Category: cinema

“Donald Trump is a weak man pretending to be strong. He is a small man pretending to be big. He’s a faithless man pretending to be righteous. He’s a perpetrator who can’t stop playing the victim. He puts on quite a show but there is no real strength there.”

It was no surprise to hear such rhetoric cheered to the rafters at the recent Democratic national convention in Chicago. But the words were not spoken by a Democrat. They came from the mouth of a stranger in a strange land: the former Republican congressman Adam Kinzinger.

It was the latest example of how the Trump era has created strange bedfellows. The former first lady Michelle Obama hugging ex-president George W Bush. Liberal audiences in Washington DC standing to applaud the arch conservative Liz Cheney. Even Trump’s vice-president, Mike Pence, has earned grudging praise for defying his boss when it mattered most.

But there are few odder couples than Kinzinger and Steve Pink, a leftwing Hollywood film director who aligns himself with the Bernie Sanders wing of the Democratic party. They came together to make The Last Republican, a debut documentary by Pink that follows Kinzinger’s year of living dangerously as a Never Trumper on Capitol Hill. It premiered at the Toronto film festival last week.

The film opens with Kinzinger expressing his and his wife’s doubts about the project and telling Pink: “I recognise that you have contempt for what I believe, like, in terms of my political viewpoints. I think in any other situation you probably would be protesting my office. You’re just so far left.”

Pink objects that is kind of mean. Kinzinger asks: “Do you have contempt for my views, Steve?”

We do not hear Pink’s reply. But in a Zoom interview from Los Angeles, the 58-year-old elaborates: “When it comes to strictly politics, I wouldn’t say I hold them in contempt although, when I’m feeling belligerent, I do hold them in contempt because I have very deeply opposing views.

“It was kind of extraordinary he took a risk with me as a film-maker because he says in the film I could make him look stupid and I could just do a hit piece. I was surprised by that and I was like, OK, I realise that, but who we are to each other despite our opposing political views is maybe more important than our political views themselves.”

So why did Kinzinger agree to the project? The answer is as simple as it is unexpected. His favourite film, the 2010 sci-fi comedy Hot Tub Time Machine, was directed by Pink. They also both hail from Illinois.

Pink adds: “I’m like, if you think I have contempt for your views, why did you choose me as a film-maker? He’s like, Hot Tub Time Machine is what sold me, and I was like, well, that’s good logic. I don’t know if I would have done that if I were you but we had common ground. Having a shared sense of humour is a great foundation to have more difficult conversations down the road, for sure.”

Kinzinger grew up with cultural touchstones such as Ronald Reagan, Rocky and Red Dawn. The former air force pilot, who served in Iraq and Afghanistan, was first elected to Congress in 2010. At first he was a loyal Republican; later Kevin McCarthy, destined to be speaker of the House of Representatives, offered to officiate Kinzinger’s wedding.

But Kinzinger broke from McCarthy, and the party, after the 6 January 2021 insurrection at the US Capitol and was among 10 House Republicans who voted to impeach Trump. He and Cheney were then the only two Republicans who joined the House committee to investigate the January 6 attack.

Both paid a price for refusing to submit to the cult of Trump and Maga (Make America great again). Kinzinger lost friends, was turned into a pariah by his own party and targeted by extremists and trolls with death threats. He did not seek re-election and formed a political organisation, Country First, to back anti-Trump candidates.

Pink, whose documentary follows Kinzinger during his final year in office, comments: “That was my initial reason for wanting to make the film: here’s a guy whose political views I oppose who stood up against his party and Donald Trump in the wake of January 6 to take a principled stand in defence of our democracy in the defence of our constitution.

“I thought that was a very brave thing to do. He sacrificed a lot. He had a pregnant wife at the time. He himself will tell you that he was shocked that he lost all of his friends and his family and the fact that he got thrown out of his own political party.”

He adds: “He felt like part of your job description as a legislator, as a congressperson in our country is to uphold and defend the constitution. That’s the oath you take and so when he saw everyone around him being absolutely comfortable with violating that oath, it was absolutely shocking to him and kind of devastating and he was very isolated very quickly.”

Perhaps the truly shocking thing is not that Kinzinger and a handful of others have dared to make a stand, but that so many members of the party of Abraham Lincoln, Dwight Eisenhower and Reagan have sold their political souls and capitulated? When the chronicles of the Trump era are written there will be a special place in infamy for enablers such as Pence, McCarthy, Kellyanne Conway, Rudy Giuliani, Elise Stefanik, Sean Spicer and many others.

