Put your best foot forward as we take a stroll round the best doors on film with Kevin Holmes. After you …

Few bits of furniture are so rich in symbolic meaning as the door: it can be an opening or an exit, a beginning or an ending. It can protect and guard but also trap and imprison. It holds promise or danger, and often both. And, of course, cinema itself is a doorway, a threshold to another world where anything is possible.

An open door is an invitation, but once you walk through it your life can change forever. Take Karen in Goodfellas entering the Copacabana nightclub; she isn’t just entering the club, but Henry’s life too – it’s a classic portal.

As well as an opening doors can also be a barrier; a divider between home and the world. Hidden behind a locked door can lurk something nasty, something terrifying; an alien presence, even from within. The unseen slamming shut of a door can evoke tension, terror – and comedy. And yet, somehow, a door has never won an Academy Award. The words “cellar door” may be considered by a linguist as one of the most beautiful phrases in the English language, but in Donnie Darko it also represents a descent into darkness, into the basement of the mind.

A door is a temptation and revulsion all in one, which must be what makes it so attractive to the film-maker. So please, come inside, have a look around, but don’t forget to close the door on your way out.

1) At the end of the cyclone scene, Dorothy opens her front door and is transported from one world – Kansas – to Oz; from the real to the imagined. But it was also opening the door to cinema’s future: from sepia to Technicolor.

2) A doorway into another life through the side door of the Copacabana – set, appropriately, to the entire tune of And Then He Kissed Me by The Crystals. This long tracking shot not only seduces the viewer but reflects Henry’s seduction of Karen, too.

3) The blazing orange light from a UFO eloping through a living room door was the master image Steven Spielberg chose to sum up his entire film career.

4) A recurring motif throughout The Searchers is the open doorway; inside is the known, outside is the other. It’s the central conflict of John Wayne’s antihero. Where does he belong? In neither, probably. But this closing shot sees him about to enter the house, and pausing, before heading back into the wilderness.

5) Shelley Duvall finds safety behind a bathroom door in The Shining. But though doors can protect us from the horrors we don’t want to face, when that horror has an axe, the sanctuary can be short-lived.

Last week on Clip joint, swanstep saluted faces and scenes that have launched a thousand drips. Here are his top picks from your suggested clips featuring rain.

1) I’m feeling some pressure to include at least one truly popular choice on this list, lest this moment be twitter-scorned, or worse, lost forever like Rutger Hauer’s utterly splendid, improv/invention at the end of Blade Runner. (Sorry Tiffany’s, Cherbourg, and Casablanca.)

2) In Days of Being Wild Wong Kar-Wai takes full advantage of the natural justification that rain affords for extremely short visual and aural focal lengths as a cop tries to comfort a disconsolate beauty (go 7:30 in).

3) Greatpoochini tempted me with Suspiria, but I settled on his choice of a bizarre, long dark afternoon of the soul that climaxes with Burt Lancaster hobbling past a rain-swept tennis court to a mildly comical doorstep deluge in The Swimmer (go 2m in).

4) In Ozu’s Floating Weeds, Kamajuro cruelly berates and foreswears his lover and leading lady, Sumiko, from across a rain drenched street.

5) And this week’s winner is ExFi, who convincingly urged that Tarkovsky reigns in rain with this truly mind-expanding, heart-stunning omnibus clip. Is it possible that Tarkovsky, widely acclaimed as he always has been, is nonetheless still underrated as a film-maker relative to his evident achievements? That’s certainly what this compilation has me thinking.

Thanks also to steenbeck and AJBee for their picks, and to many others for discussions.

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Moving Here migration project.
Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery (BMAG) wishes to commission an Artist Film Maker for a community engagement project which will be delivered between September 2010…

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On-screen tinkering with racial identity is dangerous, but at least Essential Killing, in which Vincent Gallo plays a Taliban soldier, might be good – unlike M Night Shyamalan’s The Last Airbender

So, the good news for anyone who’s been feeling bereft without a wince-inducing Hollywood controversy over race is that The Last Airbender is now out in the US, and will shortly be released here, too. Yes, two years after the to-do over Robert Downey Jr’s sporting of blackface in Tropic Thunder, the sure directorial hand of M Night Shyamalan has just dropped his latest taste-bomb in the form of his long-mooted anime adaptation – and the response has been, hard though it may be to believe, worse than usual.

