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Metro
2 days ago
- Entertainment
- Metro
These are the greatest films of all time you need to stream right now
Some of the greatest movies ever are hiding right under your nose on popular streaming platforms. With a plethora of films accessible at our fingertips, choosing which film to watch in the evenings can result in endless scrolling and indecision, debating between the latest Netflix rom-com or a chilling crime documentary. But hidden away on most platforms are some gems that have been lauded by film critics for decades – and in some cases, generations. The top seven films – as voted for by critics on Rotten Tomatoes – are all different in theme and genre, and all available to stream. From Schindler's List to Top Gun: Maverick, here's a breakdown of some of the absolute corkers to watch tonight. Wake up to find news on your TV shows in your inbox every morning with Metro's TV Newsletter. Sign up to our newsletter and then select your show in the link we'll send you so we can get TV news tailored to you. The Godfather is the number one top-rated film of all time with an impressive 97% Rotten Tomatoes score. Francis Ford Coppola's Mafia drama was met with both critical and commercial acclaim, earning over $200million (£147.5m) at the box office and winning three Oscars, including Best Picture. The film focuses on the powerful Italian-American crime family, the Corleones, and its patriarch, Don Vito Corleone (Marlon Brando). The story unfolds as the youngest son, Michael (Al Pacino), joins the mafia and becomes increasingly involved in the life of crime he had been reluctant to join. The film is available to stream on Amazon Prime, Now, and Paramount. Casablanca is a classic romance movie from 1942 which has stood the test of time and earned a 99% ranking on Rotten Tomatoes. The film follows Rick Blaine (Humphrey Bogart) and Ilsa (Ingrid Bergman) romance which was filmed and set during World War II. One night while at his nightclub in Casablanca, Rick discovers his old flame Ilsa is in town with her husband Victor (Paul Henreid), a rebel with the Germans after him. Rick can help the couple escape – but at what cost? The film went on to win the Academy Award for Best Picture, while Michael Curtiz was selected as Best Director. The film is available to stream on BBC iPlayer With a 100% ranking on Rotten Tomatoes, LA Confidential is a 1997 American neo-noir crime thriller from Curtis Hanson. The movie stars Kevin Spacey, Russell Crowe, and Guy Pearce and focuses on a group of 1950s LAPD cops, some of whom are more than a little corrupt and collaborate with tabloid journalists. While it's not a true story, the film draws inspiration from a variety of real events that took place in the 1950s, and the title refers to the 1950s scandal magazine Confidential, portrayed in the film as Hush-Hush. LA Confidential is available to stream on Disney Plus. With a 100% ranking on Rotten Tomatoes, Seven Samurai is a 1954 Japanese epic samurai action film directed by Akira Kurosawa. The film follows a village of farmers who, out of desperation, attempt to hire a samurai who will fight off the bandits who steal their crops. The critics' consensus on Rotten Tomatoes reads: 'Arguably Akira Kurosawa's masterpiece, The Seven Samurai is an epic adventure classic with an engrossing story, memorable characters, and stunning action sequences that make it one of the most influential films ever made.' The film is available to watch on Amazon Prime. The Godfather (1972) Casablanca (1942) L.A. Confidential (1997) Seven Samurai (1954) Parasite (2019) Schindler's List (1993) Top Gun: Maverick (2022) Chinatown (1974) On the Waterfront (1954) Toy Story 2 (1999) Rear Window (1954) The Battle of Algiers (1966) Modern Times (1936) Finding Nemo (2003) How to Train Your Dragon (2010) Toy Story 3 (2010) Up (2009) All About Eve (1950) Godzilla Minus One (2023) Toy Story (1995) With a 100% ranking, the 2019 Korean movie Parasite was a blockbuster hit, following the wealthy Park family and the destitute Kim clan who ingratiate themselves in the Park's lives. The film came from writer-director Bong Joon Ho, and received huge oscar buzz, snagging the Palme d'Or at the 2019 Cannes Film Festival, the Academy Award for Best Picture at the 92nd Academy Awards, as well as five other Oscars. Parasite is available to stream on Netflix. Schindler's List is Steven