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Why most Hollywood marriages rarely follow the script

Not one to waste a lockdown, Ethan Hawke spent the dark days of 2020 assembling The Last Movie Stars, a remarkable documentary series on one of his heroes, Paul Newman. But not just Newman, because the great star of the 1950s and 1960s was part of one of Hollywood’s most celebrated and enduring couples.

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Marilyn Monroe: unravelling the myth

Next Thursday marks the 60th anniversary of Marilyn Monroe’s death, but in some ways it’s as if she never went away. In May, a new documentary about her life and death was released which rehashed conspiracy theories that have inspired shelf-loads of books. In September, Netflix will release a biopic directed by Andrew Dominik, more on which in a moment.

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A very good year: the best films of 2022 so far

With Covid lockdowns behind us (for the moment), and cinemas enjoying their first uninterrupted year’s business since 2019, there’s been an encouraging rebound at the box office.

Art of Persuasion: Jane Austen on the big screen

When Jane Austen died in 1817, at the age of just 41, Napoleon was still alive, the US was an upstart minor power and Britain was just entering its world-dominating golden age.

The pop stars who tried to make a name in the movies

Taylor Swift has hinted that she’d like to act more, and perhaps even write and direct a feature, after making a short film for her song, All Too Well. She has acted occasionally before, on TV shows, but now says she’s “very curious” about movies, and would “love to” continue working in film.

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Austin Butler: ‘I had feelings of imposter syndrome before playing Elvis’

About a quarter of an hour into Baz Luhrmann’s bright and brash biopic Elvis, unscrupulous promoter Colonel Tom Parker (Tom Hanks) is discussing the finer points of soft country with his leading musical acts when he hears a strange but compelling noise coming from a phonograph.

Francois Ozon: ‘If you don’t have money, you have to wait for death’

What would you do if your father asked you to help him die? This is the fraught ethical dilemma posed by Everything Went Fine, François Ozon’s witty and powerful drama based on a true story and novel by Emmanuèle Bernheim. Sophie Marceau is Manue, a Parisian writer whose contemplative existence is rudely interrupted when she finds out her father, André (André Dussollier) has had a stroke.

Is there method to the madness?

In a recent interview with The Guardian, the actor Jon Bernthal described his preparations for a forthcoming role. Cast as corrupt police officer Wayne Jenkins in We Own this City, a new mini-series from David Simon about the antics of a rogue armed unit in the Baltimore PD, Bernthal cut no corners.

Laurence Olivier: The life and times of a tortured man of stage and screen

From the start, Laurence Olivier and Vivien Leigh were cast as a golden couple, the Brad and Jen of their day. He was the rising Shakespearean star of British theatre, she the doll-like beauty who’d beaten out the heavy guns of Hollywood to land the plum role of Scarlett O’Hara in Gone with the Wind. Smiling into the cameras on a hundred red carpets, they certainly looked the part, but their 20-year marriage was tempestuous and dysfunctional, a hotbed of mutual unhappiness.

Nicolas Cage: shamanic genius or shameless ham?

Is Nicolas Cage a great actor or a bad one? I’m quite sure I have no idea. He won an Oscar, but then again, so did John Wayne, who couldn’t act to save his life and always played himself.

‘It’s a such a privilege when you get to work on a massive action movie’

When you see the longships coming, you know you’re in trouble. At the start of Robert Eggers’ extraordinary new film The Northman, they sweep into a Viking port, bearing a warrior king, Aurvandill (Ethan Hawke), who’s wounded, and surrounded by enemies.

The tenacious rise to stardom of Katharine Hepburn

When you think of Katharine Hepburn, the first thing you remember is her voice.

Fantastic Beasts might just escape the Rowling backlash

The Harry Potter brand has taken a battering of late. In late 2019, JK Rowling was set upon by activists after tweeting support for Maya Forstater, a woman who was fired after saying that trans women are male. That row has rumbled on, with Rowling writing essays to clarify her position, stating that “if sex isn’t real, then the lived reality of women is erased”, and explaining why she finds terms such as “people who menstruate” demeaning.

Oscars 2022: A strong field but nobody else is in Campion’s league

After the privations of 2021, when a muted ceremony held in LA’s Union Station looked about as much fun as an emergency enema, the 94th Academy Awards should feel like a celebration. Live hosts are back and Regina Hall, Amy Schumer and Wanda Sykes will present the gongs in front of a relatively packed auditorium at Oscar’s traditional home, the Dolby Theatre.

Fights, camera, action: When stars feud on set

Critics raved about George Miller’s dystopian epic Mad Max: Fury Road when it was released in 2015, but spare a thought for those poor souls who had to work on it. As if it wasn’t tough enough shooting in a Namibian desert for five months and corralling a small army of actors and extras, another problem quickly emerged. Fury Road’s stars, Charlize Theron and Tom Hardy, couldn’t stand the sight of each other.

