Category: cinema

Sparkling and vivacious, Jordan Tragash’s heartfelt queer comedy captures with considerable charm the conundrums of the precarious gig worker’s lifestyle. For those familiar with Chicago, BAM! – standing for “Broke Ass Motherfuckers!” – is a dose of eye-candy adventure, rollicking through a series of beloved local landmarks. The interlocking stories bring together a delightful group of 20-somethings, all hustling for money. Living out of a storage unit, Auggie (Tuxford Turner) delivers sex toys to make ends meet, a job that is hilariously unsexy in practice. Always on a bike, Auggie soon cross paths with another courier Eve (Tip Sayarath), whose spirited energy makes for a contrast with Auggie’s endearing awkwardness. Throw in a freelance pharmacist – AKA a drug dealer – and his hapless employees, and we’ve got ourselves a real modern-day farce.

Shot with dynamism, the relationship between Auggie and Eve fizzes with spirited chemistry as the film embraces the beauty of chance encounters and found family, something that is made possible by life in a big city. More than a love letter to Chicago, BAM! also celebrates diversity in a way that doesn’t feel forced; from Auggie and Eve to the smaller roles, each character is not only defined by their identity, but feels fully fledged in their struggles, hopes and dreams. The smart, laugh-out-loud funny dialogue also beautifully contributes to this vibrant sense of authenticity.

In an independent film-making landscape that suffers from a uniform look, the colourful palette adds another refreshing touch even if, due no doubt to its economic runtime, the conclusion feels slightly rushed. Still, for a feature debut, BAM! beautifully showcases Tragash’s promise as a director to watch.

When Omar Rodriguez-Lopez of the Mars Volta moved to the mainland US with his parents from their native Puerto Rico at age 10, he was thrilled when the white kids called him a word he’d never heard before. “They called me ‘spic’,’ he said. “I thought it was so cool that they’d given me this nickname! I only found out what it really meant when I told some Black kids at school and they said, ‘Yo, what are you talking about?’”

Meanwhile, several states away, his later bandmate, Cedric Bixler-Zavala, was experiencing his own brand of racism as a kid. Like his Mexican-born father, he has blue eyes and light skin, which drew suspicion from both the Latino and the white communities. “You have to prove yourself to each side,” Bixler-Zavala said. “It’s like being a double agent. You’re always on the outside.”

Experiences like those not only shaped the worldview of both musicians, it formed a bond between them so strong, it remains the longest, and in some ways, the deepest relationship of their lives. “For years, we lived together,” Rodriguez-Lopez said. “We were in two bands together. We shared shirts and pants. We even went to the bathroom together.”

The complex web of intimacies that created forms the core of an unusually personal new music documentary, titled Omar and Cedric: If This Ever Gets Weird. “Most music documentaries just tell you, ‘They made this album and then they became famous and then tragedy struck,’” Bixler-Zavala said. “This documentary is about the humanity behind all of that. It shows people being honest about their insecurities and vulnerabilities and how that affected the way they treated each other.”

Along the way, the film covers a daunting amount of drama, including the deaths of no fewer than 16 of their friends, bandmates and relatives, many at a young age, as well as instances of sexual abuse, homophobia brought on by Rodriguez-Lopez’ fluid sexuality, as well as a nearly ruinous brush with Scientology for Bixler-Zavala. Providing a throughline for the film is the power of their cultural identity, underscoring its meaning at a time when the term “identity politics” has been used as a cudgel to silence any conversations about its importance. In fact, one of the primary reasons the friends formed the Mars Volta, which mixes Latin music with punk and prog-rock, was to honor the cultures that shaped them. “When my mother was alive, we weren’t allowed to speak English at home,” Rodriguez-Lopez said. “That was so we would remember where we came from.”

To stress the role memory has had in his life, Rodriquez-Lopez, now 49, has been filming himself and his surroundings since he was seven years old. “Omar has documented every nook and cranny of his life,” said Bixler-Zavala. “So we had all this amazing footage.”

The film’s director, Nicholas Jack Davies, said roughly “70 to 80% of the footage we used either came from Omar or from footage he got other people to shoot when his bands played live.”

Most of the footage was shot on old VHS cameras from the 80s and 90s, giving the film a hard-grained look that feels both vintage and surreal. To Bixler-Zavala, the film’s rough edge tells viewers, “there’s no filter, this is the real thing”.

The reality of the pair’s life as parallel outliers started in the border town where they met as teens: El Paso, Texas. Both came from highly educated homes. Rodriguez-Lopez’s dad is a psychiatrist; Bixler-Zavala’s father taught Chicano Studies at University of Texas, El Paso. Growing up, both boys were small and intellectual, making them an easy target for bullies. They found a place and a voice in the underground punk scene of El Paso in the 80s, where they bonded on their love of bands like Bad Brains and the Dead Kennedys. At the same time, that made them targets as well. “Being a punk rock fan was dangerous in the 80s,” said Bixler-Zavala. “We got our asses kicked.”

