Helgeland has a knack for compelling characters and crime stories, so hopefully something good will come of this collaboration. And it also marks a reunion for the filmmaker and Jones, who previously worked together on ‘Finestkind’.
The film follows a former Chicago mob enforcer (Cube), who after being released from prison, is a man intent on changing his life. Disappearing into rural Texas, he finds work under a skilled furniture craftsman and retired Texas Ranger Gus Wanamaker (Jones).
As Ruben and Gus form an unlikely friendship, that bond is jeopardized when both men’s pasts threaten to catch up with them.
When will ‘Outside Man’ be in theaters?
That’s a question right now –– the combination of Jones, Cube and Helgeland is currently in the process of being offered to studios and streamers to see who will pick it up. So stay tuned on that front.
Ice Cube stars in ‘Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem.’
Musician Billie Eilish is to star in a new adaptation of ‘The Bell Jar.’
Sarah Polley is writing and directing the movie.
Focus Features is in talks to produce and distribute.
Having already found success in movies thanks to her Oscar-winning music for ‘No Time to Die’ and ‘Barbie’, Billie Eilish is looking to follow other singer-songwriters to the screen and making her cinematic acting debut.
The only novel written by American writer and poet Plath, ‘The Bell Jar’ was originally published in 1963.
This semi-autobiographical work charts a young woman’s descent into mental illness and the burden of societal pressures. The book paralleled Plath’s own experiences with depression; the writer tragically died by suicide just a month after the novel’s first UK publication.
Who else has tried to film the novel?
Dakota Fanning stars in Paramount Pictures’ ‘Vicious.’
Since then, it has mostly been false starts: Julia Stiles was attached to star in a version in 2007 that ultimately didn’t come to pass. And Kirsten Dunst was attached to direct Dakota Fanning in the story a decade later but that also fell by the wayside. Showtime was reportedly developing a small screen take in 2019, but that hasn’t moved forward.
Luca Guadagnino’s ‘Challengers’ was one of our favorite movies of 2024, which makes it strange to say that ‘After The Hunt’ might end up on our list of the worst films of 2025. This muddled drama, set in the elite halls of academia at Yale, focuses on a ‘he said/she said’ situation that is ripped right out of the headlines – of 2017, when #MeToo was dominating the cultural conversation.
But while the topic is certainly just as relevant and important now as it was a few years ago, ‘After The Hunt’ doesn’t add anything interesting to the conversation. Instead, Nora Garrett’s screenplay pushes a bunch of increasingly unlikable characters around on a chessboard of vagueness masquerading as ambiguity, while Guadagnino shoots it as if he’s not looking through the lens half the time. It’s a disappointingly sloppy effort in which even the blaring, burping score – by the usually spot-on Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross – sounds off.
‘After The Hunt’ kicks off with a credit sequence that immediately draws attention to itself by being done in the same font, with the same layout, that Woody Allen has used for his films for 50 years. Does Guadagnino see his film as a homage to some of Allen’s upper-class social dramas? Is he trolling Allen or Allen’s cancellation from the culture at large? It’s hard to tell.
Either way, the film opens during a party being given by Yale assistant philosophy professor Alma Imhoff (Julia Roberts) and her psychiatrist husband Frederick (Michael Stuhlbarg) for faculty and student friends, with Alma clearly the center of attention for fellow professor Hank Gibson (Andrew Garfield) and pupil Maggie Resnick (Ayo Edebiri). After a spirited if somewhat caustic night of drinking and long-winded debate, Hank escorts Maggie home – and Maggie turns up outside Alma’s door the next day, saying that he assaulted her.
Maggie seems shocked when Alma doesn’t quite provide the full-throated support she expected, given Alma’s ‘history’ – a point we’ll go back to over and over again until it eventually comes out – and Hank later gives Alma (who is also his former lover, to the surprise of no one watching) his side of the story: that he called out Maggie – who’s gay, Black, and lives with a trans lawyer, just to make sure all the boxes are checked — for plagiarism on a paper and this is her way of getting revenge.
This places the remote, chilly, deeply private Alma squarely in the middle of a classic ‘believe women’ scenario – except it doesn’t quite seem like she does. But she’s also not squarely in Hank’s corner either. And none of them seem on the level about what really happened or how they feel about it. Alma and Hank are both competing for a tenured slot, by the way, and Alma is occasionally gripped by intense stomach pains. The relentless conniving, contriving, and jockeying on all sides only seem to prove that everyone’s a jerk, with no moral compass, and that we all basically suck at being decent human beings.
At least that’s the impression one walks out of ‘After The Hunt’ with, which drives home its point by being one of the more irritating films to watch in recent memory. Guadagnino’s camera droops inexplicably from the actors’ faces to their hands while they’re talking, as if looking for some secret code. Some shots are done in extreme close-up, with the actor talking directly into the camera – a jarring and purposeless trick in this scenario. The whole film feels airless, grimy, and ugly – even Guadagnino’s other 2024 movie, ‘Queer,’ was better visually than this.
Is it all supposed to mean something, or is Guadagnino just drawing attention to the fact that this is – like the stories that Alma, Maggie, and Hank all may or may not construct about themselves – a fictional narrative? We even hear the director say “Cut!” at the very end of the film, suggesting that he’s not trying to get at any real psychological, social, or emotional truth. And the movie doesn’t feel like that either.
