Sometimes the best reason to watch a movie is because Isabelle Huppert is in it. That’s pretty much true of “La Syndicaliste,” a tangled if certainly watchable French true-crime drama about dirty political doings in the nation’s nuclear energy industry. Filled with men and women with furrowed brows, running and declaiming and sometimes explosively blowing their tops, the movie yearns to be a 1970s-style American thriller but is basically just a vehicle for Huppert’s talents. Even when it’s unclear what her character — a labor representative — is up to, she commands your attention with feverish focus and urgency.
Huppert plays Maureen Kearney, a leading union representative of Areva, a state-controlled French nuclear technology company. A no-nonsense, hard-charging official, Maureen takes her mandate seriously — Areva has more than 50,000 employees when the story opens in 2012 — and her resentful male colleagues somewhat less seriously, at least outwardly. She’s brassy and a bit flashy (she likes perilously high heels and slashes of red lipstick) and close to her boss at Areva, Anne Lauvergeon (Marina Foïs), a smooth number who’s about to lose her job because, as she explains, President Nicolas Sarkozy wants to replace her before the next election.
It isn’t obvious why Sarkozy thinks that firing Anne will help him; she suggests it’s because she’s a woman, stoking the gender war that percolates throughout this movie. Whatever the case, Sarkozy fires Anne, eventually losing the presidency to François Hollande, all of which adds real-world context to the story without illuminating it. The director Jean-Paul Salomé gives the movie a lively pace, but he crowds it with filler scenes, too many characters and political arcana. He also throws in an allusion to Hitchcock’s “Vertigo” — cue the blond chignon — that does his movie no favors. (Salomé wrote the script with Fadette Drouard.)
“La Syndicaliste” follows Anne as she tries to work with her new boss, Luc Oursel (an amusingly villainous Yvan Attal), a patronizing sexist who cozies up to Maureen even as he busily conspires against her. The extent of his schemes begin to emerge after a whistle-blower sneaks Anne a document showing that a shadowy figure who heads up another state-controlled utility, E.D.F., is clandestinely negotiating with a Chinese consortium to build low-cost plants. (Got it?) The idea is to turn E.D.F. into a world nuclear power and ruin Areva, which Maureen helpfully explains, “will be awful for our employees.”
The scheme proves worse for Maureen, who tries to bring attention to the E.D.F. plan, only to be largely met with indifference. As she continues rattling cages, she is met with escalating hostility, and then one grim morning while she’s home preparing for a big government meeting, an intruder puts a mask over her head and rapes her. Much of the rest of the movie involves Maureen navigating the aftermath of the assault as she submits to invasive medical examinations and police interviews that grow progressively antagonistic. The cops are stumped — there are no fingerprints, witnesses or surveillance visuals — and then they accuse Maureen of inventing the rape as a way to gin up sympathy for her political struggles.
Based on a 2019 book of the same title by Caroline Michel-Aguirre, “La Syndicaliste” never satisfyingly meshes the story’s corporate-political thriller elements with Maureen’s traumatic ordeal. Salomé’s handling of the rape doesn’t help. The movie opens right after a maid finds the bound Maureen in the basement of her home, and then the story flashes back several months at which point it begins to unwind chronologically. That’s fine, even if the structure is drearily familiar, but it ends up turning the rape into a narrative high point, which is just gross. Huppert, who makes her character’s pain and rage visceral, is enough.
La Syndicaliste Not rated. In French and Hungarian, with subtitles. Running time: 2 hours 1 minute. In theaters.
Here’s a peculiar misfire of a psycho-noir, for which Luke Goebel and Ottessa Moshfegh have co-adapted Moshfegh’s Booker-shortlisted novel of the same name and William Oldroyd directs. It’s acted and presented with a weirdly solemn intensity, like a deadly serious remake of some lost John Waters pulp classic. Gif immortality beckons for the bizarre moment in which Anne Hathaway’s character grapples with what looks worryingly like a fake cat, throwing it out of the front door with a yowling noise on the soundtrack.
The setting is a small Massachusetts town in the early 60s, and Thomasin McKenzie plays Eileen, a mousy and repressed young woman working as a filing assistant at a juvenile prison. At home she is effectively the carer for her aggressively alcoholic widowed father Jim (Shea Whigham), an ex-cop who likes to get drunk, brandish his gun at the neighbours and humiliate Eileen. For her part, Eileen has repeated reveries of sex, vengeful violence and self-harm: bizarre micro-fantasies that are startling at first, but also verging on the clumsy and which undermine the impact of a real-world plot-twist to come.
For reasons she can’t quite understand, Eileen is emotionally thrilled by the new consultant psychologist that the jail has hired: Dr Rebecca Saint John (Hathaway), a stylish and sophisticated Harvard-educated woman with liberal ideas and dyed blonde hair who invites timid Eileen out for cocktails, evidently amused at the way this young woman is likely to blossom under her guidance. And just when the film looks like it’s going to ape Todd Haynes’s version of Patricia Highsmith’s Carol, with Hathaway in the Cate Blanchett role and McKenzie taking the submissive Rooney Mara part, something very strange and melodramatic happens.
This film certainly has its moments: it is hilarious when the hatchet-faced jail manager Mrs Murray (Siobhan Fallon Hogan) forces the mutinous young prisoners to watch the religious Yuletide pageant she has laid on for their edification, grimly entitled Christmas in Prison. It is intentionally funny, but I’m not sure how intentional the film’s other effects are. The performances from Hathaway and McKenzie are vehement and watchable, but the film itself is an unsatisfying and anticlimactic oddity.
