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Telegraph
19-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Telegraph
Forget A Clockwork Orange, this is Kubrick's greatest film
In the early 1970s, Stanley Kubrick was enjoying one of the most extraordinary positions the film industry has ever given a director and producer. His last three films – Dr Strangelove (1964), 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) and A Clockwork Orange (1971) had been global sensations, securing his reputation as a perfectionist auteur who loomed larger over his movies than any concept or star. 'Kubrick' was by now an imprimatur of a certain style, and one that his current studio, Warner Bros, was eager to bankroll wherever it might lead them. Production on his next project was shrouded in the utmost secrecy, stemming from Kubrick's long-standing paranoia about the tabloid press. All anyone was allowed to know was that his new film would star Love Story heartthrob Ryan O'Neal – a seemingly un-Kubricky choice of leading man – and the former Vogue and Time magazine cover model Marisa Berenson, a co-star in Cabaret (1972). It was to be shot largely in Ireland. Never an originator of his own screenplays, Kubrick had in mind to adapt Thackeray's 1844 novel The Luck of Barry Lyndon, a satirical picaresque about the fortune-hunting of an Irish rogue and the position he secures for himself in the English aristocracy. Robbed by highwaymen on the road to Dublin, O'Neal's Redmond Barry advances himself through cunning and impersonation, and eventually makes his way to England, where he seduces Lady Lyndon (Berenson), an unhappy trophy wife, nudges her husband into the grave – and proceeds to squander her wealth while becoming a dreadful rotter, openly flaunting his infidelities. Almost every Kubrick film is a showcase for some major innovation in technique. In 2001, it was revolutionary visual effects; in The Shining, it was his mastery of the Steadicam. On Barry Lyndon, Kubrick and cinematographer John Alcott set themselves the challenge of shooting as many sequences as possible without recourse to electrical light. For the many densely furnished interior scenes, this meant candlelight. For months they tinkered with different combinations of lenses and film stock, before getting hold of a number of super-fast 50mm lenses developed by Zeiss for use by Nasa in the Apollo moon landings. With their huge aperture and fixed focal length, mounting these was a nightmare, but they managed it, and so Kubrick's vision of recreating the huddle and glow of a pre-electrical age was miraculously put on screen. The painterly, determinedly static quality of Barry Lyndon was thereby dictated. The actors in the many dining and gambling scenes had to move as slowly as possible, to avoid underexposure. But it all fits perfectly with Kubrick's gilded-cage aesthetic: the film is consciously a museum piece, its characters pinned to the frame like butterflies. For the stunningly beautiful exteriors, in which Ireland plays itself, as well as England, and Prussia during the Seven Years' War, Kubrick and Alcott looked to the landscapes of Watteau and Gainsborough; the interiors that were day-lit owe a lot to Hogarth, with whom Thackeray had always been fascinated. Alcott would win an Oscar for his amazing work, as would three other departments: Ken Adam and Roy Walker for their scrupulously researched art direction, Milena Canonero for her often outlandish but totally persuasive costumes and Leonard Rosenman for his arrangements of Schubert and Handel, whose addictively funereal Sarabande in D Minor stomps ominously in the background of the various duels, like a march to the gallows. The film was greeted, on its release, with dutiful admiration – but not love. Critics were itching to rail against the perceived coldness of Kubrick's style, the film's gorgeously remote artistry and sedate pace. Ever sharp-tongued, Pauline Kael dismissed it with a bored wave as a 'coffee-table movie'. Audiences, on the whole, agreed – it was not the hit Warner Bros had been hoping for, especially in the USA. Though it got seven Oscar nominations in total, it was up against fierce competition that year and lost Best Picture and Best Director to One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. (The only personal Academy Award Kubrick would receive across his career was for the effects in 2001: A Space Odyssey, rather suggesting that the Academy pegged him first and foremost