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Cinema trains lens on role of nude scene: artistic, erotic or gratuitous?
1 hour ago
As Hollywood producers sue Amber Heard for refusing to perform naked, we examine the latest manoeuvres in the long battle between prurience, commerce and art
Women have been paid, down the ages, for taking their clothes off in public: now it seems some of them are being asked to pay, and handsomely too, for the privilege of not taking them off.
The row prompted last week by news that the Texan actress and former model Amber Heard is being sued for $10m for reneging on a supposed agreement to be filmed naked has put a compelling new twist on a familiar Hollywood puzzle: why is screen nudity such a big element of so many female stars’ early careers? It is a puzzle conventionally posed just after the one about why so many film directors are men.
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- Vanessa Thorpe
Project X: Laura Poitras homes in on the dark side of the internet
12 hours ago
The director’s new short film descends on a brutalist New York building to sum up the unsettlingly intangible nature of the web
One of the great storytelling challenges of the 21st century has been describing the intangible phenomenon of the internet, especially in a visual medium such as film. Early websploitation movies like Hackers envisioned cyberspace as a kaleidoscopic theme park, while more recent dramas such as The Fifth Estate have imagined a Brazil-like world of interconnected but anonymous bodies. In this year’s HyperNormalisation, Adam Curtis joined the dots between the social isolation engendered on the web and the literal isolation of a remote algorithm farm.
Related: Laura Poitras: using art to illuminate a world that would rather remain unseen
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- Charlie Lyne
Hell of a film-maker: the directors who make Clint Eastwood look soft
25 November 2016 8:19 AM, PST
Tom Hanks said Eastwood was ‘intimidating as hell’ on the set of Sully and treated his actors ‘like horses’. He clearly hasn’t worked with these directorial terrors
In his acting heyday, Clint Eastwood was a taciturn maestro of understatement. In his Man With No Name or Dirty Harry periods, one eyebrow raised was usually enough to pitch even the most arrogant antagonist into throes of panic and self-doubt, while a simple curl of the lip usually signified that the nearest dude was a dead man walking. So it comes as no surprise to learn that Eastwood’s unusual directing style made Tom Hanks extremely nervous on the set of the true-life disaster movie Sully.
Related: Tom Hanks: Clint Eastwood 'treats actors like horses'
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- Ben Child
Martin Scorsese’s Silence to premiere at the Vatican
25 November 2016 6:29 AM, PST
Director will be joined by 400 priests for screening of film based on story of 17th-century Jesuit missionaries in Japan
There will be no red carpet, and almost certainly none of the usual glamour. But when Martin Scorsese’s new film, Silence, has its world premiere at the Vatican on Tuesday, it will be the culmination of a 27-year project that the director has described as “an obsession”.
Pope Francis is not expected to attend the screening at the Pontifical Oriental Institute for the Jesuits, but Scorsese will join about 400 priests and other guests to watch the 159-minute movie. The director may meet the pontiff separately.
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- Harriet Sherwood Religion correspondent
Jim Jarmusch: ‘I shy away from sex in my films. It makes me nervous’
25 November 2016 6:00 AM, PST
After almost 40 years in cinema, the director remains the quintessential leftfield auteur. He discusses how his gentle new film Paterson offers a Zen alternative to blockbuster chaos
Related: Paterson review – Adam Driver beguiling in miraculous tale of everyday goodness | Peter Bradshaw's film of the week
There’s a line in Jim Jarmusch’s 1986 film Down By Law that seems apposite in November 2016. It goes: “My mama used to say that America’s the big melting pot. You bring it to a boil and all the scum rises to the top.”
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- Kevin EG Perry
Oscars 2017: 11 female performances too good to be overlooked
25 November 2016 5:00 AM, PST
In a year overflowing with exceptional performances, many are bound to fall by the wayside this awards season. Here are some worthy of a closer inspection
Even with months to go before next year’s Academy Awards, and loads of vying films still to be unveiled, one thing about the race is certain: the pool of female actors is stacked. While Tom Hanks and Casey Affleck were arguably the only male actors to receive major awards momentum from the recent slate of fall film festivals (for their performances in Sully and Manchester by the Sea, respectively), a glut of their female colleagues have emerged as surefire contenders.
