News

Born a King

Agusti Villaronga’s ninth feature Born a King should be ready for 2019 in what stands as one of the Spanish filmmaker’s largest productions in some time. Produced by Stuart Sutherland of Celtic Entertainment, Andres Vincent Gomez of Lola Films and Marco Gomez and lensed by Josep M. Civit (of Villaronga’s Uncertain Glory and The King of Havana), the period piece stars Ed Skrein, Abdullah Khaleel (in his film debut), Hermione Corfield, James Fleet, Kenneth Cranham, Ruben Ochandiano and Laurence Fox.…...

Biopic of painter due to shoot from mid-January in Manchester.

Source: Wikimedia Commons

Vanessa Redgrave and Timothy Spall

Oscar-winner Vanessa Redgrave and BAFTA-nominee Timothy Spall are to star in Mrs Lowry & Son, about the relationship between British painter L.S. Lowry and his mother, Elizabeth.

Redgrave will play the role of Lowry’s mother opposite Spall in the role of painter Lowry who was famous for painting scenes of life in the industrial districts of North West England in the mid-20th century.

He developed a distinctive style of painting and is best known for his urban landscapes peopled with human figures often referred to as ’matchstick men’.

The artist lived all of his life with his overbearing mother, a bed-ridden and depressed presence in her bachelor son’s life and a deterring voice as he pursued his artistic ambition. Spending his days as a rent collector, Lowry took art classes by night, painting into the early...

For a self-described "reactionary" filmmaker, Monte Hellman is remarkably forward-thinking. Road to Nowhere (reviewed here), his first feature since 1989, is a film shot digitally that's partly about cinema in the digital age; from its very first shot—where a character pops a DVD-r with the film's title on it into a laptop—on, Road to Nowhere is a film about the slipperiness of digitally created, manipulated and viewed images. Written by longtime Hellman collaborator Steve Gaydos, it stars Shannyn Sossammon as Laurel, an inexperienced actress who is cast in a true crime drama also called Road to Nowhere (directed by one “Mitchell Haven” and written by one “Stephen Gates”); in this film-within-a-film, Laurel plays femme-fatale-ish Velma Duran, though the whole thing is ambiguous enough (in terms of structure, characterization, aesthetics, etc.) that at least one character begins to suspect that Laurel and Duran are in fact the same person.

Hellman is erudite and easygoing.