Category: cinema

In the early stages of researching Want, a book about women’s sexual fantasies, the thing that shocked Gillian Anderson the most was the prevalence of shame. The book, which is based on My Secret Garden, the 1973 classic by Nancy Friday, is a compilation of anonymous letters by women sharing their sexual fantasies, and many of them, observed Anderson, still need permission to voice a desire – not just in public, but, “more shockingly, even in our private worlds”. To her amazement, the 56-year-old discovered she was not herself immune to this inhibition. Called upon to submit her own fantasy, Anderson says: “I kept putting it off and putting it off. I’m not a prude by any stretch and I can say any words out loud. But writing it down? I got really uncomfortable.”

It is not in the spirit of the venture to ask Anderson, who is talking to me on a video call from a hotel in Marrakech, which letter was hers, although the reader will, of course, wonder. The actor is on a few days’ break from filming a western in Canada, a gig for which she is simultaneously grateful – “I’m so fucking lucky” – and also finds herself energetically resenting. “There’s a part of me, when I’m up on the horse, that thinks, fucking hell, I can’t believe I’m having to do all this, with the rain and the wind and all of that.” This is the Anderson we have grown to know and love, the sweary, British incarnation of a formerly strait-laced American actor who, even after she has lived in London for decades and raised her two sons here, we can’t quite believe has chosen us and our accent over them and theirs. For a long time, says Anderson, she was too uptight to let the humour and irreverence of her British side show. But as her 60s approach, she has very much entered what she calls the “fuck it, succeed or fail I’m going to have fun” years of her life, and we are all the better off for it.

Hence the curation of Want, a whimsical piece of casting by the book’s publishers, inspired by Anderson’s role as Jean Milburn, a sex therapist in the hit four-season Netflix show Sex Education. The project required her to wade through thousands of sex fantasies submitted anonymously online. It is hard to imagine a modern version having the power of the original book, which, as anyone who got their hands on a copy when they were slightly too young will know, left certain indelible images. From the opening line – “In my mind, as in our fucking, I am at the crucial point … We are at the Baltimore Colt-Minnesota Viking football game, and it is very cold”; to the one about the dog (do you remember that one?!); to the contributions by suburban housewives describing what, in 1973, was clearly considered normal marital relations and to modern eyes is marital rape. As Anderson says, rightly: “Lots of women still struggle to speak about these things, even among their friends, let alone with their partners.” But what is more interesting about Want, perhaps, is where the taboos have shifted since the 1970s, and where the book’s generational anxieties lie.

There is a lot of throat clearing around fantasy being a safe space. Anderson writes in the introduction to the chapter about violent fantasies, “I can say, with utmost certainty, very few women would want … to play [these] out in real life.” There is a lot of conscientious representation of what one contributor describes as “navigating queer love and sex”, although, curiously, it sits alongside entries from women timidly and apologetically offering up their lesbian fantasies as if they are the most transgressive thing they can possibly imagine. (Anderson is irritated by my characterisation of this, but we will get to that.)

On the subject of straight women, there is a lot of this sort of thing: “My deep-seated fantasy, the one to which I touch myself after a warm cup of camomile and milk to bless my dreams, is for a man to be indelibly – and entirely ordinarily – nice to me.” And this: “I would do anything to fuck my best friend’s brother.” OK! And this: “I long to be ravaged by a tall German man.” (The presence of the word “ravaged” here, underscores the dangers of using written contributions rather than relying, as Friday did, on actual interviews; the influence of Fifty Shades of Grey’s EL James – “a man whispers invocations”; “reaching a state of sublime ecstasy” – and pornography in general is all over this book.)

There’s a lot of humour, deliberate or otherwise: “I have a recurring sexual fantasy about a dentist. It specifically involves the dentist chair and being tied down. I don’t know what it means and I’d probably be super-upset if my actual dentist tried to fuck me but … ” And then there is Anderson, in essay form at the top of each chapter, gamely and cheerfully offering interpretation and encouragement. “At the very heart of all my own fantasies,” she writes, “I am the watcher, not the watched. Or sometimes I switch between watcher and participant, maybe in a subconscious nod to my daily life as an actor. In my fantasies, I am undoubtedly a director. The privacy of my own mind is the one place where I am truly in control of when, how or even whether I am seen.”

What I find fascinating about all this is that while Friday was a cranky magazine journalist with no public profile, Gillian Anderson is not only a famous actor, but a famous sex symbol for the 30 years since her role as – to use the language of Want – the smouldering nerd Dana Scully in The X-Files. As she notes in one of the intros: “I had a surreal experience in 1996 when I was voted world’s sexiest woman by readers of FHM magazine … a type of worship not far off some of the descriptions in these fantasies.” The thinking, I guess, is what better way to encourage ordinary women to own their own fantasies than to have a hot celebrity with a down-to-earth attitude doing the same. But I wonder if Anderson’s celebrity, and the book’s invitation to address submissions to “Dear Gillian”, tips the scale in some fundamental way?

“Possibly,” Anderson says warily. “I’m not sure I got the sense that it was inhibiting anybody.” I suggest it risks introducing a performative aspect to the letters, which Anderson doesn’t think is the case. “I think we all felt that if people did feel they were writing to me, knowing how open I am – I’m pretty understanding and nonjudgmental, and I try to be as inclusive as humanly possible – people might feel safer, somehow. That they could put anything down and I wouldn’t be shocked.”

Which brings us to the lesbian fantasies. What to make of letters such as the one from a British woman who is “happily married” to a man but fantasises, guiltily, that he is dead and she’s getting it on with a woman at work? A fairly generic fantasy in other words, that is presented, amid much trembling drama, as if she were breaking the most shocking taboo. “I wonder if I’d be brave enough to let her work her way around my body,” writes the contributor, and the shame around this sophomoric fantasy strikes me, at a point in history when the world is supposed to have loosened up about gay stuff, as wild and vaguely depressing.

There is, I suggest to Anderson, an awful lot of latent homophobia in letters from ostensibly straight women who really need to get out more. Anderson looks taken aback. “Did you pay attention to what their religion was or where they were from?” (Most entries detail the writer’s sexuality, religion, location, but – a big oversight – don’t include ages.)

I did; some identified as religious, or came from conservative parts of the world, but not all. “I mean it’s easy to come at these letters and contributions from the perspective of living in our world, and more challenging to step into other people’s shoes. The fact that some of the women who contributed felt brave enough at all to press send, is remarkable.” She asks: “Did reading this book make you want to be less judgmental?” No! And I think that’s OK! This book will provide comfort not just by offering readers a chance to find fantasies similar to their own, but via the inescapably human experience of thinking, “God, I thought I was weird, but check out this bird and her crazy inner life.” Or as Anderson puts it, the project is designed “to encourage different ways of looking at how different but the same we are, depending on our backgrounds and religion. That we’re part of a melting pot. I’m hoping that it’s unifying. I hope people are entertained and moved. I hope it brings joy, and laughter. And understanding. And self-acceptance. And really encourages nonjudgment and inclusivity – that in our inner minds, in so many ways, we’re all the same.”

My takeaway, as a resentful lesbian, would be that the world is much straighter and unfriendlier than many of us would like to believe. “Yes, precisely. Which is why I don’t think we can say, ‘Get out more.’ It’s a bigger conversation for people more adept at it than I: to talk about the degree to which things, as a culture, are not as open and accepting and free as we might imagine they should be in 2024.”

A turning point for Gillian Anderson, in her life and career, was making the BBC thriller The Fall, 11 years ago. At the time, she was at a frustrating point in her professional life when none of the projects she was chasing were coming through. As an actor, Anderson has a stillness about her that is at the heart of her appeal, and for a long time, she says, it reflected how she moved through the world. “I’ve played so many serious characters, and I’ve been so serious in my life,” she says, and this was the case right until the moment it wasn’t.

Anderson’s habit of holding herself lightly in reserve has recommended her over the years for, among other roles, the lead in Edith Wharton and Dickens adaptations, and as Margaret Thatcher, Eleanor Roosevelt and Emily Maitlis, wildly different women linked by a sort of chilly hauteur that, embodied by Anderson, may have something to do with her bicultural background. The first part of her childhood took place in Crouch End, north London, where she lived with her American parents until the age of 11, when the family moved to Grand Rapids, Michigan. After the move, to a town Anderson once characterised as small and Republican, she cultivated an outsider-ish image, getting into punk in her teens and positioning herself, as she would decades later as an actor, as someone at an angle to the mainstream. This was in the late 70s and early 80s, and it wasn’t an easy transition, she says; a kid following that same journey today would, she assumes, have “less struggle than I did because of streamers, and shows like Sex Education, where there is such an amalgamation of American and British, the whole thing of where you’re from is less critical”.