as a technician.) An air of disappointment clouded the film's reputation for many years – as O'Neal (who died in 2023) would tend to agree. He was madly fond of Kubrick and spent the long, arduous shoot doing everything he could to please him. But like a reality TV contestant griping about a distorted edit, he was dismayed by the end result. Kubrick's year-long cutting process, in O'Neal's view, had ruined his performance, making him look like a 'clueless and opportunistic Shallow Hal of the 18th century'. Newly restored in 4K, Barry Lyndon turns 50 this year – and has only grown more mesmerising with each passing decade. O'Neal's take actually gets to the heart of it: the film's compulsive power depends entirely on the weak moral fibre of its antihero, a soldier of fortune who becomes ever more corrupt the richer he gets. We can celebrate the lucky breaks of a penniless scamp, but it all comes to nothing once he claws his way to the topmost rungs of society. Only there does he meet his nemesis: pouting stepson Lord Bullingdon (played with teary resentfulness by Kubrick's right-hand man, Leon Vitali), who implacably punishes Barry for ruining Lady Lyndon's life and orchestrates his downfall. The ending may not be quite as windingly savage as in Kubrick's next two films (The Shining and Full Metal Jacket), but the sense of waste, irony and unfulfilment are cosmic lessons learnt. It's telling that Kubrick made this and A Clockwork Orange back-to-back in the 1970s – the heyday of the misogynist antihero, including pretty much every character Jack Nicholson ever played, from Five Easy Pieces to Chinatown and beyond. Kubrick's male rebels belong to that lineage: they aim to defy whatever cage society tries to put them in, but never truly manage to escape. What made A Clockwork Orange a huge global hit (it grossed $114 million, versus Barry Lyndon's paltry $20 million) was that it gave audiences their kicks: sex, ultraviolence and musings on free will, all set to beefed-up Beethoven, which electrified the counterculture. Candlelit strolls to the terrace, to the slow strum of a Schubert trio, were self-evidently a far harder sell. The period piece may have spoken to its own time more obliquely than the twisted science-fiction morality play, but A Clockwork Orange has not dated at all well. It's Barry Lyndon that now looks timeless. Indeed, bizarrely current. In 2021, it spawned a viral sensation on TikTok, when the British rapper 21 Savage found his track 'a lot' wedded, unexpectedly, to a fan edit of Lyndon moments that perfectly matched the chorus: 'How much money you got? A lot. How many problems you got? A lot.' Revisiting Lyndon in full today is a spellbinding experience on many levels, but it makes you realise that the most undervalued aspect of Kubrick's genius could well be his way with actors. O'Neal's slippery, unformed quality is more perfect for the lead role than he ever clearly knew, and the doll-like presence of Berenson, her face a sad mask, is similarly ideal. Meanwhile, the supporting cast is a long, glittering procession of cameos – not from star names, but from vital character players. Leonard Rossiter makes the first unforgettable impression as Captain Quin, the pompous and prickly suitor of Barry's cousin Nora (Gay Hamilton), raising snobbish indignation to an art form. The Irish stage actor Arthur O'Sullivan has just two scenes as the notorious highwayman Captain Feeney, but manages to be both disarmingly polite and quietly terrifying. Patrick Magee, who played the crippled writer in A Clockwork Orange, gets a lovely, quizzical turn as the avuncular Chevalier de Balibari, an inveterate cheat at cards who takes Barry under his wing. And the list goes on, taking in the extraordinary Murray Melvin as a pursed-lipped reverend, Marie Kean as Barry's mother, Frank Middlemass as the splenetic Sir Charles Lyndon, Hardy Krüger as a Prussian captain, Steven Berkoff as a priapic gambler, Vitali's blubbing Lord Bullingdon and Kubrick favourite Philip Stone – Alex's father in A Clockwork Orange and the dead caretaker Grady in The Shining – as the Lyndon family lawyer. Subjected to the director's infamous regime of many, many exacting takes, their faces light up the film and the era like a series of fine, carefully hung oil portraits. Kubrick's cast may have been required to sit for these for days and weeks on end, but we're forever in their debt. This slow-burn masterpiece is a gallery worth walking through again and again.
