One Love entertains with a powerful soundtrack, magnificent visuals and a very good performance by the cast, especially Kingsly Ben-Adir as Bob Marley and Lashana Lynch as his wife Rita Marley.
BOB MARLEY: ONE LOVE celebrates the life and music of an icon who inspired generations through his message of love and unity.
In addition to being a cultural icon, Bob Marley is the subject of the film “Bob Marley: One Love” which follows a specific time frame in Marley’s life. So don’t walk into this film expecting a thorough biography. It focuses on the last three years of his life with some recurring flashbacks to his childhood.
Starring Kingsley Ben-Adir as Bob Marley and Lashana Lynch as his wife Rita, the film follows the icon’s controversial concert in his native Jamaica. The country, which had recently gained independence from Great Britain, was on the verge of a civil war. To bring peace and hope to Jamaica, Marley decides to have a concert in the name of unity.
Ben-Adir has been on my radar since his standout performance in Regina King’s “One Night in Miami” as the human rights activist, Malcolm X. So my interest peaked after hearing Ben-Adir was taking on the role of Bob Marley. I’m not entirely sure what I expected from the performance, but it left an everlasting impression.
Ben-Adir loses himself in this character. For several moments, I genuinely believed that I was watching Bob Marley perform. The voice, the accent, his mannerisms and facial expressions were all meticulously studied and represented.
My Marley knowledge comes from cultural references, interviews, music, and stories from others who knew him. I’ve learned about him through others since I wasn’t around during the peak of his career. Working adjacent to Ben-Adir is the equally talented Lynch who also delivers a committed powerful performance.
Marley’s dedication to seeking peace and unity in his native country is admirable. His message of love is timeless and is simultaneously timely. In our current state where multiple wars are unfolding globally, his message can be one to consider. The music is fantastic! And it chronicles the inception of what’s thought to be one of the most essential albums of the 20th century, Exodus.
For the first 15 minutes, I had some challenges understanding what Ben-Adir was saying. The accent was thick and a bit fast, but I could decipher everything once I got accustomed to his dialect. Another downside to this film is the formulaic structure. It’s a semi-biopic, so many tropes are found here. Lastly, the plot felt spotty at times. It felt like jumping from one thing to another, but it wasn’t distracting enough to disappoint.
“Bob Marley: One Love” is a decent look at a specific window into the life of one of the most remarkable musicians to ever live. Anchored by an extraordinary leading performance from Ben-Adir, the message of love and unity could not be more timely—a perfect introduction of an icon to the newer generations.
Robert Carlton Breer (September 30, 1926 – August 11, 2011) was an American experimental filmmaker, painter, and sculptor.
Son of an inventor and automotive engineer, Breer is known for experimentation with a range of film and animation techniques. Breer was drawn to film through painting in the early 1950s while living in Paris. His interest in geometric abstraction is evident in his first films, which explored the role of movement in the understanding of form and space. He also created kinetic sculptures, which he called ‘floats’ in two separate periods of his career.
Breer has always been fascinated by the mechanics of film. Perhaps his father’s fascination with 3-D inspired Breer to tinker with early mechanical cinematic devices. His father was an engineer and designer of the legendary Chrysler Airflow automobile in 1934 and built a 3-D camera to film all the family vacations. After studying engineering at Stanford, Breer changed his focus toward hand crafted arts and began experimenting with flip books. These animations, done on ordinary 4″ by 6″ file cards have become the standard for all of Breer’s work, even to this day.
Like many of his generation, Breer’s early work was influenced by the various European modern art movements of the early 20th century, ranging from the abstract forms of the Russian Constructivists and the structuralist formulas of the Bauhaus, to the nonsensible universe of the Dadaists. Through his association with the Denise René Gallery, which specialized in geometric art, he saw the abstract films of such pioneers as Hans Richter, Viking Eggeling, Walter Ruttman and Fernand Léger. Breer acknowledges his respect for this purist, “cubist” cinema, which uses geometric shapes moving in time and space. In 1955, he helped organize and exhibited in a show in Paris entitled “Le Mouvement” (The Movement), which paved the way for new cinema aesthetics. During this period, Breer also met the poet Alan Ginsberg and introduced him to his film Recreation (1956), which made use of frame-by-frame experiments in a non-narrative structure. Although Breer disdains being labeled a beatnik, the film does capture some aspects of beat poetry and music.
