‘The Goldman Case’ Review: Enthralling Courtroom Drama Navigates the Contradictions of a Left-Wing Outlaw

“The Righteous Gemstones” has added new members to its congregation for Season 3. Stephen Dorff, Shea Whigham, Iliza Shlesinger, Casey Wilson and four other actors are set to appear in this new season in recurring roles. The HBO comedy will premiere its first two episodes on Sunday, June 18 at 10/9c p.m.Dorff and Whigham appeared in the Season 3 teaser but were not formally introduced.

This article contains major spoilers for the ‘Succession’ finale.Succession star Matthew Macfadyen has shared his thoughts on the HBO show’s dramatic finale, which aired earlier this week.After a power struggle between the Roy siblings after the death of their father Logan, the finale ended with Shiv Roy (Sarah Snook) backtracking on her pact with brothers Kendall (Jeremy Strong) and Roman (Kieran Culkin) to betray them and cast the deciding vote to sell Waystar Royco to Lukas Matsson’s (Alexander Skarsgård) GoJo company.This meant that Shiv’s husband and ATN boss Tom Wambsgans (Macfadyen) became boss of the company in a major twist after Matsson betrayed Shiv, who was initially in line for the CEO job.Speaking about the plot twist, Macfadyen told the New York Times: “Maybe she doesn’t choose Tom over her brothers. Maybe she just can’t stomach her big brother. It’s not a binary choice.

Jessica Kiang In her career to date, French director Katell Quillévéré has demonstrated an unusual talent for connecting to her characters so intensely that in some moments they seem less to be up on the screen in front of you, than sitting right next to you. Or even, as with the daydreams and interior musings that punctuated her wonderful last film “Heal the Living,” right inside you. But with her fourth feature, “Along Came Love,” that intimate connection appears to have been broken, as though this turbid post-war romantic saga is coming to us through the decades via a long-distance call that keeps dropping. Perhaps to establish some authenticity early, the film opens with archival footage of the French liberation celebrations at the end of World War II. The jubilant scenes darken as “collaborator” Frenchwomen, accused of pursuing relationships with the occupying Germans, are lined up for ritual public humiliation. Last year, Alice Diop’s extraordinary “Saint Omer” also alluded to the practise of shame-shaving these women’s heads, then allowed the viewer to infer the connection to its seemingly unrelated story. By contrast, “Along Came Love” makes the link ploddingly literal — and also a little dubious considering the florid melodrama that is about to unfold — by morphing from archive to (admittedly well-matched) monochrome footage of thus-disgraced Madeleine (Anaïs Demoustier), fleeing the retributive mob and taking refuge in a barn, where she tries to scrub the painted swastika off her pregnant belly. 

After months of drama and mostly negative reviews coming from its highly-publicized Cannes debut, HBO’s newest series, “The Idol,” is finally hitting TV screens later this week.  And in honor of the series finally making its debut, HBO has released a trailer for “The Idol,” which is definitely the buzziest show of the summer. The series follows the story of a pop star who falls under the influence of a creepy nightclub owner.

UPDATED: “You’re the American dream. Rags to riches. Trailers to mansions. You are f***ing Jocelyn. Just be you.” HBO released the final trailer Tuesday for music drama The Idol, starring Abel “The Weeknd” Tesfaye and Lily-Rose Depp, ahead of its June 4 premiere. Watch it above.

Leo Barraclough International Features Editor In “The Old Oak,” which played in Competition in Cannes, Ken Loach portrays a village in the North-East of England where the indigenous white community comes into conflict with Syrian refugees – a conflict fuelled by the despair, deprivation and decline of the rust-belt region. Such conditions can be a seed-bed for far right groups, the director tells Variety. Such issues have not been explored sufficiently in film and television, Loach says, and he draws a parallel with the portrayal of the rise of Nazism in Germany in the mass media. “We have endless programs about the Second World War, about the horrors of Nazism and fascism, about the racism, about the Holocaust. Quite properly, we have endless programs about that, but what they refuse to point out is that that arose from alienation, anger, feeling cheated, and finding scapegoats. And that’s how we ended up with Hitler, and that’s the ground in which the far right flourishes. One of the points of the film is to say: This is the cause of fascism. This is where it comes from. This is its seed-bed, and it comes as an inevitable consequence of our economic system. Because if the neoliberal agenda was an essential development for capitalism, to use the old-fashioned word, then that’s where fascism comes from. Implicit in that is that the far right will rise because that’s how people will be heading. And they know that and yet the mass media, the press, just turn their backs on that. They’ll tell us all about the horrors of Hitler. Sure. But they won’t tell us how he came to power. And that’s the huge lesson. And we see it in essence now all the time.”

