Shanghai International Film Festival (SIFF) has unveiled the major competition selections for its 25th edition (June 9-18), which will be the first to be held in a fully physical format with international guests since before the pandemic.
26.05.2023 - 18:11 / deadline.com
What could well be Ken Loach’s final film has as much fire and fury as his debut Poor Cow did in 1967, if we discount his pioneering TV work in the run-up. The visual style hasn’t changed a great deal in the years since, but that’s because the British movie veteran, soon to turn 87, isn’t much fussed about surfaces, it’s the inner lives of his characters that he wants to capture. In that respect, The Old Oak would make a fitting swansong, capping the recent North-East trilogy with a vital film that is clearly the work of the team behind previous Cannes Competition hits I, Daniel Blake and Sorry We Missed You.
The setting is Easington, County Durham, and the year is 2016. Curiously, the Brexit Referendum is never mentioned, but the sentiments that fueled the pro-Leave movement certainly are. It opens with a coach party of Syrian refugees moving into a row of terraced houses in the former mining town, much to the annoyance of the locals. “It’s not fair,” says one, “it’s shit.” “Why didn’t you tell us they were coming?” yells another. A young immigrant, Yara (Elba Mari), arriving with her mother, brother and sisters, documents the protest with her beloved camera, which gets smashed in a scuffle.
Local pub licensee T.J. Ballantyne (Dave Turner) comes to her aid, gallantly offering to fix the broken device and striking up a friendship with the woman, being impressed by her resilience after fleeing a war zone. This does not go down too well with the regulars at his pub The Old Oak, who see the refugees as an insult to their communities and an assault on their values. Surprisingly, Loach and writer Paul Laverty indulge these voices: racism in Easington is not a luxury belief but a reaction to 40 years of decline in
Shanghai International Film Festival (SIFF) has unveiled the major competition selections for its 25th edition (June 9-18), which will be the first to be held in a fully physical format with international guests since before the pandemic.
The Old Oak will be his last.Speaking at a press conference for his new movie at the Cannes Film Festival, Loach was asked by Deadline whether reports about his retirement are true.“One day at a time,” he responded. “If you get up in the morning, and you’re not in the obituary column; one day at a time.”It comes after he told The Hollywood Reporter last month that “it would be hard to do a feature film again” because “your facilities do decline.”He said: “Films take a couple of years and I’ll be nearly 90,” he said of a potential next movie.
Ken Loach still has more to say against The Man in society with his cinema, that was clear coming away from the Cannes press conference for his latest movie The Old Oak.
Owen Gleiberman Chief Film Critic Tommy Joe Ballantyne (Dave Turner), the central character in Ken Loach’s “The Old Oak,” is a middle-aged landlord and proprietor of a pub that sits near the bottom of a sloped street of working-class row houses. We’re in an unnamed village in the northeast of England, and the pub, called the Old Oak, has seen better days. So has Tommy, who’s known as TJ. Dave Turner, the very good actor who plays him, resembles a bone-weary cross between John C. Reilly and Michael Moore. There’s a sweet-souled directness to his sad prole stare, and he treats his customers, some of whom he has known since they were in grade school together, with quiet affection and respect. But the pub is falling apart, and the property values in the neighborhood have plunged. TJ is barely scraping by serving pints of bitters.
By Hanna RantalaCANNES (Reuters) - Ken Loach said on Friday he does not know if "The Old Oak," the 86-year-old British director's attempt to win the Cannes Film Festival's top prize for a third time, would be his last. "Oh, I don't know, I live day by day," said Loach, who turns 87 in June. "If you read the obituary columns and you're not in them, it's a good day.
A Chimera is something one tries to achieve but alas, never manages to find. It is the heart and soul of a quest in life, in different ways, for the cast of characters in writer/director Alice Rohrwacher’s beautiful new film La Chimera premiering today as one of the last entries in competition at the 2023 Cannes Film Festival. It also happens to be one of the best.
Only nine directors have ever won the Palme d’Or twice. Francis Ford Coppola did it in the ’70s with The Conversation and Apocalypse Now. Ruben Östlund joined the club last year after following The Square with Triangle of Sadness. But this year, there is a very real possibility that, at 86, Ken Loach may go above and beyond that by winning a third Palme for his new film, The Old Oak. Loach first won in 2006 with the historical Irish drama The Wind That Shakes the Barley, then doubled up in 2016 with I, Daniel Blake, a caustic study of Britain’s healthcare crisis. After that came Sorry, We Missed You, a no-less withering look at the punitive gig economy. Like the latter two films, The Old Oak is set in the North East of England and completes an unofficial trilogy, this time with a slightly more optimistic bent. Like all of Loach’s output since 1996, it was written by Paul Laverty, and the pair sat down with Damon Wise to discuss the film’s themes of humanity and social responsibility.
A picture of Austin Hill with his arm around his dad, Mark, on holiday in Greece in 2021 captures the love between them. It was taken just two weeks after Mark had been diagnosed with bowel cancer.
