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Jack Archer’s intimate documentary traces Douglas’s bond with social worker Peter Jewell with tremendous warmth

With enormous warmth, film-maker Jack Archer has made an intimate documentary about Peter Jewell, the London social worker who was also the lifelong best friend, inspirational collaborator and – in a way that is perhaps not entirely elucidated here – a non-sexual partner of film-maker Bill Douglas.

Jewell was as important to Douglas, perhaps, as Peter Pears was to Benjamin Britten. He was the real-life model of “Robert”, the well-educated Englishman in My Way Home from 1978, the third part of Douglas’s autobiographical trilogy; he befriends the unhappy working-class Scot Jamie while they are doing National Service in the Egyptian Suez canal zone.

It’s 30 years this week since the death of the celebrated arthouse auteur. Across historical romps, dystopian nightmares and homoerotic poetry, we rate Jarman’s finest full-length films

Judi Dench reads 14 Shakespeare sonnets over 77 minutes of homoerotic imagery, backed by compositions by Benjamin Britten and experimental band Coil in this romantic and dreamy film. While not as powerful as Jarman’s best queer works, which channelled anger as well as beauty in their rebellion against oppression, Dench’s readings and the woozy imagery work beautifully together.

The Art Directors Guild (Adg, IATSE, Local 800) announced today that Academy Award®-nominated filmmaker Baz Luhrmann and his long-time producing partner and collaborator, Academy Award-winning production and costume designer Catherine Martin, known for their visually stunning movies, including the recent highly acclaimed Elvis, will receive the esteemed 2023 Cinematic Imagery Award. The Luhrmann/Martin 30-year collaboration has produced decades of successful and innovative entertainment for film, television, and the stage. They will accept the honor at the 27th Annual Adg Awards on Saturday, February 18, 2023, at the InterContinental Los Angeles Downtown. The announcement was made today by Adg President Nelson Coates, Adg, and Awards Producers Michael Allen Glover, Adg and Megan Elizabeth Bell, Adg.

“We are incredibly thrilled to honor Baz Luhrmann and Catherine Martin with the 2023 Adg Cinematic Imagery Award. Since their first collaboration, the extraordinarily creative and impactful pairing of these groundbreaking filmmakers has continued to dazzle audiences, stretch the imagination,...

Exclusive: Blood in the Water, the true story of the murder at sea of Philip Boudreau, is set to be adapted for screen after Pictou Twist Pictures, the company founded by Trailer Park Boys co-creator Barrie Dunn optioned the rights.

Pictou Twist Pictures and Ion Inc. acquired the film and television rights to the book, which was written by late Canadian author Silver Donald Cameron.

Blood in the Water tells the story of the 2013 murder of Philip Boudreau, a notorious outlaw – equally loved and hated – who was killed while vandalizing the lobster traps of three Cape Breton fishermen.

The book was billed as a “must-read” by Margaret Atwood, author of The Handmaid’s Tale

Dunn is the co-creator, writer and producer of Canadian mockumentary series The Trailer Park Boys, which ran for over 100 episodes and spawned a number of feature films. He founded Pictou Twist Pictures with Patrick Graham to focus on political dramas and thrillers,...

There was recently a Twitter thread going around asking which director has never made a bad film. Among my picks was Claire Denis, and one of the highlights in a career full of them is certainly the French director’s 1999 masterpiece Beau Travail, a Djibouti-set exploration of masculinity, sexuality, isolation, and power structures. Recently undergoing a new 4K digital restoration––supervised by director of photography Agnès Godard and approved by director Claire Denis, courtesy of Janus Films––the film will now arrive in Virtual Cinemas before a Criterion release next month.

Set to debut at Film at Lincoln Center in New York, Laemmle Theatres in Los Angeles, Coolidge Corner in Boston, the Music Box Theatre in Chicago, the Salt Lake Film Society in Salt Lake City, and the Belcourt Theatre in Nashville, with additional theaters and dates to come, a new trailer and poster have now arrived to get a preview of the stunning restoration.

Dubois Records, in cooperation with Mammoth Screen and Masterpiece will release the Victoria – Original Soundtrack digitally on all music streaming platforms to coincide with the Us release of the television series on PBS this coming weekend. The album features the limited series’ original score by multi-bafta and Ivor Novello winning composer Martin Phipps (Woman In Gold, The Keeping Room) and Ruth Barrett (City Of Tiny Lights, Whitechapel) with vocals from the Mediaeval Baebes. Victoria was first aired on ITV in the UK on August 28, 2016.

Phipps says: “The idea was to give Victoria a dynamic voice, an explosive theme through which we could rejoice in her strength & courage. The Mediaeval Baebes were the perfect sound for this. With one foot in the classical world & one in the commercial, they gave Victoria the mixture of refinement & attitude I was after.”

Barrett says: “I started composing from episode 2, weaving in some of Martin...

I’m a child of pop culture.

Nowhere is that more obvious to me in the earworms that I get. Earworms are a song or piece of a song that gets stuck in your head and seems to be on an endless replay cycle. I don’t know about you but I get them a lot. A lot. I wish I could say they were songs that I like but often they’re songs I’m pretty “meh” about and sometimes even hate.

