Category: cinema

Donald Trump, impersonated by Marvel actor Sebastian Stan, will make an unlikely star attraction on the Côte d’Azur in May, as a new film about the US presidential candidate’s real-estate career is set to premiere at Cannes in May.

The lineup for the 77th edition of the film festival, unveiled at a press conference in Paris on Thursday by general delegate Thierry Frémaux and president Iris Knobloch, will also see Yorgos Lanthimos and Emma Stone continue their prize-winning creative partnership, and British film-maker Andrea Arnold team up with Saltburn star Barry Keoghan for her first feature film in eight years.

Running in the competition are also new films by David Cronenberg, Taxi Driver scriptwriter Paul Schrader, Cannes veteran Jacques Audiard and Francis Ford Coppola’s previously announced passion project Megalopolis.

While the main programme does not quite match last year’s vintage selection for star-studdedness, it hinted at several intriguing – and often political – storylines.

In The Apprentice, Sweden-based Iranian-Danish director Ali Abbasi will examine Trump’s career as a real estate businessman in New York in the 1970s and 80s. Romanian-American actor Sebastian Stan, best known as Bucky Barnes in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, will impersonate the orange-faced US presidential candidate, while Jeremy Strong plays Roy Cohn, the attorney who represented Trump in the 1970s.

Running outside the competition, meanwhile, Canadian arthouse favourite Guy Maddin’s new film Rumours will see Cate Blanchett play an Ursula von der Leyen-esque politician at a fictional G7 meeting.

Running in the competition, Greek director Lanthimos’s anthology film Kinds of Kindness, which again features Willem Dafoe, comes just two months after his last film Poor Things’ glory at the Oscars, and less than a year after scooping the Golden Lion at the Venice film festival.

Dartford-born Arnold (Red Road, Fish Tank, Cow) will not only receive the Golden Coach award at the festival but also show her new feature, Bird, her first since 2016’s American Honey. Frémaux described it as a coming-of-age story about a young girl trying to escape from the narrow confines of the neighbourhood she grew up in.

Ben Whishaw plays Russian poet and political dissident Eduard Limonov in director Khiril Sebrennikov’s Limonov: The Ballad of Eddie, an adaptation of the feted novel by French writer Emmanuel Carrère.

Paolo Sorrentino, the Italian director of The Hand of God and The Young Pope, returns to Cannes with Parthenope, another film set in his native Napoli, while 2015 Palme d’Or winner Jacques Audiard will premiere Emilia Perez, a musical set in the world of Mexican drug cartels.

The festival’s jury will be chaired by Barbie director Greta Gerwig, the first female film-maker in the role since Jane Campion in 2014.

Films already announced include George Miller’s Mad Max prequel Furiosa, Kevin Costner’s multi-episode Western Horizon: An American Saga and Coppola’s long-awaited Megalopolis. Supposedly inspired by the Roman empire, the film has been four decades in the making and was reported to have been funded with $120m of the Godfather director’s own money.

The opening film will be absurdist comedy The Second Act starring Léa Seydoux and directed by French director Quentin Dupieux, once upon a time better known under his musical alias Mr Oizo. As tradition has it, the opening film will debut in French cinemas the same day.

Star Wars creator George Lucas will receive an honorary Palme d’Or at the closing ceremony on 25 May.

A spectacularly strong lineup for the festival in 2023 saw Justine Triet’s Anatomy of a Fall claim the Palme d’Or and Jonathan Glazer’s The Zone of Interest awarded the Grand Prix. The two films became juggernauts of the awards season, with Glazer’s stylised Holocaust drama winning two Oscars in March.

