Film

The late director Anthony Minghella made three films with actor Jude Law: The Talented Mr Ripley, Cold Mountain and Breaking and Entering. They would undoubtedly have made more if Minghella hadn’t died at the cruelly young age of 54 in 2008. He referred to the actor as ‘my muse’, but had a more perceptive comment about him too. ‘Jude is a beautiful boy with the mind of a man. A true character actor struggling to get out of a beautiful body.’ For years, Law seemed to struggle with the weight of his good looks, taking on mediocre roles that talent agencies and producers had shoehorned him into. Now, at the age of 50, he has embraced middle age and the greater opportunities for versatility it offers.

We might never have taken the Eurovision Song Contest terribly seriously in the UK – but with British Ted Neeley lookalike Sam Ryder winning second place last year and the staging of this year’s event in Liverpool, some are singing to a different tune. This year’s UK entry comes from Mae Muller – ‘I Wrote a Song’ is a serviceable enough generic toe-tapper, but no ‘Puppet on a String’ (Sandie Shaw, 1967 winner) if you ask me. Or even ‘Ooh Aah… Just a Little Bit', Gina G’s 1996 banger that claimed eighth place in the contest. Ahead of tomorrow night’s final, here are ten movies to get you in the mood for Eurovision 2023 – films where the plucky underdog (almost always) triumphs.

This year’s Cannes Film Festival promises to be interesting viewing, with a record number of female directors in contention (a stark contrast to the 2023 Academy Awards) and a greater than usual representation of old-guard auteurs (including Martin Scorsese, Wim Wenders, Ken Loach and Finnish maverick Aki Kaurismäki). Fans will no doubt be enthused by the return of Jonathan Glazer (Sexy Beast) with his first picture since 2013’s acclaimed Under the Skin. I can’t say Glazer’s choice of material - Martin Amis’s 2014 concentration camp novel Zone of Interest – particularly grabs me, but the director’s work is always worth checking out.

‘In her big, white dress the Queen looks like a balloon that’s about to float up to the roof of Westminster Abbey and bob about up there amongst the gilded arches and roof bosses. To prevent this happening people keep weighing her down with cloaks and robes, orbs and spectres, until she’s so heavy that bishops and archbishops have to help propel her around.’ This is the coronation of Elizabeth II in 1953 as described by one-year-old Ruby Lennox in Kate Atkinson’s Behind the Scenes at the Museum. These observations might seem preternaturally advanced from a narrator not yet old enough to walk and talk, but that is consistent for this witty novel. It opens with Ruby being fully aware of her own conception: ‘I exist!

Before Westminster Abbey opens its doors on Saturday, what better way to get in the spirit than to explore the storied history of coronations in the movies? The sheer spectacle of a monarch’s formal coronation has an inherently cinematic aspect – and it's one that motion pictures have long exploited. Here are ten films to savour before the event: The Lord of the Rings: the Return of the King (2003) – NOW, Amazon Rent/Buy https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r5X-hFf6Bwo Impressive as King Charles III’s coronation is sure to be, it’s unlikely to match the crowning of Aragorn (Viggo Mortensen) as King Elessar in the final instalment of Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings trilogy.

Afew weeks ago, news broke that Paramount was planning to embark on a remake of Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo with a starring role for Robert Downey Jr. You are forgiven if your reaction is one of deep scepticism. What can possibly be gained by remaking a film widely regarded as the apex of the art form? What director today can step into the shoes of the Master of Suspense? And who would ever mistake the star of Iron Man for Jimmy Stewart?  Gut reactions of this sort remind us of the scorn with which remakes in general are usually – sometimes unfairly – met. After all, remakes are considered by all fair observers to be inherently synthetic and unoriginal, right?

From bucket hats to Britney Spears, the 1990s and 2000s are back in vogue. Who could have predicted that the cringe-inducing baggy trousers and All Saints-esque crop tops that filled teenage wardrobes 20 years ago would be resurrected with such gusto by Gen Z? But there’s one part of turn-of-the-century culture that remains firmly consigned to the past. Unlike the clothing of the era, the romcom has proved remarkably resistant to modern reinvention – no matter how hard Hollywood tries. Last month, two romantic comedy veterans – Reese Witherspoon and Ashton Kutcher – reunited in a stoic effort to woo audiences back to the genre.

The received wisdom that the Oscar for Best Picture always goes to mainstream, generally inoffensive ‘quality’ pictures is only partially true. There have been multiple exceptions to this – and increasingly so over recent years, with an influx of younger Academy voters and a desire to be seen as more progressive than in the past. Who knows what it might mean for this year’s Best Picture nominees – which are All Quiet on the Western Front, Avatar: The Way of Water, The Banshees of Inisherin, Elvis, Everything Everywhere All at Once, The Fabelmans, Tár, Top Gun: Maverick, Triangle of Sadness and Women Talking.

In 1969, for my seventh birthday, I was taken – dragged, probably – ‘up west’ to the theatre to see a musical. As I recall, it didn’t fill me with joy to be going, but it turned out to be fantastic. The songs, the acting, the dancing: it was great fun. Then we went for pasta in Soho, which was also a special event in those days. More importantly, though, I think it was the first time I became truly aware of a vital part of my identity: that I was here because decades earlier my great-grandfather had arrived on these shores, driven out of his native Russia by a pogrom, the ethnic cleansing of Jews across that vast country.

I was interested to read that the next Joker film has the subtitle ‘Folie à Deux’ – a lovely phrase not used enough these days. When shrinks talk about folie à deux (also known as Lasègue-Falret Syndrome, after the 19th-century French psychiatrists who discovered it) they mean a ‘shared delusional disorder’ in which symptoms of an irrational belief are transmitted from one individual to another – including folie en famille or folie à plusieurs ('madness of several’), sometimes leading to violence and even murder.

I never made it to the end of Martin McDonagh’s The Banshees of Inisherin, which won four Baftas on Sunday and has been tipped for further success at the Oscars next month. Inisherin is a fictional place that apparently translates as 'Island Ireland'. I know it’s probably churlish of me, but, being Irish, I was turned off by the film’s maudlin sentimentality mixed with self-obsession, self-harm, child abuse, wanton violence, dead pets and suicidal ideation. It bothered me that the film trotted out as many Oirish stereotypes as were in Gone With the Wind, released in 1939. Let me list some of the most obvious of these at the outset.