They’re almost always pop songs – nothing classical although I am a fan of classical music. Not of all classical music, but of some. The only opera I really like, for example, is Peter Grimes by Benjamin Britten. The closest I get to classical earworms are the orchestral movie soundtracks – I like soundtracks quite a bit. For example, the Star Wars Theme is likely to pop up in rotation pretty often,...

There are always plenty of Christmas-music roundups this time of year. This one's different. The others usually focus on the newest offerings. Nothing I've gotten this year has really struck a chord, but there is no shortage of favorites from years past that have proven their merits and held up over time. It is those in the classical realm, where trends matter least; and choral, because it's sacred choir music that's at the heart of the celebration of Christmas, that are listed below. 

Ancient

If you want some Christmas music you don't already know by heart, just look further back in history.The early music movement of the past half-century has unearthed many long-forgotten masterpieces from the Medieval and Renaissance eras.

Sequentia: Aquitania: Christmas Music from Aquitanian Monasteries (12th century) (Deutsche Harmonia Mundi)

This was Sequentia's second album of Aquitanian Christmas season music, following on the heels of the much-praised Shining Light.

We’ve got questions, and you’ve (maybe) got answers! With another week of TV gone by, we’re lobbing queries left and right about shows including I Am Cait, Sytycd, Dancing With the Stars, Ninja Warrior and Mindy Project!

1 | Last weekend’s Worst Creative Arts Emmy snub: Jane the Virgin‘s Anthony Mendez not winning for Outstanding Narrator?

RelatedEmmys 2015: Americans, House of Cards and Shameless Stars, Freak Show, Thrones Among Winners

2 | How amazing was it that, even in the middle of a riot, Fear the Walking Dead’s Travis A) found his truck still in one piece and...

Benedict Cumberbatch just said I Do - but who is his Cumberbride? The Imitation Game actor, 38, and Sophie Hunter tied the knot on Saturday in an intimate ceremony at the Church of St. Peter and St. Paul on the Isle of Wight in England. Like her husband, Hunter, 36, has a flair for the dramatics. (They did reportedly meet on the set of 2009's Burlesque Fairytales, after all. ) The newlywed - who studied French and Italian at Oxford - is perhaps best known for her playwriting and directing in avant-garde theater. In 2007, she received the prestigious Samuel Beckett Award for writing...

Benedict Cumberbatch just said I Do - but who is his Cumberbride? The Imitation Game actor, 38, and Sophie Hunter tied the knot on Saturday in an intimate ceremony at the Church of St. Peter and St. Paul on the Isle of Wight in England. Like her husband, Hunter, 36, has a flair for the dramatics. (They did reportedly meet on the set of 2009's Burlesque Fairytales, after all. ) The newlywed - who studied French and Italian at Oxford - is perhaps best known for her playwriting and directing in avant-garde theater. In 2007, she received the prestigious Samuel Beckett Award for writing...

Complete list of winners and nominees of the 2014 Grammy Awards, held in Los Angeles at the Staples Center on Sunday February 8. Winners will be updated as they're announced during the telecast and pre-telecast. Record Of The Year “Fancy,” Iggy Azalea Featuring Charli Xcx “Chandelier,” Sia **Winner** “Stay With Me (Darkchild Version),” Sam Smith “Shake It Off,” Taylor Swift “All About That Bass,” Meghan Trainor Album Of The Year **Winner** “Morning Phase,” Beck “Beyoncé,” Beyoncé “X,” Ed Sheeran “In The Lonely Hour,” Sam Smith “Girl,” Pharrell Williams Song Of The Year “All About That Bass,” Kevin Kadish & Meghan Trainor, songwriters (Meghan Trainor) “Chandelier,” Sia Furler & Jesse Shatkin, songwriters (Sia) “Shake It Off,” Max Martin, Shellback & Taylor Swift, songwriters (Taylor Swift) **Winner** “Stay With Me (Darkchild Version),” James Napier, William Phillips & Sam Smith, songwriters (Sam Smith) “Take Me To Church,” Andrew Hozier-Byrne, songwriter (Hozier) Best New Artist Iggy Azalea Bastille Brandy Clark...

The team behind "u-Carmen eKhayelitsha" - a modern remake of Georges Bizet's classic 1875 opera "Carmen," shot entirely in Xhosa (one of South Africa's official languages), with an all-black South African cast, combining both music from the original opera with traditional music - have done a similar thing with Giacomo Puccini’s classic 1896 opera, "La Boheme." The creative group's most recent film, a re-imagining of another operatic work, Benjamin Britten’s 1957 piece, "Noye’s Fludde," made its World Premiere in the Contemporary World Cinema section at the 2013 Toronto...

The team behind "u-Carmen eKhayelitsha" - a modern remake of Georges Bizet's classic 1875 opera "Carmen," shot entirely in Xhosa (one of South Africa's official languages), with an all-black South African cast, combining both music from the original opera with traditional music - are now going to do similar thing with Giacomo Puccini’s classic 1896 opera, "La Boheme." The creative group's most recent film, a re-imagining of another operatic work, Benjamin Britten’s 1957 piece, "Noye’s Fludde," made its World Premiere in the Contemporary World Cinema section at last...