When Breer returned to the United States in the late 1950s, the American avant-garde was thriving and films by Kenneth Anger, Stan Brakhage, Peter Kubelka and Maria Menken were creating a new visionary movement. Breer found kindred spirits within the New York experimental scene. As Pop Art emerged as a phenomenon in the 1960s, Breer befriended Claes Oldenburg and others. He worked on the TV show, David Brinkley’s Journal, filming pieces on art shows in Europe; at the same time, he made his debut documentary on the sculptor Jean Tinguely in 1961, Homage to Tinguely. Screened at the Museum of Modern Art, it reflects Breer’s interest in mechanical forms and the fine art of moving sculpture; techniques he used in his work, as his own kinetic sculpture was sparked by Tinguely’s keen interest in mechanical gadgets, kinetic movement and abstract forms.
Breer was influenced by the new performance art and “happenings” making waves in the avant-garde of Europe and New York. He worked briefly with Claes Oldenburg and his performance pieces resulting in a 13 minute film, Pat’s Birthday (1962). Breer also befriended artists like Nam June Paik, Charlotte Mormon and others exposed to the new trends in multimedia events.
While he was working on the film Fist Fight, he met Stockhausen, then working in Cologne on Originale, a performance piece. The composer’s work soon came into vogue in American circles and he was asked to perform his piece in New York’s Judson Hall in 1964. Breer presented Fist Fight as part of this performance, making the film a visual event in its own right.
Always whimsical, Breer soon developed a line technique related to the free form work of Swiss painter Paul Klee. Such short narrative pieces as A Man with his Dog Out for Air (1958) and Inner and Outer Space (1960) use the dynamics of drawing and line to capture the essence of humor and motion. Time and time again, he relies on the roots of simple techniques of pencils or 4 x 6 cards for inspiration. While Breer rarely uses conventional storytelling techniques, these films have a sense of the quick movements of a Tex Avery cartoon and the wit of an electric comic strip.
Historical Perspectives Breer continued to search for historical perspectives in his work and discovered the color theories of Chevreul and Rood. He also began a series of minimalist pieces based on number series, which were nonfigurative and based on geometry and formal issues. 66, 69 and 70 rely on formalist images from his early research into color paintings.
The 1970s brought Breer into a more commercial world of animation and he worked for the Children’s Television Workshop in 1971 doing animation for The Electric Company. His popular Gulls and Buoys relates back both to the poetry of William Carlos Williams and the early rotoscoping techniques devised by Max Fleischer back in 1916. Breer explored the latter method in order to give a live-action sense to the animated form. Disney and other commercial studios still use this method to animate reality-based scenes. With his new interest in technology, Breer was invited to Japan with other artists to work on the Pepsi Pavilion, making a set of mobile sculptures. While in Japan, he made Fuji, again using rotoscoping combined with Japanese textural imagery.
Returning to the United States, for his next work, LMNO (1978), he once again sought out historical references. A homage to one of the fathers of animation, Émile Cohl, it uses a simple French policeman as a main character. Cohl became famous for his Fantoche stick figure, which predated Mickey by 20 years. Using the simple technique of 4 x 6 index cards, this film used every imaginable technique from spray paint to pencils. His next film, TZ, continues this line of energetic experiments and is a portrait of his new living space then near the Tappan Zee bridge, in New York’s Hudson River Valley. Breer often uses domestic imagery in his work, incorporating objects surrounding the artist to fantasy sequences using Polaroid photographs reworked with erasable marker pens. The compositions, as always on 4 x 6 index cards, are enhanced by kitchen clatter in a free stream of conscious
Breer’s work continued his experiments with various techniques and materials with Swiss Army Knife with Rats and Pigeons (1980), which again includes live-action and line techniques.
