Category: cinema

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Never say Jude Law doesn’t throw himself into a role. To better inhabit late-stage Henry VIII, he of the rolls of fat, rotting leg and questionable dentistry, Law commissioned a special perfume he’d douse himself in during shooting for new film Firebrand. Its ingredients? An “extraordinary variety of blood, faecal matter and sweat”.

We have questions about this – no doubt you will, too. Perhaps you might like to quiz Law further on the Tudor monarchy or England’s move from Catholicism to the Church of England (with, maybe, a side reference to his role in The Young Pope). In his review of Firebrand, our own Peter Bradshaw writes that “we at one stage get a full-on shot of His Majesty’s pale, fleshy bum as he has conjugal relations with Catherine – like the giant, shaved arse of a sheep. Did Law use a buttock double for this stomach-turning image?” Food for thought there.

Not that the rest of Law’s career isn’t ripe for discussion. He broke through as a golden Lord Alfred “Bosie” Douglas, opposite Stephen Fry in Wilde (1997), before a mesmeric turn as Dickie Greenleaf in Anthony Minghella’s The Talented Mr Ripley (1999).

He’s also been Dr Watson (opposite Robert Downey Jr), Dumbledore (in Fantastic Beasts), twice played roles made famous by Michael Caine (in remakes of Alfie and Sleuth, the latter opposite the great man himself).

He was a charming beau wooing Cameron Diaz in The Holiday, Yon-Rogg in Captain Marvel, a conspiracy theorist in Covid-prescient Contagion, the doomed dad in Scorsese’s Hugo, a dastardly double agent in Spy and the young author in The Grand Budapest Hotel.

On stage, he’s done Hamlet, Joseph, Dr Faustus and Henry V. And Star Wars fans will already know that he’s set to star in the latest Star Wars spin-off Skeleton Crew – out for Christmas – he likely won’t talk about that at all, but you can always try.

What else is there to know? Apparently he is named after the Beatles song, turned down the chance to play Superman, was rumoured to be in the running for Bond, features on a Radiohead album and supports Spurs.

We’re chatting to Law next Monday and will print his answers in Film & Music next Friday 13 September, so please post your questions in the comments below by 6pm on Sunday 8 September.

Here’s a dreamy, quirky, well-acted but weirdly misjudged movie that I couldn’t make friends with. It is a romance in a New Wave style, with the British-French film-maker Jethro Massey making his feature debut as writer-director in the Venice critics’ week section. The Paul and Paulette of the title hang out in Paris, have sex and conversations in a way that perhaps conjures sense-memories of Jacques Rivette. Paul, played by Jérémie Galiana, is a young American in Paris, yearning to be a photographer, but forced to take a dull job in a real estate office; here he finds himself having an affair with his demanding female boss, nicknamed “Goebbels”, one of the film’s many baffling and tonally calamitous Nazi gags.

In the Place de la Concorde, formerly the Place de la Révolution, Paul is enraptured by the sight of Paulette (Marie Benati), an elegant, beautiful and stylish young French woman who is kneeling down in a trance, fervently imagining what it was like to be Marie Antoinette on the point of execution. He takes her picture, they get talking – amusingly, she asks him to cut her hair then and there, just like Marie Antoinette before the guillotine. They have a friendship with a sensual element: they talk about their current romances and Paulette tells him about her preoccupation with Marilyn Monroe and Elvis Presley (pretty cliched fan crushes these, surely, and sadly the film has nothing very new or interesting to say on the subjects). Finally, Paul and Paulette go and see her parents in Salzburg where her dad rather shrewdly says that the similarity of their names makes them sound like siblings – and perhaps in a way that is what they are.

So far, so diverting. Yet the film leaves a strange taste in the mouth with the bath they’re taking in the title. It happens in Munich, in an apartment that Paul has rented for them using his real-estate contacts; it is an apartment that he imagines or pretends or has been told is where Adolf Hitler lived as a young man. There have been a few more Hitler conversations in the film before this and Paul and Paulette playfully call each other “Eva” and “Adolf” in the bath.

The truth about this flat is clarified later (and the tiniest bit of Googling would have revealed that of course Hitler’s flat is not available for Airbnb-type short-term lets). But why did Paul think this was an adorably romantic or impetuous thing to pretend? It’s such a silly and wince-inducing wrong move for this film to take, and it undermines all the other factually real interludes, such as Paul and Paulette’s visit to the site of the 19th-century “human zoo” in the Bois de Vincennes, an odious colonial exhibition of subject peoples.

And as if the Hitler apartment scenes weren’t sufficiently jarring, Paul winds up in a desolate mood implausibly renting a flat supposedly occupied by one of the Bataclan killers, another very peculiar false note. A shame, because there is obvious talent at work here on both sides of the camera.

Name: George Smiley.

Age: It was once observed that Smiley is “one of those ashen Englishmen, like the poet Philip Larkin, who seem to be permanently 60 years old”.

Appearance: Small, podgy, balding, glasses – often compared to a toad or a mole.

Occupation: British intelligence officer, working for “The Circus”.

MI6, in other words, and a spy. Correct, on both counts.

