Emma Thompson

Alone in Berlin

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Otto and Anna Quangel face each other over the dinner table

During the Second World War, a Berlin couple, Otto and Elise Hampel, waged a two-person war against the Nazi regime. Prompted by the death of their son at the Front, they embarked on a campaign of writing seditious postcards and leaving them all over the city for people to find. The cards urged their fellow countrymen to rise up against Hitler and join the German resistance. Being just little postcards, they weren’t much of a statement, maybe, but they were enough to make the authorities to sit up and take notice. In 1947 writer Hans Fallada published Jeder stirbt für sich allein (Every Man Dies Alone), a novel about the Hampels and their … Read more

Good Luck to You, Leo Grande

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Leo and Nancy in bed

Good Luck to You, Leo Grande is a film about a middle aged woman hiring a young stud for impersonal hotel sex. Things get talky rather than saucy (that stuff is going on off-screen). So much so that you can almost imagine watching it with your mother. Your Mother May Vary. It’s a stage piece, really, a two-hander that feels expressly written for that clever, dithery, diffident, endlessly self-unpromoting British character Emma Thompson has been playing for what seems like aeons. Nanny McPhee gets her bits out. Nancy, not Nanny, since Thompson plays Nancy Stokes (possibly not her real name), a recently widowed ex-teacher whose blameless life of service to her husband, children … Read more

Cruella

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Emma Stone as Cruella

Cruella, like Maleficent, gives a female baddie an origin story, and ends up in the same cul-de-sac, insisting that here is one of the female baddies for the ages, while at the same time asking us to sympathise with a poor Disney dear who’s been badly treated. 101 dogs’ breakfasts is the result. Since Emma Stone is one of the film’s producers (as is former Cruella De Vil Glenn Close, interestingly), she is partly to blame for this boring, messy film. Which is a pity because that wonky smile and arched eyebrow suit her magnificently for the role of Cruella, the girl born Estella who, after her mother is killed by Dalmatians, grows … Read more