8 h. ago EPiC: Elvis Presley in Concert review – Baz Luhrmann’s electric yet avoidant documentary

Toronto film festival: the bombastic director’s second film about the music legend shows the singer at his most mesmerizing but the picture remains incompleteBaz Luhrmann now has two Elvis movies under his bedazzled belt. The first is his epic biopic starring Austin Butler and now he has unleashed another called EPiC: Elvis Presley in Concert, remixing archival material with never-before-seen footage from the singer’s residency in Las Vegas. What’s remarkable about them both, apart from the director’s obvious affinity for his subject’s showmanship, is his refusal across so many hours of jiggling and swivelling to meaningfully hold Elvis to account.Luhrmann’s Oscar-nominated 2022 film acknowledged Elvis’s cultural appropriation: how his phenomenal success owed so much to the R&B, gospel and rock he grew up around and the racist institutions that put him on a pedestal while holding down the Black artists that birthed and gave that music its soul. The movie also painted Elvis as a ...

Culture

22 h. ago Festival director: Roma culture needs to gain same status as Irish music in Scotland

The Ando Glaso Roma Fest wants to highlight Roma culture and music

Culture

35 h. ago The Lost Bus review – Paul Greengrass wildfire movie is as stressful as you’d expect

Toronto film festival: the director retells the worst wildfire in California’s history with expected technical prowess but he’s hampered by a soapy scriptEven before the wildfire has started to rage in fact-based docudrama The Lost Bus, Paul Greengrass has us on edge. We’re inside a schoolbus for the morning drop-off and we’re reminded of the dangers already faced on the day-to-day, young children without seatbelts being driven around the precarious rolling roads of the California hills, the director cranking up every little sound of a vehicle we’re told is in delayed need of a maintenance check. The world is dangerous enough.That nervy tension soon gets considerably ramped up and then rarely lets up for the next two-plus hours, an exhausting, assaultive experience aiming to both take us back to the horrors of 2018’s historically destructive Camp fire and to show us what Californians have been facing ever since and will bleakly continue to in the future. It’s ruthlessly efficient in...

Events

45 h. ago Obsession review – nasty horror sees a wish for true love go horribly wrong

Toronto film festival: Writer-director Curry Barker follows up $800 YouTube hit Milk & Serial with a frighteningly effective, and head-smashingly gory, cautionary taleThis year’s Sundance saw the real-life couple Dave Franco and Alison Brie play with the grotesque reality of being literally stuck to one another in the body horror Together, a wincingly effective lark that turned codependency into a curse. It didn’t really find its audience upon too-wide release this summer, a campaign that couldn’t succinctly explain the plot or convey a tone that went from horror to comedy and back again.At Toronto, YouTuber turned film-maker Curry Barker’s similarly themed Obsession should be an easier sell when it gets swiftly bought and packaged (it’s entering the festival as a sure-to-be-fought-over sales title). It’s a cleaner, more concise pitch – love spell gone wrong – and its reaction-securing moments of horrible violence even more alarming, a Midnight Madness winner that will probably ...

Events

3 d. ago A House of Dynamite review: The most exciting movie at Venice Film Festival could lead to Kathryn Bigelow's second Best Director Oscar, writes BRIAN VINER

How might the United States respond in the event of a nuclear attack, with less than 20 minutes before an incoming missile lands on Chicago? 

Culture

9 d. ago Julia Roberts says humanity ‘losing art of conversation’ in defence of new #MeToo

After the Hunt, directed by Luca Guadagnino, centres on an accusation of sexual assault at a universityJulia Roberts has defended her new #MeToo-themed film, After the Hunt, from accusations that it revives anti-feminist arguments, saying humanity was at risk of “losing the art of conversation”.The Oscar-winning actor is making her Venice film festival debut with the psychological thriller from the Italian director Luca Guadagnino. It premieres out of competition on the Lido on Friday evening. Continue reading...

Politics

1 week ago Mother review – Noomi Rapace is a fanatical Mother Teresa full of fury

Rapace plays the canonised Kolkata nun with hard-bitten intensity in a complex, lurid story that veers between faithful telling and bouts of funThe convent is a pressure cooker in this fevered, energetic account of a pivotal week in the life of the young Mother Teresa, which jump-starts the Orizzonti sidebar at this year’s Venice film festival. Macedonian writer-director Teona Strugar Mitevska ticks down the days from seven to one and wrings a performance of flayed, hard-bitten intensity from Noomi Rapace, who marches down the corridors with a face full of fury. Rapace is a long way from her breakout role in The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo; tonally, though, not so much. If Mother Teresa never goes so far as to set about the sisters with an axe, the sense that she might injects Mitevska’s film with a pleasing dose of danger.It is 1948, we’re in the broiling heart of Kolkata and Sister Teresa has tired of her teaching role at the Loreto Entally convent. “I’m a woman in a system run by...

Politics

1 week ago Celeb worlds collide as Danny Dyer and Pixie Lott team up with Hollywood's Eva Longoria, Billy Porter and Kunal Nayyar for A Christmas Carol reboot in first look pics

Titled Christmas Karma, the upcoming festive spectacular is the brainchild of Gurinder Chadha, the acclaimed director behind Bend It Like Beckham and Blinded By The Light.

Politics

1 week ago Woody Allen responds after Ukraine slams director for appearing at Russian film festival: ‘Disgrace and insult’

Filmmaker says he ‘always liked Russian cinema’ and would like to make a movie in the country

Sport

2 w. ago Bands boycott music festival after Irish group was hauled off stage following pro

The Last Dinner Party, Cliffords and The Academic announced on Saturday that they would no longer be performing at the Portsmouth music festival following Friday's incident.

Culture

2 w. ago Irish band are hauled off stage at UK festival after starting pro

An Irish folk music band were pulled off stage at a UK festival after starting a pro-Palestine chant.

Culture

3 w. ago Director Paul Andrew Williams on returning to EIFF with intense new film Dragonfly: ‘Brenda Blethyn was up for anything’

Writer/director Paul Andrew Williams is back at the Edinburgh International Film Festival with a quietly gripping film starring Andrea Riseborough and Brenda Blethyn. Interview by Alistair Harkness

Politics

4 w. ago Mektoub My Love: Canto Due review – gobsmackingly weird series drops another surreal sex shocker

Locarno film festivalBlue Is the Warmest Colour director Abdellatif Kechiche’s latest erotic melodrama delivers another heady dose of flirting, farce and bafflementSo here it is – the third but, incredibly, perhaps not the final episode in the most bizarre arthouse franchise in film history, and which, for its sheer melodramatic ker-aziness it commands attention. So, as it were, previously on Mektoub My Love The first film in the series from Tunisian-French director Abdellatif Kechiche, who had won the Cannes Palme d’Or for Blue Is the Warmest Colour (for which he was famously required to share the award with his two acting leads Adèle Exarchopoulos and Léa Seydoux), arrived in 2017. This first MML (called Mektoub My Love: Canto Uno) turned out to be an epic erotic summer romance set in the early 90s about a guy called Amin (Shaïn Boumedine) who comes back from Paris to his hometown of Sète, having abandoned his medical studies to follow his dream of being a screenwriter, and finds ...

Events