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Onward thespian soldier: Swapping bullets for Broadway
Saturday, 10 January 2009
Ewan Ross swapped bullets for Broadway when he left the Army to become an actor. Now he's starring in a film about the shooting of Jean Charles de Menezes.
Anne Hathaway: Fame, scandal and the road to the Oscars
Saturday, 10 January 2009
Just months after her private life was touched by scandal, Anne Hathaway finds herself nominated for a Golden Globe – and a serious contender for this year's Oscars. James Mottram talks to the actress about the ups and downs of fame
Michael Sheen: 'I try to inhabit what it is I'm doing'
Friday, 9 January 2009
The award-winning actor thrives on playing real people. After Tony Blair and Kenneth Williams, he has now taken on David Frost
The battle for Middle Earth
Friday, 9 January 2009
Guillermo del Toro is a controversial choice to take over on The Hobbit from Peter Jackson. Can he satisfy the fans? By Jonathan Dean
Sundance Film Festival: The rebel and the Empress
Friday, 9 January 2009
Thirty years after being forced into exile with her husband, the Shah of Iran, Queen Farah explains to Geoffrey Macnab why she agreed to a documentary on her life
Bryan Singer - the misfit with the Midas touch
Friday, 9 January 2009
A film portraying Nazi generals as heroes, starring Tom Cruise? Not the easiest sell, perhaps – but the director Bryan Singer, champion of the outsider, has never been one to shirk a challenge. He talks to James Mottram
Cultural Life: Jodhi May, actress
Friday, 9 January 2009
"I love Clint Eastwood's films. 'Changeling' was beautifully shot and crafted to perfection. Erick Zonca's 'Julia' is a crazy, exhilarating film; Tilda Swinton is compelling."
Hollyweird: William Desmond Taylor
Friday, 9 January 2009
In Hollywood's glitzy society, stories are never ordinary stories and murders are never ordinary murders.
Rising Star - Mia Wasikowskaactress
Friday, 9 January 2009
The 17-year-old Mia Wasikowska went tête-à-tête with Gabriel Byrne in the HBO psychoanalyst drama 'In Treatment' and emerged with a profile in top health. In the show she plays a teenage tearaway who seeks help after a motorcycle accident; as the weeks pass, more and more of her personal demons come out of the closet and the full extent of Wasikowska's remarkable range becomes apparent. British audiences will get their first chance to see why directors are clamouring to cast her when Ed Zwick's war drama 'Defiance' is released this week. The young actress plays a Holocaust survivor who is romantically linked with a soldier played by Jamie Bell. Arriving soon after is Mira Nair's star-studded biopic on Amelia Earhart, where the high-flying actress plays a rival pilot. If that were not enough, she's currently filming in the UK, playing Alice in Tim Burton's adaptation of Lewis Carroll's classic text, but it's Wasikowska herself who should be in wonderland.
Screen Talk: Sundance ready for a heady mix
Friday, 9 January 2009
Movie wheeler-dealers are gearing up for this year's Sundance Film Festival in Park City, Utah, which gets under way on 15 January.
The Word On... The Reader
Friday, 9 January 2009
"This film is emotionally inert. At the very least, it could be objectionable and offensive – I'd hoped it would be offensive, when I first heard the plot – but no, that would interfere with Stephen Daldry's Prestige Machine." - Tim Brayton, http://antagonie.blogspot.com/
America's great secret
Thursday, 8 January 2009
Richard Yates was one of the 20th century's best writers, but he never made the literary big time. A film of his debut novel will change that
Swayze: 'Yeah, I'm angry. Yeah, I'm scared'
Thursday, 8 January 2009
In his first interview since being diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, Patrick Swayze reveals his despair – and defiance
Why cinema can't get enough of the Nazis
Wednesday, 7 January 2009
Geoffrey Macnab: Valkyrie, Inglour- ious Basterds, Defiance, The Reader – more than six decades on, the Second World War is still taking Hollywood by storm. Why? It's got more to do with the modern psyche than history.
