Alexander Larman

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.

There is probably no American documentary filmmaker more respected than Ken Burns. From his landmark 1990 series about the Civil War to his most recent work that has explored everyone and everything from Ernest Hemingway to country music, Burns has established himself as a fearless chronicler of stories that illuminate the nation’s history, sometimes in ways that viewers might find uncomfortable. His 2005 documentary about the African-American boxing champion Jack Johnson, Unforgiveable Blackness, was a fine example of the filmmaker turning his gaze on a subject that many might have preferred be left obscure, and it won him an Emmy for Outstanding Directing as a result — one of fifteen that he and his films have won to date.