News

His portrayals of the idiosyncratic, moustache-fanatic, and rule-imposing Bhawani Shankar or the stern Acp Dhurandhar Bhatawadekar in a brace of breezy Bollywood comedies are undeniably unforgettable, but he played a more realistic role in ‘Guddi’ – that gentle deconstruction of the glittering yet hollow edifice of filmdom.

Utpal Dutt, as Prof Gupta in the 1971 film, knows neither scolding nor advice will change the filmstar-struck teenager (then Jaya Bhaduri in her first Hindi film), and the only way out is to let her indulge in fascination with films and learn first-hand the artificiality, heartbreaks, and struggle that lies behind them.

Portraying a teacher, with innovative ideas, was not difficult for Dutt, who was born on this day (March 29) in Bengal’s Barisal (now in Bangladesh) in 1929. He had been an English teacher in (then) Calcutta’s South Point School in the 1950s and earned his students’ admiration for his insights into literature,...

Vidhu Vinod Chopra’s masterpiece 12th Fail depicts an ordinary man’s extraordinary journey to achieve his dreams of becoming an honest and hardworking law enforcement officer. The lead protagonist of the film, Manoj Kunar Sharma (portrayed by Vikrant Massey), is a character inspired by the real-life Ips officer, Manoj Kumar Sharma, who remained inexhaustible in his hard work to make his dream come true. Manoj Sharma, just as depicted in the film, was from a very underprivileged family in a village in Madhya Pradesh, but from a very young age, he was committed to bringing about a change in his family’s financial and social status, but not by cheating. Let’s take a deep dive into Manoj Sharma’s character arc to learn about his journey from darkness to light.

Manoj Sharma grew up witnessing poverty, deprivation, and humiliation. Seeing the corruption of government employees and teachers, Manoj...

Screenwriter Bo Goldman, who won Oscars for his scripts to “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” and “Melvin and Howard” and was among a select group of film scribes including Robert Towne and William Goldman considered to be among that generation’s best, died Tuesday in Helendale, Calif., his son-in-law, director Todd Field, confirmed to the New York Times. He was 90.

Goldman was also Oscar nominated for 1993’s “Scent of a Woman.”

The 1976 Oscar he shared with Lawrence Hauben for co-adapting Ken Kesey’s novel “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” was a particularly impressive achievement considering that “Cuckoo’s Nest” represented only Goldman’s second screenplay and the first to be produced. The win for adapted screenplay was part of a sweep for the film that also included victories for best picture, director, actor and actress. No movie had won those five awards since 1934’s “It’s a Wonderful...

And this was recognised by his peers. There is a story that once he and Raj Kapoor were at the Calcutta airport in 1973, when a cinema fan went to the latter to get his autograph and was told to approach Dutt first, with the master showman saying that he was only a "star", but Dutt was an actor!

While Dutt’s sense of timing, the funny intonation, and the maniacal gleam and laughter he could produce at will, served him well in comedy as "Gol Maal" (1979), "Rang Birangi" – with its slapstick chase through a children’s playground, "Kissi Se Na Kehna" (both 1983), "Lakhon Ki Baat" (1984), et al, attest, he could deftly turn the same mannerisms to display a marked unrepentant villainy.

Be it as the leader of the 40 thieves in "Marjina Abdulla", the crafty munim Ghoshal who drives the hero (Uttam Kumar) to utter despair in "Amanush", as corrupt and...

A high-level delegation led by Deputy Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis, Assembly Speaker Rahul Narwekar, Mumbai University’s Annabhau Sathe Study Centre Director, Dr. Baliram Gaikwad, and Central Eurasian Studies Department Director, Dr. Sanjay Deshpande, besides other professors shall attend the ceremony on September 14.

Vice Chancellor Dr. Suhas Pednekar and Pro Vice Chancellor Prof. Ravindra Kulkarni – who inspired and contributed to the project majorly – will join the event online.

Dr. Gaikwad said that the proposal was first mooted at an international literary meet in the Russian Consulate in Mumbai in 2017, since Sathe is a well-known figure in the Russian academia.

"Annabhau Sathe, who is also the proponent of rural literature in India, had been invited to Russia several times, but finally made it for two months in 1961 as India’s ‘cultural ambassador’ and left an indelible mark there. He is widely regarded as the ‘Maxim Gorky’ of Indian literature, and he...

With readers turning to their home viewing options more than ever, this daily feature provides one new movie each day worth checking out on a major streaming platform.

