call_end

    • chevron_right

      The Stimming Pool review – film-makers on the autistic spectrum dive ingeniously into the uncanny

      news.movim.eu / TheGuardian • 26 March • 1 minute

    This docufiction is funny and pregnant with ideas – as a group of young artists on the spectrum examine how their creativity and sense of self is shaped by autism

    Here is an engaging docufictional experiment, an investigation into autism co-created by a group of young artists on the spectrum called the Neurocultures Collective . The resulting film is ingenious, funny, intellectually curious – and pregnant with ideas. It is all about how autism shapes creativity and makes sense of the self, and it gives a new kind of access to the mysterious and the uncanny.

    One of the group is shown hosting a B-movie cult film club and also drawing a storyboard for his planned shlock-horror animation about zombies in the American civil war, a fragment of which we will see later. Another is apparently in a doctor’s waiting room filling out a questionnaire designed to assess her possible autism, while a little girl opposite is reading a story about a border collie called Chess. (Another member of the group will later act out the part of Chess.) Having finished the questionnaire, she is asked by the doctor to watch videos while he tracks her eye movements; we then watch the same videos ourselves while onscreen graphics – red dots and lines – make jagged shapes across the action, in places where we maybe weren’t looking. Other participants demonstrate their own choreography of ritualistic and repetitive movements: a part of intuitive role-play.

    Continue reading...
    • chevron_right

      Yuan Yang, Neneh Cherry and Rachel Clarke shortlisted for Women’s prize for nonfiction

      news.movim.eu / TheGuardian • 26 March

    Chloe Dalton, Helen Scales and Clare Mulley are also in the running for the £30,000 award, with the winner due to be announced on 12 June

    The Buffalo Stance singer Neneh Cherry, Labour MP Yuan Yang and the doctor Rachel Clarke have been shortlisted for this year’s Women’s prize for nonfiction.

    Foreign policy expert Chloe Dalton, marine biologist Helen Scales and biographer Clare Mulley also remain in contention for the £30,000 prize.

    Continue reading...
    • chevron_right

      Director Marco Berger: ‘My films make some masculine viewers question if they could be gay’

      news.movim.eu / TheGuardian • 26 March • 1 minute

    The Argentinian film-maker, whose movies blur the lines between gay and straight, discusses what inspired him to make his latest work – queer romcom The Astronaut Lovers

    Marco Berger’s films often begin, in one way or another, with a knock on the door. A young gay man steps into a summer house, or sometimes a luxury villa, typically inhabited by a group of attractive young men on holiday. As homoerotic tension simmers, the hyper-masculine environment is charged with banter, dares, and provocative games. The Argentinian director’s films test the fragile boundaries of homosocial spaces, blurring the lines between gay and straight as characters navigate complex emotions. His settings become pressure cookers – or at times, ticking time bombs – of unspoken dynamics, male bonding, and the perils of repressed desire.

    It’s these elements – heightened by homoerotic scenes and prolonged shots of the male body – that have made Berger one of the most prolific and successful film-makers in Latin America and widely pirated globally. “I’m obsessed with telling the story of two men in a summer house because summer creates the perfect conditions for exploring male desire,” Berger says. “The clothes come off, and the skin is exposed. It’s the perfect setting.”

    Continue reading...
    • chevron_right

      Misericordia review – waking dream of a movie is one of the strangest films of the year

      news.movim.eu / TheGuardian • 26 March • 1 minute

    A man moves in with his employer’s widow in this playful but dreamlike and inscrutable drama from Alain Guiraudie, the director of Stranger By the Lake

    Writer-director Alain Guiraudie must surely now be said to match Quentin Dupieux for the weirdest sense of humour in French cinema. But is comedy exactly what is happening here? Because this has to be one of the strangest films of the year – or the most deadpan of deadpan in-jokes. At one point, I thought I saw the performer playing a police officer almost laugh, but perhaps every single actor here was on the verge of cracking up throughout the shoot. It could be that every time Guiraudie yelled “Cut” everyone burst out laughing.

    You could also call Misericordia queer cinema, with the word “queer” also working in its non-sexual sense. Guiraudie made his international breakthrough with his 2013 film Stranger By the Lake , but it’s now clear that the seriousness and vehemence of that psychosexual drama are atypical of the director’s real instincts, which are towards waywardness and playfulness and unreadable, inscrutable mischief. And here, as sometimes in the past, he looks as if he is making it up as he goes along.

    Continue reading...
    • chevron_right

      Cold war chronicler: Thomas Billhardt’s East Germany – in pictures

      news.movim.eu / TheGuardian • 26 March

    The photojournalist, who died in January, captured daily life in East Germany as well as Castro and Gorbachev’s visits, the fall of the Berlin Wall and life in Vietnam during the war

    Continue reading...
    • chevron_right

      Million Dollar Secret review – you won’t be able to get enough of this shameless rip-off of The Traitors

      news.movim.eu / TheGuardian • 26 March

    A group of strangers gather in a big fancy house and one has a big secret they must protect at all costs. Sure, this US gameshow is derivative, but it’s also utterly gripping and hysterical. Welcome to your new obsession

    Sometimes, the best way to describe a new competition series is to triangulate it between a couple of shows that already exist. So Fame Academy was The X Factor meets Big Brother, and The Great British Sewing Bee is Bake Off meets Project Runway.

