Film Features
theartsdesk's Top 10 Films of 2012: 5 - 1Friday, 28 December 2012
Yesterday our film writers brought you numbers 10 – 6 in our movies of 2012 countdown. Looking back over that list it’s hard to imagine a clutch of finer films. Yet, testament to a year of remarkable filmmaking, it’s a hell of a race to the finish, taking in sex addiction, murder, spies, hostages and cults. And so we present our final five. Drumroll please… 5 – Once Upon a Time in Anatolia (dir. Nuri Bilge Ceylan)... Read more... |
theartsdesk's Top 10 Films of 2012: 10 - 6Thursday, 27 December 2012
With the end of 2012 nearly upon us it’s time for a spot of reflection. We’ve polled our film writers for their picks of the year and bring you our top 10 in all its drama and diversity. This is cinema at its very best, representing the numerous shades of the filmic rainbow: spectacular, plucky, horrifying, challenging, comedic, harrowing, joyous and strange. Read more... |
12 Films of Christmas: Meet Me in St LouisFriday, 21 December 2012
Blessed with the finest (and most infuriatingly catchy) soundtrack of any Christmas film, Vincente Minnelli’s 1944 movie-musical Meet Me in St Louis is a festive classic of a simpler, happier time. Small girls roam the streets in safety getting up to all kinds of wholesome mischief, bigger girls sing songs around the piano and fall for the boy next door. Read more... |
theartsdesk in Valletta: the 25th European Film AwardsSunday, 02 December 2012
Michael Haneke’s Amour was the big winner last night in the European Film Awards’ silver jubilee year. As well as Best Film, Haneke won Best Director, as he did for his previous two films The White Ribbon (2009) and Hidden (2005), while his veteran stars Emmanuelle Riva and Jean-Louis Trintignant were named Best Actress and Actor. Read more... |
theartsdesk in Thessaloniki: Moving Pictures in the Cradle of AusteritySunday, 11 November 2012
Greece is in economic meltdown. Austerity is hitting most of the population very hard. Businesses are closing down. The amount of homeless has increased. There are strikes and huge anti-government demonstrations throughout the country. What better time to hold a huge film festival? Read more... |
theartsdesk in Kazakhstan: the 8th Eurasia International Film FestivalSunday, 30 September 2012
Almaty may have lost its capital status to Astana in 1997, but this city of 1.6m inhabitants, about nine percent of the country's population, remains the commercial and cultural hub of Kazakhstan. The Eurasia Film Festival was first held here in 1998 with the support of the Filmmakers Union as a forum for movies from the CIS and Baltic countries. Read more... |
Film on Demand: SkeletonsThursday, 27 September 2012
Nick Wheatfield’s surreal comedy Skeletons won the Michael Powell Award for best new British feature at the 2010 Edinburgh Film Festival, and deservedly so. An off-beat film combining British eccentricity with a high-concept hook, there is more than a touch of Beckett about the central characters, Davis and Bennett, played with oddball appeal by Andrew Buckley and Ed Gaughan. Read more... |
The Hitchcock Players: Barbara Harris, Family PlotThursday, 30 August 2012
Alfred Hitchcock famously loved his blondes, and they didn't come much more lovable than Barbara Harris. A Broadway star during the 1960s who later shifted her attentions towards film, Harris was at the peak of her talent in Family Plot, a delightful if minor Hitchcock entry distinguished by a fine quartet of American leads (Karen Black, William Devane and Bruce Dern are the others) among whom Harris stands apart. Read more... |
The Hitchcock Players: Naunton Wayne and Basil Radford, The Lady VanishesWednesday, 29 August 2012
Never one to underestimate the potency of a cameo (as evidenced by his own appearances in his films), Alfred Hitchcock had a particular genius with supporting roles – generating menace, intrigue or comedy with the fewest of brush strokes. Two of his earliest, and slightest, creations would also prove two of his most enduringly popular: cricket-obsessed duo Caldicott and Charters from 1938’s The Lady Vanishes. Read more... |
The Hitchcock Players: Hume Cronyn, Shadow of a DoubtTuesday, 28 August 2012
Shadow of a Doubt was reputedly Hitchcock’s personal favourite among his films. Joseph Cotten was cast against type as the glamorous, homicidal uncle, fleeing from the police and pitching up unexpectedly in his sister’s household in a sleepy Californian town. Hitchcock’s decision to shoot Thornton Wilder's script largely on location gives the film a unique flavour. Read more... |
The Hitchcock Players: Grace Kelly, Dial M for MurderSunday, 26 August 2012
Aside from the platinum hair and the porcelain beauty, there is no identikit Hitchcock blonde. She can be an ice-hearted femme fatale or a traumatised hysteric, or she can be Grace Kelly, a peachy embodiment of femininity whom the director enjoyed throwing in harm’s way. He would memorably do it in Rear Window, a film which he talked about to his leading lady throughout the making of Dial M for Murder. Read more... |
The Hitchcock Players: Cary Grant, NotoriousSaturday, 25 August 2012
Like his great contemporary Jimmy Stewart, Cary Grant not only gave some of his best performances for Hitchcock, he also grabbed the opportunity to darken his screen persona. It was never the case, with either of them, of simply playing “baddies”. Far more significantly, they revealed the dark psyches of average, even good men, in performances that leave the audience with the bitter aftertaste of familiarity. Read more... |
The Hitchcock Players: Lila Kedrova, Torn CurtainFriday, 24 August 2012
There’s an affecting moment in the café scene in Torn Curtain (1966) when the physicist Michael Armstrong (Paul Newman) and his fiancée-assistant Sarah Sherman (Julie Andrews), desperate to flee East Berlin, are awed into compassion for the jittery Polish Countess Kuchinska, who offers to help them if they will sponsor her bid to emigrate to the U.S. It looks a little as if Newman and Andrews themselves were awed by Lila Kedrova’s fabulously flowing performance. Read more... |
The Hitchcock Players: Tippi Hedren, The Birds, MarnieThursday, 23 August 2012
The relationship between Hitchcock and Hedren was already subject to scrutiny, and is symbolic of his fascination with blondes. Soon, with Sienna Miller playing the leading lady of 1963’s terrifying The Birds and Toby Jones as the director, it’s going to be revisited with the TV film The Girl (2010’s Hitchcock’s Women had trodden this path). Read more... |
The Hitchcock Players: Farley Granger and Robert Walker, Strangers on a TrainTuesday, 21 August 2012
Some actors build their characters from the feet up. In fact, it’s a theatrical commonplace to think that shoes can hold the key to a character's psychology. Hitchcock takes the idea and applies it to the opening sequence of Strangers on a Train, his 1951 adaptation of Patricia Highsmith’s 1950 debut novel. Read more... |
Tony Scott 1944-2012Monday, 20 August 2012
Anthony David “Tony” Scott was "the other Scott brother" whose filmmaking was cinematic, determined and all-encompassing. After directing thousands of television commercials, Scott’s breakthrough film, The Hunger, starring Catherine Deneuve, Susan Sarandon and David Bowie, became a classic, setting the stage for beautiful, elegiac and shocking tales of vampirism, love, and the implications of immortality. A trained fine artist, Scott's eye always found the perfect shot. Read more... |
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