Max von Sydow as Jesus Christ in The Greatest Story Ever Told (1965) One of the more unlikely sights in 1960s Hollywood cinema is John Wayne’s Centurion, in Roman toga and sandals, standing beneath the crucifix and declaiming in his rasping, frontier voice that “Truly, this man was the son of God!” The unfortunate Christ, nailed up above him, is Max von Sydow. George Stevens’ The Greatest Story Ever Told (1965) is distinctly patchy even as biblical epics go, but largely thanks to his efforts as the Messiah, von Sydow (in his first non-Swedish part) became an international star. “Playing J ..read more

Credit: Michelle Thompson For more than 20 years, it has been hard to imagine world cinema without a strong Brazilian presence. Walter Salles’s Central Station (1998), Fernando Meirelles’s City of God (2002), Héctor Babenco’s Carandiru (2003), José Padilha’s documentary Bus 174 (2002) and his 2007 Berlin winner Elite Squad, and Kleber Mendonça Filho’s Neighbouring Sounds (2012) – these are just some of the high-profile titles that have given Brazil a place of honour on cinema’s map since the ‘retomada’, the resurgence in national ..read more

Constanze Ruhm’s The Notes of Anna Azzori / A Mirror That Travels through Time remixes Alberto Grifi and Massimo Sarchielli’s 1971 Anna to question imbalances of power 1. Solidarity then The founding of Berlinale Forum, by Erika and Ulrich Gregor, in 1971, coincided with the growing awareness in Germany that if cinema were to stay relevant it needed to embrace both experimental forms and a diversity of voices. In 1974, the German director Helke Sander founded Frauen in Film (Women in Film) magazine. The 70th Berlinale ran 20 February–1 March 2020. The feminist struggle, however, wa ..read more

Max von Sydow Credit: BFI National Archive Appropriately, the first indelible impression that Max von Sydow made on world cinema saw him surrounded by jagged rocks while staring death in the face. Only in his late 20s when he starred in Ingmar Bergman’s The Seventh Seal (1956), he already gave the impression of a man who’d witnessed a lifetime of anguish, to the point that when actually confronted by Death (Bengt Ekerot), his gaunt, Crusades-weary knight Antonius Blok reacts with a disarmingly calm “Are you coming for me?” before challenging the white-faced spectre to a game of chess. Dea ..read more

Bachi Valishvili as Irakli and Levan Gelbakhiani as Merab in And Then We Danced “The film is very loving towards Georgia – it’s almost an invitation to go,” said director Levan Akin to me at the BFI London Film Festival last October, discussing his film And Then We Danced – a moving, visually gorgeous gay love story about Merab (Levan Gelbakhiani), a teenage Georgian dancer living in Tbilisi, who falls hard for new recruit Irakli (Bachi Valishvili). And Then We Danced was released in UK cinemas on 13 March 2020 and is now available to stream on BFI Player and Curzon Home Cinema. “I ..read more

Crip Camp co-director Jim LeBrecht was born in New York in the 1950s with spina bifida and a lust for life. His debut documentary, executive-produced by Barack and Michelle Obama, is a vital and joyful work that puts a lesser-known part of American civil rights history on the map using archive footage of a summer camp for disabled teens unearthed by LeBrecht and co-director Nicole Newnham. Crip Camp screens on 17, 18, 20 March at the Human Rights Watch Film Festival in London and will stream on Netflix from 25 March. Crip Camp introduces LeBrecht before diving back to the summer ..read more

Credit: Simon Cooper for Sight & Sound Every ten years, Sight & Sound has conducted a worldwide poll of critics in order to decide which films are currently regarded as the greatest ever made. We’re proud that the longevity of this poll means that it’s widely regarded as the most trusted guide there is to the canon of cinema greats. Back in 1952, Vittorio De Sica’s neorealist parable Bicycle Thieves won the first poll only four years after it was shot. In today’s era of digital plenitude, it’s hard to imagine how critics could be so sure they had recently seen the greatest film ev ..read more

Fantasporto 2020 underway at the Teatro Rivoli   1. Longevity is its own reward Dreamt up in 1980 by a trio of film fanatics, two of whom – Beatriz Pacheco Pereira and Mário Dorminsky – incredibly are still running it 40 years later, Fantasporto was Portugal’s only film festival back then, and remains (after Sitges, established in 1968) one of the world’s oldest festivals dedicated to genre cinema. Initially based in the Teatro Carlos Alberto, it would attract all of Portugal’s cinephiles, otherwise starved of anything stimulating or provocative in the nation’s theatres, and so it in ..read more

How to Build a Girl (2019) Glasgow stays open and thriving This year’s Glasgow Film Festival constantly faced the prospect of major disruption amidst the global outbreak of COVID-19, as major overseas events, most notably SXSW, fell to advance cancellations while this year’s GFF was still taking place. The organisers managed to pull off a complete edition before the axe fell, with the Scottish government now scaling back public gatherings in the days since its closing night. The virus has now been assigned pandemic status, and even more spring festivals in the UK and globally ha ..read more

Roger Deakins (standing) with director Sam Mendes (seated, in flat cap) on the set of World War I drama 1917, which earned the cinematographer his second Oscar from 15 Academy Award nominations Credit: Getty Images Until not that long ago, it was easy to praise cinematographer Roger Deakins as the man who didn’t need Oscars. To see through his eyes, to speak in his colour palette and luxuriate in his inky blacks – those were perks enough. Now 70 and in the prime of his career, fresh from winning his second Academy Award for his work on Sam Mendes’s 1917, the Devon-born Deakins feels like ..read more