John le Carré, right? Right. The character, a sort of anti-Bond, was introduced in the author’s first novel, Call for the Dead, published in 1961. He went on to be the central character in Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, The Honourable Schoolboy and Smiley’s People, as well as appearing in other novels including The Spy Came Who Came in from the Cold. Oh, and he’s in the new novel, Karla’s Choice.

Excuse me? Er, didn’t David Cornwell (le Carré’s real name) die in 2020? He did, but his character lives on, in the hands of JLC’s son Nicholas Cornwell, who writes as Nick Harkaway and who has written a new espionage novel featuring, you guessed it, George Smiley.

Tinker Tailor Soldier Ghost! Or The Spy Who Came in from the Cold … Again? Actually the new novel, due out next month, is set during the decade that comes between the end of TSWCIFTC and TTSS. So he can still be permanently 60 years old, rather than about 110.

And of course George Smiley has been portrayed on screen also. Most famously and most masterfully by Alec Guinness in two BBC series, in 1979 and 1982. More recently by Gary Oldman in the 2011 film adaptation of Tinker Tailor.

Also good, no? Oldman was nominated for an Academy Award for best actor. Guardian critic Peter Bradshaw was impressed, as was le Carré. “I love the movie, love your Smiley … it’s a beautiful performance,” he wrote in an email to Oldman. Others may be less keen …

Which others? David Cornwell’s sons.

Nick? Also Simon Cornwell, a film producer.

And how has this lukewarmness manifested itself? So Gary Oldman was all set – and psyched – to appear in the sequel but reportedly found himself blocked.

The Actor Left Out in the Cold …? “We’ve reached out … to le Carré’s sons and – the damnedest thing – they have no interest in Gary playing Smiley again,” Oldman’s manager Douglas Urbanski told the Radio Times. “I don’t know why.”

What do Nick and Simon say? At the time of writing, nothing – though they might have quoted from Smiley’s People: “In the spook business, nothing is as it seems. Ever.” Same with the book business, and film business, perhaps.

Do say: “No matter, Gary, you’re great in Slow Horses, which everyone loves, and there’s a new season of that.”

Don’t say: “Not so smiley now, are you, Gary … ”

Older viewers may feel, well, erm, old, to see that this film comes prefaced with a wise statement – handed down as if ’twere written on tablets of stone – from the 2009 film Jennifer’s Body. (Wasn’t 2009 about four years ago?) Portentously proclaiming “Hell is a teenage girl”, it’s an apt little quote to kick off this neatly done teen movie, which unusually throws a rare biological condition into the typical mix of virginity loss, relationship drama and high school politics. Our lead Lindy (Maddie Ziegler) discovers, after a routine medical appointment, that she does not have a uterus or vaginal canal deeper than “a vaginal dimple”, making the prospect of first-time sex with her dreamy boyfriend Adam (D’Pharaoh Woon-A-Tai) more than usually anxiety-making.

For the majority of its runtime, Fitting In takes a commendably character-based approach to something that could have become a preachy issues film. Lindy is a person, not an avatar for anyone and everyone with her condition. There are contemporary socio-political resonances, of course; how would Lindy be classified by people who define a woman as someone with a vagina and uterus? But writer-director Molly McGlynn (who was born with the same condition) hasn’t written a one-dimensional transphobic character to help make this point. Likewise, Lindy does experience an attraction to an intersex person, Jax (Ki Griffin), who she’s then embarrassed to be seen making out with at a party; but again, while this is an illustration of how internalised attitudes of shame can poison people against those with whom they ought to have common ground, McGlynn shows this rather than telling us.

Most of the film looks and feels like the kind of inexpensive teen movie there used to be every couple of weeks during the 90s. It’s not up there with the heights of the genre – Clueless, The Craft and Ginger Snaps (name-checked in the film) can rest easy – but represents a thematically rich addition to the canon.

Rising French cinema notable Arthur Harari is a film-maker, screenwriter and actor – but the last of these only occasionally, and with reservations. He has also, a touch reluctantly, become highly visible as half of French film’s new “véritable power couple”, according to a recent national edition of Vanity Fair – partner and co-writer to Justine Triet, the director of 2023’s Palme d’Or and Oscar-winning courtroom drama Anatomy of a Fall.

When I meet Harari in a Paris photo studio in June, he is preparing to direct his own third feature but is taking time out to promote a film in which he acts – as it happens, another courtroom drama, this one based on real life.

Directed by Cédric Kahn, The Goldman Case recreates the 1975 trial of Pierre Goldman, a French leftwing militant who had committed a number of robberies but denied the two killings with which he was charged. During an initial prison spell, he had published a memoir of his colourful career (including a spell with a guerrilla cell in Venezuela); by the time of the trial depicted, he was a national celebrity.

Although the case had been somewhat forgotten, Harari knew about it from his parents, both architects who in their day had been Trotskyist militants: “They were in the same organisation as Goldman – the Revolutionary Communist League.”

