‘We can do it’: Yalitza Aparicio’s Vogue cover hailed by indigenous women

The indigenous Mexican actor Yalitza Aparicio has made history by appearing on the cover of Vogue Mexico, in a first for a country where light-skinned people dominate the media landscape – despite an overwhelmingly mestizo and indigenous population.

Aparicio, who has won acclaim for her debut performance in Alfonso Cuarón’s new film Roma, wears a Gucci dress on the magazine’s December edition, next to the title “In tiu’n ntav’i” – “A star is born” – in the indigenous Mixtec language.

In a video released by Vogue, Aparicio, a preschool teacher from Oaxaca state, said: “Certain stereotypes are being broken: that only people with a certain profile can be actresses or be on the cover of magazines.

“Other faces of Mexico are now being recognized. It is something that makes me happy and proud of my roots.”

Her appearance on the cover of the magazine’s Mexico and Latin America edition was hailed by indigenous women. “I saw it and wow! It was very powerful. Just like she did, others will say: ‘We can do it,’” said Esther Poot, 24, an indigenous Maya activist and preschool teacher in south-eastern Quintana Roo state.

“We can continue raising our voices and say ‘yes’, as indigenous women we can go on television and come out in movies or appear on the cover a magazine. It’s exciting, but also motivating,” she said.

Mexico portrays its pre-Hispanic history in heroic terms, while demonizing Spanish conquistadors such as Hernán Cortés, but modern day indigenous peoples are portrayed less glowingly – if they are portrayed at all.

Indigenous Mexicans comprise 15% of the population but are often marginalized from public life and politics, and many live in poverty.

Aparicio’s magazine appearance comes shortly after the country swore in a new government led by populist president Andrés Manuel López Obrador, who has promised to put a priority on indigenous issues.

“Some media outlets are getting that sensibilities in Mexico are changing,” Federico Navarrete, author of the Alphabet of Mexican Racism, told El País. “It’s incredible that in 2019, 80% of the population of Mexico – those who look like Yalitza Aparicio – are not represented in the Mexican press.”

A survey by BuzzFeed Mexico showed the vast majority of people featured in Mexican magazines were white – with some publications having just 2% of its photos showing mestizo or indigenous people.

Skeptics noted that Aparicio appeared in the US edition of Vanity Fair before Vogue Mexico put her on its cover, while some online reaction to her cover has been explicitly racist.

“It shouldn’t be so surprising, but it is and that’s because of the racism we experience in the country and the exclusion of indigenous people historically,” said Betina Cruz Velázquez, a leader of the Binnizá community in the Isthmus region of southern Oaxaca state.

“The whole idea that indigenous people are not attached to western ideas or western beauty stereotypes causes people to be surprised that an indigenous woman can use an expensive dress and be on a magazine cover that isn’t targeting indigenous people.”

Roma: why Alfonso Cuaron's Oscar frontrunner is a triumph

Roma, Alfonso Cuarón’s first film since 2013’s Oscar-guzzling outer space spectacular Gravity, is by most measures a pretty major work. It won the Golden Lion at Venice after its premiere prompted a collective critical swoon, and it’s widely expected to become the first Spanish-language production to land an Oscar nomination for best picture. (Cuarón is currently the bookies’ favourite to take his second best director statuette.) Beyond such accolades, meanwhile, it’s a significant industry milestone on the business side of things: the first film ever to persuade Netflix to drop their hitherto stubborn day-and-date strategy and release it exclusively in cinemas first.

You might expect a film with that level of clout to be some manner of blockbuster, though those who approach Roma on hype alone may be surprised by how exquisitely small it is: hefty in formal scope, yes, but finally an intimate, fine-boned character study as memory piece, built from vignettes and images that suggest an uncovered family album in gleaming monochrome. Loosely autobiographical, it’s a reflection on Cuarón’s middle-class upbringing in the Colonia Roma district of Mexico City amid the political tumult of the early 1970s, though Cuarón’s pre-teen proxy is a marginal presence: the protagonist and focal point here is Cleo, a young but prematurely world-weary woman who acts as the family’s live-in nanny and domestic worker.

Taciturn, delicate but resilient, she’s regarded with adoring awe throughout by Cuarón’s limber camera. From the opening shots, lingering patiently over the soapy water Cleo uses to clean the family’s driveway, it’s clear that Roma is intended as a belated valentine to an unseen woman, treated with needy affection by employers who also take her casually for granted, rarely pausing to notice either the back-aching drudgery she endures for their sake or the shipshape domestic order left in its wake. In gazing upon that drudgery, framing it in meticulous black and white, Roma is nothing if not an act of noticing, paying its respects and attention most directly to its fictionalised subject with a closing dedication: “For Libo,” it says, doffing its cap to the Cuarón family’s longtime maid Liboria Rodríguez, whom the film-maker says he consulted extensively in the writing process.

