Latest news with #JamesAshcroft
Yahoo
9 hours ago
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Geoffrey Rush To Receive Taormina Film Festival Excellence Award
EXCLUSIVE: Oscar winning actor Geoffrey Rush is the latest addition to the Taormina Film Festival lineup, and will receive the event's Excellence Award during the 71st edition which runs June 10-14 in the hilltop Sicilian town. Rush will also present his latest feature, The Rule of Jenny Pen, as part of the official competition selection. The psychological thriller from director James Ashcroft and co-starring John Lithgow debuted on the festival circuit last year and will make its Italian premiere in Taormina. More from Deadline Olivia Wilde To Receive Taormina Film Festival Creativity Award Helen Hunt To Receive Taormina Film Festival Lifetime Achievement Award Catherine Deneuve To Receive Taormina Film Festival Lifetime Achievement Award Rush won the Academy Award for Best Actor in 1997 for Shine, and has also received three BAFTAs, two Golden Globes, a Tony Award, an Emmy Award and four Screen Actors Guild Awards, along with three additional Oscar nominations in other categories. Tiziana Rocca, Artistic Director of the Taormina Film Festival, said: 'We are honored to welcome an artist of Geoffrey Rush's caliber to Taormina. His presence is a tribute to the greatness of acting in all its forms. His commitment, sensitivity and mastery have inspired generations of actors and audiences around the world. Presenting him with the Taormina Excellence Award is a way to celebrate a living icon of cinema and make this edition of the festival even more unforgettable.' Rush joins such other big names who will attend Taormina this year as Martin Scorsese, Michael Douglas, Catherine Deneuve, Helen Hunt and Olivia Wilde. The international jury will be led by Oscar-winner Da'Vine Joy Randolph, with panel support from British actor Rupert Everett, three-time Oscar-winning costume designer Sandy Powell and more. Lionsgate's John Wick spinoff Ballerina will open the festival. Best of Deadline 2025 TV Cancellations: Photo Gallery 2025-26 Awards Season Calendar: Dates For Tonys, Emmys, Oscars & More 2025 TV Series Renewals: Photo Gallery
The Guardian
16-03-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
The Rule of Jenny Pen review – John Lithgow and Geoffrey Rush excel in malicious nursing home chiller
A chillingly unexpected spin on the geriatric horror genre, James Ashcroft's nervy New Zealand psychological thriller combines two credible threats to unsettling effect. One is dementia and the dread of a once sharp mind losing its edge and autonomy. The other is a demented senior psychopath with an eyeless doll repurposed as a glove puppet, who terrorises the fellow residents of his nursing home. The Rule of Jenny Pen plays out as a battle of wills between former judge Stefan Mortensen (Geoffrey Rush), newly arrived as a patient at the facility after a stroke, and the monstrous, cackling Dave Crealy (a thoroughly chilling John Lithgow) and his demonic rubber sidekick, Jenny Pen. There are moments of greatness in this bracingly malicious tale of elder abuse. The opening sequence, which captures the disorientation and reality slippage resulting from Stefan's stroke, is superb. The use of sound and music (the chirpy cockney anthem Knees Up Mother Brown takes on a sense of choking menace) is first-rate. And both central performances are impressive. Where the picture founders is in a repetitive screenplay that clumsily switches character perspectives and squanders much of the story's initial promise. In UK and Irish cinemas
The Guardian
12-03-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
The Rule of Jenny Pen review – John Lithgow pulls the strings in care home horror
Film-maker James Ashcroft has created a scary and intimately upsetting psychological horror based on a story by New Zealand author Owen Marshall set in a care home, a film whose coolly maintained claustrophobic mood and bravura performances make up for the slight narrative blurring towards the end. It's a movie about bullying and elder abuse – more specifically, elder-on-elder abuse – and it is always most chilling when it sticks to the realist constraints of what could actually happen. The locale is an un-luxurious residential care facility where a retired judge is now astonished to find himself; this is Stefan Mortensen, played by Geoffrey Rush, who succumbed to a catastrophic stroke while passing judgment from the bench. He is a cantankerous and high-handed man, furious to be in this demeaning place and who, like many there, assures himself it isn't for long. Mortensen has to share a room with Tony Garfield (George Henare), a retired rugby star whose career fizzled out. These men are terrorised by long-term patient Dave Crealy, played with true hideousness by John Lithgow, a racist bully who convinces the care staff he is a gentle, harmless soul by exaggerating his mental and physical decay, but tyrannises patients behind officialdom's back with his therapy hand puppet named Jenny Pen, making the bewildered and terrified patients submit to her 'rule'. This is a film to remind you of the ventriloquist in DC Comics' Scarface Puppet or the Ealing classic Dead of Night, although Jenny's dysfunctionally independent existence is an open question. And it reminded me of Patrick Hamilton's depictions of mean-minded bullying, petty but toxic, among the miserable inmates of boarding houses. The long, insupportable afternoons of boredom stretch ahead in the home's bland association room, a place whose sheer featureless blankness is shown to encourage mental decay and catatonia; it's a woozy, timeless non-place in which Crealy appears like a capering, malicious demon with his own secret history in the institution. You'll spend the film longing for Stefan and Tony to hit back at the unspeakable Dave, and the question of when and how this happens is a flaw in the film; there's a kind of finale duplication here. But pure choking horror fills the screen like poison gas. One footnote: therapy hand puppets do indeed exist in the real world and they are not the preserve of psychopaths. Roger Ross Williams's 2016 documentary Life, Animated tells the uplifting story of a boy with autism who was helped by his Disney-character puppets; maybe it could act as a palate cleanser after this film. The Rule of Jenny Pen is in UK and Irish cinemas from 14 March, and on Shudder and AMC+ from 28 March.
