Guy Lodge Latest Celebrity News & Gossip

Guy Lodge Film Critic If any writer has ever retreated to a remote, idyllic rural pad with the intention of getting some work done, and proceeded to have a productive and creatively fulfilling time, it has certainly never happened in the movies. Leon, the callow young novelist at the center of Christian Petzold’s canny, many-layered new film “Afire,” is the latest in a long line of onscreen scribes to learn that lesson. But over the course of a hot, rainless summer by the Baltic coastline, the elusiveness of his imagined masterwork turns out to be far from his greatest problem: Writer’s block spills over into bitter social paralysis, exposing every facet of life he doesn’t yet know how to live, let alone write about. All the while, the surrounding woodsy landscape wilts and scorches, the threat of natural disaster lending an urgent pull to this dry, elegant comedy of manners — so dry, in fact, it’s just a breath of wind away from tragedy.

Guy Lodge Film Critic In time, stories like “20,000 Species of Bees” will come to feel as commonplace within the coming-of-age genre as tales of first love or heartbreak: a young girl, unhappy in her skin and at odds with her family, finally recognizes her gender over the course of one pivotal summer, and persuades others to recognize it too. For now, Spanish writer-director Estibaliz Urresola Solaguren’s mellow, softly piercing debut feature joins the likes of Céline Sciamma’s “Tomboy” and Emanuele Crialese’s “L’Immensità” in a select but growing canon of trans or nonbinary childhood studies. Unassuming and meanderingly character-oriented, the film doesn’t assert itself as an issue drama — in large part because, as Solaguren presents her eight-year-old protagonist’s gradual steps toward self-realization, her film doesn’t see much of an issue to begin with.

Guy Lodge Film Critic On stage, drag artist Aphrodite Banks is a femme fatale: Caked in war paint, with a waterfall of braids whipping around her waist, she’s possessed of the white-hot glare and forthright confidence to match her Amazonian height and bearing. Off stage, as Jules, he’s simply femme: that term for gay men who present or express themselves in a more feminine way, too often used as a slur or a dismissal even by their community brethren. (Open up a cruising app like Grindr and see how frequently “no fems” comes up as a requirement.) The former identity connotes swaggering strength; the latter, to many, delicate weakness. How those associations and stigmas battle each other in one man’s body is the driving conflict in “Femme,” a tense, sometimes startling revenge drama from British freshmen Sam H. Freeman and Ng Choon Ping.

Guy Lodge Film Critic Giacomo Abbruzzese’s debut feature is a hazily seductive, frequently dreamlike study of life in the French Foreign Legion, fixated on masculine bodies in synchronized and sometimes violently clashing motion. It is also called “Disco Boy.” You almost certainly wouldn’t choose that subject, tone and title for a film if you didn’t want viewers’ minds to immediately wander to “Beau Travail,” Claire Denis’ seminal Foreign Legion cine-ballet, with its climactic solo number set to a thumping Eurodance classic; even if you somehow made that error, you wouldn’t compound it with electro-scored terpsichorean interludes of your own. Choosing homage this direct for a first feature is a brazen move, but notwithstanding its openly derivative qualities, “Disco Boy” doesn’t want for boldness or surprise — Abbruzzese’s hot, fluxional command of sound and image keeps us curious.

Guy Lodge Film Critic Depending on the state of your own family network, the relationship between the trio of grown siblings at the center of “The Adults” may strike you as intensely, skin-crawlingly familiar or quite desolately alien. Either way, Dustin Guy Defa’s determinedly quiet family-reunion drama seeks to be discomfiting, gradually giving the viewer that hollow, lurching, pit-of-the-stomach feeling that either precedes a dreaded encounter or follows a disappointing one. That might not sounds like a good thing, but in the context of this small, expansively sad film, it is one: From that queasiness comes bristly tension, tautening and deepening what otherwise seems a low-key, low-stakes character study, and eventually a sweet, conciliatory sliver of hope too.

Guy Lodge Film Critic Last November, in a gesture that the actor himself described as “a symbolic, silly thing,” Sean Penn gifted one of his two Academy Awards to Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy, to mark his emotional investment in the country as they continue to fight Russia’s invasion — attracting widespread mockery from social media and the entertainment press in the process. That this moment is not included in Penn and co-director Aaron Kaufman’s “Superpower,” a disordered, distinctly Penn-centric account of recent Ukrainian history, counts as one of the film’s few moments of self-awareness. As far as the rest goes, anyone watching this doc right after emerging from a two-year coma could be forgiven for identifying the Hollywood veteran as a key player in the conflict.