Spielberg's World War II epic starring Liam Neeson. Despite being released in 1993, the film is entirely in black and white – except for one haunting piece of colour used devastatingly in the film. Schindler's List focuses on Oskar Schindler, a German industrialist who saved more than a thousand mostly Polish–Jewish refugees from the Holocaust. The film shows how Schindler used bribery and his status as a prominent businessman to employ over a thousand people and save them from the concentration camps. With a 98% ranking on Rotten Tomatoes, the film is considered a classic and has been lauded as powerful and brutal. The film is available to stream on Netflix and Now. Released in 2022, Top Gun: Maverick is the long-awaited sequel to the hit 1986 film, Top Gun More Trending Starring Tom Cruise reprising his role, the film has an A-list cast with Miles Teller, Jennifer Connelly, Jon Hamm, Glen Powell, and Monica Barbaro all starring. The movie has a 96% ranking on Rotten Tomatoes and follows the Maverick (Cruise) a naval aviator who is forced to confront his past while training a group of younger Top Gun graduates – including the son of his dead best friend – for his most dangerous mission yet. The movie is available to stream on Channel 4. Got a story? If you've got a celebrity story, video or pictures get in touch with the entertainment team by emailing us celebtips@ calling 020 3615 2145 or by visiting our Submit Stuff page – we'd love to hear from you. MORE: Doctor Who fans finally get sci-fi crossover they've been waiting 20 years for MORE: The Vivienne was going to play 80s legend in movie – 'we had it all planned' MORE: TV fans defend 'unbelievably stupid' crime thriller that's streaming for free
Times
10-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Times
James Ellroy: ‘I have been obsessed with crime since my mother's murder'
James Ellroy is prowling a tiny hat shop in a side street in Seville, Spain. His angular 6ft 3in frame, loud bark and garish Hawaiian shirt draw attention. Everyone watches as he reaches for a khaki green cashmere fedora and tries it on. 'Does it look big?' he drawls, squinting at himself in a mirror. 'Shake your head and see if it moves,' I suggest. He waggles his head: the hat fits but he is still not sure. 'It does not vibrate my vindaloo,' he bellows. 'Let's broom on outta here.' Ellroy, 77, has been vibrating the vindaloo of millions of crime fiction readers for decades, and he is part of his own myth-generating machine. 'I am the greatest popular novelist that America has ever produced,' he declares. 'The author of 24 books, masterpieces all, which precede all my future masterpieces.' He repeats variations of this self-praise multiple times during the week I spend with him in Spain, where he has come to speak at a literary festival. When I ask how he feels about the author Joyce Carol Oates describing him as the American Dostoyevsky, he snorts derisively: 'Dostoyevsky is the Russian Ellroy.' His densely plotted novels, which include 1995's American Tabloid and 2023's The Enchanters, focus on the criminal underbelly of postwar America, especially Los Angeles, and have sold millions of copies. Several, including The Black Dahlia (1987) and most notably LA Confidential (1990), have been adapted into movies. His writing style is a sort of staccato cop rap from a bygone era, sometimes echoed in his own speech. And he has a truly shocking origin story for a crime writer: when he was ten years old his mother was murdered, her body found in shrubs beside a California high school with one of her stockings tied around her neck. 'I have been obsessed with crime since the hot Sunday afternoon of June 22, 1958, when a policeman named Ward Hallinen squatted down to my little kid level and said, 'Son, your mother has been killed,' ' he says. • James Ellroy calls LA Confidential film 'a 'turkey of the highest form' Ellroy's own life inspires much of his work, which often blurs fact and fiction. At times it seems as though he has walked out of one of his novels. And it's no wonder he wants a convincing hat to wear: the Hat Squad in his books, as any self-respecting Ellroy fan will tell you, comprises four inseparable fedora-wearing robbery detectives who are based on real LAPD officers, known for their tough veneer and compassionate hearts. Which sums up Ellroy too. Despite the braggadocio, he is not insufferable — he veers between extreme self-confidence and a touching unworldliness. 