s drone-strike thriller tries to create taut drama with a starry cast. But the message is masked by snoozeworthy scenes of them talking into phones
In pondering why Gavin Hood’s drone-strike thriller Eye In The Sky failed to involve me very deeply, I keep coming back to other movies like it. These are the films in which soldiers, spies and politicians stand around in different locations worrying about moral issues as the clock ticks down to zero-hour and the political complications and unspeakable dilemmas become ever more excruciating: Sydney Lumet’s Fail-Safe, and various wishy-washy Dlc-liberal movies by Rod Lurie, Andrew Niccol and George Clooney/Grant Heslov. My conclusion is that, like many of them, it allows the Big Issue to become the main character, and neglects to allow the drama to unfold among the characters.
In Eye In The Sky, people in different locations – military bases in England and Nevada, »
- John Patterson
11 articles