Tue, 23 Sep 2025, 11:03 am
Opinion

US Returning to the Point

No national election in the recent past, let aside US, anywhere else in the democratic world gained so much of attention, all for the wrong reasons and that too for

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His lonely days and nights in prison

Autobiographies can indeed be touching if written by authors destined to convey the truth. They can be even more attractive if they describe the other people in the author’s life.

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In Search of Win-Win Friendship

It was an unusual development when the senior government officials of the North Indian state of Mizoram, adjacent to the borders of Bandarban of Bangladesh declared recently if  necessary they

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University-Industry Collaboration to Enhance Quality of Higher Education

Today we live in a global village where economic pursuits have become highly competitive. Productivity and economic growth solely depend upon new knowledge generated in universities. Creativity and innovation are

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How to better utilise forex reserves

The country’s foreign exchange reserves recently crossed the 40 Billion USD mark, mainly owing to lower import payment pressure combined with consistently high flow of inward remittance. Revival of exports

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Biden makes diplomacy dull as president-elect

After Donald Trump in his first week as president spoke to Australia’s prime minister, leaks of the call left many dumbfounded, with the new US leader haranguing and hanging up

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The Light of God . . . and Those Lengthening Cemeteries

The muezzin sounds the call to prayer in the little mosque in the little village. Conch shells echo in the temple on the banks of the river and beyond. In

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Trump Legacy to Continue?

The all important US presidential election is over and the country has a new President-elect for next four years: Joseph Robinette Biden Jr. and his running mate Kamala Harris of

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Tackling post-LDC graduation challenges

Bangladesh in every possibility will get into the next trajectory of graduation from LDC status from next year. A World Bank executive in charge of helping the countries post LDC

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Tourism Entrepreneurship: A Potential Venture

Nowadays, entrepreneurship has become a buzzword. Entrepreneurship is the driver that plunges any successful industry of an economy to move forward. Likewise, entrepreneurship plays roles as the engine of the

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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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