In memoriam: Frank Mancuso Sr. (Telegraph 18/10/26)

Frank Mancuso Sr., who has died aged 93, was a studio chief whose spell at the helm of Paramount Pictures became the stuff of industry legend; between 1984 and 1991, he oversaw a run of major commercial hits, notably Beverly Hills Cop (1984), Top Gun (1986), Fatal Attraction (1987) and Ghost (1990).

A softly spoken figure dubbed “Gentleman Frank”, Mancuso joined the studio’s Buffalo office in 1962 as a film booker. After establishing himself in sales, he was appointed VP of domestic distribution in 1977, overseeing publicity for Saturday Night Fever (1977). That epochal hit taught Mancuso the importance of regular radio airplay for tie-in tunes that became inseparable from a movie’s images: An Officer and a Gentleman (1982), Flashdance (1983) and Top Gun would all benefit.

In 1980, Mancuso took over distribution, launching Robert Redford’s Ordinary People to Best Picture glory. Appointed president of Paramount’s motion-picture division in 1983, he was similarly instrumental to the success of James L. Brooks’s Terms of Endearment, insisting the comedy-drama should open at Thanksgiving; the decision paid off with excellent box office and a second Best Picture triumph.

Upon Paramount chief Barry Diller’s departure for Fox in 1984, Mancuso was appointed chairman and CEO, beating out future Disney head Michael Eisner; he quickly reinforced his team, appointing the keen-eyed Ned Tanen to head the motion-picture division, and cutting exclusivity deals with such talent as Flashdance producers Don Simpson and Jerry Bruckheimer and comic-turned-star Eddie Murphy, whose Beverly Hills Cop had just been a summer blockbuster.

The Mancuso regime began bumpily, with an abortive (and costly) 1985 attempt to film The Two Jakes, Robert Towne’s long-nurtured sequel to Chinatown (1974); the studio dipped to fourth in that year’s rankings. Yet it regained the top spot in 1986, Simpson/Bruckheimer’s Top Gun the high-flier on a notably varied slate that also included “Crocodile” Dundee, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off and Children of a Lesser God. 

1987 was even better, with Paramount producing three of the year’s top four films: Beverly Hills Cop II heading talking-point thriller Fatal Attraction and Brian De Palma’s stylish throwback The Untouchables. Further hits followed via Murphy (Coming to America, 1988) and Steven Spielberg (Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, 1989). Yet after an exhausted Tanen quit in 1988, the studio found itself newly vulnerable to creative ego and marketplace vagaries.

In 1990, the studio had a huge summer hit with Ghost, but the Tom Cruise vehicle Days of Thunder, Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather Part III and the completed The Two Jakes all underperformed. Following squabbles with Paramount’s parent company Gulf + Western, Mancuso walked away, filing a breach-of-contract lawsuit and receiving a $20m settlement. He told reporters: “Most people who know me never mistake my fairness and the calmness in my manner for weakness.”

Frank George Mancuso was born on July 25, 1933 to Buffalo postal worker George Mancuso and his wife Mary (née Scott). He got into film early: at fifteen, he lied about his age to become an usher in his hometown’s Lafayette Theatre. He was promoted to assistant manager while studying optometry at New York State University; after graduating in 1958, he oversaw programming of the same cinema chain’s fifty theatres across New York and Pennsylvania.

In 1993, Mancuso returned to the studio fold, replacing Alan Ladd Jr. as the head of MGM. Once again, he began to work his magic: MGM won awards with Leaving Las Vegas (1995) and had hits with Stargate (1994), Get Shorty (1995) and the revived James Bond series, while a shrewd acquisitions policy swelled MGM’s film library from 1,600 to 3,800 titles. (These were foundational to the $8.5bn deal by which Amazon acquired MGM in 2022.)

He was appointed Governor of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in 1986; he served as chairman of the Motion Picture and Television fund between 2003 and 2010.

He is survived by Frances “Fay” Mancuso (née Mauro), the childhood sweetheart he married in 1957, and by the couple’s two children, the designer Maria Mancuso Gersh and the producer Frank Mancuso Jr.

Frank Mancuso Sr., born July 25, 1933, died October 1, 2026.

