‘The crude language of Maga folks’: Joyce Carol Oates criticises Emily Wilson for criticising Nolan’s Odyssey

 

‘The crude language of Maga folks’: Joyce Carol Oates criticises Emily Wilson for criticising Nolan’s Odyssey

The novelist suggested Wilson should have been ‘a wee bit more thoughtful and respectful’ towards a film-maker who may have helped boost her book sales

Catherine Shoard

Thursday 30 July 2026

The off-screen drama surrounding Christopher Nolan’s blockbuster version of the Odyssey stepped up a gear overnight, as the novelist Joyce Carol Oates sought to defend the film-maker from an attack by classicist Emily Wilson.

Diane Keaton, Oscar-winning star of Annie Hall and The Godfather, dies aged 79

 

Diane Keaton, 2018

Diane Keaton, Oscar-winning star of Annie Hall and The Godfather, dies aged 79

The legendary actor best known for her many collaborations with Woody Allen, as well as films including Reds, The First Wives Club and Book Club, has died

Catherine Shoard
Saturday 11 Octobet 2025

Diane Keaton, one of the best-loved film stars of the past 50 years, has died at the age of 79 in California.

Michael Madsen

Michael Madsen, star of Reservoir Dogs, Kill Bill and Donnie Brasco, dies aged 67

The actor, best known for his collaborations with Quentin Tarantino, was found unresponsive in Los Angeles

Catherine Shoard

3 July 2025

The actor Michael Madsen has died aged 67 at his home in Malibu, according to authorities and his representatives. No foul play is suspected, the sheriff’s department confirmed, after deputies responded to the Los Angeles county home following a call to the emergency services on Thursday morning.

Gladiator II takes $87m to break Ridley Scott opening box-office record

Gladiator II takes $87m to break Ridley Scott opening box-office record

Long-awaited sequel performs strongly in UK and France, although behind February blockbuster Dune: Part Two

Catherine Shoard

Monday 18 November 2024

Gladiator II isn’t entertaining audiences in the US, Canada and China until this Friday, but scored the highest ever international opening for a Ridley Scott film over the weekend, taking $87m.

 

The beloved actress said that “the time has come for Netflix to reconsider” as “a mark of respect” to the late Queen Elizabeth II.

Judi Dench says she can no longer see on film sets

The actor, 88, who has macular degeneration, relies on friends to teach her the script but says, ‘You just deal with it’

Catherine Shoard
Monday 31 July 2023

Dame Judi Dench, one of the UK’s best-known and most-loved actors, has said her eyesight has now deteriorated to the extent that she is no longer able to see on film sets.

Audrey Tautou: 'There is no room for poetry in Thérèse's world'

The French actor tells Catherine Shoard why she swerved away from sweetness to play a gritty, troubled heiress in the 1920s

• 
• • Catherine Shoard
  • The Guardian, Thursday 6 June 2013 18.00 BST
  • 
    

Audrey Tautou plays against type in her new film Thérèse Desqueyroux

Meeting Room F in the basement of Toronto's Hyatt Regency hotel has no windows. It has coffee and cookies and the groggy chuckle of an extractor fan. It is 11am at the fag-end of last autumn's film festival. In the corner is a whiteboard in search of a mantra, and a big bin.

 

Gabriel Byrne ... ‘Hollywood isn’t interested in making artistic statements. It’s interested in making money.’ 
Photograph: Linda Nylind

Interview

Gabriel Byrne: 'There’s a shame about men speaking out. A sense that if you were abused, it was your fault'

Catherine Shoard

Gabriel Byrne: ‘I’ve never played Hamlet, but in many ways I am him’

The actor’s autobiography confronts the abuse he experienced at the hands of the church. But he has just as much contempt for Hollywood – and US presidents from Obama to Trump


Catherine Shoard

Sun 8 Nov 2020 14.00 GMT

Forget the pollsters. If you wanted to know the outcome of last week’s US election, you just had to ask Gabriel Byrne. I did, a month ago. I wish I had gone to the bookies.

 

Brandon Lee in 1993’s The Crow, in which he was fatally shot on set by another actor. 

‘No one should be killed on set’: tragic history of fatalities during filming

On-set deaths like Halyna Hutchins’ remain thankfully rare – but only one film director has been convicted in the US for such incidents

Catherine Shoard
Fri 22 Oct 2021 15.56 BST

S

afety on film and TV sets is under renewed scrutiny following the fatal shooting of cinematographer Halyna Hutchins by actor and producer Alec Baldwin during production on Rust, a western being filmed in New Mexico.

 

Sophia Loren in Los Angeles last year. Photograph: Jordan Strauss

Sophia Loren returns to movies aged 86

Italian superstar plays a Holocaust survivor who befriends an orphan in Netflix film The Life Ahead, directed by her son Edoardo Ponti

Catherine Shoard
Wed 23 Sep 2020 12.29 BST

Sophia Loren is returning to cinema after an 11-year absence. Loren, 86, stars in upcoming Netflix drama The Life Ahead, which is directed by her son, Edoardo Ponti.

In the film, Loren plays Madame Rosa, a Jewish Holocaust survivor who helps raise the children of deceased sex workers with whom she once walked the streets. She then strikes up an enduring friendship with Momo, a 12-year-old Senegalese orphan who tries to steal her candlesticks.

Sophia Loren with the boy, played by Ibrahima Gueye. Photograph: Regine de Lazzaris Aka Greta/Netflix

It will be the second film adaptation of the novel by Romain Gary, following a 1977 movie named after the main character, starring Simone Signoret.

Following a premiere in Rome in October, the film will be available on Netflix a month later, on 13 November, with Deadline reporting that the streaming service will mount a considerable awards campaign behind the title.

