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Readers suggest the 10 best actor transformations

Aurora Percannella — Thu, 03 Dec 2015 12:00:12 GMT

Last week we brought you our 10 best transformations by actors in film. Here you suggest who should have made the list.

Kind Hearts and Coronets

The best films of 2015 so far – UK

Guardian film — Tue, 01 Sep 2015 12:30:09 GMT

From Birdman to Mistress America, we gather together the best movies released in the UK this year, updated weekly

Birdman
Director: Alejandro González Iñárritu
Running time: 119 minutes
Certificate: 15
One-shot, double-Oscar-winning comedy starring Michael Keaton as an actor who tries to put his movie superhero past behind him by classying it up on Broadway.

When the laughter stops: how sitcom stars have fared in Hollywood

Stephen Puddicombe — Mon, 13 Jul 2015 11:49:40 GMT

For every Chris Pratt, Woody Harrelson and Amy Poehler, there is a Sofia Vergara or Jennifer Aniston. We look at the former small-screen stars who made the biggest splash in Hollywood

Amy Poehler is one of the most popular sitcom stars of recent years, thanks to her role in Parks and Recreation and awards-show turns with Tina Fey. She has seamlessly made the transition from TV to the big screen via Pixar’s latest hit, Inside Out. But such a path has proven hazardous in the past. Many TV comedy stars have briefly popped up on the big screen, only to retreat back to their comfort zone; some have become something of a joke, and others have been let down by the different demands of Hollywood. Few have gone on to enjoy a prolonged career making movies – fewer still making good movies. But who has managed to pull it off? We sort 25 sitcom stars into the ones whose careers went big, and those who stayed small.

Mark Schultz on Foxcatcher: why I threatened to kill its director

Alex Godfrey — Thu, 21 May 2015 06:02:00 GMT

Wrestler Mark Schultz was thrilled with Foxcatcher, the Oscar-nominated film about his life. But then it started being compared to Behind the Candelabra …

I approach Mark Schultz with caution. In 1996, the ex-wrestler’s brother, Dave, was shot dead by the man who had been sponsoring them both, John du Pont. Discussing such a tragedy requires sensitivity – and Schultz has proved himself to be a social media firecracker. Having initially been wildly supportive of Foxcatcher, Bennett Miller’s dramatisation of his story, Schultz then viciously rejected the film, after reading how some critics interpreted it.

“You think I’m going to sit back and watch you destroy my name and the reputation I sweat blood for?” he spat at Miller on Twitter. “You ain’t seen nothing yet, dude.” Similar threats followed: Schultz hated the film now, hated Miller, hated everything “that scum” touched. Then, a fortnight later, he apologised, saying he loved Foxcatcher, calling Miller “the greatest director ever”. He was, he wrote, “temporarily insane”.

Foxcatcher; A Most Violent Year; Into the Woods; Altman; Grace and Frankie – review

Guy Lodge — Sun, 17 May 2015 06:00:16 GMT

The American Dream goes wrong, Disney goes dark, a tribute to director Robert Altman and the return of a few old friends

If, amid the post-election fug of Great British doomsaying, it would be of some consolation to focus on the soured American Dream instead, this week’s DVD release slate has your back. Two terrific films take on the corruptive influence of capitalism and the creeping defeat of self-made success in not-quite-modern America.

In Bennett Miller’s Foxcatcher (Entertainment One, 15), the will to win and deference to team spirit that are the pillars of many a rousing sports movie here take an acrid, corruptive turn. This story of Olympic gold medallists Mark and Dave Schultz, brothers whose bond was insidiously exploited by sociopathic billionaire and self-styled wrestling guru John du Pont, has a blunt, psychologically jarring ending that many of us already know; if it were fiction, you’d say it hardly made sense. Miller isn’t interested in unpicking the precise motivations behind the crime in question. Rather, this slate-skied mood piece is concerned with building the kind of oppressive atmosphere between discordant male egos that makes any fallout seem possible.

