Category: cinema

Thank goodness Deadpool & Wolverine is still in cinemas, or Ryan Reynolds’ sweary mutant might have taken over Disney’s usually squeaky-clean D23 fan event in Anaheim, California. As it was, Reynolds only appeared briefly on the spectacularly giant screens at the 15,000 capacity Honda Centre for a recorded segment thanking fans for supporting his film to a likely $1bn global box office return this weekend. And naturally to remind Marvel boss Kevin Feige – tongue firmly in cheek – who saved the studio.

It was left to Disney’s more conventional franchises across its subdivisions Marvel, Star Wars, Pixar and what used to be 20th Century Fox to steal the show. And with a number of new movie announcements and impressive sneak peeks, this was a fan event to suggest the Mouse House has plenty up its sleeve to keep audiences interested over the next few years.

One of Marvel’s most highly-anticipated future episodes is Fantastic Four: First Steps, and attendees were treated to the first footage from Matt Shakman’s film, which seems to be set in an alternate reality 1960s. Imagine if Wes Anderson, in Asteroid City mode, directed a Marvel movie and you might get somewhere close to the look and feel of this one. Stars Pedro Pascal (Reed Richards/Mr. Fantastic), Vanessa Kirby (Sue Storm/The Invisible Woman), Joseph Quinn (Johnny Storm/The Human Torch) and Ebon Moss-Bachrach (Ben Grimm/Thing) look a cut above previous incumbents from earlier, misguided attempts to bring Marvel’s first family to multiplexes, while the fuzzy, Apollo-era vibes hint at a big screen take on WandaVision’s eccentric retro-futurism. The movie has just started production in the UK, and is due out next year.

Marvel boss Kevin Feige also treated attendees to an in-depth look at the upcoming Captain America: Brave New World, which seems to tease the arrival of the X-Men in the main MCU. The plot appears to centre around the discovery in a remote ocean of the element adamantium, famously the incredibly hard metal from which Wolverine’s claws are made in the comics. Harrison Ford takes over the role of General Thaddeus E “Thunderbolt” Ross from the late William Hurt in Julian Onah’s film, and there were gasps at the end of a segment of footage as the character transformed into a version of the legendary Red Hulk (with Ford’s face!)

Over in the former Fox corner of the Disney universe, James Cameron took to the stage to reveal that the new Avatar movie will be titled Avatar: Fire & Ash. The Canadian film-maker is determined to show us every mystical, photo-real corner of the cosmic moon Pandora, and this time it looks like we’ll be meeting a new tribe of Na’avi with flamey crests on their heads (though these might well be head-dresses). Footage was limited, but Cameron will be hoping to repeat the achievements of the original Avatar (from 2009) and its 2022 sequel Avatar: The Way of Water, which between them have taken more than $5bn at the global box office, and opened up the prospect of their creator making these movies well into the 23rd century. The new episode is due to hit multiplexes in December 2025.

Still basking in the remarkable box office success of Inside Out 2 (now the highest-grossing animated film of all time), Pixar chief creative officer Pete Docter revealed that studio stalwart Andrew Stanton will direct the forthcoming Toy Story 5, the fourth sequel to the 1995 film that singlehandedly transformed the world of animation with its all-CGI approach. The new episode will focus on a battle for supremacy between Woody, Buzz et al and a new tech-based rival for the affections of the children who play with them. Perhaps a baddie from the video game Fortnite, or the nefarious Captain iPad, will be centre stage this time around. We’ll just have to wait and see.

Stanton is best known for directing Finding Nemo from 2003, its 2016 sequel Finding Dory and the wonderful Wall-E in 2008. He has co-written all four of the earlier Toy Story films, and will be regarded as an incredibly safe pair of hands for the new instalment. Docter also revealed that a third movie in the much-loved The Incredibles series about a family of superheroes has been greenlit, with Brad Bird (who else?) once again at the helm. Docter also showcased exclusive footage from the upcoming film Elio, about a young space fanatic who is beamed up to the cosmos and ends up being mistaken for Earth’s leader by an alien organisation known as the Communiverse, which sounds like precisely the sort of thing that Donald Trump invented Space Force to try and eliminate.

