Arts Reviews

Steven Spielberg might be the most beloved and popular American director of the 20th century, but it is also unavoidably the case that, since 2005’s Munich, he has been on something of a disappointing run. While many of his films, not least The Fabelmans and West Side Story, have been critically acclaimed and Oscar-nominated, there is a growing sense that he has not made a really interesting or worthwhile picture in 20 years, with the partial exception of the enjoyable, quirky, Coen Brothers-scripted Bridge of Spies.

In This World of Tomorrow – the new play starring and cowritten by Tom Hanks, currently on at The Shed in Manhattan – Tom Hanks plays a classic, well, Tom Hanks character.  Bert Allenberry (Hanks) is the nicest guy in the room: he’s the kind of great guy who will escort a lady home in a taxicab, even if it will make him late. And in This World of Tomorrow being late matters a lot. Bert, you see, is a successful but dissatisfied scientist from the future who travels back in time to the 1939 New York World’s Fair in Queens. Once there he has complete free rein, except for one thing. He must return to his hotel at a certain hour to be whisked back to the future – or risk mortal bodily damage.    Love, of course, gets in the way.

The death of the director and actor Rob Reiner in violent and unexplained circumstances is one of the most horrific and surprising stories to have emerged from Hollywood in living memory. One of the reasons why its elites live in areas such as Reiner’s exclusive neighborhood of Brentwood in California is precisely so that they will not be subject to the possibility of random violence in a way that less wealthy Americans face daily. Yet if news reports are to be believed, Reiner and his wife Michele were the victims of intrafamilial strife: a situation that all the gated walls and security cameras in the world could not ameliorate.

There are relatively few Netflix documentaries – even in this increasingly sensationalized and prurient age – that have made anything like the splash that the new show about the artist formerly known as P. Diddy has caused. Sean Combs: The Reckoning isn’t just hard to watch, but positively mind-blowing in its account of the imprisoned mogul’s actions and predilections. Although he was acquitted of the most serious charges that he was on trial for this year, Combs will not be released from jail until May 2028. Given the number of allegations and civil suits pending against him, any comeback for the disgraced musician looks impossible – even in an era when Kanye West is, apparently, given second chance after second chance.

Well, One Battle After Another is the toast of the Golden Globe nominations and Wicked: For Good is… not. That’s the biggest immediate takeaway of the first indicator as to how the awards race next year is likely to pan out. The many nuances and surprises of Monday's announcement are not only a fascinating insight into the state of Hollywood in 2025, but also a reminder that the Globes have always prized big star names above everything else – including, perhaps, the worthiness of their inclusion.

That creaking sound you hear creaking is Jack Warner, the founder of Warner Bros. studio, turning in his grave. Last week, it was announced that Netflix had purchased one of Hollywood’s most respected studios for a staggering, indeed insane $83 billion – which makes Disney’s purchase of Lucasfilm for $4 billion in 2012 seem like the bargain of the century. The sale would create a monopoly the likes of which has never been seen before in the film industry. Most people assumed that such a bid – in this increasingly beleaguered business – is very, very bad news. They might be correct. That’s why it’s even more staggering that Paramount have today, with impeccable timing, announced their own hostile takeover bid for Warner, offering an even more outlandish $108.

For someone who has directed two of the three highest-grossing films of all time – and if we include Titanic in the mix, three of the top five – James Cameron struck an unusually modest figure at this week’s premiere Avatar: Fire and Ash. When asked at the screening whether its inevitable box-office success would result in the planned fourth and fifth films being produced, the erstwhile King of the World responded “I’m not even thinking about four. Are you kidding me? I'm unemployed right now.” Admittedly, Cameron’s definition of “unemployed” is rather different to that of most people, whether they be A-list directors or the less fortunate.

So, the new – and supposedly final – season of Stranger Things has arrived in Netflix, just in time for Thanksgiving. Expectations have been through the roof that this installment will not be a turkey, but the good (stranger?) thing about the series so far is that it has maintained a remarkably high level of quality since it began in 2016. This is by no means a given for an Eighties-inflected fantasy show that is so devoted (the cynics might and have said slavishly) to all things that Steven Spielberg produced in that decade that the bearded one might have sued for plagiarism, were it not for the fact that the homage remains an affectionate and heartfelt, rather than cynical, one.

The Beatles broke up in 1970, but you wouldn’t know it from the activity of the last few years. In no particular order, we have had an underwhelming valedictory single, “Now and Then,” raised from the dead thanks to the wonders of artificial intelligence and Peter Jackson alike; an eight-hour – eight!– documentary, Get Back, resurrected from the footage of the Let It Be sessions; and now, an all-singing, all-dancing reissue on Disney+ of the Nineties Anthology documentary series, which has been promoted with the fourth volume of offcuts and rare tracks from the band’s career, appropriately titled Anthology 4.