The best films of 2015 so far – Australia

Guardian Film — Wed, 06 May 2015 08:10:56 GMT

Gathering the best movies released in Australia this year, updated weekly

The Imitation Game
Director: Morten Tyldum
Running time: 114 minutes
Certificate: M
Oscar-winning drama that tells the true story of Alan Turing whose code-breaking helped to win the second world war while homophobic laws hastened his tragic downfall.

Mark Ruffalo: five best moments

Benjamin Lee — Fri, 24 Apr 2015 06:00:07 GMT

We pick our favourite scenes starring the twice-Oscar-nominated actor, who is reprising his role as the tortured and irritable Bruce Banner in Avengers: Age of Ultron. But which would you choose?

When Mark Ruffalo initially broke on to the scene, his nervy awkwardness didn’t scream out, “Please cast me in a superhero movie.” But when playing the socially challenged Bruce Banner, whose unhinged temperament leads to his transformations into the Hulk, Ruffalo’s shiftiness becomes a major selling point.

In this week’s Avengers: Age of Ultron, Ruffalo returns to the greenest green screen in the business, to alternate between brooding and smashing. If you miss Ruffalo just being Ruffalo, without any CG help, here are his five best moments.

Oscars 2015: our final predictions on who will win the big prizes

Andrew Pulver — Sun, 22 Feb 2015 21:49:17 GMT

The Oscars kick off this evening – and you can follow the action with us from 2pm PT, 5pm ET and 10pm GMT. Here’s our final predictions in the key categories

Follow our live coverage of the Oscars 2015

This is the big one. After all the huffing and puffing, red-carpet showboating and shameless campaigning, after all the visits to obscure craft guilds and far-flung film festivals to scrape up extra votes, it’s time for the show. The 87th Academy awards may make or break careers, could thrust unknowns into the spotlight, or turn the previously-tolerated into the outright-ridiculed. The gargantuan, four-hour telecast has become a masterclass in product placement, Twitter-friendly stunts, and dead-eyed bonhomie; that, of course, is what makes it a great watch.

Plus, there’s one or two gongs to be dished out. This year has been particularly interesting with regard to the internal politics of the film industry, with American Sniper replacing Selma as the film that’s benefitting from real-world engagement, the most heavily campaigned movies – The Imitation Game, Wild, Foxcatcher – fading at the last, and the advance of what passes in Hollywood for avant-garde cinema – Boyhood, Birdman, Grand Budapest – sucking most of the awards oxygen their way.

Oscars 2015: Birdman and Boyhood set for a sumo contest

Peter Bradshaw — Sat, 21 Feb 2015 17:17:39 GMT

I’ll be on tenterhooks on Sunday night, hoping Richard Linklater’s coming-of-age classic gets the attention it deserves – though will Birdman’s Iñárritu take off with the best director gong? It’s all to play for as the ceremony nears

Cover the Academy Awards long enough, and a certain sheepish self-consciousness sets in. Look back at the ghosts of Oscars ceremonies past, and it’s like discovering old photos of yourself in once-trendy clothes. Yikes! Did we really devote all that brow-furrowing critical attention to Argo (best picture, 2012), an engaging but supremely middleweight true-life dramedy about the 1979 Iran hostage crisis? Did we really spend so much time reflecting upon Catherine Zeta-Jones (best supporting actress, 2002) and her competent performance in the musical Chicago? We did. As the late Christopher Hitchens remarked: it’s impossible to have a nourishing conversation about last year’s Oscars results.

But as it happens I am excited about this year’s Oscars – really and truly – because they are likely to honour a film which I think is a modern classic: Boyhood, directed by Richard Linklater. This is the time-lapse study of a child’s growth to adulthood, filmed for a fortnight or so annually for 12 years: an artwork of inspired simplicity and organic consistency, infused with pure generosity and love, and easily capable of riding out the backlash-lifecycle that always attends much-fancied films like this. (Nay-sayers and meh-sayers call it something knocked off from TV’s 7-Up, and wonder if it would have been praised as much if it was just an actor in incrementally increased ageing makeup. This, in the words of Caitlin Moran, is not just missing the point but dozing off on the train and finding the Point was three stations back.) Boyhood is a frontrunner to win best film, with a best supporting actress prize for Patricia Arquette, who plays the mother of the boy (Ellar Coltrane): Arquette deserves it for her heartbreaking moment of empty-nest agony and fear of death at the film’s end.