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Joss Ackland, a self-described workaholic actor who appeared in more than 130 movies, TV shows and radio programs, most notably — for American audiences, at least — as a villainous South African diplomat in “Lethal Weapon 2,” died on Sunday at his home in Clovelly, a village in southwestern England. He was 95.
His agent, Paul Pearson, confirmed the death.
He was a renowned character actor onscreen, having held memorable supporting roles in movies like the Cold War thriller “The Hunt for Red October” (1990) and the hockey comedy “The Mighty Ducks” (1992). He also earned a British Academy Film Awards nomination for “White Mischief” (1987), a drama set in colonial Kenya. But Mr. Ackland’s true home was the London stage.
He was among the actors who provided the firm foundation of English theater during the postwar years, ranking alongside Ian Holm, Maggie Smith and Claire Bloom. Many in that generation, like Mr. Ackland, later found success in Hollywood.
A bear of a man with a gravelly voice and a gregarious, opinionated presence onstage and off, Mr. Ackland was prolific and versatile. He played Falstaff, Shakespeare’s great comic character in “Henry IV, Part 1” and Henry IV, Part 2”; the writer C.S. Lewis in the British TV version of “Shadowlands”; and Juan Perón in the original London cast of Tim Rice and Andrew Lloyd Weber’s “Evita” (1978), opposite Elaine Paige in the title role.
“I don’t think I’ve made any role my own,” he told The Evening Standard in 2006. “My quality is variation. I’m a hit- and-run actor. I get to do a lot of villains, but that’s because I’m English.”
Mr. Ackland could be self-disparaging about his willingness to take work wherever it became available, a predilection driven less by money than a need to be constantly on the move.
He came to regret many of his nontheatrical roles, like those in the comedy “Bill and Ted’s Bogus Journey” (1991) and a meaty cameo in the video for the song “Always on My Mind” by the English pop band the Pet Shop Boys.
“I do an awful lot of crap, but if it’s not immoral, I don’t mind,” he told The Guardian in 2001. “I’m a workaholic. Sometimes it’s a form of masochism.”
He was even ambivalent about his role in “Lethal Weapon 2” (1989) as Arjen Rudd, the oily, racist South African who battles two Los Angeles police detectives, Martin Riggs (Mel Gibson) and Roger Murtaugh (Danny Glover).
Rudd, a consul-general dealing drugs on the side, gets away with murder by claiming diplomatic immunity, even at the point where he appears to kill Riggs — just before Murtaugh shoots him in the head.
“It’s just been revoked,” Murtaugh says, a punchline that became a catchphrase of the late 1980s, much to Mr. Ackland’s chagrin.
“Not a day goes by without someone across the street going ‘diplomatic immunity,’” he said in a BBC interview in 2013. “It drives you up the wall.”
Sidney Edmond Jocelyn Ackland was born on Feb. 29, 1928 — a leap day — in the North Kensington neighborhood of London. His father, Sydney Ackland, was a journalist from Ireland whose serial philandering kept him largely out of his son’s life, leaving him to be raised by his mother, Ruth Izod, a maid.
He gravitated to acting as a child, inspired, he later said, by the mysterious smoke and fog of Depression-era London.
“To be in the fog was to be in an adventure where the imagination could stretch itself, allowing me to be anywhere in the world,” he told The Independent in 1997. “Houses and streets would disappear, and a lamppost would faintly emerge from the gloom and become a pirate ship.”
He attended the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama in London, paying his way by cleaning barracks for U.S. Army troops stationed there during World War II. He graduated in 1945, the same year he started acting professionally.
Mr. Ackland spent decades performing in repertory and small-town theater. In 1951, he traveled to Pitlochry, a small town in the Scottish Highlands, to appear in J.M. Barrie’s play “Mary Rose.” Among his fellow actors was Rosemary Kirkcaldy.
Though she was engaged at the time, the two fell in love and married later that year.
With a growing family — the couple eventually had seven children — Mr. Ackland despaired of making a career in acting. In 1955, he and his wife, with two infants in tow, moved to East Africa, where he spent six months running a tea plantation in Malawi.
But the stage beckoned, and they spent two years in South Africa picking up acting work. The country’s intrusive apartheid regime disgusted them; at one point the police raided their home looking for subversive material and left with a copy of the novel “Black Beauty,” the tale of a horse by Anna Sewell, which investigators thought might be anti-apartheid.
After returning to Britain, the couple restarted their careers, even as their family was growing rapidly.
One evening in 1963, when Mr. Ackland was performing as the lead in Bertolt Brecht’s “Life of Galileo,” a fire broke out in their London home. Ms. Kirkcaldy, pregnant with their sixth child, managed to get the other five out of the house but broke her back when she leaped from an upper floor.
Doctors said she would miscarry and never walk again; instead, she delivered a healthy child and was on her feet again within 18 months.
Ms. Kirkcaldy was diagnosed with motor neuron disease in 1999 and died in 2002. Mr. Ackland is survived by his daughters, Kirsty Baring and Sammy, Penny, Melanie and Toni Ackland; his son, Toby; 34 grandchildren; and 30 great-grandchildren. Another son, Paul, died in 1982.
After his wife’s death, Mr. Ackland developed stage fright and stayed away from theater for 12 years, he said. During that time, he edited her diaries, a project she had encouraged him to pursue, and published them in 2009 as “My Better Half and Me: A Love Affair That Lasted Fifty Years.”
