Tue, 23 Sep 2025, 10:03 am
Literature

World’s largest astronomy museum set to open in Shanghai

The world’s largest astronomy museum is opening in Shanghai, and its complex curvilinear shape has been designed to reflect the geometry of the cosmos. With no straight lines or right

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Da Vinci bear drawing expected to fetch up to £12m at auction

A small drawing of a bear’s head by Leonardo da Vinci is expected to sell for up to £12m ($16.7m) at a London auction on Thursday. Measuring 7x7cm, Head of

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Two artworks chosen for display in London’s Trafalgar Square

A sculpture symbolizing Britain’s complex colonial ties and an artwork featuring the faces of 850 transgender people are set to go on display in Trafalgar Square, one of London’s highest-profile

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Significant Edward Lear poems discovered

Previously unseen poems and letters written by Victorian nonsense poet Edward Lear have been found hidden in a private collection. The discovery was made by University of Nottingham PhD student

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Passionate Plath love letters to Hughes up for sale

Possessions of Sylvia Plath from the happier early days of her doomed marriage to fellow poet Ted Hughes, including ardent love letters and their wedding rings, are to go on

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Mini Statue of Liberty arrives in the US, retracing big sister’s steps

A scaled-down replica of the Statue of Liberty that has retraced the journey made over a century ago by its big sister was erected on Ellis Island in New York

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Fragonard painting ‘forgotten’ by its owners sells for $9 million

A”forgotten” painting kept in the same family for generations has sold for 7.68 million euros ($9.1 million) at auction after experts discovered it was the work of French painter Jean-Honoré

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The Obama portraits are on display at the site of their first date

Three years after Barack and Michelle Obama’s official portraits were unveiled at the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery, the paintings have arrived at the Art Institute of Chicago, where the former

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Removing Teddy Roosevelt’s statue is the worst kind of pandering

In life, he was a Bull Moose. Over one hundred years since his death, however, President Teddy Roosevelt is being bullied himself by woke activists who seek the erasure of

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110th birth anniversary of Sufia Kamal today

Sunday marks the 110th anniversary of the birth of poet and feminist Begum Sufia Kamal. Also revered as the trailblazing woman rights activist, poet and  educationist who took part in

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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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