At certain points in their careers, even cinema’s greatest auteurs have needed to cover their asses with a hit. For Akira Kurosawa at the height of his powers, that wasn’t going to be a problem. Kurosawa had earned a tremendous amount of goodwill after the critical and commercial success of 1954’s “Seven Samurai,” and by 1958 he’d spent every last scrap of it. First there was “I Live in Fear,” a difficult (but worthwhile) melodrama in which Toshiro Mifune played an elderly man so fraught with nuclear anxiety that he obliterates his own family. Kurosawa rebounded with the grim yet profitable “Macbeth” adaptation “Throne of Blood,” only to follow that with the most dire film he would ever make, a...

Ready for some good old-fashioned artistic propaganda, Soviet-style Russian filmmakers tried to make film grammar into an emotional-intellectual science, and these pro-Revolution masterpieces by Vsevolod Pudovkin are terrific lessons in cinematic persuasion. The first two commemorate big moments in proletarian revolt. The third heads east to Soviet Mongolia for an even more powerful demonstration of Pure Kino-Power harnessed to political ends. With plenty of extras including informed, insightful (and needed) audio commentaries.

The Bolshevik Trilogy

Three Films by Vsevolod Pudovkin

Blu-ray

Flicker Alley

1926-1928 / B&w / 1:33 flat / 87, 73, 131 (291) min.

Street Date March 23, 2020

Available through Flicker Alley / 34.95

Mother

The End of St. Petersburg

Storm Over Asia

Directed by Vsevolod Pudovkin

The more abstract Soviet agit-prop film classics were a tough row to hoe in film school. We’d study the writings of Sergei Eisenstein, etc., but the theories on paper didn’t always apply to the films we could see. In...

Ready for some good old-fashioned artistic propaganda, Soviet-style? Russian filmmakers tried to make emotional-intellectual film grammar into a science, and these pro-Revolution masterpieces by Vsevolod Pudovkin are terrific lessons in cinematic persuasion. The first two commemorate big moments in proletarian revolt. The third heads east to Soviet Mongolia for an even more powerful demonstration of Pure Kino-Power harnessed to political ends. With plenty of extras including informed, insightful (and needed) audio commentaries.

The Bolshevik Trilogy

Three Films by Vsevolod Pudovkin

Blu-ray

Flicker Alley

1926-1928 / B&w / 1:33 flat / 87, 73, 131 (291) min.

Street Date March 23, 2020

Available through Flicker Alley / 34.95

Mother

The End of St. Petersburg

Storm Over Asia

Directed by Vsevolod Pudovkin

The more abstract Soviet agit-prop film classics were a tough row to hoe in film school. We’d study the writings of Sergei Eisenstein, etc., but the theories on paper didn’t always apply to the films we could see. In...

Every filmmaker hopes to make a good movie, but sometimes the impact is bigger than expected.

Neon’s “Parasite” is one example of a 2019 film hitting a nerve. Writer-director Bong Joon Ho’s film has been praised for its originality and daring shifts in tone. It also has resonance due to its subject matter: the gap between the haves and the have-nots.

“Parasite” is only one of the year’s films that address this zeitgeist subject, also including “Hustlers,” “Joker,” “Knives Out” and the French “Les Miserables,” to name a few. It’s not a new theme: In prehistoric times, some people were no doubt troubled that other cave dwellers had more than they did.

But the subject found new expression in 19th century novels from writers including Victor Hugo and Charles Dickens. In 1902, Maxim Gorky’s play “The Lower Depths” was a sensation with its depiction of people at a homeless shelter.

2017-08-23T05:06:14-07:00Denzel Washington Going Back to Broadway

Page Six reports that Denzel Washington will go back to Broadway next year. We think it's great to see an actor of his stature showing off his skills on stage. What do you think? Let us know below.

Denzel Washington will return to Broadway this spring in “The Iceman Cometh,” The Post has learned.

A 14-week run of Eugene O’Neill’s drama, to be directed by five-time Tony winner George C. Wolfe, is set to start March 22 at the Bernard B. Jacobs Theatre.

“I’m very excited to come back to Broadway in this great play and to be working on it with George Wolfe,” Washington told The Post.

Scott Rudin, fresh off a home run with Bette Midler in “Hello, Dolly!” is producing.

Washington will play Hickey, a charismatic traveling salesman with a secret who...

iO Tillett Wright was on the phone with Amber Heard on Saturday, May 21, when Heard claims that Johnny Depp hurled a phone at her. In court documents obtained by People, Heard claims her husband hit her with a cell phone, pulled her hair and screamed at her last Saturday night - and was abusive to her throughout their 15-month marriage. Heard was granted a temporary restraining order against Depp on Friday. Wright, a friend of Heard and Depp, was called in an attempt to pacify an angry Depp, who was "obsessing about something that was untrue" and became "extremely angry,...

