The acclaimed British director said Glazer had ‘understood the possible consequences, which made him braver still’

Veteran British director Ken Loach has added his support to Jonathan Glazer over the latter’s controversial Oscar acceptance speech for The Zone of Interest.

In an interview with Variety , Loach said he had “great respect” for Glazer and that his speech was “very brave”. He added: “And I’m sure he understood the possible consequences, which makes him braver still, so I’ve got great respect for him and his work.”

‘Dream team’ will reimagine black comedy about an epic divorce battle, which originally starred Kathleen Turner and Michael Douglas

A remake of 1980s divorce comedy The War of the Roses is to go ahead with Olivia Colman and Benedict Cumberbatch in the lead roles.

In an announcement reported by Deadline , studio Searchlight Pictures said that Colman and Cumberbatch would appear in a new version of the story directed by Austin Powers’ Jay Roach and written by Poor Things’ Tony McNamara. Searchlight president Matthew Greenfield said: “The Roses is a wildly funny, bigger than life, and yet deeply human story … With Jay at the helm, and Benedict and Olivia and Tony, we have a dream team bringing it to life.”

Griffiths, who has died aged 88, explored the conflict between reform and revolution in plays and scripts from the film Reds to dramas such as Occupations, The Party and Comedians

Of all the political dramatists who emerged in Britain in the late 1960s, Trevor Griffiths, who has died aged 88, was the most fervent and committed. As a Mancunian Marxist he brought to theatre his love of dialectic. He also believed passionately in “strategic penetration” of the citadels of culture. He succeeded, in that plays such as The Party and Comedians were taken up by the National Theatre; Bill Brand, an 11-part series about the frustrations of parliamentary democracy, was shown on ITV; and his screenplay for Reds, co-authored with Warren Beatty and based on John Reed’s account of the Russian revolution, Ten Days That Shook the World, became an Oscar-winning Hollywood movie.

If there was one theme that informed Griffiths’s work, it was the conflict between reformist pragmatism and revolutionary idealism. It was there in an early work like Occupations, first seen at the Manchester Stables in 1970 and quickly picked up by the RSC for a production starring Patrick Stewart and Ben Kingsley. Set in Turin in 1920 at a time when every engineering factory in northern Italy had been taken over by the workers, the play involves a head-on confrontation between Kabak, a businesslike Comintern representative, and Antonio Gramsci, the Sardinian firebrand advocating shop-floor soviets.

The Colombian pop star – and mother of two boys – disliked the global blockbuster, saying its message robs men of chance to ‘protect and provide’

In an unlikely dissension from what has become a critical and commercial consensus, Colombian musician Shakira has said that the Barbie movie is “emasculating” and suggested that it “rob[s] men of their possibility to be men”.

In an interview with Allure magazine that focused on the “she-wolf feminism” behind her work, Shakira said she had watched the Greta Gerwig-directed satire and said: “My sons absolutely hated it. They felt that it was emasculating. And I agree, to a certain extent.”

Two teenage boys star in Matteo Garrone’s passionate exposé of how greed, trauma and corruption drive the modern-day slave trade in would-be migrants

Matteo Garrone’s new film is part adventure story, part slavery drama; the slavery which did not in fact vanish with the end of the American civil war, but thrives in the globalised present day without needing to shapeshift too much, driven by the age-old forces of geopolitics and the market.

Seydou and Moussa, played by nonprofessional acting newcomers Seydou Sarr and Moustapha Fall, are 16-year-old cousins in Dakar, Senegal, dreaming of escape to the fabled land of the EU as refugees, where they expect to go viral and make a fortune as music stars like the people they’re watching on TikTok. For years they have been writing songs and secretly working on building sites while pretending to go to football practice, amassing cash savings which in the succeeding months they will hand over to various gangmasters, fixers and corrupt gun-wielding soldiers.

Henderson, Indira Varma, Rufus Sewell and Olivia Williams attend a Hampstead dinner party that takes a dark turn in a play-like sendup that could go harder

There are echoes of Carnage and Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? in this satire of north London liberals. It’s an original script but has the staginess of a filmed play, set almost entirely in one location: a big fancy house in Hampstead where two uber-successful couples in their 50s are chattering over dinner. I wasn’t totally convinced by the dialogue; some of the lines aren’t especially clever or witty given that this is a bunch of highly intelligent over-achievers. Not enough sparks were flying.

