You're Seriously Not A True 2000s Kid If You Can't Correctly Answer At Least 10 Of These Trivia Questions About Iconic Rom-Coms
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I was born in the '90s, and for me, the perfect sleepover when I was a kid involved two important ingredients: Snacks and a girly rom-com.
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Elle
a few seconds ago
- Elle
The Sensational True Story That Inspired ‘The Twisted Tale Of Amanda Knox'
It was one of the defining legal battles of the 2000s, when a young American student was accused of murdering her British roommate in a case that captivated global audiences and sparked debates about justice, media coverage and the complexities of international law. Now, Amanda Knox's story returns to our screens in Hulu's The Twisted Tale of Amanda Knox , an eight-episode series that premieres on Disney+ today. The series, which has been executive produced by Knox herself alongside her husband Christopher Robinson and Monica Lewinsky, spans from Knox's 2007 arrival in Italy as a hopeful student to her return in 2022. It's worth noting that the family of murdered British student Meredith Kercher was not involved in the production of this series, adding another layer of complexity to how this story that impacted so many continues to be framed and retold. Andrea Miconi 'We start it with two young girls who go to study abroad in Perugia, Italy, and it's a beautiful experience,' Knox told Today of the series, which stars Tell Me Lies ' Grace van Patten as Knox. 'They have the whole world ahead of them. That's who I was, and that's who Meredith was.' Amanda Knox was a 20-year-old American student from Seattle studying abroad in Perugia, Italy, when her life irrevocably changed in November 2007. She arrived as countless American students do — eager to experience European culture, learn a new language, and expand her worldview during what should have been a transformative but carefree period of her education. Instead, she found herself at the centre of an international legal and media storm following the murder of her British roommate, Meredith Kercher. Knox's story quickly became tabloid fodder as she began a years-long journey through the Italian justice system. Knox spent about four years in an Italian prison and faced multiple trials. She was ultimately cleared of all murder charges, although an Italian court upheld her conviction for slander for accusing an innocent man in 2025. AFP Today, at 38, Knox is a mother of two young children, a podcast host exploring themes of justice and truth, an author examining freedom and meaning, and an ambassador for the Innocence Network. The events in Perugia in 2007 fundamentally altered two lives — ending one and forever changing another. Knox, along with her then-boyfriend Raffaele Sollecito, was accused of killing her roommate, Meredith Kercher. What followed was a legal labyrinth that stretched across years, each twist seeming to deepen rather than resolve the mysteries surrounding that November night. Knox and Sollecito were convicted of murder in 2009, their young faces becoming symbols of either justice or injustice depending on who was watching. The truth, as it often does, proved more elusive than the headlines suggested. By 2015, Italy's Supreme Court had definitively exonerated both, but not before their lives had been fundamentally reshaped by years of legal uncertainty. Rudy Guede, whose DNA and fingerprints were found at the scene, was convicted separately and served 13 years of his 16-year sentence before his release in 2021. Yet even with this conviction, questions lingered — the kind that are resistant to the finality that courts are meant to provide. Adrienn Szabo The first trial began in 2009, capturing international attention as prosecutors painted Knox and Sollecito as participants in a fuelled sexual assault gone wrong. Knox's behaviour during the investigation — including cartwheels at the police station and public displays of affection with Sollecito — was scrutinised and criticised by media and prosecutors alike. In December 2009, both Knox and Sollecito were convicted of murder and sentenced to lengthy prison terms: 26 years for Knox, 25 for Sollecito. The second trial, an appeal that began in 2010, introduced new forensic evidence that cast doubt on the prosecution's case. Independent experts questioned the reliability of DNA evidence that