Rodriguez-Lopez, who played guitar, worked with a hardcore band for a while but when they imploded in the early 90s, he joined singer Bixler-Zavala in a promising band he was in called At the Drive In. The music they made had the force and speed of punk but without its cliches, creating a sound with its own textures and scope. From the start, however, the two butted heads with key member Jim Ward about musical direction and worldview. “He was conservative, and I was very, very liberal,” Rodriguez-Lopez said. “He knew Latin kids, but he didn’t hang out with them.”

As a result, he said Ward was insensitive to both the racism he experienced and the queer culture he began to relate to. Meanwhile, Rodriguez-Lopez and Bixler-Zavala were getting closer, in part through their mutual interest in the more explorative aspects of drugs. “They helped us not just creatively but also physiologically and philosophically,” Rodriguez-Lopez said. “There’s a certain positive thing that happens when you isolate yourself from external influences and get more internal.”

The music that resulted started to catch on, earning them hype as the next big thing after the release of Relationship of Command, their powerful album in 2000 . At the same time, they hated the aggressive groups they got lumped in with and the subsequent misunderstandings about their intent. “Coming up in the punk scene, there’s this promise of hope and joy, but we found the world we were in to be very sexist and homophobic,” said Rodriguez-Lopez. “Back at that time, Rolling Stone was promoting Limp Bizkit and Korn, two overtly misogynist bands.”

An especially tense scene in the film reflects their discomfort with the world they found themselves in. While playing for an audience far more interested in breaking things and slam-dancing than getting the message of the music, Bixler-Zavala reacted by calling them “robots” and “sheep”, eliciting a hellish waves of boos. “That happened all the time,” Rodriguez-Lopez said. “I found myself in a space with the kind of dumb jocks I tried my whole life to avoid.”

When At the Drive In played Australia’s Big Day Out Festival in 2001, a 16-year-old girl died from injuries inflicted by the crowd in a mosh pit. When the band stopped their show due to the escalating violence, the promoters threatened to sue. Yet, the next time they played that festival, years later, “the promoters had meetings with every band about how to safely handle the crowd,” Bixler-Zavala said. “We were saying, ‘You don’t need to tell us. We’re the ones who started this!’”

The pressures of the road, vividly evoked in the film, eventually drove the band to the brink, inspiring them to call a six-month break for their mental health. Today, mental health issues are openly talked about by major artists like Chappell Roan and Shawn Mendes, but in the 90s they weren’t discussed at all. “Back then, it wasn’t even understood by members of our own band!” Rodriguez-Lopez said.

When the other members of the group insisted that they go back on the road well before the promised 6 month break was over, the two friends decided they’d had enough, leading to a decision to start a band of their own. For the new project, dubbed the Mars Volta, they vowed to make their culture a central part of both their sound and their philosophy. At the same time, the Latin music they drew on, including salsa, sounded wholly new in their hands.

In the film, the musicians liken the pure frenzy of the resultant music to an Aztec ritual sacrifice, with all of its blood and fury. At the same time, the new sound allowed for nuance, drawn from sophisticated prog groups like King Crimson and Magma. A key part of the alternate aural universe they created came from member Jeremy Ward (no relation to At the Drive-In Member Jim Ward). He didn’t play an instrument but his manipulations of the group’s vocals, along with his use of a made-up language for song and album titles, proved crucial to the group’s gestalt.

In the film, Rodriguez-Lopez likens what Ward did for the Mars Volta to what Eno did for Roxy Music. The relationship between Ward and the guitarist also turned romantic, though they made sure to hide their relationship from their audience, the press as well as from certain members of their own band. “Even in the underground we came from, the majority of places you went still felt threatening,” Rodriguez-Lopez said.

He calls his relationship with Ward “profoundly important. It was such a big part of my evolution.” At the same time, he doesn’t label his sexuality. “I fall in love with the person,” he said.

His closeness with Ward helped keep the latter in the band after he got into heroin, a habit he tried to break before it killed him in 2003 at the legendary rock star death age of 27. Ward’s passing is but one of many chronicled in the film. Yet, due to aspects of their Latin background, the friends say they’ve come to experience mortality as an enriching part of the life cycle. For them, remembering the dead and accepting their loss is inextricable from the desire to honor their culture, a concept taken from the indigenous Taino people of the Caribbean. “People say, ‘Oh my God, there was so much loss in your life when you were young. I’m so sorry,’” Rodriguez-Lopez said. “I say to them, ‘why sorry? I got to know these people, if only for a short time. And, from them, I got to know very early the value life has.”

Even so, Rodriguez-Lopez calls the death of his mother at 63, “mutilating”. To make things harder, at that time he and Bixler-Zavala were bitterly estranged, in part, due to the latter’s involvement with Scientology. The singer’s eventual break with that organization, as well as the duo’s subsequent reproachment, brings the film’s already operatic narrative to an emotional peak.

Along the way, we see the two friends say and do many things they now regret, yet today they say they’re proud to have it all represented on film so frankly. “In art, we’re always aiming for this high realm which at many times can make you an ogre,” Bixler-Zavala said. “My ultimate hope is that the film reminds people that we’re human and fragile just like you. It’s important to never forget that.”

