Peter Bradshaw | |
|---|---|
 Bradshaw in 2013 | |
| Born | Peter Nicholas Bradshaw 19 June 1962 |
| Education | Haberdashers' Aske's Boys' School |
| Alma mater | University of Cambridge (BA, PhD) |
| Occupations |
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| Years active | 1997–present |
| Employer(s) | The Guardian Evening Standard |
| Spouse | Caroline S. Hill |
| Website | theguardian |
Peter Nicholas Bradshaw (born 19 June 1962) is a British writer and film critic. He has been chief film critic at The Guardian since 1999, and is a contributing editor at Esquire .
Bradshaw was educated at Haberdashers' Aske's Boys' School in Hertfordshire [1] and studied English at Pembroke College, Cambridge, where he was president of the Cambridge Footlights. He was awarded a Bachelor of Arts degree in 1984, followed by postgraduate research in the Early Modern period in which he studied with Lisa Jardine and Anne Barton. He received his PhD in 1989. [2]
In the 1990s, Bradshaw was employed by the Evening Standard as a columnist, and during the 1997 general election campaign, editor Max Hastings asked him to write a series of parodic diary entries purporting to be written by the Conservative MP and historian Alan Clark, which Clark thought deceptive and which were the subject of a court case resolved in January 1998, the first in newspaper history in which the subject of a satire sued its author. Bradshaw was not put into the witness box by his QC Peter Prescott, and the judge Gavin Lightman found in Clark's favour, granting an injunction, deciding that Bradshaw's articles were then being published in a form that "a substantial number of readers" would believe they were genuinely being written by Alan Clark. [3] Bradshaw found it "the most bizarre and surreal business of my professional life. I'm very flattered that Mr Clark should go to all this trouble and expense in suing me like this." [4]
Since 1999, Bradshaw has been chief film critic for The Guardian , writing a weekly review column every Friday for the paper's Film&Music section. He is a regular guest reviewer on the Film... programme broadcast on BBC One. He was on the Un Certain Regard jury for 2011 Cannes Film Festival.
He wrote and performed a BBC Radio 4 programme entitled For One Horrible Moment, recorded on 10 October 1998 and first broadcast on 20 January 1999, which chronicled a young man's coming of age in 1970s Cambridgeshire. His bittersweet short story Reunion, first broadcast on BBC Radio 4 on 21 October 2016, was narrated by Tom Hollander and described as "sad and sly, and connected impermeably to the mid-Seventies and what it felt like to be young". [5] Another short story, entitled Neighbours Of Zero, first broadcast on Radio 4 on 17 November 2017, was narrated by Daniel Mays. [6] Bradshaw's story Senior Moment, first broadcast on Radio 4 on 22 May 2020, was narrated by Michael Maloney. [7] Bradshaw co-wrote and acted in David Baddiel's sitcom Baddiel's Syndrome , first aired on Sky One. [8]
In a 2022 Sight & Sound poll of cinema's greatest films, Bradshaw indicated that his ten favourites are: [9]
Bradshaw has been shortlisted four times at The Press Awards in the Critic of the Year category, in 2001, 2007, 2013 and 2014, "Highly Commended" the last time. [10]
At the 2024 Cannes Film Festival, Bradshaw was presented with the Annual Achievement Award for an International Film Critic by the Arab Cinema Center. [11]
Alan Bennett is an English actor, author, playwright and screenwriter. Over his entertainment career he has received numerous awards and honours including two BAFTA Awards, four Laurence Olivier Awards, and two Tony Awards. He also earned an Academy Award nomination for his film The Madness of King George (1994). In 2005 he received the Society of London Theatre Special Award.
Sir Kenneth Charles Branagh is a British actor and filmmaker. Born in Belfast and raised primarily in Reading, Berkshire, Branagh trained at RADA in London and served as its president from 2015 to 2024. His accolades include an Academy Award, four BAFTAs, two Emmy Awards, a Golden Globe Award, a Screen Actors Guild Award, and an Olivier Award. He was appointed a Knight Bachelor in the 2012 Birthday Honours, and was given Freedom of the City in his native Belfast in 2018. In 2020, he was ranked in 20th place on The Irish Times' list of Ireland's greatest film actors.
Armando Giovanni Iannucci is a Scottish satirist, writer, director, producer, performer and panellist. Born in Glasgow to Italian parents, Iannucci studied at the University of Glasgow followed by the University of Oxford. Starting on BBC Scotland and BBC Radio 4, his early work with Chris Morris on the radio series On the Hour transferred to television as The Day Today.