had been central to the original conviction. In October 2011, Knox and Sollecito were acquitted, with Knox breaking down in tears as the verdict was read. After serving four years in Italian prison, she was free to return to Seattle. But Italy's complex legal system wasn't finished with them. The third trial came when Italy's highest court overturned the acquittal in 2013, sending the case back to a lower court. In 2014, Knox and Sollecito were convicted again in absentia — Knox remaining safely in Seattle while the legal proceedings continued without her physical presence. This conviction carried a 28-year sentence that Knox vowed never to serve. Andrea Miconi Finally, in March 2015, Italy's Supreme Court definitively exonerated both Knox and Sollecito, ruling that the evidence was insufficient for conviction. The court's reasoning was scathing, describing the investigation as plagued by 'stunning flaws' and 'sensational failures'. Knox and Sollecito were declared innocent, their legal nightmare officially over after eight years of uncertainty. Rather than Knox's return to freedom in 2011 marking an ending, it instead was the start of a complicated beginning. After four years in Italian prison, she found herself back in Seattle, attempting to reconstruct a life that had been interrupted at its most formative moment. The world had moved on; she had to catch up while simultaneously processing trauma that defied comprehension. Her path back to normalcy took deliberate steps. She completed her creative writing degree at the University of Washington in 2014, reclaiming the educational journey that had been so violently derailed. Her 2015 memoir Waiting to Be Heard became both catharsis and clarification — an attempt to wrestle her narrative back from years of media speculation and legal proceedings. But Knox's legal troubles proved as persistent as her determination to move forward. Her acquittal was annulled and the case sent to lower courts, leading to re-conviction in 2014 before the Supreme Court's final exoneration in 2015. Even then, shadows remained. In 2024, she returned to an Italian courtroom to face a slander conviction related to statements made during her original interrogation. Ida Mae Astute Knox's relationship with Italy remains complex and ongoing. She has returned multiple times since her exoneration, including a poignant 2022 trip with Sollecito to Gubbio — the city they had planned to visit the day Kercher was found dead. 'It was bittersweet to go back as we were supposed to go there in such different circumstances,' Sollecito observed in a 2022 interview, 'but it was just nice for us to be able to talk about something that wasn't the case.' Today, Knox lives in the Seattle area with her husband Christopher Robinson, whom she met in 2015 at his book launch. 'I was probably the only person at the party who didn't really know who she was,' Robinson later recalled in a 2017 interview. They married in 2020 in a space-themed ceremony and share two children: daughter Eureka, born in 2021, and son Echo, born in 2023. As an ambassador for the Innocence Network, Knox channels her experience into advocacy for others caught in similar legal predicaments. The couple co-hosts the Labyrinths podcast, while Knox hosts several others on her own including Hard Knox With Amanda Knox . Her latest book, Free: My Search For Meaning , was published earlier this year. The Twisted Tale of Amanda Knox is available to stream on Disney+ in the UK and Ireland, on Hulu in the U.S., and Disney+ internationally. ELLE Collective is a new community of fashion, beauty and culture lovers. For access to exclusive content, events, inspiring advice from our Editors and industry experts, as well the opportunity to meet designers, thought-leaders and stylists, become a member today HERE . Netflix Has Renewed 'Dept Q' For Season 2 Farewell, 'And Just Like That' Naomi May is a seasoned culture journalist and editor with over ten years' worth of experience in shaping stories and building digital communities. After graduating with a First Class Honours from City University's prestigious Journalism course, Naomi joined the Evening Standard, where she worked across both the newspaper and website. She is now the Digital Editor at ELLE Magazine and has written features for the likes of The Guardian, Vogue, Vice and Refinery29, among many others. Naomi is also the host of the ELLE Collective book club.