The figure of the swashbuckling revolutionary criminal and public intellectual is a singularly French hybrid. “It was Goldman’s personality, his life story, his thought – because he really was a thinker – that made him a different kind of criminal,” Harari says. “His voice, his entire personality, is in his book.” It didn’t hurt Goldman’s mythic status that he was also half-brother to a much-loved singing star, Jean-Jacques Goldman.

While Harari’s character, lawyer Georges Kiejman is less flamboyant than the screw-the-system polemicist Goldman, he was a celebrity too. Kiejman would become a minister in François Mitterrand’s socialist government and was lawyer to cinema notables including François Truffaut, Jeanne Moreau and Roman Polanski, as well as the tragically fated Charlie Hebdo magazine. Harari met Kiejman before his death in 2023 at the age of 90, but he learned the most from footage of him in a 1960s TV mock trial: “He was very different from the way I play him – he was relaxed, calm, ironic, something of a dandy. He wasn’t exactly an actor, but there’s definitely a touch of performance.”

There is certainly plenty of theatre in The Goldman Case, not least provided by a boisterous chorus of courtroom protesters. The mood is more chaotic even than in Anatomy of a Fall, in which everyone present seemed to have free rein to interrupt each other. Despite co-writing Anatomy of a Fall with Triet, Harari says that he himself has only ever spent half an hour in an actual courtroom, briefly dropping in at Paris’s Palais de Justice. But both Anatomy of a Fall and The Goldman Case, he says, reasonably reflect French legal etiquette. “In The Goldman Case, the presiding judge lets things get rowdy, but apparently that’s how it was.”

The two films are examples of a mini resurgence of the courtroom drama in French cinema, along with Alice Diop’s steely Saint Omer and Laetitia Dosch’s considerably larkier French-Swiss canine farce Dog on Trial. “Courtroom drama lets you get to grips with the question of language,” Harari says. “It involves the whole business of justice, identity and politics – the court is a privileged space for dealing with all those themes.”

Harari is serious in manner but much more relaxed than you might suppose from his portrayal of tense, hawkish Kiejman and you can imagine him profitably joining the army of tousled-forelock French actors who regularly get cast as dapper but blase left-bank intellectuals. But acting has been strictly a sideline, with occasional bit parts for Triet: a therapist, a literary critic in Anatomy of a Fall, even a chimpanzee trainer.

He is still getting used to his and Triet’s new celebrity after the success of Anatomy of a Fall: “Everyone recognises Justine in the street now – me not so much, but it happens. We have a certain notoriety – it’s a bit unsettling.” They had fun, he says, on the film’s Oscar campaign, playing up the domestic duo angle for comic effect in interviews, sometimes accompanied on tour by the older of their two daughters, 13 (the younger is five): “She enjoyed the luxury hotels, living the princess life.”

The grandson of actor and stage director Clément Harari, Arthur, 43, studied film at university in Saint-Denis, Paris, and made his first feature in 2016, a crime drama set in the Antwerp diamond world. The cameraman was his brother Tom Harari, a successful name in current French cinema, and his collaborator on numerous Super 8 shorts in their youth.

The follow-up was Onoda: 10,000 Nights in the Jungle, about Hiroo Onoda, the Japanese soldier who refused to recognise that the second world war had ended, hiding out in the Philippines until 1974. It’s a wildly ambitious film – shot in Cambodia, entirely in Japanese, which Harari doesn’t speak – and a compellingly sombre one. Its quixotic intensity has a certain tinge of Werner Herzog – and indeed, the German director had planned to film Onoda’s story before writing a book about him instead. Harari happened to meet Herzog once and got his blessing to film his own version of the story. He laughs, as he tells me the payoff: according to different accounts Harari has heard, Herzog either loved his Onoda, or got bored and stopped watching after 10 minutes.

Both Harari and Triet are known for being politically vocal. Jewish but non-practising, Harari says his identity played a part in his stating his opposition to Israel’s actions in Gaza: “It seemed crucial to speak out as a Jew – even if on some level, I find that a problematic idea, to speak as a Jew.” (Jewish diaspora identity, in fact, plays a prominent role in the courtroom arguments of The Goldman Case.)

And like Triet, Harari has been highly critical of Emmanuel Macron’s government. Triet’s Palme d’Or acceptance speech in Cannes, lambasting his cultural policies, received a hostile reception from authority figures, including France’s minister of culture at the time, who labelled the director ungrateful for the support she had received. “People were incredibly harsh towards Justine – it was quite violent,” says Harari, who is certain that Triet’s forthrightness was the cause of Anatomy of a Fall being controversially snubbed when it came to selecting France’s official Oscars entry in the foreign film category (in the event, it won a more major award, best original screenplay).

Our interview happens in the lead-up to France’s July elections, when the nation appeared to face a triumph of the far right represented by Marine Le Pen’s National Rally. A far-right government was certain to be hostile towards France’s cultural sector and to the system of finance on which French cinema depends. “Culture might seem a trivial concern compared to other possible social or economical effects the National Rally might have,” Harari admits. “So maybe we’re not the worst off – but we’re very afraid.”