As regular Shyamalan watchers will know, the film-maker’s decision to cast white actors in the apparently Asian roles at the heart of the source material created a stink from the outset – one that’s only intensifying now the end product is nigh. But I’m not looking to revive the debate of two years ago. To me, it seems self-evident that tinkering with racial identity like this is loaded with risk, one requiring huge sensitivity and foolproof artistic judgment. Reader, I will leave it to you as to whether these are traits we have come to associate with the creator of The Happening – and turn instead to the way the controversy is partly echoed by another, rather more intriguing project.

That film is the political thriller Essential Killing, the trailer for which has been popping up everywhere in recent days. The movie follows a Taliban foot soldier captured in Afghanistan, then rendered to an anonymous location somewhere in eastern Europe, only to escape US custody and flee into an unfamiliar snowbound wasteland. And the salient point here is that the fugitive is being played not by an Afghan actor, but by Vincent Gallo – renaissance man, contrarian, would-be sperm donor and, the last time anyone checked, the son of Sicilian immigrants to Buffalo, New York. As such, it’s only fair to acknowledge the vague similarity of the situations – but I find myself much less troubled by Endless Killing than The Last Airbender.

Which is, I’m sure, partly a product of my own hypocrisy: my aversion to everything Shyamalan has done from the last two minutes of Unbreakable onwards contrasted with the fact that Gallo is always compelling on screen, while his director here, Jerzy Skolimowski, is a true wild card. In my defence, there’s also the way it feels particularly icky of Shyamalan to invite this kind of furore over what is a special effects movie for kids, while Essential Killing promises to offset whatever aggro it creates with moments that are genuinely thought-provoking.

Given his fondness for the Republican party, it’s hard not to be struck by Gallo’s willingness to portray a soldier from the other side in a war from which American coffins are still returning (British ones, too, of course), in a film that suggests if not overt sympathy for his character, then certainly a lack of condemnation.

Then again, quelle surprise, if anyone was ever comfortable with hostility it’s Gallo, his entire persona often seems like one big slice of middle-finger-waving performance art. Yet even by his standards, there’s still a certain confrontational glee to this latest move. Rarely do bad-guy roles come quite as politically loaded as this, and rarely are they allowed any sense of nuance (which is why a supplementary tip of the hat is also due here to Riz Ahmed, who took on a similar gig in the very different Four Lions). All it needs now is for Gallo to announce his next job in a warm and fuzzy biopic of BP boss Tony Hayward, and his reputation will be safe forever.

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Robert Rodriguez and Nimród Antal’s remake of the 1987 Arnie-starring gorefest has had hype and glowing reviews, but can it match the original’s trashy cool?

The basics

On an unknown, heavily forested planet surrounded by oodles of what look like giant moons (suggesting that someone has been watching a little too much Avatar), a body drops from the sky, complete with parachute and assorted weaponry. It belongs to an extremely buff Adrien Brody, who’s playing a special ops guy who apparently has no idea where he is or why he has just been booted out of a spaceship on to an alien planet. Swiftly afterwards, various other highly dangerous soldiers, criminals and assorted weirdos begin falling from the clouds. Turns out that they have all been transported there to act as “game” for the Predators of the much-loved 1987 Arnold Schwarzenegger movie. Chaos inevitably ensues.

The stakes

Let’s be honest, this was a no-brainer for everybody involved. Robert Rodriguez, who’s producing, got to dust off an extremely hokey screenplay he wrote more than a decade ago when studio 20th Century Fox was trying to entice Arnie back to the franchise. Director Nimród Antal gets a crack at a Hollywood blockbuster, and can always go back to directing stylish fare such as his noirish comedy thriller debut, Kontroll, if it all goes sideways. Brody already has an Oscar in the bag, but clearly aspires to being the thinking man’s Jason Statham. He may be a bit funny-looking for an action star, but no amount of critical derision is going to stop the likes of Wes Anderson giving him regular screen time, so why not have a crack?

