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Sydney Morning Herald
4 days ago
- Entertainment
- Sydney Morning Herald
Bust out the popcorn: What to watch at Sydney Film Festival
This story is part of the May 31 edition of Good Weekend. See all 14 stories. WATCH / Scene stealers Cinephiles, it's time to get those corn kernels a-poppin'. Over 12 days (June 4-15) and 13 venues, the Sydney Film Festival will be raising the curtain on 201 films from 70 countries, more than half of them Australian premieres (17 of them world debuts), many still wreathed in glory from recent screenings at Toronto, Sundance and Cannes. These include Kelly Reichardt's The Mastermind ('70s art heist), starring Josh O'Connor, It Was Just an Accident (Iranian Jafar Panahi's reimagining of the road movie) and Cherien Dabis's All That's Left of You (sweeping Palestinian family saga). Expect a heavy sprinkling of stardust, too, namely Mike Flanagan's The Life of Chuck (Stephen King adaptation, starring Tom Hiddleston) and On Swift Horses (sizzling '50s love pickle with Daisy Edgar-Jones and leading man-of-the-hour Jacob Elordi). Other Aussies will be out in force, too; don't miss Slanted, by newbie filmmaker Amy Wang, and the jewel in the opening-night crown, Together (starring real-life double act Alison Brie and Dave Franco), by Michael Shanks. (Fret not, Victorians: the Melbourne International Film Festival kicks off on August 7; watch this space.) READ / The write stuff Deception, misappropriation, ethical dilemmas, ambition – I Want Everything, the debut novel from Australian writer Dominic Amerena (Summit Books; $35), has it all. When a down-on-his-luck writer spots an iconic literary recluse at his local pool, he can't believe his luck. He worms his way into her affections, persuading her to spill the beans on the true stories behind her two celebrated novels and let him write her biography, convinced it will make his name as a writer. First, though, he must put aside his moral scruples. A literary thriller as well as a takedown of book-industry pretensions, with a cracker of an ending. Nicole Abadee LISTEN / Back to life Jacob Haendel was handed a death sentence in 2017. Due to complications from his heroin addiction, he contracted a rare, progressive brain disease that kills anyone who gets it within six months. He deteriorated to the point where doctors thought he was brain-dead but, in fact, he was trapped in his body, fully conscious, despite the inability to speak, eat or move a muscle. He was in hell. And he became aware that his wife, who outwardly played the fiercely protective caregiver, was separating him from his family, planning to divorce him; she even announced his death on social media. Spoiler alert: he miraculously survives. In the podcast Blink, host Corinne Vien helps Haendel tell the remarkable tale of someone who lost his life and then clawed his way back. Barry Divola
The Age
4 days ago
- Entertainment
- The Age
Bust out the popcorn: What to watch at Sydney Film Festival
This story is part of the May 31 edition of Good Weekend. See all 14 stories. WATCH / Scene stealers Cinephiles, it's time to get those corn kernels a-poppin'. Over 12 days (June 4-15) and 13 venues, the Sydney Film Festival will be raising the curtain on 201 films from 70 countries, more than half of them Australian premieres (17 of them world debuts), many still wreathed in glory from recent screenings at Toronto, Sundance and Cannes. These include Kelly Reichardt's The Mastermind ('70s art heist), starring Josh O'Connor, It Was Just an Accident (Iranian Jafar Panahi's reimagining of the road movie) and Cherien Dabis's All That's Left of You (sweeping Palestinian family saga). Expect a heavy sprinkling of stardust, too, namely Mike Flanagan's The Life of Chuck (Stephen King adaptation, starring Tom Hiddleston) and On Swift Horses (sizzling '50s love pickle with Daisy Edgar-Jones and leading man-of-the-hour Jacob Elordi). Other Aussies will be out in force, too; don't miss Slanted, by newbie filmmaker Amy Wang, and the jewel in the opening-night crown, Together (starring real-life double act Alison Brie and Dave Franco), by Michael Shanks. (Fret not, Victorians: the Melbourne International Film Festival kicks off on August 7; watch this space.) READ / The write stuff Deception, misappropriation, ethical dilemmas, ambition – I Want Everything, the debut novel from Australian writer Dominic Amerena (Summit Books; $35), has it all. When a down-on-his-luck writer spots an iconic literary recluse at his local pool, he can't believe his luck. He worms his way into her affections, persuading her to spill the beans on the true stories behind her two celebrated novels and let him write her biography, convinced it will make his name as a writer. First, though, he must put aside his moral scruples. A literary thriller as well as a takedown of book-industry pretensions, with a cracker of an ending. Nicole Abadee LISTEN / Back to life Jacob Haendel was handed a death sentence in 2017. Due to complications from his heroin addiction, he contracted a rare, progressive brain disease that kills anyone who gets it within six months. He deteriorated to the point where doctors thought he was brain-dead but, in fact, he was trapped in his body, fully conscious, despite the inability to speak, eat or move a muscle. He was in hell. And he became aware that his wife, who outwardly played the fiercely protective caregiver, was separating him from his family, planning to divorce him; she even announced his death on social media. Spoiler alert: he miraculously survives. In the podcast Blink, host Corinne Vien helps Haendel tell the remarkable tale of someone who lost his life and then clawed his way back. Barry Divola