Washington Post
17-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Washington Post
‘Eddington': The early days of covid seen through a glass, weirdly
Since making his sensational debut in 2018 with the disquietingly effective horror movie 'Hereditary,' Ari Aster has secured a place for himself as American cinema's chief purveyor of free-floating unease. His follow-up films, 'Midsommar' and 'Beau is Afraid,' elaborated on his auteurial signature, one by way of an exquisitely executed exercise in mannered ritual, the other a Pynchon-esque picaresque of male anxiety, dysfunction and self-sabotage. Joaquin Phoenix portrayed the tortured title character in 'Beau is Afraid,' and returns as a similarly addled semihero in 'Eddington,' Aster's answer to the covid age. Set in May 2020 in an eponymous fictional town in New Mexico (Aster's home state), 'Eddington' is rife with period signifiers, from arguments about masks, mandates and social distancing to spontaneous protests after the killing of George Floyd. Phoenix plays Joe Cross, Eddington's mild-mannered sheriff, who patrols the sleepy streets with a perpetual five o'clock shadow and live-and-let-live attitude. His nemesis, an ambitious, by-the-numbers mayor named Ted Garcia (Pedro Pascal), is punctilious about following the rules sent down by the governor, a political ally; he's also advocating for the construction of an enormous data center that critics say will suck up the town's already scarce water and power. After Joe and Ted have a showdown — presumably about public protocols, but really about something unresolved in their past — Joe decides to run for mayor. He decorates the sheriff's car with signs, flags, tassels and a bullhorn; his campaign motto is 'Joe for air.' This might all sound like ripe fodder for a biting social satire, but Aster positions 'Eddington' as a modern-day western, where guns have been replaced by phones that people aim at each other to capture images that are either humiliating, incriminating or deifying. It's a smart concept, but like most of the movie it isn't fully realized, and Aster undermines it by resorting to kinetic weaponry when he needs a dramatic climax. Joe's ambulations around Eddington are punctuated by a dreary, claustrophobic home life: He shares a cramped, sepulchral house with his emotionally disturbed wife, Louise (Emma Stone), and her mother, Dawn (Deirdre O'Connell), who spends her days on the internet, 'doing her own research' on conspiracies ranging from Hillary Clinton's body double to covid as a plot hatched at Johns Hopkins. It's convenient that Joe has asthma, which allows viewers to sympathize when he chooses not to wear a mask; he also has a Black deputy named Michael (Micheal Ward), which makes it equally convenient when a Black Lives Matter group forms in Eddington: Some of the film's most amusing moments involve loud, self-righteous protesters yelling at Michael to join them, forcing him to choose identities on the spot. Just about every modern-day scourge is name-checked in 'Eddington,' from passive-aggressive Zoom meetings, bitcoin and drone technology to AI, deepfakes and cynical #MeToo accusations. (Even the Gen Z stare gets a brief shout-out.) When the revolution is Aster-ized, that means it's put into a blender of fear, bemusement, outrage and who-have-we-become mortification. Aster enlists a panoply of small-town characters to embody all that's gone wrong with American society over the past decade and a half — a strategy that begins to feel like a pageant of woozy straw men, stumbling in to introduce yet another breach of humanity and then disappearing (Austin Butler shows up in just such a cameo, as a creepy cult leader). 'Eddington' doesn't possess the sharp prescience of Mike Judge's 2006 parodic crystal ball 'Idiocracy,' nor does it pack the accusatory power of Michael Winterbottom's devastating pandemic ticktock, 2022's 'This England.' As a film, it offers neither illumination nor catharsis. Like Joe himself, it seems to float through reality rather than grasp it, detached from the world it seeks to bemoan. The sanctimony, certainty, hypocrisy and, ultimately, destructive potential of moral arrogance are on full display throughout 'Eddington,' which purposefully doesn't take any explicitly partisan stances. This is a human-zoo exercise which, admittedly, can be entertaining but ultimately doesn't have much to offer by way of wisdom or insight. The characters all seem drawn from the same stacked deck: As the beleaguered Joe, Phoenix delivers one of his now-familiar recessive, grumbling performances as a man hoist on his own confidently noble petard (his political rhetoric is limited to criticizing the government for ruining people's days, and calling for 'freeing each other's hearts'). Stone is utterly wasted as Louise, who makes weird-looking dolls for weird-looking dolls' sake. Pascal's mayor is probably the movie's most vividly drawn figure, but like all his peers he exists in a world that feels like it's been filmed through algae-covered glass. For a movie drenched in foreboding in menace, there's very little narrative tension in 'Eddington,' a problem Aster solves with an intrusive sound design and dissonant, clanging piano chords. As self-consciously bizarre as 'Eddington' is (would Aster have it any other way?), one look at current headlines about the Epstein files, now-official vaccine policies and chemtrail theories about the recent Texas floods suggests that the filmmaker's worries are nothing if not well-founded. We are going to hell, in a hand basket we're weaving ourselves, post by post, ping by ping. Aster isn't wrong, but by the grotesque, Oedipally tinged conclusion of his cri de coeur, what might have been an energizing or at least enraging cautionary tale ends in a what-just-happened shrug. Let the bad times scroll, on and on. R. At area theaters. Contains strong violence, some grisly images, language and graphic nudity. 148 minutes.