The buzz

Predators has been hyped to the heavens by fanboy-friendly sites such as Aint It Cool News, with Rodriguez intelligently fuelling the fires with plenty of video interviews and featurettes. The film-maker has been pitching this one as a sequel that will be to Predator what Aliens was to Alien, and for the most part the blogosphere has swallowed that line. “I like that we’re going into the Predator’s homeworld not as an establishing shot, but as a place of primary action. That’s genuinely killer … potentially,” wrote AIC’s Harry Knowles last year. Meanwhile, the LA Times reported that Brody had been in full method mode while on set, even sleeping in the jungle alone at night to get in the zone.

Flash forward to the film’s release date (it arrived in UK cinemas last night and debuts in the US tonight) and the reviews are pretty damn good. The film’s “fresh” rating on rottentomatoes.com is more than 70%, with most critics suggesting it’s a passable revival of a franchise that looked dead in the water after the awful Aliens vs Predator movies, though not a patch on the original’s trashy cool.

The bitching

The Guardian’s Andrew Pulver is not playing ball. “This is a stolid, uninspired imitation … with Rodriguez’s innovations largely confined to inconsequential details of who’s hunting whom,” he writes. “It doesn’t get anywhere near the snap of the original, even though Arnold Schwarzenegger is thankfully nowhere to be seen.”

“These aren’t characters, they’re cardboard cliches lining up for the body count,” agrees Entertainment Weekly’s Chris Nashawaty. “As a fan of Schwarzenegger’s macho, heart-of-darkness original, it gives me no pleasure to say that Predators is an uninspired mess of mediocre action scenes strung together until the final reel. But it gives me even less pleasure to add that that final reel leaves room for a sequel. The horror.”

The fawning

“Predators is a pretty awesome flick,” says Brad Miska of Bloody Disgusting. “There’s no question in my mind that Antal and Rodriguez are die-hard fans. While they missed the tone of the original, they captured everything else ranging from the colourful characters to the score and sound design (the gunfire gave me goose bumps). Predators is loaded with action, gore and freakin’ cool Predators; this is what summer movies are made of.”

“This is the sequel that John McTiernan and Arnold Schwarzenegger’s 1987 original deserved, as director Nimród Antal delivers enough hardcore sci-fi, explosive action and monster mayhem to justify its belated arrival,” writes Time Out’s Nigel Floyd. “Forget the official sequel and the lame Alien vs Predator spin-offs: this Predator sequel deserves one of its own.”

The punters

Predators has been trending on Twitter, perhaps aided by Fox buying a “promoted” slot.

The viewer response seems to be mixed. “If anyone is gonna watch Predators, let me know because I’ll watch it again! Damn good movie!” writes Ht4everbond. But YuriLowenthal complains: “140 characters is nowhere near enough to express how much I hated Predators.”

The prognosis

This is an entertaining Predator movie, and there are more than a few moments to send a nostalgic chill down one’s spine. But Antal doesn’t quite seem to have the touch or understanding of pace to make the most of the standout moments: a panoramic CGI shot of an array of moons orbiting the unknown planet is fluffed, and a scene in which Brody covers himself in mud to mimic Schwarzenegger’s ploy in the first film (to counteract the predator’s thermal vision) is distinctly underwhelming. The actor simply walks into shot as though he’s just popped back after a fag break – the whole thing lacks sparkle. The original Predator was a pulpy joy. But was its premise ever really worth more than one film? On this evidence, the answer would have to be no.

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Robert Rodriguez and Nimród Antal’s remake of the 1987 Arnie-starring gorefest has had hype and glowing reviews, but can it match the original’s trashy cool?

The basics

On an unknown, heavily forested planet surrounded by oodles of what look like giant moons (suggesting that someone has been watching a little too much Avatar), a body drops from the sky, complete with parachute and assorted weaponry. It belongs to an extremely buff Adrien Brody, who’s playing a special ops guy who apparently has no idea where he is or why he has just been booted out of a spaceship on to an alien planet. Swiftly afterwards, various other highly dangerous soldiers, criminals and assorted weirdos begin falling from the clouds. Turns out that they have all been transported there to act as “game” for the Predators of the much-loved 1987 Arnold Schwarzenegger movie. Chaos inevitably ensues.

