Cinema

The director that everyone loved to hate: David Thomson interviews Peter Bogdanovich

Peter Bogdanovich’s new documentary about Buster Keaton, The Great Buster, is a match made in movie heaven. I can’t think of two men more devoted to making motion pictures — huge successes in their day — more acquainted with the merciless climate of Hollywood, or more aware that they were as instrumental in their own downfall as in their glory. ‘Buster said he made the great mistake of his life in 1928,’ says Bogdanovich. ‘He had done these masterpieces in the 1920s — Steamboat Bill Jr, Sherlock Jr, The Navigator, The General — and done them the way he wanted with his own production unit… It couldn’t get any better.

I’ve found the perfect family film (eventually)

As a member of Bafta, I get sent about 75 ‘screeners’ during the awards season, which is always a treat at the end of the year. I was particularly excited about it this time because of the makeshift home cinema I’ve set up in our playroom. I had fantasies of sitting in there with Caroline and the four kids, munching popcorn as we worked our way through the Bafta hopefuls. However, getting everyone to agree on a film to watch is always tricky in the Young household. On Christmas Eve, my recommendation was a French animated feature called I Lost My Body, which charts the adventures of a hand that’s

How could any woman fail to be won over by my new cinema room?

As Christmas approaches, fighting has broken out in the Young household. No, I’m not talking about my three boys, aged 11, 12 and 14, who have taken to playing a no-holds-barred version of American football in the kitchen. Rather, it’s Caroline and me who have been going at it. My sin has been to assume responsibility for the decor of one of the rooms in our house. This has been Caroline’s domain until now. She chooses which colour to paint the walls, what furniture to buy at Ikea and how that furniture should be arranged. My role is confined to assembling desks and bookshelves and occasionally moving beds around. But

Shooting star

This is an edited extract from the Foreword to Christopher Frayling’s Once Upon a Time in the West: Shooting a Masterpiece (Reel Art Press), based on a long conversation between Frayling and Tarantino from January 2018.  The movie that made me consider filmmaking, the movie that showed me how a director does what he does, how a director can control a movie through his camera, is Once Upon a Time in the West. It was almost like a film school in a movie. It really illustrated how to make an impact as a filmmaker. How to give your work a signature. I found myself completely fascinated, thinking: ‘That’s how you do

Men behaving very badly

Fans of Paolo Sorrentino’s Il Divo, The Great Beauty (which won an Oscar) and his HBO series, The Young Pope, will have been keenly anticipating Loro, his take on the life and times of Silvio Berlusconi, the media tycoon and former Italian prime minister who has been involved in one lurid scandal after another. But if you were expecting some kind of blistering take-down, or satire, it isn’t that, and if you were expecting to somehow get under Berlusconi’s skin, heaven forbid, it isn’t that either. Hard to say what it is, beyond a sprawling mess that caters so exclusively to the male gaze it makes The Wolf of Wall

Stealing beauty | 22 November 2018

The major releases this week are Robin Hood, as a big Hollywood retelling, and The Girl in the Spider’s Web, a reboot of the Stieg Larsson thriller franchise starring Claire Foy. But the film you want to see, even if you may not know it yet, is Hirokazu Koreeda’s Shoplifters. This is a film with no set pieces or major plot twists but it is wholly absorbing and it will steal your heart. (Among other things. There is a lot of stealing.) It won the Palme d’Or at Cannes and is the latest from the Japanese filmmaker who mostly turns his camera on to families (After the Storm, Our Little

Don’t believe the critics. If you like Queen’s music, see the Queen film

When it was released as a single, Bohemian Rhapsody was slated by the critics – yet went on to be the most popular commercial record in history. Ben Elton’s Queen musical, We Will Rock You, was panned by reviewers when it was released 16 years ago: today, it’s still packing in crowds the world over. So when the Queen film, Bohemian Rhapsody, was trashed by pretty much every film reviewer in Britain this week, it should not have been a surprise. Nor, for those planning on watching it, a deterrent. The film is not an expert portrait of Freddie Mercury, but it doesn’t pretend to be, any more than We

Net effect

As a documentary-maker, Werner Herzog is a master of tone. His widely parodied voiceovers — breathy, raspy, ominous — are cunningly ambivalent. The interviews he conducts are seldom less than strange, often shocking, and the pacing and tenor of his films are subtly modulated. Never more so than here. Lo and Behold is divided into chapters. The first is a fairly conventional documentary about the beginnings of the internet. Herzog talks to the people in California who made the first computer-to-computer connection in 1969, asking them reasonable questions and generally making them seem like comfortable, all-round good guys. This is then subverted by the appearance of Ted Nelson, a cyber-pioneer

An artist’s eye

There are moments in The Guardians when you can imagine you’re in the wrong art form. Time stills, the frame all but freezes, and the film seems to have taken a left turn into an exhibition of fetching French landscapes and interiors from the early 20th century. The camera hovers over the harrowed earth, admires the sturdy sunlit front of a farmhouse, lingers thoughtfully on a face. The running time of 138 minutes could easily have been slashed to 100 by a heartless editor. But this is un film de Xavier Beauvois, a specialist in painterly exactitude. The writer-director’s greatest success came in 2010 with Of Gods and Men. This,

Wonder of Wenders

What know they of movies who only movies know? Wim Wenders’s latest collection of essays arrives at a time when the best-known film critic in England is unashamed to claim that tendentious tosh The Exorcist as the best picture ever made. Even though the slightest piece in The Pixels of Paul Cézanne is its title essay, it is good to know that there is still at least one film buff around who is alive to the first six arts. As a young man in Dusseldorf, Wenders fancied himself a painter — so much so that, before the movies lured him away, he was planning to further his studies in Paris.

