Latest news with #TheEnglishPatient
Perth Now
27-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Perth Now
Juliette Binoche's confidence has grown with age
Juliette Binoche has become more confident with age. The 61-year-old actress explained that she is more accomplished in her profession as she now feels comfortable enough asking directors to give her more time to perfect a scene. Juliette told HELLO! magazine: "When I started as an actress, sometimes I couldn't do the takes that I wanted to do. "At the end of the day, I was replaying scenes over and over, because I felt that I hadn't gone where I wanted to go. I felt guilty and I felt: 'This is horrible.' So critical. "Now, it has come to a time in my life where directors don't dare say: 'No, this is over,' if I want to do another take. Usually, they say yes, probably because of time and because they allow me to go where I want to go." Juliette reunites with Ralph Fiennes in her latest film 'The Return' – almost 30 years after they starred in the Oscar-winning picture 'The English Patient' together – and admits that the experience made her contemplate the process of growing older. The French star said: "The fact Ralph was there, I think it brought depth and emotions, because time goes by." Binoche continued: "When you're coming towards the end – we're not yet at the end, but we're coming towards it – there's a sense of strength and fragility at the same time. "That's the beauty of life. Life is a movement, so it feels as though it's going through us. This fine line of fragility of life... it's a strong feeling." The Oscar-winning actress has urged others to "live truthfully" if they are to get the most out of their lives. She said: "Live truthfully. What you want, what you feel – don't do the thing you don't want to do. Don't say yes to something you don't want. I think that's the first step. And trust; trust what you have in your heart." Juliette says it was "joyful" having the chance to work with Fiennes once more. The 'Chocolat' actress said: "Being on a set, with the camera, is something very specific, very special. "It's different from being in a restaurant and sharing some time together. He's really involved, and I think in that way, we're very much the same."
Telegraph
26-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Telegraph
The man who changed the way you see (and hear) Hollywood
To describe Walter Murch as the Yoda of editing wouldn't do the man physical justice. Tall, bearded, professorial, the 81-year-old triple-Oscar-winner has more of a wizardly stature. Murch's sagacity in the field, though? Well, pretty much unmatched, it is. Not only the picture editor on such classics as Julia, Ghost and The English Patient, Murch was also the first person ever to be credited as 'sound designer' (on Apocalypse Now), having already mixed Coppola's first two Godfather films and The Conversation. There are few veterans of either discipline who have ever treated their craft more intellectually, or been more generous about passing on their discernment. Murch, who prefers to edit standing up, returns to his elevated desk every few years for a project now, but devotes more of his time to lectures and masterclasses. (He's an honorary associate of the London Film School, and lives in Primrose Hill with his wife, Aggie.) Previous books include his 1992 long essay In the Blink of an Eye, and, in his spare time, a translation of selected works by the Italian writer Curzio Malaparte, which he released as The Bird That Swallowed its Cage (2012). His new book, Suddenly Something Clicked, is a dip-in-and-out compendium, an evident passion project, the fruit of a life's work in cinema. There are 30 chapters, mostly adapted from lectures he's prepared in the past. All cleave to editing and sound as his main areas of expertise. (A second, longer volume on filmmaking's essentials will focus on the script, the casting and the vision of the director.) Murch goes off on a few technical tangents mainly addressed to film students; 'I am going to avoid keystroke-specific details about different non-linear editing systems' is intended as reassurance. And while his flights of erudition are wide-ranging – a Copernicus analogy, a tribute to the nymph Echo – they can dazzle and befuddle at once. Luckily, the man is a outright genius at what he does, with rare and deep first-hand knowledge of the whole production process. He co-wrote THX-1138 (1971) with George Lucas, and was temporarily fired by Disney while making the audaciously dark Return to Oz (1985), his sole directing job. What happened there was an executive reshuffle, which cast doubt on his vision, and it took phone calls from Lucas and Coppola to restore faith. We learn most from Murch when he digs into the nitty-gritty of particular problems he had to solve. For instance, when Coppola was yanked away from finishing photography on The Conversation (1974), because Paramount had him under the cosh to start The Godfather, Part II, Murch inherited a massive jumble of raw footage and a script that hadn't been completely filmed. There were holes. There wasn't really an ending. His salvage job on that classic of paranoid surveillance, deservedly famous, gets back-to-back chapters, and even film buffs who know the details are treated to a fascinating blow-by-blow account, complete with QR codes to Vimeo links of animated graphics (these are eccentric to see on the page, but strangely charming). Murch reshaped that whole film using sound, trimming subplots, and moving scenes into a revealingly different order. He never even met Gene Hackman, but he was responsible for piecing together arguably the late actor's greatest performance. The same ingenuity marked his work on Anthony Minghella's The English Patient (1996) and his painstaking restoration of Orson Welles's Touch of Evil (1958), when he was hired in 1998 to address all the complaints the late Welles had fired off, in a 58-page typed memo to Universal, when they re-edited it without his approval. Murch used all the available sources – a magnetic master of the audio, and a 15-minute-longer cut found in the 1970s – to refurbish the film in line with Welles's intentions. All of these adventures are charted, and make the book an enthralling treasury for anyone who cares about the nuts and bolts of filmmaking. There's a chapter, too, on dealing with Harvey Weinstein, back when he was nicknamed 'Harvey Scissorhands' for his infamous meddling on final cuts (before the considerably greater infamy to come). Murch had helped to restore 'semi-cordial relations' between the bullying producer and Minghella when they couldn't agree on the right way to end The Talented Mr Ripley (1999). For surviving Harvey's post-production tyranny on Cold Mountain (2003), the author gives less credit to himself and more to his beloved border terrier, Hana. The dog pounced into Weinstein's lap in the edit suite. 'Within five minutes his personality transformed, as if he had been slipped a dose of ketamine. All the changes that we had made to the film were now 'wonderful' and we were 'geniuses'.' A dumbfounded Minghella proposed an executive position for Hana at his production company. He was barely joking. It was Murch who wedded Wagner's 'The Ride of the Valkyries' to the helicopter raid in Apocalypse Now. When he did so, no one had bothered to check whether the rights to use George Solti's great 1965 recording had actually been obtained. This sent Murch scurrying off to purchase 19 other stereo versions of the piece from Tower Records, to find the closest approach to Solti's rubato. Nothing else worked quite so well. Thankfully, Coppola was able to seek permission from Solti directly. One issue remained: this was so late in post-production that there wasn't time to source the magnetic masters for a state-of-the-art mix. 'What you hear in the film,' Murch explains, 'is a tape transfer from the LP disk, spread in re-recording to six channels of sound as if it were coming from those military speaker-horns that you see sticking out of the side of the helicopters. But perhaps this contingency lends a certain serendipitous truth to the scene, since Colonel Kilgore himself, now revealed to be a connoisseur of music, would doubtless have also copied his tape directly, as we did, from Solti's Decca disk.' Other figures in cinema history have expanded the parameters of how we see or hear it. No one but Murch has welded sight and sound with such intuition for both.
The Independent
13-04-2025
- Entertainment
- The Independent
Juliette Binoche on reuniting with Ralph Fiennes: ‘I know his desires. I know his dark sides'
Juliette Binoche is chilly. It is a sunny day in central London, but she has bundled herself up in a sturdy leather jacket and ordered a hot chocolate. 'Thin or thick?' our waiter asks. Binoche seems thrown by the question. Thick, she says, ambivalently. The waiter's eyes light up: 'Ah, the French way!' Binoche shrugs. As if anyone needed a reminder. Binoche is to France what Matthew McConaughey is to Texas, or Sean Connery was to Scotland – that brilliant face of hers, round and lovely, may as well be printed on the national flag by this point. Binoche has spent more than four decades as one of the world's most adventurous movie stars; putty in the hands of auteurs such as Claire Denis, Jean-Luc Godard, Olivier Assayas and Michael Haneke. The confectionery romp Chocolat and the grand love story of The English Patient – for which she won an Oscar in 1997 – may have leant into her gamine luminosity, and are likely her most well-known films, but they're mere snapshots of a more colourful, mercurial career. Her ashen grief in Krzysztof Kieślowski's Three Colours: Blue avoids histrionics – there is a slight quiver here, a flush of devastation there. There is potency, too, to