Ireland's oldest cinema event, Cork Film Festival will run November 7-16, 2014. Last year James Mullighan was appointed Creative Director of the festival, which is not only one of the most important cultural events in the country but also the highest profile platform for the new talent discovery.

As part their latest efforts to create new distribution platforms to connect audience with content, James Mullighan and Head of Program and Editorial Don O’Mahoney attended this year's Cannes Film Festival, and announced that their Fest is launching its very first video on demand initiative. Their inaugural digital program is conformed of seven shorts and seven features being retailed on a pay what you want basis, alongside bonus content. The films can be digitally purchased viia the innovative platform Vodo, which careful curates themed bundles of content, and it's working with a film Fest for the first time. Vodo.net/cork.

The initiative has three tiers: Pay What you Want (four shorts and one feature, including Made in Cork prize winner Yvonne’ Keane’s Stolen, and Filmbase Ireland’s How to be Happy, starring Brian Gleeson); Beat the Average (three features and three shorts, including biopic of writer / chess master John Healy Barbaric Genius, and Cork Fest 2013 opening night short Mechanic, starring Syl Fox); and Beat the Premium (including Tony Palmer’s recently reissued 1974 Leonard Cohen doc Bird on a Wire, and John Kastner’s prize winner mental health sensational doc Not Criminally Responsible).

“We’ve been working with Jamie King and the team at Vodo since straight after the Fest last year”, said James Mullighan, Creative Director, Cork Film Festival.

“In this day of screeching web noise, I really admire the platform’s loving, carefully curated approach to films and more. They were the ideal choice to launch this experiment in distribution. I am hopeful it will be popular with the thousands and thousands of fans of the Cork Film Festival in Ireland, Europe and amongst the global Irish diaspora, who fondly wish they could attend the Fest, but cannot. I’m grateful to and proud of the independent directors and producers who lit up our Fest in November last year to trust Jamie and I with their babies”.

Once payment handling costs have been deducted, Vodo - who levy no extra charges other than their 25% sales fee - hand all the proceeds to Cork Film Festival. The Festival send 70% of that straight to the filmmakers, ringfencing 5% for its new €1,500 feature film Gradam Spiorad na Féile / Spirit of the Festival Award, which takes a bow during the Fest’s 59th Edition this year.

"Cork's Bundle shows a real engagement with online culture and experimentation in the transmedia sphere", commented Jamie King, CEO and Founder of Vodo, which has recently successfully promoted Not Safe for Work and Big Brother bundles.

“When you let customers set the price for themselves,’ says Vodo’s Jamie King, ‘they can turn out to be surprisingly generous. The average price paid for the Cork Bundle is currently $11.20. That's a win both for audiences and the filmmakers.”

"I had a wonderful time when I was honored to be invited to Cork last November as filmmaker in residence”, remembered Tony Palmer, celebrated British music film biographer and documentarian, whose Leonard Cohen film Bird on a Wire played at the Fest, as well as his new Benjamin Britten feature Nocturne, and his entire 7 hour, 46 minute dramatic reconstruction of the life of composer Richard Wagner, the last film Richard Burton even made.

“The Cork Film Festival is going out on a limb to bring its films to a wider audience. This should be celebrated, and I’m delighted to be involved.

The bundle went live on Wednesday 14 May, the opening day of Cannes International Film Festival, and runs until Tuesday 3 June.

Roster includes Tell Me The Truth About Love [pictured] and The More You Ignore Me.

Producer Debbie Gray and real estate developer Julian Gleek have announce the initial slate on their fledgling Genesius Pictures Limited.

Robbie Little of The Little Film Company will handle sales on a number of the titles and has begun conversations with buyers here.

The roster includes Tell Me The Truth About Love, the story of composer Benjamin Britten’s affair with Peter Pears. Gray is producing with Anne Beresford and Margaret Williams will direct James Northcote and James Norton.

The More You Ignore Me comes from comedienne Jo Brand, who wrote and will star, while Reg Traviss will direct The Ladykiller from Martina Cole’s adaptation of the novel of the same name. Cole and Chris Whiteside produce.

Flush is a co-production with Robbie Little and Ellen Little of The Little Film Company adapted from the Virginia Woolf novel about Elizabeth Barrett and Robert Browning...

