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6 articles
Polanksi thanks supporters in open letter to French philosopher
3 hours ago
Film director under house arrest and facing extradition to Us 'overwhelmed' by worldwide messages of sympathy
Roman Polanski, the Oscar-winning film director under house arrest on charges of having sex with a 13-year-old girl, has expressed his gratitude to his supporters in an open letter to the French intellectual Bernard-Henri Lévy.
In his first public comments on the case since he was placed in detention in September, the director said he had been "overwhelmed" by the messages of sympathy he had received from "across the world. I would like every one of them to know how heartening it is, when one is locked up in a cell, to hear this murmur of human voices and of solidarity in the morning post," he wrote in the letter. "In the darkest moments, each of their notes has been a source of comfort and hope, and they continue to be so in my current situation. »
- Lizzy Davies
1941 | DVD review
5 hours ago
The 33-year-old Steven Spielberg had just made Jaws and Close Encounters, two of the biggest-ever box-office hits, when he directed this farcical comedy about the panic produced in Los Angeles when, after the raid on Pearl Harbor, the appearance on the coast of California of an off-course Japanese submarine created fear of invasion. It was a critical disaster, condemned for its length, extravagance, tastelessness, self-references (the opening is a lovely parody of Jaws), lack of laughs and going wildly over budget. It did, however (a fact largely ignored) make a considerable profit worldwide.
A shaken Spielberg recovered to make Raiders of the Lost Ark but never wholly got over the experience. Yet for all its coarseness and heavy-handed humour, this first appearance on DVD, which bravely quotes all the worst reviews, is well worth seeing. 1941 is a dazzling film with an all-star cast ranging from Toshiro Mifune as the sub's »
- Philip French
Nowhere Boy gets nowhere near unravelling the Lennon conundrum
6 hours ago
Sam Taylor-Wood's portrait of a troubled teenager's life tells us little about the roots of his genius
Nowadays, most of us enjoy what academics like to call "parasocial" lives, in which we feast on the doings of our celebrity heroes even more voraciously than we attend to the ups and downs, triumphs and embarrassments of our actual families and friends. Hence, perhaps, the current appetite for biography of all kinds.
The slender narratives of Wags and sportspersons elbow Booker shortlisters out of the bestseller charts. It's not just the red-tops that trade on the private behaviour of the famous; posh Sundays fill their pages with the sexual exploits of long-dead literary giants. Cinema, however, can go where print can't. Its reimagined, improved and tastefully dramatised equivalents of the medieval lives of the saints leave Hello magazine standing.
Sometimes, however, we like to crack up our interest in the behaviour of »
- David Cox
Avatar delivers a very happy Christmas for Fox at Us box office
6 hours ago
James Cameron's sci-fi adventure packed them in for a second weekend, contributing to a record breaking session
The winner
Proving that it is here to stay, Avatar slipped a mere 3% in its second weekend as the Fox release generated a further $75m ($47m) in what turned out to be a record breaking session in North America. On the back of this astonishing holdover, James Cameron's year-end treat is fast becoming everything Fox hoped it would be and looks set to become one of the biggest movies of all time. So far the North American take stands at $212.3m, and when you factor in the $405m international gross the worldwide tally is $617.3m. All this after only 12 days.
Avatar's big numbers owe much to the 3D element, of course, because cinema owners can charge a premium on tickets for 3D screenings. However, it would be unfair to put »
- Jeremy Kay
Best films of the noughtiesNo 5: The White Ribbon
9 hours ago
Michael Haneke's unforgettable 2009 Palme d'Or winner is exact in its composition, yet allows for gentleness and humour
As the decade progressed, the reputation of this German-born Austrian director increased almost exponentially. His movies were difficult, extreme, painful and confrontational; yet a box-office smash with his surveillance nightmare Hidden took him out of the arthouse ghetto and in 2009 he won the Cannes Palme d'Or for this period movie made in black-and-white.
Set in a remote Protestant village of northern Germany in 1913, the film is about an outwardly placid rural community which is in fact repressive and plagued with anonymous acts of retaliatory malice and spite. The authorities clamp down further, and so the cycle goes on. There is no clear solution to the puzzle of who is carrying out these acts. The mystery simply deepens. But it is clear that the village children hold the key. We are witnessing the »
- Peter Bradshaw
From trashing the Terminator to praising the baboon – readers' favourites of 2009
17 hours ago
From trashing the Terminator to praising the baboon – here's a selection of the stories you chose as your favourite in 2009
Anything by Lucy Mangan, because of the hooting hilarity that invariably ensues (Wookey Hole wants to hire a witch. Well, I can cackle ... G2 shortcuts, 9 July) – Sadie Clifford, Stockport
The greatest named place in Britain is inviting applicants for possibly the country's greatest job – to become the modern-day counterpart to the legendary witch of Wookey Hole.
The Somerset caves have long been home to a witch turned to stone in the middle ages by a Benedictine monk with a flair for that kind of thing called Father Bernard. Now, however, the popular tourist attraction is in need of someone with a wider skill set than that possessed by the average vaguely person-shaped rocky outcropping, and is advertising for a living witch to take up residence in the caves at weekends, »
- Guardian readers
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