Cannes 2024 official selection: the full list

Competition

The Apprentice, dir: Ali Abbasi

Motel Destino, dir: Karim Aïnouz

Bird, dir: Andrea Arnold

Emilia Perez, dir: Jacques Audiard

Anora, dir: Sean Baker

Megalopolis, dir: Francis Ford Coppola

The Shrounds, dir: David Cronenberg

The Substance, dir: Coralie Fargeat

Grand Tour, dir: Miguel Gomes

Marcello Mio, dir: Christophe Honoré

Feng Liu Yi Dai, dir: Jia Zhang-Ke

All We Imagine as Light, dir: Payal Kapadia

Kinds of Kindness, dir: Yorgos Lanthimos

L’Amour Ouf, dir: Gilles Lellouche

Diamant Brut, dir: Agathe Riedinger

Oh Canada, dir: Paul Schrader

Limonov – The Ballad, dir: Kirill Serebrennikov

Parthenope, dir: Paolo Sorrentino

The Girl with the Needle, dir: Magnus von Horn

Un Certain Regard

Norah, dir: Tawfik Alzaidi

The Shameless, dir: Konstantin Bojanov

Le Royaume, dir: Julien Colonna

Vingt Dieux, dir: Louise Courvoisier

Le Procès du Chien (Who Let the Dog Bite?), dir: Laetitia Dosch

Gou Zhen (Black Dog), dir: Guan Hu

The Village Next to Paradise, dir: Mo Harawe

September Says, dir: Arian Labed

L’Histoire de Souleymane, dir: Boris Lojkine

The Damned, dir: Roberto Minervini

On Becoming a Guinea Fowl, dir: Rungano Nyoni

Boku No Ohisama (My Sunshine), dir: Hiroshi Okuyama

Santosh, dir: Sandhya Suri

Viet and Nam, dir: Truong Minh Quy

Armand, dir: Halfdan Ullmann Tøndel

Out of Competition

She’s Got no Name, dir: Chan Peter Ho-Sun

Horizon, An American Saga, dir: Kevin Costner

Rumours, dir: Evan Johnson, Galen Johnson and Guy Maddin

Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga, dir: George Miller

Midnight Screenings

Twilight of the Warrior Walled In, dir: Soi Cheang

The Surfer, dir: Lorcan Finnegan

Les Femmes Au Balcon, dir: Noémie Merlant

I, The Executioner, dir: Ryoo Seung-Wan

Cannes Premiere

Everybody Loves Touda, dir: Nabil Ayouch

C’est Pas Moi, dir: Leos Carax

En Fanfare (The Matching Bang), dir: Emmanuel Courcol

Miséricorde, dir: Alain Guiraudie

Le Roman de Him, dir: Arnaud Larrieu and Jean-Marie Larrieu

Rendez-vous avec Pol Pot, dir: Rithy Panh

Special Screenings

Le Fil, dir: Daniel Auteil

Ernest Cole, Lost and Found, dir: Raoul Peck

The Invasion, dir: Sergei Loznitsa

Appendre, dir: Claire Simon

La Belle de Gaza, dir: Yolande Zauberman

He’s back. But he never went away. Patricia Highsmith’s diabolically inspired postwar creation Tom Ripley has returned, to luxuriate in our 21st-century age of Instagram lifestyle envy, tacit class paranoia and online identity fraud. He has triumphantly resurfaced in Steven Zaillian’s sumptuous and instantly addictive new eight-episode adaptation of Highsmith’s novel The Talented Mr Ripley for Netflix, starring the incomparable Andrew Scott as the charmer, aesthete and serial killer. It’s a seven-star luxury hotel of a TV show in arthouse black-and-white, which my colleague Lucy Mangan has hailed as quite possibly definitive.

It’s set in the early 60s, but has a queasy resonance for 2024. At an unhurried tempo, Scott’s Ripley is shown surmounting his early unease and likable callow vulnerability, attaining a hypnotic and insidious poise, his irises seeming to merge blackly with his pupils. He even to me seems to sway slightly, like a cobra in the presence of a hamster. Ripley is seen at first in flophouse poverty in New York running petty scams with stolen cheques; he is then approached via a private detective by troubled wealthy plutocrat Herbert Greenleaf (played by Kenneth Lonergan), because Ripley once had a passing acquaintance with this man’s wastrel son Dickie Greenleaf, played by Johnny Flynn. Greenleaf Sr offers Ripley large sums of money to travel to Italy, where Dickie is lounging about with his girlfriend Marge (Dakota Fanning), and persuade Dickie to come home. Instead, Ripley befriends Dickie, deploying his gift for mimicry and flattery, a parasitic conquest that leads to obsession and murder.

Scott gives a much more downbeat, more realist account of the antihero, or pro-villain Ripley, a contrast to the readably wicked Moriarty that appeared opposite Benedict Cumberbatch’s Sherlock. In Anthony Minghella’s 2000 movie version, Matt Damon played Ripley with a nerdier, needier and more beta-male vibe which at first amuses Jude Law’s Dickie Greenleaf. Scott’s Ripley is closer to Alain Delon’s portrayal in René Clément’s 1960 version Purple Noon, in that Scott’s Ripley cultivates a blankness, an unsettling gift for inscrutable reserve: the sociopath’s resting face. And yet Zaillian’s adaptation gives us much more of Ripley’s essential loneliness and miserable vulnerability. He doesn’t, it seems to me, show us the more worldly and more extravagantly malign figure of Highsmith’s later novel Ripley’s Game, incarnated by Dennis Hopper in Wim Wenders’ 1977 film The American Friend and by John Malkovich in Liliane Cavani’s Ripley’s Game from 2002.

Why is Ripley so fascinating? Partly because there is something so timelessly disturbing about his modus operandi: the perversion of friendship. We might think that to befriend someone, or to be befriended, is a universal good. Aren’t strangers, after all, just friends we haven’t met yet? And yet you can never really know what is happening inside someone else’s head; not even your best friend or lover or spouse, especially someone you met in later life. Who knows what ulterior motives exist in friendship, what gratification of vested interests, or how friendship can for years coexist with rivalry and even dislike? “Frenemy” is word that dates back to Ripley’s birth but has become common currency in recent times.

Ripley’s relationship with Dickie has a long pedigree; it’s the relationship of Mr Hyde with Dr Jekyll, or Dorian Gray with Lord Henry Wotton, or Dirk Bogarde’s creepy valet with James Fox’s indolent man-about-town in Joseph Losey’s movie The Servant. And there is no need of any overtly contemporary interpretation to find that queer dimension: Emerald Fennell’s divisive psycho-thriller satire Saltburn was about an oikish upstart at Oxford conceiving an obsessive love for a beautiful young male aristocrat and being deliriously but secretly overexcited to be invited to this young exquisite’s stately home for the summer.