Most of us were introduced to Anderson in the mid-90s via The X-Files, when she was firmly in her American phase. It wasn’t until 2002 that she moved to London full-time, and although some of the American emphases still linger (she says “process” with the short, American vowel and there is the occasional soft t), she is very British these days. She lives in London with her teenage sons, Oscar and Felix, who she had with ex-partner, Mark Griffiths, and her older daughter, Piper, who she had in her 20s with her first husband, Clyde Klotz, an art director she met on the set of The X-Files. Anderson – who won’t discuss her love life, but is thought to have rekindled her most recent public relationship, with Peter Morgan, creator of The Crown – is still amused by the gap between the 90s FHM version of her, and her actual life, which outside work consists primarily of running her two boys around the country to compete in downhill mountain bike races. (Both boys ride for pro-teams.)

“It felt so preposterous to me,” she says of the 90s magazine version of her, which even back then would have been more authentically represented by a photo of her desperately trying to prep for a scene while baby Piper crawled around her trailer. “If you saw my life and where I am half the time, between work and set and kids and driving and drop-offs and pick-ups and all that sort of stuff – the fact that you’d end up with those pictures is just so … ” She laughs. “It’s just part of the fantasy. It doesn’t feel like it represents me at all.”

There is no question, she says, that in the decade or so between having her daughter and her sons, she grew in confidence, a fact she ascribes, in part, to the impact of a single role. By the early 2010s, when the script for The Fall came around, Anderson was feeling gloomy about the options available to her. “There were one or two things I was involved in producing that just weren’t right, weren’t good enough. Or things landed in my lap that seemed like they would be great, except the writing was shit.”

She didn’t think, at the time, she was interested in doing another series after being in The X-Files for 11 seasons, and in the first instance refused to meet the writers and producers for The Fall. “I was told that it was written with me in mind, and it took some convincing before I’d read it,” she says. But once she did sit down with Allan Cubitt’s pilot, a taut, hour-long drama about DS Stella Gibson, a steely cop in Belfast chasing a serial killer, she did an immediate about-face. “The scripts were so good, they were so spare and so clever. And reading a woman like Stella on the page after reading many, many scripts where I was starting to lose hope felt like an incredible breakthrough. She felt unique to me; like the world would be a better place for her being in it, or for everything that she stood for.” Like what? “Like how unashamed she was about her own sexuality, not just how she presented, but how she went after what she wanted.”

The experience of playing Stella Gibson over a three-series arc, with Jamie Dornan as the killer with whom – like Javert in Les Misérables – she had a weird, charged relationship, changed Anderson. Gibson was written as a woman with frank sexual appetites, for both men and women, and Anderson found the experience of playing her so liberating it spilled over into her life. In one of the essays in Want, she talks about that period as one of “stepping into my sexual power in my 40s” and links it directly to the example set by her character. “Stella was effortlessly confident physically, intellectually and sexually,” she writes, and somewhere in there Anderson started to unwind. She had, she says, always been goofy and funny and confident in the privacy of her own home. But it wasn’t until The Fall and, right afterwards, her success playing a rare comic role in Sex Education, that she started to loosen up in public. “I feel like people understand my sense of humour, maybe for the first time. Like only in the last three or four years have I felt comfortable enough in my own skin and my place as a public person to reveal more of that aspect of me. There’s some joy in sharing the crazy, the funny.”

I tell Anderson it strikes me that, at 56, she is on an amazing career jag; hugely in demand as an actor, playing recent high-profile roles such as Emily Maitlis in the Netflix movie Scoop, and generally giving the impression she has inherited the Earth. She doesn’t disagree. “I mean that is true! I feel that, and I feel unbelievably lucky.” She also feels strident about the example she is setting. As well as collaborating on Want, Anderson has expanded her career lately into other interests beyond acting, and believes there is a general principle to extract from it. “It’s good for my boys, and I think for other women and young women to see it: that I’m adding things to my life right at the point when some people think I should be subtracting.” Anderson launched a soft drinks brand called G Spot last year (“natural, low calorie and with no added sugar”), that grew somewhat randomly out of the wellness conversations she was invited to join after playing Milburn in Sex Education. To embrace these opportunities, she has, at times, had to push against her own nature. Her first instinct in life is often to “sit down, indoors, in a dark room”, so becoming an entrepreneur has been largely a question of “not running away”.

She says: “Particularly at a certain age, particularly now for some reason, there are more and more women who are saying, ‘Fuck it, even though I’m 60, I’m going to start something new.’ A new business, a new relationship, a new venture. Just throwing everything to the wind. I don’t know if it’s going to succeed or fail, but I’m having fun, and the narrative that we’re building around it, and the encouragement other women are feeling as a result of seeing it, is – embrace it! Don’t run away; run towards it!”

It is in this spirit that Anderson approached the new book. (Tangentially, she mentions in Want learning that, after she played Margaret Thatcher in season four of The Crown, there was erotic fanfic on the internet about Thatcher, or rather, about Gillian Anderson as Thatcher. The fact that this blew her mind suggests there are dark corners of the British psyche that she will never fully understand.) She hopes it will help other women to articulate “their wants and needs”, and encourage them to be “as honest as they can be”, although I should say that in Anderson’s endearing awkwardness about her own contribution to the book, she has never seemed more British.

Given how easily she can move between the US and UK, then, I ask: if she had to pick a team, which would it be? “It feels like my cells are American, and my soul is British,” she says. “So if you ask me to give up my American passport, I would say it doesn’t feel right, no. Absolutely not. I’m American. And if you asked me to leave living in the UK? I’d say this is where I’m most comfortable, understood, accepted. So fuck off.”

There are a few tried and true staples of the American high school: yellow buses, homecoming, prom, the social safari that is the school cafeteria. And with each micro-generation, raunchy teen movies about trying to get some or remain a loser for life. Incoming, a new Netflix teen film from The Mick creators Dave and John Chernin, is the latest attempt to revive the type of outrageous R-rated comedy that Hollywood now makes in fits and starts. Like last year’s No Hard Feelings, Joy Ride or Bottoms, it’s trying to channel the unfiltered debauchery of American Pie or Superbad, but for kids born after both of those movies premiered. (I’ve realized with horror that fall’s freshmen, born in 2010, are the first of gen alpha to enter high school.)

As in both of those antecedents, Incoming focuses on one pod at the bottom of the food chain: nerdy freshman boys who haven’t grown yet. Benj Nielsen (an endearing Mason Thames) and his friends – Connor (Raphael Alejandro), Eddie (Ramon Reed) and Danah “Koosh” Koushani (Bardia Seiri) – all look like children, in a school populated with boorish proto-men played by actors in their late 20s. The plot in this 91-minute film is admirably slight and brass-tacks: Benj, a former theater kid trying to rebrand, is in love with his older sister Alyssa’s (Ali Gallo) best friend Bailey (Isabella Ferreira), but she’s a sophomore and cool; Koosh needs to prove himself to his older brother Kayvon (Kayvan Shai), a sociopathic senior who regularly beats him up, by hooking up with someone. Kayvon’s blowout party for the first weekend of school offers an ideal opportunity for both schemes, plus plenty of Project X-style hijinks.

Though Incoming has a decent handle on the raucous momentum of a high school party and the crass dialect of freshman boys (Koosh says the party will have “an insane dong-to-puss ratio”), the film has the consistently distracting sheen of a made-for-streaming film, making for cheap comparison to its inspirations. And its sensibility-pushing schtick works significantly less well than some of its peers, most notably Netflix’s biting Do Revenge or Paramount’s Honor Society, both self-conscious throwbacks to blockbuster teen movies that lean into the campy satire side of the canon.

Incoming also strives for ridiculous caricature – Alyssa has an openly acknowledged nose job as a sophomore, Benj’s monstrous senior carpool buddy (Thomas Barbusca) ropes him into a drug deal, Koosh installs a high-quality surveillance system to spy on potential targets for a “meet-cute” – that land as more cringe than funny. That’s especially the case for Bobby Cannavale as the jocular chemistry teacher so desperate for past glory and validation that he attends, then passes out at the party – a waste of the actor’s palpable charisma and comedic timing on a character used only for pity laughs.