Despite the disjointed script and characters they’re given to work with, Julia Roberts and Andrew Garfield do fine work here. Roberts gives a performance that is both mysterious and somehow intimate, and effectively conveys Alma’s increasing terror as her carefully woven world begins to unravel around her. Garfield is similarly nuanced, making Hank both somehow sympathetic and yet totally the kind of arrogant, brash, rock-star academic who thinks he floats above the rules.
The movie’s secret weapon may be Michael Stuhlbarg, who exhibits patience, wariness, exasperation, and his own quirky, embittered set of values as Frederik – although he can be an intrusive boor with the best of them as well. The weakest link here is the gifted comedian Edebiri, who exhibits flashes of Maggie’s inner rage and cynicism, but who can no more carry this weighty material than she could the flat ‘Opus’ from earlier this year (the one in which John Malkovich attempted to play a rock god).
From time to time in ‘After The Hunt,’ Guadagnino puts a loudly ticking clock on the soundtrack as just another signifier that something dreadfully urgent and important is happening. But like everything else in the film, it’s instead merely annoying. And what exactly is happening anyway? Is the film indicting cancel culture, the #MeToo movement itself, or the insular bubble of academic life?
It’s all too incoherent to get a straight answer, and no one seems to know (except maybe Stuhlbarg) whether to play this as serious drama or histrionic soap opera. Either way, ‘After The Hunt’ is an empty mess that tries to say too much about a lot of different topics, and ends up saying nothing at all.
‘After The Hunt’ receives a score of 40 out of 100.
A college professor is forced to grapple with her own secretive past after one of her colleagues is faced with a serious accusation.
Who is in the cast of ‘After The Hunt’?
Julia Roberts as Alma Imhoff
Ayo Edebiri as Margaret “Maggie” Resnick
Andrew Garfield as Henrik “Hank” Gibson
Michael Stuhlbarg as Frederik Imhoff
Chloë Sevigny as Dr. Kim Sayers
Lío Mehiel as Alex
It’s been eight years since the great Daniel Day-Lewis last appeared in a motion picture – ‘Phantom Thread,’ one of my least favorite Paul Thomas Anderson films – so the news of his return was rightly regarded with lots of anticipation.
But while Day-Lewis remains a riveting, magnetic presence on screen, the film itself, ‘Anemone,’ ends up somewhat of disappointment. Co-written by the actor with his son, Ronan Day-Lewis – who also makes his feature directorial debut here – ‘Anemone’ is painstakingly slow in stretching a thin, rather well-worn plot to two hours. The younger Day-Lewis pulls off some gorgeous imagery (as befitting his work as a painter), but aside from that and the acting by his father and Sean Bean, there’s not enough here to make this a welcome return for the three-time Oscar winner.
‘Anemone’ opens with what chillingly looks like children’s drawings of the Troubles in Ireland and the conflict between the IRA and the British Army, immediately giving us an idea of the story’s backdrop. But the main narrative itself is revealed only sluggishly, as Jem Stoker (Sean Bean) leaves his partner Nessa (Samantha Morton) and her son Brian (Samuel Bottomley) on a quest to see his estranged younger brother Ray (Daniel Day-Lewis), who has exiled himself to a cabin deep in a remote forest for 20 years with virtually no contact from his family.
There’s a palpable unease between the two men at first, with the paranoid and incommunicative Ray only gradually opening up to his sibling. As the film continues, we find out – bit by bit – that Jem is deeply religious while Ray is not (with his own very good reasons, which he recounts in a long monologue as disgusting as it is bizarre), that both men were subjected to a brutal upbringing from their father, and that both also served in the military during the Troubles – with Ray in particularly wracked by memories that he can’t let go. But Jem is on a mission to bring his brother back with him in order to deal with a family situation that has reached the point of crisis.
(L to R) Ronan Day-Lewis and Daniel Day-Lewis at the premiere of ‘Anemone’. Photo: Focus Features.
In the end, that storyline is just not enough to sustain any momentum, and ‘Anemone’ begins to drag in all the wrong places, just as the critical revelations begin to fully come to light. There are lots of scenes of Ray or Ray and Jem walking through woods or along beaches, which only pad out the essential slimness of the narrative. And that narrative itself doesn’t necessarily tell us anything new that we haven’t seen in tales like this before, of absent, violent, or disengaged fathers, or of men traumatized by the institutions in which they were raised and the legacies they bequeath their sons.
Ronan Day-Lewis and cinematographer Ben Fordesman pull off a number of gorgeous, painterly compositions – while working primarily in muted greens, blues, and browns – but the director also shows his relative greenness behind the camera with some awkwardly showy moves as well. More hallucinatory sequences are mysterious seemingly just for the sake of it, while other scenes – like a massive hailstorm battering down on the characters – seem heavy-handed in their symbolism, as is the fact that the flower of the title, which Jem and Ray’s father used to grow, continues to bloom outside Ray’s cabin.