Guy Lodge Film Critic Anyone who has spent much time on Film Twitter recently might know that there are two recurring subjects sure to instigate discourse wars between certain moralistic Zoomers and their befuddled elders: on-screen relationships marked by significant age gaps, and on-screen sex scenes between partners of any age, largely condemned by youthful detractors as gratuitous narrative roadblocks. That demographic won’t be seeking out Emily Atef’s film “Someday We’ll Tell Each Other Everything,” a brazenly sensual May-December romance between a teenage ingenue and a middle-aged social outcast, though beyond the festival circuit, this pretty but somewhat dreary mood piece is unlikely to end up on many people’s radars at all.

Guy Lodge Film Critic “The Echo” — or rather, El Eco — is the name of a tiny rural village in Mexico’s Puebla state that sufficiently captivated Mexican-Salvadorean filmmaker Tatiana Huezo into filming it over the course of 18 months, observing its changes in weather, fortune and the temperament of its few, tightly bonded residents in fine, fraught degrees. But there’s more to the title of Huezo’s return to documentary filmmaking — following the major success of her 2021 fiction debut “Prayers for the Stolen” — than a mere marker of place: Examining the unique ties that bind farming families, where everyone’s welfare hangs on the same unkind elements, this exquisitely textured film observes how children’s lives echo those of their parents, repeating for generations on the same constantly inconstant land, until somebody breaks the pattern.

Guy Lodge Film Critic The most rewarding moment of last year’s BAFTA ceremony came with the presentation of the lead actress award: As Joanna Scanlan was named the winner for her moving turn as a widow uncovering her husband’s double life in the British indie “After Love,” her visibly emotional reaction was matched by the palpable warmth of the applause. But a large part of the reason it was so memorable was because, in the long run of precursor awards and televised ceremonies that make up Oscar season, this moment belonged to BAFTA alone. Versions of Scanlan’s speech hadn’t been heard a dozen times before; she wasn’t even eligible for prizes Stateside. This was a case of the British Academy voters honoring one of their own with little regard for their place in the U.S. race. Scanlan’s unusual win, however, was only enabled because of a rarer occurrence still: Thanks partially to jury intervention in compiling the nominees, there was zero overlap between the BAFTA and Oscar slates for lead actress, essentially freeing the Brits to go their own way.

Guy Lodge Film Critic Even before last year’s Supreme Court overturning of Roe v. Wade, a recent international surge in films about abortion rights and the endangerment thereof — from period pieces like “Happening” to present-day portraits like “Never Rarely Sometimes Always” — almost seemed to anticipate such a devastating blow. In America in particular, where talk of abortion access has always been snarled up in extreme religious rhetoric and eternal red-blue division, it has never been a subject to be treated complacently. Urgent and unvarnished, Tracy Droz Tragos’ documentary “Plan C” is an early entry in what might be considered post-Roe cinema, focusing less on pro-choice ideology than on the practicalities of ensuring choice in a system increasingly stacked against the idea.

Angelique Jackson CAA has signed director Saim Sadiq, who helmed “Joyland,” Pakistan’s official entry for the 95th Academy Awards, for representation. Sadiq was named one of Variety’s “10 Directors to Watch” for 2023 in recognition of the film, which marks his debut feature. “Joyland” made its world premiere at the 2022 Cannes Film Festival — becoming the first Pakistani film to debut at the fest — where it was awarded the Un Certain Regard jury prize and the Queer Palm. The film has also been nominated for best international film at the 2023 Independent Spirit Awards and made history as Pakistan’s first film to be shortlisted for best international feature film at the Academy Awards.

Guy Lodge Film Critic Through films as varied as “The Father,” “Dick Johnson is Dead” and “Relic,” dementia and neurodegenerative disease have been extensively portrayed on screen in recent years — a subgenre that carries a trigger warning for anyone with off-screen experience of the subject. For those who think they cannot stomach one more, Maite Alberdi’s “The Eternal Memory” treats inexorably sad material with a lighter, more lyrical approach than most — focusing less on the day-to-day ravages of living with Alzheimer’s than on the slippery, transient concept of memory itself, as formed, held and lost both in the individual mind and a wider collective consciousness. Key to the film’s thesis is that its subject is Augusto Góngora, a veteran Chilean political journalist who labored through the 1970s and 1980s to bring the iniquities of the Pinochet regime to public attention — and later dedicated himself to conserving that national memory for future generations.

