BLACKPINK member Jennie’s upcoming album Ruby will feature artists like Dua Lipa, Childish Gambino, Doechii, and more

Critic’s Rating: 4.0/5

Review:

‘The Seed of the Sacred Fig’ captivates despite its lengthy 167-minute runtime, offering a gripping narrative of a Tehran-based family’s gradual unravelling amid political turmoil. The film centers on Iman (Missagh Zareh), a government investigator poised to become a judge who faces intense pressure to deliver government-favourable verdicts, including a looming death sentence for a 21-year-old protestor. Iman’s seemingly idyllic family life—with his devoted wife, Najmeh (Soheila Golestani) and two daughters, Rezvan (Mahsa Rostami) and Sana (Setareh Maleki)—is disrupted when Rezvan brings home her injured friend Sadaf (Niousha Akhshi), a protest victim. The family’s precarious situation intensifies when Iman’s official revolver goes missing, threatening his career and freedom. The film skilfully fuses together personal and political struggles, creating a poignant reflection on loyalty, morality, and the impact of political unrest on private lives.

This thriller-drama offers an intimate portrayal of a family’s unravelling amidst political unrest, capturing the tension with remarkable authenticity. The film’s use of real protest footage makes the story feel more realistic and connected to actual events. Focusing on just four family members, it scrutinises the complex challenges arising from the country’s shifting political landscape. Each character navigates a moral dilemma, with Iman embodying the fear and compliance of the middle class under a repressive regime—a portrayal skilfully handled by director Mohammad Rasoulof. The film also subtly highlights the evolving role of women, hinting at a cultural shift towards Western ideals. Rasoulof masterfully weaves these themes into an engaging and thought-provoking narrative.

Beyond its compelling plot and well-crafted screenplay, this film thrives on the strength of its performances. Missagh Zareh delivers a standout portrayal of Iman, a dedicated investigator on the brink of promotion. His depiction of a patriarch torn between his love for his family and the pressures of survival under a repressive regime is both poignant and powerful, capturing the complexities of his character’s internal conflict. Soheila Golestani’s portrayal of Najmeh, the caring yet conflicted wife, is equally impressive. Her restrained, emotive performance lingers long after the credits roll. Mahsa Rostami and Setareh Maleki, as Rezvan and Sana, respectively, bring authenticity and emotional gravitas, rounding out the cast’s remarkable contributions.

‘The Seed of the Sacred Fig’ begins by drawing viewers into the seemingly mundane life of a family, making the sudden shift all the more striking once the revolver enters the picture. What was once a harmonious household quickly descends into panic. The father fears for his job, the mother is consumed by the threat to the family’s reputation, while the daughters grapple with their uncertain futures. Director Mohammad Rasoulof paints a vivid portrait of these escalating tensions, using the screenplay not only to depict the unravelling of a family but also to subtly comment on the broader societal issues plaguing the country.

While this thriller-drama may not be flawless, it stands as a courageous and bold cinematic work that challenges authority with unflinching resolve. The film is filled with powerful moments, particularly the intense scene where Najmeh carefully removes buckshot from Sadaf’s face, highlighting the personal toll of political unrest. The climax is significantly striking as the mother and daughters navigate a maze-like village mound, a metaphor for their entrapment and the complexities of their circumstances. This slow-burning drama builds to a gripping and explosive conclusion. With its riveting narrative and superb performances, the film dares to confront difficult truths, making it a brilliant watch.

News Credit :Times Of India

Laying bare American life’s hidden horrors and absurdities, the auteur behind ‘Mulholland Drive’ and ‘Twin Peaks’ held up a distorted but unsettlingly truthful mirror.

Rare is the artist whose work is such a game-changer that the only way to describe it is to transform their last name into an adjective. Even rarer is the chance of that ever happening in Hollywood, a place where creativity, especially of the dark and deranged kind, tends to take a back seat to commercial viability and the all-powerful bottom line.

Yet somehow, David Lynch, who passed away Thursday at the age of 78, not only directed a game-changing array of films that can only be defined as Lynchian. He did it a time when the American movie business began to grow, and then balloon, into a franchise-driven behemoth where his brand of off-the-wall work was the last thing the studios wanted.