Abbas Kiarostami was an Iranian film director, screenwriter, poet, photographer, and film producer. An active filmmaker from 1970, Kiarostami had been involved in the production of over forty films, including shorts and documentaries. Kiarostami attained critical acclaim for directing the Koker trilogy (1987–1994), Close-Up (1990), The Wind Will Carry Us (1999), and Taste of Cherry (1997), which was awarded the Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival that year. In later works, Certified Copy (2010) and Like Someone in Love (2012), he filmed for the first time outside Iran: in Italy and Japan, respectively. His films Where Is the Friend's Home? (1987), Close-Up, and The Wind Will Carry Us were ranked among the 100 best foreign films in a 2018 critics' poll by BBC Culture. Close-Up was also ranked one of the 50 greatest movies of all time in the famous decennial Sight & Sound poll conducted in 2012.
Barry Leslie Norman was a British film critic, television presenter and journalist. He presented the BBC's cinema review programme, Film..., from 1972 to 1998.
Spider is a 2002 psychological thriller film produced and directed by David Cronenberg and based on the 1990 novel of the same name by Patrick McGrath, who also wrote the screenplay.
Michael Haneke is an Austrian film director and screenwriter. His work often examines social issues and depicts the feelings of estrangement experienced by individuals in modern society. Haneke has made films in French, German, and English and has worked in television and theatre. He also teaches film direction at the Film Academy Vienna.
Terence Davies was a British screenwriter, film director, and novelist. He is best known as the writer and director of autobiographical films, including Distant Voices, Still Lives (1988), The Long Day Closes (1992) and the collage film Of Time and the City (2008), as well as the literary adaptations The Neon Bible (1995), The House of Mirth (2000), The Deep Blue Sea (2011) and Sunset Song (2015). His final two feature films were centered around the lives of influential literary figures, Emily Dickinson in A Quiet Passion (2016) and Siegfried Sassoon in Benediction (2021). Davies was considered by some critics as one of the great British directors of his period.
Film '71 – Film 2018 is a British film review television programme, which was usually broadcast on BBC One. The title of the show changed each year to incorporate the year of broadcast until its cancellation in December 2018.
Mark Kermode is an English film critic, musician, radio presenter, television presenter, author and podcaster. He is the co-presenter, with Ellen E. Jones, of the BBC Radio 4 programme Screenshot and co-presenter of the film-review podcast Kermode & Mayo's Take, alongside long-time collaborator Simon Mayo. Kermode is a regular contributor to The Observer, for which he was chief film critic between September 2013 and September 2023.
Sophie Fiennes is an English filmmaker best known for her films Grace Jones: Bloodlight and Bami (2017) and Over Your Cities Grass Will Grow (2010), as well as for her collaborations with philosopher Slavoj Žižek: The Pervert’s Guide to Cinema (2006), and The Pervert’s Guide to Ideology (2013).
Neil Brand is an English dramatist, composer and author. In addition to being a regular silent film accompanist at London's National Film Theatre, Brand has composed new scores for two restored films from the 1920s, The Wrecker and Anthony Asquith's Underground.
Tropical Malady is a 2004 Thai romantic psychological drama art film written and directed by Apichatpong Weerasethakul. The film has a bifurcated structure; it is divided into two segments – the first is a romance between two men, and the second a mysterious tale about a soldier lost in the woods, bedeviled by the spirit of a shaman.
Peter Kosminsky is a British writer, director and producer. He has directed Hollywood movies such as White Oleander and television films like Warriors, The Government Inspector, The Promise, Wolf Hall and The State.
Asif Kapadia is a British filmmaker. Kapadia is best known for his trilogy of narratively driven, archive-constructed documentaries Senna, Amy and Diego Maradona.
Richard Stanley Roud was an American writer on film and co-founder, with Amos Vogel, of the New York Film Festival (NYFF). At the NYFF, Roud was a former program director, and latterly director, from 1963 to 1987.
Mark Cousins is an English-born, Northern Irish director and writer. A prolific documentarian, among his best-known works is the 15-hour 2011 documentary The Story of Film: An Odyssey.
The Great Beauty is a 2013 art drama film co-written and directed by Paolo Sorrentino. Filming took place in Rome starting on 9 August 2012. It premiered at the 2013 Cannes Film Festival where it was screened in competition for the Palme d'Or. It was shown at the 2013 Toronto International Film Festival, the 2013 Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival, and at the 2013 Reykjavik European Film Festival.
Kenneth Charles Loach is a British film director and screenwriter. His socially critical directing style and socialism are evident in his film treatment of social issues such as poverty, homelessness, and labour rights.
Be Natural: The Untold Story of Alice Guy-Blaché is a 2018 documentary about the first female filmmaker Alice Guy-Blaché, directed by Pamela B. Green. It was screened out of competition at the 2018 Cannes Film Festival in the Cannes Classics category. It was nominated for the festival's L'Œil d'or documentary prize. Be Natural went on to screen at Telluride, Deauville American Film Festival, New York Film Festival, and London BFI Film Festival.
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