The D23 fan event is never complete without a Star Wars update, and the big news this time around was an exclusive first peek at the much-anticipated debut big screen outing for The Mandalorian and Grogu, which was introduced by director Jon Favreau and writer Dave Filoni. There were audible gasps in the audience as Star Wars Rebels’ pointy-eared Zeb made his first live action appearance, but rather less excitement at the prospect of Babu Frick (from 2019 entry The Rise of Skywalker) lining up alongside Baby Yoda. At one point, a planet that looked a lot like the ice world Hoth from The Empire Strikes Back made it into frame, while there were flickers of mini and giant AT-ATs. The sight of Grogu in his Mandalorian Beskar armour, meanwhile, almost had some fans passing out from the excitement.

It’s hard to know at this longstanding corporate event whether attendees are just into literally anything with Disney written on it; they even cheered the studio’s chief executive officer Bob Iger as if he had just handed them all $10,000 each. Likewise, Tron Ares star Jared Leto was greeted with the kind of rapture you might have expected him to have received back in 2013, when he had just won an Oscar for a startling performance in Dallas Buyers Club, even though he has really done very little to deserve such garlands since. But it might just be worth reserving judgment on Tron: footage suggests the new episode will see the lightcycle-riding digital baddies entering the real world, which is at least a fresh approach, and one that plays on Hollywood’s ongoing fascination with everything nefarious AI. First introduced in 1982, when the original film marked an early use of CGI graphics, this sci-fi saga ought to be perfect for the Disney machine, if only the studio can get it right. That did not happen with 2010’s undercooked Tron: Legacy, despite that episode boasting music from Daft Punk and Jeff Bridges returning from the first film.

Ares boasts tunes from Nine Inch Nails, while Bridges (also in attendance at D23, though looking slightly baffled as to how he got there) is back again. Hopefully this time he won’t look so much like a CGI Jedi Knight moonlighting at a techno rave. Director Joseph Kosinski also returns after taking charge of Legacy, but with Top Gun: Maverick in his back pocket since that bloodless effort, Disney clearly trusts him to make sure the Master Control Program is operating on full power mode this time around.

Residential schools for Indigenous children have been a stain on the histories of both the United States and Canada, and although steps have been taken in making amends with the past, the new documentary Sugarcane reveals just how much of the process still remains incomplete.

These schools operated throughout the 19th and 20th centuries, with Canada’s last residential school only closing in 1997, and they have been referred to as sites of attempted cultural genocide against Indigenous people. For many children, attendance at these schools was compulsory, forcing them to travel far away from their homes, where they were systematically separated from their language and culture and suffered various forms of abuse. Attendance at these schools has been linked to serious mental health consequences, including elevated rates of depression, substance use and suicide.

New light was recently shed on the level of atrocities that occurred at residential schools when in 2021 it was revealed that potential unmarked graves had been discovered on the site where the former Kamloops Indian residential school once stood. It was this news that spearheaded the creation of the documentary Sugarcane, which investigates the residential school St Joseph’s Mission.

The revelations of Sugarcane are many, but perhaps the most shocking one is the evidence that the film-makers bring forth that infanticide was practiced at this school, where the bodies of children of women abused by Catholic priests were incinerated on school grounds. As it turns out, this horrific discovery has serious implications for co-director Julian Brave NoiseCat, whose father, Archie, may have been the only survivor of these events. Julian makes the courageous decision to place himself into the movie, and we see father and son slowly work through years of estrangement and decades of history to learn the facts about how Archie came into this world.

NoiseCat’s is possibly the most compelling of the four entwined narratives that the movie follows, which include Chief Rick Gilbert, who travels to the Vatican seeking redress for the church’s actions, investigator Charlene Belleau, who painstakingly pieces together exactly what happened at the school, and Chief Willie Sellars, who has organized and led the inquiry into the school’s history.

