Get ready for an evening of mental gymnastics as “Mastermind” returns with Season 21 Episode 30, airing on BBC Two at 7:30 Pm on Monday, March 25, 2024. In this thrilling installment, Clive Myrie takes the helm to present the last semi-final of the classic quiz show, where contestants battle it out in the ultimate test of knowledge and wit.
With a diverse range of specialist subjects on the line, viewers can expect an exhilarating display of expertise and passion. From bears to the novels of Dame Muriel Spark, the Icc Men’s Cricket World Cup, and the pioneering work of William Harvey in the discovery of circulation of the blood, contestants delve deep into their chosen topics in pursuit of victory.
As tensions mount and the pressure rises, audiences are treated to a captivating showcase of intellect and determination. Whether you’re a trivia enthusiast or simply enjoy the thrill of competition, “Mastermind...
With a diverse range of specialist subjects on the line, viewers can expect an exhilarating display of expertise and passion. From bears to the novels of Dame Muriel Spark, the Icc Men’s Cricket World Cup, and the pioneering work of William Harvey in the discovery of circulation of the blood, contestants delve deep into their chosen topics in pursuit of victory.
As tensions mount and the pressure rises, audiences are treated to a captivating showcase of intellect and determination. Whether you’re a trivia enthusiast or simply enjoy the thrill of competition, “Mastermind...
- 3/19/2024
- by Posts UK
- TV Everyday
The BBC is celebrating the art of the literary adaptation by screening a variety of classics on BBC Four. More details here.
The BBC is quite rightly celebrated for its rich history of book to screen adaptations, such as the iconic 1995 version of Jane Austen’a Pride And Prejudice to Cbbc’s hugely successful adaptation of Dame Jacqueline Wilson’s Tracy Beaker series.
It has now put together a season of 14 adaptations from the BBC archive, some of which have rarely been seen since their original broadcast.
The dramas are:
The Great Gatsby
Toby Stephens, Mira Sorvino and Paul Rudd lead the cast in this 2000 BBC adaptation of F Scott Fitzgerald’s classic novel on the American dream in the jazz age.
Small Island
Naomie Harris, Ruth Wilson, David Oyelowo, Benedict Cumberbatch and Ashley Walters star in this 2009 TV version of Andrea Levy’s novel focusing on the lives and...
The BBC is quite rightly celebrated for its rich history of book to screen adaptations, such as the iconic 1995 version of Jane Austen’a Pride And Prejudice to Cbbc’s hugely successful adaptation of Dame Jacqueline Wilson’s Tracy Beaker series.
It has now put together a season of 14 adaptations from the BBC archive, some of which have rarely been seen since their original broadcast.
The dramas are:
The Great Gatsby
Toby Stephens, Mira Sorvino and Paul Rudd lead the cast in this 2000 BBC adaptation of F Scott Fitzgerald’s classic novel on the American dream in the jazz age.
Small Island
Naomie Harris, Ruth Wilson, David Oyelowo, Benedict Cumberbatch and Ashley Walters star in this 2009 TV version of Andrea Levy’s novel focusing on the lives and...
- 2/6/2024
- by Jake Godfrey
- Film Stories
Taylor is both hammy and subtle as a woman on the verge of a breakdown in this preposterous but watchable 1974 drama that features an extraordinary cameo from Andy Warhol
It’s peak 70s Liz Taylor in this arrestingly bizarre movie which is being released in the UK for the first time; it was directed by Italian film-maker Giuseppe Patroni Griffi in 1974, which he co-adapted from the 1970 novella by Muriel Spark and was issued under the title Identikit in Italy. With her big sunglasses and permanently dishevelled jet-black hair, Taylor gives an intense and more-than-slightly alarming performance in a preposterous, slightly dated yet very watchable psycho-existential mystery, a cousin to the era’s paranoid thrillers. It was shot by Vittorio Storaro, who repeatedly directs light sources into the camera so that the figures often move like shadows behind a disconcerting glow, which is part of the film’s distinctive puzzle.
Taylor plays Lise,...