Like many of the best things in life, overindulgence, even with the classics, can lead to irritability. One could well be sated for life with A Midsummer Night’s Dream (probably the most frequently mounted of all Shakespeare comedies) after landmark productions by Max Reinhardt, Peter Brook and Peter Hall, the Benjamin Britten opera, the George Balanchine ballet, not to mention a classic Czech animated feature or a recent starry Hollywood version. That is to say, there had better be a compelling reason to tour any new version internationally. The novelty here is the puppetry of Capetown’s Handspring Puppet Company, which

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Winding up a yearlong celebration of Benjamin Britten’s centennial, L.A. Opera presents the composer’s most ambitious opera, Billy Budd, featuring definitive staging by Francesca Zambello from her 1995 Covent Garden production. It stars Liam Bonner in the lead role, and is conducted by the company’s own James Conlon, with performances Feb. 22 through March 16. When it was composed in 1951, Billy Budd was Britten’s most daring work, addressing homosexual themes that were taboo at the time. Today, such themes are less challenging than the production’s technical logistics, including a levitating stage that gives audiences a view of the action above

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Plot isn't what matters to Wes Anderson – his movies care more about lush palettes and playfulness. Seitz's collection of essays and interviews with the director reveals a rare film-maker who isn't afraid to take risks

In Wes Anderson's 2001 film The Royal Tenenbaums, an insensitive father fails to appreciate his daughter's childhood attempt at writing and staging a play. There's no narrative, he complains, and as for characters, "What characters? It's a bunch of little kids dressed up in animal costumes." You might be tempted to dismiss Anderson's films in similar terms: the stories don't always add up to much, and while we know we're watching grownups (played by major Hollywood actors such as Bill Murray, Anjelica Huston and Ralph Fiennes), they often behave more like children dressed in their parents' clothes.

This quality of Anderson's cinema is captured in Max Dalton's paintings for a lavishly illustrated recent book,...

In Britain’s naval heyday, a warship was a floating fragment of the empire — frail, distant, and solitary, yet tethered to the homeland by a thread of morals and laws. In this little world, full of sealed-in love and loathing, and populated solely by men, Benjamin Britten found the ideal vessel for an opera. And in Billy Budd, he found the ideal music for every moment of the seaman’s day. The rhythmic scraping of the deck, the heaving of ropes, the loading of guns, the ocean swells and bleak stillness of a windless day — it’s as if Britten had cast a spell on the physical world and turned it into a topography of sound.It’s difficult to describe the roundness of a specific sphere; it’s nearly as stymying to tease apart the seamless intensity of Michael Grandage’s Glyndebourne production, which is now in the midst...

Which music stars went home with awards at the 2014 Grammy Awards? Find out with this full winners list.

Winners in each category are bolded.

Record of the Year

"Get Lucky" -- Daft Punk feat. Pharrell Williams and Nile Rodgers

"Radioactive" -- Imagine Dragons

"Royals" -- Lorde

"Locked Out of Heaven" -- Bruno Mars

"Blurred Lines" -- Robin Thick feat. T.I. and Pharrell

Album of the year

"The Blessed Unrest" -- Sara Bareilles

"Random Access Memories" -- Daft Punk

"Good Kid, M.A.A.D City" -- Kendrick Lamar

"The Heist" -- Macklemore and Ryan Lewis

"Red" -- Taylor Swift

Song of the year

"Just Give Me a Reason" -- Jeff Bhasker, Pink and Nate Ruess (Pink feat. Nate Ruess)

"Locked Out of Heaven" -- Philip Lawrence, Ari Levine and Bruno Mars (Bruno Mars)

"Roar" -- Lukasz Gottwald, Max Martin, Bonnie McKee, Katy Perry and Henry Walter (Katy Perry)

"Royals...

Composer Max Richter on Zadie Smith, the Edinburgh festival and why he has a soft spot for James Joyce's Ulysses

Composer Max Richter was born in Germany, and moved to the UK as a child. As a founding member of the contemporary classical group Piano Circus, he commissioned and performed music by composers including Brian Eno, Philip Glass and Julia Wolfe. On the solo albums that followed, he collaborated with the likes of actress Tilda Swinton, musician Robert Wyatt and DJ/ producer Roni Size. In 2008, the Royal Ballet commissioned him to compose the music for Infra, choreographed by Wayne McGregor, with whom he later worked on the chamber opera, Sum (2012). Richter's work has featured in films such as Shutter Island (2010), and he penned the original soundtrack to Waltz with Bashir (2008). He has also provided music for several art installations, including rAndom International's Rain Room at the Barbican. In 2012, Richter...

To kick off year-long celebrations of the life and work of film director Derek Jarman on the 20th anniversary of his death, Neil Bartlett explains why he will be holding an all-night party-vigil in King's College London's chapel

Anniversaries are strange things. They are meant to fix time in its proper place, but sometimes they seem to do just the opposite, bending and distorting it instead. Although I know for a fact that it is now a full 20 years since Derek Jarman died, I'm still finding this particular anniversary hard to credit. Is it really possible that somebody so productive and disruptive, so loquaciously and outrageously alive, can now be that distant?

Jarman's films – and later, his activism – were crucial points of reference in my generation's struggles to endure and enjoy life. Even before I had the good fortune to meet him in person, I intuited that here was a true ally,...

As always, there are biases at play here; my greatest interests are symphonic music, choral music, and piano music, so that's what comes my way most often. There are some paired reviews; the ranking of the second of each pair might not be the true, exact ranking, but it works better from a writing standpoint this way.

1. Brahms: Symphonies Nos. 1-4; Academic Festival Overture, Op. 80 Tragic Overture, Op. 81; Variations on a Theme by Haydn, Op. 56a; 3 Hungarian Dances; 9 Liebeslieder Waltzes; Intermezzi, Op. 116 No. 4 & Op. 117 No. 1 Gewandhausorchester/Riccardo Chailly (Decca)

It is not easy, at this point in recording history, to match the giants of the baton in a Brahms cycle, but Chailly has done it (this is my fiftieth Brahms cycle, and I have more than another fifty Brahms Firsts, and upwards of thirty each of the other symphonies outside those cycles, so I've got some basis for comparison...