What the movie does have going for it is a terrific performance by Shirley Henderson as brittle, nervy Sarah, the owner of said fancy Hampstead house, along with her husband Tom (Alan Tudyk). He’s a big-name architect whose latest project is a massive flop, which has forced the couple to put the house on the market. They’ve invited their best mates round for one last dinner party. There’s Beth (Olivia Williams) and her husband Richard (Rufus Sewell), a flashy, cynical celebrity barrister. Beth and Richard bring round an unwanted guest, another old pal called Jessica (Indira Varma), who has just published a bestselling memoir about her footloose wild years. Jessica flirts outrageously with architect Tom, then walks into the garden and hangs herself.

Dupieux’s melancholic comedy sees a disillusioned audience member pull a gun before demanding a word processor to write the actors a better play

Quentin Dupieux is one of the vanishingly small number of film-makers on the non-Anglo-American distribution circuit who really is interested in – and allowed to make – straight-up comedy, albeit flavoured with melancholy or violent absurdity. For me, only Benoît Delépine and Gustave Kervern are comparable. Aki Kaurismäki, for example, is different; although gently and wonderfully comic, his films don’t try to hit the laugh lines in the same way.

The prolific Dupieux has now created a 67-minute sketch, a one-act cine-play about a mediocre Paris stage company performing a dinner-theatre comedy called The Cuckold to a bored, half-empty house. Just as they are grinding through their tired old routines, a guy called Yannick (Raphaël Quenard) stands up in the auditorium and announces that this so-called comedy is making him sad and he wants his money back. The dumbfounded actors start mocking this jerk but Yannick pulls a gun, clambers on to the stage and demands a word processor and printer so he can write a better play for them. Is he a radical hero for disrupting mediocre bourgeois culture? If this is a hostage situation, he says, well, so is sitting through a bad play.

American actor best known for his role as Gunnery Sergeant Emil Foley in the 1982 film An Officer and a Gentleman

The actor Lou Gossett Jr, who has died aged 87, is best known for his performance in An Officer and A Gentleman (1982) as Gunnery Sergeant Emil Foley, whose tough training transforms recruit Richard Gere into the man of the film’s title. He was the first black winner of an Academy Award for best supporting actor, and only the third black actor (after Hattie McDaniel and Sidney Poitier ) to take home any Oscar.

The director, Taylor Hackford, said he cast Gossett in a role written for a white actor, following a familiar Hollywood trope played by John Wayne , Burt Lancaster , Victor McLaglen or R Lee Ermey , because while researching he realised the tension of “black enlisted men having make-or-break control over whether white college graduates would become officers”. Gossett had already won an Emmy award playing a different sort of mentor, the slave Fiddler who teaches Kunta Kinte the ropes in Roots (1977), but he was still a relatively unknown 46-year-old when he got his breakthrough role, despite a long history of success on stage and in music as well as on screen.

It is seen as one of the greatest films ever, with the most hypnotic child performance in history. So what has Víctor Erice been doing in the half century since Beehive? As his new film Close Your Eyes hits screens, the Spanish legend reveals all

In 1972, when Ana Torrent was six years old, a man came to her school and asked her to be in his film. “He had a beard,” she recalls now, from her home in Madrid. “And I told him I didn’t like men with beards.” The director said his film was about Frankenstein’s monster and asked if she was familiar with that character. “I replied, ‘I’ve heard about him but I haven’t yet been introduced.’ That’s when he thought, ‘She’s the one.’”

The director was Víctor Erice and the film was The Spirit of the Beehive . Made at the end of the Franco regime but set in 1940, in a Castilian village scarred by the recent Spanish civil war, it concerns two sisters whose imaginations are stimulated by seeing James Whale’s 1931 film Frankenstein at a travelling cinema. Torrent’s performance as the younger of the two girls – her face as pale and round as a communion wafer, her inky eyes watchful and wide – is among the most hypnotic ever given by a child.