Almost 40 years ago, in The Purple Rose of Cairo, the film director Woody Allen showed a character step out of a movie into the cinema, to fall in love with a member of the audience.
It’s a clever fantasy and a complete reversal of what happens when many of us see a great film. We enter into it in our imagination. The characters come to life so that we feel their pain, their happiness, their sorrow.
Given the state of the world right now, this time of year is one of my favourite for precisely that sense of escaping reality. Gale-force winds are rocking much of Britain. Lashing rain is coming in from the west. But I’ve been gorging on the brilliant escapism and warmth of the big screen.
There will be news about the top Oscar nominations today, with critics talking of the awards going to “Barbenheimer” – the battle between Barbie and Oppenheimer for the most coveted prizes. There has rarely been a contest between two films that manage to be both engaging pieces of art but also polar opposites in storytelling, style and substance.
Hollywood is in good shape, you may be sure, when critics see the contest for best picture between the pink world of children’s dolls, the brilliantly scripted antics of Barbie and Ken in the most garish colours imaginable, pitted against the politics and science of the atomic age, and the eccentric genius and tempestuous life of J Robert Oppenheimer.
We enter into the film in our imagination. The characters come to life so that we feel their pain, their happiness, their sorrow
But with the British equivalent of the Oscars – the Baftas – also coming up next month, I’ve been viewing dozens of films in one of the most creatively diverse awards seasons that I can remember. It’s been an antidote to the all-too-real miseries of the world outside.
Napoleon, for example, directed by Ridley Scott (now in his mid-eighties), annoyed some critics for not being historically accurate. It’s certainly true that the real Napoleon wasn’t watching the execution of Marie Antoinette. But as a theatrical event – which is what we as audiences pay for – the Battle of Austerlitz on ice includes the most extraordinary battle scenes I’ve ever watched in the cinema. Historically accurate? I don’t know. Entertaining? Absolutely.
Then there is the almost indescribable joy of Poor Things, from Yorgos Lanthimos. This film has some relationship to the old story of Frankenstein, but it’s not a horror movie. Ultimately, it’s indescribable. You just need to go to see it, and I hope like me you will be transfixed and astonished for two hours and 21 minutes, especially since the central character, played by Emma Stone, is surely an Oscar possibility.
The other surprise, for me at least, was how diverse this year’s children’s movies have become. They range from Spider Man and Chicken Run Two to Elemental and the Japanese animation The Boy and the Heron. But for me, three films that will never rival the popularity (or the budget) of Barbie or Oppenheimer sum up the wonderfully inventive spirit of the times.
American Fiction centres on a learned African-American writer whose work doesn’t sell. “Black Gangster” fiction is much more successful and so, almost as a joke, the writer adopts a “gangsta” persona. It’s a clever and funny satire of racial stereotypes and of the American literary world. Another beautifully scripted gem is Anatomy of a Fall in which a man dies after falling from his house balcony. Did his wife murder him? It’s a simple idea, and a tangled web of relationships to the very end.
But the film I have been thinking about most is The Zone of Interest. Superficially, it’s a kind of domestic family drama set around an enormous factory, with the husband about to be relocated to a new job. His wife likes things as they are. She resents the idea of a move. Boring? No, because the husband is Rudolf Hoess, the real-life SS commandant of the Nazi death factory, Auschwitz, at the peak of the Holocaust.
In the foreground, there are meetings about his “production” targets in the camp, plus the tension in his family about the prospect of moving. In the background, there is occasional smoke, shouting and distant gunfire. The horrors are always off-screen, never shown, and the brutality is even more chilling for the fact that it is always unseen and in the viewer’s imagination.
The film’s genius is to remind us of what the German philosopher Hannah Arendt once called “the banality of evil”. The Zone of Interest illustrates perfectly the dull little lives and trivia of bureaucrats and functionaries whose priorities are about their personal comforts and possibilities of promotion, while they go about their business involving the most unspeakable horrors.
It’s not Woody Allen’s characters stepping out of the film. It’s those of us in the audience stepping inside a newly created world of the film director’s imagination. It’s about empathy and understanding and about how ordinary people are capable of terrible things, then sit down for a quiet meal with their families. And that revelation is always worth the price of a ticket to the movies.
F1 The Movie
Starring: Brad Pitt, Damson Idris, Kerry Condon, Javier Bardem
Director: Joseph Kosinski
Rating: 4/5
The White Lotus: Season three
Creator: Mike White
Starring: Walton Goggins, Jason Isaacs, Natasha Rothwell
Rating: 4.5/5
More from Rashmee Roshan Lall
Lexus LX700h specs
Engine: 3.4-litre twin-turbo V6 plus supplementary electric motor
Power: 464hp at 5,200rpm
Torque: 790Nm from 2,000-3,600rpm
Transmission: 10-speed auto
Fuel consumption: 11.7L/100km
On sale: Now
Price: From Dh590,000
Company%20Profile
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Mica
Director: Ismael Ferroukhi
Stars: Zakaria Inan, Sabrina Ouazani
3 stars
Some of Darwish's last words
"They see their tomorrows slipping out of their reach. And though it seems to them that everything outside this reality is heaven, yet they do not want to go to that heaven. They stay, because they are afflicted with hope." - Mahmoud Darwish, to attendees of the Palestine Festival of Literature, 2008
His life in brief: Born in a village near Galilee, he lived in exile for most of his life and started writing poetry after high school. He was arrested several times by Israel for what were deemed to be inciteful poems. Most of his work focused on the love and yearning for his homeland, and he was regarded the Palestinian poet of resistance. Over the course of his life, he published more than 30 poetry collections and books of prose, with his work translated into more than 20 languages. Many of his poems were set to music by Arab composers, most significantly Marcel Khalife. Darwish died on August 9, 2008 after undergoing heart surgery in the United States. He was later buried in Ramallah where a shrine was erected in his honour.
