Mon, 22 Sep 2025, 07:45 pm
Opinion

Lanka economic recovery needs no referendum

GOVERNMENT leaders appear to be considering all options for remaining in office beyond the constitutionally mandated periods of five years for the presidency and parliament. The United National Party general

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Land, legacy and the future

HUMANITY came into being after most ecosystem services had been in operation. The land feeds, clothes and shelters us. It sustains our economies, lives and livelihoods. About 99 per cent

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The military-industrial complex is killing us all

WE NEED to talk about what bombs do in war. Bombs shred flesh. Bombs shatter bones. Bombs dismember. Bombs cause brains, lungs, and other organs to shake so violently they

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If the wars go on

I SUPPOSE my title could have been couched in the singular form, as Hermann Hesse, the Nobel prize winning German/Swiss author, did with his collection of anti-war essays about World

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Burning of Rafah’s tent people

Oh hell, what do mine eyes with grief behold? — John Milton, Paradise Lost   PEOPLE were saying their evening prayers when the IDF attacked the refuge camp at Tel

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Mass media, social media, and new civil war

HOW close are we to being in the movie? Leila and I went to the Baghdad Theatre, down the road from our apartment in Portland, Oregon, to see the new

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Israel’s onslaught of revenge

AS AMAL Nassar lay in pain on a bed at the Al-Awda Hospital in the Nuseirat refugee camp in northern Gaza, the echoes of explosions and artillery fire could be

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A certain French stubbornness

FRANCE’S Emmanuel Macron can, at times, show himself at odds with the grime and gristle of grounded politics. Able to pack in various snatches of philosophical reflection in a speech,

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2024: people starve as the rich get richer

EARNING enough to pay the rent or mortgage, cover utility bills and travel costs, buy food and have the occasional coffee is difficult, impossible for many. But it’s not hard

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THIS week, the prosecutor of the International Criminal Court, or ICC, applied for arrest warrants for three Hamas leaders, as well as Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu and defence minister

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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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