Category: cinema

Film star Anne Hathaway reportedly walked out of a photoshoot in New York on Tuesday for Vanity Fair in a show of solidarity with striking workers for the magazine’s publisher, Condé Nast.

The actor had been prepared with makeup and hair styling but had not begun posing for pictures when word reached her that media workers were taking part in a 24-hour work stoppage amid union-corporation negotiations, Variety magazine was first to report on Tuesday.

About 400 workers who are union members at Condé Nast and working for titles including Vanity Fair, Vogue, GQ and others had downed pens in a protest at the way the publisher is negotiating over layoffs.

Hathaway was on the premises for a photoshoot on Tuesday morning.

“They hadn’t even started taking photos yet,” Variety magazine reported an unnamed source telling the outlet, adding: “Once Anne was made aware of what was going on, she just got up from hair and makeup and left.”

The Guardian has reached out to Condé Nast and representatives of Hathaway for comment.

Workers walked off the job in the morning around the time the Oscar nominations were announced, Variety further reported, and held a rally outside the company’s offices in Manhattan.

The union posted on X, formerly Twitter, saying: “Thank you Anne Hathaway for not crossing our picket line.”

Stories of estranged family members finding their way back to each other have long been a reliable Sundance staple, a stacked subgenre in itself and one that can grow a little wearying as a result. Artist-turned-film-maker Titus Kaphar’s debut Exhibiting Forgiveness, showing in the main dramatic competition here, may not exactly revolutionise the form but he finds an authentic and sensitive way through, distinguishing his film from the flurry of other superficially similar stories.

It’s art as therapy for Kaphar, grappling with a strained relationship with his own father, based on a recorded conversation they once had after 15 years of no contact. Working through one’s own strife as a form of autofiction can often lead to self-indulgence but Kaphar has crafted something that deserves to exist outside of his inner circle, an emotionally wrenching drama set to resonate with those who have also had to confront the complicated equation of radical forgiveness.

How much is too much to take and when does carrying so much resentment start to hurt you more? They’re questions that have been buried by painter Tarrell (André Holland), with a sleekly curated life far from his conflicted upbringing, the light of his devoted mother (Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor) muddied by the dark of his abusive father La’Ron (theatre actor John Earl Jelks). But there’s something eating away at him, night terrors that won’t go away, and when he travels home with his wife (a radiant Andra Day) and young son to help his mother move house, the re-emergence of his father causes a difficult reckoning.

There are troubling questions that Kaphar refuses to provide pat answers for, how one comes to terms with the good things a bad parent might be partly responsible for and how you learn to silence the worst parts of them echoing in your head, if that’s ever truly possible. Flashbacks are admirably limited, mostly focused on one day where we see La’Ron cruelly instill a sense of extreme work ethic in a young Tarrell, a layer of steel he insists is vital in a world that will demand it. How much does Tarrell then credit the strength of his meteoric career to him? How much of that hardness can be justified by the upbringing his father received as a child? Kaphar allows difficult moments to linger as Tarrell voices his anxieties, worrying that he’ll never be able to find his way through this arduous emotional maze. There’s also an effectively angry throughline about the hypocrisy of religion, Tarrell fatigued at how it’s shamelessly used to imply goodness when behaviour suggests otherwise.

Holland wears all of this turbulence in his face, a rage forever simmering, rage that he knows has come directly from his father, a darker part of himself that he’s far quicker in crediting. He’s dynamite here, the kind of dream in-every-scene showcase he’s never really been allowed on screen before, and there are enough electrifying moments, battling with his mother over her maddening enduring love for his father and a final explosion of emotion, to push Holland into both next year’s Oscar race and into a newer, long-deserved category of more prestigious leading roles. As his parents, Ellis-Taylor and Jelks are both superb, intimate arguments with them acted with such rawness, it feels like we’re watching them on stage.