This is a world apart from the vision of domestic routine in a film such as Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles, which stresses the banality of housework to underscore a homemaker’s psychological unravelling. If Cleo finds her job dreary – and Roma doesn’t skimp on how thankless his blindly privileged family often made it for her – Cuarón’s cinematic thank-you letter effectively takes pride in it for her. This is a risky stance to take, particularly with a heroine already written as a naif of few words: Roma gives a disenfranchised woman a spotlight more than it does a voice, and it’s left to the soulful, jaded expressivity of the non-professional actor Yalitzia Aparicio in the lead to wrest some storytelling control from the film’s imposingly perfect mise-en-scene.
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If it took place in a vacuum of purely personal reference points, Roma could easily seem at once reverent and slightly condescending: a nostalgic beautification of an ugly facet of family history. Cuarón is a smarter film-maker than that, of course. As in his last Mexican film, 2001’s Y tu Mama También, a tender coming-of-age narrative is suffused with broader, brittler class politics, as the vast economic disparity between the country’s lighter-skinned haves and darker-skinned have-nots is denoted throughout – not least in the large, fashionably appointed family townhouse around which so much of the film’s action airily revolves. Cleo’s shabby servant’s quarters at the back, meanwhile, are pointedly shot from one outward-facing angle: there, the camera has no room to roam. Woman of the house Sofía may occasionally make magnanimous part-of-the-family gestures to Cleo, but the manifold enforced divisions and differences between them are illustrated in, well, black and white. (Not to mention aurally: a less careful film wouldn’t differentiate between the subtitles –complete with introductory on-screen key – indicating the Spanish spoken by the family and the Mixtec dialect spoken by Cleo and her class peers.)

Regardless of language, no one in Roma talks about politics. The family has the luxury of being able to ignore such concerns; the illiterate Cleo, meanwhile, appears to be kept ignorant, even as the Corpus Christi massacre (ironically, a brutal response to students demonstrating for education reform) rages around her on a day of intense personal crisis. In this, the film’s most stunningly executed set piece, national affairs are pushed literally into the background, echoing the character’s own curtailed perspective. Is it in sympathy with her, too, that Roma keeps its political critique tacit – littering the film with evidence of her oppression but refraining from speaking for her in protest?

Viewed from different angles, Roma becomes either a seething confession of middle-class guilt, a complacent declaration of love or, most believably and movingly, a conflicted mixture of the two. If we never quite get to hear what Cleo makes of her lot, that’s indicative of an entrenched social system that gives men like Cuarón greater powers and outlets of expression. If Roma is his magnum opus, it’s the beneficiary of multiple tiers of privilege, from his wealthy upbringing to the Hollywood success that enabled him to make this muscularly uncommercial personal project at all, much less see it given the full red-carpet treatment. (It’s not as if many of Roma’s most vocal champions are regular proponents of Mexican neo-realist cinema, after all.)

It’s to Cuarón’s credit that he’s taken advantage of advantage, to turn the lens on a life that nobody in the industry was clamouring for the director of Gravity and Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban to portray. But there are parts of Cleo, of Libo, that even this great film-maker cannot see. Stirring as both a labour of love and, perhaps, a whispered mea culpa, Roma is a film of exacting observation and equally precise blind spots – leaving space, one hopes, for the stories of Cleo and women like her to be told from other vantage points.

Bad Reputation review – smart, funny Joan Jett rock retrospective

It is an odd but all-too-common phenomenon that cinematic biographies about musical stars often leave the viewer liking the subject less as a person, sometimes in direct proportion to how much he or she liked the subject’s work beforehand. (See, for example, Nina Simone bio-doc What Happened, Miss Simone? and the Lady Gaga tribute Gaga: Five Foot Two.) It’s pleasing to report that’s not the case with Bad Reputation, a career-long retrospective devoted to rock star Joan Jett, who comes across here every bit as funny, smart, self-aware and generous as you could hope for. Ageing gracefully now that she’s into her seventh decade, Jett reflects with honesty on her career highs and lows, from her early days as a founder member of proto-punk girl-group the Runaways to the solo-star years of her hits I Love Rock ’n’ Roll and the titular Bad Reputation and acting side gigs – clips showing her in Paul Schrader’s now-rarely-seen Light of Day are worth the price of admission alone – to her most recent apotheosis as grand old dame and mentor to the young.

Director Kevin Kerslake moves the story along at a nice adagio pace, swerving into the archives to unearth vintage clips of not just Jett and her coevals performing but also David Bowie and one-time Runaways manager Kim Fowley, a troubling, multifaceted character, taking about the high times on Los Angeles’ Sunset Strip in the mid-70s. In addition, there’s a fairly starry lineup of Jett fans and friends offering insights, including Debbie Harry, Miley Cyrus and Iggy Pop. But the big treat is seeing Jett herself talk and watching her still-strong bond with producer and best friend Kenny Laguna: two leather-clad old mates, constantly bickering but inseparable.

Black 47 review – brutal revenge amid the horror of the Irish famine

Irish film-maker Lance Daly has taken on the great famine of the 19th century, and its worst year, the “Black ’47”, drawing from it an intestine-snappingly brutal movie that you could call revenge horror, or revenge western. Revenge something, anyway. And this is probably the generic result of seeing the famine not as a sorrowful tragedy, but as a matter of criminal constitutional negligence, with colonial rulers creating a serf class of disenfranchised tenant farmers, whose product was exported and who were made dependent for subsistence on a single, blight-vulnerable strain of potato.

Australian actor James Frecheville (who made his 2010 breakthrough in David Michôd’s Melbourne mob thriller Animal Kingdom) gives a coldly terrifying performance as Feeney, an Irishman who deserts from the British army and returns to his homeland to discover the horrifying truth about how his family have been tyrannised and allowed to die in squalor and misery. Repurposing his army training, Feeney goes on a rampaging mission of revenge-banditry against the landlords and their collaborator middlemen, in the process becoming a kind of implacable Fury, a Ned Kelly figure of insurgent justice.

