Category: Entertainment

MGM+ and BBC One’s A Tale of Two Cities is neither the best of adaptations nor the worst of adaptations, but Daniel West’s take on the Charles Dickens classic may well be the meh-est of adaptations.

The four-part series benefits somewhat from the lack of an instantly identifiable definitive filmed interpretation of A Tale of Two Cities (depending on how you feel, I suppose, about the best picture-nominated 1935 feature) — a minor oddity given that the novel is in many ways Dickens’ most streamlined, featuring one of his best beginnings, best endings and most approachable narrative hooks.

It’s a love triangle and a thriller set against the backdrop of the French Revolution. It features the usual Dickensian melange of colorful characters, breathless cliffhangers, shocking twists (not Oliver) and trenchant social commentary. It’s very much the epitome of a ripping yarn.

Ultimately, though, freedom from negative comparisons to previous adaptations is not enough to prevent this take on A Tale of Two Cities from being a bland disappointment — one of the least Dickensian adaptations of a Charles Dickens work since Steven Knight adapted A Christmas Carol around the question, “What if Ebenezer Scrooge could say ‘fuck’?” It’s still a love story, but with virtually no passion between any of its three principals; and while it may be a tale of two cities, they both look like nearly identically designed stages in a warehouse in some affordable Eastern European country.

For those who haven’t read A Tale of Two Cities or seen one of the forgettable previous adaptations — none, apparently, since a 1989 take that aired in the States under the Masterpiece Theatre banner — the plot is at once simple and convoluted.

After a brief prelude in Paris in 1764, in which a young Lucie Manette watches her father apparently be killed, the action jumps forward 18 years. Lucie (Mirren Mack) is now living in London hoping to follow in her late father’s footsteps as a doctor. Lucie’s concrete interest in medicine is not, if memory serves, a part of a book in which she’s a more nebulous “healer,” nor is it all that relevant to the series after a strange introduction in which she’s practicing surgery on a corpse. It’s a nearly pointless choice, one of many.

Lucie is living with Mrs. Lorry (Sharon Duncan-Brewster) and doing just fine for herself when her life is turned upside down with the arrival of Charles Darnay (François Civil). Charles is working on behalf of French revolutionaries, embodied by Roxane Duran’s Madame Defarge, to smuggle a generally irrelevant woman to safety in England. He’s also bearing a letter that suggests that Lucie’s dad (Yannick Renier) isn’t actually dead. The letter contains the evocative words “recalled to life,” which are potent on the page and nearly meaningless in the series.

At the English border, Charles is wounded, which lets Lucie utilize her medical knowledge briefly. Then he’s arrested as a spy. Lucie seeks out legal representation for the heroic Charles, but finds only the generally drunk and uncouth Sydney Carton (Kit Harington).

Both Charles and Sydney immediately fall in love with Lucie, because she’s somewhat the protagonist of the story and she’s pretty. Lucie, for her part, falls in love with both Charles and Sydney, which makes a little bit of sense since they look almost identical (assuming they aren’t standing next to each other, allowing one to see that Civil is a lot taller) and they’re both in constant need of chaste undressing. It makes less sense, though, because nothing in her interactions with either man comes across as the least bit romantic and the chemistry between Mack, Civil and Harington is wholly lacking, regardless of the permutation.

As Lucie is reunited with her father, seriously psychologically damaged by his two decades in the Bastille, she learns shocking truths about Charles and his lineage and about the revolutionary motivations of Madame Defarge, whose general intransigence has caused her to be viewed as the villain of the piece, regardless of logic.

Watching A Tale of Two Cities, it’s almost impossible to gauge what attracted West and the producers to the book, other than the IP and the reality that there are only so many times one can adapt Great Expectations, David Copperfield, Oliver Twist and A Christmas Carol before it becomes necessary to cycle back into the Dickens catalogue. The inspiration is nowhere to be found here.

And A Tale of Two Cities is, as I’ve already said, a ripping yarn, featuring doppelgängers and surprises and the French blooming Revolution — featured in one thoroughly lifeless scene — plus it’s eternally timely since the story is one of those reliable Dickens screeds in which the impoverished masses are on the verge of toppling the heartless elite. Madame Defarge is — whether or not you buy her as a villain — one of fiction’s great adversaries, and her backstory is, itself, both eternally timely and specifically timely at a historical moment when you might have noticed one or two headlines about immoral wealthy men preying on defenseless young women.