Although the residential schools have had an immense impact on NoiseCat’s family, he shared with me in a video interview that for much of his life he knew virtually nothing about his grandmother’s experiences there as a young girl. During summers visiting with her, she would offer the strange story of how she and her fellow female students would say to one another “the black bear is coming” whenever they saw one of the school’s priests or nuns. “All I got from my grandmother was this very cryptic accounting of her experience at the residential school,” NoiseCat told me, “where she said that the people who were supposed to be looking out for us were predators.”

NoiseCat’s story about his grandmother indicates the larger silence surrounding these schools, even within the Indigenous community, and this is one of the reasons why this documentary is so important. According to NoiseCat, Sugarcane contradicts the popular view among many in the media that residential schools are well-known and thoroughly discussed within the Indigenous communities. “Every time I heard this,” he told me, “I thought, ‘This doesn’t ring true to my experience.’”

Indeed, when NoiseCat and his co-director, Emily Kassie, attempt to discuss the schools within the community, they are largely met with silence. As the film explores, part of the trauma faced by Indigenous people is that the things they suffered at the schools left them speechless, without a language to discuss the events, or people with whom they could share their experiences. One of the keys to processing and overcoming this past is to learn to talk about it, and for those who suffered to tell the story in their own terms. Both in terms of constructing this narrative, and in encouraging others to do so, Sugarcane is a powerful intervention for the health of the community.

One of the strengths of Sugarcane is how NoiseCat and and Kassie let this reality make its presence felt throughout their documentary. The movie plunges viewers right into the heart of the story, preferring the texture of the lived experience of the Indigenous people over a more straightforward accounting of exactly what happened. “Jules and I talked a lot about what the silences meant, and also reflecting the pacing of this world,” Kassie told me. “This is really what the world feels like, and it was very important to us that it felt representative of what we were seeing and feeling.”

Because of these choices, Sugarcane is a movie that moves at a very deliberate pace. This may challenge some viewers accustomed to punchier rhythms, although this choice gives space to the silences that continue to permeate the community, and it makes the few words that do eventually escape feel hard-earned and substantial. “We didn’t want to tell a story from 10ft away,” Kassie said. “We wanted to tell it from people living it.” This makes Sugarcane extremely effective at reflecting the larger challenges still faced by the Indigenous community as it begins the long, difficult work of confronting its trauma by piecing together the story and speaking about what happened at residential schools.

As the film also makes clear, this is very much an ongoing story. When Gilbert heads to the Vatican to have an audience with a bishop, he does receive an apology but responds that this is not enough: noting that the Bible says that apologies are only the first step in righting a wrong, he tells the bishop: “There have been apologies, but nothing has happened.”

This nothing is a significant part of the systematic failure that traumatized the attendees of the residential schools. Sugarcane notes how attempts were made at the time to report that children were being abused at the schools, but these reports fell on deaf ears. The attempted infanticide of NoiseCat’s father was reported to the police but nothing ever happened. “This was reported to the police, along with records of other victims,” Kassie said, “like finding a body of a baby in a shoe box, and other accounts of babies being taken and forced into adoptions. Nothing was done to follow up on these crimes.” In fact, as Sugarcane reports, the only person to face any criminal liability was the baby’s mother, who was sentenced to a year in jail for neglect of her child.

It is too late for many of the Catholic priests who abused children in the residential school system to be held accountable, but simply sharing the truth of what happened can still have a powerful healing effect. NoiseCat has discussed how screenings of the film often end with audience members experiencing catharsis, and the film documents how the process of being involved with this project has helped many process and overcome their trauma.

“This film is also about the resilience and the love of the community and the families that you see here,” said NoiseCat. “They have endured in spite of how these schools were designed to tear families apart.”

