Cabin fever: "Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma"

Three films into this career, it's become apparent that the work of the writer-director Jane Schoenbrun transmits on unusually particularised frequencies: one cinemagoer might vibe with a film that completely bypasses the person sitting next to them, while keen admirers of the previous emission might be left indifferent or flummoxed by the next. Adding to this sense of a narrowband cinema is this oeuvre's fascination with marginal or culturally disreputable reference points. After an online RPG game in 2021's We're All Going to the World's Fair and the cult teen serial at the centre of 2024's I Saw the TV Glow, Schoenbrun's latest Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma takes as its backdrop an overextended slasher franchise. Behind its opening credits, we're afforded a potted history of this Friday the 13th-like enterprise: boffo early Eighties box office, tie-in toys and other assorted memorabilia, sluggish sequels, increasingly scathing reviews, slow financial death, then online reappropriation by Gen Z, and news of the kind of high-profile reboot Schoenbrun themselves may have been approached to direct once I Saw the TV Glow became a minor phenomenon. On screen, the reboot has been assigned to Sundance-lauded wunderkind Kris Williams (Hannah Einbinder) whose preparation involves driving out to a snowy woodland middle-of-nowhere to meet with the first movie's leading lady. The now-eccentric and reclusive Billy Presley (Gillian Anderson) has had the film's summer camp set converted into an inhabitable property; somewhat unnervingly, given fairytale lore, this wooden cabin has been stocked high with candy of various stripes. In a straightahead horror movie, it'd be a natural site of carnage, overrun by the ghosts of the past. Here, though, it also serves as something of a getaway, a place where an uptight creative can maybe begin to work through some of her issues. Schoenbrun intends to give us the best of both worlds: the transgressive thrills and pleasures of the slasher film, with a thick toplayer of meta commentary on same. What we actually get, I think, is a mishmash, and a script that could have done with one or two more passes that buzzy directors sometimes don't have (or have the time) to make.

On the plus side, here is what may end up being 2026's pre-eminent example of a deeply personal - even confessional - American cinema. It's not inconceivable that Einbinder, donning specs and babbling even more than she did on TV's Hacks, is doing (and has been coached to do) an impersonation of her director: nervy, nerdy, a peeper, a poker and a pryer, Kris comes this way clinging anxiously to bifurcating pronouns, presenting as a curious soul in multiple senses. If I Saw the TV Glow was a fan's film, bound up in the complications of modern fandom, this is demonstrably the work of an acclaimed writer-director mulling over the industry they now find themselves welcomed into - its own fairytale kingdom, simultaneously beckoning and terrifying, rife with possibilities both candycoated and bloodcurdling. (It feels odd to compare a figure as non-binary as Schoenbrun to Eminem, that millennial voice of straight male rage, but Camp Miasma has something of the latter's difficult post-breakout albums, when he abandoned the cartoon rap that made him famous in favour of writing - and grousing - about his newfound circumstances.) Within the cabin, Kris and Billy effectively hold a two-person symposium, reflecting on the unwoke, transphobic terrors of the original Camp Miasmas, and whether or not the reboot should embrace its roots or radically course-correct. The most potent sequence sees us watching our heroines rewatching the franchise's first instalment (in which the younger Billy had an uncomfortable sex scene), an exposing hall-of-mirrors conceit that allows Schoenbrun to evoke what it is to sit close to others as an especially fraught strip of celluloid unspools before us. Am I supposed to be watching this? Am I allowed to enjoy it? What will this other person think of me when the lights come up? This line of inquiry may account for one early, jarring Weinstein allusion (seemingly toned down on the advice of someone's lawyers): Schoenbrun is all too aware of the traumas the cinema can trigger. I'm not sure the film's proposed corrective - getting fingered by your prospective leading lady on a rug scattered with Twixes - would be any easier to navigate from an HR (or a dry cleaning) perspective, but at least everything's now consensual. Yet at some point Camp Miasma segues from film analysis into self-analysis, and here's where Schoenbrun risks losing anyone who isn't Jane Schoenbrun.