He returned to the theater in 2012 to play King George V in David Seidler’s play “The King’s Speech” (later adapted as a movie). By then, he had soured on the turns that his profession had taken toward instant stardom and pyrotechnic productions.
“They give them all these car chases, the villain dying twice, and they play down to the audience,” Mr. Ackland told Strand magazine in 2002. “But I believe you should never give people what they want. Give them something a little more than what they want and that way they grow up.”
There are bad bosses, and then there’s Jackson Lamb: rumpled, smelly, discouraging and mildly corrupt. Yet for fans of Slow Horses, the returning Apple TV+ series based on the espionage fiction of Mick Herron, this is a character that reliably emits a magnetic, congealed gleam. Like a day-old doner kebab.
Lamb, rendered in grimy perfection for the small screen by Gary Oldman, is the underachieving spymaster who has been mysteriously placed in charge of a sidelined team of defunct spooks.
In Oldman’s capable hands Lamb carries with him the burden not just of his own failures but the failures of the entire viewing audience. He drinks, he swears, he farts and he undermines his staff. For Lamb there is no dawn untainted with pessimism and no joke without a bleak truth at its core, courtesy of dialogue honed by showrunner Will Smith, late of The Thick of It and Veep.
It is a role that has brought Oldman an appreciative box-set fanbase, admittedly not quite yet rivalling his cinematic turn as Sirius Black in the Harry Potter franchise. And playing Lamb also appears to have let the actor draw deep on a career of off-beam, frequently unsettling performances. In 1988, he was a football hooligan in Alan Clarke’s 1989 TV film The Firm and playwright Joe Orton in Prick Up Your Ears. Then he was the punk Sid Vicious in Sid and Nancy, the infamous assassin in Oliver Stone’s JFK and Dracula for Francis Ford Coppola in 1992.
In the years since, Oldman has become an admired Hollywood fixture, with recurring performances as Gordon in Christopher Nolan’s Batman films and an almost unrecognisable appearance this summer as President Truman in the director’s latest, Oppenheimer.
But Oldman has earned the most entertainment industry acclaim so far for playing a duo of contrasting and particularly British heroes. First he was George Smiley, John le Carré’s careful secret service maestro, in the film Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, and then Winston Churchill in Darkest Hour. The former won him an Oscar nomination, the second secured him the gilt statuette itself. And two years ago he was nominated for a third time for an eponymous role in Mank, David Fincher’s paean to a past era of great American film-making.
‘Rumpled, smelly, discouraging and mildly corrupt’: Oldman as Jackson Lamb in season 3 of Slow Horses, starting in December. Photograph: Jack English/Apple
Every actor regularly changes shape to some extent, with the aid of costumes and props, but for Oldman this holds a special appeal. “I do love a disguise,” he admitted to Hollywood news website Deadline while he was in England filming an earlier season of Slow Horses. He had found it challenging, he went on, to divest himself of fake trappings for Fincher on the set of Mank. “You know, I do like to hide, but I’m hiding because it’s all my baggage and all my stuff, and so that was my problem, that wasn’t Fincher’s problem, and when he said: ‘No, I just want no veil between you and the audience’, it wasn’t that I resisted it, it made me a little anxious because, hey, even George Smiley has those glasses, you know – at least I could hide a little behind those glasses.”
Among the items of personal “baggage” that Oldman is referring to are probably his difficult childhood and a previous addiction to alcohol. He also has some failed marriages behind him – four, in fact, including one to British screen favourite Lesley Manville, the mother of his eldest son Alfie, and a brief one with the young Uma Thurman. He also had a relationship with Isabella Rossellini.
The nature of his childhood sorrows is commonly thought to have been explored to impressive effect in the film Nil By Mouth, which Oldman wrote and directed in 1997. Oldman, however, regardless of audience assumptions, has distanced the gritty story from the truth of his own family life. For the critic Nick James the film, which is set in Oldman’s native south London and depicts a violent father, is a highlight. “He’s a hero for me simply because of that film,” he said in 2014. “Put aside all his acting achievements and he’s still the person who has made the most authentic working-class Cockney movie ever.”
Oldman was born in New Cross in 1958 and his real-life father, Leonard, was a welder and former sailor who left home and Gary’s mother, Kathleen, when his son was seven. The teenage Gary, a Millwall fan, was initially drawn to the idea of a life in music, but he gravitated towards the theatre instead after seeing Malcolm McDowell on stage. He went on to drama school, appearing later at the Royal Court and with the Royal Shakespeare Company and then winning television roles, including parts in Mike Leigh’s film Meantime, as well as Clarke’s acclaimed football gang TV drama.
In disguise: Oldman’s Oscar-winning performance as Winston Churchill in Darkest Hour. Photograph: Working Title Films/Allstar
Film actors inevitably accrue their own bespoke flavour over a long career. The people they have portrayed before on screen begin to matter, despite their varied props and chameleon tendencies. A back catalogue of work slowly builds up a visual and emotional network, something which is linked to them whether they like it or not. Good casting directors know this and often let an actor play against their public image, so a villain is suddenly a hero or vice versa. Unfortunately, a star’s image is also affected by associations thrown up by their private life. In the golden days of Hollywood, the studios understood this risk and protected reputations ferociously as a result.
In the 1990s, the press picked up on rumours of Oldman’s hard drinking and unruly behaviour. More recently he has faced down accusations that he was violent to his third wife, Donya Fiorentino, the mother of his younger sons, Gulliver and Charlie. He denied her claims, which came out in an interview while he was being venerated for Darkest Hour in 2018.
