The Apprentice actor Sebastian Stan says Hollywood stars are ‘afraid’ of Trump | Movies
Sebastian Stan, who stars in The Apprentice, a biopic of Donald Trump focusing on his association in the 1970s with lawyer Roy Cohn, has said that other actors in Hollywood are too “afraid” of the president-elect to participate in press with him.
Stan claimed that he had failed to find a single peer who would appear opposite him in the Actors on Actors series run by industry magazine Variety, in which key awards contenders quiz each other.
During a recent Q&A about the film in Los Angeles alongside director Ali Abbasi, Stan – best known for his work in Marvel films – said: “I couldn’t find another actor to do it with me, because they were too afraid to go and talk about this movie. So I couldn’t do it.”
He added: “You know, I’ve got to do a lot of great things, and that’s not pointing at anyone specific. It was … we couldn’t get past the publicists or the people representing them, because [they were] too afraid to talk about this movie.”
His claim was confirmed to People magazine by Variety co-editor in chief Ramin Setoodeh. “What Sebastian said is accurate,” he said. “We invited him to participate in Actors on Actors, the biggest franchise of awards season, but other actors didn’t want to pair with him because they didn’t want to talk about Donald Trump.”
Stan said that he felt the response was ominous in terms of the film industry’s interactions with Trump after he comes into power in January.
“That’s when I think we lose the situation,” he continued. “Because if it really becomes like that – fear or that discomfort to talk about this – then we’re really going to have a problem.
“For many, the idea that Trump is the same as any one of us is a really difficult thing to deal with at the moment and I understand the emotions are very high, but I think that’s the only way you’re going to grasp this film,” said Stan.
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“If all it’s saying is you cannot keep casting this person aside, especially after they get the popular vote, should we not give this a closer look and try to understand what it is about this person that’s even driving that?”
Trump called the biopic, which features a scene in which he rapes his ex-wife, Ivana, a “cheap, defamatory, and politically disgusting hatchet job” ahead of its release in the US, adding that it was “fake and classless” and took particular issue with its director and screenwriter.
Writing on Truth Social, Trump said: “So sad that HUMAN SCUM, like the people involved in this hopefully unsuccessful enterprise, are allowed to say and do whatever they want in order to hurt a Political Movement, which is far bigger than any of us. MAGA2024!”
Raoul Peck on his Ernest Cole film: ‘I wanted to give him the total podium’ | Documentary films
You can’t possibly look at Ernest Cole’s haunting photography, capturing the struggle for South Africans during apartheid, and not immediately and urgently think about what Palestinians are living through today. Ernest Cole: Lost And Found, the latest documentary from I Am Not Your Negro director Raoul Peck, pours over those violent images captured by the late photographer in his 1967 book House of Bondage. They show South Africans living with a proverbial boot to their neck – constantly policed, segregated, barred entry to not just spaces but employment opportunities their European oppressors access freely, having their homes bulldozed for new settlements and their marches brutally met with gunfire – viscerally recalling what’s happening in Gaza and the West Bank.
“Yes, those parallels are clearly in the film,” says Peck, on a Zoom call, adding that it’s those types of connections that inspire him to tell whatever story he pursues. “In this film you can also see the western world not wanting to boycott South Africa while doing business with them: selling arms, buying arms, buying gold, uranium.”
“But it’s not my job to point to anything,” Peck continues, speaking not just to his new film but all his work. “That’s the contract between me and the person watching the film. I leave space for you to bring in your own current situation, to help you understand the world as it is now.”
Peck is a former minister of culture in Haiti who has lived in West Berlin, Paris and the US, describing his experience as a life in exile. His films going back 40 years are often drawn to people whose relationship to their homes are tenuous, uncertain or altogether severed, whether politically or violently. His first narrative feature, 2000’s Lumumba, focused on the Congo leader’s exile. Last year’s Silver Dollar Road stuck by a Black family whose home comes under threat from land developers.
His HBO series Exterminate All The Brutes, examines genocide as a pillar of the European and US cultures, wiping Indigenous, African and Jewish people from their homes. Though what’s happening in Israel falls just outside that show’s purview, Peck highlights a passing mention in Exterminate All The Brutes of a Palestinian suicide bomber. “I ask the question, what would I have done if it was my daughter? Would I call her a monster? That’s how I address it.”
