The Trial of Christine Keeler review – a furiously fast, fun ride

I had no idea what an extraordinary life I was leading,” says the voiceover as a young woman prepares to leave her flat in Notting Hill to go to an audition for a toothpaste ad. The year is 1962, the woman is Christine Keeler and she ain’t seen nothing yet.

The Trial of Christine Keeler (BBC One) is the story of the Profumo affair told from a rare perspective: hers. The opening episode is a cracker and the rest – with so much ground still to cover, as by the end the seeds of the scandal have barely been scattered – promises to be likewise. It captures the tremendous sense of fun the 19-year-old model Keeler (Sophie Cookson) had, but it never turns her into a dolly bird or airhead, or paints the time and place as a hip and happening idyll. Racism, experienced directly by her black boyfriend Johnny (Nathan Stewart-Jarrett) who is habitually passed over for white applicants at job interviews, and indirectly by her as his companion in the street, is endemic. The capital is a bubble into which she has escaped from her deprived childhood and within which she thinks herself protected, despite its periodic punctures by her mother’s phone calls and constant requests for cash.

The man who brings her into the bubble within the bubble, upper-class London, and introduces her to all the right people who are so very wrong for her, is society osteopath Stephen Ward (James Norton, perhaps too earthy a casting choice for the part, though his creepily patronising delivery of “little baby”, his nickname for Keeler, is worth the price of admission). He’s a man who knows people. And who likes to watch them, from a safe distance. He winds them up like clockwork toys, sets them off and waits for the collisions to entertain him. I would watch a drama from his perspective, too. Who doesn’t want to know what the voyeur thinks? Although I’m most interested of all in the psychology of a man who can live with the title “society osteopath” and make it work for him.

We flash back at various points to Keeler’s first meeting with Profumo (customarily convincing stuff from Ben Miles, giving the secretary of state for war a steely charm that goes precisely so far and no further) and watch as she becomes increasingly tangled in a web whose reaches she can barely imagine. The question of whether history happens to her or she makes history lurks in the shadows of every scene. “Look what you made me do,” says her jealous ex-boyfriend, Lucky (Anthony Welsh), when he sees her in the street and, maddened by her continued existence without him, hits her. It is a sentiment, we understand, she has met before – from the men who groped her as they took her home as a teenager from babysitting their own children – and will again in the near future, as men with ever more to lose cast around for someone other than themselves to blame.

By the end of the opening episode, Ward and his circle have come sufficiently to the attention of the secret services to make a crisis inevitable. In the closing scenes, Johnny – by now another maddened ex – shoots at Ward’s flat with Christine inside and the quality of attention on them all shifts. “I didn’t know it then,” comes the final voiceover. “But I still had a hell of a lot to learn.”

If The Trial doesn’t quite reach the dizzying heights of last year’s A Very English Scandal, about the 70s equivalent of Keeler and its fallout, it remains a furiously fast, fun ride which doesn’t let the deeper, darker issues fall from its grasp. And it works, incidentally, as a great companion piece to the closing episode of The Crown’s second series, fleshing out the people with whom Matt Smith’s Prince Philip may or may not have partied the night (or many nights) away, watched by Ward.

Like The Crown, it could also have a scroll atop every scene reading “O tempora! O mores!” In the decades since the Profumo affair we have moved from a time when a politician having sex with a woman tangentially associated with Russia caused the establishment to have a near nervous breakdown, to the leader of the free world snuggling up to Putin while soliciting favours from Ukraine with near impunity. To say nothing of our own government now being led by … well, insert your own term here. But I shall go out on a limb and say that “a man who evokes all of Supermac’s pragmatism, wit, unshakeable calm and firm grasp on how many children he had fathered” is probably not among them.

'A very nice guy': how Godfrey Gao made it to the top

Taiwanese-Canadian actor Godfrey Gao was famous for being the first Asian international supermodel but he was much more than just a pretty face – he had a reputation for being one of the friendliest stars in an intensely competitive industry.

“He was known for being a very nice guy,” says Cecilia Pidgeon, a former celebrity editor at GQ China. “He had a very good reputation among other actors. He was always nice to his fans. All of the colleagues he worked with only had good things to say.”

His shocking death at the age of 35 yesterday from a heart attack on the set of the reality TV show Chase Me cut short a career that included a role in 2013 as Magnus Bane in the Hollywood adaption of The Mortal Instruments: City of Bones.

Born Tsao Chih-hsiang in Taipei, Taiwan, Gao moved to Vancouver in Canada as a child and became the first Asian model to star in a Louis Vuitton campaign in 2011.

After returning to his home country in 2004, he became part of a new generation of actors, who were born in Asia and moved back to establish their careers after emigrating abroad with their families. Along with Gao, Shawn Dou, a Chinese-Canadian actor who was born in Xi’an, and Eddie Peng, a Taiwanese-Canadian actor and singer from Penghu, have also achieved fame by returning to Asia.

