film directors
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 ...
Jasper Rees
The trajectory of Terence Rattigan’s standing finds two peaks separated by a deep trough. From the late Thirties to the mid Fifties, he gave a voice to a social class which liked to keep its feelings under lock and key. Then in 1956 Rattigan was occluded by the dazzling verbal incontinence of Jimmy Porter. In 1991 a production of The Deep Blue Sea at the Almeida starring Penelope Wilton rebooted his reputation.His centenary amounts to another celebratory reassessment. Theatres small and large have been turning to the unvisited margins of Rattigan’s work. But Separate Tables and The Browning Read more ...
Jasper Rees
At Thanksgiving in 1999, a 75-year-old retired widowed museum director came out to his family. He had only recently been widowed after a marriage lasting more than four decades. One of the people to whom he broke the news was his son Mike Mills, then in his early thirties and not yet a film director. This year the movie inspired by that moment was released, and it now appears on DVD.Beginners, written and directed by Mills, features a delightful and zesty performance from Christopher Plummer in the role of Hal, who announces his homosexuality to his son, a cartoonist played by Ewan McGregor. Read more ...
Nick Hasted
When the former Miss Wyoming, Joyce McKinney, walked towards UK Customs in 1977, she had a perfect tabloid story in her bag: handcuffs, a Smith and Wesson pistol, and a burning desire to rescue the love of her life from the Epsom Mormons. One of her American accomplices, KJ May, attracted by her newspaper ad - “Big Adventurous Dude Wanted” for a “Free Trip to Europe!” - and tendency to open the door in transparent blouses, stuck with her long enough to help spirit that love, Kirk Anderson, away to a Devon cottage. They had a three-night “romantic honeymoon” (McKinney) or “rape” (the Read more ...
fisun.guner
Based on the novel by SE Hinton, The Outsiders is a tender coming-of-age movie set against a tough backdrop of flick-knives, rumbles and gang warfare. In Francis Ford Coppola’s vision, it’s also a romantic cinematic homage to Gone with the Wind.Released in 1983 to a fairly mixed critical reception, the story is set in 1960s Oklahoma and involves the gang rivalry between the Greasers, a bunch of kids born on the wrong side of the tracks, and the Socs, affluent prep boys. It's told through the eyes of Ponyboy (C Thomas Howell), a 14-year-old Greaser who is involved in an opening chase sequence Read more ...