Peck is speaking from a hotel room in New York City, where his latest subject Ernest Cole lived in exile and died in 1990. Peck’s film isn’t just a showcase of Cole’s work in House of Bondage, which the photographer published at 27, exposing the world to casual horrors in the country he could no longer return to due to apartheid. The film also explores selections among 60,000 negatives that mysteriously surfaced seven years ago in a Swedish bank vault, lost images Cole had taken while he was living in the US, touring the American south as well as Europe, before he became despondent, houseless for some years and fallen of the map. Many of the alternately warm and striking images Cole shot in places such as Alabama observe African American life; the joys and the resilience, but also the echoes to his experience in Johannesburg, the oppression that they share with their counterparts across the world.
“It’s the view of a 26-year-old, 27-year-old South African who has spent all his life in an apartheid prison,” says Peck, “discovering something that was sold to him as the free world. That alone is worth observing. What does he do? What does he catch? What does he see?”
Ernest Cole: Lost and Found works as a companion piece to Peck’s James Baldwin documentary I Am Not Your Negro, in that it’s also about a critical voice who experienced varying realities through travel and refused to have his humanity reduced to just being Black. “Baldwin is somebody who always said: ‘I don’t let anybody define who I am,’” says Peck. “And I learned that very early in my life. I read Baldwin when I was 16. And he gave me the gave me the tools, already.”
Where the Baldwin documentary had the author’s words but also his footage of him speaking passionately during interviews, the new film has photographs, Peck’s camera moving within them, directing our gaze, searching for the details Cole would have fixated on. An image from South Africa, when a white child in a bathing suit innocently sips water from a park fountain, the camera pans up to reveal the violence of a Europeans-only sign hanging just above her. “Beyond the innocence”, Peck says.
The film also pairs Cole’s photos with his own words. Atlanta actor LaKeith Stanfield lends his voice as Cole to the criticism and poetry found in House of Bondage’s prose, subsequent letters he wrote or observations pieced together from testimonies of those who knew or witnessed him. In a street scene showing a young Black man interrogated by police, the camera scans the crowd around him. Cole asks what each person in the photo is thinking, how they see themselves in relation to the anxious police interaction on the street, as either the next potential victim or the white man calmly affirmed that things are the way they should be.
In the US, Cole photographs white citizens, describing and mulling over the way they look into his camera, and regard him, with indignance or suspicion. Such photos aren’t just a window into the US’s soul, but Cole’s own. When he photographs couples on the street embracing each other, there’s an ache in his words as he ruminates on their public displays of affection. “You can see how cold it was for him in the metropolis,” says Peck. “That he was isolated.”
That isolation is even more pronounced when Cole describes the unhoused people he captures sleeping on the street or benches. “Empty useless bodies”, he says, reflecting perhaps on himself. “My ultimate photos.”
While there’s no record of what Cole is going through when those photos are taken, and only assumptions as far as addiction projected onto him, Peck is confident he can fill in the gaps, at least emotionally. “Having been in exile myself, I know what happened,” he says. “Knowing what is happening in your country every day and not be able to do anything, that can make you crazy. That can depress you. It’s like PTSD, before it was diagnosed as such.”
For Peck, Ernest Cole: Lost and Found is a reclamation of the photographer’s voice, a film that forgoes talking head interviews and the opinions of others – and instead leaves the space for the artist to tell his own story.
“It was about Ernest taking back his power,” says Peck, describing how his film, and even the way his camera points in habits the artists gaze. “Because he had been disempowered for the last 50 years … I wanted to give him the total podium to talk about his work, to talk about his life and even beyond his death.”
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Ernest Cole: Lost and Found is out in New York cinemas on 22 November, Los Angeles on 29 November, with more cities to follow and a UK date to be announced
1000 Words Photography Magazine #17: New work from Christian Patterson, Doug Rickard, Cristina De Middel and much more!
It is hard to believe that 2014 marks the fifth year of publishing 1000 Words. Yet, we still remain as passionate and committed to the mission of exploring the limits and possibilities of photography, and to stimulating debate around the medium’s myriad of current practices and discourses as ever.
It therefore gives us great pleasure to announce the launch of issue 17, our first release of the new calendar. To view it, please go to www.1000wordsmag.com
Charlottesville's Violet Crown theater denies it is closing – The Daily Progress
Charlottesville’s Violet Crown theater denies it is closing The Daily Progress
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Hannigan Tops Musical America 2025 Artist of the Year Awards
Musical America 64th annual “of the year” awards, announced today by publisher Stephanie Challener, celebrate conductor and soprano Barbara Hannigan as Artist of the Year, Jake Heggie as Composer of the Year, Víkingur Ólafsson as Instrumentalist of the Year, Angel Blue as Vocalist of the Year, and James Robinson as Director of the Year. They are being recognized, said Challener in comments, because “they have advanced the artform…far beyond any expectations and have brought entirely new perspectives and vistas to the performing arts.”