Case in point: Lynch’s debut, Eraserhead, was released in 1977, the same year the first Star Wars came out. Both were, in fact, box office hits: The Lucas film became one of the first big summer blockbusters, paving the way for the kinds of movies that now completely dominate the business. But Lynch’s brilliant black-and-white freakshow, which began as a student project at AFI, was a smash on the midnight circuit, grossing $7 million off a tiny $100,000 budget made up of grants and donations from friends.

Eraserhead was so ungraspable, so far into left field, that most critics dismissed it at the time. Variety called it a “sickening bad-taste exercise” and The New York Times, reviewing three years later, claimed it was “not a particularly horrifying film, merely interminable.” But audiences were drawn to Eraserhead precisely because it was unlike anything they’d ever seen. Here was a movie that wasn’t giving them a story, or characters that even spoke. There was only a screaming mutant baby and a guy with hair like Frankenstein’s bride, coupled with lots of gory close-ups and shattering sound design.

It was as if Lynch had tapped into something that people had wanted to see all along — something bizarre and grotesque beneath the surface that was waiting to be unearthed by an artist as visionary as he was. And perhaps that’s one way to define “Lynchian”: the lifting away of the facades and illusions of so-called normal life — and so-called normal movies — to reveal something that speaks to our darker selves.

My own first encounter with the Lynchian world had a similar effect. After exhausting all the horror and action flicks at my local video store as a teenager, I took a chance on Blue Velvet, a movie I knew nothing about. I went home, popped the tape in the VCR and, for at least the first few minutes, believed I was watching a high school movie. But then things got weird. A severed ear was lying in the bushes, covered with ants. People weren’t speaking like normal people, but like people pretending to be normal people.

By the time I got to the scene where Kyle MacLachlan hides in a closet to spy on Isabella Rossellini, only to see Dennis Hopper emerge with an oxygen mask screaming “Baby wants to fuck!”, I can tell you that my 12-year-old self was transformed. Once again, it was about Lynch stripping away the appearances of the regular world — in this case small-town America — to reveal how those appearances were false, and always had been. The picturesque suburbs we grew up in, or had watched on Leave It to Beaver, were masking something deeply disturbing: unquenched or unspeakable sexual desires buried inside of us, or hidden behind all the happy families portrayed on television.

My second encounter with the Lynchian was, indeed, on TV. And once again it started off seemingly normal, quickly veered off the rails, then plunged into surreal chaos. I was visiting my grandma in Florida when the first episode of Twin Peaks aired during spring break in 1990. There had been lots of promotion by ABC for its new series, and we were both excited to watch the big Sunday night pilot together. Well, by the time we got to the end of those two crazy hours, I was embarrassed to even look over at grandma. What did we just watch? Why was Kyle MacLachlan again playing a guy who keeps encountering so much batshit crazy stuff? And yeah, who killed Laura Palmer?

I went back home to New York the next week, fairly convinced that my grandma, silently knitting as we watched the show (talk about a Lynchian image), would continue following Twin Peaks until the bitter end, just as I was planning to do. Lynch had now transformed my world in a totally different medium. He had managed to take what appeared to be a small-town crime caper, turn it on its head and twist it inside out, exposing its messy innards to the whole nation.

With Twin Peaks, Lynch wasn’t only revealing, yet again, the darkness and weirdness that prevail behind the humble facades of American life. He was showing how those facades were being built up and promoted by the very kind of primetime series he was remolding every Thursday night on ABC. And that’s perhaps another definition of Lynchian: the contorting of familiar genres and tropes, such as a typical TV murder mystery, until those genres and tropes begin to flush away, leaving behind something more sinister and disquieting — something that a TV show was never supposed to do.

Unlike the many books, essays, film school classes and podcasts about his work, Lynch never seemed to have big theories about the things he made — he just made things whenever he could. He was an artist who worked in many mediums: movies, television, music, transcendental meditation, weather reports on his website, and most consistently, painting and the fine arts. (The 2016 documentary, David Lynch: The Art Life, offers a rare glimpse into his process as a plastic artist.) As much as people tried to find meaning in his work, especially his most famous movies, he kept his head down and kept working, even as it became increasingly harder for him to do so in Hollywood.

The culmination of this struggle — between a major artist and the popular art form of movies that he was constantly circumventing — was his 2001 masterpiece, Mulholland Drive. Initiated as another ABC series, the show was dropped by the network at the pilot stage (rumor has it, because Lynch refused to remove a close-up of feces from the edit) and transformed, with additional shooting, into one of the greatest anti-Hollywood movies ever made. In Mulholland Drive, the Lynchian form and function are perfectly united in a story of Tinseltown dreams that drift into nightmares.

