Category: cinema

If you’ve watched enough action movies over the last decade or so, you’ve probably noticed what feels like a bit of … an escalation. In the original John Wick, Keanu Reeves shoots, stabs and car-crashes his way through 77 mostly-unnamed mooks; by John Wick 4, he’s up to 140. Bullet Train, right at the whimsical-comedy end of the ballistic-ballet spectrum, features 152 individual onscreen deaths; Extraction 2, very much on the laugh-free side, has 108. (Commando, by far Arnie’s most violent film, has a mere 81).

Rebel Ridge, which scored 31.2m views over its first six days on Netflix, feels like an almost-deliberate antidote to all this carnage. Yes, it’s a classic bit of dad-coded competence porn: a tall, muscular stranger rolls into a small town run by corrupt cops, and proves to be almost supernaturally good at everything he needs to do to unseat them. Yes, there are deadpan monologues and one-liners galore (“I put too much sauce on that?” asks soon-to-be-household-name leading man Aaron Pierre after delivering one memorable bon mot). But it’s more than just a riff on Reacher, and the lack of fatalities is just one reason why.

For starters, the plot centres on a civil forfeiture, a legal process that pretty much every US citizen may be genuinely concerned about. The trouble starts with a couple of cops effectively stealing $36,000 from ex-marine Terry Richmond via a process that allows law enforcement to seize property from ordinary citizens without any proof of criminal activity (“I thought it’d make a great premise for a movie because of how unifying it is,” says director Jeremy Saulnier in the film’s promotional material. “It pisses everyone off”). There’s a decent chunk of legalese woven into the drum-tight dialogue, with the worst excesses of the process laid infuriatingly bare; in a detail pulled straight from the headlines, it turns out the cops have bought themselves a margarita machine with confiscated money.

But just as importantly – and this is a bit of a spoiler – in the ensuing revenge rampage, Richmond doesn’t kill anyone. Faces get punched, bodies get slammed, and one arm gets gruesomely snapped – but as far as I can see, there isn’t a single on-screen death in the entire film. Richmond, you see, is an unarmed combat instructor who’s also well-versed in non-lethal alternatives to the usual shotguns and pistols (“We have to call ’em ‘less-lethal.’ Liability purposes.” says the police chief in one early confrontation). And so for most of the running time, he disarms and de-escalates, firing off tasers and flashbangs without ever starting a bodycount.

This is partly interesting because Saulnier’s other films are so good at portraying bits of the old ultraviolence: his debut Murder Party is absurd and exaggerated, subversive revenge thriller Blue Ruin is raw and awkward, and siege-horror Green Room is visceral, shocking, and very real. Rebel Ridge has plenty of the slickly choreographed Brazilian jiu-jitsu that’s a trademark of the revenge-thriller genre, but here it’s a way to incapacitate and immobilise, rather than a prelude to something more horrible. (In Green Room, for example, an ineffective chokehold leads to one of the film’s most gruesome moments.) Pierre’s size and real-life martial arts experience make all of this extremely convincing; the armlocks and throws are effortlessly fluid, and in one take that was apparently done without wires, he hauls another six-foot man halfway across a car park.

But it’s also interesting because the setting of Rebel Ridge almost demands this de-escalation, as more than one character points out throughout the two-hour runtime. The cops aren’t ever explicitly racist – they initially run Richmond off his bike for apparently no reason, before shaking him down for his cash – but there’s a feeling throughout the film that things could go horribly wrong at any moment. In Rambo, from 1982, another film with a police-harassment setup, the title character manages to machine-gun a sheriff’s office and (non-fatally) shoot the sheriff without suffering too much in the way of consequences. In 2024, it seems even less plausible that Richmond could shoot a cop and stand any chance of survival than that he could tear the wall off a police station. Ultimately, maybe that’s why Rebel Ridge feels like a breath of fresh mountain air, compared to the dozens of corpse-riddled action movies currently being produced by every streaming service. It might be a wish-fulfilment revenge fantasy, but suspension of disbelief only goes so far.

Giancarlo Esposito is used to frightening people. After all, he’s built a career out of it. Once, while on a flight, a woman waiting for the toilet saw him coming up the aisle and was so scared that she begged him to go before her. Bemused, he did: “I came out and said, ‘Have a nice piss!’” Even the tallest, most muscular men who approach him admit they feel intimidated in his presence. “My talents are facial expressions and intensity,” he says. “A guy last weekend said, ‘Wow, you’re not a big man, but you’re so frightening!’ It’s all about energy; that’s all we are as human beings, we’re energy.”

He may frighten people, but it’s all an act: one he has played to perfection. Over the last decade he’s become Hollywood’s go-to baddie since his turn as Gus Fring, the menacing meth kingpin in Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul. He’s played an aristocratic drug lord in Guy Ritchie’s The Gentlemen; the war criminal Moff Gideon in The Mandalorian, hunting for baby Yoda across space; ruthless Stan Edgar in The Boys, wrangling a squad of spoilt superheroes; and corrupt Mayor Cicero in Francis Ford Coppola’s Megalopolis. Next year, he will be Marvel’s newest big bad in Captain America: Brave New World. When we speak, he is in Toronto filming something he can’t tell me anything about, which leaves me racking my brains for a megafranchise he hasn’t been in yet.

When he’s just being himself, Esposito is warm and effusive, prone to flapping his hands in a way that reveals his Italian heritage. At 66, he is blessed with a face that seems to get more handsome as time adds lines. He’s “Papa” to four daughters, who he loves talking about. He also brings up energy and love and the universe a lot; more engaged with the metaphysical than I anticipated for a guy who specialises in playing cold, ruthless men. He likes surprising people with his warmth, because he sees himself as an entertainer. “And if I’m just playing myself over and over and over again, without any salt or pepper, is it still entertainment?” he asks.

At a recent convention – he “really loves” fan conventions – he overheard some people laughing at a woman who was so overwhelmed by his presence that she couldn’t look him in the eye. “I could tell she was really an intense human being, and it was a big moment in her life to meet me,” he says. “She didn’t know what to say, and I didn’t want to force her. I didn’t do the … ”

His face and posture snap into the blank mask of Gus Fring: shark-eyes, deep monotone. “‘Look at me. Woman, look at me,’” he says, quietly, coldly, then blink, Gus is gone and Papa is back.

“She was just really shy and needed a hug,” he says, holding his chest. “So I gave her one! And she put her head right in my chest and she was on the verge of tears. She just needed some love.”

Esposito is having the time of his life. He doesn’t mind when people want him to do a bit of Fring, or when they stop him to show their tattoos of his face, or to pose for a photo – often with him holding something threateningly to their neck, re-creating an iconic Breaking Bad scene involving a box cutter (fans must make do with safer objects, like bananas). He’s happy to do it all, because this level of fame still feels exciting. He describes his career as having three rises to stardom: first on Broadway, then in film, now on television. But with rises come falls.

He was born in Copenhagen, to an Italian stagehand father and a Black American opera singer from Alabama; his parents met in Italy while his mother was touring Europe in a production of Porgy and Bess. (His surname is pronounced “eh-POZZI-toh”, though he accepts that people default to “es-POH-sito”, thinking he is Latino.)

The Espositos moved from Rome to Manhattan when he was five, where his parents separated. He was raised first Baptist, then Catholic; he became an altar boy and considered the priesthood. He and his older brother were sent away to a Catholic military school; he considered joining the military. Religion and service offered discipline and a sense of belonging, both of which he craved.

But he came from a family of performers and, by 10, he was a musical star, making his Broadway debut in Maggie Flynn. As he got older he moved from theatre and into film: his breakout role was in Spike Lee’s 1988 film School Daze. Over the following four years, Lee and Esposito (who are still great friends) worked together three more times, on Do the Right Thing, Mo’ Better Blues and Malcolm X. It was an exhilarating time for Esposito, even if his white father didn’t understand it; when he saw Do the Right Thing, his father criticised it for having “too much cursing”. “That was when I realised, he didn’t know what it was like being in my skin,” Esposito recalls.

He had a uniquely varied career on screen: he was Big Bird’s camp counsellor on Sesame Street, an FBI agent in The Usual Suspects, a cadet in Taps. But by the late 90s, work began to dry up. “It was a really difficult time. I chased breadcrumbs,” he says. By the late 90s, he was bankrupt. The bank took his house. He got divorced. “I was getting work as a guest star, but I was living over my head – I had too many kids, too fast,” he says. He said yes to small roles in every procedural going: Law & Order, Homicide: Life on the Street, NYPD Blue, CSI, Bones.

Things were so bad that he began to consider the unthinkable: hiring someone to kill him, so his family could get the insurance payout.

“I was in a really desperate position,” he says. “My former wife’s family were all in insurance, so her father had a big life insurance policy on me. I started asking these very pointed questions, like: can you collect life insurance if you die from misadventure? Can you collect life insurance if you kill yourself? I was going down the list to figure out what options I had. I eventually realised none of those would work – but, if someone killed me, that might be different, and it might be worth the price of the ticket to have my family be OK.”

“It was a horrible thought. But eventually I realised, the sacrifice is you would never experience them being OK. You’d never have the opportunity to experience all the love they have for you and you for them. But I did really consider it.”

Did he ever consider quitting acting? “Become Mr Mom and stay at home to take care of my kids? I probably would have,” he says. “But my instinct was always to go out and bring the world home. And when I act, I tune the world out. Everything is gone. All the voices in my head go away. All my worries about my children, the bills, it goes away, because I’m in flight.”

When he joined Breaking Bad in 2009, creator Vince Gilligan couldn’t believe they could get him, completely unaware of what dire straits he’d been in. Esposito throws himself into every character: to play Gus Fring, he did yoga to gain better control over his breath, which helped with his frightening stillness: “It allowed me to give you a chance to see my emotion before I even spoke. Now that’s scary.” To play Moff Gideon, he practised lightsaber fighting with a broom at home: “I did! I picked up a few different sticks because I needed to figure out how to wield it.” Never mind that he was going to get training on set – this is not the Esposito way.