“Because of the success of the mainland Chinese film industry, they all decided to go back to Asia to start their career there,” says Dr Ruby Cheung, lecturer in film studies at Southampton University. “For Chinese, Taiwan or Hong Kong-born actors who have emigrated, there are more opportunities there for them to become really big. If they started out in Hollywood, they would have to work extremely hard to achieve the same level of stardom.”

Gao started acting in Chinese TV shows in 2006, but his most popular role came in Remembering Lichuan, a romantic drama that aired in 2016. By then he had already moved into films with roles in Chinese blockbuster Shanghai Fortress and as the character of Ken in Toy Story 3 for the Mandarin dub.

Transitioning from TV to film is a traditional route for most Asian actors. Chinese superstar Fan Bingbing, Red Cliff’s Vicki Zhao and Liu Yifei, who will take the lead in the upcoming live action adaptation of Disney’s Mulan, all became massive stars in China this way.

It’s also very common for the Asian acting world to look to the modelling industry for new talent. Hu Bing, who was nominated for best actor at the 2010 Rome film festival, is one of China’s most famous models, while Taiwanese star Lin Chi-ling also started out on the runway.

But in the past few years, reality TV shows have emerged as one of the easiest ways to gain instant stardom. I Am a Singer, The Rap of China, Idol Producer and The Voice of China are all wildly popular and have produced overnight sensations. Then there’s Chase Me, the competitive sports challenge show broadcast on China’s Zhejiang Television, that Gao agreed to guest star on.

The actor is reported to have collapsed while on Chase Me’s set in Ningbo, China, after working for 17 hours straight. According to Pidgeon, long working hours are extremely common in the Chinese TV and film industry. “It’s normal because it’s a very competitive industry. You can get famous very quickly. So everyone works extra hours to finish a show fast. All these actors make a lot of money but actually they work really hard. Working overnight is normal.”

China, of course, is now becoming a major player in Hollywood too, with an increasing amount of investment from Chinese companies. This means there’s potential for more crossover artists like Gao, who appeared alongside Lily Collins and Jamie Campbell Bower in The Mortal Instruments: City of Bones.

The actor was not just a rising star with a career that was likely to take him to giddier heights but also a trailblazer for diversity and Asian representation in US movies. It’s a real tragedy that such talent was brought back to earth so cruelly.

Monos review – Apocalypse Now on shrooms

This overpoweringly tense and deeply mad thriller from Colombian film-maker Alejandro Landes is the best thing I have seen at Berlin this year: something between Apocalypse Now, Lord of the Flies and Embrace of the Serpent. It depicts a dysfunctional society and guilt-ridden family in miniature, and demonstrates the shifting power dynamics of a cult, the craziness embedded in the minds of child soldiers, the resentments nursed in a military unit without a supervising commanding officer, and the very real danger of eating shrooms grown in cowshit.

The Monos are a unit of teenage guerrilla bandits, operating in a country very similar to Colombia or Bolivia — and apparently named after the Mono Grande, the mythical giant monkey for centuries rumoured to exist somewhere in South America. They are initially shown in their up-country mountainous retreat where they have little to do but hang out, await orders on the radio, look after a cow that has been given to them for milk (good for their young bones and teeth) and see to their American hostage, an engineer who is being held captive separately from her small child. They are permitted and even encouraged to develop sexual relationships among themselves, and have developed weird rituals and traditions. When one of them has a birthday, there is a version of the bumps, except it’s sexualised thrashing with a belt. Everyone joins in and their hostage is also sportingly allowed a go.

But what they most like doing is firing their semi-automatics, an excitement simply impossible to resist, and this, inevitably, leads to disaster. (I was reminded of something PJ O’Rourke wrote about hearing semi-automatic fire for the first time at close quarters: the “chemical craziness” it triggers in the pit of your stomach – something that is horrible for most, but for some could be addictive.) The Monos are required to move from the eerie aloneness of the mountain down into the jungle, and when the hostage shows signs of wanting to escape, the leader has a spasm of rage, trashes the radio that theoretically connects them to a larger command structure and the entire group effectively goes rogue – even more rogue than it was in the first place.

It is not clear if they are now just breaking the rules in pursuit of some definite objective, or submitting to some collective orgiastic breakdown. There is no Kurtz, no progressive loosening of the unstable bonds of civilised restraints; it’s just an intensification of the chaos which was there all along.

Monos is not concerned just to show a static situation deteriorating. There is a driving narrative impulse: tense things happen. And they are made even tenser by the vivid, disturbing musical score from Mica Levi, which periodically rolls in timpani like exclamations of thunder.

Jasper Wolf’s cinematography captures the transcendent beauty of the landscape, the density and hostile lushness of the undergrowth and the banks of cloud with us floating overhead, as if monitoring the characters’ habitat in some dreamily removed state.

What is so intriguing about Monos is that it is simply about the group, collectively, with no member more important than any other. Individuals do emerge, yet it is never clear who is evolving as the most significant. Landes’s film refuses the final girl trope or indeed the final boy trope. And of course it is not simply about child soldiers, but rather soldiers generally, although it is conceivable that their parodic littleness offers a faint pun on Conrad’s Mr Kurtz: sounds like kurz, or short.