The stakes

Let’s be honest, this was a no-brainer for everybody involved. Robert Rodriguez, who’s producing, got to dust off an extremely hokey screenplay he wrote more than a decade ago when studio 20th Century Fox was trying to entice Arnie back to the franchise. Director Nimród Antal gets a crack at a Hollywood blockbuster, and can always go back to directing stylish fare such as his noirish comedy thriller debut, Kontroll, if it all goes sideways. Brody already has an Oscar in the bag, but clearly aspires to being the thinking man’s Jason Statham. He may be a bit funny-looking for an action star, but no amount of critical derision is going to stop the likes of Wes Anderson giving him regular screen time, so why not have a crack?

The buzz

Predators has been hyped to the heavens by fanboy-friendly sites such as Aint It Cool News, with Rodriguez intelligently fuelling the fires with plenty of video interviews and featurettes. The film-maker has been pitching this one as a sequel that will be to Predator what Aliens was to Alien, and for the most part the blogosphere has swallowed that line. “I like that we’re going into the Predator’s homeworld not as an establishing shot, but as a place of primary action. That’s genuinely killer … potentially,” wrote AIC’s Harry Knowles last year. Meanwhile, the LA Times reported that Brody had been in full method mode while on set, even sleeping in the jungle alone at night to get in the zone.

Flash forward to the film’s release date (it arrived in UK cinemas last night and debuts in the US tonight) and the reviews are pretty damn good. The film’s “fresh” rating on rottentomatoes.com is more than 70%, with most critics suggesting it’s a passable revival of a franchise that looked dead in the water after the awful Aliens vs Predator movies, though not a patch on the original’s trashy cool.

The bitching

The Guardian’s Andrew Pulver is not playing ball. “This is a stolid, uninspired imitation … with Rodriguez’s innovations largely confined to inconsequential details of who’s hunting whom,” he writes. “It doesn’t get anywhere near the snap of the original, even though Arnold Schwarzenegger is thankfully nowhere to be seen.”

“These aren’t characters, they’re cardboard cliches lining up for the body count,” agrees Entertainment Weekly’s Chris Nashawaty. “As a fan of Schwarzenegger’s macho, heart-of-darkness original, it gives me no pleasure to say that Predators is an uninspired mess of mediocre action scenes strung together until the final reel. But it gives me even less pleasure to add that that final reel leaves room for a sequel. The horror.”

The fawning

“Predators is a pretty awesome flick,” says Brad Miska of Bloody Disgusting. “There’s no question in my mind that Antal and Rodriguez are die-hard fans. While they missed the tone of the original, they captured everything else ranging from the colourful characters to the score and sound design (the gunfire gave me goose bumps). Predators is loaded with action, gore and freakin’ cool Predators; this is what summer movies are made of.”

“This is the sequel that John McTiernan and Arnold Schwarzenegger’s 1987 original deserved, as director Nimród Antal delivers enough hardcore sci-fi, explosive action and monster mayhem to justify its belated arrival,” writes Time Out’s Nigel Floyd. “Forget the official sequel and the lame Alien vs Predator spin-offs: this Predator sequel deserves one of its own.”

The punters

Predators has been trending on Twitter, perhaps aided by Fox buying a “promoted” slot.

The viewer response seems to be mixed. “If anyone is gonna watch Predators, let me know because I’ll watch it again! Damn good movie!” writes Ht4everbond. But YuriLowenthal complains: “140 characters is nowhere near enough to express how much I hated Predators.”

The prognosis

This is an entertaining Predator movie, and there are more than a few moments to send a nostalgic chill down one’s spine. But Antal doesn’t quite seem to have the touch or understanding of pace to make the most of the standout moments: a panoramic CGI shot of an array of moons orbiting the unknown planet is fluffed, and a scene in which Brody covers himself in mud to mimic Schwarzenegger’s ploy in the first film (to counteract the predator’s thermal vision) is distinctly underwhelming. The actor simply walks into shot as though he’s just popped back after a fag break – the whole thing lacks sparkle. The original Predator was a pulpy joy. But was its premise ever really worth more than one film? On this evidence, the answer would have to be no.

