Emma Stone

Why Poor Things should win the best picture Oscar

This scabrous and risky melodrama, with a magnificent performance by Emma Stone, is an object lesson in real art rising above social media scolding

Peter Bradshaw

29 February 2024

“You did not see me working on myself to get HAPPINESS did you?”

“What of the TONGUE-PLAY? Is that not happening?”

“I MUST GO PUNCH THAT BABY!”

Emma Stone’s delivery of the many outrageous laugh lines in Yorgos Lanthimos’s brilliant and scabrous Poor Things is cause enough to hand over the best picture Oscar right away.But there is also the deliciously offensive Frankensteinian high concept, the hallucinatory cinematography switching between colour and monochrome, the inspired production design and costumes, the insinuating musical score which appears at first to mimic our heroine’s childish thumping on the piano, then surge and swirl alongside her increasing intelligence and naive sexual confidence. And of course there’s the propulsive story itself, which rockets along like a steampunk steamtrain.

The evening’s violet-tinged mouth played off the chartreuse yellow of the tulle dress. Goodwin enhanced Stone’s freckles for an ultra-natural effect, while the handmade Louis Vuitton choker dialed up the glamour.

 

How Emma Stone Got Ready for the New York Premiere of Poor Things 

The star of Yorgos Lanthimos’s exuberantly off-kilter riff on the Frankenstein tale turned up to the red carpet in a pearl-studded Louis Vuitton dress and shimmery lids—an off-screen ode to the character’s free spirit. 

DECEMBER 8, 2023

Bella Baxter, the curiosity (played by Emma Stone) at the center of Yorgos Lanthimos’s neo-Gothic romp, Poor Things, cuts a severe figure in waist-grazing raven hair and heavyset brows. But the character herself—a living, breathing experiment on her way to self-actualization—is really a tangle of contradictions. Her delicate beauty skews feral, her sexual hedonism is braided with the absurd. Even before the film’s New York premiere on Wednesday evening, Stone’s performance had already been drawing praise. (A snippet of a frenetic dance sequence in the trailer hints at just how much the performance is a finely calibrated, full-bodied feat.) But with a winding awards season likely ahead, how might an actor carry the spirit of this wild child onto an otherwise buttoned-up red carpet?

 

Jon Fosse

A BOOK OF THE DAY

Review

A Shining by Jon Fosse review – a spiritual journey

The new Nobel laureate’s latest novella is a shimmering fable about a man lost in a dark forest

Lauren Groff

Saturday 18 November 2023

O

ne day in late autumn, a man goes for a drive so far into the countryside that he begins to pass no more dwellings of the living, only abandoned farmhouses and cabins. At last, he pulls into a forest and goes down a road so deeply rutted that the car finally becomes stuck. Night is falling. It has begun to snow. The man decides to leave his car and walk alone into the dark woods to try to find someone to help him.

Simon Armitage. Photograph: Gareth Phillips for the Guardian

THE LONG READ

Simon Armitage: Making poetry pay

In a culture that has consigned poetry to the margins, Armitage has become something very rare: a genuinely popular British poet. Aida Edemariam hits the road with the busiest man in verse

Aida Edemarian

Tuesday 26 May 2015

One Indian summer evening last September, off a busy slip road not far from the Tower of London, Simon Armitage took to the stage of the world’s oldest surviving music hall and, after a short introduction from the broadcaster Melvyn Bragg, started to read. “It begins with a house, an end terrace / in this case …” The hall was full, generous with silence and later with laughter: young couples in careful retro outfits, men in suits dropping by after work, students, and older women; audience and performers held beneath a glowing tent of wobbly fairy lights that rose from the balconies to a bright apex in the roof. “But it will not stop there. Soon it is / an avenue / which cambers arrogantly past the Mechanics’ Institute …” Armitage’s reading voice is light; not exactly monotonal, but strung on a more delicate, questioning skein than his conversational voice. The poem, Zoom!, the title piece in his very first collection, in 1989, turns left at the main road, leads to a town, “city, nation, hemisphere, universe, … [is] bulleted into a neighbouring galaxy”, before finally coming to rest in the checkout queue at the local supermarket.

Emma Beddington / I have been forced into a month of minimalism – and I hate it

 

I have been forced into a month of minimalism – and I hate it

Emma Beddington

Far from home, in a rental apartment, the scarcity of my own stuff is making me strange. Where is the focus, calm and happiness I was promised?

Sun 25 Feb 2024 15.00 

Ottessa Moshfegh

Shirt by Gucci.