This 1989 movie from Turkish director Tunç Basaran is a gentle and touching but also energised and emotionally urgent piece of work, whose cast present themselves to the audience with a rough-and-ready immediacy, like a theatrical company. But there’s no question as to the star turn: a rather amazing performance from five-year-old newcomer Ozen Bilen as Baris, a wide-eyed little boy who is sent to a women’s prison with his mum Fatma (Füsun Demirel) after Turkey’s 1980 military coup.

Fatma has been convicted for drug-smuggling and now, lethargic and embittered, has not much time for Baris who wanders freely around the shabby hallways and into the bathrooms and dormitory cells. He forms a poignant attachment with Inci (Nür Surer), a political prisoner whose own loneliness finds a heartbreaking expression in her quasi-maternal relationship with this vulnerable child. The movie is recalled in flashback, as Inci (now released) looks over the hills of Ankara and remembers how she promised young Baris that her spirit would fly over the prison like a kite.

In the prison, the politicals mix freely with what in Ireland might be called ODCs or Ordinary Decent Criminals, although it’s the state authorities who look indecent; the male governor is pompous and tyrannical, with a Stalinesque or Stasi-like habit of making a subordinate do something, getting a second subordinate to check that the first subordinate is doing it and then a third subordinate to ensure the second is doing the checking. Innocent Baris learns how to say words he hears from the grownups like “communist” and “slander”, has a ringside seat at ferocious arguments and brawls but also has life-changing experiences in jail, such as circumcision.

This is a film which in some ways could be put alongside Empire of the Sun, another story about a child’s paradoxically liberating experience of imprisonment, yet there is real heartbreak in Inci leaving Baris behind in jail.

The businesswoman and TV personality Martha Stewart has taken issue with a major new documentary about her life and work, which has premiered on Netflix.

Stewart, 83, one of the highest-profile media personalities in the US, criticises the production, focus and editing of RJ Cutler’s Martha. She cooperated in the making of the film, and contributed extensive contemporary interviews.

In an interview with The New York Times, Stewart poured scorn on the product she was nominally promoting, saying that while Cutler was given “total access” to her archive, he “really used very little. It was just shocking.”

She took particular issue with the closing segment of the film, which she unsuccessfully lobbied the director to change. “Those last scenes with me looking like a lonely old lady walking hunched over in the garden?” she said. “Boy, I told him to get rid of those. And he refused.

“I hate those last scenes. Hate them. I had ruptured my achilles tendon. I had to have this hideous operation. And so I was limping a little. But again, he doesn’t even mention why – that I can live through that and still work seven days a week.”

Cutler’s previous work includes biographical studies of Billie Eilish, Elton John, John Belushi, Dick Cheney and Anna Wintour. His first film credit, The War Room, about Bill Clinton’s 1992 presidential campaign, was nominated for the best documentary Oscar.

Stewart’s other criticisms of Martha included the “lousy” score and unflattering cinematography.

“I said to RJ,” she said: “‘An essential part of the film is that you play rap music.’ Dr Dre will probably score it, or Snoop or Fredwreck. I said, ‘I want that music.’ And then he gets some lousy classical score in there, which has nothing to do with me.” (Stewart co-presented a TV series with Snoop Dogg, Potluck Dinner Party, between 2016 and 2020.)

The director also refused to take her instruction on cameras, she said, despite using three of them. “He chooses to use the ugliest angle,” she said. “And I told him, ‘Don’t use that angle! That’s not the nicest angle. You had three cameras. Use the other angle.’ He would not change that.”

Meanwhile, Stewart felt that Cutler chose to focus disproportionately on her high-profile 2004 trial, which led to her conviction on felony charges relating to stock trading.

“It was not that important,” she told the New York Times. “The trial and the actual incarceration was less than two years out of an 83-year life. I considered it a vacation, to tell you the truth.”

However, Stewart did say she liked the first half of the film, as it “gets into things that many people don’t know anything about” and said she had received some cheering feedback from young female viewers.

“So many girls have already told me that watching it gave them a strength that they didn’t know they had,” Stewart said. “And that’s the thing I like most about the documentary. It really shows a strong woman standing up for herself and living through horror as well as some huge success.”

“That’s what I wanted the documentary to be,” she added. “It shouldn’t be me boasting about inner strength and any of that crap. It should be about showing that you can get through life and still be yourself.”

The director responded to his subject’s criticisms by telling the publication: “I am really proud of this film, and I admire Martha’s courage in entrusting me to make it. I’m not surprised that it’s hard for her to see aspects of it.”

In 2021, Alanis Morissette disowned a documentary about her life and career, Jagged, which premiered at the Toronto film festival and accused director Alison Klayman of betraying her trust.

“I was lulled into a false sense of security and their salacious agenda became apparent immediately upon my seeing the first cut of the film,” said Morissette. “This was not the story I agreed to tell.”

The former Republican governor of California Arnold Schwarzenegger has announced that he is backing Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris in next week’s election.

In a long post on X, Schwarzenegger, 77, said that while he doesn’t “really do endorsements” … “hate[s] politics” and doesn’t “trust most politicians”, he felt compelled to formally endorse Harris and her pick for vice president Tim Walz.

“I will always be an American before I am a Republican,” he wrote. “That’s why, this week, I am voting for Kamala Harris and Tim Walz. I’m sharing it with all of you because I think there are a lot of you who feel like I do. You don’t recognise our country. And you are right to be furious.”

