An Alexander McQueen Movie Is on the Way

The award for best decision of the year goes to whoever's in charge of casting the hotly anticipated Alexander McQueen biopic. On Tuesday, it was announced that actor Jack O'Connell will star in the film, which is an incredibly good call.

That's not just because O'Connell, who was one of GQ's men of the year in 2014, looks a lot like the late, great designer—dude's already got the goatee!—but also because he has a rough charm and a rakish sensibility, which are two of the qualities that helped make McQueen a beloved figure all over the world.

The film will track the creation of McQueen's Fall 2009 ready-to-wear show, a highly controversial demi-retrospective of his own work—the models wore what Style.com called "sex-doll lips and sometimes painfully theatrical costumes." Nevertheless, it's remembered as one of his greatest collections.

"It was a show that he dedicated to his mother and one in which he tried to make sense of his life and art," said a statement from Pathé, the production company behind the movie. "The film explores McQueen's creative process in the months leading up to the show, providing an intimate portrait of the man behind the global brand—a moving celebration of a visionary genius whose designs transcended fashion to become art."

It's a lot of history to live up to, but after watching O'Connell act his face off in projects as wide-ranging as Skins and Unbroken, we're confident he can do the work. (Jack, if you're reading this, know that we're rooting for you. And in the immortal words of RuPaul Charles, don't fuck it up.)

Oscars 2017: best foreign language race stacked with auteurs and provocations

This year’s Academy award for best foreign language film went to Hungary’s daring Holocaust drama Son of Saul, the universally lauded yet undeniably difficult to watch debut from director László Nemes. Next year, it’s doubtful a newcomer will once again take gold.

On Monday, France made the somewhat surprising decision to place its Oscar bets in the hands of the master provocateur Paul Verhoeven, an auteur known for boundary-pushing populist fare.

The film-maker, whose work includes Showgirls and Basic Instinct, has never made it his mission to pander to the Academy. His film in question, Elle, does star Isabelle Huppert, one of the most celebrated actors of all time - but the thriller, about a steely businesswoman caught in a game of cat and mouse with her rapist, refuses to tone down the director’s confrontational style. In France, where the film opened in May following its debut at the Cannes film festival, there was nary a hint of controversy. That’s likely to change when Elle arrives on these shores on 11 November.

It’s notable that instead of going with François Ozon’s Frantz, a period war drama that plays more to the Academy’s often cautious sensibilities, France went for this year’s most button-pushing Cannes selection (each country can only nominate a single film). Verhoeven, who is from the Netherlands, has made fewer films than Ozon over the course of his career, but he’s indisputably better known, and his film higher profile – all of which highlights a trend that’s emerged in this year’s race for the foreign award.

Frequent competitors - such as France, Spain, Iran, South Korea and Chile - have opted to bank on festival favorites from directors with significant art-house clout.

As tried-and-tested as this method of attack sounds, it’s in fact not a given occurrence. Pedro Almodóvar, Spain’s most renowned living film-maker, has made more than 15 films, but has only represented his country in the category five times. With Spain’s decision to support his latest melodrama, Julieta, that tally has now grown to six. It marks the first time Almodóvar’s been nominated by his country since 2006’s Volver, despite the fact his fans in Spain largely shunned the drama, resulting in smaller-than-average homespun numbers for the prolific director.

Similar to Spain, Italy doesn’t seem too concerned with box office clout, having chosen Gianfranco Rosi’s refugee-crisis-themed documentary Fire at Sea over some of the country’s splashier, star-driven output. The film opened to paltry figures in Italy over the spring. What seems to matter for Spain, however, is that the film has a proven hit at festivals, having won the Golden Bear at the Berlin international film festival (a rare feat for a documentary) and garnered acclaim at several more.

Germany and Chile have followed suit, placing their hopes in Maren Ade’s Cannes favorite Toni Erdmann and Pablo Larraín’s festival darling Neruda, respectively. Ade isn’t as established as the bulk of directors vying for the prize, having helmed four features prior to the family comedy, but as many critics would wager, Toni Erdmann is distinctive enough to warrant her the auteur moniker.

The same goes for Larraín, who is in the midst of a remarkable run this year, having premiered Neruda, his metafictional portrait of the celebrated poet and politician Pablo Neruda, at Cannes, followed mere months later by the debut of Jackie at Venice. Both films confirm him as a world-class film-maker.

Other big-name players in the mix this year include South Korea’s Kim Jee-woon (The Age of Shadows), the Iranian Oscar winner Asghar Farhadi (The Salesman), Canada’s wunderkind Xavier Dolan (It’s Only the End of the World), and the Philippines’ Brilliante Mendoza (Ma’ Rosa). Like the aforementioned talent, all produce singular work that’s often brazen and uncompromising.