Pink observes: “It is more shocking and it’s more infuriating and Adam talks about that as well. He’s actually more furious with the people who remain silent and have just gone along with this thing. He finds that deeply shocking and deeply troubling. There’s no question about it.”

The film-maker himself was taken aback by the high stakes when Kinzinger sat with his congressional staff mapping out his final 14 months in office. He could have pursued all kinds of legislation but said instead his priority was the preservation of democracy – and that the history books would look kindly on that.

“I found that to be a very shocking thing to say. Wait, so your legislative agenda is democracy preservation? I didn’t think that was on the table. I thought it was about safer streets, less government regulation, something legislative? But his focus was going to be democracy preservation. That was a terrifying moment for me that it was even a question in a staff meeting.”

Pink gained access to the January 6 committee hearings on Capitol Hill and chronicles how they faced much scepticism at first. The headline of a David Brooks column in the New York Times declared: “The Jan 6 Committee Has Already Blown It,” before the first gavel had been wielded. In fact the sessions made riveting theatre for those in the room and compelling television for those at home.

Kinzinger offers an inside track on how it all came together, what he thought of his colleagues on the panel and how a text message from his wife informed his public remarks, bringing him close to tears. Pink says: “It was quite a moment for Adam and all the committee members to have worked as hard as they did and to be able to successfully get the message out, which clearly helped speed up the justice department’s investigation into the matter.”

But there was backlash. The Last Republican plays some of the chilling and ugly voicemails that Kinzinger received because of the stand he made. One says: “You little cocksucker. Are you Liz Cheney’s fag-hag? You two cock-sucking little bitches. We’re gonna get ya. Coming to your house, son. Ha ha ha ha!” Others describe Kinzinger as “a piece of shit” and a “traitor”.

A company provides 24-hour security at Kinzinger’s family home. He explains to Pink with a rueful laugh: “People wanna kill me so, you know, it sucks, right?

It is a stark reminder of the incentive structure that Trump has built inside the Republican party: kiss the ring and you will be rewarded with endorsements and Maga stardom; cross him and you will be ostracised, challenged in a party primary and subjected to vile abuse and death threats.

Pink says: “At first when I talked to him about it, it hadn’t left the confines of the congressional office. When the death threats were coming in, weirdly they became commonplace. They had an increased Capitol police and even FBI interest in what was happening. Obviously, there’s a lot of protection around you in that context.

“Whereas when the death threats started expanding to his family, to his wife, at his home, it was very stressful and it took a toll on him. There was almost a level of disbelief that there was so much hatred and that people took the time to actually express their hatred. It was shocking to him and it was very hard on Sofia and Adam for sure.”

During the film Kinzinger also talks movingly about an incident in his past that seems unrelated but actually explains much about his political decision-making. One night in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, in 2006 he encountered a young woman holding her throat, which was bleeding profusely, and her boyfriend intent on killing her with a knife.

Kinzinger recalls: “If somebody would have whispered ‘run’ to me I would have run. But there are two immediate thoughts that went through my head. The first one was like, if I act, I’m gonna die. The second one was, if I watch this lady die and I did nothing, I can’t live with myself the rest of my life.”

The assailant was bigger and Kinzinger can still remember feeling the knife hand trying to stab him. But he wrestled the man to the ground and held him there until police arrived. The 46-year-old says that moment in Milwaukee utterly changed his life.

Pink comments: “Here again was an example where he stepped into a situation without thinking of the consequences, purely on the basis that he thought it was the right thing to do. I was interested in the kind of person who actually does that. To me the film became less a story about a guy who sacrifices for his country and more about what he wouldn’t sacrifice.

“Despite the apparent danger, he didn’t want to give up his willingness to serve and lose that desire to do that and fall prey to cynicism. It’s one thing to say that you’re courageous to sacrifice. It’s a different kind of courage to say what I don’t want to lose are these things that are important to me. Despite everything against me, I don’t want to lose these things that I believe in because those are the things that keep me going.”

The anti-Trump coalition has been described as the biggest political force in America today. It has scrambled old alliances and thrown together progressives, independents and groups such as the Lincoln Project, conceived largely by old-school Bush and McCain Republicans – often middle-aged white men – who now find themselves rooting for a liberal woman of colour from California to win the presidency.

