Come and see: "Stand By Me" at 40

Stand By Me celebrates its 40th birthday, albeit in more sorrowful circumstances than it might, given the murder of director Rob Reiner last December. Revisiting the film, one realises that death is everywhere: somewhere in here is the disquieting idea that looking it in the eye - whether by staring down an express train or gazing upon a fallen schoolmate - has become an American way of life or rite of passage. This was one of an odd cluster of 1986 films in which young Americans happen across decaying body parts; the other two (Blue Velvet and River's Edge) were effectively fringe items, but Reiner, coming off the back of This is Spinal Tap and The Sure Thing, made his variation at the very heart of the Hollywood studio system. You sense the executives hoped the fresh-faced youthfulness of this cast (Wil Wheaton, River Phoenix, Corey Feldman and Jerry O'Connell as its central quartet, plus John Cusack and Kiefer Sutherland in dispatches) might give the movie a leg up before audiences got to considering the sadness Stephen King, in his source novella "The Body", was actually writing about: the passage of time, and the passing of old friends and longstanding friendships with it. Finding the body of a contemporary is here positioned as a grand day out for four boys from the wrong side of the tracks, which would itself seem pretty sorrowful; it's made even more painful by a framing device that establishes Phoenix's Chris Chambers, generally regarded as the one of the quartet bright and scrappy enough to actually do something with his life, has perished in a random act of violence. Yes, there are vague similarities to the rock 'n' roll childhood of American Graffiti and the previous year's megahit Back to the Future - to some degree, this was also boomers revisiting their glory days to the sounds of their youth - but, deep down, Stand By Me sensed that, at some point, the fun stops. Hell: at some point, you stop.

What Reiner brought to the adaptation was, primarily, an appreciable and not inappropriate economy: Stand By Me goes deep in just 85 minutes. (Some films, like some lives, are too short.) Having apprenticed on television sitcom (All in the Family), he'd learnt to get what he needed without undue fuss, and shooting Tap had persuaded him not everything had to go up to eleven, that there remained artistic value in understatement. Maybe he knew certain sequences here - the rail bridge crossing, the bit with the junkyard dog, the pie-eating contest - would expand in the mind; their anecdotal, lived experience does come to assume a far greater significance in the movie's rear-view mirror. He knew, wisely, to set the kids' innocence against the unsparing horror of this American life: the shitty dads and broken homes, the poverty and the bullying. (Stray thought prompted by the lead-in to the pie-eating contest, a curious setpiece that is at once a nerd's revenge, an elaborate cutaway gag and the Carrie finale turned inside out: was the robust Reiner likewise mocked for his weight and eating habits?) One reason King and Reiner shaped up as among the current President's most vocal Hollywood critics: they grasped that nostalgia only covers so much ground, that - for many folks - America was never that great to begin with. Here, despite the deceptively leafy and sunny location work, the land of the free starts to seem as deadly for some kids as Korea or Vietnam. Reiner is as protective of his leads as any Hollywood director can be (for all the good it did two of them): there are very few of Back to the Future's eternally jarring tonal issues, he preserves Gordy's campfire confession that he misses his older brother (as the movie, too, seems to pine for Cusack), and in the boys' roughhousing, he sees at least a consolatory solidarity. But Stand By Me struck me this time around as more than ever a displaced war movie: a small squadron of lads dispatched on a critical, life-changing mission, facing up both to enemy combatants (older lads) and their own ever-growing sense of mortality. (Note the dogtag Feldman's Teddy wears around his neck, and the war stories he tells.) One way of approaching it on this anniversary rerelease: as Rob Reiner's own Platoon.

Stand By Me returns to cinemas nationwide from tomorrow.