As veterans of It’s Always Sunny In Philadelphia, the Chernin brothers work in touches of the long-running sitcom’s beloved shithead debauchery, most obviously by casting Kaitlin Olson as Benj and Alyssa’s mom, a concerned parent stuck at maximum volume. Incoming works best when that sensibility meets a touch of sweetness – poor Benj’s nerves when he accidentally ends up in a K-hole, the bond of girls taking selfies while they pee in the yard, drunk girl babbling or the revelations made in the post-party haze. Unfortunately, those touches are outweighed by attempts at gross-out shock – a broken bone or, most egregiously, a subplot involving Connor and Eddie taking a blackout drunk popular senior girl (Loren Gray) to Taco Bell and enduring a bowel disaster so disgusting I nearly turned the movie off.

The over-reliance on poop jokes for half the movie admittedly burned through much of my goodwill, though not all of it. When the kids are not having an all-out brawl, attempting to scheme drug deals or enduring a literal shit storm, little moments of chemistry, particularly between an appealing Thames and believably cool Ferreira, allow the movie to not feel like a writing exercise for an R-rating. The Chernins are savvy enough to not wrap the whole thing in a neat “just be yourself” bow in the end, but Incoming could have worn a little more of its heart on its sleeve.

19. Dumbo (2019)

Here is the great clunker of the Tim Burton canon. His cumbersome live-action remake of the Disney hit is a great big flightless pachyderm of a film that misses the pathos and charm of the original, saddling itself with 21st-century embarrassment at the whole idea of circus animals and overcomplicating everything. Burton’s instinct may be for a gothic overload of detail, but that feels wrong here.

18. Planet of the Apes (2001)

Burton’s “reimagining” of Pierre Boulle’s novel was the film that signalled his shift into the blockbuster mainstream. But this director’s complex, refined talent tends towards humour, emotion and visual style, not punchy action and plot, and his Pota was disappointing – although there is interest in the fact that the ape stars (like Helena Bonham Carter) were at this stage still using costumes and prosthetics, not mo-cap and CGI.

17. Alice in Wonderland (2010)

This was a thumping box-office triumph, and Burton’s goth take on Alice in Wonderland was what (unfortunately) got him the Dumbo gig – see above – and re-established his bankability as a Hollywood director. But it’s an exasperatingly mannered and often quite dull fantasy version: Mia Wasikowska’s Alice has dark, gloomy circles round her eyes; Johnny Depp (inevitably cast as the Mad Hatter) has peculiar gingery hair and a slippery English-Scottish accent; and Bonham Carter, equally inevitably the Red Queen, has a giant cartoony head. An oddity.

16. Big Fish (2003)

Burton doesn’t really go in for sentimental family cutesiness but really that is what Big Fish is about, despite its various walks on the weird side. The setting is a picturesque 50s anytown where Albert Finney’s ageing retired salesman is on his deathbed, regaling his son (Billy Crudup) about all the larks he got up to as an adventurous big fish in the pond of life, with Ewan McGregor as his younger self in flashback. Is he just making all this up? It’s a question that gets swept away in a gloopy tide of fantasy gibberish.

15. Batman Returns (1992)

Many consider Burton’s second Batman film to be superior to the first, but in my view it is less interesting, despite Michelle Pfeiffer’s rather iconic leather-clad turn as the slinky Catwoman. Michael Keaton is back as the caped crusader but there is a strange performance from Danny DeVito as the cackling Penguin; Burton’s Batman franchise would appear to have run out of steam.

14. Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children (2016)

Burton gave us something like a classic British tale for children here, and again it is elaborate and eccentric, with the Marmitey Burton flavour thickly spread everywhere. Asa Butterfield is the lonely American kid Jake who becomes obsessed with the stories told by his Welsh grandfather (Terence Stamp), all about an upbringing at the titular home for peculiar youngsters. On travelling to Wales, Jake finds that the home still exists in a cosmic time-warp. Miss Peregrine is played by Eva Green, an actor who feels like a Burton natural (second only to HBC); she also appeared in Dumbo and Dark Shadows.

13. Corpse Bride (2005)

The Burton signature style is in some way boiled down to its essentials in a stop-motion animation co-directed with Mike Johnson. There is some amusement in this Halloweeny bit of fun, set in a shadowy world with Depp voicing the hapless young man called Victor, who has been coerced into an arranged marriage with a young aristocrat. Miserably rehearsing his wedding lines in a local creepy forest, Victor practises the key moment by slipping the ring over a twig, which releases from the earth a ghostly, ghastly “corpse bride” voiced – of course – by Bonham Carter.

12. Sleepy Hollow (1999)

Burton found an almost classically supernatural register for this version of the Washington Irving gothic romance. Depp is Ichabod Crane, the police officer from New York sent at the turn of the 18th century to the obscure village of Sleepy Hollow to investigate panicky reports of a headless horseman. He falls in love with a local woman, played by Christina Ricci who, like HBC and Green, is very much in the mould of the Burton leading lady.

11. Mars Attacks! (1996)

Goofy, broad comedy isn’t precisely Burton’s style – and pastiche of someone else’s is not really him either, as his own authorial signature is usually so foregrounded. But here he sends up cheesy 1950s sci-fi films about alien attacks (the sort of thing Ed Wood might do, in fact) with Jack Nicholson as the grinning president (and Glenn Close as the first lady) faced with a Martian invasion.

10. Dark Shadows (2012)

The original was a campy-scary television show from the US that few in the UK knew or cared about; Burton’s movie adaptation of it didn’t really change that situation too much. Depp plays an exquisite young 18th-century dandy who has a curse put on him by Green’s sexy witch for trifling with her affections. He is condemned to eternal undeadness and wakes up in the 1970s where his baronial mansion is occupied by the messed-up family of his own descendants. Funny stuff from HBC as their live-in psychotherapist.

9. Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street (2007)

Stephen Sondheim is arguably a natural fit for Burton: complex, intricate, forceful and demanding an immersive commitment from the audience. Here is Burton’s production of Sondheim’s Sweeney Todd, with Depp as the gruesome barber himself, cutting customers’ throats and dumping corpses downstairs so that his partner-in-crime Mrs Lovett (HBC) can turn them into delicious pies. It could be that the human pie flavour is what Burton is always looking for.

8. Batman (1989)

Burton’s take on the Batman mythology in 1989 laid the foundations for the great superhero renaissance of the next century. His caped crusader, played by MichaelKeaton, was brooding, thoughtful and an absolute fit with the noir look that Burton was going for. Yet there is nothing understated or unsubtle about Jack Nicholson’s panto turn as Joker. His crazy laughing-man act was a vivid comic-book barnstormer of a performance.

7. Frankenweenie (2012)

This witty, ingenious spin on the Frankenstein myth was actually a feature-length version of Burton’s 1984 short film: a stop-motion animation that takes place in a world in which somehow everyone has an unhealthy, deathly pallor. A kid called Victor Frankenstein is devastated when his beloved dog Sparky dies in a freak accident. But then Victor digs up the corpse, connects it to electric currents from a thunderstorm and the dog lives again: as Frankenweenie.

6. Big Eyes (2014)

This is the nearest Burton ever came in his movies to showcasing a sophisticated, grownup debate; in this case about art, gender and ownership. Amy Adams plays Margaret Keane, the real-life popular artist from the 50s and 60s who painted kids with big soulful eyes, work praised by Andy Warhol. Christoph Waltz plays her dishonest, domineering husband Walter, who claimed her work as his own. The film considers the fact that if a woman is found to have created these little-girl images, it might be considered obviously motherly and sentimental; but if a man does it, it is obviously somehow questionable, inappropriate or transgressive – in short, artistic. An interesting, underrated film.

5. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (2005)

The critical consensus has rather turned against Burton’s version of Roald Dahl’s novel, with fan-critics apparently assuming that praising it would undermine their fan-loyalty to Mel Stuart’s 1971 version with Gene Wilder. But in fact, Burton’s take is very good, one of his best films, with Depp’s fey, quasi-innocent creepiness making real sense as the strange chocolatier Willy Wonka who permits lucky children with the golden ticket to come into his sweet factory.

4. Pee-wee’s Big Adventure (1985)

Burton’s feature debut was the first and perhaps the only time that one of his movies invited the audience to laugh with and laugh at the infantile weirdness, or even to feel uncomfortable about it, in the service of irony and comedy. This was the film that introduced cinema audiences to Paul Reubens’ squeaky-voiced, bow-tied manchild character Pee-wee Herman, who goes on big adventures to get his stolen bicycle back. It has a fascination of its own: bright, clean, with terrific visual panache – but clearly Burton would go on to feel that Depp was a more congenial alter ego than Reubens.