    However, this is impossible to do with Netflix’s new competition series, Million Dollar Secret. That’s not because it is so fiercely original that it defies comparison. No, it is because Million Dollar Secret is The Traitors. It is transparently, baldly, shamelessly The Traitors. Million Dollar Secret feels like the result of a careful scientific procedure designed to make something as identical to The Traitors as humanly possible, while remaining just legally distinct enough to prevent it from being sued into oblivion by All3Media.

    Continue reading...
    • chevron_right

      TV tonight: an incredibly moving story about teaching sign language

      news.movim.eu / TheGuardian • 26 March

    Rose Ayling-Ellis is inspirational as she meets a retirement community ready to learn new skills. Plus: the finale of an excellent true crime drama. Here’s what to watch this evening

    9pm, BBC One
    It’s not an easy pitch for deaf actor and Strictly champion Rose Ayling-Ellis to teach sign language to a retirement community. But she finds a group of enthusiastic 65-95-year-olds, some of whom are experiencing hearing loss. Along with charismatic teacher Marios Costi, she determinedly starts a two-part experiment to highlight the increasing need for signing. This is moving, inspirational television – with added bingo and karaoke. As one of the students says: “We’re not old people; we’re recycled teenagers.” Hollie Richardson

    Continue reading...
    • chevron_right

      The Studio review – Seth Rogen’s Hollywood satire is fast, furious and beautifully fun

      news.movim.eu / TheGuardian • 26 March • 1 minute

    An unimpeachably brilliant cast, plus astonishing guest stars (Efron! Theron! Scorsese!) create wonderful chaos in this tale of a movie studio executive’s calamitous attempts to climb the greasy pole

    The war between art and commerce is an ancient and bloody one. The chair of Continental Studios, Griffin Mill (Bryan Cranston) is keen to deliver a decisive blow with the hammer of his newly acquired IP. Because “if Warner Bros can make a billion dollars off the plastic tits of a pussyless doll, we should be able to make TWO billion off the legacy brand of Kool-Aid.” He has just fired his long-serving studio head, Patty Leigh (Catherine O’Hara), for her preference for art and is on the verge of promoting studio executive Matt Remick (Seth Rogen) to the big job. What’s a guy – even if he is a devoted cinephile who dreams of adding his contribution to the illustrious roll call of meaningful movies, even if Patty has been his friend and mentor for years – to do? He kisses the ring, takes the job and grabs the Kool-Aid man by the hand. And with that we are off to the races for 10 fast, furious and farcical episodes of Rogen’s new Hollywood satire The Studio, created with his partner since their Superbad-minting days, Evan Goldberg.

    Can Matt make a Kool-Aid movie that satisfies his inner cineaste and the gaping studio money maw? Why, it certainly seems so when Martin Scorsese (played, inimitably, by Martin Scorsese) turns out to have a script about just that subject! Well, indirectly about just that subject. Actually about the Jonestown massacre, whose 918 victims are supposed to have killed themselves by drinking … yes, you guessed it! And starring Steve Buscemi as Jim Jones. This is going to work out great.

    Continue reading...
    • chevron_right

      Grayson Perry: Delusions of Grandeur review – pomposity puncturing gets lost in personae

      news.movim.eu / TheGuardian • 26 March • 1 minute

    Wallace Collection, London
    Artworks ‘by’ Perry’s new alter ego – an abuse survivor from the East End called Shirley Smith – sit among works by real outsider artists. His stronger pieces are more straightforward

    Grayson Perry is fascinated by outsiders – outcasts, nonconformists, the marginalised and the deviant. He has frequently assumed the outsider position, delivering commentary on class, gender and Britons’ petty snobberies. Across his career, he has pronounced on how his medium of choice (ceramics), his crossdressing, or his engagement with popular culture have excited the disapproval of cliques including the art world. Now, as a member of the Royal Academy, a knight of the realm and a ubiquitous presence on TV, that anti-establishment stance is under some strain. He shall hereafter be referred to as Sir Grayson, to keep him in his (elevated) place.

    Delusions of Grandeur is a classic Graysonian bluff – a title that carries its own takedown (who does he think he is?). Though it is a bluff of a distinctly wanting-to-own-Gail’s-and-eat-the-chocolate-babkas-too variety. This exhibition coincides with his 65th birthday, and the Wallace Collection is hung with banner photographs of the artist, glamorous in sheeny tights and a vast bouffant. If nothing else, Sir Grayson is happy to play along with someone else’s belief that he is worth celebrating on a grand scale.

    Continue reading...