Filmmakers

Get our free weekly email for all the latest cinematic news from our film critic Clarisse LoughreyGet our The Life Cinematic email for freeSteven Spielberg said services such as HBO Max are throwing filmmakers “under the bus”.The 75-year-old film director seemed to be referring to high-profile new films that are being released on streaming platforms and not theatres.“The pandemic created an opportunity for streaming platforms to raise their subscriptions to record-breaking levels and also throw some of my best filmmaker…

Get our free weekly email for all the latest cinematic news from our film critic Clarisse LoughreyGet our The Life Cinematic email for freeQuentin Tarantino has shared his disdain for superhero films, criticising the “chokehold” they have on the modern film industry.The Once Upon a Time in Hollywood filmmaker compared the ongoing glut of superhero movies – led by the multi-billion-dollar Marvel franchise – to the studio musical boom of the 1960s.Recalling how pioneering New Hollywood auteurs rejoiced when the studio…

Film director Danny Boyle has expressed a lack of confidence in the achievements of the British film industry at an event at the BFI Southbank in London.In remarks reported by the Daily Mail, Boyle said: “It’s a terrible thing to say at the home of British film but I am not sure we are great film-makers, to be absolutely honest.”He added: “As a nation, our two art-forms are theatre, in a middle-class sense, and pop music, because we are extraordinary at it.”The film-maker was speaking after a screening of 28 Days Later,…

There are some heartfelt performances and vignettes in this debut feature from producer-turned-director Kirsty Bell and writers Elizabeth Morris and Dominic Wells – and certainly some lustrous monochrome images from cinematographer Sergio Delgado. But this lockdown ensemble piece about a movie production stymied by Covid is self-conscious and doesn’t really come together, and the tonal shifts can be a little uncomfortable.Camilla Rutherford plays Rebecca, an actor who gives a great performance in a film shoot that wraps…

The Fabelmans is director Steven Spielberg’s magnum opus. The family found at the heart of this painfully personal and stunningly emotional feature stands in for Spielberg’s own, as the Oscar-winning filmmaker turns his camera back on his adolescence to examine – through his unique, masterful lens – the hardships and triumphs that led to him becoming one of our greatest filmmakers. The film is an homage to Spielberg’s two religions: Judaism and Film. It clarifies the enormous hold that each one has on the man, as well as…

Everyone loved John Michael McDonagh’s first film, The Guard, with Brendan Gleeson as a sloshed cop. They admired his second, Calvary, in which Gleeson played a priest reconciled to his own murder. His third, a black comedy with Alexander Skarsgård and Michael Peña, was mostly loathed. McDonagh anticipated these reactions, he says in a pub in south London. He had assumed people would like his first two, “and War on Everyone was meant to be divisive”.So he would be forgiven for having felt perky before the premiere last…

Wildlife films, as seen and experienced by people on TV, are captured with the help of extremely sophisticated and expensive equipment. These cool cameras and gadgets are operated by some of the world's best cinematographers, but this does not mean you cannot get into the amazing world of wildlife filmmaking. By making the right gear choices and learning the right techniques, you too can capture some incredible natural history moments.When your subjects are out of your control, the cameraperson and the gear have to be…

Whenever a master of one artistic medium chooses to work in another, it raises the question of what the new discipline might offer, and what the previous one denied. The Twilight World isn’t Werner Herzog’s first book (nor his last – a memoir is awaiting translation), but it is his first attempt at what might loosely be called a novel. So: why not another film? What does the novel have to offer a man who, 60 years and 70 films deep into his career, can surely film whatever he wants?Herzog’s preliminary disclaimer offers a…

Last week, beloved author Stephen King made an interesting admission: he's only walked out of one movie as an adult, and it was Michael Bay's Transformers back in 2007. While making this revelation on Twitter, he encouraged others to share the titles that saw them reach their own breaking point, and among the hundreds who replied to the prompt are some filmmakers and actors.It's not uncommon for people to hit a point watching a bad movie where they get the feeling "life is too short for this," and you can evidently count…

Here is a feature-length selection of documentary shorts from Britain’s pioneering women film-makers from the 1930s to the 1960s – a theatrical “touring version” from the Independent Cinema Office, taken from a larger assortment on the BFI’s two-disc DVD release.The directors are very often tackling what were considered – by the male producers, that is – to be the “women’s issues” of the day: motherhood, family, hearth and home. Sometimes these are the explicit themes and sometimes they are a subtext. Two of the films are…