Pink is still ready for an argument about policy but acknowledges that, for now, there is a higher priority. “I remain deeply conflicted in terms of my political views but we are in a crisis moment in our country and there’s no way to avoid the fact that the more important value right now is the thing that we agree on: that everyone should have a vote and that vote should count and we need to ensure, in order to preserve our democracy, a peaceful transfer of power. Those two things are fundamental.”

He says of Republicans: “It’s not whether they’re heroes. I even say to him in the movie a courageous Republican is still a Republican. You don’t have to be a Republican to believe in the peaceful transfer of power and believe that everyone’s vote should count.

“It is shocking that one of our two major political parties don’t hold those as essential values. It’s terrifying and we’re going to need to do the work to lessen the influence and power of people who don’t believe in those two fundamental values.”

Kinzinger received a warm reception on the final night of the Democratic convention, not long before Kamala Harris took the stage to accept the party nomination. Her speech, and a subsequent CNN interview, indicate that she is tilting towards the centre on climate, healthcare and immigration. But when the alternative is Trump, even an old lefty like Pink believes the choice is clear.

“Because I’m a political junkie, you see how politicians move to different spaces as part of a campaign and then their political philosophy is revealed when they are in power. I don’t take that much stock in if someone says to me, oh, Kamala’s position on X or Y is this, it should be that.

“Do we believe in her political philosophy broadly speaking? I do. She would make a great leader of our country. The kind of president she will be remains to be seen and I look forward to seeing the kind of president she will be. I’m not troubled by any particular political position she holds in this time when she’s campaigning for president.”

Harris would be the first woman and first woman of colour to serve as president, dealing perhaps the final symbolic blow to Maga: the result would show that it was Trump, not Barack Obama, who was the historic aberration.

Pink describes himself as “bullish” about her chances. “The hypocrisy and narcissism and bullying and madness of Donald Trump have been exposed over and over and over and over and over again and yet he’s somehow managed to survive, being a formidable person in American politics. One of these days he’s not going to be and I hope that moment is upon us.”

In August 1944, the photographer and war journalist Lee Miller was sent to France to report on conditions in the newly liberated port city of Saint-Malo in Brittany. But, as it rapidly became clear, some intelligence wires had got crossed. Far from being liberated, much of Saint-Malo was still a violent war zone, with US soldiers under heavy fire as they battled to dislodge the occupying Germans.

At this point in the second world war, around 200 women had, like Miller, gained military accreditation with the allied forces. Yet as Miller well knew, none of them were meant to be reporting on scenes of actual fighting, since their brief was simply to write the “softer” stories of war, about hospitals, air raid wardens and civilian heroism. If Miller chose to remain in Saint-Malo, she would certainly be punished, yet it was too fabulous an opportunity for her to miss. “I was the only photographer for miles around,” she said, “and now I owned a private war.” For five exhilarating days, aided and abetted by the Americans and sometimes coming under fire herself, she observed and photographed everything.

Miller had never felt so alert, so fully herself. Her life, as told in Ellen Kuras’s new film Lee, had until then been a series of brief, if brilliant, dead ends: her stint as a model for Condé Nast, her time as muse and collaborator to the surrealist Man Ray, her career as a photographer of fashion and celebrity. It was only now – crouching for safety in a German dugout and realising the cold and fleshy object beneath her boot was a severed hand – that Miller fully understood that war was the subject for which she and her camera had been searching for years.

Miller had gained her accreditation as a correspondent for British Vogue and her editor could not have been more thrilled by the “great adventure” of her Saint-Malo story. The military authorities, however, were not so impressed. When Miller was discovered, she was put under temporary house arrest and stricter limits were placed on her freedom of movement, and those of her female peers.

The reasoning behind this protocol was, of course, the atavistic assumption that women were the weaker sex, too fragile to cope with the blood and guts of war. But muddled along with that was the more banally practical issue of toilet facilities. The possibility of a woman in a battle zone being forced to relieve herself openly among men was something the squeamish military imagination could not tolerate. Throughout the war, when female correspondents argued for the right to report on equal terms as men, they were told that the “convenience question” – or what the Americans more briskly termed the “latrine business” – made it impossible.

The small and valiant minority who did make their way to the fighting showed exceptional courage and cunning. Not only were they given no access to military transport and accommodation, they were even denied official press briefings, which meant they were frequently in unnecessary peril. But because they were operating below the official radar, these women could get to stories their more privileged male colleagues might miss.