her reckless, sophisticated sexuality in Denis's Let the Sunshine In, and her carnally minded scientist in the filmmaker's sci-fi oddity High Life. Haneke seems to bring out the icy prickliness in her, in movies like Code Unknown and the frightening Caché. When she is on film, you never know which Binoche you're going to get. Likewise, in person. The 61-year-old is fiercely intense, slamming her hands down on the table between us at one point. Soon after, she is giggly and upbeat. The mere act of her sitting down feels grand and theatrical, as if it's been scripted by a dramatist. She pulls off her jacket (too hot), then slips it over her back (too cold). She takes an almighty gulp from her hot chocolate as soon as it arrives, and burns her mouth. Interviewers have found Binoche incredibly open, spilling out facts about her love affairs (among her notable former partners are the filmmaker Leos Carax and, reportedly, Daniel Day-Lewis, while she has two children, one with the scuba diver André Halle and the other with the actor Benoît Magimel). Others have remarked on her reticence. Whichever Binoche you get, she'll certainly keep you on your toes. We are here to talk about The Return, a subversive spin on Homer's Odyssey that marks her third film with the actor Ralph Fiennes. They first appeared together as Cathy and Heathcliff in a maligned adaptation of Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights in 1992, then played a traumatised nurse and disfigured convalescent, respectively, in The English Patient. Much of the power in The Return, which casts the pair as lovers separated for decades by war, stems from their shared history as actors: we've watched them fall in love once before, share a kind of love story elsewhere; now they reunite in a world of loincloths and savagery. 'We've remained friends over the years,' Binoche says. 'So we came to this story with luggage.' She laughs. 'I moved myself, honestly. Because we were playing these archetypes but also playing human beings, and it was the two of us bringing that humanity to them. We were Odysseus and Penelope, yes, but we were also Ralph and Juliette.' I believe there is a God up there, but it cannot just be belief. It needs to be concrete for me – real, embodied. Otherwise it is just ideas I ask how they've evolved in the years since they first met. 'I see evolution more with Ralph than I see with myself,' she thinks. 'I know him better now. He's let me in closer to him. I know his desires, I know his dark sides and his beauty.' She won't be broached on the specifics, but says she adores him. 'He knows his limits, and he's not afraid to talk about them with me. It feels like we are from the same family in a way.' Fiennes has spoken about being more guarded and grumpy when he was a young actor, particularly on sets, while Binoche would seek rapport and agency. Many early interviews described her as lightly challenging for her directors – Claude Berri once dropped her from a film mid-production for taking issue with choices made by her character. Today, though, Binoche disputes that she was like that early on, and that it actually took time for her to gain such confidence. For The Return, she asked director Uberto Pasolini to allow her total free rein for three takes of each one of her scenes, in exchange for his having control over her performance from take four onwards. He could then pick and choose which Binoche he wanted in the editing room. 'I would never have dared ask that as a younger actress,' she says. 'But it is essential to me. When a director has strict ideas about how they want a character to be, I struggle. As an actor, it is dangerous to be a prisoner of someone else's thoughts. Acting needs to be unpredictable. It needs to be about discovery in the moment. It is almost a call of the spirit. Or a prayer.' She feels everything, she says. When I ask if she and Fiennes have ever, on some level, fallen for one another while playing out love stories over the last 30 years, I am surprised by her sudden candour. 'Of course we fell in love,' she says, firmly. 'Your body, your eyes, your skin, your being – it has to believe it, and you have to make the audience believe it.' Her hands become animated as she explains further. 'In the realm of acting, you do believe what you're feeling, every single step. But it doesn't mean that you are lovers outside of it.' She senses my disappointment – that I briefly thought I'd got a scoop. 'I understand it from your perspective, though,' she says. 'I remember asking Meryl Streep, 'Did you fall in love with Robert De Niro [on the set of The Deer Hunter ]? How could you resist him?' She said, 'I love him, I'm really deeply in love with him, but when it comes down to life, it's another story.'' Binoche smiles. 