One could certainly adapt A Tale of Two Cities in a way that steers into the complications of Madame Defarge as a character, resulting in something that might almost resemble Hulu’s summer hit, Furious. She is, as a character, at best a righteous crusader and at worst a rigid zealot, but she’s hard to make uninteresting. Duran captures Defarge’s rage and, in a series plagued by thinly sketched characterizations hers comes closest to rising to the level of interesting. But her cause and her connection to that cause are mechanical pieces of the plot here, making it impossible to hate her or empathize with her. She’s just the person stirring up trouble whenever we go to Paris.

Plus, it’s hard to know when we’re in Paris. As directed by Richard Clark, A Tale of Two Cities is temporally choppy and fails to build any emotional or geographical momentum. Though two cities are in the title, we’re treated to maybe a block or two of London and a block or two of Paris, visually interchangeable in a way that offers no real tangible connection to either staged location.

Presumably, making Paris and London interchangeable is intentional, a parallel to the similarities between Charles and Sydney? Except that the entire purpose of the story’s arc is that one should be able to chart the life Charles was born into and the changes he made (all before the start of the story, since he’s pretty much stagnant onscreen throughout) and compare that to Sydney’s journey from the man he is when we meet him to the man he becomes by the end of the tale. In this case, though, since Harington and Civil are comparably solemn and earnest throughout — the actors do, if nothing else, look as similar as the story necessitates — there isn’t much evolution to trace.

There are supposed to be comparable parallels to the arcs of Lucie and Madame Defarge, one as a force of optimistic good and the other as a force of all-consuming vengeance, but neither progression is all that engaging. Like Duran, Mack brings a little fire to the series, but Lucie is one of those Dickensian women who are unexplained rays of light who exist mostly to fuel the growth of the main male characters.

As for the supporting ensemble from the page, from the bloodthirsty revolutionaries collectively known as Jacques to Sydney’s partner Mr. Stryver (a wasted Fehinti Balogun) to the figure known as The Vengeance, they’re either gone entirely or written so thinly here as to leave no impression.

A Tale of Two Cities is in such a hurry to get from that memorable opening (rendered poorly as a voiceover at the end of the first episode) to that tremendous closing (rendered poorly as another voiceover) that the adaptation might as well have been as a two-hour movie. Certainly the cliffhangers at the end of each episode lack the urgency that Dickens himself understood so well how to evoke. The story itself is probably good enough to pull some viewers along from episode to episode, but the telling definitely is not good enough to inspire anybody to seek out MGM+.

Regardless, there’s a far, far better adaptation of A Tale of Two Cities than has ever been done. This is not it.

When Mona (Julianne Moore) tells a friend she’s auditioned for a production of a show called Nosy Neighbors at their local theater, he admits he’s never liked musicals. They just don’t feel authentic, he explains, the way the characters are always bursting into song. Who does that?

Well, no one, not even in the musical-loving The Debut. But among the first of the film’s sly tricks is that it builds a world in which it feels like people could, where in fact it feels more unnatural that they don’t. Blessed with swing-for-the-fences brio and, in Moore and Paul Giamatti, a leading duo capable of navigating every one of those wild turns, the latest feature by Jesse Eisenberg makes for a frequently hilarious journey into the mind of an overly committed actor — even if, in the end, it seems unsure quite what it wants to say about the self-destructive pursuit of artistic perfection.

At first, Mona would seem an unlikely candidate to go Method in the way of certain prestige actors or comic book movie stars. When we meet her, she’s a meek suburban housewife who’s never acted a day in her life, and whose audition is so mediocre she doesn’t even realize how mediocre it is. Once she lands a relatively minor role anyway, owing to a twist of fate that she may have ever-so-slightly nudged along, she’s just happy to be there, drinking in any suggestion or note or friendly gesture extended to her.