Raising a family throughout the 1980s, Breer began to work with what he considers “children’s animation,” resulting in A Frog on a Swing(1988), which is dedicated to his daughter. He also experimented with associative spontaneity in Trial Balloons, a metaphor for anything experimental.
In recent years, Breer continued to make one film per year. His Sparkill Ave! (1993) is a homey study on his new neighborhood using hundreds of still photographs, combined with index card drawings. As always, he prefers animation “close to home.”
Today, Breer continues exploring animated forms while teaching animation at Cooper Union in New York City. When asked about his current work, he says that he still relies on the history of cinema and early “gadgets” as the source of his inspiration. His most recent work Now You See It (1996), now on exhibit at the American Museum of the Moving Image, in New York, uses a two sided panel which spins into an animated film much like a Thaumatrope, the first cinematic device that used persistence of vision back in 1826. Like two slides flipping back and forth, it is a continuous animation based on his explorations into the devices of cinema’s early history (and prehistory), which dazzled audiences by creating visual kinesis.
At the heart of his work is the imagination of the artist mixed with the inquisitive mind of the mad scientist, delving into lost archives of cinema to revive forgotten art forms and giving them new life for generations to come. This is the secret to Breer’s unique world.
By Jackie Leger : Santa Monica-based documentary filmmaker interested in the roots of American experimental film.
Alma Pöysti graduated 2007 from the Theatre Academy at the University of Helsinki with a Masters degree in Arts, and has since gathered a broad experience on the theatre stages as well as in front of the camera. For over ten years Alma Pöysti has been doing stage work in both Finland and Sweden. In 2020 she played Tove Jansson in Tove and is also known from films and TV productions like Liberty, Naked Harbour and Lola upside down. Pöysti is cast in the upcoming TV series Blackwater and Harjunpää. In 2023 she played in Finnish director Aki Kaurismaki’s latest film : Fallen Leaves
FallenLeaves has touched audiences with its heartfelt story and collected recognition for its exceptional performances. Alma Pöysti’s nomination at the Golden Globe Awards is a testament to the high-quality work of Finnish film.
The film is nominated for best non-English motion picture and it is also on the short list for an Academy Award for best international feature film.
Historically, Alma Pöysti is also nominated for a Golden Globe in the category of Best Performance by a Female Actor in Musical or Comedy, for her role as Ansa. This is the most recent nomination for a Finnish actress for this prize and the first time ever a nomination in this category for a Finnish film.
This is the first time for both Alma Pöysti and Jussi Vatanen, the leading male actor, to appear in a movie directed by Aki Kaurismäki. Kaurismäki, renowned for award-winning films like “Lights in the Dusk” (2006) and “The Man Without A Past” (2002), has a very minimalistic approach to acting.
“It’s really surreal to be nominated alongside these fenomenal actresses whom I admire so much. So I am kind of pinching myself and I find myself just having a big smile on my face. Life is fantastic.”
“Aki told us he prefers to do the shots in one take. But if you mess up, we will do it in two takes. And if it is a disaster, we will do it in three takes,” Alma Pöysti describes the directions they received from Kaurismäki.
“This was of course his great sense of humor, but actually it was also true. Most of the scenes are done in one take and thats is quite remarkable.”
“It was like a journey to old-time movie making for us, using a 35mm film camera. Aki doesn’t use a monitor, which is extraordinary. He sits by the camera, following the takes and building the frames. His vision is clear and he knows exactly what he wants. It is a privilege to work with a master of their craft.”
But even though it is simple expression, the film has an intensity.