The Batman movie review: Robert Pattinson is The Darkest Knight yet in director Matt Reeves’ gruesome superhero horror

The Batman (15A, 176mins)

The Godfather of all gangster sagas turns 50

With much fanfare, The Godfather turns 50 this week, inspiring a 4K cinema rerelease, and many gushing column inches. In a recent interview with Empire, Francis Ford Coppola described how the film “changed my life so significantly”. Before it, he was an unknown 29-year-old whose Hollywood career was not exactly going places: by the end of it, he was globally famous, a millionaire several times over.

‘After Nirvana, I went to Ireland just to clear my head’

First popularised by The Beatles, the rock band movie has long since fallen out of fashion, killed off to a large extent by Spinal Tap, a satire so pointed as to make all future projects moot. Or so you would have thought. Now, with obligatory tongues in cheek, Foo Fighters have revived the band film with aplomb in their cod chiller Studio 666.

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‘My preference is to not ignore the Troubles. It’s in the bones of the people’

An exciting new voice in cinema emerges next week, as Stacey Gregg’s debut feature Here Before is released. Made around Belfast during the pandemic on a tight budget, Gregg’s edgy psychological horror was very warmly received at last year’s South by Southwest Film Festival in Texas, and critics have compared her haunting, pared-back style to everyone from Lynne Ramsay (Morvern Callar) and Andrea Arnold (Fish Tank) to Nicolas Roeg (Don’t Look Now).

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‘I wonder what would have happened if we had been more loving, like Tammy Faye was’

With a wry smile Jesscia Chastain asks: “You guys don’t really have televangelism, do you?”.

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Why reading James Joyce’s Ulysses is easier than you think

Years ago, an old friend of mine called Eddie Donoghue used to joke that he was about to write ‘the definitive Irish novel’. The joke, of course, was that it had already been written: Ulysses, the great modernist behemoth, which looms like a zeppelin over Irish literature, intimidating all-comers, unlikely ever to be surpassed.

Hitchcock and the #MeToo reckoning that never was

Alfred Hitchcock would not have fared well in the MeToo age.

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Peter Dinklage: ‘I loved the community of Belfast... I just miss that’

Peter Dinklage is talkng about his new film Cyrano, in which he plays — and sings — the role of the doomed swordsman, poet and lover Cyrano de Bergerac, and he’s not being especially kind to himself. “There are people who can sing and then there are proper singers, and I definitely fall into the former category,” he muses.

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‘When I think of my life, there is before 12 Years A Slave, and after it’

Lupita Nyong’o, brought to us by Zoom, sits serene and regal at a long table backed by French doors leading to a handsome garden. All seems in order, but midway through our interview a terrible racket erupts, as though a jackhammer has been revved up in the near vicinity.

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The big picture: movies to catch in 2022

Will things ever return to “normal”? After another year that began and ended with ramped-up restrictions, only a fool would hope that 2022 will be any different. But in movie terms, the success of No Time to Die and other big releases proves that Covid has not killed the public appetite for cinema-going.

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From Bond to Nomadland: the 12 best films of 2021

If ever there was a year of two halves, it was 2021. Cinema doors stayed firmly shut for the first six months or so, prompting studios to delay, delay and delay again the release of marquee blockbusters such as No Time to Die and Black Widow, which needed big box office to stand any chance of breaking even.

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‘Lady Gaga was so real I forgot she was American’

True stories are often the hardest to believe — and Ridley Scott’s new film, House of Gucci, charts a chain of events that would surely be dismissed as fanciful if they weren’t verifiably real.

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Kindred spirits: the pressure of making a Ghostbusters sequel

Anyone who was sentient in the mid-1980s will remember with a chill the opening bars of Ray Parker Jr’s hit song Ghostbusters.

Clint Eastwood: A man who knows when less is more

At the age of 91, Clint Eastwood looks like the fifth head on Mount Rushmore: in fact the federal authorities could do worse than carving his face into the Black Hills peak because it would fit right in. As quintessentially Ameri can as a gun sale at Walmart, Eastwood has for many decades exemplified a modern version of the frontier spirit. Speaking softly, but carrying a large pistol, he has time and again played iconoclastic loners with a stark moral code who dispense summary justice on all who displease them.

Michael Collins: Would Branagh have played The Big Fellow differently?

What would Michael Collins have been like had Kevin Costner made it? According to Neil Jordan, the Hollywood giant was at one point interested in a Collins biopic, and was seen loitering with intent in the vicinity of Béal na mBláth. Lords knows what mawkish paddywhackery the director of Dances with Wolves would have inflicted on the War of Independence, and a proposed Michael Cimino version might have been even worse.