film directors
fisun.guner
Rainer Werner Fassbinder, the wunderkind of New German Cinema, worked at a prodigious rate. By the time of his death in 1982, aged just 37, he’d made over 40 feature films and directed over half as many stage plays. He also made films specially commissioned for television, something that was certainly looked down upon by both mainstream and avant-garde film-makers in the Seventies. Treating his television projects with no less commitment, Fassbinder was an arthouse film-maker who broke the mould in many ways, though his output must be said to be of vastly variable quality.I Only Want You to Read more ...
emma.simmonds
If you’re game for a galling statistic, here’s one that’s guaranteed to stun: at present, only 14 per cent of British films released in the UK are directed by women. If that seems oddly as well as infuriatingly low, it’s probably because so many of the brightest and boldest British film-makers of recent years, from Lynne Ramsay to Lucy Walker, are women – women who it seems are exceptions as well as being exceptional. These towering talents, it could be said, give the impression that opportunities for women behind the camera are at a high, rather than being persistently paltry. And so it’s Read more ...
fisun.guner
With only a modest, handheld camera and an iPhone at his disposal, the internationally acclaimed Iranian director Jafar Panahi shot this film in secret whilst under house arrest. His close friend, and co-director of this film, Mojtaba Mirtahmasb, then smuggled it into France hidden in a cake as a last-minute submission to Cannes last year. Made whilst awaiting his appeal for a six-year prison sentence and a film-making ban of 20 years for publicly supporting the opposition party in Iran’s 2009 election, the film bravely and eloquently attempts to circumvent these restrictions: he is not " Read more ...
fisun.guner
Michael is a work of fiction, but it is also clearly an amalgam of real-life events. For first-time Austrian director Markus Schleinzer (former casting director for Michael Haneke, whose influence you may detect), the subject must have particular resonance: in this story of a child abduction by a lone paedophile, it’s unavoidable that we think of Josef Fritzl and Wolfgang Priklopil, as well as Belgian child-killer Marc Dutroux. Schleinzer has created a script that bears comparison to all three cases in ways that are incidental but also striking.Schleinzer also appears to rely on some of the Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
The first time I saw Michael Fassbender (b 1977) in the flesh, it was in Venice, in 2011. I was heading home on the last day of the film festival, where Steve McQueen’s Shame – starring the Irishman as a New York sex addict – had enjoyed an enthusiastically received premiere a week before. As I jumped off a vaporetto at Marco Polo Airport, I noticed Fassbender walking in the opposite direction, towards the water. Alone, with a tuxedo slung casually over his shoulder, the actor had obviously got “the call”, to return to the festival to collect a prize.Indeed, that night he was on stage, Read more ...
mark.kidel
Bernardo Bertolucci’s The Conformist, originally released in 1970, is without doubt his masterpiece and marks the Italian director’s move from experimental art-house movies to larger scale-studio production. The film is stunningly beautiful, each frame carefully composed in terms of colour and form, and every camera movement contributing to mood and story rather than being used for effect. Vittorio Storaro’s cinematography broke new ground and inspired many other great film makers, not least Coppola who hired him for Apocalypse Now.In a series of seamlessly handled flashbacks, the film tells Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
It’s got Daniel Auteuil striding moodily (yet approachably) through the Provençal countryside so it must be Pagnol, right? Up to a point. He is best known to us as the author of Jean de Florette and Manon des sources. On paper, this is vintage Marcel Pagnol – a remake of the writer-film-maker’s 1940 film La fille du puisatier, faithful down to large chunks of dialogue – but on screen this is a rather different creature, and it’s clear that there’s a new eye behind the lens. That eye belongs to none other than Auteuil himself. At a distance of some 50 years, the actor has chosen to make his Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Connecticut-born Jules Dassin graduated from lightweight suspense and comedy fodder for MGM to pungent, location-based crime dramas, hitting his stride with Brute Force (1947) and The Naked City (1948), both included in this package. However, his upward trajectory was derailed after he was identified as a communist at the HUAC hearings. Producer Darryl Zanuck gave Dassin the script for Night and the City and dispatched him to London to shoot it, days before the Committee was due to grill the director. Then Dassin relocated to France, where he created the noir masterpiece - and the third Read more ...
Matt Wolf
It's tempting to say that Martin Scorsese's first so-called "family film" works like clockwork, except that the movie possesses considerably more soul than that statement suggests. What's more, it would help to be a clan of thoroughgoing cinéastes to tap entirely into its charms, as a director steeped in the history of his chosen medium takes us backwards in time towards the very origins of the art form he so reveres. Kids may love the sweep and scope of the visuals, many of them involving timepieces that whir and tick and hum, but Hugo at heart is an extended act of homage toward the miracle Read more ...
Jasper Rees
In 2006 the thatched house in Lymington on the Hampshire coast which had been the home of Ken Russell (b 1927) for 30 years burned down. All of the director’s original film scripts, including Women in Love, The Devils and Tommy, were destroyed. So was the bulk of the music collection which inspired him to make his groundbreaking films about composers in the 1960s. There is, however, one part of the Russell archive which has survived, for the simple reason that for 50 years it had never once been in his possession.In the 1950s, after giving up on a career as a dancer, Russell freelanced as a Read more ...
Jasper Rees
An exhibition of Ken Russell's photographs, taken in the 1950s, spirits you back to a London still in recovery from the trauma of war. And yet seen through the prism of Russell's lively eye, always on the look-out for mischief and absurdity, an era we now view as both innocent and slightly dull appears anything but. He took a series of pictures in Hyde Park designed to lampoon ridiculous local by-laws. He had fun with stilts and penny farthings and assorted props. Above all, he celebrated the great British penchant for dressing up. Enjoy a selection of photographs from Ken Russell: A Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
There’s a scene in Theo Angelopoulos’s The Travelling Players where those gathered in a square hear “the wind of freedom is blowing” being sung. The wartime Nazi occupation is over. Greek, Russian and American flags are aloft. A bomb goes off. In asking whose freedom this was, Angelopoulos had chosen his moment carefully. The film was released in 1975, a year after Greece held its first election since the Colonels took power with American backing in 1967.Angelopoulos made his first film in 1968, just after the coup d’état had installed the quasi-fascist regime. A new four-DVD box set collects Read more ...