On demand: "My Father's Shadow"

My Father's Shadow is a notable example of a British film that probably couldn't have been made during the Working Title era 25 years ago: the co-production arrangements wouldn't have been in place, and - for one reason or another - the key creative personnel wouldn't yet be on the books at BAFTA. Brothers Akinola and Wale Davies have come up with a 90-minute extension of what seems like a hyper-specific, often overwhelmingly vivid childhood memory. The year's 1993, and two bored and squabbling pre-teen siblings in a small Nigerian village (played by Godwin and Chibuike Marvellous Egbo) are taken on an impromptu day trip to the country's capital Lagos by their stern but loving father (Ṣọpẹ Dìrísù, from His House), keen to find some renewed way of showing some interest in his boys. The interpersonal business at first appears secondary to the logistics of the trip, and the new and strange images it imprints on the brothers: the idiosyncrasies of the grown-ups on their commuter bus, the vague chatter about an election the youngsters are too young to fully understand, the look on a local girl and a homeless boy's faces once this family unit arrives at its destination, the look on the faces of the young soldiers themselves bussed into central Lagos in a pre-emptive (and, it transpires, vain) bid to quell any electoral unrest. Watching My Father's Shadow, it becomes very clear very quickly why the moneymen handed over this budget to the Davieses: here are folks who seem to know this time and this place intimately - who may well have lived through it - and who are able to both recall and recreate them in ultra-evocative, close-up detail.

It's a transporting perspective, to say the least: that of wide-eyed kids looking out at the big city for the first time. Every shot here is a precious memory, even those that hurt. On a technical level, the film is a small triumph of production design: Pablo and Jennifer Anti (who helped style Beyoncé's Black is King) have turned the chaos of today's Lagos into a city that more readily reflects the period setting. More specifically yet - and only compounding a general sense of slippage - it's a version of 1990s Lagos that seems to have one foot stuck in the 1970s, underdeveloped in some key aspects: the theme of the day's election. If the kids - innocents snapping up the offers of free food and funfair rides - aren't old enough to see what's wrong, the father evidently can; the subtext of this daytrip is his effort to secure them a better and brighter future. The Davieses nod to one realist classic (Bicycle Thieves, in the film's questing structure) and to a more contemporary influence (Barry Jenkins' Moonlight; here as there, the pull of the ocean softens man and boys alike), yet they finally make this story their own by casting the exact right combination of people to occupy centre frame. Dìrísù keeps the father figure forbidding - we look at him as his boys do - yet he's also as vulnerable as anyone else on screen; if the brothers really do resemble brothers in both looks and attitude, that's doubtless in part because the Egbos actually are brothers, but this camera's sustained, sympathetic observation nevertheless reveals one as softer and more sensitive than the other. On my walk home from town, I started to revise the opening statement of this review: maybe My Father's Shadow could have been made at the turn of the century, but it would likely have been by a director who wouldn't have been certain of where he was going, and who wouldn't fully know what the father means when he sighs "Nigeria is hard". That version wouldn't have turned out as compelling and convincing as this - nor, I suspect, would it be this quietly beautiful.

My Father's Shadow is available to stream via MUBI from tomorrow.

She said: "The Drama"

With The Drama, those algorithmic whizzkids at A24 - and the merry Scandie prankster Kristoffer Borgli (Sick of Myself, Dream Scenario) - have arrived at a movie to get everybody talking, save us critics. You'll doubtless have heard the set-up by now: picture-perfect young sweethearts (Robert Pattinson and Zendaya) are waist-deep in wedding plans when, during a drunken night out with friends, she confesses to the worst thing she's ever done, causing him to reevaluate all his previous certainties and sureties. Though this confession is more revelation of (former) character than rug-pulling Shyamalanian twist, it's only fair for me to allow you to discover it in context. (Should you wish to know without forking out for a ticket, the details are inevitably already out there on the Internet, including in a report by a major news outlet that also details the concern and consternation Borgli's film has provoked in some quarters.) My problem with The Drama wasn't so much with The Revelation - which, if nothing else, is evidence of an American film daring to engage with something that apparently happens in America every other day - as with The Tone, The Framing and especially The Casting. OK, Kristoffer Borgli, so you're telling me Zendaya is the sort of person who might be inspired to do this? Zendaya Coleman, with her air of ever-upright girl scout? I spent a lot of The Drama suffering unhelpful flashbacks to 2024's Challengers, which asked us to believe Zendaya might spend her nights and days concocting exotic polysexual headgames rather than colour-coding her revision notes or organising a whist drive for local elders. (But then that film also invited us to swallow the idea Zendaya was mother to a toddling child: it grows only more ridiculous in retrospect.) That Zendaya. Doing this. Okay. Sure. Whatever.

