The Favourite review – Olivia Colman is priceless in punk Restoration romp

Just when we thought Olivia Colman couldn’t get any better, she steps up to movie-star lead status with an uproarious performance as Britain’s needy and emotionally wounded Queen Anne in this bizarre black comedy of the 18th-century court, a souped up and sweary quasi-Restoration romp full of intrigue and plotting – with wigs, clavichords and long corridors to storm down. The drama is loosely based on the true story of Sarah, Duchess of Marlborough, competing with her cousin Abigail, Baroness Masham, for the monarch’s favours, and creating a horribly dysfunctional politico-sexual love triangle with mother issues. The two emotional duelists are played here by Rachel Weisz and Emma Stone, the latter with a very good Brit accent.

There is a cheerfully obscene original script from Deborah Davis and Tony McNamara, directed by the Greek auteur Yorgos Lanthimos, who brings to it the absurdism he’s already known for, along with something even more jagged and uninhibited. In fact, The Favourite may have corrected Lanthimos’s tendency towards arthouse torpor. It is a scabrous and often hilarious film, made loopier by the nightmarish visions and wide-angle distortions contrived by the cinematographer Robbie Ryan.

At first – I admit it – I thought these stylisations were going to be insufferable, and even had the unworthy thought that this script might work quite as well with a trad director, in a trad style. But no. Acclimatisation to the visual and verbal rhetoric doesn’t take long and the point is that Lanthimos’s provocations pump and energise the screenplay, which with a conventional director might have just reverted to simpering bonnets-and-ruffles period drama, for all the raucous language.

Olivia Colman’s queen is a really funny creation – perhaps funnier and more sympathetic than her Queen Elizabeth II is going to be for Netflix, but who knows how she will reinvent that role? Her Anne is like something between the QEI that Quentin Crisp created in Sally Potter’s Orlando and a weird blend of Nursey and QEI in Blackadder. But that doesn’t do justice to the sadness of her Queen Anne: someone who has been infantilised by a lifetime of emotional manipulation. She is transported everywhere by wheelchair or sedan chair but can walk just as well. She sometimes flies into something between an anxiety attack and a rage at music or the spectacle of people enjoying themselves because of a self-hating inability to participate in pleasure. There is a private tragedy in her life which means that her emotional energies have been displaced into her large menagerie of house rabbits and she shows a keen interest in racing ducks and lobsters. Again: in the hands of an actor who wasn’t funny this could have been awful, but Colman sells all of it.

Weisz plays her court favourite and intimate Lady Sarah, who deploys every sly sexual and emotional trick to keep the monarch co-dependent and keen on the raising of taxes for an ongoing French war that will glorify Lady Sarah’s warrior husband Marlborough (Mark Gatiss). This is to the horror of minister, Robert Harley (Nicholas Hoult). Then a gentlewoman and cousin of Sarah’s, fallen on hard times, arrives at the court as a servant: this is Abigail (Stone), whose knowledge of medicinal herbs helps the queen’s gout. Her majesty takes a shine to the pretty little thing. So does the predatory nobleman Lord Masham (Joe Alwyn). The contest between Abigail and Sarah is on like the 18th-century equivalent of Donkey Kong.

If there is a flaw in the film, it is probably that Colman will inevitably upstage Stone and Weisz, and put their very important face-off in the shade. That is a minor consideration. The Favourite is full of freaky zingers and deeply strange laugh-lines: I loved the idea of someone sleeping like a “shot badger”. (There’s quite a lot about badgers.) And The Favourite is a reminder that the idea of royalty as polite and picturesquely sentimental is something that came in with Queen Victoria: The Favourite is more punk than that. It’s a rousingly nasty, bleary, hungover punchup.
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• The Favourite has premiered at the Venice film festival and is released in the US on 23 November, in Australia on 26 December and in the UK on 1 January 2019

Pokémon the Movie: The Power of Us review – dud animation lost in promo fog

I have no idea whether this makes the prospect more appealing for accompanying adults, but the 112-minute running time here includes ads for the official Pokémon magazine and console games, multiple unfathomable shorts, and a sneak peek at next summer’s live-action Detective Pikachu. After last year’s animated series reboot I Choose You! – detailing how everyboy hero Ash first teamed up with the totemic Pikachu – it’s evidently business as usual within the branded collectibles universe.