You don't know Oscar: can you beat the ultimate 2015 nominee quiz?

Thu, 19 Feb 2015 13:16:44 GMT

Nine exclusive games. Sixty movies. One mega-quiz. How well do you know this year’s films? Test your eyes, ears and cinematic knowledge – before it’s too late

Oscars 2015: what will win best picture?

Guy Lodge — Fri, 13 Feb 2015 15:53:21 GMT

It looks like a straight fight between Birdman and Boyhood – but can any of the other contenders make a dent in the tussle over the biggest Oscar of all?

Read the rest of the Oscar predictions here

So it all comes down to this. After three consecutive years of nine nominees in the newly elasticated best picture category, the Academy collectively (albeit not intentionally) elected to dock this year’s field by one. (Foxcatcher, with its surprise best director bid and four nominations besides, appears to have been the unlucky #9 finisher.) This slight shrinking of the roster feels appropriate for a race that has been more closely fought than usual – at least half this year’s best picture nominees have looked like potential winners at one point or another, though it appears to have boiled down to a squeaker between two oppositely-styled independents from the same mini-major studio.

Since the expansion of the best picture category, there’s been a near-annual slot for the previous year’s big Sundance winner – a tip of the hat to the scrappier strand of “true” independent cinema that has yet to enjoy its big Oscar moment, as opposed to the polished mid-range indies that are now the Academy’s bread and butter. So it is that Whiplash follows in the footsteps of Precious, Winter’s Bone and Beasts of the Southern Wild. And while it could convert a few of its five nominations to gold – JK Simmons has it locked, though I’m betting it will nab wins for adapted screenplay and editing too – most voters will deem the sweaty, shouty drumming drama not quite their tempo in the top category.

Berlin 2015 review: 54: The Director's Cut – a disco-era Cabaret thrusting its way to delirium

Ryan Gilbey — Thu, 12 Feb 2015 12:10:55 GMT

An ode to the decadence and sleaze of the glitterball era, 54 was sanitised beyond recognition before its first release. Now Mike Myers and Ryan Phillippe are revealed in all their hedonistic glory in this restoration of the original edit

Seventeen years before Steve Carell swapped comedy for drama, donned a prosthetic nose dusted with cocaine and lusted after a shirtless hunk in Foxcatcher, Mike Myers did all those things and more in 54, a love letter to the New York City disco scene of the late 1970s. Despite acclaim for Myers’s snivelling performance as Steve Rubell, co-owner of the disco mecca Studio 54, this frothy movie vanished as quickly as a freshly pricked bubble.

No wonder. The theatrical version had been slashed and scarred by its executive producer Harvey Weinstein. Apparently fearful that audiences would recoil from bisexual, morally ambivalent characters, Miramax snipped almost a third from the 100-minute movie and then dispatched its writer-director, Mark Christopher, to complete half an hour of reshoots. Fully sanitised, and with Neve Campbell promoted from cameo to love interest on account of her sudden fame in Scream, 54 was fatally compromised. Now the director’s cut, which received its world premiere this week at the Berlinale, brings the picture closer to Christopher’s idea of it as a disco-era Cabaret.

Oscars 2015: who will win best actor?