On his trail is a once disgraced English soldier-turned-policeman, played by Hugo Weaving, together with a drawlingly arrogant officer, Pope (Freddie Fox), and a kind of tracker-guide named Conneely, played by Stephen Rea. And all the while, Feeney comes closer to his ultimate target – the landowner himself, Lord Kilmichael, played by Jim Broadbent – fictional, but presumably inspired by Ireland’s most hated absentee landlord, the Earl of Lucan, whose descendant was to become notorious in London a century later for other reasons.

Black 47 is a viscerally tough and uncompromisingly violent picture, something like an exploitation shocker at times, though with real insights. The west of Ireland, where the movie is set, is a place where Irish was the predominant language. Crucially, Broadbent’s Lord Kilmichael is shown irritably dismissing this as “aboriginal” gibberish and demanding English be spoken, thus typifying Britain’s dismal refusal to see Irish as a European language and culture equivalent to, say, French or Spanish – not to mention bigotry on the subject of Native American or Australian cultures. Tellingly, he says he longs for the day when a Celtic Irishman is as rare in Ireland as a “Red Indian in Manhattan”.

It is a harrowingly effective film, though flawed by the actions of Weaving’s officer being unconvincingly motivated at the end, and perhaps born of an emollient screenwriting need to split the difference between the Irish avenger-hero and his enemies. A gripping piece of storytelling, all the same.

James Bond on film – 007's best and worst movies ranked!

With the news of Danny Boyle’s departure as director of the next 007 instalment, we rank the big-screen outings of Britain’s finest, from 1962’s Dr No to 2015’s Spectre

26. Casino Royale (1967)

Wrong. Wrong, wrong, wrong. Even a cameo from Orson Welles couldn’t lend lustre to this pointless and unfunny spoof, a dire tongue-in-cheeker that slipped past the franchise control of the producers, Eon. David Niven saunters unsexily as the retired “Sir James Bond” in this chaotic film.

25. Die Another Day (2002)

Oh lawdy. The Bond franchise was looking lost in the grim and joyless new “war on terror”-era, and this movie featured the worst gadget in the history of 007: an invisible car. What on earth is the point of that? You can almost see the P45 being pressed into Brosnan’s hand.

24. The Living Daylights (1987)

This was the turn of straight actor and RSC stalwart Timothy Dalton. He was supposedly there to give Bond a hard and gritty new seriousness, but always just looked a bit humourless. This was during the Aids era of sexual restraint, too, so Bond only cops off a couple of times.

23. Licence to Kill (1989)

Bond goes rogue, and Dalton stays dull. This one is notable for the young Benicio del Toro as a humble henchman. After this, legal copyright rows caused a six-year production hiatus during which Dalton quit.

22. For Your Eyes Only (1981)

You can hear a whistling and a crackling in the air as Roger Moore begins to tune out. The stunts hold up, but Moore is on the exit ramp and his flaccid relationship with 24-year-old Carole Bouquet is a deathly embarrassment.

21. Never Say Never Again (1983)

The title is what Connery’s agent should have shouted at him when he was offered the comeback: (“Never”! Say “Never”! Again!) Connery lumbers back for the remake of Thunderball that no one wanted or needed. He was never a six-pack guy at the best of times, but he’s out of condition here. One to forget.

20. Quantum of Solace (2008)

Much mocked at the time, this film wasn’t as bad as that – despite the silliest title in the series’ history. Craig is always watchable and Mathieu Amalric is a very eccentric oddball villain.

19. The World Is Not Enough (1999)

Not bad, but some of the fizz has gone. In this film, the distinction between villain and henchman seems to collapse with three bad guys: Robert Carlyle, Robbie Coltrane and, erm, Goldie, who was very big in those days.

18. GoldenEye (1995)

Was it a Bondaissance? A Brosnanaissance? Whatever. Stylish yet assertive smoothie Pierce Brosnan had already made an impression in the TV caper Remington Steele. He took to Bond like a duck to water: virile, cool, nice suits. Judi Dench made her debut as M. Bond was back!

17. A View to a Kill (1985)

Quite unexpectedly, Moore pulled it back a bit for his last hurrah. (It was also, sadly, the last hurrah for Lois Maxwell’s Miss Moneypenny.) Christopher Walken was always destined to play a Bond villain and it came to pass in this film, as the evil electronics mogul Max Zorin. A good note for Moore to bow out on.

16. Moonraker (1979)

A whopping, megabudget Bond in its day, clearly influenced by the Star Wars-led sci-fi revival. It is all about the theft of a space shuttle, but this excursion into space can’t conceal the fact that Moore is looking a bit jaded.

15. On Her Majesty’s Secret Service (1969)

George Lazenby’s sole appearance wasn’t a bad Bond. Had he done more, Lazenby might have become a favourite. Diana Rigg played the woman who shows 007 is no commitmentphobe. They marry, before gunfire poignantly restores Bond’s eternal singledom.

14. Diamonds Are Forever (1971)

Uh-oh. Connery was tempted back to the role with a big pay packet, now looking craggier and toupeed. Ernst Blofeld, boringly played by Charles Gray, wants to use diamonds to focus his space laser. Bond girl Tiffany Case was played by Jill St John, whose real-life boyfriend, Henry Kissinger, would have been better as the villain.

