Kaleem Aftab

XXY

This, the winning film of the Cannes Critics’ Week International Grand Prix Prize brings to mind the opening line of Jeffrey Eugenedes bestseller Middlesex: ‘I was born twice: first, as a baby girl, on a remarkably smogless Detroit day in January of…

Crazy Love

Burt Pugach was working in the movie business when he spotted Linda Rise sitting on a park bench and decided he had to have her. Little did she know that he had a wife and disabled child already. From this moment on their story proves the adage that…

Ethan Hawke

Kaleem Aftab talks to actor, writer and now director Ethan Hawke about adapting his novel The Hottest State for the big screen

Jess Weixler

Jess Weixler is so all-American she looks like she’s jumped straight out of a photograph of high school cheerleaders. Her long blond hair and blue eyes make her the archetypal American beauty – just like all those Britney Spears wannabes lusted after by…

Happy as a Sandbag

Interview

A decade ago when La Vie de Jésus premiered at Cannes French filmmaker Dumont was hailed as the second-coming – the bastard love child of Robert Bresson or Pier Paolo Pasolini.

Klimt

Chilean Raul Ruiz is one of the most remarkable avant-garde filmmakers working today. Having exited Chile after the Allende assassination he found a home in Paris and made a series of films that played with narrative structure and form in a manner…

Two Days in Paris

Edinburgh International Film Festival A woman for all seasons Julie Delpy talks to Kaleem Aftab about her feature film directorial debut and tells him why she finds it hard to sit still

Knocked Up

Writer, director and producer Judd Apatow honed his skills on The Larry Sanders Show, winning a couple of Emmys for his writing. What he took from the experience was that the best comedies are not made up of jokes, but of observations on the ways people…

Rupert Everett

Film Special

FILM SPECIAL A man of many faces Innocent, plotter, maniac or queen? Rupert Everett claims to be all of the above but Kaleem Aftab finds the actor in sanguine form Rupert Everett just gets better and better. The actor and now producer of…

Transformers

ACTION/ADVENTURE/SCI-FI TRANSFORMERS (12A) 144min In 1984 toy manufacturer Hasbro released the Transformers, and as part of its marketing strategy, commissioned a Marvel comic strip and an animated TV series that became an instant…

Interview - Maggie Q

In Die Hard 4.0 Maggie Q is described by Bruce Willis’ John McClane character as ‘The Asian kid that kicks people.’ Although, Maggie Q has become the first chick to kick John McClane’s behind, and was recently seen battling it out with Tom Cruise and…

Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix

FANTASY/ADAPTATION At over 800 Pages Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix was always likely to be the hardest of JK Rowling’s tomes to adapt and true to form this is the worst of the little wizard films. The franchise, which has thus far been…

Charlotte Gainsbourg

Charlotte Gainsbourg is alluring. Tall and lithe with dark long hair dropping past her visage she’s far from a classic beauty. What she does have is a sense of mystery, and it’s this quality that Italian filmmaker Emanuelle Crialese makes use of in The…

Captivity

Since she stopped watching the clock as Kim Bauer in 24, Elisha Cuthbert has been typecast on the silver screen as the archetypal damsel in distress. In Captivity she plays the kind of girl that, if she weren’t already famous, would be auditioning for…

Saadi Yacef

Name Saadi Yacef Born 20 January 1928, Algiers Background Having worked in a bakery he joined the Parti du Peuple Algerien (Algerian nationalist party) in 1945. Soon after the group was outlawed and Yacef became one of the leaders of the…

Water

After 2002’s abysmal effort at cinema fusion Bollywood/Hollywood, Toronto based Indian filmmaker Deepa Mehta serves up Water, the final part of her elements trilogy. The good news for those who missed Fire (1996) and Earth (1998) is that this is a…

Zodiac

Se7en director David Fincher returns to the scene of the crime with another engrossing yarn about a serial killer. The film is based on Robert Graysmith’s books about the real life Zodiac, who terrorised San Francisco with a series of random murders in…

Spider-Man 3

(12A) 156min

‘Oh what a tangled web we weave when first we practice to deceive.’ Writer/director Sam Raimi’s third and (alleged) final film outing with the New York dwelling arachnid superhero is a hit and miss affair which still manages to contain some of the best…

Goya's Ghosts

It seems to be the silly season for biopics that lure audiences into the cinema only to slap them across the face with a heavy hand full of nonsense. Steven Secretary Shainberg’s Fur, about photographer Diane Arbus, and the forthcoming Klimt from Raoul…

DVD - Spike Lee Box Set

Spike Lee Box Set

DIRECTOR COLLECTION Spike Lee was 50 on March 20 and this nine disc box set has been released to celebrate the occasion. It is an odd collection that reeks of commercialism with the films - School Daze, Do The Right Thing, Mo’ Better Blues, Jungle…

Reign Over Me

It’s interesting to note that the more serious the role Adam Sandler plays the more he looks like Bob Dylan. Last time he wiped the smile off his own face was in Paul Thomas Anderson’s Punch Drunk Love but that was only an aperitif for this turn as a…

Shooter

(15) 125min

ACTION/THRILLER More adventures for Mark Wahlberg at the frontline of flawed American foreign policy. Here he swaps the Iraqi desert of Three Kings for the African coast. When a mission ends with the death of his best mate and spotter (the human…

Unknown

(15) 85min

THRILLER Five guys (Barry Pepper, Jim Caviezel, Greg Kinnear, Joe Pantoliano and Jeremy Sisko) wake up in an abandoned warehouse. It’s obvious that some of them hate each other as one of them is handcuffed and another bound. Unfortunately they’re…

The Namesake

(12A) 121min

HISTORY/DRAMA/ROMANCE Not only is Mira Nair one of the world’s pre-eminent women directors, she has also taken over Spike Lee’s mantle as the most intuitive director making movies about ethnic minorities in America. Having started off making…