It’s peak 70s Liz Taylor in this arrestingly bizarre movie which is being released in the UK for the first time; it was directed by Italian film-maker Giuseppe Patroni Griffi in 1974, which he co-adapted from the 1970 novella by Muriel Spark and was issued under the title Identikit in Italy. With her big sunglasses and permanently dishevelled jet-black hair, Taylor gives an intense and more-than-slightly alarming performance in a preposterous, slightly dated yet very watchable psycho-existential mystery, a cousin to the era’s paranoid thrillers. It was shot by Vittorio Storaro, who repeatedly directs light sources into the camera so that the figures often move like shadows behind a disconcerting glow, which is part of the film’s distinctive puzzle.
Taylor plays Lise,...
- 6/21/2023
- by Peter Bradshaw
- The Guardian - Film News
Rome’s Mia, a market dedicated to international TV series, feature films, animation and documentaries, wrapped its eighth edition on Saturday on a positive note boasting a 20 rise in attendance compared with 2021, having attracted more than 2,400 registered industry execs from 60 countries, more than half of which from Italy. However, the pandemic was still limiting travel last year, which makes comparisons difficult.
The mood was undoubtedly upbeat in the halls and terraces of central Rome’s Palazzo Barberini – which besides being Italy’s national ancient art gallery is also the market’s main hub – and in the adjacent state-of-the-art Cinema Barberini movie theater during five days of curated dealmaking and dozens of panels and project pitching sessions involving 70 TV, film, doc and animation projects.
The winner of this year’s Paramount + prize awarded by a jury of experts to the best project at the Mia Drama Pitching Forum is “The Abbess,...
The mood was undoubtedly upbeat in the halls and terraces of central Rome’s Palazzo Barberini – which besides being Italy’s national ancient art gallery is also the market’s main hub – and in the adjacent state-of-the-art Cinema Barberini movie theater during five days of curated dealmaking and dozens of panels and project pitching sessions involving 70 TV, film, doc and animation projects.
The winner of this year’s Paramount + prize awarded by a jury of experts to the best project at the Mia Drama Pitching Forum is “The Abbess,...
- 10/16/2022
- by Nick Vivarelli
- Variety Film + TV
Severin’s October offerings include this investigation of Euro-weirdness curated with academic purpose and clarity by Kier-La Janisse, evoking the name of her book from 2012. The thesis is the representation of women in filmic horror — except that in these strange experiences, hysteria transforms into a liberating form of empowerment: Identikit, I Like Bats, Footsteps and The Other Side of the Underneath. Elizabeth Tayor and Florinda Bolkan are the top stars in the collection, two of which bear the cinematography of Vittorio Storaro. The final film is a totally different, experimental experience. Ms. Janisse’s introductions connect the dots for these filmworks that envigorate and disturb.
House of Psychotic Women
Blu-ray
Severin Films
1972 – 1986 / Color / 1:85 + 1:66 + 1:85 + 1:33 / 102 + 81 + 96 + 111 min. / Street Date October 25, 2022 / Available from Severin Films / 104.95
Starring: Elizabeth Taylor; Katarzyna Walter; Florinda Bolkan; Sheila Allen, Ann Lynn, Penny Slinger, Jane Arden .
Directed by Giuseppe Patroni Griffi; Grzegorz Warchol; Luigi Bazzoni; Jane...
House of Psychotic Women
Blu-ray
Severin Films
1972 – 1986 / Color / 1:85 + 1:66 + 1:85 + 1:33 / 102 + 81 + 96 + 111 min. / Street Date October 25, 2022 / Available from Severin Films / 104.95
Starring: Elizabeth Taylor; Katarzyna Walter; Florinda Bolkan; Sheila Allen, Ann Lynn, Penny Slinger, Jane Arden .
Directed by Giuseppe Patroni Griffi; Grzegorz Warchol; Luigi Bazzoni; Jane...
- 10/11/2022
- by Glenn Erickson
- Trailers from Hell
Musician and actor David Bowie has topped a Sky Arts list celebrating the 50 most influential British artists of the last 50 years.
Bowie was named most influential by judges as they commended his influence across the industry and ability to transcend a variety of mediums including music, film and fashion.