In some ways, Monos is a ritual heading to disaster, like a Jim Jones ceremonial in the jungle clearing, or alternatively a dream, a hallucination, one that we are having about them, or they are having about themselves: a delirium brought on by altitude sickness or hunger or post-traumatic stress disorder. And Landes withholds from us any sense of when precisely this is supposed to be happening: now, or in some postapocalyptic future or in the past, as if his children are a version of the mythic Japanese soldier in the jungle unaware the war is over.

Perhaps it is an allegory about his homeland, Colombia, a country awakening as if from an endless dream of violence but with an uneasy suspicion that the seedlings of new violence are always there. An unforgettable immersion in terror.

Joker makes great disability art by letting its hero bite back

I knew Joker was a film whose relationship to society today is a rich – and sometimes fraught – one. But until I saw it, I hadn’t realised just how pertinent a film it would be. Set in dystopian Gotham of the 1980s, it’s a world where the vulnerable of society, such as single mothers, the elderly and people with mental health issues are crammed into crumbling housing projects, while super-affluent bankers live it large. The villains in Joker are the filthy rich, such as the bullying, Trump-like Thomas Wayne who blames the poor for their own poverty as he campaigns to become mayor.

This is first-person cinema told from the point of view of someone with mental health issues. The character of Arthur Fleck is an authentic and well-researched depiction of a man with borderline personality disorder. At times, it felt less like watching a superhero movie and more like a social drama depicting a real-life horror story of austerity.

Played with corporeal commitment by Joaquin Phoenix, Arthur has a neurological condition called Pseudobulbar Affect, most straightforwardly explained as spontaneous and uncontrollable laughter at inappropriate moments. The scene where Arthur is confronted by a woman on a bus who becomes irritated by his laughter is a situation that will be all too familiar to anyone who has experienced firsthand the frustration, misunderstanding and sense of helplessness involuntary mental health conditions can cause. It’s not Arthur who has the problem, though – it’s an uncaring and misunderstanding society and that’s what this scene brilliantly conveys. Joker puts us in the shoes of the Other, a disabled man oppressed by the able-bodied.

People with mental health issues are feared in society – derogatory terms such as psycho or nutter are part of everyday conversation. We live in fear of “the insane” and avoid them on the street or move away from them on the train. The truth is that the vast majority of people with mental-health issues are the real victims. Those with non-visible disabilities face everyday hostility, persecution and lack of care. In her recent book Crippled: Austerity and the Demonization of Disabled People, Frances Ryan writes that the new fit for work tests can be linked to 590 extra suicides in England.

But Joker isn’t just the standard disability tragedy narrative that we’ve come to expect. It’s about someone with a disability biting back. Watching the hordes of Joker’s acolytes descend on Gotham in revenge for their degradation at the hands of the wealthy had the audience I watched it with cheering. Joker’s Network-style takedown of a talk show that seeks to ridicule him made me wonder what would have happened if the Block Telethon protest by disabled rights activists who stormed the live ITV Telethon broadcast in 1992 had gone further? At the time there was a sense of anarchy, mayhem and poking fun at the charity culture that oppresses the disabled. The actions of those disability rights activists contributed to the introduction of the disability discrimination act almost 25 years ago.

Joker might just be a classic of disability cinema, a film that takes the experience of the outsider and makes us root for them. I can’t think of a more subversive mainstream film, especially not in the sanitised, spandex-clad, wholesome worlds of the superhero genre. Unlike Heath Ledger’s Joker, Arthur Fleck’s violence isn’t chaotic, it has angry purpose, and he unwittingly creates a vent for the dispossessed. I think the film will divide the disabled community and I am sure some people will take issue with the depiction of mental health. Maybe though, we’ve seen enough of disabled people depicted as pious martyrs, and it’s time the victims fought back. Not by shooting people, but with smart, anarchic direct action.

Viola Davis set to play Michelle Obama in TV series

Viola Davis is set to play Michelle Obama in a new TV series called First Ladies.

The Oscar-winning actor will also executive produce the Showtime drama that will provide insight into the personal and political lives of first ladies throughout history. The first season will focus on Obama, Eleanor Roosevelt and Betty Ford.

Written by novelist Aaron Cooley, the show will be set in the east rather than west wing and will show how many game-changing decisions were made hidden from view. The project is being fast-tracked.

Davis will executive produce with husband Julius Tennon under their company JuVee Productions. Speaking of her ambition for the company with the Guardian last year, she said she hoped it would “shift the pendulum because it’s changing the narrative for people of colour”.

The pair share a friendship having met on multiple occasions. In 2017, Davis paid tribute to Obama on Facebook with a picture of them together and the words: “May you continue to shine your light and impact future generations to come”.

Davis was most recently seen on the big screen in Steve McQueen’s critically acclaimed thriller Widows and continues to star in the small screen drama How to Get Away with Murder. She is currently filming Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom with Chadwick Boseman and is set to take on the role of Shirley Chisholm in an Amazon biopic of the first woman and first person of colour to run for president.