“You need to include life, thoughts, and feelings in your work. Trust your audience. In Akis world, less is more. The narrative will carry the story even without exaggeration. Aki has been doing this for a long time and has his own unique aesthetics, storytelling, and humanism, which I greatly admire. So it was easy to sit back and let Aki take care of everything else. The lighting, rhythm, props, everything is clear. It’s a wonderful world to be a part of,” Pöysti describes.
Being nominated is, according to her, a great recognition of the teams’ work.
“I’m so grateful. Many colleagues and people in the film industry have been cheering us on, and it’s nice to see that we can produce high-quality work in Nordic countries that gets recognized internationally.”
Eva Green is a French actress. She first gained recognition in the films The Dreamers (2003) and Kingdom of Heaven (2005). She achieved international fame when she starred as Vesper Lind in the 2006 James Bond movie Casino Royale. In 2007, Green was awarded the BAFTA Rising Star Award. Her other most famous films include 2012’s Dark Shadows, 2014’s 300: Rise of an Empire, 2014’s Sin City: A Dame to Kill For, 2019’s Dumbo and 2019’s Proxima. Green is also known for her starring roles on the television series Penny Dreadful (2014-2016), which earned her a Golden Globe nomination for Best Actress in a Television Series – Drama.
2023
The Three Musketeers: Milady – named after the free-spirited and devious woman imagined by Alexandre Dumas – is a film which struggles to break new ground and fails to carve out a strong presence for its female lead, once again played by Eva Green. Milady is, however, at the heart of the story, and the film sets out to unravel the knots of intrigue and mystery surrounding this woman’s identity.
This final installment in Satyajit Ray’s Apu Trilogy follows Apu’s life as an orphaned adult aspiring to be a writer
Apur Sansar (Bengali: অপুর সংসার), also known as The World of Apu, is a 1959 Indian Bengali-language drama film produced, written and directed by Satyajit Ray. It is based on the second half of Bibhutibhushan Bandopadhyay’s novel Aparajito. Following Pather Panchali (1955) and Aparajito(1956), The World of Apu is the final part of Ray’s The Apu Trilogy, about the childhood and early adulthood of a young Bengali named Apu in early twentieth century India. The World of Apu stars Soumitra Chatterjee (as Apu) and Sharmila Tagore (as Apu’s wife Aparna); the duo would go on to appear in many subsequent Ray films, ( Wikipedia)
By the time Apur Sansar was released, Satyajit Ray had directed not only the first two Apu films but also the masterpiece The Music Room, and was well on his way to becoming a legend. This extraordinary final chapter brings our protagonist’s journey full circle. Apu is now in his early twenties, out of college, and hoping to live as a writer. Alongside his professional ambitions, the film charts his romantic awakening, which occurs as the result of a most unlikely turn of events, and his eventual, fraught fatherhood. Featuring soon-to-be Ray regulars Soumitra Chatterjee and Sharmila Tagore in star-making performances, and demonstrating Ray’s ever more impressive skills as a crafter of pure cinematic imagery, Apur Sansar is a moving conclusion to this monumental trilogy.
THE LOUVRE INVITES PATRICE CHÉREAU: FACES AND BODIES; BEHIND THE IMAGES; SCOPOPHILIA. THE LOUVRE. 4 NOVEMBER 2010– 31 JANUARY 2011
Patrice Chéreau, one of the most brilliant figures on the French culture scene – an opera, stage and film director, actor and producer – is making his debut in an area hitherto unexplored by him. The Louvre, perhaps the most snobbish, largest and most prestigious museum in the world, has invited him to create his own programme, a mini-festival representing a range of genres that covers so much more than just theatre: the project, united under the title of Faces and Bodies, also features cinema, dance and visual art. The latter is represented by three separate shows which see Patrice Chéreau try on an art curator’s uniform – and, by the looks of it, he is wearing it well. The Faces and Bodies exhibition comprises 40 paintings owned by Musée du Louvre, the Pompidou Centre and Musée d’Orsay, their mutual interplay becoming an important part of the rest of art events planned by Chéreau and a significant feature of the general narrative. Enthusiasts of contemporary art will appreciate Scopophilia, Chéreau’s show of photographs by Nan Goldin – the product of the artist’s six-month series of visits to the Louvre and the evidence of the impact of painting and sculpture on Goldin’s art. The Behind the Images exhibition, on the other hand, provides an insight into the world of set designers: sketches, scale models and archive materials, all of them on public view for the first time. According to the artist, the relationship between the Louvre and Patrice Chéreau started as early as in his childhood when the museum became an object of genuine admiration for the boy.