A team of judges across music, film and TV, performing arts, literature and visual art were asked to create the list by TV channel Sky Arts in a celebration of British artists past and present and their influence on global culture. The 15-person judging panel, led by DJ, presenter and author Lauren Laverne, included Mobo Awards founder Kanya King, writer Bonnie Greer, film critic Ali Plumb and theater critic Lyn Gardner.
The top 10 also includes artist and filmmaker Steve McQueen (“Small Axe”) in second place; Russell T. Davies in third; fashion designer Vivienne Westwood fourth; playwright Caryl Churchill fifth; dancer-choreographer Michael Clark...
Bowie was named most influential by judges as they commended his influence across the industry and ability to transcend a variety of mediums including music, film and fashion.
A team of judges across music, film and TV, performing arts, literature and visual art were asked to create the list by TV channel Sky Arts in a celebration of British artists past and present and their influence on global culture. The 15-person judging panel, led by DJ, presenter and author Lauren Laverne, included Mobo Awards founder Kanya King, writer Bonnie Greer, film critic Ali Plumb and theater critic Lyn Gardner.
The top 10 also includes artist and filmmaker Steve McQueen (“Small Axe”) in second place; Russell T. Davies in third; fashion designer Vivienne Westwood fourth; playwright Caryl Churchill fifth; dancer-choreographer Michael Clark...
- 8/11/2022
- by Naman Ramachandran
- Variety Film + TV
Lee Mi-Mi’s intoxicating film, which sits in a rich cinematic tradition of all-girls’ schools, with their homoerotic tensions, as social microcosms, earns a rare screening this week
Love is a many-splendoured thing in Lee Mi-Mi’s Girls’ School, a Taiwanese gem from 1982 beautifully restored just in time for its 40th anniversary. Screened in the UK at BFI Southbank as part of Queer East, an LGBTQ+ film festival showcasing lesser-known treasures from east and south-east Asian cinema, Girls’ School is a time capsule of social attitudes towards homosexuality in 1980s Taiwan at the meeting point between commercial and arthouse film-making.
As a site of surveillance, tempestuous impulses and healing camaraderie, all-girls’ schools can double as a microcosm for society and have a psychological intensity that has fascinated generations of film-makers. Dario Argento’s Suspiria (1977) views such places as a source of horror and mystery while The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie...
Love is a many-splendoured thing in Lee Mi-Mi’s Girls’ School, a Taiwanese gem from 1982 beautifully restored just in time for its 40th anniversary. Screened in the UK at BFI Southbank as part of Queer East, an LGBTQ+ film festival showcasing lesser-known treasures from east and south-east Asian cinema, Girls’ School is a time capsule of social attitudes towards homosexuality in 1980s Taiwan at the meeting point between commercial and arthouse film-making.
As a site of surveillance, tempestuous impulses and healing camaraderie, all-girls’ schools can double as a microcosm for society and have a psychological intensity that has fascinated generations of film-makers. Dario Argento’s Suspiria (1977) views such places as a source of horror and mystery while The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie...
- 5/23/2022
- by Phuong Le
- The Guardian - Film News
Tabbert Fiiller on John Lydon: "I never thought about that in relation to Annalisa. There's also, like, he was very shy as a child and then, certainly after or during the Sex Pistols…" Photo: Anne-Katrin Titze
Following the world première at the Tribeca Film Festival of The Public Image Is Rotten, shot by Yamit Shimonovitz, director Tabbert Fiiller went with me into the John Lydon style that took us to Comme des Garçons, Julian Schnabel and pajamas, Muriel Spark's The Public Image, John Waters at a PiL concert, and wildlife. Beastie Boys' Adam Horovitz, Red Hot Chili Peppers' Flea, Sonic Youth's Thurston Moore, and Moby count PiL as an influence.
John Lydon: "John is so good with words. I was just trying to keep up. We shot every day."
John Lydon's Public Image Ltd. started out as Keith Levene, Jah Wobble, and Jim Walker,...