The overextended cartoon that follows broadens its predecessor’s focus by establishing a coastal Poké-festival that brings multiple players – including (brand expansion alert) girls – to the table. Yet it never transcends its resemblance to a trailer for other forms of product, landing just in time for Christmas.

The cynicism might have slipped down easier had it been cut with something else; instead, it’s set before us in artless blocks. Director Tetsuo Yajima, a veteran of the late-90s TV series that made this pursuit a phenomenon, can punch up the colours here and there and drop in (clumsy) stabs at digimation, but he’s contractually obliged to retain the same basic-to-ungainly after-school visuals and irritating voice artists.

This reboot hasn’t changed the way these things look and sound. That arrested creative development surely accounts for the needless furore provoked online by the live-action movie’s newly furry Pikachu: an imagination has been applied that challenges the long-established rules of the game.

Even narratively, the new film is a dud, as diffuse in its storytelling as the clouds of toxic smog that threaten the festival’s success. Amid the fug, grownups will be able to make out an entirely arbitrary designation of rare new creatures, intended to shift more packets of trading cards, and an environmental message, half-baked and half-inched from Ghibli, which seriously positions Pokémon collecting as a means of slowing the depletion of the Earth’s natural resources. Suffice to say, it plays a little synthetic coming barely an hour after an advert for a tie-in magazine offering an array of single-use free gifts.

Give the conglomerates responsible points for brazenness, but if our kids are swallowing this Pika-garbage wholesale, we really are doomed.

Scarlett Johansson reportedly turned down film funding from Saudi prince

Scarlett Johansson reportedly vetoed funding from the Saudi crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman, for her next film.

The actor is set to play the Pulitzer prize-winning photojournalist Lynsey Addario in a biopic directed by Ridley Scott, but when she found out the initial set of funders included Bin Salman, she rejected his involvement.

“Scarlett Johansson said absolutely not,” Addario said in an interview with Nicholas Kristof of the New York Times. “She said: ‘This guy is perpetuating the war in Yemen. He has women in prison.’”

She also added: “This was before the killing of Khashoggi, when he became one of the main people who wanted to fund the movie.”

Bin Salman has recently been implicated in the death of Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi, who died in the Saudi embassy in Turkey after writing critically about Bin Salman’s rule.

“I didn’t meet with him personally,” Addario said. “But my sense is that he probably – my movie got folded into this huge charm campaign. And that fact that he wanted to show the west that he was into Hollywood, he was into all the great things of the west … Do I want him associated with this movie? Obviously not. And thank God he’s not.”

In April, Bin Salman headed to Hollywood to meet with studio heads and stars including Dwayne Johnson. It was a visit that led to protests and last week the CNN reporter Oliver Darcy tweeted a screen grab of an Instagram post from Johnson at the time stating it was a “pleasure” to meet him.

“Such a silly, clickbait post, Oliver,” Johnson fired back. “I’m surprised you’d post this. Go back and really read my words. I listened and learned then. As I listen and learn now. C’mon man.”

Addario’s work has focused on global conflicts and particularly the effect they have had on women. During her career, she has been kidnapped twice and sexually assaulted while detained in Libya. The upcoming film, originally set to be directed by Steven Spielberg and starring Jennifer Lawrence, is based on Addario’s memoir It’s What I Do.

Johansson was recently embroiled in controversy after signing on to play a transgender character in fact-based crime drama Rub & Tug, a decision that led to upset and caused her to abandon the project. “Our cultural understanding of transgender people continues to advance, and I’ve learned a lot from the community since making my first statement about my casting and realize it was insensitive,” a statement read.

House With a Clock in Its Walls ticks up nicely for Steven Spielberg

The winner: The House With a Clock in Its Walls

The robustly reliable family market propelled the latest production from Steven Spielberg’s Amblin Entertainment to the top of the UK box office, with £2.3m for the weekend period for The House With a Clock in Its Walls, and £3.37m including previews from the previous Saturday and Sunday. Local distributor Entertainment One should be content with that result.

The film faced the challenge of a 12A certificate, which might have put off some families with younger children. However, a cast including Jack Black and Cate Blanchett, with Eli Roth in the director’s chair, might have helped to position the film more appealingly for an adult audience. Source material is John Bellairs’ 1973 novel of the same title – the first in a series of 12 books featuring the orphan Lewis Barnavelt.