For him, no baddie is just a baddie. He convinced Gilligan to make Fring a generous employer – if anything, making him capable of kindness just made him scarier – and on The Mandalorian, he talked showrunner Jon Favreau into making Gideon desperate to wield the force, a desire that made him more interesting. He’s never afraid of talking directors into making changes. “Intention is everything. Intention can be seen and felt, but it can also be stated. I like to encourage people to ask for what they want,” he says, then smiles. “My family has a list of Giancarlo-isms, and that’s one of them: ‘Ask for what you want.’ Say it to the world!”

Tell me some others, I say. “Never leave a man behind!” he shouts. “One of my daughters is always wandering off – now it may be my military-school training, but you just don’t leave a man behind! And ‘Head on a swivel’! I’m hyper-vigilant because people recognise me all the time, so I always tell the girls this because they are always walking around like this,” he says, tapping away at an imaginary phone. “Head on a swivel!”

Someone once told him that acting can heal actors, which he still believes deeply. “Playing very intense characters has helped me to realise how intense I am, and made it OK,” he says. “The opportunity to play so many different kinds of characters with foibles – evil, mean, liars, cheaters, killers – has allowed me to tap into an energy, to look at who I am when I’m in that character’s skin. How angry am I? How mean can I be? How happy can I be? How funny can I be? It allows me to look at all the dark and light spaces within myself. And that has helped me all my life.”

One Sunday night in September 1984, between championship darts and the news with Jan Leeming, the BBC broadcast one of its bravest, most devastating commissions. This was Threads, a two-hour documentary-style drama exploring a hypothetical event deeply feared at the time and also somehow unthinkable: what would happen if a nuclear bomb dropped on a British city.

Made by British director Mick Jackson with Kes author Barry Hines, and set in Sheffield, it begins with a young couple, working-class Jimmy and middle-class Ruth, dealing with her unexpected pregnancy in familiar kitchen-sink drama surroundings. International tensions build slowly in the background as the minutes tick by, bursting in through newspaper headlines, radio and TV news, and the ominous words of narrator Paul Vaughan, known then as a presenter of BBC science series Horizon.

Then come CND protests; council officers being summoned to an emergency bunker; and animated films on TV instructing people how to survive. Forty-seven minutes in, a nuclear bomb drops. The film ends more than a decade later with Jimmy and Ruth’s baby, Jane, now an adolescent, giving birth in a world devastated by nuclear winter.

Bringing horror into the homes, shops and streets of a very ordinary world, Threads is a brilliant, terrifying film, and for anyone who has seen it (I watched it in 1999 on a dusty VHS), its effects will have been long-lasting. To mark the film’s 40th anniversary, I have examined its creation and legacy for a forthcoming radio documentary, Archive on 4: Reweaving Threads, 40 Years On, digging into the BBC vaults to show how the film has influenced writers, politicians and fans (including Jim Jupp of the brilliant Ghost Box record label, who has created an exclusive soundtrack for the programme).

The BBC has shown Threads only three times to date: in 1984; in August of the following year, to mark the 40th anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki; and as part of a cold war special on BBC Four in 2003. Another – timely – showing is planned for October. When I watched the film at the end of the 20th century, Threads felt like a piece of history. Today, in a world of conflict in Russia, China and the Middle East, and expanding nuclear capabilities, it no longer does.

In a light-dazzled sunroom in Santa Monica, California, Mick Jackson, director of LA Story and The Bodyguard, is remembering the film of which he’s most proud. “You know that on the Internet Movie Database, at the end of each entry for a film, there’s a space for people to write their own comments? I’ve checked that page for Threads practically every year. It varies with the state of tension in the world, but regularly there are [new] entries there saying: ‘I saw this as a kid sitting around the door when I was supposed to be in bed’, or ‘I came to this because people had talked about it and it’s the most horrific, sobering thing I’ve ever seen’.” The latest reviewer, jotchy-14285, posted in June, saying: “Just watch it people, judge for yourselves and hope that the ones with their fingers on the buttons have seen it as well...”

A science documentary-maker in his early career, Jackson joined the BBC in 1966, soon after the corporation decided to ban another film it had commissioned about the effects of a nuclear bomb: Peter Watkins’s The War Game. Blending documentary, newsy vox pops and a cast of amateur actors and extras, it was dropped from the schedules following advice from the Home Office, but later won the 1967 best documentary Oscar after a cinema release. “So I entered a corporation where everybody felt a great deal of shame, that the BBC has somehow betrayed them,” Jackson says.

By the early 1980s, the atmosphere was more confident. A 1980 Panorama episode, If the Bomb Drops…, presented by a young Jeremy Paxman, leaked a series of government films, Protect and Survive, made in secret in the mid-1970s for broadcast if the worst happened. Producer David Darlow convinced a local government commissioner to show them to him, despite their status as state secrets, and editor Roger Bolton took the gamble to include them.

The films became instantly – and chillingly – notorious for how hopelessly ineffective their advice was. Using simple, childlike illustrations, they instruct the public how to make shelters out of mattresses and bury family members outside in the event of a nuclear attack. One of these films plays in Threads on Jimmy and Ruth’s TV as they try to decorate their new flat, the first in a swathe of government responses that are simply not enough.

Inspired by this Panorama, Jackson buried himself in textbooks, papers and conferences, finding out in rigorous scientific detail what could happen in the advent of nuclear war at a time when cold war tensions were ramping up. In 1982 – the year a tactical missile wing was opened at RAF Greenham Common – he made a successful documentary on the subject, A Guide to Armageddon, for the BBC science show QED – but knew that drama would help propel messages to the public more effectively.

Jackson recruited Barry Hines to write the screenplay. My radio producer, Leonie Thomas, found archive footage of Hines talking on Pebble Mill at One about his first meeting with Jackson. “I considered it very seriously,” he says, in his soft South Yorkshire accent. “[And] because I write about contemporary social issues, I thought I ought to have a go at this because it’s the most important of them all.”

Hines, who died in 2016, grew up in Hoyland, near Sheffield, which appealed to Jackson for a location. Why? “Because it was an industrial centre, a Nato base,” says Jackson, “and, excuse the phrase, bang in the middle of Britain.” It helped that the leftwing city council, then run by David Blunkett, was amenable to the BBC’s crew. The area was also a hotbed of CND activism and had local people more than willing to be extras.

Threads was made in only 17 days in early 1984 with a budget of £250,000. By setting it in Sheffield, Jackson provided viewers with a familiar, relatable backdrop. When I saw it, by which time it had the status of a cult film, it reminded me of my home town, Swansea – similarly rebuilt after the second world war. I recognised the people drinking in dimly lit pubs, panic-buying in familiar corner shops, running amok outside Debenhams and Woolworths as sirens wailed their four-minute warning.

This scene takes place in Sheffield’s the Moor, still a shopping district, and still largely unchanged. I recently visited that spot, standing where an image of a mushroom cloud appears in the city centre sky. The same mid-century concrete buildings and church in the distance frame that view. Threads continues to haunt Sheffield and it still haunts me.

In 2018, Charlie Brooker talked to Kirsty Young on Desert Island Discs about watching Jackson’s QED film and Threads as an adolescent. “I remember watching these things and not being able to process what that meant – not understanding how society kept going; why people bothered going to work and feeding ducks and getting on buses and weren’t just weeping and screaming.”

The morning after Threads was broadcast, Neil Kinnock, then leader of the Labour party, wrote to Jackson and Hines to praise them – a letter he reads again for Archive on 4 from a chair in his living room 40 years later, and that Jackson has framed on his Santa Monica sunroom wall.

It ends: “This story must be told time and time again… Don’t, by the way, be troubled by the possibility that some people might be inured to the real thing by seeing horrifying films. The dangers of complacency are much greater than any risks of knowledge.” I ask Kinnock how it feels to read it now. “I’d stick by every word, I think,” he says. “The dangers of complacency are lethal.”

He watched Threads with wife, Glenys, son, Stephen, then 14, now a Labour MP, and daughter, Rachel, 12, now an ITN producer (“It did affect them,” Kinnock admits). He rewatched the film before our interview, and was struck by “how brave and truthful it was”. But did it change government conversations at the time? “None,” he said, bluntly. “It didn’t shift policy at all.”

But films such as Threads can still have an impact, he says – he cites Mr Bates vs the Post Office as another production that directly challenged people in power. “A film can shift opinion by enhancing understanding, and when a democracy becomes conscious of injustice, that makes an important contribution to public comprehension.”

For Jackson, the message of Threads comes down to something very simple: trusting people with the truth. “That’s what I wanted to get across,” he says. “That there’s no going back, that this happens. You can’t go back and press replay.”

But with a film you can. This month, Russian deputy foreign minister Sergei Ryabkov hinted at his country’s intention to change its stance on the use of nuclear weapons “connected with the escalation course of our western adversaries”. The UK and the US recently enhanced their nuclear cooperation pact. Threads airs on BBC Four next month. Be brave for two hours, and then continue the conversation.

I first catch sight of Demi Moore crouching on the floor in a hotel corridor, coal-black hair fanned across her back. She’s talking in a peeping high voice, which is confusing: Moore’s husky pitch is her trademark. What I can’t see until I’m close are the tiny dogs she’s playing with. When I say tiny, Moore’s chihuahua, Pilaf, is a thing unimaginable until you see her. Thimble small. How-is-that-even-a- dog small. Moore is overseeing an introduction to Bruno, a puppy belonging to one of the comms team I’d met earlier and who was, until Pilaf, the smallest dog I’d seen. Bruno now looks like the Hulk. The dogs’ characters are compared, their habits, their fur; they snuffle each other, squeak and squelch (their version of barking). Finally, Moore scoops Pilaf from the floor – bye Bruno – and the little angel joins us for our interview. First on her lap, then on the PR’s lap, then investigating the sofa and my bag (don’t wee there, Pilaf).

