Thatâs my name. Itâs always been my name. Iâm taking back whatâs mine.
Thandiwe Newton
Sign up for Sight & Soundâs Weekly Film Bulletin and more
News, reviews and archive features every Friday, and information about our latest magazine once a month.
Email
Sign up
In a Vogue interview in April, a major Hollywood star revealed that she had never appeared on screen under her real name. When Thandiwe Newton made her debut in Flirting in 1991, she was credited as âThandieâ â an Anglicised nickname â without her say-so. She ended up sticking to it, but times have begun to change, and she has said she wants to take back what is hers and always has been: her name.
Sign up for Sight & Soundâs Weekly Film Bulletin and more
News, reviews and archive features every Friday, and information about our latest magazine once a month.
Email
Sign up
Jeanie Finlay creates award-winning work for cinema and television, telling intimate stories to international audiences. She has made films for HBO, IFC and the BBC, including four commissions for the acclaimed BBC Storyville strand. Watch her films at jeaniefinlay.com.
In March, the BBC announced that arts and culture channel BBC Four is to cease commissioning new programmes and become archive-only as part of the ongoing significant cost-cutting drive across the corporation.
Rare Beasts is in UK cinemas from 21 May 2021.
Rare Beasts is chaotic, messy and often difficult to watch – intentionally, fittingly, exhilaratingly so. Billie Piper’s directorial debut (she also wrote the screenplay) touches on themes of female insecurity, gender roles and social binds that she explored to great acclaim in last year’s TV series I Hate Suzie. While this 2019 feature may be rougher round the edges, and at times threatens to collapse under the weight of its characters’ neuroses, it’s a raw and bitingly honest watch.
Piper is bracingly good as Mandy, an anxious, self-deprecating 30-something Londoner who is is attempting to forge a successful career in TV production. If this sounds a bit Bridget Jones, that’s as far as the comparison goes. Things have moved on since Renee Zellweger’s clumsy heroine was seen as the cutting edge of female characterisation and, in its brutally frank depiction of frazzled femininity, Rare Beasts has far more in common wit
The new horror movie Censor takes the world of video nasties and satanic panic to new heights. From director Prano Bailey-Bond, the movie stars Niamh Algar and recalls the work of David Cronenberg, Dario Argento, and John Carpenter.
CPH:DOX 2021 ran 21 April to 12Â May.
You open the front door to a man standing on your door step. A film camera sits on his shoulder, with a fluffy oversized microphone attached.
Have you won a prize? Has some murky part of your past come back to bite you? Are you about to get killed by a Peeping Tom copycat murderer?
Michael Powellâs Peeping Tom comes to mind because a man with a camera shows up on womenâs doorsteps and kills them. My sixth-form film tutor screened it to us. He was later caught filming secretly up the skirts of shoppers in a high street fashion chain store â and a stash of footage from hidden cameras in the girlsâ loos was then found on campus. It can be hard to trust a man and a camera.