All the Money in the World review – raucous crime thriller banishes ghost of Kevin Spacey

‘The rich are different from you and me,” said F Scott Fitzgerald, to which Ernest Hemingway is famously alleged to have replied: “Yes, they have more money.” This film suggests they also have more fear of their own children – fear that they will parasitically suck away energy that should be devoted to building up riches and status; that they will fail to be worthy inheritors of it, or waste it, or cause it to be catastrophically mortgaged to their own pampered weakness. This fear is the driving force of Ridley Scott’s raucous pedal-to-the-metal thriller about the ageing and super-rich oil tycoon J Paul Getty, freely adapted by screenwriter David Scarpa from the 1995 page-turner Painfully Rich: The Outrageous Fortune and Misfortunes of the Heirs of J Paul Getty by veteran true-crime author John Pearson. It is directed by the 80-year-old Ridley Scott with gleeful energy and riotous attack. The old guy is always the most interesting character on screen, and that can hardly be an accident.

In 1973, cantankerous Getty refused to pay the kidnap ransom demanded after his 16-year-old grandson John Paul Getty III was snatched by Calabrian mobsters from the streets of Rome. And why? Because he didn’t want to set a precedent and reward crime? Because he suspected this wastrel boy had cooked up a scheme to scam him? Or because, in his wizened and ornery old apology for a heart, he just didn’t feel like parting with a single dime? Only when a severed ear arrives through the post does the old boy feel like getting out his chequebook.

Christopher Plummer won a footnote in the history of the #MeToo campaign when Scott, disgusted by the allegations made against Kevin Spacey, removed Spacey from the role of Getty and replaced him with Plummer for last-second reshoots. Yet Plummer doesn’t look like a hasty replacement. He relishes and luxuriates in the role. It fits him perfectly. Getty is exactly right for Plummer’s talent for subversive glittery-eyed grandfatherly mischief, cut with a dash of misanthropic malice.

Sylvester Stallone accused of sexually assaulting 16-year-old girl in 1986

Sylvester Stallone has denied allegations that he and his bodyguard sexually assaulted a 16-year-old fan in the 1980s and then threatened to “beat her head in” if she spoke up about it.

A spokesperson for the actor described the claims as “ridiculous” and “categorically false”, after a 1986 police report into the alleged encounter was obtained by Mail Online.

“No one was ever aware of this story until it was published today, including Mr Stallone. At no time was Mr Stallone ever contacted by any authorities or anyone else regarding this matter,” Stallone’s representative, Michelle Bega, told the Hollywood Reporter.

The incident is said to have taken place at what was then the Las Vegas Hilton in 1986, while Stallone was promoting the film Over the Top. According to the police report, the unnamed woman, who was staying at the hotel with her family, said she was given keys to a hotel room by the actor’s bodyguard, Michael De Luca. After having sex with Stallone there, the woman claimed that De Luca became involved in the encounter, at which point she became “very uncomfortable”.

The woman said there was no physical force involved in the incident, but she felt “intimidated” into having sex with the pair. “She became very uncomfortable with the situation. She states she did not want to have any type of sexual contact with the bodyguard, but felt she had no choice in the matter,” the report claims.

After the incident, “Stallone made the comment that they were both married men and that she could not tell anybody about the incident and if she did, that they would have to beat her head in”, according to the report.

Police noted that the woman was “extremely emotional” during their interview with her and had “difficulty in relating her thoughts”. She ultimately decided not to pursue charges against Stallone and De Luca because she felt “humiliated and ashamed” by the incident, the report states.

Retired detective sergeant John Samolovitich, who was the head of Las Vegas police force’s sexual assault unit at the time of the alleged incident, confirmed to the Mail that they had obtained a “true” copy of the report.

De Luca, a former professional boxer, died in a 2013 police shooting in California.

The claims against Stallone come in the wake of allegations of sexual assault and harassment made against a number of entertainment industry figures.

The Death of Stalin review – Armando Iannucci has us tremblin' in the Kremlin

Fear rises like gas from a corpse in Armando Iannucci’s brilliant horror-satire The Death Of Stalin. It’s a sulphurous black comedy about backstairs Kremlin intrigue following the death of Joseph Stalin in 1953 – adapted by Iannucci, David Schneider and Ian Martin from the French graphic novel series by Fabien Nury and Thierry Robin.

Faced with the unthinkable demise of Stalin, so long revered as nothing less than a god, these Soviet dignitaries panic, plot and go in and out of denial: a bizarre, dysfunctional hokey cokey of the mind. Everyone is of course initially terrified of saying out loud that he is dead – a quasi-regicidal act, which could, in any case, turn out to be wrong and interpreted as traitorous wishful thinking. But dead he is, and Iannucci shows that it is like the casting, or lifting, of some witch’s spell. All these ageing courtiers and sycophants have suddenly been turned into a bunch of scared and malicious children.

The Death Of Stalin is superbly cast, and acted with icy and ruthless force by an A-list lineup. There are no weak links. Each has a plum role; each squeezes every gorgeous horrible drop.

Michael Palin is outstanding as Molotov, the pathetic functionary with the kindly, unhappy face who has long since sacrificed his marriage and self-respect on the altar of Stalinism; Steve Buscemi is a nervy Khrushchev, who morphs from uneasy court jester into a Soprano-esque player; Andrea Riseborough is compelling as Stalin’s wan daughter Svetlana, driven to a borderline-Ophelia state of trauma and dread. Jeffrey Tambor is hilarious as the vain and preposterous Malenkov, and so is Rupert Friend as Stalin’s deadbeat boozer son, Vasily. Jason Isaacs gets sledgehammer laughs as the truculent war hero Zhukov, to whom he gives a muscular northern accent: a down-to-earth man of action who is to carry out the film’s final, brutal coup.

And the first among equals is Simon Russell Beale as the toadlike secret police chief, Beria, a figure oozing evil. For decades, I wondered if this extraordinary theatre actor would ever get a screen role worthy of his stage career. Now at last he has. His Beria is the dark heart of the film: a man who disingenuously suggests softening or “pausing” the programme of beatings, imprisoning and torture, so that reformists can be reviled for ideological disloyalty and weakness, and he can be credited for restoring authority. It is Beria’s cruelty and inhumanity that puts the warhead on the satire.