Schwarzenegger, who quit acting between 2003 and 2011 while he served in California, continued by writing that he was disappointed in all those who have been in power in the US over the past decades who have discussed addressing the national debt and “our broken immigration system” yet not managing to do so. This continued during election campaigning, he said, as politicians prefer “having talking points” for elections rather than performing “the public service that will make Americans’ lives better.”

“It is a just game to them. But it is life for my fellow Americans. We should be pissed,” Schwarzenegger wrote. “But a candidate who won’t respect your vote unless it is for him, a candidate who will send his followers to storm the Capitol while he watches with a Diet Coke, a candidate who has shown no ability to work to pass any policy besides a tax cut that helped his donors and other rich people like me but helped no one else else, a candidate who thinks Americans who disagree with him are the bigger enemies than China, Russia, or North Korea – that won’t solve our problems.”

Schwarzenegger, who replaced Donald Trump as host of The New Celebrity Apprentice in 2016, has long been an outspoken critic of the former president and current Republican candidate. Schwarzenegger likened the 6 January attack on the Capitol to the Kristallnacht in Nazi Germany and described Trump as “a failed leader. He will go down in history as the worst president ever.”

He returned to the aftermath of the 2020 election on X, saying that “rejecting the results of an election is as un-American as it gets. To someone like me who talks to people all over the world and still knows America is the shining city on a hill, calling America [a] trash can for the world is so unpatriotic, it makes me furious.”

Were Trump to be re-elected, he said, “it will just be four more years of bullshit with no results that makes us angrier and angrier, more divided, and more hateful. We need to close the door on this chapter of American history, and I know that former President Trump won’t do that.”

“I want to move forward as a country,” he concluded, “and even though I have plenty of disagreements with their platform, I think the only way to do that is with Harris and Walz.”

A swirl of concern and outright fear has long been following Robert Zemeckis’s unusual big bet Here, a 30-year reunion for his Forrest Gump co-stars Tom Hanks and Robin Wright. The film, based on Richard McGuire’s comic strip turned graphic novel, was heralded as the most ambitious use of digital de-aging yet, following the pair through the decades, from teenage years to final days, as part of an ensemble of characters who have lived in the same space over time. Early stills, and a trailer, had clued us into the film being plainly terrifying but nothing had quite prepared us for just how unforgivably dull it would also be. Here lies the year’s most eerie and embarrassing misfire.

Zemeckis was once a director who knew exactly how to manipulate a mass audience. He was the guy who made Back to the Future, Death Becomes Her, Romancing the Stone, Cast Away and What Lies Beneath, a conjurer of the kind of transcendent movie magic we just don’t get that much of anymore. We’re certainly not seeing it in his contemporary work, whether it be pointless sub-par remakes like The Witches or Pinocchio or misfiring tech experiments like The Walk or Welcome to Marwen (I will gladly be one of the few defenders of his perfectly fun 2016 second world war thriller Allied). Here exists in the latter category, another baffling folly that plays this time like a museum installation crossed with a 100-minute insurance advert. His latest gimmick traps us in the same fixed spot as he flits back and forth in time, from the dinosaurs all the way through to Covid, an ugly sitcom melange of surreal FX, painful overacting and pat Live Laugh Love lessons.

Zemeckis and his Oscar-winning Forrest Gump co-writer Eric Roth (here on less of a Killers of the Flower Moon day and more of an Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close one instead) guide us through history told in the briefest, and blandest, of snippets. We have multiple strands that follow a Native American courtship, Benjamin Franklin’s illegitimate son William during the war, an ambitious early pilot and his concerned family, the inventor of the La-Z-Boy chair and his pin-up wife (!), a second world war veteran starting a family, his son then starting his own and up-to-date with a Black family dealing with racial injustice and a pandemic. We shift from timeframe to timeframe with rectangles contrasting each iteration of the house or, way back when, lack thereof, an effect that briefly offers an interesting contrast in home decor before growing increasingly tiresome.

As a digitally altered 18-year-old, Hanks looks less like himself circa his 80s slasher debut He Knows You’re Alone and more like Ben Platt circa the equally cursed Dear Evan Hansen movie while in his 50s, he somehow looks even older than the real Hanks does in his late 60s. It’s not just that the FX work is unsettling, which it really really is, it’s also that it’s kind of shoddy, never even in a brief moment persuasive enough to justify such a bizarre concept. Without a successful gimmick (The Walk did at least boast one seat-edge sequence in top-of-the-range 3D, the only real reason it was made), we’re left with a hopelessly banal series of life events that are too quick and too anonymous to evoke any emotion or interest. When the film tries to tackle weightier, more recent events, it goes from inoffensively boring to uncomfortably questionable. There’s the thrill of seeing someone die of Covid in crisp HD, something many of us have surely been craving, and then there’s the utterly anonymous Black family’s longest scene in which the father explains to his son how to survive a police stop, an empty back-pat of a gesture that means nothing given that we don’t even know their names (for a far more thoughtful, and authentic, version of this scene watch The Hate U Give instead).