13. Tomorrow Never Dies (1997)

It took a spanking from Titanic at the box office, but this is a good, underrated Bond: one of the very few films (or plays or books) to satirise Rupert Murdoch and his Chinese expansionist plans – a rather taboo subject in 90s media. Jonathan Pryce has great fun with the role of the villainous mogul.

12. Octopussy (1983)

Outrageously daft, but silly and fun. Roger Moore wears a gorilla costume.

11. The Spy Who Loved Me (1977)

This has a well-loved Bond song, Carly Simon’s Nobody Does It Better. It also introduced us to the exotic henchman Jaws. The action opens with that staggering skiing-off-a-cliff stunt, just after Moore is seen supposedly skiing in front of an obvious back projection.

10. The Man With the Golden Gun (1974)

Despite iffy reviews at the time, this has one of the very best villains, wonderfully played by Christopher Lee: Scaramanga, he of the creepy third nipple. It is a preposterous 70s fuel-crisis drama about a solar energy device. There’s some funky martial arts, too.

9. Skyfall (2012)

An excellent, intelligent Bond which shrewdly expanded the role of Judi Dench’s M, developed her relationship with 007 and created a plausible, sympathetic backstory for him. Javier Bardem got his teeth into the villain role.

8. Live and Let Die (1973)

And so began the reign of Roger Moore, tacitly conceding the campness that many saw as unavoidable for Bond. Moore was witty, sprightly and a mature 46 when he took over (Connery had started at 32.) This movie has a great song from Paul McCartney and Wings.

7. Thunderball (1965)

The evil organisation Spectre had its first appearance in Fleming’s Thunderball novel, but we were used to it by now, this being the fourth outing for 007 on the big screen. Good stuff here, but the franchise faltered a bit, with long underwater sequences.

6. Spectre (2015)

Boom! Craig and director Sam Mendes bring off an absolutely storming 007 extravaganza, kicking off with a head-banging action sequence in Mexico City. Léa Seydoux has a Veronica Lake-type sultriness and Ben Whishaw almost steals the show as the geeky Q.

5. Casino Royale (2006)

Daniel Craig had to face a lot of internet bickering when he was cast, but he blew everyone away with a performance that was just right: cool, cruel, ruthless, yet sardonic. It was great at the time and looks even better now. One of the best Bonds.

4. Dr No (1962)

Sean Connery’s first outing in the Bond role. It gave us the gun-barrel titles and the Monty Norman theme. There was Ursula Andress in the bikini and the exotic Johnny Foreigner villain with an outrageous island lair.

3. From Russia With Love (1963)

Weirdly ungadgety and downbeat. Connery searches his hotel room for bugs for what seems like 10 minutes, with the theme music playing deafeningly. There’s a great train fight with Robert Shaw’s Red Grant.

2. Goldfinger (1964)

“You eckshpect me to talk?” “No, Mr Bond, I expect you to DIE!” This introduced us to Bond’s Aston Martin DB5 and the weird spectacle of Shirley Eaton suffocating in gold. It established the convention whereby the villain leaves 007 time to escape some elaborate automated death.

1. You Only Live Twice (1967)

This great action movie put Connery’s Bond right back on top and introduced us to the Nehru-suit-wearing, cat-stroking master criminal Spectre chief, Blofeld, played by Donald Pleasence. Connery announced his intention to quit after this. Perhaps he knew it could never be this good again?

Ethan Hawke and Janeane Garofalo: how we made Reality Bites

Ethan Hawke, actor

The last time I watched this, I was at a wedding. I went to my room and it was on late-night TV. I was surprised how well it held up. It was funnier than I remembered, too. Douglas Coupland’s Generation X was published in 1991 and you kept hearing the phrase everywhere. That’s who we were. Everyone would say the script captured Gen X and I would roll my eyes and say: “What does that even mean?” I resisted it, but now I find it fun.

The story, about a woman trying to make a documentary about the disenfranchised lives of her friends and room-mates, is extremely good. Helen Childress based it on her own experiences. What’s rare is that there was no grownup in charge. Usually with movies about young people – like when I did Dead Poets Society – there’s an older person.

Being in your early 20s isn’t a happy time. Everybody is so hungry to prove themselves, even to themselves. This was Ben Stiller’s first movie as a director, too. Ben is a passionate and creative person but he’s also an extremely intense dude. He’d been in some Saturday Night Live sketches and all of a sudden he was directing the biggest movie star in America – and it’s really to Winona Ryder’s credit that the movie happened. She cast me and gave the green light to Ben. She had a lot of power at that moment.

Her character, Lelaina, is an aspiring film-maker. When we were shooting footage for her home movies, we were encouraged to improvise. In one scene, I recited a Gregory Corso poem, Marriage, while playing the guitar. When I saw the final cut, I said to Ben: “Hey man, that’s a famous poem! We’ve got to buy the rights to that.” A year later, I was in New York and this old guy grabbed me by the face and kissed me. “I’m Gregory Corso!” he said. “You are an angel. I was destitute. And out of nowhere I got a cheque for $17,000!”

Troy, my character, appealed because of his inability to like himself. There’s a lot of young people who are smart, with tremendous insight into the phoniness around them, but they’re unable to be forgiving of themselves. It was strange afterwards: I was constantly meeting people who thought I was full of myself. They thought I was Troy – and they really didn’t like him.