Pilaf’s teensiness initially distracts me from noticing how Moore herself is fine-boned and delicate; poised like a Modigliani in her chair and so toned I can see taut bands of muscle sweeping from her clavicle. Her dark hair forms two straight varnished curtains that hang to her waist. She wears a structured brown dress and killer-red nail varnish and uses hand gestures so voluminous that if you witnessed our conversation with the sound off, you’d think she was describing a series of explosions.

Why am I focusing on the way she looks? Because we are here to discuss her film The Substance, which is at once a body horror and a funny, furious satire of our obsession with youth and appearance.

Moore, 61, plays Elizabeth Sparkle, a lonely has-been celebrity who is axed from her aerobics show on her 50th birthday by TV executive Harvey (Dennis Quaid). Over lunch Harvey reminds her, as all women must be reminded, that a woman’s value lasts only as long as her fertility. That same day the offer of an injectable cell-reproducing serum that will cause the body to generate a shiny young version of itself, with some small-print caveats, seems timely and all too tempting. It’s a Dorian Gray plot, less absurd, perhaps, with the current hysteria around semaglutide (the weightloss drug sold as Ozempic and now thought to slow ageing). The film is hyper-real, the sound sharp, the overall effect queasy.

Moore – who has spent her adult life having her anatomy scrutinised for signs of plastic surgery – did not mind that French writer/director Coralie Fargeat thought she was “perfect” for the role. She did not mind that she would be required to strip down for full-frontal nude scenes. Or even that her regenerated self “Sue” would be played by Margaret Qualley and that she’d therefore be compared with the 29-year-old in some hyper-sexualised, male-gaze satirising bum and boob shots. “Fully intrigued,” she sat down and read the script. “I thought, ‘OK, this could either be really amazing or an absolute disaster.’”

Although she’d watched Fargeat’s 2017 debut Revenge – “so I understood her sensibility” – Moore was unfamiliar with body horror and at times she found it “head spinning”. One person suggested she think of it as “phantasmagoric”. “I was like, ‘What is that?’ Someone else said, ‘Well, The Fly is considered body horror.’” Early in The Substance, the subject of that film is neatly referenced, floating in a glass of wine. Actually it draws from across the comic-horror-fantasy board, not least Carrie (1976), Freaky Friday (1976), Death Becomes Her (1992) and in subtler ways, Moore feels, All About Eve (1950).

The thing that really grabbed Moore – “obviously” – was “the circumstances of a woman in the entertainment industry who’s facing rejection and deep despair. Everything in her life that seemed meaningful is being ripped out.” And beyond, “What really struck me was the harsh violence against oneself. It’s not what’s being done to you, it’s what we do to ourselves.” Traditional horror, she says, merely terrifies, “whereas there’s a depth to the exploration of our psyches, our inner dialogue, that body horror seems to amplify”.

Even after filming she had no idea if it would appeal to audiences. When she settled into the 2,000-seat theatre at Cannes to watch the final cut in May, she was looking round thinking, “Is it going to resonate? Is it going to connect? Are all the grotesque parts going to translate? Or be like, too off-putting?” The crowd, according to reports, “went wild”.

How does she feel now? She smiles. “I’m still in shock.”

The Substance has been described as Moore’s “comeback”, which she finds baffling as, “it’s not like I’ve really left to come back”. It is true that before this film she had been wondering if the acting side of her life had – she stalls – “not ended, but like, was it ‘complete’?” She does a lot of this linguistic repackaging, as though gently guiding herself away from the cliff edge. “I’ll leave others to, like, identify or label it however they need to.” She adds: “As Michelle Yeoh said, ‘You were just on pause!’”

A reminder: Demi Moore was the dangerous beauty of 80s and 90s cinema, the wild and surly rebel of the original Brat Pack movie St Elmo’s Fire (1985) and star of Ghost (1990) and A Few Good Men (1992). It’s hard to imagine today the almighty fuss over her nude and pregnant cover of Vanity Fair, shot by Annie Leibovitz in 1991. It was called “pornography”; newsstands refused to stock it. In an era where the gender pay gap is front of mind, it’s also maddening to remember that she was dubbed Gimme Moore for negotiating $12m for Striptease (1996), when her then husband Bruce Willis was merrily cashing nearly double that for Die Hard 3 (1995).

For much of the 2000s, Moore was dogged by tabloid gossip about her marriage to Ashton Kutcher, whom she met when he was 25 and she 40. The age gap inflamed the savage obsession with her appearance – whole articles were devoted to how much surgery she’d supposedly had, including a guessed-at “knee lift” because, well, doctors with newspaper columns zoomed in on her image and decided she didn’t have enough “kninkles”.

Meanwhile, Moore and Kutcher holidayed in the Caribbean, in Mexico, spent endless days in bed. Kutcher dotted the house with Post-its telling her how magical she was, how much he loved her, until he didn’t. There were rumours of meltdowns, exclusives on his one-night stands – one such report in 2011 appeared on her phone as a Google alert while she was having her hair and makeup done for the premiere of Five. For seven years she kept a relatively low profile, until in 2019 she “shared” as she puts it, Inside Out, her dynamite memoir ghosted by the writer Ariel Levy. It was an instant New York Times bestseller.

In it, Moore described her turbulent peripatetic childhood with a suicidal bipolar mother and cheating, violent father – later revealed not to be her biological parent after all. She recounted being raped at 15 by a family friend who asked her afterwards how it felt “to be whored by your mother for $500”. She left home at 16, married at 17, made her first film at 19. She told of her issues with alcohol and cocaine, which she had for breakfast – “I nearly burned a hole through my nostrils” – and which was supplied by, among others, her dentist.

She got clean in 1984, but eating issues followed, fuelled by executives telling her she needed to lose weight. She was on the frontline of relentless Hollywood sexism. One producer couldn’t understand why Moore’s character didn’t have sex with Tom Cruise in A Few Good Men. “If Tom and Demi aren’t going to sleep together, why is Demi a woman?”

Pretty much all her partners – including fellow Brat Packer Emilio Estevez – were allegedly unfaithful. Kutcher blamed his flings on the “blurred lines” of their marriage (the couple had threesomes, experiences that Moore writes filled her with shame). After nearly two decades of sobriety, he also reintroduced her to alcohol saying, as he enjoyed a glass of red one romantic evening, “I don’t know if alcoholism is a real thing – I think it’s all about moderation.” Moore wished she’d thought, “This is a kid in his 20s who has no idea what he’s talking about.”

In January 2012, just shy of 50, Moore was at an all-time low. Kutcher had left, post-marriage cordiality with Willis had soured, her daughters barely spoke to her, her career seemed to be over. She found herself in the midst of an existential reckoning. If this is life, she thought, “I’m done.” Her memoir opens with a scene at home in Los Angeles: friends are partying around her and she listlessly joins in taking hits of nitrous oxide and smoking synthetic pot, known as Spice. Next, she was having a seizure and someone was screaming, “Call 911!”

It was gripping to Fargeat, all of it, but the director was particularly caught by Moore’s relationship with her body. In the 90s and noughties, women were not attractive or desirable unless they were thin, Moore tells me. Thinness was the vital component, explicitly and implicitly in film, fashion and the media. But what Fargeat kept coming back to was the decades of abject torture Moore put herself through with frenzied starving and exercising to achieve this ideal. “What I did to myself,” is the way Moore explains it. “What I made it mean about me. Really looking at that violence, how violent we can be towards ourselves, how just brutal.”

As an aside she says this idea is 100% relatable to men, too. “Self-judgment, chasing perfection, trying to rid ourselves of ‘flaws’, also feeling rejected and despair, none of this is exclusive to women.” She references a scene where Elizabeth is asked on a date but keeps finding fault with herself in the mirror. “We’ve all had moments where you go back and you’re trying to fix something, and you’re just making it worse to the point where you’re incapacitated. We’re seeing these small things nobody else is looking at, but we’re so hyper-focused on all that we’re not.” She takes the idea further. “All of us, if we start to think our value is only with how we look then ultimately we’re going to be crushed.”

In 2021, there was uproar over her appearance when Moore walked the runway for Fendi. Perhaps it was overenthusiastic makeup contouring, or perhaps she was caught by unflattering spotlights, or perhaps she’d had “work”; for whatever reason, her cheekbones appeared unnaturally severe. “Yes,” she says, acknowledging that this happened. She speaks carefully, deliberately. “Look, we are living at a time of great judgment. People can anonymously judge one another really in cruel ways. I feel [this kind of judgment] is a reflection of someone’s own unhappiness and/or a way to boost their own sense of self. When those things happen, I have learned to just let it roll.” Ultimately, she adds, “It’s what I make it mean about me. If I give it a lot of weight and value and power, it will have it. If I don’t, it won’t.” In other words: mind your own business.

Besides, the frantic scramble to find a miracle to transform each of us into “a better, younger” version is felt by everyone, she says. “We’re all exposed, we see stuff every day – ‘Oh, this vitamin, this thing, this thing’ – there’s stuff everywhere.” But in the film, what does Elizabeth do with this shiny new opportunity? She simply retraces the steps of her own life. Yes, her young “self” goes back to the TV exec, she goes back to the aerobic show. Moore loves this about the script, that it’s shoving into our faces what we apparently don’t know: that given the same chances all over again, we will seek the same crappy validation and make the same dumb choices. “Because, if you think about it – and obviously it would have been a different movie – she could have said, ‘You know what, I’m going to produce my own show. I’m going do X, Y and Z differently.’ But no. The need to have that same validation is there until we break our patterns.” She sighs. It’s a sigh for all of us.

Moore has searched everywhere for answers: she turned to Kabbalah with Madonna and Guy Ritchie, consulted tarot cards, psychics and had endless therapy. She even keeps an open mind about reincarnation (we spend five minutes discussing Surviving Death, a Netflix series investigating the afterlife). But one of the most powerful things said to her, she says, was when she was complaining to a tarot card reader that she never felt good enough. The woman told her flatly, “‘Oh, well, you’ll never be good enough.’ I was so shocked, like that was such a harsh truth. She said, ‘But you can know the value of your worth. You just have to put down the measuring stick.’” She says she thinks about this “gem of wisdom” when she is tempted to “compare and despair” while, say, scrolling social media.