The film opened in the US with $26.6m (£20.2m), so the UK number is in line with that outcome. Recent Amblin productions include Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom, Ready Player One, The Post, A Dog’s Purpose and The BFG. The last of those titles seems the most relevant yardstick for this new film, but the huge local popularity of author Roald Dahl invalidates the comparison. The BFG began in the UK with £5.29m in July 2016.

The runner-up: A Simple Favour

Recent commercial precedents for a darkly comic missing-person thriller are difficlut to pinpoint, and director Paul Feig is best known for pure comedies featuring Melissa McCarthy, so the commercial outcome for his A Simple Favour was hard to call. Lead actor Anna Kendrick is relatively unproved outside the Pitch Perfect franchise, and co-star Blake Lively remains best known for TV’s Gossip Girl.

Given these factors, distributor Lionsgate should easily be happy with a £1.32m opening, and £1.62m including previews. The film is based on a novel by Darcey Bell, and Lionsgate was happy to push any associations with Gone Girl and The Girl on the Train – differently toned films adapted from bestsellers with female-skewing audiences. A Simple Favour was never going to perform at the level of those two hits.

It faced competition for its date-night adult audience from Crazy Rich Asians, with which it shares its leading man, Henry Golding. Crazy Rich Asians dropped 26%, for second-weekend takings of £1.14m and a total after 10 days of £3.58m.

The disappointment: Mile 22

Director Peter Berg has built a steady partnership with actor Mark Wahlberg since 2013, producing a trio of muscular films based on real-life events: Lone Survivor, Deepwater Horizon and Patriots Day. Mile 22 takes the pair into a purely fictional realm and thus into franchise potential, focusing on an elite US intelligence officer leading a covert tactical command unit. But if the response of UK audiences is representative, sequels now appear unlikely.

Mile 22 opened in the territory with £559,000 for the weekend period and £796,000 including Wednesday and Thursday previews – only enough for sixth place in the chart. The film maxed out at an uninspiring $36m at US cinemas following its mid-August release.

The arrival of The House With a Clock in Its Walls had no measurable effect on existing family films in the marketplace. In fact, Disney’s Christopher Robin, Incredibles 2 and Hotel Transylvania 3: A Monster Vacation delivered the strongest holds of any major titles. Compared with the previous weekend, takings for the trio were respectively down 7%, up 1% and dead even. The rainy weather on Saturday and Sunday seems to have been particularly kind to this sector of the market, as families evidently looked to their local multiplex to keep kids entertained.

The market

For the third weekend in a row, takings were down on the equivalent session from 2017, and September appears to be trailing the pace of a year ago by around 20%. The month is traditionally a weak period for UK cinemagoing, but 2017 benefited from the Stephen King adaptation It, which notched up £32.3m and was the year’s ninth biggest hit.

Cinema bookers have big hopes pinned on next month, which brings both A Star Is Born and Venom on 3 October, Johnny English Strikes Again two days later, and then the likes of Damien Chazelle’s First Man, David Gordon Green’s Halloween and Bryan Singer’s Bohemian Rhapsody. Meanwhile, there is one more weekend of September to struggle through – which offers the comedy Night School starring Kevin Hart and hot talent du jour Tiffany Haddish. Alternatives include Glenn Close in The Wife, which looks likely to connect with older and upscale audiences.

Top 10 films September 21-23

1. The House With a Clock in Its Walls, £3,370,591 from 541 sites (new)

2. A Simple Favour, £1,621,900 from 480 sites (new)

3. Crazy Rich Asians, £1,142,208 from 542 sites. Total: £3,575,569 (2 weeks)

4. King of Thieves, £1,121,883 from 526 sites. Total: £3,737,376 (2 weeks)

5. The Nun, £1,021,628 from 490 sites. Total: £9,497,601 (3 weeks)

6. Mile 22, £795,888 from 376 sites (new)

7. The Predator, £677,078 from 532 sites. Total: £3,886,572 (2 weeks)

8. Disney’s Christopher Robin, £486,411 from 535 sites. Total: £13,837,384 (6 weeks)

9. Incredibles 2, £348,660 from 460 sites. Total: £55,254,076 (11 weeks)

10. Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again, £326,987 from 465 sites. Total: £64,872,422 (10 weeks)
Other openers

The Little Stranger, £300,089 from 296 sites

The Intent 2: The Come Up, £149,392 from 80 sites

Batti Gul Meter Chalu, £58,507 from 52 sites

Faces, Places, £49,529 from 34 sites

Qismat, £48,117 from 10 sites

Matangi/Maya/MIA, £43,130 from 39 sites

Saamy 2, £31,507 from 43 sites

Climax, £29,816 from 31 sites

The Godfather, £16,590 from 9 sites (reissue)