Of course, Karas has given Miller the glory in Lee, but two months before Miller had found herself a private war, Martha Gellhorn had acquired an even more gutsy story. On 6 June 1944, furious that she and every other woman had been banned from covering the Normandy landings, Gellhorn hid herself aboard a US hospital ship and crossed the Channel as a stowaway. She knew she was on the verge of an adventure when she came up on deck and realised her ship was in the middle of “the greatest naval traffic jam in history”. That adventure became more extraordinary still when she was sent ashore with the medical crew to help recover wounded soldiers. Gellhorn was so close to the fighting on Omaha beach that the roar of artillery and the screams of dying soldiers were all but overwhelming.

None of the male press corps had yet been permitted onshore and the story Gellhorn filed was far more authentically dramatic than that of her husband, Ernest Hemingway. Even though she was arrested and stripped of her accreditation, her success as a stowaway convinced Gellhorn that rules were there only to be broken. Once she’d escaped her guards, she hitched a flight to Italy (faking a sob story about a missing fiance) and for the rest of her war, she would find sympathetic soldiers who helped her to move from one frontline exploit to the next.

Gellhorn freely admitted the advantage she enjoyed in being “a long-legged blonde”. A few years earlier, her friend Virginia Cowles had scooped one of the great stories of the Spanish civil war when a Soviet general had been so dazzled by her glamour that he’d kept her prisoner in his HQ, feeding her champagne and Marxism for three days and nights in an attempt to convert her to communism.

It was accepted, if not welcomed, by most female correspondents that they sometimes had to trade on their looks. But Clare Hollingworth, who was sent to south-west Poland in late August 1939, got her first headline story through luck, timing and nerve. Not only was she in place on 1 September to phone through an eyewitness account of the start of the German invasion, effectively the beginning of the second world war, she was also able to remain in Poland for the full three weeks it took for that country to fall, driving through air raids and shellings to deliver her exclusives.

Because the British weren’t fighting in Poland, there was no one to curb her activities and Hollingworth would continue to duck and dive her way to parts of the conflict in which allied protocol was not strictly enforced. She became a personal affront to Field Marshal Montgomery. “I’ll have no women in my war!” he roared.

However, for Helen Kirkpatrick, it was the special protection of Supreme Cmdr Eisenhower that opened up her war. She so impressed the American with her grasp of military issues that he gave her special permission to travel with the allies as they fought their way towards Paris. Not only was Kirkpatrick among the very first journalists, male or female, to enter the newly liberated city, she was also one of just two or three reporters present at Notre Dame Cathedral when German snipers opened fire on General de Gaulle while he was leading the French resistance in a service of blessing.

Twenty-five were killed and Kirkpatrick’s report – “Daily News Writer Sees Man Slain at Her Side in Hail of Lead” – made the next morning’s news. By now, the number of intrepid war stories written by women had become so conspicuous that it was hard for the authorities to maintain their ban. When the allies began their push into Germany, a very small number of female correspondents were finally permitted to travel as official press.

The experience was thrilling but terrible, as the horrors of Nazi Germany were revealed. When Miller entered Dachau, just hours after the concentration camp was liberated, it took all her professional control to document its incomprehensible evils, from its piles of skeletal corpses to its “medical” torture chamber and the place where its prisoners were murdered.

Afterwards, when Miller moved on to Munich, she famously ended up in Hitler’s apartment where she was photographed scrubbing the filth of Dachau off herself in Hitler’s bath. That photograph exemplified the triumph of Miller’s war but once the fighting had ended it was a triumph hard to sustain. Many female correspondents lost their jobs, many struggled to adapt to peace, and Miller additionally suffered from what would now be diagnosed as post-traumatic stress disorder.

In her effort to forget the death and destruction she’d witnessed, Miller simply stopped talking about the war, escaping into drink. Only after her death did her son Antony Penrose discover the boxes of photographs and writings she’d kept. He finally understood that his difficult, angry mother had actually been a heroic photojournalist – one whose courage had played a huge role in the battle waged by women for the right to report on war.

Audiences got a look at Benjamin Netanyahu’s leaked police interrogation videos for the first time at last night’s world premiere of The Bibi Files. The urgent and incendiary documentary played at the Toronto film festival despite the Israeli prime minister’s attempts to block its screening.

