Steven Berkoff
John Morrish Earlier this year, an actor/writer took to the stage in an off-West End theatre for a demanding one-man show. It tackled an incendiary topic, and portrayed a character who – while still innocent pending trial – is no-one’s idea of lovable. The character was Harvey Weinstein. The actor taking on the challenge, and risking the wrath of the entire #metoo generation, was 81 years old. This was an extraordinary development…
Sorry To Bother You
John Morrish Sorry To Bother You, one of the surprise hits of 2018, is a strange film by any standards, but then it had a very odd genesis. The film is a powerful, funny, unorthodox satire by Raymond Riley, born 1971, better known as the rapper Boots Riley. Riley is a highly political artist: his parents were social rights activists in Chicago and he has been associated with left-wing groups…
Polish Cinema
John Morrish Cinema in Poland started early. Two Poles, a chemist called Piotr Lebiedziński and an inventor, Kazimierz Prószyńsk, created a simple movie camera, the pleograph, in 1893. This was at least a year before the Lumière Brothers’ famous screenings in Paris. In the first years of the next century, Prószyński went on to create short documentary films about Warsaw life. The first Polish film studio was called Pleograf, after…
Scandinavian Drama at Cheltenham International Festival of Film.
By John Morrish Snow and ice. Deep conversations about God and his absence. Blithe sunlit romance and bitter divorce. Disputes about farm animals. The clichés about Scandinavian film come thick and fast, but the region has always had so much more to offer. In over a century of cinema, the Nordic countries – Sweden, Denmark, Norway, Finland and Iceland – have produced films in all styles, from action to broad comedy, and…
Women in Film
In the last few years, the role of women in the film industry has become a burning issue. And not before time. The statistics are dismaying. Although women have always been represented on screen, they have often played uninteresting and demeaning roles. When it comes to the crafts of film-making, their representation is vanishingly small. A survey of the highest-grossing 250 films in America in 2018 showed only eight per…