A Complete Unknown, from Walk the Line director James Mangold, will show the musician’s rise to worldwide fame in early 60s New York City

The first trailer for A Complete Unknown shows Oscar nominee Timothée Chalamet as Bob Dylan in the much-anticipated biopic.

The Dune and Call Me by Your Name star has transformed into the legendary musician for an awards-aiming drama to be released in the US in December. It comes from film-maker James Mangold, who previously directed the Johnny Cash biopic Walk the Line.

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From her Oakland background to her Black Hollywood ties, the vice-president’s experience is resonating with voters

Within moments of Joe Biden announcing his decision to hand his presidential campaign over to Kamala Harris, the greatest hits of her meme stardom re-entered circulation: the “We did it, Joe” call, the “Momala” interview with Drew Barrymore. Never mind callbacks to the vice-president quoting her Indian mother’s habit of asking, in frustration, “You think you just fell out of a coconut tree?”

Black Twitter users, however, quickly recalled Harris’s august history as the Black girl next door – starting with the 2019 Breakfast Club interview in which Harris defended herself against charges that she was not “African American” because her parents were immigrants. “Look, this is the same thing they did to Barack [Obama],” she said. “I was born Black. I will die Black, and I’m not going to make excuses for anybody because they don’t understand.”

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This David Puttnam-produced parable of patriotism, faith and meritocratic success – rereleased in honour of the 1924 event – is on the level of classic Hollywood

In honour of both the imminent Paris Olympics and the centenary of the 1924 Olympics, also in Paris, here is a rerelease of this superbly watchable true-story parable of patriotism, faith and meritocratic success within the system, much admired by Margaret Thatcher, Ronald Reagan and Joe Biden . It was produced by David Puttnam, who had discovered the story of the devout Christian athlete Eric Liddell refusing to run on Sunday and commissioned a terrifically punchy and sympathetic script from Colin Welland (whose victorious Oscar night cry of “the British are coming!” was destined to be endlessly and ironically re-quoted at moments of British failure and disappointment in Hollywood). It was Welland who incorporated Jewish sprinter Harold Abrahams into the film (as well as another gold medallist, Douglas Lowe, who refused any involvement and had to be written out).

The film was directed with gusto by first-time director and former adman Hugh Hudson, an Old Etonian who had a real feeling for how the establishment preens itself. The British Olympic team’s ecstatic barefoot training run on Broadstairs beach is accompanied by the instantly iconic, daringly non-period and trance-inducing synth score by Vangelis, hilariously spoofed by Rowan Atkinson’s Mr Bean in the London 2012 opening ceremony. And watching the credits again, you might jump at that name just behind Welland and Hudson: young producer Dodi Fayed, given prominence in exchange for cash from his father Mohamed , whose own establishment yearnings were as painful as anything on screen.

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Michael Winner’s violent 1974 thriller demonized inner-city living and rationalised bloody revenge, a film that still acts as a telling Republican text

We denizens of the present like to presume a higher degree of moral clarity over the past, but some things don’t require the benefit of hindsight to be correctly assessed. They had Michael Winner’s 1974 film Death Wish dead to rights the first time around, for instance, when a solid faction of critics cried foul at its shameless stoking of reactionary fears about inner-city living.

In one of his two broadsides against the low-budget thriller turned surprise blockbuster, the New York Times’ Vincent Canby branded it “a tackily made melodrama, but it so cannily orchestrates the audience’s responses that it can appeal to law‐and‐order fanatics, sadists, muggers, club women, fathers, older sisters, masochists, policemen, politicians, and, it seems, a number of film critics”. Some took its despairing depiction of New York City as a lawless hellscape teeming with street criminals at face value; others charged Winner with panic-mongering, playing on a paranoid conservative imagination to his own benefit. So the culture war lines were drawn, and so they remain.

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L'adaptation cinématographique signée Philippe Lacheau donne de ses nouvelles un peu plus d'un an après son annonce.

