Oscar-winning director Chloé Zhao had her London Film Festival audience completely zen ahead of the U.K. premiere of Hamnet.
The Nomadland and Eternals filmmaker was introduced by Hollywood heavyweight Steven Spielberg — a co-producer on the movie through Amblin Entertainment — ahead of the screening at London’s Royal Festival Hall on Saturday. The gut-wrenching period drama follows Paul Mescal as William Shakespeare and Jessie Buckley as his wife, Agnes, thrown into contrasting experiences of grief following the death of their young son, Hamnet.
“When you see this, I have to just explain one thing,” the Jaws and E.T. director began. “I really believe that the earth has a heartbeat. It’s a 24/7 seismic cycle and it’s true. All of us are connected to this heartbeat which happens right under our feet, but Chloé Zhao has connected to it in a profound way because it’s where her art comes from. It’s what she plugs into. It’s what she brings to the set every day. It’s what she anoints and brings to her cast every day.”
“And I really believe that when you see Hamnet,” continued Spielberg, “you’ll be able to feel the seismic heartbeat of the earth because of Chloé Zhao.”
Zhao entered the theater to raucous applause and spoke spiritually about the making of Hamnet, a film she co-wrote with Northern Irish writer Maggie O’Farrell based on O’Farrell’s 2020 novel of the same name.
“I feel immense gratitude because today we finally bring Hamnet home,” said the Chinese creative, visibly emotional. “Making this film on this island with this village has given me a deep, deep feeling of belonging, of community, of safety, and I don’t think I’ve ever experienced it before. And it helped me through a very difficult time in my life.”
“When you see #Hamnet, you’ll be able to feel the seismic heartbeat of the earth because of Chloé Zhao.”
Steven Spielberg makes a surprise appearance at the London Film Festival to introduce Chloé Zhao and ‘Hamnet’. #LFF25 pic.twitter.com/4ynKkhGEp8
— The Hollywood Reporter (@THR) October 11, 2025
After she had finished speaking, silence fell across the room as Zhao led a meditative session with the thousands of audience members — as well as Mescal, Buckley and producer Sam Mendes on stage — who breathed in and out, palms to chest in rhythm with the director. She did the same ahead of the movie’s TIFF outing last month.
Mescal caught up with The Hollywood Reporter on the carpet ahead of the screening. “Thank God that we were both in Telluride at the same time,” said Mescal about meeting Zhao, who told THR at TIFF that she could only envision making Hamnet once she’d met the Irish talent.
“I loved the book so much,” the Gladiator II and Aftersun actor added. “And [Telluride] was one of those times where I shamelessly was putting myself in position for a film,” he confessed. “I was like, ‘I really think this would work,’ and I’m very glad that Chloé agreed to.”
On the swift awards buzz that the movie has garnered out of screenings at Telluride and TIFF (THR‘s current standings have both leads as frontrunners for Oscar nominations), Mescal said: “It’s something that’s out of your hands when you’re making it, but it does correlate to something. I’t’s correlating to an appetite for audiences to want to talk about it. And what will be will be,” he continued, “but I’m definitely proud that people are recognising the film that we made and not seeing a different film. That’s always the great fear.”
Diane Keaton, who sparkled in her Oscar-winning turn as the titular quirky woman in Woody Allen’s Annie Hall and portrayed the outsider Kay Adams-Corleone in Francis Ford Coppola’s three Godfather films, has died. She was 79.
Her death in California was reported by People magazine. Further details were not immediately available.
Keaton also starred as a playwright/mother who becomes involved with a nefarious womanizer (Jack Nicholson) in Something’s Gotta Give (2003), good for her fourth best actress Oscar nomination. She was nominated for her work as a writer-activist in Warren Beatty’s Reds (1981) and as a woman with leukemia in Marvin’s Room (1996) as well.
Keaton had an acclaimed performance as a Catholic school teacher who frequents singles bars in the dark Looking for Mr. Goodbar (1977), starred in the thriller The Little Drummer Girl (1984) and co-starred with Jessica Lange and Sissy Spacek in the emotional Crimes of the Heart (1986).