Related: Fences review: Denzel Washington and Viola Davis set to convert Tonys to Oscars
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- Nigel M Smith
Toni Erdmann: exclusive UK trailer for Oscar favourite German comedy – video
25 November 2016 3:56 AM, PST
The critics’ favourite at this year’s Cannes film festival, Maren Ade’s three-hour German comedy is about the fractious relationship between a hardworking businesswoman in her mid 30s and her prank-loving father. The film opens in the Us on Christmas Day and in the UK on 3 February 2017
• Peter Bradshaw’s review
• As Cannes closes, a new breed of female lead emerges: empowered, careerist –and ‘gender-neutral’
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- Guardian Staff
Tom Hanks: Clint Eastwood 'treats actors like horses'
25 November 2016 3:40 AM, PST
Actor tells Graham Norton Show he found director ‘intimidating as hell’ on set of Sully, where the real-life pilot he was playing also voiced opinions
Veteran actor Tom Hanks has likened Clint Eastwood’s directorial style to wrangling animals. Hanks worked with Eastwood for the first time on Sully, the story of a real-life feat of heroism in which his character, Chesley “Sully” Sullenberger, safely landed an endangered plane New York’s Hudson river in 2009.
Hanks told the the Graham Norton Show: “You certainly don’t want one of those Eastwood looks.
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- Catherine Shoard
Australia's best kept cultural secret: Asia Pacific films land in Brisbane
24 November 2016 8:35 PM, PST
Run concurrently with a film festival, the Asia Pacific Screen awards could be Australia’s least parochial film event
When Islamic State besieged thousands of Yazidi people near Mount Sinjar in northern Iraq in August 2014, the Us president, Barack Obama, called in air strikes and Australia, Britain and the Us dropped humanitarian aid.
As Kurdish fighters picked up their guns, Kurdish film-makers Hussein Hassan and Mehmet Aktaş picked up their cameras, setting aside the film they had been working on to shoot another. They wanted to fight the fear.
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- Julie Rigg
Almost Christmas review – almost unbearable holiday heartwarmer
24 November 2016 2:45 PM, PST
At least Danny Glover brings some poise to this syrupy family comedy about a man preparing for his first Christmas since his wife’s death
Almost unbearable would be a better title. This is a syrupy family comedy relying heavily on the tinsel in the hope that yuletide sentimentality will earn it a free pass: it’s a painful heartwarmer to give you heartburn. Danny Glover at least brings some poise to the role of Walter, a much-loved old guy who is preparing for his first Christmas since his wife died. He’s invited all his lovably quarrelling grownup children, along with their spouses and adorably quirky-smart-observant kids, for an old-fashioned family reunion for the holidays.
Related: Never mind the baubles: why the best Christmas films are darker than December
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- Peter Bradshaw
Bad Santa 2 review – same old dirty tricks
24 November 2016 2:30 PM, PST
Billy Bob Thornton returns in a belated sequel that wrings occasional snickers from a patchy script
Related: Never mind the baubles: why the best Christmas films are darker than December
This tardy-to-needless sequel to 2003’s unusually scabrous studio comedy plays the same dirty tricks with only negligible variations: rather than shopping malls, incorrigible wash-up Willie Soke (Billy Bob Thornton) and his diminutive sidekick (Tony Cox) are reteamed to rip off a Chicago homeless charity. If confronting Willie with mother-from-hell Kathy Bates was one smart creative decision, nothing else – not the jokes about Cox’s size, not charity supervisor Christina Hendricks’ susceptibility to Willie’s dubious charms, nor the ensuing alleyway pumping – catches us by surprise this time. Likable Mean Girls pro Mark Waters wrings occasional snickers from a patchy script, but the whole feels tamely conventional: misanthropy passed through the usual Hollywood motions.
