Florence Pugh is a kick playing the least likable March sister in Greta Gerwig’s film adaptation of Louisa May Alcott’s novel

By Graham Fuller

There are many reasons to see Greta Gerwig’s vibrant film of Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women: Saoirse Ronan’s plucky, proto-feminist Jo; Emma Watson and Eliza Scanlen as the more easily contented March sisters Meg and Beth; Laura Dern as the compassionate Marmee and Meryl Streep as the spiky Aunt March; and Gerwig’s note-perfect evocation of the Civil War era in New England.

Forgive yourself, though, if you can’t take your eyes off Amy, the March sister we traditionally love to hate. The English actress Florence Pugh makes the unruly adolescent a self-obsessed vortex of melodrama. (Her modern equivalent READ ON

Francesca Hayward arrives in Cats, Coppélia, and Romeo and Juliet: Beyond Words

By Sarah Crompton

Francesca Hayward groans as she climbs the stairs, half hidden behind the black net tutu she is carrying. She’s tired after a morning’s rehearsal, and her legs are grumbling about the vertiginous climb to the room at the top of the Royal Opera House where we are meeting. If it seems strange that a ballerina should struggle with a staircase, that’s an indication of just how hard she is currently pushing herself. Hayward is a dancer who has reached the top and is determined to explore every view it offers.

She is already familiar to dance lovers as READ ON

It’s the most streamed show on Netflix. Teenagers quote its jokes—even though it is 25 years old. So what explains its appeal?

By Polly Vernon

Saturday afternoon. My 13-year-old goddaughter and I sit on the sofa and watch four episodes of Friends, back-to-back. I’ve seen them a hundred times before; so, apparently, has she, but this doesn’t bother us. We are equally rapt. We laugh at the same bits. We anticipate the same lines.

“Which one do you fancy?” she asks, at some point.

“Uh, Joey, OBVIOUSLY,” I reply. “I have eyes. You?”

“Uh, Joey, OBVIOUSLY,” she says.

I’d had a similar conversation, two and a half decades earlier, with my friend Jules, only Jules had chosen Chandler, “because he’s funny”. I’d held READ ON

Mischief Theatre, the comedy group that gave us The Play That Goes Wrong, gets a new series

By Benji Wilson

Jonathan Sayer knows a lot about things going wrong. When he was a child, he served a stint playing the young street urchin Gavroche in the hit musical Les Misérables. One night, during his death scene, he fell to the floor and landed on the revolving stage. “My hair got caught in the innards of the revolve and was torn out. But the show went on. People kept singing. I had to just lie there, because I was supposed to be a dead body, but I was, like, ‘Argh, my hair!’”

It was a formative moment for Sayer, who realised, after the agonising pain had subsided, that things going wrong on stage can be funny. READ ON

Rian Johnson, the creator of Knives Out, reveals how he updated Hitchcock, Sleuth, and Christie

By Emily Poenisch

Knives Out, which opened this week, shakes off the dustier conventions of the whodunit genre to tell the tale of a fabulously wealthy mystery writer (played by Christopher Plummer) who meets his untimely demise following a family gathering to celebrate his 85th birthday. Enter famed detective and all-around odd duck Benoit Blanc (Daniel Craig, armed with a thick Mississippi drawl), who deploys his formidable powers of deduction to finger the greedy guttersnipe who’s snuffed out Gramps. The cast, including Jamie Lee Curtis, Chris Evans, Toni Collette, Don Johnson, Michael Shannon, and Ana de Armas, is a knockout. Here, Rian Johnson, who wrote and directed the movie, discusses how he devised his flawless puzzle of a plot, and his experience shifting from the all-consuming work of d READ ON

Erin Doherty is pure ebullience, even if her Princess Anne is something else entirely

By David Jays

On the verge of leaving drama school, Erin Doherty and her fellow students sat in a circle and predicted how each would be cast in their future careers. “I got ‘cowboy’,” Doherty exclaims, bemused. She looks sad for an instant. “I have never played a cowboy. They were really wrong.”