Time Magazine
31 minutes ago
- Time Magazine
The Problem With 'The Twisted Tale of Amanda Knox'
In a notorious video that circulated around the globe, 20-year-old exchange student Amanda Knox is kissing her boyfriend, Raffaele Sollecito. Out of context, it looks like banal, sun-dappled vacation footage—American girl goes to picturesque Perugia, falls for scarf-wearing Italian boy. In fact, the couple had just learned, after an eerie morning at the apartment Knox shared with three other young women, that police had found her roommate Meredith Kercher brutally murdered in Kercher's bedroom. The kiss became a key piece of a prosecutorial propaganda campaign, giddily inflamed by the tabloid media, that framed Knox as a perverse, cold-blooded killer. You only have to keep watching for a few more seconds, as the lovers turn away from one another, to catch the look of pain and confusion on her face and realize she's not celebrating. The moment is recreated in The Twisted Tale of Amanda Knox, a true crime drama that traces the since-exonerated Knox's Kafkaesque ordeal in an Italian justice system that tarred her as a psycho sex fiend who masterminded Kercher's rape and murder. What's strange, considering that Knox, her husband Chris Robinson, and public-shaming expert Monica Lewinsky are among the series' executive producers, is how much more ambiguous the kiss looks in this telling. When Grace Van Patten, who plays Knox, turns to face the camera, her expression is wide-eyed and inscrutable. Twisted is otherwise overwhelmingly sympathetic to its protagonist, and Van Patten (Nine Perfect Strangers, Tell Me Lies) does an admirable job with limited material. Yet the fumbling of this scene captures what is so frustrating about the show. For all its fidelity to the complicated facts of one of this century's most infamous murder cases, Twisted fails to deliver the one element of Knox's story that might be best expressed through scripted drama: insight into who its viciously caricatured, widely misunderstood subject really is. The eight-part series, helmed by showrunner K.J. Steinberg (This Is Us), often plays like an extended version of the broad reenactments you see in crime docs. In a way, this makes sense. There is much to reenact, to explain and unravel and contextualize, in a legal saga that began on Nov. 2, 2007, the morning Kercher's body was discovered, and had yet to be fully resolved as late as this year. Italy's justice system differs greatly from its American counterpart; prosecutors lead police investigations, criminal and civil trials can be consolidated into the same proceedings, juries in even the highest-profile cases are unsequestered. From paparazzi photos to footage recorded at the scene by the forensics team to TV news reports to interviews with Knox, plenty of imagery exists from throughout this story—much of which already appeared in the 2016 Netflix documentary Amanda Knox before being restaged, shot-for-shot, in Twisted. Following a flash-forward to Amanda's return to Italy in 2022, during which she spends a tense car ride hiding under a blanket from local media ravenous for a glimpse of its favorite villain, the tale unfolds in mostly chronological order. We watch an ingenuous Amanda skip around Perugia, in the fall of 2007, living out a study-abroad fairytale with her new boyfriend, Raffaele (Giuseppe De Domenico, heartbreaking), and three female roommates, including Meredith (Rhianne Barreto), a British student. About 10 minutes into the premiere, the dream sours. Amanda returns to her adorable apartment to shower after a night at Raffa's but slowly realizes something isn't right. There are blood stains in the bathroom, a revolting mess in the toilet. Meredith's door is locked, and no one answers when Amanda calls out to her. Soon after the body is found, the young couple become crucial witnesses in the police investigation, detained at the station for days' worth of questioning. Bilingual scripts effectively demonstrate how the language barrier exacerbated Knox's predicament, as she was far from fluent in Italian at the time and often lacked an adequate translator. It is (almost cartoonishly) clear from the outset that Amanda has rubbed the investigators the wrong way. They don't like the kiss, or her sexual candor, or the vibrator that was found among her toiletries; their prejudices are reinforced when Meredith's British friends express their own dislike for Amanda. A pair of nightmarish, physically and psychologically violent marathon interrogations ends with Raffaele manipulated into destroying her alibi and a disoriented Amanda implicating Patrick Lumumba (Souleymane Seye Ndiaye), the proprietor of the bar where she worked, in the murder. (Though she almost immediately recanted this accusation, Lumumba was arrested, then quickly cleared, and a slander charge was added to list of crimes for which she'd face trial.) The middle half of the series wades, somewhat laboriously, through years of legal wrangling and incarceration, as Amanda and Raffaele are found guilty and serve four years of their sentences before seeing their convictions overturned due to an astonishing absence of reliable physical evidence. The arrival in Italy of Amanda's fiercely loyal mother, Edda Mellas (the usually great Sharon Horgan, struggling with an American accent), should raise the emotional stakes, but, as is the case with so much of the show's dialogue, the women mostly speak in gloomy exposition. Richer and more thoughtfully depicted is the