Jane Schoenbrun confirms her place as a superbly gifted film-maker with the weirdly wonderful story of two misfits finding solace in a creepy TV show

Cinephiles lie awake at night worrying that talented young film-makers are deserting cinema for TV. Jane Schoenbrun, one of the most gifted around, has just made a superb feature film about a fictional TV show, imagined here with such loving and unnerving intensity that it surely can’t be long before they are called upon to conjure up a dozen or so episodes for real. With a compelling cod-90s score by Schoenbrun’s musical collaborator Alexander Giannascoli, or Alex G, I Saw the TV Glow lives on in my head. It deserves cult classic status without the “cult”; it is deeply scary, deeply strange and deeply sad, a deadly serious new version of Gore Vidal’s Myra Breckinridge for the 2020s.

Schoenbrun made a brilliant impression with a startling debut in 2021 that exploited the lockdown-Zoom aesthetic with an ingenuity that, for me, is still unmatched by any other film, the no-budget chiller We’re All Going to the World’s Fair , about a young woman drawn into the world of online gaming and collaboratively authored creepypasta-type online horror. There were no in-person dialogue scenes: everyone was alone in an atomised universe. Now we are in the pre-internet world of the 1990s, in a high school where parents are voting for a second Clinton term. Owen, played by Ian Foreman as a kid and as an adult by Justice Smith (from Benjamin Caron’s thriller Sharper ), is a deeply unhappy person, unsure about his relationship with his mother, about his sexuality, about everything. He meets the older, supercool, emo-ish Maddy (Brigette Lundy-Paine, channelling a very young Winona Ryder), equally unhappy and abused by her stepdad. She is queer (as hardly anyone used to say in 1996) and, asked about his own preferences, Owen says shyly that he “likes TV shows”.

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She got her big break on Lena Dunham’s hit show – and has since established a great and growing career. The actor and writer discusses Madame Web, introversion and her surprisingly personal essays

Zosia Mamet hasn’t seen Madame Web, the turkey that crashed the Marvel franchise earlier this year and launched a thousand memes. “I chose not to,” she says with a smile. Mamet starred in the Spider-Man spin-off, which has an 11% rating on Rotten Tomatoes, was described by one reviewer as a “Chornobyl-level disaster”, and became one of this year’s biggest box-office bombs.

The 36-year-old actor laughs awkwardly when I mention it. For a few days in February, Madame Web – and lead actor Dakota Johnson’s sublime press tour – was all the internet wanted to talk about.

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The highly-anticipated odd-couple action bromance shatters the fourth wall into a million pieces with plenty of juke-box slams to keep blood-sugar content high

Can the ailing Marvel Cinematic Universe franchise be redeemed with a metric tonne of frantically self-aware comedy? Now that fewer and fewer people care, can this summer tent pole persuade them to have a laugh at what they used to care about? Can the superhero genre get back on top with a gag riot from Ryan Reynolds’s wisecracking crime fighter Deadpool in an odd-couple action bromance with Hugh Jackman’s wizened Wolverine as his straight man, the careworn spirit of seriousness?

Kind of. Deadpool was always the satiric turn – but this is a movie which more or less orders the audience to stop taking any of the proceedings seriously, shattering the fourth wall into a million pieces with material about nerds saving their “special sock” for particular fight scenes. It cheerfully (if sheepishly) makes mock of the MCU’s cosmic timeline shenanigans which permit characters to be brought back to life and even does loads of very tiresome corporate in-jokes about Disney taking over Fox, presumably on the basis that civilians care as much about this as the Hollywood combatants. Reynolds is often funny, sometimes very funny, periodically entirely unbearable, often a weird and interesting mix of the three.

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A lineup for the senses includes Tim Burton’s Beetlejuice sequel, Lady Gaga in Joker: Folie à Deux and Angelina Jolie as Maria Callas. How nutritious it will prove remains to be seen

Kidman, Clooney, Craig and Jolie join Venice film festival lineup

Once again, Venice film festival director Alberto Barbera presents a mouthwateringly calorific menu of awards-bait movies, and a pageant of Hollywood stars about to arrive at the Palazzo del Cinema , kicking off with Tim Burton’s sequel Beetlejuice Beetlejuice .

The debate about festival gender parity among directors, never a huge priority in Venice, does seem to have receded still further in the memory – but there are brilliant women directors and it’s another festival of alpha-list auteurs and bankable names either side of the camera, both in competition and out – 86-year-old French icon Claude Lelouch is incidentally in the latter list, poignantly giving us his swan song Finalement … Ou La Folie Des Sentiments .

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