Guy Lodge — Wed, 11 Feb 2015 16:37:00 GMT

Considered by many to be locked on for Eddie Redmayne, the Academy could end up rewarding Bradley Cooper’s zeitgeist-storming lead in American Sniper

With the names Julianne Moore, JK Simmons and Patricia Arquette all but engraved on the other three trophies, best actor serves up the last vestige of suspense in the acting Oscar races. It’s been a hard-fought category throughout the season – at the nominations stage, it was a veritable bloodbath, with at least 10 perfectly conceivable contenders vying for half that number of slots. In another year, Jake Gyllenhaal, David Oyelowo, Ralph Fiennes, Timothy Spall and Oscar Isaac could have constituted a credible and competitive slate of nominees on their own. As it is, none made the cut. The field we’re left with isn’t quite as daring or diverse as it might have been (four of the five are in prestige biopics, for starters), but even at this late stage, it isn’t entirely predictable.

Some wags have suggested that Foxcatcher’s nominations for best actor and best makeup should have been granted in tandem: for many, the chief memory of Steve Carell’s brittle, spookily funny turn as psychotic multi-millionaire and self-styled wrestling coach John du Pont will be of the prosthetic hooter adorning (or obscuring) the sitcom star’s face. Yes, we all know the Academy’s weakness for so-called “transformative” work, and for primarily comic actors proving their dramatic chops. Yet it’d be selling Carell short to dismiss his performance as a naked Oscar play: it’s such a strange, insidious interpretation (beginning with that high, rusty vocal tone) that it could easily have turned off voters entirely. Carell’s buzz has dwindled since the film’s Cannes premiere last spring; when Bafta overrode his campaign and nominated him in the supporting race, many wondered if he should have targeted that award to begin with. But he’d have been an also-ran there, too: despite five nominations, Foxcatcher just isn’t a film the industry has taken to its heart.

Oscars 2015: who will win best director?

Guy Lodge — Mon, 09 Feb 2015 17:29:12 GMT

This one’s going down to the wire, but Birdman’s Alejandro González Iñárritu is most likely to fly off with this year’s top directing prize ahead of Boyhood’s Richard Linklater

Conventional Oscar wisdom has it that the best director award goes hand-in-hand with the night’s top prize: “How can the best-directed film not be the best film?” is the question asked by many, and while such an argument undersells the contribution of writers, producers and many others to the finished product, category statistics prove the Academy usually feels the same way.

For the past two years running, however, that logic has been upended – Ang Lee and Alfonso Cuarón the beneficiaries of the first consecutive splitting of the awards since 1951/52. You have to go back to the 1930s to find three mismatches in a row, but in a season where key precursor awards (including last weekend’s Baftas and Directors Guild of America awards) have demonstrated significant differences in opinion, such an outcome seems entirely possible.

Oscars 2015: who will win best original screenplay?

Guy Lodge — Mon, 02 Feb 2015 15:32:32 GMT

Sometimes a refuge for wild cards and risk takers, the best original screenplay category this year is dominated by big best picture hopefuls, including The Grand Budapest Hotel, Boyhood and Birdman

In some years, the best original screenplay category serves as an adventurous refuge from the conservatism of the overall best picture race. While comfy prestige adaptations have duked it out on the other end of the table, the Academy has recently taken advantage of the airier original field to hand Oscars to such leftfield talents as Pedro Almodóvar (Talk to Her), Charlie Kaufman (Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind) and, last year, Spike Jonze (Her).

This, however, is not one of those years. While the adapted race is being kept unpredictable by its relative softness, its original counterpart looks like a stiff contest between the three arguable best picture frontrunners. Don’t necessarily expect the outcome here to foreshadow the big one, however. This trophy could be the night’s key consolation prize, but which way round things will go is anyone’s guess.

Oscars 2015: who will win best supporting actor?

Guy Lodge — Mon, 26 Jan 2015 17:14:34 GMT

Four of the names on the best supporting actor ticket would be worthy picks – but only one is a shoo-in

• Read all the Oscar predictions

Just because people refer to an Oscar race as “competitive”, it doesn’t mean it’s an especially high-quality one. In some categories, multiple nominees of comparable mediocrity can fight for golden statuettes. In others, a surfeit of outstanding contenders are declared also-rans from the outset, simply because one nominee has unbeatable momentum. So it is in this year’s best supporting actor race, for which the word “race” is hardly fitting: four top-form actors have award-worthy work to offer, but one of them has had this whole thing licked for the better part of a year.

