25 h. ago One in four UK students don't see film careers as viable option for key reason

A new study has found that one in four secondary school students don't see a career in film as a viable option, and there's an understandable reason for it.

Politics

27 h. ago UK teens don't see film as viable career path for one key reason, study finds

A study of 500 young people in education aged 13 to 18 found that seven in ten would never consider a career in the film and TV industry

Politics

3 d. ago My Tennis Maestro review – unforced errors keep Italian coming

Venice film festivalPierfrancesco Favino is a robust lead as a teenage tennis hopeful’s charming yet flawed new coach in a film that’s too long and too indecisive to stand up to recent big hittersWe have had some sparky tennis movies recently, such as Luca Guadagnino’s Challengers and Reinaldo Marcus Green’s King Richard, and it seemed at first as if this coming-of-age comedy from Italian actor turned director Andrea Di Stefano could be joining them. But despite a very robust lead performance from Pierfrancesco Favino, the enjoyably grizzled alpha male of Italian cinema, this completely runs aground in the third act, quite unable to decide if it should offer the traditional comeback story of an underdog sports movie, or if it should pursue its implied repudiation of the win-at-all-costs ethic. The other issue is whether its young hero should ignore what his dad has to say in favour of an attractive, if flawed, new mentor. The film does in fact appear finally to get off the fence on ...

Politics

6 d. ago ‘I want to earn my stripes’: Cooper Hoffman on ambition, anxiety, and following in his dad’s footsteps

He was never meant to be an actor – wary of comparisons with his late father Philip Seymour Hoffman. Now a rising star, he talks about growing up, embracing discomfort and forging his own pathWhen Cooper Hoffman was in his teens, he didn’t have any grand plans for the future, though there was one thing he knew for sure: he did not want to be an actor. Why? “I didn’t want to do it because my dad did it so well, and it felt like I’d be going up against him. It would feel like I was inherently stepping into something competitive.”Given Hoffman’s father is Philip Seymour Hoffman, Oscar-winning star of Boogie Nights, Almost Famous, The Master and Capote, you can see why he would feel that way. But then Paul Thomas Anderson, the Boogie Nights director who is a friend of the family, and whose children Cooper played with when he was growing up, asked him if he would read for a part. It was the lead in the 2021 film Licorice Pizza, about a teenage boy smitten with a woman in her mid-20s. It ...

Politics

6 d. ago Scientists pinpoint reason why 'healthy' people have heart attacks and strokes

A new study has revealed the reason why so many seemingly 'healthy' people suffer heart attacks and strokes.

Events

2 w. ago Little Trouble Girls review – monstrous choirmaster spikes a sublime Catholic coming

Utterly absorbing Slovenian debut reinvents the cliched idea of a Catholic girl’s sexual awakening, and proves that no teacher can be as cruel as a music teacherThis elegant and mysterious debut from Slovenian director Urška Djukić, with its superb musical score and sound design, reinvents the cliched idea of a Catholic girl’s sexual awakening. It’s also proof, if proof were needed, that no teacher in the world can be as cruel and abusive as a music teacher. We have already seen JK Simmons’ terrifying jazz instructor in Damien Chazelle’s Whiplash and Isabelle Huppert’s keyboard monster in Michael Haneke’s The Piano Teacher; now there is Slovenian actor and musician Saša Tabaković playing a demanding, yet insidious choirmaster in charge of a group of talented, vulnerable teenage girls. The film incidentally has a lesson for any teenage person watching: if a music teacher asks you to sit next to them on the piano stool with no one else in the room and murmurs “You can confide in me” y...

Events

3 w. ago My cultural awakening: a Steve Carell film made me realise I was being abused

After my dad died, my mum and I endured the coercive control of her new partner for years. It was The Way Way Back that freed us bothIn the first five minutes of the 2013 comedy drama The Way Way Back, a teenage boy has a conversation with his stepfather in a car bound for Cape Cod. You can only see the stepdad’s eyes in the rearview mirror, but you instantly know it’s Steve Carell. At this point, I loved Carell. He’s the reason that I, then a teenager, watched the film.“Duncan let me ask you something,” Carell’s character says. “On a scale of one to 10, what do you think you are?” Duncan responds shyly that he thinks he’s a six. Any normal adult would balk and correct him. Tell him he’s nothing less than a 10. “I think you’re a three,” says Carell’s character, Trent. Suddenly, I hated Carell with a blind fury. He was a vision of pure evil. I didn’t want to watch him in anything else, ever. Continue reading...

Events