New York Times
30-04-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
New Historical Fiction That Whisks You to Paris, Vienna and Elsewhere
The Paris Express 'A railway carriage is as intimate as a dinner party, but one with no host and guests assembled at random.' You'll find plenty of intimacy but few displays of party manners among the passengers Donoghue introduces in THE PARIS EXPRESS (Summit Books, 274 pp., $26.99), which takes place on a train departing from the Normandy coast in the autumn of 1895 with a bomb-toting anarchist aboard. Adding even more uncertainty to a dangerous situation is a flaw in young Mado Pelletier's plan — 'riding for hours in third class means getting familiar with these people before she has to kill them.' Donoghue's novel was inspired by an actual French railway disaster, and while she sketches convincing portraits of many of the real-life participants, she can't resist adding some people 'who could have been there' — including the American artist Henry Ossawa Tanner and the Irish playwright John Millington Synge — who were living in or near Paris at the time. As the train speeds toward the capital, vignettes in the various carriages provide a tension-filled panorama of fin-de-siècle French society. We see the crew struggling to keep to an impossible schedule, the blue-collar crowd jostling and bickering in the cheap seats, even the pampered occupants of a lushly carpeted private car. And always in the background is our awareness of Mado's homemade explosive, packed into a lunch pail, awaiting detonation. The Jackal's Mistress The true story of a wounded Union officer saved by a Confederate woman amid the shifting battle lines in the Shenandoah Valley was the subject of a magazine article Bohjalian published in 2003. Now, in THE JACKAL'S MISTRESS (Doubleday, 318 pp. $29), he returns to this historical material, adding imaginative twists to the original story line. In his telling, Libby Steadman has always been on shaky ground with her neighbors: When her father-in-law died, her husband, Peter, freed the family's slaves. And although Peter fought for the rebel cause and now languishes in a Union prison camp, that principled act has led others to suspect his wife of less than ironclad loyalty. Left to run her husband's gristmill with an elderly Black couple who chose to remain there as employees, she seems mainly focused on sheer survival. But when Capt. Jonathan Weybridge is severely wounded in battle and left to die after the Union retreat, Libby feels honor bound to do for him what she hopes a Union woman would do for her husband. Thus 'the Jackal,' as Libby's 12-year-old niece calls him, becomes a secret member of their household and a perilous friendship blossoms. The only safe refuge, 20 miles away, is the federal garrison at Harpers Ferry, but reaching it will require much subterfuge and even more luck. Not to mention an awareness that saving this life may well involve taking others. Mutual Interest If she'd been born in a different era, Vivian Lesperance 'might have had a career as a battlefield general.' However, in Gilded Age New York she must be content to act as a clandestine commander. And so, as observed by the witty omniscient narrator of MUTUAL INTEREST (Bloomsbury, 320 pp., $28.99), Vivian escapes her stifling parents in stifling Utica by attaching herself to various well-connected women in Manhattan, achieving 'fluency in New York's native tongues — wealth, influence, fashion.' Yet despite the satisfactions of female companionship, she's forced to realize that a secure future is more likely to be achieved by allying herself with a man. Wolfgang-Smith has a great deal of fun tracking Vivian's maneuvers as she marries Oscar Schmidt, an upwardly mobile but socially clueless businessman, then merges his interests with those of a former professional rival, Squire Clancy, the deeply eccentric scion of one of the city's most prominent families. Conveniently, the men fall obsessively in love, leaving Vivian free to quietly pursue her own female conquests — and quietly run their increasingly profitable manufacturing empire. For years, this arrangement glides along very smoothly. But for how long? And at what personal cost? As Wolfgang-Smith's narrator reminds us, 'our subject is change.' The Café With No Name According to the newspapers, 'a radiant future' is 'rising from the morass of the past.' The inhabitants of the Vienna slum at the heart of Seethaler's THE CAFÉ WITH NO NAME (Europa, 191 pp., $25) might beg to differ. Although World War II ended two decades earlier, the working-class patrons of the cafe run by a 30-ish war orphan named Robert Simon don't seem to have emerged from its shadows. In fact, they're content merely to have a place where 'you can talk if you need to, or shut up if you'd rather.' But in Katy Derbyshire's translation from the German, this bare-bones establishment becomes a good deal more: a gallery of vibrant characters presented with an appealing blend of understated honesty and unsentimental warmth. 'It was strange,' Robert observes, 'how little information he had about them and yet how well he knew them.' Seethaler's readers will feel the same way.