‘Anemone’ is a small movie, with just five main speaking parts, but of course Daniel Day-Lewis is the main attraction here. And he brings all of his skills to bear in what is certainly an enigmatic, shape-shifting character. Ray Stoker is at times reclusive, misanthropic, cruel, and cold, with a hint of violence churning under the surface; but Day-Lewis subtly, masterfully peels back the hard exterior to show us vulnerability, hurt, and even love. His work meets the moment in a movie that needs him to essentially give it purpose.
Two often underrated actors get a chance to shine here as well. Samantha Morton’s role as the woman at the nexus of the lives of these three men is less well-defined, unfortunately, but Morton does what she can and creates a portrait of a woman for whom a hard life has not quite destroyed her heart just yet. And we have to give it up for Sean Bean, another great British actor who often doesn’t get the credit he deserves, as Jem, the grounded, decent, pragmatic counterweight to his impulsive and tormented brother. Spoiler alert: Bean also avoids the fate that usually befalls his characters in films, which is nice to see.
Final Thoughts
(L to R) Daniel Day-Lewis, Ronan Day-Lewis and Sean Bean at the premiere of ‘Anemone’. Photo: Focus Features.
As we stated earlier, Daniel Day-Lewis is an actor one can always watch for his total submersion into whatever character he’s playing, and he’s lost none of that powerful presence in the eight years he’s been away. ‘Anemone’ is worth seeing if you are a DDL completist, while Ronan Day-Lewis certain has enough visual acumen to point toward a promising career as a filmmaker. Bobby Krlic (aka The Haxan Cloak) also contributes a haunting, guitar-driven score that adds a lot of atmosphere.
But by the time it reaches a climax that should be emotional but doesn’t quite get there, ‘Anemone’ doesn’t offer enough of a compelling reason for Daniel Day Lewis’ return, except for the fact that the film – like its subject matter – is a family affair.
‘Anemone’ receives a score of 50 out of 100.
(L to R) Daniel Day-Lewis and Sean Bean at the premiere of ‘Anemone’. Photo: Focus Features.
What is the plot of ‘Anemone’?
A mysterious shared history has left brothers Ray (Daniel Day-Lewis) and Jem (Sean Bean) Stoker estranged for 20 years, with Ray living in self-imposed exile. But a family crisis forces Jem to track Ray down in his cabin deep in the woods and ask him to revisit the most troubling moments of their past.
(L to R): Tom Blyth and Russell Tovey in ‘Plainclothes’, a Magnolia Pictures release. Photo: Magnolia Pictures.
In theaters via Magnet Releasing on September 19th is ‘Plainclothes’, a dramatic thriller that explores one man’s conflicting ties to duty and desire that threaten to tear him apart.
(L to R): Tom Blyth and Russell Tovey in ‘Plainclothes’, a Magnolia Pictures release. Photo: Magnolia Pictures.
Movies with an LGBTQ+ vantage point, particularly those dealing with characters who struggle with their sexuality, are tough to get right. There is a tendency towards histrionics or hyper-focusing on certain details.
With ‘Plainclothes’, writer-director Carmen Emmi largely delivers.
Script and Direction
(L to R): Tom Blyth and Russell Tovey in ‘Plainclothes’, a Magnolia Pictures release. Photo: Magnolia Pictures.
Emmi, making the leap from short films and TV work to features with this assured, carefully crafted debut, has created several excellent, heartfelt and authentic central roles that provide solid source material via a committed cast.
If he sometimes lets his stylistic side swamp the storytelling with flashbacks in various footage formats to indicate time periods, it doesn’t ultimately detract from the full impact of the movie.
Cast and Performances
(L to R): Tom Blyth and Russell Tovey in ‘Plainclothes’, a Magnolia Pictures release. Photo: Magnolia Pictures.
The highlights here are Brits Tom Blyth and Russell Tovey, who not only deliver nuance and honest emotion, but do so while both offering convincing American accents. Blyth in particular draws you into his character’s world, whether he’s working sting operations on gay men in mall toilets or dealing with the complex, twisty dynamics of his family.
And the supporting cast, from the other cops in the department to that aforementioned family, certainly do good work bringing smaller, but vital, roles to life.
Final Thoughts
Russell Tovey in ‘Plainclothes’, a Magnolia Pictures release. Photo: Magnolia Pictures.
Side-stepping many of the cliché traps possible in a story such as this, ‘Plainclothes’ delivers with low-fi filming and superb central performances.
Emmi establishes himself as a director to watch in the coming years.
‘Plainclothes’ receives 75 out of 100.
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What’s the story of ‘Plainclothes?
At his mother’s New Year’s Eve party Lucas (Tom Blyth), a young police officer, loses a letter no one was ever meant to read. Amid the backdrop of the suffocating family party, the search for the letter unlocks memories of a past he’s tried to forget: months earlier, while working undercover in a mall bathroom, Lucas arrested men by seducing them.
But when he encounters Andrew (Russell Tovey), everything changes. What begins as another setup becomes something far more electric and intimate. As their secret connection deepens and police pressure to deliver arrests intensifies, Lucas finds himself torn between duty and desire.
(L to R) Jude Law and Vanessa Kirby on the set of ‘Eden’. Photo: Jasin Boland.
We can’t say that ‘Eden’ is a very good movie, but we will say it’s a pretty entertaining one. Based on a true story, the latest from veteran director Ron Howard (‘Thirteen Lives’) is perhaps the most un-Ron Howard-like film of his career – a dark, sometimes brooding, sometimes over-the-top exploration of human beings giving into their worst impulses instead of coming together to help each other.