Prior to that, in 2014, Oldman issued an apology for offending Jewish people. He had been quoted in a Playboy magazineinterview sympathising with Mel Gibson, who had made antisemitic comments when he was stopped for drunk driving in 2006. Oldman was “deeply remorseful”, he said, for the way he had spoken and had really only meant to expose common hypocrisy. “I have an enormous personal affinity for the Jewish people in general, and those specifically in my life,” he added.
The chance to pick up a fresh set of props and a new, rich identity could become addictive for an actor with a “past”, whatever the audience might think they know of them. Oldman certainly appreciates the plum parts he has enjoyed down the years. “Some of the roles that I’ve played, I look back and think, you know, I was very lucky – I’ve done pretty well,” he has said. “I’ve had a few special ones come in and land on the desk.”
Film lovers can only hope that good scripts keep dropping down in front of Oldman. And if the desk he is sitting at when they land is the one Lamb occupies inside the set of grotty Slough House in Slow Horses, it will, fans know, be covered in dead whisky glasses and cigarette butts.
After three years of buddy banter and watching the same movies over and over, astronauts Adam and Jane, marooned on a busted ship, accept the fact that they won’t get back to Earth and finally give in to their mutual attraction. Of course that’s when their navigation system starts working again, enabling them to return home — where their spouses are waiting. Uh-oh. Does it count as cheating if you thought you were doomed?
Anthony Mackie (recently seen in the “Twisted Metal” series) and Zoë Chao (“Party Down”) convincingly, playfully connect as both sparring partners and lovers, and pairing them in a romantic comedy of the sci-fi persuasion was a felicitous move. While the story is relatively straightforward, the director Kristian Mercado puts a fun twist on it: The ship is cartoonishly designed, with flat surfaces that often look drawn, while everything on Earth is filmed in a naturalistic manner. This suggest that the space sexcapades were not part of “real” life. But what if they led to feelings that are simultaneously grounded and lightheaded? Never mind where Adam and Jane are: You are likely to find yourself rooting for them, which is a good rom-com’s ultimate objective.
Set in gritty, racially mixed housing projects, the banlieue movie has become a thriving subgenre of French cinema since “La Haine” in 1995. It has gone through multiple variations, taking the form of thrillers, coming-of-age tales, comedies and family dramas. Now comes “The Gravity,” in which teen gangs, drug dealers and people with dreams of escape confront one another against an ominous apocalyptic background. Most of the French-Burkinabé director Cédric Ido’s film takes place before a freak alignment of all eight planets in the solar system. Nobody knows exactly what will happen, but everybody is on edge. Daniel (Max Gomis) is about to move away with his girlfriend (Hafsia Herzi) and their daughter, but the pull of the neighborhood is strong — and no one is pulling stronger than his own brother, Joshua (Steve Tientcheu), a wheelchair-using tinkerer and dealer. What’s most striking about “The Gravity” is the precision with which Ido builds mood, using camera work and editing that are economical and precise. As Daniel faces off with his own flesh and blood as well as a quasi-mystical gang, the Ronins, the movie plays off the idea of gravitational pull, both literal and metaphorical, suggesting that people can be kept in place by implacable forces.
Kyle Patrick Alvarez’s movie is pretty much “The Goonies” but on the moon. Too bad “Moonies” has quite a different meaning because it would have been a great title. Set in 2257, the film takes place on a long-established lunar colony that’s basically a glorified dormitory for miners harvesting helium, a crucial component for intergalactic travel. The mining company’s treatment of the workers amounts to semi-enslavement, which this Disney production addresses in a peripheral way. (“Crater” premiered on Disney+ in May and was pulled just seven weeks later as part of a cost-cutting move; now it is finally available again on demand.)
The real focus is a band of local kids who try to help their friend Caleb (Isaiah Russell-Bailey) get to a far-flung crater that holds special meaning for him, before he is shipped off to distant Omega — an idyllic outpost reachable only after 75 years of cryo-sleep that would forever sever him from his buddies. The group, which includes the soulful heartthrob Dylan (Billy Barratt, the clairvoyant Caspar on Apple TV+’s “Invasion”), steals a big rover and sets off on a trek. The expedition takes maybe a little too long to reach the crater, with shenanigans and pit stops at abandoned moon condos along the way. But it’s all made worth it by a lovely, bittersweet coda about what awaits Caleb on Omega.
By the time humanity limps to the year 2144 in this Canadian movie, major floods have frozen over, creating vast expanses of snow and ice. The one-eyed foundling Sumi (Viva Lee) was raised by a polar bear, so when we meet her, the little girl expresses herself in grunts and growls. It follows that when she meets strangers (only women seem to be left), she does not understand what they say. The director Kirsten Carthew fully commits to the premise and there are no subtitles for the (made-up) language we hear, putting us in the same position as our pint-size heroine. This might frustrate some viewers, but “Polaris” is easy to follow. Which does not mean it’s always easy to understand. Carthew mixes a certain amount of realism, especially when it comes to violence and the brutal Morads and their jury-rigged snowmobiles, with a fablelike, almost mystical dimension. Sumi has a preternatural obsession with following the title’s North Star, and who is the frozen girl (Khamisa Wilsher) who may or may not be human? So many questions, so few answers. Just accept “Polaris” on its own poetic terms.