Bong Joon-ho (Korean: 봉준호), born September 14, 1969, is a South Korean film director, producer and screenwriter.
봉준호(奉俊昊, 1969년9월 14일 ~ )는 대한민국의 영화 감독이다. 1993년 단편 영화 《백색인》으로 데뷔 후 2000년 영화 《플란다스의 개》로 장편 영화 감독으로 데뷔하였다. 두 번째 장편 영화 《살인의 추억》(2003)에 이어 《괴물》(2006)과 《설국열차》(2013)로 상업적으로 성공을 거두었다.[1] 2017년 《옥자》와 2019년 《기생충》이 칸 국제 영화제에서 공식경쟁부문에 초청되었다.[2] 《기생충》을 통해 한국 감독으로는 최초로 2019년 황금종려상을 수상하였고,[3][4] 2020년 제77회 골든 글로브상에서 최우수 외국어 영화상을 수상했다. 제92회 아카데미상에서 최우수 국제영화상에 후보 지명 된 최초의 한국 영화가 되었다. 봉준호는 그의 영화 작업을 인정 받아 최우수 국제영화상, 최우수 작품상, 최우수 감독상, 최우수 각본상의 4개 부문의 상을 모두 수상한 최초의 아시아 영화 감독이 되었다. 봉준호는 또한 테시가하라 히로시, 구로사와 아키라, M. 나이트 샤말란과 리안에 이어 다섯 번째로 감독상에 후보 지명되었으며, 두 번째로 수상한 아시아 감독이자 첫 수상한 한국 감독이 되었다.
Gina Lollobrigida, the 1950s Italian bombshell who starred in films including “Fanfan la Tulipe,” “Beat the Devil,” “Trapeze” and “Buona Sera, Mrs. Campbell,” has died. She was 95.
According to Italian news agency Lapresse, Lollobrigida died in a clinic in Rome. No cause of death has been cited. In September she had had surgery to repair a thigh bone broken in a fall, but she recovered and competed for a Senate seat in Italy’s elections held last year in September, though she did not win.
After resisting Howard Hughes’ offer to make movies in Hollywood in 1950, Lollobrigida starred with Gerard Philipe in the 1952 French swashbuckler “Fanfan la Tulipe,” a fest winner and popular favorite.
Her first American movie, shot in Italy, was John Huston’s 1953 film noir spoof “Beat the Devil,” in which she starred with Humphrey Bogart and Jennifer Jones. The same year she starred with Vittorio De Sica in Luigi Comencini’s “Bread, Love and Dreams,” for which she won a BAFTA for best actress in a foreign film.
Lollobrigida starred in director Robert Z. Leonard’s Italian-language “The Most Beautiful Woman in the World” (aka Beautiful but Dangerous”), for which she received the best actress award at the inaugural David di Donatello Awards in 1956.
That year, she also starred in Carol Reed’s “Trapeze,” also starring Burt Lancaster and Tony Curtis and lensed in Paris. Also in 1956 she shot an Italian- and French-produced remake of “The Hunchback of Notre Dame” in which Anthony Quinn played Quasimodo but Lollobrigida, playing Esmerelda, was first billed.
More high-profile projects followed, including King Vidor’s “Solomon and Sheba,” with Yul Brynner, and WWII movie “Never So Few,” with Frank Sinatra, Peter Lawford and Steve McQueen, both in 1959; in 1961 she starred with Rock Hudson in the comedy “Come September.” By this point she was regularly shuttling between Italian, American and the occasional French production.