As a first-time director with a background in visual art, Kaphar makes for a refreshingly restrained film-maker, keeping visual gimmicky at bay and involving his real paintings only when the film requires. He understands the importance of using one’s art as a way to untangle the knots of a troubled upbringing but avoids any form of pretentious overstatement. The work speaks for itself without him speaking for it. As writer, Kaphar makes a few more missteps along the way, a slight overstack of melodrama near the end, some rather crudely cartoonish art world stereotypes and some lines that are a tad ungainly (“Some things can’t be worked out on a canvas” – groan). These broad strokes only act as temporary distraction with a heart-grabbing finale that brings together all emotional threads while denying us the cliched hugged out happy ending we’ve learned to expect. Kaphar knows that forgiveness is harder than that and his film refuses to make things easy.

Crazy was most famously sung by Patsy Cline but written by Willie Nelson. I Will Always Love You was most famously sung by Whitney Houston but written by Dolly Parton. Ring of Fire, a love song reeking of sulphur and damnation, took off when Johnny Cash sang it on his 1963 album Ring of Fire: The Best of Johnny Cash.

But it was written by his wife, June Carter Cash, a singer, songwriter, musician, actor and author who spent much of her career in his shadow. “I feel aggrieved on her behalf,” says Kristen Vaurio, 46, director of a new documentary, June, which shines a light on one of music’s hidden figures.

“There are a lot of people who are like, oh no, she couldn’t have written that. This is a hard sell in Nashville but I feel like it’s the most recognisable country song there is in the world. I think because she was a woman, people didn’t want to let her have it.”

Vaurio’s film contains previously unseen archival material and interviews with family and friends as well as Willie Nelson, Dolly Parton, Emmylou Harris, Kacey Musgraves and Reese Witherspoon (who won an Oscar for her role as Carter Cash in the 2005 film Walk the Line). It offers a reassessment of the legacy of a woman who received less recognition as a pioneer than Loretta Lynn and Tammy Wynette and still does not have a place in the Country Music Hall of Fame.

June Carter was born in Maces Spring, Virginia, in 1929, and was at the microphone by the age of 10. Her mother, Maybelle Carter, had a family music act with her cousin Sara Carter and Sara’s husband, AP Carter. They made some of the first country music recordings.

Speaking from Los Angeles, Vaurio says: “She came from Poor Valley at the base of Clinch Mountain, Maces Spring, and that place was always a very spiritual home for her. She spent so much of her life on the road, but having that place as home and those songs that she sang, and those Carter family songs, are very much rooted in that place.”

The family act broke up but mother and daughters June, Helen and Anita continued as Mother Maybelle & the Carter Sisters, with June playing autoharp and singing comic numbers with an exaggerated hillbilly accent and a wide toothy grin. From 1939 the sisters starred in a radio show on XERA in Del Rio, Texas, that reached far across America and Canada. They went on to become staples of the Grand Ole Opry country music show in Nashville.

Vaurio continues: “She came from – still to this day – a family of remarkable women. I don’t think that there’s another group of women like that – geniuses, business geniuses – and they just did it. Even though it was hard, they made it work.”

June’s effort to have a solo career ran into attitudes of the day in which a woman in a travelling show was referred to as a “girl singer”. Vaurio adds: “They also weren’t wanting to sign women to recording contracts because they didn’t think that women would sell. She was fighting against that.

“Everybody exists in their time and place and that was the time and place that she was in. She was in Nashville and trying to make it on her own in the 50s. She probably wouldn’t have called herself a feminist but she lived it.”

June and country singer Carl Smith became the “it” couple of their day at the Grand Ole Opry. But their marriage ended in divorce just four years later – a scandal at that time. Their daughter, Carlene Carter, recalls in the film that Smith claimed years later June never loved him, only the idea of him.

Carlene, one of the executive producers of the new documentary, says in a Zoom interview from Nashville: “I was so small when they split up, I have very few memories of them even hanging out in the same room together. Not that they didn’t like each other.

“There was a lot of hurt there for mom for a lot of years but she never talk bad about my daddy. They had a chemistry that was undeniable in their working career and they fit well in that regard. He wanted a different life than she did. He always said country music afforded him the luxury to be what he wanted to be, which was a cowboy.”

