Catherine

New Zealander Catherine Chidgey’s 2020 novel, Remote Sympathy, was set in Buchenwald and made both the longlist of the Women’s prize for fiction and the shortlist of the Dublin literary award for its devastating insights into the Nazi propaganda machine and the deadly role played by those who were all too willing to be duped. Now comes Pet, a sly psychological thriller that might seem to require a little less of the reader but saves its most sinister twist for the end.It’s set largely in suburban, Catholic Wellington in…

Catherine Breillat has made a hot – or rather tepid – mess of this remake of the very recent Danish erotic thriller Queen of Hearts, and it’s not immediately clear why exactly she felt she needed to direct her own moderate version. The changes amount to smudging the original’s icy Scandi sheen, decreasing its erotic excitement, making the performances more laboured and thus leaving the story’s essential preposterousness dangerously exposed.The first film, from writer-director May el-Toukhy, featured Trine Dyrholm as an…

Jude Law outrageously steals every scene as a horrendously unwell and cross Henry VIII in this Tudor court intrigue drama that also serves as an amusing noir counterfactual, adapted by the screenwriters Jessica and Henrietta Ashworth from the novel by Elizabeth Fremantle and directed by the Brazilian film-maker Karim Aïnouz, making his English-language feature debut.It’s all about the king’s tense relationship with his sixth and final queen, Catherine Parr, played with creamy, inscrutable placidity by Alicia Vikander.The…

Earlier this week, veteran actor Michael Douglas received the honorary Palme d’Or at the 76th Cannes Film Festival. He recently also attended a session at the India Pavilion with minister of state for information and broadcasting L Murugan, where the actor received an invitation for the International Film Festival of India (IFFI) in Goa, which will be held in November. Also read: Michael Douglas, Catherine Zeta-Jones explore India Michael Douglas and Catherine Zeta-Jones during one of their visits to India.…

Despite some warm and sympathetic performances and lovely cinematography, there is something weirdly glib in director and co-writer Catherine Corsini’s new film in which a summer of drama gives us supposedly tragic personal discoveries uneasily coexisting with some almost photo love-style holiday romance.Khedidja (Aïssatou Diallo Sagna) is a black woman in her 40s living in Paris with her two teen daughters – promising student Jess (Suzy Bemba) and tearaway Farah (Esther Gohourou) – and working as a nanny for a wealthy…

Jeff Spicer/Getty Images Disney must be excited by all the love that the upcoming remake of The Little Mermaid is getting, but they may not have done themselves any favors by adding a scene that seems to take a shot at Kate Middleton, also known as Catherine, Princess of Wales. It also inadvertently serves as a dis to any girl named Catherine. The potential bad-look for Disney makes one wonder why they would even approve such a scene, despite it apparently being a very mild dig at the present Princess of Wales.…

Image: Myriad PicturesFor years, the idea of Beetlejuice getting a sequel has been a pipe dream. A sequel to Tim Burton’s 1988 film has been sparking up since 2011, though nothing everreally got off the ground in the last decade. But with casting announcements over the last week, the long discussed sequel is beginning to come together, and now another big name actor is joining the ensemble.Balancing Fan Expectations in The MandalorianPer the Hollywood Reporter, Willem Dafoe’s been cast in the upcoming sequel, which began…

French film director Catherine Corsini has hit back at claims she harassed crew and put children at risk during the shooting of her film shortlisted for the Cannes Palme d’Or award.The row over Le Retour (Homecoming) has divided France’s film world, with one director announcing a boycott of the festival and feminists claiming that the industry has learned nothing from #MeToo.In an open letter, Corsini and her partner, the producer Elisabeth Perez, denied any wrongdoing on the set of Le Retour, which will have its world…

The announcement of the Cannes film festival’s selection list, like the unveiling of a mountain of still-wrapped Christmas presents, is a ritual that this year again affirmed its high-minded internationalism, its loyalty to its big-hitting auteurs of festivals past, its commitment to cinema as a live, in-person event and its repudiation of movies that are only shown on streaming TV. General delegate Thierry Frémaux was at pains to emphasise that that Martin Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon, starring Leonardo DiCaprio…

Catherine Lacey, 37, is the author of three previous novels, including The Answers, currently being adapted for television by Darren Aronofsky, and Pew (2020), about a nameless amnesiac of ambiguous race and gender. Her new novel, Biography of X, set in a parallel America, follows a widow untangling the life story of her wife, an avant-garde artist known as X. The New York Times has called it “sprawling and ambitious… strange and dystopian”. Lacey, one of Granta’s best young American novelists in 2017, was speaking from…