Beale’s great scene, maybe the best scene in the film, is when he, Molotov and Khrushchev are having a conversation, and Beria grinningly insists on hearing again Molotov submissively and piously say in a loud, clear voice how his wife deserved to be taken away and executed for treason. Beria has got a satanic surprise in store for Molotov: what Greene might have called the worst horror of all, although poor dopey Molotov doesn’t recognise it as such. If you re-read the final scenes between Winston Smith and Julia from Nineteen Eighty-Four and then watch this scene, you can have your own version of Marx’s dictum about history as tragedy, then farce.

Paddy Considine also has a tremendous small role at the very beginning as Andreyev, the radio producer who presides over a live transmission of a piano concerto, featuring a soloist, Maria Yudina (Olga Kurylenko) who is to play a fateful role in the action. Towards the end of the broadcast, Andreyev is aghast to receive a phone call from Stalin himself, curtly asking for a gramophone recording of the event. He then has no choice but to tell his exhausted musicians to re-perform for a recording, and to round up another conductor in circumstances reminiscent of preparing someone to be sent to a labour camp. And his mention of their glorious leader triggers an outburst of neurotic clapping among those present, a droll allusion to the myth that official applause could go on virtually for ever in that era when no one wanted to be the first to stop.

Stylishly plugging into the classic Soviet-era mode of subversive satire, and melding it with his own, Iannucci has returned to his great thematic troika of power, incompetence and bad faith. Like the spin-doctors and aides of his TV satires The Thick of It and Veep, these poisonous Soviet rivals are orphaned by the times. The real power – PM, president, general secretary of the Soviet Union – to whom these people pay lip-service but have forgotten why, is absent, somewhere beyond or above or below them. They scurry around in an eternal headless-chicken dance whose purpose is to make sure that someone gets the blame. But in The Thick of It or Veep it was different. Get something wrong, and for the most part all you endured was media embarrassment. Here you get a bullet in the back of the head. I wonder if anyone from Vladimir Putin’s cabinet will see The Death of Stalin. They might see something awful being born.

On Body and Soul review – bizarre and brutal tale of lovers in the slaughterhouse

On Body and Soul is an urban pastoral. It’s a love story that unfolds both in a secret inner dreamscape and an outer world of ostensible normality – which is actually far more comically irrational. This duality could be the one hinted at in the title. But which is body and which soul? Where do we assume the spirituality and physicality are located? It’s not entirely clear.

The Hungarian film-maker Ildikó Enyedi won the Golden Bear in Berlin this year for this film, perhaps her most notable success since winning the Camera d’Or at Cannes in 1989 for My Twentieth Century, about identical twin sisters heading for an appointment with destiny and modernity aboard the Orient Express. This movie has the same playfully unexpected sensuality that My Twentieth Century was praised for. Its eroticism has something of the Czech author Milan Kundera.

The premise of the film and its unwatchably brutal opening sequences are there to stun you, or in the butcher’s sense tenderise you, so that you hardly notice the implausible weirdness of human behaviour in the workplace scenes that follow. The setting is a slaughterhouse, and we see some explicit shots of animals being chopped up, and part of what we must absorb is the everyday paradox of commercial violence, which is extreme and yet entirely routine. It happens behind the backs of carnivore city-dwellers who might prefer not to know where their food comes from.

Endre (Géza Morcsányi) is the manager, a middle-aged man with a disabled arm and a drolly observant manner. His only friend, so far as this prickly and solitary man has friends, is HR supervisor Jenö (Zoltán Schneider), a beefy and hassled guy, forever being chivvied by his co-worker wife Zsuzsa (Zsuzsa Járó) with whom Endre once had a brief relationship. Endre’s eye is caught by a new person in the office: the delicately beautiful and shy young woman, Maria (Alexandra Borbély) who is the new hygiene inspector, examining the slaughtered beasts for signs of disease or excess fat. She radiates anxiety and loneliness and some Asperger mannerisms. Slowly and surely, Endre and Maria begin to fall in love. But they do this in the alternative universe of their dreams: they have the same, shared nightly dream, that they are deer wandering a snowy forest. We see this dream, and it is quite as real as anything else.

And how do they both find out? Ildikó contrives a comically preposterous plot mechanism whereby someone in the slaughterhouse has been stealing a special Viagra powder for cattle – the sheer improbability of an abattoir having such a thing needs its own sub-explanation – so each employee must naturally be interrogated by a distractingly sexy police psychologist Klára (Réka Tenki), questioning them about their dreams. A ridiculous and unlikely idea, yet such is the engaging nimbleness and poise of Ildikó’s direction that its surreal absurdity is noticed at first only as a comic lubricant for the poignant love story that is to come. Laura Marling’s bittersweet What He Wrote crops up pleasingly on the soundtrack.

The disconnect between mysterious dreamy visions of deer and gruesome scenes of cattle slaughter creates a space that the film utilises. Georges Franju’s famous short film Le Sang Des Bêtes (1949) proposed the grim reality of butchery as a hidden spectacle, lying behind the growing postwar urban world. Nikolaus Geyrhalter’s documentary Our Daily Bread (2005) showed it as part of something eerie, ruthless, uncanny, amoral: the inexorable process of food production.

Ildikó’s slaughterhouse scenes are different. They exist in tandem with those captivatingly romantic dream moments and the elegance and nobility of the deer. These imagined beasts are in a way the “soul” of the film and the hacked-to-pieces cows the all too obviously carnal “body”. And yet the blank horror of agribusiness dismemberment paradoxically refocuses the mind. If we think this spectacle is horrible or obscene, is it because, in our nausea, we are intensely aware of something other than body – something that has been degraded?

Certainly, Endre and Maria’s affair is at its most romantic when it is at its most eccentric and weird. They phone each other up when they are about to go to bed, and agree to tell each other the next day about the shared “deer” dream they are about to have. They even try sleeping in the same room, the same bed. The world of regular sex, to which they seem to be heading, is going to seem very banal by comparison.