The death of cosy Christie

This is not Midsomer Murders. The new film adaptation of Agatha Christie’s Murder on the Orient Express is thick with violence and sexual innuendo. It elevates Hercule Poirot, the diminutive, fastidious Belgian detective, with his egg-shaped head and pot belly, to part-time action figure, a man who chases bad guys down dizzying descents in exotic snowscapes before straightening his magnificent moustache with a twinkle in his eye. This is less cosy, golden age detective fiction than a cross between Daniel Craig’s 007 and Scandi noir. Kenneth Branagh, who stars and directs, has brought his experience playing the dejected Swedish police inspector Wallander to the fore, giving the usually reserved detective

Life after death | 2 November 2017

According to the accountants’ ledgers, DVDs are dying. Sales of those shiny discs, along with their shinier sibling the Blu-ray, amounted to £894 million last year, which is almost a fifth lower than in 2015 and less than half of what was achieved a decade ago. And last week we finally said goodbye to the postal DVD service Lovefilm, too. The explanation for this decline is the explanation for many modern declines: digital is taking over. Nowadays, downloads and streaming services make more money than the old physical formats. But accountants don’t know everything. From a different perspective, through the bloodshot eyes of a cinephile, DVDs are thriving — and

Art of darkness | 14 September 2017

Stephen King, 69, has sold more than 350 million books, and tries not to apologise for being working-class, or imaginative, or rich. The snobbery has ebbed a little, though; in 2003 he won the National Book Foundation’s Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters, and now the BFI is screening a series of adaptations of his novels, which show how versatile he is. Why can’t you write stories like Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption, a woman asked him once. I did write it, he told her, but she did not believe him. King has published 59 novels, but he is a recovering addict and can’t remember writing them all. Most

Hollywood goes East

It’s kind of surreal being here.’ The general sentiment, no doubt, of most people on planet Earth right now, but the specific words of Matt Damon at the world première of his latest film earlier this year. The reason for his befuddlement? The film was The Great Wall, for which he had moved to China for half a year with his family. But the première was taking place beneath the extravagant pagoda of Grauman’s Chinese Theatre on Hollywood Boulevard. From actual China to Los Angeles’ idea of China — no wonder Damon found it weird. Yet, as so often happens in Hollywood, the weird could well become the way of

Sam Leith

Books Podcast: Charlotte Rampling

A few years ago, Charlotte Rampling signed a contract to write her autobiography – and then, the project not long underway, called the whole thing off. But this month she publishes something quite out of the usual run of celebrity memoirs. Who I Am, co-written with the French man of letters Christophe Bataille, is a slender, riddling approach to the actor’s inner life – not a catalogue of film anecdotes but rather a hesitant return to the child she was. She joins me to talk about why she’s done things this way, about the legacy of her Olympic medalist father, and about the terrible tragedy that defined her young womanhood.

Lloyd Evans

LA story

BREAKING NEWS: ‘Enjoyable play found at Royal Court.’ Generally, the Court likes to send its customers home feeling depressed, guilty, frightened or suicidal. And, generally, it succeeds. The Kid Stays in the Picture is based on the memoirs of Hollywood super-mogul Robert Evans. Director Simon McBurney uses artful lighting and complex staging effects to disguise the fact that this is just a glorified book-reading of the kind broadcast by Radio 4 every day of the week. The performers are concealed by deep shadows or behind screens and this threatens to break a basic rule of live theatre: an actor who can’t be seen can’t be heard. But the performers are

Why we need to cancel the Oscars to save the Oscars

Oscar has a problem, and I say that as a fan. If I could, I’d take one of those famous statuettes by its tiny golden hand, and show it a happy life in the bars, restaurants and movie theatres of its native Hollywood. But, clearly, others don’t feel the same way. The number of people who tuned into the Academy Awards last year was the lowest it has been for eight years. Even the traditional box office boost for victorious movies isn’t necessarily worth as much as it used to be. Viewing figures and box office receipts are, however, only the visible tip of what is a deeper problem: the

Napoleon dynamite

I shall never forget my first encounter with Abel Gance’s Napoleon. I saw it under the most unpromising circumstances — fragments of the great original, shown on a home projector, 25 years after its original release. Yet those fragments changed my life. I was 15, still at school in Hampstead, and already obsessed by the cinema. My parents had given me a projector for my 11th birthday. Since the only films available to me were silent films, I found myself immersed in the rarefied atmosphere of a forgotten art. As home movies were being abandoned in favour of television, I found a surprising number in London’s junk shops. Among the

The yawn supremacy

The BBC has published a list of the 100 best films of the 21st century, compiled after consulting academics, cinema curators and critics — and, as you’d expect, it’s almost comically dull. The list contains numerous turgid meditations on the spiritual void at the heart of western civilisation by obscure European ‘auteurs’ and not a single Hollywood comedy. It’s as if the respondents mistook the word ‘best’ for ‘boring’. To give you an idea of just how absurd the list is, it doesn’t include any of the billion-dollar blockbusters from Marvel Studios — no, not even Guardians of the Galaxy — but does have two movies by the impenetrable Danish

Chinese whispers

Peter Ho Davies’s second novel, The Fortunes, is a beautifully crafted study, in four parts, of the history of the Chinese in America. Though it deals, of necessity, with racism in all its insidious forms, it does so with humanity, humour, self-deprecation and a hefty dose of irony. Each section — ‘Gold’, ‘Silver’, ‘Jade’ and ‘Pearl’ — covers a separate period in Chinese-American history. ‘Gold’ follows Ling, a half-white upwardly mobile immigrant, who arrives before the Civil War, starting as a laundryman and progressing to become the valet of one of the four big barons of the Central Pacific Railroad. On the way he falls in love with a prostitute,