'That's acting.' The young Binoche, who was packed off to boarding school at the age of four after her parents divorced, saw the world of acting as a space of stability. She talks lovingly of sets, and the importance of experts in different mediums (actors, costume designers, lighting technicians) all coming together for the sake of a common goal; she repeatedly refers to Fiennes as 'a brother'. Stardom happened quickly: minor parts in films and on stage led to André Téchiné's Rendez-Vous in 1985, in which her character – a young actor – flitted between toxic men. The Unbearable Lightness of Being, where she played Day-Lewis's tormented lover, thrust her onto the world stage in 1988. For all her international success, though, she has never been drawn to American cinema for long periods of time. This has partly been a positive – little feels quite so jarring as witnessing the elegant Binoche die of radiation poisoning in Gareth Edwards's Godzilla reboot, or romance Steve Carell in the forgotten comedy Dan In Real Life. But there was always a sense that the rhythms of American celebrity were slightly alien to her sensibility. Just look at her Oscars speech, which clocks in at around 25 seconds ('It must be the shortest ever!') and feels incredibly, unusually guileless. She is surely one of the few winners to explicitly state mid-speech that she expected the award to go to a different person in her category. Lauren Bacall, whom she mentioned by name, was indeed the favourite to win that year for Barbra Streisand's quirky romantic drama The Mirror Has Two Faces. She speaks of that period as if it were a strange dream. 'I definitely enjoyed the attention [ The English Patient ] was getting, and myself as well,' she says. 'And I felt like I needed to give something back to Anthony [Minghella].' The filmmaker was known to bond strikingly with his actors. (He directed Binoche once more, in 2006's urban drama Breaking and Entering, and died in 2008 at the age of 54.) She says that at first she had a difficult time on the set of The English Patient. 'I was trembling all the time. I was so insecure. I was aware of the chance I'd received by getting to play that part, and I would find myself just crumbling. But he helped me become more comfortable, more creative. He took such care of me, so when the Oscars happened, I played the game for him.' In conversation, Binoche is loose with her words but quickly dismisses attempts to probe deeper than the surface. Pick up on particular phrases she uses (the 'game' of Hollywood, or her 'crumbling' on sets) and a barrier appears. Ask about the phone call she received from Quentin Tarantino in which he confessed that he'd burst into tears when she died in Godzilla, and she can only faintly remember it. She has lately bemoaned the state of the French film industry, but she shuts down wider conversation about it today. 'You have to create from within yourself and not worry about the outside,' she shrugs. I ask about her faith – she is a Christian and has said she reads the Bible every day – and whether it impacts her professional choices. 'I try not to separate my life from my work,' she says. 'It needs to be one. I believe there is a God up there, but it cannot just be belief. It needs to be concrete for me – real, embodied. Otherwise it is just ideas.' It is similar to what she said about acting – about the freedom she requires from her directors; how she and Fiennes didn't just act their love stories but felt those love stories. Of course she turned the ordering and consumption of a hot chocolate into a full-bodied performance piece. She's Juliette Binoche.
The Guardian
12-04-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
From The Return to The Last of Us: a complete guide to this week's entertainment
The ReturnOut now Odysseus (Ralph Fiennes) washes up looking like something the cat dragged in after 20 years away at the Trojan wars. Penelope (Juliette Binoche), his wife, has troubles of her own: a bunch of unwelcome suitors plotting to marry her and kill her son. An adaptation of Homer's Odyssey notable for reuniting the leads of The English Patient. The AmateurOut now Rami Malek is a CIA decoder whose world is turned upside down when his wife is killed. But knowledge is, as they say, power, so he attempts to put his work in intelligence to a new purpose: personal revenge. Insert dramatic music sting here. Holy CowOut now A teenager inherits the failing family farm in the Jura region of France, plus care of his younger sister, after his father tragically dies. Naturally, he decides to add to the pressure by entering a tough competition to make the best comté cheese ever, for a cash prize. Acclaimed comedy from Louise Courvoisier. DropOut now High-concept thriller in which a widowed single mother on a date is anonymously given instructions via her phone saying that she must murder her potential boyfriend – unless she wants her children to be killed. Starring Meghann Fahy (The White Lotus) as mum and Brandon Sklenar (It Ends With