Frantic: "Forgotten Island"

Competition for the latest round of Best Animated Feature gongs is in the process of ratcheting up. Netflix launched its Brad Bird-directed Ray Gunn at last week's London Film Festival; Laika's stopmotion Wildwood lands in cinemas this Friday. In the meantime, we shall have to make do with Forgotten Island, DreamWorks' zappy effort to split the difference between Disney's Moana, their own Trolls franchise and last year's all-conquering Netflix behemoth K-Pop Demon Hunters. From the former, directors Joel Crawford and Januel P. Mercado take a sherbet colour palette and an honourable yen for greater Pacific island representation: our heroines are schoolgirls in the Philippines of the 1990s - brainiac Raissa (Liza Soberano) and rowdy wildcard (H.E.R.) - whose friendship is founded on a keen sense of adventure. From the latter two, the film takes anime-style cutaways, a hyperonline mode of audience address and a belief in the power of pop music to either change the world or simply capture an emotion - although as the featured songs are Eighties standards by the likes of Journey, Simple Minds and INXS (and as the leads' Ryan Tedder-penned closing-credits duet "BRB" appears to owe some uncredited musical debt to When in Rome's 1987 artefact "The Promise") the primary emotion viewers outside the target demographic will feel being captured is a deep sigh of Christ, I'm old weariness.

Unacknowledged amid the movie's frantic digimated splicing-and-dicing: any real recognition that last year was such an undistinguished year for feature animation that a well-marketed ever-present like Demon Hunters - unavoidable on TV, the radio, the merch shelves or the Internet - was always likely to scoop everything. Forgotten Island, for its part, suggests the limitations of the lol, random storytelling style that has become a feature of so much 21st century family fare. While it's undeniably a progression that the animated feature has moved past Disney's picture-perfect princesses, having a pair of distractible dorks gabble through key scenes of exposition lessens the dramatic stakes and leaves us less than clear as to what's going on. As Jo and Raissa tumble through one such unexplained portal and into the fantasyland of the title - lol, random - the manic gabbiness brings us to some funny lines and cute bits of business: I liked the angry marshmallow warriors, resembling the Terracotta Army as remodelled by Pillsbury. Yet it also seems to speak, at roughly twelve to the dozen, to an underlying creative insecurity: we're being dragged by the seat of our pants through a culture rather than being allowed - as the original Moana allowed us - to sit with and marvel at it. Even as these events unfolded, I would have struggled to tell you the specific cultural significance of the giant parrot, the three-eyed baby, the cat memory demon, the talking dog with the infected chest tattoo or his cerulean gymbuddy with a trident: they're just the colourful filler characters we've all too regularly encountered inside the multiplex. It's a case of mixed blessings, then. Unlike a lot of commercially minded animation, Forgotten Island does have a personality, but it's the overbearing (and extremely loud) kind you tend to back away from at parties; and it does have moments of visual artistry, but - as with the surreal dream house finale - these are freefloating, unmoored from what's around them, and they register for a split-second before Crawford and Mercado scrabble onto the next setpiece. Belatedly, their film arrives at a crystallising image for itself, in the form of a thousand Post-It notes blowing in the wind; it feels like a production that's had to be hastened into cinemas before the animated bar gets decisively raised for another year.

Forgotten Island is now showing in cinemas nationwide.

For what it's worth...

UK box office Top Ten (for the weekend of October 9-11, 2026):

1 (new) Other Mommy (15)

2 (1) Verity (15)

3 (3) Heart of the Beast (12A) ***

4 (2) Resident Evil (15)

5 (new) The Social Reckoning (15) **

6 (5) Sense and Sensibility (U)

7 (new) The Uprising (15) **

8 (7) Shaun the Sheep: The Beast of Mossy Bottom (U) ****

9 (4) Digger (15)

10 (12) The Odyssey (15) ***

(source: BFI)

My top five:

1. The Others [above]

2. 24 Hour Party People

3. Dracula/Horror of Dracula

4. Arrietty

5. Tenzing

DVD/Blu-Ray/Download top ten: 

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

2 (re) Toy Story 5 (PG) **

3 (new) Paw Patrol: The Dino Movie (U)

4 (re) Minions & Monsters (U)

5 (new) Insidious: Out of the Further (15)

6 (new) Spider-Man: 4-Movie Collection (12) ***

7 (2) Disclosure Day (12) **

8 (1) The Mandolarian & Grogu (12)

9 (new) Paw Patrol: 3-Movie Collection (U)

10 (13) Michael (12)

(source: officialcharts.com)

My top five: 
1. The Secret Agent

2. The Invite

3. Billie Eilish: Hit Me Hard and Soft

4. Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie

5. Power Ballad

Top five films on terrestrial TV this week:

1. North by North-West (Saturday, BBC Two, 2.15pm)

2. Halloween (Friday, BBC Two, 10pm)

3. Selma (Monday, BBC Two, 11.05pm)

4. Children of Men (Sunday, BBC One, 11.40pm)

5. Priscilla (Sunday, BBC Two, 10.45pm)

Kelp!: "Whalefall"

Brian Duffield's Whalefall has one of the daffier conceits you will see an American studio movie proceed from in 2026: this is, to some degree, Hollywood taking the Book of Jonah at face value. A year after the mysterious suicide of his diver father at sea, grief-stricken college kid Jay (Austin Abrams) returns to the bay where pop took his final plunge and starts scouring the ocean floor in a bid to retrieve his father's remains. The opening stretch of Duffield's film does much to show off the advances made in underwater photography in recent years: we can discern every passing frond and fish Jay encounters beneath the waves, before the film arrives at a pivotal pause on the brink of an ominous abyss, into which our kid will make a fateful descent of his own. He is, we fear, getting rapidly out of his depth, a suspicion only confirmed after Jay gets snarled up in the backwash of a fight between a giant squid and a passing sperm whale, and - worse still - is swallowed up by the latter. Suddenly the screen floods with picture-book images of which Jules Verne himself might have approved. Here's our guy clinging onto the whale's front incisors for dear life; here he is trying to avoid a clubbing from the creature's heavy, lolling tongue; and now here he is in the whale's stomach, having to rely on the phosphorescence of the whale's largely liquid lunch (parbroiled jellyfish with a sprig of plankton) to help light his way. That's right: it's a Hollywood movie where the hero spends almost the entire running time literally in the belly of the beast. Whatever else Visionary Filmmaker Christopher Nolan™ pulled off with this summer's The Odyssey, he never thought to give us that.

Co-written by Duffield with Daniel Kraus (adapting his own fiction bestseller), the film that results is a curious hybrid, splashing around between a number of genres and never quite making dry land. (Hence the critical bafflement.) Some considerable part of Whalefall steers close to boys'-own adventure territory: Jay is trying to prove himself to the memory of an overbearing father (Josh Brolin, in prologue and semi-regular flashbacks) who once accused his boy of having "weak lungs". At times, something more horrific drifts into view, akin to an Alien movie that aligns us with the perspective of John Hurt's chestburster, or a damper, stickier Cube: Jay has to navigate his host's duodenum, the intestines large and small, each cavity and chamber posing its own challenges. There's even something of the generic prison-break movie sloshing around in here: consider it Jacques Cousteau's The Shawshank Redemption. Whalefall gives good production design (by Ramsey Avery), even if it's not always clear where we are and what Abrams, obliged by circumstance to keep the mouthpiece of his breathing apparatus in place, is trying to articulate. (A prevailing limitation: this is, shall we say, not the most relatable crisis into which a movie has pitched its audience.) Those sporadic, Slumdog-like flashbacks - revealing Jay had the solutions to his problems all along - would seem very rote were it not for Brolin, having an absolute ball as a heavily tatted, highly individualistic old salt. (This is recognisably the Brolin of the actor's recent memoir.) By contrast, Elisabeth Shue and Jane Levy are mostly wasted as our guy's mom and sister: it is, in the end, another all-American dads-and-lads tale, one that falls short of the cosmic, circle-of-life scale Duffield and Kraus are aiming for, instead landing closer to Ad Astra on a budget. My suspicion was that Whalefall might have been tossed out like chum in the January dumping grounds had it not been for the success of the recent, Abrams-starring Resident Evil redo, yet it's the kind of semi-diverting goof you watch with a smile on your face and a chuckle never too far from your lips. (How on earth did anyone sign off on this?) It's not good, exactly, but it might slip down well with a big bucket of salted popcorn; the delicate ecosystem of the multiplex will always feel healthier for a studio taking a modest gamble on a spitball like this, rather than betting the house on a film like Digger.

Whalefall is now showing in cinemas nationwide.