The Big Lebowski, £7,834 from 6 sites

Nureyev, £6,828 from 1 site

Theevandi, £2,763 from 11 sites

Where Do We Go From Here?, £2,746 from 1 site

The Captain, £1,109 from 1 site

Braguino review – cryptic account of Siberian family feud

This is an opaque, unpersuasive and unenlightening piece from the French artist and film-maker Clément Cogitore, whose 2015 metaphysical mystery drama Neither Heaven Nor Earth was selected for Critics’ Week in Cannes. Frankly, this rather defeated me.

At only 48 minutes, it is not substantial enough to be rewarding as a fully achieved documentary, and its factual element is something that has to be taken on trust. Moreover, it isn’t sufficiently interesting visually, and is perhaps – paradoxically – too long to claim any real installation-crossover status.

The setting is the vast boreal forests of Siberia, where the Braguino family live in hermit-like oneness with nature. But they are in the throes of a feud with another family, the Kilines, who live just over the way. Then they are at loggerheads with central Russian government, whose representatives arrive menacingly by helicopter, threatening to overturn their way of life.

The action looks, sometimes, weirdly like a reconstruction of something that Cogitore supposes to have happened, or just some docu-realist fiction. This enigmatic quality, the film’s way of withholding the substance of what it appears to be getting at, makes this a difficult and ultimately unsatisfying watch.

A Prayer Before Dawn review – Thai jail drama packs a terrifying punch

Traditionally, boxing is the way out of the ghetto, or the way into a central core of toxic masculinity – and then redemptively out of it. In this movie, it is the route to a safer, fractionally more prestigious, marginally less violent part of a Thai jail: the Klong Prem central prison in Bangkok. This is the true story of Billy Moore, a guy from Liverpool who got involved in drugs and burglary, tried to restart his life in Thailand as a boxer and stuntman, but was arrested there in 2005 for gun offences and sentenced to three years in this authentically terrifying place. He earned respect for mastering Muay Thai boxing, and was finally released in a royal amnesty in 2010 to serve the rest of his term in the UK. He was convicted again this summer for burglary.

This film has been adapted by screenwriters Jonathan Hirschbein and Nick Saltrese from the memoir Moore published about his experiences, and directed by Jean-Stéphane Sauvaire, who made the comparably grisly child-soldier drama Johnny Mad Dog in 2008. Billy is played by Joe Cole from TV’s Peaky Blinders, and his weirdly cherubic face of almost choirboy innocence hardens into a mask of rage and fear. Vithaya Pansringarm (who was the cop in Nicolas Winding Refn’s Only God Forgives) plays the prison warden.

This is visceral, often unwatchably brutal stuff: a moment-by-moment depiction of an unspeakable ordeal. Watching it feels pretty much like having your intestines wrenched out of your eye sockets, especially in one unbearable scene: in a sweatily crowded cell, tattooed gangsters rape a prisoner for Billy’s benefit, as an evil demonstration of power.

For non-Thai-speaking audiences, it is also claustrophobic because the dialogue is unsubtitled, thus putting us right inside the prison house of Billy’s mind. As warders bark orders and fellow prisoners scream at him, or at each other around him, Billy is terrified, bewildered. He has only a basic knowledge of what is going on. But a basic knowledge is all he needs, because the power relations are themselves so basic. Tellingly, it is almost an hour and a half into the film before we hear a sentence in English, when a worried doctor tells Billy some very bad news.

At any one time, a sinister shuffling choreography is being acted out. Like figures in a Hieronymus Bosch painting, the sweating, half-naked prisoners will swarm up to Billy, or away from him; they will cuff him, slap him and jostle him, maybe to punish him, maybe to get his attention, maybe to mime what they want him to do. Sometimes they will yell and sometimes burst out into aggressive and unreadable laughter, mocking whatever baffled response Billy has tried to improvise to get them to go away. Finally, Billy persuades a trainer to let him box and his talent gets him a ticket out of the grim overcrowded area and into the cushier “boxing” cells. But the wiseguys will want a cut of whatever gambling winnings they assume Billy gets, and his addiction and health get steadily worse.

