Tilda swinton

Joshua Oppenheimer’s The End is a ‘post-apocalyptic musical’ starring Tilda Swinton and Michael Shannon that is being sold as a ‘bold vision’. And as you know I’m all for bold visions – except perhaps ones that go on for two and a half hours (I genuinely feared The End would never end) and give the impression throughout of being like a premise in search of a story. The musical, however, does definitively answer one question: can Swinton and Shannon carry a tune? Spoiler: not really. This is the first dramatic feature from Oppenheimer who is best known as the documentarian behind two stunning films about the 1960s Indonesian genocide (The Act of Killing, The Look of Silence).

The Room Next Door is Pedro Almodovar’s first film in the English language and if it is his last we can probably live with that. The film, which is adapted from a novel by Sigrid Nunez, stars Tilda Swinton and Julianne Moore, who are terrific whatever they do, and it is aesthetically divine (the knitwear, in particular, is sensational). But dramatically it’s thin gruel. The subject matter is euthanasia, so you’d expect Almodovar to hold back on his usual flamboyant playfulness, bounciness and humour. But what is there to care about? Why do these two women matter? Where is that knitwear from? Spoiler alert: no answers are forthcoming. Take the pill, Martha! Take the pill, then we can all go home!

When David Fincher’s latest picture The Killer premiered at the Venice Film Festival in September, it was to a more muted reception than might have been anticipated. Part of this may have been because, with the actors’ strike very much in force, its stars Michael Fassbender and Tilda Swinton were nowhere to be seen, with Fincher himself the only A-lister on the red carpet. But it was also undoubtedly because the finished film was not remotely what many had anticipated. Early hype suggested that The Killer would follow the exploits of Fassbender’s anonymous assassin as he (inconveniently) develops a conscience, presumably setting up an existential quandary.

The Souvenir: Part II is Joanna Hogg’s follow-up to The Souvenir (2019) but it’s not your regular sequel. It’s not Sing 2, for instance. It’s not the exploitation of a franchise. And it’s not as if the industry has run out of original ideas for autobiographical films about becoming a film-maker in London in the 1980s. The two were always conceived as a pair telling the one story — and they would have been made back-to-back had Hogg not run out of money. So it’s the one story with a wait in-between which, admittedly, has been a trial. Did Julie make her graduation film about working-class kids in Sunderland? Which sounded like the worst idea ever. Also: has she moved on from Anthony?

There always comes a moment in the films of Apichatpong Weerasethakul where you’re forced to scoop your brain up from the floor. In his last, Cemetery of Splendour, this occurs at the point where the sky is invaded by a colossal blimpish amoeba. You stare. Blink. Adjust eyes. It slowly dawns that you’re peering into a crystal-clear lake, cloudy heavens and whirring mitochondria in blissful, cosmic coexistence. Man, however, is weak. And the first time I was introduced to his films, one of the most significant, sensual, startling, transcendent bodies of work by any director this century, I fell asleep. ‘Amazing,’ beams Weerasethakul over Zoom. ‘Even I slept in my films sometimes.

The American filmmaker Wes Anderson has an apartment in Paris and has always yearned to make a French movie but also he has always yearned to make a film about the New Yorker, the magazine with subscribers all round the world, some of whom actually get round to reading it before binning it, and some of whom don’t. (She says, guiltily.) So The French Dispatch is, he has said, the ‘smooching’ of these two ideas, and it is, alas, a ‘smooch’ of a film. That is, not one thing or the other. I would further add it’s as if all the cast had been instructed to act wackily and off-kilter throughout because we won’t get tired of that. But I promise you we quickly do.

Rory Stewart, who is awfully polite about wanting to be Britain’s next prime minister, has apologized for smoking opium while walking in Afghanistan. It was politeness that got him into trouble in the first place. Stewart says he felt it would have been rude not to take a deep drag on the pipe when it was passed around at the wedding he had wandered into, as one does when one is walking in Afghanistan. What happens in Herat stays in Herat, except of course, if one of your qualifications for the top job is your stint as Prisons Minister. Not a good look, as the Pashtun say. Jeremy Hunt, another ministerial candidate to replace Theresa May, has confessed to drinking mind-altering yoghurt when traveling in Asia.