An unnamed source told the New York Times the Reiners’ daughter, Romy, had discovered only her father’s body, and disputed reports the couple argued with their son, Nick, at a party the previous evening
New details have emerged about the deaths of film director Rob Reiner and photographer Michele Singer Reiner, whose bodies were discovered at their home in Brentwood, Los Angeles, on Sunday.
A report in the New York Times, quoting a “person close to the family” who remained anonymous, says that a massage therapist arriving for an appointment first raised the alarm after not being able to gain access for an appointment on Sunday. The therapist contacted their daughter Romy Reiner, who lives nearby, who entered the house and found Rob Reiner’s body. The Times said that Romy “fled the house in anguish” without realising that her mother’s body was also inside, and that her roommate, who had accompanied her, called 911. Emergency responders then discovered Michele Singer Reiner’s body.
From a John Cusack 80s teen comedy to the other Frank Capra Christmas crowd-pleaser, here are some seasonal picks you might not have seen
Something that bugs me about a lot of contemporary Christmas movies is how insistently self-conscious they are about the whole production – the ostentatious decorations, checklist of soundtrack chestnuts, the dialogue about the true meaning of the holidays that sounds canned even when the movie is trying to acknowledge its various stressors. Maybe because the idea of a holiday movie hadn’t yet ossified into routine, I’ve found that the versions of these films that came out in the 1940s tend to approach Christmas from more inventive, less neurotically obsessive angles. One of my favorite discoveries in sifting through 1940s Christmas comedies is It Happened on Fifth Avenue, a 1947 semi-romantic farce with a great starting hook: a cheerful vagrant Aloysius T McKeever (Victor Moore) winters in New York every year, because he knows a way into a particular Fifth Avenue mansion seasonally vacated by its enormously wealthy owner. One winter, Aloysius invites some new acquaintances to stay with him: veteran Jim Bullock (Don DeFore) and his military buddies, plus runaway Trudy O’Connor (Gale Storm) – who is secretly the daughter of the mansion’s owner. Eventually, the owner himself is forced to disguise himself as another vagrant and stay in the house, too, so Trudy can make sure Jim loves her on her own merits. This all takes place during the run-up to Christmas and into New Year’s, and director Roy Del Ruth gives the movie a found-family warmth that newer holiday movies have to labor two or three times as hard for, assembling a funny and lovable surrogate family in one of the city’s well-appointed empty spaces. Speaking of labor: It Happened on Fifth Avenue lands perfectly between class-conscious social picture about the importance of affordable housing and romantic urban fairytale. Jesse Hassenger
It Happened on Fifth Avenue is available on Plex and to rent digitally in the US, UK and Australia
In a spectacular return to form, the Dardenne brothers bring empathy and dignity to ill-equipped teen mums looking for a brighter future amid drug addiction and social hardship
The Dardenne brothers, Luc and Jean-Pierre, have long functioned as a Belgian answer to Ken Loach, pitching their film-making camp among the most marginalised and forgotten. Normally this means clear-eyed fables of teenagers and twentysomethings living in difficult circumstances: nightmare parents, petty crime, drugs and jail. In a series of films between the mid-90s and early-10s, they twice won the Palme d’Or, plus the best screenplay and the Grand Prix at the Cannes film festival for their distinctive brand of naturalist storytelling, employing a light-on-its-feet handheld travelling-camera style to deal with some seriously dark material. Then came bit of a wobble; perhaps their success opened up opportunities they couldn’t turn down. They found themselves working with an actual film star (Marion Cotillard) and then turned to hot-button issues – radical Islamism in Young Ahmed, illegal immigration in Tori and Lokita – which perhaps didn’t bring the best out of them.
Well, all this is a preamble to saying that Young Mothers sees the Dardennes fully back in their comfort zone, with material and actors they know how to deal with. The subject, as the title suggests, is the young women who find themselves pregnant, or with very young children, and who are heartbreakingly ill-equipped to deal with the situation. Challenges range from basic techniques of baby care – one, for example, has to be reminded to take her phone off the baby changing mat – to the emotional storms of recalcitrant boyfriends, drug dependency and narcissistic and uninterested parents of their own.
Paul Thomas Anderson’s counter-culture thriller scores nine nods, ahead of Hamnet and Ryan Coogler’s Sinners, with Leonardo DiCaprio in contention for actor of the year
One Battle After Another, starring Leonardo DiCaprio and directed by Paul Thomas Anderson, has consolidated its place as the awards-season leader in emerging with the most nominations from the London Critics’ Circle film awards.
One Battle After Another, a counter-culture thriller loosely based on Thomas Pynchon’s novel Vineland, picked up nine nominations, including film of the year, director and screenwriter of the year for Anderson, and actor of the year for DiCaprio. Co-stars Teyana Taylor, Benicio del Toro and Sean Penn were nominated in the supporting categories while Chase Infiniti was nominated for breakthrough performer.