Israeli courts rejected Netanyahu’s request before the film – in which he is seen furiously denying allegations of bribery and corruption – was unveiled to a tense and vocal audience, many of whom were carrying signs reading “Bring Them Home” and “Deal Now”, referring to hostages held in Gaza.

The film, directed by Alexis Bloom and produced by Alex Gibney, builds a rigorous and damning case, posing an argument close observers may already be familiar with: Netanyahu is prolonging the devastating war in Gaza – which has amassed more than 40,000 casualties – to avoid possible prison time stemming from corruption charges. A humanitarian crisis flouting international law is all about his self-preservation.

According to the documentary – which Bloom began working on before 7 October, when a source provided Gibney with the leaked videos – Netanyahu’s lawyer filed a motion to delay the trial currently scheduled for December. The lawyer cites the ongoing war as the reason.

“I’ve never seen the depth of moral corruption as I’ve seen in this man,” Gibney, the director of Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room, told the audience following the screening. A member of what appeared to be a largely pro-Israel audience policed Gibney’s language, interrupting the producer to clarify that Netanyahu had not yet been found guilty. The attempts at seizing control of the narrative, both on screen and off, didn’t end there.

The interrogation videos shown in the film were recorded by police between 2016 and 2018 before they formally brought charges of corruption against Netanyahu. The footage includes the prime minister addressing allegations that he and his wife accepted expensive champagne, Cuban cigars and jewelry from the Hollywood producer Arnon Milchan. Netanyahu is heard minimizing the champagne and cigars as simply gifts from a friend, while denying knowledge of the jewelry.

Several witnesses who worked for Milchan and Netanyahu are also shown speaking to police. They paint a picture of regular gifts expected by Netanyahu and his wife, Sara, in exchange for favours. One such favour includes a marginal tax break extension that benefited Milchan. Netanyahu argues his unusual interference regarding the tax break was for the good of the state, not Milchan. Meanwhile, the LA Confidential producer corroborated much of the witness testimony, though, in one excerpt, he gently asks police not to use the word “bribery” because it would make him look bad.

Netanyahu is also seen vehemently denying allegations that he signed off on regulations favouring the Israeli media mogul Shaul Elovitch. The prime minister repeatedly and dramatically calls one of his top aides, Nir Hefetz, a liar for saying so. Other witnesses argue Elovitch paid back the alleged generosity by allowing Netanyahu to directly influence coverage of his family on the popular website Walla.

The incriminating evidence in the interrogation videos have already been leaked and reported on by Israeli media. But the videos will never be shown to the public (at least legally) in that country. According to Gibney, Israeli law grants privacy to subjects who have been photographed in official proceedings, which would make publication of the footage illegal. “It’s a peculiar law to Israel [that] doesn’t affect the rest of the world,” Gibney said.

He explained that they brought The Bibi Files to Toronto, as a work-in-progress, because it urgently needed to be seen while the death toll in Gaza continues to rise. But also because they are seeking distribution partners at the festival’s market, hoping to get the film released as quickly as possible for the world to see.

Though the documentary doesn’t reveal new information, Gibney explains that for an audience familiar with Netanyahu’s carefully stage-managed speeches, watching his agitation under interrogation, where his performance begins to crack, is illuminating. At various points when police officers confront him with incriminating testimony from his peers, Netanyahu raises fists and repeatedly slams his hand against his desk as if the banging will silence the accusations.

“Even in the interrogation videos, you see performances,” says Gibney. “But you see performances that are not as finely tuned; that are performed for an audience of three people; that he doesn’t think is going to get out of the room.”

The Bibi Files contextualizes the interrogation videos with a portrait of Netanyahu, whose career is built on stoking fear and promising security, and whose personal life is largely in service of his wife Sara’s turbulent moods and expensive lifestyle. Sara Netanyahu’s erratic testimonies and outbursts during testimony are also included in the footage.

Insiders like the Israeli journalist Raviv Drucker, former Shin Bet head Ami Ayalon, a childhood friend and more are on hand as talking heads. They connect the dots and reveal the long-running pattern of Netanyahu serving his own interests while clinging to power – from deliberate ploys to sabotage an alliance between the West Bank and Gaza by enabling Hamas, to his alliance with the violent far right and attempted overhaul of the supreme court to save himself from prosecution.

Bloom expressed disappointment after the screening that more people didn’t speak up on the record. She said she interviewed former chiefs of staff, heads of Shin Bet and others in senior positions under Netanyahu who would speak to her for hours about his lies and corruption. One of them compared his regime to the Netflix series House of Cards. “One said to me, ‘Well, you know, I might go into politics myself one day,’” Bloom recalled. “‘So I have to be careful.’”