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The critics have gone crazy for the new science-fiction/heist movie from the Dark Knight director

Not every film that sounds great on paper ends up living up to expectations. I remember attending a screening of Darren Aronofsky’s The Fountain a few years back in a state of almost rabid anticipation. A science-fiction movie stretched over several millennia, “exploring the search for God and meaning” (in the film-maker’s own words) from the director of Requiem For a Dream? This, I had to see. Of course, the film turned out to be a misguided, painfully grandiose, epic botch of a movie, not to mention one of the most boring pieces of cinema since The Postman.

I’ve therefore been quietly dampening down my own expectations for Christopher Nolan’s Inception, ever since the Dark Knight director announced plans for his science-fiction/heist movie “set within the architecture of the mind”. With apparently unquestioning support from Warner Bros and a stellar cast (Leonardo DiCaprio, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Ellen Page, Marion Cotillard, to name just a few) as well as regular Nolan collaborators such as composer Hans Zimmer and cinematographer Wally Pfister on board, it seemed almost too good to be true. I’m seeing the movie tomorrow, but according to early reviews, I needn’t have worried myself: it’s a surefire humdinger.

So far, almost all the critics to offer their opinions have not just praised the film, they have cast it as potentially one of the best movies of the year: a highly intelligent, genuinely original piece of cinema in the guise of a summer blockbuster. In the run-up to its release, there have been suggestions that Inception might be rather too confusing for the average filmgoer, yet there seems to be a sense that the supremely skilful implementation of Nolan’s vision (along with excellent performances from the cast) will make this the kind of film that people go to see three or four times, rather than one which gets written off as an over-complex brainteaser.

“Inception is an exhilarating cinematic experience that suggests there is still room, even in the blockbuster world, for big ideas and dangerous emotions, and that may be the single most thrilling thing about it,” writes Drew McWeeny of Hitfix.

“The film isn’t really built as a narrative shell game with mind-blowing twists and turns so much as it is a logical and orderly descent into a trippy but airtight exploration of the way we frequently chase illusory versions of the people in our lives while ignoring the real flesh-and-blood imperfections that we don’t want to acknowledge.”

“A devilishly complicated, fiendishly enjoyable sci-fi voyage across a dreamscape that is thoroughly compelling,” writes the Hollywood Reporter’s Kirk Honeycutt. “In a summer of remakes, reboots and sequels comes Inception, easily the most original movie idea in ages.”

“No movie this year comes freighted with greater expectations than Inception,” writes Indiewire’s Anne Thompson. “Happily, the movie delivers and then some – thanks to clever original screenwriting and exhilarating mise en scene – in 2D.

“When it opens 16 July, this eye-popping film will wow moviegoers all over the world – its complexities will only encourage debate and repeat viewings – and should also score well with critics and year-end awards groups. Oscar nominations in technical categories are a certainty, but Inception is also a strong contender for multiple nominations, including Best Picture.”

“Inception is a stunning achievement and the most completely entertaining film I’ve seen in years,” writes Cinematical’s Todd Gilchrist. “Nolan crafts an amazingly sophisticated, subversive, thoughtful, and even occasionally confusing (albeit in only good ways) tale about the layers of reality in the mind that calcify and crumble when constructed from the raw materials of memory and emotion. At the same time, he’s made an utter crowd-pleaser, an epic piece of entertainment that ultimately feels so simple precisely because of all of its complexity, and one that rouses and inspires and excites in the same way as blockbusters comprised of pure spectacle.”

Cripes. What a reception. Inception arrives here next weekend, so it won’t be long before we’ll know if the film can live up to all that hype. Given its unusual subject matter, one can hardly imagine the movie reaching the blockbusting heights of The Dark Knight or Avatar. But could the movie have a similar effect on the public conciousness as, say, the first Matrix film? Or is this one destined to be a critical hit, which ultimately fails to connect with the public?