3. Edward Scissorhands (1990)

Utterly original and distinctive with an unselfconscious strangeness and sadness that continues to entrance Burton fans to this very day. Depp plays what could be the ultimate Burton/Depp role as Edward Scissorhands, a bizarre postmodern Pinocchio figure: a beautiful goth boy, created by a mad inventor (Vincent Price) who left him with scissors instead of hands, so he can’t pick anything up and cuts himself. It’s a weirdly compelling metaphor for a certain type of exotic look: mesmeric but utterly unworldly, unable to do anything. Vulgar satirists might wonder what happens when Edward needs to go to the bathroom, the issue that reportedly caused Tom Cruise to pass on the role.

2. Beetlejuice (1988)

Freaky and surrealistic, this film throws in everything but the kitchen sink, and one of its wacky components is the anarchic demon Betelgeuse, (Keaton): a supernatural disruptive force – part insult comic, part poltergeist – hired by a ghostly dead couple as someone that specialises in “exorcisms of the living”. The couple ask him to expel a living family that have moved in to the house that they bought just before they were killed in an accident. It’s really very odd that a character who on paper should be incidental is the star, but so it is in this amazing ghost train ride.

1. Ed Wood (1994)

It takes a special kind of confidence for any director to make a film about another director, however much of a byword that director is for being awful. But that is what happened with Burton’s masterpiece, which featured Depp giving the performance of his career in this tribute to the great Z-movie maestro of the 1950s: Ed Wood, the schlock king of the fleapit, the pulp preeminence of the drive-in, the man who would somehow cobble together absurd films from the tiniest of budgets, using past-their-best actors. Depp tenderly and intelligently conveys a romanticised version of Wood, the Donald Wolfit of American grindhouse cinema; the actor-manager who persuaded a loyal repertory of supporters to be in or help make his films. Depp’s Wood has an amazingly lovable, never-say-die attitude and a quixotic belief in himself.

Director Polly Steele’s documentary centres on Ed Jackson, a former professional rugby player who was catastrophically injured when he accidentally dived into a swimming pool’s shallow end. At one point diagnosed as quadriplegic and not expected to ever walk again, Ed regained enough control over parts of his body to be able not just to walk but, eventually, with some assistance, climb mountains.

Splicing together talking-head interview material with Jackson, his wife, Lois, and several of their friends, Steele deploys a voiced-over narrative bed for stunning images as the film explores Jackson’s story. The big central set piece covers an attempt to scale a Himalayan peak with Ben Halms, a paratrooper with similar injuries, only to discover that sometimes mountains have their own ideas, no matter how much an individual might want to prove to themselves and others that they can overcome the fiercest of odds.

Featuring lashings of soaring drone shots showing the extraordinary landscapes through which the subjects move, the film works fairly well as a visual spectacle seasoned with plenty of uplift from the men’s determination to push themselves. And in terms of docs about people with disabilities, this one is pretty honest about the mental anguish of losing mobility and – in a sideways fashion – addresses how such a change particularly affects men like Ed and Ben, hyper-masculine dudes whose identities are tied to their physical abilities.

Ed and Lois start a charitable foundation to help people with physical and mental challenges get out in nature and find community. But some may feel that the Boys’ Own adventure elements of the film grate a little, and it has little to say about those with disabilities whose idea of fun isn’t yomping all over the countryside like muscular 19th-century Christians.

‘That’s my favourite moment,” says Tanya Driver, as she points to the large screen facing her students. At Keighley College, students laugh along to the antics of Rowan Atkinson’s Mr Bean, more specifically the part when Mr Bean is visiting his dentist. The favourite moment in question is when Mr Bean’s chair is “reclining”, which Tanya enunciates and writes on the whiteboard as students jot down the word.

This is an entry level two ESOL (English for speakers of other languages) class at Keighley College in West Yorkshire. Driver has been teaching English to students from all walks of life for 22 years. She usually shows five to six forms of TV and film to the students in each academic year, which, as well as Mr Bean, includes shows such as Inside No 9 and films such as the 1988 Arnold Schwarzenegger comedy Twins. On this occasion, the Mr Bean episode is followed by a group discussion about the different verbs and phrases used, as Driver asks students to describe the wacky scenarios in which Mr Bean finds himself.

There are many ESOL classes like this; according to data published by the government, 144,560 students signed up for one in England last year.

Notably, since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the college has welcomed many Ukrainian students, including three who are all coincidentally named Iryna: Iryna Zhydetska, Iryna Bielikova and Iryna Baltiuk. They are among the many who attend the college, which comprises a “nice mixture of nationalities”, according to Driver, including a range of backgrounds such as Syria, Pakistan and Bangladesh.

Like the other Ukrainian students in the class, Iryna Zhydetska, 65, has lived in England for two years, since the invasion. Zhydetska says she learned English when she was younger, but it faded as time passed. For her, the use of TV and films in the classroom is a useful tool to help with language learning. “It’s good practice because when I first came I didn’t understand what the people around me were talking about, nothing, but now I understand some words, some sentences. Not all, but some.” She says she is a fan of TV gardening, and uses subtitles to aid her understanding. “I listen to the show, and if I don’t understand what they say I read and translate.”

Similarly, for Iryna Bielikova, 39, it has taken a while to get used to speaking English more frequently as she adapts to her new home: “Sometimes I make mistakes but I understand I need time and a little more practice.” Recently, along with her children, she watched Inside Out 2 at the cinema. Iryna Baltiuk, also 39, learned English in school in Ukraine but was well out of practice when she arrived in England. British reality shows, such as I’m a Celebrity … Get Me Out of Here!, are “very helpful”, she says, especially when getting used to the UK’s many accents.

This in fact ties into a common roadblock that Driver has encountered, leading to her incorporating TV and films into her teaching; many students, she says, arrive with a good level of reading and writing but often have problems with understanding people talking. “Students often have strong literacy skills, but they don’t understand native speakers, the Yorkshire accent. That’s where they are stuck: you can say something but when someone speaks back, you don’t understand, so the conversation is over. The main benefit of watching movies is to train their ear to understand more.”

John Gray, professor of applied linguistics and education at UCL says that language learners largely find it straightforward to get to a certain level of English, but that it gets gradually more difficult. “I would say film is potentially a very useful tool for use in the second-language classroom, without a doubt. The reason being it’s what we would call a very rich source of input, because to learn a language you have to have exposure to masses of input.

“There is the opportunity to eavesdrop on conversations in the language. And then if the film is well chosen it can also be extremely motivating for the students that you are working with.”

Local organisations are happy to meet the demand for films for people studying English as a second language. Chris Fell, director of the Leeds film festival which takes place in November, says that feedback forms showed many filmgoers watch films to supplement their language-learning. “A lot of people commented they love hearing languages that they might not have heard before. And many were seeing films in a language that they were learning, to supplement what they were already doing.”

Two sisters go out clubbing. In the loos, they drunkenly argue, and one of them storms out. When she wakes up the next morning, her sister’s bed is unslept in. So begins this slow-burn movie from Guatemala that’s not so much an out-and-out suspense thriller as a character study powered by an outstanding lead performance by Karen Martínez. She plays sensible, level-headed Sarita, whose party girl sister Bea (Pamela Martínez) vanishes. Sarita suspects Bea’s disappearance has something to do with the guy she’s been secretly dating. He’s mixed up in a drug gang.

When Sarita reports her sister missing at the local police station, the officer on the front desk barely looks up. Go home and pray, he tells her. Instead, Sarita infiltrates the gang that Bea’s boyfriend Andrés (Rudy Rodríguez) belongs to. The gang boss is the only proper adult in sight; the rest of them barely look old enough to shave. Cadejo Blanco director Justin Lerner spent a year casting non-professionals to play his gang members, and some of his first-time actors have former gang affiliations. They put in impressive performances and give the film a real human quality; gang life here is not all style and bravado; these kids are young and exploited. Their lives have no value, and they know it.

Still, it’s Martínez who shines as Sarita. You can see her visibly toughening up in her new life. Her first test is to pose as a prostitute to attract the attentions of a terrifying gangster in a bar. The way he eyes her up, muscular, perfectly still; he looks like a predator poised to rip apart his prey. Martínez is terrific in these moments, the mask slipping to show flickers of fear. There are a couple of gripping scenes like this, that are hard to look away from, and difficult to watch. But the tension leaks away in the second half; the film could have done with being snipped by a good 20 minutes.

Alain Delon, the celebrated actor who starred in a string of classic films such as Plein Soleil, Le Samouraï and Rocco and His Brothers, has died aged 88, his children have told French media.