The atmosphere at the premiere, which was announced just days before the festival began, was more anxious than usual. Added security, including a police canine unit, were at the scene. While the screening itself went off without a hitch, many in the audience appeared agitated during the post-screening conversation between Bloom, Gibney and Tiff’s documentary programmer, Thom Powers. Some yelled out for their turn to have a say, prompting Powers to call for some order and avoid overt statements.

Following the conversation, a visibly nervous Bloom was surrounded by a crowd and accosted by an audience member who claimed that she included “a bunch of lies” in the film. He was referring to the report that more than 40,000 people have been killed by Israel’s military actions in Gaza.

“You don’t know that,” he said before asking, accusingly, “Are you trusting Hamas?”

“I think they’re corroborated,” Bloom gently responded.

“You are putting a false narrative out there,” he warned.

Ageing and death are perhaps the foundation of all horror, but this droll French chamber piece, adapted from an 1839 novella by Aleksey Tolstoy, puts a devious spin on that. The titular “vourdalak” – a kind of Mitteleuropean vampire – is Gorcha, wizened patriarch of a family of forest-dwelling peasants, who is driven to feed on the blood of those he loves the most. With the film incarnating this beastie in the form of a toothy puppet resembling Norman Tebbit (voiced by director Adrian Beau), it’s a cruel but funny metaphor for parental authority and late-life dependency. Obviously they didn’t have assisted living in early modern Bohemia.

Arriving in the midst of this folkloric spat is Marquis Jacques Antoine Saturnin d’Urfé (Kacey Mottet Klein), a nervous envoy for the French king who has been waylaid en route. Advised to seek help at the house of the venerable Gorcha, the aristocrat only finds his children present: Turk-slaying scion Jegor (Grégoire Colin), effete second son Piotr (Vassili Schneider, also seen in the new Count of Monte Cristo) and enigmatic black-sheep daughter Sdenka (Greek new wave luminary Ariane Labed). D’Urfé must wait for a new horse; Gorcha has departed to pursue the latest Turkish raiders and, as he warns his kinfolk, should he return after more than six days it will surely be in undead form.

Beau could have adapted this as straight gothic. Instead, he opts for an enjoyable high-strung comedy that, with him often shooting through Hammer-style soft gauze, skims pastiche. D’Urfé’s court manners are ridiculously superfluous in the rustic setting, exposed as hypocritical when he roughly pursues Sdenka, and then redundant in the face of the ghoulish paterfamilias scoffing at him down the dinner table.

While never being outright scary, the claustrophobic setup keeps the film within the circle of the uncanny; this self-cannibalising family unit constantly is upset by the outsider with the annoying questions and impromptu sarabandes. Klein has fun, but Labed arguably has the harder job, playing it dead straight underneath her shatweh headdress and required to weave a course between high tragedy and camp. A delirious and oddly agreeable stopover.

In the television series The Perfect Couple, which had its UK premiere last week, it is said of Nicole Kidman’s character, Greer: “You never know where you stand with her … I mean, beneath her, for sure.”

That moment seems to break the fourth wall and refer to the 5ft 11in actor herself, a regal, ­mercurial film star who, decades into her career, remains at the height of her powers.

This year alone has seen Kidman floor the Venice film festival with erotic thriller Babygirl, for which she won the best actress award last night, as well as star in The Perfect Couple, play the lead in and produce melodic ­tragedy miniseries Expats from Lulu Wang, and fall for a movie star played by Zac Efron in A Family Affair. Still, she has spoken of doing more, ­including wanting to star in a ­“hardcore” horror movie one day.

Whether or not fulfilling a lust for gore comes to pass, there is ­little else left for Kidman, 57, to tick off her cinematic bucket list. She has won Oscars, Emmys, Golden Globes and Baftas; been in musicals, ­thrillers, superhero movies and comedies and worn questionable prosthetics in multiple biopics.

She starred in and produced one of the best female-led ensembles of peak television with Big Little Lies and has done so while maintaining a sense of artistic integrity. The idiosyncrasy of her filmography shows an actor uncompromising in their artistic interests, rather than pursuing Oscar-bait or brazen cash grabs.