The intention is clear from the very start, when a dance number set to Linda Scott’s pop hit “I Told Every Little Star” gets skewed into a kaleidoscope of distortion. (Lynch liked toying with ‘60s chart-toppers: Witness the mesmerizing lip sync of Roy Orbison’s “In Dreams” that Dean Stockwell pulls off in Blue Velvet.)

From there, Mulholland Drive shifts into what feels, at least for 5 minutes, like another story of a bright young ingénue (played by Naomi Watts in a career-defining performance) showing up in L.A. to become a star. But things slide off the rails so quickly, before taking a nosedive into the obscure, that the aspiring-actress plot becomes another façade Lynch tears apart. He’s not only mocking Hollywood and its star system — he’s asking us to consider whether, behind the system, is a shadow world in which all our identities wind up melting down.

As heavy as that all sounds, one shouldn’t forget that many of Lynch’s films, like the man himself, were marked by a dry and sardonic brand of humor that undercut some of the inherent darkness. What lots of viewers and critics found to be grotesque, Lynch may have found funny. One of the best definitions of Lynchian humor, and irony, was laid out by the late David Foster Wallace in his seminal essay on the making of Lost Highway, entitled “David Lynch Keeps His Head”: “An academic definition of Lynchian might be that the term refers to a particular kind of irony where the very macabre and the very mundane combine in such a way as to reveal the former’s perpetual containment within the latter.’ But like postmodern or pornographic, Lynchian is one of those Potter Stewart-type words that’s ultimately definable only ostensively, i.e., we know it when we see it.”

Lost Highway is a good example of a movie that feels so undeniably Lynchian at times that it nearly stoops into self-parody. And yet when I first saw it in 1997, I nearly ran out of the theater, terrified by an absolutely demented Robert Blake charging at the screen with a video camera. Even the opening credits, during which Angelo Badalamenti’s thumping score plays over a shot of a highway at night, felt both ironic and haunting, as if the director were mocking the idea of a road movie while trying to scare the hell out of us.

In the years to come, less-loved Lynch films such as Inland Empire, The Straight Story or the 1984 adaptation of Dune, will likely be reassessed, as will the critically heralded but underseen third season of Twin Peaks, which aired in 2017. The latter contained some of the most baffling sequences to ever play in a TV series, purely Lynchian moments that could be both breathtaking and perplexing.

Twin Peaks: The Return, as it was called, would be the director’s last fully realized work, although he continued to make shorts, and lots of other things, until his death. His first and last big screen appearance was, to the surprise of many, in Steven Spielberg’s 2022 drama The Fabelmans, where he cameoed in the final scene as Hollywood legend John Ford.

It may have seemed like yet another irony to have Ford played by Lynch. The two couldn’t have been more opposed in terms of style and content: Ford, who won about a gazillion Oscars, favored bold pictorial vistas, unfettered lyricism, and outsized emotions — qualities that are about as far as you can get from Lynch, who never won an Oscar for his work and only received an honorary statue in 2019. But similar to Lynch, Ford’s signature was so unique that we now use the term “Fordian” to describe it.

If Fordian means the classical Hollywood style at its absolute apex, Lynchian means what happens when that style, co-opted by today’s Hollywood blockbusters into commercial meaninglessness, gets twisted in a bold new direction that lays bare life’s hidden horrors and absurdities. Many may still see David Lynch as an avant-garde filmmaker, but like Ford, he will ultimately go down as one of the great American directors of his time — an artist whose work is as recognizable as the name itself.

News Credit : The Hollywood Reporter

As it hits Shudder this Friday, Sasha Rainbow’s Grafted is bound to receive a lot of criticism comparing it to another little horror movie called The Substance. That would be fair, as both features deal with a lot of similar themes, from body horror to freak biotechnology to how we succumb to our society’s beauty standards. However, to reduce Grafted to a Substance-like film is more than a little unfair. For starters, the Grafted screen debut is too close to The Substance’s own release date to dub it a rip-off. Secondly, director Coralie Fargeat herself is not shy about admitting to the body horror canon that inspired her own creation. The Substance is full of nods to movies like The Fly and Re-Animator – movies that, no doubt, also inform Rainbow in her film, much like the French classic Eyes Without a Face.

