News

Shelley Duvall, the iconic actress known for her distinctive voice, striking appearance, and memorable performances, passed away on July 11, 2024. She was 75 years old. Duvall’s contributions to film and television left an indelible mark on the entertainment industry, and her death is a significant loss to the world of cinema. Duvall’s cause of death was due to complications from diabetes, and she was bedridden for several months prior to her passing. Her longtime partner Dan Gilroy says the actress died in her sleep sometime after midnight.

Early Life and Career Beginnings

Shelley Alexis Duvall was born on July 7, 1949, in Fort Worth, Texas. Her early life was far from the limelight, as she initially pursued a degree in nutrition and diet therapy. However, her life took an unexpected turn when she was discovered by director Robert Altman at a party. Altman saw something unique in Duvall, leading to her film...

The Apprentice film explores Trump's real estate beginnings and relationship with mentor Roy Cohn in a corrupt world. Sebastian Stan portrays a young Trump, with Jeremy Strong as Roy Cohn. Maria Bakalova and Martin Donovan also star. The movie, premiering at Cannes, reveals Trump's rise before The Apprentice.

An early glimpse of Ali Abbasi's The Apprentice reveals Sebastian Stan portraying a young Donald Trump, with Jeremy Strong playing Roy Cohn, in an intriguing first-look image (via Vanity Fair). The upcoming film, which will premiere at the Cannes Film Festival next month, is described as an exploration of power and ambition set in a world of corruption and deceit. The film examines Trump's efforts to build his real estate business in New York in the '70s and '80s, also digging into his relationship with infamous attorney Cohn. Alongside Stan and Strong, Maria Bakalova and Martin Donovan also star,...

Josephine Tewson, star of Keeping Up Appearances and Last of the Summer Wine, has died at the age of 91.

She died on Thursday night (18 August) at Denville Hall, a retirement home for actors in Northwood, northeast London, her agent said.

The Hampstead-born star trained at London’s Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, graduating in 1952.

She went on to play small parts in the Sixties TV series Z-Cars and The Charlie Drake Show, and appeared in sketches with comedians Ronnie Corbett and Ronnie Barker in Hark at Barker and Frost on Sunday.

She also played Edna Hawkins in the first six series of the Eighties and Nineties ITV sitcom Shelley.

Tewson was best known for playing Elizabeth Warden, anxious neighbour and reluctant best friend of the stuck-up social climber Hyacinth Bucket in the adored Nineties BBC sitcom Keeping Up Appearances.

She collaborated with that show’s writer Roy Clarke again for...

A drastic departure from his prior films “Border” and “Shelley,” Ali Abbasi’s newest film, “Holy Spider,” draws inspiration from the 2000-2001 crimes and subsequent trial of Saeed Hanaei (played here by Mehdi Bajestani), a war veteran-turned-serial killer in the Iranian city of Mashhad who murdered 16 sex workers, claiming that he was cleansing the holy city of sinners and corruption in the name of Islam.

Continue reading ‘Holy Spider’ Review: Ali Abbasi’s Iranian True Crime Procedural Underwhelms [Cannes] at The Playlist.

It is hard to watch the brutalization of women on screen, especially when you know it is a re-creation of an actual crime. But it is harder still — rightly, valuably so — if you’ve been made to notice the way this woman’s lipstick is smeared over her cracked lips, if you’ve seen the old bruises that mottle that woman’s body beneath her chador, or watched her carefully stash her flats in a crinkled plastic bag as she switches into heels in a dingy bathroom. Saeed Hanaei, the real-life serial killer reimagined in Ali Abbasi’s tense and convincing procedural, believed that God was behind his grand mission to rid his city of prostitutes. But in “Holy Spider,” the devil is in those devastating details.

Hanaei, here portrayed with brave understatement by affable Iranian actor Mehdi Bajestani, was a builder, a family man, a resident of Iran’s...

The Cannes Film Festival is best-known for its lavish parties and stunning red carpets, but the celebration of cinema has also often been colored by political concerns. This year, promises to be an unusually turbulent one.

After all, filmmakers, studio executives and movie lovers are assembling in the South of France as the specter of war in Ukraine and rising autocracies around the world threaten to overshadow the good times. Indeed, the loudest applause on Cannes’ opening night were reserved for Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky, who made a special appearance via video link in which he invoked Charlie Chaplin’s “The Great Dictator,” a satire of Nazism, to remind the audience of the powerful role movies can play.

“Hundreds of people die every day,” Zelensky said. “Will cinema stay silent, or will it talk about it? If there is a dictator, if there is a war for freedom, again, it all depends on our unity.