During this long, hot, languishing summer, I have come to believe in one thing and one thing only: seeing Twisters in 4DX. The Oklahoma-set film, directed by Lee Isaac Chung, is about a 7/10 movie in 2D – a blockbuster sequel of sorts to the 1996 disaster flick, starring Glen Powell and Daisy Edgar-Jones as tornado chasers with modest chemistry. But in the immersive theatrical format known as 4DX, in which viewers are buffeted with literal wind and rain, Twisters becomes an unmissable 10/10 experience.

In 4DX, you feel every bump and jolt of a truck in an F5 gale, thanks to moving seats that, among other things, punch you in the back and tickle your ankles. When the characters clung to bolted theater seats during a final climactic storm, I too clung to my armrest, lest I get rattled off my wind-ripped chair. Each of the film’s tornado encounters drew loud cheers at my screening, as did the shot of Powell in a tight white T-shirt during a palpable drizzle. I emerged from Twisters with tangled hair and horizontal tear streaks; my friend lost her shoe. In 4DX, you do not just, in the words of Powell’s Tyler Owens, “ride” the storm. You are the storm.

I’m not alone in my glowing assessment. Though 4DX has existed in the US for a decade – it first arrived for Transformers: Age of Extinction in 2014 – Twisters marked a high point for the format, which is enjoying a breakout summer. The film broke a domestic box office record for 4DX with $2.3m from 62 US auditoriums during opening weekend. Viral TikToks captured the experience of leaving a Twisters screening with streaked mascara, jostling in the theaters’ 4-chair pods and seeing God (with your shocked parents) in the wind tunnel. A week later, Deadpool & Wolverine surpassed Twisters’ record with $2.8m, giving 4DX its two most successful weekends to date back to back. 4DX, the second most popular of so-called “premium large format” viewing options to Imax, accounted for a solid portion of this month’s box office for Alien: Romulus.

“The premium formats, including 4DX and Imax, are seeing a total renaissance,” said Paul Dergarabedian, a senior media analyst at Comscore. “While people complain a lot about the cost of movie tickets, it seems like the audiences don’t mind opting in and paying the premium to get that experience for certain movies.” For an average of $8 more than a standard ticket, viewers can feel Dune’s sandworm thumpers in their core, simulate the zero gravity terror of Alien and shriek through a tornado. The Twisters hype built on a few years of post-pandemic enthusiasm for big, bold theatrical experiences – anything to differentiate from the couch. “All of the stars aligned for us on Twisters,” Duncan Macdonald, the head of worldwide marketing and theater development for 4DX company CJ 4DPlex Americas, said. “We had been stuck inside so long and the theaters were closed for so long that they wanted to see something different, and 4DX provided that.”

The summer of 4DX owes largely to a team of artists – though the company calls them “editors” – based in Seoul, South Korea, who adapt anywhere from 35-40 Hollywood titles per year, and around 70-80 non-Hollywood titles. Since 2009, the studio has enhanced some 1,050 films – everything from horror to Fast & Furious fare to Pixar movies – with 4DX effects such as smell (gardenia, Beauty and the Beast rose, Wonka chocolate), weather, lights and chair programming adapted from military flight simulators. What started as an experiment by South Korean movie chain CJ CGV has now landed in 792 theaters globally, including 63 in the US and Canada, according to the company.

The editors take over once almost all post-production is finished, usually about a month before a film’s release. The team then go through the film scene by scene or, in the case of a particularly intense action sequence, frame by frame, to choreograph chair movements and fine-tune effects to shifting points of view. Decisions must be made on which elements to highlight and which to downplay at what moment – in the case of Twisters, do you focus on the experience of the battered truck, or the wind? During one storm scene, the 4DX experience “starts off with the truck and you feel every little bump”, said Paul Hyon Kim, the senior vice-president of content and production for CJ 4DPlex. As a tornado forms in the distance, the seat bumps consistent with the truck diminish in favor of the sweeping gusts and smoother movements of the tornado, drawing the audience into the larger storm – “you’re now focused on the tornado, you’re now part of the tornado,” said Kim.

“It’s a very, very creative process,” he added, as well as a collaborative one; each team has a lead editor and pitch internally to the studio’s chief editor, Cindy Lee, who has edited 300 titles herself over 15 years. “With that experience, you really start to develop a nuance and a feel and an expertise as to what you need to emphasize or what you need to kind of pull away from,” said Kim.

It takes about two weeks to adapt a two-hour title into 4DX, which then gets sign-off from the requisite film-makers and studio representatives. Outside viewers will occasionally offer input – Kim noted that the idea to keep the chairs attuned to Dune: Part Two’s thumpers, which attract the spectacular sandworms, even when they weren’t on screen, emerged during a quality check session with Warner Bros representatives. “It’s going to be a little bit in your subconscious, but there’s this level of suspense that’s just building up,” he said. “I don’t know how many people will be able to point that out, but I guarantee you that was an elevated experience from without it.”