The Untamed review – a film about love, pleasure and a tentacular sex monster

Mexican film-maker Amat Escalante’s work has included the challengingly violent crime drama Heli (2013). Now he has created a bizarre realist-fantasy parable in which queasy eroticism and body horror are absorbed into life’s many pains and injustices. It is set in Guanajuato in central Mexico, which Escalante’s movie endows with a forbidding remoteness. The original title is La Región Salvaje, or the savage region. A perplexing opening sequence, showing what appears to be a vast asteroid heading for Earth, lays the foundation for the film’s strange premise. The asteroid has brought with it a new life form which its elderly discoverers – retired people who live in a modest woodland shack – find it necessary to keep secret, rather like Mr and Mrs Kent when the baby Superman arrived.

 This movie has the spirit of Buñuel in many ways, also Guillermo del Toro, and maybe even Ridley Scott’s Alien. But I found myself thinking of Richard Linklater’s Before Midnight, in which Céline, played by Julie Delpy, wonders what would happen if scientists invented some kind of metal probe that would give lab rats pure sexual pleasure: she imagines the wretched beasts abandoning everything, including food and water, to rub themselves against this probe all day while their little faces become increasingly addled. The Untamed is about what would happen if there was some of kind of organism, kept in captivity, that could deliver exactly this kind of pleasure; an organism in touch with a fiercer, purer, deeper and more primitive sexual pleasure of which our evolved species has up until now only ever had an unsatisfactory and partial glimpse.

The tentacular sex monster is kept secret. It is hidden away in a woodshed and only a very few are aware of its existence, at least partly because they are aware of its dangers: unaware of its own strength, it can kill humans who submit to its penetrative caresses. Escalante cleverly gives you only a reasonable glimpse at the beginning and then keeps it away from the camera until the very end.

It materialises in the midst of a highly fraught set of human interrelations. Verónica (Simone Bucio) is a lonely, delicately beautiful young woman who has befriended the creature’s minders and enjoys regular experiences with the creature. But when it gives her a vicious wound in her side, which she has to explain away as a dog bite, she befriends the gentle, sweet gay nurse who attends to her. This is Fabián (Eden Villavicencio), who is having a very unhappy secret affair with Ángel (Jesús Meza), an arrogant, macho guy who maintains a boorish and homophobic attitude in public and is consumed with self-hate. To make things worse, Ángel is married to Fabián’s sister Alejandra (Ruth Ramos), with two children.

To help Fabián and to comfort him, Verónica lets him in on her secret. She shows him where the creature is to be found, rather as someone might – for the most high-minded and evangelical reasons – try to turn someone on to LSD and open their doors of sexual perception. The creature duly ruins Fabián’s desire for ordinary human sex, which brings with it a dire chain of events.

It might be possible to create a version of this film in which the creature is never shown, or in which it does not exist: a version in which the non-sci-fi realist love triangle of homophobia and loneliness is the only thing that matters. These are people plodding along with their lives quite accustomed to the continual nagging state of dissatisfaction and yearning that keeps them moving forward, like a donkey with a carrot dangled in front of it. And for most people, of course, that carrot is sex and love. Sex and love are the assumed ultimate pleasure and fulfilment, the promise of which is always receding like a mirage. What if there was something nasty in the woodshed that could deliver that pure heroin sex-pleasure? Something that could be kept for the purpose like livestock and, by virtue of its non-humanness, never needed to be surrounded with the pieties of romance or marriage or any conscientious interrelation? Or what if this creature represents something else: not just the pure animal pleasure we all secretly yearn for but also the dysfunctional, painful, unsatisfactory side of sex that we experience anyway?

Such a creature would be very dangerous. So is this one, in every literal and figurative sense. Its huge python tentacles slither into every orifice creating an unforgettable addiction that makes anything else the characters happen to be doing with their lives seem bland and unreal. This film is a very sly, subversive and disturbing black tragicomedy about a universal secret addiction.

Water and Sugar: Carlo Di Palma, the Colours of Life review – radiant tribute to a cinematic maestro

The cinematographer Carlo Di Palma is the subject of this intelligent and deeply cinephile documentary tribute presented by his widow, Adriana Chiesa (Di Palma died in 2004). It’s a film to remind you of the almost miraculously collaborative nature of cinema, but also the radiant personalities of individuals.

Di Palma emerges as a master of light and colour, someone who started out in the Italian neorealist cinema after the war, brilliant at working with whatever light was available on location. His working maxim was “la luce, la luce, la luce” (light, light, light). Di Palma made his breakthrough working with Michelangelo Antonioni, creating marvellous images for Blowup and Red Desert. For years he was the DoP for Woody Allen and this documentary argues that it was Di Palma who brought a cosmopolitan, Europeanised look to Allen’s New York – it demonstrates the micro-energies of a travelling shot he devised for the restaurant quarrel scene in Hannah and Her Sisters.

Despite many years in New York, Di Palma remained intensely Italian, where a technician is an artigiano, an artisan, a term that includes the word art. There is great richness and warmth in the comments from directors and admirers, including Allen, Ken Loach, Nikita Mikhalkov and Mira Nair.

Marisa Tomei: ‘I only got to be old very recently’

T oo hot, too young, too sexy: these were the cries of outraged comic-book fans on social media when Marisa Tomei was cast as Spider-Man’s Aunt May in July 2015. And the then 50-year-old Oscar winner agreed with the backlash. “I know, right?” laughs Tomei down the phone from New York, where she’s preparing for the blockbuster’s premiere this week. “It’s lucky I didn’t know much about Aunt May, because I might have been horrified if I’d seen the original image of a grey-haired pensioner. Don’t toy with my heart, Marvel. Is that really how you view me?”

She disagrees, though, that her casting was an example of Hollywood’s negative attitude towards age. She points out that it makes sense in the context of the franchise’s latest reboot, Spider-Man: Homecoming, starring 21-year-old Londoner Tom Holland as the wall-crawling web-slinger in his high school days: “They aged Peter Parker down too. He’s 15 in this movie. I ended up picking the brains of my brother Adam, who’s been an encyclopaedia of Marvel since we were little, and he explained that May’s not related to Peter by blood – she’s his aunt by marriage to his uncle Ben. So she could be elderly or pretty young, depending what age she met her husband. I thought maybe I should lean into it and made a case for them to age me up. A lot of young girls are wearing that silver hair now, so it was something we toyed with.”