Based on Henry James's The Turn of the Screw, The Innocents remains one of the very best ghost films. As it is re-released for the festive season, Michael Newton explores the freedoms and horrors of trusting your own imagination

One late Victorian Christmas Eve, around the fire, a man settles down to read aloud to the other house-guests the manuscript of a ghost story. His tale is that of a governess in another country house decades before, and of her two charges, a boy called Miles and his sister, Flora. Removed from the world in an idyll of apparent purity, things darken as the governess perceives, or perhaps merely imagines, that the children's last governess, Miss Jessel, and her Heathcliff-esque lover, the virile servant, Peter Quint, have returned from the dead to possess the children. And then a darker fear comes to her mind: what if the children are complicit in their corruption?...

Agreement with Altive Media will include a production from director Terry Gilliam.

English National Opera (Eno) has secured a partnership with alternative content distribution company Altive Media that will screen productions throughout the UK and in cinemas worldwide.

The partnership, dubbed Eno Screen, is set to broadcast the operatic productions in up to 300 cinemas across the UK and Ireland as well as selected cinemas around the world.

The first live screening will be Benjamin Britten’s opera Peter Grimes on Feb 23, directed by David Alden.

It will be followed in June by Hector Berlioz’s Benvenuto Cellini, directed by Terry Gilliam, best known for directing films such as 12 Monkeys and Brazil as well as being part of the Monty Python troupe.

The technical and creative team behind the broadcasts will be headed by award-winning MTV director Andy Morahan (Jls: Eyes Wide Open 3D) and producer Dione Orrom (Phantom of the Opera 25th Anniversary).

Altive Media will oversee...

The British Academy of Film and Television Arts (BAFTA) has released the list of entries for the Ee British Academy Film Awards 2014.

Scroll down for full list

A total of 275 films have been entered this year for consideration by more than 6,500 BAFTA members. Round One voting opens tomorrow (Dec 11).

The number is up from last year, when 262 were entered.

The full list of nominations will be announced on Jan 8 at 7.30am.

This year will see BAFTA recognise five films in the Documentary category, rather than the usual three. There will also be six nominations in the Outstanding British Film category, as previously announced.

The breakdown of the list is as follows:

45 films will be listed in the Documentary category,75 in the Outstanding British Film category,15 in Animated Film49 in Film Not in the English Language.

While 275 films have been entered overall, 252 features will be listed in the Best Film category and a further 23 have been entered for the...

The music we grow up with shapes our tastes in later life, according to a study by Cornell University. We asked Guardian writers to tell us about the songs that take them back to their childhood homes

'My mother would listen to the Carpenters while ironing'

Of the handful of albums my parents owned, it was The Carpenters' Singles 1969-1973 that struck me the most. I remember being particularly fascinated by Rainy Days and Mondays. With the benefit of hindsight, I suspect it was because it was the first piece of music I had ever heard that appeared to perfectly suit the circumstances in which I heard it. My mother would listen to the Carpenters in the afternoon, while doing the ironing in the front room, and I remember thinking that was what the woman in the song was probably doing too. In my head she was singing it...

SciScreen All-Nighter | Britten centenary | More London free festival | Dark Side Of San Francisco

SciScreen All-Nighter, Newcastle upon Tyne

If you're the sort of cinemagoer who enjoys attending all-night film shows but has a nagging suspicion that your time could be better spent doing something useful – assisting scientific research, say – then help is at hand. As part of the British Science festival 2013, the Tyneside Cinema is hosting a high-calibre all-nighter during which attendees will be assessed between films to see how their bodies are responding to sleeplessness. Doctors from the Institute of Neuroscience at Newcastle University will conduct experiments in the Tyneside bar, while sleep expert Dr Kirstie Anderson will offer tips for the night ahead. You don't have to stay for the full 12 hours, but with movies including The Man With Two Brains, Christopher Nolan's back-to-front mind mess Memento and cult smash Re-Animator, why wouldn't you?

Tyneside Cinema, Sat

Britten centenary,...

The team behind u-Carmen eKhayelitsha - a modern remake of Georges Bizet's classic 1875 opera Carmen, shot entirely in Xhosa (one of South Africa's official languages), with an all-black South African cast, combining both music from the original opera with traditional music - are planning on doing a similar thing with Giacomo Puccini’s classic 1896 opera, La Boheme. But first, their next completed film, a re-imagining another operatic work, this time, Benjamin Britten’s 1957 piece, Noye’s Fludde, will make its World Premiere in the Contemporary World Cinema section at this year's Toronto International Film Festival. Director Mark...

Child radio star of the 1940s and 50s best remembered for playing Richmal Crompton's Just William

David Spenser, who has died aged 79, was the pre-eminent child radio star of the 1940s and 50s and will be best remembered for his portrayal on air of Just William. The author Richmal Crompton cast him in the role, in a series of dramatisations of her novels about the raucous but endearing 11-year-old outlaw.

