George and Amal Clooney donate $1m to combat US rightwing extremism

George and Amal Clooney have announced a partnership with the Southern Poverty Law Center to combat “bigotry and hate” in the wake of the violence in Charlottesville, Virginia.

The Clooney Foundation for Justice says that it will bestow a grant of $1m to the SPLC in order to assist the civil rights organization in its attempts to combat violent extremism in the US, following the death of counter-protester Heather Heyer at a white supremacist rally in the campus city earlier this month.

“Amal and I wanted to add our voice (and financial assistance) to the ongoing fight for equality,” George Clooney said. “There are no two sides to bigotry and hate.”

“We are proud to support the Southern Poverty Law Center in its efforts to prevent violent extremism in the United States,” the pair added in a statement. “What happened in Charlottesville, and what is happening in communities across our country, demands our collective engagement to stand up to hate.”

SPLC president Richard Cohen welcomed the Clooney Foundation’s contribution at a time when the radical right in America is “energized”.

“Like George and Amal Clooney, we were shocked by the size, ugliness, and ferocity of the white supremacist gathering in Charlottesville,” he said in a statement. “It was a reflection of just how much Trump’s incendiary campaign and presidency have energized the radical right. We are deeply grateful to the Clooney Foundation for standing with us at this critical moment in our country’s fight against hate.”

The donation comes at a time when federal funding to organizations combating rightwing extremism in the US has been frozen by Donald Trump’s administration. Trump himself was roundly criticized for his response to the events in Charlottesville, with the president declaring that activists from “both sides” had been responsible for the violence.

The Clooney Foundation for Justice was established in 2016 to “advance justice in courtrooms, communities and classrooms around the world.” Earlier this month it announced plans to provide $3.25m to help 3,000 Syrian refugee children receive an education in Lebanon. “We don’t want to lose an entire generation because they had the bad luck of being born in the wrong place at the wrong time,” George Clooney said in a statement.

Logan Lucky review – Soderbergh roars back with a riotous heist caper

It seems, at first, like an impossible caper. Can Steven Soderbergh bring something new to the heist genre after his outstanding Oceans trilogy? The answer, as always, is to have faith in the director-producer-writer-cinematographer-editor-brandy salesman whose ingenuity has kept him one step ahead of audiences for almost 30 years.

Channing Tatum, working with Soderbergh for the fourth time, is at his sympathetic and charismatic best in Logan Lucky. His Jimmy Logan is a divorced father, injured Iraq war vet, John Denver enthusiast and loving sibling living in Boone County, West Virginia. His wounded leg gets him fired from a construction gig at the Charlotte Motor Speedway because it’s “a pre-existing condition”.

It is another example of the Logan curse, says his brother Clyde (Adam Driver), a stoic bartender with a prosthetic hand (again, Iraq). After a humiliating experience with a Nascar-affiliated energy drink creator (Seth MacFarlane, channelling all his obnoxious energy into a boorish British accent), Jimmy pitches Clyde an elaborate plan to rob the speedway.

Logan Lucky and Ocean’s Eleven would work as a wonderful diptych, similar at times, exact opposites at others. George Clooney and his band of career criminals wore fabulous suits and hung around slick airports in the world’s greatest sunglasses. Tatum works off a checklist of vague instructions and limps around unglamorous settings in an ill-fitting Charlie Daniels Band T-shirt. A shot of Tatum eating a plastic-wrapped Drake’s Yodel is the type of grace note that elevates a minor comedy-adventure into something that somehow feels important in its specificity.

This is an exercise in shining Hollywood lights on the under-represented red states, and with it comes an unexpected degree of warmth. The Logans, who also include sister Mellie (Riley Keough), a hairdresser with a less-is-more fashion sense, don’t for a minute bring up politics or gripe about the government, but wear the weight of financial disparity with each day’s new struggles.

Screenwriter Rebecca Blunt, in her first credited work, has crafted something brimming with humour and life. The heist scenes are as satisfying to watch as an elaborate domino sculpture, but there is also ample space to make Logan Lucky one of the great hangin’-out pictures.

The Logan gang can’t pull off the caper without explosives whiz Joe Bang (Daniel Craig, with an extraordinary southern accent and a penchant for chomping on boiled eggs), but Joe won’t join in unless his two idiot brothers Sam and Fish (Brian Gleeson and Jack Quaid) are there to watch his back, and, perhaps more problematically, he’s in jail. So before they can get the loot, they’ve got to mount a prison break.

