No one could accuse the Venice Festival, one of the oldest in the world, of trying to ape Cannes. But if the French festival is still considered the best in the world, Venice is fast catching up. Year after year,…
Author: Derek Malcolm
Tea and buns with Laurel and Hardy
As someone who met Orson Welles, Luis Buñuel, John Ford, Satyajit Ray, Howard Hawks, Katharine Hepburn, Charlie Chaplin and many others in the course of a long stint as the Guardian’s film critic, I am often asked who was my…
Tagged with: Laurel and Hardy
75th Venice International Film Festival
The 75th Venice Festival has recently managed to trump Cannes where its opening films are concerned. Gravity and La La Land won Oscars and no doubt Damien Chazelle’s The First Man, the story of Armstrong’s moon landing, will get nominated…
Cannes Festival
I’ve been going to the Cannes Festival for over thirty years, and there are two things that are certain. It’s totally changed from the old days when you could meet someone like Joe Losey on the Croisette and take a…
Cannes 2018 roundup
Cannes 2018 was strange affair, punctuated by controversy (the refusal to screen Netflix films unless they were guaranteed cinema exhibition, and the march up the red carpet by 80 or so women, lead by Kate Blanchett, head of this year’s…
Cannes 2018
There are plenty of big names to come, but the first week of the Cannes Festival was rather less than uplifting. This, after all, is the most prestigious film festival in the world and one expects a lot. But the…
Cannes Festival 2018
There may be no British film in the competition at the Cannes Festival this year, but at least one of the hot stories of the crowded annual jamboree concerns Terry Gilliam of Monty Python fame, whose The Man who killed…
Christine Keeler
10 years ago I was unexpectedly outed as Christine Keeler’s “favourite public school lover”. I remember Roger Alton, then of The Times but formerly the opening bat in the Guardian cricket team I captained, pleading with me to tell all…
Shashi Kapoor obituary
I was once taken to a cricket match in Bombay by Shashi Kapoor, the great Bollywood star, who has died aged 79 after a long spell of illness. As his open-topped car sped from his house to the ground, whenever…
Films not to miss from Venice
Frederick Wiseman’s Ex Libris: New York Public Library Wiseman’s three-hour plus Ex Libris is not what you’d expect. It’s an eloquent summation of one of the greatest libraries in America, and possibly the world, where talks, discussions, concerts, instructive courses…
Tagged with: Venice Festival 2017
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