film directors
Post MortemMonday, 05 September 2011
Post Mortem is Chilean Pablo Larraín’s follow-up to the extraordinary Tony Manero, and another, even tougher take on his country’s troubled past. While the first film was a blackly comic look at the dictatorship years of the Seventies, this one... Read more... |
theartsdesk at the 68th Venice Film Festival: Clooney, Polanski, MadonnaFriday, 02 September 2011
I wonder if it’s possible for a film festival to kick off with a bigger bang. For your first three competition films to be directed by one of the world’s biggest movie stars, one of its most celebrated (and controversial) auteurs and arguably the... Read more... |
The GuardWednesday, 17 August 2011
Directing and writing his first full-length feature, John Michael McDonagh fully exploits the wild and windswept landscapes of Connemara, and similarly extracts maximum value from his leading man, Brendan Gleeson. Perhaps he picked up tips from his... Read more... |
theartsdesk at the Sarajevo Film FestivalMonday, 01 August 2011
There is an interesting tension at the Sarajevo Film Festival which, though this was my first time, I suspect exists as a matter of course. And this is a tension between the spirit of the people I meet here – ebullient, good-humoured and... Read more... |
Regional TV: Life Through a Local Lens/ Britain Through a Lens - The Documentary Film Mob, BBC FourThursday, 21 July 2011
I was once shown around Anglia TV’s studios by the bloke who used to say, "And now, from Norwich - the quiz of the week!” by way of introduction to the immortal Sale of the Century. A tremendous thrill, as you can imagine. It all came back to me... Read more... |
Last Year in MarienbadSunday, 10 July 2011
It is resonantly famous, picking up plaudits from the off, with one Sight & Sound commentator claiming in 1962 that it was the "greatest film ever made", for which he'd been waiting "during the last 30 years". That now seems slightly hysterical... Read more... |
theartsdesk Q&A: Writer/Director David LelandSaturday, 02 July 2011
David Leland (b 1947) has worked extensively both sides of the Atlantic but he is best known, both as a writer and a director, for his shrewd observations of ordinary people struggling against the constraints and hypocrisy of the accepted social... Read more... |
Richard III, Old VicThursday, 30 June 2011
It's the hard-hitting hoedown of high summer. Old Vic supremo Kevin Spacey being reunited with director Sam Mendes for the first time since 1999's American Beauty was bound to make 'em whoop, and their new production of Richard III doesn't... Read more... |
A SeparationMonday, 27 June 2011
Asghar Farhadi’s new film unostentatiously suggests that Iran has many of the same things we have: cars, cash machines, schools, sex, divorce, Alzheimer’s. It doesn’t, we gather, have modern law. Before howls of protest erupt over so banal and... Read more... |
DVD: Don't Look NowFriday, 24 June 2011
Is Don’t Look Now really the best British film of all time? That’s how a panel of 150 industry experts voted earlier this year in a poll compiled by Time Out. But then, out of a list of 100 top British movies, Distant Voices, Still Lives came third... Read more... |
Interview: Film Director Nicolas RoegThursday, 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... Read more... |
Interview: Film Director Ron PeckTuesday, 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... Read more... |