This kid starts out as Evelyn Waugh’s Charles Ryder but he winds up as Highsmith’s Ripley. This was the allusion that triggered so many of the film’s detractors: the neglected and overlooked class element of Ripley-ism. Ripley speaks to the ruling class distaste for counter-jumpers and presumptuous parvenus. But his existence infuriates those who resent the ironic implication that pleading on behalf of the poor is just the politics of envy. These people aren’t poor, is the perceived sneery insinuation … they’re just pretending, and worse still, they’re like Ripley, part of the vast and spongiform middle class who can code-switch to posh or street when they want. They’re malign and invasive, they want to take the rich people’s cake and eat it.

Paradoxically, Ripley is an adventurer for the new digital age. Each time I revisit Ripley, I’m struck by how we need that original setting because his criminal impostures wouldn’t really work in an era of smartphones and Google searches. And yet he’s a narcissist fit for the new world of social media. Posting and boasting, taking carefully edited and filtered pictures of our wonderful lives and lovely holidays with witty descriptions and humblebrags, compulsively advertising our specialness. I can well imagine a version of Ripley in which he is always on Instagram, stalking Dickie’s feed, posting his own delusional version in New York, using sock-puppet Instagram and X personae to pursue his creepy scam side-hustles – and finally catching up with Dickie in Italy, killing him and taking over his account with new geolocated pictures to create the illusion that he’s still alive.

Felicity Morris’s documentary The Tinder Swindler was about a conman who uses dating sites to siphon money out of his date-victims; it’s about the chilling nexus between sociopathy, greed, emotional manipulation and the opportunities offered by social media for imposture. Tom Ripley is the ancestor of it all. Scott’s seductive performance as the Napoleon of emotional crime delivers all of it and more. If only it wasn’t quite so enjoyable.

It’s 10am on the morning of the Oscars, and Percival Everett is nowhere to be seen. We’re supposed to be meeting at his neighbourhood coffee shop in leafy South Pasadena, a suburb of Los Angeles, before he makes his way across the city for the ceremony, which begins its long march towards best picture just after lunch.

American Fiction, the film of his novel Erasure, is nominated for best adapted screenplay, up against Barbie, but tipped to win. The hour went forward last night, but surely he knows that? At 10.25am I WhatsApp him, but the message remains unread. Eventually I call. “Yes, this is Percival Everett. We’re meeting in half an hour?” The clocks, Percival, the clocks. “Ah,” he chuckles, “my fault.” He’s there in a couple of minutes, in khaki pants, grey shirt and a baseball cap, looking as if he has nothing much on today – a man not only in his own world, but his own time. When I ask why his phone didn’t update like they all do now, he says he never looks at it, and raises his wrist to flaunt a distinctively analogue watch. Hasn’t he got quite an important date later? “Oh,” he shrugs, “my wife would’ve made sure I got there on time.” That’s the novelist Danzy Senna, with whom he has two sons, aged 17 and 15.

Despite having lived in LA for more than three decades, Everett, 67, who teaches literature at the University of Southern California, doesn’t see being invited to the Oscars as somehow getting the keys to the city. It’s more like “visiting someone’s garden shed”, he says, a little bizarrely. “I’ll feel ‘Oh that’s a nice lawnmower’ and never go back.” I suggest that’s quite a prosaic image for what lots of people consider to be the most glamorous event in the universe. “I guess that betrays my feelings about glamour.”

Not that he’s ostentatiously professorial, his otherwordliness just a different way of showing off. He genuinely doesn’t seem to care: about the red carpet, accolades, critics. “I don’t go online,” he tells me. No social media? No, and no reviews. Is he not curious to see how others interpret his work? “Oh I do read scholarship – I think I learn stuff from that – but reviews I just never have any interest in.” Is it a case of protecting himself from comments that might sow doubt, or sting? “In fact, I might be interested in a really scathing review.” Why? “It might be fun? That’s gonna be kind of crazy, to be upset about a bad review. Like, what else can you expect in the world? Not everybody is gonna like my shirt.”

Acclaim isn’t a big motivator, then – instead he writes when he gets fascinated by something, which has happened often enough to produce 24 dazzlingly different novels, stories of baseball players, ranchers, mathematicians, cops and philosophising babies. And, despite his output, he finds time for plenty of other interests. Painting is the big one, and we stroll the short distance from the cafe to his studio, a windowless room in a basement complex bedecked with frenetic, abstract canvases, half-squeezed tubes of paint and impasto-slathered palettes. He’s also a skilled woodworker (he recently became obsessed with buying and repairing old mandolins), a jazz musician, and a horse and mule trainer. (Everett once told Bookforum that when he was being hired by USC a member of the faculty saw his name and exclaimed: “The last thing we need is another 50-year-old Brit,” only to be told by the receptionist that the newest professor was in fact a “black cowboy”).

Horses are no longer a part of his life – he combined working on ranches with teaching much earlier in his career – but they taught him some transferable skills. “I don’t get stressed out,” he tells me. “I think that’s from being on horses. You can’t calm down a 1,200-pound animal by getting excited.” That’s handy, because others in his position might be getting a little wound up by their work being judged in the most public way possible in just a few hours time. It’s a big day, no? “I mean, sort of. It’s not my film,” he laughs. “So, I’m excited for the director.”