If you haven’t seen Coraline – the spooky animated dark fantasy film based on British author Neil Gaiman’s novella and produced by American stop-motion animation studio Laika – now’s your chance. But don’t forget your 3D glasses (also available in the foyer) because it’s been remastered in 3D to mark its 15th anniversary. A creepy story about people with buttons for eyes, Coraline features the voices of Dakota Fanning, Jennifer Saunders, Dawn French, our old friend Ian McShane – and Teri Hatcher who’s kindly agreed to take the reader interview.

So … what to ask? Hatcher has been a Bond girl of course, in Tomorrow Never Dies; in fact, she plays Bond’s former girlfriend whom Pierce Brosnan is sent off to seduce for information. So you can probably guess how that ends. Not well. Or if it’s celeb goss you’re after, she starred with Kevin Bacon in Christopher “Spinal Tap” Guest’s The Big Picture, Sly Stallone in buddy cop action thriller Tango & Cash, Robert Downey Jr in Soapdish and Dolly Parton in Straight Talk. On TV she’s been in episodes of Seinfeld, Star Trek: The Next Generation, Quantum Leap and Frasier and gets it on with Charlie Sheen in Two and a Half Men. There’s the tiny matter of playing Lois Lane in the 90s for four series of Lois & Clark: The New Adventures of Superman. Oh, and something about some sort of housewife. A desperate one, wasn’t it?

Please post your questions for Ms Hatcher below by 6pm BST on Sunday 11 August and we’ll do our best to buff up like Jesse Metcalfe mowing the lawn with his shirt off in the meantime.

Here it is, in all its seedy absurdity and shame-filled grandeur, the controversial 1979 Romesploitation shocker Caligula, originally released towards the end of the movies’ porn-chic period. It is about the rise and fall of obscene tyrant Caligula, the Roman emperor who married his sister and ennobled his horse, extravagantly played by Malcolm McDowell. It is now rereleased in an extensively reconstructed and restored form, with a wittily designed new opening title sequence showing the animated McDowell doing the “Caligula” dance.

This is the version originally envisaged before producer Bob Guccione took over at the editing stage and tried to raunch the whole thing up for commercial purposes by adding extraneous porn footage, which infuriated the director Giovanni “Tinto” Brass – hardly, as they say, a choirboy in these matters – and screenwriter Gore Vidal. Both wanted their names taken off the credits. Had he been around today, I suspect Vidal might well have whimsically announced he still wanted his name removed; he originally told interviewers he saw Caligula as an essentially ordinary person corrupted by power and fate and said that his preferred casting in the lead would be a young Mickey Rooney in clean-cut Andy Hardy mode.

Leaving in the spurious porn might actually have added to the film’s time-capsule value. You have to imagine yourself watching it in the huge, echoingly empty Empire cinema in London’s Leicester Square in 1980 among a matinee-scattering of filth enthusiasts disappointed and irritated by its relative tameness. You might have also possibly been disappointed and irritated by its lack of subtlety compared to the far superior 70s BBC TV drama I, Claudius; this featured John Hurt as Caligula, his career shrewdly and indirectly shown via the unholy innocent and imperial successor Claudius, played by Derek Jacobi (Giancarlo Badessi plays a pretty forgettable Claudius here). In addition, leaving in the spurious porn might have let us reimagine the Guccione Caligula as conceptual art: Roman decadents haunted by prophetic indecencies yet to come.

Well, this spruced up version certainly hangs together as a kind of sub-late-Fellini dark erotic reverie, and I admit it has ambition and reach, though tinged with a cynicism and violence that Fellini would never have countenanced. There is a rather amazing execution sequence in which Caligula, positioned on a forward-moving red platform, looks on as a grotesquely circular scythe device inexorably advances to behead supposed traitors buried up to the neck. And it has to be said there is a big intentional laugh when Caligula, at a moment of crisis which needs his personal attention, snaps to an attendant: “Take my horse to his own room.”