But even from the start, before Mona properly goes off the deep end, The Debut starts inuring us to her heightened perspective. When Mona gets the call saying she’s gotten the part, a spotlight floods her grin and the camera rushes in, as if she might start belting on the spot. On her first day of rehearsal, the whole world is lit a little brighter than it was a few scenes earlier. When she endears herself to her new colleagues with a joke, the laughter feels slightly too enthusiastic. The effect is almost eerie to start, and it takes some getting used to. But it turns out to be just the tip of the iceberg.

The pivot comes when the production’s director, Jerry (Giamatti) — described in a low-key perfect bit of dialogue as “basically the biggest name in New Jersey community theater” — pulls Mona aside for the private special instruction that she (as a truly godawful singer and actress) so desperately needs. Jerry’s usual method is to break his actors down so he can “put Humpty Dumpty together again,” and it begins exactly as planned in an acting exercise that yields one of the very biggest laughs in a film rich with them.

But then Mona takes a little too well to his guidance. As Mona loses herself in her character, a building superintendent named Miss Danielle, her wardrobe, courtesy of costume designer Stacey Battat, goes from prim cardigans to ripped jeans to an actual coverall she’s stolen from a janitor. (This is neither the first nor last time you’ll think to yourself, “Man, theater people are a menace” and “Jesse Eisenberg’s seen some shit, huh?”) She begins frequenting a seedy motel that production designer Anne Ross has cleverly made into a theater actor’s exaggeratedly noirish version of what a seedy motel would look like, with smoke-blurred neon lights and a trash can fire outside and an inexplicably naked man roaming the halls inside.

Most worryingly for Nosy Neighbors — in-universe a well-known musical that’s been around a few decades, in reality an original concocted by Eisenberg and seen here in perfectly cheesy snippets — Mona starts to question Miss Danielle’s motivations, then her lines, then her actions. Jerry realizes he’s created his own worst nightmare: the sort of difficult actor who thinks she knows her character better than the director or even the script that invented her.

Lively throughout, The Debut ascends to new heights whenever Giamatti and Moore share the screen together. Moore is an absolute hoot as Mona, who starts out looking on paper like one of those disaffected housewives she’s played so often (and so expertly) in her career but turns out to be much, much stranger. Giamatti makes Jerry ferocious but not monstruous, a man who certainly likes barking orders at various underlings but loves making good theater even more. Their scenes opposite each other are not just entertaining but thrillingly dynamic, as the balance of power between them begins to shift.

It’s all so much fun that it’s easy not to notice at first that none of this is headed anywhere particularly profound. There’s a touch of poignancy in the understanding that Mona is so eager to lose herself in Miss Danielle because — like Rita, the protagonist of Telluride 2026’s other “New Jersey suburbanite abandons her family to pursue a more authentic life under the guidance of a charismatic but demanding leader” premiere — she barely knows who she is in the first place.

But the film never builds out the rest of Mona’s world, like her inattentive husband (Patrick Fabian), or even co-stars like Steph (a very endearing Halle Bailey) and Todd (Eisenberg, adorably giving himself an excuse to sing and dance), to take that line of thinking anywhere truly insightful or emotional.

Among the arguments between Mona and Jerry are what theater can or should be. Mona argues that that the stories it tell should be “real,” even at the expense of a happy ending, while Jerry argues that no one cares much about the plot — audiences just want to feel while spying on the intimate lives of other people.

The Debut, in prioritizing style, humor and outrageous plot turns over complex emotionality, would seem to side with Jerry. Maybe it’s not everything it could be. But as I howled over the lengths Mona would go to for the sake of what Jerry unkindly but accurately points out is, in the end, just some “thankless tertiary character,” it felt like more than enough.

This delightful if darkness-tinged documentary is comprised of footage shot by then not yet fully-fledged cameraman Seamus McGarvey (who went on to be DP for Atonement and The Hours among other features) on the set of Derek Jarman’s 1991 adaptation of Edward II. For reasons not explained here, McGarvey’s material was left sitting in a cupboard for 30-odd years, unedited into the making-of documentary it was meant to be, even after Jarman’s death from AIDS-related illness not long after Edward II came out.

