Culture

Released thirty years ago this year, Barcelona is the movie with which Whit Stillman came of age. The New York-born cinematic portraitist of the well-mannered and well-heeled launched his career in 1990 with Metropolitan, which charted a course deep into J.D. Salingerdom with its cast of demure debutantes and their callow escorts. For all its wit and winsomeness, the movie has a certain undeniable post-adolescent soppiness: a girl is driven to tears by a cruel remark by her brother; a young man clings to the toys of his youth; there is a paean to Babar and a lament for absentee fathers. The film’s much-loved Christmastime setting actively contributes to this tone of teenage melancholia.

Denis Villeneuve’s Dune films represent two of the more remarkable turnarounds in recent Hollywood history. After the failure of David Lynch’s ambitious but deeply, deeply flawed Eighties attempt at filming Frank Herbert’s sprawling sci-fi epic, the project was seen as all but impossible, being both vastly expensive and presumed to be of interest mainly to the kind of young men who prefer to watch films in their parents’ basements rather than at their local theater. It also didn’t help that the first film was released day-and-date with the HBO Max streaming service; the fact that it made more than $400 million at the box office was, under the circumstances, something of a miracle.

It is hard to think of the last time that the Academy Awards had a great host. Jimmy Kimmel did a competent job in 2023 and earlier this year, and was fortunate to sit out the notorious ceremony in 2022 in which Will Smith marched on stage to slap Chris Rock. Yet it’s impossible to remember anything really entertaining that Kimmel did or said — unlike his first time hosting in 2017, when the event fell apart in Curb Your Enthusiasm-esque chaos when La La Land was wrongly announced to have won Best Picture when in fact Moonlight had — and it’s no wonder that he didn’t want to return for a fifth go for next year’s ceremony. Many estimable comedians and chat show hosts have tried, and failed, to make their mark at the Oscars.

When Kevin Costner announced that he would not be returning to Yellowstone, the contemporary Western series that revitalized his career, the news was greeted with consternation. Costner had been the pivotal figure in the show’s previous four and a half seasons — and it was expected that he would return as the patriarch John Dutton III for the final installment, even though he was busy filming his own epic pictures, Horizon. However, amid well-documented spats between him and the show’s creator Taylor Sheridan, Costner announced that he would not, in fact, return for Yellowstone’s final episodes.   Rather than leaving the door open for a final, face-saving cameo, Sheridan dealt with Costner in brutal fashion.

The death of Quincy Jones, at the considerable age of ninety-one, represents not just the passing of a great American musical icon, but the departure of a truly remarkable man from the stage. The winner of an astounding twenty-eight Grammy awards, he excelled in so many different areas of music — from record production and film soundtrack composition to big band jazz and multi-instrumental playing — that it would not have been particularly surprising to discover that he had written operas or symphonies on his days off.

By now, television viewers should be inured to watching scenes of sexual congress on their screens. With any number of explicit programs airing over the past few years — given that mainstream cinema has more or less abandoned the sex scene, it is little wonder that it has snuck into the privacy of our homes — watching graphically depicted coupling should be nothing especially remarkable. But even so, the sheer amount of intercourse that is depicted in Hulu’s new adaptation of Jilly Cooper’s hugely successful novel, Rivals, comes as a surprise.

When the Oscar-winning filmmaker Alfonso Cuarón announced that his next project would be a seven-part adaptation of Renée Knight’s novel Disclaimer, it was met with a mixture of excitement and surprise. Excitement, because anything that Cuarón involves himself with tends to be an event; surprise, because after a series of high-profile recent projects that have included everything from a near-experimental sci-fi blockbuster (Gravity) to a black-and-white Mexican drama he shot himself (Roma), it seemed almost mundane, rather as if Stanley Kubrick, at the peak of his success, had decided to make a movie out of a Harold Robbins potboiler.

Sexy time at the cinema is becoming a thing of the past. That’s according to research on the prevalence of vices in top live-action films from film maven Stephen Follows. His study shows that drug taking and violence are as popular on screen as ever in the twenty-first century. Profanity has dipped only slightly, but sex has dropped off a cliff since the year 2000. We used to love what they used to call a steamy blockbuster. I came of age in an era where the “erotic thriller” — 9½ Weeks, Fatal Attraction, Basic Instinct — were the box office draws, in which big stars lost their drawers. Comedies like A Fish Called Wanda, Green Card or When Harry Met Sally relied on frisson and fizz for a large part of their appeal.