Geek Feed
18-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Geek Feed
Hideo Kojima Changed Death Stranding 2 Because People ‘Like it Too Much'
Death Stranding was already polarizing when it came out, and with the second game incoming, it's been revealed that 'polarizing' is exactly what Hideo Kojima wants out of his games. In a recent interview with Rolling Stone, Death Stranding 2 composer Woodkid reveals that Kojima opened up to him about a problem early in production where play testers 'liked it too much.' Woodkid explained: 'There's a key moment where we had a discussion, probably halfway [through] when we were doing the game, where he came to me and he said, 'We have a problem.' Then he said, 'I'm going to be very honest, we have been testing the game with players and the results are too good. They like it too much. That means something is wrong; we have to change something.' According to Woodkid, Kojima thought that if the game was being generally well-received, that means that it's 'not triggering enough emotions.' Woodkid continued to explain: 'And he said, 'If everyone likes it, it means it's mainstream. It means it's conventional. It means it's already pre-digested for people to like it. And I don't want that. I want people to end up liking things they didn't like when they first encountered it, because that's where you really end up loving something. And that was really a lesson for me; not doing stuff to please people, but to make them shift a little bit and move them.'' If you've followed Hideo Kojima, you'll know that he's considered to be a modern auteur, and even though he's admittedly not for everyone, he does have a loyal fanbase who are always in for the ride that Kojima is promising them. We don't know if DS2 will end up polarizing enough, but maybe Kojima is aiming for The Last of Us Part II levels of backlash. I wonder how it will change the movie adaptation. Watch out for Death Stranding 2: On the Beach when it comes to PS5 on June 24.
Yahoo
22-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Neon Takes North America on Jafar Panahi's ‘It Was Just an Accident'
Neon has taken North American rights on revered Iranian auteur Jafar Panahi's Cannes competition title 'It Was Just an Accident,' which marks Panahi's first film since being released from prison in Iran. The film, starring Mariam Afshari, Ebrahim Azizi, and Vahid Mobasser, was greeted with a long standing ovation and is a Cannes standout title. More from Variety Paul Mescal Says Movies Are 'Moving Away' From 'Alpha' Male Leads, Calls It 'Lazy and Frustrating' to Compare 'History of Sound' to 'Brokeback Mountain' RAI Cinema Chief Paolo Del Brocco on Selling 'Heads or Tails' in Cannes and a New Victor Kossakovsky Doc Made With Italian Botanist Stefano Mancuso (EXCLUSIVE) 'Put Your Soul on Your Hand and Walk' Review: A Stirring Chronicle of a Gaza Journalist Who Was Killed Before Its Cannes Premiere 'It Was Just an Accident' centers around an outpouring of strong feelings by a group of former prisoners toward a torturous guard. 'When you spend eight hours a day blindfolded, seated in front of a wall, being interrogated by someone standing behind your back every day, you can't stop wondering what kind of conversation you can have with this man,' Panahi told Variety in one of his first interviews following his 14-year ban on making movies, speaking to the press and traveling. The film is produced by Jafar Panahi and Philippe Martin and co-produced by Sandrine Dumas and Christel Henon, with David Thion and Lilina Eche serving as associate producers. The film is a Les Films Pelléas and Jafar Panahi Production from Iran/France and Luxembourg. MK2 Films is representing international sales rights. The deal was negotiated by Neon's Sarah Colvin and Jeff Deutchman with MK2 Films' Fionnuala Jamison on behalf of the filmmakers. 'It Was Just An Accident' marks the second collaboration between Neon and Jafar Panahi, following 'The Year of the Everlasting Storm' which played in Cannes Special Screenings in 2021. Panahi is is considered one of his country's greatest living film masters. In 2010, the auteur — known globally for prizewinning works such as 'The Circle,' 'Offside,' 'This is Not a Film,' 'Taxi' and most recently 'No Bears' — was banned from making movies, speaking to the press and traveling, though he surreptitiously kept making them anyway. The ban was lifted in April 2023, and now Iranian authorities allowed him to travel to Cannes to launch 'It Was Just an Accident.' Last year in Cannes Neon picked up 'The Seed of the Sacred Fig' from Iranian filmmaker Mohammad Rasoulof, which went on to be nominated for a BAFTA and for Best International Feature at the 97th Academy AwardsThis year in Cannes, Neon debuted Joachim Trier's much lauded 'Sentimental Value' and Julia Ducournau's 'Alpha' in competition, and Raoul Peck's 'Orwell: 2+2=5' and Michael Angelo Covino's 'Splitsville' starring Dakota Johnson and Adria Arjona which Neon also produced. Best of Variety New Movies Out Now in Theaters: What to See This Week Emmy Predictions: Talk/Scripted Variety Series - The Variety Categories Are Still a Mess; Netflix, Dropout, and 'Hot Ones' Stir Up Buzz Oscars Predictions 2026: 'Sinners' Becomes Early Contender Ahead of Cannes Film Festival