Though the recent horror renaissance has underlined this genre can be whatever you make of it, I fear those drawn here by that knowingly lurid title will be among the first to tune out: they will surely want their carnage less winking and with far fewer footnotes. It's a positive that this fugue-like narrative fits no pre-existing template; I genuinely had no idea where these characters were headed or how events were going to pan out. It's a problem, though, that the second half tumbles down what feels like the wrong rabbithole, landing us among half-digested, half-regurgitated ideas and images, in the realms of a deadly self-absorption. Schoenbrun's going for Lynchian dream horror - the first half gets a lot out of scenes that end with the editorial equivalent of unresolved chords, allowing an image or an attached feeling to linger - but the effect gets undercut by this director's need to explain themselves at every turn. It's Kris writing "DESIRE" in a notebook upon first revisiting Camp Miasma on a gas-station DVD; in some way, the film never gets over the decision to name its thrusting, shapeshifting killer Little Death. Even as it opened itself up to viewer interpretation, I Saw the TV Glow retained vast, alluring pockets of mystery, something ineffable, quietly unsettling. Camp Miasma is, ultimately, as upfront as a lonelyhearts ad: the tale of an inexperienced lover who just needs the right woman to bring her to orgasm and thereby rescue her from the tyrannies of polyamory. Even by the leftfield standards of the Schoenbrun filmography, it's perilously niche. On a scene-by-scene basis, there are consolations. Einbinder is very game, and Anderson is terrific as a sort of Dolly Parton in exile, at once sorceress and survivor, a pansexual fantasy figure, and the basis of Hallowe'en 2026's #1 outfit for hipsters. Schoenbrun surrounds them with choice, funny little freaks: Kids in the Hall's Kevin McDonald as an actor-turned-hotelier, Patrick Fischler (the guy who went behind the dumpster in Mulholland Dr.) as an ominous shopkeeper, Dylan Baker offering an unexpected Austin Powers impersonation via Zoom. Give Schoenbrun this: these three films have redefined what we think of as personal cinema. What was previously the domain of hyper-confident, hyper-loud straight men now embraces a trans nerd communicating awkwardly at a frequency not everyone in the room is automatically set to receive. A dial has shifted somewhere in the cosmos, even if the signal has occasional cause to fluctuate.

Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma is now showing in selected cinemas.  

That's not all, folks: "Coyote vs. ACME"

The live-action/animation hybrid Coyote vs. ACME was, infamously, the film Warner Bros. - a studio that has otherwise been taking far more chances than most - had consigned to a shelf for several years as a possible tax write-off. (Much of its onscreen action is dated to 2022, which tells you how long it's been sitting there.) Given some of the IP-linked tat foisted upon us in that time - WB's disastrous Space Jam sequel, a Chinese Tom and Jerry knockoff where cat and mouse were suddenly best friends - this shelving almost certainly had less to do with any quality-control reservations than with what this text was actually communicating. Adapted by May December's Samy Burch from Ian Frazier's satirical New Yorker item - which saw Wile E. Coyote seeking legal redress against the company whose products repeatedly failed him in his efforts to capture the Road Runner - Dave Green's film speaks with some degree of frazzled experience to something our executive class might well be nervy about: the public's mounting awareness that our corporations have knowingly peddled substandard product, have intimidated potential whistleblowers, and - when all else has failed - have spent huge amounts of money on rigging entire systems. While still a PG-rated family entertainment - Bugs Bunny, cameoing as the film's Deep Throat, remains in traditional masculine dress - it's also the kind of sly creative subversion that, in a slower news cycle, would have Fox News anchors bloviating about Marxist indoctrination of our young. The pitch, you begin to suspect, may have been The Insider redrawn in the style of Who Framed Roger Rabbit, two titles released by a major studio (Disney, no less) at a time when the industry was much more confident in what it was selling, and thus able to shoulder internal criticism more robustly.