Us) as her date. Catherine Bray Bright Light Bright LightLondon, 12 April; Manchester, 13 April; Brighton, 15 April; Glasgow, 16 April Wales-born, New York-based pop star Rod Thomas returns to the UK in support of last year's jubilant fifth album, Enjoy Youth. Expect a big queer dance party to help temporarily escape the world. Michael Cragg Mingus Big Band14 to 19 April, Ronnie Scott's, London Charles Mingus was one of jazz's greatest composers, his work a majestic blend of the harmonies and themes of Duke Ellington, classical music, gospel and blues. The now 30-year-old band formed in his memory still tours that repertoire and more, as younger players add their own ideas. John Fordham Turangalîla SymphonyBrighton Dome Concert Hall, 13 April Brighton Philharmonic end their centenary season with a concert devoted to one suitably celebratory work, Messiaen's Turangalîla Symphony. It is conducted by Joanna MacGregor, with the important roles for ondes martenot and piano played by Cynthia Millar and Joseph Havlat respectively. Andrew Clements Ghost15 to 20 April; tour starts Manchester Fusing heavy metal, rock opera and a propensity for the theatrical, Swedish band Ghost only really make sense live. This tour arrives ahead of sixth album Skeletá, led by a single called – you guessed it – Satanized. MB PiratesNational Maritime Museum, London, to 4 January This entertaining show starts with myths of pirates, before taking you on a historical voyage through their real exploits and fates. Mary Read and Anne Bonny, Captain Kidd and Barbarossa all star. An exhibit document describes how Blackbeard was beheaded in battle and his head hung from a navy ship's prow. Mark WallingerTension Fine Art, London, to 31 May There's a metaphysical wit to Mark Wallinger that makes him one of modern Britain's best artists. From seeing heaven in a video of passengers at airport arrivals to photographing a unicorn, he has a nice way of revealing the wondrous in the ordinary. Here, he meditates on the force of gravity. Anne CollierThe Modern Institute, Glasgow, to 21 May Marilyn Monroe, Sylvia Plath and Valerie Solanas haunt this exhibition as heroes of the artist. Collier shows cool photographs in which she ponders objects connected with these women, including hands holding the vinyl album Marilyn Monroe: Legends, and a neat stack of editions of Solanas's Scum Manifesto. Discovering DürerThe Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, to 3 August Albrecht Dürer invented the Renaissance. This Nuremberg artist visited Italy, saw what contemporaries such as Leonardo and Raphael were doing, and used his prints to popularise it. His images sink into your subconscious with their clear and compelling delineations of myths, monsters and prodigies. The Fitzwilliam owns hundreds of his prints. Jonathan Jones Joanne McNally12 April to 29 November; tour starts Hertford The whip-smart Irish comic's last tour The Prosecco Express was a runaway success (there were 78 Dublin dates alone). Now McNally is back with more wine-themed divulgence: new show Pinotphile features a deluge of uproarious stories from the dating/drinking frontline. Rachel Aroesti Arts Centre, London, 12 & 13 April Gamers, gather round. The audience becomes the performance in Patrick Blenkarn and Milton Lim's video game uprising. This seven-hour-plus, form-bending show is a spirited, political tale of struggle and perseverance, designed to be played live by the audience as a collective. Kate Wyver Our New GirlLyric theatre, Belfast, to 4 MayNancy Harris won rave reviews for her bitter comedy, The Dry. Now her nail-biting thriller is coming to the stage. A stranger comes to town as a new nanny and quickly burrows into the cracks in a supposedly perfect family home. Scottish Ballet: The CrucibleHis Majesty's theatre, Aberdeen, 17 to 19 April, then touring Helen Pickett's ballet, based on the Arthur Miller play. The witch trials of 17th-century Salem stand in for 1950s McCarthyism – with perhaps a nod to current times – in this expertly crafted narrative. Lyndsey Winship Sign up to Inside Saturday The only way to get a look behind the scenes of the Saturday magazine. Sign up to get the inside story from our top writers as well as all the must-read articles and columns, delivered to your inbox every weekend. after newsletter promotion Government CheeseApple TV+, 16 April This surreal crime caper from music video master Paul Hunter centres on Hampton Chambers (David Oyelowo), a reformed burglar determined to restore his family's reputation after his incarceration. There is no snappy synopsis for what happens next, although fishing, a film set and a self-sharpening power drill are all involved. The Last of Us Sky Atlantic & Now, 14 April, 9pm Could this be the most successful videogame adaptation of all time? The first season of the apocalypse drama was a critically lauded, star-making ratings smash. Set five years