Culture

Shortly after Stanley Kubrick’s adaptation of William Makepeace Thackeray’s novel The Luck of Barry Lyndon was released in American cinemas in 1975, it was mercilessly parodied in the satirical publication MAD magazine. Over seven pages, “Borey Lyndon,” as it was called, was treated as an embarrassing flop, something to be ridiculed and regretted. The opening caption set the tone: “So you think Historical Movies are a thing of the past?! So you think no one wants to see Costume Epics any more?! So you think they’re too dull and slow-moving to hold your interest?! Then you probably just woke up after seeing this latest dull extravaganza! Well... here’s a chance to be put back to sleep — with MAD’s even duller version of ‘Borey Lyndon’!

This year’s Oscar nominations were always going to be more low-key than usual, overshadowed as they inevitably have been both by the fires in Los Angeles — which has led to repeated delays in their announcement — and by Donald Trump’s inauguration, the after-effects of which are still rippling in Hollywood circles days later. It was therefore amusing to see that The Apprentice, the highly controversial biopic of the young Trump, has been Oscar-nominated for two of its actors, Sebastian Stan as Trump and the much-admired Jeremy Strong as his mentor Roy Cohn. Strong faces quite a challenge in the Best Supporting Actor from, among others, his Succession co-star Kieran Culkin, who is widely tipped to win for his performance in A Real Pain.

The Robbie Williams biopic Better Man opened in American theaters last weekend and, as every single box office commentator predicted, it flopped, and flopped hard. A gross of just over $1 million in its opening three days — less than the Golden Globe-winning The Brutalist, which is only showing on sixty-eight screens nationwide — is utterly disastrous, all the more so because this wasn’t a $10 million indie, or even a $40 million Rocketman, but a movie that it cost $110 million to make.

Regardless of what you made of the winners, 2024’s Golden Globes ceremony has gone down in infamy as one of the very worst in its history, entirely due to its terrible host Jo Koy. He was justly ridiculed for his incompetent, weirdly aggressive hosting style, and so the onus was on this year’s compère Nikki Glazer to bring basic professionalism back to the event as much as humor and slickness.

"Are there any more questions?” I asked loudly. I was struggling to make myself heard above about thirty seventh-graders, whom I was leading on a tour of the National Gallery of Art. There had already been many questions that morning, even before we began looking at objects in the museum’s permanent collection. We had just finished an analysis and discussion of techniques and symbolism in a seventeenth-century sculpture from Seville, so I took advantage of the momentary lull in the hand-raising and was walking toward the next work on our itinerary when I heard an unexpected sound. Thud. Turning, I saw that one of the students had fainted, practically at my feet. Teacher and chaperones rushed in, and after a few moments the student was fine.

You may, or may not, be planning on seeing the third film in the Sonic the Hedgehog franchise when it is released this Christmas, but whether or not your taste for CGI pugnacious animals encompasses this latest cash-in for the Nintendo character, the presence of Jim Carrey should provide some distraction. Carrey is playing the villainous Dr. Robotnik for the third time, and has been offering some amusingly candid comments in interviews about his decision to return to the role. He announced that he came back to this film’s universe for two reasons, “first of all, I get to play a genius, which is a bit of a stretch” and “I bought a lot of stuff, and I need the money, frankly.

To say superhero films are in a rut is to understate how bad a state they're in. Deadpool 3 was underwhelming, yet it was still the only superhero film released this year that wasn't terrible. Its competition? Venom 3, Madame Web, Kraven the Hunter and Joker: Folie à Deux.  2023 was a bit better, with Guardians of the Galaxy 3 and Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse both being genuinely great. But otherwise? Ant-Man 3 was unwatchable. The Flash was horrific. The Marvels was aneurysm-inducing. Shazam! 2 was utterly forgettable. I did actually forget that Blue Beetle existed until I started writing this list. Oh yeah, and there was another Aquaman movie. It, like most of the films listed here, flopped.