'The world bewilders me,' he says in a moment of self-doubt when we are trying to find our seats on a busy high-speed train to Madrid. He cannot stand crowded places. 'I am only comfortable around a few people.' However, when I interview Ellroy in front of an audience at the Hay Festival Forum in Seville he is more than comfortable, bounding on to the stage and roaring like a lion. Literally. The audience is aghast. 'Good evening, peepers, prowlers, pederasts, pedants, panty sniffers, punks and pimps,' he snarls in full performance mode. 'I'm James Ellroy, the death dog with the hog log, the foul owl with the death growl and the slick trick with the donkey dick…' On stage it is all swagger and stonewalling. 'I have no view on Donald Trump,' he declares when I ask for his take on the American president. He adds primly: 'I rigorously abstain from moral judgment on the current times.' Yet away from the crowd, one on one, he is much more candid. 'If you want to stray to Trump, I realised very early on that he was, at the very least, a career criminal, mobbed up and very probably a serial sexual harasser. So that should exclude him from the presidency. My cop friends like Trump because Americans have a tough-guy complex. They don't realise how weak and craven he is,' he says. Lee Earle Ellroy was born in Los Angeles in 1948, the only child of 'a great-looking, cheap couple'. His mother, Jean Hilliker, was a nurse and his father, Armand Ellroy, an accountant and, as Ellroy describes him, 'a Hollywood bottom-feeder'. He had no idea how to parent. 'He once said to me, 'Hey kid, I f***ed Rita Hayworth.' I said, 'F*** you, Dad, you did not f*** Rita Hayworth.' Ten years after his death a man who was writing her biography looked me up — my father was her business manager. Did they ever have sexual congress? I'd like to believe they did but my father was a notorious bullshit artist.' Ellroy's parents split up when he was five, and he later moved with his mother to El Monte, just outside LA, spending weekends with his father. Both parents were promiscuous. 'I realised there was a secret adult world out there and that sex is at the heart of it. I saw my mother in bed with men. And later on I came home and found my dad in bed with my sixth-grade teacher. I heard the grunting and groaning as I walked up the steps. What was funny was the dog was trying to take a nap on the bed while all those legs were kicking around.' With the encouragement of his father he grew to hate his mother. When he told her he would prefer to live with his dad, she slapped him. 'I fell and whacked my head on a glass coffee table. She didn't hit me again. She was nothing but solicitous [But] from that point on it was over. It was him and me against her. She was the bad guy.' His mother was murdered on the night of Saturday, June 21, 1958, while Ellroy was staying with his father. Sixty-seven years on, the murder remains unsolved. Only Ellroy could make it even more shocking by saying he was grateful to the killer. 'What I recall most prevalently is forcing myself to cry on the bus going back to LA,' he says. 'I cranked the tears out. I remember waking up the next morning, looking out at a bright blue sky and thinking I had a whole new life. This is not a retrospective,' he insists. 'I'm not concocting this.' In fact his feelings towards his mother are more complex. 'I admired her tremendously. She was capable and competent in a way my father was not.' In his 1996 memoir My Dark Places he admits to having had sexual thoughts about her both before and after her death. Many years later he spent 15 months and a lot of money trying to solve her murder with Bill Stoner, a retired homicide detective. Stoner later said he thought Ellroy was 'falling in love with his mother'. Not quite, Ellroy says today, but 'I am of her'. Living with his permissive father was not all he had hoped it might be. The apartment was filthy and meals were erratic. It was a 'horrible, horrible childhood', he says, but he cautions against pity. 'I'm not some crack baby butt-f***ed in his crib by his Uncle Charlie.' A voracious reader, he gravitated towards crime books after his mother's murder. He was expelled from school for fighting and truancy as a teenager, then stayed at home to care for his father, who had suffered a stroke. Eventually he could stand it no more and in 1965 he briefly joined the army to escape — something for which he has never quite forgiven himself. 