As far as the 2017 Oscar race for best foreign film goes, one thing’s for certain: the competition is bound to be a clash of the titans.

Tickled review: fetish documentary goes from giggly to grim

Tickled, the first documentary from New Zealand TV personality David Farrier (co-directed by Dylan Reeve), caused a sensation at the True/False documentary film festival in Columbia, Missouri, where it played this weekend.

It became the talk of the event not just because of its content – eye-popping though it is – but due to the peculiar occurrences surrounding its screenings. Police reportedly interrupted the first showing to remove a person attempting to pirate the film via a camera hidden in a Starbucks coffee cup, while the following day Farrier was apparently served a subpoena.

One viewing of Tickled explains the hullabaloo. The film starts out with Farrier, who’s “made a career looking at the weird and bizarre side of life”, stumbling upon a Facebook page advertising a “competitive endurance tickling” event in Los Angeles. Male participants are offered an all-expenses-paid trip plus substantial compensation to take part and be videotaped by a company named Jane O’Brien Media.

Intrigued and baffled, Farrier reaches out for an interview, only to receive a hostile emailed response attacking his homosexuality – ironic, given the intensely homoerotic nature of the “sport”.

In no time, Farrier is threatened by absurd lawsuits for inquiring into the business, leading him only to dig deeper into the fetish empire with the help of Reeve, his computer-savvy (and straight) collaborator, in the hope of creating a full documentary on the subject. To uncover more and confront the people behind the threats, the pair travel to the US. It’s there that Tickled morphs from an offbeat caper to a disturbing exposé on the dangers of cyberbullying.

Speaking to the only former tickling-video participant willing to do an interview, Farrier and Reeve are horrified to learn about the control Jane O’Brien Media attempts to exert over its models. The man they speak to reveals how he became the victim of a vicious online slander campaign that threatened his career as a pro footballer, after he objected to Jane O’Brien Media posting his footage on YouTube.

The revelations that follow are too juicy to spoil – the pleasure in watching this documentary is derived from its countless twists. Along the way, Farrier serves as his audience’s conduit, going from amused to enraged as his journey progresses.

The film doesn’t look down its nose at those who like to engage in tickling. One extended sequence sees the directors stop in Orlando for a lighthearted visit with Richard Ivey, an entrepreneur who runs a similar fetish empire – the key difference being that Ivey fully owns its intentions (his site advertises itself as “gay foot fetish heaven”). He also doesn’t spook his models.

Biopic of Obamas' first date and Ellen Page baby swap drama among Sundance competition titles

Following the announcement of its Midnight horror-themed section, the Sundance film festival has unveiled the lineup for its competitions, in both dramatic and documentary formats, as well as its non-competitive Next selection, of promising experimental work. Some 65 films have got the nod from the programmers of the influential festival, which is designed to showcase independent and unconventional film-making.

The US dramatic competition has settled on 16 films, with the most attention-grabbing projects including The Birth of a Nation, an ironically titled account of the early-19th century slave rebellion led by Nat Turner; Goat, a fraternity-pledge drama featuring musician Nick Jonas; and Southside With You, a chronicle of Barack and Michelle Obama’s first date in 1980s Chicago. Familiar Sundance faces will be on show in other films: Ellen Page plays the lead in Tallulah, about a woman who passes off another’s child as her own; Jena Malone features in Lovesong, from For Ellen director So Yong Kim; and Rebecca Hall stars in Christine, about the TV reporter Christine Chubbuck, who killed herself on air in 1974.

Chubbuck is also the subject of a film in the US documentary strand: Kate Plays Christine, directed by Robert Greene, in which actor Kate Lynn Sheil prepares to take on a role as Chubbuck. Other major names in the 16 films in this strand include Keith Fulton and Louis Pepe (The Hamster Factor) with The Bad Kids, a study of an unconventional school in the Mojave desert; Josh “Gasland” Fox with How to Let Go of the World, an examination of the effects of climate change, and Jeff Feuerzeig (The Devil and Daniel Johnston) who returns with a profile of mystery author JT LeRoy.

The World sections will feature 12 films each, with the Ireland-based director Rebecca Daly’s Mammal selected for the dramatic competition, alongside India’s Brahman Naman (about a quiz team from Bangalore university) and Israel’s Sand Storm, focusing on a Bedouin mother and daughter whose lives are upended when another wife arrives.