The Anglophiles reading this will know that the Carry On series represents some of the very best of British humor — or, alternatively, the very worst. The jokes were broad and basic, the stereotypes egregious and the production values negligible. Nonetheless, for the two decades that the series continued to attract viewers, they were enormously popular films because they did not attempt anything surprising or unpretentious. Instead, millions of viewers enjoyed them because they were just as the title promised — a carry on — with no hidden depths, or shallows.

The title tells it all. It’s a Wonderful Life was first released back in December 1946, in the same week that President Truman was issuing Proclamation 2714, which officially ended hostilities in World War Two, and for that matter prefiguring Donald Trump by proposing that the US buy Greenland. The movie may be seventy-eight years old, but it’s one of those timeless classics, like Casablanca or The Searchers, that actually improve with familiarity. It’s also long since woven its essential message of good cheer into the fabric of our festive season. It’s an unusual plot for a film synonymous with feel-good family entertainment.

A year ago I wrote about the experience of attending New York Comic Con for the first time. This type of entertainment convention, which has its equivalents in cities all over the world, brings together fans of superheroes, science fiction, fantasy and beyond. Along with the elaborate cosplay beloved of attendees, Comic Cons also feature a great variety of visual artists. This year, it happened that the Con fell in the same week the Metropolitan Museum of Art opened its first-ever exhibition of Quattrocento Sienese painting, placing a particular emphasis on storytelling. What if there were a connection between the highbrow exhibition uptown and the popular convention downtown?

Well, nobody could accuse the Golden Globes Foundation — as they are now called — of predictability. Of the films that have been nominated for the ceremony on January 5, the frontrunner is Jacques Audiard’s much-discussed crime musical Emilia Pérez with ten nominations, including Best Film (Musical or Comedy), Best Director and Best Supporting Actress for its stars Selena Gomez and Zoe Saldana. The movie, which has met with enormous controversy in some circles because of its unfettered approach to social mores — not least having a trans woman, Karla Sofía Gascón, in the lead — is undeniably a bold and distinctive film that indicates that this is a year of risk-taking rather than complacency. But to what end?

If you’re a Paramount+ or Showtime subscriber, there’s a decent chance that you spent at least some of the Thanksgiving break watching the first two episodes of The Agency, the Michael Fassbender-fronted espionage drama that the company has invested a huge amount of money in. Based on the cult French series The Bureau, starring Matthieu Kassovitz, it’s a grim and self-consciously serious piece of drama, low on explosive shootouts and one-liners and high on tortured scenes of introspection, as Fassbender’s deep-cover operative, codename Martian, is brought in from the cold by his CIA superiors to their London outpost, only to realize that he has not been entirely honest as to a tortured romantic liaison that he went through in Africa.

Amid much hype and excitement last year, Sir Elton John, that most consistently busy of rock ’n’ roll stars, announced that he was going to retire from touring so that he could spend more time with his young children. Yet John has been nothing if not productive — and his definition of “retirement” has been more elastic than most seventy-seven-year-olds. In the last year alone, since he played his final full concert in Stockholm on July 8, 2023, he has participated in a major documentary, Elton John: Never Too Late, for which he has written a new song, performed at a high-profile international business event at St. Paul’s Cathedral in London last month and now has seen his latest musical, Tammy Faye, transfer to Broadway.

Philippe Pastor is an artist on a mission to educate, alarm and call to action. His subject: our planet and the perilous situation we find ourselves in at this moment of time.  Pastor’s latest works, installed to coincide with Climate Week in New York, are a clear indication of where he sees the state of play. The first enormous canvas, ominously titled La Fin Du Monde, seems to depict an apocalyptic clash of water, fire and ice. Heavy brush strokes are densely laid on with glue and pigment, giving a sense of the swirling waters enveloping us all. “I start the paintings with a story in my mind,” he said, speaking from his studio — a former seventeenth-century farm near Cadaqués.

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.