Elio is now playing in cinemas nationwide.
Cinésthesia
Feelings. On film.
Thursday, 17 July 2025
Loving the alien: "Elio"
Wednesday, 16 July 2025
On DVD: "Quatermass 2"
Quatermass 2 is now available in a limited edition 4K Collector's Boxset through Hammer Films, and is available to stream via Prime Video.
Saturday, 12 July 2025
For what it's worth...
UK box office Top Ten (for the weekend of July 4-6, 2025):
1 (new) Jurassic World: Rebirth (12A)
3 (3) How to Train Your Dragon (PG)
6 (5) Lilo & Stitch (U)
9 (8) Sardaar Ji 3 (12A)
10 (12) The Ballad of Wallis Island (12A) ***
(source: BFI)
My top five:
2. Nine Queens [above]
4. Clueless
5. F1
DVD/Blu-Ray/Download top ten:
1 (1) A Minecraft Movie (PG)
2 (new) Thunderbolts* (12)
3 (13) Wicked: Part One (PG) **
4 (6) Jurassic World: Dominion (12)
6 (re) Disney's Snow White (PG)
8 (re) Flow (U) ***
9 (3) 28 Days Later... (15) ****
10 (new) James Bond: Sean Connery 6-Film Collection (12) ****
3. Quatermass 2
4. Flow
Top five films on terrestrial TV this week:
1. Deliverance (Friday, BBC Two, 11pm)
2. Manhunter (Tuesday, BBC Two, 11pm)
3. Passport to Pimlico (Sunday, BBC Two, 1.50pm)
4. Little Women (Saturday, Channel 4, 3pm)
5. Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (Sunday, BBC Two, 3.10pm)
In memoriam: Ken Colley (Telegraph 09/07/25)
Such extremes were however light years removed from the daily bread-and-butter of Colley the jobbing actor. After an uncredited screen debut as a corpse in the BBC’s A for Andromeda (1961), he settled into steady TV employment, appearing on The Avengers in 1963 and as a steelworker in one 1964 episode of Coronation Street; he played two roles on Emergency-Ward 10 (1957-67) and three on Z Cars (1962-78).
Colley made his film debut as a porter in the Children’s Film Foundation title Seventy Deadly Pills (1964), followed by supporting roles in more prominent titles: squaddies in How I Won the War (1967) and Oh! What a Lovely War (1969), underworld fixer Tony Farrell in Performance (1970). By then, his sad-eyed, lugubrious mien was being noticed by creatives drawn to the cultish and marginal.
Colley became a favourite of Ken Russell, who cast him as Hitler in his scandal-inducing TV film Dance of the Seven Veils (1970). (It was the second time Colley had played the dictator, after “These Men Are Dangerous”, a 1969 episode of the BBC’s Thirty-Minute Theatre.) He was Tchaikovsky’s younger brother in The Music Lovers and Legrand in The Devils (both 1971); later he appeared as Krenek in Mahler (1974) and Chopin in Lisztomania (1975).
He also bonded with the Pythons, playing “1st Fanatic” in Terry Gilliam’s Jabberwocky and Michael Palin’s bungling bank robber accomplice in “The Testing of Eric Olthwaite”, the second episode of Ripping Yarns (both 1977). With reported first choice George Lazenby unavailable, Colley was recruited to play Jesus in Monty Python’s Life of Brian (1979): “There was as much fun between takes as on takes,” the actor recalled.
The significance of his role as Lord Vader’s pilot snuck up on him: “I was out shopping in Notting Hill Gate with my wife Mary, and we walked past an old-fashioned Odeon… The queues were four-deep around the block and I said ‘Look, my Star Wars film is on. We ought to go and see it.’ There were two seats left on the front row and when the film began, with those words disappearing into infinity, you could have heard a human hair drop. I looked around at the people in the audience and I said to Mary ‘this is wonderful!’”
