Excels

After his Cannes misfire Frankie in 2021, writer-director Ira Sachs has made a compelling return to form at Sundance with his cruelly well-observed drama Passages. It’s a bit of a bland title and one that never really pays off but its subject matter is far more compelling, a messy little movie about a specifically awful brand of narcissist who will be frighteningly familiar to many of us who have known him and even moreso to those who might well be him.Transit’s Franz Rogowski plays self-obsessed film director Tomas,…

Anna Kendrick gives a vehement, self-aware lead performance in this Gaslight-style suspense drama about a young woman trapped in a coercive, abusive relationship from screenwriter Alanna Francis and debut feature director Mary Nighy. There are some edge-of-the-seat moments and interestingly subtle tonal inflexions, though the story spends time on a contrived subplot about a missing girl, time that might have been better devoted to developing the central thriller storyline.Alice (Kendrick) is in a toxic relationship with…

The raffish charisma and sinister, saturnine handsomeness of Javier Bardem is what raises this movie above the standard of soap-opera … mostly. Certainly, it would be less without that great slab of a beau-moche face looming over the action, more heavy-lidded and sensual in middle age: part matinee idol, part gargoyle. This is a workplace comedy-satire from Spanish film-maker Fernando Léon de Aranoa, and it has been a huge success on his home turf. His 2005 film Mondays in the Sun also starred Bardem as one of a crowd of…

The words “British sex comedy” will strike an icy chill into the heart of anyone raised on a diet of Brian Rix trouser-losing theatrical farces and films such as Carry on Camping and Confessions of a Window Cleaner. Yet despite such a blush-inducing heritage, the inelegantly named Good Luck To You, Leo Grande manages to keep one foot firmly on the floor of enjoyably progressive entertainment even as it dances around a peculiarly British minefield in which anxiety and openness about intimacy collide.Directed by Sophie Hyde…

HONG KONG—China’s global campaign to expand the reach of its political positions is helping it secure a coveted piece of online real estate: first-page search results on Google and other major Western portals.Content reflecting Beijing’s position on its human-rights record and the origins of Covid-19 now regularly appears among top results on Google, Bing and YouTube, according to a new report from the Brookings Institution and another Washington think tank, the Alliance for Securing Democracy, which seeks to study and…

Will Excel replace data scientists? Will Excel do the machine learning for us?TLDR: If you are not a data scientist, you too can perform exploratory data analysis. And any data scientists who previously found the distribution of Excel’s automated exploratory data analysis tools results underwhelming — you should now find time to take another look at the software’s cloud infrastructure enhanced tools. To do exploratory analysis well, a data scientist need time. The time spent on exploratory data analysis is usually well…