The Obamas also signed a production deal with Netflix in 2018, announcing a slate earlier this year which includes documentaries and narrative dramas. “Touching on issues of race and class, democracy and civil rights, and much more, we believe each of these productions won’t just entertain, but will educate, connect, and inspire us all,” Barack Obama said.

Cindy Sherman #untitled review – love, death, ageing and parrots

Cindy Sherman does not want to appear on camera. “Why not?” asks the director, Clare Beavan. “People,” says Sherman, “are just so curious to see what I really look like. So there is this intrigue.” Can you make a film about someone without seeing their face as they talk about their life and work? I’m one of those desperate to see Sherman, to reconcile the person with the roles she creates for her art, but perhaps I’m just prying. In the Arena documentary Cindy Sherman #untitled (BBC Four), we get her voice in a new interview, and Beavan has filleted previous filmed interviews, the last from 2009. Peel away the layers in her portraits and you can see the traces of Sherman’s eyebrows and the wrinkles in her skin. “You can see the cracks in the armour,” says her old photography teacher. She’s in there somewhere, despite her best efforts to vanish.

This film is a great look at one of the most important artists working today, told through the interviews with Sherman and through insightful offerings from those who have known and worked with her. I could have done without the inclusion of a group of Instagram influencers – used to make the point about how relevant Sherman’s work is in our selfie-obsessed, digitally artificial world – and had more from Sherman on the big issues: love, death, ageing and parrot-keeping. Her parrot, Mister Frieda, is the only being allowed in the studio with Sherman while she works – it’s a pity he only says “hello”.

I love Sherman’s filing cabinets of props – fake eyeballs in one drawer, teeth in another, noses in another. People say she is really trying to do self-portraits or reveal a hidden side to her, but that’s not right, says Sherman: “It’s more that I’m trying to lose myself, to really totally disappear.” In footage from previous interviews, Sherman reveals more of her working practice – she has a mirror next to the camera and concentrates on “trying to transform that reflection that I see into this other person”. She edits out the pictures where she recognises herself until “finally, I see the one that looks like somebody else”. These somebody elses are a huge cast of characters, from clowns and Renaissance Madonnas and pig-nosed horrors to Hitchcockian heroines and pink-cheeked teenagers and ageing society dames. Even if we weren’t allowed to see Sherman’s process of transformation, it would have been great to have more on where these people came from.

Like most children, Sherman loved dressing up. “I think the whole reason I developed this into an art form,” says Sherman in an older interview, “was that I would get dressed up whenever I was depressed or confused about things, I would go off into my room and turn into somebody else.” An early series shows Sherman transforming herself, shot by shot, from an unremarkable young woman to “this total vamp”. “She shows you,” says Barbara Jo Revelle, her teacher from 44 years ago, “that it’s a decision … how you create your own identity.”

So much of this is wrapped up in Sherman’s experience of being a woman, from the anxiety she feels walking down a dark street to the memories of sleeping with curlers in her hair as a teenager “and how uncomfortable women would make themselves in the name of being beautiful, but beauty at that time was really how men wanted women to look”. Her Centerfolds series, created for the magazine Artforum (but never run, possibly because some of her women looked vulnerable and victimised), “were meant to resemble in format a centrefold, but in content I wanted a man opening up a magazine to look at it in expectation of something lascivious, and then feel like the violator they would be.”

Her stepdaughters (she says she was “lucky” not to have her own children) remember, wonderfully, playing in the scenes Sherman created for her grotesque Fairytales and Disasters period in the 80s, complete with fake bums and boobs and homemade vomit. “She would let us put on all the makeup,” remembers one. This work was a rally, remembers her old boyfriend, the artist Robert Longo, against the male artists who were being feted at the time when, he says, it was the women “who were making the most aggressive, toughest art possible”.

Sherman claims not to be political, at least in her personal life, but it’s all there in her work. She made her 2008 portraits of ageing socialites so big “because male artists do it all the time, even when they’re not even well-known”. She is grappling, points out the curator Eve Respini, “with what it means to get older as a woman in a really youth-obsessed culture”.

And now, she’s on Instagram where she plays with filters – not to make herself look pretty, as everyone else does, but to transform herself not just into someone else, but something barely human. “I see them as sketches,” says Sherman, “and maybe some of them will work their way into being real art pieces.” A group of schoolgirls sit outside Sherman’s current London show, scrolling through her Instagram pictures. One wants to know what she really looks like. “Oh wow, she looks quite normal,” says another, finding an undisguised picture, and she sounds almost disappointed.

Toy Story 4 review – new characters but the same old Story

Having done so many things unimaginably better than so many other movie franchises, it’s fitting that the Toy Story series now gives us a classier, superior kind of anticlimax.

Compared to many fourquels we’ve had in the past – Jaws IV: The Revenge; Superman IV: The Quest for Peace; Police Academy 4: Citizens on Patrol – Toy Story 4 is in a different league. And if you’d never seen any other of the Toy Stories, you’d probably think this one – written by Pixar veteran Andrew Stanton with Stephany Folsom and directed by Josh Cooley – was a gem. It is sprightly, sweet-natured and gorgeous to look at (and how blase we’ve all become about animation standards that 10 years ago had us hyperventilating with astonishment). There are some nice lines and a nifty allusion to Hitchcock’s Strangers on a Train. But this movie is fundamentally repeating itself: repeating characters, ideas and plotlines – even if it does it with buoyancy and charm.