That corporate confidence is about all that's missing here. Coyote vs. ACME looks several zeroes cheaper than it would have done thirty or forty years ago, but then the idea was apparently to loose the Looney Tunes universe on the workaday Albuquerque of Better Call Saul, operating in this instance without the benefits of a Netflix budget. (You have to wonder just how much tax the suits were hoping to have written off.) Crucially, however, this is a movie made by folks who understand these old cartoons: their irreverent, rake-scattering, anvil-dropping form, the personalities of their key personnel (Bugs, Daffy, Porky, Tweety, Foghorn Leghorn: all present and correct) and the philosophies they represent. Burch and Green recognise that there is something heroic in the Coyote's persistence, and that his life's work amounts to a perverse act of optimism on a par with standing up to any all-powerful corporation. The human element here is very capably held together by Will Forte, one of our most flexible comic actors, whose washed-up (if evocatively named) claims lawyer Avery - one suit, motel lodgings, a tendency to show up for work at three in the afternoon - comes to find renewed purpose in pursuing the Coyote's case, some persistence of his own. Bob Hoskins set down the template and the markers for this variety of screensharing, but this may actually have been the tougher assignment for a flesh-and-blood co-star, because the Coyote communicates only with (a limited range of) handwritten signs, raised eyebrows and baleful looks to camera. Despite a couple of setpieces worthy of its 'toon predecessors, Green's film is neither as flashy nor starry as 2003's Joe Dante-engineered Looney Tunes: Back in Action (from a moment when WB still had residual faith in this brand), nor as chancy as what the Animaniacs were getting away with within the anarchist confines of Saturday morning kids' television. Yet it's visibly the work of creatives having immense fun and trying new things with IP, and its final moments represent a show of solidarity that is oddly heartening, moving even. That the suits ran scared of it - meep meep - may be all the commendation you need.

Coyote vs. ACME is now playing in cinemas nationwide.

Big daddy: "Vishwanath & Sons"

The current Top Ten hit Vishwanath & Sons is Tamil cinema doing the single male childraiser trope, as previously worked through by major stars the whole world over: Michael Keaton in Mr. Mom, Hugh Grant in About a Boy, Diljit Dosanjh in Honsla Rakh. The star here is the South Indian favourite Suriya (24, Retro), hoping some sustained nappy-changing can pull him out of a mid-career slump. His Sanjay Vishwanath presents initially as less caregiver, more crackshot: at the Paris Olympics, where we first find him, he's seen to win the 25m air pistol gold even after intruders break into his locker and smash up his equipment. Sanju, as he's fondly known, isn't the worst candidate for fatherhood: he can fix that air pistol, because he's inherited his late father's practicality, and he dedicates that medal to the mother whose phone calls he insists on answering on the very first ring. (Wisely perhaps, seeing as this queenly figure appears to live in one of the palaces from Dune.) The surprise is how quickly fatherhood is foisted upon our guy. Just five minutes after Facetiming a doctor in San Francisco, Sanju is walking back through the arrivals gate of Chennai Airport, bearing a surrogate son in his manly arms and resembling that old Athena poster made flesh. 

At which point, Venky Atluri's film begins to burn through plot. The kid gets sick and needs a bone marrow transfusion; Sanju isn't a match, so further input from the child's mother is required. Another movie might have made that search the entire film; Sanju just hops on another plane to the West Coast and brings her back over. (Already, we sense this is one of those plots wherein money is no object: it explains why Sanjay and his mum share that palace.) The surrogate, Maddy, is a 22-year-old who's studying medicine but majoring in partying hard; she's introduced jumping off a roof and into a swimming pool, fully clothed. She's played by Mamitha Baiju, who instantly freshens up the film's perilously fusty and conservative milieu by acting in a mode we might describe as Alia Bhatt Modern, sassing everyone around her and organising a minor insurrection in Sanju's office. But Maddy also raises a problem. She's 22, Sanju/Suriya is pushing fifty. Is Vishwanath & Sons doomed to go in a direction we fear?

The answer, it turns out, is not really, but that's only because everybody here is working from the year's least coherent screenplay, written either by a six-year-old with red crayons or by a Mexican jumping bean. What you want from a softhearted melodrama like this is more or less what you'd want for your offspring: careful development, consistent growth. But this utterly distractible film keeps pinging off at bizarre, sometimes baffling tangents (at its star's behest?): an appearance on a Surprise, Surprise-like reunion show that ends with our hero lecturing the audience about responsibility, a late-night heart-to-heart between mum and Maddy that reveals Sanju has been sowing his wild oats widely, a fight in a hotel restaurant that almost results in Sanju taking ownership of the entire hotel (?). So he's dutiful, and a loverman, and a tough guy besides: all of these episodes present as scenes an aging star might insist on adding to a workable script so as to bolster his reputation and perceived potency, no matter how poorly they serve the pre-existing narrative. 