Connection lost: "The Social Reckoning"

Hollywood has got its wires crossed again. Aaron Sorkin wanted David Fincher to direct his latest script, it being the sequel to 2010's The Social Network, which Fincher directed. Fincher, however, was busy at Netflix, directing one of Quentin Tarantino's cast-offs, so Sorkin decided to direct The Social Reckoning himself. Such is the dishevelment of the studio system in 2026: everyone has ended up in the wrong place doing the wrong thing. Flash back to 2010, and you'll remember The Social Network was something like Peak Fincher, the work of a former pop promo tyro using his mastery of sound, vision and editing to craft a film as addictive as its social-media subject. (I remember the quiet buzz of a packed public preview the night before the film officially opened: the audience, for once, glued to one big screen, collectively humming like a data centre.) When that much-feted project failed to land Fincher the awards he had so conspicuously been working towards with TSN and its immediate predecessors (2007's Zodiac, 2009's Benjamin Button), that was it: there followed a half-decade of the director giving the public what he felt they wanted (2011's The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, 2014's Gone Girl) before he took the Netflix dime on the grounds it was the path of least resistance. The tardy sequel that follows without him falls instead to a writer still best known for his TV work and a decidedly B-team cast of TV faces (few of whom have been proven to work on the big screen), so it's perhaps little surprise it should seem like a TV movie of sorts, perfunctorily and artlessly recreating the real-world circumstances whereby whistleblower Frances Haugen (played here by Anora's Mikey Madison) and Wall Street Journal reporter Jeff Horwitz (Jeremy Allen White) came to expose the fact Facebook was actively radicalising its users. Not since 2010's Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps has a sequel been more deleteriously overshadowed by what's come before. Where the first film was sharp and snappy, a Facebook movie for the age of Twitter (RIP), this follow-up is creaky and clunky, a Facebook movie modelled after a Western Union telegram.

One issue Sorkin never overcomes is that Reckoning tells an intrinsically less compelling story. The first movie's drama was interpersonal, Fincher working against the televisual neatness of Sorkin's writing by pitting his capable actors against one another in interesting, involving ways. (The Social Network may still be as close as anybody's got to filming Donna Tartt's beloved novel The Secret History.) Reckoning's story is more heavily informational, relying on regular data dumps and exposition, on mouthpiece-characters explaining who they are and what they do for a living. As yet another such figure pops up, you realise one reason the Musks and Zuckerbergs of this world have so far got away with as much as they have is that their excesses and crimes are very hard to describe without putting the layman (and any jurist) to sleep; their brand of sociopathy, switching ones and zeroes on a whim, is banally algorithmic and data-driven. The first movie had characters, personalities who took carefully defined shape before your eyes, every cut serving as a screen refresh: what Sorkin wrote was matched (perhaps even improved upon) by who Fincher cast and what those actors did with their roles. The connections held, and the electricity powering the whole project flowed from film to viewer: we, too, felt plugged in. Here, everything proves far fritzier, starting with Sorkin's casting. Madison obviously represents hot casting in the wake of her Oscar win, but she seems young even for an idealistic Facebook wonk; Sorkin has to resort to putting glasses on her and a stock soaring score under her climactic speech in the hope of lending her words the necessary weight. (The mind inevitably drifts back towards Rooney Mara in the Fincher film, older and wiser than her years.) White stolidly holds down the Sorkin position: his Horwitz is a dyed-in-the-wool nostalgic who prefers paper maps to Waze, knows the words to the songs of Show Boat and is so resolutely offline he has no idea how Protonmail works. Yet he remains an altogether bland hero, where the Andrew Garfield character in TSN had skin in the game, often appearing as disgusted by himself as he was by anything Zuckerberg did.

Jeremy Strong's Zuck, meanwhile, is another of this actor's very sharp yet ever so slightly joyless impersonations. He sure looks the part - like a gym-hardened Roman emperor, both his profile and his bearing crying out to be minted on coins - yet he's been characterised as a villain in the old-school sense: no longer the wayward prodigy Jesse Eisenberg so brilliantly captured, this Zuckerberg is a made man, someone long gone down his chosen path, someone who has himself had all the empathy radicalised out of him. All we can do during his scenes is boo (or hit the thumbs-down emoticon); it doesn't help that the character has been cordoned off in the section of the film that most resembles a Sorkin stageplay, where we find him being briefed by his advisors as to how to respond to the heroes' accusations. Just from a dramatic perspective, it's a letdown that he never comes face-to-face with the outside world represented by Horwitz and Haugen: true to life though this may be, it leaves us feeling some vital connection, some motivating spark, has been lost. In isolation, Sorkin can still write a funny line, a good scene, a neat payoff, but this Sorkin is the Sorkin of The Newsroom, trying to set the world to rights with the tricks and tropes he picked up from the scribes of his youth, oblivious to the fact the world and its algorithms have moved on. Fincher the agitator determined to mess with that syntax and punch up the underlying conflicts, but Sorkin's direction is merely content to underline everything he'd earlier set down at the word processor. (I can't be certain what Fincher would have made of the scene here where Sorkin mansplains mansplaining, but the results would almost certainly have been less self-satisfied.) The Social Network remains significant, because it demonstrated that even as recently as sixteen years ago, with the Marvel corporation gearing up for global hegemony, a major American studio could still rally its creative resources and deliver a state-of-the-art movie that engaged the general public. When I came to see The Social Reckoning on the final day of its opening week, by complete contrast, I was the only person in the cinema. As a literalisation of where social media has left us, that cannot be beaten. But it also suggests Aaron Sorkin could no more recapture the zeitgeist in 2026 than I could be the next James Bond.