With its pastel palette, soothing music and manicured settings, the French director Sophie Barthes’s film looks like an extended ad for a wellness retreat. It does not take long, however, to realize that its society, in which artificial intelligence is integrated into every aspect of life, is just as nightmarish as a postapocalyptic scorched Earth. Successful executive Rachel (Emilia Clarke) embraces A.I. in every facet of her existence — she even has a virtual therapist — and decides to have a child through a Goop-y outfit called the Womb Center. Her fetus will grow inside an egglike pod so her life and body won’t be disrupted by pregnancy. Rachel’s husband, Alvy (Chiwetel Ejiofor), is a botanist who generally prefers letting nature run its course — he has his work cut out for him in this barely futuristic setting — but he grudgingly supports her decision. The couple have such incompatible outlooks on pretty much everything that you wonder how they have made it that far. But it’s almost impossible to not get caught up in the many issues that “The Pod Generation” brings up, like, for example, Rachel’s happily oblivious embrace of technology, which she assumes is not just always benevolent, but also preferable to the real world.
If the call came, would you be the next James Bond? Bigbadsean Wouldn’t happen. There’s a sequence to the casting of 007. They choose an actor from one of the smaller UK nations, then from a non-British Commonwealth country and finally an Englishman – and repeat. Actor from smaller UK nation (Connery, Scotland), non-British actor (Lazenby, Australia), Englishman (Moore, England). Sequence completed, we go again: actor from smaller UK nation (Dalton, Wales), non-British actor (Brosnan, Ireland), Englishman (Craig, England).
So, you see, I couldn’t be the next Bond. It’ll be James Nesbitt (Northern Ireland), Ryan Gosling (Canada), then an Englishman. Assuming Nesbitt and Gosling do three movies each (one every three years), the earliest I could take the role would be 2041, when I’d be in my 80s. That’s almost certainly too old. While I have ideas as to how the role could be slightly rewritten to accommodate the secret agent’s mobility and bladder issues, even then I think it very, very unlikely they’d choose me. Given all that? Not going to happen … probably not going to happen.
I’m a vegan. What would it take to convince you to become vegan, too? elykwh I’m already about 70% vegan and have to say I don’t find it that hard. My last Sunday roast? Potatoes, carrots, parsnips, broccoli, cauliflower and beef. So, almost entirely vegan. Same with Nando’s. You’ve got your chips, your macho peas, your corn on the cob – show me a single thing on that plate that’s come from an animal. You can’t. Have another look. You still can’t. In most places, with only a minimum of effort, large portions of your meal can and will be vegan. So, be good to yourself, be good to the planet and go largely vegan today.
What song should be played at your funeral and who should sing? ambandib2005 There’s a homeless busker who performs at St Stephen’s underpass in Norwich. Some say he lives with his mum and pretends to be without a home to monetise the public’s pity for the downtrodden. I’m not sure; he looks homeless enough to me. But his act! A voice like thick honey, Kenneth-Williams-style diction and a set list comprising your Snow Patrols, Stereophonics and a slightly-too-high Goo Goo Doll encore. He’s the best singer I’ve ever heard (so far). And because I’m getting cremated and they position the singer near the furnace doors, he’d get to enjoy the warmth while singing. Even in death I’ll be giving a bit back to the needy. (Song: Pipes of Peace.)
Alan Partridge and Jennie Gresham (Susannah Fielding) in This Time With Alan Partridge. Photograph: BBC/Baby Cow/Gary Moyes/PA
Who would be your ideal partner in Strictly Come Dancing? mesm I’ve given this a lot of thought and all things considered I’d go for one of the women.
What were the greatest life lessons you learned from your parents? Abadabs From my father, I learned how to strengthen conkers (soak in vinegar, bake for two hours at 140C/gas mark 1). From my mother, never, ever stop to help a broken-down vehicle – even if they look to be in distress. It’s actually a trap set by robbers.
Have you given up on finding true love? baffledbylife It makes me laugh when people say that. I feel true love every day: the true love of seeing a flower in bloom, of hearing a bird in song, of a freshly baked loaf or a gambolling lamb. I delight at the first dew of spring and the final leaves of autumn. And my heart positively soars when I’m about to reverse out of a parking space, but then realise the space in front is empty, meaning I can zoom out forwards. So, you see, true love fills my every waking hour. For what it’s worth, I also happen to be in a sexful relationship with a woman. But yeah, like I say, makes me laugh.
Radio, TV, books, films, podcasts. What worlds are left for you to conquer? CarrAgger I’m increasingly drawn to the world of long-form documentary. What would mine be? Easy: the definitive history of the Vietnam war. Once that’s done – it would take eight to 10 weeks – I might direct a movie. The possibilities of cartoon excite me. There’s an elegance and poetry to animation that’s hard for live action to match. Also, if you have an idea for a scene where a character’s head has to turn round 350 degrees (which I do), animation makes it much easier.
If you weren’t available, who would you choose to anchor the next election night at the BBC? WyzacH Matt Baker. Next question.
What has been your most rewarding spiritual experience? Aaaaaal The opening ceremony of the 2012 London Olympics. I was watching the left-leaning propaganda display with a Welsh woman I’d accidentally started dating, and she asked if I had any Doritos, perhaps because she was hungry or wanted to crunch loudly over the commentary. I nipped to the garage and bought a bag, but didn’t buy salsa as I had a jar in the cupboard. When I got home, I noticed the salsa had gone off in 2010, but we tucked in anyway, since best-before dates are a scam. It was only when we finished that I noticed the expiry date actually said 2001.
