The Ugly (2025)

The 'Columbus' and 'After Yang' helmer directs a Black List screenplay in this film also featuring Lily Rabe, Hamish Linklater, Phoebe Waller-Bridge and Kevin Kline.

As the Amazon Prime series finally comes to an end, maybe its series finale can convince people to start acting normal online again

Debuting writer-director Murat Fıratoğlu’s meditative slow-burn “One of Those Days When Hemme Dies” starts with a row of (mostly) men while they are at halay, a popular Turkish folk dance commonly performed at celebrations like weddings — not by professional dancers necessarily, but by the guests themselves. There is much symmetry, and a specific yet [...]

Robert Redford, who has died at the age of 89, began as a blond bombshell at a time with American cinema favoured grit, then turned into a supremely assured director and unlikely keeper of the indie flameAs the 1960s turned into the 1970s, it wasn’t cool for star actors to be good-looking. The style was more a scuffed, grizzled, bleary, sweaty, paunchy and shlubby realness. The fashion was for leading men like Gene Hackman, Jack Nicholson, Woody Allen. Even a very beautiful man like Paul Newman had a kind of rugged, daylit quality. But Robert Redford was very different. This was the supremely beautiful movie star who went on to direct, produce and then be the guardian and gatekeeper of commercial-indie US cinema at his Sundance Institute. And he was always an outlier.When movie audiences thrilled to George Roy Hill’s western Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid in 1969, they knew that in breakout star Redford they had an almost indecently attractive male, however much he might dress it down with buckskins and moustaches, playing the devil-may-care outlaw Sundance Kid himself. His sardonic charisma and sexiness shone through. And when he cleaned himself up for other roles, teaming up again with Paul Newman for the Jazz Age conmen caper The Sting in 1973, the effect was electric. Neatly trimmed and shaved, Robert Redford was just outrageously handsome, incandescently handsome, he was handsomeness on legs. His photograph was in the dictionary next to “handsome”. Continue reading...