The Carters toured with Elvis Presley in the 1950s. Carlene, 68, often asked her mother whether she slept with Elvis but June would blush, giggle and deny it. “She always said Elvis was a nice young man and he had a good heart and she said he was so talented and was tormented – the usual thing that superstars end up having, that drives them in some way.

“But they were great friends. and he wasn’t past coming to our house when I was a baby and wanting a sandwich and nobody would be in there except the nanny and me, and we’d be asleep, and Elvis would be downstairs making a sandwich – probably peanut butter and bacon.”

June moved to New York in the late 1950s to study acting at the suggestion of the director Elia Kazan, who had seen her perform while scouting Tennessee for film locations. She married Edwin “Rip” Nix, a former football player and police officer, in 1957. They had a daughter, Rosie Nix Adams, but divorced in 1966.

In 1961 the Carters went on the road with Johnny Cash. Helen and Anita stepped away to raise families but June stayed on. When Cash spiralled into a drug addition and onstage outbursts, June intervened, hunting down his pills and throwing them away. She helped him find counselling and urged her daughters to pray for him.

In his autobiography, Cash described how June stuck with him through years of substance abuse. He wrote: “June said she knew me – knew the kernel of me, deep inside, beneath the drugs and deceit and despair and anger and selfishness, and knew my loneliness. She said she could help me ... If she found my pills, she flushed them down the toilet. And find them she did; she searched for them, relentlessly.”

June wrote Ring of Fire about falling in love with Cash despite his self-destructive behaviour. Carlene witnessed its creation. “I can remember when she was working on that song and then she played it with the autoharp and then tried the guitar,” she recalls.

“She made intricate notes about stuff and she ended up having a party one day with some friends and [singer and songwriter] Merle Kilgore was there, and he had been encouraging her with the song. She played it to him and he helped spur her along with it a little bit. But she wrote it and I remember running through the house and going to all Mom’s friends, ‘My momma’s written a new song!’ But we didn’t know it was a hit yet. We just thought it was going to be a hit.”

Cash recorded the song, officially credited to June and Kilgore, and it topped the US country chart in 1963. Carlene, herself a country singer and songwriter, comments: “Maybe people just look down their nose at her. ‘A woman can’t write a song like that.’ Well, wanna bet? Heartbreak Hotel – Mae Boren Axton, she sure did. There’s a lot of great women songwriters and Maybelle and Sara and the Carters, writing songs was the absolute foundation of the music of all of it for them.

“The big piece of advice that Mommy gave me was that there are no rules. You’ll know it’s a good one when you get it. ‘If you can just write one simple little song like the one I did for Johnny Cash, Ring of Fire” – she bursts into laughter – “I know she probably had her tongue in her cheek a little bit when she’s saying that to me.

“But she was dead serious, she’d look me right in the eye and tell me things like that, and I listened to her. She also was my biggest fan. She followed me all over the place and was always lifting me up and telling everybody about me. She was proud of her kids and proud that we were going to carry on in whatever way we did. That was important to them to carry on the music.”

In 1961 June turned down an offer to work on a variety show, agreeing instead to tour with Cash for $500 a week. Having both divorced in 1966, they got married two years later after he proposed to her on stage in London, Ontario, Canada. They had a son, John Carter Cash, in 1970.

Carlene says: “June was John’s absolute thing ever on the planet. She’d walk in a room and he would light up. He missed her; he called me and said, ‘Where are you and your momma at?’ I’d say, ‘Oh, we’re in shopping’ and he’d be like, ‘When’s she coming home? I just want to see June Carter.’

“It was very sweet and they were very much in love and my sister and I got to see what that looked like, for my mom to actually be in love with somebody that adored her and that she adored, and they had great mutual respect for each other. Everybody knows it was not easy all the time – definitely not – but for us girls, and for my little brother when he came along, we saw it on a daily basis between them. There were a few hiccups but that’s normal.”