Born Kenneth Colley in Manchester on December 7, 1937, he began acting while working as a gopher in rep theatre (“They threw you on stage in small parts so they didn't have to pay an actor”). Debuting in Leicester in 1961, he later appeared alongside John Hurt and Rodney Bewes in the Garrick’s recut of David Helliwell’s Little Malcolm and His Struggle Against the Eunuchs in 1966, and opposite Albert Finney in the Royal Court premiere of David Storey’s Cromwell in 1973.
His Star Wars adventures unlocked more prominent parts, often in international miniseries or TV movies: the naval hero of ITV’s BAFTA-winning I Remember Nelson (1982), for which he strapped his right arm behind his back; Eichmann in the Emmy-winning Wallenberg: A Hero’s Story (1985); Ben Gunn (opposite Brian Blessed’s Long John Silver) in Return to Treasure Island (1986).
Russell remained loyal, casting Colley as Mr. Brunt in The Rainbow (1989), Alfred Dreyfus in Prisoner of Honor (1991) and the composer John Ireland in The Secret Life of Arnold Bax (1992). Colley now had overseas admirers – he was the titular hitman in droll Finnish auteur Aki Kaurismäki’s I Hired A Contract Killer (1990) – though typically he saw the decade out with episodes of Peak Practice (in 1997) and The Bill (between 1995-99).
After revoicing Admiral Piett for the Lego Star Wars animation The Empire Strikes Out (2012), he played Estragon in the Cockpit Theatre’s 2014 revival of Waiting for Godot and Mob boss Vicente Changretta in 2016’s third series of Peaky Blinders. He briefly turned to directing, shooting the Ouija-board horror Greetings (2007) in his own Hythe home; his final role was in the Kent-shot indie thriller Dan Hawk Psychic Detective (2024).
There was, he insisted, no formula for success: “You only realise what you’ve got when it’s put together. Some of the best scripts you’ve ever read come out like dreck and you can’t understand why, while some scripts you had no respect for become wonderful movies… You cannot predict what will be a hit, otherwise we’d all be millionaires.”
He is survived by his wife Mary Dunne, who he married in 1962.
Ken Colley, born December 7, 1937, died June 30, 2025.
Battlegrounds: "Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker's Apocalypse"
The death of Eleanor Coppola and the release of her husband Francis Ford Coppola's Megalopolis last year have collectively triggered a reissue for 1991's Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker's Apocalypse. Originally assembled by Fax Bahr and George Hickenlooper for US cable network Showtime yet subsequently shown in cinemas to critical acclaim, this was the making-of documentary that notarised the legend of an earlier Coppola opus - 1979's famously troubled Conrad adaptation Apocalypse Now - while also perhaps contextualising the safe path the director would tread over the following decade. (The unhappy Godfather threequel would be followed by John Grisham adaptations and PG-rated Robin Williams vehicles.) The bulk of the doc was drawn from footage Eleanor shot during Apocalypse's attenuated eight-month shoot in the Philippines, initially to provide the foundation of a United Artists press kit. Yet Bahr and Hickenlooper open with footage of Coppola at the movie's Cannes premiere, insisting the film wasn't about Vietnam, it was Vietnam; over the doc's brisk 95 minutes, the inherent madness of this project seems to redouble with every passing frame. Much of it has long been a matter of public record. The shoot had barely begun when Francis elected to replace leading man Harvey Keitel with Martin Sheen, only for a spiritually unmoored Sheen to suffer his own on-camera breakdown; Eleanor films the 14-year-old Laurence Fishburne, cast as young gunner Mr. Clean after lying about his age, speaking about an associate who claimed he found his time in Vietnam "fun and groovy"; a passing typhoon lays waste to the sets and schedule. Coppola found himself obliged to pump in more and more of his own money and rewrite John Milius's script as he went, and while Bahr and Hickenlooper work in a parallel with Orson Welles, who'd attempted his own Heart of Darkness adaptation in the late 1930s, the figure the director most closely resembles may actually be Gromit in the climactic setpiece of The Wrong Trousers, having to put down track as he goes along so as to prevent some terrible derailment. This Coppola presents as heroic in many ways, committed to his task, refusing to abandon his post and continually fighting for his film's forward progress; yet Eleanor's access-all-areas documentation keeps alighting upon images that could have equally served as evidence in a strong case for prosecution, sectioning or simply more draconian health-and-safety legislation.