Known internationally for both of her artistries, the Canadian-born Hannigan on November 26 launches a ten-city recital tour of North America with pianist Bertrand Chamayou in Montreal. (She comes to New York in December.) As to life on the podium, in addition to guest conducting major international ensembles, she is to be the next music director of the Iceland Symphony Orchestra and is the current principal guest conductor of the Gothenburg Symphony Orchestra, associate artist of the London Symphony Orchestra, Première Artiste Invitée with l’Orchestre Philharmonique de Radio France, and, as of 2024-25, principal guest of the Orchestre de Chambre de Lausanne. She is know, in particular, for her explorations of new work.
Composer of the Year Jake Heggie is perhaps the most performed contemporary opera composer working today: To date, his 2000 opera Dead Man Walking has been mounted over 75 times on five continents; his 2010 Moby-Dick is scheduled for its Met Opera premiere in March 2025; Earth 2.0 premieres December 6, 2024, with the Fort Worth Symphony and the Urban Bush Women under conductor Robert Spano; Songs for Murdered Sisters gets its U.S. orchestral premiere next January by the Philadelphia Orchestra, first in Marian Anderson Hall, then in Carnegie Hall. Heggie began his opera career in the public relations office of the San Francisco Opera; clearly he has come a very long way.
Instrumentalist of the Year Víkingur Ólafsson who comes to Carnegie and Severance halls in February with Yuja Wang to repeat their London superduo recital, is known for having devoted an entire year to Bach’s Goldberg Variations, an exception to the wide variety of concerto repertoire he performs with orchestras around the world The Icelandic pianist has premiered some six concertos by his country’s own composers, well as solo and chamber works by Atli Ingólfsson, Mark Simpson, and Mark-Anthony Turnage. He numbers Philip Glass among his close collaborators and has a vast discography with DG, to which he is signed exclusively.
Vocalist of the Year Angel Blue has just completed a stunningly successful run singing the role of Margarita Xirgu in Osvaldo Golijov’s Ainadamar at the Metropolitan Opera. The onetime beauty-pageant winner takes the title role in the Met’s new production of Aida at its gala opening on New Year’s eve, followed a month later by a return to her 2017 debut role at the house—Mimì in La Bohème. She has sung on international opera stages and in recital halls, and won two Grammy awards, one of them for her staring role in the Met Opera’s recording of Porgy and Bess. An outgoing and sparkling personality, Blue kept many classical music fans duly entertained (and uplifted) during the pandemic hosting her own weekly show on Zoom, Faithful Fridays.
Speaking of the Met Opera’s Porgy and Bess, it was Director of the Year James Robinson who staged that award-winning production anew in 2019-20, as well as many others both at the Met and around the world. Recently the Seattle Opera lured Robinson away from his 15-year tenure at Opera Theater of St. Louis (OTSL) to be its next general and artistic director. In 2012 Robinson convinced trumpeter and band leader Terence Blanchard that he could write an opera; that resulted in Champion and, shortly thereafter, Fire Shut Up in My Bones, both staged by Robinson first at OTSL and subsequently at the Met Opera, marking the latter company’s first-ever stagings of works by an African American composer. As with all of these Musical America 2025 Awardees, Robinson is, in act and in fact, a game changer for the performing arts.
How A Refugee From The Kennedy Center Built A Center For Dance In Southern California
Judy Morr “decided to do something nobody else was doing in Southern California, which was to bring major international dance companies to Orange County. That’s how it all started. Dance became the way to establish the Center’s reputation nationally and internationally.” – CultureOC
Bye bye Zaha, hello fried egg! New designs unveiled for Tokyo Olympic stadium | Architecture
It was compared to everything from a bike helmet to a potty, and allowed to spiral to almost double its budget, before being unceremoniously scrapped and declared a national embarrassment. Zaha Hadid’s futuristic design for Tokyo’s 2020 Olympic stadium would have swaggered through the historic Meiji Park like a glossy white stormtrooper, breaching local building codes and leaving the city with a costly white elephant. But are the alternative proposals, finally unveiled this week, any better?