What little the film has to say about life can be summarised by a series of tacky fridge magnets – time flies, be true to yourself, if you never try you’ll never know – and maybe if Zemeckis was aiming to show us that the world is and always has been monotonous and empty then he has perhaps succeeded. His trick of staying in the exact same corner leaves the film feeling airless and always told at a cold distance, a disconnect for a film filled with such simple, overscored sentimentality. There’s not much that Hanks and Wright can do with the restrictions of the technology that creepily warps them through time but they’re at least as competent as they can be, especially compared to Paul Bettany and Kelly Reilly as Hanks’s parents, both shout-acting as if they’re in a small-town dinner theatre production of Death of a Salesman.

In what feels like double the time we’re sat for, Zemeckis tells us very little and makes us feel even less. For a film about living, Here is a remarkably lifeless endeavour.

The trial of Gérard Depardieu on sexual assault charges has opened in Paris in the absence of the French actor, who has declared himself to be ill.

His lawyer Jérémie Assous said earlier that the 75-year-old was “extremely affected” by ill health and that he had asked for the proceedings to be delayed until he could attend in person.

“Unfortunately, his doctors have forbidden him from appearing here today,” Assous said on arrival for the trial. He said would ask the court for a six-month suspension of the trial, which comes after numerous other complaints and with a possible second court case already lying in wait. However, the proceedings opened in Depardieu’s absence.

Depardieu is being tried on charges of sexually assaulting two women while shooting the 2021 film Les Volets Verts (The Green Shutters).

Depardieu, an icon of French cinema who has appeared in more than 200 films, has denied accusations that he aggressively groped and made explicit sexual remarks to the women – a set designer and an assistant director. In an open letter published last year, he said: “Never, but never, have I abused a woman.”

The actor is the highest-profile figure to face accusations in French cinema’s version of the #MeToo movement, triggered in 2017 by allegations against the US producer Harvey Weinstein.

The names of the two women at the centre of Monday’s trial have not been made public. The set designer reported in February that she was subjected to sexual assault, sexual harassment and sexist insults while filming Les Volets Verts, directed by Jean Becker, in a private house in Paris.

The plaintiff’s lawyer, Carine Durrieu-Diebolt, told Agence France-Presse: “I expect the justice system to be the same for everybody and for Monsieur Depardieu not to receive special treatment just because he’s an artist.”

Assous previously said Depardieu’s defence would offer “witnesses and evidence that will show he has simply been targeted by false accusations”. He accused the plaintiff of attempting to “make money” by claiming €30,000 (£25,000) in compensation.

The plaintiff told the French investigative website Mediapart that during the shoot Depardieu started loudly calling for a cooling fan because he “couldn’t even get it up” in the heat.

She claimed the actor went on to boast that he could “give women an orgasm without touching them”. The plaintiff alleged that an hour later she was “brutally grabbed” by Depardieu as she was walking off the set. The actor pinned her by “closing his legs” around her before groping her waist and her stomach and continuing up to her breasts, she said.

Depardieu made “obscene remarks” during the incident, she said, including: “Come and touch my big parasol. I’ll stick it in your pussy.” She described the actor’s bodyguards dragging him away as he shouted: “We’ll see each other again, my dear.”

Durrieu-Diebolt said: “My client expects that the justice system will find Gérard Depardieu to be a serial sexual assaulter.”

The second plaintiff in the case, an assistant director on the same film, also alleges sexual violence.

Anouk Grinberg, an actor who appeared in Les Volets Verts, told AFP that Depardieu used “salacious words … from morning till night”.

“When producers hired Depardieu to work on a film, they knew they were hiring an assaulter,” she said. Grinberg said that in her experience Depardieu had “always used sexual, smutty language”, but that his behaviour had become “much, much worse, with permission from his profession, that pays him for it and covers up his offences”.

About 20 women have accused Depardieu of various sexual offences. The actor Charlotte Arnould was the first to file a criminal complaint. A judge has yet to rule on a request from prosecutors in August for Depardieu to stand trial for raping and sexually assaulting her.

An investigation is under way in Paris after a former production assistant accused Depardieu of a sexual assault in 2014. The actor Hélène Darras filed a sexual assault complaint that fell foul of the statute of limitations. The Spanish writer and journalist Ruth Baza has accused Depardieu of raping her in 1995.

In December last year the French president, Emmanuel Macron, shocked feminists by complaining of a “manhunt” targeting Depardieu, whom he called a “towering actor” who “makes France proud”.

Macron’s remarks followed the broadcast by an investigative TV show of a recording of Depardieu making repeated misogynistic and insulting remarks about women.

Depardieu is the biggest star to face accusations in French cinema’s #MeToo movement. The directors Jacques Doillon and Benoît Jacquot are among other prominent figures accused of sexual violence. Doillon and Jacquot have denied the allegations.

Jacques Audiard was born in Paris in 1952, the son of the prolific screenwriter and director Michel Audiard. He began writing films in the mid-1970s and made his directorial debut in 1994 with See How They Fall. He won Baftas for The Beat That My Heart Skipped (2005) and A Prophet (2010) and the Cannes Palme d’Or with Dheepan in 2015. Audiard’s latest film, Emilia Pérez, a trans-empowerment musical set among Mexican drug cartels, won the Jury prize at Cannes and was described by Variety as “dazzling and instantly divisive”. It’s in cinemas now and will stream globally on Netflix from 13 November. Audiard lives in Paris.

