Interviews
Pamela Jahn
Joshua Oppenheimer made his name directing two disturbing documentaries, The Act of Killing (2012) and The Look of Silence (2014), that dealt with the aftermath of the brutal anti-communist massacres in Indonesia in 1965-66. Those films addressed how people lie to themselves in order to live with guilt and trauma. Oppenheimer's first fiction film, The End, is a radical continuation of the same idea.The End is a dystopian musical about a rich family that found refuge in a bunker 20 years after an environmental catastrophe. The parents (Tilda Swinton, Michael Shannon), their grownup son (George Read more ...
Nick Hasted
François Ozon is France’s master of sly secrets, burying hard truths in often dazzling surfaces, from Swimming Pool’s erotic mystery of writing and murder in 2003 to the teenage boy cuckooing his way into his middle-aged mentor’s life in In the House (2012).Sexuality, gender and love itself prove variously slippery in The New Girlfriend (2014) and the violently different twins of L’Amant double (2017), while feminist equality powers Potiche (2010), the provincial Seventies comedy of umbrella factory strikes and elections with a sparring Depardieu and Deneuve. Ozon’s comfort Read more ...
Pamela Jahn
Radhika Apte has been acclaimed for her ebullient performance as a reluctant bride in Sister Midnight since director Karan Kandhari’s comic horror movie was launched at Cannes last May. Talking over Zoom from her home near Epping Forest, Apte, 38, quickly stresses that it wasn’t the film's topic of arranged marriage that made her sign up for Kandhari’s feature debut. What she loved about his script, she says, “is the wild and weirdly wonderful way it tackles the feeling of not fitting in, and the eventual journey of accepting oneself as one is with all the imperfections.”Apte’s Uma Read more ...
Pamela Jahn
With his furious docu-essay I Am Not Your Negro, Raoul Peck caused a stir in 2016. The film about African-American writer James Baldwin and the Civil Rights Movement not only put the Haitian-born Peck on the map as a director, but also made him one of the defining figures of contemporary black cinema.Since his debut Haitian Corner (1990), Peck has devoted himself to political topics, switching effortlessly between documentary or feature films to achieve a stronger factual or emotional impact. His work, he says, only serves one purpose: "I need to find a narrative, something that lasts and Read more ...
Pamela Jahn
Adrien Brody is on a roll. Following his Golden Globe and BAFTA Best Actor wins for his performance as László Toth in Brady Corbet's The Brutalist, Brody picked up the equivalent Oscar last Sunday, celebrating it by giving the longest speech in Academy Awards history. Two days later, he was nominated for an Olivier for his portrayal of the real-life death-row inmate Nick Yarris in The Fear of 13, Lindsey Ferrentino's play at the Donmar having marked the 51-year-old actor’s British stage debut.The Oscar was Brody’s second. In 2003, he became the youngest winner in the Best Actor category for Read more ...
Rachel Halliburton
Sebastian Copeland’s images of the Arctic may look otherworldly – with their tilting cathedrals of ice, hypnotic light, and fractured seascapes that seem to stretch to infinity – but it would be a mistake to see them that way.For Copeland’s whole mission is to make us see how intimately our lives are caught up with a region which – for all its frozen austerity – is in flux. In his most recent book of photographs, The Arctic: A Darker Shade of White (winner of an International Photography Award), he writes that Arctic sea ice has just lost “more volume in 30 years than it has in the Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Iranian director Mohammad Rasoulof is now an Oscar-nominated refugee, in a bittersweet harvest for his film The Seed of the Sacred Fig.The 52-year-old has previously probed the moral cost of his country’s dictatorship in Manuscripts Don’t Burn (2013), A Man of Integrity (2017) and There Is No Evil (2020), work where characters suffer and snap, or refuse to participate in repression at great cost. Routinely banned at home, work right up to Sacred Fig was shot in secret, brave guerilla cinema now necessarily common in Iran.Faced with eight years’ jail, flogging and seizure of property for Read more ...
Justine Elias
There are no white-sheeted ghosts in this year’s A Ghost Story for Christmas. The BBC’s annual adaptations of MR James’s best-known stories have been a holiday favourite since the 1970s.More recently, in the hands of writer-director Mark Gatiss (pictured below), the series has been mining dread from the work of authors less well known for horror: Arthur Conan Doyle, for last year’s Lot 249, and Edith Nesbit (author of The Railway Children and Five Children and It) for this year’s tale, which is based on Man-Size in Marble. In the new adaptation, titled Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Somewhere in Germany, G7 conference leaders including German Chancellor Ortmann (Cate Blanchett) and US President Wolcott (Charles Dance) repair to a gazebo to collaborate on a “clear, but not so clear” communique addressing an unnamed, possibly apocalyptic crisis. Farcically human, they pocket hors d’oeuvres, flirt and pull rank, lose tempers and trousers. Meanwhile red flames lick the sky, a HAL-like sex chatbot commandeers comms, and the excavation of “bog men” - primeval leaders castrated, bound and buried by disgruntled constituents - serves as ominous warning of their power’s precarity Read more ...
Pamela Jahn
Payal Kapadia’s lyrical fiction feature debut All We Imagine as Light, which received the Grand Prix at Cannes in May, is now accruing end-of-year prizes. This week, the New York Film Critics Circle and the voters for the Gotham Awards (which honours independent movies) named it 2024’s Best International Film. More prizes will follow.All We Imagine as Light, which features dazzling night scenes, blends fiction and documentary. Opening on a near-vérité travelling sequence through the busy Dadar market in Mumbai, Kapadia’s birthplace, it swiftly broadens into the story of three women hospital Read more ...
Rachel Halliburton
How old were you when you first had an image of the Arctic? When you first had that image, what was it that most resonated? Was it its remoteness, the endless snow and ice, the polar bears? Did it seem like a mythical place of mirages and monsters? Or was it a place you thought you might travel to or even work one day?For young readers of the beguiling, illustrated books by fast rising children’s author Chloe Savage, there’s a chance to encounter the Arctic both as a place of magic and as a fascinating scientific proposition. In The Search for the Giant Arctic Jellyfish – which won the Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Roy Haynes, who had begun to seem immortal, has died aged 99. In this extensive Arts Desk interview from 2011, one of the greatest jazz drummers ranges across his remarkable life with sharp intelligence and generous feeling.The man who played with everyone, Roy Haynes earned his Lifetime Achievement Award at this year’s Grammys, in a career even his 86 years hardly make credible. He was 21 when he got the call to drum for Louis Armstrong in 1946. He was at the drum stool as Billie Holiday played her last club gig, crying at the pain of her dying body. Charlie Parker, John Coltrane, Thelonius Read more ...