Words by JANE CROWTHER


What would happen if The Penguin and Harley Quinn went on a road trip date? Possibly more realistic a proposition than this whimsy from Kogonada which begins with potential but will likely only bring the most gooey romantics along for the whole ride.

Margot Robbie, Colin Farrell, Phoebe Waller Bridge, Kevin Kline, Kogonada, A Big Bold Beautiful Journey
Matt Kennedy/Sony Pictures

Colin Farrell and Margot Robbie star as David and Sarah (don’t worry, you won’t forget their names, they say them to each other in pretty much every sentence), a pair of singletons at a soggy wedding who bristle at the idea of marriage and commitment. They have both arrived in rental cars hired from a quirky outfit run by Kevin Kline and Phoebe Waller-Bridge doing a German accent. In an opener that plays like Charlie Kaufman, David has found his way there to be offered a crappy 90s car with a weird GPS system by a profanity-dropping saleswoman who sits in a warehouse like a soundstage and instead of going through the collision damage waiver, suggests that all of life is a performance. 

Margot Robbie, Colin Farrell, Phoebe Waller Bridge, Kevin Kline, Kogonada, A Big Bold Beautiful Journey
Matt Kennedy/Sony Pictures
Margot Robbie, Colin Farrell, Phoebe Waller Bridge, Kevin Kline, Kogonada, A Big Bold Beautiful Journey
Matt Kennedy/Sony Pictures

Certainly, we get performance from the two incredibly charismatic leads as a Burger King meet-cute (seriously, you’ll want a Whopper with cheese) morphs into a phantasmagorical odyssey where the magical GPS (voiced by Jodie Turner-Smith) takes the duo to a series of picturesque doors which open to seminal moments in each of their lives. Moments that might explain why they both struggle to maintain a relationship, why they might desperately need each other. David has issues from a high school romantic wipeout and parental expectations of perfection; Sarah is a ‘quirky girl’ who visits museums at night and didn’t tell Mommy she loved her… Everything is colour coded (him: blue, her: red), pretty, whimsical, lens-flared, rainy. 

Matt Kennedy/Sony Pictures

There are moments of delight: David performing the lead in his high school play on muscle memory, Sarah returning home for teen-years mashed potatoes and Big on the telly. Together, Farrell and Robbie are electric – but trapped in a film that doesn’t know if it wants to be cute or deep, or both. Tonally, it zig-zags, making it hard to get an emotional read on characters who are both intriguingly self-obsessed and drearily idiosyncratic. The takeaways are that love must be entered into, not just fallen into; that Farrell can sell the hell out a musical number, that Robbie once again proves her ability to make fast food romantic and appetising after Birds Of Prey’s perfect egg sandwich. 

A sweet film with good intentions and great collaborators. But one that doesn’t ever transcend the page it’s written on.


Words by JANE CROWTHER
Photography courtesy of SONY PICTURES
A Big Bold Beautiful Journey is in cinemas now

September 8, 2024

alfonso cuarón, kodi smit-mcphee, disclaimer
hollywood authentic, venice dispatch, venice film festival, greg williams
alfonso cuarón, kodi smit-mcphee, disclaimer

DISPATCH: KODI SMIT-MCPHEE DISCLAIMER
Words by JANE CROWTHER
Photographs by GREG WILLIAMS


‘I should have stayed in my seat,’ Kodi Smit-Mcphee smiles when he recalls premiering Alfonso Cuarón’s new Apple+ limited series Disclaimer on the Venice Film Festival red carpet directly before the premiere of Maria, in which he also stars. In Disclaimer, based on Renee Knight‘s 2015 bestseller, Cate Blanchett plays an award-winning documentary filmmaker, Catherine Ravenscroft, who’s past comes back to haunt her when she receives a novel in the post. Told via three different perspectives and two different time periods, Smit-Mcphee plays the  directionless son she shares with Sasha Baron Cohen. In Pablo Larrain’s biopic of Maria Callas starring Angelina Jolie, he appears as the personification of her sedative medication who manifests as a TV reporter questioning her in the week of her life. ‘’I’m literally named Mandrax, which is this suppressant kind of medication that she takes. It’s these therapeutic conversations that she’s ultimately having with her subconscious – but with me,’ he tells Hollywood Authentic when we sit down overlooking the Grand Canal in the St Regis Hotel. Both projects gave him the opportunity to work closely with powerhouse actors in Blanchett and Jolie. ‘It was great in the sense of just how generous and giving and safe and comforting these women are. I really feel like both took me under their wing, and made me feel welcomed and good. And a couple of Angelina’s sons were also on set. So I hung out with them quite a bit. They were really beautiful as well.’

alfonso cuarón, kodi smit-mcphee, disclaimer

Venice hosted two red carpets for the premiere of the seven-part Disclaimer – the cast photographed on both occasions by Greg Williams – and for Smit-Mcphee coming to Venice gave the actor the chance to spend time with co-stars he didn’t meet during filming as their characters’ timelines didn’t cross on-screen. He and Leila Geroge, who plays the younger Catherine, and Louis Partridge – who essays a young man who has a life-changing impact on her – compared notes on filming as Smit-Mcphee spent six months filming on sets in London (and adopting an English accent) while George and Partridge filmed for seven weeks in Italy. 