At the time, Lisa Loeb and I were part of a New York theatre company. One day, she played the song Stay for me. I sent it to Ben, saying it felt perfect for Reality Bites. He put it over the end credits and Lisa was the first unsigned artist in history to go to No 1 in the US.

Steve Zahn played Lelaina’s gay friend Sammy. When the film premiered at Sundance, I remember getting stoned on a ski lift with him and saying: “Man, can you believe all this pressure, all this hype?” He said: “What do you mean? Look around you. Snow is falling, we’re on a ski lift, I don’t feel any pressure.” We burst out laughing and skied the rest of the day.

Janeane Garofalo, actor
I was born at the tail end of the baby boom so I’m not even Generation X. I was almost 30 – and playing a 21-year-old. Gwyneth Paltrow and Parker Posey auditioned for the role as well. I think the studio would have preferred to go with one of them, but luckily Ben was a big advocate and so was Winona.

I think it was the first studio film I did. Previously I’d had one line – something like “That’ll be $11.50 please” – in a movie called Late for Dinner. I didn’t like the rehearsal process in Reality Bites and I wasn’t taking things seriously. At one point, I was fired for being disruptive. That taught me a lesson and, after they took me back, I made sure I learned it quickly.

When we shot at night, I figured it was OK to have a cocktail first. So in my trailer freezer, I had vodka chilling – which didn’t hurt my mood when it came to doing scenes like the dance to My Sharona at the gas station. I remember laughing a lot doing that.

For me, it was purely fun. I was like “the friend” or “the chubby friend” and there’s about 8,050 actors you can put in that part, right? Ethan had to act quite vulnerable and sing. He wanted to transition into leading roles, but I was just thinking: “Hey! Look at this! I’m doing a movie!”

My dad and sister came to watch us film the opening scene on the rooftop. They found it so boring, the way movies are made, doing the same thing over and over. My dad couldn’t believe people were paid handsomely just for that. He thought Winona Ryder was the country singer Wynonna Judd. He’s a fan of her mother, Naomi, and came along because he thought she might be there. He hadn’t heard of Winona Ryder. When I introduced her, he said: “So that little girl is a movie star?”

Leave No Trace review – deeply intelligent story of love and survival in the wild

Debra Granik is the exceptional film-maker who directed Winter’s Bone in 2010, launching the career of Jennifer Lawrence, and now she returns with this deeply intelligent, complex, finely tuned and observed movie, adapted by Granik and her screenwriting partner, Anne Rosellini, from the novel My Abandonment by Peter Rock. Their new title alludes the rules of respect and care for the environment promoted by ecological campaigners: to minimise human impact on nature.

Weirdly, this film initially reminded me of a fatuous and naive (and bafflingly overpraised) film called Captain Fantastic, which features Viggo Mortensen as a charismatic, disciplinarian dad who has taken his children to live with him in the wilderness. Leave No Trace is everything that that movie should have been: careful, realistic, with a sense of what is possible and what is at stake for those people who really do attempt to turn their backs on conventional living and also reject the stigma of homelessness — but what is also at stake for their children who have had no choice in the matter.

Ben Foster and Thomasin McKenzie play Will and Tom, a grizzled army veteran and his 13-year-old daughter. The question of Tom’s mother is not addressed. Will and Tom are living a kind of radical Thoreau-guerrilla existence in a huge public park in Portland, Oregon. They have built a secret camp with tarps and rudimentary cooking implements, making their own fires. They share a tent. They read books. They have military-style drills for staying undercover. Periodically, they amble out of the park and into the city, where Will can pick up his prescription for opioid painkillers at the vets hospital, which he can discreetly sell for cash on the black market to buy food — and then they return to the jungle. It seems like a perfect, even Edenic setup. But then Tom carelessly allows herself to be spotted by a hiker and things take a wrong turn.

The personae of Will and Tom are strikingly restrained, both in their conception and performance: there is an attractive humility and restraint at work, a quietism. No scenery-chewing, no fireworks, no obvious scary-Colonel-Kurtz stuff from Will or obvious teen rebellion histrionics from Tom. Neither appears concerned with what the future holds for them, nor when Tom should really be getting a tent of her own – let alone meet other people her own age.

When they are picked up by the authorities, they are subject to very similar psychiatric assessments, in which they have to respond true or false to questions about whether they have dark thoughts, etc. In some ways, these tests are callous, soulless – precisely the kind of bureaucratic intrusion that Will has passionately rejected on his own behalf and that of his daughter. And yet it is clear that this is the first time either of them have considered these questions – the first time they have really thought about themselves. Perhaps not having to think about yourself, not having to shoulder the burden of relentless neurotic self-examination, is part of what their way of life is about.

Interestingly, getting picked up and then escaping is also part of their way of life. They have clearly planned for what happens. They have to accept – or pretend to accept – the social services’ remedial plans for them before they can slip away once more. There is a great sequence in which they attend a church service, blandly complaisant, not making a fuss, not standing out, biding their time. Or rather it is Will who is biding his time; Tom isn’t so sure. Each time away from the wild brings Tom into contact with a society that she rather likes. Poignantly, she loves the rabbit that a neighbouring farmer’s kid has, and there is a lovely scene where she attends a rabbit-training school. Later, she has the same connection with honeybees. A split is coming. But Granik manages this crisis with cool, unhammy clarity. The intimacy and love between Will and Tom is presented with real delicacy. It’s a movie that will live with me for a long time.