At some point - and it is, I'm afraid, an early point - the nonsense begins to obscure the sense: you need only take one look at the vertiginous stone staircase at the centre of the Vishwanath family mansion to see that nobody would realistically be allowed to raise a toddler here. There's so much nonsense that you might actually long for the hero to take up with his sophomoric houseguest, because at least that would have some logical precedent in the context of vehicles for middle-aged male stars. But flaws in the characterisation prevent us from cheering anybody on. Broad-shouldered protector Sanju feels more like an image a star wants to project than a credible character an actor can actually play: for a medal-winning shooter, he also spends very little time (none, in fact) on the range. (Maybe because he's clearly spending it all in the gym.) Baiju is a find - it's been a while since a newcomer has lit up the screen so - but Maddy is demonstrably the creation of an older male writer-director: the character barely looks as though she's had a period, let alone a baby, and of course she develops a crush of some kind on big daddy, even if he nobly declines to act on it. (By the way, Sanju's noble, too.) The hope may have been that all the nonsense would even obscure the film's weird sexual politics, but every now and again in Vishwanath & Sons - in the gaps between scenes that never connect - you spy a queasy male fantasy about keeping a young woman around to turn down. And that's the generous reading: the alternative is that everyone here was set to applying some romantic gloss to the notion of rich mother's boys hiring out young women's wombs. Certain hits just give you the ick.

Vishwanath & Sons is now showing in selected cinemas.

For what it's worth...

UK box office Top Ten (for the weekend of August 14-16, 2026):

1 (1) Spider-Man: Brand New Day (12A) ***

2 (2) The Odyssey (15) ***

3 (new) The End of Oak Street (12A) ***

4 (new) Katseye: Wild Hearts (12A)

5 (3) Paw Patrol: The Dino Movie (U)

6 (4) Toy Story 5 (PG) **

7 (5) Minions & Monsters (U)

8 (new) Tony (15)

9 (7) Moana (PG)

10 (new) Vishwanath & Sons (12A) **

(source: BFI)

My top five:

1. Trainspotting [above]

2. Kiki's Delivery Service

3. Coyote vs. ACME

4. Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma

5. Early Man

DVD/Blu-Ray/Download top ten: 

1 (1) Michael (12)

2 (re) Project Hail Mary (12) ***

3 (2) Scary Movie (15)

4 (new) Minions & Monsters (U)

5 (5) Obsession (18) *

6 (4) Disclosure Day (12) **

7 (7) The Super Mario Galaxy Movie (PG)

8 (6) Star Wars: The Mandalorian and Grogu (12)

9 (3) The Devil Wears Prada 2 (12)

10 (8) Supergirl (12)

(source: officialcharts.com)

My top five: 
1. Rose of Nevada

2. The Stranger

3. Father Mother Sister Brother

4. Project Hail Mary

5. Hokum

Top five films on terrestrial TV this week:

1. The Third Man (Saturday, BBC Two, 10.15am)

2. We Dive at Dawn (Saturday, BBC Two, 1.25pm)

3. The Quiet Girl (Tuesday, Channel 4, 1.55am)

4. Paddington (Saturday, BBC One, 7.15pm)

5. Everything Everywhere All At Once (Saturday, Channel 4, 10.15pm)

From the archive: "Early Man"

Amid the chaos of Brexit, Aardman - one of our last remaining national treasures - keep calm and carry on. In its own way, Nick Park's directorial comeback Early Man arrives as a comment on tribalism and our relationships with our neighbours - but what it most closely resembles is a British retort to Disney's Moana, the big, belting inspirational songs replaced by a cover of Mud's "Tiger Feet", jokes about the most trivial of things, and a football motif that entails more than a few cheeky riffs on the word "balls". Only Park would have visualised the glowing remains of the meteorite that wiped out the (here, very Harryhausen-ish) dinosaurs being juggled and knocked about by game cavemen in the direction of obelisks passing for goalposts; only Park would have imagined the crater formed by that meteor strike being co-opted as a pitch framed by cantilevered Subbuteo stands (and a New Wembley-style arch) containing neo-pleisticene supporters paying over the odds for entry. This will be the venue for Early Man's derby tie between wealthy Europeans who've enjoyed the considerable evolutionary advantages of the Bronze Age and a plucky troop of stone-age Brits, made up of types that have endured into the 21st century: a lumpen, fists-first Northerner who goes by the name Asbo (and is voiced, somewhat inevitably, by Johnny Vegas), an embarrassing mum (Selina Griffiths) who nods and winks around the word "tackle", plus a silky-skilled continental import who - as per 21st century animation convention - is female (voiced by Maisie Williams, no less) and bears the name Goona, which may limit the film's appeal in certain North London postcodes.