McDowell’s extraordinary cruel-cherub face makes him a very vivid villain and he is giving it everything he has, but he is surrounded by actors who are doing the ancient-Rome equivalent of phoning it in: writing it on a scroll and handing it over. Helen Mirren is poutingly sensual as his wife Caesonia; she has an amazing “birth” scene, but she’s given nothing much to work with elsewhere. British-born Teresa Ann Savoy, a veteran of adult-themed Italian movies of the era, is self-conscious and subdued in the potentially explosive and transgressive role of Caligula’s sister Drusilla (looking back, that should have been Mirren’s role). Peter O’Toole is roisteringly over the top as Tiberius, but most weird is surely John Gielgud as Nerva, Tiberius’s sorrowing and disapproving courtier in Capri. Gielgud has an expression of infinite pain, a kind of eternal suppressed wince, perhaps of his own pain at being involved in this film.

The death of Drusilla makes for a break in the proceedings (an old-fashioned intermission in fact) and then Caligula, having mingled incognito with the despised public, returns to behave ever more bizarrely until his inevitable gruesome assassination, quite without the historical import of the first Caesar’s end. This Caligula was very much as eroticism was imagined at the time, and that monastic droning that accompanies the group-sex scenes is not unlike the ambient orgy sound in Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut. It all makes for something startling, amusing and bizarre.

The expression “feelgood” is usually just an indicator of cheerful and positive content, but don’t forget it also works as an imperative. As in, you better feel good about this movie or its admirers will get very cross and maybe call you names. Such may well be the case with this Mexican comedy-drama about an unorthodox schoolteacher (winningly played by Eugenio Derbez); it is a film that a certain constituency of viewers is going love so passionately that woe betide any who might suggest that it is profoundly manipulative and unabashedly sentimental.

That said, there’s no gainsaying the skills of director Christopher Zalla and the cast, which is why, by the end, Radical earns the tears of bittersweet joy it yanks out from even the grouchiest of grouches. Zalla co-wrote the script with Laura Guadalupe, working from a 2013 Wired article by journalist Joshua Davis about a real-life teacher and his students called A Radical Way of Unleashing a Generation of Geniuses.

Despite those based-on-a-true-story bona fides, the script is taut as piano wire, strings of inciting incidents strung like steel cables between concrete coincidences, ironies and tragedy. Derbez’s Sergio arrives at a failing school in border city Matamoros, Mexico, and promptly starts in with the O Captain! My Captain! Dead-Poets-style inspirationalism, inspiring his charges to think for themselves. Naturally this ruffles the feathers of the local authorities, who only care about exam results, as well as the many impoverished parents who need their offspring to finish sixth grade and then come home – in one case to help raise the younger siblings so mom can keep working in a factory and assist at the landfill site where the family earns a living from foraged scrap.

This last situation is the one that dogs serious young Paloma (Jennifer Trejo), but Sergio spots the girl has an extraordinarily beautiful young mind and a natural aptitude for maths. Will he be able to help her stay in school, along with boy-band-cute young Nico (Danilo Guardiola), a kid carrying a torch for Paloma but who is being pressured to join the local criminal gang with whom his brother now runs.

All the outcomes feel pre-ordained, right down to a climactic late arrival at the exam hall. But Zalla refrains from making the musical cues excessively weepy, and there’s enough grit and darkness around the margins to roughen things up. Meanwhile, he gets lovely, just-so performances from the kids: neither too knowing or drama-school pert, but still full of feeling, especially the copiously talented Guardiola.

J Lee Thompson is a British director who could maybe do with a bit more auteur respect: here is a double-bill rerelease of two of his early black-and-white films from the 1950s. The Weak and the Wicked (★★★★☆) is a melodrama that came out in 1954 just before his wrenching classic Yield to the Night, which featured Diana Dors on death row. It is a tough women’s prison film as well, one that quickly morphs into a social-issue sermon; it is richly flavoured, speckled with comic interludes and gloriously cast with Glynis Johns as Jean, a young society beauty and gambling addict whose dud cheque leads to an appearance in court and whose head-girl demeanour never falters in the clink. She becomes a good pal inside to brassy blond Betty Brown, played by Dors.