The One Show's Alex Scott revealed a quirky story about her family on tonight's (Friday) show. Reporter Matt Allwright was visiting the world-famous Ronnie Scott's Jazz Club in London as part of a package.

Owen Gleiberman Chief Film Critic Tommy Joe Ballantyne (Dave Turner), the central character in Ken Loach’s “The Old Oak,” is a middle-aged landlord and proprietor of a pub that sits near the bottom of a sloped street of working-class row houses. We’re in an unnamed village in the northeast of England, and the pub, called the Old Oak, has seen better days. So has Tommy, who’s known as TJ. Dave Turner, the very good actor who plays him, resembles a bone-weary cross between John C. Reilly and Michael Moore. There’s a sweet-souled directness to his sad prole stare, and he treats his customers, some of whom he has known since they were in grade school together, with quiet affection and respect. But the pub is falling apart, and the property values in the neighborhood have plunged. TJ is barely scraping by serving pints of bitters.

Two era-defining sitcom roles prove that in Hollywood, lightning can strike twice. Mary Tyler Moore’s turn as Laura Petrie in “The Dick Van Dyke Show” in the 1960s was followed a decade later with the groundbreaking “The Mary Tyler Moore Show.” Going from playing a housewife to a single career woman when second-wave feminism was in full force puts Moore at the center of a conversation about role models and representation—a conversation she wasn’t always comfortable being the face of.

Elsa Keslassy International Correspondent Justine Triet’s “Anatomy of a Fall,” one of the best reviewed films of the Cannes competition, which was bought by Neon, examines the collapse of a marriage and a mother-and-son relationship in a documentary-style courtroom drama. The chamber piece is driven by Sandra Hüller’s (“Toni Erdmann”) nuanced performance as a successful German novelist on trial for the murder of her husband (Samuel Theis), who died in mysterious circumstances in a remote corner of the snowy French Alps. Their visually impaired 11-year-old son (Milo Machado Graner) is called on the witness stand, prompting a dissection of Sandra’s conduct as a wife and a mother. Supporting roles are played by Swann Arlaud and Antoine Reinartz.

Guy Lodge Film Critic In the rose-gray light of dawn, Juliette Binoche strides through a verdant kitchen garden, wearing a straw hat as wide and undulating as an ocean wave. She plucks a majestically large, gnarled celeriac from the earth and sniffs it deeply and fondly, as if inhaling mythical ambrosia, and takes it back to the house. This is how Tràn Anh Hùng’s “The Pot au Feu” opens, which is to say on a note of sensory reverence and a hint of kitsch, in knowing thrall to one of the less pretty vegetables in nature’s cornucopia. There are people — this critic included — who will watch this scene and immediately sense with a hungry tingle that the film to come has been made expressly for their palate, and there is everyone else. “The Pot au Feu” is not for everyone else, and that’s just fine.

Nothing screams “new chapter” more than a hair change — and Reese Witherspoon is living proof. The actress unveiled chic bangs following her split from husband Jim Toth.  

Manori Ravindran Executive Editor of International Neon has acquired Justine Triet’s Hitchcockian courtroom drama “Anatomy of a Fall.” The U.S. distributor has been “aggressively pursuing” the competition title, which premiered in Cannes on Sunday to rapturous reviews, and has beat out competition. In the 150-minute film, a frustrated writer dies of suspicious causes, leaving behind clues that implicate his wife (Sandra Hüller) of his murder. Much of the film is focused on the ensuing trial, and features German star Hüller, known to international audiences for “Toni Erdmann,” delivering a powerhouse performance as a woman fighting to clear her name while protecting the couple’s young son. (Hüller previously teamed with Triet for psychological drama “Sibyl,” which also competed for the Palme d’Or at Cannes in 2019.)

