Working on the basis that sacred cows make the juiciest steaks, Brit comedian and satirist Chris Morris applies his dark and biting humour to the topic of terrorism, in this tale of a bumbling group of Muslim suicide bombers from Sheffield. Tackling a subject as sensitive as this might seem like a dangerous mission for a comedian, but not only does Morris navigate the bad taste issue cleverly, he creates the funniest scenes to hit the big screen for a long time and then manages to go beyond the farce and show us some touching and chilling moments of humanity amongst the mayhem. (more…)
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Stanley Kubrick described Jim Thompson’s book The Killer Inside Me as ‘the most chilling and believable first-person story of a criminally warped mind’ he’d ever read. British film director Micheal Winterbottom, who’s just turned that book into a feature film starring Casey Affleck, Jessica Alba and Kate Hudson, agrees. “It is a great book, a very short, fast read,” he says. “It’s powerful and the violence is very shocking, but afterwards – unlike a lot of noir stories that grip you only while you read them – this story stayed with me. There was something truthful about Thompson’s picture of this dark world.” (more…)
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There’s a well-worn complaint amongst actors that great roles for women over forty are almost impossible to find and, when they do emerge from the green-lit rooms of film production, they frequently involve the Demi Moore’s and Catherine Zeta Jones’ of this world playing women much younger than themselves. Whilst it’s not really been a problem for Patricia Clarkson – the darling of American independent cinema for many years – when she read the script for Cairo Time (written and directed by Ruba Nadda), Clarkson felt she had found a very special story about a woman of a certain age. (more…)
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For much of this film, there is a naive charm that makes you want to forgive the glacial pace of the storytelling and the terribly theatrical performances (and the scratchy print that I watched, which undermined the stunning beauty of the Nepalese landscape on the big screen). What’s harder to excuse however, is the film’s increasingly didactic nature. As we travel higher and deeper into the mountains on a journey of hope with four gorgeous children, we slowly realise we have been led into a trap – this is no adventure, but a lesson in morality! And it’s a lesson that leaves a distinctly unpleasant taste, despite the sugarcoating. (more…)
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She has a pilot’s license, speaks German, travelled the world as a teenage model, and married a Hollywood star. It seems that life couldn’t get much sweeter for Jacinda Barrett, born and raised in Brisbane. Yet the actress, who has a house in Los Angeles and who has played opposite leading men like John Travolta, Zach Braff and Colin Firth, has been hanging out to show her home country just how far she has come. “I really wanted to do an Australian movie,” she says from the lounge of a Sydney hotel. “It was so weird to me that I hadn’t made a movie here, and it was definitely something I had to seek out – Australian scripts were not coming after me at all.” (more…)
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After exploring life behind royal curtains in The Queen, changing-room politics in English soccer with The Damned United, and the man-to-man drama of the television interview in Frost/Nixon, screenwriter Peter Morgan has turned his attention to Anglo-American affairs in a study of Tony Blair and the way he and Bill Clinton navigated the politics of their era, frequently looking to each other for support – in both personal and national matters. (more…)
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When Ewan McGregor found out that Roman Polanski was interested in casting him in his new film, he was completely gobsmacked. “It was so weird, because I hadn’t ever considered I would work with him,” says the actor in voice so soft and warm that it could sell Scotch whisky by the truckload. “I had always felt Polanski was out of reach somehow, and it had been a while since he’d made a film. I honestly never thought that it would be likely, so when I got a script from him and they said ‘he wants you to play in this new film called The Ghost Writer’, I asked ‘what does he want me to do?’ They said ‘he wants you to be the ghost writer.’ And that was that.” (more…)
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When Christian McKay auditioned for RADA (Royal Academy of Dramatic Art), he decided to overcome his nerves by pretending to be Richard Burton. McKay, the British actor currently wowing critics and audiences in the title role of the feature film Me and Orson Welles, had a perfectly good career as a concert pianist before trying out for a professional life on the stage. “Doing the audition for RADA was a kind of test, “ he says, “to see whether I had any talent for acting. I remember thinking that they wouldn’t like my voice, so I decided to do Burton. (more…)
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Scriptwriting consultants and directing gurus from all over the world frequently tell you that the golden rule of filmmaking is to write from your own experience, to tell your own story, to write about your own “tribe”. It’s only then, they argue, that the real detail and a sense of the authentic will emerge in a story world. It’s advice that Claire McCarthy didn’t have to hear in making her latest feature film The Waiting City, about a couple adopting a child from an orphanage in Calcutta. She’d lived the experience first hand, and just knew it would make for compelling cinema. (more…)
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You can’t help but think that somewhere in the evolution of Jon Amiel’s film about Charles Darwin, the best story just didn’t get selected. Opening with a line that the film is to be about the creation of Darwin’s book On The Origin of Species which changed the world forever, the poorly structured story that follows is focused less on Darwin’s struggle to get the book written and more on his melancholic reflections of his ten-year-old daughter Annie. It’s a frequently drab affair, which occasionally bursts into life with wildlife cinematography or bouts of Victorian bonhomie. (more…)
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