Iranian director Bahman Ghobadi leads the World documentary competition with A Flag Without a Country, chronicling the lives of Kurds attempting to survive harsh conditions. Also selected is The Lovers and the Despot, a UK-produced account of film director Shin Sang-ok and his movie star ex-wife Choi Eun-hee, who were kidnapped by North Korean dictator Kim Jong-il; Plaza de la Soledad, directed by photojournalist Maya Goded, about Mexico City’s long-established prostitute community, and Sky Ladder, from British director Kevin Macdonald, a profile of celebrated Chinese artist Cai Guo-Qiang.

The Next programme, designed to showcase innovative and “forward-thinking” films, has pulled together 10 selections, all US-produced. These include First Girl I Loved, about a girl-girl-boy love triangle at high school; Dark Night, a study of a cinema shooting in suburban America; and The Fits, about a mysterious fainting attack that affects a midwest dance team.

• The Sundance film festival runs from 21-31 January in Park City, Utah.

Taxi Tehran review – a joyous ride

Jafar Panahi is the Iranian film-maker and democracy campaigner facing official harassment with unique wit, grace and humanity – all apparent in his new movie Taxi Tehran, whose quietly defiant good humour and charm will grow on you, as they grew on me when I first saw it in Berlin earlier this year. It is engaging and disarming: a freewheeling semi-improv piece of guerrilla film-making, cleverly staged and choreographed, with the discursive, digressive qualities of an essay film.

In 2010, following his protests against President Ahmadinejad’s democratic legitimacy, Panahi was sentenced to six years’ house arrest on the spurious charge of crimes against the state, together with a 20-year ban on film-making and leaving the country. Yet he has continued to work, shooting films covertly on smartphones and camcorders, smuggling them out of the country as digital files, technically avoiding the ban by having his direction credited to other people, or – as with this one – no credits at all.

Once these complex and subtle films appear abroad, Panahi leaves it to Iranian officialdom to react or not as it wishes, and as far as can be judged, the authorities do not want to appear any more foolish and ham-fisted than they do now. At any rate, the appearance of each of Panahi’s films is now almost a kind of procedural miracle, not seen since Yilmaz Güney directed the 1982 Palme d’Or-winner Yol from prison.

Panahi appears as himself: reduced to driving a cab. The great film director is now a humble taxi driver picking people up on the streets of Tehran, dropping them off, amiably allowing customers to share a ride, sheepishly admitting he doesn’t know where anything is, and never asking for money. If Uber had a special app for hailing free rides from cineastes … well, that would be him. He’s a fictional variant of himself, shooting a zany ridealong selfie on his dashboard-mounted videocam. Or maybe he’s Iran’s equivalent of Larry David, shruggingly accepting his own woes and his own tense celebrity and spinning it all into his creative work.

He has a bizarre mix of clientele. A couple of women get in with some live goldfish in a bowl, leading to predictable disaster when Jafar hits the brakes too hard and winds up having to replenish the bowl with water he would normally use for the radiator. He takes a gravely injured, blood-spattered man and his keening wife to hospital. There is an aggressive young guy who starts arguing with a fellow passenger about whether hanging thieves is a good deterrent.

Panahi allows that argument to echo with a conversation he has later with a friend who has been attacked in his shop, apparently for standing up for a man and woman caught stealing money. In this way, the questions of crime and punishment are coolly, indirectly raised.

Panahi has to pick his niece up from school. She is mortified that her supposedly prestigious film-director uncle only has this nasty little car. She is studying film, and the precocious tyke starts talking about what’s “distributable” and tells him how she has been told to avoid “sordid realism”. Panahi smiles enigmatically: he knows how much sordid realism to avoid. Another young guy studying film asks him about existing works and Panahi says: “Those films are already made; those books are already written. You have to look elsewhere…”

Perhaps an unemployed director is like a taxi driver, cruising the streets, looking to pick up ideas, but benignly: an anti-Travis Bickle, and perhaps being under house-arrest feels like being a driver unable to leave his cab. Certainly, shooting a film inside a car is discreet, and good for evading bans. Abbas Kiarostami has also used the car as a symbol of imprisonment, aimlessness and loneliness in films such as Ten (2002) and Taste of Cherry (1997).

Taxi Tehran comes to two separate crunches. Panahi picks up a friend who is a lawyer, disbarred and prevented, like Panahi, from practising her trade. They discuss the case of Ghoncheh Ghavami, the Iranian woman jailed for trying to attend a men’s volleyball match. Panahi maintains a smilingly fatalistic attitude to it all. Later, Panahi’s feisty niece starts making a short film for her school project; she accidentally films a boy taking money that isn’t his and dramatically intervenes in the situation. Panahi is maybe playfully showing the authorities that film-making is a force for good.

Taxi Tehran is the work of a unique director – and survivor.