She also played warm, off-center mothers in such comedies as Baby Boom (1987) and the two Father of the Bride films of 1991 and ’95 and delighted in The First Wives Club (1996), with Goldie Hawn and Bette Midler, and the two Book Club movies, with Jane Fonda, Candice Bergen and Mary Steenburgen, of 2018 and ’23.
Allen wrote the iconic, insecure “la-di-dah” role in Annie Hall (1977) specifically for her, based on their real-life romance. (In THR‘s original review, Arthur Knight said Keaton “has to be the consummate actress of our generation.”)
She also starred for Allen in the film version of Play It Again, Sam (1972), Sleeper (1973), Love and Death (1975), Interiors (1978), Manhattan (1979), Radio Days (1987) and Manhattan Murder Mystery (1993). The filmmaker credited her as his muse during a very important portion of his career.
With her idiosyncratic wardrobe in Annie Hall, complete with menswear, vests, fedoras and baggy pants, she inspired a “look.” And she could sing; who doesn’t admire her rendition of “Seems Like Old Times” in the film.
Throughout her life and career, Keaton was a fun, adorable interview, charming listeners with her half-completed sentences, eruptive giggles and shy warbles.
Diane Keaton with her best actress Oscar for ‘Annie Hall’ in 1978.
Courtesy Everett Collection
On the eve of Keaton accepting the American Film Institute’s Life Achievement Award in 2017, THR’s Sheri Linden praised the actress’ “singular mix of intellect and heart, innocence and yearning that has infused dozens of roles over the past 45 years.”
Her “self-questioning honesty, familiar to anyone who has seen her interviewed or read her memoirs, is also essential to her distinctive work as an actor, whether she’s spoofing it up in a wacky satire, bringing a historical figure to full-blooded life or exploring the recognizable challenges of parenthood and marriage.
“She doesn’t need to stake a claim on center stage, even when she’s playing the title character — the immortal Annie Hall — in a movie that’s a valentine to her talent and spirit. She draws us in effortlessly.”
Asked by THR’s Mia Galuppo in a 2023 interview what makes a character one she would want to play, she replied: “It’s someone who has issues that are pulsing in her being. It’s also about the people, the actors and the directors [you work with]. It all depends.
“[Certain people] will let you be partially this or feel better about whatever you’re doing, as opposed to you worrying about how it’s all going to bear up. But I’ve been around a long time, and I still like it.”
Born Diane Hall — the oldest of four children — in Los Angeles on Jan. 5, 1946, she was inspired to become an actress by her mom, Dorothy, who was once named “Mrs. Los Angeles” in a pageant for homemakers. “I was a 6-year-old watching my mother in the Highland Park Theatre, which is still there, and I watched her win,” she said.
She performed in productions at Santa Ana College, and after a short stint at USC moved to New York, where she studied at The Neighborhood Playhouse under Sanford Meisner and changed her surname to Keaton (her mother’s maiden name) because another actress had that name.
(Subsequently, another young actor, so inspired, went from Michael Douglas to Michael Keaton.)
Her first professional role came in 1968 as a replacement in the original Broadway production of Hair, though it was said she refused to disrobe during performances. After nine months in the long-running musical, she auditioned for Allen’s stage comedy Play It Again, Sam and earned a Tony nomination in 1969 (her character has an affair with Allen’s magazine writer).
She said a big milestone for her was getting a 1970 commercial for Hour After Hour deodorant. “That was the biggest job I ever had at the time,” she said. “That sealed the deal. I would be nervous, anxious, try to work and then do the job. It got more and more normal.”
Keaton made her motion picture debut as an unhappy wife in Lovers and Other Strangers (1970) before being hired to portray Michael Corleone’s (Al Pacino) girlfriend, Kay Adams, in The Godfather (1972). “She played a non-Sicilian in a mafia clan, a Baptist among Catholics, a woman in a man’s world, an outsider looking in,” Linden noted.
Getting cast by Coppola “terrified” her, she said.