Indeed, Tomei has her own pet theory about Ben and May’s back-story. “I decided that maybe he was her professor. I gave it that sexy, naughty little twist in my mind. That’s not in the movie, by the way. ‘A young, hot Aunt May’ isn’t really a character description, so I fleshed out my own mental picture of who she is.” Closer in age to the arachnid adolescent, her Aunt May is more of a teasing big sister figure than an apron-clad, cookie-baking granny type. “Peter’s been a super-nerd with his studies, which is laudable, but my version of Aunt May tries to coax him out of that and broaden his interests, maybe even start dating,” says Tomei.

To her mind, the 2017 Aunt May is also something of a second-wave feminist. “I had numerous conversations with the director, Jon Watts, about Peter Parker being a local hero, which seems particularly apt for these times. He gets those values from Aunt May, who basically raised him. So we discussed how she might be involved in the community and know everyone in the neighbourhood. We considered making her a pro bono lawyer, but didn’t want her to wear suits. Instead we made her a book lover who has her own small publishing firm, like a female collective. She’s got a feminist and humanist edge – at least in my head.”

For Tomei, Hollywood’s sexism is more of an issue than its ageism. “Well, I only got to be old very recently,” she chuckles. “The industry has decided I’m an aunt-type now. I’m like, is this the way it gets broken to me? But in any profession, there’s a lot of sexism. That isn’t exactly headline news. In our business, the numbers certainly don’t lie when you see how few speaking roles there are for women [studies show that 33% of speaking roles and 22% of protagonists are female]. It’s a numbers game and if you start adding in other factors, including age, the odds diminish of getting a great part.”

Is that a source of frustration? “For sure, but frustration is the name of the game in acting. Every actor is frustrated, always worried they won’t get the next job. That’s true of any actor, of any gender, at any success level. And I’ve heard it from very, very successful actors. Sexism is part of the culture, that’s just a fact, but we can try to change that culture. I like to think things have improved in the century since we got the right to vote. But just because it’s 75% better, doesn’t mean you should stop caring about the remaining 25%. We need parity, both in availability of work and our compensation for that work.”

Two years ago, Jennifer Lawrence criticised Hollywood’s gender pay gap after the Sony email hack revealed that she earned considerably less than her male co-stars in American Hustle – and Tomei has Lawrence’s back. “Why should we get paid 75 cents on the dollar and be told we’re lucky to have that?” she says. “It’s wonderful that someone like Jennifer speaks out. Why should she be pilloried? I don’t understand why it’s even controversial. We should get paid on parity. And by the way, Jennifer was the strongest element in that whole package. She should have got paid more, if anything.”

Tomei is speaking from her apartment in Greenwich Village (“Not to be confused with Greenwich, London or Greenwich, Connecticut,” she helpfully points out), nine miles from where she grew up in Brooklyn. She’s seen her home patch transform from a sprawling, diverse borough to the hipster haven of today. “Brooklyn’s changed a lot, for sure. You used to say you were from Brooklyn with chagrin. I always wanted to live in the Village but it seemed a million miles way. It was like in Saturday Night Fever, where their whole dream of escape was to get over that bridge.” Her parents, both of Italian descent, were a teacher and a lawyer. Crucially, they were also theatre lovers who took young Marisa and Adam to Broadway shows, which so captivated the children, both went into acting.

This year marks the 25th anniversary of Tomei’s breakthrough role: as Joe Pesci’s brash, drawling fiancee Mona Lisa in wiseguy courtroom comedy My Cousin Vinny, for which Tomei won an Academy Award for best supporting actress. “Wow, is it really 25 years?” she says. “No wonder you were asking about ageism. I did get old! It’s such a funny movie and it really holds up. I was fresh to the business and didn’t know how movies worked but Joe chose me for the part, then took me by the hand and guided me immensely, so I got very lucky. I keep my Oscar in my little library here. Maybe I should throw a Vinny reunion party and bring it out to show everyone? Just kidding.”

Tomei has since been twice nominated for a best supporting actress Oscar. “I’m a leading actress caught in a supporting actress vortex,” she laughs. “But what can you do?” First came director Todd Field’s 2001 family crime drama In the Bedroom, opposite Britain’s own Tom Wilkinson. “He’s a genius, one of my favourite actors, and it was thrilling to watch Tom work,” recalls Tomei. “I pestered him many times to ask how he did it, and he eventually told me he just reads the script a lot. I was like, ‘That’s it? That’s your big secret?’”

Her next Oscar nod was for Darren Aronofsky’s The Wrestler (2008), in which she played an ageing stripper and single mother who strikes up a romance with Micky Rourke’s past-it pro wrestler. “I went to high school with Darren, so it was a little dream come true for us to work together,” says Tomei. The role involved pole-dancing, lap-dancing and nudity – and she’s glad she waited until her 40s to do nude scenes. “Early on, I desperately wanted to be a ‘legitimate’ actress and was concerned I wouldn’t be taken seriously. Plus I’m not sure I could have handled it, emotionally and psychologically. I’m pleased it happened later – not only because it forced me to exercise a lot but there’s also a definite freedom and confidence I’ve gained in my body as I got older.”

After her Oscar win, Tomei appeared in a string of middling 90s comedy-dramas – the likes of Chaplin, Untamed Heart, Only You, The Paper, Slums of Beverly Hills and What Women Want – often with a romantic bent and often opposite her then boyfriend, Robert Downey Jr. The relationship didn’t last, but their close friendship did. Indeed, Downey (aka Iron Man) was instrumental in Tomei being cast as Aunt May: “He recommended me for the role and we had a flirtatious little scene together in Captain America: Civil War [which introduced Tomei and Holland’s characters last year]. Having a familiar face around certainly made me more comfortable.”