But think laterally: hard-riding, taciturn, loves horses, hates small talk, truly resents a posh frock. Yes, it’s a cowboy — but also Princess Anne. That’s the role Doherty, already a fan favourite as a stage actor, landed in the new run of The Crown, the award-gobbling Netflix sensation.

We speak several weeks before the media around the series goes full hoo-ha, aghast that Olivia Colman’s Queen may express READ ON

An excerpt from a new book reveals how Disneyland came to be

By Richard Snow

On a September Saturday in 1953, Herb Ryman was in his studio working on a painting when the phone rang. He answered it and heard Walt Disney say, “Hi, Herbie. I’m over here at the studio.” On a Saturday? Ryman asked. That made Disney testy. “Yes, it’s my studio and I can be here anytime I want.” Then he changed his tone. “I wonder if you could come over here. Just come the way you are. I’ll be out front waiting for you.” Ryman “was curious and flattered that he picked up the phone and called me. I had no idea what he wanted.” READ ON

Ursula Andress, no Hollywood careerist, found fame and has enjoyed a “very lucky” life regardless

Written and Illustrated by David Downton

It is one of the great entrances in movies: Halfway through Dr. No, the first James Bond film, Honey Ryder (Ursula Andress) strides out of the Caribbean wearing a white bikini, a knife at her hip. She has a swimmer’s shoulders (she would not get stranded on an archvillain’s island) and an implacable gaze. A jet-age Venus.

“What are you doing here?” she asks Bond (Sean Connery). “Looking for shells?”

“No, I’m just looking,” he replies, as the 1960s clicked into gear.

Like Living in the Middle Ages

Andress was born in Bern, Switzerland, in 1936, one of six READ ON

The inside story of how the show’s creator, Peter Morgan, mixes facts with dramatic inventiveness

By Sally Bedell Smith

(Note: This story contains spoilers, but it will only enrich your viewing.)

At a recent cocktail gathering in Washington, political operatives at the Ritz-Carlton were abuzz—but not about the impeachment hearings underway on Capitol Hill. They were chattering about the third season of The Crown. “I was watching that episode about Princess Margaret, and I immediately googled ‘Princess Margaret and LBJ,’ but I came up with nothing!” said Tamera Luzzatto, Hillary Clinton’s former chief of staff.

Luzzatto was referring to one of the most hilariously entertaining bits in the second episode, “Margaretology.” She couldn’t find it on Google because READ ON

Ana de Armas, the Knives Out actress and soon-to-be Bond girl, on working with Daniel Craig and Chris Evans

By Josh Duboff

“It was so scary,” Ana de Armas says, recalling her arrival in Boston last fall to start filming Knives Out. “I was really nervous.”

The 31-year-old Cuban actress had been cast for the Rian Johnson murder mystery in something of a whirlwind. She auditioned for the role via Skype from Thailand, where she was shooting another movie; when that went smoothly, Johnson asked for an in-person meeting, with filming only a couple of weeks away; then, after passing that final round, she was cast just five days before she had to film her first scene.

De Armas—who plays levelheaded caretaker Marta, a pivotal role in the story—joined a stacked cast that included Christopher Plummer, Chris Evans, Daniel Craig, Toni Collette, Jamie Lee Curtis, READ ON

The French New Wave film posters quickly became as groundbreaking as the 50s and 60s films themselves. A new book highlights the designers behind the movement’s explosive aesthetic

By Christopher Frayling

Julie Delpy and Ethan Hawke on how they made their memorable trilogy

By Phil Hoad

Julie Delpy, actor and writer

The original script for the first film, Before Sunrise, was believe it or not kind of devoid of romance – even though Richard Linklater, the director, had based it on a woman he spent the night walking around Philadelphia with. It was a great blueprint, but it was even more cerebral and talky. He was keen to capture something very true, so wanted the two leads to be writers on the film as well – and he auditioned us about what we wanted to say. I talked about some stuff that ended up in the film, about God existing in the space between people. READ ON

A new documentary explores the life and legacy of the man behind the mega-brand

By Susan Lacy

When I started working on Very Ralph, the documentary film about Ralph Lauren that I recently produced and directed for HBO, I knew only a few basic facts about the designer. He was born Ralph Lifshitz in the Bronx, he got his start by selling ties out of a drawer in the Empire State Building, his clothing and lifestyle products are beautiful and expensive, his ads are among my favorites, and his name conjures up a very specific image of a life of ease and plenty. But over the course of making the film, I discovered the nuanced, multifaceted man behind the brand. READ ON

Will American audiences ever see An Officer and a Spy after the exiled director likened his rape case to the anti-Semitic false charges leveled against Alfred Dreyfus?