The last two Toy Stories heartwrenchingly tackled the idea of obsolescence. How do toys feel when they are not wanted, and get thrown away? Before I became a father myself, I naively thought these themes reflected the child’s fear of abandonment by the parents. After my son was born, the truth hit me like a blinding light: it is the opposite way around. It is the parents who fear that moment when their child doesn’t want to play with them any more. In Toy Story 3, Woody, Buzz and the gang are shipped off to a community centre that is chillingly like an old folks home and is run by abusive inmates; there is redemption when they are given to a new kid called Bonnie.

And basically Toy Story 4 starts the same story all over again. Same deal, new kid, though a flashback adroitly stitches a new backstory into the drama: there is some history between Woody and a certain other member of the cast. And we also meet a new toy: when Bonnie has to go off for her first day in nursery school, Woody sneaks into her backpack to keep an eye on her, and witnesses little Bonnie make a crude toy out of a plastic fork that she calls “Forky” and brings home. Inevitably, poor Forky (voiced by Tony Hale) gets lost in a certain antique store when the family goes on a road trip, and Woody and the gang have to rescue him. They encounter new characters: a creepy doll called Gabby Gabby (Christina Hendricks) with sinister assistants and shades of the terrifying Lots-o’-Huggin Bear in Toy Story 3. There is a funny new duo, Bunny and Duckie (Jordan Peele and Keegan-Michael Key) and a very amusing Canadian stunt motorbike rider, Duke Caboom (Keanu Reeves).

Forky is potentially a very interesting character. All the other toys are created by corporations, but what happens when a toy is actually made by the kid? Is there a primeval, even incestuous link between creator and created? Well, no, not really. However unevolved, Forky plays by the same rules as everyone else.

It is absurd to start complaining about implausibility in a film about magic toys, but for the first time I sensed a kind of evasion or even dishonesty in the Toy Story franchise. For this fourth film, they have decided to hit the reset button and simply restart the situation with a new kid – not Andy but Bonnie. Fine. But after more than a decade’s worth of use, these toys should be grimy and falling to pieces. Their actual demise as objects would be a real issue. Yet Woody et al look as fresh as daisies; as fresh as new toys. It is ridiculous to worry about this, of course, and yet Toy Story 2 was specifically about how toys might want to achieve immortality as collectables, the Faustian bargain of preserving their pristine quality under cellophane at the cost of not getting real, hands-on love from kids. Their mortality as objects was a real issue that has been sidestepped here.

Toy Story 4 also joins the X-Men and the Men In Black in trying to achieve a bit more gender balance, and this is something it does with artless persuasiveness and an implication that it isn’t just the kids who are growing up, it’s the toys themselves. I’m happy to see it happen. Toy Story 4 isn’t at all bad. But it’s time to let go.

Feminists with a bullet: how the ageing heroine became screen gold

The trailer for Terminator: Dark Fate hinges on the return of Linda Hamilton’s Sarah Connor to the franchise. Halfway into it, she steps from an SUV with not one but two guns so big that the trailer slips into slow-mo in sheer awe. “Who are you?” another character gasps.

Sixty-two-year-old women don’t usually get to be action stars. It’s common for guys like Clint Eastwood, Bruce Willis, Harrison Ford and Arnold Schwarzenegger to tote firearms and perform stunts into their 50s, 60s, even 70s. But women in action films are typically younger than their co-stars, often by decades. In last year’s Mission: Impossible – Fallout, Tom Cruise was 55; female lead Rebecca Ferguson was 35.

Hamilton’s star turn in Dark Fate is the latest sign, though, that things may be starting to change. Jamie Lee Curtis, who is 60, starred in a reboot of Halloween last year. Sandra Bullock, who played the lead in the Netflix hit Bird Box, is 54. Trevante Rhodes, who played her boyfriend, is only 29.

Older female stars are finally getting big action roles because younger women started to get them 30 or 40 years ago. Halloween in 1978 and Terminator in 1984 were part of a wave of movies in which women heroes got to do what male heroes had so often done before: pick up guns and blast away.

Yet those early films came out of a tradition that was not exactly feminist in intention. Halloween and Terminator were variations on the slasher genre made famous by Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho in 1960. Part of Psycho’s horror was based in a misogynist fear of gender confusion: the villain in the movie is a mentally disturbed man who dresses up as his own mother. Picking up on those themes, the suspense film Deliverance (1972) – a huge influence on later slashers – depicted a male rape. The slasher was a genre in which horror cut people loose from gender; much of the disgust, the terror, and the enjoyment was in the way that fear made men into women and women into men.

