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

For Italian actress Miriam Leone, it all started with a little black dress

By Clementine Ford

Miriam Leone has around 903,000 followers on Instagram. Her posts: a clip from her Italian L’Oréal ad, a selfie taken pre–red carpet at Cannes. But it’s likely you haven’t heard of the Italian beauty—she works from home.

And who could blame her? Leone was born on the eastern coast of Sicily, in the port city of Catania, to a family as melodramatic as an Italian opera. Her grandmother left her first fiancé after their engagement party, where she met the would-be bridegroom’s cousin, and instantly fell for him.

Her family thought Leone was fated for fame, but Italian agents disagreed. She was repeatedly told that she “could not be an actress or even a model.” After years of auditioning, Leone was ready to give up. 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

“About as funny as Schindler’s List”

By Oliver Moody

Disney has enchanted generations of children with films about a motherless deer, a singing bear and a cat-kidnapping French butler. Whether it can do the same with a black comedy about a small boy whose imaginary best friend is Adolf Hitler remains to be seen.

Months before its European release date, Jojo Rabbit has already stirred up discomfort in Germany, where the Third Reich is not usually considered a fit subject for cheap laughs.

The film, starring Scarlett Johansson and Rebel Wilson, tells the story of John “Jojo” Betzler, a lonely ten-year-old boy in the Hitler Youth. One day READ ON

A new documentary takes on the controversial attorney Roy Cohn

By Matt Tyrnauer

My new film, Where’s My Roy Cohn?, which opens in theaters this weekend, is about the American lawyer who first shot to national prominence with his role as Senator Joseph McCarthy’s chief counsel during the 1954 Army-McCarthy hearings. He developed a reputation for ruthlessness and corruption, from his early influence in the Julius and Ethel Rosenberg trial to his later client roster, which included several Mafia dons, as well as Donald Trump. Cohn died in 1986 from complications of AIDS (a fact, among countless others, that he always vehemently denied—along with his homosexuality). Here are 10 of the most interesting things I learned about this most dark prince of power brokering, while directing READ ON

The creator of Downton Abbey has lunch with an old flame

By Victoria Mather

If Julian Fellowes was set to music he’d be Gustav Holst’s Jupiter, the bringer of jollity. “I like everyone to be happy,” he says. “I love happy things, I never want to be unkind.” I have never heard him say a common or mean thing about anyone. Like Denry in Arnold Bennett’s comic novel The Card, Fellowes is “the great cause of cheering us all up.”

So far Fellowes has cheered us with Gosford Park, for which he won the Oscar for best original screenplay; two novels, Snobs and Past Imperfect; films; television performances; and, of course, Downton Abbey. READ ON

The Riverdale actress plots her move to the big screen

By Josh Duboff

Lili Reinhart almost didn’t sign on to co-star in Hustlers. The 23-year-old Riverdale star—Generation Z’s Blake Lively—was sent the script by her team, with the note that the director, Lorene Scafaria (The Meddler), wanted to meet with her. But Reinhart blanched when she saw the logline: “‘Strippers in New York drug and rob men on Wall Street.’ And I was immediately like, ‘Oooh, this is probably not the vibe that I want.’”

But after she conveyed that message to her team, they persisted. “They were like, Read the script. So I did, and it was obviously amazing.” READ ON

The Swedish bombshell who blew up Italian movies

Written and Illustrated by David Downton

“Marcello, come here!” coos movie star Sylvia Rank (Anita Ekberg) to the reporter–gossip columnist Marcello Rubini (Marcello Mastroianni) as she wades around the Trevi Fountain under a silver gelatin moon, in Fellini’s La Dolce Vita (1960). Her dress, cut low and hitched high, unfurls in the water like ink. The cascade goes silent. Nino Rota’s haunting score floats into the air. It is one of the unsurpassable moments in cinema, and with it Anita Ekberg entered into myth.

She was born in Malmö, in 1931, one of eight siblings. At 20, she won the Miss Sweden beauty pageant, a READ ON

In Season Two of HBO’s Succession, Sarah Snook proves she’s worthy of the Roy throne

By Josh Duboff

Sarah Snook is so adept at embodying the wily Siobhan “Shiv” Roy, on HBO’s breakout hit Succession, that she feels compelled to make clear that she is nothing like the character in real life. “I get a lot of ‘Shiv’s pretty badass,’ which I like, [but] I worry that people will think that I’m like Shiv … and I’m very different,” she explained in early August, shortly after finishing filming on Season Two. “She’s all buttoned up and straight lines, and I’m not that. I’m, hopefully, a lot friendlier than her.”

Shiv—who has been compared to the likes READ ON

A “very lucky” actor and the photojournalism career that got away

By Sam Kashner

It began with “Brenda Starr, Reporter,” a syndicated comic strip that Candice Bergen read faithfully when she was 9 or 10 years old. While Candice never got to play Brenda Starr in the movies (that mootable distinction going to Brooke Shields in 1989), she did get to be her in real life. A woman named Dalia Messick drew and wrote the strip, but back in 1940 she had to change her name to the gender-neutral Dale, because male editors reflexively rejected strips written by women. Dalia’s were rescued out of the trash by an assistant at the Chicago Tribune syndicate, and it was she who is rumored to have suggested that Dalia change her name. READ ON