When you're just about the hottest young star on the planet, of course, you are naturally going to be offered every last role under the sun - everybody loves you; everybody wants you; everybody wants you on their poster, selling tickets - but it's Probability 101 that only a few of those roles are going to be right for you and your persona. There are a few A24-affiliated actresses - darkly brooding, more obvious malcontents: Rachel Sennott and Odessa A'Zion come to mind - who might have stood a chance of pulling this role off, but their stars perhaps wouldn't yet be big enough to have got The Drama greenlit, and even then, I suspect they'd be more inclined to send a snarky text to the group chat rather than, you know, think about doing that. The problem is systemic: today's American cinema, hung up as it has been on franchises and squeaky-clean, family-friendly fare for the better part of the last twenty years, simply hasn't recruited the kind of actors that might do justice to the issues and dilemmas Borgli, in his cackling way, is trying to address. The sometime Mary-Jane Watson and the actor formerly known as Edward Cullen are fine as the advert characters The Drama introduces to us before The Revelation, who may as well be selling us on the Doritos available in the cinema foyer, and they give of their best as the blood-and-vomit-smeared test dummies the film subsequently invites us to sneer at. But a risky concept like this needs bruising, hard-won life experience to ground it, and actors who might conceivably have brought a weapon (or some other palpable threat) into auditions; all The Drama has in its back pocket, ultimately, is a playlist. 

My suspicions grew that Borgli was using these fresh faces to zhuzh up more than faintly hoary material: as with Dream Scenario, The Drama can seem like some coded thesis on (sigh) cancel culture. Zendaya's Emma is cancelled socially for saying something you're not supposed to say in polite society; this framework enables Borgli to write a scene in which a high-schooler points out women are as likely to do The Thing as men (#notallmen) and to have a jolly good chuckle at the implications of casting a woman of colour in the role. Any objections get channelled into Pattinson's stooge, a Diet Coke-sipping wet lefty who compares this situation to a Louis Malle movie before succumbing to erectile dysfunction. I mean, again: fine, whatever, but Lacombe, Lucien was at least a film made by grown-ups who were serious about their intentions in a way the opportunistic trolling of The Drama patently isn't. Instead, what we're getting here is another of A24's sniggery, giggling ventures - it's this year's Eddington - which suggests this studio isn't just making films for kids (with kids!) but may actually also be being run by kids. As provocations go, The Drama is shorter than Triangle of Sadness, which should count for something, but it's still a rather tiresome and self-satisfied sixth former's idea of sophisticated entertainment: a movie that wants us to pay to watch folks having a rotten time, and which continues that dead-end strain of American cinema that insists on scrubbing our best and brightest young stars of any residual trace of charm. (I'm blaming Ruben Östlund and the Safdies: it's all A24's worst instincts, wrapped up in a perversely saleable package.) Pattinson is asked to be no more than helpless in the role of a simpering wreck, and he submits to yet another bad hair movie: ruffled-floppy on those rare occasions when he has it together, terribly limp and representatively ineffectual as matters get worse in his head. As for Zendaya: highly watchable actress, very promising movie star, but she can no more convince in this role than she could beat Luke Littler in the final of the World Darts Championship. We have drifted some way from the light, people.

The Drama is now playing in cinemas nationwide.

In memoriam: Mary Beth Hurt (Guardian 04/04/26)

The thoughtful, understated actor Mary Beth Hurt, who has died aged 79, enjoyed the good fortune of seeing her early career intersect with an unusually intellectual moment in American cinema. She earned a BAFTA nomination as one of the three sisters in Woody Allen’s Chekhov-via-Bergman experiment Interiors (1978) before causing onscreen havoc as Robin Williams’ frisky college professor wife in the John Irving adaptation The World According to Garp (1982).

In Interiors, Hurt – making her movie debut – was cast as the directionless Joey, who belatedly achieves a kind of purpose in attempting to save her overbearing mother (Geraldine Page) from drowning. By far Allen’s gloomiest vision, the film nevertheless made $10m off a $3m budget, while Hurt did more than tread water in illustrious company. Though she lost out in BAFTA’s Most Promising Newcomer category to Superman Christopher Reeve, the film’s minor-key success prefigured Hurt’s four-decade big-screen career.