This was in 1948, when David turned 14 and was already a seasoned radio actor – performing more than one play a week, he once told me. He had come into acting through a ruse set up by his ambitious mother and a BBC friend: he was lured into Broadcasting House and found himself in a studio being auditioned by the Children's Hour producer Josephine Plummer. For playing the lead in Just William he received the standard juvenile fee of four guineas...

They were music megastars, and they all opened up to him. As Tony Palmer's best films resurface, the documentarian talks to Phelim O'Neill about Leonard Cohen's tears, John Lennon's fake beard – and the day Liberace invited him into his hot tub

Reading this on mobile? Click here to view video

Tony Palmer was studying moral sciences at Cambridge University in the 1960s when a moderately famous band arrived in town. "I got a call to attend this press conference the Beatles were holding, to cover it for the college paper," he recalls. "They'd had a No 1 single or two by then, so they were very well known – but not yet intergalactic. Afterwards, John Lennon came up and asked me why I hadn't asked them any questions. I told him I found the whole thing pretty silly. He laughed, and when I told him I was studying moral sciences,...

They were music megastars, and they all opened up to him. As Tony Palmer's best films resurface, the documentarian talks to Phelim O'Neill about Leonard Cohen's tears, John Lennon's fake beard – and the day Liberace invited him into his hot tub

Reading this on mobile? Click here to view video

Tony Palmer was studying moral sciences at Cambridge University in the 1960s when a moderately famous band arrived in town. "I got a call to attend this press conference the Beatles were holding, to cover it for the college paper," he recalls. "They'd had a No 1 single or two by then, so they were very well known – but not yet intergalactic. Afterwards, John Lennon came up and asked me why I hadn't asked them any questions. I told him I found the whole thing pretty silly. He laughed, and when I told him I was studying moral sciences,...

The Hangover Part III | Something In The Air | Epic 3D | Benjamin Britten – Peace And Conflict | The Moth Diaries | My Neighbour Totoro/Grave Of The Fireflies | The King Of Marvin Gardens

The Hangover Part III (15)

(Todd Phillips, 2013, Us) Bradley Cooper, Zach Galifianakis, Ed Helms, Ken Jeong, John Goodman, Justin Bartha, Melissa McCarthy. 100 mins

Here we go again, ostensibly for the last time, and if this doesn't capture the magic of the first Hangover it's at least less offensive than the second, which isn't much of a recommendation. An intervention over Alan's mental health and the hunt for Mr Chow is what sets in motion the Wtf escapades and male bonding this time, but it all feels a little forced and familiar. If anything, the "wolf pack" is now too tame.

Something In The Air (15)

(Olivier Assayas, 2012, Fra) Clément Métayer, Lola Créton. 122 mins

Assayas gets beyond the cliches of France's young, post-1968 revolutionaries,...

Although it feels a little homemade at times, this film switches effectively between dramatisation, documentary and contemporary performances of the composer's works

This drama-documentary, coinciding with Britten's centenary year, is unlikely to bring the composer to new audiences, but music lovers will find it illuminating and evocative, though in all honesty, it has BBC4 written all over it. It views the composer's life and work through the prism of his commitment to pacifism, from his liberal, progressive education to towering works such as the War Requiem, via flirtations with communism and a fateful visit to Belsen concentration camp in 1945. Director Tony Britten (no relation), a former composer, is clearly more intimate with the music than the finer points of film-making. It feels a little homemade at times, though the action switches effectively between dramatisation (newcomer Alex Lawther is very good as the fey, plummy young Britten), well-researched documentary (narrated...

★★★☆☆ It's entirely appropriate that Tony Britten, an established and well-versed composer himself, delivers this spirited biopic about the life of Benjamin Britten (no relation). His idle feature film record is in plain view however, as the structure and format of Peace and Conflict (2013), his second feature, spoil the journey. He's adopted the quasi-documentary, splitting his film in two: one half, a fictionalised account with Alex Lawther turning in an engrossing performance as a young Britten during his Gresham's School days, the other a documentary with interviews, recitals and a distracting piece of narration by John Hurt.

The decision to intercut the narrative with voiceovers and archival photographs is occasionally enlightening but mostly lethargic. Sometimes the contrast between reality and fiction works well in biopics in order to unpick the material, but the narrative clout in Peace and Conflict is completely diluted by its documentary parentheses. It's possibly a matter of personal taste,...

Yesterday I featured their last production, U-Carmen, an adaptation of perhaps the world's most-loved opera, Bizet's Carmen. Today brings news that the internationally acclaimed South African Theater Company, Dimpho Di Kopane (Ddk), is re-imagining another operatic work, Benjamin Britten’s 1957 work, Noye’s Fludde. ScreenDaily reports exclusively that director Mark Dornford-May (who made his feature film debut with U-Carmen) has wrapped production on Unogumbe, a filmed opera based on Benjamin Britten’s work, which is a medieval retelling of the Noah's Ark story. The film stars stars Pauline Malefane, who also starred in U-Carmen, playing the...