The news that Ali Abbasi’s Donald Trump drama The Apprentice has flopped in its first weekend at the US box office, taking in a mere $1.6 million from 1,740 locations across the country, may not be as surprising as liberal critics might suspect. The film received decent rather than adulatory reviews, many of which suggested that its portrayal of the young Donald Trump and his relationship with his mentor Roy Cohn was either too generous or unfairly maligned the younger Trump, depending on where your individual politics stood.

“Me and Vice President Harris are the same!” concluded Saturday Night Live veteran Dana Carvey, in character as Joe Biden, when he returned to NBC’s legendary sketch comedy show for the first episode of its fiftieth anniversary season. After Carvey, who left SNL’s regular ensemble in 1993, uttered those politically unhelpful words, former cast member Maya Rudolph, playing Kamala Harris, nervously gave him the bum rush off stage, only for him to wander back on to smell her hair — one of Biden’s stranger campaign trail moves — before the two delivered the show’s signature, “Live from New York, it’s Saturday night!” line to a cheering studio audience, millions of viewers at home and millions more who (like me) caught it later via social media streaming.

To nobody’s very great surprise, the much-anticipated, very expensive Joker sequel, the pretentiously entitled Folie à Deux, has flopped, and then some. The original film opened to a staggering $96 million on its opening weekend in 2019, and went on to earn more than a billion dollars worldwide, eventually winning an Oscar for its lead Joaquin Phoenix. It was that rare movie that appealed as much to cineastes and critics as it did to the Saturday-night popcorn crowd. Never mind that its director Todd Phillips ripped off Martin Scorsese’s The King of Comedy and Taxi Driver so much that it was virtually actionable; it was heralded as a vital, incendiary piece of cinema. Its sequel has not been.

The death of Dame Maggie Smith at the age of eighty-nine represents not just the end of a very English tradition of acting that she exemplified, but a passing of a generation. With the exceptions of Judi Dench and Eileen Atkins, there are no few grand dames of British stage and screen surviving; there is a distinct difference between, say, Smith and Helen Mirren, who pivoted early to the cinema and has largely remained there ever since. Smith was a consummate actress for film — she won two Oscars and was nominated for plenty more — but it was the smaller environs of television and stage where she truly excelled. A misapprehension about Smith is that she was a camp, OTT presence. This impression is largely derived from her latter-period work in Gosford Park (in which she was superb..

Two of the highest-profile show launches of the past month are also two of the least original. If your taste runs to hard-bitten, Sopranos­-accented crime, then you might enjoy the new HBO series The Penguin, with Colin Farrell reprising his role from 2022’s The Batman as Oswald Cobb, the so-called “Penguin,” a Mafioso who is attempting to gain control of Gotham City’s crime underworld following the death of Carmine Falcone. And if you’re more interested in female-driven whimsy, then Marvel’s Agatha All Along, the latest genre-hopping comedy-drama-fantasy-horror on Disney+, will allow Kathryn Hahn ample opportunity to chew the scenery as the witch Agatha Harkness, who forms a new coven after the misadventures of WandaVision.

Now that The Crown has finished (for the time being, at least), production companies are scrabbling about for replacements. Perhaps inevitably, the biggest royal story of the past few years — Prince Andrew’s disastrous 2019 interview with Emily Maitlis on the BBC’s Newsnight program — has now been made into two separate shows this year. The Netflix offering, Scoop, focused on Sam McAlister — and was, far from coincidentally, based on McAlister’s memoir. Now Amazon Prime has entered the fray with a three-part series that follows in the wake of the peerless A Very English Scandal and the lesser A Very British Scandal. Whatever next?

It was to be the year of Shōgun. In one of the cleanest sweeps since Succession ended, the show won virtually everything at this year’s Emmys, including Best Drama Series, Lead Actress in a Drama for Anna Sawai and, unsurprisingly, Lead Actor in a Drama for the phenomenal Hiroyuki Sanada, who triumphed in a category that had some equally strong choices (Gary Oldman for Slow Horses), as well as some more perplexing ones (Idris Elba for Hijack and, bizarrely, Dominic West for The Crown). Shōgun took a record-breaking eighteen Emmys in total, with showrunner Justin Marks remarking of its makers Hulu and FX, “You guys greenlit a very expensive subtitled Japanese period piece whose central climax revolves around a poetry competition.” It proved to be a good bet.

