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Telefilm Canada and the Talent Fund are backing 17 film teams behind first features highlighting the country’s diverse storytelling communities including one with Guy Maddin on board as executive producer.

Maddin, whose Cannes entry Rumours is being positioned in the awards conversation, is on board the English-language dramedy Hue & Cry from director Maziyar Khatam. No further details were available at time of writing.

Telefilm Canada and the Talent Fund have committed C$3.45m (approximately Usd $2.5m) after receiving a “high volume” of projects for the fiscal year 2024-2025 representing nearly C$35m (approximately Usd $26m) in funding requests, based...

Roger Michell’s final feature film brings good-natured, Ealing-style brio to the 1961 theft of Goya’s portrait of the Duke of Wellington

As with so many of cinema’s most successful practitioners, the South Africa-born British film-maker Roger Michell, who died last September aged 65, was not an “auteur” with a singular distinctive style. On the contrary, he was a versatile craftsman who could turn his hand to a range of genres with ease. From the classic Richard Curtis romcom Notting Hill to the American thriller Changing Lanes and the deliciously twisty Daphne du Maurier dark romance My Cousin Rachel, Michell instinctively understood the differing demands of each story he was telling. He adapted Hanif Kureishi’s The Buddha of Suburbia for TV with great success, gave Anne Reid her finest role in the taboo-breaking, Kureishi-scripted drama The Mother, and directed a sorely underrated screen adaptation of Ian McEwan’s Enduring Love,...

Alfred Hitchcock puts Jane Wyman in harm’s way, as she tries to rescue her unworthy boyfriend Richard Todd from a murder charge. Is Jane proving her love, or are both of them being manipulated by a scheming actress, Marlene Dietrich? This is the movie in which Hitch inflicts a ‘frump complex’ on Ms. Wyman — she looks demoralized whenever she shares the screen with Dietrich. It’s also the movie that ponders the cinematic concept of ‘The Lying Flashback,’ which made perfect sense to Hitchcock but frustrated his audience. Also starring Michael Wilding, Alastair Sim and a cherry-picked list of English acting royalty.

Stage Fright

Blu-ray

Warner Archive Collection

1950 / B&w / 1:37 Academy / 110 min. / Available at Amazon.com / Street Date January 25, 2022 / 21.99

Starring: Jane Wyman, Marlene Dietrich, Michael Wilding, Richard Todd, Alastair Sim, Sybil Thorndike, Kay Walsh, Miles Malleson, Joyce Grenfell, André Morell, Patricia Hitchcock, Alfie Bass, Irene Handl. Lionel Jeffries.

Cinematography:...

During a three-hour discussion on a recent episode of “The Empire Film Podcast,” Edgar Wright and Quentin Tarantino revealed the existence of their makeshift quarantine movie club over the last 9 months. As Wright explained, “It’s nice. We’ve kept in touch in a sort of way that cinephiles do. It’s been one of the very few blessings of this [pandemic], the chance to disappear down a rabbit hole with the hours indoors that we have.” Tarantino added, “Edgar is more social than I am. It’s a big deal that I’ve been talking to him these past 9 months.”

A bulk of the film club was curated by none other than Martin Scorsese, who sent Wright a recommendation list of nearly 50 British films that Scorsese considers personal favorites. In the five months Wright spent in lockdown before resuming production on “Last Night in Soho” — and before he received the...

Stars: Florence Henderson, Pam Grier, Judge Reinhold, Randall Batnikoff, Susie Wall, Sally Eaton, David Wassilak, Randall Batinkoff | Written by Srikant Chellappa, Jack Snyder | Directed by Srikant Chellappa

Bad Grandmas recounts the misadventures of senior citizens Mimi (Henderson), Coralee (Grier), Bobbi (Wall), and Virginia (Eaton), whose quiet life is upended when Bobbi’s son-in-law, Jim (Wassilak), cons her and she loses her house. Mimi, the unofficial leader of the group, decides to take matters into her own hands but things spin out of control, and Jim is inadvertently killed. It isn’t long before local detective Randy McLemore (Batinkoff) begins to investigate. Adding further complication, and danger, is Jim’s criminal associate Harry Lovelace (Reinhold), who’s on the hunt to collect the money his partner owes him.