“I didn’t understand why me,” she told Galuppo. “I mean, I went up to the audition. I didn’t even really — I hadn’t read it. See, this is bad! But I needed a job, so I got up there. I’d been auditioning around for about a year, and then this happened like that. And I kept thinking, ‘Why me? Why would he cast me?’ I didn’t understand it. I still don’t, really.”
Diane Keaton with Al Pacino in 1972’s ‘The Godfather.’
Courtesy Everett Collection
In 1976, she played in two movie comedies, I Will, I Will … for Now and Harry and Walter Go to New York., before Annie Hall happened.
In addition to The Godfather sequels in 1974 and 1990, her big-screen résumé included Shoot the Moon (1982), The Good Mother (1988), The Other Sister (1999), The Family Stone (2005), Because I Said So (2007), 5 Flights Up (2014) and Summer Camp (2024).
She teamed with filmmaker Nancy Meyers on Baby Boom, the two Father of the Bride movies and Something’s Gotta Give.
Keaton also directed. On the film side, she helmed Heaven (1987), a documentary about the afterlife, and the scripted Unstrung Heroes (1995), the story of a boy stricken with cancer, and the comedy Hanging Up (2000). On the TV side, she handled episodes of China Beach, Twin Peaks and Pasadena.
“I thought I could do it, but really, it was rough,” she said of directing. “I don’t mean [people] were rough or anyone, it was me. Sometimes it’d be a little easier, and then other times you’d be anxious. You need to really be on it and really smart about what you’re delving into with the subject that you’ve been given. I get that as an actress more — or an actor type or whatever I am — just by being one of the characters.”
She also produced films including Gus Van Sant’s Elephant (2003).
The stylish Keaton — known for her trousers, turtlenecks, boots, big belts and bigger hats — also was a committed preservationist whose writing and photography led to memoirs and photo books of movie stills, old hotel ballrooms and lobbies and California architecture. She had a long history in renovating properties and was known as a “serial home flipper.”
She said her love for houses started when her father, Jack, was a real estate agent, and she used to follow him to open houses in L.A. “I always had an interest in homes and the concept of home, but the problem is I never really land and stay. Something’s wrong. But something’s right, because I love it,” Keaton told Wine Spectator in 2017.
She built a home in Sullivan Canyon that takes up 8,000 square feet and is filled with burnt-red brick. In her 2017 book, The House That Pinterest Built, she noted her dream home was inspired by The Three Little Pigs and wrote, “I knew I was going to live in a brick house when I grew up.”
One of her more famous renovations was a 1920s Pacific Palisades home designed by Frank Lloyd Wright that she purchased in 2007 for $9.1 million and spent years working on. It was restored to Wright’s original designs, except for a renovated kitchen, and was listed in May for $12.8 million.
Survivors include her children, daughter Dexter and son Duke, whom she adopted in 1996 and 2001, respectively. She never married, though she did date Allen, Pacino and Beatty. “I’m really glad I didn’t get married. I’m an oddball,” she once told People.
About her acting career, “I feel just the same way I’ve always felt about whatever comes my way,” she told Galuppo. “If it’s OK, then I can manage it. Or maybe if I feel like if I’m not really that comfortable, I’m going to learn something from somebody.”
Yorgos Lanthimos might be on board with AI, after all.
The Oscar-nominated filmmaker, director of movies The Favourite, Poor Things and Kinds of Kindness, jokingly told BFI London Film Festival attendees on Saturday that he’s willing to send out a computer-generated avatar of himself if it helps him get out of promotional duties.
Lanthimos spoke with Succession creator Jesse Armstrong the day after the U.K. premiere of his latest thriller, Bugonia, starring Emma Stone as a powerful CEO who is kidnapped by two conspiracy-obsessed men, played by Jesse Plemons and Aidan Delbis, convinced she is an alien about to destroy Earth.