He means Cord Jefferson, the former journalist who also adapted the novel, and who described showing Everett the movie as “the most frightening screening I did”. The plot differences are relatively minor, though Erasure is more complex, less certain in its conclusions. Both works tell the story of Thelonius “Monk” Ellison, a writer of abstruse fiction who fumes when he finds his retelling of Aeschylus’s The Persians filed under “African American studies” in a bookstore (“The only thing ostensibly African American [about it] was my jacket photograph”). But his commercial fortunes are transformed when he decides to submit a “ghetto” novel, ramping up the stereotypes to an obscene degree that white liberal editors nevertheless find irresistible.

Everett has spoken in the past with frustration about Erasure looming so large in his body of work. Does he still feel that way? “The only thing that ever pissed me off is that everyone agreed with it. No one took issue, or said: ‘It’s not like that.’” Why was that annoying? “I like the blowback. It’s interesting. There’s nothing worse than preaching to the choir, right?” Erasure came out in 2001, but people have taken American Fiction as a satire of modern publishing. Are the double standards he satirised still as pervasive? “There is a much greater range of work [now], and that was what I was addressing. So in some ways, there’s been a lot of change. The problem I had wasn’t with particular works, just with the fact that those were the only ones available.”

On the other hand, the thinking that led to that narrow range still very much exists. “For example, I have a friend, a director, who had some success with a film. And the next call he got was someone wanting him to direct a biopic of George Floyd. Why? Because he’s black.” That could be very irritating, of course. But it could also be a dream project. “Well,” Everett considers the point. “It’s like you’re at the office and they say: ‘We need a black person.’ Why? ‘Well, we need diversity in this room, so would you come in here?’ That’s not why you want to be invited.”

In any case, he isn’t feeling proprietorial about American Fiction: “I view it as a different work,” he tells me, though I get the impression he’s making a statement of artistic fact, rather than attempting to distance himself from the production. “I appreciate it as a different work. In spirit it’s much like the novel, but being a film, it’s not as dark.” It could have been worse: he entirely disowned the TV movie of his second book, Walk Me to the Distance. “I never saw it. I read the script, and I didn’t like it. The changes that they made were so grotesque, there was no way to embrace that at all.”

Regardless, more Everett will be coming soon to a screen near you. In 2022 he published The Trees, a genre-busting comedy about lynching, if you can imagine such a thing – part police procedural, part zombie-horror, part solemn testament to the victims of racial murder. It has been optioned for a possible “limited series” and “people are working on it” but he can’t say any more. While not surprising (the novel was shortlisted for the Booker), it will be interesting to see how a big entertainment company deals with the taboo imagery and extensive gore – “Yeah, well that’s their problem!” he laughs.

His new novel, James, is at least as likely to pique the interest of producers – partly because it adapts a cornerstone of American culture, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. While I’m teasing him about his lack of interest in Hollywood glitz, I ask if there are any writers he would be starstruck by. “[All] dead,” he replies – but offers up Samuel Butler, Chester Himes and, of course, Mark Twain. What would they talk about in any ethereal meeting? “You know, I’ve thought about that,” he says. “I don’t know if we would say much. We’d probably just talk about the landscape or something. I’d just kind of like to hear what he sees.”

In the meantime, Everett has taken the initiative with Twain’s most famous text, which tells the story of 13-year-old Huck as he navigates the Mississippi River accompanied by an enslaved man, Jim. “It’s kind of a cliche to say how important it is to American letters. It’s the first time that a novel tried to deal with the very centre of the American psyche – and that is race.” There were protest novels about slavery before then, he says, but they were narrower, focused on the institution itself. “Huck Finn, picaresque adventures aside, is really about a young American, representing America, trying to navigate this landscape, and understand how someone – his friend, actually the only father figure in the book – is also property.”

“He’s got this moral conundrum: ‘He belongs to someone and I’m doing something illegal by helping him run, but he’s my friend and a person, and he shouldn’t be a slave.’ There’s nothing more American.” Whereas Twain’s focus is tightly on Huck’s moral universe, Everett tells the other half of the story, making Jim the narrator, restoring his full name, James, and turning him into an erudite intellectual. Characteristically, one of the major plot devices is linguistic. The hokey dialect that, in Twain, renders Jim rustic and unthreatening, is revealed as a feint – a survival mechanism that the slaves use to disguise their real capacities in front of white people. One evening, James sits down in his cabin to teach some of the enslaved children a language lesson. “White folks expect us to sound a certain way and it can only help if we don’t disappoint them,” he explains, the children chanting: “The better they feel, the safer we are.” He asks a little girl to translate, and is reassured when she produces a sentence in amped-up vernacular: “Da mo’ betta dey feels, da mo’ safer we be.”

Everett’s novels make abundant use of language games, conceits and disquisitions. Erasure contains a passage from Monk’s inpenetrable post-structuralist novel, and snippets of conversations between Wittgenstein and Derrida. This could be off-putting were it not for the fact that they’re often spliced with much more conventional, pacey writing, and many darkly hilarious moments – 2022’s Dr No, for example, mixes head-scratching maths with a lot of wild, Bond-inspired action. James, likewise, combines dreamed visitations from Voltaire and Locke with page-turning jeopardy. Is that kind of juxtaposition a tactic on Everett’s part, a way of licensing the intellectual gymnastics? “I don’t know if I think about it a lot. I think that any kind of intellectual understanding of the world is generated by a physical location in the world.” And by stuff happening? “Yes, by stuff happening.

