Matteo Garrone made his name as director of the brutal mafia thriller Gomorrah. Now he is back with a dark, Big Brother-inspired satire
No one could accuse the Italian writer-director Matteo Garrone of ploughing the same furrow. His new film, Reality, a bubblegum fable with an acid aftertaste, could scarcely be more different from his previous one, Gomorrah, which announced his entrance into world cinema. He had already made three features before that (including The Embalmer, a taxidermists' love triangle) but Gomorrah was an art-house crossover phenomenon. This violent exposé-cum-thriller, based on the non-fiction book by Roberto Saviano, showed how slaughter and corruption had been absorbed into everyday life under the Camorra in Naples and Caserta. The film picked apart the infrastructure of crime: we saw how far and deep the Camorra's tentacles reach, and how asphyxiating their grasp can be. Gomorrah scooped the Grand Prix at the Cannes...
No one could accuse the Italian writer-director Matteo Garrone of ploughing the same furrow. His new film, Reality, a bubblegum fable with an acid aftertaste, could scarcely be more different from his previous one, Gomorrah, which announced his entrance into world cinema. He had already made three features before that (including The Embalmer, a taxidermists' love triangle) but Gomorrah was an art-house crossover phenomenon. This violent exposé-cum-thriller, based on the non-fiction book by Roberto Saviano, showed how slaughter and corruption had been absorbed into everyday life under the Camorra in Naples and Caserta. The film picked apart the infrastructure of crime: we saw how far and deep the Camorra's tentacles reach, and how asphyxiating their grasp can be. Gomorrah scooped the Grand Prix at the Cannes...
- 3/22/2013
- by Ryan Gilbey
- The Guardian - Film News
He was friends with James Dean, dated Marilyn Monroe and made his movie debut with Hitchcock: Martin Landau, the voice of Mr Rzykruski in Frankenweenie, talks about his 60-year acting career
Midway through the interview, at the end of a monologue during which he has first marvelled at the way I can access the internet on my tape-machine (I can't) and then upset the coffee table by crossing his legs, Martin Landau checks and gives a rueful smile. "Anyway," he says. "You asked me a question a while ago. I'm sort of going on and on like a dial-tone here."
By this point it's clear that an audience with Landau will not run on conventional lines. Questions are not so much questions as prompts: an invitation for the actor to embark on another strolling pastoral through his 60-year career. He talks about the craft of acting, the actors he has...
Midway through the interview, at the end of a monologue during which he has first marvelled at the way I can access the internet on my tape-machine (I can't) and then upset the coffee table by crossing his legs, Martin Landau checks and gives a rueful smile. "Anyway," he says. "You asked me a question a while ago. I'm sort of going on and on like a dial-tone here."
By this point it's clear that an audience with Landau will not run on conventional lines. Questions are not so much questions as prompts: an invitation for the actor to embark on another strolling pastoral through his 60-year career. He talks about the craft of acting, the actors he has...
- 10/18/2012
- by Xan Brooks
- The Guardian - Film News
Originally published in the Observer on 18 December 1938
I am writing this letter now, so that the readers of the Observer can light their fires with it on Monday morning, and you will have six days after it has gone up the chimney to study my wants and decide what you are going to do about them. I know you will be very busy this Christmas, but in case you have time to think about the cinema, here are one or two suggestions for useful gifts.
Give back a film industry to England, just a little one. We have been very stupid, shortsighted and wasteful here, but most of us are sorry now. There are thousands of people out of work in the studios this Christmas, many of them with little prospect of getting back again. Be kind to them, please.
Whisper in the ear of politicians and City men, and...
I am writing this letter now, so that the readers of the Observer can light their fires with it on Monday morning, and you will have six days after it has gone up the chimney to study my wants and decide what you are going to do about them. I know you will be very busy this Christmas, but in case you have time to think about the cinema, here are one or two suggestions for useful gifts.
Give back a film industry to England, just a little one. We have been very stupid, shortsighted and wasteful here, but most of us are sorry now. There are thousands of people out of work in the studios this Christmas, many of them with little prospect of getting back again. Be kind to them, please.
Whisper in the ear of politicians and City men, and...
- 12/18/2011
- The Guardian - Film News
All lists of the "greatest" movies are propaganda. They have no deeper significance. It is useless to debate them. Even more useless to quarrel with their ordering of titles: Why is this film #11 and that one only #31? The most interesting lists are those by one person: What are Scorsese's favorites, or Herzog's? The least interesting are those by large-scale voting, for example by IMDb or movie magazines. The most respected poll, the only one I participate in, is the vote taken every 10 years by Sight & Sound, the British film magazine, which asks a large number of filmmakers, writers, critics, scholars, archivists and film festival directors.
1. The Night of the Hunter, 1955
That one at least has taken on a canonical aspect. The list evolves slowly. Keaton rises, Chaplin falls. It is eventually decided that "Vertigo" is Hitchcock's finest film. Ozu cracks the top ten. Every ten years the net is thrown out again.
1. The Night of the Hunter, 1955
That one at least has taken on a canonical aspect. The list evolves slowly. Keaton rises, Chaplin falls. It is eventually decided that "Vertigo" is Hitchcock's finest film. Ozu cracks the top ten. Every ten years the net is thrown out again.
- 8/2/2009
- by Roger Ebert
- blogs.suntimes.com/ebert
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