But maybe all things happen for a reason because now, thanks to young British director Theo Rollason and their team, the original footage gets to be part of a larger documentary. Filled out with vintage archive that supplements the portrait built here of the irrepressibly charming Jarman and his highly talented team of collaborators, this easily tallies up as more than the sum of its parts. It’s also guaranteed to induce swooning nostalgia in those who remember queer life, London and the filmmaking scene thereof in the early 1990s. Those too young, like Rollason, to have lived through those thrilling if dangerous times will have to contend with the complicated jealousy this will induce. And hopefully take away sadly timely history lessons about the necessity of resisting despotic, homophobic authoritarians, especially if you can do it with men dressed as nuns.  

Fans of Jarman can spend happy hours debating which of his features — Latin-language trailblazer Sebastiane, punk fetish object Jubilee, irreverent The Tempest, painterly Caravaggio, to name just a few — is the best, and Edward II definitely has its passionate defenders. It certainly deftly collated together key Jarmanian features, such as giving an English Lit classic (Christopher Marlowe’s 16th century play) a pointedly political contemporary frame, mixing opulence and austerity in its sets and costumes, and serving up lashings of hot boy-on-boy action and a diva or two. (Annie Lennox has a walk-on moment singing Cole Porter’s ‘Ev’ry Time We Say Goodbye.’)

As is pointed out here, this was also his most expensive feature up until then, costing about £900K, hardly a princely sum even then. Presumably a goodly chunk of that change went to proper professional actors (including Steven Waddington and Andrew Tiernan as Edward and his lover Gaveston) who could cope with the Elizabethan verse, as well as regular Jarman chums in the cast like Tilda Swinton, who played Edward’s sulky French wife. (She looks unspeakably radiant here in Sandy Powell’s gorgeous costumes.) But McGarvey also captures the comic horror show of low-budget filmmaking in Britain at the time as one producer dips into his own pocket to pay off some bolshy background artists demanding extra to cover their expenses.

Indeed, the footage of the harried production staff trying to keep the show going on from the office at Bray Studios where the shoot is happening sometimes plays like a vintage workplace comedy but with a dark undertow. The highlight is the sequence where visiting extras from the queer activist group Outrage! decide to invade a neighboring studio where popstar Cliff Richard, long rumored to be gay, is rehearsing and offer him keys to help him come out of the closet.

At first, it all looks like juvenile hijinks, the attempted outing (all the rage in those days) now looking very much not cool to contemporary eyes. Jarman, when told about it, looks more like he’s trying to keep a straight face than channel censorious disapproval. But when someone leaks the story to the tabloids and the scandal threatens to shut down production if Richard sues, it’s suddenly not such a lark, especially for production manager Sarah Swords, who’s left manning the phones, trying to negotiate with the tabloid reporters the way a canary negotiates with a cat.  

Luckily both for Swords and the film itself, and of course this documentary about the film, the whole thing blows over and the team goes on to fight other battles and make more films. Younger viewers and those not from Britain will learn here about Clause 28, proposed legislation that would criminalize the “promotion of homosexuality” in state schools, which campaigners such as Jarman, the Outrage! protesters and many others fought hard against. (It did become law but was repealed in the 2000s.) The footage here follows Jarman as he and others voluntarily “surrender” en masse to London police stations as a publicity stunt, the kind of disruptive, playful non-violent intervention that’s all too thin on the ground these days, in both the U.K. and offshore.

Rollason and fellow editor Nicole Halova, with supervision provided by the legendary longtime Werner Herzog-collaborator Joe Bini, effortlessly weave this material into the filmmaking story, underscoring how intimately intertwined politics, protest and art were at the time — a rebellious spirit of the times that will induce nostalgia almost as much as the intarsia knitwear and early ’90s haircuts seen here.

Did celebrated Italian auteur Nanni Moretti, known at home and abroad for his leftist political satires and introspective human comedies, just make his first straight-up soap opera? The answer is mostly yes, which begs yet another question: Is that actually a good thing?

With a hefty filmography that includes one Palme d’Or winner, a Silver Lion and a Silver Bear among countless Italian prizes, the 73-year-old director clearly has nothing left to prove when it comes to arthouse cinema, for which he’s been his country’s most consistent commodity since the 1980s. Not unlike Woody Allen, but minus the disastrous personal life, Moretti puts out a new film as often as he can, testing out different genres while maintaining his deadpan humor and personal touch. Not all Moretti movies are created equal — and some deserve more praise, such as his 2011 Vatican dramedy, We Have a Pope — but they’re always made with intelligence and a fair amount of levity undercut by darker currents swirling beneath the surface.