20. A Countess from Hong Kong (1967)

A minor picture with curiosity value: Charlie Chaplin’s final film as a director, starring Brando and Sophia Loren, a comedy in the style of the Hollywood Golden Age, based on the tall tales of a real-life Russian singer and in fact originally conceived by Chaplin in the 30s for Paulette Goddard. Brando plays an American diplomat who is astonished to find that the Russian countess (Loren) he was charmed by in Hong Kong has stowed away in his cabin on the voyage home. Brando does his best and this method legend was sufficiently in awe of Chaplin to submit to his old-fashioned way of working: acting out for Brando the required line-readings and movements. (Oh, to have had fly-on-the-wall location footage of these moments.) Certainly, Brando would never again be so submissive with a director.

19. The Freshman (1990)

As The Godfather becomes ever more important in film history, so there may be a kind of gathering tacit consensus among cinephiles that this should be tactfully overlooked or just forgotten about: a film in which Brando risked devaluing his brand by actually spoofing the Vito Corleone persona. He plays shady New York businessman Carmine Sabatini, who astounds fresh-faced film student Matthew Broderick with his resemblance to the legendary Don Corleone, with Brando doing all the wheezing, grandfatherly, adenoidal mannerisms. Sabatini gives Broderick’s character a job as a delivery boy, which may be a subtle reference to Apocalypse Now. A sprightly, watchable movie.

18. Mutiny on the Bounty (1962)

This Technicolor seafaring spectacular had Brando aboard the HMS Bounty playing high-minded naval officer Fletcher Christian, who will no longer tolerate the arrogance and cruelty of Captain William Bligh, a role fiercely and theatrically dispatched by Trevor Howard. It is an intriguing faceoff, and a big Hollywood stage for Brando to grandstand. It is always interesting to hear Brando doing a stagey Britspeak accent, but this is a clenched and formal role for him.

17. Viva Zapata! (1952)

With Eli Kazan directing, John Steinbeck writing and Brando in the lead role, the ingredients should surely have been in place for something great, yet the film about the great Mexican revolutionary leader Emiliano Zapata falls a little short of that. It is something to do with the dodgy blackface Mexican makeup and the droopy moustache, which was considered unconvincing at the time and more objectionable as the years have gone by, especially as Brando was always such an outspoken campaigner for civil rights and anti-racism. Brando’s Zapata begins the action as a simple, wide-eyed peasant and quickly becomes a natural leader: the role showcases Brando’s gift for hauteur and rebellious contempt for authority.

16. The Missouri Breaks (1976)

Moviegoers were longing for a Marlon Brando/Jack Nicholson pairing; they finally got it in this revisionist 70s western from director Arthur Penn. If the result wasn’t quite the combustible mix they were expecting, perhaps it’s because there’s only room for one smouldering legend on screen at once, and Nicholson was reportedly intimidated by Brando. Nicholson is Tom Logan, a cattle rustler, and Brando is the coolly intimidating “regulator” or mercenary bandit, hired by a land baron to drive away rustlers or kill them. Perhaps the role itself meant that Brando was going to steal the scene, especially with his juicy Irish accent. But the movie doesn’t come properly to life.

15. The Men (1950)

Brando’s screen debut was in this robustly made, heartfelt and well-meant issue movie from screenwriter Carl Foreman and director Fred Zinnemann. Brando plays a US soldier severely injured in the second world war and confined to using a wheelchair, coming to terms with his situation in the Veterans Administration hospital and having painful scenes with his fiancee who is now frightened of him; he suspects she now wants out of the marriage and perhaps, in his angry and confused heart, he can’t blame her. The pure nobility and handsomeness of Brando’s face and head was perhaps never more clearly showcased than in this early picture, and it shows us a distinct part of Brando’s screen acting style; that sense of bottled-up anger against some restriction or injustice that he can’t or won’t clearly describe.

14. Burn! (1969)

A complicated, richly detailed role for Brando, directed by Gillo Pontecorvo (immediately after his Battle of Algiers) and a film to set alongside Viva Zapata! or Mutiny on the Bounty – only this time Brando is on the side of the rebels in the most duplicitous way. He plays Sir William Walker, a British adventurer and mercenary (in fact based on an American historical figure), tasked by the 19th-century British government with fomenting a slave uprising in a Portuguese colony in the Caribbean so that the resulting indigenous government will be a puppet state run by British commercial interests. Brando’s Walker is arrogant, cynical, worldly and cunning – another example of Brando’s stagey but serviceable British accent transforming his whole being from lithe American into haughty and very English-patrician-looking performer.