Noah Pink’s screenplay offers a cynical view of what happens when people try to disconnect from the rest of the world, and the movie’s ultimate insights are not exactly news. It also suffers from uneven pacing and tonal issues. But its intermittently gripping story and solid performances from its topline cast – especially Sydney Sweeney and Ana de Armas – make it fascinating to watch.
Story and Direction
Ron Howard on the set of ‘Eden’. Photo: Jasin Boland.
In 1929, German doctor Friedrich Ritter (Jude Law) and his partner Dore Strauch (Vanessa Kirby) settle on a remote atoll in the Galapagos Islands called Floreana, where Ritter aims to create a simpler life away from the brutal post-World War I environment that is fostering fascism around the world. Three years later, having read about Ritter’s exploits – which have made him famous back home – Heinz Wittmer (Daniel Brühl) and his pregnant new wife Margret (Sydney Sweeney), along with Heinz’s son Harry (Jonathan Tittel), arrive on Floreana to follow in Ritter’s footsteps and create their own homestead.
But Ritter and Dore, who are nothing if not world-class misanthropes, are not pleased at the intrusion. “Nothing about our life here is magic,” Ritter warns the idealistic Heinz, adding that “failure is inevitable” for the couple, who make a fairly successful go at it despite Ritter’s admonishments. Yet Ritter, Dore, and the Wittmers are all unhappy at the arrival of the Baroness Eloise Bosquet de Wagner Wehrhorn (Ana de Armas), a debauched denizen of European high society who shows up with her two male lovers and the intent of building an exclusive resort on Floreana.
While the Wittmers, Ritter, and Strauch are all accustomed to the rigors of life on the island, the Baroness is not, and she soon sets a chain of events in motion that find all three groups – Ritter and Strauch, the Wittmers, and the Baroness and her entourage – constantly shifting allegiances and ultimately turning on each other. It’s a scenario that’s not unexpected, and Pink’s screenplay often forces the characters into situations and decisions to drive the intended narrative, rather than let it flow out of the characters organically. The result is a story that moves in fits and starts and often has the characters acting mainly get the story from one pre-determined point to the next.
(L to R) Felix Kammerer, Ana de Armas and Toby Wallace in ‘Eden’. Photo: Vertical.
This leads to a lack of urgency in the proceedings, with only a wild scene in which Margret gives birth by herself – as she is attacked by wild dogs all while the Baroness’ lovers raid the Wittmers’ food supplies – approaching levels of tension and outright horror that suggests the ghastliness of the overall situation. Other events play out largely as one might expect, and the tone veers from one of grim reality to outright camp (as in a late dinner party scene that made us think of a similar sequence in ‘The Rocky Horror Picture Show’ – albeit without the latter’s shocking reveal of what was on the menu).
Howard is more than confident on a technical and visual level (the Australian location shoot makes the isolation of Floreana feel real), but doesn’t seem as sure-footed in handling the tonal shifts or the overall darker nature of the material. The result is a movie in which you know what’s going to happen in the end – but you still want to keep looking to see if the film completely collapses or not (which it almost does in the third act).
Cast and Performances
(L to R) Felix Kammerer, Ana de Armas and Toby Wallace in ‘Eden’. Photo: Jasin Boland.
Everyone’s German accents waver throughout the film (except for Daniel Brühl’s, of course), but the performances are on solid footing for the most part. Sydney Sweeney does the best work overall, downplaying her physical attributes while effectively and subtly charting Margret’s journey from innocence and fear to strength and even a kind of ruthlessness. At the other end of the scale, de Armas is wildly flamboyant and outlandish but far more entertaining than her bland turn in ‘Ballerina’ earlier this year.
Law also gives quite a complicated and over-the-top performance, with his steel chompers (Ritter has his originals removed to prevent infection) and un-self-conscious full frontal nudity, and while Kirby is quite good at portraying Dore’s smirking distaste for others (“They’re clearly suffering…shall we f**k?” she inquires to Ritter at one point, evidently turned on by others’ misery), she doesn’t get nearly enough to do as she should, and is mostly left standing around reacting to the others.
Final Thoughts
(L to R) Daniel Brühl and Jude Law star in ‘Eden’. Photo: Vertical.
A film about people separating into their own camps and battling each other while the rest of civilization burns certainly has its relevance in our current situation, although it’s rich coming from the director who introduced the world by and large to JD Vance. And as with that woeful film, there’s a kind of lack of substance underneath the hood of ‘Eden’ that makes it ultimately a shallow exercise.
But nevertheless, it’s neither the complete disaster some folks have made it out to be, nor is it anywhere near a high point on Howard’s filmography. It works as misery porn about good-looking actors getting nasty, deceitful and violent with each other, although that may not be the result its director intended.
‘Eden’ receives a score of 55 out of 100.
Vanessa Kirby stars in ‘Eden’. Photo: Vertical.
What is the plot of ‘Eden’?
A group of disillusioned outsiders abandon modern society in search of a new beginning, settling on a remote, uninhabited island. But their utopian dream quickly unravels as tensions spiral, desperation takes hold, and a twisted power struggle leads to betrayal, violence, and death.