It’s been a while since we’ve an “old person’s” crime caper this solid and this funny – the last great example being The Maiden Heist,...

Stars: Florence Henderson, Pam Grier, Judge Reinhold, Randall Batnikoff, Susie Wall, Sally Eaton, David Wassilak, Randall Batinkoff | Written by Srikant Chellappa, Jack Snyder | Directed by Srikant Chellappa

Bad Grandmas recounts the misadventures of senior citizens Mimi (Henderson), Coralee (Grier), Bobbi (Wall), and Virginia (Eaton), whose quiet life is upended when Bobbi’s son-in-law, Jim (Wassilak), cons her and she loses her house. Mimi, the unofficial leader of the group, decides to take matters into her own hands but things spin out of control, and Jim is inadvertently killed. It isn’t long before local detective Randy McLemore (Batinkoff) begins to investigate. Adding further complication, and danger, is Jim’s criminal associate Harry Lovelace (Reinhold), who’s on the hunt to collect the money his partner owes him.

It’s been a while since we’ve an “old person’s” crime caper this solid and this funny – the last great example being The Maiden Heist,...

(Charles Crichton, 1950; StudioCanal, PG)

Made during Ealing Studios's peak period from the early 40s to the mid-1950s, Dance Hall is virtually the only movie produced by that male-dominated studio that might be considered a feminist work. Co-scripted by Diana Morgan, the sole woman admitted by Ealing boss Michael Balcon to his elite creative team, it looks at the world from the point of view of four young working-class women (Natasha Parry, Petula Clark, Jane Hylton and Diana Dors). They live in council flats, work in the same west London factory, and find romance and an escape from their drab lives at the local dance hall. Except for the middle-class accents, the film presents an honest, down-to-earth portrait of Britain in the postwar age of austerity. Typically for its time, Parry (future wife of the director Peter Brook) is torn between glamorous sports car-driving spiv Bonar Colleano and dull,...

Everything from Ang Lee's hotly anticipated adaptation of Life of Pi to Peter Jackson's epic take on Tolkien's The Hobbit

Life of Pi

Yann Martel's Life of Pi was one of the most commercially successful novels ever to win the Booker prize; now it has been turned into a keenly anticipated movie by Ang Lee. Pi Patel is the son of a zookeeper who decides to transport the family, and their entire menagerie, to Canada by sea. But a shipwreck leaves him and assorted animals on a single lifeboat, fighting for survival. Early film festival sightings have been hugely enthusiastic. 20 December.

Boxing Day

An intriguing and cerebral work from Bernard Rose, the maker of Mr Nice. This is the third of his Tolstoy adaptations, following Ivans xtc and The Kreutzer Sonata, all starring Danny (son of John) Huston. The source is the 1895 story Master and Man, and it...

We reveal the 10 debut films jostling for the big prize, ranging from a thriller about aliens in London to a documentary about Danish soldiers in Afghanistan

On Friday, we announced the shortlist for the Guardian first album award; today it's the turn of the first film. Previous winners have included The Arbor, Unrelated and Sleep Furiously; this year, after exhaustive polling of the Guardian's film writing team, the 10 debut films jostling for the big one take in everything from an alien-attack thriller set in London to a Danish Afghan-war documentary. We will lock the judges – who include Guardian film team Peter Bradshaw, Xan Brooks and Catherine Shoard – in a room next week, and hammer out a result. The winner will receive a handsome piece of glass and plastic purchased, as Michael Hann revealed on Friday, from the trophy shop round the corner. Nevertheless, bragging rights will be awesome.

So here's...

'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...

More lists, taking in Gregg Wallace's happiest feelings and Rihanna chucking up ribbons

8 movie characters you wouldn't want to fuck with, by Jordan Rizzle Kicks

1 Liam Neeson as Bryan Mills (in Taken)

Literally slaps up most of Paris in 96 hours.