“Alain Fabien, Anouchka, Anthony, as well as [his dog] Loubo, are deeply saddened to announce the passing of their father. He passed away peacefully in his home in Douchy, surrounded by his three children and his family,” they said in a statement, adding that the family had asked for privacy.

Identified with French cinema’s resurgence in the 1960s, Delon played a string of cops, hitmen and beautifully chiselled chancers for some of the country’s greatest directors, including Jean-Pierre Melville, René Clément and Jacques Deray. He also made films with auteurs including Luchino Visconti, Louis Malle, Michelangelo Antonioni and Jean-Luc Godard – though never quite succeeded in his attempts to make it in Hollywood.

The French president, Emmanuel Macron, wrote on X that Delon had through his acting roles “made the world dream … he offered his unforgettable face to shake our lives”.

“He was more than a star. He was a French monument,” Macron added.

The culture minister, Rachida Dati, wrote: “We believe he was immortal … his talent, his charisma, his aura made him destined for a Hollywood career at a young age, but he chose France.”

Born in 1935 in Sceaux in the Paris suburbs, Delon was expelled from several schools before leaving at 14 to work in a butcher’s shop. After a stint in the navy (during which he saw combat in France’s colonial war in Vietnam), he was dishonourably discharged in 1956 and drifted into acting. He was spotted by the Hollywood producer David O Selznick at Cannes and signed to a contract, but decided to try his luck in French cinema and made his debut with a small role in Yves Allégret’s 1957 thriller Send a Woman When the Devil Fails.

Delon’s intense good looks made an immediate impact, and he swiftly graduated to lead roles. In 1958 he was cast opposite Romy Schneider in Christine. They played a soldier and a musician’s daughter who fall in love. Delon and Schneider began a high-profile real-life romance off the set, which confirmed Delon’s burgeoning reputation as a sex symbol.

In 1960 he made two films that had a significant impact internationally: the Patricia Highsmith adaptation Plein Soleil (AKA Purple Noon) and Rocco and His Brothers. The former, a French-language version of The Talented Mr Ripley, turned Delon into a major star while Rocco – a saga about a southern Italian peasant family moving to the prosperous north – brought him into the orbit of Visconti, one of Europe’s foremost auteurs. Another Italian auteur, Antonioni, cast him as a smooth-talking stockbroker in 1962’s L’Eclisse. Delon reunited with Visconti in 1963 for The Leopard (AKA Il Gattopardo), a large-scale epic set in Risorgimento Sicily, adapted from the celebrated Lampedusa novel.

Such was Delon’s international profile that he began a serious attempt to break into English-language movies, starting with a small role in the Anthony Asquith-directed anthology comedy The Yellow Rolls-Royce. Delon appeared in Lost Command, about French paratroopers in the second world war, the Dean Martin western Texas Across the River, and Is Paris Burning?, another wartime epic starring Kirk Douglas. However, none were successful enough in Hollywood to establish him there, and Delon returned to France.

In 1967 he made the cult classic Le Samouraï with the director Jean-Pierre Melville, in which he played a raincoat-wearing hitman. That film’s domestic success kicked off a string of crime films, including The Sicilian Clan alongside Jean Gabin, the Marseille-set Borsalino directed by Deray, and another Melville classic, The Red Circle. Delon also found time to appear opposite Marianne Faithfull in Girl on a Motorcycle, in which a leather-clad Faithfull rides a bike across Europe, as well as La Piscine, opposite his former lover Schneider – which was remade in 2016 as A Bigger Splash with Tilda Swinton and Ralph Fiennes.

La Piscine coincided with a huge public scandal, the “Markovic affair”, which reached into France’s highest echelons after Delon’s bodyguard Stefan Markovic was found dead in a rubbish dump in 1968. François Marcantoni, a notorious underworld figure and longtime friend of Delon’s, was charged with the murder, but the charges were eventually dropped. The plot thickened when compromising photos belonging to Markovic were uncovered that allegedly contained members of the French elite, including the wife of the presidential candidate Georges Pompidou. In the end, nothing was proved, but Delon’s close association with a gallery of unsavoury characters became widely known.

Through the 1970s Delon continued to make films at a steady pace, without the same level of impact as in previous decades. Monsieur Klein, in which Delon played an art dealer during the second world war whose identity is confused with a Jewish fugitive of the same name, won the César for best film in 1977; in 1985, he won the best actor César for Bertrand Blier’s surreal fable Notre Histoire. Delon also branched out, producing a string of films with his own company, making his directorial debut in 1981 with Pour la Peau d’un Flic, and promoting boxing and designing furniture.

Delon began to slow his output in the 1990s after playing a double role in Jean-Luc Godard’s Nouvelle Vague. In 1997 he announced his retirement from acting, but returned in 2008 to play Julius Caesar in the French live action hit Asterix at the Olympic Games.

Delon had a complicated personal life, including extended relationships with Schneider, Mireille Darc (from whom he separated in 1982 after 15 years together) and Rosalie van Breemen, a Dutch model with whom he had two children and from whom he separated in 2002. He was married to Nathalie Delon from 1964 to 1968; they had one child, Anthony, in 1964. In 1962, the singer and model Nico gave birth to a son, Christian; Delon denied paternity but the child was adopted by Delon’s mother.

The former culture minister Jack Lang spoke of Delon’s kindness and their friendship of more than 20 years. Lang said Delon was “an acting giant, prodigious … a prince of the cinema”.

“He was extremely modest, reserved, restrained, shy at the same time; even if he did express himself brutally from time to time, he did it with a flourish,” Lang said.

Valérie Pécresse, the president of the Île-de-France region, wrote on X: “Goodbye dear Alain,” while Éric Ciotti, of Les Républicains, wrote that Delon was a star apart: “France mourns a sacred giant who existed in the daily lives of French people across the generations and who will continue to thrill us for a long time to come.”

The writer and film director Philippe Labro wrote: “Goodbye friend. A wonderful collection of films, an incredible and fascinating personality. Beauty is not enough to explain the exceptional evolution of his talent. He was the ultimate star. The Samurai.”

“There is absolutely nothing wrong with having no hair and a big oval face, thank you very much!” Rory Kinnear is on a mission to let everyone know how great it is to be bald. He is “evangelical” about it, he says. The actor, perhaps best known for playing M’s chief of staff Bill Tanner in the four most recent Bond films, is a proudly bald man. (He says some kind things about my hairless scalp, too.) “Everyone should see losing their hair less as the descent into ageing, and more as a passing into a phase of self-enlightenment,” Kinnear says.

He’s never been tempted to have implants, or wear a wig? Isn’t that what famous actors in their late 40s do? He rolls his eyes. “I congratulate everyone who is on the brink of baldness. When some might see that as the time to thread, or saw open, or whatever the latest surgery techniques are, I say no. I understand that people have all kinds of attitudes to their appearance and it can be very complicated, but I am really keen that everyone is OK with it.”

The only downside of hair loss for Kinnear is having to wear a hat in the summer to avoid burning. There is indeed a well-worn baseball cap to his left on the sofa of the central London hotel where we meet. I had wondered if it was an actorly disguise to throw on while walking through Soho, but after spending time with him, Kinnear, 46, doesn’t really seem like that kind of person. He is dressed sensibly – polo shirt, chinos, slightly battered trainers; shall we say extreme dadcore? – answers questions considerately and eloquently, asks a fair few of his own, and is prone to self-deprecation. When I mention the “big productions” he’s been involved with, he fakes surprise that I’m referring to the Bond films. “Oh, that! I thought you were referring to my work at the Plymouth Theatre Royal in The Tempest with Richard Briers,” he shoots back.

The son of actors Roy Kinnear and Carmel Cryan, he attended Balliol College, Oxford, and later Lamda. His early career was largely on stage, but he is now a TV and film staple, with credits including Mike Leigh’s Peterloo, Years and Years, Alex Garland’s eerie horror Men and as Winston Churchill in Guy Ritchie’s second world war romp The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare. Despite his real-life affability, he has carved out a niche for playing difficult or unlikable characters. In Southcliffe (“The most harrowing drama on TV”), he played a troubled reporter returning to his home town after a tragedy. In the first ever episode of Black Mirror, he played a spineless prime minister blackmailed into having sex with a pig, while in Sarah Solemani’s Ridley Road he starred as slippery fascist leader Colin Jordan.