relationship that Amanda, an avowed atheist, develops with Don Saulo Scarabattoli (Alfredo Pea), the prison's open-minded, in-house priest. The advice he gives her when she's on the verge of yielding to despair over what could become a life sentence—"You can serve humanity even if it doesn't serve you'—will shape her future. Knox and Lewinsky have talked about how they insisted on ending Twisted not with Amanda and Raffaele's first acquittal, on appeal in 2011, but with a pair of episodes that trace the case's aftermath: the bumpy reacclimation to freedom, the permanent reputational damage, the search for purpose in a life derailed, the ongoing legal woes and media circus. The instinct to move beyond the true crime template, avoiding a false happily-ever-after ending, is a good one. But as executed, the penultimate episode just feels like more trudging from point to point on a timeline of well-documented events. Amanda endures an aggressive interview with Chris Cuomo (Josh Burdett): Check. Amanda finds community with other exonerees: Check. The finale—which is, unfortunately, the only episode co-written by Knox—goes deeper. We see Amanda, now an author, wife, and mother, compare battle scars with Raffaele and confront the prosecutor, Giuliano Mignini (Francesco Acquaroli), who, despite the early emergence of airtight forensic evidence implicating the third person convicted of Kercher's murder, perpetrated the character assassination that led to her imprisonment. It's in this coda that the series finally feels like it's about something other than the obvious fact that Knox suffered a grave injustice. We discover that, just as Amanda is not the sex-crazed monster Mignini created, Mignini is not the bloodthirsty misogynist her allies imagined; he's a man tortured by personal demons. Everyone is more complicated than tabloid headlines make them out to be. (Knox took this argument to an extreme in a recent Atlantic essay that called the common description of University of Idaho killer Bryan Kohberger as, simply, evil 'an excuse to stop thinking, to ignore the evidence, to hate and punish someone law enforcement didn't, or wouldn't, understand.') This perspective tempers the hysteria of an earlier episode, which opens with a mini-biography narrated by Mignini that races from a childhood steeped in the Madonna-whore complex to his father's untimely death ('You're the man of the house now,' the boy is told, graveside, in an egregiously canned bit of dialogue) to the debacle that was his involvement in the Monster of Florence serial killer case. The Italian-stereotype quotient is high in this rendering, as it also is in another episode's more empathetic portrait of Raffaele. Perhaps out of respect for the privacy of the real people or their families, we barely spend any time with Meredith or Patrick—another innocent victim, whose experience as a Black, Congolese immigrant feels under-acknowledged in a story so concerned with Amanda's gendered shaming. But Raffa, a sweet, inexperienced romantic hoping for another shot at love with a woman he adores, comes through clearly. I left the series feeling as if I knew him much better than I knew Amanda, even though she gets far more screen time than any other character and Van Patten narrates most of the episodes. (These voiceovers can get pretty purple: 'Telling my tale is a sticky, tricky thing—especially when I was a stranger to my story's true beginning.') This is not for lack of discussion about her personality. She is described, variously, as quirky, impassive, naive, vulgar, blithely optimistic. 'Everyone says I'm like Amélie'—the eponymous gamine from the movie she and Raffaele watched the night of Meredith's murder—'because I'm a weirdo,' Amanda says at one point. Edda calls her 'sunny despite everything.' One of Meredith's friends testifies that the defendant struck her as 'cold,' 'unfeeling,' and 'quite open about her sex life.' It's fine that none of these contradictory characterizations bear much resemblance to the Amanda we observe. This is, after all, the story of a woman who was misread by a significant chunk of Earth's population. But The Twisted Tale of Amanda Knox should have a compelling counternarrative to offer about Amanda Knox. To the extent that she's defined, it's in terms of what she self-evidently is not—not a killer, not a sex freak, not a callous American femme fatale. With ample evidence of Knox's innocence available for over a decade, Steinberg and her writers had the chance to do something more than mount yet another defense. They could've made us understand Amanda's thinking in the most awkward and insensitive-seeming moments of her trial by media. Instead, the show tends to replay these gaffes without adding much new perspective. Amanda's alleged weirdness is mentioned more than it's explored; how much could we have learned about her if Steinberg hadn't rushed through a scene set at her time-traveler-themed wedding? A flashback episode that gave us more time with Amanda before Meredith's death might also have helped. Some of the best crime docudramas, like Hulu's own The Dropout and The Girl From Plainville, thrive on nuanced portraiture of real women whose mass-media villain edits contain far more truth than 'Foxy Knoxy.' Without powerful insight into a person who is also Twisted's executive producer—and who has drawn more perceptive conclusions from her ordeal in two memoirs, multiple podcasts, and the Netflix doc—it's hard to justify the reopening of 18-year-old wounds.