The movie is adapted by dramatist Anne Burnaby from the sensational autobiographical novel by the real-life upper class ex-con Joan Henry who also wrote the original source material for Yield to the Night. Henry married Thompson, helped him quit drinking and stayed with him through subsequent movies including Woman in a Dressing Gown, Ice Cold in Alex and The Guns of Navarone, until they divorced. (Startlingly, Burnaby was herself imprisoned in 1960 for stabbing a man with whom she had reportedly become obsessively infatuated.) Like the book, The Weak and the Wicked fudges the issue of Jean’s guilt by claiming that while she did bounce a cheque in a gambling club, the insurance fraud that got her arrested was an elaborate frame-up masterminded by the vengeful casino manager. It delivers the time-honoured frisson of the women’s prison film: hatchet-faced wardresses telling the new inmates to “strip”, with the scene subsequently held just long enough to let the audience think they are actually going to see something.

It also gives us some of the prisoners’ Ealing-esque backstories: blackmailers, shoplifters and one genuinely horrifying tale of a lonely woman who left her two young children alone in her flat to go dancing with a seedy gentleman admirer and returned at dawn to discover a ghastly tragedy. All these people are either weak or wicked; Jean is in her way claiming to be both or neither, and never explicitly says that the prison experience has cured her of gambling. It’s a rather buttoned-up British picture but with some gorgeous cameos from Rachel Roberts, Sybil Thorndike, Irene Handl, Sidney James, and, as Jean’s stern arresting officer, Ballard Berkeley, later to find immortality as Major Gowen in TV’s Fawlty Towers.

Thompson’s later film No Trees in the Street (★★★☆☆) from 1959 is bit less limber and more stage bound, a kitchen-sink crime thriller adapted by Dixon of Dock Green creator Ted Willis from his own play, and starring a young Melvyn Hayes as desperate teen tearaway Tommy, a mixed-up unhappy kid who gets involved in some bad business. The setting is a prewar slum in London’s East End, a place of much cockney backchat, warbling songs and screeching arias of despair, with news of Neville Chamberlain on the radio and graffiti about Oswald Mosley on the walls. It’s similar to, but more grim than the setting of Carol Reed’s A Kid for Two Farthings. Tommy lives with his gentle, beautiful sister Hetty (Sylvia Syms) and their mum (Joan Miller) in a cramped pair of rooms. Hetty and a local concerned copper Frank (Ronald Howard) are worried sick about Tommy, while the family’s cheeky mate Kipper (Stanley Holloway) is always coming round for a drink, singing and spinning tall tales about his former career in the music halls. He takes illegal street corner bets on behalf of brooding turf accountant Wilkie – played with magnificent menace by Herbert Lom – who is not-so-secretly involved in all sorts of mob crime.

Wilkie is in love with Hetty, who can see he’s no good. But will Wilkie simply wear her down with promises of the good life away from all this mess? The minute we see that poor, foolish Tommy has somehow got hold of a gun, it’s clear this is leading just one way: a colossal armed standoff with the police, led by grievingly upset Frank. In a later sequence Frank gives a huge ticking off to another kid, played by a young David Hemmings, who lives with his mum in the postwar high-rises that replaced the nasty slum and which, for all their faults, were a big improvement; they have trees in the street. It’s staged with robust panache, but under a proscenium arch.

If they ask you to appear in Star Trek again, would you say yes? Nicens_boi
I mean, you can’t top killing Captain James T Kirk. I suppose I could go back and kill old Patrick Stewart … I got a lot of flak from unhappy Trekkies, but there were also a lot of happy Trekkies who’d had it with old Bill. I think he overstayed his welcome. It was good for him to move on. I’m a great admirer of Shatner. He’s 90-odd. He’s still working. He’s been an astronaut. Good god, he wipes the floor with us young guys. I once made a surprise visit when he was being interviewed on stage. They introduced me: “And the one that killed Captain Kirk.” He went: “You shot me in the back.” I never thought the producers got it right, because they didn’t send him off in a glorious manner. Shot in the back on a bridge that collapses was not a noble end to a great character.