It’s all wonderfully preposterous, but also endearing and gratifying. I’d never dream of spoiling the ending, but I will say that Logan Lucky concludes with one of my favourite movie tricks, as all the characters get a curtain call. There’s almost a 30s screwball satisfaction to this rural crime story, without any of the self-referential showboating that, say, the Coen brothers would have brought to it.

Produced by Soderbergh’s new distribution company and eventually heading to Amazon’s streaming service, Logan Lucky is the perfect vehicle with which to reinstate himself as a feature director after a ballyhooed five-year sabbatical. (At first he said he’d spend that time painting, but he ended up also working as a cinematographer and producer when he wasn’t shooting two seasons of The Knick and re-editing cinema classics on his blog.)

If anyone can figure out how to pull off the biggest heist of all – getting around traditional Hollywood business models – it’s him.

Michelle Rodriguez threatens to leave Fast and Furious over limited female roles

Actor Michelle Rodriguez has threatened to leave the Fast and Furious film series if the franchise doesn’t improve the roles it creates for female actors.

The actor, who stars as the street racer Leticia “Letty” Ortiz in the films, made the comments on Instagram. “F8 is out digitally today, I hope they decide to show some love to the women of the franchise on the next one,” she wrote, “or I just might have to say goodbye to a loved franchise.”

She added: “It’s been a good ride & I’m grateful for the opportunity the fans & studio have provided over the years … One Love.”

Rodriguez has appeared in five Fast and Furious films, most recently The Fate of the Furious (titled Fast and Furious 8 outside the US). While that movie introduced two new female characters, played by Charlize Theron and Helen Mirren, Rodriguez had limited screen time, and the film had a greater focus on male actors such as Vin Diesel and Dwayne Johnson.

Rodriguez has previously expressed concern about the overly masculine nature of the franchise. In an interview with Entertainment Weekly last month she said that the tone of the franchise was male-focused because of the violent criminal world it represents. She had hoped that as the series progressed it would evolve out of that “90s macho vibe”, but the film series’ growing popularity in developing markets like China, where “the grand majority of the population are boys”, had made that impossible.

“At the end of the day, what message are we sending out there for women?” Rodriguez said. “It does weigh heavy on [me], especially in the male-dominated environment that I work in,” she said.

The Fate of the Furious was released in April and has grossed over $1bn at the worldwide box office, with a combined gross of the eight-film series to over $5bn globally.

Roger Moore: a modest, self-deprecating James Bond who brought some serious aplomb

Action heroes aren’t prized for suavity much these days, or for knowing how to carry off a double-breasted pinstripe Savile Row suit, or how to raise a single eyebrow, or how to pose with a Walther PPK – under the chin in repose, or drawn dramatically, as if about to shoot the photographer, with a facial expression of satirically calm disapproval. Even the Action Movie 101 skill of finishing a deafeningly loud and chaotic scene with a single droll wisecrack is not executed with much of the élan of old. But Roger Moore’s James Bond was a master of all this; over seven Bond movies from 1973 to 1985, he brought some serious aplomb. No-one delivered the aplomb like Roger Moore. He was the secret agent with the twinkle of humour in his eye, and who put wit into his elegant, educated tones, which deepened and decelerated into a sensual purr as his tenure went on.

For his final Bond, A View to a Kill in 1985, he was 58, and was humorously aware that he was a mature 007. So the emphasis had to be a little more on comedy and absurdity, and he was doing the job when 007 was a little out of style and it was considered appropriate to send him up a tiny bit.


Roger Moore got huge laughs on chat shows for decades after he stepped down, with his wry bemusement at all the silly things he was asked to do. In the Bangkok boat chase scene in The Man With the Golden Gun (1974), he heartlessly pushes a child trinket-seller off his boat – a child who had just helped him get away from the bad guys. As Moore loved to say: as the Unicef goodwill ambassador, and an activist for stopping children getting exploited in developing countries – a job to which he was genuinely committed, and was much respected – this was hardly an appropriate thing for him to be seen doing.

He was loved by journalists for his easygoing openness, often corresponding generously with profile-writers. During the launch of his first 007 movie Live and Let Die, he published a cheerfully indiscreet account of the filming, entitled Roger Moore’s James Bond Diary, regaling the reader with all his boyish escapades, and gossip about the big-spending, big-lunching producer Cubby Broccoli. Later he published his autobiography, My Word Is My Bond, in which his self-deprecating charm shone through.