For George the role required the actor to play two very different versions of the character as well as perform key explicit scenes with Partridge. The part required her to go to some dark place. ‘I use music quite a lot for when I have to shift into another place emotionally. Different playlists for different things, and that just immediately triggers something for me,’ she says. And the intimate scenes were an additional challenge. ‘It’s really important, of course, to have an intimacy coordinator so that everyone feels that there’s someone that they can go to, and feel safe. So there’s that side of it – the technical side of it. The other side of it is just getting to know [Partridge], and feeling safe with the person as a friend. We had so much time in Italy before we did those scenes. We’d go to each other’s trailers before we’d do something like that, and be like, ‘How are you feeling about the day?’ Communication and check-ins. And then just being able to let it go. Just leave it behind.’

leila george, disclaimer
leila george, disclaimer

‘It was kind of like a dance. It was all rehearsed,’ Partridge agrees. ‘And so, in some ways, it was more helpful to be in your own space, and occasionally checking in. Because we knew what we were about to do. And then, at the end of the day, we’d have a little dance, and shake it all off.’

Smit-Phee laughs that he enjoyed digging into playing a ‘grubby, homebody kind of teen’ as Blanchett and Baron Cohen’s son. As for working with Blanchett as his mum, he says: ‘Cate makes you question your abilities in the best way because she can go from this beautiful, light-hearted, joking fun in between takes. But then when she needs to go into something dark and heavier, it’s almost as if there’s a switch. But of course, there’s not a switch. It’s a great deal of work she does to develop these characters and get into these moments. But, my God, it looks like magic.’

The resulting work in Disclaimer is ‘so powerful’ and will prompt important conversation, says Partridge. He’s just completed work on Noah Baumbach’s new film and is currently filming Guinness, the story of the stout dynasty, playing Edward Guinness. ‘It’s brilliant, I’m loving it,’ he enthuses. ‘Do I get a lifetime’s supply of Guinness now? It wasn’t in my contract. That was a mistake, perhaps…’

alfonso cuarón, louis partridge, disclaimer
alfonso cuarón, louis partridge, disclaimer
alfonso cuarón, louis partridge, disclaimer

Disclaimer premieres on Apple TV+ on 11 October
Read our review of Disclaimer here

August 30, 2024

cate blanchett, leila george, sasha baron cohen, kodi smit-mcphee, louis partridge, alfonso cuarón

Words by JANE CROWTHER


Alfonso Cuarón’s dark seven-part thriller exploring victim blaming, the madonna/whore complex and the toxicity of trauma gives audiences a warning straight off the bat that they should question what they see. As feted documentarian Catherine Ravenscroft (Cate Blanchett) receives another award to add to her collection, the host of the ceremony touches on narrative and form and warns that they can be used for manipulation. Narrative and form are certainly used to skewed and smart effect in this elegant adap of Renée Knight’s 2015 bestseller as three stories are interwoven across decades. 

cate blanchett, leila george, sasha baron cohen, kodi smit-mcphee, louis partridge, alfonso cuarón

In one strand we follow Catherine Ravenscroft as she receives a parcel from an unknown source containing a book that seems to unravel carefully held secrets from her past. The story at the heart of the novel sends her spiralling, impacting her marriage to stuffy lawyer Robert (Sasha Baron Cohen) and estranging her even more from her 25-year-old wastrel son, Nick (Kodi Smit-McPhee). Meanwhile Stephen Brigstocke (Kevin Kline pulling off a perfect befuddled Englishman in the vein of Jim Broadbent) is mourning the loss of his son two decades previously, as well as his wife Nancy (Lesley Manville) more recently. Bereft, Stephen has nothing to live for but embittered revenge. And in a third story, horny inter-railing teen Jonathan (Louis Partridge) can’t keep his eyes off a beautiful young mother (Leila George) on an Italian beach. Grief, betrayal and brutality are bound for all the characters – but the how and why is disquietingly spun across the episodes to a gut-punch denouement that will make audiences question their own assumptions, gender bias and acceptance of narrative. The truth at the heart of this bleak tale is something that is lost repeatedly in the retelling of it, depending on who is crafting the story and what information (or lack of it) they are working with.

cate blanchett, leila george, sasha baron cohen, kodi smit-mcphee, louis partridge, alfonso cuarón
cate blanchett, leila george, sasha baron cohen, kodi smit-mcphee, louis partridge, alfonso cuarón

It would be churlish to provide any more narrative detail – the pleasure really is in the unpackaging of it – but this onion-layered story of perspective is delivered beautifully by Cuarón as writer/director, and his cast. Blanchett is a known powerhouse but she is immense here; by turns frantic, self-absorbed, rageful and ultimately incandescent as a woman being judged. George as a younger version of Catherine is a revelation in a star-making turn as both a vamp and a victim. She and Partridge generate serious heat in explicit scenes that cleverly make viewers complicit in judgement, while Kline and Manville create a blindsiding and heartbreaking portrait of grief that is hard to see past. Each of their narratives twist and turn to a barnstorming final episode that will likely prompt audience introspection about personal and public perception, society and social media’s hurry to punish without due diligence and the way we castigate women for being sexual beings. Knowing what we know at the end might also inform repeat viewing to understand the clues that were there for us to see – if only we weren’t so blinkered. A masterful binge watch that asks pertinent and uncomfortable questions.


Words by JANE CROWTHER
Disclaimer premieres on Apple TV+ on 11 October