The spectacle being offered up in A Prayer Before Dawn is part of a well-established tradition, challenging or troubling according to viewpoint. You could find it in Alan Parker’s Midnight Express, or even David Lean’s Bridge on the River Kwai – the spectacle of the white man in a foreign jail, his white body in fierce contrast to everything around him; his unclothed state, designed of course to subject and humiliate, is even more conspicuous. Perhaps he is innocent, or perhaps he is guilty, but that is not even the point. His foreignness or otherness is part of the ordeal, and the cruel-and-unusual quality of this foreignness is part of the dramatic impact: a doubling of imprisonment. Yet I never felt the Thai characters being patronised by the film; there is a tough respect in the training scenes.

It is perhaps foolish to compliment a film on being “real” if you have no independent knowledge of what that reality is, but A Prayer Before Dawn really did seem overwhelmingly real, and the fight sequences themselves are terrifically shot. In boxing movies, what happens in the ring is a metaphorical extension of what’s happening outside it. Here, there’s nothing metaphorical about it. Violence is all around. It’s a film of teeth-rattling ferocity.

Rebel Wilson ordered to repay $4.1m to Bauer Media after appeal

Actor Rebel Wilson will be left with less than 12% of the record $4.7m defamation payout she was originally awarded, after being ordered to hand back the majority of funds.

And the Hollywood star still needs to deduct some legal fees from what’s left.

Wilson was awarded a landmark payout in September 2017 after a defamation trial over a series of articles that made her out to be a liar.

But an appeal in early June found she was not entitled to $3.9m in economic damages relating to a loss of income, which made up a portion of the damages.

The Court of Appeal on Wednesday ordered Wilson repay Bauer Media $4,183,071.45 – including $60,316.45 in interest – after the original judgment was set aside.

Bauer had been quick to handover the original $4,749,920.60 payout, making a transfer to Wilson within three weeks of the 13 September judgment.

The star said she planned to distribute the money to charity and the Australian film industry.

But on appeal Wilson did not dispute that the $4.1m should be repaid.

She argued, however, the interest should be charged at the prevailing Reserve Bank cash rate of 1.5%, rather than the 2% sought by Bauer.

The appeal court disagreed and ordered interest be paid at the higher rate.

Wilson was also ordered to pay 80% of Bauer’s appeal costs.

My Friend Dahmer: is it time to stop glamorising the serial killer?

My Friend Dahmer is about as unglamorous a serial-killer movie as you could hope for: it doesn’t even feature any murders (not of humans, at least). Instead, it lays out the warning signs that all was not right with the teenage Jeffrey Dahmer: his unstable parents, his repressed sexuality, his high-school victimisation, his unwholesome interest in anatomy.

And yet, by its very existence, the movie can’t help but glamorise its subject, who went on to variously rape, murder, dismember, violate and cannibalise his 17 male victims. It doesn’t matter if you portray them as damaged souls or psychopaths; you’re still adding to the legend. Faced with this realisation, much of our current serial-killer fare has cast realism aside to embrace the glamour. That was certainly true of Ryan Murphy’s miniseries The Assassination of Gianni Versace, whose glitzy Miami settings, A-list cast and 90s couture made for a more appealing watch than such grubby classics as, say, Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer. Meanwhile, Zac Efron is set to play Ted Bundy in a big-screen thriller that suggests that, with the right breaks, Bundy could have had a fruitful career as a lifeguard. And who knows what Quentin Tarantino’s forthcoming Manson flick has in store? He’s described it as “probably the closest to Pulp Fiction that I have done”.

Post-Hannibal Lecter, we prefer our killers cultured, intelligent and presentable, like Dexter, American Psycho’s Patrick Bateman or Kevin Spacey in Seven. That dangerous glamour also rubs off on the actors. It never looks bad to have a serial-killer role on your CV, especially if all that’s on it so far are wholesome teen roles. That was the case with Ross Lynch, AKA Young Jeffrey Dahmer, who’s been largely a Disney kid up to now. Versace’s murderer Andrew Cunanan was played by Darren Criss, previously best known for Glee, just as Efron was once indelibly associated with High School Musical.
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Which brings us to the best current take on serial killers: David Fincher’s Netflix series Mindhunter, detailing the early history of FBI psychological profiling. Our wide-eyed fed hero, Holden (Jonathan Groff, another Glee graduate), is almost starstruck by the killers he interviews, including Ed Kemper and Richard Speck. He considers Manson the ultimate challenge. But unlike previous serial-killer thrillers, including Fincher’s own Seven and Zodiac, Mindhunter examines the troubling mix of awe and disgust with which we regard these murderers. In the final episode, Holden visits Kemper in hospital. “Why are you here, Holden?” Kemper asks. “I don’t know,” Holden replies. Kemper then hugs him, as he finally realises how totally messed up things have become. We’re right there with him.