Ottessa Moshfegh’s Year Has Been
Neither Restful Nor Relaxing

By Alex Israel

Photographed by Keith Oshiro

Styled by Bin X. Nguyen

April 21, 2020

In our fractured, discordant, don’t-speak-for-me present, there stands little chance that any one author could represent the spirit of the age. But Ottessa Moshfegh would be a strong nominee for those in search of a young literary polestar. A daughter of musicians, the 38- year-old novelist attained cult-writer status in the mid 2010s, publishing a novella, a novel, and a short-story collection. But cult interest turned out to be a mere pit stop. After releasing her dark and hilarious emotional barbwire of a novel, 2018’s My Year of Rest and Relaxation, about a privileged 20-something Manhattanite drowning in prescription pills, Moshfegh became a star. The novel was so smart and daring that it was passed among friends with the promise that it contained essential, unkind wisdoms.

Emily Ratajkowski and her son.

 

Of Money and Men: Emily Ratajkowski
in Conversation With Amia Srinivasan

By Amia Srinivasan

Photographed by Daniel Arnold

November 16, 2021

“I have so much anxiety about this,” says Emily Ratajkowski from the floor of her Manhattan apartment. “Even my body has responded to the desire to know how this book will be received.” Ratajkowski has long since come to terms with relinquishing control over her image, but for the 30-year-old San Diego native, the project of removing her body from the conversation has been a challenging one. After more than a decade spent embodying what many—Ratajkowski included—would say is an impossible beauty standard, the model and businesswoman has endeavored in recent years to shine light on the toxic aspects of an industry that long held her up as the epitome of female sexuality. Last fall, she published an essay about her experiences with on-the-job assault and exploitation, naming a prominent photographer in the process. The essay sparked seismic reactions—both positive and negative—in the fashion and art worlds. But instead of dwelling on the public’s reaction, Ratajkowski, a new mother, has done her best to focus on the process of creation.

Men Without Women by Haruki Murakami / Review by Kate Kellaway

Haruki Murakami

Review

Men Without Women by Haruki Murakami – review

Haruki Murakami’s long-awaited return to the short story is a masterclass in pacing and the tragicomic revelation

Kate Kellaway

Sunday 14 May 2017

C

uriosity, in Murakami’s supremely enjoyable, philosophical and pitch-perfect new collection of short stories – his first for more than a decade – is what motivates many of his characters. Their curiosity becomes ours and propels each narrative onwards. But curiosity is shown to be complicated. Is it healthy, necessary, wise? Or does it kill the cat? In the first story, Drive My Car (Murakami’s Beatlemania has outlasted the success of his bestselling novel Norwegian Wood), curiosity is in every sense a driving force. A veteran actor and widower is obliged to hire a chauffeur for his ancient yellow Saab 900 convertible (Murakami always supplies manufacturing details of his characters’ cars). Kafuku has been banned from driving after a scrape in which he was found to have been drinking, and his theatre company is now paying for his transport during a run of Uncle Vanya. He is compelled therefore to put himself in the competent hands of a plain chauffeur, a woman with ears “like satellite dishes placed in some remote landscape” (the glee with which Murakami alights on such similes is infectious). 

Norwegian Wood by Haruki Murakami / review

 

Norwegian Wood: 'languorous, visually striking movie about love and loss'.

Norwegian Wood – review

Philip French

Sunday 13 March 2011

I

n Haruki Murakami's bestselling novel of 1987, the 37-year-old narrator, Toru Watanabe, is transported back to his student days in late 1960s Tokyo by hearing the Beatles' "Norwegian Wood" on the loudspeaker system of an airliner as he flies into Hamburg. It is a time of student unrest and strident demonstrations, but in the lengthy novel and the film carved out of it, this is merely the background to a delicate love story, or series of love stories. The central tale concerns the reserved Watanabe's devotion to the mentally disturbed Naoko, the former girlfriend of Watanabe's only close friend, Kizuki, who committed suicide at the age of 17. It is a doomed affair that after a single night of love is conducted during visits to an asylum outside Kobe where Naoko is being cared for by an older woman, Reiko, a musician who's also recovering from a breakdown. It is Reiko who sings, in English, a rather beautiful version of "Norwegian Wood" which is later sung by Lennon and McCartney over the final credits. Meanwhile, Watanabe is given a dubious sentimental education at the hands of Nagasawa, a suave, promiscuous fellow student bound for the diplomatic corps, and a more beneficial one from the pretty, witty, intelligent Midori, who attempts to draw him out of his solipsistic shell.

Daniel Day-Lewis

 

Six actors on what it’s like to
work with Daniel Day-Lewis

By Scout Sabo

December 22, 2017

This month, formidable talent Daniel Day-Lewis takes his final bow in Paul Thomas Anderson’s Phantom Thread before retirement. He shines in the role of a 1950s, London-based fashion designer who starts a tumultuous employer-employee relationship with his fit model, played wonderfully by newcomer Vicky Krieps. December marks the 10th anniversary of Day-Lewis’s other Anderson collab, There Will Be Blood, and the 20th anniversary of The Boxer.

