Topic

European cinemai

From Danny Boyle to Michael Haneke, from Francois Truffaut to Ingmar Bergman, from Soviet Montage to French New Wave to Romanian New Wave, and from Berlin film festival to Cannes to Venice, this is the place to go for features, interviews and reviews about movies both classic and new from the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Italy and every other country in Europe.

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  • Quotable films gel with British chef in Hong Kong Jamie Draper. ‘I could probably recite it from start to finish,’ he says of 1987’s Withnail and I, a favourite
  • Pulp Fiction’s theme of redemption resonates with him, as does the attitude of characters in another Quentin Tarantino classic, True Romance
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Set in New York in 1984 and adapted from a comic of the same name, Robot Dreams uses the relationship between a dog and a robot to explore brilliantly the profundities of inter-human behaviour.

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In Boy Kills World, Bill Skarsgard plays a deaf-mute martial artist out for blood in a relentlessly gory action thriller that ploughs a painfully familiar path towards a predictable finale.

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From the Palme d’Or-winning Anora to The Surfer, starring one-man meme machine Nicolas Cage, to Emilia Pérez with Selena Gomez, 10 of the best movies unveiled at this year’s Cannes Film Festival.

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Director Patryk Vega uses AI to put the ruler’s face on an actor’s body to create a biopic that depicts the ruler from age 10 up to his fictional death.

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Famous for his celebrity-packed chain of Chinese restaurants, 85-year-old Michael Chow talks about facing prejudice, and why he wants to be known as the world’s greatest living artist.

Yorgos Lanthimos returns to the opaque, off-kilter style of his early films in Kinds of Kindness, which is three films in one. Something of a reunion for the stars of Poor Things, this will divide opinion.

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As well as shining a spotlight on the conflicts in Ukraine and the Palestinian West Bank, the Short Shorts Film Festival & Asia 2024 will for the first time show a movie made completely by AI.

Hong Kong-based multilingual singer Eli Zaelo’s favourite films include titles that resonate because she grew up in South Africa and reaffirm her belief in God. She’s a sucker for romantic comedies too.

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As the quintessentially British Shaun of the Dead turns 20, we look back at this genre-defining rom-zom-com and how it came to be lauded by cinema luminaries in America as well as at home.

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Starring Andrew Scott and Paul Mescal and directed by Andrew Haigh, All of us Strangers on Disney+ is a heart-shattering melodrama that dares to explore love and loneliness at its most raw.

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Rebel Moon – Part Two: The Scargiver, on Netflix, rounds off Zack Snyder’s instantly forgettable sci-fi series, with even less depth, humour and emotional complexity than the first movie.

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Abigail stars Alisha Weir as the titular 12-year-old daughter of a crime lord, who is kidnapped for a US$50 million ransom. Abigail is, however, a vampire, and takes her revenge on the extorters.

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Hollywood directors Ang Lee, the Coen brothers and Martin Scorsese were among fans of Kim Yong-man’s video rental store in a New York laundry, stocked with eclectic titles. A documentary tells its story.

Anderson plays BBC journalist Emily Maitlis in a dramatisation of her 2019 interview with Prince Andrew about sexual misconduct allegations, and the lead-up to it. Rufus Sewell plays the hapless royal.

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Horror classic The Omen, the story of the birth of the Antichrist, started a long-running franchise, including newly released prequel The First Omen, starring Nell Tiger Free, Bill Nighy and Charles Dance.

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Bill Nighy leads this football drama about a ragtag team taking part in the Homeless World Cup that is uplifting, but shies away from tackling the issues its characters face.

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Budding filmmakers take note. A government funding scheme aims to return Hong Kong cinema to its rightful place on the world stage, by encouraging collaborations with European and Asian filmmakers.

Our pick of the 200 films being shown at the festival includes Korean mega hit Exhuma, 2024 Berlin best film winner Dahomey, and all the movies of The Banshees of Inisherin director Martin McDonagh.

Christopher Nolan picked up best director and Cillian Murphy best actor, their first Oscars, for the blockbuster about the race to build the atomic bomb. Emma Stone and Hayao Miyazaki were among other winners.

Christopher Nolan’s biopic of the father of the atomic bomb dominates the Oscars, winning the top prize, plus best director for Nolan, best actor and four technical awards. Hayao Miyazaki also wins.

Scattered demonstrations were held near the Dolby Theatre in Los Angeles and protesters disrupted traffic for some making their way to the awards ceremony on Sunday.

Anne Hathaway took on an intense exercise regimen to become Catwoman in The Dark Knight Rises, and lost 25 pounds for her role as Fantine in Les Misérables – 15 of which was thanks to an extreme diet.

Our 2024 Academy Awards predictions, from why Oppenheimer should and will win best picture, to how Ryan Gosling may be pipped at the post for best supporting actor.

Kristen Stewart in lesbian crime flick Love Lies Bleeding, trans tale I Saw the TV Glow, and Min Bahadur Bham’s Himalayan film Shambhala all feature in our picks of the best movies at Berlin 2024.

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Depardieu, 75, has been charged with rape in another case and has been accused of sexual harassment and assault by more than a dozen women. He denies the allegations.

Shambala, the first Nepalese film selected for the Berlin Film Festival’s main competition, is an unhurried masterpiece about a Nepalese woman searching for her husband in the Himalayas.

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Starring Adam Sandler, Carey Mulligan and Paul Dano, Netflix sci-fi Spaceman – which premiered at the 2024 Berlin Film Festival – has its moments, but director Johan Renck struggles to sustain interest.

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Debuting at Berlin 2024, Black Tea, the first film about Africans in China made by an African filmmaker, exhibits a tone-deaf understanding of what the diaspora’s experience is like in the country.

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Jonathan Glazer’s historical drama The Zone of Interest is a profound, deeply unsettling masterpiece that highlights the horror of the Holocaust through the eyes of a camp commandant and his family.

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