on, series two reunites us with protagonists Joel and Ellie and introduces Kaitlyn Dever as a young soldier with a grudge. The Stolen Girl Disney+, 16 April Denise Gough, Holliday Grainger and Ambika Mod lead this new thriller about the playdate from hell. When Elisa goes to pick up her daughter from a sleepover, she discovers it was all a ruse to abduct her. The twist? The kidnappers may not be the real villains here. Just Act Normal BBC Three & iPlayer, 16 April, 9pm Janice Okoh's prize-winning play Three Birds becomes a Birmingham-set comedy drama about a trio of siblings trying to keep things together after their mother disappears. Romola Garai plays a kindly teacher while Sam Buchanan (Such Brave Girls) is their mum's drug dealer, Dr Feelgood. RA Lost Records: Bloom and Rage Tape 2Out 15 April; PC, PS5, Xbox The second instalment of Don't Nod's emotional 90s-set mystery continues the story of awkward teen Swann and her friends, who discover a supernatural secret in the Michigan wilderness. With wonderful characters and a clever dual-timeline structure, the intriguing opening part left us with plenty of questions … Bionic BayOut 17 April; PC, PS5 A scientist must escape a trap-filled biomechanical world using physics, a teleportation device and pixel-perfect jumping skills. For those who love 2D platformers such as Limbo and Shovel Knight, this visually stunning adventure could become a demanding new obsession. Keith Stuart Bon Iver – Sable, FableOut nowThe Sable portion of genre-skipping band Bon Iver's fifth album was first released as a four-track EP last October. Six months later, nine new songs have arrived, each one building delicately experimental soundscapes round frontman Justin Vernon's weatherworn vocals. Danielle Haim guests on lovely recent single, If Only I Could Wait. Nell Smith – AnxiousOut now This posthumous album from British singer Smith, who died in a car accident last year aged just 17, follows Where the Viaduct Looms, her 2021 album of Nick Cave covers produced by the Flaming Lips. Songs such as the melodically rich, softly cantering indie shuffle of Billions of People represent a talent who was just getting started. Röyksopp – True ElectricOut now After slowing things down last year with ambient album Nebulous Nights, Röyksopp ramp up the intensity with this 19-track album that finds the Norwegian producers creating a studio version of their recent DJ sets. The Fever Ray-assisted track What Else Is There?, originally released in 2005, marks the delirious high point. The Mars Volta – Lucro Sucio; Los Ojos Del VacioOut now The Texas rock experimentalists have been playing this album live for most of the year while supporting Deftones in the US. Last month, singer Cedric Bixler-Zavala was also rumoured to have handed a copy of it to a delivery driver. Expect the music to match this somewhat unconventional rollout. MC On the Record at the National ArchivesPodcast The latest dispatch from the National Archives series unearthing lesser-known stories from their records is a fascinating history of working women, recounting the first female Met police officers, as well as women's role fighting for labour rights. The Carpenter's DaughterYouTube Among the mass of DIY YouTubers offering home renovation advice, amateur enthusiast Vikkie Lee's channel is a breath of fresh air. Equally entertaining as it is informative, follow Lee as she painstakingly restores her farm bungalow. The ReunionRadio 4, 13 April, 10amFifteen years on from the general election that led to a Tory-Liberal Democrat coalition, Kirsty Wark explores the initial power-sharing meetings that produced a fraught partnership that would shape British politics. Ammar Kalia
New European
11-04-2025
- Entertainment
- New European
Matthew d'Ancona's culture: Ralph Feinnes as Odysseus, and the importance of forgetting
As Christopher Nolan gets to work on his mega-budget adaptation of The Odyssey, Uberto Pasolini's take on Homer's epic poem is spare, unembellished, stripped of the supernatural – and utterly riveting. Returning from the Trojan war after 20 years, Odysseus (Ralph Fiennes, superb) is washed up on the shore of Ithaca and tended back to health by the swineherd Eumaeus (Claudio Santamaria). What has become of the kingdom in which he is now taken for a wretched pauper? His queen Penelope (Juliette Binoche) is besieged by suitors, led by Antinous (Marwan Kenzari), but keeps them at bay, promising to remarry when she has completed weaving a shroud – secretly unpicking her work at night. Binoche, who has previously appeared with Fiennes in Wuthering Heights (1992) and The English Patient (1996), is mesmerising; her love for her absent husband matched by rage at the limbo into which she has been consigned, and a fierce instinct to protect their son Telemachus (Charlie Plummer). Fiennes trained for five arduous months to build a sinewy physique that conveys both primal