 Downey Jr has been teasing fans about a potential romance between their characters, referring to her as “Auntie May I?” and telling talkshow host Jimmy Kimmel: “Spider-Man’s got a hot aunt now. My God, imagine the possibilities.” Tomei is renowned as a fine on-screen kisser: she snogged her way around Italy with Downey Jr in Only You and won an MTV award for best kiss with Christian Slater in Untamed Heart. “It’s nice that I’m considered a great kisser,” she cackles. “It’s all about the partner, isn’t it? And it’s only on screen. In real life, I’m shit.”

She has also popped up in two of the biggest TV comedies of all time. Tomei played herself in two-part Seinfeld story The Cadillac as love interest for ‘Lord Of The Idiots’ George Costanza, played by Jason Alexander. “My name was the only reason I got cast,” recalls Tomei. “They just liked the way my name sounded. [Writer] Larry David told me: ‘When you say your name over and over, it has a really strong rhythm: Marisa Tomei… Marisa Tomei…’ But hey, I’ll take it. I’d love to do a TV show with Jason Alexander. We run into each other all the time and always talk about it.”

She then romanced another unlikely sitcom sex god: The Simpsons’s nicey-nicey neighbour Ned Flanders. Tomei guested in a Notting Hill-spoofing storyline about a movie star falling for a shopkeeper. “You should ask Ned Flanders what kind of kisser I am,” she laughs. “Although he’d probably just say I was okily-dokily.”

Tomei currently alternates between film and stage roles. In the past year, she’s starred in a production of Tennessee Williams’s The Rose Tattoo (“One of my castmates was a goat. A total diva but it had a better union than I did”) and Sarah Ruhl’s off-Broadway play about polyamory, How to Transcend a Happy Marriage. “Marriage is being redefined in all kinds of ways right now, so that was interesting,” she says. “Plus I got to kiss many different people and have a great big orgy scene every evening. It was a real pick-me-up.”

Projects in the pipeline include the lead role in Ms, a HBO biopic series about feminist writer and activist Gloria Steinem. “The script’s still being written but it’s definitely happening,” says Tomei. “I’m a huge fan of Gloria and her life’s work. We’re all indebted to her. She’s a fascinating figure, as were the women around her. That whole period is under-represented on screen. There are lots of great stories still to tell about the women’s revolution.”

At the moment, though, Tomei is relishing being part of the Marvel machine. “It’s so old-fashioned in a way: proper spectacle, gloriously larger than life. Spider-Man comes with fervent fans and intense scrutiny. They keep the script so secret, you have to give back your pages at the end of the day. But the system works and they put out really good movies.”

Will she be back for the inevitable sequels? “We’ll see. Hopefully the fans will love this new iteration and we’ll do more. Anyway, I think Aunt May should get her own spin-off. Something should go on with Tony Stark, and those two should get into their own capers.”

Happy End review - Michael Haneke's satanic soap opera of pure sociopathy

It hardly needs saying that the adjective in the title is about as accurate as the one in Haneke’s Funny Games. Happy End is a satirical nightmare of haute-bourgeois European prosperity: as stark, brilliant and unforgiving as a halogen light. It is not a new direction for this film-maker, admittedly, but an existing direction pursued with the same dazzling inspiration as ever. It is also as gripping as a satanically inspired soap opera, a dynasty of lost souls.

The movie rehearses almost all of Haneke’s classic themes and visual ideas: family dysfunction, inter-generational revenge, the poisonous suppression of guilt and the return of the repressed. There is the horror of death combined with a Thanatos-longing for its deliverance – one line in particular shows how Happy End has been inspired by the climactic moment of his previous film, Amour.

There is the distinctive preoccupation with surveillance and video recording as technologically unsparing moral reproaches to what we choose not to see in our own behaviour. And Haneke combines this with a new interest in the affectless visual texture of social-media livestreaming, instant messaging, and YouTube supercuts.

Often Haneke’s cinema is a cousin to conventional horror, conventional thrillers. Happy End is no exception. It is almost a genre movie. But the genre is that of Haneke’s own invention. It is unmistakably his work, presented with his usual masterly compositional flair, a mosaic of horror, filmed by cinematographer Christian Berger in crystal-clear light, often with icily detached long-shot camera positions. One character’s face is in fact never shown clearly at all – a diabolically apposite device. The narrative sometimes takes insidious little leaps forward, allowing us to register with a lurch the awful things that have been passed over.

Yet here there is an intriguing new tang of comedy or even grisly farce. The final images of the movie may intend an echo of Samuel Beckett’s Happy Days, and the unusual presence of a British actor, and the seaside location, made me wonder if Haneke, like Alain Resnais, had conceived an interest in that often underestimated master of middle class horror: Alan Ayckbourn. There is comedy in Happy End, of the most glacial sort. One scene shows the entire cast, at a grand family party, listening to a musical performance which – even without what we know about the musician – would be preposterous, reeking with imposture and deceit.


Isabelle Huppert plays Anne Laurent, effectively the chatelaine of a magnificent house and estate in Calais, having taken over the lucrative family construction and transport business from her ageing father Georges (Jean-Louis Trintignant). He is suffering from incipient dementia, and is waited on like a dispossessed Shakespearean king by the family’s Moroccan servants Rachid (Hassan Ghancy) and Jamila (Nabiha Akkari) - who are periodically subject to racist condescension. Anne herself is getting engaged to the British lawyer handling a new UK deal: Lawrence, played by Toby Jones.

This household is clenched with fear and anxiety. Anne’s drunken deadbeat son Pierre (Franz Rogowski), supposedly a site supervisor, has through negligence allowed a catastrophic accident which puts the firm in line for a huge civil suit. Meanwhile, Anne’s brother Thomas (Mathieu Kassovitz) has secrets of his own and must now look after the 12-year-old daughter of his previous marriage and accept her into their creepy manorial family-compound.

This is the eerily self-possessed and computer-savvy Ève (Fantine Harduin) whose mother is now terribly ill in hospital with a drug overdose, the cause of which is queasily unclear. And behind all this, the refugees trudge the streets of Calais, waiting to make another attempt at the tunnel.