Peter Debruge Chief Film Critic Depending on where you come down on the question of its main character’s guilt or innocence, Justine Triet’s “Anatomy of a Fall” could be seen as a kind of “Gone Girl” in reverse: A frustrated writer dies of suspicious causes, leaving behind clues that implicate his wife (Sandra Hüller). If the man’s death was a suicide — and the bilingual (half-English) movie strongly points in that direction — then there’s a terrible cruelty to what follows, as his grieving wife is hauled into court and tried for his murder. Their 11-year-old son is obsessed with trying to make sense of what happened, whereas it’s the death of the marriage, not the husband, that preoccupies Triet. Can any couple’s relationship withstand the kind of scrutiny this one is subjected to, as old fights and infidelities are dragged into the open?

Manori Ravindran Executive Editor of International In Britain, schoolchildren learning about Tudor history are taught a handy rhyme to remember the order of King Henry VIII’s six wives: “Divorced, beheaded, died. Divorced, beheaded, survived.” Hollywood has for decades been transfixed by the “beheaded” and “died” bits — essentially, the stories about women suffering — but what moviegoers are rarely reminded of is the wife who outlived Henry. In Karim Aïnouz’s hotly anticipated “Firebrand,” it’s the notorious Tudor king’s final companion, Katherine Parr, who finally takes center stage. “What’s mostly been dramatized are the wives who didn’t make it,” says Swedish star Alicia Vikander, who plays the surviving queen opposite Jude Law’s ailing monarch. “[When I read the script] I immediately thought, ‘Huh, isn’t it interesting that most people know more about the other wives.’ It’s almost like people are drawn to quite grim stories.”

A Black Lady Sketch Show” creator and star Robin Thede is working with the show’s editors to put the finishing touches on Season 4 of the half-hour HBO comedy. “First season,” she tells Variety, “I was like, I want every third line to be a joke. Second season, every other line. Now, literally every line is a joke, even the setups to the punchlines. It’s crazy.” With sketches that riff on relatable themes — like hair woes, ashy skin and the politics of the Black church — “A Black Lady Sketch Show” frames the world from a Black woman’s point of view. Even when the subject matter has nothing to do with Blackness, the show’s existence is impactful, a sentiment Whoopi Goldberg underlined during a recent episode of “The View.”

Guy Lodge Film Critic The story template of “Homecoming” is a standard one: Years after an unexplained trauma, a family returns to the place they once called home, where hidden truths come to light and bitter conflicts arise over the course of one seemingly idyllic summer. Yet for all the secrets and lies that shape the narrative of Catherine Corsini’s straightforwardly told but consistently intriguing new film, its most interesting tensions often emerge from things its characters already know, even if they haven’t acknowledged them out loud. For Black single parent Khédidja (Aïssatou Diallo Sagna), arriving at the Corsican birthplace of her children after 15 years away, disinterring a buried past throws her maternal insecurities into sharp relief; for her teenage daughters Jessica (Suzy Bemba) and Farah (Esther Gohourou), what revelations the trip yields only underline their respective senses of not-belonging in their own small family.

Who would’ve thought Disney would be commenting on the feud between Meghan Markle and Princess Catherine?? Nonetheless publicly taking sides!?

At its best moments, the extremely straightforward construction of Cédric Kahn’s “The Goldman Case” allows for fascinating dynamics and images to occur apparently unforced, as if by themselves, for the viewer to seize on their own. The film, which has just opened the Directors’ Fortnight section of this year’s Cannes Film Festival, is refreshing for this bared-down, almost documentary-like approach — especially because it focuses on an incredibly complex man who needs all the space he can get to show everything that he is, in all his apparent contradictions.  READ MORE: 2023 Cannes Film Festival: 21 Must-See Movies To Watch This revelation takes place progressively, over the course of the almost surgically precise and aggressive trial that takes up most of the film’s runtime.

Ben Croll Opening this year’s Directors’ Fortnight, “The Goldman Case” soars on rhetoric and singes with political debate, condensing a decade worth of civic upheaval into the narrow contours of a courtroom thriller. At the center of this docudrama is Pierre Goldman (Arieh Worthalter), a left-wing radical appealing a murder charge – alongside a number of other offenses he actually does cop to – who became a galvanizing figure in France of the 1970s. Working with co-writer Nathalie Hertzberg, director Cedric Kahn lifted from the accused’s two trials in 1974 and 1975, from subsequent interviews with friends and associates, and from the pages of the landmark book, “Dim Memories of a Polish Jew Born in France,” that turned the imprisoned Goldman into a left-wing cause célèbre. Growing up amid fellow travelers, Kahn recognized the 1975 tome from his parents’ night table, though he only became familiar with its contents later in life.