2 Brad Pitt as Mickey O'Neil (in Snatch)

One-hit wonder.

3 Gary Oldman as Stansfield (in Leon)

No one plays gun-toting villains like Gary Oldman.

4 Vincent Cassel as Jacques (in Mesrine)

He holds up a judge at gunpoint. Enough said.

5 Keanu Reeves as Neo (in The Matrix)

Can literally do anything.

6 Denzel Washington as Eli (in The Book Of Eli)

Can batter people while wearing a backpack.

7 Samuel L Jackson as Jules (in Pulp Fiction)

Just wants to be the shepherd.

8 Ben Kingsley as Don Logan (in Sexy Beast)

Doesn't take no for an answer.

Rizzle Kicks' single Mama Do The Hump is out on Boxing Day

Alistair Darling's finest...

First seen in the summer of 1951, year of the Festival of Britain, this heist spoof is one of the most glorious gems in the Ealing crown, with a fine script by wartime copper Teb Clarke and marvellous black-and-white photography by Douglas Slocombe, who shot Hue and Cry and Kind Hearts and Coronets. The Old Vic's Guinness, speaking with a slight lisp that gives his sad, nervous nonentity a curious edge, and music hall comedian Stanley Holloway, all brash confidence, are perfect as the bullion thieves who recruit inept, small-time crooks Sid James and Alfie Bass for the eponymous band of south London villains. Inventive, economic, masterly.

ComedyCrimePhilip French

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Decades of rainy-Sunday screenings have blinded us to the true nature of postwar British cinema – freedom, naughtiness and a very black humour indeed

It begins with a parrot and a gaucho band. We're in South America – or a tiny patch of it, conjured some 60 years ago on a sound stage in London. The customers wear fur wraps and hair cream. The Atlantic stands, suspiciously immobile, beyond the window. And here is Alec Guinness, a British robber in rich retirement, sitting at a table, grinning a complacent grin and declaring his attachment to the Latin high life in that thin, high, gurgling voice. He is a prototypical Ronnie Biggs – and he's prepared to put his money where his mouth is.

When a conspicuously privileged middle-aged woman stops to talk, Guinness presses a roll of banknotes into her outstretched hands – a donation for the "victims of the revolution". A waiter receives a similarly thick wad of beneficence.

First-time director Joe Cornish excels in this very funny comedy about an alien invasion on a London council estate

Back in 1995, Mathieu Kassovitz gave us a brutal inner-city classic called La Haine (Hate). Now British comedian-turned-film-maker Joe Cornish has created something from much the same world. But this good-natured and endlessly likable debut could as well be called La Gaiété, or L'Espoir, or indeed L'Amour. It's a terrifically funny, gutsy action-adventure comedy about invaders from space attacking a council tower block in south London. The extra-terrestrials, with their hairy lupine bodies and glowing blue fangs, make aggressive planetfall right in the middle of a council estate, to the astonishment of a petty gang of lairy teens who have just mugged a defenceless nurse for her money and jewellery, and are about to move up to the big time, selling drugs for a paranoid gangland leader holed up in his reinforced strongroom,...

The Technicolor technician visited the London Film School, a bedrock of anarchic creativity, in 1968 and set a keen student on his way. Don Boyd has never forgotten his masterclass

I first met the great cinematographer and director Jack Cardiff when he came to the London Film School in 1968 to show his film The Girl on a Motorcycle, which starred Marianne Faithfull. I was a student there, and he presented a mesmeric lecture, which in simple, unpretentious terms explained the complexities of that film's almost hallucinogenic colour photography. He also talked about the lessons he had learned from the great painters about colour and light, lessons which had come from spending hours at the National Gallery.

In October 1968 the London Film School was a bedrock of anarchic creativity. Many of the students were engaged in the political flotsam and jetsam of the time – the Vietnam war being the most obvious target...