Kinnear’s next appearance will be in the second season of Prime Video’s The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power. He’s playing Tom Bombadil, a mysterious, magical, much-beloved character from JRR Tolkien’s classic, but one never before seen on screen. Viewed by Tolkien as a personification of nature, and the oldest being in Middle-earth, Bombadil doesn’t intervene in any of the goings-on in the books. Having been around since the dawn of time, he’s above the petty notions of good and evil.

That makes him a tricky character to adapt. Neither Ralph Bakshi, director of the 1978 animated retelling of the story, nor Peter Jackson, the film-maker behind the multi-Oscar-winning Lord of the Rings trilogy, thought him worthy of inclusion in their versions. Bakshi said Bombadil “didn’t move the story along”, a view shared by Jackson. Even JD Payne, co-showrunner of The Rings of Power, told Vanity Fair that the character was “anti-dramatic … the characters kind of just go there [to Bombadil’s home] and hang out for a while, and Tom drops some knowledge on them.”

What drew Kinnear to a character so inconsequential no director ever wanted to go near him before? His partner, it turns out. Kinnear had been approached by the producers of the series in late 2022 about joining the cast. But having never read the books or seen any adaptations, he was in the dark about the significance of the character. He got off the phone and went downstairs to tell his partner, fellow actor Pandora Colin, about some character called Tom Bombadil.

“She looked at me and said: ‘You’re kidding?’” he recalls. “It’s her favourite part of the books. I usually like her taste, so I thought I’d better read them and start preparing. It was mainly from her reaction that I was interested. Inconsequential, dramatically, as Tom may be, he’s obviously left an impression on fans.”

The Rings of Power takes place during the Second Age, centuries before the events of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, and plays fast and loose with the lore so sacred to Tolkien heads. Bombadil’s appearance in the show is not based on anything Tolkien himself wrote, meaning the showrunners can pretty much do whatever they like with him. What we do know is that Bombadil will encounter the Stranger – a character very likely to be outed as Gandalf the Grey – and help him fulfil his true purpose. It isn’t possible to give more than that away: only four of the eight episodes were available to preview, in keeping with a show whose writers’ room reportedly had a fingerprint scanner and security guard sitting outside.

How does Kinnear deal with the secrecy on such big productions? “On The Rings of Power, and on Bond, there’s nothing in my emails that would be searchable if you were snooping. Scripts for Bond arrive in taxis, nothing is sent digitally. But once you’re in person people are a lot more open. And it’s all understandable when you consider people try to fly drones over sets, or take long-lens photographs.”

Reaction to the first series of Rings of Power bordered on hysterical, whether it was Tolkien scholars crying sacrilege, anti-Amazon folk objecting to the company’s association and giant sums of money involved (the budget was rumoured to be about $450m) or those delicate souls who needed smelling salts at the sight of an elf or dwarf being portrayed by a Black person. The series was heavily “review-bombed” (the practice of mass publishing negative reviews to tank a film or TV show’s rating on sites such as Rotten Tomatoes), so much so that Amazon suspended reviews on its own platform. It’s quite an environment to be walking into, but none of this particularly bothers Kinnear. As with most things, his approach appears to be entirely sensible.

“It reminds me of my first day on Quantum of Solace,” he says. “I was about to do a take with Judi – Dame Judi Dench, I mean – and we were walking across a hallway. A thought went into my mind: ‘Everyone is going to see this.’ I immediately messed it up and couldn’t put one foot in front of the other. What an amazing time to have that thought. And why hadn’t I had it before? They were already quite popular films. It’s not as if we were going to chuck it out and hope it found an audience. It’s similar with The Rings of Power. People are going to watch it. You have to recognise that and do your job well.”

Indeed, for all the negative online chatter, Rings of Power is Prime Video’s most watched show ever, with more than 100 million viewers worldwide. Kinnear is sanguine about the discourse around it; however many people are commenting, there are more just simply watching.

“I can be well aware of what other people have said in the bubblespheres about a show, and then watch it, and none of that have any impact on my enjoyment of the show,” he says. “As long as the noise doesn’t put people off watching something altogether, which can happen, that attendant noise just creates more buzz, which brings more people to it anyway.

“And for every force there is an opposite. You could say that the opinion on TV shows and particularly theatre being held by three or four, normally white, men, throughout the 60s, 70s, 80s and 90s was no good either. You could say social media chatter is the democratisation of opinion.”

One project of Kinnear’s that proves his point is Bank of Dave, Netflix’s film about real-life Burnley businessman Dave Fishwick, who tried to set up his own equitable bank to help his community. Reviews were middling , but it became a word-of-mouth smash. Kinnear has filmed the sequel and it will be released in January. Another project in the bag with a similar campaigning spirit is Toxic Town, a four-part series written by Jack Thorne and due later this year, which tells the story of the Corby toxic waste case, one of the UK’s biggest environmental scandals. Both projects are part of a trend of dramas shining a light on real-world injustices and connecting with audiences in a way that, as with the hugely successful Mr Bates vs the Post Office, can help bring about actual change.

Starring in Bank of Dave and Toxic Town in such quick succession is mere coincidence, says Kinnear, not part of some grand plan to become a champion of the people. “People have to write them in the first place, and Jack Thorne has form in this area. A lot of his writing career has been about injustices faced by disabled people and maybe that’s why they were led to me,” he adds, referring to his sister Karina, who was disabled from birth and died of coronavirus in 2020. “But I don’t think so, I’m not seeking this work out. They are both just projects that have a resonance that chimes with me. I wanted to be involved.”

Although, with some affecting personal journalism for the Guardian in recent years – notably one piece about his anger at having to bury his sister on the same day one of the Downing Street lockdown parties took place – he perhaps has more power than he might think. Or at least has a gift for calmly articulating the public mood. I ask if he might become more involved in campaigning for social care reform, which he has also written powerfully about, perhaps becoming a James Timpson figure in that arena. He winces gently and stresses that no, he’s “fundamentally an actor”, and that he’s wary of it seeming as if he’s talking on behalf of people who would prefer to have a microphone or dictaphone put in front of them.

Still, he will assist where he can. “Just walking down the street, you will see lots of people with visible disabilities, let alone the people with invisible ones. So unless the rest of us are there to give support, to give voice to and advocate for those people, it’s easy for politicians to ignore. It takes an awful lot of time and effort to look after someone, or to be looked after or to advocate for yourself, let alone try to bring about change in the system. If you just leave it to the people who it directly impacts, then there just isn’t the time in the day for them to lead a campaign as well as everything else they have to do.”

Even if he isn’t ready to throw himself into social justice campaigning, Kinnear still has more than enough in his calendar. As well as Toxic Town and the Bank of Dave sequel, he will appear as Mozart’s patron Joseph II in a small-screen version of Amadeus, and of course there’s the potential for more Rings of Power. While he hadn’t read any fantasy fiction before swotting up on The Lord of the Rings – he’s more of a James Joyce man – he admits he can now see the appeal, noting that the best fantasy holds up a mirror to our world. Could this newfound love of Tolkien spark a midlife diversion? Is Kinnear about to enter his nerd era?

“It hasn’t started yet,” he says. “But who knows? I got into opera in my 30s, listening, then watching and then even directing some. Then I got more into cricket in my 40s. Maybe my 50s, fast approaching, will be my fantasy decade? Perhaps as I approach my own shuffling off, I will need something to help me escape.”

Season two of The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power is available on Amazon Prime from 29 August.

The last time Elliot Page appeared in a film, it was literally a car crash. Page, who was nominated for an Oscar at the age of 20 for the teen-pregnancy comedy Juno, was starring in a remake of the Julia Roberts thriller Flatliners, playing one of a group of medical students who engineer near-death experiences to get a peek at the afterlife. His co-stars included James Norton, Diego Luna and Kiersey Clemons, but during a hazardous driving scene it was only Page and Clemons who were not given seatbelts. Stunt coordinators told them: “You’ll be fine.”

Instead, they were traumatised. In his 2023 memoir Pageboy, the Canadian actor describes the shoot as “a shitshow”. It wasn’t merely the cavalier regard for his safety. He also had pressure put on him to look stereotypically feminine, and one senior crew member asked whether he was angry that his character was straight.

That was seven years ago. Page, who came out as transgender in 2020, has been seen on television in the interim, including a recurring role on superhero series The Umbrella Academy, where his character transitioned, too. Page’s return to cinema has been a long time coming but he could scarcely have chosen a better re-entry point than Close to You. It’s a thrillingly intimate drama in which he plays Sam, a trans man drawn back to his Canadian home town for his father’s birthday. His well-intentioned family try their best to be welcoming and upbeat, but the conditions in their acceptance of him soon start to show.