ESSENTIALS
The flights
Emirates flies from Dubai to Phnom Penh via Yangon from Dh2,700 return including taxes. Cambodia Bayon Airlines and Cambodia Angkor Air offer return flights from Phnom Penh to Siem Reap from Dh250 return including taxes. The flight takes about 45 minutes.
The hotels
Rooms at the Raffles Le Royal in Phnom Penh cost from $225 (Dh826) per night including taxes. Rooms at the Grand Hotel d'Angkor cost from $261 (Dh960) per night including taxes.
The tours
A cyclo architecture tour of Phnom Penh costs from $20 (Dh75) per person for about three hours, with Khmer Architecture Tours. Tailor-made tours of all of Cambodia, or sites like Angkor alone, can be arranged by About Asia Travel. Emirates Holidays also offers packages.
UAE currency: the story behind the money in your pockets
Real estate tokenisation project
Dubai launched the pilot phase of its real estate tokenisation project last month.
The initiative focuses on converting real estate assets into digital tokens recorded on blockchain technology and helps in streamlining the process of buying, selling and investing, the Dubai Land Department said.
Dubai’s real estate tokenisation market is projected to reach Dh60 billion ($16.33 billion) by 2033, representing 7 per cent of the emirate’s total property transactions, according to the DLD.
Company profile
Name: GiftBag.ae
Based: Dubai
Founded: 2011
Number of employees: 4
Sector: E-commerce
Funding: Self-funded to date
World Cup warm-up fixtures
Friday, May 24:
- Pakistan v Afghanistan (Bristol)
- Sri Lanka v South Africa (Cardiff)
Saturday, May 25
- England v Australia (Southampton)
- India v New Zealand (The Oval, London)
Sunday, May 26
- South Africa v West Indies (Bristol)
- Pakistan v Bangladesh (Cardiff)
Monday, May 27
- Australia v Sri Lanka (Southampton)
- England v Afghanistan (The Oval, London)
Tuesday, May 28
- West Indies v New Zealand (Bristol)
- Bangladesh v India (Cardiff)
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Indoor Cricket World Cup Dubai 2017
Venue Insportz, Dubai; Admission Free
Fixtures - Open Men 2pm: India v New Zealand, Malaysia v UAE, Singapore v South Africa, Sri Lanka v England; 8pm: Australia v Singapore, India v Sri Lanka, England v Malaysia, New Zealand v South Africa
Fixtures - Open Women Noon: New Zealand v England, UAE v Australia; 6pm: England v South Africa, New Zealand v Australia
Who are the Sacklers?
The Sackler family is a transatlantic dynasty that owns Purdue Pharma, which manufactures and markets OxyContin, one of the drugs at the centre of America's opioids crisis. The family is well known for their generous philanthropy towards the world's top cultural institutions, including Guggenheim Museum, the National Portrait Gallery, Tate in Britain, Yale University and the Serpentine Gallery, to name a few. Two branches of the family control Purdue Pharma.
Isaac Sackler and Sophie Greenberg were Jewish immigrants who arrived in New York before the First World War. They had three sons. The first, Arthur, died before OxyContin was invented. The second, Mortimer, who died aged 93 in 2010, was a former chief executive of Purdue Pharma. The third, Raymond, died aged 97 in 2017 and was also a former chief executive of Purdue Pharma.
It was Arthur, a psychiatrist and pharmaceutical marketeer, who started the family business dynasty. He and his brothers bought a small company called Purdue Frederick; among their first products were laxatives and prescription earwax remover.
Arthur's branch of the family has not been involved in Purdue for many years and his daughter, Elizabeth, has spoken out against it, saying the company's role in America's drugs crisis is "morally abhorrent".
The lawsuits that were brought by the attorneys general of New York and Massachussetts named eight Sacklers. This includes Kathe, Mortimer, Richard, Jonathan and Ilene Sackler Lefcourt, who are all the children of either Mortimer or Raymond. Then there's Theresa Sackler, who is Mortimer senior's widow; Beverly, Raymond's widow; and David Sackler, Raymond's grandson.
Members of the Sackler family are rarely seen in public.
Company Profile
Name: Thndr
Started: 2019
Co-founders: Ahmad Hammouda and Seif Amr
Sector: FinTech
Headquarters: Egypt
UAE base: Hub71, Abu Dhabi
Current number of staff: More than 150
Funds raised: $22 million
Volvo ES90 Specs
Engine: Electric single motor (96kW), twin motor (106kW) and twin motor performance (106kW)
Power: 333hp, 449hp, 680hp
Torque: 480Nm, 670Nm, 870Nm
On sale: Later in 2025 or early 2026, depending on region
Price: Exact regional pricing TBA
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