As for Roger Moore’s acting skills, he was never more charming than when he modestly said that these were nothing to write home about. And his milieu was not the National Theatre or the Old Vic: more Langan’s restaurant in London’s West End, dining with pals like Sean Connery and Michael Caine, wreathed in politically incorrect cigar smoke.

But his performance in what I think is his best film, Basil Dearden’s terrific 1970 doppelganger thriller The Man Who Haunted Himself, showed the world that he was actually a skilful and effective actor with an instinctive feel for how to play to the camera and how to undersell a line. This is a brilliant Jekyll and Hyde nightmare, and Moore cleverly conveys the creeping terror of a respectable professional man who is astonished to find that he has an exact double who is going to destroy his life.

Moore started his career on television, starring first in Ivanhoe, a high-minded children’s TV adaptation of the Walter Scott novel; and then, improbably enough, in a couple of US western series in the era when the Old West ruled television dramas. He was in The Alaskans and then Maverick, opposite James Garner. But it was in The Saint that Moore really established himself: as Simon Templar, the stylish man-about-town Brit, a Raffles gentleman thief and adorable rascal who only fleeced the bad guys, although in the first series his character tended to affect an American accent, apparently to help the show play in the US.

The programme’s running motif, in which the halo would appear above Simon Templar’s head and Moore gave an outrageous butter-wouldn’t-melt smirk, established his knack for posing and pouting in a cheeky way, a mannerism learned from his teenage days, earning an occasional crust as a model.

Moore was always being rumoured for the role of Bond, but he appeared to have lost the moment when he was cast in the 70s buddy action-comedy TV series The Persuaders with Tony Curtis. (Persuading? Who were they persuading? Nobody knew or cared.) It was at this moment that nation fell in love with Roger Moore – certainly I did, as a wide-eyed kid – because of the outrageous, yet brilliant split-screen opening title sequence that always began the show, with John Barry’s great music, showing the parallel lives of Moore’s character Lord Brett Sinclair (the placing of the title presumably making him specifically the son of an earl or duke) going through Harrow, Oxford and the Guards, while Tony Curtis’s Danny Wilde came up the hard way in the mean streets of New York, making his cash in oil. The sequence ended by demonstrating their outrageous sexism, ogling a young woman in a bikini who walked between them – tacky and obnoxious behaviour, of course, yet hardly to be taken seriously.


So by the time Moore took on the mantle of Bond his persona already appeared to have been pre-satirised with two quasi-Bond characters. Furthermore, he had the awful job of following Connery in the role, and knew that the only way to play it was to go the other way, to bring out the humour, not to try to be the straight-faced tough guy, and certainly not the borderline psychopath that Ian Fleming’s books seemed occasionally to be hinting at.

But Moore stayed the course, and his 007 movies did perfectly respectably at the box office; and in commercial terms, his Bond tenure was just as much of a golden age as that which had gone before. And when the 90s came, and Mike Myers’s comedy international spy Austin Powers became a smash hit, his style of Bond became increasingly adored: raffish, deadpan, devil-may-care. The Connery Bond was feared and admired, and the same went for the Brosnan Bond or the Craig Bond. But the Roger Moore Bond was loved. And Sir Roger Moore was loved too. It is desperately sad to see him go.

The Happiest Day in the Life of Olli Mäki review – delightful, mysterious Finnish comedy

Here is a treat and a delight: this lovely film from Finnish director Juho Kuosmanen is a gentle, shrewd, somehow mysterious love story, based on real life, beautifully photographed in luminous black-and-white and drawing inspiration from Scorsese and Truffaut. It is inspired by the Finnish boxer Olli Mäki, who electrified Finland’s boxing fans in 1962 by getting a shot at the world featherweight title, fighting on home turf against visiting American star Davey Moore. It is to be the greatest day of his life – but not for the reasons he might once have thought.

The movie has Jarkko Lahti playing the intense, wiry Olli, who finds that as the big fight approaches, he has fallen in love with a beautiful young schoolteacher, Raija (Oona Airola) – to the horror of his tightly wound trainer and manager, Elis, played by Eero Milonoff, who occasionally resembles a young Harrison Ford. Elis’s own marriage appears to be crumbling, and he is aghast, for complex reasons, at the distractions of love, which might mess with Olli’s focus. Like Jake La Motta, Olli has a habit of zoning out in public occasions at the thought of his love, and he sometimes looks like a blond Antoine Doinel, taking 400 blows outside the ring. It is a film of immense humanity and charm: the very best kind of date movie.