Chris Tookey

There are actors who dominate the cinema screen, and actors who deepen it. There are stars who are ‘bankable’ and have names above the titles, and there are artists who, almost invisibly, give a film its weight, its texture, its lasting emotional impact.  Catherine O’Hara, who has died at the age of 71, belongs emphatically to the second group. She was one of the rare performers whose presence elevated everything around her. She understood precisely how to serve the story, the tone and the ensemble. Over a career that spanned many decades, genres and registers, O’Hara enhanced every film she appeared in.  What made her exceptional was not merely that she was funny, though she was one of the great comic performers of her generation.

Despite the recent death of its world-famous founder, Robert Redford, the Sundance Film Festival is about to become much, much bigger. This year’s festival, which ends tomorrow, is its last hurrah in the small Utah ski resort it brought to prominence, Park City (population 9,000). Sundance needs more cinemas, more venues and better logistics. Next year and for the foreseeable future, it will be held in Boulder, Colorado (population 100,000). For more than four decades, the Sundance Film Festival has been American cinema’s most visible argument in favour of independence: independence of voice, of form, of subject matter, and – crucially – of ambition. At its best, Sundance has insisted that films do not need to be large to be significant, nor expensive to be terrific.

Robert Redford was more than a film star, though he knew that was how he would be remembered. He didn’t like fame all that much, especially when he attracted a creepy stalker: ‘Some strange, dark character was sending me gifts. They kept coming and coming. The guy was obsessed with me and Joan Baez. They had a Swat team and infrared binoculars, and they threw us out of the house. They caught the guy, and he was insane. They put him away and he died in prison.’ Though Redford acquired a reputation as a Hollywood activist, he was careful to distance himself from some of his flakier peers: ‘The way you really find out about the performer’s seriousness about the cause is how long they stay with it when the spotlight gets turned off. You see a lot of celebrities switch gears.

As we come to the end of another troubling year, suddenly the news from the film front isn’t all doom and gloom. Cinema audiences may be in steep decline, but there’s one kind doing much better than any other: the family-friendly film. Fans of gratuitous nudity, extreme violence and Gregg Wallace are going to hate me for pointing this out; but stay with me. The facts back me up. Universal’s latest fun-for-all-the-family musical Wicked (PG) survived iffy reviews to set a record for the biggest opening weekend for a Broadway adaptation, with a $114 million debut in the USA. Disney’s colourful Moana 2 (PG) enjoyed a record-breaking Thanksgiving weekend, grossing $221 million.