Following the world première at the Tribeca Film Festival of The Public Image Is Rotten, shot by Yamit Shimonovitz, director Tabbert Fiiller went with me into the John Lydon style that took us to Comme des Garçons, Julian Schnabel and pajamas, Muriel Spark's The Public Image, John Waters at a PiL concert, and wildlife. Beastie Boys' Adam Horovitz, Red Hot Chili Peppers' Flea, Sonic Youth's Thurston Moore, and Moby count PiL as an influence.
John Lydon: "John is so good with words. I was just trying to keep up. We shot every day."
John Lydon's Public Image Ltd. started out as Keith Levene, Jah Wobble, and Jim Walker,...
- 5/5/2017
- by Anne-Katrin Titze
- eyeforfilm.co.uk
Kurt Walker in the background of Hit 2 Pass / Gina Telaroli making her way to the foreground in Here's to the Future!As has been previously reported, Here's to the Future! and Hit 2 Pass, new feature films from Notebook contributors Gina Telaroli and Kurt Walker, is starting its roll out this month. Following an open call for screenings the films will be playing at New York's Spectacle Theater (starting this Thursday November 5th), Toronto's Mdff (November 4th), Philadelphia's public access channel (starting November 13th), and more. The open call for screenings is in conjunction with an online release being done independently by the filmmakers themselves on their own website starting November 9th: http://h2phttf.tumblr.com The release, online and in real life, is a follow-up to Telaroli's grassroots release of her 2011 feature film Traveling Light (done in conjunction with the Spanish film journal Lumière). The following is...
- 11/7/2015
- by gina telaroli
- MUBI
'Henry V' Movie Actress Renée Asherson dead at 99: Laurence Olivier leading lady in acclaimed 1944 film (image: Renée Asherson and Laurence Olivier in 'Henry V') Renée Asherson, a British stage actress featured in London productions of A Streetcar Named Desire and Three Sisters, but best known internationally as Laurence Olivier's leading lady in the 1944 film version of Henry V, died on October 30, 2014. Asherson was 99 years old. The exact cause of death hasn't been specified. She was born Dorothy Renée Ascherson (she would drop the "c" some time after becoming an actress) on May 19, 1915, in Kensington, London, to Jewish parents: businessman Charles Ascherson and his second wife, Dorothy Wiseman -- both of whom narrowly escaped spending their honeymoon aboard the Titanic. (Ascherson cancelled the voyage after suffering an attack of appendicitis.) According to Michael Coveney's The Guardian obit for the actress, Renée Asherson was "scantly...
- 11/5/2014
- by Andre Soares
- Alt Film Guide
It's hell revisiting things that school has rubbed smooth. You know, books you had to read, plays you had to act in, essays you had to write. Not only do they seem, when you think about them, about as edgy as tapioca, they inevitably bring to mind the gray-skinned, watery-eyed, crunchy-haired teachers who harangued you about them, the five-page papers you had to write about them, the paperback books you wanted to crumble to pieces that held them. It's hard to believe that before they were anesthetized by the school district, these books were -- often -- art. They were shots across the bow of society by men and women who cared, about life. Muriel Spark's The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie is a prime case. Forget the movie. Forget the tests and the quizzes.
This is a tragedy about the passage of time and a comedy about the...
This is a tragedy about the passage of time and a comedy about the...
- 6/5/2013
- by Ken Krimstein
- www.culturecatch.com
Our most enduring stories reflect the nocturnal picturehouse of our subconscious
Interviews with the horror novelist James Herbert – and, after his death on Wednesday, obituaries – revealed two crucial autobiographical details: that he was prone to shockingly vivid dreams, and was brought up as a Roman Catholic. Herbert's acknowledgement of nightmares as a contribution to stories that sold 54m copies is striking because any tally of the profits made from popular entertainment over the last two centuries suggests a clear link between the most enduring forms of storytelling and the most frequent features of the nocturnal picturehouse of our subconscious.
If the images created in the heads of sleepers were downloaded, it's likely that the majority of narratives would be: sexual/romantic fulfilment, comic misunderstanding or humiliation, horrifying pursuit and capture, and the continued presence of our beloved dead. And these scenarios best fill the cinema and literature industry tills when...