Who is in the cast of ‘Eden’?
Jude Law as Dr. Friedrich Ritter
Vanessa Kirby as Dora Strauch
Daniel Brühl as Heinz Wittmer
Sydney Sweeney as Margret Wittmer
Ana de Armas as Baroness Eloise Bosquet de Wagner Wehrhorn
Jonathan Tittel as Harry Wittmer
Richard Roxburgh as Allan Hancock
Toby Wallace as Robert Phillipson
Felix Kammerer as Rudolph Lorenz
‘Eden’ opens in theaters on August 22nd. Photo: Vertical.
(L to R) Tilda Swinton and Julianne Moore in ‘The Room Next Door’. Photo: Warner Bros. Pictures.
‘The Room Next Door’ receives 5.5 out of 10 stars.
Opening in wide release in theaters on January 18th, ‘The Room Next Door’ represents something that would ordinarily be cause for celebration among cineastes –– it marks the English-language debut of accomplished and rightly celebrated writer/director Pedro Almodóvar working in the sort of low-key yet meaning-packed drama genre he has shone in in the past.
And it also feature another key element of the filmmaker’s career –– superb female actors in the lead roles. The problem is that with this latest effort, the switch to entirely English has somehow resulted in the life of the piece getting lost in translation.
Does ‘The Room Next Door’ house quality filmmaking?
(L to R) Julianne Moore and Tilda Swinton in ‘The Room Next Door’. Photo: Warner Bros. Pictures.
Perhaps the biggest issue with ‘The Room Next Door’ is quite how stilted and staid it all feels. While you don’t necessarily look to Almodóvar for genre-smashing fireworks, you might hope for some real level of passion, and that simply doesn’t really come through here.
While the cast acquits themselves adequately, the dialogue they have to deliver sounds more like something out of a film school effort, with labored exposition in the early going (pity poor Tilda Swinton having to explain how she worked late nights and didn’t get to see much of her daughter to the very woman who worked the long shifts with her all those years ago), or Julianne Moore doing her best to breathe life into a sequence where the two women look around a rented house deciding which room to each take.
The film is full of moments that feel like they were excised from other, better dramas and though the main pair are still at the top of their game, nothing in the script is worthy of their talents.
Script and Direction
Director Pedro Almodóvar in ‘The Room Next Door’. Photo: Warner Bros. Pictures.
Almodóvar is here adapting Sigrid Nunez’ novel ‘What Are You Going Through’ and you do rather wonder whether the novel had deeper layers that Almodóvar somehow didn’t manage to transfer into his screenplay.
While the early portions feature Moore’s Ingrid and Swinton’s Martha reminiscing about old times, the disjointed nature of Martha’s recollections in particular make the movie tough going. The story jumps around in time, but with little consequence or real impact, and editor Teresa Font doesn’t do too much to help, sequences ending abruptly or feeling choppy.
Visually, the film has more to recommend it as Almodóvar floods the screen with color and keeps the locales beautiful –– it’s just a shame that the actual filmmaking is so timid and staid, cutting from one average, locked-down shot to another, and rarely finding much in the way of natural rhythm.
‘The Room Next Door’: performances
Beyond Julianne Moore, Tilda Swinton and later arrival John Turturro, there’s little to recommend on the performance front.
Julianne Moore as Ingrid
Julianne Moore in ‘The Room Next Door’. Photo: Warner Bros. Pictures.
A reporter-turned-novelist, Ingrid is our focal point, but despite Moore giving her some spirit, she’s honestly so bland and first base that it’s hard to argue she’s worth spending time with. Her exchanges with Swinton’s characters only ever work because of the two performers’ consummate skill.
Tilda Swinton as Martha
Tilda Swinton in ‘The Room Next Door’. Photo: Warner Bros. Pictures.
Swinton has more to play given that her character, who spent years reporting on conflicts, now finds herself at war with cancer. There are layers and depth to Martha and Swinton naturally finds them all, keeping her composure when necessary but hinting at darker depths.
Yet, like Moore, she struggles to do much with the first-base scripting.
John Turturro as Damian
(L to R) Julianne Moore and John Turturro in ‘The Room Next Door’. Photo: Warner Bros. Pictures.
Memorably talked about before he ever arrives on screen (since he’s someone both women slept with and recall as an enthusiastic lover), Turturro’s Damian is possibly the only supporting cast member who really makes much of an impact.
He fully commits to his quirky yet quiet character and his scenes are watchable.
Honestly, the less said about Nivola’s character the better, since he’s more of a stereotype than an actual functioning human being. A police officer who interrogates Ingrid over the circumstances of Martha’s self-administered euthanasia, he’s in one scene and comes across as a plot point –– a religious fanatic who has serious issues with what Martha has done and is threatening Ingrid with punishment for her part in supporting her friend.
Between this and ‘Kraven the Hunter,’ Nivola isn’t having a great time of it lately, though he can thank a great performance in ‘The Brutalist’ for helping keep his cine-ledger balanced between disappointment and success.
Final Thoughts
(L to R) Tilda Swinton and Julianne Moore in ‘The Room Next Door’. Photo: Warner Bros. Pictures.