The cinephiles in Bahr and Hickenlooper exercise their own judgement, and Hearts of Darkness includes enough of what Coppola did get filmed for the pair to make their own case for Apocalypse Now. No madness, no craziness, no shoulder-dislocating big swings, and you don't get the Ride of the Valkyries sequence, you don't get Robert Duvall as Kilgore, and you don't get whatever the hell Brando and Dennis Hopper were doing in the movie's final reel. George Lucas, who was briefly attached to direct Milius's script at an early stage, notes the insanity of the initial plan to film in Vietnam while the war was ongoing, but no madness, and you get more George Lucas films than you do John Milius films; you end up with a war movie like Revenge of the Sith, shot against green screens on entirely sterile sets, detached from gravity and reality alike. I'd forgotten how much fun the documentary is: this shoot yielded great, one-of-a-kind war stories (retold here by born storytellers), and it's amusing to see how sober Coppola, Sheen and Duvall appear in contemporary interviews shot long after the dust had settled and their ears had stopped ringing. The now-adult Fishburne, presumably doorstopped at the moment between School Daze and Boyz N The Hood, reflects that he was cast to represent all those draftees who didn't know what they were getting into; Sam Bottoms, the film's surf-dude gunner, reveals he matched his on-set drug consumption to the mood of individual scenes. The Hollywood these chastened and battle-scarred warriors came home to was one of childproofed franchises and PG-13 ratings; the old grindhouses and drive-ins were being pulled down and replaced with gleaming multiplexes. Everything now had to make commercial sense. Yet Hearts of Darkness sent viewers back to its source, even if just to goggle at it, and revisiting the plantation sequence in Bahr and Hickenlooper's company seemed to remind Coppola to finish what he started. No Hearts of Darkness, no Apocalypse Now Redux, nor Apocalypse Now: The Final Cut - and you could argue those rejigs were central to Coppola restarting on Megalopolis. By all accounts, Mike Figgis has been tasked with overseeing the making-of that grand folly: heaven knows what will come out of that.
Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker's Apocalypse is now showing in selected cinemas; a new Blu-Ray edition will be available through StudioCanal from July 28.
Friday, 11 July 2025
Child's play: "Sitaare Zameen Par"
On the plus side, SZP confirms its producer-star's nose for non-toxic material, for characterisations that are appreciably human rather than the superhuman figures namesake Salman Khan has been struggling to convince as, and for projects offering the prospect of chuckles. Chuckles there are here, on the subject of terminology (while shrugging off their own labels, the lads decide upon "businesswoman" as a synonym for sex worker), and at the sight of the pint-sized Khan being dwarfed by the absolute hulks among his charges. The star, passing into middle age with a lived-in, Jude Law-ish handsomeness, remains game for a laugh; a recent divorcee, he even works in some metatextual business involving Gulshan's gradual renegotiation of his relationship with ex-wife Sunita (Genelia Deshmukh, sparkier than a lot of recent Hindi heroines). The movie is aggressively unobjectionable: it's become the box-office hit it was always intended to be, and which Khan perhaps needed after a rocky Covid era. Yet it's only been ten years since P.K., a major Khan hit that took creative and satirical risks, where SZP goes genially through the motions. Unwilling to train his neurodivergent performers to dunk like Shaquille, Prasanna is never particularly interested in basketball as a sport, which means any in-game drama has had to be conveyed by cutaways to the sidelines. You could also duck out of the cinema for a meal during the entire central stretch, which doesn't trade in scenes so much as gentle lessons on the theme of "everybody has their own normal", put across in the same tone as an elementary teacher and in the same colours used to sell multivitamins to pre-teens. (The Shankar-Ehsaan-Loy songs play like nursery rhymes and lullabies.) In those stretches that aren't blandly entertaining, you spy the predicament of a megastar in an industry that's been set on a war footing even before India went to war. (Gulshan's community service comes to seem like a form of conscientious objection.) Rather than bang a nationalist drum, Khan has retreated to a gym that resembles a crèche to coach a sport that suggests war without the casualties. It's the very definition of a safe space, for star and audience alike, but there's not much more to the film than that - and set against the memory of Khan's epic and stirring Lagaan, a sports movie from a bolder, more confident era of Hindi filmmaking, it can't help but seem like kids' stuff.