Interviews with the horror novelist James Herbert – and, after his death on Wednesday, obituaries – revealed two crucial autobiographical details: that he was prone to shockingly vivid dreams, and was brought up as a Roman Catholic. Herbert's acknowledgement of nightmares as a contribution to stories that sold 54m copies is striking because any tally of the profits made from popular entertainment over the last two centuries suggests a clear link between the most enduring forms of storytelling and the most frequent features of the nocturnal picturehouse of our subconscious.
If the images created in the heads of sleepers were downloaded, it's likely that the majority of narratives would be: sexual/romantic fulfilment, comic misunderstanding or humiliation, horrifying pursuit and capture, and the continued presence of our beloved dead. And these scenarios best fill the cinema and literature industry tills when...
- 3/23/2013
- by Mark Lawson
- The Guardian - Film News
How to follow the success of Little Miss Sunshine? Directors Valerie Faris and Jonathan Dayton finally settled on a film that elides life and art: just the thing for a husband-and-wife team
As directing partners who happen also to be married, Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris are doubly anomalous. Their comedy-dramas – Little Miss Sunshine, which inspired a Sundance bidding war and won two Oscars, and the new Ruby Sparks, a bizarre psychological love story – are searching, compassionate and zesty. Judging by the hour I spend with them, their relationship is no less stimulating. They welcome me into their hotel room with a merry babble of overlapping greetings. They don't so much finish each other's sentences as nip in and out of them, supplying any just-out-of-reach words or asides as though passing the condiments across the dinner table.
In his straw Panama hat, striped shirt and navy tank-top, Dayton, who is 55, looks like a bearded,...
As directing partners who happen also to be married, Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris are doubly anomalous. Their comedy-dramas – Little Miss Sunshine, which inspired a Sundance bidding war and won two Oscars, and the new Ruby Sparks, a bizarre psychological love story – are searching, compassionate and zesty. Judging by the hour I spend with them, their relationship is no less stimulating. They welcome me into their hotel room with a merry babble of overlapping greetings. They don't so much finish each other's sentences as nip in and out of them, supplying any just-out-of-reach words or asides as though passing the condiments across the dinner table.
In his straw Panama hat, striped shirt and navy tank-top, Dayton, who is 55, looks like a bearded,...
- 9/27/2012
- by Ryan Gilbey
- The Guardian - Film News
Giuseppe Patroni Griffi deserves attention. His chic revenger's tragedy 'Tis Pity She's a Whore (1971) is one possible way in: you get Charlotte Rampling, an Ennio Morricone score that's just a Jacobean riff on his spaghetti western stylings, lashings of sex and gore, and a design sensibility which pays some kind of lip service to period while being deliriously seventies at all times, so that it would not be too surprising if Oliver Tobias donned a set of sixteenth century tinted shades, or a tie-dyed doublet.
An alternative entry point is Identikit (1974), Aka The Driver's Seat, from the novel of that name by Muriel Spark. It's the tale of a mysterious woman wandering through a nameless city, hoping to rendezvous with "a friend" whom she's apparently never met. In a parallel plot thread, apparently taking place a day or two later, the police are interrogating everyone she's come into contact with.
An alternative entry point is Identikit (1974), Aka The Driver's Seat, from the novel of that name by Muriel Spark. It's the tale of a mysterious woman wandering through a nameless city, hoping to rendezvous with "a friend" whom she's apparently never met. In a parallel plot thread, apparently taking place a day or two later, the police are interrogating everyone she's come into contact with.
- 5/3/2012
- MUBI
Edinburgh on film isn't just Trainspotting it's classics: Chariots of Fire, romance: One Day and thrills: Burke and Hare. Here are 10, picked by Andrew Pulver, film editor of the Guardian
• As featured in our Edinburgh city guide
The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, Ronald Neame, 1969
Muriel Spark's celebrated 1961 novella was, until Trainspotting, Edinburgh's most readily identifiable contribution to modern literature. Inspired largely by Spark's own time at [James] Gillespie's school, this elaborate, empathetic satire on a fascism-admiring teacher would not have been expected to be a major candidate for Oscar attention, but Maggie Smith won the best actress award in 1969, after Ronald "Poseidon Adventure" Neame directed the film version. Sixties Edinburgh has no problem standing in for 30s Edinburgh: the Marcia Blaine school is sited in the Edinburgh Academy building in Henderson Row, while it's possible to stand in the exact same spot as Maggie Smith on the Grassmarket and bellow: "Observe,...
