Latest news with #Kinoteka
The Guardian
05-04-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
From A Minecraft Movie to Black Mirror: a complete guide to this week's entertainment
A Minecraft MovieOut now You know how it is – you're hanging out minding your own business when you're pulled through a random portal into a three-dimensional world made up of voxels. That's the fate that befalls Jason Momoa, Sebastian Hansen, Emma Myers and Danielle Brooks, where they meet Jack Black in this adaptation of the popular game. SebastianOut now Twentysomething Max works at a literary magazine in London while side-hustling as sex worker Sebastian to get inspiration for his debut novel, but soon finds his double life leading to a new understanding of his own identity, in this acclaimed first film from Mikko Mäkelä. Death of a UnicornOut now Accidentally hitting an animal is any driver's nightmare. But it's worse when said animal is an honest-to-god unicorn. That's the jumping-off point for this comedy horror with Paul Rudd and Jenna Ortega as the father and daughter who compound their error by taking the creature to an unscrupulous billionaire (Richard E Grant). Kinoteka on TourTo 25 April The 23rd edition of the Kinoteka Polish film festival goes on the road with a mixture of new and classic Polish films, including work by the poetic surrealist Wojciech Has. The eight cities on the tour include Newcastle upon Tyne, Leeds and Sheffield. Catherine Bray Kamasi WashingtonGateshead, Saturday; touring to 14 April LA-raised star saxophonist Kamasi Washington, an eclectic jazz maestro whose influences and friends include the likes of Thundercat and Kendrick Lamar, tours his powerful Fearless Movement band. His majestic yet exploratory music makes new friends everywhere he goes. John Fordham Peter GrimesWales Millennium Centre, Cardiff, 5, 8 & 11 April; touring to 7 June WNO follow up last year's outstanding Death in Venice, Benjamin Britten's final opera, with a new staging of the work that established his international reputation. It's directed by Melly Still and conducted by WNO music director Tomáš Hanus. Andrew Clements Sugababes8 to 19 April; tour starts Leeds The returning British girlband cement their must-see live status with an arena tour. This time there's new music to showcase in the shape of heady banger Jungle, which should slot nicely alongside Overload and Round Round. Michael Cragg Caity Baser9 to 20 April; tour starts Southampton After peaking inside the UK Top 10 with bolshy mixtape Still Learning last March, Southampton's pop upstart Baser returned with February's brutally honest Watch That Girl (She's Gonna Say It). Expect other new songs to be roadtested as work continues on her debut proper. MC David SalleThaddaeus Ropac, London, to 8 June The postmodern painter whose art splices up images from popular culture here splices up his own paintings. He's taken a group of canvases called Pastorals and used AI to mix and merge their elements in the surreal ways AI will do. He calls the new works Some Versions of Pastoral. Mat CollishawSeed130, London, to 31 May If there's one artist who has a grasp of how technology is remaking society, culture and reality itself, it's Mat Collishaw. Having started his career in the late 1980s as part of the Goldsmiths generation, he has kept his edge by engaging with the digital revolution. His new show embraces AI. Surf!National Maritime Museum Cornwall, Falmouth, to January 2027 The advent of modern wetsuits means you can always expect to see surfers on Cornish beaches, even in the depths of winter. But this exhibition shows Cornwall's fine surf has attracted the sport for a long time, telling the story of Cornish surfing from the 1920s to contemporary board art. The Gorgeous NothingsChatsworth House and Gardens, Derbyshire, to 5 October The gardens at Chatsworth have been tended since the Renaissance, and make a stunning spectacle with their water features. This exhibition looks at the history of these gardens using botanical manuscripts and other works from the Devonshire Collections. Plus modern art by Frank Bowling, Dorothy Cross, Chris Ofili and more. Jonathan Jones Kool Story Bro10 April to 22 May; tour starts Bristol Kiell Smith-Bynoe gives improvised comedy a new lease of life by riffing on audience members' wild real-life tales with help from fellow TV faces Emma Sidi, Lola-Rose Maxwell and Nic Sampson. Rachel Aroesti Kim's Convenience Home, Manchester, 8 to 12 April; touring to 5 July Having gone from the Toronto fringe to Netflix, Ins Choi's easygoing comedy, set in a family-run Korean store, now heads on a UK tour. Made with a sitcom-style gloss, remarkably realistic set and charming cast, it's a love letter to first-generation immigrants. Kate Wyver SpeedBush theatre, London, to 17 May Joining a speed awareness course probably isn't your idea of a fun night out. But with Milli Bhatia directing, you should give it a go. Mohamed-Zain Dada's new dark comedy forces together a nurse, a delivery driver and an entrepreneur, as secrets spill. KW Solène Weinachter: After AllThe Mount Without, Bristol, 8 to 10 April The story starts with choreographer Weinachter being asked to dance at her uncle's funeral, and turns into a warm, funny, poignant and thought-provoking one-woman show on the subject of death and