June performed with Cash on record and on stage with songs including Jackson and If I Were a Carpenter, which won Grammy awards in 1967 and 1970, respectively. Among their duets were It Ain’t Me Babe in 1964 and If I Had a Hammer in 1972. In later years they often appeared with the evangelist Billy Graham. Cash’s addiction demons resurfaced, putting strains on the marriage until he went into rehab.

June’s occasional acting roles included the part of Robert Duvall’s mother in the 1997 film The Apostle. In 1999 she released an acoustic album, Press On, her first in a quarter-century, following her career from its beginning through her then 31-year marriage and collaboration with Cash. Archival footage of the making of Press On forms the spine of the Paramount+ documentary.

Carlene recalls: “One of the hardest things for June in the end was that she had never not been on the road. She had always been an entertainer and done it so the fact that she came back and made a record and went out and played some shows and got recognition and won a couple of Grammys in her 70s is hope for all of us women. I was so proud of her.”

When June died in 2003, of complications from heart surgery at the age of 73 with Cash at her bedside, obituaries produced by the Associated Press, Guardian, New York Times and others all mentioned her more famous husband in the first paragraph. But Vaurio hopes her film will disrupt that narrative.

She says: “I want nobody to ever say June Carter Cash and then say who, Johnny’s wife? I want her to be known as her own artist. She went out burning and that to me is such an inspiration and that’s a great lesson that anybody can take from this.”

Carlene adds she hopes the documentary will convey “the absolute total awesomeness of my mother, the whole package, flaws and diamonds. All of it is just so interesting and never dull moment, y’all.”

I was a funny little girl with lots of little girlfriends. A friend of mine said I always had the best shoes. She had to wear orthopaedic shoes – she had weak ankles. I wore red patent-leather Mary Janes. My mother was very stylish. I suppose that sense of style was in me, too.

I was a bit of a rebel, but I never got caught. I didn’t get up to anything really naughty – I just wanted people to have fun. I did once get up on stage at 17 and start singing with a band. I thought I was pretty good. Nobody else did.

I ran away from college and arrived in New York at 19, and I felt a lot of pressure to make it. I got paid $50 for my first published piece and modelled in punk fashion shows for the free clothes. I used to say to people, “I’m a writer. Do you need a writer?” I was determined. Aged 20 I got paid $1,000 to write a children’s book and thought I was rich.

I saw people doing drugs and women dancing topless in Studio 54, but I wasn’t down in the basement with Mick Jagger. That’s probably because I’m from a nice family in Connecticut. I was more of an observer.

Sex and the City didn’t change my life. It was an evolution. I was two years into the show, working in the writers’ room, having just written my second book, Four Blondes, when I got a million-dollar contract. That was what changed my life. TV didn’t make me successful. It was writing the novels.

Before the show took its own direction, Carrie Bradshaw was pretty close to Candace Bushnell. The character really was my alter ego. There are a lot of things in the show that happened to me in real life. Some of them were better in my life. Some of them were worse.

Sex and the City struck a chord because it’s about women taking charge. In the 80s, women were going to do and have it all. By the 90s, a lot of those women had careers and money, but they still hadn’t found a guy. What I realised was that when you take the “I need to depend on a man for my finances” out of the equation, women’s sex lives start to look very different. There’s more control, more freedom and more partners.

I got married very quickly [to ballet dancer Charles Askegard]. We married three months after we met and were together for 10 years. The day we signed the divorce papers was the last time I saw him until I ran into him in the street three years ago. We talked and laughed a little, but I’ve never seen him again.

I got divorced 11 years ago. The editor in chief of the New York Observer described the feeling of divorce best to me. He said, “You walk around feeling like you’re full of broken glass.” It’s a terrible experience.

I dated a 21-year-old and a 91-year-old in the same week. I go out with guys of all different ages. I’m not having sex with these people, but I do like going to dinner with them. Younger guys ask a lot of questions; the older men only talk about themselves.

When it comes to sex there’s no such thing as a free lunch. Another lesson is that you can’t rely on a relationship for your happiness or a roof over your head.