Custody review – the screw turns in understated separation drama

There’s a unidirectional agony to this psychological drama from actor turned director Xavier Legrand – this is the much-talked-about festival prizewinner which Legrand developed from his 2013 short Avant Que De Tout Perdre, or Just Before Losing Everything. Legrand could have kept that title for his full-length feature version. It’s almost a story without a story, in that there is hardly any narrative progression as such, no phased revelation of character, no twist and counter-twist, and no point-of-view switches designed to raise queries about the truth. No: the focus is on one single horrible situation, getting steadily and unwatchably worse: a simmering pot of rage and toxic masculinity under which the gas-ring gets turned up and up. It concerns a divorce, and a legal hearing about custody.

Denis Ménochet plays Antoine, a glowering, heavy-set guy who is in dispute with his ex-wife Miriam (Léa Drucker) about custody of their 11-year-old son Julien (Thomas Gioria). The couple have an elder daughter Joséphine (Mathilde Auneveux) who, being about to turn 18 and enter adulthood, does not form part of the case. The drama begins with a hearing in front of the judge (Saadia Bentaïeb) who must hear Miriam’s fears about Antoine’s violence and threats, although there is no clear legal evidence.

The case is settled by the judge in a way that surprises both parties. Now Antoine is allowed access to Julien, but not allowed to know Miriam’s address, to interfere with their household arrangements – and he certainly has no say in the matter of Julien acquiring a new stepfather. With icy rage, Antoine decides he has a right to know everything that’s going on and begins to turn the screw on his innocent, terrified son. The performances are frighteningly good – and without these performances, in fact, the film would have been merely blank or histrionic. This especially applies to Gioria as the young son, and more than any actor in a film I can remember, he conveys what emotional and physical abuse is like. Julien’s scenes with Antoine have to be watched between your fingers. Legrand shows how simply getting into his dad’s car and being driven by him is an unspeakable ordeal; there is a clever moment when the seatbelt alarm keeps pinging because Julien has failed, to his dad’s irritation, to buckle up. Later, Antoine will be too enraged to do it himself and the pinging becomes an ominous alarm system for his state of mind. Meanwhile, other family tensions are orbiting.

The film shows that a lot of Antoine’s macho rage and bullying derives from anger at his own father, Joël (Jean-Marie Winling). Miriam is also concerned that Joséphine’s education is about to be derailed by her possessive boyfriend, Samuel (Mathieu Saikaly), who seems charming enough – but Miriam knows how these things can turn out. And where are we going with all this? The temptation is to compare Custody with Asghar Farhadi’s modern classic A Separation. But they are quite different. Custody doesn’t have the subtlety or nuance of Farhadi’s film, nor is it quite like Joachim Lafosse’s divorce drama from 2016, L’Économie Du Couple, or After Love.

There are moments in the original custody hearing here which hint that blame may not be straightforward. But actually, blame is pretty straightforward, and it is incidentally a flaw of this film that it sticks very predictably to Chekhov’s rule about what happens to a firearm which is produced in act one. The film it resembles much more is something like Claude Chabrol’s L’Enfer, or Hell, from 1994, about a married man who simply descends into the horror of fanatical jealousy and paranoia. There is not much storytelling light and shade in Custody, but it has the shock and swipe of real life.

Robin Williams groped and flashed me on set, says Mork & Mindy co-star

Robin Williams’s Mork & Mindy co-star has said he repeatedly grabbed her breasts and bottom and exposed himself to her on the set, a new book reveals, but she excused it as part of Williams’s playful personality.

“I had the grossest things done to me by him,” said Pam Dawber, who played Mindy. “And I never took offence. I mean I was flashed, humped, bumped, grabbed. I think he probably did it to a lot of people … but it was so much fun.”

Williams would also wrestle her, break wind on her and come on to the set totally naked. He also once “goosed” an elderly woman playing Mindy’s grandmother by poking her between the buttocks with a cane.

The revelations are contained in a new biography of Williams by New York Times journalist Dave Itzkoff, to be published in May, and were reproduced in the Daily Mail.

