film directors
Photo Gallery: Ken Russell - A RetrospectiveMonday, 28 November 2011![]() 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... Read more... |
DVD: The Theo Angelopoulos Collection Volume 1Friday, 25 November 2011![]() 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... Read more... |
Q&A: Director Terence Davies on The Deep Blue SeaThursday, 24 November 2011![]() 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... Read more... |
Q&A Special: Director Mike Mills on BeginnersMonday, 21 November 2011![]() 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,... Read more... |
Interview: Errol Morris on making TabloidFriday, 11 November 2011![]() 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... Read more... |
DVD: The OutsidersFriday, 04 November 2011![]() 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.... Read more... |
Jack Goes BoatingTuesday, 01 November 2011![]() Actors who migrate between stage and screen are often asked in interviews to assess the different disciplines. The answers tend not to vary much. On stage, they explain, you have to make a gift of your performance. In front of the camera, that... Read more... |
John Leguizamo: Ghetto Klown, Charing Cross TheatreMonday, 31 October 2011![]() At Murry Bergtraum high school in Queens, New York, John Leguizamo was voted the "Most Talkative" student by his classmates. Not much has changed. As this one-man show demonstrates, Leguizamo talks like a Gatling gun on speed, switching almost... Read more... |
CD: David Lynch - Crazy Clown TimeMonday, 31 October 2011![]() “Molly had a red shirt/ Susie, she ripped her shirt off completely/ Danny poured the beer all over Sally/ We all ran around the back yard/ It was crazy clown time/ It was real fun”. The voice is strangled, high. A treated guitar phases in and out,... Read more... |
theartsdesk Q&A: Director Mike LeighTuesday, 20 September 2011![]() There is somewhere called Leighland, where people may be ineffably sad or existentially cheerful, old or young, live in a high rise or a semi. But they are all recognisably inhabitants of the world famously conjured up over a long period of... Read more... |
The Story of Film: An Odyssey, More 4Saturday, 10 September 2011![]() After the first two parts of Mark Cousins’s magisterial The Story of Film: An Odyssey, I’m still in two minds as to whether it’s fair to call the presenter a generalist. He has already managed to piece together details from the cinema cultures of... Read more... |
theartsdesk at the Venice Film Festival: McQueen, Lanthimos, ArnoldSaturday, 10 September 2011![]() This year’s Venice Film Festival has been awash with great directors from what one might call the old guard: David Cronenberg, Roman Polanski, William Friedkin, Aleksander Sokurov, Philippe Garrel. But when the jury presents its prizes tonight, I... Read more... |