That hot and cold, funny and tragic tone is present throughout the early parts of his searing 17-year romance, It Will Happen Tonight (Succederà questa notte), until the film swerves into pure melodrama later on, taking Moretti to places he hasn’t necessarily gone before — except, perhaps, in The Son’s Room, which remains one of his biggest successes to date.

The sharp and luminous Jasmine Trinca (also headlining Venice competition title The Spiral) made her screen debut in that 2001 movie and is well-served here by a role in which she has to constantly contain her passion for a total stranger, until finally deciding it’s time to go for it. Her paramour is played by hunky French charmer Louis Garrel, who flexes his Italian skills, as well as a handlebar mustache that makes him look like a forgotten member of the Red Brigades, as a man so smitten with an unknown woman that he never forgets her despite all the time gone by.

Is the film often cheesy and a tad ridiculous? Certo. But it’s also rather watchable if you accept its mass of coincidences, hopping as easily as an Alitalia frequent flyer to multiple destinations (Rome, Oslo, Turino, San Sebastian and Mumbai) and spanning several decades to tell the tale of two lovers who keep serendipitously crossing paths. As the years go by, babies are born, parents get sick and die, careers are started then ended, wives and husbands are thwarted, and, eventually, sheets are strewn and booties are tapped. Despite some questionable hair styles, Trinca and Garrel remain agelessly attractive throughout all of this, proving that their characters’ undying love, whether unrequited or not, is all they ever needed.

Adapted by Moretti, Federica Pontremoli and Valia Santella from the stories of Israeli writer Eshkol Nevo, the script requires a sizeable leap of faith from the get-go, although the director sprinkles early scenes with just enough humor to make the medicine go down.

We are simultaneously introduced to Matteo (Garrel) and Greta (Trinca), two 20-somethings undergoing major romantic crises in two parts of the globe. The former just had a kid in Oslo with his younger Norwegian girlfriend (Melina Akerman), who abandons them when Matteo decides to move back to Rome to spend more time with his domineering Italian mother (Angela Finocchiaro). Greta, meanwhile, is living in India when her expat boyfriend proposes to her out of the blue, making her question whether she wants a marriage and prompting her to ask her father (Moretti, providing most of the movie’s laughs) to swoop in and act as a sounding board.

The film then skips ahead to seven years later: Matteo is out playing tennis in Rome with his brother and, what do you know, Greta just happens to be getting married to a new man (Antonio De Matteo) in the garden right next door. She strolls onto the court in her wedding dress for a quick game with Matteo, who falls head over heels for her but is unable to jump in like Dustin Hoffmann in The Graduate to break up the ceremony. Did I say this film is corny?

Several more improbable twists occur over the next decade, throwing Matteo and Greta into each other’s paths until they can no longer quell their burning mutual attraction. Before that happens, the film takes a long detour to focus on Matteo’s relationship with his cancer-stricken French father (Hippolyte Girardot), who’s dying wish is to attend a Bruce Springsteen concert. Off they go to Spain, where Matteo somehow runs into Greta a second time, then heads over to see The Boss with his dad, prompting a teary-eyed singalong of “Hungry Heart” (also the title of Nevo’s short story collection) before the inevitable death scene that follows.

Moments like these can definitely be a bit overwrought (and humor-wise, Moretti should probably refrain from the Viagra jokes), but they’re also handled with a fair amount of tongue-in-cheek tact despite the unbelievable circumstances. The director has always excelled at shifting moods from light to dark and back again — his most beloved work, Caro Diaro, is all about that — and It Will Happen Tonight benefits from that tone until the gloves finally come off along with all the clothes, and the movie starts laying on the sauce too thickly.

By then, Greta and Matteo have been through a lot — there’s a whole subplot involving Greta’s depressed teenage daughter (Elisabetta Traversa), but it feels too sketched out to carry weight — and this in part explains why they’ve never been available for each other, even if they’ve clearly had a few too many chances over the years. The gloomy reality of not getting what you want, because life keeps getting in the way, is the main ingredient that holds this otherwise tawdry romance together, though not entirely.