13. The Fugitive Kind (1960)

Brando’s association with Tennessee Williams in A Streetcar Named Desire has become legendary and it confers some interest in Brando’s later Williams film, in which he plays a familiar role in a steamy drama directed by Sidney Lumet, co-written by Williams adapting his play Orpheus Descending. Brando is the sexy, earthy, guitar-playing drifter Snakeskin who blows into a small town, evidently wanted by the cops back in New Orleans. Many of the drunk or bored women around the place are interested in Snakeskin, but he seems to have feelings for the unhappily married woman running the local store, played by no less a movie figure than Anna Magnani. She is someone he can open up to about his feelings and his inner life, and in this movie we see the plaintive, almost martyred Brando expression, his eyes repeatedly turned upwards as he speaks like a secular saint.

12. Sayonara (1957)

Self-conscious it may be, but this handsomely produced romantic drama of the postwar years, based on the chunky bestseller by James A Michener, deals earnestly and forthrightly with the subject of racism. Brando’s fighter pilot Ace, based in Japan, starts out with the usual bigoted attitudes, and entirely in agreement with the US army’s rules against interracial relationships. But then he falls deeply in love with elegant Japanese singer Hana-ogi, played by Japanese-American performer Miiko Taka. Today, the movie might be vulnerable to charges of orientalism and exoticism, but ittoughly sticks to its conviction that the union of a white American man and a Japanese woman can and will work out. The title means saying “goodbye” to racist attitudes.

11. Superman (1978) + Superman II: The Richard Donner Cut (2006)

Brando got a huge fee for a small cameo in the 1978 Superman movie starring Christopher Reeve, which laid the groundwork for superhero movies becoming the westerns of the 21st century – and perhaps also laid the groundwork for Brando’s own cynical and rather boorish disenchantment with movie-making generally. Certainly Reeve made no secret of his dismay and disillusion at Brando’s shrugging and negligent attitude. Brando played Superman’s snowy-haired father Jor-El on the doomed planet Krypton in both the first film and the sequel as directed by Richard Donner, but when Donner was fired from Superman II, which was almost entirely reshot by replacement Richard Lester, Brando’s excised contribution only surfaced when the Donner cut was released in 2006. Perhaps Brando would have raised his game if he had been cast as Lex Luthor, the part that went to Gene Hackman.

10. Apocalypse Now (1979)

This is the great Brando icon-cameo, the movie in which his small, incomparably potent contribution makes sense because of the fugitive legend nature of the part –rather like Orson Welles in The Third Man. He plays Col Kurtz, the brilliant and once exemplary US army officer who must be tracked down during the Vietnam war, having gone mad in the Cambodian jungle and established his own cult where he is worshipped as a pagan god. Brando’s head looms out of the darkness like an angry planet or a giant carved fetish; just his face, and those staring eyes, are enough to compel (and scare) the viewer. His scenes above ground, which surfaced with the newer director’s cuts successively licensed by Francis Ford Coppola, are, in their way, just as unsettling, and the breathy, semi-strangulated Brando voice is like a sinister message from the bowels of the earth.

9. The Chase (1966)

Brando got the above-the-title billing that might more properly belong to the young Robert Redford, who played the criminal who has just escaped from a Texas prison and is being chased by Brando’s sheriff. The latter is hoping to catch Redford’s desperado before he discovers his wife (Jane Fonda) is having an affair with the town’s wealthy businessman, who has the lawmen in his pocket. Brando has the smaller role and is, at this stage of his career, heavier set and slower moving, beginning to concede the star roles to a younger generation. But he still has that power and sleekness to his bearing.

8. Last Tango in Paris (1972)

No film of Brando’s has become discredited more than this drama of death, grief and obsessive sex. Brando is stricken widower Paul, whose wife might have taken her own life (or been driven to it by Paul); he tries to cauterise his spiritual agony with regular, brutally anonymous and explicit sex with hippy-chick Jeanne, played by Maria Schneider. Her air of vulnerability is very disquieting since the revelation in 2013 that Brando and director Bernardo Bertolucci planned the improvised “butter” scene without telling Schneider and she therefore felt in effect raped. Perhaps there is no way of seeing past this, but Brando’s performance has that ruined leonine hauteur, a vast disgust and self-disgust – and there is inspiration in his final Cagneyesque top-of-the-world moment in Maria’s apartment in which he does his florid Briton accent. This is a movie experience about nausea; more nausea than its creators realised.

7. Julius Caesar (1953)

Mark Antony was a part that Brando was born to play: his extraordinary profile could appear on a Roman coin or statue. It was a film reportedly inspired by the success of Olivier’s Henry V and here, fascinatingly, Brando portrays the role with the absolute assurance and distinction of someone who has had classical training, a great relief to those who worried that he could only perform in mumbling method-speak. How fascinating would it have been to see Brando play Coriolanus, or Leontes, or Lear; he might well have been the American Olivier, although here I have to say that his English-Bardspeak accent is in misplaced good taste. (And maybe The Godfather was his Shakespearean career-climax.) Director Joseph L Mankiewicz and producer John Houseman should have encouraged him to speak in his normal American accent.

6. The Wild One (1953)

A decade before the counterculture got into full swing, this outlaw biker movie – in effect banned in the UK until 1967 – gave us a hint of the forthcoming speed-thrills of rebellion, starring Brando as leather-clad Johnny, leader of the Black Rebels Motorcycle Club. (In fact, motorbike lawlessness had been in evidence in the US since the end of the war.) “Hey Johnny, what are you rebelling against?” a young woman asks. “What’ve you got?” Brando famously replies – incidentally reviving the memory of Groucho Marx’s song I’m Against It in Horse Feathers. Johnny is against the older generation, against the idea of marriage and getting a job, against everything and nothing. Brando’s sheer physical heft and presence lend a kind of meaning and purpose to his outlaw vocation.