strength and the terrible price paid by the warrior. His description of Troy as a city that 'could not be conquered, only destroyed' echoes the remark of a US officer in Vietnam during the devastation of Huế in 1968. Scarcely able to speak of these horrors, Odysseus occupies what Fiennes describes as an 'undecided space'. It has taken 30 years for Pasolini (no relation to Pier Paolo, but, confusingly, the grandnephew of Luchino Visconti) to bring this project to fruition. In his screenplay, co-written with John Collee and the late Edward Bond, the gods are entirely absent, as are the Cyclops, Sirens and Circe. As Pasolini explained at the preview I attended, his intention was not to simulate the Bronze Age Grecian world, but to dramatise universal predicaments of the soul and the emotions. This pared-down version of books 13 to 23 of the Odyssey – drawing upon Emily Wilson's magnificent 2017 translation – is myth as a gaunt psychological exploration of trauma, loss and reconciliation rather than a visually spectacular entanglement between the human and the magical. Acts of terrible brutality are required of Odysseus to restore order to Ithaca. But his deeper need is to achieve reconciliation with his beloved queen and – hardest of all – to find with her a way of both remembering and forgetting. Black Mirror (Netflix) Since Charlie Brooker's anthology series made its debut on Channel 4 in 2011, he has transformed the borderlands between the digital world and human consciousness into a dramatic canvas – following, with consistent success and rich comedy, in the intellectual footsteps of William Gibson, but in the televisual format pioneered in Rod Serling's The Twilight Zone. The seventh season is also one of the best, full of ingenious premises, great performances and, for the obsessive, Easter egg references to past storylines. In the first of six episodes, 'Common People', schoolteacher Amanda (Rashida Jones) is diagnosed with a brain tumour – but, thanks to 'a revolution in neurological science' by the tech company Rivermind, is given the chance to back up the damaged areas on a computer which she accesses with implanted 'synthetic receiver tissue'. The catch? She must remain geographically within the 'coverage area' – and she and husband Mike (Chris O'Dowd) must cough up the subscription fee of $300 a month. Soon, they are offered the upgraded service of Rivermind Plus, for an additional $800. If they don't, Amanda will involuntarily read out adverts at unpredictable moments. What, in the new digital gig economy, can Mike do to find the extra cash? I also loved 'Hotel Reverie', in which Hollywood actress Brandy Friday (Issa Rae) is uploaded into a digital recreation of a 1940s movie classic starring screen icon Dorothy Chambers (Emma Corrin) as Clara Ryce-Lechere. There is a glitch in the system and Dorothy – a digital avatar – starts to acquire agency, even as Brandy develops romantic feelings for her. Best of all is 'Eulogy' with Paul Giamatti as Phillip, invited by an AI Guide (Patsy Ferran) to contribute to the funeral memorial of his long-lost love Carol by stepping into old photographs (in one of which 'Fools Gold' by the Stone Roses is playing on the party turntable). Not surprisingly, Giamatti extracts authentic emotion from this entirely artificial digital context. 'Plaything', starring Peter Capaldi, is intimately entangled with the interactive film, Black Mirror: Bandersnatch (2018), and coincides with the real-life release of a game called 'Thronglets' which you can download via mobile app stores. And the seventh episode, 'USS Callister: Into Infinity' is a feature-length sequel to 'USS Callister' in season four. There is no sign at all of Brooker's imagination drying up. But then why would it? The digital world that he satirises and explores is, after all, only getting stranger. Your Friends & Neighbors (Apple TV+) Andrew 'Coop' Cooper (John Hamm) is fired from his job as a high-rolling hedge funder and, after dispiriting efforts to find new employment, resorts to crime. His multi-millionaire neighbours in Westmont Village, New York, live in houses 'filled with expensive shit that would never be missed'. So – he rationalises – why not just take it? Of course, there is a gap between theory and practice. For a start, he must find an obliging fence: Lu (Randy Danson) who sits in the back-office of a down-at-heel pawn shop and gets Coop's measure immediately ('Rich guy loses his big job, has liquidity problems, turns to petty crime'). He also chances upon insider help from one of the housekeepers, Elena (Aimee Carrero), who knows from her fellow workers which family is going to be away when, and where the good stuff is kept. She, too, has Coop's number – 'the shit that you complain about – most people would kill for'. Ten years after Mad Men ended, Hamm makes a pleasing return to a lead televisual role in this six-episode drama. Like