If this is what happens when the great Pedro Almodóvar switches to working entirely in English, he might be better served sticking to Spanish-language movies. He has nothing to prove given his hefty past of successful movies and full awards cabinet, but this feels like a stumble.
If a movie with two of the best actors around and the seemingly compelling twin subjects of friendship and assisted suicide can’t bring the drama, you know something is very wrong.
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What is the plot of ‘The Room Next Door’?
Ingrid (Julianne Moore) and Martha (Tilda Swinton) were close friends in their youth, when they worked together at the same magazine. Ingrid went on to become an autofiction novelist while Martha became a war reporter, and they were separated by the circumstances of life. After years of being out of touch, they meet again in an extreme but strangely sweet situation.
Who is in the cast of ‘The Room Next Door’?
Tilda Swinton as Martha / Michelle
Julianne Moore as Ingrid
John Turturro as Damian
Alessandro Nivola as Policeman
(L to R) Tilda Swinton and director Pedro Almodóvar in ‘The Room Next Door’. Photo: Warner Bros. Pictures.
Moviefone recently had the pleasure of speaking with Pierce Brosnan about his work on ‘The Last Rifleman’, his first reaction to the screenplay, the journey his character goes on and the people he meets along the way, working with the late John Amos, the guilt his character has over losing his wife and his best friend, playing a character in their nineties, and what Brosnan still wants to accomplish in his life before his time runs out.
(L to R) Pierce Brosnan and Samuel Bottomley in ‘The Last Rifleman’. Photo: Sky Cinema.
Moviefone: To begin with, can you talk about your first reaction to the screenplay and why you wanted to be a part of this project?
Pierce Brosnan: I wanted to be a part of it for the memory of the men, the young men who went to war all those years back in time. I wanted to work with Terry Loane, who I’ve tried to work with before. I wanted to go back to Ireland to make this movie and be part of such a production and such a story, to capture something that had a poignancy and a memory of pain and suffering and a lament for the loss of life, loss to the barbarity of war and the barbarity of war that haunts a man and still lives with us today. I thought it was beautifully rendered and I thought it was even more poignant that it came from the essence of a story that had a truth to it.
MF: Can you talk about the journey that Artie goes on and the incredibly kind strangers that he meets along the way that help him on his journey?
PB: Well, I think the essence of his being is kindness, and I thought it was a wonderful road movie, and I was surrounded by such great performers. To go back to my homeland, to go back to Ireland, to discover a part of my homeland, the north of Ireland, which I fell in love with, the people, the landscape, they’ve had a deep poignancy for me.
John Amos in ‘The West Wing’. Photo: Warner Bros. Television.
MF: You have a fantastic scene with the late actor John Amos. What was it like working with him and having him as a scene partner?
PB: Oh, John, I have the greatest love and fondness of memory for him. He is a man that I had seen over the years of being an actor myself and living in Los Angeles and coming to America in early 1982 and finding a life and a career, and discovering all these wonderful actors who have great stories of character. To be an entertainer, to be an actor, to be in the public eye, to be on the stage for so many years like John was, and then to sit in his company, along with his son, it had, again, a very meaningful memory for me. We got on famously. I also had my mother on the shoot with me and my wife, Keely. So, it was a joy to have my family with me and to share this charming road movie of a story. So, John was great. Lovely voice, lovely man, kindhearted, and a joy to be with.
MF: Can you talk about the love and guilt that Artie carries for both his late wife Maggie, and his friend Charlie, who was lost in WWII?
PB: Yes. Well, we do as humans carry so many regrets and misfortunes that some of us never heal from. Maggie suffers from dementia, which is such a cruel plight on our humanity. They had such a love, and the torment and the pain and the sacrifice of war, and that moment of hesitation and the battle in the fury of war where you freeze, and you must suffer with the consequences of your fear and not moving forward and perhaps being cowardly and not courageous in that torrential tumult of war, that he loses his friend. That’s the essence of the story. Again, using such a word, that I thought was well rendered. Terry Loane, I go back to, because he made one of my favorite films, and my wife Keely, he made a movie called ‘Mickybo and Me’, which is a charming film if no one has ever seen it. We both, Keely, my wife and I fell in love with that film. Then lo and behold, Terry came to me with another project, which never found wings, and time and years ticked on. Then he came to me with this jewel of a story about Artie, ‘The Last Rifleman’. So I said, “Let’s go. Let’s make the movie.”
Pierce Brosnan in ‘The Last Rifleman’. Photo: Sky Cinema.
MF: What are the challenges of playing an older character and can you also talk about the make-up process that you went through for this film?
PB: Well, at this age, I mean, I’m now 70 years of age, so I’m in that wonderful act of the third. But to play this man, I wished and desired to make some transformation, and I found a company called Millennium FX, and they came out to visit with me in California, and we did casts, and we looked at various presentations of myself, of possibilities of what I might look like when I’m 93, and I thought that was necessary for me to try and portray this character. So, it was a ritual every day, and I knew it was going to be so, and that is the delight of being an actor now at this age and having done what I’ve done as an actor and lived in the world of some representation of myself as a man and as an actor, to try and get away from that, to try and transform. So, it was quite demanding, but it was also a wonderful meditation every morning, with these wonderful artists. It would take about two hours and it was a meditation. I was up at 5:30am, and I would sit in the chair, and these wonderful artists just transformed me. I would open my eyes and after a period there’d be the character. Also, as a painter, as an artist, I did studies, so I have a whole series of self-portraits of myself as this character. So, I came away not only with portraying the man, but also with a piece of artwork, which has its own story.