“I have mixed feelings about… figuring out what the best way to do it is, because [producers] spend a lot of money and they do have to make it back,” Lanthimos began when asked if he cares about the commercial success of his features. “It’s not my passion to go around being photographed and tell people stuff. It’s almost the same amount of time as making a film — you spend four to six months filming, six months editing and then you have, like, six months going around promoting the film.”
He continued about the repetitive nature of a film’s press run: “Isn’t there another way? You sit down with your people and they say, [You need to do] this interview, this interview. Can’t you just take out some of them? Do I have to do all of them and say the same thing a thousand times? By the middle of the day, I won’t remember the things I’ve said. I’m looking at people like, ‘Did I tell you this?’” It’s a big part of it, I understand… But especially now with technology, you capture something and everyone has it! Why do I have to do it a million times?”
As audience members erupted with laughter, the director joked, “I mean, AI… I’ll make an avatar and send it out. That sounds really opposite to my beliefs [about AI]!”
Armstrong quipped back: “First you want a dictatorship and now you want an AI version of yourself to talk about your films.” The award-winning Brit writer was referring to earlier in the session when Lanthimos told Armstrong he believes the world needs a benevolent dictator to combat the far-right dominating the world’s current political landscape. “The way things are going, [we have] ones that are doing the bad things, but [we need] a dictator who does good things for the people.”
Lanthimos clarified: “Because it seems like, whatever you call it, maybe the left, they haven’t found a way to do this. You need someone who will take responsibility and go: ‘We’re going to do the good things.’”
Across the session, the men covered a myriad of topics including how Lanthimos made films in the wake of the 2008 financial crash — which hit Lanthimos’ native Greece particularly hard — and finding creative freedom in moving to the U.K. to make English-language films.
Stone, in particular, is already garnering more awards buzz for Bugonia only two years after her Oscar win for Poor Things.
Friday’s BlumFest 2025 panel at New York Comic Con teased celebrating the studio’s 15th anniversary with appearances by the Black Phone 2 and Five Nights at Freddy’s sequel teams, exclusive footage and the announcement of Megan Fox as part of FNAF 2’s voice cast.
Producer and Blumhouse studio founder Jason Blum opened the panel, speaking to where he’d want to go in another decade and a half. “One of the things I’m proudest of is discovering and empowering new talent. People who haven’t done horror, or maybe have done a little bit of horror. People like Jordan Peele,” he told the crowd. “What I’m really looking forward to is meeting and hopefully producing the next generation of horror. Probably the most exciting part about my job, especially as I get older, is working with young people who have vision and energy.”
He also shouted out several upcoming film and TV titles, such as Lee Cronin’s The Mummy. “I just saw it two weeks ago, but you’re gonna be very happy about it, but I’m not supposed to talk it up too much. It’s really cool,” he shared. He then shouted out the Jessica Chastain-led and Rob Savage directed The Other Mommy and the series Scarpetta, with Nicole Kidman.
At one point during the panel, the audience received a message from The Further, with Blum noting that Insidious: The Red Door will arrive next fall. During another portion of the panel, Nine inch Nails’ and Eyes Out Studio’s Robin Finck arrived on stage to tease Sleep Awake, the upcoming Blumhouse game that uses full motion video within the 3D game space.
“It’s set in a stunning world, truly of environmental storytelling, and it leverages unique story-driven puzzles with intense stealth and chase sequences,” he said. “We’re playing in a world where everyone is in a panic to remain awake because those who succumb to sleep inexplicably vanish. People are disappearing, leaving only void shadows behind.” The soundtrack will be released on Milan Records.
Read on for more on Black Phone 2 and Five Nights at Freddy’s 2 reveals at BlumFest 2025.
Five Nights at Freddy’s 2
Blum, director Emma Tammi, actor Elizabeth Lail and Matthew Lillard all made appearances during the last portion of Friday’s panel, where the director teased that fans can expect “a bunch more animatronics.” That includes Toy Freddie and Toy Bonnie, who made character appearances in the crowd. She also noted that there were more humans, with Lael and Lillard both making appearances. In terms of what the cast and creative team were excited about with the sequel, Lillard teased more lore, more jump scares.