Guy Lodge Film Critic The possessive claim in the title “Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio” is a gutsy one. There’s confidence — some would even say arrogance — in filming an oft-told story at least as old as the hills, and suddenly branding it as your own: Even two auteurs as ballsy as Francis Ford Coppola and Baz Luhrmann didn’t slap their own names on “Bram Stoker’s Dracula” and “William Shakespeare’s Romeo + Juliet,” respectively. Still, you can hardly blame del Toro’s stop-motion spin on Carlo Collodi’s 19th-century chestnut “The Adventures of Pinocchio” for wanting to advertise its distinguishing vision up top: After umpteen tellings of the wooden-boy tale, and coming on the heels of Robert Zemeckis’ wretched Disney remake, Netflix’s rival adaptation has to announce itself as something different. That it is; it’s often delightful too.

Guy Lodge Film Critic Children’s literature loves few things as much as a mighty monster who remains, against all outward appearances, defiantly benign — one who sets out to soothe young nightmares after initially stoking them, ultimately proving that fears and anxieties aren’t limited to little folk. Boris, the cheerfully dorky title character in Ruth Stiles Gannett’s 1948 book “My Father’s Dragon,” is cut from the same soft felt as Frank L. Baum’s Cowardly Lion, Roald Dahl’s Big Friendly Giant or Jill Murphy’s Worst Witch. A would-be flying fire-breather who hasn’t yet found his wings or his flames, he has even more growing up to do than fearful 10-year-old hero Elmer, and their mutual guilelessness sets the tone for Irish animator Nora Twomey’s winningly sweet-natured, visually transporting adaptation.

Guy Lodge Film Critic What children love about Roald Dahl’s books is the very thing other writers tend to dodge when adapting them: that icy, unapologetic streak of misanthropy, so exhilarating to kids who have been instructed to see the good in everyone, opening their eyes to the nastier, more ironic adult world that awaits them. Even the craftiest, classiest Dahl adaptations tend to mollify that cruelty somewhat: Nicolas Roeg’s “The Witches” is viciously frightening but tacks on an unmitigatedly happy ending, while Wes Anderson’s “Fantastic Mr. Fox” muffles the violent survivalism of its source tale with its director’s more gently quirky world-building. Already based on one of his kindlier stories, “Roald Dahl’s Matilda the Musical” further softens matters by pruning the presence of its funniest adult grotesques to accommodate more child’s-eye exuberance. The long-late author probably would have grumbled; young viewers will be delighted nonetheless.

Guy Lodge Film Critic A total of 164 feature films will play at this year’s London Film Festival, alongside an abundance of shorts, TV series and an expanded program of XR (extended reality) works — and that’s in a comparatively slimmed-down era of curation for a public-facing festival that has long aimed to bring the best of the global festival circuit to non-traveling cinephiles. What has definitely grown is the LFF’s national reach: In what fest director Tricia Tuttle terms the festival’s “new normal” format after a few years of structural shifts and COVID-era adjustments, the capital-centered event will also be hosting screenings in 10 other cities around the U.K., from Manchester to Edinburgh to Belfast — sealing its status as the country’s preeminent film festival. A digital program of up to 20 titles will also be made available for online viewing, while short films and screen talks will be free to stream on the BFI Player platform: “It’s really important to us to get to those places we can’t reach with our venue partnerships,” says Tuttle, adding that their priority is “to give new audiences a taste of what the festival is like.”

Angelique Jackson Award-winning German actor Nina Hoss has signed with CAA for representation. Hoss stars opposite Cate Blanchett in Todd Field’s “Tár,” which will open theatrically on Oct. 7 via Focus Features. The film debuted to rave reviews at the Venice and Telluride film festivals, with Variety Senior Awards Editor Clayton Davis suggesting that Hoss could land her first Oscar nomination for her supporting performance as wife to Blanchett’s trailblazing composer, who becomes the first woman to conduct a major German orchestra. In his awards analysis, Davis described Hoss as the “heart and soul of the film.” Best known for her acclaimed performances in Christian Petzold’s films “Phoenix” and “Barbara,” as well as Anton Corbijn’s “A Most Wanted Man,” Hoss made her debut in 1996 with “A Girl Called Rosemary.” Additional credits include “Yella” and Petzold’s “Something to Remind Me” and “Wolfsburg.”