MF: Finally, Artie goes on this journey because he feels that he has one more thing he must do before he dies. Is there anything that you feel like you need to do before your time on this Earth is up?
PB: Oh, dear, I suppose. But there are so many. You know, one last performance that will seal the deal, one great piece of poetry, or a memoir, or a painting. Yeah, there’s so many. It all comes from an artistic life, but I don’t really think in those terms of last wishes or last moments. I’m just hope that it comes gently.
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What is the plot of ‘The Last Rifleman’?
Inspired by a true story, Pierce Brosnan plays Artie Crawford, a World War II veteran living in a care home in Northern Ireland who has just lost his wife. On the 75th anniversary of the D-Day landings, he decides to escape his care home and embarks on a journey to France to pay his final respects.
First set in 1950s Brighton, a gay policeman, Tom Burgess (Harry Styles), marries schoolteacher Marion Taylor (Emma Corrin) while being in a relationship with Patrick Hazlewood (David Dawson), a museum curator.
The secret they share threatens to ruin them all and continues for decades, with a flash-forward to the late 1990s depicting an older Marion (Gina McKee) now caring for the ailing Patrick (Rupert Everett), against Tom’s (Linus Roache) wishes.
Moviefone recently had the pleasure of speaking with director Michael Grandage and actress Gina McKee about their work on ‘My Policeman,’ why Grandage wanted to make the movie, setting the movie in two separate timelines, the pain and regret that Marion feels, why she chooses to help Patrick, and how McKee worked with actress Emma Corrin to create the character.
You can read the full interviews below or click on the video player above to watch our interviews with director Michael Grandage and Gina McKee about ‘My Policeman.’
Moviefone: To begin with, as a director, what excited you about this project and what were some of the themes that you wanted to explore with this movie?
Michael Grandage: Well, it’s always great when you think you can bring something of a personal voice to something. I was born in the England that this movie is set in, and the law didn’t change until I was quite young. When it did, there were years of prejudice left after it.
I kind of thought it would be lovely to be able to make something quite apart from all of the cinematic reasons I wanted to make it, quite apart from all the thematic reasons, it would also be wonderful to make a movie that might be part of a slightly bigger debate. Because in spite of all of the wonderful advances that have been made, that I’m very proud of over the last 40 years by the LGBTQ+ community, I think for the moment it’s feeling a little fragile.
I think right now it would be great to have a film in the consciousness of young people that helps them understand a little bit about what it’s like if you live in a society where you can’t be free to be yourself. So, for me, and I haven’t even touched on the answer to your question about all of the aesthetic and creative reasons, but that’s one big reason why I’d love to make a movie that is part of something that I think is important right now.
MF: Can you talk about the challenges of setting the movie in two separate timelines?
MG: Yeah, I mean for me, I actually see it almost as three because you can’t help but take the timeline you are in and watch it through the prism of 2022. You watch a film that takes place 23 years ago in 1999, and then beyond that. In a way, you go on some brief moment of time travel right up to the present to see what has changed from a societal point of view. I think that’s also helpful as part of the bigger picture.
But the biggest reason I wanted to do it was because of the fact that I believe that missing 40 years in the film, I think we change hugely in our personalities in a period like that. I was wanting to explore the whole notion of time and memory and what it does and how, sometimes, it only seems like yesterday. The reason we have that phrase is sometimes it does, and other days it absolutely doesn’t.
So, there’s a little moment when Rupert Everett’s character in the film is getting his pills from Gina McKee, and he looks up at Gina and just in a tiny flash he sees the younger Marion looking down at him. Because that’s what memory sometimes does, that’s how memory works, that’s how time works. But it’s a brief fleeting moment, and I think you can only do that if you’re playing with the two time periods.
I knew I wanted to use it very fleetingly, the whole way you bring the one time period into another time period. I barely use it at all, but it’s there as a kind of unspoken thing, if you like.
MF: Gina, could talk about the pain and the regret that Marion has lived with through all these years?
Gina McKee: I think that’s a really good starting point because as you may have established already, we meet three people in the 1950s, who are brought together by love and divided by prejudice. The things that they experience with each other and the things that they do for and against one another indelibly marks them. So, there’s a lot. All three characters have regret and certainly a huge amount of pain. In Marion’s case, a massive learning curve.
She also has a huge sense of duty and love. The bond of love brings her together with Tom, and they find solace in that love. But I think ultimately, the courage to face the past is something that completely drew me to the film. What happens when somebody like that doesn’t continue to seek refuge, who says, “No, we’ve got to check this out. We’ve got to look at this.” I think that’s a wonderful dynamic and ultimately for me, a very hopeful thing.
MF: Why does Marion decide to help Patrick, all these years later, even against Tom’s own wishes?
GM: Because she has to, there’s no way forward. They’re in a holding pattern and that can’t continue. You’ve got a woman who is now in retirement and it’s now or never. So, I think that there is lots of forms of love and I think Marion’s duty to Tom is absolute. Sometimes, the way she interprets duty is completely screwed up as you see in the movie.