London — The English National Opera's 2013-14 season will include a world premiere of Oedipus-inspired opera "Thebans" and the return of Monty Python's Terry Gilliam to direct a new production, the company announced Wednesday.

"Thebans," based on the tragedies of Sophocles, is a first opera from composer Julian Anderson, with libretto by Irish playwright Frank McGuinness. It opens in May 2014.

Gilliam, who directed "The Damnation of Faust" at the Eno in 2011, will lead a production of Hector Berlioz's "Benvenuto Cellini" in June 2014.

Both will be conducted by Eno Musical Director Edward Garner.

The season includes 10 new productions, including Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart's "Cosi Fan Tutte," directed by Katie Mitchell, a Calixto Bieito-directed production of Ludwig van Beethoven's "Fidelio" and Mozart's "The Magic Flute" directed by Simon McBurney – a co-production with the Netherlands Opera.

The company also plans revivals of recent successes including David Alden's production of...

At Streetwise Opera we make shows with people who have experienced homelessness. Could combining live performance and film bring us a bigger audience?

Over the last few years, cinemas have been filled with something a little more lyrical than Tom Cruise jumping out of a helicopter in his latest blockbuster. These days you're as likely to encounter The Magic Flute as Mission Impossible at your local Odeon, since live opera relays from the likes of New York's Metropolitan Opera and Glyndebourne, with multiple camera set-ups capturing the action at close quarters, make you feel as if you're in the actual theatre – in the best seats in the house.

But purists maintain that nothing can really compare with the raw passion and immediacy of experiencing opera live, and we at Streetwise Opera began to wonder if there was a way of combining the best of live opera and film in a single production.

Programme for May's three-week arts celebration – released today – will feature Emil and the Detectives, Judith Kerr and Michael Rosen's orchestral work for kids, The Great Enormo

Emil and the Detectives – Erich Kästner's 1929 classic story about a boy who enlists the help of friends to foil a bank robber – is the book at the heart of this year's Brighton festival, which is guest-directed by author, broadcaster and former children's laureate Michael Rosen.

Rosen, who was read the book in weekly instalments by his class teacher when he was nine – and who remembers elaborating and acting out episodes of it with his friends – said the book was "very special in a variety of ways. It was the first of its kind: the first book in which children are detectives and solve a crime. And it was completely new in its attitude to the city. There's a tradition in literature of...

Future Film Festival | Turkish Film Festival | Deep Desires And Broken Dreams | Keswick Film Festival

Future Film Festival, London

Have you got what it takes to be Britain's next great film-maker? Come along and find out at this talent-nurturing event, where all you need is youth (it's aimed at ages 15-25), curiosity and a little bit of cash (tickets start at a very reasonable £5 per day). The three days deal respectively with fiction, animation and documentary, and on each you get screenings, hands-on workshops, and advice and support from industry bodies and film-makers such Sally El Hosaini (accompanying My Brother The Devil, pictured), Penny Woolcock and the makers of ParaNorman. If you're young and in Wales, alternatively, check out the Ffresh student film festival in Wrexham (Wed to Fri).

BFI, SE1, Sat to Mon

Turkish Film Festival, London

A new slot in the calendar, just after the Berlin film festival (it...

A few weeks back, Matthew Perpetua of Buzzfeed wrote a post arguing that the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences should consider an award for “Best Use of an Old Song,” citing the memorable instances of Stevie Wonder’s “My Cherie Amour” in Silver Linings Playbook and Benjamin Britten’s “The Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra” in Moonrise Kingdom as possible contenders in this imaginary category. I could not agree more. It’s been a long time since a Best Original Song or Best Original Score winner made a major cultural impact, and the Music Supervisors who find the best existing music (within legal and budgetary constraints) for the greatest effect deserve their day in the spotlight for making us think about old songs in a new memorable audio-visual context or introducing us to great music that we didn’t know was always out there. Here are the reasons why such a category doesn...

(Gonzo Multimedia)

What better way to start Benjamin Britten's centenary year than with these four historic films by Tony Palmer, which capture so much of the essence of Britten's music-making. The classic A Time There Was… interviews relatives and housekeepers and includes extensive performance footage. Then there are two full performances: The Burning Fiery Furnace and Death in Venice, the latter atmospherically shot on site (except for Peter Pears who oddly only appears partway through the opera). Freshest of all, the 1967 Benjamin Britten and his Festival captures the excitement of Aldeburgh and the opening of Snape Maltings before the fire that temporarily destroyed it.

Benjamin BrittenClassical musicDVD and video reviewsNicholas Kenyon

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From a full programme of film and stage adaptations to a new James Bond novel, unpublished works by Rs Thomas and Wg Sebald and a new prize for women writers, 2013 is set to be a real page-turner

January

10th The Oscar nominations are announced unusually early this year. Keep an eye out for a bumper crop of literary adaptations, including David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas, Yann Martel's Life of Pi, the David Nicholls-scripted Great Expectations, as well as Les Miserables, Anna Karenina and The Hobbit.

18th A new stage adaptation of Henry James's The Turn of the Screw at the Almeida theatre in London. In the year of the centenary of Benjamin Britten's birth, his musical version will also feature around the country in both concert and stage performances.

