News

Martin Lawrence is returning for a sequel to his 1999 action comedy Blue Streak.

In what might just be the most out of left field sequel news we’ve reported this year, Martin Lawrence police comedy Blue Streak is getting a follow up, 25 years after the original.

Deadline has revealed that a sequel is in development at Sony. Lawrence is onboard as star and a producer through his company Run Tel Dat. The script has been written by Cole Maliska, but there’s currently no word on who might direct.

If you need a refresher, the original Blue Streak was inspired by, of all things, the 1965 Sid James and Dick Emery film The Big Job. It saw Lawrence play Miles, a jewel thief who disguises himself as a policeman in order to steal diamonds, but ends up being partnered with actual cop, Detective Carlson, played by Luke Wilson. Shenanigans ensue, and...

British publicist and marketing consultant Freddie Ross Hancock, whose clients included Sophia Loren, Julie Andrews and Benny Hill, and helped bring the British Academy of Film and Television Arts to New York, has died in the city at the age of 92.

Born Freda Ross in 1930 in North London, she learned the public relations business working for the Holland America cruise line for two years, after which she joined the Universal Film Corporation of America as assistant head of publicity in the U.K.

In the early 1950s she set up her own publicity firm, Freda Ross Associates, representing performers such as Benny Hill, Dick Emery, Bob Monkhouse, Terry Scott and Hugh Lloyd. She met comedian and actor Tony Hancock in 1954 when she was 24, and persuaded him to take her on as his publicist.

In 1959 Ross and Hancock began an affair, although he was married, but they lived together openly from...

British veteran comedy actress Josephine Tewson, who found her biggest success in her sixties starring in one of the 1990s’ biggest TV sitcoms, has died aged 91.

Tewson was best known for playing Elizabeth, the living-on-her-nerves neighbour of Hyacinth Bucket in Keeping Up Appearances, from 1990 to 1995.

But she appeared in a string of other shows too, such as Shelley with Hywel Bennet and No Appointment Necessary with Roy Kinnear. Following the success of Keeping Up Appearances, the show’s writer Roy Clarke gave Tewson the role of Miss Davenport in Last of the Summer Wine, which she played from 2003 to 2010.

In a statement, her agent Jean Diamond said: “It is with great sadness that we announce the passing of Josephine Tewson.”

The actress died on Thursday at Denville Hall, a care home for actors and other members of the entertainment industry in north London.

Several decades before she enjoyed sitcom stardom,...

Garland’s latest is like a scary-movie remake of Dick Emery, with excellent performances from Kinnear in a number of different roles, and Jessie Buckley

The grim accusation about men – the one about them being all alike – might occur to you during this film, along perhaps with the shrill defensive hashtag #notallmen. It is an unsubtle and schematic but very well-acted Brit folk-horror pastiche from the writer-director Alex Garland; it feels like a reverse-engineered version of The League of Gentlemen, with the overt comic intention concealed or denied. For me, the film never quite addresses the obvious dramatic implications of its startling central conceit: the wacky multirole casting of Rory Kinnear. But there’s undoubtedly something unnerving and outrageous in Kinnear’s performances, with the wigs and false teeth, like a scary-movie remake of The Dick Emery Show.

The setting is a picture-perfect Hertfordshire village with a sumptuously restored Elizabethan manor house,...

This big-budget prequel to the Peter Pan story adds little to the legacy of Jm Barrie’s classic

Like so many revisionist Peter Pan spin-offs, from Spielberg’s dismal Hook to Fernando Trueba’s unfairly maligned The Mad Monkey, Joe Wright’s multimillion-dollar prequel has already proved an unloved progeny, abandoned at the Us box office amid gloating “Pan gets panned” headlines. It’s actually not that bad, although crucially, it’s not that good either. With its piratical blend of Happy Feet-style reconfigured pop hits (Smells Like Teen Spirit, Blitzkrieg Bop), creaky funfair sets and weightlessly ropey wire-work, Pan is hardly timeless fare. Hugh Jackman plays Blackbeard, who steals away children to Neverland, like the bastard son of Johnny Depp and Dick Emery – all teeth, hair and gurning theatricality. He’s fun, but no match for Kathy Burke’s Mother Barnabas, or Adeel Akhtar’s consistently scene-stealing Sam Smiegel.

As Brendan O'Carroll stood in front of Digital Spy and hundreds of other guests at the biggest cinema screen in Ireland, surrounded by loved ones/co-stars for the world premiere of Mrs Brown's Boys D'Movie in Dublin on Wednesday (June 25), his voice noticeably cracked and buckled as he tried to process just how far his formidable comedy creation had come.