So far, there’s little concern that 4DX’s borderline amusement park fare, in which it’s somewhat acceptable to have one’s phone out to record the ride, will replace standard cinema, though CJ 4DPlex does have plans to expand into more theaters. But Kim can foresee a future in which Hollywood directors, like some South Korean ones before them, make movies with the 4DX experience in mind, similar to how Hollywood auteurs like Christopher Nolan and Denis Villeneuve film with intention for Imax. “We’re finding that a lot more film-makers are interested in 4DX, and so I think it’s only a matter of time before we see big budget blockbuster films really take into account the 4DX offerings and what you can and cannot do in a 4DX theater when you’re shooting the film,” he said.

For all the enthusiasm, the limit remains the number of domestic 4DX theaters (mostly operated by Regal, owned by Cineworld), the amount theaters are willing to pay upfront to install what are essentially mini rollercoasters, and the number of movies for which the 4D treatment makes sense. (In the coming months, the company plans to adapt big-budget swings such as Gladiator 2, Beetlejuice Beetlejuice and Wicked.) “The movie is at the center of this and this is meant to enhance the movie-going experience, not to replace the movie,” said Dergarabedian.

And should options run short, there are always classic titles; last month, CJ 4DPlex announced the 4DX version of the original Twister, alongside the returns of the new Twisters 4DX, on Labor Day weekend, building on an existing catalog of updated-for-4DX films including the Nightmare Before Christmas and the Lord of the Rings trilogy.

Whether you opt for the $8 extra rollercoaster experience or stick to 2D, the hype around 4DX is a boon for movie theaters still desperate to get audiences back in any version of seats post-pandemic. “You’ve got to get people back into the movie theaters, and how do you do that? You can’t do something that’s just strictly a larger screen when everyone’s got an 85in TV at home,” said Kim. “We think that 4DX does a really, really good job of doing something different.” And if you see Twisters back in 4DX this weekend – make sure you get a lid for your popcorn, and bring a sweater.

In 1975, two Australian surfers thought they had discovered the holy grail: the perfect wave. Kevin Lovett and John Geisel were at the southernmost tip of Nias, a tiny island just to the west of Sumatra in Indonesia. But during their first fortnight of carving up the then unknown right-hand point break at Lagundri Bay, a miraculous gyre that spat the pair out of ridiculously long-lasting barrels, they were hounded on the shore by sinister figures wearing bird-feather cloaks. When one of them, with burning red eyes, came closer, a friendly local explained what the deal was. “He was supposedly discussing how to kill us,” recalls Lovett. “They said they’d come to take heads.”

In a more typical surf film, the discovery of a world-class break in a malaria-infested backwater with a history of head collection would be the starting point for a gnarly wave-riding version of Apocalypse Now. Instead, Point of Change charts the long-term effects on Lagundri Bay of Lovett and Geisel’s expedition. In short: it was less Endless Summer and more endless consumerism.

“I didn’t want it to be lots of talking heads of blokes saying: ‘We found the wave and conquered it – and it was amazing.’ We’ve seen that a million times,” says director Rebecca Coley, whose beach life started with her father’s pedalo business on Jersey before graduating to surfing. Her film features surf pioneer Lovett recalling his brushes with these tribal animists and regretting the rampant overdevelopment at Lagundri Bay once word filtered out. But, more importantly, Point of Change canvasses the islanders on the evolution of their home into a cluttered and often tense resort, asking whether it rescued them from poverty or corrupted their spirit. By the 1990s, the bay area was blighted by jerry-built hostels, shoddy infrastructure and aggressive hustlers.

It was a touchy subject: Coley spent many months persuading people to go public. “They had to understand what I was going do with the film,” she says, “and that it wouldn’t be a negative thing to be on camera saying bad things about Nias.” Bonne Gea, from a Muslim Nias family and five-time Indonesian women’s surfing champion, is one of those who bear witness. Gea was the initial impetus for Point of Change: Coley began making a short film about Gea’s achievements in 2015 – then, after returning to the island following a spell in Bali, Gea realised how fast it was transforming.

There is, says Gea, no easy answer to surf tourism’s impact on Lagundri Bay: “It’s both good and bad. The good being the things we learn from tourists: speaking English, better job opportunities and how to cook western food. But there is no longer a good vibe when you surf that spot – and sometimes no respect.”

The film shows how mass tourism was a radical interruption to centuries-old Nias culture. Years after his initial visit, Lovett is told something shocking by Sufarma Gea, the area’s sole resident in the mid-1970s and a distant relative of Bonne’s. As the foreigners were leaving on a subsequent trip, a shadowy malefactor may have abducted and murdered a malaria-stricken companion of theirs. Rumour has it that he buried her head underneath a new bridge, as a blessing – in Nias’s warrior culture, heads were a symbol of power. Coley has tried to locate the woman, known only as Ingrid, but to no avail. True or not, the anecdote is like a cursed creation myth for the colonisation that followed.

Nias was the latest iteration of a familiar story. Hawaii’s Waimea Bay, St Francis Bay in South Africa and Uluwatu in Bali have all been examples of what you might call “the surfer’s burden”: the desire to ride the perfect wave in some exotic locale while knowing there is a distinct chance that your presence is contributing to the gradual destruction of that place, or at least its essential character.