 

10 Best Stephen King Books, Ranked By Horror Readers

10. Doctor Sleep (The Shining Book 2) (2013) 

Warning: Contains spoilers for The Shining.

Danny Torrance has been trying hard to shake his childhood memories of the Overlook Hotel. And in the beginning of Doctor Sleep, it seems like he might be able to do just that when he settles down in New Hampshire, joins an AA group, and gets a job at a nursing home where he becomes known as “Doctor Sleep.” But his past isn’t ready to let go of him yet, because Dan is about to meet Abra Stone — who has the gift of “the shining,” just like Dan, and is being hunted by a group of quasi-immortal travelers called the True Knot.

Mariana Enriquez

 

They Toss Bodies at You: On Mariana Enríquez’s “Our Share of Night”

By Elizabeth Gonzalez James

February 6, 2023

“TE TIRAN MUERTOS,” Mariana Enríquez writes in Our Share of Night, the hotly anticipated English translation of her 2019 Spanish-language novel. “In Argentina, they toss bodies at you.” This arresting line comes near the end of the almost 600-page novel, as a character grapples with having discovered that a loved one was kidnapped and tortured, their chest split open and a child’s severed arm sewn up inside. I begin my review with this image not to shock, but rather to prepare you for the world we are about to enter, not unlike the sign hung above Dante’s gates of Hell: “Abandon hope, all ye who enter here.”

The Smallest Woman in the World by Clarice Lispector

Pablo Picasso

The Smallest Woman 

in the World

by Clarice Lispector

Translated by Elizabeth Bishop

In the depths of Equatorial Africa the French explorer, Marcel Pretre, hunter and man of the world, came across a tribe of surprisingly small pygmies. Therefore he was even more surprised when he was informed that a still smaller people existed, beyond forests and distances. So he plunged farther on.

The Hen by Clarice Lispector

Hen

by Clarice Lispector

Translated by Elizabeth Bishop

She was a Sunday hen.  She was still alive only because it was not yet 9:00 o’clock.

She seemed calm.  Since Saturday she had cowered in a corner of the kitchen.  She didn’t look at anyone, no one looked at her.  Even when they had selected her, fingering her intimately and indifferently, they couldn’t have said whether she was fat or thin.   No one would ever have guessed that she had a desire.

Bob Marley by Dennis Morris

Babylon by van, 1973

‘They asked me if I wanted to come on tour. “Yes!” I said. I met the band at their hotel, the following day after the Speakeasy gig. There was no tour bus as such, just a transit van and a driver cum roadie cum manager Benji Foot (Michael Foot’s son) and a woman named Hazel Charik. They were a little surprised to see me. “Who is this?” they asked. “It’s my photographer, Dennis,” said Bob. “You ready, Dennis?”. “Yeah, I am ready!” I replied’

Bob Marley 

by Dennis Morris

Photographer Dennis Morris worked extensively with Bob Marley between 1973 and 1980, charting his rise from small crowds to global superstardom. After greeting the reggae star at a London club in May 1973, Morris was invited to join the tour – the start of a strong friendship and unrivalled photographic access. We hear from Morris about his memories of photographing Marley

• An exhibition, Portraits of the King: Bob Marley by Dennis Morris,
  runs at 28 Old Burlington Street in London until 7 March
• Morris’s book Portraits of the King is published by Tang Deng

Photographs by Dennis Morris

Main image: Bob Marley in his tour van, London 1973. Photograph: Dennis Morris

Fri 16 Feb 2024 11.22 GMT

Hand on Heart, on tour, UK, 1973

‘I first met Bob in 1973 outside the Speakeasy club in London on the first date of the Wailers UK Catch a Fire tour to promote the Catch a Fire album, his first for Island Records. Bob invited me into the club.’ During a break, he says Marley asked him: ‘So, you wanna be a photographer? Well, they will tell you you can’t do it. You have to believe, Dennis’

 

John Travolta, at the Governor's Ball held after the 2022 Oscars, in Los Angeles, California.VARIETY (PENSKE MEDIA VIA GETTY IMAGES)

John Travolta, the 70-year-old semi-retired widower soaring over Hollywood 

A pilot who’s more interested these days in his planes and children than in his acting career, the two-time Oscar nominee faced personal tragedies that shaped his life

María PorcelLos Ángeles, February 18, 2024

John Travolta could have been Richard Gere. His career and life have had many ups and many downs that feel much like the lingering melancholy that follows moments of joy. Professional success has seemed more like the outcome of haphazard decisions than acting talent, perhaps due to misguided advice. In his personal life, the inevitable misfortunes that befall a person — famous or not — have crossed his path several times. Too many times.