24th The finalists for the fifth Man Booker International prize will be announced at the Jaipur festival.

Odd List Ivan Radford Jan 3, 2013

As 2012 recedes into history, Ivan counts down his pick of the year's finest movie soundtracks...

While Den of Geek writers were busy voting for the top film of the year, I’ve been rifling through my collection of albums from the last 12 months to work out which film soundtrack was the best. The conclusion? It’s been one heck of a year. (Please excuse the long list of Honourable Mentions at the end…)

These are the best movie soundtracks of 2012. Probably.

1. The Master (Jonny Greenwood)

A quick rewatch of the trailer to Paul Thomas Anderson’s film reminds you of the power of Jonny Greenwood’s music. The Master is surpassed by its haunting score, which nails the psychological state of Joaquin Phoenix’s Able-Bodied Seamen, increasingly dominated by His Master’s Voice. It may not be as lyrical as Greenwood’s Norwegian Wood soundtrack,...

Django Unchained

Traditionally, Quentin Tarantino’s films recycle older pop tunes and soundtrack snippets, helping to build up his image as a sort of “cultural DJ” as opposed to a traditonal filmmaker. Django Unchained might signal a change in approach Favoring a style-hopping mixtape feel that careens from country to gangsta rap, the Django soundtrack also features several original contributions from the likes of Ennio Morricone (who contributes some brief original themes), John Legend, and Rick Ross, as well as a (slightly superfluous) James Brown/2Pac mashup. It’s a melting-pot approach that complements Tarantino’s cinematic style perfectly.

Listen to the full soundtrack here.

****

Man With The Iron Fists

By most accounts, Gza’s directorial debut was a bit of a mess, but the expertly arranged soundtrack was just as solid as anyone could have hoped. From killer Wu posse cuts to a mini-Blackroc reunion courtesy of The Black Keys to well-placed soul tunes,...

Feature James Clayton Dec 21, 2012

With 2012 drawing to a close, James looks back over the year's movies - as seen from a strange alternate universe...

So 2012, then. Helluva ride, huh? I saw many films and some of them were films within films and films about films and now we’ve all ended up in a disaster movie of our own at the arrival of the Mayan apocalypse that Mel Gibson warned us about way back when. We didn’t even get to enjoy Christmas.

Never mind though. Before Jaguar Paw came screaming out of the Mesoamerican rainforest and we all perished as doomsday struck, we watched some brilliant movies. The past calendar year has been packed with superb cinematic releases, and looking back from the other side of oblivion, I see that we were spoiled.

Unfortunately, from this standpoint on the flipside of forever, I can’t actually see the old timeline of reality.

This year's Golden Globe nominations have been announced with Steven Spielberg's "Lincoln" scoring the most nods with seven. Not far behind at the Globes are "Argo" and "Django Unchained" with five; "Silver Linings Playbook," "Zero Dark Thirty" and "Les Miserables" with four; and "Life of Pi," "The Master," "Salmon Fishing in the Yemen" and "The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel" with three.

Quite a few surprises were in store. Completely forgotten in the lead-up awards race, "Salmon Fishing in the Yemen" came out of nowhere to score three nominations. On the flip side "Beasts of the Southern Wild" didn't score a single nomination. "Hotel Transylvania" made it into the Best Animated Feature Film category but "ParaNorman" didn't. Nicole Kidman's performance in the much derided "The Paperboy" scored a nod.

On the TV front, last year's love for "Game of Thrones" seems to have been transferred to "The Newsroom". "Girls,...

Striking Russian opera singer and wife of Mstislav Rostropovich, she was made an 'unperson' during the Soviet era

The soprano Galina Vishnevskaya, who has died aged 86, coloured her performances of opera, and especially of Russian song, so beautifully that full comprehension was not essential for enjoyment. Of course, once you did understand the words, you realised how much meaning she brought to them.

Possessed of a striking physical presence with lustrous dark hair, she was such a natural actor that she became the star of her generation at the Bolshoi opera company in Moscow, forging artistic relationships with the stage director Boris Pokrovsky and the conductor Alexander Melik-Pashaev. And – appropriately for a performer who sang with all the skill of an instrumentalist – for more than half a century she was married to Mstislav Rostropovich, not just a great cellist, but also a considerable conductor and pianist.

Their marriage – her third...

Len Lye's deliriously jazzy 1930s animation for the Post Office Savings Bank shows public information films needn't be dull

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The colours might look late-60s-psychedelic; some of the interaction between graphics and the human figure (at approx 1.40, for example) seems comparable with the experiments made by contemporary digital artists such as Klaus Obermaier. But this short animation, Rainbow Dance, was actually created back in 1936 as an advert for the Post Office Savings Bank. Between 1933 and 1940 the Gpo (now the Royal Mail) ran a film unit which produced dozens of short public-information films. The most famous was Night Mail with music by Benjamin Britten and words by Wh Auden, but while that was a classic black-and-white vision of Britain, avant-garde mainly in its combination of music and poetry, Len Lye's Rainbow Dance was one of several extravagantly experimental animations on which...