The Social Reckoning is now showing in selected cinemas.

The good, the bad, the weird: "Hope"

In one go, you can see exactly why Na Hong-jin's Hope was snapped up by boutique studio Neon at Cannes this year, why it didn't win any prizes there, and why it hasn't exactly set the Western box office alight in recent weeks, as its distributor surely hoped. This is a subtitled Korean action fantasy constructed on modern Hollywood lines, the business of a pulpy B-movie drawn out to a length (160 minutes) more commonly associated with Memories of Murder-like artistic statements, topped with a coda setting up sequels that may or may not now follow. (Everybody wants a money-spinning universe, before they've determined whether there's an audience out there.) Previously a purveyor of much-exported, much-cheered genre items (The Chaser, The Yellow Sea, The Wailing), Na is pushing on into bigger-picture, potential blockbuster territory here: such expansiveness is clear from Hope's prologue, which spends a leisurely ten-to-fifteen minutes determining that we're on the outskirts of a small bordertown, where intemperate police chief Bum-seok (Hwang Jung-min) and a huddle of concerned citizens with hunting rifles have congregated over the carcass of a recently mauled heifer. Dead livestock will prove the least of this group's problems, as the following two hours turn up human limbs hanging limply from trees, holes blown through local real estate, and a pack of feral monsters revealed to be aliens on a tear. (With, it turns out, good reason.) We get the pulp, the blood, the gore, thrills both cheap and nasty, plus bonus flickers of genuine event-movie artistry. But as early as that prologue, we're also getting plenty of bluster, waffle, hot air, wrong turns and dead ends. For better and worse, Na remains one of those incorrigible auteurs who take not the slightest bit of notice of even their most trusted producers' notes; Hope, accordingly, turns out to be something like the Tristram Shandy of monster movies.

Both the maximalism and the waywardness here were built-in. Rather than seek out a choice handful of shooting locations, Na appears to have commandeered an entire town for several weeks, shaken its properties around by the ankles, and emptied their contents out onto the streets before him. The movie is a masterpiece of production and art design, countering the minimalism of a Backrooms with the chaotically dishevelled sightlines of a garage sale: one alternative title would be Front Yards. (Everything must go.) That roominess has encouraged Na to start showboating: he, too, is in salesman mode here. He directs in pauses for audience gasps and laughter; a scene where two characters count to three and still do nothing; a mid-film lunch break; a long postmortem; and an even longer monologue about pooing. Throughout, he keeps bringing on turns who bicker, bumble, fumble, stumble and fall over; it takes these variably dimwitted folks a good ten minutes longer than us to reach the same conclusions, which means we spend much of the running time waiting around for them to catch up. In Memories of Murder, that comprehension lag served a narrative purpose: it told us something about the unreliability of the authorities working the case. Here, however, it just plays as a consequence of a well-placed filmmaker taking an opportunity to goof off. There are certainly reasons for Na to delay showing the film's monsters: when they're finally tracked down, they're revealed as sloppy old things, resembling aggrieved ragdolls or rejected Iron Maiden cover art. These aggressors port across some of the ferocity of Na's earlier work - they're certainly more frenzied than, say, Mark Ruffalo's mo-cap Hulk - but they also pitch us into yet another conflict between humans and visual effects; much of the first hour feels like watching somebody else play a videogame, much of the second is live-action cartoon, with the principals being bounced repeatedly off trees at high velocity without incurring harm, and then it's back to videogames again for the inconclusive wrap-up. Parasite crossed over because it was doing something Hollywood, in its current iteration, couldn't: craft a Marxist parable within a distinctively Korean idiom. (It felt both radical and a discovery, even before we considered the excellence of its storytelling.) Nothing in Hope dispels the notion Na is a capable engineer of baroque shaggy-dog stories, but equally nothing goes too far beyond one of the better made MCU instalments: the movie is, finally, just a bloodier variant of that spectacle Hollywood has been pumping out every three months for the past eighteen years. Rightly or wrongly, in this case, audiences have decided to shop local.

