Tue, 23 Sep 2025, 09:28 am
Opinion

War clouds in ME

WITH the targeted assassination of Hamas leader, Ismail Haniyeh, in Tehran on July 30 and a Hezbollah commander in Beirut a day before, the Middle East is once again overcast

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Israel could set Middle East further aflame

The likelihood of an expanding regional war is now exponentially higher –with the danger of a much more direct conflict between Israel and Iran, and the possibility of even greater

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What it’s like for Palestinian women living through the Gaza genocide

WHILE the world often focuses on the political and military aspects of Gaza, the daily realities encountered by women are frequently overlooked. Women in Gaza bear heavy burdens, demonstrating remarkable

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Unbearable anthropocentrism of our world in data

HOW billionaire elites help fund an Oxford statistics lab that makes the destruction of Earth look just great. Roughly a decade ago, a 30-year-old economic statistician at Oxford University named

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A tale of two student movements

THIS article brings two student movements in Bangladesh together. The juxtaposition will tell many things about the nation and its people — it’s past, present, and future. It will help

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Killings and repression must stop

ON JUNE 5, a High Court bench declared illegal a government circular issued in 2018, which abolished the 30 per cent quota for the dependents of the freedom fighters. In

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Struggle for quality health care

IN BANGLADESH, seeking medical attention can often feel like embarking on a journey fraught with uncertainty and frustration. The process of consulting a doctor, whether in a public hospital or

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Common Lanka candidate excites popular imagination

THE presence of a Tamil common candidate would mean that the Tamil voter in the north and east would lose the option of voting for one of the three candidates

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Venezuelans to vote on continuing the Bolivarian revolution

THE future of Venezuela’s 25-year-old socialist movement will be decided in the upcoming July 28 election. Venezuelans will go to the polls knowing that a vote for incumbent president Nicolás

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The shooting of Donald Trump

AS A nation, the United States, as if we did not already know, is convulsed. Paranoid and divided, giddy with conspiracy and deranged by a fear of totalitarian seizure, hyper

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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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