'I used to dream about the abandonment of my father when he was dying,' he says. He returned from the army just before his father's death later that year. 'His final words to me were, 'Try to pick up every waitress who serves you.' ' Ellroy — who adopted the name James because he hated the 'tongue-tripping l's and e's' of Lee Earle Ellroy — hit a precarious decade. Often homeless, he would sleep in parks, could not hold down a job and sank into alcoholism. He was arrested multiple times: 'I used to shoplift. I used to break into houses and sniff women's undergarments, I stole a few cars — Mickey Mouse misdemeanours. I probably got arrested forty times but [on] aggregate I served no more than four or five months of county jail time.' His determination to write lifted him out of this spiral. In 1977 he took a job as a golf caddie at the Bel-Air Country Club outside LA and started his first novel, Brown's Requiem, about a caddy who hires a detective to spy on his sister. Murder and mayhem ensue, interwoven with a love story. 'All my books are love stories set against violent backdrops,' he says. 'If there are two great themes in my books it's history as a state of yearning and bad men in love with strong women.' His most recent book, The Enchanters, published in 2023, features a real-life Hollywood private eye, Freddy Otash, spying on Marilyn Monroe to get dirt on the Kennedys. Describing Monroe as 'talentless and usurious', Ellroy conjures a murky world of corrupt politicians and craven stars and looks on with his readers, enthralled and titillated, as they tear each other apart. 'Absolute factual reality means nothing to me,' he stresses. 'What I do is I slander the dead.' • The Enchanters by James Ellroy review — he's a one-off The police in his novels are often as corrupt as the criminals. 'I love the cops. It started when a policeman put a nickel in a vending machine and handed me a candy bar the afternoon [after] my mother was killed. He gave me a little pat on the head and I have given my heart to cops ever since. I don't care what kind of outré illegal shit they pull, I take gleeful joy in describing police misconduct. Rogue cops are my guys.' Would he ever have contemplated becoming a cop himself? 'Naaah,' he growls. What about a criminal? Has he ever fantasised about murdering someone? He narrows his eyes and for a moment I wonder if I have overstepped the mark. But his face softens into a smile: 'No, I never have.' Ellroy has been married and divorced twice — first to Mary Doherty, a phone company executive, from 1988 to 1991. These days he lives in Denver with his second ex-wife, the Canadian author Helen Knode, whom he met in 1990 when his marriage to Doherty was crumbling. 'She's the single most brilliant human being I've ever met,' he says of Knode. They married in October 1991, but their relationship became tumultuous: Ellroy was tackling addiction and mental health problems. They now live in the same building but in different apartments. 'I have a key to hers, she has a key to mine. It's not monogamy that's the problem, it's cohabitation. We can fight a fight. She gets shrill real quick. Helen would believe she is remarkably more open-minded than me. I would say I'm remarkably more open-minded than her… Tell her I said that. She will bray like a horse.' A few days later I speak to Knode on the phone. She splutters indignantly when I tell her what Ellroy said. How does she put up with him? 'It's breathtakingly exhausting to be him and to be around him,' she says affectionately. 'There are several James Ellroys and they all cohabit sometimes.' He has never had children, saying in the past he feared he would be a 'bad father'. 'I have absolutely no feeling for families,' he tells me. He and Knode experimented with an open marriage but by 2005 they had agreed to split. 'It was the best day of my life when I realised I could divorce him,' Knode says with a laugh. Ellroy then had a series of relationships with, as Knode puts it, 'parasitical women' — but they remained close. During his last relationship, more than a decade ago, his girlfriend complained about the amount of time he spent talking to Knode on the phone. 'She said, 'Her or me?' I said, 'Her.' We've been together ever since,' Ellroy says. They usually spend the late afternoon together at Knode's apartment, have 'dinch' (lunch/dinner) and watch a documentary or an old movie. 