By Alexandra Marshall

Roman Polanski’s film about the Dreyfus affair is undeniably good, but you just knew it was going to end badly when the film’s producers sat the director down with the French intellectual Pascal Bruckner for a Q&A featured in the movie’s press notes, distributed at the Venice Film Festival this August.

Before anyone had the chance to watch An Officer and a Spy, centered on the seismic fin de siècle scandal about anti-Semitism at the heart of the French establishment—and which has resurgent relevance today—they were dunked into a warm bath of contemporary male persecution complex, flowing with bitter, aging-man tears over Polanski’s suffering at the hands of what Bruckner called “neo-feminist McCarthyism.” READ ON

Graydon Carter toasts Ash Carter and Sam Kashner at Monkey Bar to celebrate their new oral biography of Mike Nichols

Last Monday evening, two days in advance of what would have been Mike Nichols’s 88th birthday, Graydon Carter hosted a party at Monkey Bar for Ash Carter and Sam Kashner to celebrate their new oral biography, Life Isn’t Everything: Mike Nichols, as Remembered by 150 of His Closest Friends. Nichols, who directed classics including The Graduate and Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf, earned more Oscar and Tony nominations than there have been American presidents. Monday’s lively affair was worthy of the book’s inimitable subject.

If you’d fought your way through the bar, you might have glimpsed Patricia Clarkson holding court on a banquette and READ ON

Goldblum defies his age with a new travel series, another jazz album, a young family, and all those films

By Ben Hoyle

A roar of excitement erupts inside the Californian hall as 7,000 fans spot a gangly silver-haired man sauntering on stage, waving theatrically. Jeff Goldblum is wearing a black and white tie, a colourful shirt patterned with polka dots and sections of comic strip, slim black trousers that somehow elongate his 6ft 4in frame and gleaming black and white loafers.

The outfit would be a sartorial disaster on anyone else, but on Goldblum it proves a triumph, cited by Vogue as proof that the actor, pianist and now social media star is “one of Hollywood’s most snazzy dressers”.

“I Know Nothing, That’s the Premise” READ ON

Long-hidden diaries reveal the dark obsessions and deep hatreds she drew from to write The Talented Mr. Ripley and other noir masterpieces

By Edward Helmore

It promises to be one of the literary highlights of 2021 – publication of the diaries of Patricia Highsmith, one of the most conflicted, fascinating novelists of the 20th century.

Highsmith, who died in 1995 having written a series of psychological thrillers, including The Talented Mr Ripley and Strangers on a Train and the romance The Price of Salt, left two sets of diaries hidden in a linen closet in her home in Ticino, Switzerland.

In one she recorded details about her professional life: plot ideas, philosophical musings and thoughts on writing. In the other she documented her READ ON

I’ve never met one I didn’t like and I just wanted to understand

By Errol Morris

It’s hard to know how to write this essay without a) being self-serving, and b) appearing to be self-serving. Neither seems entirely desirable. Maybe I should stop here. Why take the risk? What’s in it for me? Promoting my movie, which is now, finally, about to be released, and which I would like people to see?

Please, see my movie. So, now it’s all out in the open.

But how did I get to this point, where I’m pleading with my readership? Sometime in January 2018, I had this crazy idea that instead of doing nothing, I should weigh in on the current, miserable situation in America. READ ON

Helen Mirren brings something special to every performance. But for HBO’s Catherine the Great, she also draws on her own White Russian roots

By Sam Kashner

“I’m not the bloody queen!”