Imagine, if you will, that you are a patron of what used to be euphemistically called “blue movies” at the beginning of 1980, during the so-called “Golden Age of Porn.” The previous few years have seen pornography enter the mainstream in the form of such hugely popular pictures as Deep Throat and Debbie Does Dallas, which saw such stars as Linda Lovelace and Marilyn Chambers briefly achieve nearly the fame (or notoriety) of their Hollywood peers, as their films came close to becoming, if not respectable, at least part of the cinematic fabric of the day. Then you hear tell of something truly remarkable: a big-budget Roman epic with an A-list cast, scripted by Gore Vidal and combining intricately recreated scenes of classical debauchery with envelope-pushing sexual content.

Milo Yiannopoulos has fallen out with another Trump-supporting musical artist. The right-wing provocateur and one-time intern of Marjorie Taylor Greene had been teasing his intention to start managing Azealia Banks, a rapper and singer as talented as she is controversial best known for her songs "212" and "Anna Wintour." "At Yeezy, I discovered a gift for navigating, protecting and advising mercurial and demanding geniuses," he tweeted ten days ago. "I deliver and close ruthlessly, effectively and efficiently. So I’m moving into artist management full time. Signing my first client in a few days. You will, as they say, gag." Banks retweeted his post. Yet days later, on the eve of Banks's UK tour, the blossoming working relationship appears to have unraveled.

The death of the great actor James Earl Jones, at the robust age of ninety-three, has been marked with tributes from every walk of society, not least the acting profession. There were many remarkable things about Jones’s career, from his being the last surviving member of the cast of Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove to his many and varied Shakespearean roles, all of which he excelled in (save, perhaps, Mark Rylance’s misguided attempt to cast him as a superannuated Benedick in Much Ado About Nothing at the Old Vic in London in 2013, which was critically ridiculed). Yet the reason why he has a fame and repute far beyond just about any other actor of his generation is simple: he was the voice of Darth Vader.

Beetlejuice Beetlejuice — so good, they named it twice. At least, that’s what you would have hoped. Unfortunately, Tim Burton’s latest movie is a dismally confused hotchpotch that aims for a curious mixture of comedy, mild horror and the usual Burton wackiness, along with performances from his regular actors including Michael Keaton, Jenna Ortega and Winona Ryder. Sequel to an Eighties curio that was diverting rather than brilliant in the first place, it has nevertheless capitalized on the ever-present vogue for nostalgia that has permeated theaters over the past few years. It made an astonishing $111 million at the US box office last weekend; the original grossed $75 million worldwide during its entire run at movie theaters, albeit the best part of four decades ago.

Apple TV+ may be struggling to break through into the streaming mainstream with more than a handful of their shows (as I’ve written before), but one categorical success is the British comedy-thriller Slow Horses, about to begin its fourth series on the service this week.   Because Apple has a vastly lower take-up for its subscriptions than Netflix or Amazon Prime, it remains a niche, cult show, rather than a much-discussed behemoth, and this suits its admirers down to the ground, who discuss its fidelity to Mick Herron’s brilliant series of novels with the kind of revivalist fervor usually seen at the Democratic National Convention.  From one clapped out old has-been to another.

Lovers of Jason Sudeikis, British soccer — that’ll be “football” to you — and undemanding, if surprisingly curse-laden, comedy-dramas, rejoice. The third season of Sudeikis’s hit comedy Ted Lasso ended last year, with what seemed to be a fairly definitive conclusion to the show. The eponymous Ted returned home after seeing his beloved AFC Richmond come second in the league, the club’s dastardly former owner Rupert (Anthony Head, the show’s MVP in my opinion) was defeated and comic sidekick-turned-villain Nate “the Great” was redeemed and welcomed back into the fold. There were, admittedly, a few curveballs and loose ends chucked in there, but it was hard to see where a fourth season could go.   It now looks as if we will find out.

After a fairly barren summer movies-wise (I’m just waiting for the Alien: Romulus backlash to begin, and will be only too pleased to join in with it), there are more promising movies coming our way this fall. Yet the one that’s attracted more attention and interest than possibly anything else this year, maybe even this decade, is the grand return of Francis Ford Coppola with Megalopolis, a self-funded, wildly ambitious folie de grandeur that premiered at this year’s Cannes Film Festival to predictably mixed reactions and an overall consensus that, alas, the one-time visionary genius of theater is no longer a force to be reckoned with, however loopily wild his latest (and, one reluctantly assumes, last) movie is.