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      Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire review – breezy, forgettable monster sequel

      news.movim.eu / TheGuardian · Yesterday - 17:14 · 1 minute

    There’s a likable, light-hearted zip to the monster mash follow-up but energy dissipates when we’re stuck with the humans

    It was a strange old time when the creature feature mash-up Godzilla vs Kong was released, the first major blockbuster in cinemas since Covid shuttered them all a year prior. Expectations were low, thanks to how rotten the last two Godzilla films had been, but thirst for something, anything , truly escapist was high and the big screen equivalent of a kid smashing his toys together became an unlikely saviour, both commercially and critically.

    Three years later with normality resuming, there’s arguably less audience demand for another instalment, although the industry could definitely do with another monster hit, the strikes leaving the first few months of 2024 a little weakened. There’s enough easily marketable simplicity to Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire that it should become a swift global hit (the film is tracking to make $135m worldwide in its opening weekend) but, especially in the shadow of the Oscar-winning Godzilla Minus One , there will be predictably diminishing returns for those who venture out. It’s a still fun yet far sloppier outing, a second round that’s less of a win for us and more of a draw.

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      Bill Nighy: ‘I have danced naked in my front room, but you need shoes to really spin’

      news.movim.eu / TheGuardian · Yesterday - 12:06 · 1 minute

    The star of The First Omen takes your questions on working as a chimney sweep, finessing his perfect sandwich – and hoping to die in a hail of bullets

    There’s an argument that you’re the person James Bond matures into: women still want to sleep with you and men want to be you. What’s your secret? MarcoPoloMint
    I have no idea. I don’t get out much and I don’t identify with whomever they’re talking about. I did used to quip that I could be James Bond’s grandfather and I’ve always wanted to say: “The name’s Nighy. Bill Nighy.” I’m very happy to hear, but it’s a bit of a stretch for me to grasp.

    When you were younger, you travelled to Paris to write a book, but never completed it. Will you ever dust down your great unfinished novel to realise your literary ambitions? VerulamiumParkRanger
    I had a very romantic idea – I was a walking cliche in my 20s – of running away to Paris to write the great English short story. The pathetic thing is that I went and stood in the Trocadéro, outside the Shakespeare and Company bookstore and under the Arc de Triomphe, hoping to catch some vibes. I sat down for an hour in front of a blank page and drew a margin, like at school, for the teacher’s remarks, but the doorbell went or the phone rang and that was the end of my literary career.

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      Mary Poppins review – Disney’s entertainment sugar rush possesses thermonuclear brilliance

      news.movim.eu / TheGuardian · Yesterday - 11:00 · 1 minute

    Manic, magic, madcap … Julie Andrews is superb in the role of the flying nanny, in a film filled with amazing songs

    Brilliant, entrancing, exhausting, and with thermonuclear showtunes from Richard and Robert Sherman, Disney’s hybrid live-action/animation classic from 1964 is now rereleased on home entertainment platforms for its 60th anniversary. And it has a brand-new certificate from the BBFC : upgraded from a U to a PG on account of “discriminatory language” from the eccentric seadog character Admiral Boom, who fires a cannon from his roof shouting “Fight the Hottentots!” (an obsolete term for South Africa’s indigenous Khoekhoe people ). However the BBFC is evidently not bothered by the foxhunting scene in which the fox has a cod Irish accent (perhaps because chimney sweep Bert, played by Dick Van Dyke , saves the fox), nor by the cheerful suicide reference made by one of the servants: “Nice spot there by Southwark Bridge, very popular with jumpers!”

    In an upmarket part of Edwardian London created on almost dreamlike artificial sets in California, the prosperous upper-middle-class Banks family are having problems controlling their high-spirited children, Michael (Matthew Garber) and Jane (Karen Dotrice); this is grumpy banker George Banks (David Tomlinson) and his suffragette wife Winifred (Glynis Johns), who is always whirling around going to votes-for-women marches. Pompous Mr Banks saunters into the action with complacent song The Life I Lead (which melodically owes a tiny bit to With a Little Bit of Luck from the stage show My Fair Lady).

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      Kung Fu Panda 4 review – Jack Black and Awkwafina in hurricane of slapstick more miss than hit

      news.movim.eu / TheGuardian · Yesterday - 09:00 · 1 minute

    The lead pair make a brilliant double act, but the franchise has run out of its signature sweetness and charm

    The cuddly kung fu master is back. Jack Black returns as dumpling-loving panda Po, the unlikeliest of lean, mean fightin’ machines. It’s been eight years since Kung Fu Panda 3, and on the evidence here, the delay can’t be put down to KFP4 being a labour of love, the product of animation studio DreamWorks’ A team pouring in enormous amounts of effort. It’s a hurricane of slapstick (some of it in fact very funny) and age-appropriate energetic fight scenes, but lacks the sweetness and charm of the franchise at its best. It failed the wriggle test on my seven-year-old cinema date, who was squirming in her seat around the hour mark.