Sitaare Zameen Par is now playing in selected cinemas.
Wednesday, 9 July 2025
My Top 100 Films of the Century So Far
Amid what's so far been a so-so moviegoing summer (and year), it's been educative to look back on the artistic highpoints of the past quarter-century; they do still sometimes make 'em like they used to, and - even better - sporadically make 'em like they've never been made before. Figures in brackets indicate their position on a similar list I compiled back in 2017 (which included films made in 2000, where this doesn't).
1 (1) Mulholland Dr. (David Lynch, 2001) [above]
2 (2) Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives (Apichatpong Weerasethakul, 2010)
3 (16) Once Upon a Time in Anatolia (Nuri Bilge Ceylan, 2011)
4 (7) In the City of Sylvia (José Luis Guerín, 2007)
5 (71) Mad Max: Fury Road (George Miller, 2015)
6 (3) The Corporation (Mark Achbar and Jennifer Abbott, 2003)
7 (new) Decision to Leave (Park Chan-wook, 2022)
8 (5) Father of My Children (Mia Hansen-Løve, 2009)
9 (4) Zodiac (David Fincher, 2007)
10 (10) There Will Be Blood (Paul Thomas Anderson, 2007)
11 (6) The Class (Laurent Cantet, 2008)
12 (new) Memoria (Apichatpong Weerasethakul, 2021)
13 (23) Toni Erdmann (Maren Ade, 2016)
14 (new) Saint Omer (Alice Diop, 2022)
15 (8) Take Shelter (Jeff Nichols, 2011)
16 (9) The Social Network (David Fincher, 2010)
17 (25) Memories of Murder (Bong Joon Ho, 2003)
18 (new) Roma (Alfonso Cuarón, 2018)
19 (new) Our Body (Claire Simon, 2023)
20 (new) No Bears (Jafar Panahi, 2022)
21 (new) Parasite (Bong Joon Ho, 2019)
22 (new) Godland (Hlynur Pálmason, 2022)
23 (new) Killers of the Flower Moon (Martin Scorsese, 2023)
24 (33) Our Little Sister (Hirokazu Kore-eda, 2015)
25 (21) The Last of the Unjust (Claude Lanzmann, 2013)
26 (new) For Sama (Waad Al-Kateab and Edward Watts, 2019)
27 (27) London: The Modern Babylon (Julien Temple, 2012)
28 (new) The Irishman (Martin Scorsese, 2019)
29 (new) Blitz (Steve McQueen, 2024)
30 (new) Heal the Living (Katell Quillévéré, 2016)
31 (new) The Worst Person in the World (Joachim Trier, 2021)
32 (new) Bloody Nose, Empty Pockets (Bill and Turner Ross, 2020)
33 (49) A Town Called Panic (Stéphane Aubier and Vincent Patar, 2009)
34 (new) Summer of Soul (or, When the Revolution Could Not Be Televised) (Questlove and Hal Tuchin, 2021)
35 (36) We Steal Secrets: The Story of Wikileaks (Alex Gibney, 2013)
36 (new) Kokomo City (D. Smith, 2023)
37 (new) Profit Motive and the Whispering Wind (John Gianvito, 2007)
38 (12) Être et avoir (Nicolas Philibert, 2002)
39 (34) Brokeback Mountain (Ang Lee, 2005)
40 (40) Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room (Alex Gibney, 2005)
41 (32) Crimson Gold (Jafar Panahi, 2003)
42 (63) It's Such a Beautiful Day (Don Hertzfeldt, 2012)
43 (15) Pan's Labyrinth (Guillermo del Toro, 2006)
44 (new) Annette (Leos Carax, 2021)