• As featured in our Edinburgh city guide
The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, Ronald Neame, 1969
Muriel Spark's celebrated 1961 novella was, until Trainspotting, Edinburgh's most readily identifiable contribution to modern literature. Inspired largely by Spark's own time at [James] Gillespie's school, this elaborate, empathetic satire on a fascism-admiring teacher would not have been expected to be a major candidate for Oscar attention, but Maggie Smith won the best actress award in 1969, after Ronald "Poseidon Adventure" Neame directed the film version. Sixties Edinburgh has no problem standing in for 30s Edinburgh: the Marcia Blaine school is sited in the Edinburgh Academy building in Henderson Row, while it's possible to stand in the exact same spot as Maggie Smith on the Grassmarket and bellow: "Observe,...
- 10/13/2011
- by Andrew Pulver
- The Guardian - Film News
The Brontës are often dismissed as up-market Mills & Boon. But with the release of two films this autumn, Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights, they look set to rival even Jane Austen in the public's affections
Ours is supposed to be the age of instantaneity, where books can be downloaded in a few seconds and reputations created overnight. But the Victorians could be speedy, too, and there's no more striking example of instant celebrity than Jane Eyre. Charlotte Brontë posted the manuscript to Messrs Smith and Elder on 24 August 1847, two weeks after the publisher had expressed an interest in seeing her new novel while turning down her first. Within a fortnight, a deal had been struck (Charlotte was paid £100) and proofs were being worked on. In the 21st century a first novel can wait two years between acceptance and publication. Jane Eyre was out in eight weeks, on 17 October, with Thackeray...
Ours is supposed to be the age of instantaneity, where books can be downloaded in a few seconds and reputations created overnight. But the Victorians could be speedy, too, and there's no more striking example of instant celebrity than Jane Eyre. Charlotte Brontë posted the manuscript to Messrs Smith and Elder on 24 August 1847, two weeks after the publisher had expressed an interest in seeing her new novel while turning down her first. Within a fortnight, a deal had been struck (Charlotte was paid £100) and proofs were being worked on. In the 21st century a first novel can wait two years between acceptance and publication. Jane Eyre was out in eight weeks, on 17 October, with Thackeray...
- 9/9/2011
- by Blake Morrison
- The Guardian - Film News
Ferociously intelligent actor who reigned supreme in Stoppard and Shakespeare
John Wood, who has died aged 81, was one of the greatest stage actors of the past century, especially associated with his roles in the plays of Tom Stoppard. But a combination of his enigmatic privacy and low profile on film – he cropped up a lot without dominating a movie – meant that he remained largely unknown to the wider public.
As with all great actors, you always knew what he was thinking, all the time. Wood was especially striking in the brain-box department. Tall, forbidding and aquiline-featured, he was as much the perfect Sherlock Holmes on stage as he was the ideal Brutus. He exuded ferocious intelligence, and the twinkle in his eye could be as merciless as it was invariably amused.
As the Royal Shakespeare Company's Brutus in Julius Caesar in 1972, he was undoubtedly the noblest Roman of them all,...
John Wood, who has died aged 81, was one of the greatest stage actors of the past century, especially associated with his roles in the plays of Tom Stoppard. But a combination of his enigmatic privacy and low profile on film – he cropped up a lot without dominating a movie – meant that he remained largely unknown to the wider public.
As with all great actors, you always knew what he was thinking, all the time. Wood was especially striking in the brain-box department. Tall, forbidding and aquiline-featured, he was as much the perfect Sherlock Holmes on stage as he was the ideal Brutus. He exuded ferocious intelligence, and the twinkle in his eye could be as merciless as it was invariably amused.
As the Royal Shakespeare Company's Brutus in Julius Caesar in 1972, he was undoubtedly the noblest Roman of them all,...