Something of his sad freedom

As he rode the tumbril

Should come to me, driving,

Saying the names

Tollund, Grauballe, Nebelgard,

Watching the pointing hands

Of country people,

Not knowing their tongue.

Out here in Jutland

In the old man-killing parishes

I will feel lost,

Unhappy and at home.

—Seamus Heaney, The Tollund Man

It ended, like all journeys do, in Solitude, a long way from any cinema. Solitude—or rather Zolitūde, in Latvian—is a suburb of Riga, four miles as the crow flies from the fancy Scandi-Gothic-Art Nouveau city centre; six miles on foot if the pedestrian avoids diversions. But by the time I reached Solitude on that cold December Saturday afternoon, however, my inadvertent divagations must have pushed the total to the ten-mile mark. I'd looked at maps prior to departing from my hotel, of course but deliberately didn't bring one along (not a fan); I don't...

New films from Krzysztof Zanussi and Ralph Fiennes to also world premiere at Window To Europe Film Festival.

New films by Gérard Depardieu, Krzysztof Zanussi and Ralph Fiennes will have their world premieres at the 22nd edition of the Window To Europe Film Festival (Aug 8-15) in the Russian town of Vyborg situated close to the border with Finland.

French director Philippe Martinez’s tale of redemption and revenge Viktor, which stars Depardieu, Elizabeth Hurley and Eli Danker, will open a competition section dedicated to films co-produced with Russia.

Viktor, which was shot in Chechnya and Moscow last summer and is being handled internationally by UK-based sales agent Saradan Media, will be released by Paradise in Russian cinemas on September 4.

Co-production competition

Other co-productions selected include Zanussi’s Foreign Body, produced by his own company Studio Filmowe Tor with Italy’s Revolver Film and Russia’s Ineureka and Bella Vostok Ltd; Uzbek director Dilmurod Masaidov’s thriller...

By Søren Hough

Contributor

* * *

Roman Polanski once said, “I’d rather watch a film in a movie theatre. I have all the kit you need at home, but it’s not the same.”

A few months ago, I had the privilege of seeing The Matrix (1999) on the big screen. I missed its theatrical debut fourteen years ago, but my local cinema occasionally plays older movies in special screening events. The Matrix was already one of my favorite films, so I jumped at the chance to see it in theaters. The experience was nothing short of revelatory.

Only sitting in a theater did I understand the purpose of the film’s wide 2.35:1 aspect ratio. As my head turned to keep up with a back-and-forth between Neo and Morpheus, I became cognizant of how deliberately cinematographer Bill Pope framed every shot in the film. No matter how many times I’d watched The Matrix on Blu-ray,...

White Sun of the Desert

Written by Valentin Ezhov, Rustam Ibragimbekov, Mark Zakharov

Directed by Vladimir Motyl

Soviet Union, 1969

The glimmering cupola on a fondly named Borscht Western chapel, Vladimir Motyl’s 1969 film White Sun of the Desert is a telling contrast to its compatriot Spaghetti Westerns, as it chronicles a few peculiar events of civil war on the Caspian Sea through the eyes of Red Army soldier Fyodor Sukhov (Anatoli Kuznetsov). The film quickly became an unofficial national treasure, though its statements are offered through the hushed humour of sometimes farcical, often philosophical, performance.

This is a tale of one man stranded on the cusp between a war and his home, his capers peppered by the letters he faithfully scribes to his wife. It is no incidental matter that Fyodor Sukhov’s memories hold a staunch grip on the alabaster skin and scarlet cloth that swathes Katerina Matveyevna (Galina Luchai).

With her voluptuous figure,...

The first-ever manufacturer of light bulbs in Portugal, Manoel de Oliveira’s father died in 1932, nine years after Raul Brandão wrote a play called Gebo and the Shadow. In the year 2012 Oliveira turned the play into a film, making a grimy, dim oil lamp its legitimate character: elderly accountant Gebo burns the midnight oil in it as he plods away at his books. In an early scene, meanwhile, his wife lights the lanterns outside their house with a match. No one seems yet to have heard of electricity; the time setting is unclear; presumably, it’s the turn of the century.

Presumably. Oliveira’s Benilde, or The Virgin Mother (1975) opens with a title-card of this word to gradually lure us into a province of utter chronological disorder. This very same word has ever since been unchallenged as the most accurate description of the bizarre, atemporal effect that grows stronger in each subsequent Oliveira film.