5. One-Eyed Jacks (1961)

This stark and mesmeric revenge western, co-written by Sam Peckinpah, which Brando co-produced and wound up directing himself, is his sole directing credit, having originally hired Stanley Kubrick. He plays Rio, the bank robber who works with (older) partner, “Dad” Longworth, played by Karl Malden. After one lucrative job in Mexico, the two-faced Dad leaves Rio to be captured by the cops and Rio does five years in prison. On release, Rio fanatically tracks Dad down to discover his former comrade has now reinvented himself as a respectable lawman and sheriff; things are complicated further when Rio falls for Dad’s stepdaughter Louisa (Pina Pellicer). There is something Freudian in his conflicted need to kill, or not kill, “Dad”.

4. Guys and Dolls (1955)

Brando was never thought of as a musical star before or after Guys and Dolls, which feels like an outlier – and yet Brando gives a glorious performance as inveterate gambler and romantic Sky Masterson who falls in love with Jean Simmons’s Salvation Army stalwart Sarah Brown. Brando sings his own numbers without dubbing and his version of Luck Be a Lady, although clearly not the work of a Broadway pro, is still an absolute showstopper. Brando reportedly had a chilly on-set relationship with Frank Sinatra, who played Nathan Detroit – something that continued to rankle with Sinatra when he saw the Johnny Fontaine character in The Godfather 17 years later, and realised who it was supposed to be.

3. A Streetcar Named Desire (1951)

Kazan was a passionate, intuitive director of actors and Brando did some of his very best work for him – and in Tennessee Williams’s famous drama Brando truly detonates his sexuality and rage. He plays Stanley, the sullen, moody, swaggering and often shirtless husband of Kim Hunter’s Stella living in a tough part of New Orleans. Stella’s highly strung, refined sister Blanche (played by Vivien Leigh ) comes to stay, and from the very first, she ignites a deeply ambiguous mix of desire, wariness and class-based resentment in Stanley. It is a toxic chemistry. Does Stanley want to go to bed with her? Does he want to punish Blanche for apparently squandering her parents’ money to which, as brother-in-law, he considers himself partly entitled? Is Blanche a projection of Williams himself, tauntingly seeing and provoking the mixed-up feelings in so many young men? Brando instinctively and sensually embodies all of this; it is a role that unlocked so much of his acting genius.

2. On the Waterfront (1954)

This was the movie that most fully allowed Brando to be a tragic hero and a figure who directly engages with contemporary America. In a tale ripped from the headlines, he is Terry Molloy, an ex-boxer turned dockyard worker, demeaningly running errands for the corrupt union mob boss and beginning to go to seed, nursing a muddled and self-destructive rage. He could have been a contender, but his brother Charley (Rod Steiger) persuaded him to throw a key fight to enrich this same mob boss and his career was never the same again. Now Terry is convulsed with shame for having connived at the murder of a longshoreman who was going to testify about corrupt practices, and he falls in love with the dead man’s sister, played by Eva Marie Saint. Brando conveyed all the inarticulate pain, aimless uncertainty and dissatisfaction with the world; he is a tough guy with a gallant streak and the soul of a poet.

1. The Godfather (1972)

Apart from everything else, Brando’s sensational starring role in Francis Ford Coppola’s Shakespearean mob drama was an amazing comeback. Just when everyone thought that Brando was on the slide, he returned suddenly as an obviously older man, but with a power and reach even greater than that of the lithe and potent performances of his youth. All of his mannerisms, the faintly adenoidal speaking voice, the muscular assertion, the almost ethereally inarticulate expression of pain; they had now a new maturity and poignancy. His Vito Corleone, presiding over a powerful crime family in postwar America, is fearful of losing his power, and unsure which of the younger generation will carry on the flame. His presence at the wedding scene, receiving petitioners in his darkened study surrounded by consiglieri, is unforgettable, as his later speech, telling the other capi at the peace summit what he will and will not forgive even as his own authority is ebbing away. This was Brando’s claim to movie immortality.

On the Waterfront is in UK cinemas from 5 April

A remake of 1980s divorce comedy The War of the Roses is to go ahead with Olivia Colman and Benedict Cumberbatch in the lead roles.

In an announcement reported by Deadline, studio Searchlight Pictures said that Colman and Cumberbatch would appear in a new version of the story directed by Austin Powers’ Jay Roach and written by Poor Things’ Tony McNamara. Searchlight president Matthew Greenfield said: “The Roses is a wildly funny, bigger than life, and yet deeply human story … With Jay at the helm, and Benedict and Olivia and Tony, we have a dream team bringing it to life.”

The original film version of The Wars of the Roses was released in 1989, and starred Michael Douglas and Kathleen Turner as an apparently well-matched couple whose marriage breakdown turns into an epic battle of wills over the divorce settlement. It was directed by Danny DeVito, who also appeared in the film as a lawyer.