This week sees the release of Heretic, Hugh Grant’s 45th feature film. Few critics would have predicted that length of career after his pouting 1982 debut in Privileged, a pretentiously shonky whodunnit featuring several of his fellow Oxford students. For the next decade he wasn’t so much a fringe actor as an actor with a floppy fringe, invariably cast as a posh, slightly foppish Englishman, doomed to be forever brushing his lustrous hair back from his finely chiselled features.

Then 12 years on everything changed with the release of Four Weddings and a Funeral. More accurately, the floppy fringe remained, but now it was employed as comedy cover for a strikingly diffident kind of romantic hero. Overnight Grant was catapulted into the realm of international fame, going on to co-star with his haircut in a series of not wildly dissimilar romcoms.

A horror film, Heretic is a world away from all that. Grant is now 64, the curtain mop is long gone and the boyish charm has matured into something far more dangerously charismatic.

He plays Mr Reed, who is driven by a provocative yet pitiless logic, and betrays more than a touch of evil. It’s not his first bad guy. He’s been flirting with villainy for a while in films like Paddington 2 and Dungeons & Dragons, not to mention his suavely ruthless Jeremy Thorpe in the much-lauded TV drama A Very English Scandal.

Mr Reed, though, occupies much darker territory. Grant said recently that the role is part of “the freak-show era” of his career. The change in direction has suited him, not least because a roguish character, as he’s made a point of saying, is closer to his own.

The stammering toff who seemed to have fallen out of an early Evelyn Waugh novel was his party piece, and it was used to brilliantly subversive effect in Roman Polanski’s Bitter Moon, which predated Four Weddings. But it was perfected for Richard Curtis and it became his go-to public persona.

As he told the New York Times: “I thought if that’s what people love so much, I’ll be that person in real life, too.”

That job grew much more challenging after his arrest in June 1995 following a brief encounter in a BMW on Sunset Boulevard with sex worker Divine Brown. His timid romantic act appeared to have been dealt a fatal blow, but Grant doubled down, dealing with the fallout in character, as it were.

The nervous young man who squirmed in the Tonight Show armchair while Jay Leno asked: “What the hell were you thinking?” managed to perform a delicate piece of image repair. In this endeavour he was ably supported by his then girlfriend, Elizabeth Hurley.

With her photogenic looks and preference for well-ventilated clothing, Hurley had become a fixture in the UK press, making the couple a red-carpet dream team. The attention they drew would later have far-reaching repercussions when Grant discovered what press intrusion really entailed.

The sordid sex crisis deftly negotiated, Grant’s star continued to rise in a trio of Curtis-scripted films: Notting Hill, Bridget Jones’s Diary and Love Actually.

It was in the middle one, in which he played the caddish Daniel Cleaver, that Grant began to grow as a comedic actor, famously ad-libbing some of the film’s best lines. Next year he reprises Cleaver in the fourth Bridget Jones film, Mad About the Boy.

“I think he did feel apprehension about stepping out of that floppy, tongue-tied English character,” recalls Bridget Jones’s Diary director Sharon Maguire. “I remember him being really pleasantly surprised and relieved the first time he saw the movie at the New York premiere … and only a teensy bit jealous that Colin Firth got just as many laughs.”

The making of that film coincided, roughly, with his breakup with Hurley. There followed a prolonged period of intermittent dating and an ever-more fractious relationship with the tabloids. The key text of this period is About A Boy, in which he plays a man in flight from romantic commitment. Grant acknowledged that he put a lot of himself into the role.

Yet suddenly, in his 50s, the confirmed bachelor contrived to father two children who are now 13 and 11 with the actor Tinglan Hong, and in between a son with Swedish TV producer Anna Eberstein, with whom he had two more children and to whom he has been married for six years.

Grant, whose father was an ex-army officer who worked in the carpet business and mother a French teacher, had originally wanted to be a writer. Although he more or less fell into acting, he’d always been a performer. Old schoolmates at Latymer Upper School in Hammersmith, West London, still talk of his mesmerising recital of Eliot’s The Waste Land.

But without formal drama training or a background in the theatre, Grant, even by the neurotic standards of most actors, nurtured a deep streak of professional insecurity – he has complained of being paralysed by panic attacks when filming.

“I got the strong impression,” says Maguire, “that Hugh was filled with loathing at his own acting and yet he was hugely conscientious about the process of acting, a perfectionist who often contributed gold in terms of the comedy and authenticity of a scene.” His exacting approach to work has not always won him friends on set. Robert Downey Jr called him a “jerk” after they made Restoration together in 1995. And Jerry Seinfeld, who directed him in Unfrosted, was only half-joking when, earlier this year, he described Grant as “a pain in the ass to work with”.

For all his self-criticism – he’s said that people were rightly “repelled” by his stumbling Englishman character – Grant also knows his own worth, not just financially but also in terms of industry longevity and position. The man who appears nowadays on talk shows with his well-honed anecdotes and waspish self-deprecation is a supremely confident veteran of the business of selling himself.