Page must have been biding his time for a movie this meaningful. Presumably he felt his return to cinema needed to double as a statement. Right? “Gosh, maybe I should think about things more that way,” the 37-year-old says bashfully. “But it was really organic. Before finally coming out as trans, I wasn’t feeling so inspired. I didn’t feel right for certain reasons, as you can imagine. But then to be connected with Dominic …”

That is a reference to Dominic Savage, the 61-year-old director of Close to You. A videocall with the pair of them is a tale of two cities, and two sitting rooms. Page, in a charcoal T-shirt, is in his New York home, a minimalist vision of cream walls and white curtains. Savage, wearing a knotted neckerchief and chunky Ronnie Barker-style glasses, is in London in what resembles an upmarket bric-a-brac shop. A pair of Baftas preside from the mantelpiece over a cluttered landscape of lamps, chairs and cushions.

“I was aware of Elliot when we were introduced,” he says of the actor, who appeared in blockbusters including Inception and the X-Men franchise. “But part of the process for me in making films is to be able to see inside someone.” The first work of Savage’s that Page saw was I Am Kirsty, part of his I Am … series of character studies of women for Channel 4. This one starred Samantha Morton, whom Page already worshipped for her performance in Lynne Ramsay’s Morvern Callar. Is his character in Close to You named Sam in tribute to her? “I didn’t think of that until now,” says Page. “I kind of love it. That’s awesome. Dominic?”

“Here’s a little secret,” says Savage with the sheepishness of someone poised to rain on his friend’s parade. “Behind my computer here, there’s a whole load of CDs and that’s how I name my characters. Sam must be Sam Cooke. I do think quite musically. I don’t want to sound pretentious but there’s a kind of musicality to my films, as there is to life.”

Music has been with Savage from an early age. His late father was an organist at a bandstand in Margate, the Kent coastal town where he was raised. The director’s first film experience was in front of the camera, not behind it. At 11 years old, he was cast in Stanley Kubrick’s Barry Lyndon as the young Lord Bullingdon, who grows up to challenge his stepfather to a duel. Discovering that Savage was an accomplished pianist, Kubrick packed him off on the US chatshow circuit to promote the film by playing selections from the soundtrack. On the day we speak, Savage is preparing to fly to Dublin for a screening of that 1975 masterpiece. “You should dress up like your character!” says Page.

But Savage’s musical point is well made. His method of working – building the initial story with his lead actor, shaping the cast’s improvisations without writing any dialogue, and shooting everything with a handheld camera in natural light – has resulted in a body of work that moves to natural, soulful rhythms. From the improvisatory process miracles of naturalism emerge, such as the moment when Sam’s sweet but twitchy mother, played by Wendy Crewson, accidentally misgenders him. Was that a genuine slip of the tongue?

“It was!” laughs Page. “I feel weird because I get misgendered all the time, and I don’t care unless someone’s trying to, you know …” He wrinkles his nose to indicate dubious motives. “I want to be clear: I wouldn’t correct Wendy as me. I’d be like: ‘It’s fine. We’re going to move on from the moment. It takes a second.’ But, you know, I’m not me. I’m Sam here. And that moment was so perfect because that’s what happens.” Page’s own mother does her best, he says. “She’s pretty good. I’m like, ‘Of course, it’s going to take you a second, mom. It’s fine. You don’t need to beat yourself up about it!’”

Close to You is manifestly not the story of Page’s own life. Whereas Sam’s father is kind, even if he doesn’t always spring to his son’s defence as readily as he might, the family portrait in Pageboy is less rosy. Page writes of the cruelty of his stepmother during his childhood, and the hurtfulness of his father, who later “liked” a social media post from Jordan Peterson, despite the rightwinger having once been expelled from Twitter in its pre-Elon Musk days for deadnaming and misgendering Page. “To be frank, it is hard to imagine a relationship with them again,” the actor wrote of those family members.

But there are points of overlap between Sam’s life and his own. Page and Hillary Baack, who co-stars as Sam’s almost-sweetheart from his school days, really are longtime friends: they met on the 2013 thriller The East, and never lost touch. Baack tells me by email that she and Page have “remained curious and genuinely care about each other. Compared to when I first met Elliot, he is much calmer, more grounded. I can feel a weight having lifted, and a real joy for life emerge with more freedom and colour than I’ve seen before.”

Another crossover is the red woolly hat that Sam wears for most of the film. In Pageboy, he writes of being told as a young actor in Hollywood to “take off your hat”, another push toward gender conformity. Now he wears it proudly throughout Close to You. Deliberate or coincidental? “I think a bit of both. A hat is, and has been throughout my life, some kind of gender marker for me. And now it’s like: ‘Oh yeah, I can do this. And it’s not an issue. It’s not going to turn into a long conversation.’” Arguably the most radical moment in the film occurs when Sam has taken all he can of the domestic tensions. “Family is not the most important thing,” he announces. For queer and trans people, the pressure to placate or conform to a family who may not have your best interests at heart means putting up with aggressions of the micro and macro variety. Close to You suggests it is perfectly reasonable simply to opt out.

“I don’t write those lines, so things are said that are really meant,” says Savage of his improvisatory process. “The actors aren’t acting any more. Elliot reacted in that organic way and it was rather perfect and beautiful. I liked the surprise of it. I remember us at the time saying to each other: ‘That was important.’” Page beams proudly. “You could feel something happen,” he says. “And yeah, we’re not actually used to a queer trans person having a boundary in that moment: ‘Hey, I actually don’t want to sit here and this isn’t good for me.’”

That resonates with Savage, who is a father of three adult daughters. “I get it. We find our families in all kinds of places, don’t we? They’re not necessarily the people that we’ve grown up with and that we were born to. Some people, I imagine, would think that was heresy, but I find it quite a liberating idea.”

The scarcity of trans narratives puts undue pressure on the ones that get made to tell everybody’s stories. But trans film-makers including Isabel Sandoval (Lingua Franca) and Jessica Dunn Rovinelli (So Pretty) have spoken of their frustration at the emphasis on the educational in trans cinema and an obligation for those films to be easily understood by cisgender audiences. Close to You is not guilty of that, but Page isn’t oblivious to the complaint.

“It can, of course, be tiresome,” he says. “But I also try my best when I’m doing press to be like: ‘I understand that you don’t know a trans person, so let’s talk about it …’ The vast majority of people don’t personally know a trans person, or don’t think they do. That helps to spread the lies about our lives, about our healthcare, about who we are – and to then have those lies utilised for nefarious means.”

Close to You can only help, though any good intentions would count for little if it wasn’t also a complex work: wise about how we balance our duties to ourselves and others, devout but unsentimental in its portrait of romance, and with a brave, bold lead performance that deserves to shock a temporarily flatlined film career back to life.

The bad blood between Vitali Klitschko, former heavyweight champ and now mayor of Kyiv, and Ukraine’s hero president Volodymyr Zelenskiy, is not exactly a secret but there’s fascinating detail in this film by Kevin Macdonald that shows how both men – who we’d fondly like to think are united at the hip in the struggle to repel the Russian invasion – appear to undermine each other. I say “appear” of course, because this can’t be anything other than a partial view; with Macdonald’s camera and access firmly focused on Klitschko, and no response provided from Zelenskiy’s camp.

Still, the footage Macdonald gets is remarkable, particularly of Klitschko in meetings with senior American politicians (including secretary of state Anthony Blinken) during which he attacks, in a not especially veiled manner, the Zelenskiy government as becoming an autocracy. In other sequences Klitschko claims Zelenskiy is victimising powerful city mayors and running a murky, Soviet-style political operation, that Ukrainian democracy is in danger and that, without “reform” aid money will disappear. In effect, he accuses Zelenskiy of wanting to turn Ukraine into “Russia 2.0”. True or not, it’s sobering evidence of a split at the heart of the Ukrainian establishment, though perhaps not immediately obvious how it will affect the prosecution of the war, or indeed what comes after hostilities have concluded.

All this material adds layers of complexity to what – initially at least – looks like a home run of a documentary profile. Klitschko, along with his brother Wladimir, dominated the heavyweight division in the 00s, and brought the same combative spirit to a post-ring political career, which resulted in his election win in 2014. (The film suggests the root of Klitschko’s feud with Zelenskiy dates from the latter lampooning him on his TV shows before launching his own tilt for office.) Like any politician, Klitschko is a hard nut to crack, presenting a resolute, hardworking face to the world: we see him doing media interviews, political meet-and-greets, attempting to console grief-stricken citizens, handing out posthumous medals for dead servicemen. He also comes in for his share of criticism; accused of wasting money on vanity building projects instead of shoring up Kyiv’s defences, and – crucially, perhaps, for its relevance to his conflict with Zelenskiy – failing to keep a bomb shelter open when it was needed. (We see Klitschko visibly greying as he is berated by one of the distraught survivors of the attack.)