“And while I can intellectually comprehend it, like many things, it’s a constant effort to work on it. You catch yourself when you’re being in a state of like …” Her hands mime her despair. “And you’re like, ‘No, I need to focus on being the best me.’ I remember my daughter saying, ‘I want to quit wasting time focused on all the things that I see as not good or not how I want, because it’s taking away from celebrating all the things that I am.’”

So then, did it change her, making the film? “Definitely. It was a very hard film, very raw; very vulnerable to make. But at the same time liberating. I had less pressure than Margaret, because she had the added pressure to look amazing. I degrade throughout and I knew going in that I wasn’t going to be shot in the most glamorous way, or with the edges softened. In fact, the opposite. But there was something freeing about that.”

In the film, the younger and older self must share one life, alternating every seven days. Inevitably they disapprove of what the other is doing with their time. The split becomes war, older versus younger, with all the implicit mother/daughter dynamics therein. Unlike the fairytale trope, the older self is not the evil witch. It’s the younger self who is the self-obsessed wicked little monster. Moore concedes with a knowing smile, that our younger “selves” are, indeed, “a little bit more narcissistic, a little more, ‘everything is about me’”.

That said, she is heartened greatly by the “beautiful shift” in the way young women navigate their lives. She loved watching Qualley on set, for instance. “I learned from her. Learned and appreciated the confidence she had in asking for what she wanted, without being apologetic, in ways that made me go, ‘Wow.’ Back in the day, a woman being strong was often seen as a bitch. Difficult. So how great is it that at such a young age she can be in that place and not need more years to get there?”

Moore’s daughters (she has three with Bruce Willis – Rumer, 36, Scout, 33, and Tallulah, 30) have only seen the trailer, having decided to wait and watch it all together at the Los Angeles premiere on 17 September (Rumer told her, “Oh my God, I’m terrified”). Pilaf, currently barking at my coat, will probably go, too, as she is the only one of Moore’s nine dogs she takes almost everywhere.

I ask what her life looks like now her children have grown up, and she says it’s interesting living alone, admiring the landscape of life in her 60s. She still lives at the ranch in Hailey, Idaho, where she and Willis raised their children (Willis, 69, has a place nearby with his wife and two more daughters; the family is coping with his diagnosis of frontotemporal dementia). She says there’s a joy in waking up every morning and thinking, “What do I want to do?” That she doesn’t have to orbit anyone else’s schedule, that if she liked she could get on a plane and spend the weekend somewhere of her own choosing, and that she didn’t have to feel uncomfortable or guilty or anything about it. “That was a real learning curve for me, an awakening.” She found herself expanding horizons in other ways, asking not just what she wanted to do, but who she wanted to be. “Like, who am I as a woman? Not as a mother, or wife, or actor. As just a person?”

She realised she’d been conditioned to believe that when you grow up your life dulls and, to some extent, she’d bought into that. “A lot of people believe – as the film says – that a woman’s value goes when her fertility ends, and that when your desirability ends, your passion in life ends, too. For so long that was a truth not spoken overtly, but silently. And I’m realising that, actually, that’s not true.”

Now she sees a completely different future, one that she gets to define, one that will include more acting, including a St Elmo’s Fire reunion with the original cast; more producing (among her previous credits are all three Austin Powers movies); maybe another memoir, “when I’ve lived a little bit more”. And not just because she likes her life and all the possibilities it presents, but because she wants to reflect a positive attitude to ageing back to her daughters; to show them all that is available to them, too.

“So, if I want to open that door for them, I need to be willing to step out,” she uses her hands to gesture the movement. “I’ve never been at this exact point in my life before, so I don’t know what it is or where it’s going. But I know that I want to continue to keep growing as a person. I want to keep learning. I want to keep challenging myself, pushing myself out of my comfort zone, which isn’t something any of us love, but I always know that I am better for it when I get to the other side.”

“Do I date?” Moore repeats my question, looking briefly to the ceiling. “I don’t know. It’s not really been where my focus is, I’ll say that. Particularly in the past four, five years, my focus has been to lean into my work.” She adds that she wanted to give her craft more attention, to refine and finesse the part of her that fell by the wayside when she “chose not to work for a long time”.

She says she doesn’t need a relationship to complete her. “It’s not about not being interested in dating. It’s more about realising that I’m now in a place that’s much more about choice as opposed to feeling that there’s any kind of lack.” She thinks there is truth to the idea that men need women more as they age and women need men less, because women are “in many respects hardier; stronger. But I also think that we are often – not to generalise – but we are often caretakers. So, I think as we get to that place of greater independence and freedom in our later years, I don’t know if we …” – she is careful again with her phrasing – “seek to take on the responsibility of others. We have, for the first time, real room to move without the weight of others.” Yes she enjoys her time alone, “But I also enjoy being with others … I have full faith, because I think we’re a communal species.”

I ask whether she still has her 2,000-strong doll collection (it was reported that Kutcher found them creepy). “I do. I haven’t added to the collection in a long time, but most of them are one of a kind, what are considered ‘art dolls’.” She had intended to create a museum because some are extraordinary works of art, including by the French artist Anne Mitrani. But dolls are not all she collects. “I have a collection of both oversized items and miniatures. My particular penchant is for oversized things that are real, meaning that they’re exactly how they might be made in real scale, but oversized. And so I have a 6ft butcher’s knife, like a kitchen knife, that an artist did, and it’s literally a real knife.”

What are the mini things, aside from Pilaf? “There’s a variety. I have a pair of 3ft scissors and then I have miniatures. I have oversized boxing gloves. I have an oversized clipboard. The idea of scale is interesting because we get very accustomed to, like, ‘this is the size,’” she picks up a cup, “and that’s normal. But what is normal? And so, when you see things in a different scale, it affects you differently, and the oversized items in truth just make me laugh.”

Is she a real life Alice in Wonderland? “Oh, that is truly like what I step into. I have a very childlike quality. I think it’s important. What was that quote – ‘Play like a child?’” She can’t remember it. “It’s important not to lose that sense of innocent joy. I look at my granddaughter” – Louetta, 17 months – “and I see the awe in such small little things. And it’s that beautiful reminder of not taking things for granted.”

A strong theme in her personal philosophy is to avoid reproach and recrimination. “So often there’s this idea that we want to blame the outside. We tend to see ourselves as the victim. We can be like, ‘But this is happening to me.’ I am a big believer in the idea that everything in life is happening for me, not to me. And applying that lens to my personal life, I find, is really a game changer. That doesn’t mean things aren’t difficult, painful, disappointing – all of that can still exist when it’s happening for you. It is just looking at it through the lens that is saying, ‘What is this trying to give me?’ so that I don’t miss that opportunity.”

In that vein, she doesn’t want to blame her terrible parents. Or her succession of cheating partners. Or the way that the press or Hollywood have treated her. Perhaps she doesn’t feel that she can change anything, ultimately. Except with acting, which she allows to speak for itself.

Oh wait, there is one exception to Moore’s ethos of personal responsibility: Pilaf. When the dog gets disruptive again and starts making her little Ewok grumbling noises, Moore is baffled by her behaviour. “She normally doesn’t bark. I don’t know what she’s barking at.” And then it dawns on her, and for one dizzying second, I fear she’s going to say it’s me, that Pilaf hates me. “No, no,” whispers Moore. So who is to blame? “I think it’s him, the other little dog: it’s Bruno.”

Sir Ian McKellen dropped a stinker on the British talkshow This Morning earlier in the week so putrid that even Gollum himself might steer clear of it. The 85-year-old star of the Lord of the Rings movies was being asked about a return to Middle-earth in The Hunt for Gollum, which will see Peter Jackson (this time as producer) and Andy Serkis (director, and Gollum) heading back to JRR Tolkien’s high fantasy classic more than two decades after the former completed 2003’s Oscar-winning The Return of the King.

“There’ll be a script arriving sometime in the new year, and I’ll judge whether I want to go back,” laughed McKellen. “I would. I would love to go back to New Zealand, number one. And also, I don’t like the idea of anyone else playing Gandalf.”

But then he added: “I’m told it’s two films. I probably shouldn’t be saying that. But I haven’t read the script. So, I don’t know if it is.”

Is McKellen winding us up? For those who haven’t been keeping a close eye on The Hunt for Gollum, which was announced in May, it’s possible this doesn’t sound all that weird. After all, Jackson made trilogies out of both The Lord of the Rings (1,000 pages +) and the far more breezy, 300-page Hobbit.

These movies kept the entire Kiwi film industry rolling for more than a decade. People ate, good times were had and McKellen was on screen longer than Gollum himself has spent gnawing on questionable fish. There were even quite a few bits of The Lord of the Rings that Jackson didn’t manage to reimagine for the multiplex, such as the scouring of the Shire or the bit featuring Tom Bombadil, though with The Hobbit he was forced to parachute in various Orc mini-bosses from Tolkien’s more obscure scribblings, as well as a highly dubious elf-dwarf romance, just to pad things out.

And here lies the problem with The Hunt for Gollum, and in particular the prospect of it being stretched to two movies. It’s not a book at all, in fact it’s barely a few hundred words of high-end Gandalf-speak at the Council of Elrond, in Rivendell, before the quest to destroy the ring begins a-proper (though there are some background details in the Lord of the Rings’ appendices and Tolkien’s posthumously assembled Unfinished Tales). Yes, we’re told that Aragorn’s search for the wretched former ring-bearer, at the behest of the grey wizard, took many years. But while the future King of Gondor’s adventures in the period are well-documented in Tolkien’s writings, he definitely did not spend all this time trudging through murky pools in search of Middle-earth’s equivalent of the guy in the park who’s always talking to pigeons.