Guy Lodge Film Critic Colombian director Laura Mora’s coming-of-age drama “Kings of the World” has taken the Golden Shell for Best Film at the San Sebastian Film Festival, marking the third consecutive year that a female filmmaker has taken the top prize at the Spanish fest. Longer report to follow; full list of winners below. OFFICIAL SELECTION PRIZES Golden Shell for Best Film: “Kings of the World,” Laura Mora Special Jury Prize: “Runner,” Marian Mathias Silver Shell for Best Director: “A Hundred Flowers,” Genki Kawamura

Guy Lodge Film Critic It takes a village to raise a child, goes the old saying, and at least in the figurative sense, Spanish director Pilar Palomero’s tremendous sophomore feature “La Maternal” shows that to be true. Before that can happen, however, pregnant 14-year-old Carla needs to get out of the village and into the city — specifically, to a Barcelona shelter for teenage mothers where the troubled adolescent finds the community and empathy her life has been missing all along. Female solidarity drives Palomero’s follow-up to the celebrated, similarly sisterhood-themed “Schoolgirls,” but without any glib girl-power sloganeering: A tough, unsweetened work of social realism built around an astonishing screen debut by Carla Quílez, “La Maternal” sentimentalizes not one detail of juvenile motherhood, truly earning its flashes of hope and grace.

Guy Lodge Film Critic At the height of his career, Czech-born composer Josef Mysliveček was the most prolific and sought-after figure in Italian opera, bound for immortal celebrity. Nearly three centuries later, his name isn’t forgotten to classical music scholars, but neither does it have anything approaching household status; the facts and records of his personal life, meanwhile, have largely been lost to history. Via a blend of free narrative speculation and exacting musical presentation, Petr Vaclav’s stately, sumptuous biopic “Il Boemo” seeks to restore a degree of iconic status to a talent latterly overshadowed by relative 18th-century contemporaries, albeit not with much swagger or modernity of its own: This is costume drama of a traditional, ornately brocaded stripe, a classical music lesson for classicists.

Guy Lodge Film Critic In the little-remembered 1950 noir “The Damned Don’t Cry,” Joan Crawford plays a Texan housewife whose grief for her late son spurs her to make a new life for herself in the urban underworld. Fyzal Boulifa’s exquisite new film of the same title is named expressly for that Crawford vehicle, but is neither a remake nor a direct homage. Rather, it remixes the narrative components of that film and others of its ilk into the kind of new-school-old-school heart-tugger — one might say tearjerker if its characters weren’t, true to its title, stoically dry-eyed throughout — that might have been designed for the shoulder-padded diva were she alive in 2022 and, perhaps more crucially, of Moroccan heritage. 

Manori Ravindran International Editor Magnolia Pictures has acquired the North American rights to Venice Film Festival sensation “Blue Jean.” The directorial debut of Georgia Oakley, which just world-premiered in the Venice Days section of the Italian festival, is set in England in 1988, where Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative government is about to pass a law stigmatizing gays and lesbians. The new legislation forces Jean (Rosy McEwen), a closeted gym teacher, to live a double life. But as pressure mounts from all sides, the arrival of a new student catalyzes a crisis that will challenge Jean to her core.

Guy Lodge Film Critic If you found yourself wide awake in the wee small hours with personal demons rattling in your brain, and you picked up the phone to share them with a patient, neutral stranger, Tessa Thompson’s measured, calming voice is more or less exactly what you’d hope to hear on the other end of the line. As Beth, a night-shift volunteer for a crisis helpline, the actor’s naturally gentle, benevolent presence is the chief asset of Steve Buscemi’s minor-key chamber drama “The Listener” — not that she has a host of elements to compete with in what amounts, on screen at least, to a one-woman show.  Thompson’s unforced credibility isn’t shared, however, by a flat, superficial script that treats an assortment of mental health ailments as quirky conversation fuel. Each anguished call that Beth takes, over the course of one long, dark night of assorted souls, is written less like a recognizable human exchange than as an actor’s heightened audition piece, and played out as such by a voice-only ensemble stacked with distractingly recognizable names. Though the global pandemic is only incidentally mentioned, “The Listener” plays in all aspects like a project conceived in the most self-searching and self-indulgent depths of the isolation era. It’s hard to imagine audiences wanting to enter that headspace now.

Guy Lodge Film Critic At the 1987 Conservative Party Conference in Britain, then Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher issued one of the most grimly memorable quotes of her career: “Children who need to be taught to respect traditional moral values are being taught that they have an inalienable right to be gay.” For many of us, it’s a line that now sounds so archaically out of step with contemporary life as to be comical — that “inalienable right” wording ironically appropriated by many a queer-rights cause — though you need only look at Florida’s recent Don’t Say Gay bill to know that Thatcher’s sentiments live among us still. A frank, piercing debut from British writer-director Georgia Oakley, “Blue Jean” is a Thatcher-era period piece that crisply evokes that climate of politically propagated homophobia without preserving it in amber: It effectively puts the past in tacit dialogue with the present.