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Aspiring film maker(s) / student wanted to film, edit and co-direct a music video.
Concept will be based around Japanese Samurai art form Kendo,  borrowing themes from the cult…

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We are a Charity based in North London organising a Dance event on Friday 9th July from 4 to 6.30pm, as a part of London BIG DANCE Festival. the event will be attended by local residents and MPs and…

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What: Plymouth City Museum and Art Gallery are looking to commission a community film maker to work with young people for a project called ‘Lets Talk about Sex’. Where: Plymouth
When:  August…

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The City of God director is bringing his wit and energy to the capital for a talk as part of Festival Brazil

It is Festival Brazil in the UK this week, and as a part of it, the director Fernando Meirelles is coming to London next Tuesday evening to talk about his movies and Brazilian cinema in general – an event in which I am tangentially involved.

Meirelles is, of course the film-maker whose explosively powerful City of God – which effortlessly secured the bragging rights at the Cannes film festival when it premiered there in 2002 – did more than anything to trigger a new Latin American wave. It was the complex, interwoven account of gang-warfare in the Cidade De Deus favela in Rio de Janeiro: the story of children who manage to be both the ghetto’s underclass and its criminal overlords. Its hyperactive energy was much admired and imitated, and three years later, Meirelles was an inspired choice as director for the John le Carré tale The Constant Gardener, bringing to the English spy author a new cinematic reflex, quite different from the Greeneian melancholy and thoughtfulness that is sometimes considered appropriate. Meirelles conveyed anger, discontent, restless curiosity, flashes of passion. Three years after that, Meirelles released his version of José Saramago’s Blindness, a movie which received mixed notices, but which I thought was excellent. Saramago’s death is as good a time as any for the re-evaluation it deserves. It returned the director, in some ways, to the themes of City of God, and looked to me like a parable for the denied pain of city life, its negation of community, its pressure cooker of commerce in which there is a willed blindness to other people’s existences, to the fragile urban order and especially to the urban poor who underpin its service economy. I should very much like Meirelles to direct a version of Saramago’s fascinating quasi-sequel, Seeing.

But preparing for Fernando Meirelles’s visit, I have tried to have a look at his earlier features: Golden Gate (2000), a precursor to City of God, has so far eluded me, as has his Nutty Boy 2 (1998), a wacky sequel to a popular comedy based on a comic-book character. But I’m very glad to have, at last, seen Meirelles’s 2001 film Domésticas, or Maids, in which he has a co-directing credit with Nando Olival. It’s a film with cult status among Meirelles fans, and it is indeed a little gem, which shows Meirelles’s flair for a certain sort of black comedy. Maids is a loose ensemble picture about five housemaids in São Paulo, restoring to this put-upon servant class a visibility that they lack both in real life and in the movies: they are the unseen hired hands who make life liveable for Brazil’s wealthy bourgeoisie.

With wit and freewheeling energy, Meirelles shows the fraught lives of these five characters who periodically address the camera with wan prose-poems about themselves. One sadly recalls what little girls say when asked what they want to be when they grow up – a princess, a nurse, etc – “No one says: ‘I want to be a maid.’ It’s fate.” Another muses on her chaotic existence: “Everything for poor people is so badly organised”, showing us that order is precisely what she and her ilk are providing for their overclass employers, at their own expense. The order, the pleasantness, the neat-and-tidiness enjoyed by the rich has been donated by the poor from their own increasingly messy and disordered lives.

The centrepiece of Maids is probably the bus robbery scene – a witty, even rather daringly black comic sequence, given that bus robberies are an all too grimly real phenomenon: the film was made one year after a notorious armed robbery and hostage-taking situation in Rio, an event recorded in José Padilha’s documentary Bus 174. What happens in this film is that two guys get on a bus, nerving themselves up to rob the passengers – but two of the maids on board recognise these local boys, and effectively bully them into returning everyone’s money, a tricky business when it comes to remembering the exact sum each victim handed over, and one which ends in the would-be robbers plaintively asking the passengers for change. I’m surprised that no one in Hollywood has ripped this scene off.

Meirelles is a great director, with a claim to be one of the most important film-makers in the world. His talk on Tuesday night promises to be an intriguing event.

• Festival Brazil’s In Conversation With Fernando Meirelles will take place on 29 June at 6.45pm at Canning House, London SW1

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