John Carpenter’s Halloween extended the gender play by making its protagonist, Laurie Strode, a tomboyish high-school student. Laurie is first pursued by killer Michael Myers in typical stalking fashion, but eventually she turns the tables, picking up the phallic knife and becoming the attacker. Laurie is the protoype of what Carol Clover called the “final girl”: the last character alive in a slasher – almost always a woman – who claims the role of violent victor.

The final girl gradually moved into the mainstream with characters like Sigourney Weaver’s Ripley in Alien (1979) and Sarah Connor in Terminator (1984), two sci-fi-inflected slashers. That helped pave the way for more straightforward action movie heroines, often with more explicit feminist messaging, as in the recent Wonder Woman and Captain Marvel films.

The success of those early slashers also created the opportunity for their stars to take up their roles again for sequels. Hamilton returning to play Connor again, or Curtis playing Laurie, is an event, just like Schwarzenegger reprising his turn as the Terminator or Harrison Ford coming back as Han Solo. The success of the earlier films mean their stars are still beloved and bankable.

As the Halloween reboot showed, slasher tropes work just as well with older actresses in the main role – if not better. The Final Girl is all about reversing power dynamics. The horror of the pursuit is greater because women are figured as weak and helpless, and the conclusion is more exciting because of the rush of the power reversal. Older women set up an even more visceral victory. Laurie by the end of the 2018 Halloween becomes more mythic even than Michael Myers. The seesaw excitement of disempowerment/empowerment is part of why Bird Box, a movie about a mature who has to blindfold herself to fight mysterious assailants, captured the imagination.
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The creators of the early slasher films certainly weren’t trying to expand roles for older women in Hollywood. But pushing against stereotypes can have unexpected benefits. Because of choices some film-makers and actors made three decades ago, it now seems natural to watch a 60-year-old woman lock horns with a killer robot. When you start telling different stories with different heroes, you don’t know where you’ll end up, or who will get to hold the rocket launcher.

Top that! Game of Thrones pulls off the biggest spectacle in TV history

Thwack! The time for talking is over. Here was the ultimate rebuttal to any complaints about the chat-heavy nostalgia-fest of this final season’s first two episodes, a clonking great feature-length instalment that flew by in a flurry of limbs and severed heads. Game of Thrones is back to sticking them with the pointy end.

We had been warned, of course. Advance buzz over what was then being called The Battle of Winterfell, but is now known as The Long Night, had centred on the sheer heft of the thing: the fact that it was easily the most expensive single episode of television in the history of the medium; that it featured a battle scene longer than anything seen in Lord of the Rings; that it required several months and a cast equivalent to the population of a small Balkan country to film.

But even whispers from little birds couldn’t prepare us for the finished product. In its CGI-lacquered ostentatiousness, this felt like a new high water mark for TV, a dragon roar of a challenge to competitors from showrunners David Benioff and DB Weiss: “top that”. Though you could argue that those competitors might not come from TV at all – it’s telling that The Long Night aired on the same weekend that another giga-spectacle, Avengers: Endgame, stomped into cinemas.

Biggest ever TV episode it may have been, but whether this was the best battle Game of Thrones has staged is an altogether trickier question to answer; some may still opt for the sudden shock and awe of Hardhome or the claustrophobic horror of the Battle of the Bastards. Certainly, compared to those two, The Long Night had the inbuilt handicap of being set at, well, night. Its earliest moments were so shrouded in darkness it required some intense squinting to discern what was actually going on. Salvation came in the form of Melisandre, striding through the freezing fog to set the arakhs of the Dothraki aflame, aiding them – and the audience at home – in battle. Dragon fire did a similar trick later, albeit on a rather more dramatic scale, bringing into focus the pallid, pock-marked faces of the Wights as they descended on Winterfell.

Where conflagration didn’t work, director Miguel Sapochnik relied on darkness itself to provide mood and tension, correctly surmising that an army of the dead are far more terrifying the less you can see of them. If the job of great war films is to provide viewers with the slightest sliver of the sensation of what it is to fight in one, this managed to do the same for an even more extreme situation – a fight to the death with the marauding, unceasing force of death itself. The moment when, at a flick of the Night King’s wrist, the bodies of the fallen lurched, groaning and clicking, to their feet was chillingly well-realised.

Of course, when staring death in the face you’re likely to see something of yourself staring back, and – away from the budget-blowing spectacle – one of the smaller but no less significant pleasures of The Long Night was witnessing how beloved characters reacted to this most desperate of situations. There was Sam, terrified, baffled, but clinging on; Jon, grimly throwing himself into the line of fire (well, ice in this case) as everyone else was running away; The Hound, Winterfell’s hardest coward, finding that his affection for Arya outweighed his own desire for self-preservation; Lyanna Mormont, an indefatigable, giant-slaying Scrappy Doo; and Theon, bug-eyed, jittery, but ably exemplifying the adage that being brave and pretending to be brave are essentially the same thing. Most fist-pumpingly stirring of all, there was Arya, who managed to reconcile her two jarring personalities – guileless teen and stone-cold killer – and save the day.