You see how this looks, right? Now we do.

Lance Oppenheim‘s Primetime hit the big screen inside Sala Grande Saturday for a much anticipated world premiere at the Venice Film Festival. The A24 pic casts Robert Pattinson as To Catch a Predator host Chris Hansen — who repeatedly uttered that phrase to alleged pedophiles after they were confronted by camera crews — and the audience caught what they put down and responded with a nearly eight-minute electric standing ovation.

It was a packed house inside the theater with the entire cast joining Oppenheim and Pattinson as well as some notable Hollywood auteurs and stars. A few rows back behind the film’s creative team were Ari Aster, Chloe Zhao, Mona Fastvold and Amanda Seyfried (who snuck in after the lights went down before the premiere) and others. At one point, Aster was among a group of attendees that began chanting “Lance! Lance! Lance! Lance!” in honor of Oppenheim.

Shortly before that, Pattinson turned to around to greet his partner, Suki Waterhouse, with a kiss after she had been cheering enthusiastically for the film. Spotted capturing the scene on his iPhone was Jeff Zucker, the former NBC chief who plays himself in the film and hit the Lido in support of Primetime as he oversaw the run of To Catch a Predator as a Dateline franchise.

Oppenheim’s film was among the most sought after tickets of the first weekend at this year’s festival. In his official director’s statement for Venice, the filmmaker, whose previous works include the series Ren Faire and films Spermworld and Some Kind of Heaven, said he set out to make “an institutional portrait of To Catch a Predator at the height of its success.”

He added: “I wanted to trace the disparate ambitions of people who existed inside this apparatus — a journalistic crusader, a mercenary TV producer and a wide-eyed Hollywood dreamer — converging into a moment of crisis. And I liked the idea of revisiting the media culture of the early 2000s, before the news landscape fractured, when a “primetime” slot felt like a matter of life or death. For some, it was.

In doing so, he drafted a cast to star opposite Pattinson that included Merritt Wever, Skyler Gisondo, Phoebe Bridgers and Bokeem Woodbine. Fun fact: Oppenheim also directed Bridgers’ recently released music video “Lost Boys,” the lead single off her new album Lost Weekend. During the film’s standing ovation, after the aforementioned group shouted “Lance!” they turned their attention to Bridgers with “Phoebe! Phoebe! Phoebe!”

The Hollywood Reporter’s David Canfield broke the first interview with the film’s creative team. Primetime is loosely adapted by first-time screenwriter Ajon Singh from an Esquire article by Luke Dittrich, and it dramatizes the darkest year in Hansen’s tenure on To Catch a Predator.

“I always loved the way To Catch a Predator mixed truth and fiction — creating this apparatus, blending artifice actors with fake decoy houses and props like the sweet tea and the pepperoni pizza, that would then collide with very, very real stakes,” Oppenheim told Canfield. “How do you create something that captures the darkest feelings of humanity mixed with the feeling you would get when you’d hear Chris Hansen say one of his all-time great one-liners?”

Primetime marks Pattinson’s first producing credit, and in an interview with THR, he said it marked the first time he boarded a project pre-director through release. And he dove deep into the research to create his version of the investigative journalist/entertainment news host.

“I watched a ton of the show, every episode of his podcast, every interview I could find,” Pattinson explained. “But I knew from the first read of the script that the character in the movie was going to be a conceptual figure based on the public persona of ‘Chris Hansen’ as he’s been portrayed and perceived across all mediums and internet culture — a reconfigured egregore of sorts.”

Hansen was not involved in making the movie, and he said he declined an invitation to see it because he was asked to sign an NDA. As reported by THR’s Seth Abramovitch, Hansen purchased pre-show advertising on every screen showing the A24 release, as a way to promote TruBlu, his streaming network devoted to the same kind of predator investigations.

During Saturday afternoon’s press conference, Pattinson said that despite Hansen’s objections, “Obviously, I hope he likes the movie.”

The 83rd edition of the Venice Film Festival concludes with an awards ceremony on Sept. 12.