Leonard Di Caprio Will Play Rasputin but Still Won't Win an Oscar

Our friends at Grolsch Film Works have a website where you can find out what they’ve been up to and read/watch interesting stuff about films. Every week we'll be plucking the highlights. This is that.

Three photogenic young women in neon balaclavas pick up guitars and break into Moscow’s Cathedral of Christ the Saviour. Howling an anti-Putin punk song with waving hands and stomping feet, they’re dragged out and sentenced to two years in prison. Suddenly, Madonna’s taking her top off in ode to them, and Sting is getting a bit emotional. Throw in some religious fundamentalists, a rather heated-up Putin, and some Riot grrrl for the 21st century, and you may have the ultimate example of the statement: ‘you couldn’t make this stuff up’. The story of how the leaderless feminist activist group Pussy Riot offended and enamoured a nation in equal measure is the subject of Mike Lerner and Maxim Pozdorovkin’s slick HBO documentary, an entertaining if shallow exploration of a very modern revolution.

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Like director Terrence Malick, J.D. Salinger – the well-known recluse and creator of 'Catcher in the Rye' – was famously impossible to photograph. He was so private, in fact, that surprisingly little is known about his life and why, mysteriously, he stopped publishing work in 1965. So why did he stop? Well, that's the question this new documentary aims to answer. And with so many enigmas surrounding the author's life and work, it's about time someone had a proper crack at figuring it all out.

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Leonard di Caprio Will Play Rasputin, Still Won't Win An Oscar

Yep, DiCaprio will play the controversial Russian historical figure, will do an incredible job capturing his bizarre, hypnotic hold over Romanovs, won't win an Oscar.

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Behind the Candelabra, Steven Soderbergh’s superb biopic of Liberace, is in cinemas now. It features great turns from a resurgent Michael Douglas as the famed entertainer and Matt Damon as his young lover Scott Thorson, but for our money, it’s Rob Lowe, cameoing as shiny and stiff-faced plastic surgeon Dr. Jack Startz, who steals the show. To create Startz’s shockingly bizarre look, make-up artists fitted the actor with an elaborate mixture of elastic, tape and wigs, a process that caused him severe headaches. His brief performance is so weirdly mesmeric that we’d have to say the pain was worth it. Intriguingly the real Startz, a Beverley Hills surgeon, ended up being sued by more than 100 of his patients, and committed suicide in 1985. Perhaps a brave director could team up with Lowe for a dedicated Startz biopic? We’d certainly be keen.

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"You know how the script has this scene where these two characters have a conversation? Well, maybe these characters could have that conversation in the middle of a battle between robots and dinosaurs in a laser disco while a fireworks factory explodes behind them." – every producer ever. Why not save the time and effort and just throw a bucket of money at the camera? We get it, you blew the budget on this. And sometimes you guys just get too ambitious and these crimes against judgement happen…

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Keep your peepers peeled for more Grolsch Film Works updates next week. Go to grolschfilmworks.com to see what’s happening right now.