This is the paradox facing the hippy surfers who were chasing santosha, or spiritual contentment, but who already had a Super 8 on a tripod on the beach at Nias to film themselves – and presumably show others. Now the latest technological snake to taint Eden is the controversial $5m aluminium judges’ tower drilled into the reef at Olympic surfing venue Teahupo’o in Tahiti. “I’m very interested to see what the fallout is after the Olympics,” says Coley. “It feels, again, like the local people are not ready for the whole world to turn up. But at the same time, as a surfer, I’m contradicted, because it’s amazing to watch these world-class athletes.”

Lovett and Geisel’s efforts to keep the place a closely guarded secret, which included printing their postcards backwards, were futile – and these days, our social media-oriented world is even more inclined to display and disclose everything. But Coley thinks there may be a correction: “I do wonder if there will be a pushback – where we travel in a slower, more authentic way, without documenting everything we do.” Fretting over such issues may have the air of first-world problems, but the issues are genuinely complex. So Coley says she was careful not to take a proscriptive line in the film, despite pressure from potential financiers to do so. All the better to let the locals’ voices be clearly heard – as it is their opinions that ultimately count.

Point of Change suggests there have been some partial improvements for Nias, particularly after the more eco-friendly wave of reconstruction that followed two tsunamis in 2004 and 2005. According to Coley, local decision-making groups exist that, in principle, give Nias residents some measure of responsibility for and control over their community. Gea can attest to the importance of those things on a personal level. They are precisely what an aquatic life has given her: “My life with no surfing in Nias? Married at a young age to a man of my parents’ choice – with as many children as possible.”

Cate Blanchett has spoken about the “distinct lack of shame” in modern society during a discussion about her new Apple TV+ series, Disclaimer.

Blanchett’s character, Catherine Ravenscroft, faces a public shaming in the seven-episode psychological thriller. Asked at the Venice film festival if the way society shames women has changed in recent years, and how she approached this role as a woman, the Australian actor and film-maker said: “I always approach every role as a woman, because I am one. I don’t really think about that.

“There’s a distinct lack of shame in society at the moment. Shame is very different to guilt. Guilt is a very useless emotion, I don’t know what you do with that. But shame and regret, and the lessons one can learn from that, are very powerful.”

Blanchett added, however, that there was a lot of “shaming” in society.

“Just look at the way you attempt to parent children. If you publicly shame them, it can lead to rage. Private conversations are often far more powerful than public ones. I’m not saying public ones are not important, but one-to-one, face-to-face reconciliation type conversations are far more powerful than public shaming.”

The psychological thriller, which premieres on the Lido on Thursday, is five-time Oscar winner Alfonso Cuarón’s big budget streaming series debut. Based on the bestselling novel by Renée Knight, it tells the story of an acclaimed journalist who discovers she is the protagonist in a novel that threatens to reveal her darkest secret.

As Catherine races to uncover the anonymous writer’s identity, she is forced to confront her past before it destroys her life and relationships with her husband (Sacha Baron Cohen) and their son (Kodi Smit-McPhee). The show also stars Kevin Kline, Lesley Manville and Indira Varma as its narrator.

“We all have dark sides,” Blanchett said. “I think there’s a belief system going around that if people don’t tell you everything they have a sinister side to hide. That’s called privacy.

“We think if people aren’t honest they’re doing nefarious things, but perhaps we’re in the process of dealing with them ourselves. I play a woman that has things she has buried, traumatic things.”

The actor referenced the book The Body Keeps the Score by Bessel van der Kolk, which is about the effects of psychological trauma. “The way trauma can remain in the body on a cellular level, and what happens to repressed memories. I found that fascinating and quite painful, and I was very grateful that I wasn’t in the same space.”

Asked whether her outfit for the series premiere would be noteworthy after she walked the Cannes red carpet in a dress reminiscent of the Palestinian flag, Blanchett joked: “I’m going naked.”

Meanwhile Cuarón, whose past film credits include Children of Men and Roma, addressed his foray into television. “I don’t know how to direct TV, probably at this stage of my life it’s too late to learn. We approached this whole thing as a film.”

He admitted that this might have been a “miscalculation” on his part. “To shoot a film takes longer, and these were like seven films. It was a really long process, I really felt for the actors,” he said.

There have been dozens of (mostly inadequate) attempts to adapt Alexandre Dumas’ behemoth payback yarn on film and TV, but it doesn’t stop people trying; this time, it’s the team behind the recent two-part Three Musketeers adaptation. Compared to the saturnine Gérard Depardieu in the well-regarded 1998 TV miniseries, lead actor Pierre Niney is a lightweight proposition as the count, playing his second major French icon after Yves Saint Laurent in 2014. But Niney’s physical slightness and poise lend something distinctive here, a hint of vulnerability underneath the multiple masks, a mortal psychological wound that can never be healed.

There’s no improving on Dumas’ timeless setup: young mariner Edmond Dantès (Niney) is imprisoned ad eternum in the Chateau d’If, Marseille’s own Devil’s Island, after being framed as a Bonapartist by shady prosecutor Villefort (Laurent Lafitte) and backstabbed by his pal Fernand (Bastien Bouillon), a rival for the hand of his wife-to-be Mercédès (Anaïs Demoustier). Bequeathed an impossible fortune and given a crash course in the gentlemanly arts by fellow inmate Abbé Faria (Pierfrancesco Favino), Dantès re-emerges in Parisian high society as the enigmatic aristocrat. Behind the swank orientalist mansion and unimpeachable manners is a simmering volcano of revenge. In other words: he’s French Batman.