As Macdonald’s film goes on, Klitschko emerges as a more conflicted and perhaps compromised character, particularly after his ex-wife and children weigh in, explaining his seemingly conscious change into political persona. (He’s certainly remarkably different from the lumbering, almost gauche figure who whupped all those fighters back in the day.) Klitschko and his brother also ponder the legacy of their father, a Soviet military officer whose loyalty to the Soviet regime was rewarded with leukaemia, probably caused by the his dedication to helping deal with the Chernobyl nuclear accident.

Like the Ukrainian war itself, this is a story that is far from over, even if Klitschko’s power struggle with Zelenskiy is likely to remain a footnote in the wider struggle. Doggedly pacing through conference centres, military bunkers and hotel corridors, Klitschko aims to represent an implacable force and in Macdonald’s intelligent and capable hands he certainly does – in what will no doubt become an invaluable document for future historians of the conflict.

This rerelease of John Sayles’s western crime drama from 1996 is a reminder that he offered a vital but now maybe overlooked strand of indie movie-making and myth-making in 90s Hollywood, distinct from the brilliant ironies and shocks of Tarantino or the literary noir of the Coen brothers. Lone Star is a richly and densely achieved movie that gets a lot of storytelling done in two and a quarter hours; it is thoughtful and complex and grownup, a movie about the old west and the new west and about the culture wars of Texas and Mexico, about the melancholy spectacle of old white guys in Stetsons having coffee together, about who owns the narrative and who prints the legend. And it’s a film about the Freudian fear of the father and the embrace of taboo, with an extraordinary and very subversive ending.

The setting is the (fictional) little town of Frontera, Texas, attractive to a certain kind of visitor for being close to the border and a world of cheap bought sex in Mexico. In the grim words of Sheriff Sam Deeds, played by Sayles’s repertory regular Chris Cooper, the town should have a tourist slogan: “gateway to inexpensive pussy”. Sam should be in a good mood because the local courthouse is being named after his late father, Buddy, once himself the town’s sheriff, but Sam is subdued because a couple of treasure-hunt enthusiasts with a metal detector have dug up a skeleton with a “lone star” badge in some rough scrubland nearby. It is apparently what remains of a notoriously racist and corrupt law enforcement officer from even longer ago called Charlie Wade, played in flashback by Kris Kristofferson.

The rumour (which can hardly be spoken aloud) is that Wade was actually shot and secretly buried there by Buddy himself, played in flashback scenes by Matthew McConaughey. There was another beta-male sycophant officer hanging around: Hollis, phlegmatically played in the present day by Clifton James. But when Sam goes around asking questions about this skeleton and its rusted badge, the entire community stirs, as if roused from an uneasy sleep.

Sam himself is divorced – Frances McDormand has a great cameo as his unhappy, hyperactive, football-crazy ex-wife – and he has moved back here to his home town because he has never forgotten his Mexican high school sweetheart Pilar, now a history teacher played by Elizabeth Peña; her job is complicated now that she must debate with angry parents the way in which she teaches Tex-Mex issues. Meanwhile, Pilar’s demanding mother Mercedes (Míriam Colón) runs a restaurant, which, like many other such establishments, provides employment for illegal migrants and which institutionalises the ongoing crisis of loyalty. African Americans, the third ethnic presence after Anglos and Mexicans, are represented in a bar run by Otis Payne (Ron Canada), whose estranged son Delmore (Joe Morton) is an ambitiously careerist army officer.

These people form a constellation of stories and focal points of suppressed emotion and pain from which Cooper’s Sam emerges as the central figure, going through a kind of midlife crisis as he remembers how cruelly his father broke up his relationship with Pilar when they were kids. Sayles also brings off a particular kind of memory-flashback approach for Sam and Pilar, moving the camera in unbroken physical space from the thoughtful middle-aged Sam to the actor playing the kid that he was: a theatrical technique emphasising that all these events happened in the same place, and not that long ago.

The emerging truth is that the horror that once greeted intermarrying, a bigotry that governed life in decades past, is receding. Perhaps the tribal distinctions with which everyone has grown up – and which in people’s minds constitute the notion of “history” itself – will blur and vanish. A really absorbing and powerfully acted drama, guided with a distinctive kind of Zen wisdom by Sayles.

Celebrated Hong Kong martial arts actor and director Corey Yuen died two years ago during the Covid pandemic, it has been reported.

The Federation of Hong Kong Filmmakers confirmed Yuen’s death following a social media post by action star Jackie Chan naming Yuen (also known as Yuen Kwai) among a list of late disciples of China Drama Academy head Yu Jim-yuen, who died in 1997.

Chan and Yuen were both members of the Seven Little Fortunes, a famous touring troupe of child performers from the China Drama Academy based in Hong Kong, along with other future notables, including Sammo Hung and Yuen Biao. Having appeared as a fight extra in Hong Kong films in the 1970s including Bruce Lee’s Fist of Fury, Yuen gained a larger role in Tsui Hark’s landmark 1983 film Zu Warriors from the Magic Mountain while acting as a stunt choreographer and becoming a director in his own right.

Yuen worked on a string of martial arts films in Hong Kong in the 1980s and 90s, including Dragons Forever, starring Chan and which Yuen co-directed with Hung, hit comedy All for the Winner, co-directed with Jeffrey Lau, and Michelle Yeoh vehicle Yes, Madam. Yuen also branched out into English language film-making, with No Retreat, No Surrender marking Jean-Claude Van Damme’s first significant film role.

In the early 1990s Yeun began a productive collaboration with Jet Li, directing a series of the latter’s successful Hong Kong films (including The Legend of Fong Sai-Yuk, The Bodyguard from Beijing and My Father Is a Hero). He followed Li to the US, becoming a fight choreographer and stunt coordinator on a number of Li’s Hollywood pictures, including Lethal Weapon 4, Romeo Must Die and The Expendables. He was also credited as joint director on the Jason Statham action film The Transporter, along with Louis Leterrier.

Yuen’s final directorial credit was the 2006 video game adaptation DOA: Dead or Alive, starring Jaime Pressly and Holly Valance, but continued to work as a fight choreographer or second unit director on high profile titles including War, Red Cliff and The Man With the Iron Fists.

‘Ballet is fucking punk rock,” declaims corps de ballet member Shaelynn Estrada, towards the end of this absorbing documentary, which might be a bit of a definitional stretch for some viewers – but it sort of makes sense. I guess Estrada wants to celebrate the hardcore commitment the art requires from performers like her, or maybe its capacity to elicit raw emotion. Whatever she’s trying to say, there’s no denying Estrada herself is pretty punk rock herself, a ferociously likable character whose transition from home-schooled army brat (who paid for ballet lessons as a kid by cleaning the studio) to being member of the National Ballet of Canada’s corps makes up one of several very compelling stories in this solid documentary.

As the film’s director Chelsea McMullan and crew observe the rehearsals and lead-up to the company’s debut of a new production of Swan Lake in 2022, a diverse range of characters are introduced. First and foremost is the production’s director Karen Kain, a former prima who became the company’s artistic director, and is about to retire after this show debuts (hence the title). Diplomatic and relentlessly elegant, Kain seems as classical and echt-ballet as Estrada is punk, even if she remembers the night Rudolf Nureyev took her to a party where she met Andy Warhol among heaped bowls of cocaine. (She has a portrait of herself by Warhol to prove it.) Meanwhile, representing another facet of ballet identity, the company’s current superstar, Jurgita Dronina is struggling in near secrecy with a nerve injury. With the lead role of Odette/Odile in the show, Dronina is every bit the stoic star, suffering for her art.

After a series of awkward rehearsals and setbacks, it doesn’t seem like a sure thing that the company will pull it all together for opening night. The show in fact makes some departures from tradition, such as having the corps not wear white or pink tights that make them all look homogeneously Caucasian, a break with tradition that Black Australian dancer Tene Ward welcomes especially. Unfolding not long after the Covid-19 lockdowns that shut theatres and performance spaces everywhere, this offers an interesting snapshot of an art form struggling, like so many others, with changing expectations about representation. McMullan has a light touch with these deeper themes, and edits together the dance sequences seamlessly, tweaking the music in places to give the film an extra modernity. By the end, ballet as practised here does indeed look a bit punk rock.