She's best mates with Lady Mary, but Ruth Wilson reveals why she sidestepped Downton in favour of Tolstoy

Ruth Wilson talks brusquely, in quick, ungainly sentences that take one back to her excellent Jane Eyre and make her seem, oddly, both older and younger than her 30 years. She is about to appear in Tom Stoppard's adaptation of Anna Karenina, directed by Joe Wright and starring Keira Knightley in the title role, is currently filming The Lone Ranger in Colorado, and shows every indication of joining the first ranks of Britain's leading ladies. "I've always been quite shy," she says. "Very confident but very shy." She laughs awkwardly. If there is such a thing as belligerent shyness, this is it what it looks like.

We are in a coffee shop in Manhattan, where Wilson is spending a few days before returning to Colorado. Anna Karenina is the first book adaptation...

The critics adore her and tomorrow she is up for an Olivier award. She is known for brave portrayals of emotional extremity, but Ruth Wilson says fear is the key to her acting

'I wish I was more of a girly girl and could enjoy this more," says Ruth Wilson. We're walking down Waterloo backstreets to a pub for her photo shoot. She's the one in the sharp suit with good posture and a dancer's gait. After that ordeal, she has an appointment to choose the jewellery she will wear for tomorrow night's Olivier awards at the Royal Opera House, where she has been nominated as best actress for her critically acclaimed performance in the title role of Eugene O'Neill's play Anna Christie. Her sartorial mentor for the awards, Vogue editor Anna Wintour, has already helped Wilson choose a dress.

"The difficult thing for me is going to a event...

When you're watching a film on your computer, does the idea of commenting on it in real time appeal to you? What if you could create an original live blog of your favorite new releases, which all your friends could see, comment on, repost, reblog or retweet?

More and more studios are hopping aboard social film streaming on Facebook, and they're really hoping you will, too.

On Tuesday, Lionsgate became the first studio to release a film on the social networking site in tandem with its DVD and Blu-ray release. "Abduction," an action film starring Taylor Lautner that was poorly received by critics and flopped at the box office during its theatrical run, can now be rented on Facebook for $3.99; the loan lasts for two days. The film's Facebook page also posted a message alerting fans that they could could unlock an exclusive interview with Lautner if they answered a trivia question.

An ambitious attempt to write a 'personal' history of cinema is sometimes intelligent but rarely convincing

Maxim Gorky, the first major writer to record his impressions of the cinema, wrote in his local newspaper the day after seeing the first Lumière brothers show in Nizhny Novgorod in 1896: "Last night I was in the Kingdom of Shadows. If you only knew how strange it is to be there … I was at Aumont's and saw Lumière's cinématographe – moving photography. The extraordinary impression it creates is so unique and complex that I doubt my ability to describe it with all its nuances." A few years later Rudyard Kipling wrote Mrs Bathurst, the first significant work of fiction inspired by the movies, a mysteriously haunting tale of a sailor driven to his death by a brief newsreel he obsessively views in Cape Town. The new medium had the power to disturb, to fascinate,...

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,...

It’s another week which means another round up of all the titles Criterion has put up on their Hulu Plus page. And it’s a great smorgasbord of releases that will keep your eyes full until the next installment. Also, thanks again to everyone who has signed up for Hulu Plus via our referral page. Please sign up and let us know what you think of the service. Enough of this small talk, let’s get into the nitty gritty.

Last week’s article spoke about Louis Malle’s films being put up and sure enough, only a few days later they finally released Black Moon to their page, showing a film that will be coming out on June 28th. I love that they’re doing that with releases that are coming out, just to give their audience the film itself and if you like it, you’ll want to grab the whole package.

Why are we always driven by the elusive goal of living forever? A new book argues that we should give up on perfectability and embrace our mortality. Malcolm Jones talks to philosopher John Gray.

The English political philosopher John Gray has a quarrel with progress. It's not that he doesn't believe in it. Indeed, he cheerfully admits that science and technology have, in many ways, improved our lot. "Remember what DeQuincey said in the 1820s in his Confessions of an English Opium Eater: a quarter of all human suffering is toothache. It would've been true then. Now we don't suffer that," Gray says, by phone from his home in Bath. "Progress in dental science is real. And it's only one example of a respect in which the growth of knowledge is absolutely real."

Related story on The Daily Beast: Rise of the Superbacteria

The problem, according to Gray, is that while technology improves,...

Some of the finest directors have produced masterful triptychs. But do we really need a fourth Pirates of the Caribbean?

It currently seems the only three that interests Hollywood relates to dimensionality. The reverence once extended to the film trilogy is fast diminishing, and although third instalments are due for Transformers, Ong-Bak, Paranormal Activity, Alvin and the Chipmunks, Men in Black, Madagascar, Batman and Iron Man, only the first two have been announced as series finales.