What’s has been your most exciting find in an antique shop? Catupatree
I’ve found some real beauties. I once went into an antique shop and there was a weather vane with $700 on it. I thought: “That seems cheap.” I brought it home, showed it to a friend who was a dealer who said: “That’s worth $35,000.” So that was very pleasing. My wife is brilliant. When she was 25, she looked 17. She walked into this very famous antique shop in Montreal, picked three things and had them brought to the counter. The woman said: “We have just debating who the hell you are. You look like a schoolgirl but you’ve picked the three best things we have in the store.” She has an uncanny knack for knowing what’s incredible.

Yeah it’s a Kubrick one (sorry). Don’t want interesting, funny or scary. Please tell us something really mundane about working with him. TooMuchSpareTime
Mundane? I’ve never been asked that one. We ate lunch together. I suppose that was fairly mundane, but even that was extraordinary. It was a takeout of Chinese food, and I noticed he’d eat the stewed pears then take a bit of hot and sour chicken. I said: “Why are you mixing all this up?” He looked at me and said: “Napoleon did.” I said: “Oh, I see. So we’re copying Napoleon now, are we?” He said: “Listen, it all goes down one way.” Food to him was fuel to live. I love to go out for dinner and have a great feast. That was considered a great privilege and something I really liked after being a successful actor because I’d had enough of fast food joints and fish and chips in newspaper. Stanley couldn’t care less. But mundane is not a word I would associate with Kubrick.

How was it working alongside the great Peter O’Toole? SalfordianBlue
Peter had such a natural charisma. I’d admired him as a young actor. I saw him in Lawrence of Arabia, one of the great cinematic performances. I was playing very small parts of the Royal Shakespeare Company at the Aldwych. Somebody said: “There’s a bring-a-bottle party up in Hampstead” and we ended up in somebody’s flat enjoying ourselves. Suddenly there was a hush in the room, I looked over and there was this Greek god Peter O’Toole, flaxen blond hair – fake of course – but it didn’t matter. Cigarette holder, a great grin on his face, thin as a rail. He had his jeans tucked into knee-high boots and he looked like a movie star, which is indeed what he was. I’ll never forget that first image of him.

Any lasting eye damage following that scene in A Clockwork Orange? timo123
I did scratch my corneas, that is correct. My eyes were anaesthetised so I couldn’t feel those lid locks scraping down my eyes. The doctor was a real doctor from Moorfields eye hospital who kept putting in artificial teardrops because you can’t leave your eyes dry too long, you have to keep them moist. That was his job. Stanley decided to put him in the scene and give him a line, which was a big mistake. He was more concerned with his stupid line of dialogue, something like: “How are we feeling today, little Alex?” He kept saying: “What’s your name again?” “I mean, Jesus, doc, it doesn’t matter, just get those drops in.” I was home an hour later when the anaesthetic wore off and I’ve never felt pain like it. My own doctor came around and gave me a shot of morphine in my ass, which sent me to sleep. When I woke up the next day, it felt like I’d had a whole sack of sand in my eyes. The eyes heal themselves very quickly, so I didn’t suffer any permanent damage, only psychological.

The punishment scene in If … looked very realistic. Did you suffer any pain? tyroneshoelaces
Well, that’s down to good acting. Thank you very much. Lindsay Anderson wasn’t a sadist. He wouldn’t put you through being beaten. I had something in my ass. I did get walloped, it’s true, but I had an exercise book on my ass, so it stung less. Lindsey rarely said anything about one’s performance. He’d say: “All right, good, let’s move on,” and that would be it. But he did say to me after that sequence: “Malcolm, if all else fails in our film, at least we can look back on this sequence and say: ‘Job well done’.”