After Hadid’s heady vision, the two new designs might seem a bit bargain-basement. One looks like an undercooked fried egg – a wobbly white roof with a gelatinous, albumeny middle. The other looks like a pile of salad plates cleared away before anyone had finished, with bits of lettuce poking out from between the stack of saucers.
But both are significantly slimmer and cheaper than Hadid’s design – around 153bn yen (£835m), as opposed to 252bn yen (£1.3bn) – and they appear to be models of a lighter-weight, low-key approach that would fit better with the parkland setting. Anonymously released as Design A and Design B, but believed to be the work of celebrated Japanese architects Kengo Kuma and Toyo Ito, both are titled Stadium in a Forest and make prominent use of wooden construction, in contrast to Hadid’s hefty steel arches.
Scheme A (which looks like the work of Kuma to me) has a roof supported by a dense lattice of exposed timber trusses. If well-detailed it could be a magnificent thing, forming a cat’s cradle of interlocking beams above spectators’ heads and recalling the intricate complexity of Japanese joinery. It would be a first for any contemporary stadium, which usually rely on steel and stretchy skins of PVC and ETFE, and a welcome nod to the country’s building traditions.
From outside, its seating terraces look like slender piles of plates, supported on rings of raked columns with the air of a traditional Japanese temple, while the whole thing is garnished with greenery. It’s too early to tell whether it will be token sprigs or full-sized trees (as some views suggest), but it could enable the park to reclaim the structure after the Olympics, engulfing it with greenery.
Scheme B looks more like it was born on Planet Ito. It has the Pritzker prize-winning architect’s trademark amoebic geometries, with an undulating white steel roof that ripples over the seating bowl, like a toned-down version of SANAA’s entry to the original stadium competition. A colonnade of majestic timber columns march around the perimeter, supporting the roof that flares out like a peaked sailor’s cap. The whole thing is proposed to be sheathed in a full-height skin of glass, bringing all the usual metaphors of transparency and reflection, and allowing the structure to “dissolve into the park”.
Whether covering a stadium in plants or glass offers more potential for it to disappear is debatable – and perhaps irrelevant, given that any Olympic stadium will be very visible indeed, no matter what rhetorical flourishes the architects try and achieve. Design B could be ethereal, or it could look like a lumpen IMAX cinema. Design A could be a wondrous wooden tree-house, or a half-baked idea disguised with garden trellis.
Local reaction has been lukewarm so far. “Both designs have a mundane appearance,” Yasuhiro Kimura, a 34-year-old out jogging near the construction site on Monday, told the Japan Times. “I can’t tell one from the other.” “They don’t have the characteristics particular to Tokyo,” added 16-year-old Akihiro Mori, a high school baseball player, in a disapproving tone.
Such reactions hit on the eternal existential nub of any Olympic stadium design: people expect them to be dazzlingly iconic, the pride of the nation capable of seducing the global TV audience at the opening – yet they also insist they must be built at a cut-price cost with as little impact on the context as possible. The two rarely go hand in hand.
Both Kuma and Ito are eminently capable. They understand the Tokyo context – and they both signed the petition to halt Hadid’s plan, lending the latest competition an unfortunate backstabbing air. When Hadid’s scheme was first unveiled, it was met with a blistering assault from the Japanese architectural community. Arata Isozaki, architect of Barcelona’s Olympic stadium, described Hadid’s project as a “monumental mistake” and warned it would be a “disgrace to future generations”. In a lengthy open letter to the Japan Sports Council, the government body in charge of plans for the 2020 games, he railed against the “distorted” process that had led to “a dull, slow form, like a turtle waiting for Japan to sink so that it can swim away”.
Ito was more measured in his criticism, choosing to quietly work up an alternative proposal that would have incorporated the original 1964 Olympic stadium, a 54,000-capacity venue already on the site. He argued it could be upgraded and reused, just as successful refurbishments had been made to the Olympiastadion in Berlin, host of the 1936 Games, and to the Memorial Coliseum in Los Angeles, Olympic host in 1932 and 1984. His alternative could have been the best option of all – if the structure hadn’t already been reduced to a pile of rubble.
As for Hadid, her practice is bitterly disappointed at the way they have been treated. They had always maintained that the spiralling costs were a result of rising construction costs in Tokyo, not their design.
“It is disappointing that the government did not even consider working with the existing design team to build on the two years of design work they and the Japanese people had invested,” said a spokesman for the practice. “The rules of entry to the new competition restricted the existing design team, as well as many other Japanese and international architects and contractors that wished to take part, from entering. There are now serious risks of a rushed process, with no certainty on the likely construction costs of the stadium, and that it may not be ready in time or deliver a significant sporting legacy without expensive conversion after the 2020 Games.”