Directors Matthieu Delaporte and Alexandre de la Patellière, screenwriters on the Musketeers films, perform the necessary surgery on the novel with efficiency and even elegance. In place of Dumas’ sprawl, they concentrate the intrigue in two protégés: dagger-eyed foundling André (Julien de Saint Jean) and comely Ottoman princess Haydée (Anamaria Vartolomei), whose romances are designed to hit the count’s betrayers where it hurts. The pace is so strident, though, across the film’s three acts that neither the original themes (vengeance v justice; the count’s God complex) or newly introduced ones (a very social-media era emphasis on the reality behind the facade) leave more than a faint imprint.

The pay-off is a fast-moving, good-looking gallop of Mission: Impossible-style mask play, languorous conniving in courtyards and occasional outbreaks of derring-do that chews up three hours without pausing for quail sandwiches. It’s also couched in a white-bread Netflix-esque production style that’s big on drone approaches into opulent chateaux and bounding up staircases; handy for streaming sales, but less so for locating the rancour and gothic undertones that gave gravity to Dumas’ maximalism.

Fortunately Niney is fully in the swing of things, lapping up campy disguise scenes that are oddly reminiscent of Peter Sellers in the Pink Panther series, acting in French, Italian, Greek, English and Franglais, and lording up one brutal dinner-party revelation. But he does finer work alongside Demoustier in the scenes where the long-sundered lovers are reunited but unable to acknowledge it; their micro-expressions signal bottomless fathoms of emotion. The dramatisation itself could have used more of this rapier finesse to complement its insistent whip hand.

Not unlike A Story of Bones from a few weeks back, which focused on an island (Saint Helena) in another ocean, this film offers a thoughtful, somewhat downbeat story rooted in colonialism and its aftermath. The island in this case is Nias, a speck of a place off the west coast of Sumatra in Indonesia, barely developed and thinly populated in the 1970s when a pair of Australian surfers, John Geisel and Kevin Lovett, who were bumming around Indonesia looking for places to catch waves, get stoned and get away from the macho surf culture in Oz fetched up there. They had spotted Nias on the map and correctly surmised that it might have “surf potential”, as Lovett calls it. It turned out to be one of the greatest surf spots in Oceania, if not the world. Geisel and Lovett arrived on Nias at the same time as “surf explorer” Peter Troy and his then-girlfriend Wendy Adcock; soon the four of them were revelling in the islands perfect tubular waves, empty beaches and hospitable locals.

Of course, their contact with this Shangri-La sowed seeds of destruction that are still felt today. Word got out to the surfing community about Nias’ idyllic charms, and soon led to boatloads of tourists, pollution and a local populace all too eager to profit from the visitors’ appetites for drugs, alcohol and sex. Geisel, Lovett and others developed malaria. People went mysteriously missing and some died suddenly abroad, suggesting dark forces at work; these were talked of by the locals who believed in shamanism and the presence of dark magic.

Director Rebecca Coley rather indulges this woo-woo mysticism, making Point of Change both a bit creepier and sillier at the same time, enhanced by the charming bits of chunky animation throughout used to fill in backstory or illustrate ideas. The trippy 1970s vibe to the graphics suits the material well at first but serves the story less effectively later on when we meet Bonne Gea, a local woman who went on to become a champion surfer inspired by the tourists who brought the sport to the island. But as geography-cum-sports docs go, this is pretty interesting stuff, and is also – of course – chock full of impressive grainy film footage of folks riding the waves.

You might suspect that documentaries like this – quietly didactic, discreetly partisan, yet dry enough to seem faintly journalistic, and sprinkled with just the right amount of visual sugar to look arty and aesthetically pleasing – are factory-farmed in vats somewhere, genetically engineered to appeal to eggheads on the film-festival circuit. Farming the Revolution takes exactly that kind of low-key, observational look at the 2020-21 protests in India over three farm acts that unions felt would highly disadvantage farmers and enrich large corporations. Titles throughout explain some of the background, and there are plenty of clips of union organisers and speakers at protest rallies explaining why the farm bills were felt to be a bad thing, but there’s no getting round the fact that it’s a pretty niche topic unless you are especially interested in Indian agricultural policy.

That said, it’s interesting the way the protest turned into a year-long occupation on the outskirts of Delhi, a temporary suburb of squatting protesters who travelled miles, mostly from Punjab state, to lend their support and make their voices known. The film’s midsection features some interesting coverage of the logistics of feeding so many people, and if you watch very closely you may pick up some tips for making rotis on a mass scale. The people we meet are mostly very likable if not especially articulate, apart from the union organisers, and it’s nice to hear how much they valued helping one another to make the protest work.