Mrs Brown's Boys is a comedy contradiction. The critics loathe it, but it has become a global phenomenon. It was the most-watched show of Christmas Day in the UK last year, while a combined total of over 22 million people tuned in for the two festive specials in 2012. The movie is reported to have taken around £1m in advance bookings.

Its detractors will argue that it showcases dated humour, and hold this aloft as an example of Brendan being lazy or lacking creativity. What they may not know is...

As Brendan O'Carroll stood in front of Digital Spy and hundreds of other guests at the biggest cinema screen in Ireland, surrounded by loved ones/co-stars for the world premiere of Mrs Brown's Boys D'Movie in Dublin on Wednesday (June 25), his voice noticeably cracked and buckled as he tried to process just how far his formidable comedy creation had come.

Mrs Brown's Boys is a comedy contradiction. The critics loathe it, but it has become a global phenomenon. It was the most-watched show of Christmas Day in the UK last year, while a combined total of over 22 million people tuned in for the two festive specials in 2012. The movie is reported to have taken around £1m in advance bookings.

Its detractors will argue that it showcases dated humour, and hold this aloft as an example of Brendan being lazy or lacking creativity. What they may not know is...

Prolific comedy actor who worked with Peter Sellers, Tony Hancock, Spike Milligan and Hattie Jacques

The stony-faced, beaky comedy actor Graham Stark, who has died aged 91, is best remembered for his appearances alongside Peter Sellers, notably in the Pink Panther movies. His familiar face and voice, on television and radio, were part of the essential furniture in the sitting room of our popular culture for more than half a century. A stalwart in the national postwar comedy boom led by Sellers, Tony Hancock, Spike Milligan, Dick Emery, Eric Sykes and Benny Hill, he worked with them all in a sort of unofficial supporting repertory company that also included Hattie Jacques, Deryck Guyler, Patricia Hayes and Arthur Mullard. He was also a man of surprising and various parts: child actor, trained dancer, film-maker, occasional writer, and dedicated and critically acclaimed photographer.

Like Gypsy Rose Lee, he had a resourceful and determined...

The classic animated musical Yellow Submarine was recently released on Blu-ray and DVD, featuring some of The Beatles' biggest hits. We're giving away copies of the Blu-ray to our readers along with limited-edition postcards in our Yellow Submarine contest! These hi-def discs are highly coveted, so enter today for your chance to win!

Winners Receive:

Yellow Submarine Blu-rayYellow Submarine limited edition postcards

Here's How To Win!

Just "Like" (fan) the MovieWeb Facebook page (below) and then leave a comment below telling us why these prizes must be yours!

If you already "Like" MovieWeb, just leave a comment below telling us why these prizes must be yours!

Once upon a time... or maybe twice, there was an unearthly paradise called Pepperland, a place where happiness and music reigned supreme. But all that was threatened when the terrible Blue Meanies declared war and sent in their army led by a menacing Flying...

The 47-year-old star of Scott & Bailey on adoption, acting and Russell T Davies

People can't place me. I'll be in the supermarket and they'll say, "Are you the woman who goes to the gym with my sister?" And I'll say, "I don't know. Probably." You can choose to go about your life attracting attention or deflecting it. I'm very happy to do my work and then slip into my private life.

I would go anywhere and do anything for Russell T Davies. We did some great work 10 years ago – the TV series Bob & Rose and The Second Coming. It's not true that he wanted me to be the first female Doctor Who, but I would if he asked, obviously.

Being adopted is different for everybody. For me it has always meant that at some level I don't belong anywhere. It wasn't my adoptive parents who created that feeling – they were...

'Cheeky cockney' character actor who graced British screens for more than 60 years

While working on the classic Ealing comedy Hue and Cry in 1947, the actor Harry Fowler, who has died aged 85, was given sage advice by one of his co-stars, Jack Warner: "Never turn anything down … stars come and go but as a character actor, you'll work until you're 90."

Fowler took the suggestion and proved its near veracity. Between his 1942 debut as Ern in Those Kids from Town until television appearances more than 60 years later, he notched up scores of feature films and innumerable TV shows, including three years as Corporal "Flogger" Hoskins in The Army Game.

He never attained star status but created a gallery of sparky characters, including minor villains, servicemen, reporters and tradesmen enriched by an ever-present cheeky smile and an authentic cockney accent. He was Smudge or Smiley, Nipper or Knocker, Bert or 'Orace, as...

Co-writer of TV sitcoms On the Buses and The Rag Trade

At the height of his writing partnership with Ronald Chesney, Ronald Wolfe, who has died aged 89 after a fall, enjoyed huge success with the sitcom On the Buses; its bawdy humour was panned by the critics but lapped up by the viewing public. Originally turned down by the BBC, the idea for a comedy based around the antics of a driver and conductor giving their inspector the runaround at the Luxton Bus Company appealed to Frank Muir, head of entertainment at the newly launched ITV company London Weekend Television.

