News for
My Son the Fanatic (1997) More at IMDbPro »

ad feedback

5 items from 2011

20 December 2011 7:00 AM, PST | The Guardian - Film News | See recent The Guardian - Film News news »

Hang around in Calderdale, and you could well end up in a movie. Our Hebden Bridge outpost, Jill Robinson, reels off some the greats

Last year saw the premiere at the Hebden Bridge Picture House of the film A Calder Valley Christmas, with local people (including this outpost of the Northerner) queuing around the block to be among the first to see it. Directed by local film-maker Nick Wilding, the piece combines archive material, reminiscences about bad winters, carols, poems, scenes of local Mummers and other traditions, and monologues by the incomparable Ian Dewhirst MBE. (He actually lives in Keighley, but he tells such a good tale that he is often invited over the hill.) Like all the best films, there is an accompanying song, Christmas in Hebden Bridge, performed by children from local schools.

However, this is by no means the only film to have used the dramatic natural »

- Jill Robinson

21 June 2011 4:06 PM, PDT | The Guardian - TV News | See recent The Guardian - TV News news »

Actor best known for his part in Potter's The Singing Detective

The actor Badi Uzzaman, who has died from a lung infection aged 72, was perhaps best known for playing the patient in the hospital bed next to Michael Gambon in The Singing Detective (1985). The pair's camaraderie provided some of the lighter moments in Dennis Potter's TV series and showed off Uzzaman's talent for comedic roles. In their scenes together, Gambon (as Philip Marlow) and Uzzaman (as Ali) were shown to share an outsider status, Marlow due to his disfiguring skin condition and Ali due to his race.

Uzzaman again explored British attitudes toward race in Brothers in Trouble (1995), a film directed by Udayan Prasad and based on Abdullah Hussein's novel about the experiences of Pakistani illegal immigrants in Britain in the 1960s. Uzzaman himself was no stranger to the immigrant experience. He was born in Phulpur, in Azamgarh, »

- Tania Ahsan

21 June 2011 4:06 PM, PDT | The Guardian - Film News | See recent The Guardian - Film News news »

Actor best known for his part in Potter's The Singing Detective

The actor Badi Uzzaman, who has died from a lung infection aged 72, was perhaps best known for playing the patient in the hospital bed next to Michael Gambon in The Singing Detective (1985). The pair's camaraderie provided some of the lighter moments in Dennis Potter's TV series and showed off Uzzaman's talent for comedic roles. In their scenes together, Gambon (as Philip Marlow) and Uzzaman (as Ali) were shown to share an outsider status, Marlow due to his disfiguring skin condition and Ali due to his race.

Uzzaman again explored British attitudes toward race in Brothers in Trouble (1995), a film directed by Udayan Prasad and based on Abdullah Hussein's novel about the experiences of Pakistani illegal immigrants in Britain in the 1960s. Uzzaman himself was no stranger to the immigrant experience. He was born in Phulpur, in Azamgarh, »

- Tania Ahsan

17 February 2011 4:00 PM, PST | The Guardian - Film News | See recent The Guardian - Film News news »

Twelve years on from the hugely acclaimed East Is East comes its sequel, West Is West. Sarfraz Manzoor examines the new directions British-Asian film-makers are taking

Ayub Khan-Din was in his first year at drama school in Salford when his mother was diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease. Khan-Din, the mixed-race son of a Pakistani Muslim father and a white Catholic mother, found that each time he came home, another slab of his mother's memory had disappeared. The past, with all its stories, was slipping into the void, and Khan-Din became determined to try to preserve his parents' history and his own experience of growing up.

Although he was studying to be an actor, Khan-Din started writing. At the time, Asians were rarely glimpsed on screen in the UK unless they were being beaten up by racist skinheads, running corner shops or fleeing arranged marriages. Khan-Din wanted to tell a different story »

- Sarfraz Manzoor

5 January 2011 1:45 AM, PST | ifc.com | See recent IFC news »

A look at what's new on DVD today:

"Bitter Feast"

Directed by Joe Maggio

Released by Mpi Home Video

When a food critic ("Humpday"'s Justin Leonard) takes a butcher knife to the restaurant of a celebrity chef (James LeGros), the chef plots the ultimate revenge in this gory satirical thriller from director Joe Maggio. (My review from the Los Angeles Film Festival is here.)

"Case 39"

Directed by Christian Alvart

Released by Paramount

2010 is probably a year best forgotten by Renee Zellweger, who not only appeared in the execrable "My Own Love Song," which went straight to Netflix, but also this thriller that was filmed in 2006, but didn't see a release until last fall. Zellweger stars as a social worker whose latest case involving a child (Jodelle Ferland) that she believes is a victim of abuse leads to something far more terrifying. Bradley Cooper and Ian McShane co-star.

"Catfish »

- Stephen Saito

5 items from 2011