Tributes have poured in for Patrick Stewart, who has died aged 86. The distinguished actor had a long and varied career that began on stage with the Royal Shakespeare Company before going on to global stardom on the screen in the Star Trek and X-Men franchises. Stewart was born in Yorkshire in 1940, and had spoken of a challenging childhood marred by alcoholism and domestic violence – something he campaigned against for much of his life. Lucy Hough speaks to the Guardian film critic Peter Bradshaw
For Halloween, Guardian writers have picked the most efficiently terrifying films outside of the horror genre from How to Have Sex to The Hunchback of Notre Dame
Minor spoilers ahead
Hiding in plain sight throughout Lee Chang-dong’s deliciously enigmatic Burning, in which a spirited young woman (Jeon Jong-seo) disappears, and a wealthy playboy (Steven Yeun) gives serial killer vibes, is a disaffected male rage. That’s perhaps the most commonplace horror of our times, whether on the internet or politics, and you feel the tremors of it steadily breaking the surface in Yoo Ah-in’s performance. He plays Jong-su, an aspiring writer, quietly frustrated with his lot in life. Jong-su works odd jobs and tends to his incarcerated father’s dilapidated farm, growing more desperate to grasp some sense of control over the world around him, which is where the scary part comes in. Lee is the master dramatist who with Burning tilts violently into thriller territory, navigating elements from Taxi Driver, The Vanishing and Michael Haneke’s Caché, using the language of horror movies to conjure up a creeping anxiety and dread that erupts into pure existential fear. Radheyan Simonpillai
She plays a depressed fisherwoman. He plays a man made of wicker who is solely dedicated to her pleasure. How did the actors feel about this strange, emotional connection – and what did Colman draw from her own marriage?
Another year, another raunchy comedy-drama in which Alexander Skarsgård is the answer to a social outcast’s erotic dreams. “I fucking loved Pillion so much!” says Olivia Colman, reliably sweary straight out of the gate, as she brings up last year’s British indie hit starring Skarsgård as a leather-clad dom with a timid traffic warden as his submissive. “And when they kissed at the end … Aww.” The 52-year-old Oscar-winner for The Favourite gives a mock-sniffle and a little shake of her frizzy grey locks, then pretends to dab her eyes.
Seated beside her in a London hotel room and wearing a bright orange “I’m With Stupid” T-shirt, Skarsgård tilts his head appreciatively. In Pillion, it was Harry Melling who had the privilege of being ravaged by the 50-year-old Swedish actor. Now it is Colman’s turn in Wicker, an earthy adult fairytale filmed in Budapest and set in a medieval village populated almost exclusively by British comic actors who converse in language both archaically formal (“Happy to transact with you”) and bluntly colloquial (“I’d better fuck off”). Among them is Phil Daniels as a leering butcher and Richard E Grant as a doctor who is even more inept at his job than Grant was as a Celebrity Traitor.
Ryan Dinnage – who accompanied Reform UK leader on walkabouts before local elections – was later jailed, raising questions about vetting failure
One of Nigel Farage’s security team who accompanied him on the local election campaign trail this year was facing a rape charge and was later jailed for eight years, raising questions about a failure of vetting.
Ryan Dinnage spent time protecting Farage in April and May, but in June was convicted of having raped a woman while she slept in a caravan at the Royal Windsor horse show.
Ryan Dinnage – who accompanied Reform UK leader on walkabouts before local elections – was later jailed, raising questions about vetting failure
One of Nigel Farage’s security team who accompanied him on the local election campaign trail this year was facing a rape charge and was later jailed for eight years, raising questions about a failure of vetting.
Ryan Dinnage spent time protecting Farage in April and May, but in June was convicted of having raped a woman while she slept in a caravan at the Royal Windsor horse show.
Vivian Beaumont theater, New York City Unconvincing performances and an ill-fitting big stage make a retooled version of the classic courtroom drama feel like a missed opportunity
Given the current state of the US military brass, it makes some sense that audiences would want to drift back to an older, nobler idea of the armed services, in which bad actors exist but are rooted out by the good guys in uniform. That perhaps explains the Broadway revival of A Few Good Men, Aaron Sorkin’s 1989 courtroom drama about a cocky military attorney defending two young marines who followed an illegal order with fatal results. The play is at once sharp and misty-eyed, critiquing a hallowed institution while reverently imbuing it with a certain dignity – in some ways, it does for the military what Sorkin’s The West Wing did for the Oval Office.
A Few Good Men was turned into a hit Oscar-nominated film in 1992, starring a then boyish Tom Cruise in the role of recalcitrant navy lawyer Daniel Kaffee and a frightening Jack Nicholson as Kaffee’s ultimate enemy, Colonel Jessep, the hardliner in command of the US military base at Guantánamo Bay, where a marine has died under troubling circumstances. Directed by Rob Reiner, the film is a clever, old-fashioned crowd pleaser, culminating in a classic trial scene punctuated by the line. “You can’t handle the truth!”, Jessep memorably bellows at Kaffee just before confessing to his misdeeds. Those in search of crackling drama and sentimentality about the military should just watch that film, rather than plunking down a considerable sum of money to see the play in its current form at Lincoln Center’s Vivian Beaumont theater.
From Jean-Luc Picard to Charles Xavier, the actor’s Shakespearean training – and that sonorous voice – made him a unique charismatic force in Hollywood
No actor showed the commercial potential of blue-chip British classical training like Patrick Stewart. With style, technique and the most minutely self-aware, almost vaudevillian sense of mimicry, Shakespearean thesps can turn their hand to American movies and high-end American television and show the American method actors how it’s done – sometimes, even, at the beginning of their screen careers, at a competitively low wage.
Stewart was one of the thoroughbreds of the Royal Shakespeare Company’s 1970s stage generation who had also had classy small screen roles, such as his intimidating Sejanus in I, Claudius opposite Derek Jacobi. But he effected a warp-speed leap to pop culture stardom by getting the role of Jean-Luc Picard, captain of the Federation starship USS Enterprise, in TV’s Star Trek: The Next Generation, the hugely successful reboot of Star Trek that ran from 1987 to 1994, spawning four separate feature films and then another series, Star Trek: Picard.
By Christmas, the winning voice will echo through Boston Logan International in recorded greetings and announcements that millions of travelers will hear.
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