You’ve said you didn’t think Caligula could be salvaged, but seem to have embraced the new Ultimate Cut. What was the turning point? dallywhitty
What is coming out is not a re-edit so much as a new film. There’s not one frame of the Guccione Caligula, the old one. The new one was put together by this incredibly talented guy called Tom Negovan. Negovan’s Caligula is very much the movie I thought I was making with Tinto Brass. It’s sad that Tinto will not see it because he’s got dementia and is not well enough. It’s Tinto Brass’s movie, then Guccione took hold. He paid for it, or he claims he did. He recut the movie but didn’t care about continuity or story. He just wanted names above the title in porn. That’s what he got. It became a scandal. Unfortunately, nobody saw the movie that I made and it really depressed me. We’re going back 47 years, but critics would say: “Why would Malcolm McDowell do this pile of crap?” Why indeed? The answer is: “I didn’t do that pile of crap. It was rejiggered by a pornographer who had an eye for money.” When he built his casino in Atlantic City, do you know who his partner was? Donald Trump.

How did you approach playing Rupert Murdoch in 2019 #MeToo drama Bombshell? VerulamiumParkRanger
I knew I would have to get the accent right. Obviously he is Australian, lived in London a long time, then in New York. So there is a twang of everything. I listened to him quite a lot. The same person that did Gary Oldman for Churchill did the prosthetics for Bombshell. It was a terrific part. I’m good at coming in during the last 10 minutes of a movie.

What was the best thing about working in a nut factory? MrSOBaldrick
I never worked in a nut factory, did I? I remember working for the Chase & Sanborn Coffee Company. They sent me off in a car as a salesman to Yorkshire as my territory with loads of samples. A lot of my experience from that is in O Lucky Man! It was the same time the Beatles were happening. Seeing them in Liverpool and being part of that whole thing, I thought every city had 3,000 groups. Every single pub had a live band. It was incredible. Liverpool was an incredible place to grow up because it was bombed out, industrial, very dirty, but yet the spirit and humour was fantastic. I have many happy memories of going to Anfield as a kid. But a sportsman’s life is like a shooting star. You’re an idol for a moment, and then it’s all gone. There’s a lot of depression amongst professional sportsmen, and no wonder. One minute you’re idolised, the next minute, nobody knows you. Of course I would’ve loved to have played for Liverpool. But as an actor you can go on to play old grandpas, which is what I’m playing now.

Thelma is in cinemas now. Caligula: The Ultimate Cut is in cinemas from 9 August

A host for next year’s Academy Awards is being headhunted, after the role was declined by chatshow host Jimmy Kimmel – whose stint in March marked his fourth time in the role – and comedian John Mulaney.

Mulaney had been tipped by many, after praise for his stint as a presenter in the March ceremony, in which he delivered an extended riff on the Kevin Costner film Field of Dreams. He also hosted the Governors Awards in January, which award honorary Oscars.

Speaking to Variety in June, Academy CEO Bill Kramer appeared to tip him for the job, saying: “We are lucky to have Jimmy [Kimmel], who helped create one of the best Oscars last year. John Mulaney also did an incredible job. All I will say is, with whomever hosts the show moving forward, we want to continue with this tone of celebration, respect, humour and a great love of movies. We have some great options.”

The website Puck, which first reported the news, suggested Mulaney had passed on an offer because of concerns over his workload.

The most prolific Oscars host was Bob Hope, who took charge of the ceremony 19 times. Billy Crystal managed nine, Johnny Carson five and Kimmel, Whoopi Goldberg and Jack Lemmon all racked up four.

The Golden Globes in January are also seeking a host, following Jo Koy’s appallingly reviewed stint earlier this year. Previous hosts include the ecstatically received Tina Fey and Amy Poehler, as well as Ricky Gervais’s acclaimed tenure.

Key awards contenders this year look set to include sequels to Gladiator and Joker, as well as Bob Dylan biopic A Complete Unknown, papal drama Conclave, Joshua Oppenheimer’s apocalyptic musical The End, Nightbitch with Amy Adams, Luca Guadagnino’s Queer starring Daniel Craig and Pablo Larraín’s Maria, with Angelina Jolie.

The Oscars ceremony will take place on 2 March.