Of course, with a Haneke movie, we are waiting a final flourish of violence or shock. Inevitably, perhaps, this comes from Huppert. But it is a tiny, almost microscopic incursion, a nasty little assault that perhaps belongs to the schoolyard, in keeping with the register of malign absurdity. And yet when it came, the entire audience in my screening gave a dismayed yelp. And the final images got something between a laugh and a wince. This is a black comedy of pure sociopathy.

Sophie Okonedo: ‘My body is my barometer – my instincts are physical’

Sophie Okonedo was born in 1968 in London and studied at Rada. She has worked extensively across theatre, film and TV and was nominated for a best supporting actress Oscar for the 2004 film Hotel Rwanda. On Broadway, she won a Tony award in 2014 for A Raisin in the Sun and two years later was nominated for her performance in Arthur Miller’s The Crucible. Her TV credits include The Slap, Undercover and The Hollow Crown. She is currently performing alongside Damian Lewis in Edward Albee’s 2002 play The Goat, or Who Is Sylvia?; she plays Stevie, a woman who discovers her husband is having an affair with an animal.

What was your first reaction on reading The Goat?
I thought I was due a break from theatre, because I’ve been doing a lot, but I was just really gripped by the play. I found it quite shocking. But everything I do is based on instinct, so when people say: “Why did you do that?”, I don’t really know… my gut just told me to.

That must be a helpful barometer – you can’t trick yourself into having a physical reaction…
Exactly; my body is my barometer. The minute I go into my head to try to work something out, that muddles me a little bit – my instincts are always very physical. It might be that I start shaking when I read the script or break out in a sweat.

Do you still get stage fright?
Yes! For the first few weeks, it’s just like standing at the edge of a cliff and hoping the parachute will come up.

The Goat treads a fine line between tragedy and comedy. How do you switch between them?
I don’t really think about it – I just go with playing the truth. I knew the play was funny when I read it. I was upset and laughing all at the same time, but you forget about how funny it is once you’re rehearsing. So it was a real shock when people laughed so much.

It’s quite a provocative play to have in the West End. How are audiences reacting?
The West End has changed quite a lot, hasn’t it? There are loads of brilliant shows and lots coming from subsidised theatre… it’s quite exciting. It’s very fizzy in the audience, sometimes: they’re not sure whether to laugh or cry or be disgusted or walk out. I’m not sure if we’ve had walk-outs: I sometimes hear a few seats going, but they could just be going to the toilet…

What’s it like working with Damian Lewis?
He’s a wonderful actor and enormous fun. I have a big second act with Damian and it’s a bit like doing a dance every night: I don’t know quite what he’s going to do; he doesn’t know quite what I’m going to do. He’s so agile, Damian – he’s not set in his ways. I couldn’t do a show where I’m just repeating the same thing every night… I find that deadening. I set out on an adventure with the show.

You get to smash a lot of vases in that scene. Is that satisfying?
It is very cathartic. People get quite jealous when they watch – they want to have a go!

You worked with the director Ivo van Hove on The Crucible. He’s known for taking very fresh approaches to classic plays – does that excite you?
I don’t really know – I think what really excites me is the play. And I’m not sure that I loved The Crucible, as a play – that’s probably sacrilege to say! But it is just so dark and I found that tiring. There’s a lot of anger in the play. That was a show I probably shouldn’t have done for 16 weeks; it was a bit too long.

Do you enjoy working in America?
I do miss home, but I really enjoyed being in New York. It was a dream to be on Broadway as a kid, so to actually end up there, I loved it. And it’s an amazing city.

You work between TV, film and theatre – which is your first love?
My first love is a wonderful script. It’s the story. But I can’t imagine not doing theatre – there’s something about that live experience, the exchange with the audience, I find quite moving. And I love going to the theatre: one of my favourite things is to go and see a matinee on my own.

What have you enjoyed lately?
I saw See Me Now at the Young Vic, which was performed by sex workers. I thought that was extraordinary. It showed the capacity of human beings for love: different types of people in different types of situations.

Last year, you played Queen Margaret across three parts of TV series The Hollow Crown – how was that?
It was just brilliant. Doing Shakespeare is a treat anyway, because of the language, but also working with Dominic [Cooke]. He’s a theatre director, so we had wonderful rehearsal time, and then went to all these castles and had a whale of a time.

Presumably, the colour-blind casting was not an issue?
No, it wasn’t an issue. I didn’t talk about it with Dominic. I played Elizabeth Proctor [in The Crucible] and me and Ivo didn’t talk about it. But as a caveat, I do think it’s brilliant there is so much discussion about diversity now – it has changed and people think about it more.

You’re based in Sussex – what’s the appeal of living in the countryside?
I like gardening. And my husband is here – obviously, that’s a reason. I like being in nature; it’s really relaxing and I get the best of it all, really. I come up to London, do a show, then retreat here. I’m on the South Downs a lot, too – I really like the solitude. Being in the theatre is like being in a little family: you get really close. But I think I’m probably not such a social person, so I need to switch all that off.

Beauty and the Beast smashes the box office in opening weekend

Disney’s Beauty and the Beast has broken box office records after taking £18.4m over its opening weekend.

The huge haul means the live-action version of the animated classic, which stars Emma Watson as Belle and Dan Stevens as the Beast, is the fifth highest grossing three-day opening of all time and the highest grossing three-day opening weekend for a PG movie.

In the UK and Ireland it also delivered the biggest Disney live-action opening of all time, the biggest March opening weekend of all time and the number one opening of 2017 to date.

Beauty and the Beast now has the biggest opening ever for a musical in the UK, ahead of Universal’s Les Misérables which had grossed £8.13m.

The movie also performed well at the US box office, opening with an estimated $170m (£137m) and setting a new high mark for family movies.

According to studio estimates, it blew past Finding Dory, which was the previous record-holder for G- or PG-rated releases after it debuted with $135m (£108m) last year.

It is also America’s seventh best debut of all time and the top March debut ever.

The film, directed by Bill Condon, cost around $160m (£129m).

It has received widespread acclaim but also triggered controversy over what has been called a “gay moment”.

Character LeFou, played by Josh Gad, is the sidekick to the story’s villain Gaston and “is confused about his sexuality”, according to director Condon, who also described a brief scene as a “gay moment”.