'I've had to put my foot down,' she says. 'I told him we're not watching any movies with guns.' 'Then we say goodnight,' Ellroy says, 'and I go back to my apartment. I have insomnia, so I'm padding around.' Ellroy's flat is austere with grey walls, overlooking a railway track. 'It's reassuring. Trains going by at two and three o'clock in the morning.' The bookshelves are filled with copies of his own books. He rarely goes out. 'Helen has friends, I don't. I actually have panic attacks if Helen stays out too late.' He spends most of the day at home, writing and listening to classical music, especially Beethoven. 'I write by hand, I've never logged on to a computer. I believe the internet, computers, cell phones, apps, electronic devices are the most pernicious version of Satan on earth. Get a gun and shoot your computer through its evil digital heart. In its guise of convenience it has destroyed civility and turned younger people into uncivil, brusque, rude, low-attention-span, shithead kids and we have to rescue future generations from this evil.' He will never write a novel set in the present — or even in the last half century: 'In 1972 Watergate eats up the political scenery. There's no place to go after that.' He knows his political history but very little about the world today. He admired Margaret Thatcher as 'the saviour of Britain' (he even named a dog after her), but when I ask what he thinks of Keir Starmer, he replies, 'Who?' Ellroy has almost finished writing his next novel, set in the aftermath of the Cuban missile crisis but spanning back to include the bombing of Guernica. He has never seen Picasso's Guernica painting of 1937, so we arrange to meet one afternoon at the Reina Sofia art museum in Madrid. He stands silently in front of the huge monochrome oil painting for a full ten minutes, scanning every detail, before making the sign of the cross. 'It's horrifying,' he says quietly. In the next room, though, he is back in ebullient mode. Catching sight of Salvador Dalí's 1929 painting The Great Masturbator, he chuckles. 'Wanker!' he says loudly. There is something restless about Ellroy, both physically — loping around, fidgeting — and in spirit. 'I want to get lost,' he says repeatedly. 'I gotta get outside of myself. I wrestle with it all the time.' What does he mean? 'I'm always thinking. I can't sleep for shit. I just want to go to a place where nobody knows me and have one double Manhattan, or eat a marijuana cookie, and just see what happens.' But he won't let himself. He has been teetotal for years and during his sleepless nights he worries about everything, death above all. 'Horror of death is the tremor that lies beneath everything. And 77 will get you there.' He has thought carefully about how he would like to be buried. 'I want to have my briefcase and my three stuffed alligators.' He's not joking — but they are fluffy toys rather than taxidermy. 'Sometimes I'll put the gators under the covers with me, they're a family. Al is the alligator, of course. Wife is named Clara and they have a daughter named Gertie. They're going in the hole with me.' Not that he is winding down. 'I'm not checking out of here any time soon.' Indeed he often says that he will live until he's 101. 'I've got a lot of books left in me. I'm going to have a strong third act. Not to labour a point, but I am a genius.' Hay Festival Segovia runs Sep 11-14 and Hay Forum Seville Feb 11-14, 2026;
Buzz Feed
22-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Buzz Feed
Kevin Spacey And Shia LaBeouf At Cannes: Opinion
Note: This post is an Op-Ed and shares the author's personal views. Discussion of sexual abuse. Listen, I know that looking for feminism at the Cannes Film Festival might be like looking for oranges at the scrap heap. But, for the love of god, Kevin Spacey was just awarded with the "excellence in film and television" lifetime achievement award at the Better World Fund's gala dinner. Well, surely Spacey must have been in some wonderous film or TV show as of late? No, of course he hasn't. Since 2017, the actor has faced numerous allegations of sexual misconduct, starting with actor Anthony Rapp accusing him of making a "sexual advance" towards him when he was 14. Now, Spacey was found not liable for sexual battery against Rapp. Criminal charges against him were dropped in Massachusetts. He was also cleared of all sexual assault charges