Reg Varney played Stan Butler, at the wheel of the No 11, and Bob Grant was his lothario conductor, Jack. The pair made life hell for the miserable Inspector Blake (Stephen Lewis). Blakey's "Get that bus out" and "I 'ate you, Butler" were two of the most frequent lines that flowed...

W Stephen Gilbert writes: I first met Alastair Reid (obituary, 10 September) in 1972 when I was a trainee script editor at the BBC and shadowing a Penelope Mortimer play called Three's One under his direction. It was an awkward beast, centred on therapy sessions in which the analyst (the dapper Fulton Mackay) went unseen. Alastair got away with it – as I would now reckon – in the way he did much else, for he was he was fleet of foot, always pulling an eye-catching trick if he thought a script was flagging.

When later in the 70s I wrote about television, especially drama, in the London listings magazine Time Out, I would refer to Alastair in print as Flash Harry, which made him roar with laughter. I was thinking particularly of how he applied his inventiveness in his ghastly, lurid, modish feature Baby Love (1968).His later work matured into something lucid, judicious and humane.

Imagine Federico Fellini's I Vitelloni set in Reading in the early 1970s and sprinkled with Dick Emery-style gags and you'll come close to the essence of Cemetery Junction.

This is a heartfelt and intermittently funny account of growing up in – and trying to escape from – suburban England. Freddie (Christian Cook) takes a job selling life insurance under stern patriarch Mr Kendrick (Ralph Fiennes in Leonard Rossiter mode). His mum (Julia Davis) and dad (Gervais) mock his middle-class aspirations ("why do you want to go to Paris? There are parts of Reading you haven't seen?").

The directorial debut of Bad Santa writers Glenn Ficarra and John Requa, I love You Phillip Morris has stirred up a fair amount of controversy on its way to the screen. Still unreleased in America despite a warm reception at the Sundance Film Festival, largely because of explicit sex scenes (which, based on what's seen in the film have presumably been cut for release, either that or this is sad indictment of the conservative nature of American distributors). Telling the remarkably true story of Steven Russell, an ex-cop, Christian, family man who after surviving a car accident decides to come out as gay - the only problem is, as he remarks 'being gay is really expensive' so he becomes a con man, relying on numerous fake IDs and credit cards and injuring himself for the insurance money. Which eventually loses him his boyfriend and sees him end up in jail,...

The directorial debut of Bad Santa writers Glenn Ficarra and John Requa, I love You Phillip Morris has stirred up a fair amount of controversy on its way to the screen. Still unreleased in America despite a warm reception at the Sundance Film Festival, largely because of explicit sex scenes (which, based on what's seen in the film have presumably been cut for release, either that or this is sad indictment of the conservative nature of American distributors). Telling the remarkably true story of Steven Russell, an ex-cop, Christian, family man who after surviving a car accident decides to come out as gay - the only problem is, as he remarks 'being gay is really expensive' so he becomes a con man, relying on numerous fake IDs and credit cards and injuring himself for the insurance money. Which eventually loses him his boyfriend and sees him end up in jail,...

John Hurt brilliantly reprised his role as Quentin Crisp while a BBC adaptation of Henry James's ghost story kept us guessing, writes Phil Hogan

It's hard to imagine now the national astonishment that greeted The Naked Civil Servant when it first aired in the 1970s, an era when the sight of a man promenading in a floppy hat, eyeshadow and a chiffon scarf could only mean Dick Emery. The film – a moving adaptation of Quentin Crisp's then little-known memoir of his imperilled life in the 1930s as a brazen homosexual – made an icon of Crisp and a star of John Hurt, who caught his subject's manner and spirit with such eerie exactitude that it took The Elephant Man (1980) to shake it off. But Hurt buttoned himself back into the role without a fumble for An Englishman in New York, which saw the elderly Crisp taking his fabulous new...

I love the Beatles. Some might say I'm obsessed with them and the incredible burst of creative sonic wonderment that they built and embodied for such a short amount of time. In fact, if you enjoy "music," then you love them to even if you don't know it. That song you're humming in your head right now, regardless of genre, wouldn't be the same without them. Unless the song is completely influenced by the Beach Boys and their specific version of pop music. So, maybe you have an out after all. But even with the release of the monster Fab Four catalog in plastic guitar and colored button form, it makes absolutely no damned sense to me that Robert Zemeckis would want to remake Yellow Submarine. Here are some reasons why: The original film came out in 1968, and didn't really feature the Beatles themselves except for a cameo at the end. It's...