Director: Sasha Rainbow

Cast:Joyena Sun , Jess Hong , Jared Turner , Mark Mitchinson , Ginette McDonald , Benjamin Hudson

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Rainbow and her fellow screenwriters Lee Murray and Mia Maramara manage to do something new with familiar tropes, crafting a work of art that is original and heartfelt in a way that we haven’t seen before. The result is a movie that merits watching, even though it fails in some crucial aspects.

What Is ‘Grafted’ About?

Grafted is the story of Wei (Joyena Sun), a teenage girl who leaves China to live with her aunt and cousin Angela (Jess Hong) in a wealthy suburb of Auckland, New Zealand. Bearing a big reddish blotch on her face, Wei also has a dark past: her father, who suffered from the same condition as his daughter, died as a result of his experiments on the creation of a skin graft that would render them both “beautiful” in society’s eyes. A biology genius in her own right, Wei takes her father’s mantle in trying to change her appearance, but her experiments take a dark turn when her path crosses with Angela’s group of popular mean girls. Things get even worse when her science teacher, a former boy genius, threatens to take away her work.

‘Grafted’ Works Best as a Metaphor For Immigration

Grafted’s story is a bit all over the place. By the end, it feels almost like a wonder that Rainbow, Maramara, and Murray actually manage to wrap up all the loose ends, even if some twists and turns seem to come out of nowhere. But perhaps the most important thing to say about Grafted’s screenplay is that it doesn’t really work as the mediation on beauty standards it textually purports to be via Wei’s insistence that she wants to make people beautiful, including the homeless burn victim she befriends. Instead, Grafted is a tale about a constantly othered immigrant child trying her best to fit in.

Wei is constantly belittled by her New Zealand-born cousin for her attachment to Chinese traditions, and the mean girls that pretend to be her friends mock her not for her blotchy face, but for the food she eats and her altar to her dead father. Thus, it is hard to read Wei’s dark turn as a quest for beauty, and not as a desperate attempt to assimilate to a culture that doesn’t accept her for who she is. Grafted seems a little confused about what its actual themes are. Wei’s skin condition is almost forgotten as the story progresses, but the text keeps insisting that her real desire is to cure her “deformity.”

The very first scene of Grafted is one of its best, courtesy not only of Rainbow but of the cinematography by Tammy Williams and the performances by Mohan Liu and Sam Wang as little Wei and her father, Liu. After that one scene, though, the movie gets chaotic, the story rushing to arrive at the tipping point audiences are certainly waiting for. This leaves little room for the plot and the characters to breathe, as well as no time for us to delight ourselves with Williams’ beautiful and inventive images. Ultimately, it is hard to pick up the film’s tone in its first 30 minutes of screen time, to the point that a less dedicated viewer might give up on watching. Even the script’s very fine sense of humor gets lost as it’s hard to determine whether we’re laughing with or at the story. It is only after the first third that the movie finds its footing.

‘Grafted’ Gets Better as Its Story Gets Wilder

When that happens, Grafted truly becomes something to behold. It’s not exactly great, but it certainly showcases all of the potential of Sasha Rainbow and her team. The performances also get stronger as the story grows wilder, allowing viewers into the full madness of Wei’s world. All that it takes is a head in the fridge and a straightening iron being used as a nunchuck, and suddenly all the pieces fall into place, from Bikkie, the constantly yapping dog, to the over-the-top vibes of most, if not all, death scenes. And it’s as Grafted becomes crazier — and, therefore, funnier — that it achieves its goal.

Grafted is not a scary movie. Instead of fear, it is meant to produce discomfort and disgust. It never really reaches the apex of any of those feelings, as it’s so focused on telling a story that it neglects its visual aspects. And, yet, after Wei goes full haywire, the film gifts us with images that are hard to forget – images that make us cheer in their horror, both because we feel for Wei and because they are kinda punk rock, with amazing practical effects. However, Grafted is guilty of a particularly cruel ending; one that, without too many spoilers, punishes its main character while not convincing us that she deserves it. Sure, Wei does some pretty awful things over the course of the film, but can we really fault her for wanting to feel at home? Do we really revel in her getting her comeuppance? It feels like a resounding “no.”