- 8/10/2011
- by Michael Coveney
- The Guardian - Film News
After ten years, eight films and countless articles celebrating both, it’s all over. Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2 has apparated into cinemas, broken records all over the place, and now there’s nothing left to do but watch it over and over and over again. Possibly in 3D.
But when you come out of the coma induced by the sudden realisation that yes, you really are ten years older than you were when The Philosopher’s Stone came out, you may want to watch a different film. Here are some suggestions for ways to plug that Potter-shaped hole in your heart.
(Just in case you are one of the three fans in the world who haven’t seen it yet, there are some Deathly Hallows 2 spoilers below).
The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (dir. Ronald Neame, 1969)
Professor McGonagall has always suffered from never having quite enough screen-time,...
But when you come out of the coma induced by the sudden realisation that yes, you really are ten years older than you were when The Philosopher’s Stone came out, you may want to watch a different film. Here are some suggestions for ways to plug that Potter-shaped hole in your heart.
(Just in case you are one of the three fans in the world who haven’t seen it yet, there are some Deathly Hallows 2 spoilers below).
The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (dir. Ronald Neame, 1969)
Professor McGonagall has always suffered from never having quite enough screen-time,...
- 7/20/2011
- by Juliette Harrisson
- SoundOnSight
Award-winning actor with a fastidious intelligence and a hint of inner steel
Anna Massey, who has died of cancer aged 73, made her name on the stage as a teenager in French-window froth. She then graduated, with effortless and extraordinary ease, to the classics and to the work of Samuel Beckett, Harold Pinter and David Hare. In later years, she became best known for her award-winning work in television and film. What constantly impressed was her fastidious intelligence and capacity for stillness: always the mark of a first-rate actor.
Born in Thakeham, West Sussex, she was bred into show business although, in personal terms, that proved something of a mixed blessing. Her father was Raymond Massey, a Canadian actor who achieved success in Hollywood; her mother was Adrianne Allen who had appeared in the original production of Noël Coward's Private Lives. Anna's godfather was the film director John Ford.
Since...
Anna Massey, who has died of cancer aged 73, made her name on the stage as a teenager in French-window froth. She then graduated, with effortless and extraordinary ease, to the classics and to the work of Samuel Beckett, Harold Pinter and David Hare. In later years, she became best known for her award-winning work in television and film. What constantly impressed was her fastidious intelligence and capacity for stillness: always the mark of a first-rate actor.
Born in Thakeham, West Sussex, she was bred into show business although, in personal terms, that proved something of a mixed blessing. Her father was Raymond Massey, a Canadian actor who achieved success in Hollywood; her mother was Adrianne Allen who had appeared in the original production of Noël Coward's Private Lives. Anna's godfather was the film director John Ford.
Since...
- 7/6/2011
- by Michael Billington, Ronald Bergan
- The Guardian - Film News
Jonathan Franzen's family epic, a new collection from Seamus Heaney, Philip Larkin's love letters, a memoir centred on tiny Japanese sculptures ... which books most excited our writers this year?
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
In Red Dust Road (Picador) Jackie Kay writes lucidly and honestly about being the adopted black daughter of white parents, about searching for her white birth mother and Nigerian birth father, and about the many layers of identity. She has a rare ability to portray sentiment with absolutely no sentimentality. Isabel Wilkerson's The Warmth of Other Suns (Random House) is a fresh and wonderful history of African-American migration. Chang-rae Lee's The Surrendered (Little, Brown) is a grave, beautiful novel about people who experienced the Korean war and the war's legacy. And David Remnick's The Bridge (Picador) is a thorough and well-written biography of Barack Obama. The many Americans who believe invented biographical details about Obama would do well to read it.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
In Red Dust Road (Picador) Jackie Kay writes lucidly and honestly about being the adopted black daughter of white parents, about searching for her white birth mother and Nigerian birth father, and about the many layers of identity. She has a rare ability to portray sentiment with absolutely no sentimentality. Isabel Wilkerson's The Warmth of Other Suns (Random House) is a fresh and wonderful history of African-American migration. Chang-rae Lee's The Surrendered (Little, Brown) is a grave, beautiful novel about people who experienced the Korean war and the war's legacy. And David Remnick's The Bridge (Picador) is a thorough and well-written biography of Barack Obama. The many Americans who believe invented biographical details about Obama would do well to read it.
