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6 days ago | 
msn.com | Peter Bradshaw |Stuart Heritage |Phil Hoad |Anne Billson |Laura Snapes |Lucy Knight | +6 more
Microsoft Cares About Your PrivacyMicrosoft and our third-party vendors use cookies to store and access information such as unique IDs to deliver, maintain and improve our services and ads. If you agree, MSN and Microsoft Bing will personalise the content and ads that you see. You can select ‘I Accept’ to consent to these uses or click on ‘Manage preferences’ to review your options and exercise your right to object to Legitimate Interest where used.
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6 days ago | 
theguardian.com | Peter Bradshaw |Stuart Heritage |Phil Hoad |Anne Billson |Laura Snapes |Lucy Knight | +6 more
Archie Leach makes an appearanceOne of Hollywood’s most durable Easter eggs debuted in Howard Hawks’s His Girl Friday (1940) when Cary Grant’s character says: “The last man who said that to me was Archie Leach just a week before he cut his throat!” And in Arsenic and Old Lace (1944) his character sits pensively in a cemetery where Archie Leach’s gravestone is to be seen. In Charles Crichton’s A Fish Called Wanda (1988), John Cleese’s character is called Archie Leach.
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2 weeks ago | 
theguardian.com | Ryan Gilbey
Is Derek Jarman the first director to be more famous for his foliage than his films? At Prospect Cottage, his black-and-yellow sanctuary squatting in the shadow of the nuclear power station at Dungeness on the Kent coast, Jarman nurtured a garden in the inauspicious shingle; plants thrived between the jagged upturned stones he likened to dragon’s teeth.
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2 weeks ago | 
msn.com | Ryan Gilbey
Microsoft Cares About Your PrivacyMicrosoft and our third-party vendors use cookies to store and access information such as unique IDs to deliver, maintain and improve our services and ads. If you agree, MSN and Microsoft Bing will personalise the content and ads that you see. You can select ‘I Accept’ to consent to these uses or click on ‘Manage preferences’ to review your options and exercise your right to object to Legitimate Interest where used.
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3 weeks ago | 
msn.com | Ryan Gilbey
Microsoft Cares About Your PrivacyMicrosoft and our third-party vendors use cookies to store and access information such as unique IDs to deliver, maintain and improve our services and ads. If you agree, MSN and Microsoft Bing will personalise the content and ads that you see. You can select ‘I Accept’ to consent to these uses or click on ‘Manage preferences’ to review your options and exercise your right to object to Legitimate Interest where used.
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3 weeks ago | 
theguardian.com | Ryan Gilbey
‘When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.” So runs the most famous line from John Ford’s elegiac 1962 western The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance. The 44-year-old historian Karina Longworth has other ideas. The former LA Weekly film critic launched her podcast, You Must Remember This, in 2014, setting out to tell “the secret and/or forgotten histories of Hollywood’s first century”, as she puts it in the show’s introduction.
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3 weeks ago | 
theguardian.com | Ryan Gilbey
Troop into Eg White’s living room, past the bright, spacious kitchen and the yapping terriers (“Meet the unwelcoming committee!”), then descend into the snug basement studio with its underfloor heating and you will have reached the place where pop bangers are born: hits for Adele (Chasing Pavements), Will Young (Leave Right Now), Duffy (Warwick Avenue) and countless others.
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3 weeks ago | 
theguardian.com | Ryan Gilbey
Temperamental on-set behaviour by successful actors is common, but rarely made public. So it takes a particular type of performer, or one with poor PR defences, to become notorious for tantrums or capriciousness. The actor Val Kilmer, who has died aged 65 after suffering from pneumonia, was one such case. He starred in several box-office hits, including Top Gun (1986), and played roles as distinctive as Jim Morrison in The Doors (1991) and the ghost of Elvis Presley in True Romance (1993).
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3 weeks ago | 
theguardian.com | Ryan Gilbey
In the films of Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne, the Belgian social realist brothers who specialise in studies of life on the breadline, a roving hand-held camera tends to cling to the main character as closely as a shadow. Rosetta (1999), their first picture to feature a female protagonist, follows a tenacious, single-minded teenager who lives in a trailer park with her alcoholic mother on the edge of the desolate town of Seraing.
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4 weeks ago | 
theguardian.com | Ryan Gilbey
Growing up in a small Finnish town close to the Russian border, Mikko Mäkelä knew he was gay from the age of 11. “I think I was happy until then,” says the shy 36-year-old, whose slippery second film Sebastian is about to be released. Isolated he may have been, but at least the young Mäkelä had movies. Alone in his room, he watched queer gems such as Mysterious Skin, Presque Rien and Beautiful Thing, keeping the volume low in case his parents heard.
