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Anouk Aimée was an entrancing 60s movie icon with an air of glamorous unknowability

The star of La Dolce Vita and A Man and a Woman, who has died aged 92, had a unique screen presence that was at once alluring and forbidding

The superbly aquiline beauty and patrician style of Anouk Aimée made her a 60s movie icon in France, Italy and everywhere else with a presence at once alluring and forbidding. She had something of the young Joan Crawford, or Marlene Dietrich, or her contemporary, the French model and actress Capucine. Aimée radiated an enigmatic sexual aura flavoured with melancholy, sophistication and worldly reserve. Hers was not a face that could simper or pout: it was the entranced men around her who were more likely to be doing that. Hirokazu Kore-eda once wrote an amusing line that all the great French movie actresses have surnames that begin with the same letter as their first names: Danielle Darrieux, Simone Signoret, Brigitte Bardot … and of course Anouk Aimée is absolutely in that brand-identity tradition – although this is a stage name (she was born Nicole Dreyfus) derived from the name of her first movie character and the resonant word “beloved”.

In Jacques Demy’s musicless musical Lola from 1961, Aimée played the title role: a cabaret singer (like Dietrich in The Blue Angel) who stuns men everywhere, but her unattainability is naturally essential to her desirability. In Demy’s later film Model Shop (1969), he revives the Lola character; she is now working at a sleazy “model shop” studio where men can take lurid photos. Other directors found in Aimée that same melodramatic “muse” quality that her air of untouchability perhaps encouraged: Jacques Becker’s 1958 film about Modigliani, Montparnasse 19 had Aimée as the painter’s lover and subject Jeanne Hébuterne.

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© Photograph: Riama-Pathe/Kobal/REX/Shutterstock

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© Photograph: Riama-Pathe/Kobal/REX/Shutterstock

Divine comedies: the best jokes for the Pope

Pitching his creed to a roomful of comic stars, the pontiff pronounced that it is good to laugh at God. In which case, he may enjoy these

A hundred top comedians are generally considered a tough crowd, but Pope Francis had them rolling in the aisles at the Vatican on Friday, with jovial praise for their profession.

To “laugh at God” was fine, he explained, in the same way “we play and joke with the people we love”.

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© Photograph: Landmark Media/Alamy

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© Photograph: Landmark Media/Alamy

Amy Poehler: ‘If we want young people to fix everything, why do we make fun of them?’

She’s the voice of Joy in Pixar’s Inside Out 2 – but Poehler has more complicated emotions on her mind. The SNL star talks teen angst and clueless grownups in a non-binary world

Britain is ruled by three emotions, says Amy Poehler: “Sadness, anger, fear.” Plus some disgust, too. She’s kidding! She’s also not kidding. But we can take it, right?

“Frankly, I think the UK is excellent at gentle teasing that I really love,” she says. “It feels very familiar. You have to give it to each other in a good way. That’s how you respect each other. You don’t poke fun at people you don’t think can take it.”

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© Photograph: Sally Montana Photography LLC/Sally Montana

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© Photograph: Sally Montana Photography LLC/Sally Montana

Fantasia to Flesh and Fantasy, the Coens to Cavalcanti: anthology films – ranked!

With Yorgos Lanthimos’s Kinds of Kindness hitting UK cinemas next week, we ask where it features in the pantheon of anthology masterpieces

The Meaning of Life is probably closer to the world of TV sketch comedy, rather than ensemble movie, but the Pythons’ gang-show film was a box office smash and won the Grand Prix in Cannes in 1983 (while Víctor Erice’s The South and Martin Scorsese’s The King of Comedy got zip). With crazy grandiloquence, it took us through all the big questions of existence, and the tragicomic limits of physical pleasure were finally exposed by the restaurant scene in which Mr Creosote explodes. Like John Landis’s portmanteau comedy The Kentucky Fried Movie from 1977, this was full of very chancy, confrontationally bad-taste material that wouldn’t get on television then or now.

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© Photograph: Universal/Celandine/Monty Python/Kobal/REX/Shutterstock

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© Photograph: Universal/Celandine/Monty Python/Kobal/REX/Shutterstock

Ultraman: Rising review – endearing kaiju animation battles the monster that is parenting

Appealing superhero film saddles a kaiju fighter with an orphaned infant, who brings challenges to test supernanny’s domestic mettle

In this family superhero animation with a twist, the monster that must be grappled with by our hero is parenthood – and specifically baby-care. We open in Odaiba, Japan, with a flashback to the childhood of Ken Sato, whose dad is passionate about kaiju, the giant monsters of Japanese pop culture (of which Godzilla is probably the best known in the west). Twenty years later, Ken is a baseball star by day and gigantic kaiju fighter Ultraman by night (or indeed, whenever the kaiju show up) though like his father before him, it’s more about protecting people and monsters from each other than a standard slay-the-beast trajectory.

Things get complicated when he finds himself unexpectedly landed with an orphaned baby kaiju to look after. Ken is not prepared for single parenthood, and is duly rushed off his feet managing the competing demands of work and adopted infant, getting covered in bodily fluids in the process, and making all sorts of delightful discoveries about the limits of his own knowledge. “Babies get acid reflux?” he exclaims despairingly at one point, in a line that feels rooted in lived experience. Mind you, this baby is 35ft tall and breathes fire, so, you know, a challenge even for Supernanny.

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© Photograph: Netflix

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© Photograph: Netflix

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