The return of the brilliant Nicolas Cage
He’s one of our most talented actors, elevating even the most awful of scripts
Hollywood
Wednesday
Wednesday
Stillwater and the rise of the blue-collar American in Hollywood
The movie humanizes the camo-hat and cutoff shirt-wearing segment of America while still telling an entertaining story
Sunday
Fatty Arbuckle’s fall
Arbuckle was an accidental pioneer of cancel culture
Monday
Hollywood’s vacuous moral turn
Black Widow, Luca and Nomadland are films for decaffeinated protesters
Tuesday
I was fathernapped
Someone couldn’t seriously have called the police and told them I was a threat to my children
Wednesday
John Cena’s car-crash Taiwan apology
‘You can’t CCP me’
Tuesday
How COVID-19 killed Hollywood
The pandemic has sped up the decline of glitzy award ceremonies
Monday
Sundance memories
Robert Redford’s film festival goes virtual
Wednesday
Here’s looking at you, Kid
One hundred years on from the seminal Chaplin flick
Tuesday
No, Meghan Markle isn’t going to be president
The more people see her, the less they like
Monday
Terry O’Neill: ‘Hollywood is lonely’
He was one of Britain’s greatest portrait photographers, possibly the greatest
Wednesday
Hollywood’s transrace hypocrisy
The Academy Awards are making America look stupid in front of the entire world
Tuesday
Olivia de Havilland’s Red Scare
She was not an anti-communist in spite of being a liberal, she was an anti-communist because she was a liberal
Monday
Where can patriotic Americans find America?
It is hard to identify safe spaces for those of us on the American right
Thursday
It’s OK everyone, actors are ‘taking responsibility’
Let’s all be grateful to these very rich, very famous people
Friday
Harry and Meghan represent the triumph of celebrity over royalty
We treat the royal family like Hollywood stars but get offended if they behave like them
Tuesday
Hollywood parrots the Chinese Communist party line
For almost a decade, American cinema has rolled over and had its fluffy belly tickled by grim-faced CCP censors
Monday
Hollywood loves a remake, but do we?
Once more, with feeling
Thursday
‘Steer clear of that cave boy, James Dean, and grease ball, Elvis Presley’
Lucky bastard. Such are the words that come constantly to mind while you’re reading Clancy Sigal’s two volumes of posthumously published autobiography. Blacklisted as a (self-confessedly lousy) actor for refusing to name names in the McCarthy era, working as the agent for the likes of Peter Lorre, Rod Steiger and — sigh — Barbara Stanwyck in 1950s Hollywood and freelancing on Fleet Street in countercultural London (including reviewing films for The Spectator), Sigal was at the centre of every piece of action going. Should Black Sunset and The London Lover ever be gathered into a single volume (perhaps taking Sigal’s earlier memoir, Going Away, along for the ride), ‘Been there,
Wednesday
How Hollywood lost its shine
Reading the lip-smacking reports of the latest troubled celebrity relationships (Jennifer Aniston and Justin Theroux definitely high and dry, Cheryl Cole and Liam Payne allegedly on the rocks) I couldn’t help musing that stars – and more specifically, the place they occupy in our mass psychological landscape – have very much changed since the first mass-market celebrities emerged. The film stars of the fledgling Hollywood truly were worshipped as higher beings; a tribe of Pathan Indians opened fire on a cinema when they were denied entry to a Greta Garbo film while women committed suicide when Valentino died. Their marriages were regarded as heavenly unions; their romantic sunderings as tragedies.