But that is really the heart of her motivation. Then, what continues for decades is duty. It is a strong bond that they have, but it’s a bond which is about solace as opposed to moving forward. Those elements are really potent.
MF: Finally, since you are playing the older version of Marion, did you work at all with Emma Corrin, who plays the younger version, to establish a connection between the two performance?
GM: Emma Corrin and I, because it was COVID protocols, we couldn’t physically meet. We were in separate bubbles. But we did talk on the phone. We also all had a collective Zoom conversation, which was quite extensive and that was really useful. We talked with Michael Grandage, our director, who became a brilliant conduit.
Also, I had the good fortune to look at about three or four of her scenes that Emma shot already, because they shot the 1950s stuff first. That was a brilliant resource. I also checked out as much as I could of Emma’s work and studied elements of the way she has a fantastic ability to watch and listen, and that comes across in her work enormously. So, those elements absorbed hopefully by osmosis. I found them really useful.
Set in the small Irish town of Inisherin during the Irish Civil War, Pádraic Súilleabháin (Colin Farrell) discovers one day to his surprise that his best friend and drinking buddy Colm Doherty (Brendan Gleeson) no longer wants anything to do with him, with no other reason given.
Broken hearted, Pádraic confides in his sister, Siobhán (Kerry Condon), who encourages him not to give up on their friendship. Pádraic tries to befriend Colm again, or at least find out why he no longer wants to be his friend. But Colm will not change his mind and tells Pádraic that if he ever speaks to him again, he will cut off his own fingers. What follows is a war between the two men, one that the town of Inisherin will not soon forget.
‘The Banshees of Inisherin’ is a simple story, beautifully written and directed by Martin McDonagh, featuring brilliant performances from Brendan Gleeson, and especially Colin Farrell. The movie examines friendship, loneliness, and sacrifice, while still being quite funny and having a lot to say about humanity.
McDonagh’s script is very smart and says a lot about human nature. While the story is simple, it allows the filmmaker to really focus on these characters and examine their relationships with each other. Everything about Inisherin seems authentic, right down to the accents and the gorgeous landscapes shot by cinematographer Ben Davis. McDonagh builds an immersive environment that as an audience member you completely fall in love with.
But McDonagh’s screenplay is also very funny, and the film finds the dark humor in the unfortunate situation. Farrell and Gleeson both clearly understand their characters, and much of the humor comes out of how serious the situation becomes. The dialogue is also very clever but seems incredibly organic at the same time.
McDonagh also wisely chose the Irish Civil War as the backdrop to this smaller but still very bloody war between former friends. It acts as an allegory for what war really is and how any person is capable of waging war on another human being. The fact that Pádraic and Colm were lifelong friends that could so easily turn on each other, is parallel to the actual family members fighting against each other in the Irish Civil War.
Kerry Condon also gives a strong performance as Siobhán, Pádraic’s understanding sister. She tries to make the peace between Pádraic and Colm but to no avail. Condon has great chemistry with Farrell and they are terrific in their scenes together.
Pádraic is reliant on Siobhán, and that has been difficult for her as she dreams of leaving her small town but worries what will happen to her brother if she leaves him behind. Condon’s performance communicates her character’s feelings with very little dialogue.
Barry Keoghan does his best as Dominic Kearney, a local who tries to befriend Pádraic when Colm turns his back on him. Keoghan is a promising young actor, but his character is never given enough time to really be fleshed out and his outcome does little to affect the main characters.
Brendan Gleeson gives a very powerful performance and as crazy as his characters actions are, makes them completely believable to the audience. While he may seem cold at first, the actor is able to break his character’s facade at times and lets us in on the sorrow and emptiness he feels. Colm seeks greatness to outlast him mortality, and in doing so, forsakes friendship and humanity.
The movie is really an examination of what happens when we shut other people out of our lives. After we all spent time in lockdown during the pandemic, the movie really illuminates for the audience the idea that human beings need other human beings to survive, and what happens to a person in complete solidarity.
But frankly, I expect a top-level performance from an actor like Brendan Gleeson, what I didn’t expect was how good a performance Colin Farrell would give. I’ve always really liked Farrell as an actor, but thought he was unfairly underrated. I hope that changes with this film, because it is the best performance of his career and definitely deserves Oscar attention.
In some ways, Farrell is really a character actor rather than a leading man, having given great performances in supporting roles in ‘The Batman,’ ‘The Gentlemen,’ and even ‘Dumbo.’ While Pádraic is definitely the main character of this story, Farrell completely loses himself in the role, creating an awkward and insecure man heartbroken by rejection.
Gleeson and Farrell also have great chemistry together after appearing in McDonagh’s modern classic ‘In Bruges,’ and make a compelling onscreen duo. I imagine many ‘Bruges’ fans will want to see this movie because of the reuniting cast, they won’t be disappointed, but should be prepared that this is NOT ‘In Bruges 2.’
In the end, writer and director Martin McDonagh has crafted another compelling, if not slightly odd, comedic drama with brilliant performances from its lead actors. ‘The Banshees of Inisherin’ is one of the best films of the year, and Colin Farrell’s performance deserves a lot of attention come awards time.
