Tag: Rembrandt

Categories
Features Live Action Movies

Fountain of Youth
(2025)

Director – Guy Ritchie – 2025 – US – Cert. 12a – 126m

*

Two estranged, treasure-hunting siblings, with the help of a rich backer, pursue the trail towards the life-giving water source of legend, pursued by forces that want to prevent them from doing so – premieres globally on Apple TV+ from Friday, May 23rd

Films get made in a variety of different ways. According to the press handouts, this one came about initially through producer Tripp Vinson’s research into the legendary Fountain of Youth and the desire to have a globe-trotting hero searching for it. This idea was developed by screenwriter James Vanderbilt (Scream VI, Matt Bettinelli-Olpin, Tyler Gillett, 2022; The Amazing Spider-man, Marc Webb, 2012; Zodiac, David Fincher, 2007) into where the hero was not one but two people, an estranged brother and sister. When director Ritchie later came on board, he brought to it the idea of the journey being more important than the destination. This is not, therefore, a director-led project. In the process of making movies, however, it is ultimately the director, once they are on board, who is responsible for the myriad decisions that are taken in putting the film on the screen.… Read the rest

Categories
Art Documentary Features Live Action Movies

Exhibition on Screen
Michelangelo
Love and Death

Director – David Bickerstaff – 2017 – UK – Cert. U – 91m

*****

Sixteenth Century Renaissance sculptor Michelangelo remains one of the greatest artists of all time, yet his overreaching ambition frequently proved his undoing – back out in UK cinemas to tie in with the 550th anniversary of Michelangelo’s birth from Tuesday, May 20th

“From a fountain of mercy… my suffering is born.” These words (voiced by James Faulkner as Michelangelo) accompany images of a present day sculptor (Marco Ambrosini) working away at a piece of marble in his studio. The writings of Vasari (voice: Lawrence Kennedy) take up the story. A boy was born to a noble family in 1475. Art Critic and Author Jonathan Jones places Michelangelo among the greats, like Leonardo da Vinci, Rembrandt, Picasso. He deals with the strangest, darkest and most difficult stuff. He is the original famous artist. He had two biographies written about him in his lifetime, and took great interest in them, helping bring them to fruition. He painted, sculpted, built architecture, wrote poetry, even built military fortifications. This was the time when artists started being regarded as creative geniuses, according to Art Historian Jennifer Sliwka. Vasari referred to Michelangelo and his art in terms of Divinity and then the Divine.… Read the rest

Categories
Features Live Action Movies

Widow Clicquot

Director – Thomas Napper – 2023 – UK – Cert. 15 – 90m

****

A nineteenth century French widow innovates in the male-dominated world of champagne production – out in UK cinemas on Friday, August 23rd

In the early nineteenth century, Veuve Clicquot established itself as something of an innovation in the world of champagne. You would imagine that if anyone were to make a period picture about it, it would be the French, but as may well be guessed from the English language translation title here, this is a British production using English actors speaking English.

There’s nothing whatsoever wrong with that, but given that France has a sizeable movie industry which, among other things, often makes period costume dramas, watching a film about an historical period in that country in English feels decidedly odd. Perhaps if there were more of an epic sense of scale (think: Napoleon, Ridley Scott, 2023) it might feel less so. The screenplay is based on a book by North American writer Tilar J. Mazzeo.

Perhaps it’s explained with greater clarity in the book, but the film assumes a familiarity on the part of the audience with the ins and outs of the Napoleonic Wars, which take place in the backdrop of the film and on the edge of the narrative, affecting it from a distance, as it were.… Read the rest

Categories
Art Documentary Features Live Action Movies Series Shorts Television

Greenaway
By Numbers

How Peter Greenaway’s obsession with various numeric and other cataloguing systems has led to the creation of highly complex, multi-layered film pieces that joyfully play with audiences

If ever anyone were to make a film about the Dewey Decimal System, it would be Peter Greenaway. He is obsessed with ways and means to classify the world in which he finds himself, systems to organise and make sense of that peculiar world, people’s relationship networks with one another and their movement and actions within that world and those networks.

I first came across him on the theatrical release in Hammersmith of his three hours plus epic The Falls (1980), made in between his early, self-financed short films of the 1960s and 1970s and his first, more conventional in length feature The Draughtsman’s Contract (1982). The Falls takes its name from entries in the section of a directory beginning with the letters F A L L e.g. Orchard Falla, Constance Ortuist Fallaburr, Melorder Fallaburr. The directory chronicles survivors of a Violent Unknown Event, VUE for short… [read more]

Full article at DMovies.org in association with Doesn’t Exist Magazine – purchase your copy now.