Patricia Morison, star of Broadway and Hollywood, dies aged 103

Patricia Morison, who originated the role of an overemotional diva in the Broadway musical Kiss Me, Kate, starred on stage opposite Yul Brynner in The King and I and appeared in films with Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn, died on Sunday at the age of 103.

Morison died of natural causes at her home in Los Angeles, publicist Harlan Boll said. Morison’s death was first reported by the Hollywood Reporter.

With her long auburn hair and fiery blue-gray eyes, Morison radiated a sophisticated sex appeal. She had “the most sensual mouth of any lady in the movies”, Gregory William Mank wrote in his book Women in Horror Films, 1940s.

The Broadway actress Merle Dandridge posted a picture of herself with Morison on Sunday and tweeted out a tribute. “Rest, Beautiful Patricia Morison,” Dandridge said. “It was an honor to follow in your footsteps.”

Morison’s career got off to a rocky start. At 18 she was cast in the 1933 Broadway comedy Growing Pains, which lasted 29 performances. “I was so bad in it, they fired me in rehearsals,” she told the Los Angeles Times in 2015. “I cried so hard they gave me a walk-on.”

Her second Broadway role five years later was only marginally better – The Two Bouquets with Alfred Drake lasted 55 performances – but Hollywood noticed and Paramount signed her. The New York Times praised her “willowy elegance.”

Morison made her film debut in 1939’s Persons in Hiding, but she often found her options in the studio system frustrating. She appeared as Empress Eugenie in 1943’s The Song of Bernadette, opposite John Garfield in the 1943 thriller The Fallen Sparrow and in the 1945 Tracy-Hepburn romantic comedy Without Love.

She was often cast as the femme fatale or villain, including the mastermind in 1946’s Dressed to Kill, sparring with Sherlock Holmes, played by Basil Rathbone. Her other films included Danger Woman and Tarzan and the Huntress.

Born in New York, she was the daughter of playwright and actor William R Morison and Salina Morison. She studied acting and movement with Martha Graham. In 1935, she understudied Helen Hayes in Victoria Regina on Broadway.

After Paramount replaced her in several films, Morison left the studio and joined Al Jolson on a USO tour of Britain to entertain troops in 1942. She returned to get a part in one of her most-remembered films, Hitler’s Madman. She also played opposite Lon Chaney Jr in Calling Dr Death in 1943 and Victor Mature in Kiss of Death.

To appear in Kiss Me, Kate, Morison needed to get out of a commitment to appear in what was a new line of work for actors in 1947 –a TV series. She had been cast as a psychiatrist who helps a detective solve cases. The producer shot all of her 13 segments on the show in a quick two-week period.

Kiss Me, Kate, in which she was reunited with Drake, turned out to be Cole Porter’s biggest musical success and gave Morison the opportunity to play the temperamental Lili Vanessi and sing such songs as Wunderbar and So in Love.

She told the Associated Press in 1988 that she went to Porter’s home to audition for him but picked a Rodgers and Hammerstein song to sing. “I thought it was safer,” she said. She went on perform the role for almost 1,500 performances on Broadway and in London. The New York Times called her “an agile and humorous actress who is not afraid of slapstick and who can sing enchantingly”.

In 1954, Morison appeared on Broadway as a replacement Anna Leonowens with Brynner in The King and I and joined him on tour. She took over the role in 1952 shortly after Gertrude Lawrence died while performing the lead character. “She was marvelous,” Brynner said. “I could do anything with her.”

One story she told frequently was knocking on Brynner’s stage door and opening it to find Brynner sitting naked, in a Buddha style position, waiting to get his skin stained with a special juice to look like the King of Siam.

In 2000, she was struck by a car and the right side of her body was badly hurt. Morison, who never married, lived in a Los Angeles apartment with a piano upon which there were signed photographs of Porter and Oscar Hammerstein II.

A Fistful of Dollars review – punk-rock western as fabulous as ever

Two fistfuls in fact: two $500 payments – a gigantic amount – which the Man With No Name accepts casually from either side of a bloody feud in the sunbaked Mexican town of San Miguel. He has blown in like a strange force of nature, with a coolly amoral plan to use their mutual hate to his own gunslinging advantage. Striding towards a gunfight, he tells the coffin-maker in advance how many to knock up.

This is the 1964 movie, now on rerelease, which created the revolutionary new genre of the Spaghetti Western, an Italian coproduction shot in Spain and directed with inspirational pulp passion by Sergio Leone –drawing on Kurosawa. And it made a star and a legend of Clint Eastwood. He had been the impetuous young Rowdy Yates on TV’s Rawhide, an open-faced boy with a pleasant singing voice. In this movie, he suddenly, terrifyingly grew up: hat, poncho, grizzly growth of beard, short cigar, eyes perpetually screwed up, as if staring into the sun or suppressing a grimace of incredulous disgust. The Man With No Name and the brutal Dollars movies were a colossal rebuke to the blander Rawhide-style westerns that had come to dominate television.

The other figure that became a legend here was composer Ennio Morricone, for his extraordinary musical score – sometimes with plaintive and slightly nasal trumpets that declaimed his robust Aranjuez-type pastiche, and sometimes the main theme with its whip-poor-will whistling cries, whip-cracks, bells and eerie percussive shouts. The blaringly dubbed dialogue from bit-part players adds to the dreamlike quality of the film.