Boston Globe
an hour ago
- Boston Globe
At 90, pianist Ran Blake has countless mentees - and an immeasurable legacy
To celebrate Blake's 10th decade, a few of his favorite mentees, including Dominique Eade and Get Starting Point A guide through the most important stories of the morning, delivered Monday through Friday. Enter Email Sign Up 'Ran gave me the freedom to find myself in jazz standards,' said Portuguese singer Sara Serpa, who studied with Blake at NEC and made an album, 'Camera Obscura,' with him in 2009. As a European, she said, she was leery of approaching 'this sacred American art form. Ran really gave me permission to find myself in the songs, to create my own stories.' Advertisement Before coming to NEC, where he ran the Department of Third Stream (named for Schuller's idea of a 'third stream' of music between jazz and classical), Blake befriended and studied with Oscar Peterson, Mal Waldron, Charles Mingus, and other jazz greats. On a video call from his Brookline apartment, Blake laughed as he mentioned all of the musicians who didn't 'get' his idiosyncratic style: 'JJ Johnson wasn't impressed. Ray Brown was very nice to me, but not impressed. Bob Brookmeyer hated me.' Advertisement But his reliance on his own instincts – eventually laid out in his philosophy, 'the primacy of the ear' – also won him countless admirers. 'Everyone I've met has a profound admiration for his sound,' said Serpa, who has a tradition of bringing her family to visit him each Thanksgiving, cooking for him. (She will perform with pianist Matt Mitchell at NEC on October 2.) 'He's just so original,' Serpa said. 'And it's hard to be original, to be different. And build a career mostly on solo records. That can get quite lonely, I think.' Blake's longtime NEC colleague Hankus Netsky, who chairs the department Blake once led (now called the Department of Contemporary Improvisation), explained the idea behind his friend's philosophy in an email: 'Take in a diverse diet of great music, learn it through detailed listening to the fine points of each artist's interpretation, and then use it as a springboard for your own creative musical imagination.' Through a faculty professional development program, Netsky said, Blake recently recorded a solo piano album called 'Voices,' honoring some of his favorite singers, among them Aretha Franklin, Edith Piaf, Mahalia Jackson, and Al Green. That's expected to come out in early 2026. Archivists also continue to release material from Blake's earliest collaboration, with the singer Jeanne Lee, whom he met while both were students at Bard College in the late 1950s. Their joint debut, 'The Newest Sound Around' (1961), remains one of his most notable releases. Advertisement Before taking over the new Third Stream department at NEC, Blake served for a few years as the school's community services director. They brought music programming to the public — to institutions including a retirement community and the prison then known as MCI-Walpole. They also ran night classes in ear training, studying artists from Messiaen and Mingus, to one of Blake's favorite jazz singers, Chris Connor. 'The whole semester cost $20,' Blake recalled. Those programs were especially meaningful to him, he said: 'It was very important to send music to where the people are and encourage them to play.' And not just for the students' own sake. The educators, Blake said, learned plenty from the students. It was an early lesson in a belief he still holds – that making music is really about a heightened ability to listen. RAN BLAKE'S 90TH CELEBRATION At the Square Root, 2 Corinth St., Boston, Sunday, Aug. 24, 4 p.m. Tickets available at the door. James Sullivan can be reached at jamesgsullivan@