“If you put it on paper you would be appalled,” said Dawber, 66. “But somehow he had this guileless little thing that he would do – those sparkly eyes. He’d look at you, really playful, like a puppy, all of a sudden. And then he’d grab your tits and then run away. And somehow he could get away with it. It was the 70s, after all.”

“It was just Robin being Robin,” said Howard Storm, who directed Mork & Mindy. Often Williams groped Dawber because he was “bored”, he said: “He’d be doing a paragraph and in the middle of it he would just turn and grab her ass. Or grab a breast. And we’d start again. I’d say, ‘Robin, there’s nothing in the script that says you grab Pam’s ass.’ And he’d say: ‘Oh, OK.’’’

The show’s producer, Garry Marshall, also recalled: “He would take all his clothes off, he would be standing there totally naked and she was trying to act. His aim in life was to make Pam Dawber blush.”

Mork & Mindy ran from 1978 to 1982, and starred Williams as a curious alien who lodged with Dawber’s Mindy in Boulder, Colorado. The show was Williams’s springboard to a successful movie career. He went on to star in Hollywood hits including Good Morning Vietnam, Dead Poets’ Society, Mrs Doubtfire and Good Will Hunting – for the last of which he won the best supporting actor Oscar in 1997.

Williams killed himself in 2014, following a history of depression, drug addiction and mental health issues. He was misdiagnosed with Parkinson’s and found after his death to have had Lewy body dementia.

Despite his on-set behaviour, Dawber characterised her relationship with Williams as sisterly and spoke of his “gigantic heart”. “I really loved Robin and Robin really loved me,” she said. “We just clicked.”

Ophelia review – Daisy Ridley stranded in disastrous Hamlet reimagining

If a producer cornered me in an elevator and pitched “Hamlet, but from Ophelia’s point of view, and we’ve got Daisy Ridley in the lead”, I’d sell everything I had to invest. And I’d probably make a killing, as Claire McCarthy’s Ophelia is going to cut into one heck of a trailer. But to thine own self one must be true.

This film looks absolutely gorgeous, but apart from its production design it is basically a disaster. Shakespeare purists will revolt, high-fantasy fans will be bored and the kids who make gifs of Daisy Ridley and put them on Tumblr will wait until they can pirate this anyway. This project is madness with no method to it.

Daisy Ridley’s voiceover introduces us to Ophelia, floating in her watery grave, suggesting that only now will we hear “the real story”. We cut to her childhood at court, a little scamp that Queen Gertrude (Naomi Watts) chooses to be one of her ladies-in-waiting. She and young Hamlet are already making eyes at one another, yet when he returns to Elsinore as a young man (played by George MacKay) their flirtation soon escalates.

The first obvious hurdle this film faces is figuring out how these people talk. They can’t speak the language of Shakespeare, so the dialogue is dumbed down to a generic Game of Thrones level. So when the narrative intersects with scenes from the play, lines like “Get thee to a nunnery” are changed to something on the order of “I told you to go to that nunnery”. (I didn’t write down the precise line, by this point of the film I was clutching my head with both hands.)

The other problem is that nearly every scene we see has almost no narrative drive. It’s well over an hour before Polonius is killed, with Ophelia essentially offstage twiddling her thumbs. Sure, she’s floating about the palace and witnessing things – but there is zero emotional investment.

Lisa Klein’s novel (adapted by screenwriter Semi Chellas) decides it will be great fun to make substantive changes to the story. So Gertrude has a lost witch sister that makes potions (the influence is more The Dark Crystal than Macbeth), and one such brew can temporarily simulate death like in Romeo and Juliet. This leads to a, shall we say, altered version of the play’s final scenes that caused more than one snicker during the Sundance premiere.

It must be said though that the film looks exquisite, from the costumes and props to the cinematography and camerawork. There are iridescent blue dragonflies and white peacocks and so many intricately brocade gowns. The level of craft in this film is absolutely off the charts. That said, I’ll tell you a quick story.

About 20 years ago I saw a production of Macbeth in a New York City park that was defiant in its lack of scenery and props. The actors were in their street clothes. They went all-in on the acting and the words, and I tell you that it was one of the best Shakespeare performances I’ve seen in my life. I’d do anything to somehow experience a repeat of it. For all the flash and filigree in Ophelia, the only way I’ll sit through this again is to laugh at it.