Arya’s sudden sprint into the limelight was perhaps the one big gasp-inducer in an episode that largely sidestepped shocking moments. (The only other was the awakening of the dead in the crypt, and let’s face it, we all predicted that.) In this gravest of battles, it was notable that only a handful of notables met their maker, and no one – with the greatest respect to Theon, Beric, Dolorous Edd, Melisandre, poor, brave Jorah and the aforementioned Lyanna Mormont (between her and little Ned Umber, this has been a rough season for pre-teens) – who felt truly significant. Perhaps Benioff and Weiss are saving some gut-wrenching deaths for the final trio of episodes but, for all the shankings and immolations, there remains the sneaking suspicion that Game of Thrones has largely lost its capacity to surprise.

The other major grumble is the relatively meek end of the Night King himself. Those predictions that this battle was a bluff, and that he was instead racing towards King’s Landing to see off Cersei and set up a climactic showdown in the final episode, proved wide of the mark. Instead, the greatest threat Westeros has ever known is now a puddle of thawing ice-cubes, and the final bosses are likely to be, as one wag on Twitter put it, “a pregnant lady and a pirate”.

Have Benioff and Weiss played their trump card too early? Perhaps, though it does feel fitting that Game of Thrones will conclude not with a straightforward clash between the diametrically opposed forces of good and evil, but with a return to the squabbling and infighting that has characterised the Seven Kingdoms to date. The conflicts within conflicts – Cersei v Jaime, the Hound v the Mountain, Sansa v Dany – that have been bubbling under can now play out. We’ve had the showstopper, now on with the show.

Us review – Jordan Peele's brash and brilliant beach holiday horror

An almost erotic surge of dread powers this brash and spectacular new horror-comedy from Jordan Peele, right from its ineffably creepy opening. It’s a satirical doppelganger nightmare of the American way, a horrified double-take in the mirror of certainty, a realisation that the corroborative image of happiness and prosperity you hoped to see has turned its back, like something by Magritte. And though this doesn’t quite have the same lethal narrative discipline of Peele’s debut masterpiece Get Out, with its drum-tight clarity and control, what it certainly does have is a magnificent lead performance from Lupita Nyong’o, who brings to it a basilisk stare of horror. The musical score by Michael Abels has the same disturbing “Satan spiritual” feel of his compositions for Get Out.

This is a Twilight Zone chiller with something of John Frankenheimer or George A Romero. It opens with a playful borrowing from the spirit and the letter of Spielberg’s Jaws and there’s a horribly prescient invocation of Michael Jackson. The title is of course ambiguous: meaning either the snugly inclusive “us” or the US itself. (An RSC group-devised play about Vietnam in 1966 directed by Peter Brook had the same title and the same double-edged meaning.)

Nyong’o plays Adelaide, who with her genial, good-natured husband Gabe (Winston Duke) is taking the kids for a summer lakehouse vacation: this is Zora and younger brother Jason, in which roles Shahadi Wright Joseph and Evan Alex are both excellent. The family is in a handsomely appointed cabin, which they have stayed in before, but Gabe is discontented. He wants to drive a little further down to the coast for some old-fashioned family time at the beach. Adelaide is not so sure. It was at this very beach resort that she had a horrible experience when she was a child – in 1986, the Reaganite era of the optimistic Hands Across America charity campaign. While with her parents at the funfair, right after her dad had won her a Michael Jackson T-shirt, little Adelaide had wandered off on her own and had a terrible ordeal. Now, as an adult, she is terrified of her own children straying from her and being “taken”. And she has cause to remember a sickening detail: a strange man on the pier holding a sign with the biblical reference – Jeremiah 11:11.

The traumatised memory has stayed with her, although she has never spoken about it, and being back at this cursed place makes her jittery and on edge. On the beach, they are reunited with a somewhat jaded white couple, the Tylers (Elisabeth Moss and Tim Heidecker), who annoy Gabe by showing off about being just that little bit richer. Their cabin is flashier, his car is a cooler model than Gabe’s and their rented boat seems in better shape. (Gabe’s is called “Craw Daddy”; the Tylers’ is toe-curlingly called “B’Yacht’ch”.) And so Adelaide and Gabe’s compromised family happiness, with its tingling undertow of material and personal disquiet, is shattered one night when they see a group of four people standing in their driveway, a group which seems eerily familiar.

Impostor syndrome is something that afflicts people who have fought their way up to a position of some prestige, while never quite being able to suppress the feeling that they don’t deserve it, that they are just fakes, and that they are taking up a space that should be filled by someone more deserving. Is that partly what Us is about: a whole nation of people who each feel a shadow of historical rebuke behind them? Or perhaps the impostors are coming back to grab everything back, having just been deposed? The demonic invaders seem to be attacking from below and at the height of the horror and mayhem, Gabe and Adelaide briefly discuss the possibility of escaping to Mexico, before deciding they are much better off where they are. Perhaps if America was in dispute with Canada, we would be getting a zeitgeisty horror-thriller about Americans getting attacked from above.