in a UK trial against four men. Spacey himself has consistently denied allegations of misconduct. But that's not the end of his legal woes. He's currently facing at least two civil lawsuits in the UK alleging sexual abuse. In total, Spacey has been accused of sexual misconduct by over 30 men. This includes his LA Confidential costar Guy Pearce, to which Spacey said, "Grow up. You are not a victim." So, what did ol' Kev spend his time in Cannes doing? Comparing himself to artists who had been blacklisted during the McCarthy era. Spacey said in a speech of one such person, "He couldn't find work in Hollywood for 13 years... There are times when one has to stand up for principle. I've learned a lot from history — it often repeats itself. The blacklist was a terrible time in our history so that it never happens again." The award was, as per a Vulture writer in attendance, "an 'engagement award' for 'people who have engaged, inspired, and mobilized for a cause.'" The emcee even spoke about victims of violence. Yes, folks, losing your career because you might be a communist is totally the same thing as being #MeToo-ed. It feeds into other antagonistic language I've heard about the movement: That it's a witch hunt, that victims can just say any old thing and ruin men's lives. Never mind that serious abuse allegations don't stop you from being President of the goddamn United States, no, won't someone think of the men! Never even consider how many talented people we may have lost because of mistreatment. I swear to god if someone comments about how "Believe All Women" is wrong — THAT'S NOT THE SLOGAN. Now, to the credit of the festival itself, it's worth noting that the award ceremony was not an official event. In a statement to the Guardian from the festival read, 'The Festival de Cannes had no involvement in, and was not informed of, either the invitation extended to Mr Spacey or the award presented during this private event.' But let's take a moment to look back. In 2024 — the year after Johnny Depp presented his movie Jeanne du Barry — Variety wrote that the festival began as the "belated" #MeToo movement came to the French film industry. This year continues in that suit: previous Cannes fixture Gerard Depardieu recently began his 18-mont suspended sentence for sexual assault. There's also been a parliamentary inquiry into the entertainment industry, which found misconduct to be "endemic." Inquiry chairwoman Sandrine Rousseau subsequently said, "The Cannes Film Festival must be the place where this shift in mindset happens; the place where we say loud and clear ... amid the glitter and the red carpets ... that finally, we all want things to change: every one of us, at every level of the industry." As per Variety, the festival issued a rule for this year "banning filmmakers or talent accused of sexual misconduct from walking the red carpet and presenting films at the festival." Actor Theo Navarro-Mussy was subsequently barred from the premiere of Case 137 as he had been accused of rape and sexual assault (though the charges were dropped, his accusers reportedly plan to appeal). It hasn't been foolproof. Ezra Miller, who walked down the red carpet of Die My Love, and who's faced allegations of abuse and grooming. Then there's Shia LaBeouf, who attended the red carpet for The Phoenician Scheme, despite the fact that he's set to go to trial against his ex, FKA Twigs, later this year in a case where she has alleged sexual assault and battery. To add insult to injury, LaBeouf is at the center of a documentary that also debuted at Cannes this year called Slauson Rec, which reportedly features him screaming and behaving violently towards his acting students. Shia also attended the photo call for the documentary. The real cherry on this shit sundae is that the splashiest new rule at Cannes was that the dress code had been updated to bar nudity and voluminous dresses. Many took this to be on a comment on the presence of female nipples we've seen in recent years on the red carpet. It's funny what's considered bad behavior, isn't it? But hey, maybe my hopes are too high! If someone says they want to "guarantee that the films submitted have respected and continue respecting the safety, integrity and dignity of all contributors," then why on earth would I expect them to actually do something about it? BuzzFeed has reached out to representatives for the Cannes Film Festival for comment.