Fair enough, Gollum is essentially Middle-earth’s hide-and-seek champion, a creature with the ability to vanish into a rock crevice like a feral cat who owes you rent money. Tracking him would be like trying to follow lembas breadcrumbs through a hurricane on the peaks of the Misty Mountains, or chasing a hyperactive squirrel hopped up on pipeweed through Fangorn Forest. But two (probably two-hour plus) movies? Perhaps we’ll get 20 minutes of Aragorn thoughtfully stroking his chin while staring at some vague footprints, or a 45-minute subplot where Gandalf takes a quick detour to the Prancing Pony for a not-so-swift half or eight. Or maybe there will be huge detours away from the dead marshes in which Strider gets involved in something else entirely, just for a bit of a break from the tedium.

Amazon’s The Rings of Power has shown it is possible to draw completely disparate threads of Tolkien’s legendarium (some of which took place thousands of years apart in the books) together into a coherent whole with the help of totally made-up additional characters and a side-order of irritating homunculi. Throw us a glimpse of someone who might be one of the lost “blue” Istari and the odd mention of “Rhûn” (RHÛN!) into the mix and those of us who lap this stuff up will soon find ourselves purring like a juvenile warg on the lap of Sauron who’s just been told it’s hobbit for dinner.

It turns out there really are plenty more stories of Middle-earth to tell, and this is indeed a world ripe for fleshing out. But that does not explain why Jackson is returning to a LOTR subplot that takes up as much space in Tolkien’s texts as Tom Bombadil’s haircare routine.

We’re also told, by the way, that Orlando Bloom will be back as Legolas, which makes a certain amount of sense. When Aragorn does eventually capture the wretched beast in the books, he takes him into the heart of Mirkwood, to the realm of the elf king Thranduil, who just happens to be Legolas’s dad.

The only issue here, of course, is that Bloom will be approaching 50 when this thing eventually gets made, but will be appearing as a younger version of the character he played 20-plus years ago. But don’t panic, the film-makers are reportedly planning to overcome such issues – elves are supposed to be immortal, but they do not age backwards – via the magic of artificial intelligence. “I did speak to Andy [Serkis] and he did say they were thinking about how to do things,” Bloom told Variety. “I was like, ‘How would that even work?’ And he was like, ‘Well, AI!’”

No doubt 65-year-old Viggo Mortensen will also be pricking up his ears at this news. And perhaps Serkis and Jackson can use the same AI tools to flesh out The Hunt for Gollum to epic length, like children who are handed a single Lego brick and somehow end up building a perfect replica of Minas Tirith complete with working trebuchets and a tiny Aragorn giving motivational speeches. Stranger things have already happened in the brave new world of Tolkien adaptations, and some of them are actually pretty cool.

But given we’ve now seen the wonders of Númenor, and even the mysterious Bombadil himself in Rings of Power, couldn’t Serkis and Jackson have given us Beren and Lúthien’s quest to retrieve a silmaril from the crown of Morgoth, the first dark lord of Middle-earth? Or perhaps even a film focused on the War of Wrath, the final battle to defeat the latter that saw elves, men and valar (gods) battling against dragons, balrogs and other dark creatures?

Frankly, they may as well give us Lord of the Rings Zombies (Aragorn and Faramir are duped into purchasing some dodgy jewellery and end up as proto-ringwraiths!) or Boromir: Origins, a six-part prequel series in which Sean Bean gets to die repeatedly in new and horrifically inventive ways each episode. It couldn’t be worse than the prospect of spending the best part of four or five hours crisscrossing the dead marshes as an increasingly desperate Gollum tries to convince Strider to partake of the icky local pond life.

“Donald Trump is a weak man pretending to be strong. He is a small man pretending to be big. He’s a faithless man pretending to be righteous. He’s a perpetrator who can’t stop playing the victim. He puts on quite a show but there is no real strength there.”

It was no surprise to hear such rhetoric cheered to the rafters at the recent Democratic national convention in Chicago. But the words were not spoken by a Democrat. They came from the mouth of a stranger in a strange land: the former Republican congressman Adam Kinzinger.

It was the latest example of how the Trump era has created strange bedfellows. The former first lady Michelle Obama hugging ex-president George W Bush. Liberal audiences in Washington DC standing to applaud the arch conservative Liz Cheney. Even Trump’s vice-president, Mike Pence, has earned grudging praise for defying his boss when it mattered most.

But there are few odder couples than Kinzinger and Steve Pink, a leftwing Hollywood film director who aligns himself with the Bernie Sanders wing of the Democratic party. They came together to make The Last Republican, a debut documentary by Pink that follows Kinzinger’s year of living dangerously as a Never Trumper on Capitol Hill. It premiered at the Toronto film festival last week.

The film opens with Kinzinger expressing his and his wife’s doubts about the project and telling Pink: “I recognise that you have contempt for what I believe, like, in terms of my political viewpoints. I think in any other situation you probably would be protesting my office. You’re just so far left.”

Pink objects that is kind of mean. Kinzinger asks: “Do you have contempt for my views, Steve?”

We do not hear Pink’s reply. But in a Zoom interview from Los Angeles, the 58-year-old elaborates: “When it comes to strictly politics, I wouldn’t say I hold them in contempt although, when I’m feeling belligerent, I do hold them in contempt because I have very deeply opposing views.

“It was kind of extraordinary he took a risk with me as a film-maker because he says in the film I could make him look stupid and I could just do a hit piece. I was surprised by that and I was like, OK, I realise that, but who we are to each other despite our opposing political views is maybe more important than our political views themselves.”

So why did Kinzinger agree to the project? The answer is as simple as it is unexpected. His favourite film, the 2010 sci-fi comedy Hot Tub Time Machine, was directed by Pink. They also both hail from Illinois.

Pink adds: “I’m like, if you think I have contempt for your views, why did you choose me as a film-maker? He’s like, Hot Tub Time Machine is what sold me, and I was like, well, that’s good logic. I don’t know if I would have done that if I were you but we had common ground. Having a shared sense of humour is a great foundation to have more difficult conversations down the road, for sure.”

Kinzinger grew up with cultural touchstones such as Ronald Reagan, Rocky and Red Dawn. The former air force pilot, who served in Iraq and Afghanistan, was first elected to Congress in 2010. At first he was a loyal Republican; later Kevin McCarthy, destined to be speaker of the House of Representatives, offered to officiate Kinzinger’s wedding.

But Kinzinger broke from McCarthy, and the party, after the 6 January 2021 insurrection at the US Capitol and was among 10 House Republicans who voted to impeach Trump. He and Cheney were then the only two Republicans who joined the House committee to investigate the January 6 attack.

Both paid a price for refusing to submit to the cult of Trump and Maga (Make America great again). Kinzinger lost friends, was turned into a pariah by his own party and targeted by extremists and trolls with death threats. He did not seek re-election and formed a political organisation, Country First, to back anti-Trump candidates.

Pink, whose documentary follows Kinzinger during his final year in office, comments: “That was my initial reason for wanting to make the film: here’s a guy whose political views I oppose who stood up against his party and Donald Trump in the wake of January 6 to take a principled stand in defence of our democracy in the defence of our constitution.

“I thought that was a very brave thing to do. He sacrificed a lot. He had a pregnant wife at the time. He himself will tell you that he was shocked that he lost all of his friends and his family and the fact that he got thrown out of his own political party.”

He adds: “He felt like part of your job description as a legislator, as a congressperson in our country is to uphold and defend the constitution. That’s the oath you take and so when he saw everyone around him being absolutely comfortable with violating that oath, it was absolutely shocking to him and kind of devastating and he was very isolated very quickly.”

Perhaps the truly shocking thing is not that Kinzinger and a handful of others have dared to make a stand, but that so many members of the party of Abraham Lincoln, Dwight Eisenhower and Reagan have sold their political souls and capitulated? When the chronicles of the Trump era are written there will be a special place in infamy for enablers such as Pence, McCarthy, Kellyanne Conway, Rudy Giuliani, Elise Stefanik, Sean Spicer and many others.

Pink observes: “It is more shocking and it’s more infuriating and Adam talks about that as well. He’s actually more furious with the people who remain silent and have just gone along with this thing. He finds that deeply shocking and deeply troubling. There’s no question about it.”

The film-maker himself was taken aback by the high stakes when Kinzinger sat with his congressional staff mapping out his final 14 months in office. He could have pursued all kinds of legislation but said instead his priority was the preservation of democracy – and that the history books would look kindly on that.

“I found that to be a very shocking thing to say. Wait, so your legislative agenda is democracy preservation? I didn’t think that was on the table. I thought it was about safer streets, less government regulation, something legislative? But his focus was going to be democracy preservation. That was a terrifying moment for me that it was even a question in a staff meeting.”

Pink gained access to the January 6 committee hearings on Capitol Hill and chronicles how they faced much scepticism at first. The headline of a David Brooks column in the New York Times declared: “The Jan 6 Committee Has Already Blown It,” before the first gavel had been wielded. In fact the sessions made riveting theatre for those in the room and compelling television for those at home.

Kinzinger offers an inside track on how it all came together, what he thought of his colleagues on the panel and how a text message from his wife informed his public remarks, bringing him close to tears. Pink says: “It was quite a moment for Adam and all the committee members to have worked as hard as they did and to be able to successfully get the message out, which clearly helped speed up the justice department’s investigation into the matter.”

But there was backlash. The Last Republican plays some of the chilling and ugly voicemails that Kinzinger received because of the stand he made. One says: “You little cocksucker. Are you Liz Cheney’s fag-hag? You two cock-sucking little bitches. We’re gonna get ya. Coming to your house, son. Ha ha ha ha!” Others describe Kinzinger as “a piece of shit” and a “traitor”.

A company provides 24-hour security at Kinzinger’s family home. He explains to Pink with a rueful laugh: “People wanna kill me so, you know, it sucks, right?

It is a stark reminder of the incentive structure that Trump has built inside the Republican party: kiss the ring and you will be rewarded with endorsements and Maga stardom; cross him and you will be ostracised, challenged in a party primary and subjected to vile abuse and death threats.