Yet perhaps these lines of interpretation are beside the point and what is important is the attack from within. It leads to uproarious scenes of chaos, as Gabe shouts to the invaders: “If you wanna get crazy, we can get crazy” – and crazy is certainly what they get, especially in the outrageous fight scene, which makes shrewd use of the Beach Boys’ Good Vibrations and NWA’s Fuck tha Police.

The fiercely charismatic, mesmeric gaze of Lupita Nyong’o holds the movie together, and I have to say that without her presence, the movie’s final spasm of anarchic weirdness might have lost its grip. She radiates a force-field of pure defiance.

Rape inquiry dropped against French film mogul Luc Besson

French prosecutors have dropped an investigation into claims that the film mogul Luc Besson raped his former girlfriend, his lawyers said on Monday.

The actor Sand Van Roy told police in May that she had been repeatedly raped by Besson, 59, during an on-off relationship.

She is one of nine women who have said they were assaulted or harassed by the director and producer, whose 2017 space odyssey, Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets, was the most expensive European film ever made.

But his lawyers said that prosecutors had closed their inquiry into the alleged rapes, which Besson had always denied.

Besson “is sad that some people – a minority happily – were too quick to condemn him”, his lawyers said. They said the director “thanks all those others whose constant support has helped him get through these difficult months”.

Van Roy, a Dutch-Belgian actor who had relatively minor roles in Besson’s Taxi 5 and Valerian, had said she had been raped a total of four times but had feared for her career if she complained.

Besson had denounced the claims as “fantasist accusations”.

Blood tests conducted after the first rape claim was made in May showed that Van Roy had not been drugged.

But her allegations prompted eight other women to complain to the police or the French media about his behaviour. One actor claimed she had had to escape on “her hands and knees” from a casting in his Paris office in 2002.

The woman, in her 40s, who now lives in the US, wrote to prosecutors 10 days ago to say she wanted to formally add her testimony to the other complaints against him.

The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind review – Chiwetel Ejiofor's charming directorial debut

Last year, Chiwetel Ejiofor and Netflix headed to Sundance with Come Sunday, a dramatisation of the life of “heretic” pastor Carlton Pearson that, despite the provocative source material, fizzled out before making a soft landing online months later. Actor and platform have reassembled for a second attempt to woo Utah crowds with a BFI-backed project close to the Oscar nominee’s heart – so close, in fact, that the 12 Years a Slave star picked it as his directorial debut.

In The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind, Ejiofor has found an astonishing true story to tell, based on a book by William Kamkwamba, the boy of the title. It’s 2001 in Malawi, and the Kamkwamba family is struggling to make ends meet but parents Trywell (Ejiofor) and Agnes (Aïssa Maïga) remain focused on their children’s education, despite the financial cost. When their 13-year-old son William (Maxwell Simba) is forced to leave school after falling behind on payments, he becomes determined to help not only his family but a community facing famine.

When adapting a novel with a child protagonist, directors too often resort to creating an overly childlike film, earnest and sentimental to a fault, any sense of reality failing to seep through. From The Kite Runner to The Lovely Bones, a delicate balance of trauma and treacle on the page has erred toward an overdose of the latter on the big screen. Ejiofor, from a script he adapted himself, is up against a similar battle but despite behind-camera inexperience, he manages to toe the line with ease, skilfully manoeuvring between charm and poignancy. It’s a conventional film in many ways but one that slowly and effectively builds to a remarkably rousing climax, displaying an act of overwhelming ingenuity that’s hard to deny.

For some, the journey there might be a tad too slow but I’d argue that it’s a necessary crawl: Ejiofor carefully lays the film’s emotional foundation and ensures that the story is never less than involving. A great credit here should also be given to newcomer Simba, whose lead performance is really quite extraordinary. With his soulful eyes and infectious enthusiasm, he anchors the drama around him, easily steering himself through the story’s emotional shifts as he matures from a playful child to a philanthropic saviour.

While Ejiofor does pitch the film at a broad audience, he makes a key decision not to force his characters to always speak English. They oscillate between English and Chichewa, mostly using the latter, and at a time when too many film-makers are choosing to avoid subtitles, even when telling fact-based stories from foreign countries, it’s hugely refreshing. There’s an interesting throughline, rarely seen on screen, of tradition v modernity in rural Africa, of parents deliberately eschewing what they perceive to be dated belief systems of the past to encourage progress. They don’t want to rely on praying for rain to save their crops; they want pragmatism instead. It’s also reflected in a desire for education so that children can leave their village, determined that they won’t be facing similar hardships as adults.

There’s similar complexity in the characterisation, most notably in Ejiofor’s conflicted, flawed father who craves education for his children yet must deal with the consequences of feeling less intelligent than them and of the crippling financial impact. Ejiofor has long been a charming presence on screen but here he’s stripped back of his more obvious star presence and is no less impressive as a haunted, beleaguered and not always likable man.

There’s unavoidable darkness in the story and Ejiofor leans into the brutal reality of Malawi’s early 2000s food crisis while balancing the more harrowing details with notes of resilience and hope. When the climax arrives, it’s with immense, earned satisfaction, a crowd-pleasing triumph that will have to be enjoyed on Netflix without one.