Reiner’s own films reshaped modern comedy and drama with their intelligence, empathy and range. But through his company, Castle Rock, he paved the way for Seinfeld, Sorkin and many more
As a film-maker, Rob Reiner championed humour, civility and intelligence – qualities you suppose would be out of step with the Hollywood of the 1980s where he made his name, and in the 1990s where he scored a series of extraordinary, far-reaching successes. Reiner had a family interest in the workings of on-screen comedy: his father Carl had played a key role on Sid Caesar’s TV shows, which themselves were revolutionary, and helped birth a new generation of screen comics by directing Steve Martin’s film debut The Jerk. Rob had become a household name as Meathead, the liberal foil to Carroll O’Connor’s bigoted Archie Bunker in 70s sitcom All in the Family (the equivalent to Mike Rawlins v Warren Mitchell in the British original, Till Death Us Do Part). But it was as a director and producer that he really made his impact felt.
In 1984, Reiner released This Is Spinal Tap, a “mockumentary” about a fictitious heavy metal band from the UK that rewrote the rules on what comedy could do. It sent up rock’n’roll behaviour and codified its cliches (with Reiner himself doing a hilarious parody of Martin Scorsese’s hosting role in The Last Waltz) and gave us zingers that haven’t lost their comedy power more than 30 years on: “The numbers all go to 11”, “it’s such a fine line between stupid, and er … clever.” Its deployment of improvised comedy was revolutionary for a Hollywood feature, and while Reiner wasn’t the first to use the fake-documentary techniques for comedic purposes (that goes back at least to Woody Allen’s Take the Money and Run), it hugely popularised the mockumentary style; subsequent efforts include Bob Roberts, Fear of a Black Hat, Drop Dead Gorgeous and Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan. All these owe Tap a huge debt – as well as the microgenre of star Christopher Guest’s improv-mockumentaries: Waiting for Guffman, Best in Show and A Mighty Wind. Almost incidentally, Spinal Tap became a sort-of-real band, with tours, record releases and a follow-up feature (Spinal Tap II: The End Continues), in which the presence of music industry titans Paul McCartney and Elton John demonstrated the high regard in which the original was held.
When reports started to emerge that Timothée Chalamet was going to play a ping pong champion in a film called Marty Supreme, the world (including this correspondent) rolled its eyes. Was Hollywood’s most annoying actor going to go for broke in what promised to be the most irritating film of all time? Well I am here to hold up my hand and say that first impressions couldn’t have been more wrong. Marty Supreme is one of the most exciting, indeed sensational films of the year, and if the Guardian film critics’ poll wasn’t a democracy, many of us would made it No 1 by some distance.
For it turns out that Marty Supreme is a character drama of quite remarkable richness, its excitement and sensation deriving from the nervous energy of its protagonist – who is indeed a ping pong player called Marty – but plying his trade in the decidedly non-quirky early 1950s where our hero, played by Chalamet, is essentially trying to use this non-traditional sport to plot a way out of the dullness and grind of his normie life, where he is on track to become a manager of a shoe store. Marty (whose last name is not actually Supreme, but the amusingly alliterative Mauser) is a pretty dislikable individual: happy to abandon a girl he gets pregnant, throw a fit when he loses a match, and think he can talk his way out of any kind of difficulty. But such is his verve, charisma and never-say-die attitude, he carries you with him.
The Housemaid actor received backlash in September when she left a comment on Instagram after the rightwing activist was killed
The Housemaid star Amanda Seyfried has said she is “not fucking apologising” for describing Charlie Kirk as “hateful” after the latter was shot dead in September.
Seyfried was speaking to Who What Wear when she was asked about her social media activity, including the backlash around her Kirk comment. “I’m not fucking apologising for that. I mean, for fuck’s sake, I commented on one thing. I said something that was based on actual reality and actual footage and actual quotes. What I said was pretty damn factual, and I’m free to have an opinion, of course.”
Currently in production the second prequel in the series, Sunrise on the Reaping, will likely feature the married couple ‘in a flash-forward’
Jennifer Lawrence and Josh Hutcherson are to appear in the new Hunger Games movie, The Hunger Games: Sunrise on the Reaping, which is in production.
The Hollywood Reporter said it confirmed the pair’s return to the Hunger Games series, in what is the sixth film in the franchise. Both will play the same characters as in the original set of films – Lawrence as Katniss Everdeen and Hutcherson as Peeta Mellark – with the Hollywood Reporter suggesting they will “likely appear in a flash-forward”. At the close of The Hunger Games: Mockingjay – Part 2 (released in 2015), Everdeen and Mellark are married with children.
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