Alexander Larman

Ask your average man on the street — or at least your average clued-up man with a decent knowledge of modern Hollywood — about the films of William Friedkin, who has died aged eighty-seven, and he will confidently sing the praises of Friedkin’s legendary pictures, The French Connection and The Exorcist. Then if he is pressed on the other eighteen films Friedkin directed, ranging from the excellent and underrated to the dismal, and a look of panic is likely to come over his face before he excuses himself and rushes into a nearby subway (or, if he is in New York, flees to an overground railway in homage to the legendary car chase scene in The French Connection). It is your choice whether you do a Popeye Doyle and head off in frantic pursuit, or leave him be.

The death of actor Paul Reubens of cancer at the age of seventy was an oddly low-key departure for a man who created one of the twentieth century’s iconic comic characters, and also found himself mired in scandal that threatened to destroy his career, and to a large extent took him away from the A-list fame that he would have expected to attain. Yet throughout his more than four-decade career, Reubens was nothing if not a survivor, even a fighter. The fact that incidents that would have ruined most other men were treated by him as obstacles to be overcome indicated both his resilience and — to some — a refusal to kowtow to the expected demands of the industry that both made and ruined him.

The Barbenheimer phenomenon — thought of by many as just idle chatter on the internet — has enduring power. Last weekend, Barbie and Oppenheimer earned a combined $511 million in global box office receipts; an unprecedented number where neither film is a superhero picture or a sequel. Barbie made more money, on the grounds that it’s an hour shorter and is PG-13 rated, but the vast box office success of the R-rated Oppenheimer, which made over $170 million in its opening weekend, is testament both to Barbenheimer excitement, and to the film’s very own brand: its powerful writer-director-producer, Christopher Nolan.  James Cameron aside, it is hard to think of any filmmaker who wields such power and influence in contemporary Hollywood.

Christopher Nolan’s latest film, Oppenheimer, is about the second biggest bang in history. Yet at its London premiere on Thursday, there was another explosion that, in its own way, was no less seismic than anything put on screen. Its star-studded cast, including Cillian Murphy, Emily Blunt, Matt Damon and Robert Downey Jr., assembled dutifully on the red carpet for interviews and selfies, but by the time that the film itself was about to screen, none of the actors were anywhere to be seen.  As Nolan said of his “incredible cast” in his introductory talk, “You’ve seen them here earlier on the red carpet.

The trailer for Ridley Scott’s eagerly awaited magnum opus Napoleon has finally arrived — and it does not disappoint. Boasting what looks like another Oscar-worthy performance from Joaquin Phoenix, the trailer teases an intoxicating mixture of full-throttle battle scenes, executed and shot on a scale unparalleled in modern cinema, as well as insight into the complex psyche of the French emperor, to say nothing of his often-tortuous relationship with his wife Josephine (played here by Vanessa Kirby.)  https://www.youtube.com/watch?

At first glance, Sound of Freedom sounds as if it’s a Donald Trump re-election slogan for next year’s presidential battle. Yet, despite the presence of Jesus himself — The Passion of the Christ’s Jim Caviezel — in the lead role, Alejandro Monteverde’s new film has nothing to do with US politics. Instead, it revolves around that most hot button of controversial topics: child sex trafficking and the evils thereof. Caviezel stars as a real-life figure, Tim Ballard, who founded something called Operation Underground Railroad to rescue children from Latin American cartels and traffickers.

It always used to be that, in Hollywood movies, big business was seen as a force for ill rather than good. Leaving aside that the films themselves were financed by giant studios hellbent on making a profit, such classics as Frank Capra’s It’s a Wonderful Life and Charlie Chaplin’s Modern Times firmly took the side of the individual against the system and presented the corporate world as a faceless and uncaring one — if, that is, it wasn’t simply a criminal one altogether, as best expressed by Lionel Barrymore’s sneering robber baron Potter in Capra’s film. Today, things have changed immeasurably.

When The Flash opens at cinemas this week, its production company DC Studios and distributor Warner Brothers will no doubt be hoping that attention is diverted away from its troubled, pronoun-wielding star Ezra Miller and towards its multiverse qualities. To the uninitiated, this sounds simply as if the studio has rounded up every actor who ever played Batman (save Christian Bale, who has wisely moved onto other things), chucked a Supergirl into the mix and even produced a truly bizarre Nicolas Cage cameo as Superman. Even Christopher Reeve appears, from beyond the grave. But to its now-desperate makers, mindful of the massive financial success of Spider-Man: No Way Home, the film has to succeed.

For anyone of a certain age who grew up in the Eighties and Nineties, there was always a wistful feeling that persisted whenever a big-budget blockbuster came out. The likes of Arnold Schwarzenegger, Sylvester Stallone and Bruce Willis were often seen slaughtering (usually foreign) villains and dispensing manly quips. But why did they never team up to do so together? Was there not the possibility that, one day, a veritable Dirty Dozen of Hollywood hard men could be assembled to kick ass, take names and (perhaps) compare notes on agents’ fees, too? Well, Stallone himself was not deaf to the pleas of action-loving cineastes, and so his 2010 film The Expendables was an honorable attempt to make exactly this sort of film.