Tue, 23 Sep 2025, 09:13 am
Feature

Silkworm cat grub smells like success

Licking its lips imperiously, a ginger cat mops up every last morsel of food from its curly whiskers, clearly undaunted by its supper’s rather unusual base ingredient — silkworm pupae.

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Organic farmers find fertile ground in North Africa

Proudly displaying her freshly picked pomegranates, Tunisian farmer Sarah Shili says going organic is “the future of farming” — and as demand surges in North Africa and beyond, the sector

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Fans return for classic Cairo football rivalry

For the first time in years fans returned to Cairo’s International Stadium on Friday for a classic local football clash between two of Africa’s greatest rivals, Al Ahly and Zamalek.

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Dream of Barcelona return comes true for club icon Xavi

Xavi Hernandez left with Barcelona the envy of the world and returns to save them from mediocrity, the club’s legendary midfielder brought back as coach with the mammoth task of

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Why are disabled people so affected by the climate crisis?

Israeli minister Karine Elharrar made headlines around the world when it emerged she couldn’t attend the COP26 summit on Monday because it wasn’t wheelchair-accessible. For many disabled people, it was

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Uzbek traders learn to do business with the Taliban

As lorries arrive in bursts of dust at a logistics hub in Uzbekistan’s southern city of Termez, squatting drivers share complaints about how trade has suffered since the Taliban seized

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Oil giant Saudi Arabia sees opportunity in climate crisis

The climate crisis does not look like good news for the oil industry, but Saudi Arabia is sniffing an opportunity that could help retain its energy dominance for decades. Not

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Delicious hilsa set to be back on menu

Looking for hilsa? No worries it is coming back! Fishermen are taking preparations to resume hilsa netting as a 22-day ban imposed by the government comes to an end Monday

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Climate change will bring global tension – US spies

Climate change will lead to growing international tensions, the US intelligence community has warned in a bleak assessment. The first ever National Intelligence Estimate on Climate Change looks at the

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Climate change: Is the UK on track to meet its targets?

The UK has committed to reduce its greenhouse-gas emissions to net zero by 2050. Net zero is the point at which the country is taking as much of these climate-changing

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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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