Léa Seydoux: 'I have got lighter as I’ve got older'

A cold and overcast day in London suddenly feels a little warmer thanks to an impromptu interlude from Léa Seydoux. The French actor, who is heavily pregnant when we meet, has just broken into song, filling the room with lyrics from Down Here I’ve Done My Best by American gospel group Take 6. There’s no R&B swagger in her version, mind you – she whispers the words rather than belts them out – but she feels that their content is apt. “The guy who is singing,” she tells me once she’s finished her recital, “he is saying that he’s done his best and right now he has no regrets. I feel like that now. I don’t feel like a victim and I like that.”

The Paris-born actor is happy at last. She might be hugely successful on screen – in Bond and Mission Impossible as well as being a star in France – but an ennui, fostered during childhood, has cast a long shadow. Now, at 31 and on the cusp of parenthood, she has emerged into the light. “I have got lighter as I’ve got older,” she says. “I know you have to enjoy the moment. I feel I have no frustrations any more. I have done my best so far. As a young girl I didn’t know what I wanted or what I was able to do. Now I feel more confident and that helps me feel better in my skin.”

We’re sitting in a Soho hotel and our conversation has dived into the deep end earlier than I’d anticipated, though this is perhaps typical of Seydoux. Even with her newfound sunny disposition, anxiety bubbles under the surface. She is, it seems, a bundle of contradictions. She claims to be incredibly shy, but also “a little bit of an exhibitionist”. She often speaks in short sentences and yet is candid about her anxieties, regularly breaking into her warm, gap-toothed smile, occasionally erupting into fits of giggles, before suddenly trailing off, dreamily.


Today, she looks every inch the epitome of Parisian style in a red Louis Vuitton dress and flowing overcoat, though she undercuts the chic with regular sniffles and nose parping (she has a cold). The Take 6 lyrics popped into her head when I asked about her pregnancy. “I always knew I wanted to have a baby,” she says. Seydoux has been with boyfriend André Meyer for three years. “I’ve always dreamed of being a mother,” she adds. “But I am happy it came now because before I think I was not ready. I would have loved to have had kids when I was young, but I think I was too dark.”

Seydoux is one of seven children. Her mother had three, the eldest of whom is 16 years older than Léa, before having another two (Seydoux and older sister Camille, a stylist with whom she worked for a while) when she married her father. Her parents divorced when she was three, and her father had two more children with his next wife.

Other children, she says, thought she was weird. “I looked like a boy. I had very short hair. I had lice so I had to cut my hair all the time. My sister, I think, wanted to have a brother, so she dressed me like a boy. I was sad.”


She was a creative child, though, and harboured dreams of singing. Opera was her ambition. “I don’t have an amazing voice, though it makes me feel free.” Only as an adult did acting appear on the horizon. The story goes that she was besotted with a French actor (whose name she will not reveal), though when she finally met him she was appalled by his arrogance. He kept forgetting her name. “Right,” she thought, “I’ll show you.”

Despite the unlikely motivation the move paid dividends, Seydoux proving both industrious and versatile, her myriad talents working on a clutch of English-language directors. Quentin Tarantino cast her in Inglourious Basterds; Ridley Scott gave her three scenes in Robin Hood, and Wes Anderson, after working with her on a short film for Prada, invited her for a three-day cameo on The Grand Budapest Hotel. And then there is Woody Allen who, beguiled by her photographs, chose her for Midnight in Paris after a short phone call, during which he asked just two questions. “Could I travel straight away and how long is my hair,” she recalls.

The shyness she felt in childhood lingered, she concedes, and she was too nervous to really relish her work with Tarantino and Scott, “and I was too scared to talk much to Russell Crowe,” but Anderson and Allen, well, they’re just her “tasse de thé”. Not surprisingly, she likes Allen’s anxiety and his ability to turn desperation into comedy. “I love that he finds humour in the fact that life is so tragic.”


Her most high-profile outings have come courtesy of Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol, where franchise star Tom Cruise requested her specifically, casting her without an audition after allegedly developing a crush on her. She won’t be drawn on working with him except to say: “He has a strong presence. He has a natural authority, and he can do anything. And it is his franchise…”; and then her turn as Dr Madeleine Swann in Spectre. The Bond film, she says, has proved her favourite film experience thus far: “Because Sam Mendes and Daniel Craig were so accessible, and so kind.”

Back home in France, her star is positively incandescent. She first arrived on the screen in 2009, winning the award for best newcomer at Cannes with La Belle Personne. Critical acclaim followed for the likes of Rebecca Zlotowski’s Belle Épine, the period drama Les Adieux à la Reine and Ursula Meier’s L’Enfant d’en haut, which scooped the Silver Bear at the Berlin Film Festival. The director of Cannes, Thierry Frémaux, famously described her as “Bardot, plus Binoche, plus Kate Moss, and sometimes all three at once.”

It was Frémaux’s festival that helped solidify her iconic status in France, granting the Palme d’Or to her 2013 film Blue is the Warmest Colour. It was the first time the award was granted to the actors as well as the director. For all the plaudits, the experience was a mixed blessing with Seydoux and co-star Adèle Exarchopoulos’s fractious relationship with writer-director Abdellatif Kechiche passing into film folklore. When it comes to her craft, Seydoux knows her mind. “Some actors say they have to become the character,” she says. “But I never have to become the character. I am the character.”

She cites a moment in her latest film, the ensemble piece It’s Only the End of the World from director Xavier Dolan, in which she stars alongside French acting royalty – Vincent Cassel, Marion Cotillard, Gaspard Ulliel, and Nathalie Baye. It is adapted from the play of the same name by Jean-Luc Lagarce.


“On the set there was a moment with Xavier where we didn’t have the same vision for a scene,” she says, remembering a moment when her character smokes weed in her bedroom. “He felt I didn’t understand my character. I said: ‘No, it’s you that doesn’t understand her. I completely understand her.’” Seydoux got her way. “When I hear “Action!” I become this character. It’s not fabrication. She lives in me.”

