News

Noomi Rapace will play the most influential female opera singer of the 20th century in what is set to be one of the most glamorous projects on the market as Content commences talks with buyers this week.

Niki Caro is attached to direct the Maria Callas biopic from a screenplay she adapted from Alfonso Signorini’s biography Too Proud, Too Fragile.

Callas centres on the American-born Greek soprano’s relationship in her final years with shipping magnate Aristotle Onassis, whom she met while married to Giovanni Battista Meneghini.

Guido, Nicola and Marco De Angelis of Italy’s De Angelis Group are producing alongside René Bastian, Linda Moran and Victoria Bousis of New York-based Belladonna Productions and Ben Latham-Jones of the UK’s Ealing Studios and Londinium Films.

James Spring of Ealing Studios, Brett Thornquest of Eclectic Vision in Australia, Jason Van Eman of Weathervane and Content film president Jamie Carmichael serve as executive producers.

“This movie is...

Knowing a film is to be Hayao Miyazaki’s last is something you don’t really want to hear, but The Wind Rises shows why he is such a master of his art. Studio Ghibli is a company that I regard as being the best at what they do, and that is no small thing when you think of their competition. If this truly is his last film, then Miyazaki leaves us with a masterpiece.

Loosely based on the life story of Jiro Horikoshi the Japanese plane designer who created the Zero fighter plane used in World War 2 it is the story of hardship, and the effects of earthquakes, tuberculosis epidemics and economic depression on Japan that pushes them into the industrial age of war. Horikoshi’s dream was to build planes at a time when something new was needed and he had the skill to do it. Though his...

Director: Hayao Miyazaki; Screenwriter: Hayao Miyazaki; Starring: Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Emily Blunt, John Krasinski, William H Macy, Stanley Tucci, Werner Herzog; Running time: 127 mins; Certificate: PG

Hayao Miyazaki's big screen swan song The Wind Rises is a film as elegant and masterfully-constructed as the aircraft that lie at the heart of its story. More mature in outlook and thematic weight than Miyazaki's recent offerings Ponyo and Howl's Moving Castle, his 11th feature centres on Jiro Horikoshi, the Japanese engineer who pushed the boundaries of aircraft design in between the World Wars.

Jiro is an idealist and a dreamer, as a young boy he yearns to be a pilot but weak eye sight means he must settle on building planes. Legendary Italian engineer Giovanni Battista Caproni serves as his inspiration, mentoring Miyazaki's bespectacled hero in a series of stunningly-realised fantasy sequences.

"Airplanes are beautiful dreams," Caproni tells the young Jiro at one point.

Visually ravishing, as you’d expect from Hayao Miyazaki, but there is, disappointingly, no drama and no conflict here. I’m “biast” (pro): love Studio Ghibli flicks

I’m “biast” (con): nothing

(what is this about? see my critic’s minifesto)

It’s visually ravishing, of course; we’ve come to expect as much from Studio Ghibli. Legendary filmmaker Hayao Miyazaki (Ponyo) concocts gorgeous sequences that sit somewhere between steampunk engineering fantasias and grounded historical between-the-wars nostalgias. But there’s no drama and no conflict in this semifictionalized tale of Jiro Horikoshi. He dreamed of designing “beautiful airplanes” from his early-20th-century boyhood… and no obstacles stand in his way along the path to joining Mitsubishi as an aeronautical engineer. He doesn’t want to make aircraft for warfare, but that’s the direction things are moving in throughout the 1930s, and so he helps to create and...

One of last year's most dazzling cinematic experiences was Hayao Miyazaki's supposedly final film "The Wind Rises."

This traditionally animated 2D stunner charts the life of Jiro Horikoshi, a Japanese designer who would go on to mold the Japanese Zero, a sleek fighter jet that would be instrumental in the country's World War II operations. While some have decried the film for romanticizing a war monger, it's really a story of inspiration, invention and imagination -- how his designs were used is almost beside the point. You'll be able to form your own opinion soon enough -- the movie is about to get a wide release, with an all-new English language dub (supervised by Steven Spielberg confederate Frank Marshall), just in time for the Oscars, where it's in the running for Best Animated Feature. And what's more -- we have an exclusive clip!

The clip features Jiro (here voiced...

Until I actually watched The Wind Rises, I could not believe Hayao Miyazaki was truly retiring.

It isn’t that I refused to believe it. Miyazaki-san may be my favorite filmmaker, and one who I would love to see many more films from, but everything, including great artistic careers, is finite, and that is a fact I can accept. No, what prevented me from truly accepting the notion of Miyazaki’s filmmaking days coming to an end was that he has, simply put, said all this before. His post-Mononoke and post-Spirited Away retirements may not have been as ‘official’ as this one, but his intention to walk away from filmmaking was clear and understandable. In both cases, it was the desire to create that brought him back, the allure of a great idea that led him to make art once more. So while I fully believed Miyazaki was being...

The Royal Academy of Arts announces details of exhibition called Dennis Hopper: The Lost Album

More than 400 previously unseen photographs from the 1960s, which were discovered in cardboard boxes after the death of the actor Dennis Hopper, are to go on display in Britain for the first time.

The Royal Academy of Arts on Friday announced details of an exhibition called Dennis Hopper: The Lost Album.

Hopper is best known as a hell-raising actor and director with films such as Easy Rider, Apocalypse Now and Blue Velvet. But he was also a respected artist and photographer.

The Ra's director of exhibitions, Kathleen Soriano, said the discovery of the boxes by his family, after his death in 2010, revealed "just how obsessively Hopper took photographs with a 35mm Nikon camera that his wife gave him after their house, with all his paintings in it, was destroyed by fire in 1961".

Hopper took photographs of everything.

Knowing The Wind Rises is expected to be writer/director Hayao Miyazaki's final feature film brings with it a certain sense of want, expectation and hope. Miyazaki has given us some of the best animated films cinema has ever seen from films such as Spirited Away, My Neighbor Totoro and any countless number of personal favorites you and I have beyond that. To imagine such a splendid cinematic era coming to an end brings with it a bit of disappointment as well, which is only emphasized due to the fact this final effort lands with a bit of a dull thud. Taking his past filmography into consideration, The Wind Rises is a bit of a departure from what we've come to expect from the animation icon. It's a much darker, more down-to-earth drama. The fantastical elements he usually employs are less a part of the story and more a...