Category: cinema

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

19. Dumbo (2019)

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

18. Planet of the Apes (2001)

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

17. Alice in Wonderland (2010)

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

16. Big Fish (2003)

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

15. Batman Returns (1992)

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

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

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

13. Corpse Bride (2005)

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

12. Sleepy Hollow (1999)

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

11. Mars Attacks! (1996)

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

10. Dark Shadows (2012)

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

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

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

8. Batman (1989)

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

7. Frankenweenie (2012)

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

6. Big Eyes (2014)

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

5. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (2005)

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

4. Pee-wee’s Big Adventure (1985)

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

3. Edward Scissorhands (1990)

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

2. Beetlejuice (1988)

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

1. Ed Wood (1994)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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