Don Draper, Coop has a mouvementé private life: his ex-wife Mel (Amanda Peet) is now with a former basketball star turned gym entrepreneur, Nick (Mark Tallman); he is having a secret affair with Sam (Olivia Munn); his kids Tori (Isabel Gravitt) and Hunter (Donovan Colan) are annoyed by him. Unlike Don, he is open about the absurdities of his predicament. After the mystical meditations of The White Lotus season three upon the malaise of the wealthy, Your Friends & Neighbors dissects their foibles with a broader comedy, overlain by Coop's witty noir narration ('I know what you're thinking. The pool is a metaphor. But it was also very fucking real and very fucking cold'). Already renewed – and deservedly so. One to One: John & Yoko (selected cinemas) After the Beatles but before the Dakota, John Lennon and Yoko Ono lived in a modest two-room apartment on Bank Street in New York's West Village. They enjoyed the company of bohemians, radicals and Beat legend Allen Ginsberg. They sought a fresh start. Lennon declared himself a 'revolutionary artist', and joined forces with Jerry Rubin, co-founder of the Youth International Party, or 'Yippies'. Ono pursued her conceptual art, not least the acquisition of thousands of flies, which proved a logistical challenge for her assistants – an entertaining thread in the movie. By narrowing their focus with such discipline to 1971-2, co-directors Kevin Macdonald and Sam Rice-Edwards capture with depth, imagination and intensity a moment in the life of the couple. The television at the end of the Lennons' bed was always on, and the movie is interspersed with contemporary clips: The Waltons, a Tupperware ad, the Attica prison riot, The Mary Tyler Moore Show, Nixon declaring his love of 'square' music, Tony the Tiger. 'I just like TV,' said Lennon. But it was also his portal into the teeming multiplicities of modern life – a medium for passive consumption that, paradoxically, energised him. What would he have made of the Internet? He and Ono believed their phones were being tapped by the FBI (they were) and, as a counter-measure, recorded all their calls. This provides Macdonald and Rice-Edwards with an audio treasure trove – including such gems as manager Allen Klein doing his best to feign enthusiasm for Lennon's political projects, including a concert tour to raise money for prisoners' bail. The heart of this wonderful movie is the benefit gig coordinated by the couple at Madison Square Garden on August 30, 1972, to raise money for the shockingly treated children at Willowbrook State School on Staten Island: their neglect and misery highlighted in a television report by Geraldo Rivera. Restored by their son, Sean Ono Lennon, the music is a revelation: powerful, rigorously performed, full of hope and self-assurance. There are terrific renditions of Come Together, Imagine, New York City, Instant Karma! (We All Shine On) and more. Lennon's two full-length concerts that day were the last he gave after leaving the Beatles. In one phone recording, drummer Jim Keltner urges him to think about his safety in public appearances. Lennon replies, with a chuckle: 'I'm not about to get myself shot.' What They Found (iPlayer) 'How could you, looking at all this death, keep going?' So recalled Sergeant Mike Lewis of his work filming the scenes at Belsen that he and others recorded in 1945, working for the British Army Film and Photographic Unit (AFPU). The horrors of the Nazi camps were, as he put it, 'death by administration'. In his first documentary, Sam Mendes has drawn on audio interviews with Lewis and Sergeant Bill Lawrie and silent film footage in the Imperial War Museum's archive. With a running time of only 36 minutes, What They Found encapsulates the opening of the gates of hell; the aphasia of the soldiers who beheld the dead and the survivors (Lawrie: 'they were what was left of people – shells'); and the fundamental challenge that the mass graves posed to everything they believed in and believed possible. 'Why in Germany? What was there about the Germans that made them do this?' said Lewis. 'The discovery came to me. It was a horrifying discovery. [It was] not only the Germans: any race was capable of it. Anybody, given the circumstances of Germany, could achieve this'. This was what the late Martin Amis, after visiting Auschwitz, called 'species-shame'. More than 52,000 people, mostly Jewish, died at Belsen. Almost 70 years since Allain Resnais' pioneering documentary Night and Fog and 40 since Claude Lanzmann's monumental Shoah, it is depressing to note that ignorance and outright denial of the Holocaust are sharply on the rise. A third of young adults in the UK are unable to name a single location where the greatest crime in history was committed; a fifth of US citizens aged between 18 and 29 believe the Holocaust is a myth. We need many more documentaries such as Mendes's, shown to as many people as possible.