remembrance. Lyndsey Winship Sign up to Inside Saturday The only way to get a look behind the scenes of the Saturday magazine. Sign up to get the inside story from our top writers as well as all the must-read articles and columns, delivered to your inbox every weekend. after newsletter promotion Black MirrorNetflix, 10 April Charlie Brooker's zeitgeist-dictating anthology series returns for more labyrinthine tech nightmares, with a sensational cast (Peter Capaldi, Issa Rae, Emma Corrin, Paul Giamatti) and, for the first time, reprises: a sequel for USS Callister and a return to the computer nerd universe of Bandersnatch. Your Friends & NeighboursApple TV+, 11 April A decade after Mad Men, Jon Hamm plays another alpha male on the make. When hedge fund manager Coop is fired, he starts stealing valuables from the homes of his uber-wealthy peers to maintain the lifestyle to which he and his children have become accustomed. ReunionBBC One/iPlayer, 7 April, 9pm This trailblazing new Sheffield-set drama from deaf writer William Mager switches between English and British Sign Language to tell the story of Daniel (Matthew Gurney), a deaf man who is shunned by his community after committing a terrible crime. Rose Ayling-Ellis, Anne-Marie Duff and Eddie Marsan also star. What They FoundBBC Two/iPlayer, 7 April, 10pm Exactly 80 years ago, army cameramen Sgt Mike Lewis and Sgt Bill Lawrie accompanied troops to what they thought was a typhus hospital. It turned out to be Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. The pair's footage shocked the world; in his documentary debut, Sam Mendes revisits the men's work and the final days of the Holocaust. RA South of MidnightOut 8 April; PC, XBoxGorgeous action-adventure with a charming, ever so slightly sinister stop-motion aesthetic, mixing fantasy, black magic folklore and a smattering of Guillermo del Toro weirdness. You play as Hazel, a young woman searching for her mother in the bayous and woods of a mysterious, supernatural spin on the American deep south. Descenders NextOut Wed; PC, XBoxSnowboards and mountainboards (essentially snowboards with wheels) are the focus of this fun, fast and arcadey extreme-sports romp, in which the sole aim is to chuck yourself down something recklessly steep and survive your hazard-heavy journey to the bottom. Luke Holland Elton John and Brandi Carlile – Who Believes in Angels?Out now Having set themselves the target of writing and recording an album from scratch in 20 days, the creation of this collaborative album was fraught with tension. You can hear it being released, however, on the urgent dustbowl rock of Swing for the Fences, featuring a furious piano solo. Black Country, New Road – Forever HowlongOut now After the sudden departure of lead vocalist Isaac Wood in 2022, the playful British alt-rock experimentalists return with their third album. Produced by James Ford (Blur, Pet Shop Boys), Forever Howlong is a poppier affair than their previous output, but Happy Birthday keeps the weird quota high. Sleigh Bells – Bunky Becky Birthday BoyOut now When New York's Sleigh Bells first emerged in 2010, their noisy blend of pop, hip-hop and metal caught the ear of Beyoncé, who recorded with the duo. Fifteen years later, their sixth album sticks to that once unique formula pretty rigidly, but songs such as Wanna Start a Band? are enormous fun. Miki Berenyi Trio – TriplaOut now Musician, author and ex-member of shoegazers Lush, Miki Berenyi releases the debut album from her self-titled trio (KJ 'Moose' McKillop and Oliver Cherer make up the numbers). Fiercely political – 8th Deadly Sin rails at useless politicians – but sonically spacious and crisply melodic, Tripla is consistently thrilling. MC Scratch & WinPodcast Delving into the history of US state lotteries, this engrossing series explains how the birth of scratchcards in 1970s Boston brought organised crime into government-sanctioned gambling and opened the door for today's billion-dollar industry. SmartHistoryYouTube With expert commentary from more than 500 global art historians, SmartHistory's YouTube channel provides accessible analysis of artworks from Hieronymus Bosch's paintings to Lee Krasner's abstractions and public monuments such as Cleopatra's Needle in New York. Bad Influence9 April, Netflix The world of 'kidfluencing' is a lucrative one and this often shocking film exposes how the YouTube vlogging life of child star Piper Rockelle was a multimillion-dollar business built on the exploitation of her friends. Ammar Kalia
New European
19-03-2025
- Entertainment
- New European
The iron curtain and the silver screen