"Listen patiently... We, who are the last men, earnestly desire to communicate with you." Films Boutique has released the first promo teaser for the experimental feature Last and First Men, which is premiering at the Berlin Film Festival this month. This is the only feature film directed by iconic Icelandic composer Jóhann Jóhannsson, who made this before he died in 2018. Featuring narration by Tilda Swinton. This feature is a repackaged version of the video Jóhannsson made for his touring concerts, inspired by Dutch photographer Jan Kempenaers' 2010 art book "Spomenik" about oddly shaped war monuments. It was shot on 16mm B&w film by acclaimed Norwegian cinematographer Sturla Brandth Grøvlen. Indiewire describes this as "Jóhannsson’s own artistic riff on the avant-garde style of Koyaanisqatsi," although it seems to be something else quite unique. There's not much to this teaser so far, but have a look anyway. I am certainly curious...

Here’s the latest episode of the The Filmmakers Podcast, part of the ever-growing podcast roster here on Nerdly. If you haven’t heard the show yet, you can check out previous episodes on the official podcast site, whilst we’ll be featuring each and every new episode as it premieres.

For those unfamiliar, with the series, The Filmmakers Podcast is a podcast about how to make films from micro budget indie films to bigger budget studio films and everything in-between. Our hosts Giles Alderson, Dan Richardson, Andrew Rodger and Cristian James talk how to get films made, how to actually make them and how to try not to f… it up in their very humble opinion. Guests will come on and chat about their film making experiences from directors, writers, producers, screenwriters, actors, cinematographers and distributors. They also shoot the breeze about their new films, The Dare, World of Darkness,...

Wesley Mead Dec 20, 2016

Looking for some TV to fill you with festive cheer? Here are the next 20 episodes in our list of the top 100 Xmas TV episodes ever...

This article first appeared in December 2015. Read entries 100 - 81 on this list, here.

See related Alien: Covenant - its new title's meaning & other questions

Since the medium’s infancy, viewers have enjoyed sharing holidays with their favourite television characters. We grow invested in our friends on screen over the years; spending Christmas with them is a rite of passage, a chance for us to share tradition from our world with the fictional ones we see on screen. Some shows embrace the season wholeheartedly, characters in good spirits and enjoying the trappings of the season; others skew a little darker, bringing the more oppressive, burdensome side of the holidays to life. Either way, Christmas episodes tend to demonstrate the strengths of our favourite series,...

facebook

twitter

google+

Looking for some TV to fill you with festive cheer? Here are the next 20 episodes in our list of the top 100 Xmas TV episodes ever...

Read entries 100 - 81 on this list, here.

Since the medium’s infancy, viewers have enjoyed sharing holidays with their favourite television characters. We grow invested in our friends on screen over the years; spending Christmas with them is a rite of passage, a chance for us to share tradition from our world with the fictional ones we see on screen. Some shows embrace the season wholeheartedly, characters in good spirits and enjoying the trappings of the season; others skew a little darker, bringing the more oppressive, burdensome side of the holidays to life. Either way, Christmas episodes tend to demonstrate the strengths of our favourite series, and it’s long been a festive ritual of mine to wheel out old DVD sets...

A giant frog with delusions of grandeur? Nope, you haven't stumbled upon an episode of Dangermouse in which our hero's arch enemy - and dead ringer for Ann Widdecombe - Baron Greenback is plotting revenge, but in fact an episode of Doctor Who called Four To Doomsday.

Sounds crazy? Well, you'd be right. But then only in the previous season, we had a talking cactus with designs on the world, so the term "silly" is neither here nor there. Even so, Four To Doomsday requires an awful lot of tolerance on the viewer's part when it comes to dramatic credibility.

Maybe the common link here is Terence Dudley, who, after directing 1980's Meglos, switched his hat to writing. It has to be said though that his contributions to Doctor Who can charitably be described as eccentric. Four To Doomsday gives the impression of a writer who hasn't seen Doctor Who much.

Actor best known for his role in The Sweeney

For decades a versatile figure in regional theatre, both behind and in front of the footlights, the actor Garfield Morgan, who has died aged 78, achieved national recognition as Frank Haskins in the mould-breaking action series The Sweeney (Thames, 1975-78), having spent years playing police officers on screen. He brought narrow eyes and a habitually rueful expression to the role of Haskins, who was continually beset by ulcers and colds and whose somewhat puritanical nature distanced him from his charges, played by John Thaw and Dennis Waterman.

Born and raised in Birmingham, Morgan was initially apprenticed to a dental mechanic. His professional debut was in July 1953, in Cannon Hill Park, Birmingham, as part of the Arena Theatre Company, for the city's sixth summer theatre festival. Also in the company was the future director Clifford Williams.

The following month, Morgan was a founder member of the Marlowe Players,...