New York Times
09-04-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
Faced With Death, He Did the Only Thing He Could: Take Notes
As a child growing up in Zimbabwe, Peter Godwin saw neighbors murdered by guerrillas during the civil war that broke out during the fight for independence from Britain. Before he turned 18, he was conscripted into the army. Later, he wrote about conflicts from South Africa to Bosnia to Ukraine, practiced human rights law and was left for dead near a refugee camp in northern Somalia. 'I'm on more than nodding terms with death,' said Godwin, an award-winning war correspondent and author, filmmaker and Guggenheim fellow. 'It's something I've had a front-row seat to my whole life.' The subject is also at the center of his most recent book, 'Exit Wounds: A Story of Love, Loss and Occasional Wars,' published by Summit Books on April 8. After chronicling childhood and civil war in Africa in 'Mukiwa,' and the chaos in Zimbabwe under Robert Mugabe's authoritarian rule in 'When a Crocodile Eats the Sun' and 'The Fear,' Godwin, 67, now wrote about the death of his mother, the end of his marriage of nearly two decades to the media executive Joanna Coles, and the disorientation of finding himself, in his sixth decade, adrift without the stabilizing anchor of family. Image His editor in the United States, Judy Clain, who — like his British editor Ellah Wakatama — is from Zimbabwe, worked with Godwin on 'When a Crocodile Eats the Sun' and 'The Fear.' Clain said she connected deeply with the grief and the humor in 'Exit Wounds,' and that the book is a departure for him because, unlike his previous memoirs, it's not rooted in Africa. 'The book is about home and belonging and longing and secrets,' said Clain. 'It's about letting go not just of his mother and his marriage and coming to terms with the death of his sister, but also mourning the idea of being an exile. I almost feel like he won't write about Africa again. I feel he's turned a corner in some way.''Exit Wounds' is Godwin's seventh book and third memoir — and a book he tried really hard not to write, he said. He didn't want to tell a story about personal loss that was 'wallowing in self-pity.' But, as his mother lay bedridden in England, suffering from dementia, his wife surprised him one morning in Manhattan by telling him she wanted to end the marriage. Amid this emotional chaos, Godwin said, he couldn't help himself. He did what any memoirist would do: He started taking notes. Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times. Thank you for your patience while we verify access. Already a subscriber? Log in. Want all of The Times? Subscribe.
South China Morning Post
08-03-2025
- Entertainment
- South China Morning Post
Anthony Hopkins memoir considers his personal struggles, mortality and how he did as actor
Welsh actor Anthony Hopkins will have a memoir out this autumn, its title inspired by a childhood picture. Advertisement We Did OK, Kid will be published on November 4 by Summit Books, a division of publishing house Simon & Schuster. 'There is a photograph I keep on my phone of my father and me on the beach when I was a child. I often tell that boy: 'We did OK, kid,'' the Oscar-winning actor said. 'I wonder how a boy from Wales, the son of a baker, got here. My entire life is a great mystery. This book is my story.' The cover of the memoir by Anthony Hopkins. Photo: Summit Books via AP