The current project, which has been in development since 2017, is reportedly a “reimagining” of the source novel by the late Warren Adler, published in 1981. Production companies associated with both lead actors are involved: Cumberbatch’s SunnyMarch, which is also credited on The End We Start From, The Courier, The Electrical Life of Louis Wain, and Colman’s South of the River (Wicked Little Lies). Adler’s sons Jonathan and Michael are also credited, as part of a deal between Searchlight and Adler’s estate.

Eddie Marsan, 55, is an actor it is impossible not to like – although he has taken care in his versatile career (he has been in more than 70 films and counting) not always to be typecast as the twinkling, approachable East Ender you meet in person. He is one of our top character actors, with roles including the irresistibly bonkers driving instructor in Mike Leigh’s Happy-Go-Lucky and a seven-year stint as Terry in Ray Donovan. Next month he stars as John Adams, opposite Michael Douglas, in the new Apple TV+ series Franklin, about Benjamin Franklin’s mission in France to secure American independence, and Mitch Winehouse, Amy’s dad, in Sam Taylor-Johnson’s new film Back to Black.

What sort of a man is Mitch? He came out pretty badly from the documentary Amy (2015).
He is a father and that’s how I played him. A friend of mine worked with Amy in the music industry and knew him. I said to him: what do you think about Mitch? He said: I liked the man. He saw him as a loving father who had a daughter who was an addict and who was at the same time the most famous woman in the world. He was just a cab driver trying to do his best, trying to deal with it. I’d never have done this film if it sanitised – or demonised – Mitch. It’s not even the way I approach life. Life is more complex than that.

You’ve said that talent involves being able to ask the right questions. What did you want to know about Mitch when you met him?
I wanted to know what steps the family took to deal with an impossible situation. The truth is they had nine interventions – and that isn’t documented. Nine times they tried to get her sectioned or put into rehab, and I was fascinated by that. They were just a normal north London family, so how did they deal with Amy’s fame? How do you navigate that – who wouldn’t be a little bit seduced?

As a father yourself, how difficult do you find it to strike a balance between being protective and encouraging independence?
I have four teenage children and every time they go out the door, I worry: are they going to be all right? You feel pride, love, fear, frustration… Parents who improvise are probably the best. Whenever you get anybody who tells you they have all the answers, it’s just not true.

Sometimes the most consoling thing is when people admit there isn’t a solution…
That’s right. Sometimes there isn’t. That’s why the narrative about Mitch being the cause of Amy’s demise has taken hold. When someone as young as Amy dies, the trauma is so bad we want to find someone to blame. But the world is chaotic and addiction is as much genetic as it is about nurture. My interpretation of Mitch is that he loves her, is proud of her and is heartbroken.

What was your father like and do you resemble him?
I don’t resemble him at all – and that’s all I am going to say about it.

What did he do?
He was a lorry driver.

What were you like as a teenager?
I wasn’t in a very good place. I left school at 15. I worked as an apprentice printer and in a menswear store, for a bookmaker called Mr Bennett. I used to dance and was asked, with my mate Emmanuel, to be an extra in a film. Emmanuel is like my older brother. I saw Jamie Foreman do a scene and thought: that’s what I want to be. Mr Bennett said if I got into drama school, he’d pay for me. And Emmanuel became a model. He was better looking than me: 6ft 4in and gorgeous – a mixture between Sidney Poitier and Harry Belafonte.

You’re often cast in Jewish roles, though you’re not Jewish. Should anyone be allowed to act anyone?
A Jewish actor should be able to play non-Jewish roles and a non-Jewish actor should be able to play Jewish roles. A gay actor should be able to play straight roles and a straight actor should be able to play gay roles… You need to categorise people to measure and address inequality. But the problem is if you then confine people in categories, you take away acting opportunity.

You live in Chiswick nowadays. What was Bethnal Green like growing up?
Mitch told me that Amy used to ask him to take her in the black cab back to the East End. He comes from Stepney – I was born there too. She wanted to hear all his stories about growing up there. On a personal level, the reason I love going back to the East End is because of the people I see there – they all loved me before I became famous and that means so much to me. I’m patron of the charity Streets of Growth, in Tower Hamlets, which helps kids to avoid bullying, drug gangs, knife gangs… I was at Pellicci’s only a couple of days ago – my mate’s caff on Bethnal Green Road – and we had a great time.

You bring to your role as John Adams in Franklin a wonderfully undeceived quality. What was it like playing opposite Michael Douglas?
John Adams is a Bostonian lawyer – I enjoyed his articulacy. He embodies the puritanical part of the American psyche, Franklin embodies the libertarian – they’re an odd couple. Once I am in character, I try to stay in character, but each time I did a scene with Michael I’d go to myself: “F-me, it’s Michael Douglas” – I couldn’t help it.

What did you learn working with Mike Leigh?
When you work with Mike, you know you can only be authentic – you don’t show off.

To what extent has your distinctive face been your fortune?
My face represents the other. If you had a video game, you wouldn’t choose my face as your avatar!

What part would you like that is least likely to come your way?
When I was growing up in the East End, there was a wonderful acceptance of different sexualities and some very tough gay men. To play someone like that would fascinate me – to play masculinity with a gay edge.