There’s also an added steeliness, a disinclination to suffer fools, that has been sharpened in the legal battles waged since he learned that his phone had been hacked by the now defunct News of the World. A leading figure in Hacked Off, the campaign group that seeks reform of press self-regulation, Grant settled a lawsuit with the Sun this year, having accused the paper of hiring a private investigator to break into his flat and bug him.

He said on X that he would have liked to go to court, but if he’d been awarded damages that were less than the settlement offer “I would have to pay the legal costs of both sides”, which he said could be as much as £10m, adding: “I’m afraid I am shying at the fence.”

Taking on Rupert Murdoch is one thing, but Grant is also not averse to showing his tetchier side to those lower down the media ladder. Last year his stilted interview with model Ashley Graham on the Oscars red carpet inspired almost as much condemnatory newsprint as his other Hollywood interaction three decades earlier with the unfortunate Brown.

When asked what he thought of the event, he compared it to Vanity Fair. He meant the Thackery novel, but Graham assumed it was the magazine after-party. The conversation only went downhill from there. Grant was derided as a snob and self-important, though it’s fair to say that some of his fanfare-deflating drollery was lost in cultural translation.

Then again, maybe he wasn’t just bored with banality but instead, with one eye on his career, he was establishing his new edge in the public imagination. With Grant it’s impossible to know. His real motivations and character are buried beneath geological layers of artifice, irony and a highly developed celebrity defence system.

He could probably write a wonderfully scabrous exposé of the film world and himself in the tradition of David Niven and Rupert Everett, but it’s far more likely he’ll concentrate on the job in hand: gradually occupying the position of a national treasure.

Andrea Arnold and Robbie Ryan take the corner table at their favourite Soho cafe. The director and cinematographer have loved this greasy-spoon joint for years. It’s an ungentrified throwback, a slice of old London, serving big mugs of coffee and double helpings of spuds. Arnold points at the menu. “Look at this, mash and chips. That’s my idea of heaven.”

The pair first worked together more than two decades ago, when Arnold was making her Oscar-winning short, Wasp. The film’s opening shot required Ryan to run backwards down a steep flight of stairs while keeping the lead actor in frame. Most camera operators would have balked at the task, but he relished it – and they’ve been working that way ever since. He scrolls through his phone for a photo from the set of 2011’s Wuthering Heights. It shows him filming backwards again, this time on a horse. “I don’t know if I’d be allowed to do that now,” he says. “But this was up in Yorkshire. They’re a bit more lax there.”

Film-making, they feel, has become risk averse. The wild ways are endangered. Health and safety concerns rule the roost. Arnold’s features – Red Road, Fish Tank, Wuthering Heights, American Honey – are fuelled by a restless, freewheeling spirit. They throw untrained actors against real-world locations and conjure scattershot poetry from the prose of dirty, humdrum life. But her latest work, Bird, became a nightmare of sharp turns. The shoot was beset by bureaucracy: by permits and release forms and various reversals of fortune that she is not keen to discuss. “Lots of problems,” says Ryan. “Lots of plates spinning. Usually chaos is great. But this time it went a bit over the top.”

Partly that’s the job, Arnold says. It’s the nature of the beast. “You win some, you lose some. But on this I kept losing things.” She peers again at the menu; her eyesight has played tricks. “Mash or chips,” she says. “That isn’t half so exciting.”

Bird might not be the dish that she ordered, but it’s a joyous film: a work of fragile, grubby glory; big-hearted and full of life as it scoots alongside 12-year-old Bailey (newcomer Nykiya Adams) and her scallywag dad (Barry Keoghan). Arnold’s tale moves from the low-rise estates of north Kent to the scrubland beyond town, and from punchy social realism into mysticism and magic. Bailey needs a friend and eventually finds one in Bird (Franz Rogowski), a spooky visitor from out of town who materialises in the meadow like Puck of Pook’s Hill. “I come from here, but I have little memory of it,” he tells her. He’s in search of his father, the elusive link to his past.

Much like Bird, the film returns Arnold to her roots. She was raised in north Kent, the eldest child of a single mum. But she was also like Bailey: a wild kid on the prowl. “The estate where we filmed felt very like my childhood,” she says. “I grew up in Dartford, which is changing now because people have realised it’s not that far from London. I used to go to the Dartford show with my mum, which was the wildest, most unhinged event in the country. Everyone drunk, lots of lairy characters, fights everywhere you looked. It was like the wild west. I went back a few years ago and it’s all vegan burgers. Fenced off and tidy. It just wasn’t the same.”

Her film-making, though, has always been personal. Her private life remains private; the work itself is her statement. “But I heard something the other day that was like an equation. It said that pain into art is freedom. It was really hard to make Bird, but something about it was liberating. That sounds weird, because it felt so tough at the time – practically, physically and emotionally. But pain into art means freedom. I like that explanation.”

Her career is one of giant leaps. Critics like to cite Arnold’s humble early gigs – first as a dancer on Top of the Pops, then as the roller-skating TV presenter on Saturday morning kids show No. 73 – and marvel at how far she’s come. But the biggest jump was from Dartford to London, from a Kent council house to a job on kids’ telly.

