Film Features

French Cancan: Jean Renoir in the Moulin Rouge

Ronald Bergan Saturday, 30 July 2011

When Jean Renoir returned to France at the end of 1953 after 13 years of exile, he felt as if he were beginning his career from scratch. His Hollywood films were not highly regarded, and neither The River (1951) nor The Golden Coach (1953), shot in India and Italy respectively, were successful enough to redeem his international standing among reviewers or at the box office. The critical consensus declared that he was an artist in decline.

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theartsdesk in Los Angeles: The Film Festival Without Stars

Sarvenaz Sheybany Sunday, 03 July 2011

'An Ordinary Family' seems determined to sidestep a whole host of clichés about religion and gay identity

In its second year under creative director David Ansen and in its new home at the LA Live complex, the Los Angeles Film Festival seems to have recovered from the slightly rocky start of its downtown debut last year. While one or two of the several hundred volunteers still seemed to be in it for the free T-shirt, most were clearly film enthusiasts...

Interview: Film Director Nicolas Roeg

Hilary Whitney Thursday, 23 June 2011

There is something rather bloody-minded and heroic about Nicolas Roeg’s films with their fractured narratives, macabre imagery and extremes of sex and violence which place him, along with film-makers such as Ken Russell and Roger Corman, within a very particular but thrilling seam of dark English Romanticism.

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Interview: Film Director Ron Peck

Tom Birchenough Tuesday, 07 June 2011

The identity of British independent film, and its future directions, has always been a matter of some contention – and with the ongoing transfer of authority on funding issues from the now-defunct UK Film Council to the British Film Institute, it’s a question that isn’t going to go away. For Ron Peck, whose most recent film Cross-Channel has been...

theartsdesk in Western Sahara: The World's Most Remote Film Festival

Stefan Simanowitz Sunday, 22 May 2011

At FiSahara, films are screened at night in the centre of the camp onto a multiplex-sized screen

During the 1960s, when decolonisation movements were sweeping the world, it was joked that, after achieving independence, a country had to do three things: design a flag, launch an airline and found a film festival. Western Sahara has a flag but no airline and, despite a 35-year struggle, has yet to achieve independence. The closest Western Sahara comes to its own film festival is the Sahara International Film Festival (known as FiSahara), the world's most remote film festival, whose...

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The Battleship Potemkin Comes Out of the Closet

Ronald Bergan Saturday, 23 April 2011

When Sergei Eisenstein's film The Battleship Potemkin was first shown in Moscow in December 1925, just in time to commemorate the 1905 Revolution, the film played to half-empty theatres, because audiences, then as now, preferred the products from Hollywood. Box-office figures were exaggerated by the authorities to demonstrate to the rest of the world that there was a large Soviet audience for Soviet films.

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Director Lucien Castaing-Taylor on the Making of Sweetgrass

Lucien Castaing Saturday, 23 April 2011

I grew up in Liverpool, but my grandmother was from the Lake District - Wordsworth country, and about as rural and remote as could be. We used to stay with her on weekends, and I still remember the sense of freedom as we escaped the post-industrial detritus of Merseyside and Lancashire, and approached her cottage in this Arcadian paradise. But my bucolic fantasy was of course the projection of an urban child, who knew next to nothing about what it was like to actually inhabit this landscape...

Celebrating Angela Scoular, 1945-2011

Graham Fuller Wednesday, 20 April 2011

Soopah!: Angela Scoular with Barry Evans in 'Here We Go Round the Mulberry Bush'

In Clive Donner’s 1968 Here We Go Round the Mulberry Bush, which was released on DVD earlier this year, Barry Evans plays Jamie, a Stevenage sixth-former whose rush to lose his virginity leads him into a series of muted misadventures with girls. They are played by the likes of Adrienne Posta, Judy Geeson, Sheila White and Vanessa Howard. Jamie is randy but sweet, scarcely a rake, and Donner’s jocular film transcends its Swinging Sixties sex comedy label by getting under the skin...

theartsdesk in Kinshasa: The Making of Benda Bilili!

Andy Morgan Sunday, 13 March 2011

Benda Bilili! is in some ways very Hollywood – the story of a dream of stardom which comes true despite incredible odds. On the other hand, the subject matter of a group of homeless paraplegic musicians in a band called Staff Benda Bilili (which means something like “looking beyond appearances”) in one of the most dangerous cities in the world – Kinshasa – is hardly Tinsel Town.

Oscars 2011: The King's Speech sweeps the 83rd Academy Awards (eventually)

Matt Wolf Monday, 28 February 2011

The King’s Speech survived a faltering start at the 83rd annual Academy Awards – think of it as an Oscar-night stammer – to emerge victorious with four trophies, three of them in the last 30 minutes of the (seemingly endless) ceremony. But long after this cinematic Cinderella’s final domination of the gong-giving season just gone is forgotten, 2011 will be remembered as the year that the Oscars dropped the F-bomb.

Opinion: Awards - aren't you sick of them?

Ismene Brown Sunday, 20 February 2011

Sorry if I haven’t seen you since New Year, darling, but I've been non-stop. Last night it was the whatsonstage.com awards, I’m in LA next weekend for the Oscars of course, and I ruined my Jimmy Choos at the Globes - such a riot! I had to pop into a couple of dull old Critics Circle awards, but there's only wine, lovey, and at least Melvyn's South Bank do gives you a decent dinner. Was so hungover I had to positively skulk at the National Television Awards the next night.

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theartsdesk in Berlin: The 61st Berlinale

james Woodall Saturday, 19 February 2011

Another 400 films, another rush for seats, another biting wind from Vladivostock: the 61st Berlin Film Festival - the Berlinale - has packed ’em in in the centre of town at Potsdamer Platz (mainly) over the last 10 days and hoped to light up the inevitably gloomy middle of February, and almost succeeded. But boy were there some tedious competition films this year.

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Opinion: 3D is as revolutionary as the talkie

alexandra Coghlan Monday, 07 February 2011

Tainted by its origins and association with the pulp cinema of the 1950s (classics like Bwana Devil, It Came from Outer Space and House of Wax were pioneers of stereoscopic technology), 3D cinema has remained the province of entertainment cinema, a novelty no art-house auteur would touch.

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Interview: Film Director Beeban Kidron

Hilary Whitney Friday, 21 January 2011

'People do not have proper witness to their lives and I am really interested so I start asking them questions'

It’s a fairly safe bet that when director Beeban Kidron made her first film, the documentary Carry Greenham Home (1983), she never envisaged that 20 years later she’d be directing a whopping great blockbuster about a Chardonnay-swigging young woman’s desperate quest to get a ring on her finger - Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason (2004). But then Kidron’s career trajectory has never been predictable.

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2010: A Film Odyssey

Anne Billson Monday, 27 December 2010

My new role model, Dr Ronald Chevalier: Bestselling author, plagiarist and Gentleman Bronco

2010 will go down as the year I fell out of love with Johnny Depp. And not just because of his cringe-making Mad Hatter in Alice in Wonderland, an over-produced farrago which reduced Lewis Carroll's dark Victorian whimsy to a dull computer gamelike chase-rescue-showdown scenario. The Deppster sealed the Double Whammy of Dreadfulness with his uncanny impression of naff comedian Rob Schneider in The Tourist, a would-be rom-com thriller that somehow sacrificed the...

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The 10 Best Christmas Movies

Graham Fuller Tuesday, 21 December 2010

A nostalgified panacea of pine, tinsel, and tintinnabulation? Or a black hole of loneliness, bitterness and melancholy? Films about Christmas, wholly or partially, have straddled both polarities over the years, producing a surprising number of classics.