There were early missteps. Hurt beat out Jamie Lee Curtis to the female lead in Joan Micklin Silver’s Head Over Heels (1979) – where she played the married woman beguiling John Heard’s civil servant – but the film suffered from studio jitters and an enforced happy ending. “Mr. Heard and Miss Hurt are two of our best young actors,” sighed The New York Times’s Vincent Canby, “but the material is either thin and unfocused or rich and besides the point.”

Worse was to follow with the marital melodrama A Change of Seasons (1980), where Shirley Maclaine, Anthony Hopkins and Bo Derek formed an altogether unlikely love triangle. Hurt, cast as Maclaine and Hopkins’ daughter, had a ringside seat as her onscreen parents rowed on set; Derek, meanwhile, fell out with original director Noel Black, who was fired and replaced with Richard Lang. Even reshoots featuring Hopkins and Derek romping in a hot tub did little to tempt cinemagoers.

The World According to Garp, then, presented as a lifeline. Hurt’s Helen Holm proved central to the film’s most memorable scene, wherein Williams’ eponymous T.S. Garp, correctly suspecting his wife of infidelity, races home in a state of agitation and crashes his car, containing the couple’s two children, into another in which Helen is performing oral sex on her younger lover. (The lover is sorely wounded; one child is killed, the other blinded.)

Remarkably, this tonal rollercoaster – which also featured, in passing, John Lithgow as a transsexual football player – proved both a critical and commercial hit, gaining Oscar nominations for Lithgow and Glenn Close, a Broadway friend of Hurt’s, as Williams’ radical mother. For Hurt, it was a rare opportunity to play an unabashedly sexual woman: “I’ve never been cast as a mistress. I’m the girl men marry, not the girl they have affairs with.”

She was born Mary Beth Supinger in Marshalltown, Iowa on September 26, 1946 to army lieutenant Forrest Supinger and his wife Dolores (née Andre). In an early brush with fame, one of her babysitters was the aspirant actress Jean Seberg, whose family lived nearby. “Marshalltown went sort of crazy with Seberg,” she later recalled. “I remember there was a parade. She came back from shooting Otto Preminger’s Saint Joan, I think. And all the kids just ran outside.”

The young Mary Beth studied drama at the University of Iowa and acting at the NYU School of the Arts, where classmates included William Hurt, whom she married in 1971. Her early stage career established her versatility: she debuted in 1973 playing a 98-year-old Vietnamese man, alongside the young Meat Loaf, in Jim Steinman and Michael Weller’s rock musical More Than You Deserve.

She debuted on Broadway in 1974 in a revival of William Congreve’s Love for Love opposite Close, then began to pick up TV gigs, playing a police officer in Ann in Blue (1974) and a troubled skater in “A Shield for Murder”, a two-part Kojak in 1976. That same year Hurt landed her first Tony nomination for her performance in Pinero’s Trelawny of the ‘Wells’, opposite a debuting Meryl Streep; she landed a second for a 1982 revival of Beth Henley’s Crimes of the Heart.

After divorcing William Hurt in December 1982, she married the director Paul Schrader the following August. (She later appeared in Schrader’s Light Sleeper (1992), Affliction (1997) and The Walker (2007).) She landed a third Tony nod in 1986 for Michael Frayn’s Benefactors; had a chewy role as a suspected cannibal in Bob Balaban’s droll black comedy Parents (1989); and played Manhattan grande dames in Scorsese’s The Age of Innocence and Fred Schepisi’s Six Degrees of Separation (both 1993).

Hurt eventually embodied a battle-hardened Seberg – clutching a new perspective on her own celebrity – in Mark Rappaport’s inventive cinephile tribute From the Journals of Jean Seberg (1995). She also earned an Independent Spirit nomination as a wife who suspects her husband may be a killer in Karen Moncrieff’s clever feminist fable The Dead Girl (2006). Her final stage role was in the 2011 revival of John Guare’s The House of Blue Leaves; her final film, before an Alzheimer’s diagnosis, was the smalltown drama Change in the Air (2018).

There again, Hurt took a supporting role, a preference she explained in 2009: “I never felt very beautiful or incredibly smart or witty, so I was always looking for something about [these roles] that intrigued me… You walk down the street and you see people and you realize that every person chose the clothing they’re going to wear for the day. It means you’ve costumed yourself, and that you’re presenting yourself in a way that you want the world to see you. And I find that fascinating; more fascinating, really, than the gold medal moments. It’s the secondary things.”