The dignity of labor is explored with gentle humor and a very melancholy sense of joie de vivre in Wim Wenders’ second 2023 Cannes entry after his 3D documentary Anselm. Shot entirely in Japan, with very little English spoken, Perfect Days is an unusual film from a westerner since it does nothing to “other” a country that is often romanticized as a series of specific cultural signifiers (as in the well-meaning Lost in Translation, for example). It’s a compliment to say that Jim Jarmusch could have made it.
Naman Ramachandran British actor Tobias Menzies, Emmy winner for Netflix’s “The Crown,” will next be seen in A24’s “You Hurt My Feelings,” directed by Nicole Holofcener. In the film, which bowed at Sundance earlier this year, Menzies plays Don, a psychologist whose long-standing happy marriage to author Beth (Julia Louis-Dreyfus) is upended when she overhears his honest reaction to her latest book. Menzies says that the initial brief provided by Holofcener was about a key aspect of his character – his insecurities about his looks and ageing. Going into the project, both Menzies and Holofcener, whose credits include comedy-drama films “Walking and Talking” (1996), “Friends with Money” (2006) and “Enough Said” (2013), were already keen to work with each other. The director cast the London-born star after watching “This Way Up,” the BAFTA-winning British television comedy in which he played straight man to stand-up comic Aisling Bea.
Leo Barraclough International Features Editor Leonardo Di Caprio, Tobey Maguire, Michael Douglas, Catherine Zeta-Jones and Queen Latifah were among the guests at Aston Martin’s 110th anniversary party Wednesday at Hotel du Cap-Eden-Roc, on the French Riviera. The luxury car company also unveiled the first in a new generation of sportscars, the DB12. Other actors in attendance included Kate Beckinsale, James Marsden and James Bond actor Jeffrey Wright. They were joined by singer-songwriter Adam Lambert. The world of fashion was represented by leading models Winnie Harlow, Lais Ribeiro, Alessandra Ambrosio and Poppy Delevingne.
The ladies of Aespa just made their Cannes Film Festival debut!
Mubi has snapped up rights to the acclaimed feature Fallen Leaves, written and directed by Aki Kaurismäki, in a competitive situation, following its world premiere in Official Competition at the Cannes Film Festival.
Joe Alwyn has attended a dinner hosted by Celine artistic director Hedi Slimane during the 2023 Cannes Film Festival. The British actor was photographed at the event at Hotel du Cap-Eden Roc on Monday night (22 May). It marks the 32-year-old’s first appearance at a public event since he and Taylor Swift reportedly split up in April after six years together.
#TheFlashMovie pic.twitter.com/Eadn1lVYcQAlfred Pennyworth is played by English actor Jeremy Irons, who previously played the character in the films “Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice” and “Justice League.” Irons brought his own spin to the iconic character, portraying Alfred as a hero with a small “h.” “Alfred’s not a superhero, but in some small, retiring way, I think he could be regarded with a small ‘h’ as a bit of a hero,” Irons previously told Screenrant. “I think he’s a good calming influence, he’s a good advisor.
Dapper Dude! Joe Alwyn was a fashionable sight in Cannes, France, on Monday, May 22.
Irina Shayk just stepped out in one of her most daring looks yet!
Bleak, clean spaces arranged in ominously geometrical order: Jessica Hausner’s eye for threatening design was destined to alight, sooner or later, on a boarding school. Our first glimpse of the expensive English boarding school for talented teenagers is from somewhere on the ceiling, from where we watch students in a sporty pan-gender uniform – long shorts and shirts in a sickly acid green, surely the color of nausea – moving stackable plastic chairs to form a circle.
Most movies about England’s King Henry VIII like to focus on the mercurial monarch’s failed marriages. His six wives have been collectively described as divorced, died, beheaded, divorced, beheaded, survived. That last one, the little talked-about Katherine Parr, had the distinction of outlasting Henry — their marriage was about four years as he started to succumb to the result of hard living. She was there during that time, but also a wife who if she weren’t so connected to the King easily could have qualified as a feminist. She not only was the first English woman to have a book published, was privately a radical Protestant in an England that had been staunchly Catholic, but also a sharply intelligent woman who had a head on her shoulders and was determined to keep it there.
Nick Vivarelli International Correspondent Adrian Wootton, CEO of Film London and the British Film Commission, will preside over the jury of the Malta Film Commission’s inaugural Mediterrane Film Festival celebrating movies from the Mediterranean Basin. The fest, which will take place in Valletta, Malta’s capital, and other locations on the island between June 25-30, will showcase films from each of the MED9 nations, an alliance of nine Mediterranean and Southern European Union member states. It comprises: Croatia, Cyprus, France, Greece, Italy, Malta, Portugal, Slovenia and Spain. Besides Wotton the other jury members are “Triangle Of Sadness”actor Zlatko Burić; Cypriot filmmaker Tonia Mishiali; French actor and director Vahina Giocante; Greek producer Amanda Livanou; Italian journalist Boris Sollazzo; Maltese critic Mario Azzopardi; Portuguese journalist and programmer José Vieira Mendes; Slovenian journalist Tina Poglajen; and Spanish programmer Carlos Reviriego.