As her movie career faded, Lollobrigida pursued other interests, including photojournalism and sculpting; she also ran, unsuccessfully, for a seat in the European Parliament.
In 2018, Lollobrigida was awarded a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.
Though Daney is the most trenchant and visionary post-1968 French critic, his writing has been scantly published in English translation—until now. The newly released “The Cinema House and the World: The Cahiers du Cinéma Years, 1962-1981” (translated by Christine Pichini) is the first of four hefty volumes in a series collecting Daney’s works that has been published in France, and the first to appear in English.
Daney’s criticism is haunted by ghosts and by a time that’s out of joint. He writes with the feeling of being too late, coming after the French New Wave and the golden age of Hollywood that inspired it; after May, 1968, and its unkept promise of real political revolution; after the failure of purely ideological commitments; even, in a certain way, after the end of the cinema that he loved. He writes with a mournful assertion of cinematic decline. In 1978, enthusing about the art of melodrama, he lamented that “the last great American melodramas . . . date from twenty years ago.” In 1980, he asserted that “today, the voices of those who continue to think that the cinema is ‘the art of our time’ are growing increasingly faint.” The power of the American cinema that he loved came from its popularity—not the number of viewers it attracted but the kind of viewers—yet the composition of movie audiences had changed. As Daney says in the 1977 interview, “Cinema is less and less a form of popular expression and more and more recognized as ‘art’ by the middle classes,” whereas in the early days of Cahiers, in the nineteen-fifties, “Hawks and Hitchcock’s films were seen in their day by working class people and ignored by the cultivated people. It’s a relation to the working class space through forms that the people experienced and loved for fifty years.”
Serge Daney died in 1992 of aids, at the age of forty-eight. (Trafic ceased publication as a quarterly, after a hundred and twenty issues, in 2021, but is expected to continue as an annual collection.) His strongest legacy, though, lies in the art of movies itself. Like Bazin, Daney was an institutionalist who primed the terrain for future filmmakers, whose ideas were validated not by his films but by the films of others. Through his own work and in the publications that he invigorated and preserved, he cultivated and inspired critics who would perpetuate the stringent and self-questioning Cahiers legacy that also lives on in the best of French cinema
The Tuche are a French film series very popular in France, with 3 sequels and probably another one after Tuche 4
The first Tuche movie was released in 2011 amid widespread expectations that it would be shunned by filmgoers.
Instead, Jeff Tuche, the father, who is played by Jean-Paul Rouve, his wife, Cathy, played by Isabelle Nanty, and their children, have become such stars that Les Tuche 4 was released in 2021 in 918 theaters.
As Hollywood continues to grapple with the far-reaching and damaging effects of Covid pandemic, on the other side of the world Australia and New Zealand are bucking the downward trend.
The countries are no stranger to major international productions — in part thanks to lucrative tax incentives — but they are currently benefitting from a production boom unlike anywhere else thanks to their governments’ swift and stringent response to the virus (in addition to geographic and demographic factors). Equally as encouraging, their distribution sectors are showing some glorious glimmers of hope that demonstrate that audiences are keen to return to theaters when it’s safe to do so.
New Zealand’s film industry boomed during the pandemic : We’re lucky that we’re isolated from the rest of the world, and I feel we’ve got a government that’s been super helpful to the film industry. We’re in the Hollywood of the Pacific, and it’s almost too easy to take for granted how lucky we are.
International blockbusters including James Cameron’s Avatar sequels, Amazon’s Lord of the Rings series and Jane Campion’s The Power of the Dog – starring Benedict Cumberbatch and Kirsten Dunst – all managed complex film shoots in New Zealand this year.
French comedy dismantles clichés about what it means to be black in France.
In “Tout simplement noir” (Simply Black), French rapper and amateur filmmaker Jean-Pascal Zadi has pulled in a host of big names from France’s “visible minorities” to challenge clichés around black identity and communitypolitics.
Le journal du peintre 2 