Loren won her first Oscar in 1961 for Two Women, before receiving a second, honorary, Oscar in 1991 for “a career rich with memorable performances that has added permanent lustre to our art form”.

The actor says she “jumped at the chance” to play the character, who reminded her of her own mother. She has worked with her son twice before, most recently on 2002’s Between Strangers.

 

Edoardo Ponti, 46, is Loren’s second child with the film director Carlo Ponti, to whom she was married from 1966 until his death in 2007. Speaking to Deadline, he called his mother “a survivor … a thoroughbred in the best sense of the word”.

He also indicated that the role – which requires her not to blink for an extend period – would offer her the chance to showcase previously unseen acting skills. “Sophia Loren has never done parts where she loses her mind, when she gets into this kind of mental paralysis.”

Loren’s last role was in 2010 TV biopic My House Is Full of Mirrors; the previous year she played Daniel Day Lewis’s mother in Nine, based on Federico Fellini’s semi-autobiographical 1963 film 8½. Loren presented Fellini with his honorary Oscar in 1993, shortly before his death.

THE GUARDIAN

Actor’s actor … Ian Holm in King Lear at the National Theatre in 1997. Photograph: Robbie JacK

'This is the best moment of my life,' he said, lying in the bath: Ian Holm remembered

Richard Eyre, Anne-Marie Duff, Ken Stott and Hugh Hudson pay tribute to the screen and stage actor who died on Friday


Richard Eyre, Anne-Marie Duff, Ken Stott and Hugh Hudson
Mon 22 Jun 2020 13.03 BST

That sense of emotional ruthlessness was what made him such a brilliant Lear

Richard Eyre

Ian Holm was, as it was so often said, the actor’s actor. Not because he was virtuosic, meticulous, droll and charismatic, all of which he was, but because he always drew the audience in, he always withheld something mysterious – something under the skin, something of the soul – and the audience always came to seek it. It’s no surprise that he was Harold Pinter’s favourite actor.

Max von Sydow

Max von Sydow, star of The Exorcist and The Seventh Seal, dies aged 90

The veteran actor, best known for his collaborations with Ingmar Bergman, as well as roles in Star Wars and Hannah and Her Sisters, has died

Catherine Shoard
Monday 9 March 2020

Max von Sydow, the Swedish actor who made his name in a series of landmark films with Ingmar Bergman before progressing to international stardom, has died in France. He was 90.

Sydow’s most iconic role was in Bergman’s The Seventh Seal (1957), in which he plays chess with Death. He also brought immense presence and gravity to roles such as Jesus Christ in The Greatest Story Ever Told (1965), a doomed priest in William Friedkin’s The Exorcist, and an intellectually snobbish artist in Woody Allen‘s Hannah and Her Sisters (1986).

Alejandro González Iñárritu first Mexican to serve as Cannes jury president

The Birdman director will oversee prize deliberations at the film festival in May, making him the first person from his country to do so

Catherine Shoard
27 Feb 2019

Alejandro González Iñárritu has been named president of this year’s Cannes film festival. Iñárritu, who won the best director Oscar two years running for Birdman and The Revenant, is the first Mexican to chair the panel.

The 50 best films of 2018 in the UK: No 8 – Widows

Steve McQueen’s heist drama is starry, sleek and majestically composed, with an emotional depth that sets it apart

Catherine Shoard

Wednesday 12 December 2018

S

teve McQueen’s previous film, 12 Years a Slave, won the best picture Oscar (plus supporting actress and adapted screenplay), the best picture Bafta (plus best actor), the Golden Globe for best drama and innumerable other prizes, including, perhaps most significantly, best director at the inaugural (and final) Guardian film awards.

It performed surprisingly well at the box office, too, taking $56m in the US despite scenes of a wildly upsetting nature, and changing the ambition, scope and effect of cinema for ever. (McQueen was, amazingly the first black director whose film won the top gong.) It also – not a little thing, this – affected many generations’ perception of the reality of slavery and its legacy for modern-day race relations.

Last week, McQueen’s follow-up failed to bag even a single Golden Globe nomination. It has also underperformed at the box office, so far taking less worldwide than Slave made in the States alone.

Why? On paper at least, Widows is an eminently commercial prospect: a whopping glossy thriller, with big stars (Viola Davis, Michelle Rodriguez, Liam Neeson, Colin Farrell), dazzling explosions, babes in vests firing off rounds of ammo and some flashy villainous business from Get Out’s Daniel Kaluuya.

It has a top – and topical – plot about a bunch of inexperienced women planning a big-bucks heist in Chicago to get heavies off their back, the genius of their plan being that their gender renders them all but invisible.

But for something so apparently mainstream it is also leftfield. I’m not sure what I was expecting Britain’s most talented director to do next, but it probably wasn’t to update a Lynda La Plante ITV big-hair mini-series from the mid 80s. It’s less audacious and ambitious than McQueen’s predecessor; essentially, it’s a genre piece, albeit one with the sort of sleekness and style you’d associate with a winner of the Turner prize.

What makes it great is its sombreness. This is a film that, despite some lighter touches, is steeped in fatalism and even grief. It’s reluctant to offer the kind of catharsis most action flicks indulge in – or even that audiences were permitted in the final scenes of Slave. It is majestically composed and spare; as much a meditation on the mourning process as a sisters-are-doin’-it-for-themselves slamdunk.

This is also, perhaps, what means it has proved resistible for audiences eager for either a sugar-rush brain-twister or a meaty piece of arthouse. It’s a pity: Widows is wonderful. Yes, it’s not McQueen’s best. But few films ever could be.

THE GUARDIAN