Jane Tennison in Prime Suspect

She had come to christen a ship.

Dame Helen Mirren arrived in New York City in early September with her husband, the director Taylor Hackford, to christen the Scenic Eclipse, a cruise ship. That’s usually the purview of queens, but as Oscar Wilde once wrote, “Life imitates Art far more than Art imitates Life.” Mirren has played royalty throughout her long career, from Queen Charlotte in The Madness of King George to both Elizabeths—Elizabeth I (in a 2005 TV series) and, most famously, Elizabeth II in both The Queen, READ ON

In Henry V, Timothée Chalamet tries to fill the sabbatons of Olivier and Branagh

By John Bleasdale

I stand up to greet Timothée Chalamet and he shakes my hand. “Nice to see you again,” he says. Endearingly, he thinks we’ve already met — sadly, we haven’t, although his face is awfully familiar. The posters for his new Netflix film are everywhere, proclaiming “All Hail the King.” I’m not sure if they mean King Henry V, the character he’s playing in a film adapted from Shakespeare’s history plays, or Chalamet himself who, at the tender age of 23, is fast becoming Hollywood royalty. And I’ve seen the pin-up du jour draped across magazine spreads and on Instagram — both his official account and the @chalametinart account that photoshops his face on to classic works of art (my favourites are READ ON

Parasite, the South Korean director’s new film about class warfare, triumphed at Cannes and is generating Oscar heat

By Emily Poenisch

Not too long ago, satire was a dirty word in Hollywood. The studios thought it too dark and political, and a bit of a slippery eel as far as marketing was concerned. Why couldn’t these pesky writers just stick to square-jawed heroes averting the apocalypse and maneuvering grateful beauties into bed? But the era of peak television has proved that audiences are more than capable of handling stiff social commentary, and dramatic lurches in world events have created an appetite for timely tales. And when it comes to cinema’s keen observers of the times, writer-director Bong Joon-ho (Snowpiercer, Okja READ ON

She goes toe to toe with Eddie Murphy in his new comedy, Dolemite Is My Name

By Emily Poenisch

Dolemite Is My Name struts into theaters this weekend with Eddie Murphy in top form, making a long-awaited return to R-rated material and playing a real-life character for the first time. Set in 1970s Los Angeles, it tells the true story of Rudy Ray Moore, a pudgy, middle-aged wannabe comic and singer—a contemporary of Richard Pryor and Redd Foxx—who strikes gold when he creates a foulmouthed, smack-talking alter ego: Dolemite.

What follows is a film within a film, as Moore self-funds a Dolemite movie with a ragtag group of cohorts (think The Disaster Artist or Ed Wood) that becomes a record-making success and a blaxploitation cult classic. It’s a rollicking good time, a salute to one man’s determination to make it in an industry that would not make room for him. READ ON

The comedy show created by Ukraine’s new president skewered Donald Trump

Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky, a former comedian, has been diplomatic this week (“Nobody pushed me”) about being pressured by Donald Trump to dig up dirt on his Democratic opponent. In the pulled-together transcript of the two presidents’ phone conversation that took place in July, Mr. Zelensky sounded accommodating and, for all too obvious reasons, at times downright flattering.

But back in Kiev, Block 95, the comedy show that Zelensky created and once starred in, has had plenty to say about Trump. None of it was tactful.

In a skit shown earlier this month, the show parodied the 2016 American READ ON

Did the creator of The Crown tell the one who wears it what happens next on the series?

By Robin Olson

It’s a lesson in the art of reading between the lines, where things left unsaid may signify more than mere words. In early September, The Guardian ran a long piece about the enormously popular Netflix series The Crown, whose third season airs in November. In the article, the show’s creator and writer, Peter Morgan, revealed that he has quarterly meetings with highly placed Buckingham Palace insiders, giving them a heads-up about coming story lines and a chance to “brace themselves slightly.”

Morgan named no names in the interview, leaving readers to decide whether he meant staff, courtiers, or members of the royal family when he identified his contacts only as “people who are very high-ranking and very active within the organization.” READ ON