Tue, 23 Sep 2025, 09:37 am
Feature

Finding Skywalker gibbons with love songs

Valentine’s day is over but love’s call lingers: the Skywalker gibbons’ mating song, scientists reported this week, has revealed a previously unknown population — the largest in the world —

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Spring of love welcomed

Buoyancy and an air of romance spread among the people of Bangladesh on Wednesday as they celebrated Pahela Falgun, a festival welcoming the arrival of spring, and Valentine’s Day, a

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Valentine’s Day: Myth turns into festival

Although ‘LOVE’ is not restricted to a single day, every year people across the globe observe Valentine’s Day to celebrate love and companionship with their partners on 14 February. The

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How diabetes slows healing in the eye

For the first time, researchers from Cedars-Sinai have identified two connected disease-associated changes to the cornea that explain how diabetes slows down wound healing in the eye. The research, which

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Eco-anxiety and Its Rising Psychological Burden

The current climate crisis, which has been lingering for decades in every region, is not unheard of. Climate change is the defining issue of our time; an extreme issue. Climate

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Here’s how to beat the hype and overcome loneliness on Valentine’s Day

Elise Plessis hasn’t been in a long-term relationship for 26 years. It’s by choice, yet she still suffers FOMO when Valentine’s Day rolls around. “I’m the singleton of the family

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Tips to reconnect with your partner

Sometimes in a relationship, we tend to grow distance from the partner. It can happen due to a variety of reasons – from not finding time for each other to

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Tips to reconnect with your partner

Sometimes in a relationship, we tend to grow distance from the partner. It can happen due to a variety of reasons – from not finding time for each other to

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Red rice and its benefits for your body

The latest fixation among health enthusiasts: red rice. While rice remains a dietary staple for Asians and the Asian community, a shift in health perceptions and dietary choices is driving

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Culture Shock Experienced by International Students in the US

I have been living in the US on a student visa since August 2022. Leaving the land where I was born, grew up, and created beautiful memories with my friends

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The megastar plays a philosophy professor shaken by a student’s sexual assault allegation against a colleague in Luca Guadagnino’s new film – and she’s easily the best thing about it. Julia Roberts doesn’t make many films these days. She was in Leave the World Behind in 2023; in 2022, there was her tropical romantic comedy with George Clooney, Ticket to Paradise; and then we have to jump all the way back to 2018 for her previous turn in Ben Is Back. But you can see why she chose to star in After the Hunt, a contentious campus drama directed by Luca Guadagnino (Call Me By Your Name, Challengers). Roberts is on screen for almost every one of its 139 minutes, and she is the monumental centre around which its chaos and controversy swirl. It’s the kind of heavyweight role that gets awards nominations if it goes to the right person – and Roberts is definitely the right person. Her character is Alma, a philosophy professor at Yale University. Striding regally around its leafy quadrangles in a chic white suit that matches her blonde hair, this combatively intelligent alpha female is adored by everyone who knows her. Her husband Frederik (Michael Stuhlbarg) is resigned to the fact that he loves her more than she loves him, and is willing to make whimsical jokes about the imbalance; Hank (Andrew Garfield), a would-be rebellious friend and colleague, is even more flirtatious with her than he is with everyone else; and her favourite PhD student, Maggie (Ayo Edebiri), worships her – which could explain why she is Alma’s favourite PhD student. It seems as if the status quo might soon be upset, though, as either Alma or Hank – or perhaps both – is expected to be granted permanent tenure. But then something far more drastic happens. The day after a boozy party in Alma and Frederik’s book-lined flat, Maggie tells Alma that Hank walked her home and then “crossed a line”. Alma is sympathetic – but only up to a point. There is no evidence of assault, so she isn’t sure whether to trust the word of a new friend over an old one, especially at such a critical moment in her career. And maybe, her thinking goes, lines were crossed at the party anyway, considering that teachers and students were hugging each other while knocking back expensive wine. “Roberts’ Alma is a coiled spring: her steely stillness makes her ferocity all the more powerful” It’s refreshing to see a grown-up Hollywood film that takes on contemporary issues: feminism, cancel culture, identity politics, and the generation gap. But After the Hunt is more of an admirable project than an engaging drama, because it never stops reminding you of how clever it wants to be. Guadagnino keeps showing off his quirky camera angles and intrusive music choices. The screenplay, by Nora Garrett, squeezes too much philosophical jargon into the dialogue, and too many tangential scenes and subplots into the structure. You might think that the alleged assault would be a big enough deal for any film, but Alma is given mysterious abdominal pains and guilty secrets, and Maggie is overloaded with significance as a queer, black, plagiarism-prone young woman with a non-binary partner and rich parents who are major donors to the university. In theory, viewers of After the Hunt should leave the cinema arguing about its subject matter. In practice, they’re more likely to be asking each other what was going on and what it meant. It’s all a bit much, basically. Garfield, miscast as a denim-clad dude who is, it is implied, roughly the same age as Roberts’ character, shouts and swears and waves his arms with a quantity-over-quality approach to acting. Stuhlbarg’s flouncing and sing-song delivery are presumably meant to be irritating, but perhaps not as irritating as they actually are. At the heart of it all, though, Roberts is a different matter. She understands that less can be more. Her Alma is a coiled spring: her steely stillness makes her ferocity all the more powerful and her pain all the more intense. Her muttering is scarier than Garfield’s yelling, and when she glares at someone, they stay glared at. It’s an expertly controlled performance which demonstrates why Roberts has been a Hollywood icon for so long, and why she could well be in line for her second Oscar, 25 years after Erin Brockovich. After the Hunt would have been better if everyone else involved had had some of that control, too.

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