The Man With No Name (he acquires the name “Joe” from the locals, apparently an all-purpose term for gringos) arrives and instantly sizes up the way the local Rojo brothers are psychotically bullying a small child, who has been taken away from his mother, Marisol (Marianne Koch), because one of the brothers has conceived a fanatically possessive attachment to this woman. This is the hateful bandit Ramón (Gian Maria Volontè), who has a sensual face that often looms sweatily in Leone’s many melodramatic closeups – like a cross between Omar Sharif and Laurence Olivier.

His is the crew which has audaciously kidnapped and killed members of the US army and, disguised in their uniforms, tricked the Mexican army into handing over a huge amount in gold in return for a promised consignment of rifles. The deal ends in slaughter. Ranged against the Rojo gang are the Baxters – anglos who are every bit as violent, and also pompous and pusillanimous. Eastwood’s nameless avenger somehow manages to use one against the other, but shows a human side, of a sort, in his laconic friendship with the bar owner Silvanito (José Calvo) and his gallant rescue of Marisol.

Finally, he will materialise as if from a dust storm with what looks like a supernatural invulnerability to bullets, though keen to dispute Ramón’s belief that a Winchester repeating rifle will always be better than a .45 pistol. And he achieves that all-important ronin asceticism, a need only to keep moving on, although that thousand dollars has in fact made him very rich. A Fistful of Dollars has a cult, comic-book intensity. It is the punk rock of westerns.

Terror Nullius review – dazzling, kinetic, mishmashed beast of an Australian film

Remember the scene from the original Mad Max, when a wounded Max Rockatansky lies on the road and Nicole Kidman from BMX Bandits arrives and jumps over him? Remember how Olivia Newton-John from Grease, glammed up in a leather jacket and skin-tight black pants, observed this interaction from the side of the road while smoking a cigarette?

Remember how one of the cars in Mad Max was destroyed by a group of angry women, including Lucy Fry from the Wolf Creek TV series and Jacqueline McKenzie from Romper Stomper? Remember how Essie Davis from The Babadook throws a match on the vehicle while Toni Collette and Rachel Griffiths from Muriel’s Wedding laugh as it goes up in flames?

Of course you don’t. No such scene ever took place ... at least, until now. Precisely this moment transpires in Terror Nullius, a weird, dazzling, kinetic, dizzyingly ambitious, sensationally mishmashed beast of an Australian film, one part video art installation project, one part revisionist documentary, and one part, I don’t know – LSD-infused YouTube compilation video?

Running for 55 minutes and screening at Melbourne’s Australian Centre for the Moving Image gallery, it is a rabble-rousing work of political satire from Soda_Jerk, a two-person collective comprising Sydney-born siblings Dan and Dominique Angeloro. The pair describe their work as existing “at the intersection of documentary and speculative fiction”, meshing together pop culture bits and pieces in order to create “a form of rogue historiography”.

The work has already sparked backlash due to its political nature – from its own funders, no less. Terror Nullius received $100,000 from the Ian Potter Cultural Trust as part of the Moving Image Commission in 2016, a 10-year initiative for new projects by mid-career Australian artists. On Monday, the day before the film’s premiere, the trust released a statement saying they did not wish to be associated with the marketing and publicity of the film, calling it “a very controversial piece of art”. The film-makers told Guardian Australia: “If ‘very controversial’ is another way of saying that the work is willing to start uncomfortable conversations, then we’ll happily wear it.”

Soda_Jerk’s approach, which has its roots in electronic music, involves mashing together bits of sequences, and/or scissoring out parts of the frame (or soundtrack) and pasting them into different compositions. Josh Thomas from Please Like Me, for example, is inserted into a scene with Terence Stamp from The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert, their two previously unrelated characters now discussing attitudes towards Indigenous rights.

When asylum seekers from Lucky Miles arrive on our shores in Terror Nullius, they are greeted by Russell Crowe’s violent skinhead, Hando, from Romper Stomper, who ... well, you probably can guess what he does to them. This scene epitomises Soda_Jerk’s bits-and-pieces approach, which involves taking one form of media representation and contrasting it with another, in order to create new meaning – often making provocative messages about sensitive topics such as LGBT+ rights, land rights and asylum seekers.

Terror Nullius is a fiercely distinctive and interesting film, at once behind, ahead and of the times. Behind the times in that all of us have been sampling and rearranging media since we started consuming it: this is, to an extent, how our brains and memories work. Ahead, in that there’s nothing else quite like it, and the remix culture and era of IP appropriation it belongs to will hardly be disappearing anytime soon.

And it is utterly contemporary, given today’s media-converging times, with boundary-blurring initiatives such as (to name one of many examples) the Instagram account Call Me By Monet, which blends images from a recent film with Monet paintings. There’s also the director Steven Spielberg’s impending blockbuster Ready Player One which, as a core part of its premise, appropriates and regurgitates pop culture from the 1980s, continuing a trend of nostalgia-mongering prevalent in the recent Star Wars movies.

George Miller’s Mad Max films feature prominently in Terror Nullius. Lord Humungus from The Road Warrior, now with Pauline Hanson as one of his gang and a Southern Cross tattoo on the back of his neck, has something else on his mind this time around, when he delivers his famous speech. And wait until you hear what Furiosa and (Tom Hardy era) Max Rockatansky listen to in the middle of the desert – a strange and shocking moment of meta truthfulness.