Pink says: “At first when I talked to him about it, it hadn’t left the confines of the congressional office. When the death threats were coming in, weirdly they became commonplace. They had an increased Capitol police and even FBI interest in what was happening. Obviously, there’s a lot of protection around you in that context.

“Whereas when the death threats started expanding to his family, to his wife, at his home, it was very stressful and it took a toll on him. There was almost a level of disbelief that there was so much hatred and that people took the time to actually express their hatred. It was shocking to him and it was very hard on Sofia and Adam for sure.”

During the film Kinzinger also talks movingly about an incident in his past that seems unrelated but actually explains much about his political decision-making. One night in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, in 2006 he encountered a young woman holding her throat, which was bleeding profusely, and her boyfriend intent on killing her with a knife.

Kinzinger recalls: “If somebody would have whispered ‘run’ to me I would have run. But there are two immediate thoughts that went through my head. The first one was like, if I act, I’m gonna die. The second one was, if I watch this lady die and I did nothing, I can’t live with myself the rest of my life.”

The assailant was bigger and Kinzinger can still remember feeling the knife hand trying to stab him. But he wrestled the man to the ground and held him there until police arrived. The 46-year-old says that moment in Milwaukee utterly changed his life.

Pink comments: “Here again was an example where he stepped into a situation without thinking of the consequences, purely on the basis that he thought it was the right thing to do. I was interested in the kind of person who actually does that. To me the film became less a story about a guy who sacrifices for his country and more about what he wouldn’t sacrifice.

“Despite the apparent danger, he didn’t want to give up his willingness to serve and lose that desire to do that and fall prey to cynicism. It’s one thing to say that you’re courageous to sacrifice. It’s a different kind of courage to say what I don’t want to lose are these things that are important to me. Despite everything against me, I don’t want to lose these things that I believe in because those are the things that keep me going.”

The anti-Trump coalition has been described as the biggest political force in America today. It has scrambled old alliances and thrown together progressives, independents and groups such as the Lincoln Project, conceived largely by old-school Bush and McCain Republicans – often middle-aged white men – who now find themselves rooting for a liberal woman of colour from California to win the presidency.

Pink is still ready for an argument about policy but acknowledges that, for now, there is a higher priority. “I remain deeply conflicted in terms of my political views but we are in a crisis moment in our country and there’s no way to avoid the fact that the more important value right now is the thing that we agree on: that everyone should have a vote and that vote should count and we need to ensure, in order to preserve our democracy, a peaceful transfer of power. Those two things are fundamental.”

He says of Republicans: “It’s not whether they’re heroes. I even say to him in the movie a courageous Republican is still a Republican. You don’t have to be a Republican to believe in the peaceful transfer of power and believe that everyone’s vote should count.

“It is shocking that one of our two major political parties don’t hold those as essential values. It’s terrifying and we’re going to need to do the work to lessen the influence and power of people who don’t believe in those two fundamental values.”

Kinzinger received a warm reception on the final night of the Democratic convention, not long before Kamala Harris took the stage to accept the party nomination. Her speech, and a subsequent CNN interview, indicate that she is tilting towards the centre on climate, healthcare and immigration. But when the alternative is Trump, even an old lefty like Pink believes the choice is clear.

“Because I’m a political junkie, you see how politicians move to different spaces as part of a campaign and then their political philosophy is revealed when they are in power. I don’t take that much stock in if someone says to me, oh, Kamala’s position on X or Y is this, it should be that.

“Do we believe in her political philosophy broadly speaking? I do. She would make a great leader of our country. The kind of president she will be remains to be seen and I look forward to seeing the kind of president she will be. I’m not troubled by any particular political position she holds in this time when she’s campaigning for president.”

Harris would be the first woman and first woman of colour to serve as president, dealing perhaps the final symbolic blow to Maga: the result would show that it was Trump, not Barack Obama, who was the historic aberration.

Pink describes himself as “bullish” about her chances. “The hypocrisy and narcissism and bullying and madness of Donald Trump have been exposed over and over and over and over and over again and yet he’s somehow managed to survive, being a formidable person in American politics. One of these days he’s not going to be and I hope that moment is upon us.”

In August 1944, the photographer and war journalist Lee Miller was sent to France to report on conditions in the newly liberated port city of Saint-Malo in Brittany. But, as it rapidly became clear, some intelligence wires had got crossed. Far from being liberated, much of Saint-Malo was still a violent war zone, with US soldiers under heavy fire as they battled to dislodge the occupying Germans.

At this point in the second world war, around 200 women had, like Miller, gained military accreditation with the allied forces. Yet as Miller well knew, none of them were meant to be reporting on scenes of actual fighting, since their brief was simply to write the “softer” stories of war, about hospitals, air raid wardens and civilian heroism. If Miller chose to remain in Saint-Malo, she would certainly be punished, yet it was too fabulous an opportunity for her to miss. “I was the only photographer for miles around,” she said, “and now I owned a private war.” For five exhilarating days, aided and abetted by the Americans and sometimes coming under fire herself, she observed and photographed everything.

Miller had never felt so alert, so fully herself. Her life, as told in Ellen Kuras’s new film Lee, had until then been a series of brief, if brilliant, dead ends: her stint as a model for Condé Nast, her time as muse and collaborator to the surrealist Man Ray, her career as a photographer of fashion and celebrity. It was only now – crouching for safety in a German dugout and realising the cold and fleshy object beneath her boot was a severed hand – that Miller fully understood that war was the subject for which she and her camera had been searching for years.

Miller had gained her accreditation as a correspondent for British Vogue and her editor could not have been more thrilled by the “great adventure” of her Saint-Malo story. The military authorities, however, were not so impressed. When Miller was discovered, she was put under temporary house arrest and stricter limits were placed on her freedom of movement, and those of her female peers.

The reasoning behind this protocol was, of course, the atavistic assumption that women were the weaker sex, too fragile to cope with the blood and guts of war. But muddled along with that was the more banally practical issue of toilet facilities. The possibility of a woman in a battle zone being forced to relieve herself openly among men was something the squeamish military imagination could not tolerate. Throughout the war, when female correspondents argued for the right to report on equal terms as men, they were told that the “convenience question” – or what the Americans more briskly termed the “latrine business” – made it impossible.

The small and valiant minority who did make their way to the fighting showed exceptional courage and cunning. Not only were they given no access to military transport and accommodation, they were even denied official press briefings, which meant they were frequently in unnecessary peril. But because they were operating below the official radar, these women could get to stories their more privileged male colleagues might miss.

Of course, Karas has given Miller the glory in Lee, but two months before Miller had found herself a private war, Martha Gellhorn had acquired an even more gutsy story. On 6 June 1944, furious that she and every other woman had been banned from covering the Normandy landings, Gellhorn hid herself aboard a US hospital ship and crossed the Channel as a stowaway. She knew she was on the verge of an adventure when she came up on deck and realised her ship was in the middle of “the greatest naval traffic jam in history”. That adventure became more extraordinary still when she was sent ashore with the medical crew to help recover wounded soldiers. Gellhorn was so close to the fighting on Omaha beach that the roar of artillery and the screams of dying soldiers were all but overwhelming.

None of the male press corps had yet been permitted onshore and the story Gellhorn filed was far more authentically dramatic than that of her husband, Ernest Hemingway. Even though she was arrested and stripped of her accreditation, her success as a stowaway convinced Gellhorn that rules were there only to be broken. Once she’d escaped her guards, she hitched a flight to Italy (faking a sob story about a missing fiance) and for the rest of her war, she would find sympathetic soldiers who helped her to move from one frontline exploit to the next.

Gellhorn freely admitted the advantage she enjoyed in being “a long-legged blonde”. A few years earlier, her friend Virginia Cowles had scooped one of the great stories of the Spanish civil war when a Soviet general had been so dazzled by her glamour that he’d kept her prisoner in his HQ, feeding her champagne and Marxism for three days and nights in an attempt to convert her to communism.

It was accepted, if not welcomed, by most female correspondents that they sometimes had to trade on their looks. But Clare Hollingworth, who was sent to south-west Poland in late August 1939, got her first headline story through luck, timing and nerve. Not only was she in place on 1 September to phone through an eyewitness account of the start of the German invasion, effectively the beginning of the second world war, she was also able to remain in Poland for the full three weeks it took for that country to fall, driving through air raids and shellings to deliver her exclusives.

Because the British weren’t fighting in Poland, there was no one to curb her activities and Hollingworth would continue to duck and dive her way to parts of the conflict in which allied protocol was not strictly enforced. She became a personal affront to Field Marshal Montgomery. “I’ll have no women in my war!” he roared.

However, for Helen Kirkpatrick, it was the special protection of Supreme Cmdr Eisenhower that opened up her war. She so impressed the American with her grasp of military issues that he gave her special permission to travel with the allies as they fought their way towards Paris. Not only was Kirkpatrick among the very first journalists, male or female, to enter the newly liberated city, she was also one of just two or three reporters present at Notre Dame Cathedral when German snipers opened fire on General de Gaulle while he was leading the French resistance in a service of blessing.

Twenty-five were killed and Kirkpatrick’s report – “Daily News Writer Sees Man Slain at Her Side in Hail of Lead” – made the next morning’s news. By now, the number of intrepid war stories written by women had become so conspicuous that it was hard for the authorities to maintain their ban. When the allies began their push into Germany, a very small number of female correspondents were finally permitted to travel as official press.

The experience was thrilling but terrible, as the horrors of Nazi Germany were revealed. When Miller entered Dachau, just hours after the concentration camp was liberated, it took all her professional control to document its incomprehensible evils, from its piles of skeletal corpses to its “medical” torture chamber and the place where its prisoners were murdered.

Afterwards, when Miller moved on to Munich, she famously ended up in Hitler’s apartment where she was photographed scrubbing the filth of Dachau off herself in Hitler’s bath. That photograph exemplified the triumph of Miller’s war but once the fighting had ended it was a triumph hard to sustain. Many female correspondents lost their jobs, many struggled to adapt to peace, and Miller additionally suffered from what would now be diagnosed as post-traumatic stress disorder.