“I was 18,” she says. “I’d left home and had nowhere to live. I was really struggling. I’d had a big argument with my boyfriend and almost didn’t go to the audition [for No. 73]. I didn’t think I’d get it. Suddenly, I was earning really good money. And in those days you got per diems as well. I used to live off the per diems and put the money I earned in the bank. So I was supporting myself. That was life-changing.”

She made another leap in her 20s by starting to write scripts. She devised A Beetle Called Derek, an environmental magazine show named after a bloke back in Kent, which featured Benjamin Zephaniah. “My mum went out with a guy called Derek. He worked as a welder and he was the best fighter in Dartford. One day he said to me, ‘I’m feeling upset because I keep using these aerosol cans and they’re affecting the ozone layer.’ And I was touched by that. I thought, blimey, maybe I can make a series that explains science and the environment in really simple terms.” The money she earned from it paid her way through film school.

Ryan hasn’t done too badly either. He was just starting out when he collaborated with Arnold on Wasp. Now he’s arguably the industry’s most sought-after cinematographer. He’s worked with Noah Baumbach and Ken Loach; he shot Yorgos Lanthimos’s Kinds of Kindness and Poor Things. “Fuck you, you traitor,” Arnold says – but she’s joking; she’s delighted. Every time she makes a new film, she worries Ryan might not be available. So far he has always come back.

It’s more than loyalty, Ryan says. The relationship is his foundation. “I wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t for Andrea.”

“I reckon he’d be fine,” she says. “You undersell yourself. He might be a slightly different version of where he is now, but only slightly.”

Ryan has ordered another round of coffees. He says: “I’m glad it’s this version. I’ve had more fun with this version.”

The problem is, Arnold’s films take so long to make. Years of writing and raising money. Months of painstaking editing. But a great cinematographer can bounce from one paying gig to the next. It’s a good life, Ryan says. He’s just finished work on Lanthimos’s next film, while living out of a houseboat in Henley, a five-minute walk from the set. “I like working. And I like the challenge of shooting different kinds of films. I’ve only had one occasion where I really haven’t enjoyed it.”

“Don’t say that,” Arnold says. “Now we’ll be looking through your credits, trying to work out what it was.”

Have we covered the movies? How about a new topic? Ryan says that music has always been a big part of their friendship. They mostly share the same tastes. Tomorrow night, it transpires, they’re both DJ’ing, at different venues. Ryan has a regular monthly gig with a mate, playing what he calls “the golden triangle – funk, soul and reggae”. Across town, Arnold is booked for her daughter’s 30th birthday party. It’s a lot of pressure, she says.

“I’ve made a playlist. Actually I’ve made three playlists. I’m going to read the room and then decide which one to go with.”

She pulls out her phone and plays a recent song that she likes. It’s by Lova Lova, a Congolese rapper. The video shows him barrelling around the parched streets of Kinshasa, from the lock-up garages to the market stalls, bathed in African sunshine and sideswiped by pale dust. Arnold adores it. She says, “Look at that video. I want to make a film like this.” From Dartford to London to the Democratic Republic of Congo. It’s been a life of great leaps. She may yet take some more.

With his hat, claw glove and dodgy knitwear, Freddy Krueger gifted the world’s children an easy costume for Halloween and – given the novelisations – for World Book Day. Now Wes Craven’s original movie from 1984 is rereleased for its 40th anniversary; it is an ingenious and jauntily outrageous shocker which upends the idea of being kept awake by fear.

Robert Englund plays the unspeakable Krueger, who once upon a time killed 20 children but apparently walked free owing to an incorrectly signed search warrant. “The lawyers got fat and the judge got famous,” says one character, and, well, it certainly does sound like the victims’ parents are entitled to be miffed. (Perhaps Mr Krueger’s resourceful lawyer deserves a more prominent position in the ANOES franchise.)

Vigilante justice meant the killer was chased down and burned alive, but the molten-faced Krueger has now returned to haunt the dreams of local teenagers: you’re OK, so long as you don’t fall asleep. One of the young people involved is Glen, the movie debut for the 21-year-old Johnny Depp, who six years later played the Dr Jekyll version of Krueger: Edward Scissorhands.

Glen’s girlfriend Nancy (Heather Langenkamp) is deeply disturbed by her friend Tina (Amanda Wyss) having eerily real nightmares concerning a murderous creep in a jumper and a hat with a lethal hand-claw accessory: she’s been awakening to find claw-shaped rips in her pyjamas. Nancy’s having the same dreams – and she’s got a problematic home life as well; her cop dad (John Saxon) neglects the family and her mom (Ronee Blakley) has issues with alcohol. Nancy figures she might be able to kill Krueger because he can be brought into the waking world if you have your hands on him when you wake up – but how do you manage that? The answer, according to Glen, is by cultivating the Balinese art of lucid dreaming, although there’s nothing particularly lucid or controlled about Nancy’s dreams.

Maybe this film didn’t exactly deserve its interminable later franchise, but Craven gives us cheerfully crass black-comic energy and there’s a real laugh when Glen, on whom Nancy has imposed celibacy for the evening, has to listen to Tina and her badass boyfriend Rod (Jsu Garcia) having noisy sex in the next room. “Morality sucks!” he mutters. It certainly does.