Early Man opened to modest reviews at home - not terrible, but certainly cavilling, less effusive than those generated by Park's Wallace-and-Gromit output, which may just be to this director what the Toy Storys were to Pixar: a high bar set very early. Tellingly, this is the first time Park has directed from somebody else's script, and it does look as if the pleasurably baroque, fiendishly clever plotting of Park's own screenplays has been quietly dropped in favour of something altogether more route-one. The new film sets up its main event and stakes - that football match for the right to live on in this valley - then doodles gags while we wait for the big kick-off. Most of these gags, thankfully, are rather good: the stadium, with its "suspended" players hanging over the centre circle, offers comic possibilities in every direction. Maybe it's the blokey soccer milieu, but there is also a certain tendency here towards dad gags: it's the kind of script where a character says "a simple solution won't just walk through the door", only for the door to open and present everybody with just that. (You smile, but it's a little predictable, where Park's very best work has generally been more surprising.) Still, even on this midtable, playoff-chasing form, Park's films remain a reliable pleasure to watch, and none of those critics could have foreseen how, with its "we're going home" subtext, Early Man did pre-empt the summer of 2018, when a plucky tribe under big chief Gareth Southgate pulled itself together and performed better at the World Cup than anyone dared hope. Given the unusually convivial atmosphere within the England camp, it wouldn't surprise me to learn there was a copy of Park's film aboard the team bus, and that it provoked the same levels of chuckles and titters there as it had everywhere else on the continent.

(January 2019)

Early Man returns to selected cinemas from today.

In memoriam: Mark Rydell (Telegraph 19/08/26)

Mark Rydell, who has died aged 97, was an American actor-turned-director who straddled the divide between the studio contract era and the New Hollywood that followed, refusing to pick sides. He filmed John Wayne being shot in the back for The Cowboys (1972); in his role as gangster Marty Augustine in Robert Altman’s The Long Goodbye (1973), he was seen to smash a Coke bottle into his girlfriend’s face. It was something of a curveball, then, when Rydell directed On Golden Pond (1981), that genteel matinee perennial pairing Katharine Hepburn with Henry Fonda. 

Rydell’s career-long ease with performers derived partly from his own acting experiences, and partly from his apprenticeship as a director-for-hire on the American television of the 1960s, where he oversaw episodes of The Virginian (in 1963), I Spy (in 1965), Gunsmoke (1964-66) and The Fugitive (in 1966): “I come from the school of sitting around the table for two weeks examining every detail of the material, working out relationships with the actors, so they know what they are doing, [then] bringing them to locations, so they can get comfortable.”

He made an immediate impact with his feature directorial debut The Fox (1967), which transposed D.H. Lawrence’s WW2-set tale to present-day Canada while revelling in the era’s permissiveness. The New York Times’ Renata Adler judged it “quite faithful in spirit to something D.H. Lawrence would not have minded”; Roger Ebert went further, pronouncing the film “a quiet, powerful masterpiece”. Golden Globes voters agreed, nominating Rydell for Best Director.

Sprung into the Hollywood big leagues, Rydell reteamed with Steve McQueen, his co-star in a 1960 episode of Wanted: Dead or Alive (1958-61), for The Reivers (1969), a sentimental adaptation of the Faulkner novel that rustled up Oscar nods for actor Rupert Crosse (the first Black performer to be nominated for Best Supporting Actor) and emergent composer John Williams. (The young Steven Spielberg, then working his own way up in television, was among those taking note of Williams’ name.)