The stomach cramps were the first to come, followed by dizzying nausea and soon (lots of) vomit. For the next six hours, we were sick again and again, locked in a double helix of distress and euphoric relief accompanied by the smell of wet wipes. It became a hallucinogenic, out-of-body experience. We found ourselves hugging and laughing, sharing our innermost thoughts, lost in flights of fancy and repeatedly being sick. By sunrise, it had worn off. I called her a cab and emailed my assistant five carefully chosen words: “Get me a cleaner, quick.”
I think of my life as the story of two Alans: the Alan before the time I was sick watching the opening ceremony of the 2012 London Olympics and the Alan after the time I was sick watching the opening ceremony of the 2012 London Olympics.
As a man with few equals, who can think on his feet while talking eloquently into a microphone, isn’t it time we heard you commentating on a Cup Final? thedribbler2 It’s a good question and, despite the fact you inexplicably capitalised the words “Cup” and “Final”, one I’m happy to answer. The only football finals I’d be prepared to commentate on would be for the women’s game. I’ll probably take some flak for this, but I happen to believe that women and girls are the future of the sport. Like I say, might not be the cool or popular thing to say, but it’s just what I happen to believe.
As an authority on the benefits of self-reflection and continuous improvement, what are your top three regrets and how did you learn from them? MarkAP Laughed at wife when face swelled up after bee sting(s); kicked pig; wasn’t great dad. Don’t believe in looking back, so haven’t learned from them.
A 2002 Range Rover. Photograph: Goddard Archive/Alamy
From the Rover Vitesse fastback to the Vauxhall Insignia, you have owned some of the truly great modern automobiles. Which has been your favourite car over the years? cy7000 An interesting question, and the answer may surprise you. I could easily reel off the high-class cars I’ve driven over the years: 2022 Range Rover Velar, 2021 Range Rover Vogue SE, Range Rover Sport 4.4 V8 petrol. But years before then, as a younger man in a simpler time, I fondly remember pootling around Norfolk in a humble little runaround. Wasn’t the fanciest nor most expensive, but it had personality, and that matters more than anything to me. I cried when I had to sell it. It was a 2002 Range Rover HSE+.
What’s your opinion on the rise of electric cars? CosmoLang As Norfolk’s car laureate, it’s my job – my privilege – to promote car ownership and usage across the county. As such, I’m largely fuel-agnostic: what powers our vehicles is less important than that we’re in our vehicles. Remember: Norfolk is a big, flat pancake of a county with fewer public transport journeys available per head, as a percentage of mean population density, than anywhere in the UK. And although I made that statistic up, cars will continue to be central to our prosperity, not to mention our ability to get to work or our racquets club.
Does that make me an apologist for big oil or large petrol? Not a bit. Don’t forget, in the 90s, I was one of the first car-liking public figures to openly discuss catalytic converters, and not just because I liked saying the words “catalytic converter”. And while this isn’t the place to get into the whole he-said-she-said of whether climate change is actually happening, what I will say is that while cars are demonised, other sources of greenhouse emissions get off scot-free. Prime example? Cow trumps.
While I welcome the rise of electric cars, I don’t necessarily see it as the only show in town. With the technology available to make smaller and smaller reactors, we’d be fools to rule out the emergence of the nuclear hatchback.
Todd Haynes first received the script for his latest movie, “May December,” from Natalie Portman during the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020. With Hollywood and other industries shuttered, the director found himself drawn to the “pleasurable uncertainty” that the film’s two female protagonists relayed.
“There was humor, and there was also darkness, and the way those things interwove was so masterfully done. Just when you thought you knew what you were thinking and feeling, the ground would shift,” Haynes told HuffPost. “Natalie and I started to talk about it, and we found so many commonalities about what attracted us to the material, from expectations about who these characters are to the judgments and moral groundings around these women.”
“May December,” which opened in theaters last week ahead of a Dec. 1 release on Netflix, is a fictionalized take on a real-life case that ignited a tabloid frenzy in the 1990s. The film follows Elizabeth Berry (played by Portman), a television actor who is hoping to portray Gracie Atherton-Yoo (Julianne Moore) in a biopic.
Julianne Moore, left, and Natalie Portman in "May December."
Francois Duhamel/Courtesy of Netflix
Gracie, as it turns out, is a former pet shop owner living in relative seclusion with her much younger husband, Joe Yoo (Charles Melton), and their children after her release from prison. The couple met when Gracie was 36 and Joe was a 13-year-old seventh grader. (Read HuffPost’s review of the film here.)
Screenwriter Samy Burch was clearly inspired by the case of Seattle area teacher Mary Kay Letourneau, who in 1997 pleaded guilty to the second-degree rape of Vili Fualaau, a former student in her sixth grade class. In interviews, Burch has said that she didn’t set out to dramatize Letourneau’s story as much as comment more broadly on how the tabloid culture of the past helped shape the true crime-obsessed audiences of the present.
Haynes also makes an effort to distance “May December” from Letourneau, who died in 2020. “The stroke of genius in the script is how she separates the story from the tabloid event of Gracie meeting Joe, which happened 20-some years in the past,” he said, referring to Burch. “It’s really about this outsider coming into a well-fortified community, a neighborhood, a family that’s built up so many barriers to survive that kind of an event.”
From left: Charles Melton, Todd Haynes and Moore on the "May December" set.