Her latest, Babygirl, from Halina Reijn, the Dutch director of Bodies Bodies Bodies, was written with her in mind. The film harks back to the era of the erotic thriller while being firmly of the feminist now, seeing Kidman’s glamorous CEO caught up in a kinky love ­triangle with Antonio Banderas and Harris Dickinson.

It doesn’t flatten Kidman into the role of effortless femme fatale but rather nakedly depicts an inner ­turmoil and the lengths required to keep up her glamorous facade.

Skin-tight outfits are wrestled into, botox liberally injected and a litany of plunge pools, light ­therapy and cryotherapy employed to keep up an appearance of serenity.

As the complex dynamics with her husband and lover become increasingly messy and raw, Kidman proves once again why she is one of Hollywood’s best and subtly ­most transgressive stars.

The Australian actor made her first tentative steps towards stardom trapped on a yacht with Sam Neill and Billy Zane in the 1989 thriller Dead Calm and ­coming of age alongside Thandiwe Newton in a 1960s boarding school in 1991’s Flirting.

She received even more global attention starring alongside her future ex-husband in Days of Thunder, which briefly threatened to have her labelled “Mrs Cruise”.

Rather than be content to play the glamorous love interest of the ­leading man both on and off the screen, however, she followed up a thankless romance with Batman with the gloriously twisted To Die For, which satirised the narrative around sexually liberated ambitious women and skewered the tabloid obsession with them.

One of her greatest roles would also be one of her longest shoots, when, alongside Cruise she spent two years on Eyes Wide Shut. She might be the only person who left a Stanley Kubrick film wishing it had gone on longer, telling the BBC in 2022: “I would have shot that thing for five years, I didn’t care … I’m with the greatest film-maker.”

Eyes Wide Shut, released in 1999, hit the headlines for its explicit masked orgy scenes but is rightly regarded as a masterpiece.

Kidman’s monologue about her dissatisfaction with monogamy, while smoking a joint, is her finest in a career packed to the rafters with powerful monologues.

Corrina Antrobus, film critic, Bechdel Test festival founder and author of I Love RomComs & I Am A Feminist, says: “If you look at Eyes Wide Shut, it’s the end of the 90s, a paparazzi-filled awful time for objectifying women. Things like Hello! were at their peak of ­selling us this fantasy of the perfect marriage, of ­selling your wedding for millions of pounds, but here you had Tom and Nicole – a bona fide Hollywood couple – ­breaking the fantasy and ­daring to present a woman with desires of her own.”

At Babygirl’s press conference, Kidman explained: “I approach everything ­artistically, so I don’t think of the minutiae, just how do I give over to this character fully without censoring my director.” In the case of that film, it requires a level of bravery not accessible to most actors, both in sex scenes that ­centre female pleasure and in playing a powerful CEO for whom cosmetic enhancements and psycho-sexual torment are willingly endured.

Despite her many head-turning appearances on the red carpet, dense filmography, a high-profile marriage to Cruise which ended in 2001 (the moment of its dissolution captured in a memorable paparazzi image of seeming euphoria), a subsequent marriage to the country music star Keith Urban and many charming talkshow appearances, there has always been something unknowable about Kidman. In all senses, she exists above the fray, living a life that we only get the briefest or most curated glances of.

She rarely speaks about her private life, and concealed an engagement to the rock star Lenny Kravitz for years. But the peeks we do get are fascinating.

In a moment that reportedly inspired one of the most quoted lines in Greta Gerwig’s Barbie, Kidman sat down with her Big Little Lies co-star Reese Witherspoon, who was expecting to chat movies, and instead asked her: “Do you ever think about dying Reese? Because I think about it all the time.”

As an actor, she is continually revealing new depths. Antrobus says: “Everyone knows she’s got the skills, but I think there’s ­conscious decisions in making sure that ­people don’t forget how multi-faceted she is. While she’s somebody that can be seen as uptight, she just unravels so erotically and beautifully. Seeing a woman unravel themselves like that continuously and shock us and entertain us and surprise us is her theme, somehow.”

It’s a career not without its ­missteps – remakes of The Stepford Wives and Bewitched rightfully sank without a trace – but most actors could only dream of having the kind of cultural impact Kidman is ­capable of achieving in a few months.

In A Family Affair, her first proper romantic comedy leading role, she has once again moved the needle. As Antrobus puts it, “Family Affair is a really smart move.” The film was released on Netflix in June. “It’s a modern romcom that delivers a sliver of justice to films that haven’t exactly been kind to the portrayal of motherhood. It has a representation of a mother as a woman with unapologetic needs, with sexual needs that sees a woman navigate what I think is a very genuine rite of passage in accepting that it’s now time to serve herself.”

