Alexander Larman

In about a month’s time, one of the most boring conversations in social media discourse will begin (assuming Elon Musk hasn’t taken Twitter away from us out of pique). "X is a Christmas film." "X is not a Christmas film." And so on, as keyboard warriors angrily debate whether the eclectic likes of Die Hard, Lethal Weapon and Love, Actually qualify for this designation, as purists claim on endless Reddit threads that a Christmas movie can only be so-called if the plot and events are entirely driven by the festive season itself. Even for those of us who would argue that Die Hard and It’s A Wonderful Life make the perfect Christmas double bill — wider designations of the term be damned — there is considerably less debate as to what makes a Thanksgiving film.

Later this week, probably the world’s greatest living film director will celebrate his eightieth birthday. However he celebrates — whether in the company of friends and family in his no doubt opulent Manhattan home, or working on his eagerly awaited new film Killers of the Flower Moon — Martin Scorsese can reach his milestone age in the confidence that his position in cinematic history is assured forever. For a man so steeped in the art and practice of filmmaking — and who has made several excellent documentaries about movies — it must be intensely gratifying for Scorsese to be aware that he is that rarest of persons, a living legend, whose contributions to film will live forever.

As the midterm elections loom, there is the usual excitable commentary about what it all means. Every voter will have their own heroes and villains, the dashing white knight and the looming bogeyman. The complexities of the wider sociopolitical issues at hand will be subsumed to simple questions: will the results encourage Trump to run in 2024? Is this curtains for Kamala’s presidential ambitions? These are, of course, over-simplifications of difficult and nuanced issues. This is why the movies have inevitably dealt better with the drama (and farce) of fictitious — or at least fictionally disguised — election campaigns.

My favorite Paul Newman performance is his final on-screen one, as mob boss John Rooney in Sam Mendes’s Road to Perdition. It’s a good, not great, film, which is a disappointment given its phenomenal cast and to-die-for Conrad Hall cinematography. But there’s something unique in Newman’s contained performance as a man of infinite complexity, someone as comfortable playing a piano duet with his surrogate son as breathing portentously of his profession, "This is the life we chose, the life we lead. And there is only one guarantee: none of us will see heaven.

Thirty years after it was first released in America, Francis Ford Coppola’s Bram Stoker’s Dracula is returning to theaters, appropriately enough for a Halloween re-release. (It also serves as a soft preview for Coppola’s newly announced passion project, Megalopolis, an epic drama starring Adam Driver and Aubrey Plaza.) It is hard to overstate what a difference the past three decades have made in Dracula's popular reception. Although it was a significant commercial hit upon release, thanks in part to Annie Lennox’s enormously popular theme tune "Love Song For a Vampire," it was critically derided as poorly acted, overblown, excessively bloody without being frightening and a travesty of the original novel.

The recent downfall and shaming of Kanye West was likely to have been greeted with schadenfreude by at least one 32-year-old pop star. In 2009, West interrupted Taylor Swift's winning best female video at the MTV Video Music Awards to inform her that the gong should have gone to Beyoncé instead. Their relationship ever since has been a gossip-friendly roundabout of fallout, reconciliation, sniping and bitching. West’s current defenestration from public life, owing to antisemitic comments he made, has not been publicly alluded to by Swift yet. But the lyrics from the song "Karma" on her new album Midnights might make tacit reference to their ongoing feud, as Swift castigates an anonymous man for "talking shit/For the hell of it/Addicted to betrayal but you're relevant.

The only time I ever saw Angela Lansbury on stage was in 2014 in London, when she played the half-baked medium Madame Arcati in a revival of Noel Coward’s supernatural comedy Blithe Spirit. Although it was rumored that the then-88-year-old Lansbury was having her lines fed to her via earpieces, it did not affect her comic timing one iota. It is no exaggeration to say that Lansbury took a character who has passed into over-familiarity via decades of revivals and made her fresh and hilarious once again. For anyone to achieve this is remarkable, but to do so at an age when most actors would have long since retired is little short of phenomenal. Lansbury’s death at the age of 96 — a few days shy of her 97th birthday — has some uncanny parallels with the recent passing of the Queen.