I have no idea what the future holds. What defines that is how healthy I end up being. People have very different trajectories when they’re in their 60s. Some people end up with cancer and that’s it. But I have friends with mothers well into their 90s. You just don’t know.

Candace Bushnell: True Tales of Sex, Success and Sex and the City premieres at the London Palladium on 7 February, visit candacebushnell.entertainers.co.uk

If you’re not in the market for what David Ayer is forcefully selling in batty January thriller The Beekeeper at the point when someone says to the titular character, “To bee or not to bee, that is the bloody question,” then you might as well just give up and walk out. By this stage, late in the film, Ayer and screenwriter Kurt Wimmer have given us just about enough bee puns, bone cracks and bizarre cameos from British actors to give those in the right headspace (read: drunk) a solid, low-stakes, medium-reward new year’s effort. I can’t imagine a devoted Beekeeper hive emerging any time soon (it’s far too derivative and far too rough around the edges), but there’s enough energy and well-pitched silliness to have audiences, ahem, swarming to cinemas this weekend.

It’s primed as Jason Statham’s John Wick (not that the actor needs another franchise since out of his last 10 movies, only two were not part of a series) and its desperation to be so can often be distracting, but in a crowded landscape of equally desperate imitators, it makes a more persuasive case than most. Statham knows exactly what to do here, more than most would, and has figured out just how seriously, or not, to take such material. During the cold open, you’d be forgiven for thinking that this was going to be more serious than most. He plays a withdrawn beekeeper working on land owned by a retired teacher, played by the luminous and wasted Phylicia Rashad. In a surprisingly wrenching set-up, she gets hoodwinked by a crooked call centre into allowing access to her accounts, leading to automatic bankruptcy and a self-inflicted bullet through the head. Statham is spurred into tackling the system that preyed on her and so a mission begins.

It’s an effectively involving motivator, although Ayer rushes through it so fast that one can sense his boredom shooting a scene without shooting (a shame as more of Rashad and her relationship with Statham wouldn’t have gone amiss). It introduces her FBI agent daughter (a wildly unconvincing Emmy Raver-Lampman) and allows for the start of some hilariously rubbish dialogue delivered with a very grave face (“Taking from an elderly person is as bad as stealing from a child ... maybe worse!”) as well as many, often confusing, lines involving bees (“When someone hurts an older person, sometimes they’re left to face the hornets alone!”). In screenwriter Kurt Wimmer’s world, a beekeeper isn’t just a beekeeper but is also a trained assassin, part of a hive protecting the queen bee, which means that the FBI agents on his trail are forced to, you know, read books on beekeeping to get to the bottom of this.

Like most of these films, it’s then structured like a video game all the way to the Big Bad Boss. Given that it was set in the US but filmed in the UK, these road stops involve an underused Minnie Driver, a snarling Jeremy Irons and a dead-behind-the-eyes Jemma Redgrave, none of them having anywhere near as much fun as Josh Hutcherson’s obnoxious nepo baby tech bro. Bizarrely and ambitiously, the Beekeeper finds that the honey leads all the way to the White House and Wimmer aims to vaguely make some sort of commentary about the fine line between the evils of politics and the evils of big business. But then not really, he’s not taking any of this all that seriously, proven in a finale that’s all action and little talk (an ebulliently gory hallway fight scene is a real blast) and an end-note that clumsily leaves things open for more.

Statham is ever the pro (one wonders if he’s had enough training at this stage to make a dangerously good assassin for real), but it’s all more of the same. His two non-franchise films of late showed how great he can be when afforded both a little more lightness (Operation Fortune) and a lot more darkness (Wrath of Man), and it would be satisfying to see him try something just a little out of the ordinary next. He works well with Ayer, who himself works better on a smaller, gnarlier scale, allowed more freedom to get nasty (his Suicide Squad remains a great-looking, what-if disaster). There’s a grubby, late-night appeal to his dialled-up trash aesthetic and The Beekeeper mostly works because of it. Bee prepared for a sequel.