She is survived by Schrader and the couple’s two children, Molly and Sam.

Mary Beth Hurt, actor, born September 26, 1946, died March 28, 2026.

For what it's worth...

UK box office Top Ten (for the weekend of March 27-29, 2026):

1 (1) Project Hail Mary (12A) ***

2 (new) The Magic Faraway Tree (U)

3 (3) Hoppers (U) ****

4 (2) Dhurandhar: The Revenge (18) **

5 (4) Reminders of Him (PG)

6 (5) Ready or Not 2: Here I Come (15)

7 (new) They Will Kill You (15)

8 (new) Bluey at the Cinema: Playdates with Friends (U)

9 (8) Mother's Pride (12A) **

10 (7) How to Make a Killing (12A)

(source: BFI)

My top five:

1. Orwell: 2+2=5

2. Amélie

3. Romeo + Juliet

4. Moulin Rouge!

5. The Good Boy

DVD/Blu-Ray/Download top ten: 

1 (1) Sinners (15) ****

2 (3) One Battle After Another (15) ****

3 (2) Wicked: For Good (PG)

4 (21) Anaconda (12)

5 (6) Spider-Man: No Way Home (12) ***

6 (4) Dune: Part One (12) **

7 (5) Shelter (15)

8 (new) Send Help (15) ***

9 (19) Spider-Man: Homecoming (12) **

10 (10) The Super Mario Bros Movie (PG)

(source: officialcharts.com)

My top five: 
1. Saipan

2. Sisu: Road to Revenge

3. Good Boy

4. Marty Supreme

5. The SpongeBob Movie: Search for SquarePants

Top five films on terrestrial TV this week:

1. Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory [above] (Easter Sunday, ITV1, 2.30pm)

2. High Society (Easter Sunday, BBC Two, 2.15pm)

3. Speed (Easter Sunday, Channel 4, 12midnight)

4. Toy Story 3 (Easter Sunday, Channel 4, 5.10pm)

5. Gosford Park (Easter Monday, BBC Two, 10pm)

Éloge de l'amour: "Amélie" at 25

Amélie - ageless Amélie - is 25 this year, which means we've all had ample time to work out where we stand on it. Is this, as Xan Brooks argued earlier this week in The Independent, mere moodboard cinema, with a cloyingly cutesy-poo heroine who embodies all the worst aspects of the 21st century's main character syndrome? (Even if, granted, she is the main character of a film called, you know, Amélie.) Is it still, as many believed at the time, a defining modern date movie? This is an unfashionable confession, but I too had previously found Jean-Pierre Jeunet's film affecting up to a point. Beneath its sugarcoated crème brûlée toplayer, its garrulous array of kooks and quirks and talking inanimate objects, it always struck me as a rare romcom with some understanding of solitude. There are moments during that melancholy stretch in the middle - governed above all else by the sad pools of Audrey Tautou's eyes and Yann Tiersen's immediately evocative piano-and-accordion score, very much the Buena Vista Social Club sound of autumn 2001 - when Jeunet allows us to sit quietly with its heroine's (sometimes self-imposed) loneliness; a creative choice that makes it all the more lovely and moving when she does finally find someone (and someone who might actually be right for her, given his comparably curious habits). Rewatching the film again this week, I was most struck by the solitude of those around her. The denizens of the Deux Moulins cafe, walled off in separate booths, separate lives; the woman in the fake Renoir painting; the neighbours, in their own little boxes; Lady Di, killed in the pursuit of true love. All the lonely people. Where do they all come from?