Tammi also revealed several sequel voice actors, including Kellen Goff (Toy Freddy), MatPat (Toy Bonnie) and Megan Fox (Toy Chica). “Her kids happen to be huge Five Nights at Freddy‘s fans as well. So she has heard about this world for a long time from her kids, and she was really pumped to do the voice of Toy Chica. She did the most amazing job. She wanted to pay homage to the games, but also make it her own. And I’m so stoked for you guys to hear her. She’s amazing,” said Tammi of Fox’s casting.
Black Phone 2
Blum was joined by cast members Ethan Hawke, Mason Thames, Madeleine McGraw, Miguel Mora, Demián Bichir and author Joe Hill appeared to tease the sequel and shared exclusive footage in the room. Beyond the clip, the group discussed the first movie’s impact, coming back for another film and what tonally makes the sequel different from the original.
“I wrote the story over 20 years ago, and I got paid like 35 bucks for it, so I was pretty psyched about the film, because Jason Blum actually pays a little bit better,” Hill said about the initial reaction to the films. “I knew it was in good hands because Scott Erickson and Robert Cargill were tackling it, and everything they’ve done has come from the heart. They care intensely about the characters and put the characters first in their stories. I felt safe with them.”
Hawke spoke to Scott’s pitch on a sequel, noting that he got it while in an airport. “Scott said, ‘I really have an idea for a sequel,’ and I paced the airport for about an hour as he kind of described what this movie is. It was breathtaking. Just the dream of the movie, everything that it was,” he said. “In the years that the movie has come out, the fans have really grown and really cared. Knowing the script I’ve read, we were going to make a lot of people really happy.”
Added Thames, “When the movie came out, and how the fans received it, and how special it was to so many people, was insane. It was such a whirlwind. So getting the chance to bring it back, and bring these characters back in this world, expanding on that in a way that I never could have imagined, it’s really special.”
McGraw teased what fans can expect coming back, while noting how it was challenging for her. “Gwen is honestly completely different from where we left off in the first movie. Obviously, years have gone by, and you get to see the trauma and how it has shaped them, and how they’ve tried to grow from it,” she said. “She definitely feels like an outcast now. She’s much more reserved than she was in the first one, and I am definitely the opposite of that. I’m a very social and extroverted person, so I feel like, in a lot of ways, especially with all the emotional scenes, it definitely tested my abilities as an actor.”
Added Mora, “Black Phone 2 revolves so deeply around the trauma that these characters go through, and that they experience was the terrifying grabber,” he said. “Grief is one of those very heavy things with these characters. Ernesto lost his brother in the first one, and stepping into this new perspective was definitely quite the challenge, but something I really enjoyed.”
Jim Caviezel will not return to play Jesus Christ for director Mel Gibson‘s forthcoming follow-ups to the smash hit The Passion of the Christ, The Hollywood Reporter has confirmed.
Lionsgate is set to release the two-film project The Resurrection of the Christ theatrically in 2027, with the production aiming to begin soon in Rome. Key roles will be recast for the new movies, as Caviezel will not reprise the titular part of Jesus, while Monica Bellucci also won’t return as Mary Magdalene.
Telling the story of Jesus’ arrest and crucifixion, The Passion of the Christ was a box office sensation when it hit theaters Feb. 25, 2004, surpassing $600 million globally. Until last year, the movie’s $370 million box office sum in North America made it the highest-grossing R-rated title of all time domestically. Gibson’s gamble to produce and self-finance the movie clearly paid off.
After having been in the works for nearly a decade, The Resurrection of the Christ: Part One hits theaters March 26, 2027, which is Good Friday. Forty days later, Part Two will debut May 6, 2027, in honor of Ascension Day. Gibson is producing the films with Icon Production partner Bruce Davey.
Newmarket Releasing/courtesy Everett Collection
The lead role in The Passion of the Christ has been a career-defining one for Caviezel. He is also known for starring on the CBS series Person of Interest and in such films as Angel Eyes and Sound of Freedom.