Nevertheless, Rainbow manages to craft something unique that deserves to be seen. The director’s one hour of unhinged madness is a lot better than many movies that take themselves too seriously out there, even if her first 30 minutes feel bloated and clunky. And, when we take into consideration the fact that this is Rainbow’s first feature film, Grafted becomes even more interesting. There is a lot of promise here, even with all its flaws. With beautiful visuals, an interesting plot, and a middle that some might even say makes up for its beginning and ending, Grafted is worth watching and Sasha Rainbow is a horror filmmaker to keep an eye on.

Grafted releases on Shudder on January 24 in the U.S.

News Credit : collider.com

Jacob Fortune-Lloyd plays Epstein and shows us his business genius, and the torment of his gay life. But even the dark side is a bit too on-the-nose.

Almost anyone who grew up with the Beatles knows a few key things about their manager, Brian Epstein, the subject of the new biopic “Midas Man.” You might know that he ran a popular record store in Liverpool when he first saw the Beatles perform at the Cavern Club and realized that it was his destiny to manage them. You almost surely know that it was Epstein who made over the Beatles’ image, taking four scruffy working-class rockers in black leather jackets, dressing them in collarless gray suits and giving them those fabled moptop haircuts — the look that launched a thousand screams. Or the visionary way he spearheaded the Beatles’ international career, cutting the deal for them to appear on “The Ed Sullivan Show.” Or the fact that Epstein was gay, something he kept well-hidden.

Reviewed online, Jan. 19, 2025. Running time: 112 MIN.

Production: An Olyn, Briarcliff Entertainment release of a Studio Pow, Mister Smith Entertainment, Trevor Beattie Films production. Producers: Perry Trevers, Trevor Beattie, Jeremy Chatterton, William Dietrich, Tom Reeve. Executive producers: Jacob Fortune-Lloyd, Steffen Wild, Asaf Nawi, Mark Borkowski, Peter Dunne, Jordan Reeve, Rawaf Alhasan, David Poole, Charlie Wood, Samanatha Brayson, Saskia Thomas, Ian Hutchinson.

Crew: Director: Joe Stephenson. Screenplay: Brigit Grant, Jonathan Wakeham. Camera: Birgit Bebe Dierken. Editor: Joe Stephenson. Music: Alex Baranowski.

With: Jacob Fortune-Lloyd, Blake Richardson, Jonah Lees, Ed Speleers, Eddie Marsan, Emily Watson, Leo Harvey-Elledge, Campbell Wallace, Adam Lawrence, Darci Shaw, Charley Palmer-Rothwell, Eddie Izzard, Milo Parker, Chukwuma Omambala, James Corrigan, Jay Leno

If you’ve ever seen footage of Brian Epstein, you also know the most resonant and, in a way, the most fascinating thing about him: that he was a straightarrow British gentleman with a rock-steady gaze and a low-key charm, who spoke in a voice of silken aristocratic polish (the product of years of private school). He was as conservative in his businessman’s demeanor as the Beatles were rebellious and cheeky.

If you know even some of this, you go into “Midas Man” wanting to see the fabled anecdotes filled in (which the director, Joe Stephenson, and the screenwriters, Brigit Grant and Jonathan Wakeham, bring off in a rather perfunctory TV-movie fashion). And, of course, you want to see who Brian Epstein really was — the man beneath the image, something the film presents in dutiful tabloid detail. Yet there’s something a bit TV-movie perfunctory about that as well. Even the sketchiest made-for-television biopic of the ’80s was always about the “dark side,” since that, supposedly, is where the drama is.

In “Midas Man,” we get glimpses of Epstein’s secret gay life in Liverpool (picking up men in the middle of the night at isolated cruising spots, at one point engaging a mugger who threatens to blackmail him). And we see how uncomfortable the dawning awareness of his secret side makes his traditional Jewish parents, the adoring Queenie (Emily Watson) and the sternly resentful Harry (Eddie Marsan). Later, when the Beatles are famous and Epstein has moved to London, we see Brian’s liberated but problematic relationship with a ne’er-do-well American actor named Tex (Ed Speleers), and we see his increasing dependence on self-medicating: the tumbler of whiskey he’s always got in hand, his escalating cocktail of amphetamines and barbiturates (so that he can go go go…and then sleep). But even though it’s all true, simply presenting this stuff feels quite…standard.