In serving herself, Kidman doesn’t look to be slowing down any time soon. Seven further projects listing her as a producer have been announced, Big Little Lies is set to return for a third season and a long-awaited adaptation of Patricia Cornwell’s Kay Scarpetta books will feature her in the titular role.

Awards buzz around Babygirl is building after last night’s success and, while it remains to be seen if that role will prove too ­disquieting for the Oscars, Kidman has already won the long game. Whether she is playing a glamorous writer living in a Nantucket mansion, a mother falling for a hunky young movie star or a kinky ­robotics CEO straddling Harris Dickinson, it has never been more exciting to be beneath Nicole Kidman.

A new documentary portraying the lives of Russian soldiers near the Ukrainian frontlines has faced fierce criticism for attempting to whitewash Moscow’s war crimes.

Russians at War, directed by the Russian-Canadian film-maker Anastasia Trofimova, chronicles seven months spent embedded with a Russian army battalion in eastern Ukraine, presenting itself as a unique window into the daily lives of Russian soldiers.

In the film, which premiered at the Venice film festival last week, young soldiers are portrayed grappling with the purpose of their fight. Their motivations to join Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine vary from financial reasons to a sense of camaraderie.

“It’s so confusing here, I don’t even know what we’re fighting for,” says one soldier, a sentiment shared by others, who are largely portrayed in a sympathetic light.

But Russians at War appears to offer only brief glimpses of combat and critics say it provides no insight into the mass-scale destruction caused by Moscow’s forces in Ukraine since February 2022.

Throughout the two-and-a-half years of full-scale war, Russia has targeted civilian sites, while multiple UN investigations have documented evidence of “indiscriminate attacks” and war crimes by Russian forces in Ukraine, including rape and the deportation of children to Russia.

On Friday, CNN published drone footage filmed during fighting in August near the embattled city of Pokrovsk in eastern Ukraine, showing an apparent execution by Russian troops of three surrendering Ukrainians, the latest in a series of gruesome clips to emerge.

When asked at a press conference in Venice about Russia’s actions in Ukraine, Trofimova said the soldiers she lived with for seven months were “absolutely ordinary guys” and claimed she saw no signs of war crimes during her time near the front.

“I understand that there are many reports of war crimes and pretty much, I think in western media, that’s what Russian soldiers are associated with at this point, because there were no other stories. This is another story, and this was the reality that they lived,” the director said. “If there were war crimes committed, obviously you would see them on screen, but in the seven months that I was there, that was not my experience … it’s important to show other stories.”

The documentary screening and Trofimova’s subsequent comments sparked an immediate backlash from Ukraine’s artistic community.

Ukrainian producer Darya Bassel, whose documentary Songs of Slow Burning Earth depicting the suffering of Ukraine also premiered at Venice, criticised the decision to screen the Russian film, saying it “presents a very distorted picture of reality, spreading false narratives”.

“We can only be happy for her [Trofimova] that she was fortunate enough not to witness any war crimes. Unfortunately, thousands of Ukrainians have not been so lucky,” Bassel wrote in a critical post on Facebook after attending a screening.

The documentary is likely to prompt a debate over the ethics of filming inside Russia and the territories under Russian occupation. Unlike in Ukraine, where foreign reporters can travel to the frontlines, Russia has largely prohibited such access to independent journalists, only occasionally permitting select ones to join tightly controlled press tours.

Trofimova defended her decision to make the film, telling journalists in Venice: “There was a missing element: the human face of those people involved in the war.

“The point of view of Russian soldiers is not usually heard and I think it’s so important to see through the fog of the war: to see the tragedy that the war is and to see people for people, outside politicians’ black-and-white reasoning and war propaganda.”

But Bassel, along with other prominent Ukrainian cultural figures, criticised the documentary for distorting the portrayal of Russian soldiers. They argued that it neglects their responsibility, portraying them as “victims” rather than active participants in the war.“It is important to remember that these individuals joined the army that invaded an independent country, many of them willingly,” Bassel said.

“Are their crimes any less significant simply because they claim to be unaware of why they are involved in this war?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Name: George Smiley.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Which others? David Cornwell’s sons.

Nick? Also Simon Cornwell, a film producer.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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