Warner Bros. briefly attached Rydell to The Exorcist (1973), but he was instead reassigned to The Cowboys, pitting him against a different boogeyman: the ever-looming Wayne. Before filming, Rydell decided to have it out with his firebrand star: “I said ‘How the hell are we going to work together? I hate everything you stand for politically, and you despise my liberal points of view.” Wayne replied: “Well, we’ll just talk about acting.” For Rydell, “[Wayne] taught me a lesson, an important lesson in my life: not to judge too quickly.”

Despite this bonhomie, The Cowboys underwhelmed – Pauline Kael dubbed it “pious muck” – yet Rydell secured regular studio employment, earning a reputation as a boon for actors. He made the freewheeling Cinderella Liberty (1973) with James Caan and an Oscar-nominated Marsha Mason; the patchy post-Sting caper Harry and Walter Go to New York (1976), starring Caan, Elliott Gould, Michael Caine and Diane Keaton; and The Rose (1978), a full-throttle rock musical toplined by an electrifying (and, again, Oscar-nominated) Bette Midler.

It was On Golden Pond, Ernest Thompson’s adaptation of his own 1978 play, which proved most attuned to Academy voters’ tastes, although for it to succeed Rydell found himself having to address movie royalty with tact and delicacy. Hepburn showed up wearing entirely the wrong costume, in what onlookers determined was a queenly test of her director’s ability to run a tight set; Rydell duly shepherded his venerable leading lady back to wardrobe, and the shoot ran like clockwork.

The results split the critics. Ebert confessed he “left the theater feeling good and warm, and with a certain resolve to try and mend my own relationships and start listening better”. Kael, representing the naysayers, called it both “a doddery valentine” and “a rather indecently premature memorial service” for its stars. Cinemagoers flocked, however, making the film the year’s second biggest hit after Spielberg’s Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981), and it was eventually garnished with three Oscars, for Hepburn, Fonda and Thompson’s screenplay. 

Rydell was left clutching a full house of Best Director nominations – Oscars, BAFTAs, Golden Globes – but no trophies to show for it. Still, this inarguably sincere throwback served to indicate he’d survived the 1970s without succumbing to the negativity of certain contemporaries: “I’m a hopeful person; I’m not a cynic. I believe that cynicism is a cancer for an artist. It’s a way of insulating yourself from experience… If you believe that life [is all] to do with an engagement of issues and personalities that make you young and vital, it’s hard to be anything but hopeful.”

He was born Mortimer Harold Rydell in New York on March 23, 1929 to stockbroker Sidney Rydell and wife Evelyn (née Cohn), a talented pianist. Inheriting his mother’s musical gifts, he would study at Julliard, where he found his hopes of becoming a conductor threatened by his peers’ mounting drug habits: “[Given] that I have an addict’s personality, in that a little is good but a lot is better, I knew I was in danger.”

Changing course while snappily rechristening himself, Rydell began acting at New York’s Neighborhood Playhouse before joining the Actors Studio, falling in with the young James Dean. He juggled stage and TV roles with a sideline as a jazz pianist, before landing a notable supporting part opposite John Cassavetes in Don Siegel’s juvenile-delinquent melodrama Crime in the Streets (1956) and a recurring spot on the long-running CBS soap As the World Turns (1956-2010). 

In the latter’s early years, Rydell’s upright Jeff Baker became a fan favourite; one episode even showcased his piano skills. Upon rejecting a new contract in 1962, his character was killed off in a car crash; retraining as a director, Rydell acted only sporadically thereafter, muscling on as mobster Meyer Lansky in his friend Sydney Pollack’s Havana (1990) and as Woody Allen’s agent in the ill-fated Hollywood Ending (2002).  

By then, however, Rydell was far better known for his work behind the camera. Marketed as “from the director of On Golden Pond”, the Mel Gibson/Sissy Spacek farming drama The River (1984) endured iffy reviews to reap four more Oscar nominations; the wartime flagwaver For the Boys (1991) enjoyed modest multiplex success, despite thunderous on-set disharmony between leads Midler and Caan.

After the glossy love triangle Intersection (1994) nosedived at the box office, Rydell segued to cable TV, with renewed success. His HBO film Crime of the Century (1996) nobly dramatised Ludovic Kennedy’s non-fiction account of the Lindbergh baby kidnapping; the biopic James Dean (2001) launched James Franco in the title role. (Rydell bolstered the impersonation, appearing as studio chief Jack Warner.)