Second World War film quiz answers
Wednesday, 7 January 2009
1. The Dirty Dozen 2. Casablanca 3. Life is Beautiful 4. Sands of Iwo Jima 5. The Guns of Navarone 6. The Eagle Has Landed 7. Saving Private Ryan 8. From Here To Eternity 9. The Best Years of Our Lives 10. Au Revoir les Enfants 11. South Pacific 12. To Be or Not To Be 13. Downfall 14. Stalag 17 15. The Dam Busters 16. The Great Escape 17. The Night Porter 18. Patton 19. Battle of Britain 20. Catch-22
Sam Peckinpah: A taste for blood
Monday, 5 January 2009
Sam Peckinpah’s appetite for real and cinematic violence approached the psychopathic. As a season of his films opens, Geoffrey Macnab assesses the director’s career
Danny Boyle: Why the Oscars are finally calling for the maverick director
Sunday, 4 January 2009
He made his name directing a cast of unknowns in a squalid urban setting, on a tiny budget; 13 years after 'Trainspotting', Danny Boyle has pulled it off again, and 'Slumdog Millionaire' is already a contender for film of the year. Here, the director talks about his Mumbai miracle
Culture: These Globes are less than golden
Sunday, 4 January 2009
The Hollywood awards season officially kicks off next Sunday when this year's Golden Globe winners are announced. This looks set to be a vintage year for the Brits, with likely winners including Kate Winslet, Hugh Laurie, Sally Hawkins (pictured), the director Danny Boyle and the screenwriter Simon Beaufoy.
Holding out for a hero: Frank Miller on his 20-year tussle with the film industry
Sunday, 4 January 2009
Frank Miller created the Dark Knight, and the template for the brooding superhero. So why did it take 20 years for Hollywood to give the comics genius a film of his own to make?
Mickey Rourke: The bruiser is back
Saturday, 3 January 2009
For years, Hollywood didn't want to know the hell-raising actor who had been compared to Brando. But in his latest film, his performance as a boxer has the industry buzzing with talk of a best actor Oscar
True Defiance: The story of the fabulous Bielski boys
Saturday, 3 January 2009
The thrilling story of three Jewish brothers who dared to defy the Nazis is an epic new movie. And their descendants live on in a quiet New York neighbourhood. David Usborne reports
Evan Rachel Wood: Beauty and the beastliness
Friday, 2 January 2009
The actress has been called a whore, a slut and a home-wrecker. What has the Golden Globe-nominated star done to deserve such treatment, asks James Mottram
Highlights of 2009: Film
Friday, 2 January 2009
Lily Allen's second album, Jude Law as Hamlet, Michael Sheen as Brian Clough, Martin Amis on feminism – 2009 promises a variety of treats in the arts. Our critics predict what will make waves in the coming months
Kasparov's movie: from chess to politics
Tuesday, 30 December 2008
At the premiere of a film following Garry Kasparov's battle to stand for president in Russia, the chess champion tells Geoffrey Macnab why it ended in stalemate
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The Independent Film Forum
This week's Independent Film Forum looks at 'Lesbian Vampire Killers'. Have your say on the film
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FIVE BEST FILMS
Il Divo, 15
Paolo Sorrentino’s terrific film presents an extraordinarily sinister portrait of Giulio Andreotti, Italy’s most significant politician of the post-war era. As incarnated by Toni Servillo, Andreotti appears not so much an eminence grise as a black hole.
Nationwide
Wendy and Lucy , 15
Michelle Williams, with page-boy haircut and a martyrishly sad face, is quite lovely in this extremely low-key but very touching humanist drama about hardship and a modern-day hobo’s search for her missing dog.
Limited release
Bronson, 18
An original and pacy portrait of Charles Bronson, a violent sociopath who has spent most of his adult life in solitary confinement. Tom Hardy gives what ought to be a career-making performance.
Nationwide
The Class, 15
The winner of the Palme d’Or at last year’s Cannes festival is a remarkable piece of naturalistic film-making, set over the course of a school year in a racially mixed classroom of boisterous and endearing adolescents in an inner-city Paris high school.
Nationwide
Not Quite Hollywood, 18
Informative and very funny documentary charting the history of Ozploitation, a forgotten strand of exploitation cinema that was concurrent with the Australian New Wave of the 1970s and 1980s, but had rather more nudity, mayhem and gore.
Limited release