It's something of a miracle that we ever notice their plight(s). Jeunet had dropped his old partner-in-crime Marc Caro some years before, yet he'd retained the insistent busyness and eccentric character playing of the pair's breakthroughs Delicatessen and The City of Lost Children. Though Amélie would prove more overtly crowdpleasing, there is still a lot of clutter around the film's heart. (Much more than I remember there being, in fact.) Yet in certain moments, Jeunet still had the energy to clear the table of childish things and flirt with something tragically real: the fear of growing old alone, of dying without having known love. That's... well, that's more than we were offered in the same year's more generously reviewed Bridget Jones's Diary, which introduced a very different romantic heroine, and played out her travails as winking, cringe-inducing farce. Jeunet has Paris in the summertime, a yen to make cinema rather than Bridget's television, and Tautou, the actress as petting-zoo creature: doe-eyed yet oddly bovine in her responses, as if she were just about the last person on set to realise what Jeunet was getting at here. We can surely agree it's an acquired taste: this review may be as close as I'm going to get to responding in any favourable way to Wes Anderson's recent doodles. And it's as simplistic in its worldview as anything made in Paris with Raimu seventy years before, rewarding our gal's virtue while punishing the grocer's brutish sins. More than most recent anniversary reissues, Amélie does now seem a relic of an older world, and not just because it opened mere days or weeks before 9/11. Jeunet made one further attempt at a grand cinematic statement - with 2005's sputtering period romance A Very Long Engagement, again with Tautou - before beating a total retreat into trivia. This time round, I came to look upon his best-known film with the residual fondness one feels for an old flame, while also wondering why I fell so hard for it in the first place, and feeling a pang of nostalgia for the days when a French romcom could become not just a hit but a pop-cultural totem - a film that inspired such passions you had to take sides on it. Where have they gone?

Amélie returns to selected cinemas from tomorrow.

On demand: "The Witches"

The family sector had grown so unignorably vast by the end of the 1980s that even Nicolas Roeg - the visionary behind the altogether adult Don't Look Now, Bad Timing, Eureka and Insignificance - was tempted by the offer of a fat Warner Bros. payday. 1990's The Witches, from more or less the same moment as Tim Burton's Batman, at least saw its maker drawn towards a darker hued bedtime story in the form of the Roald Dahl perennial about a global network of witches working overtime to kill children. The adaptation was by Don't Look Now scribe Allan Scott; the results were not exactly A Minecraft Movie. Roeg, for one, took the opportunity to lean back into the Gothic, much as he had in his early days as a cinematographer on Roger Corman's Poe films. After a prologue of ominous warnings passed on by kindly grandma Mia Zetterling to her now American grandson Luke (Jasen Fisher, so expressive Spielberg pinched him for his subsequent Hook), everybody decamps to the Hotel Excelsior, a seafront art deco hostelry run by Rowan Atkinson's hapless manager Mr. Stringer; there, granny and Luke's fellow travellers include the patrons of a conference staged by the so-called Royal Society for the Protection of Children, where keynote speaker Anjelica Huston proposes the mass extermination of all kiddiwinks in a thick Germanic accent. The ambience is not unlike that of any Tory party conference of the 1980s - Mrs. T would have found herself right at home amid the curling cucumber sandwiches - but you can tell this was a production with American money to spend from its disproportionately spacious idea of coastal British hotel rooms.

For a while, you could be forgiven for thinking Roeg has simply bedded down in these environs to gaze, with much the same mix of awe and fear displayed by young Luke, upon large groups of witchy and bewitching women. Huston wafts into shot, peers disdainfully at the British character actors wibbling and bibbling several feet beneath her (primetime favourites one and all: Atkinson, Bill Paterson, Brenda Blethyn, Jane Horrocks, Jim Carter) and clinches the Morticia gig in the following year's The Addams Family, if she hadn't already. (She also, in passing, peels off her own scalp with a flourish, a sequence pushing at the upper limits of the PG certificate.) As Dahl's byzantine narrative unfolds, however, one starts to wonder whether Roeg the visionary was drawn this way by the prospect of a hero who spends much of the film transformed into a talking mouse, and whether The Witches had any influence on another visionary, George Miller, determining to adapt Dick King-Smith's The Sheep-Pig as Babe a few years later. Though initially a little clunky and rough-hewn in comparison with the matinee delights that followed it, this Witches soon starts to beguile: anecdotal evidence would suggest kids everywhere continue to thrill to the mouse (and mouse-eye) photography, while accompanying adults can savour Roeg's slyer allusions to the idea this hotel isn't as above board as it first seems, not least Stanley Myers' score, with its pronounced echoes of The Shining. Remade - or, rather, retold - by Robert Zemeckis, an Eighties graduate with no particular flair for the Gothic, in 2020; I haven't seen the official statistics, but I should imagine its predecessor scared an entire generation out of accepting sweets from strangers.

The Witches is currently streaming via HBO Max and NOW, available to rent via Prime Video, and on DVD via Warner Bros. Home Entertainment.