You wouldn’t want to see a film like Terror Nullius every week, or even every month. But it’s exhilarating to see this kind of proverbial cattle prod applied to both the viewer and the medium. It plays like a kind of 21st century Beat poetry, with an electric, freewheeling energy obsessed with messing with craft and structure. Terror Nullius is arthouse and grindhouse; high art and low art; avant-garde and kitsch. It is also an ode to the film and television editor: their unequalled power in the creation and shaping of meaning.

George Miller’s Mad Max films feature prominently in Terror Nullius. Lord Humungus from The Road Warrior, now with Pauline Hanson as one of his gang and a Southern Cross tattoo on the back of his neck, has something else on his mind this time around, when he delivers his famous speech. And wait until you hear what Furiosa and (Tom Hardy era) Max Rockatansky listen to in the middle of the desert – a strange and shocking moment of meta truthfulness.

You wouldn’t want to see a film like Terror Nullius every week, or even every month. But it’s exhilarating to see this kind of proverbial cattle prod applied to both the viewer and the medium. It plays like a kind of 21st century Beat poetry, with an electric, freewheeling energy obsessed with messing with craft and structure. Terror Nullius is arthouse and grindhouse; high art and low art; avant-garde and kitsch. It is also an ode to the film and television editor: their unequalled power in the creation and shaping of meaning.

The rising star to look out for at the Oscars? That’ll be Netflix…

Oscar nominations are unveiled next week, and away from the fluffier speculation over who will win what, many in the industry will be perusing the list with a longer-term question in mind: will this be the year that Netflix finally breaks through? The streaming giant has been buzzing around the awards race for a couple of years now, though the Academy has hitherto mostly swatted it away – loth to give its blessing to films uploaded directly online, give or take a minor cinema release for the sake of form. Two years ago, their complete shut-out of Beasts of No Nation – Netflix’s first narrative original, scooped fresh from an acclaimed festival run – seemed a pointed vote in favour of traditional distribution models, notwithstanding the film’s recognition from Bafta and assorted industry guilds.

Several fine Netflix documentaries (The Square, Virunga, Winter on Fire, What Happened, Miss Simone?, Ava DuVernay’s 13th) have broken past the old-school bias. It stands to reason that members of the Academy’s doc branch, hip to the challenges of getting audiences to see their movies at all, are less likely to romanticise the big-screen experience. That should continue this year, with Netflix behind four of the 15 films already longlisted for the documentary Oscar: Yance Ford’s superb, politically charged grief memoir Strong Island, previously spotlit in this column; Icarus, Bryan Fogel’s riveting study of sports doping that tumbles dizzyingly into a life-and-death international scandal; Chasing Coral, a slickly persuasive environmentalist call to arms; and One of Us, a sober, absorbing portrait of three Brooklyn Hasidic Jews variously breaking away from their religious community.

Higher up the ladder, all eyes are on Dee Rees’s muscular, expansive southern farm epic Mudbound to become Netflix’s first nominee in the biggest races. Nods for screenplay and supporting actress Mary J Blige seem assured. Rees is angling to become the first black woman, and cinematographer Rachel Morrison the first woman at all, to be nominated in their fields. And if Mudbound makes the best picture lineup – a touch-and-go possibility, according to pundits – it’ll be a first for a film viewed on vastly more laptop screens than silver ones upon release. Even their roundly derided orc-cop thriller Bright could set a precedent: its tacky but elaborate prosthetics rather astonishingly made the Academy’s best makeup shortlist.

Netflix’s rival Amazon has previously cracked the Oscar race by playing nice with an old-fashioned cinema-first release for prestige hopefuls such as Manchester by the Sea. How Mudbound performs this week may tell us just how swiftly the goldrush game is about to change.

If it makes the cut, that’ll buoy the hopes of multiple titles on Netflix’s vastly expanded roster of original films for 2018, among them such seemingly awards-friendly titles as Come Sunday, the fact-based story of a theologically conflicted televangelist played by Chiwetel Ejiofor. Directed by Joshua Marston (Maria Full of Grace), it premieres at Sundance before hitting Netflix in April.

You sense Netflix using such scrappy indies as Oscar-season trial runs before they go supernova on us. By the time they bring us the likes of David Mackenzie’s Outlaw King, a $120m Robert the Bruce epic starring Chris Pine, or Martin Scorsese’s as-yet-unscheduled The Irishman, a gangster saga reuniting De Niro and Pacino, they’ll want their Oscar mojo in full working order.

New to streaming & DVD this week
Mother!
(Paramount, 18)
Scarcely less dementedly exhilarating on Blu-ray than it was in cinemas, Darren Aronofsky’s nightmarish vision of the artist’s ego run amok stands as one of last year’s gutsiest.

Wind River
(Sony, 15)
Layer upon layer of brisk, forbidding wilderness atmosphere carry a more pedestrian murder mystery in Taylor Sheridan’s stern, stylish, Native American reservation-set thriller.

Blue Collar
(Powerhouse, 18)
A 40th-anniversary reissue for Paul Schrader’s sinewy portrait of working lives and union politics in a Detroit car factory, which has held on to its earthy, profane anger.

Since you’re here …