In Warsaw during the iron curtain years, a young artist is shown into an unfussy private screening room and offered a cup of tea. Then, the latest Hollywood blockbuster begins to play for an audience of one – sometimes with subtitles included, sometimes with an official reading over the dialogue from a translated script. When the artist emerges into the light, they have only one brief: to produce a poster for the film that they have just watched, but in a style that bears no resemblance whatsoever to typical western film posters. 'We relied on visual metaphors, symbols, to produce cultural statements,' says Andrzej Klimowski, one of the art school graduates who produced work for the communist government's centralised film distributors. Ironically, given the circumstances, he says, 'There was a great deal of freedom – freedom for self-expression.' Klimowski's work forms part of a remarkable exhibition of Polish film posters currently running at London's Coal Drops Yard as part of Kinoteka, the Polish film festival. Made from the postwar period to the present day, they present unique and unsettling visions of cinema and the world forged in what literally was an alternate reality. The Polish poster for the 1979 sci-fi horror Alien , designed by Jakub Erol Andrzej Klimowskiʼs poster for Down By Law (1986) Stanley Kubrick's 1980 horror The Shining as designed by Leszek Żebrowski Images: Kinoteka/ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London 2025 Klimowski, born to Polish parents in London, chose to return to a Soviet-era Warsaw after an undergraduate degree at St Martin's, London. The lure was the art being produced there – impressionistic images that are occasionally playful, occasionally paranoid, deeply political without overtly criticising the regime. He says: 'After the second world war there was a big surge of rebuilding, and while you may have disagreed with the ideology, there was a recognition that culture would be at the heart of this. There was a certain pride in Poland's artistic past, our heritage. To produce posters for film and theatre, the ministry of culture set up a panel of experts, one of whom was Henryk Tomaszewski, who was later my tutor at the Warsaw Academy of Fine Arts. 'His condition was that there would be no insistence on copying American posters, with a picture of the biggest star in the centre of the frame and the actors' names in size of their supposed importance. These would be statements in their own right. 'There was no commercial pressure for us, or the distributors – the cinemas and theatres were always full anyway. The work had to be approved, but largely we could do what we liked. The posters appeared on the cinemas and the streets and I saw that they would prolong the power of the film, not just promoting it but giving the audience something else to think about when it was over.' The poster for Francis Ford Coppola's Apocalypse Now (1979), designed by Waldemar Swierzy Witold Dybowski's poster for Return of the Jedi (1983), the third instalment in the original Star Wars trilogy The Polish poster for John Schlesinger's drama Midnight Cowboy (1969), by designer Waldemar Swierzy, featured in the Familiar Strangers Outdoor Polish Film Poster Exhibition at Coal Drops Yard, King's Cross, London Images: Kinoteka Similar posters were made in other eastern bloc countries, but Klimowski says, 'We did it better, and I don't say that because of national pride. After the war Poland was not as strong in material goods as, say, East Germany or Czechoslovakia but artistically and intellectually I think we set the trends that the others followed. We had the most artistic freedom and we could take more chances.' Klimowski returned to London in the late 1980s and later became head of Illustration at the Royal College of Art, continuing to design posters and book jackets. He was once praised by Harold Pinter, a man who did not offer praise readily, in glowing terms: 'He is a free man and you'll never catch him… He leads the field by a long furlong, out on his own, making his own weather.' Now 75, Klimowski is enthused by the work of younger artists in the exhibition and notes that in the digital age, reimagining posters for classic and cult films has become a cottage industry thanks to websites like Etsy. But, he says, 'It makes me feel slightly uncomfortable for the people that create them. The thrill of it for me, for us, was that our work wasn't on the wall in a private home, or a private gallery. Our gallery was the streets. We were on every corner.' Familiar Strangers is at Kiosk N1C, Lower Stable Street, King's Cross until April 2. Kinoteka, the Polish film festival, runs across London and the UK until April 29; details at Edifice , a new graphic novel by Andrzej Klimowski, is published by Self-Made Hero
The Guardian
06-03-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Give it a Polish! Classic film posters with a twist
Step into a world where Hollywood classics are transformed through the bold, imaginative lens of artists from the Polish poster school. Familiar Strangers: Hollywood and British Cinema in Polish Poster Art is at Coal Drops Yard, London, until 2 April. All photos courtesy: Kinoteka Polish film festival This exhibition unveils how Polish artists interpreted US and UK films such as The Shining and Return of the Jedi while navigating the harsh realities of communist and post-Soviet Poland, at a time when censorship, propaganda and surveillance were omnipresent It also highlights a new chapter in the evolution of the Polish poster school, as London-based digital artists will be reinterpreting these posters for digital screens Photograph: ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London 2025 Blending raw intensity with haunting beauty, these posters reflect the psychological landscape of a society shaped by repression. This poster, inspired by Bob Fosse's Cabaret (1972), is from the Kinoteka archives Additional posters will be on display in a digital exhibition at Samsung KX, London, until 2 April