During an April interview on the Arroyo Grande podcast, Caviezel appeared to be ready to star in Resurrection. “It takes a while to make these things, but it takes the right time, and only God knows that,” Caviezel said about the lengthy gap between the 2004 feature and the forthcoming one. “Am I scared? Yes, but if I wasn’t, I wouldn’t want to work with that actor because you’re not ready.”
In its 2004 review of The Passion of the Christ, THR noted the film’s “near pornographic violence” and deemed it “a medieval Passion Play with much better effects.”
New York Post was first to report on the roles being recast.
After a quarter century as a working actor, it’s hardly surprising that Bradley Cooper would be drawn for subject matter to the cathartic nature of performing and its effect on relationships. What’s less expected is that all three of his highly accomplished films as director have used that spark in such different ways. A Star Is Born explored the arc of a couple respectively experiencing the glow of the spotlight and the chill as it dims, while Maestro weighed the creative genius of an impassioned artist against the limited oxygen left for a uniquely complex love story.
In Cooper’s tenderly observed third feature, Is This Thing On?, performance is a rebound reflex, a therapeutic means of working through the end of a marriage and stumbling onto the self-discovery necessary to process what went wrong — inadvertently realizing that the foundations on which it was built remain intact. It’s an unassuming comic drama that sneaks up on you, its emotional honesty fueled by gorgeous performances of unimpeachable naturalness from Will Arnett and Laura Dern.
Is This Thing On?
The Bottom Line
Soulful, funny and affecting.
Venue: New York Film Festival (Closing Night, Main Slate) Release date: Friday, Dec. 19 Cast: Will Arnett, Laura Dern, Andra Day, Bradley Cooper, Christine Ebersole, Ciarán Hinds, Sean Hayes, Amy Sedaris Director: Bradley Cooper Screenwriters: Bradley Cooper, Will Arnett, Mark Chappell
Rated R,
2 hours
Inspired by British footballer-turned-comedian John Bishop’s personal story and written by Cooper and Arnett with Mark Chappell, the movie drops the bombshell of marital breakdown with a disarming absence of melodrama. “I think we need to call it, right?” says Dern’s Tess Novak, while cleaning her teeth before bed. “I think so too,” concurs Arnett’s Alex. Refreshingly, it’s a mutual decision that appears not to be pickled in bitterness but grounded in maturity and mutual respect.
Peeling away any superfluous connective tissue along with the preamble, the script picks up on Alex and Tess having an amicable get-together with their friends in Manhattan — long-married couple Christine (Andra Day) and Balls (Cooper), soon to be empty nesters, and gay newlyweds Stephen (Sean Hayes) and Geoffrey (Hayes’ real-life husband Scott Icenogle).
Only later when they sit on a Grand Central platform sharing a hash cookie and Alex absent-mindedly gets up to board the Metro-North train with Tess does it become clear that the couple is already living apart.
Slightly stoned and clearly in no rush to go home alone, Alex wanders into the Olive Tree Café in the West Village. To avoid paying the $15 cover charge, he puts his name down on the sign-up sheet for open mic night at the Comedy Cellar downstairs. After an uncertain start, he begins riffing with candor and self-deprecation about his divorce after 26 years with his ex, revealing that he’s living alone in a city apartment. Seemingly to his own surprise as much as anyone’s, his impromptu material gets laughs.
Skipping over the usual “breaking-the-news” scenes regarding Tess and Alex’s separation, the film focuses more on their adjustment and that of the people closest to them. The chief moments of revelation are those pertaining to Alex’s burgeoning stand-up career as he gains confidence and begins to feel a camaraderie with fellow performers — many of them played by New York comedy scene fixtures, adding immeasurably to the film’s fond sense of place.
The most poignant moment takes place in Alex’s car as he’s driving his 10-year-old sons (Blake Kane and Calvin Knegton) — not twins, but “Irish twins,” as he describes them on stage — back home after an overnight stay at his apartment. Disconcerted to find themselves and their mother serving as joke material in the notebook they discover beside their dad’s bed, the boys are confused, one of them particularly upset.