François Duhamel/Courtesy of Netflix
The movie also gave Haynes the opportunity to reunite with Moore, a longtime collaborator. The pair have previously worked together on four films — “Safe,” “I’m Not There,” “Wonderstruck” and, most notably, “Far From Heaven.”
“Julianne is about as extraordinary an actor as I’ve ever known on film,” Haynes said. “I mean that as a lover of film, not just somebody who’s worked with her so intimately on projects.”
He shared similar sentiments ahead of a “May December” screening at NewFest, New York’s premier LGBTQ+ film festival, in October. “There’s a transparency, and there’s something that you cannot penetrate in her as an actor, and it completely wakes you up as a viewer,” he said at the time. “And that’s what I’ve tried in do in the films I’ve made as well.”
Reviews of “May December” have already named Moore and Portman as front-runners for next year’s Academy Awards. Best known for his portrayal of Reggie Mantle on “Riverdale,” Melton delivers a breakout performance that could land him on the Oscars shortlist, too.
Haynes, left, was presented with NewFest's Queer Visionary Award by fellow filmmaker Tom Kalin in October.
Haynes, who is gay, was honored with NewFest’s Queer Visionary Award at the October festival. A pioneering talent in the “New Queer Cinema” movement of the late 1980s and early ’90s, the director has never been defined by a single genre.
Though none of the principal characters in “May December” identifies as LGBTQ+, the film is imbued with a fair amount of camp humor that aligns with a queer aesthetic. And Haynes, who has always been interested in exploring “outsiders and criminality and deviancy and transgression” in his work, sees it as a natural fit within his cinematic oeuvre.
“What was distinctive about New Queer Cinema was that it wasn’t trying to make happy, domesticated characters that you wanted to bring into your living room,” Haynes recalled. “It wanted the queerness of characters to be raising questions about the norms of society. It felt like we were going somewhere and moving somewhere, and I don’t always feel that today, even though we’re faced with about as fierce a culture of antagonism from the far right as we’ve ever been.”
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Adam Sandler stars in “Leo” as a grumpy lizard who has spent his entire life in the terrarium of a fifth-grade classroom. He’s been joined by a turtle named Squirtle (Bill Burr), and the two are mostly content to stare out the glass, year after year, commenting like Statler and Waldorf on the various tween archetypes that show up on the first day of school: the motormouth, the class clown, the kid with helicopter parents who’s allergic to everything. But the bubble bursts for Sandler’s Leo when he realizes that he’s approaching 75 — the average life span for his species — and has hardly gotten to live out his dreams as a free lizard.
Leo sees an opportunity with the arrival of a no-nonsense substitute teacher, Ms. Malkin (Cecily Strong), after the usual instructor goes on maternity leave. Along with implementing a stricter disciplinary system, she assigns her students at the Florida school to take turns bringing Leo home, caring for him as their own pet. The kids are dismayed, until one of them, the chatty Summer (voiced by Sandler’s daughter Sunny), discovers that the seemingly docile lizard can talk, and begins to open up to him about her problems. Leo, finding fulfillment in his new task, takes on the role of therapist each week, dishing out advice and convincing each student that they’re the only one who can hear him speak.
“Leo” is the second animated film from Sandler’s creative house Happy Madison Productions and his newest release for Netflix. Unlike the company’s first foray into animation, the raunchy 2002 Hanukkah flick “Eight Crazy Nights,” “Leo” aims for wholesome family entertainment, combining themes like the challenges of growing older with a healthy dose of G-rated toilet humor (and a few double entendres that will go over kids’ heads).
Sandler does a fine job as the voice of Leo, delivering a good mix of gruffness and sweetness into an absurd scenario. The kids in “Leo” confide in him their desire to be understood by their parents and peers, and the film drives home the overdone but nonetheless true message that everyone faces this struggle — even popular girls like Jayda (played by Sandler’s other daughter, Sadie). These tender moments are punctuated by several original songs — yes, “Leo” is a full-blown musical — and a plethora of running gags, like portraying the school’s kindergartners as wide-eyed bobbleheads crashing into walls.
Written by Sandler, Paul Sado, and Robert Smigel (who also directed the film with Robert Marianetti and David Wachtenheim), “Leo” sometimes has trouble identifying its audience. The musical sequences aren’t particularly interesting visually and will drag on for adults, yet it’s hard to imagine children sitting through Leo and Squirtle’s extended riffs on divorced parents or the courtship behaviors of reptiles and not getting a little bored. But with the holidays rolling around and families gathering, this will undoubtedly work as something to put on in the background for everyone.
The two defining currents of Tamil cinema of the past decade — the engaged, politically aware films of the Pa. Ranjith school and the playful, movie-aware work of the Naalaya Iyakkunar gang — collide head on in Karthik Subbaraj’s Jigarthanda DoubleX (2023), a spiritual sequel to the director’s second feature Jigarthanda (2014). Where the earlier film, arguably its maker’s finest, was a heady celebration of the supremacy of cinematic mythmaking over that of the gun barrel, DoubleX is a much more solemn, spiritually tortured assertion of the importance of cinematic demystification.
As a filmmaker, Karthik Subbaraj calls to mind those expert craftsmen who keep snipping away at a chunk of folded paper without giving us an idea of where they are going with it, only to unfold it at the end and have us marvel the intricacy of the design and the necessity of every redundant seeming gesture. He begins with pet ideas and images — in this case, again, the primacy of the camera over the gun — and then weaves a convoluted plot over them outwards, allowing the audience to arrive at their beating heart in the middle of a film. Showy? Absolutely. And DoubleX doubles down on the showiness. Every shot is an event – sometimes tiringly so, as in the many ritual shootouts organized in a movie theatre — and dramatic logic makes way for a logic of the spectacle.