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- Mike McCahill
I Am Bolt review – an awed survey of the fastest man alive
24 November 2016 2:15 PM, PST
Gabe and Benjamin Turner keep pace with the Jamaican sprinter from the track to the nightclub for an illuminating look at athletic genius
Related: Usain Bolt: ‘I feel good because I know I’ve done it clean’
What makes Usain Bolt run? Benjamin and Gabe Turner’s understandably awed survey of how the Jamaican sprinter got from there to here in record time benefits from tailing its subject over a period – between Beijing 2015 and Rio 2016 – when his supremacy faced unprecedented threats: nightclubbing injuries, a hunger diminishing in inverse proportion to his distractibility, and rivals new (Yohan Blake) and old (Justin Gatlin). If Bolt’s talent continues to defy all explanation, the Turner brothers bring us close enough to it to witness bugs swarming over nerveless knuckles on the start line. They also spot how crucial coach Glen Mills is in reframing the training his charge loathes as the kind »
- Mike McCahill
Creepy review – gripping study of urban isolation, with goosepimples
24 November 2016 2:00 PM, PST
Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s unnerving, virtuosic horror movie is amazingly attuned to ambience and emotional textures
In any normal week, Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s almost self-deprecatingly titled film would be a shoo-in for most unnerving watch. But what he concedes to Na Hong-jin’s The Wailing in sheer unrelenting devilry, Kurosawa almost makes up for in virtuosic technique. After a few relatively benign years with the likes of Tokyo Sonata and Journey to the Shore, he makes a return to the goosepimpled values of classic J-horror. Traumatised former homicide detective Hidetoshi Nishijima looks to wipe the slate clean with a new job as a criminology professor and a new home, but when his wife delivers homemade chocolates to the neighbours, there’s something off about Mr Nishino next door. Amazingly attuned to ambience and liminal emotional textures, Kurosawa conveys them with immense subtlety: the soundless crowds, for instance, present behind floor-to-ceiling windows »
- Phil Hoad
The Wailing review – Korean horror flick takes fear to the brink of an abyss
24 November 2016 1:45 PM, PST
Korean director Na Hong-jin delivers a supreme evocation of evil in this intense rural-horror
Korean cinema has a new genre maestro to succeed Park Chan-wook and Bong Joon-ho. His The Chaser (2008) and The Yellow Sea (2010) flagged up a natural instinct for propulsive narratives – but Na Hong-jin lets this intensity drag him over the brink of an abyss of fear and superstition in his new rural-horror The Wailing. As Kwak Do-won’s slapdash country police sergeant cop investigates a series of violent murders apparently linked to a strange sickness, Na carefully blindsides with the kind of bungling police procedural familiar from Bong’s Memories of Murder; the comedy, though, quickly steepens into a calamitous atmosphere in which anything could be unleashed. The village’s suspicions fall on a Japanese vagrant rumoured to have malevolent powers, and efforts to rid the area of him reach frenzy pitch in one astonishing scene. Then, »
- Phil Hoad
Mum's List review – sweet and sad story of life after loss
24 November 2016 1:20 PM, PST
Rafe Spall and Emilia Fox are commanding in a real-life story about a man raising his sons after losing his wife to breast cancer
Related: Mum’s bucket list: ‘Have a great time after I’ve gone’
Heartfelt and utterly committed performances from Rafe Spall and Emilia Fox are the bedrock of this sweet and desperately sad British film, taken from the autobiographical first novel by Somerset paramedic St John Greene, about the loss of his wife, Kate, to breast cancer, right after their young son had himself recovered from a tumour. An unthinkably cruel blow. It is a movie with big scenes and it did get under my guard: the sheer emotional candour from Spall and Fox carries the drama, whose action turns on the fact that St John has created a list of the texts his wife sent him in her final days, each intended to remind him »
- Peter Bradshaw
The Incident review – pointedly understated middle-class sex drama
24 November 2016 1:15 PM, PST
A man turns his back on his perfect life and sleeps with an underage prostitute in this well-acted but unlikely drama