Note that I said four top-form actors. The exception, as agreed by pretty much everyone except those who voted to put him on the ballot – and even they can’t be entirely convinced – is Robert Duvall. A near-annual slot is reserved in this category for an esteemed veteran who has done a film the great service of showing up, usually to scowl in an ornery fashion before expiring wheezily on screen. In this regard, Duvall’s work in the title role of The Judge – a failed vehicle for Robert Downey Jr that has already slipped the minds of critics and audiences – is a textbook slot-filler; certainly, no other branch of the Academy thought the film merited their attention. But Duvall, an Oscar winner and seven-time nominee, is 84-years-old (for trivia hounds, that makes him the oldest man ever nominated for an acting Oscar), and working less frequently in roles even of this marginal calibre. Consider this a hat tip to a remarkable career, if not a remarkable performance.

American Sniper dispatches sceptics at UK box office

Charles Gant — Tue, 20 Jan 2015 17:49:40 GMT

British audiences flock to Clint Eastwood’s patriotic Iraq war drama, as best actor Oscar buzz intensifies around Bradley Cooper

The winner

When American Sniper, Wild, Whiplash and Testament of Youth were all slated to open on 16 January, it was by no means obvious that the first of these titles would debut with a sum nearly five times the amount of any of the other three. Director Clint Eastwood and star Bradley Cooper are strong marketable elements, but films about the Iraq war have tended to struggle with audiences, and the patriotically American flavour of the film might not have played so well in the UK. Any such scepticism has been banished by the result: £2.53m from 410 cinemas, yielding a site average of £6,172.

Mark Schultz apologises for angry outburst against Foxcatcher director

Ben Child — Mon, 19 Jan 2015 10:36:28 GMT

The former Olympic wrestler, whose life is depicted in the Oscar-nominated Foxcatcher, said he ‘feels terrible’ about attacking Bennett Miller, calling the film a ‘miracle’ that ‘is going to help wrestling’

This story features major spoilers for the film Foxcatcher
Steve Carell on Foxcatcher: ‘I’ve never cared about being taken seriously’
Bennett Miller on the ‘uneasy relationship between money and creativity’
The true story behind Foxcatcher

The US Olympic wrestling champion whose life is dramatised in the Oscar-nominated drama Foxcatcher has apologised for an expletive-ridden attack on director Bennett Miller over his portrayal in the film.

Mark Schultz, who is played by Channing Tatum in Foxcatcher, labelled Miller’s film a “miracle” and said he hugely regretted his previous criticisms. He called for the director to be rewarded with an Oscar at next month’s ceremony and lamented Tatum’s failure to secure a best actor nomination last week.

How I beat Foxcatcher star: UK wrestler tells of his battle with Olympic champion

Vanessa Thorpe arts and media correspondent — Sun, 18 Jan 2015 00:05:10 GMT

Brian Aspen recalls wrestling’s glory days and bout with Dave Schultz – and says he will watch sporting psychodrama tipped for Oscar success

It is a chilling tale of the dysfunctional world of elite sport that is drawing audiences into cinemas across Britain and last week earned actor Steve Carell an Oscar nomination. Foxcatcher, the acclaimed new film, tells of the fate of the Olympic gold medallist Dave Schultz who, together with his equally successful brother Mark, became a celebrated American wrestling champion. It is an understatement to say that Schultz’s story does not end well, but this weekend one British man will admit to envying him.

“When I think what Dave went on to achieve, I just wish I had been able to go on to train full-time like he did,” said Brian Aspen, 54, a former top bantamweight who once met, fought and beat Schultz at the junior world championships in 1974. “I would have improved just like he did if I had been able to get into a training programme.”

The big winners and losers at the Oscar 2015 nominations – in pictures

Guardian Staff — Thu, 15 Jan 2015 14:57:49 GMT

Here are the films of the year ranked by number of nominations, topped by Birdman and The Grand Budapest Hotel – plus those, like A Most Violent Year, that missed out