She plays Suzanne, the sister of a young man (Ulliel) who returns home to tell his family of his impending death. Resentment and familial feuds, however, rise to the surface and derail his plans. “I had a lot of empathy for the film and for my character. Suzanne is part of me and is another version of me in a way.” Suzanne is plagued by childhood anxiety, the flames of which are fanned by her family. “I really do feel like I am her, though I feel that with all my characters.”

Filmmaking is in Seydoux’s blood. Her grandfather is co-chairman of Pathé and her grand-uncle manages Gaumont, these bastions of cinema standing as two of the oldest film companies in the world. Another grand-uncle, Michel Seydoux, produced Cyrano de Bergerac, starring Gérard Depardieu. Her mother, Valérie Schlumberger, is often described as a former actor, though she appeared in just one well-known picture, director Maurice Pialat plucking her from the costume department on 1983’s A Nos Amours and placing her on screen.


“My mother is in this iconic film, but she never wanted to be an actress. Acting is not in our family,” says Seydoux. “And my father, maybe because his father is in cinema, it is not his thing. He is more into technology. He makes headphones.” The truth is slightly grander. He is CEO of French electrical giant Parrot. “He is like a geek with his glasses and his passion for computers,” she chuckles.

Seydoux maintains that despite the deep-rooted connections to her industry, her family has paid little attention to her career. “My mother, I don’t think she realised I was doing this job until recently.” She recalls heading out to Canada for what at the time was a watershed moment. “My mum called me and said: ‘Oh, what are you doing now?’ I said I was packing to go to Canada to shoot Mission: Impossible.’ She paused for a moment and said: ‘Oh, OK, and when do you come back?’” The story sends her into fits of laughter. “My mother is definitely in her own world. She has a special personality.” Seydoux pauses again, searching for the right word. “She is… uncommon. Like me, she is a dreamer.”

And Seydoux is a dreamer still. “Actually, I had this crazy dream last night,” she says. “I was flying in the sky and I was singing. It was a beautiful voice I had in my dream.” Another bout of giggles ensues. “I don’t know what it means. Do you?” I don’t, though I note, somewhat tritely, that she is flying high in real life, too – in April she will go back to work, starring with Ewan McGregor in the offbeat love story Zoe. She also has a good voice, I tell her. “Thank you,” she says as she clears her throat. The Take 6 lyrics once more fill the room.

The Founder review: Michael Keaton supersizes McDonald's and births Trump's US

All this film’s irony and ambiguity are showcased in the title, though Birth of a Salesman was an alternative that occurred to me. The Founder is an absorbing and unexpectedly subtle movie about the genesis of the McDonald’s burger empire. There is an avoiding of obviousness that resides in its clever casting of not-immediately-dislikable Michael Keaton as Ray Kroc, the needy, driven, insecure marketing type with the predatory surname who masterminded a nationwide franchising for the original California hamburger restaurant in the 1950s; finally taking it away from its owners and revolutionary fast-food pioneers, Dick and Mac McDonald, played by Nick Offerman and John Carroll Lynch.

Keaton is never the cartoon bad guy, not even at the very end. His moonfaced openness makes him look like a giant, middle-aged baby, wide-eyed with optimism about the world. He looks like the kind of unemployed comedian who might earn a buck playing scary clown Ronald McDonald – who is not in fact mentioned in the film.

The film’s first act is careful to show Kroc sympathetically; screenwriter Robert D Siegel and director John Lee Hancock cleverly set up Ray’s early struggle, his genuine ecstasy on discovering the McDonald brothers and his acumen in seeing the global potential of their little burger joint. And is it so wrong to call him the Founder? After all, the corporate-franchised experience of going into McDonald’s anywhere in the world is what Kroc envisioned and effectively founded. Along the way, the film shows us something about postwar entrepreneurial capitalism, innovation, corporate expansion and intellectual property rights. It even casts an oblique light on the new age of Trump.

Keaton’s Kroc is a hardworking man who’s always on the road, driving from town to town, exasperated by slow and erratic service at the drive-ins where he gets lunch, while his bored wife (a thankless role for Laura Dern) stays at home. Ray is trying to sell restaurant managers a new five-spindled milkshake machine – which makes five times as much as the usual single-spindle model – and crucially sell them on the concept that an increase in supply creates its own demand through market stimulus. The poor guy gets doors slammed in his face all over the country. But not in California, where a couple of bright, cheery brothers, Dick and Mac McDonald, have created an extraordinarily efficient fast-food system in their burger restaurant with no plates, no cutlery, no tedious wait times. They want six or eight of Kroc’s five-spindle milkshake machines. They don’t have to create demand. They’ve already got more than they can handle.

Ray listens to their story and is electrified by their innovative genius and American can-do. He positively insists on setting up a franchise operation for them. Too late, the poor McDonald brothers realise that this pushy fellow has pulled off what might be America’s first corporate takeover.

Like the young Donald Trump, Kroc is a huge fan of self-help and how-to-win-friends-and-influence-people type stuff. Alone in his scuzzy hotel rooms, he listens to a motivational LP which intones the words of Calvin Coolidge: “Nothing in the world can take the place of persistence, talent will not, nothing is more common than unsuccessful men with talent …” It was the McDonald brothers who had the talent. Kroc was the one with the persistence. Yet that, after all, is a kind of talent.

Also like Trump, Kroc’s wealth is to be founded on land and real estate, not burgers. He finally understands the importance of buying the land for his franchise outlets. And like Trump, he becomes an early connoisseur of branding and market identity. To the brothers’ astonishment, he takes out a copyright on their solidly reassuring name. And he finally returns to his supply-over-demand theory: America didn’t know it wanted or needed an identikit burger joint until he gave it to them.

Yet for all this, The Founder has a very different effect to, say, Morgan Spurlock’s gonzo documentary Super Size Me from 2004, which set out to show America’s Big Mac habit as nasty and damaging. However bad Kroc’s behaviour in this film, and however poignant the innocence of poor Mac and Dick, the actual customers of the restaurant are never shown as anything other than happy. Perhaps we are invited to see all this as the inevitable, rough business of market forces.

Crucially, Keaton’s Ray does not see himself as a sociopath or a narcissist but as the Capraesque hero of a feelgood underdog drama. He thinks he is the little guy making good. Yet by the end, we have seen quite another side to him.