Hope is now showing in selected cinemas.

The climb: "Tenzing"

Given the film industry's general direction of travel in recent years, Tenzing might perhaps seem like an inevitability. Here's a lavish, streamer-backed period drama about the 1953 conquest of Everest - or Chomolungma, to give it its local name - as revisited not from the colonialists' POV, but that of Tenzing Norgay, the Nepalese sherpa who made it possible. The director is Jennifer Peedom, who established herself as a big-climb specialist with her 2015 documentary Sherpa and its 2017 follow-up Mountain; together with Lion screenwriter Luke Davies, she's adapted Ed Douglas's 2003 biography Tenzing: Hero of Everest. As played by Genden Phuntsok with a soulful mien and floppy period hair that is eventually revealed to have narrative significance, this Tenzing is seen to have travelled this way before. A prologue dramatises the young Tenzing's encounter with George Mallory (a cameoing Johnny Flynn) on the mountain's lower slopes in 1924; his adult self, we learn, was part of the Swiss expedition who only just failed to reach the summit in 1952. The palefaces here are relegated to the supporting cast, from where they summon varying levels of colonial condescension. Willem Dafoe, with a chewy English accent, is the blustery Colonel John Hunt, insisting his men conquer the mountain for the new Queen before overseeing a vertical talent contest to determine which climbers will make it to the very top; a nicely relaxed Tom Hiddleston is Edmund Hillary, the Kiwi loner who comes to feel he has more in common with his Nepalese guides than with his English masters; and Catriona Balfe, embodying a recognisably mumsy upper-class type, is the Army secretary who packs her boys off on their way. It is, then, a film that has worked out something seasoned climbers will appreciate: a different yet no less rewarding line of approach, offering new sights, sounds and perspectives. Around half of Davies's dialogue is presented as subtitled Sherpa, and Peedom can now cut pointedly to Tenzing's face when the British ambassador declares Everest a British mountain, catching emotions most directors wouldn't have thought to film two decades ago.

What Tenzing can't quite shake, as it proceeds on this climb, is that familiar biopic sense of predestination. Peedom and Davies are simply updating an old adventure-movie template, after all, cross-fading between spectacular vistas, mocked-up cine-camera footage and dotted lines on interstitial maps. Partly, this is a structural issue: the ascent is interrupted by clockwork-regular flashbacks, filling us in on how the protagonist got this far. These sequences at least reveal how Tenzing was having to navigate not just the Brits' prejudices, but those of his own people: accusations he was a mere servant boy (and from a lower caste than sherpas were typically drawn), fears that a successful ascent would put paid to any future sherpa-ing work. (History and the mountains of litter now threatening to obscure Everest would seem to have proven those fears ill-founded.) The writing gets more haphazard the closer we get to the top: there are one or two false trails, while a late veer into pop psychology feels notably more "rousing Hollywood movie" than "lived Sherpa experience". Yet Peedom really does know how to shoot mountains: working with the Aussie cinematographer Stefan Duscio, she lights these rock formations as Josef von Sternberg once did Dietrich, and shows Everest looming over her players and stunt climbers as at once a source of fascination, a place of surreal, forbidding beauty and a challenge to which the smitten must rise. She locks down the physical aspects of mountaineering: the crampons and carabiners, the draining hard work of lugging equipment from one camp to the next in subzero conditions. But she also understands the spiritual implications: she's realised this ascent was a far bigger deal for someone who was tilling fields a few years before this expedition than it would have been for rich foreigners trailing all the equipment, training and resources in the world. Speaking of whom: it's a pity Apple aren't deigning to give Tenzing anything more than the most cursory theatrical push, for this is, in the end, a handsome, foursquare, finally stirring big-screen entertainment, not to mention an early frontrunner in the category of the year's Best Dad Film. There will surely be shakier and less satisfying ventures as we hike on deeper into awards season: you may want to stock up on Kendal Mint Cake while you have the chance.

Tenzing is now showing in selected cinemas, and will be available to stream on Apple TV from Friday 16.