Indeed, with Scre4m, Pirates of the Caribbean 4: On Stranger Tides and Spy Kids 4: All the Time in the World soon to be followed by fourth entries in the Austin Powers, Mission: Impossible, Underworld and Bourne franchises, the trilogy could soon go the way of the 2D movie, as the synergy-obsessed suits controlling the multi-media conglomerates now owning the major studios adhere to the maxim that familiarity breeds both content and profit.

In our latest World Cinema column, we salute the work of Spanish director Pedro Almodovar, and take a look back at 1997’s Live Flesh...

A conversation in the pub the other night got me thinking. The conversation was about Pedro Almodovar, and the (as we thought) unfair critical reaction to Broken Embraces. It was unfair to judge the film on solely its own merits, as it many ways acts as a summation and retrospective of Almodovar's previous body of work. It was, in fact, casting a look over the world he had created and letting the viewer remember their own individual past memories of this world.

This, in turn, led to a discussion about Almodovar's legacy, and his influence on not just a generation of Spanish language filmmakers, but to an entire world audience.

For many viewers, the Spain of his movies is the reality of the country...

MOSCOW -- The Czech Republic's International Film Festival for Children and Youth will focus on Russian cinematography when its 46th edition opens May 28 in the southern Moravian town of Zlin. Festival artistic director Peter Kohila said the program, which runs through June 3, will offer Russian features and animation in all sections, competition and sidebars. A special section will mark the 90th anniversary of Moscow's Maxim Gorky film studios, an established source of children's film over many years, Kohila said in remarks reported by Czech wire agency CTK.

Opening with a spooky shot traveling up the stairs of a run-of-the-mill New York tenement, with the sounds of a woman seemingly in mortal peril on the soundtrack, "Somewhere in the City" gets off to a ribald start as the screamer is revealed to be Sandra Bernhard's manic character in bed with a lover.

Inspired by Maxim Gorky's "The Lower Depths" and deftly directed by Iranian-born Ramin Niami, the low-budget ensemble comedy debuted at the 1997 Seattle Film Festival and has unspooled at numerous international fests. Probably destined to get lost in the indie shuffle as a limited theatrical release, the Artistic License film opened Friday in New York and bows Oct. 2 in Los Angeles.

In his feature debut as director, Niami (producer of "Manhattan by Numbers"), who co-wrote the script with Patrick Dillon, amusingly probes a multicultural milieu that reflects the diversity of the city and era, and he doesn't take himself too seriously when the film addresses important issues.

Concentrating on six neighbors all living desperate lives, with lots of overlapping, "Somewhere" is a Bohemian rhapsody that's exactly the sum of its parts -- uneven but entertaining with often sprightly dialogue and predictable conflicts and character development.

Bernhard is a therapist who's unlucky in love and desperate to find a man with whom to have children. Chinese star Bai Ling is a recent arrival in America, under pressure to marry one of her countrymen but developing a taste for skimpy outfits and a punkish attitude. Peter Stormare ("Fargo") is a serious gay actor who pins his hopes on appearing in a movie remake of "I Dream of Jeannie".

The inspired casting continues with Italian star Ornella Muti as the unhappy wife of the building's superintendent. She has a fling with an inept thief played by Robert John Burke. In the least interesting subplot, an amateur revolutionary Paul Anthony Stewart) with a cell phone and a nagging mother develops a crush on Ling's character.

One of the funniest bits has former New York mayor Ed Koch kidnapped and mildly abused by Stewart's clueless would-be terrorist. But the most satisfying material involves the friendship of Bernard's neurotic busybody and Ling's sassy rebel. Veteran French actress Bulle Ogier, Linda Dano and Bill Sage appear in small roles, while Bernard sings "Until The Real Thing Comes Along" on the terrific soundtrack that includes original music by Velvet Underground founder John Cale.

SOMEWHERE IN THE CITY

Artistic License

A Sideshow production

Director: Ramin Niami

Producers: Ramin Niami, Karen Robson

Screenwriters: Ramin Niami, Patrick Dillon

Executive producers: Paula Brancato, Das Werk

Director of photography: Igor Sunara

Production designer: Lisa Albin

Editors: Ramin Niami, Elizabeth Gazzara

Costume designer: S. Batim Balaman

Music: John Cale

Casting: Caroline Sinclair

Color/stereo

Cast:

Betty: Sandra Bernhard

Lu Lu: Bai Ling

Graham: Peter Stormare

Marta: Ornella Muti

Frankie: Robert John Burke

Che: Paul Anthony Stewart

Running time -- 93 minutes

No MPAA rating...