Guy Lodge Film Critic Not many films hit an emotional crescendo around the publication of a Pitchfork review, but Bill Pohlad’s “Dreamin’ Wild” is sufficiently sincere and embedded in musical nerdery to make it work. As onetime brother act Donnie and Joe Emerson huddle with their family around a 30-years-late evaluation of the album they recorded as teenagers, one particular critical reference sends them giddily reeling: “To twist a Brian Wilson phrase,” it reads, “[the album] is a godlike symphony to teenhood.” For fortysomething Donnie, who has spent his whole adult life scrambling for anyone to listen to his music — let alone love it — the mere mention of his musical hero in relation to his work is a crowning triumph: Donnie, as played by a typically disheveled, downcast Casey Affleck, looks briefly, guardedly happy for a moment, and this often melancholic film is suddenly suffused with well-being.

Guy Lodge Film Critic Gianni Amelio was in his late sixties when he came out as gay a few years ago. The announcement preceded the release of his documentary “Happy to Be Different,” which worked toward an overriding sunniness in contemplating the trials and challenges of being gay in Italy at various points in the 20th century. In turning to a gay-themed narrative project, Amelio narrows the focus and dims the mood: “Lord of the Ants” takes as its subject the gay Italian author Aldo Braibanti, and the social and legal opposition he faced over his sexuality in mid-1960s Rome. Solemn, stately and perhaps a little stifled, it’s the kind of queer statement you might expect from a veteran filmmaker who wasn’t until relatively recently out and proud, and is rather poignant for that.

Guy Lodge Film Critic Even the most solidly founded of marriages can be strained and shattered by the death of a child. For handsome, wholesome Japanese couple Taeko and Jiro, however, that tragedy shows up all the fault lines that were already in their young relationship, and that’s before living ghosts of the past show up for both partners. Koji Fukada’s “Love Life” unabashedly embraces melodramatic contrivance in its examination of modern middle-class love tested as much by social prejudices as by personal demons; it just does so with such pallid, polite reserve that its sentimentality never becomes transcendently moving. As such, this agreeable but overlong pic finds the Japanese writer-director still struggling to regain the form of his jolting 2016 Cannes prizewinner “Harmonium.”

Guy Lodge Film Critic Friendships can be as changeable and temperamental and outright dramatic as grand romances, though they tend to get a bland rap on screen — with friends, for most screenwriters, merely convenient constants, there to support protagonists through matters of supposedly more consequence. If substantial platonic relationship studies are rare, ones about men are rarer still. And if that comes down to a social convention rather than a cinematic one, that’s integral to the power and poignancy of Martin McDonagh’s searing “The Banshees of Inisherin,” a film that traces the tortured breakup between two best pals in remote rural Ireland with all the anguish and gravity of the most charged romantic melodrama — its high, unleashed emotions all the more startling in a world where men don’t speak their feelings.

Guy Lodge Film Critic “L’Immensità” is director Emanuele Crialese’s first feature film in 11 years, and only his fifth in a quarter-century: The gifted Italian, best known to international audiences for his splendid, richly felt Ellis Island immigrant saga “Golden Door,” has never been one for unconsidered or impersonal projects. At first glance, then, one might wonder what drew him out of hibernation for a film that, with its trim runtime and small-scale domestic narrative, belies a title that translates as “immensity.” This 1970s-set story of a 12-year-old navigating his gender identity while his mother battles mental health demons is too palpably pained and heartfelt to be called slight, but it’s sensitive and peculiar in ways that feel fragile — occasionally splintered and swamped by an elaborate setpiece, or the outsize star magnetism of arguably its secondary lead, one Penélope Cruz. 

Guy Lodge Film Critic While waiting to pick up five-year-old Leila from judo practice, personable 40-ish schoolteacher Rachel introduces herself to another parent as Leila’s stepmom, before backtracking to awkwardly correct herself. Later, when a kindly stranger on a train remarks on the resemblance between the two, Rachel doesn’t bother clarifying, merely accepting the benign compliment. Her relationship to Leila is both unremarkably simple and complicated by an absence of clear language for it: She’s dating the girl’s father, and the attachment between woman and child has grown perhaps stronger than the relationship on which it depends. It’s the kind of delicate everyday situation that rarely occupies the centre of a film, and in the superb “Other People’s Children,” writer-director Rebecca Zlotowski negotiates it with warm intelligence and compassion.