His final theatrical release was the poorly received addiction drama Easy Money (2006), but he signed off where he began, on TV, directing “A Clean Escape”, the premiere of Showtime’s anthology series Masters of Science Fiction (2007). His final acting appearance was in the streaming-bound mockumentary Senior Entourage (2021), opposite fellow veterans Ed Asner and Marion Ross.

In recent decades, Rydell taught at the Actors Studio, eventually becoming director of Actors Studio West, from which vantage he reflected on what American movies had become: “All the pictures I made, I don’t think I could get them made today. The market is so different; they’re not interested in substantial, human dramas. That’s what attracted me to become a director in the first place: the dramatic interaction between people.”

He married twice, to Joanne Linville and Esther Jacobs; both marriages ended in divorce. He is survived by three children, actors Amy and Christopher Rydell by Linville and the filmmaker Alexander Rydell by Jacobs.

Mark Rydell, born March 23, 1929, died August 13, 2026.

On demand: "Ocean with David Attenborough"

Renewed signs of ecological urgency: David Attenborough has left the small screen behind to make big-picture presentations, in the hope we popcorn-guzzlers might finally learn to stop smashing shit up and setting the world on fire. It's a format shift that reflects a wider shift in the Attenborough thinking and methodology. Where his early BBC ratings toppers sought merely to inspire wonder at the myriad miracles of the natural world, more recent projects have had to solicit our concern, perhaps even our outrage at what has been done, and continues to be done, to the planet in our collective name. Ocean finds this now nonagenarian greyhair standing on a shore, staring at the sea and wondering "what lies beyond", a phrase that in this stark existential context seems to refer simultaneously to the open ocean before him, his own immediate future and mankind's wider future. The documentary that follows comprises Attenborough's most Cousteauvian (or James Cameron-ish) endeavour, determined as it is to get to the bottom of the big blue. Yet it's also been anchored in those recognisably Reithian concerns its creative prime mover internalised over his many decades at the Beeb, setting its entertainment alongside something more informative, seeking to dazzle us with oceanic spectacle before opening our eyes anew to the threat such spectacle now faces. We're initially hooked by the prospect of 95 minutes' worth of chill or trippy imagery: corals popping, tendrils putting on a lightshow, crabs donning gloves made of venomous anemones to see off their predators. (Another bedrock of the BBC, the DJ John Peel, would surely have got The Venomous Anemones in to record a session.) Some part of Ocean resembles those VHS tapes of fishtanks sold in the 1990s to soothe the frazzled psyches of overworked yuppies: these sections are as mollifying and as invigorating as any dawn plunge. 

But there's also a certain fragility in play, linked to Attenborough's repeated assertions that everything we see is in some way connected. Remove one element from this ecosystem, and many others will disappear with it; take away the plankton who suck up vast amounts of atmospheric CO2, keep on hit-and-hope trawling the ocean bed in scenes that resemble a traumatic setpiece from a Pixar movie, and the whole house of cards will come crashing down. The film, too, has been delicately structured. Half an hour of wonder; half an hour of despair, the filling in the sandwich, something for us to chew over and digest; and then a closing half-hour of cautious optimism. What if we change this? Why don't we try that? What, ultimately, can we do? The answer to the latter, reassuringly, is very little, which is to say leave the seas alone; it's one of those rare occasions where to step back and do nothing is exactly the right course of action. (As my limited grasp of marine biology understands it, nature is fundamentally horny: give it space, time and privacy, keep the trawlers indoors as one would delinquent children, and it'll soon be reproducing at a remarkable rate of knots.) Through it all, the man posing the questions, attempting to steer us, remains a great connector and a great communicator. As with that similarly aging eco-warrior Steven Seagal - star of 1994's On Deadly Ground - Attenborough has to do most of his onscreen work sitting down nowadays, but he's retained the qualities that made him such a revered broadcaster: he cannot hide his excitement nor his despair at the footage his camera team have brought back to shore, and he finds the right words to frame complex environmental concepts and processes in terms even non-scientists can understand. Like the ocean, like the wildlife it shelters, we shall miss him terribly when he's gone.

Ocean with David Attenborough is now streaming via National Geographic and Disney+, available to rent via Prime Video, and on Blu-ray via Altitude.