- 11/27/2010
- The Guardian - Film News
Producer, director and cinematographer of many well-loved British film classics, including Oliver Twist, Tunes of Glory and The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie
The producer, director, writer and cinematographer Ronald Neame, who has died aged 99, played an important role in British cinema for more than half a century. The critic Matthew Sweet once called him "a living embodiment of cinema, a sort of one-man world heritage site". Neame was assistant director to Alfred Hitchcock on Blackmail (1929), the first British talkie; he was the cinematographer on In Which We Serve (1942), Noël Coward's moving tribute to the Royal Navy during the second world war; he co-produced and co-wrote David Lean's Brief Encounter (1945) and Great Expectations (1946); and he directed Alec Guinness in two of his best roles, in The Horse's Mouth (1958) and Tunes of Glory (1960). As if this wasn't enough, Neame also conquered Hollywoo d with one of the first and most successful disaster movies,...
The producer, director, writer and cinematographer Ronald Neame, who has died aged 99, played an important role in British cinema for more than half a century. The critic Matthew Sweet once called him "a living embodiment of cinema, a sort of one-man world heritage site". Neame was assistant director to Alfred Hitchcock on Blackmail (1929), the first British talkie; he was the cinematographer on In Which We Serve (1942), Noël Coward's moving tribute to the Royal Navy during the second world war; he co-produced and co-wrote David Lean's Brief Encounter (1945) and Great Expectations (1946); and he directed Alec Guinness in two of his best roles, in The Horse's Mouth (1958) and Tunes of Glory (1960). As if this wasn't enough, Neame also conquered Hollywoo d with one of the first and most successful disaster movies,...
- 6/20/2010
- by Ronald Bergan
- The Guardian - Film News
"It's hard for people our age to think about dying. Perhaps we should have got into the habit when we were young."
A dissolve from the dial of an old-fashioned clock to the dial of an old-fashioned telephone.
When Val Lewton was preparing Isle of the Dead, one of his grimmest and most poetic horror films, an Rko executive reminded him that the studio had decided that its films should not have messages. "I'm sorry to say that your film does have a message," Lewton said, "and the message is, 'Death is Good.'"
In this light, Jack Clayton's final film, Memento Mori, can be seen as an exercise in redundancy, since it helpfully includes it's message in the title, for anyone with the classical background to understand it. But of course a message is not, or should not, be the whole point of a movie. Those much derided...
A dissolve from the dial of an old-fashioned clock to the dial of an old-fashioned telephone.
When Val Lewton was preparing Isle of the Dead, one of his grimmest and most poetic horror films, an Rko executive reminded him that the studio had decided that its films should not have messages. "I'm sorry to say that your film does have a message," Lewton said, "and the message is, 'Death is Good.'"
In this light, Jack Clayton's final film, Memento Mori, can be seen as an exercise in redundancy, since it helpfully includes it's message in the title, for anyone with the classical background to understand it. But of course a message is not, or should not, be the whole point of a movie. Those much derided...
- 4/8/2010
- MUBI
Signal Ensemble Theatre continues its sixth season with the Scottish drama "The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie" by Jay Presson Allen, based on the novel by Muriel Spark, directed by Co-Artistic Director Ronan Marra. Jean Brodie is in the business of putting old heads on young shoulders, and all of her pupils are the cr?me de le cr?me. The Brodie Set, as her students at the Marcia Blaine School for Girls are famously known, hang on Miss Brodie's every word as she - with reckless abandon - dismisses the standard curriculum in favor of lessons in subjects as wide-ranging as Giotto to Hitler to her own romances. When Miss Brodie begins an affair with one teacher to distract from her affair with another, and a false love letter falls into the wrong hands, the headmistress puts Brodie under review. Her considerable bombast is the only thing that saves her job,...
- 2/3/2009
- BroadwayWorld.com
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