Coerced by a cop to kill a ruthless, Clint Eastwood-loving henchman named Caesar (Raghava Lawrence, spitting image of a young Rajinikanth), prisoner Raydas (SJ Suryah) masquerades as a filmmaker to woo his vain target into a celluloid dream and slay him. Raydas and Caesar embark on a movie project together, but they soon find their fiction overwhelmed by reality. Faced with the genocide of a mountainous tribe by those in power, both filmmaker and subject must choose to leave fiction for reality. Rather, transform their fiction into reality.
As the synopsis suggests, the film goes all over the place, and then some, and part of the fun and the frustration is in observing Karthik Subbaraj make straight-faced connections between elements that have no right to be together. His previous film Mahaan (2022) — built around the idea of real-life father and son playing a slippery morality game on screen — was in comparison a lean operation, balancing its two central elements with relative ease. DoubleX, in contrast, is unwieldy — weighed down by seriousness where Jigarthanda was shrewdly unserious and light-footed — overstuffed with dramatic developments, all of which, to be sure, is fleshed out with the director’s characteristic taste for symmetries, repetitions and reversals. A wannabe cop, Raydas ends up as a criminal, pretends to be a filmmaker, only to become a real filmmaker exposing the cops; a petty criminal, Caesar aspires to be a movie star, only to turn into a real hero, who becomes a screen legend. And so on.
After Mahaan, Karthik Subbaraj seems to have grown more comfortable propelling his narrative through characters that aren’t conventionally likeable. For a good while, DoubleX is a veritable parade of inglorious bastards, our identification never resting securely with any of them. But despite Karthik Subbaraj’s self-absorbed cinephilia, there’s a naïve idealism at the heart of his films that keeps them from hip cynicism. Part of the idealism comes from the subaltern political assertion, now domesticated thanks to the work of Ranjith and Mari Selvaraj, that DoubleX borrows and gives a unique spin to: cinema cannot defeat oppression, but it can stand witness to it; art cannot fight malevolent power, but it can influence individuals to change the nature of that power.
DoubleX is Karthik Subbaraj’s first film to release in theatres in many years (Mahaan went straight to streaming), so it is perhaps understandable that he turns it into a sentimental ode to the collective movie experience. The notion that a theatre audience can be outraged by images of oppression and moved to action (a lasting legacy of Shankar’s cinema, where cable news and social media become the keepers of public conscience) is so corny and old-fashioned that it is thoroughly impressive in its sincerity. DoubleX presents it almost as a necessary myth for truth to flourish.
It is curious that we get Martin Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon (2023) and DoubleX within the span of a month. Very different pictures, but both tackle fraught political subjects with an often stifling piety (although Karthik Subbaraj is capable of inserting an absolutely juvenile punchline in a cop’s mouth in the film’s most harrowing scene), expose cinema’s tendency to “print the legend,” yet refuse to stop at this demystification in order to lay the foundations for truth. The worst rogues in DoubleX use cinema as a medium for political propaganda, but it is also put at the service of justice. The camera is neutral, it is those who wield it that make it good or evil. That, perhaps, is the ultimate myth.
My friend Paul Bush, who has died aged 67 in a road traffic accident, was an experimental film-maker and film teacher. His film-making work focused on replacement animation, in which objects are replaced between frames, lending a magical instability to the physical world.
Paul’s first short film, Furniture Poetry, replaced pieces of furniture and fruit, but later he went on to replace actors, with his films Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde and Pas de Deux de Deux swapping out two pairs of protagonists between each frame of film, while keeping the action continuous.
His replacement objects also included insects and, in his film Ride (2018), real motorbikes, from a huge historical collection in Portugal. His last film, Orgiastic Hyper-Plastic (2020), used a vast collection of plastic objects foraged from beaches and roadsides to make a stunning elegy to humanity’s love affair with the material. He also created longer-form mixed-media films, including The Rumour of True Things (1996) and Babeldom (2012).
Paul was born in London, to Geoffrey Bush, a composer of classical music, and Julie (nee McKenna), a physiotherapist. He grew up in Golders Green, north London, and after attending University College school in Hampstead studied fine art at the Central School of Art and Design and then Goldsmiths, University of London, before teaching himself film-making at the London Film Makers’ Co-op and the Chapter Film workshop in Cardiff.
Having experimented briefly with animation as a student, he returned to the medium in the 1990s, with the encouragement and support of Channel 4’s then commissioning editor for animation, Clare Kitson, and aided by the Arts Council of England’s funding for innovative work. This allowed him to start producing films that were laborious in their making process but compelling and seductive to the viewer. Paul’s enduring excitement about the mechanisms of film-making and perception translated into playful explorations of the possibilities for frame-by-frame production.
As his films did not generate much in the way of money, Paul made a living by teaching all over the world, including at the National Film and Television School in the UK, the Lucerne School of Art and Design in Switzerland, Harvard University and the International School of Film and TV in Cuba. Possessed of a razor-sharp wit, he was a kind and generous teacher. His ex-students populate the world of experimental film-making, and his films and his teaching have made a lasting impact in the world of innovative visual culture.
Paul is survived by his partner, Lana Nikolič, whom he met in 2018, and two children, Lewis and Eva, from his marriage to Jane Wilkinson, which ended in divorce in 2007.