    The plot is a bit overfussy for its target audience of small kids, though the scriptwriters have been careful to make it work for newbies – no previous Kung Fu Panda experience necessary. It opens with Po being promoted from his role as Dragon Warrior to spiritual leader of the valley, taking over from his mentor Shifu (Dustin Hoffman – no expense has been spared on the vocal cast). But before he can appoint his successor, Po apprehends Zhen (Awkwafina), a streetwise thieving fox. The two of them make a brilliant double act: Black is adorable, Awkwafina terrific as the cynical wisecracker.

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      ‘Rental places will surge back’: readers on the fight to preserve physical media

      news.movim.eu / TheGuardian · Yesterday - 08:05


    Readers share their thoughts on maintaining the world of DVDs and Blu-rays after a feature looking exploring the phenomenon

    At home we have been getting into the habit, when we identify (a knack in itself!) a show or movie we are confident we will want to re-watch, of ordering an inexpensive DVD copy.

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      Ryuichi Sakamoto: Opus review – a stark, emotional finale from master musician

      news.movim.eu / TheGuardian · Yesterday - 07:00 · 1 minute

    In his last weeks of life, the Oscar-winning composer is filmed at the piano by his son. It is an almost wordless paean to a remarkable career

    Short of presenting nothing more than music and a blank screen, this documentary about the late Japanese composer-performer Ryuichi Sakamoto’s last appearances is as stark and minimal as a concert film can get. And yet it’s a work suffused with emotional tones and shades, surprisingly not all of them sad even though the subject knew at the time of filming he had mere weeks left before he’d die of cancer.

    There are moments when director Neo Sora, Sakamoto’s son, turns up the lighting for the more upbeat songs and we can see the master smile, pleased with his own performance, or the composition, or … we know not what, as there is almost no dialogue, no nattering about the life. We had all that in an earlier documentary, Ryuichi Sakamoto: Coda . In Opus it is the music, played by the man himself, that is completely sufficient to the moment and all that remains, with the occasional very human stumbles and missed notes. When he says he needs a break for a while, exhausted by a performance, the strain is painfully visible, audible, practically palpable.

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      Kinds of Kindness: first trailer released for Yorgos Lanthimos and Emma Stone’s next film

      news.movim.eu / TheGuardian · 2 days ago - 16:22

    Lanthimos’s first feature set in contemporary America also stars Margaret Qualley, Jesse Plemons and Poor Things’s Willem Dafoe

    Less than three weeks after Poor Things took four Oscars, including best actress for Emma Stone , the trailer for their new film has been released.

    Kinds of Kindness, which filmed in New Orleans in late 2022, is Yorgos Lanthimos’s first film set in contemporary America. According to its official synopsis, the film is a “triptych fable, following a man without choice who tries to take control of his own life; a policeman who is alarmed that his wife who was missing-at-sea has returned and seems a different person; and a woman determined to find a specific someone with a special ability, who is destined to become a prodigious spiritual leader.”

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      Tilda Swinton bedtime story among Cinema for Gaza auction lots

      news.movim.eu / TheGuardian · 2 days ago - 14:03

    Option to make porridge with Josh O’Connor or be serenaded by Olly Alexander also up for grabs in inaugural online auction to support Medical Aid for Palestinians in Gaza

    Directors Mike Leigh, Ken Loach, Asif Kapadia and Joanna Hogg, as well as the cast of shows including Doctor Who and Downton Abbey, are among British film and TV creatives donating lots to a new auction to crowdfund for humanitarian relief in Gaza.

    Leigh has given a signed poster of the original 1977 theatre production of Abigail’s Party, while Loach provides signed copies of the poster and script of his latest film, The Old Oak.

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      Shock of the old: nine disturbing, disruptive and demonic clowns

      news.movim.eu / TheGuardian · 2 days ago - 13:29

    For centuries, they have been subversive speakers of truth to power – and a focus for our fears. Why do clowns provoke such strong emotions?

    Perhaps more than other Shocks of the Old, today’s needs a content warning because much of humanity is scared of clowns. In 2022, of 987 respondents to the Fear of Clowns Questionnaire, or FCQ (yes, a real thing ) 272 (27.6%) reported “a fear of clowns, while 50 (5.1%) rated this fear as extreme”.

    In a controversial ( with clowns ) 2008 survey of more than 250 children, every single one said they disliked clown decor in hospitals . “We found that clowns are universally disliked by children,” said the study lead, Dr Penny Curtis. “Some found them quite frightening and unknowable.”

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