The Guardian
10-04-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Babe review – tale of the talking sheep-pig a charming relic of its time
Thirty years ago, a non-Disney talking-animal adventure became a big movie talking point. Babe, adapted from Dick King-Smith's children's book The Sheep-Pig, features an adorable piglet who is rescued from a brutally realistic-looking agribusiness breeding shed as his mum and siblings are taken off to be slaughtered; it is then rehomed in a quaintly old-fashioned farm with lots of different animals, situated in an uncanny-valley landscape of rolling green hills which looks like Olde England but where everyone speaks in an American accent. The lead human is grumpy cap-wearing Farmer Hoggett, played by James Cromwell, later to be hard-faced Captain Dudley Smith in LA Confidential and Prince Philip in Stephen Frears' film The Queen. The little piglet does his best to fit in and finds his destiny when it looks as if he could be a very talented sheep-herder. But this is not animation, nor is it precisely live-action. The movie got a (justified) best visual effects Oscar for its mix of animatronics and real animals, modifying their appearance and behaviour onscreen and using CGI for their mouths. It was a startling novelty which was very much of its time. Yet Babe and its innovations didn't really lead to anything else; they were almost a standalone phenomenon, soon superseded in mainstream family-movie terms by the digital animation of Pixar and Disney's continuing live-action productions. Babe is a strange film, for me. The digitally confected moving mouths superimposed on the faces of largely real animals do not convey emotions and moods in the way even a crude animation might; the rest of the animal's face remains inscrutable and unreadable, and the animals have neither the charm of unadorned reality nor the thoroughgoing ingenuity of animation. And the story itself is a kind of weird anti-Orwell farmyard tale in which the slaughter of animals is a reality central to Babe's identity crisis, but which is otherwise not part of the film's world; nor is there much zip to the script. But, shot by the late Andrew Lesnie, cinematographer on the Hobbit and Lord of the Rings films, it always looks good. Babe is in UK cinemas from 11 April.
The Independent
01-03-2025
- Entertainment
- The Independent
Kim Basinger shares rare comments on ex Alec Baldwin decades after tumultuous divorce
Their divorce was one of the rockiest to hit Hollywood in the 1990s, but new comments suggest they are on much better terms these days. Kim Basinger, 71, and Alec Baldwin, 66, were married from 1993 to 2002 after meeting on the set of 1990's The Marrying Man. They share one daughter, Ireland, who was seven when they divorced and is now 29 years old and welcomed her own daughter Holland in 2023. Their marriage came to an end in a tumultuous divorce that led to a contentious and highly publicised custody battle over their daughter. In a new interview with Variety, Basinger spoke about where she stands with Baldwin for whom, she said, she has 'great respect'. 'Alec and I have a great relationship. I have great respect for where he is today, and his family,' she said. 'You know, we don't spend Christmases and holidays or see each other very much. But we talk.' The LA Confidential actor continued: 'He'll pick up the phone and call me, and we have a very genuinely cordial and I think loving relationship in a lot of ways, just because we share a daughter, and I don't wish him anything but everything good. 'He's been through a lot lately,' she added, apparently referring to the death of cinematographer Halya Hutchins in 2021. Last year, Baldwin faced an involuntary manslaughter trial after the fatal shooting of cinematographer Hutchins, who was 42 when she died. In July, the case was dismissed with prejudice based on the misconduct of police and prosecutors over the withholding of evidence from the defence. The prosecution will not be able to file charges against Baldwin again in Hutchins' death. Basinger went on to praise Baldwin's wife, Hilaria, stating: 'But Hilaria seems to have a great handle on that. So more power to her.' Basinger's comments come nearly two decades after Baldwin left a notorious voicemail for Ireland, who was 12 at the time. Originally contained in a sealed file from the former couple's court battle, the audio – in which he called Ireland a 'rude, thoughtless little pig' for not answering his call at a prearranged time – was leaked online and went viral. In a statement, the 30 Rock star apologised, writing: '"I'm sorry, as everyone who knows me is aware, for losing my temper with my child. 'I have been driven to the edge by parental alienation for many years now." Ireland joked about the infamous voicemail at her father's roast on Comedy Central in 2019, quipping on stage: "It's good to be here. I almost didn't even know about it because I haven't checked my voicemails from my dad for the last 12 years." Baldwin's wife, Hilaria, faced her own controversy back in 2020 after she was accused of faking her Spanish heritage, prompting her to later confirm that she was, in fact, born in Boston under the name Hillary Hayward-Thomas. She spent a lot of her childhood in Spain, where her family still lives. This month, the 41-year-old yoga instructor hit back at the criticism she has faced for her Spanish accent during the season premiere of her and Alec's new show The Baldwins. 'I love English, I also love Spanish, and when I mix the two it doesn't make me inauthentic, and when I mix the two, that makes me normal,' she said. 'I'd be lying if I said [the controversy] didn't make me sad and it didn't hurt and it didn't put me in dark places.'