In her effort to forget the death and destruction she’d witnessed, Miller simply stopped talking about the war, escaping into drink. Only after her death did her son Antony Penrose discover the boxes of photographs and writings she’d kept. He finally understood that his difficult, angry mother had actually been a heroic photojournalist – one whose courage had played a huge role in the battle waged by women for the right to report on war.

Audiences got a look at Benjamin Netanyahu’s leaked police interrogation videos for the first time at last night’s world premiere of The Bibi Files. The urgent and incendiary documentary played at the Toronto film festival despite the Israeli prime minister’s attempts to block its screening.

Israeli courts rejected Netanyahu’s request before the film – in which he is seen furiously denying allegations of bribery and corruption – was unveiled to a tense and vocal audience, many of whom were carrying signs reading “Bring Them Home” and “Deal Now”, referring to hostages held in Gaza.

The film, directed by Alexis Bloom and produced by Alex Gibney, builds a rigorous and damning case, posing an argument close observers may already be familiar with: Netanyahu is prolonging the devastating war in Gaza – which has amassed more than 40,000 casualties – to avoid possible prison time stemming from corruption charges. A humanitarian crisis flouting international law is all about his self-preservation.

According to the documentary – which Bloom began working on before 7 October, when a source provided Gibney with the leaked videos – Netanyahu’s lawyer filed a motion to delay the trial currently scheduled for December. The lawyer cites the ongoing war as the reason.

“I’ve never seen the depth of moral corruption as I’ve seen in this man,” Gibney, the director of Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room, told the audience following the screening. A member of what appeared to be a largely pro-Israel audience policed Gibney’s language, interrupting the producer to clarify that Netanyahu had not yet been found guilty. The attempts at seizing control of the narrative, both on screen and off, didn’t end there.

The interrogation videos shown in the film were recorded by police between 2016 and 2018 before they formally brought charges of corruption against Netanyahu. The footage includes the prime minister addressing allegations that he and his wife accepted expensive champagne, Cuban cigars and jewelry from the Hollywood producer Arnon Milchan. Netanyahu is heard minimizing the champagne and cigars as simply gifts from a friend, while denying knowledge of the jewelry.

Several witnesses who worked for Milchan and Netanyahu are also shown speaking to police. They paint a picture of regular gifts expected by Netanyahu and his wife, Sara, in exchange for favours. One such favour includes a marginal tax break extension that benefited Milchan. Netanyahu argues his unusual interference regarding the tax break was for the good of the state, not Milchan. Meanwhile, the LA Confidential producer corroborated much of the witness testimony, though, in one excerpt, he gently asks police not to use the word “bribery” because it would make him look bad.

Netanyahu is also seen vehemently denying allegations that he signed off on regulations favouring the Israeli media mogul Shaul Elovitch. The prime minister repeatedly and dramatically calls one of his top aides, Nir Hefetz, a liar for saying so. Other witnesses argue Elovitch paid back the alleged generosity by allowing Netanyahu to directly influence coverage of his family on the popular website Walla.

The incriminating evidence in the interrogation videos have already been leaked and reported on by Israeli media. But the videos will never be shown to the public (at least legally) in that country. According to Gibney, Israeli law grants privacy to subjects who have been photographed in official proceedings, which would make publication of the footage illegal. “It’s a peculiar law to Israel [that] doesn’t affect the rest of the world,” Gibney said.

He explained that they brought The Bibi Files to Toronto, as a work-in-progress, because it urgently needed to be seen while the death toll in Gaza continues to rise. But also because they are seeking distribution partners at the festival’s market, hoping to get the film released as quickly as possible for the world to see.

Though the documentary doesn’t reveal new information, Gibney explains that for an audience familiar with Netanyahu’s carefully stage-managed speeches, watching his agitation under interrogation, where his performance begins to crack, is illuminating. At various points when police officers confront him with incriminating testimony from his peers, Netanyahu raises fists and repeatedly slams his hand against his desk as if the banging will silence the accusations.

“Even in the interrogation videos, you see performances,” says Gibney. “But you see performances that are not as finely tuned; that are performed for an audience of three people; that he doesn’t think is going to get out of the room.”

The Bibi Files contextualizes the interrogation videos with a portrait of Netanyahu, whose career is built on stoking fear and promising security, and whose personal life is largely in service of his wife Sara’s turbulent moods and expensive lifestyle. Sara Netanyahu’s erratic testimonies and outbursts during testimony are also included in the footage.

Insiders like the Israeli journalist Raviv Drucker, former Shin Bet head Ami Ayalon, a childhood friend and more are on hand as talking heads. They connect the dots and reveal the long-running pattern of Netanyahu serving his own interests while clinging to power – from deliberate ploys to sabotage an alliance between the West Bank and Gaza by enabling Hamas, to his alliance with the violent far right and attempted overhaul of the supreme court to save himself from prosecution.

Bloom expressed disappointment after the screening that more people didn’t speak up on the record. She said she interviewed former chiefs of staff, heads of Shin Bet and others in senior positions under Netanyahu who would speak to her for hours about his lies and corruption. One of them compared his regime to the Netflix series House of Cards. “One said to me, ‘Well, you know, I might go into politics myself one day,’” Bloom recalled. “‘So I have to be careful.’”

The atmosphere at the premiere, which was announced just days before the festival began, was more anxious than usual. Added security, including a police canine unit, were at the scene. While the screening itself went off without a hitch, many in the audience appeared agitated during the post-screening conversation between Bloom, Gibney and Tiff’s documentary programmer, Thom Powers. Some yelled out for their turn to have a say, prompting Powers to call for some order and avoid overt statements.

Following the conversation, a visibly nervous Bloom was surrounded by a crowd and accosted by an audience member who claimed that she included “a bunch of lies” in the film. He was referring to the report that more than 40,000 people have been killed by Israel’s military actions in Gaza.

“You don’t know that,” he said before asking, accusingly, “Are you trusting Hamas?”

“I think they’re corroborated,” Bloom gently responded.

“You are putting a false narrative out there,” he warned.

Ageing and death are perhaps the foundation of all horror, but this droll French chamber piece, adapted from an 1839 novella by Aleksey Tolstoy, puts a devious spin on that. The titular “vourdalak” – a kind of Mitteleuropean vampire – is Gorcha, wizened patriarch of a family of forest-dwelling peasants, who is driven to feed on the blood of those he loves the most. With the film incarnating this beastie in the form of a toothy puppet resembling Norman Tebbit (voiced by director Adrian Beau), it’s a cruel but funny metaphor for parental authority and late-life dependency. Obviously they didn’t have assisted living in early modern Bohemia.

Arriving in the midst of this folkloric spat is Marquis Jacques Antoine Saturnin d’Urfé (Kacey Mottet Klein), a nervous envoy for the French king who has been waylaid en route. Advised to seek help at the house of the venerable Gorcha, the aristocrat only finds his children present: Turk-slaying scion Jegor (Grégoire Colin), effete second son Piotr (Vassili Schneider, also seen in the new Count of Monte Cristo) and enigmatic black-sheep daughter Sdenka (Greek new wave luminary Ariane Labed). D’Urfé must wait for a new horse; Gorcha has departed to pursue the latest Turkish raiders and, as he warns his kinfolk, should he return after more than six days it will surely be in undead form.

Beau could have adapted this as straight gothic. Instead, he opts for an enjoyable high-strung comedy that, with him often shooting through Hammer-style soft gauze, skims pastiche. D’Urfé’s court manners are ridiculously superfluous in the rustic setting, exposed as hypocritical when he roughly pursues Sdenka, and then redundant in the face of the ghoulish paterfamilias scoffing at him down the dinner table.

While never being outright scary, the claustrophobic setup keeps the film within the circle of the uncanny; this self-cannibalising family unit constantly is upset by the outsider with the annoying questions and impromptu sarabandes. Klein has fun, but Labed arguably has the harder job, playing it dead straight underneath her shatweh headdress and required to weave a course between high tragedy and camp. A delirious and oddly agreeable stopover.

In the television series The Perfect Couple, which had its UK premiere last week, it is said of Nicole Kidman’s character, Greer: “You never know where you stand with her … I mean, beneath her, for sure.”

That moment seems to break the fourth wall and refer to the 5ft 11in actor herself, a regal, ­mercurial film star who, decades into her career, remains at the height of her powers.

This year alone has seen Kidman floor the Venice film festival with erotic thriller Babygirl, for which she won the best actress award last night, as well as star in The Perfect Couple, play the lead in and produce melodic ­tragedy miniseries Expats from Lulu Wang, and fall for a movie star played by Zac Efron in A Family Affair. Still, she has spoken of doing more, ­including wanting to star in a ­“hardcore” horror movie one day.

Whether or not fulfilling a lust for gore comes to pass, there is ­little else left for Kidman, 57, to tick off her cinematic bucket list. She has won Oscars, Emmys, Golden Globes and Baftas; been in musicals, ­thrillers, superhero movies and comedies and worn questionable prosthetics in multiple biopics.

She starred in and produced one of the best female-led ensembles of peak television with Big Little Lies and has done so while maintaining a sense of artistic integrity. The idiosyncrasy of her filmography shows an actor uncompromising in their artistic interests, rather than pursuing Oscar-bait or brazen cash grabs.

Her latest, Babygirl, from Halina Reijn, the Dutch director of Bodies Bodies Bodies, was written with her in mind. The film harks back to the era of the erotic thriller while being firmly of the feminist now, seeing Kidman’s glamorous CEO caught up in a kinky love ­triangle with Antonio Banderas and Harris Dickinson.

It doesn’t flatten Kidman into the role of effortless femme fatale but rather nakedly depicts an inner ­turmoil and the lengths required to keep up her glamorous facade.

Skin-tight outfits are wrestled into, botox liberally injected and a litany of plunge pools, light ­therapy and cryotherapy employed to keep up an appearance of serenity.