The participation of women is highlighted, both by the film and the protest organisers, but still one wonders about how everyone kept it all together for such a long time without apparent strife, violence or disruption within the camp. Naturally, things got hairy when the protests broke out in Delhi itself, with an incursion at the Red Fort and much hysteria from the Indian state which tried to paint the protesters as separatists or religious zealots. Neither India’s prime minister, Narendra Modi, nor the mainstream Indian press come out of the story well, but there is a muted happy ending of sorts.

Born in Essex and trained at Rada, Juliet Stevenson, 67, made her TV acting debut in Granada drama The Mallens in 1979. She has won numerous awards and nominations, including an Evening Standard best actress award for Truly, Madly, Deeply opposite Alan Rickman. She is also a hugely popular audiobook narrator. Her new film, Reawakening, co-stars Jared Harris and Erin Doherty.

Reawakening is about a working-class couple, Mary and John, whose 14-year-old daughter went missing a decade ago. As a parent who has experienced loss [Stevenson’s stepson, Tomo Brody, died in 2020, aged 37], how did you prepare emotionally for that?
I often feel like a ruthless recycling machine, recycling things I have felt in my life and what I’ve observed others feeling. Nothing is sacred, because my memory bank is my fuel. But I also love that this film is a thriller, where something very profound – the loss of a child – is explored, before it twists and becomes something much more, about desperate yearnings, faith and belief.

And then their daughter reappears. A film about grief made you famous of course…
It did. And I still get lots of feedback from Truly, Madly, Deeply, which is astonishing – so many people still, generation after generation.

Why do you think that is?
Because loss and grief are usually portrayed on film and stage as sort of elegant. You get one or two beautiful tears rolling down the perfect cheek. Nothing’s smudged. There’s no dirt. But when you’re in grief you feel like shit. You hate the world. You’re jealous of other people’s happiness. It can be a very ugly state. I remember Anthony Minghella cleverly saying: Look, it’s very whimsical to have ghosts coming back from the dead, so you have to root that in something very real and raw. So I made Nina’s grief unbearable!

Reawakening sees you working with writer-director Virginia Gilbert, and you recently spoke enthusiastically about working with a female director of photography on ITV drama The Long Call. Is the business getting easier for women?
It’s changing but slowly, and not nearly enough. I’ve done three big filming projects this year for the BBC and CBS, and all the directors, writers and technicians were men, pretty much, however nice they were to work with. There needs to be more women and more film-makers of colour in this country because there are so many stories that need to be told, and different, subtler ways of telling them, but they’re not supported.

What’s the biggest issue?
Chronic underfunding. We create so much talent in this country – writers, actors, designers, technicians – and have centuries of storytelling, art and design in our culture, but as soon as anybody makes a bit of a reputation, off they go to the States and we lose it. It’s just heartbreaking, like a brain drain. A talent drain.

You were recently quoted as saying you’d join the Garrick Club if it accepted women. Have you?
No! I haven’t been subsequently invited to join, and I’m not a very club person anyway. I only got involved in the campaign alongside Mary Beard because I supported the idea in principle. I just simply didn’t understand the opposition. You know, guys, what are you scared of?

You’re vocally political – speaking up recently about the situation in Gaza and the refugee crisis. Do you ever worry about doing that publicly?
There’s a long tradition of people in the creative professions standing up and speaking about things going on in the world that affect people, from writers like Jonathan Swift or Charles Dickens, artists like Hogarth, or film directors like Mike Leigh or Ken Loach. I just consider myself, and I say this with humility, to be part of that. I think the arts are political with a very small “p”, in the sense that we are reflecting humanity back at itself.

You married your partner of more than 30 years, and father of your children, Hugh Brody, in 2021. What’s different?
Absolutely nothing at all! [laughs] So many people said: “Oh, I felt quite different once we got married,” but that’s not true for me. The only reason we did it is we’re older now, and it made a sort of sense. To have weathered some of the most challenging storms, and actually love each other even more after many, many years, makes me feel incredibly lucky. Love needs time and energy. It’s the most important force in the world.

Looking back, what projects are you most proud of?
I loved being in Bend It Like Beckham, where I play Keira Knightley’s mum – I based her on a mum I was very fond of at the school my kids went to, who was always turning up late in a panic, always made up to the nines. I think Gurinder Chadha genuinely made a huge contribution to the way that girls’ football is perceived in this country 20-odd years ago. To do so in a film that was also a fascinating exploration of what it is to grow up as a British Asian kid in a Muslim family was brilliant too. All credit to her.

Did you read Alan Rickman’s diaries?
I didn’t. I don’t know whether he wanted them published, but I just didn’t want to be involved in that world. I know what my relationship with him was like. He was a complicated person, but like a big brother – he just picked me up and kind of looked after me, bossed me around, gave me notes endlessly, and taught me a huge amount.

What excites you in the acting world today?
So many great young directors, like Alex Lowther, who just directed me in a short film, who I’ve already worked with as an actor, and Robert Icke in theatre. I find the younger generation easier to work with – they’re more direct and you just get on with the work. I always say to them: “Please just treat me like I’ve just left drama school”, and they do. I need notes. I always want direction. I’m always desperate to get better!