45 (new) The World to Come (Mona Fastvold, 2020)
46 (new) The Zone of Interest (Jonathan Glazer, 2023)
47 (19) The Magdalene Sisters (Peter Mullan, 2002)
48 (new) The Lost City of Z (James Gray, 2016)
49 (17) Before the Devil Knows You're Dead (Sidney Lumet, 2007)
50 (new) Leave No Trace (Debra Granik, 2018)
51 (18) NO (Pablo Larraín, 2012)
52 (37) The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada (Tommy Lee Jones, 2005)
53 (new) R.I.P./ee.ma.yau (Lijo Jose Pellissery, 2018)
54 (83) Far From Heaven (Todd Haynes, 2002)
55 (new) Ponniyin Selvan: Parts 1 & 2 (Mani Ratnam, 2022-23)
56 (new) The Death of Stalin (Armando Iannucci, 2017)
57 (13) The Piano Teacher (Michael Haneke, 2001)
58 (20) Talk to Her (Pedro Almodovar, 2002)
59 (31) 24 Hour Party People (Michael Winterbottom, 2002)
60 (new) And Your Mother Too/Y tu mamá también (Alfonso Cuaron, 2001)
61 (new) Possessor (Brandon Cronenberg, 2020)
62 (41) Lady Chatterley (Pascale Ferran, 2006)
63 (new) Driveways (Andrew Ahn, 2019)
64 (new) A Hidden Life (Terrence Malick, 2019)
65 (70) Train to Busan (Yeon Sang-ho, 2016)
66 (30) WALL-E (Andrew Stanton, 2008)
67 (89) Amélie (Jean-Pierre Jeunet, 2001)
68 (28) Before Midnight (Richard Linklater, 2013)
69 (new) The Son's Room (Nanni Moretti, 2001)
70 (48) Bridge of Spies (Steven Spielberg, 2015)
71 (new) Labyrinth of Cinema (Nobuhiko Obayashi, 2019)
72 (new) First Reformed (Paul Schrader, 2017)
73 (new) 25th Hour (Spike Lee, 2002)
74 (new) Eden (Mia Hansen-Løve, 2014)
75 (new) Hale County This Morning, This Evening (RaMell Ross, 2018)
76 (new) The Florida Project (Sean Baker, 2017)
77 (new) Manchester by the Sea (Kenneth Lonergan, 2016)
78 (58) The Tree of Life (Terrence Malick, 2011)
79 (new) John McEnroe: In the Realm of Perfection (Julien Faraut, 2018)
80 (61) The Court/Bamako (Abderrahmane Sissako, 2006)
81 (60) Om Shanti Om (Farah Khan, 2007)
82 (39) Punch-Drunk Love (Paul Thomas Anderson, 2002)
83 (55) Spirited Away (Hayao Miyazaki, 2001)
84 (new) Goodbye, Dragon Inn (Tsai Ming-liang, 2003)
85 (new) I Am Not Your Negro (Raoul Peck, 2016)
86 (new) A Thousand and One (A.V. Rockwell, 2023)
87 (84) Lootera (Vikramaditya Motwane, 2013)
88 (new) Foxcatcher (Bennett Miller, 2014)
89 (new) Gangubai Kathiawadi (Sanjay Leela Bhansali, 2022)
90 (new) Mr. Turner (Mike Leigh, 2014)
91 (86) Inside Llewyn Davis (Joel and Ethan Coen, 2013)
92 (68) Under the Skin (Jonathan Glazer, 2013)
93 (new) Lost in Translation (Sofia Coppola, 2003)
94 (new) Moneyball (Bennett Miller, 2011)
95 (new) Rocky aur Rani Kii Prem Kahaani (Karan Johar, 2023)
96 (new) Of Time and the City (Terence Davies, 2008)
97 (new) The Image Book (Jean-Luc Godard, 2018)
98 (new) Joyland (Saim Sadiq, 2022)
99 (new) 120BPM (Robin Campillo, 2017)
100 (new) Gagarine (Fanny Liatard and Jérémy Trouilh, 2020)
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