It’s a forgivable movie-ish contrivance to have Tess on a quasi-date (with Peyton Manning in an amusing appearance) wander into the Comedy Cellar by chance and catch Alex’s act, just as he’s sharing the unaccustomed sensations of sex with another woman for the first time in decades. He also confesses that it made him miss his ex-wife more, wondering what that’s about.
Arnett and Dern so fully inhabit their characters that nothing about that awkward encounter feels false. Instead, it uncovers mutual affection and attraction that have been dormant rather than dead, in a funny, sexy, kinda sorta reunion. There’s no swift solution to Tess and Alex’s problems as a couple, but there is a new willingness to talk about their frustrations.
Just as Alex finds a contentment that he’s been missing through stand-up, Tess returns to volleyball, a sport at which she excelled in her younger years, finding gratifying opportunities as a professional coach. While Alex’s stand-up evolution is the hook, the heart of the movie is their marriage. It’s to the filmmakers’ credit that rather than one man’s reawakening, it becomes a re-evaluation for both partners of the value and meaning of loving commitment.
The shifts in the central couple’s relationship are also echoed in different ways by the other couples around them. That includes Alex’s parents — his father Jan (Ciarán Hinds), a warm, sensitive soul with empathetic access to his son’s feelings; and the hilariously plain-spoken Marilyn (Christine Ebersole), who makes no apologies for the close friendship with Tess that she has no intention of severing.
Family scenes with the boys and their two big adorably lollopy dogs at home or at their grandparents’ place are so lived-in and natural — the defining strength of Cooper’s work with his entire cast — that we feel the pangs Alex feels in stepping away from that life.
The other chief marital comparison point is Christine and Balls, notably during an annual group weekend with Stephen and Geoffrey in a sprawling house in Oyster Bay, Long Island, where Alex and Tess sneak around to conceal the fact that they are, if not definitively back together, at least having sex. (A lovely interlude as the various guests wander down to breakfast while Christine gently sings “Amazing Grace” seems a direct nod to The Big Chill.)
In amusing intersecting scenes, Balls tells Alex that seeing him so happy has inspired him to ask Christine for a divorce. Christine, who has always been closer to Tess and a little prickly around Alex, tells him that watching him stagnate and lose his spark has confirmed her belief that marriage just doesn’t work.
This is a superb ensemble piece with a wonderfully loose, almost improv vibe and an emotional trajectory that rarely goes exactly where you might expect. Cooper’s grasp of the material is unerring, imbuing it with a sweetness that’s never cloying, a generosity of spirit that’s never unearned. And the film’s intimacy throughout is amplified in the frequent tight close-ups of cinematographer Matthew Libatique’s expressive visual language.
The movie gives the distinct sense of a quick, unfussy shoot with an easygoing sense of community — on the set, in the stand-up milieu and among Tess and Alex’s friends and family. Everything flows; nothing feels forced.
Cooper gets considerable humorous mileage out of his goofy stoner role, starting with a guffaw-inducing pratfall entrance involving an exploding carton of oat milk. But there’s no scene-stealing, just harmoniously synced ensemble work that makes us invested in all the connections orbiting around Alex and Tess, roles in which Arnett and Dern could not be better. Arnett’s comic timing is a given, but the actor finds previously unseen depths in the ache roiling underneath.
A scene in the Oyster Bay attic bedroom when Alex suggests a therapy exercise in which they confess the things they dislike about each other is both needling and perceptive in its insights into the give and take, the corrosive compromises, the pettiness that flares into resentment that can come to define a long-term relationship. But the script never gives up on Alex and Tess, and neither do we.
Without spoiling the outcome too much, it’s fair to say that although there are thematic overlaps here with Noah Baumbach’s exquisite Marriage Story, the tone and ultimate outlook are entirely different. It’s unlikely that any movie will ever use “Under Pressure,” the hit by Queen and David Bowie, with anything close to the searing emotional power of the Aftersun climax. But a performance of the song by the school band in which Tess and Alex’s boys play brings its own kind of joyous release to cap this soulful, satisfying movie.