As the complex dynamics with her husband and lover become increasingly messy and raw, Kidman proves once again why she is one of Hollywood’s best and subtly ­most transgressive stars.

The Australian actor made her first tentative steps towards stardom trapped on a yacht with Sam Neill and Billy Zane in the 1989 thriller Dead Calm and ­coming of age alongside Thandiwe Newton in a 1960s boarding school in 1991’s Flirting.

She received even more global attention starring alongside her future ex-husband in Days of Thunder, which briefly threatened to have her labelled “Mrs Cruise”.

Rather than be content to play the glamorous love interest of the ­leading man both on and off the screen, however, she followed up a thankless romance with Batman with the gloriously twisted To Die For, which satirised the narrative around sexually liberated ambitious women and skewered the tabloid obsession with them.

One of her greatest roles would also be one of her longest shoots, when, alongside Cruise she spent two years on Eyes Wide Shut. She might be the only person who left a Stanley Kubrick film wishing it had gone on longer, telling the BBC in 2022: “I would have shot that thing for five years, I didn’t care … I’m with the greatest film-maker.”

Eyes Wide Shut, released in 1999, hit the headlines for its explicit masked orgy scenes but is rightly regarded as a masterpiece.

Kidman’s monologue about her dissatisfaction with monogamy, while smoking a joint, is her finest in a career packed to the rafters with powerful monologues.

Corrina Antrobus, film critic, Bechdel Test festival founder and author of I Love RomComs & I Am A Feminist, says: “If you look at Eyes Wide Shut, it’s the end of the 90s, a paparazzi-filled awful time for objectifying women. Things like Hello! were at their peak of ­selling us this fantasy of the perfect marriage, of ­selling your wedding for millions of pounds, but here you had Tom and Nicole – a bona fide Hollywood couple – ­breaking the fantasy and ­daring to present a woman with desires of her own.”

At Babygirl’s press conference, Kidman explained: “I approach everything ­artistically, so I don’t think of the minutiae, just how do I give over to this character fully without censoring my director.” In the case of that film, it requires a level of bravery not accessible to most actors, both in sex scenes that ­centre female pleasure and in playing a powerful CEO for whom cosmetic enhancements and psycho-sexual torment are willingly endured.

Despite her many head-turning appearances on the red carpet, dense filmography, a high-profile marriage to Cruise which ended in 2001 (the moment of its dissolution captured in a memorable paparazzi image of seeming euphoria), a subsequent marriage to the country music star Keith Urban and many charming talkshow appearances, there has always been something unknowable about Kidman. In all senses, she exists above the fray, living a life that we only get the briefest or most curated glances of.

She rarely speaks about her private life, and concealed an engagement to the rock star Lenny Kravitz for years. But the peeks we do get are fascinating.

In a moment that reportedly inspired one of the most quoted lines in Greta Gerwig’s Barbie, Kidman sat down with her Big Little Lies co-star Reese Witherspoon, who was expecting to chat movies, and instead asked her: “Do you ever think about dying Reese? Because I think about it all the time.”

As an actor, she is continually revealing new depths. Antrobus says: “Everyone knows she’s got the skills, but I think there’s ­conscious decisions in making sure that ­people don’t forget how multi-faceted she is. While she’s somebody that can be seen as uptight, she just unravels so erotically and beautifully. Seeing a woman unravel themselves like that continuously and shock us and entertain us and surprise us is her theme, somehow.”

It’s a career not without its ­missteps – remakes of The Stepford Wives and Bewitched rightfully sank without a trace – but most actors could only dream of having the kind of cultural impact Kidman is ­capable of achieving in a few months.

In A Family Affair, her first proper romantic comedy leading role, she has once again moved the needle. As Antrobus puts it, “Family Affair is a really smart move.” The film was released on Netflix in June. “It’s a modern romcom that delivers a sliver of justice to films that haven’t exactly been kind to the portrayal of motherhood. It has a representation of a mother as a woman with unapologetic needs, with sexual needs that sees a woman navigate what I think is a very genuine rite of passage in accepting that it’s now time to serve herself.”

In serving herself, Kidman doesn’t look to be slowing down any time soon. Seven further projects listing her as a producer have been announced, Big Little Lies is set to return for a third season and a long-awaited adaptation of Patricia Cornwell’s Kay Scarpetta books will feature her in the titular role.

Awards buzz around Babygirl is building after last night’s success and, while it remains to be seen if that role will prove too ­disquieting for the Oscars, Kidman has already won the long game. Whether she is playing a glamorous writer living in a Nantucket mansion, a mother falling for a hunky young movie star or a kinky ­robotics CEO straddling Harris Dickinson, it has never been more exciting to be beneath Nicole Kidman.

A new documentary portraying the lives of Russian soldiers near the Ukrainian frontlines has faced fierce criticism for attempting to whitewash Moscow’s war crimes.

Russians at War, directed by the Russian-Canadian film-maker Anastasia Trofimova, chronicles seven months spent embedded with a Russian army battalion in eastern Ukraine, presenting itself as a unique window into the daily lives of Russian soldiers.

In the film, which premiered at the Venice film festival last week, young soldiers are portrayed grappling with the purpose of their fight. Their motivations to join Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine vary from financial reasons to a sense of camaraderie.

“It’s so confusing here, I don’t even know what we’re fighting for,” says one soldier, a sentiment shared by others, who are largely portrayed in a sympathetic light.

But Russians at War appears to offer only brief glimpses of combat and critics say it provides no insight into the mass-scale destruction caused by Moscow’s forces in Ukraine since February 2022.

Throughout the two-and-a-half years of full-scale war, Russia has targeted civilian sites, while multiple UN investigations have documented evidence of “indiscriminate attacks” and war crimes by Russian forces in Ukraine, including rape and the deportation of children to Russia.

On Friday, CNN published drone footage filmed during fighting in August near the embattled city of Pokrovsk in eastern Ukraine, showing an apparent execution by Russian troops of three surrendering Ukrainians, the latest in a series of gruesome clips to emerge.

When asked at a press conference in Venice about Russia’s actions in Ukraine, Trofimova said the soldiers she lived with for seven months were “absolutely ordinary guys” and claimed she saw no signs of war crimes during her time near the front.

“I understand that there are many reports of war crimes and pretty much, I think in western media, that’s what Russian soldiers are associated with at this point, because there were no other stories. This is another story, and this was the reality that they lived,” the director said. “If there were war crimes committed, obviously you would see them on screen, but in the seven months that I was there, that was not my experience … it’s important to show other stories.”

The documentary screening and Trofimova’s subsequent comments sparked an immediate backlash from Ukraine’s artistic community.

Ukrainian producer Darya Bassel, whose documentary Songs of Slow Burning Earth depicting the suffering of Ukraine also premiered at Venice, criticised the decision to screen the Russian film, saying it “presents a very distorted picture of reality, spreading false narratives”.

“We can only be happy for her [Trofimova] that she was fortunate enough not to witness any war crimes. Unfortunately, thousands of Ukrainians have not been so lucky,” Bassel wrote in a critical post on Facebook after attending a screening.

The documentary is likely to prompt a debate over the ethics of filming inside Russia and the territories under Russian occupation. Unlike in Ukraine, where foreign reporters can travel to the frontlines, Russia has largely prohibited such access to independent journalists, only occasionally permitting select ones to join tightly controlled press tours.

Trofimova defended her decision to make the film, telling journalists in Venice: “There was a missing element: the human face of those people involved in the war.

“The point of view of Russian soldiers is not usually heard and I think it’s so important to see through the fog of the war: to see the tragedy that the war is and to see people for people, outside politicians’ black-and-white reasoning and war propaganda.”

But Bassel, along with other prominent Ukrainian cultural figures, criticised the documentary for distorting the portrayal of Russian soldiers. They argued that it neglects their responsibility, portraying them as “victims” rather than active participants in the war.“It is important to remember that these individuals joined the army that invaded an independent country, many of them willingly,” Bassel said.

“Are their crimes any less significant simply because they claim to be unaware of why they are involved in this war?”

Norman Spencer, who worked on some of the most acclaimed films made in Britain in the 1940s and 50s, has died at the age of 110.

Spencer worked as a producer, screenwriter, production designer and actor, most frequently with longtime collaborator David Lean. After meeting in 1942, they went on to work on movies including Blithe Spirit, Great Expectations, The Bridge on the River Kwai and Lawrence of Arabia.

He also served as assistant producer on Joseph L Mankiewicz’s Suddenly, Last Summer (1959), starring Elizabeth Taylor, Montgomery Clift and Katharine Hepburn, as well as producing 1971 car chase classic Vanishing Point and Richard Attenborough’s apartheid drama Cry Freedom (1987), starring Denzel Washington.

The news was announced by the European Supercentenarian Organisation, who reported that Spencer died in Wimbledon on 16 August, three days after his birthday. He was believed to be the oldest man living in Greater London, and the second-oldest man living in the UK. The oldest man in the UK, and the world, is 112-year-old John Tinniswood, who was born the year the Titanic sunk.

Spencer’s first credit was as third assistant director on Lean’s debut, In Which We Serve (1942), in which he also played an officer in a small role. Two years later, alongside Lean, Noël Coward, producer Anthony Havelock-Allan and film-maker Ronald Neame, he launched Cineguild Productions, responsible for many of the classic British films of the immediate postwar period.

For Lawrence of Arabia, Spencer was tasked with liaising with Moroccan royalty including King Hassan II, as well as wrangling 800 camels and riders and 600 other men to play the foot soldiers in the epic battle scenes.

Spencer said he and Lean bonded when they started going to the movies with their wives together; Spencer married Barbara Sheppard in 1943, and the couple had two children.

He later recalled to the Guardian how charismatic his friend and colleague was. “David was so handsome,” he said. “He was a huge womaniser: to my knowledge, he had almost 1,000 women. When we shot [Hobson’s Choice (1954)] in the streets, people asked: “Who’s that good-looking actor?” I had to say: “That’s not the leading man, it’s the director.”