The film’s star, Jacob Fortune-Lloyd, is an appealing actor (best known for his work on “The Queen’s Gambit”) who dramatizes the crispness of Brian’s intelligence, and how his passion for the Beatles was a response to their magic that he converted into a kind of equation — about how those girls in the packed crowd at the Cavern Club could be leveled up to global scale. He foresaw it all. But I wish Fortune-Lloyd looked more like Brian (he’s taller, darker, and more raw-boned), and that he signified more of Epstein’s almost painful velvet politesse.

“Midas Man” has had a troubled production, with a revolving door of directors and a special problem you wouldn’t see outside of a modestly budgeted early-Beatles biopic. It seems that a number of the film’s investors assumed that it would include original Beatles songs — but, in fact, the producers never landed the rights. So the only songs we hear the Beatles perform in the film are covers (“Please Mr. Postman,” “Money,” etc.).

Sorry, but I could have told the investors that. In what universe would Apple Corps Ltd. or Sony Music Publishing license the use of the Beatles’ music for a small-scale independent production? “Backbeat,” the superb early Beatles biopic from 1994, faced the same stumbling block but made artistic hay out of it (which it could do because the film took place only in Liverpool and Hamburg). But by the time “Midas Man” reaches the moment when the Beatles get famous, you feel the absence of their music, as if scenes had been cut out.

Finding actors to impersonate the Beatles is almost always a cringe endeavor, but I thought these actors did a reasonable job — Blake Richardson avidly reproducing Paul’s grins and head cocks and cherubic stubbornness, Jonah Lees nailing the vulnerability under John’s hostility (though he’s too short! — couldn’t they have given him lifts?).

Backstage at the Cavern Club after he first sees them, Brian says, “You were mah-velous,” which leads to much mockery of his classy airs. But his loyalty is real. When it looks like the Beatles can’t find a record company to sign them, he perseveres, and they land an audition at Parlophone, a label that specializes in comedy. There, they have to win over the house producer, George Martin, played by Charley Palmer Rothwell, who looks so much like Martin — and so exquisitely mimics his meticulous brilliance and Mona Lisa scowl — that he lifts the movie up and, in a strange way, hurts it a bit. Rothwell reminds you, for a few minutes, what a biopic looks like when it’s living up to the gold standard of authenticity. The rest of “Midas Man”…not so much. (Jay Leno as Ed Sullivan? We get the concept, but it still plays like…huh?)

That said, “Midas Man” is never less than watchable, and it does capture something about Brian Epstein that’s honest and affecting. His devotion to the Beatles, and to the business of making them more legendary than Elvis, is so consuming that he seems a man who’s living his dream. Yet keeping his romantic life in the closet torments him. He has his hookups (and doesn’t appear to harbor guilt about his sexuality), but the intense intolerance of his society means that it’s almost impossible for him to fully be with someone. And so the prison Brian finds himself in is one of spiritual isolation. He has no family of his own, and wants one desperately. The Beatles are kind of like family, and so is the winsome Cilla Black (Darci Shaw), one of his growing roster of artists. But they can’t fill that void of loneliness. So when John, shell-shocked by the controversy over his the-Beatles-are-bigger-than-Jesus remark, tells Brian in 1966 that he wants to stop touring, it’s as if Brian is getting kicked off the train of his own existence.

“Midas Man” makes us feel for Brian. Yet the film is too sketchy about too may things. It shows us the exterior of his actual townhouse in London, but what about his hobbies? His taste in movies? Give us something beyond scenes that have that on-the-nose quality. In the last part of the movie, we needed to see more of how Brian’s relationship with the Beatles evolved. “Midas Man” implies that once the group was done touring, they almost didn’t need Brian anymore; that wasn’t the case.

And in the end, the film doesn’t swing far enough to the dark side. Brian Epstein died, on Aug. 27, 1967, of an accidental drug overdose. He was 32, and sitting on top of the world. Yet he had massive doses of uppers and downers in his system. This was one of those overdoses that had the absolute reverberation of a slow-motion, unconscious descent into self-destruction. “Midas Man” shouldn’t have tidied things up by leaving that chapter of his life a mystery. Brian Epstein deserves more than a watchable, serviceable, in too many ways threadbare biopic. Let’s hope that one day (maybe in Sam Mendes’ upcoming Beatles films?) his behind-the-scenes genius, and highly civilized joy and torment, will get their due.

News Credit : Variety.com