Annabel (Ruta Gedmintas), a gallerist, and her architect husband, Joe (Tom Hughes), are ridiculously good-looking, wealthy enough to afford two or maybe more homes, and about to have their first child. But their perfectly appointed life with its chunky knits and innumerable shades of taupe is about to unravel. One night, for reasons never directly explained (perhaps writer-director Jane Linfoot thinks they are obvious and self-explanatory), Joe pays for sex with Lily (Tasha Connor), an underage girl who picks up customers out of a local pizza parlour. Then, a series of unfortunate and somewhat unlikely coincidences put Lily and Annabel on a collision course, leading to pointedly understated drama about how the middle classes fail to see the suffering and exploitation right in front of their retrousse noses. Gedmintas »
- Leslie Felperin
Starless Dreams review – brilliant but painful story of girls in Iran's detention system
24 November 2016 1:00 PM, PST
Mehrdad Oskouei’s unflinching documentary looks at young inmates locked up for murder and theft – but whose lives were often worse outside
This brilliant documentary focuses on the lives of girls in a juvenile delinquency centre in Iran. Most of the girls have drug addicts in their family, and almost all have been physically or mentally abused. Although they are being punished for murder, drug dealing and car theft, their biggest crime was to be born in the wrong place. “The pain drips from the walls,” as one inmate says, but despite this the girls find some moments of joy in snowball fights and games of truth or dare, even bursting into impromptu song at one point. The subjects are remarkably open when answering Mehrdad Oskouei’s unflinchingly direct questions and talk about their crimes in matter-of-fact fashion, but when asked what they’ll do when they’re released, many »
- Alan Evans
Magnus review – chess doc about grandmaster makes all the wrong moves
24 November 2016 12:50 PM, PST
This documentary about world champion Magnus Carlsen has nothing interesting to say about the state of chess today
Norwegian grandmaster Magnus Carlsen, 25, is the current chess world champion, but if there were a tournament for the best chess movie of all time, this one would get knocked out well before the quarter finals. Why a documentary about Carlsen is hitting our screens at all rather than one about, say, his rival Viswanathan Anand, may have something to do with Magnus’ stolid Scandinavian good looks, chiselled if somewhat bovine features that have made him a bit of a celebrity beyond the chess world. But even though director Benjamin Ree has accessed the family archive of footage showing young Magnus as a socially awkward prodigy through the years and interviewed him directly many times, the film barely dents his inviolate wall of polite reticence. Worse still, there’s scant input from chess »
- Leslie Felperin
The sizzling secrets of on-screen chemistry: from Dirty Dancing to La La Land
24 November 2016 9:29 AM, PST
Hollywood’s got it down to a science. Audience demographics, judgment and projected fantasies can all help create that all-important spark. Just look at Emma Stone and Ryan Gosling, says sex therapist and former actor Pamela Stephenson Connolly
The mysterious relationship between actors who play on-screen lovers has long been conversational catnip. For audiences, the believability of attraction is a topic that approaches almost academic analysis. Such chemistry tends to be viewed as an absolute. By common agreement, a couple either have it (Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall in, say, To Have and Have Not) or they don’t (Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie in By the Sea).
La La Land, a frontrunner for next year’s best picture Oscar, reunites Ryan Gosling and Emma Stone as lovers for the third time, following Crazy Stupid Love and Gangster Squad. Here, they sling fiery one-liners at each other, break into song, »
- Pamela Stephenson Connolly
Paterson review – Adam Driver beguiling in miraculous tale of everyday goodness | Peter Bradshaw's film of the week
24 November 2016 7:30 AM, PST
Driver’s delicate performance as a poetic bus driver in Jim Jarmusch’s delightfully unironic film is far, far away from his Star Wars persona
Slowly but surely, the gentleness of Jim Jarmusch’s lovely new film steals up on you. It has an almost miraculous innocence. I can’t remember when I last saw a movie whose adult characters had so much simple, unassuming goodness, goodness that breaks everything in the modern culture rulebook by going unironised and unpunished. And Adam Driver’s face is something to fall in love with. An Easter Island statue reborn as a sensitive, delicate boy.
Related: Punch the keys now! Why cinema keeps churning out films about writers
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- Peter Bradshaw
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