The risks are real, and the whole process has been a sorry but familiar saga. Originally intended to host the 2019 Rugby World Cup, the new stadium now won’t be ready in time. But, whichever option they choose, I’m looking forward to seeing what could be the first wooden Olympic stadium in history. As long as they go easy on the fireworks.
New York Art Reviews by John Haber
Think keeping up with the news is hard? What about keeping up with the streets?
With “We Are Here,” the International Center of Photography exhibits “scenes from the streets,” through January 6, and its title is an assertion. It speaks for the show’s subjects, in sixteen countries, asserting their presence and demanding a voice. It speaks to the pace of the streets and the very nature of a photography, snapping away as best it can. We are here, it says, and soon we will be gone. What, though, will anyone remember? And what has happened to photography’s decisive moment?
Of course, Henri Cartier-Bresson coined “the decisive moment” to describe a vision of the present that not all photographers share—and I work this together with past reviews of Mark Steinmetz, Hans Breder, and Cartier-Bresson’s ideal as a longer review and my latest upload. Fashion photography or product photography needs time to create an image and to land a sale. Abstract photography asks to step out of time, even when it provides a window onto the photographer at work. From ICP’s founding, though, fifty years ago, it made photojournalism not a choice but a responsibility. It was not just keeping up with the news but making news. Lives were at stake.
Street photography can seem a casualty—or a foster child of silence and very fast time. You know what to expect at ICP, a city in motion. Look back to New York in the 1970s with Martha Cooper, when crime was at its peak, for empty lots and kids climbing the fences, if not the walls. Just crossing Canal Street with so many others is enough for Corky Lee. Skip ahead to the present, and collective motion means protest—for Freddie Gray in Baltimore with Devin Allen or for Women’s Day in Mexico City with Yolanda Andrade. Rest assured that the riot squad will turn up in force, even when no riot is going on.
Look for symbols, like the American flag put to personal use. Look for protest signs and graffiti, like spray paint that rechristens the American West for Nicholas Galanin as No Name Creek and Indian Land. Look for Palestinians on a day at the beach, Ferris wheels, kids doing cartwheels, or everyone just hanging out. Look for displays of street fashion, one girl or woman at a time. Look for them all again and again. The thirty-odd photographers get several shots apiece to do them justice. Most are contemporary and barely known.
The trouble is that you very much can expect them, over and over. Nothing seems all that decisive. As one protest sign has it, for Vanessa Charlot, the people demand “full humanity.” Actual humans, though, can get forgotten along the way, as older street photographers like Ming Smith and William Klein would never have allowed. The photographs do not want to make isolated, iconic images, which is exhilarating. Something, though, is lost—be it the issues at stake in protest, the poignancy of outcomes, or photography’s experiments.
There are things worth remembering nonetheless, on top of the sheer weight of the familiar. Street lives matter. While many stick to black and white, a tribute to street photography’s past, color can tell a story, too. It can erupt in umbrellas for Janette Beckman or women together, in South Africa for Trevor Stuurman or and in China for Feg Li. They are not just showing off but being themselves. Smugglers cycle or cart their bright bundles for Romuald Hazoumè, and yellow caps make police no less dangerous for Lam Yik Fei.
Is a riot going on after all—a riot of color in the riot of the streets? Chastening to a critic, even the breaks in uniformity come more than once. I had admired Anthony Hernandez before for LA seen through a chain-link fence, but here the distancing comes again with Michael Wolf. Long exposures from Alexey Titarenko turn St. Petersburg into a city of ghosts. And then women in white at church in Nigeria for Stephen Tayo could be an extraterrestrial delegation for peace. This, too, is the street.
Read more, now in a feature-length article on this site.
ART TREKS: Miami Art Week 2024 at Wynwood
Spectrum Miami and Red Dot Miami
When: Dec. 4-8
Where: MANA Wynwood Convention Center (318 NW 23rd St., Miami, FL 33127)
Head on over to the MANA Wynwood Convention Center, where Spectrum Miami and Red Dot Miami will host highly curated exhibitions spanning 150,000 square feet of indoor space.
Spectrum Miami will feature special programs that showcase exhibitors, art industry professionals, and select nonprofits and institutions. One of their featured programs, The Discoveries Collection, will spotlight highly collectible works from around the world and showcase some of their favorite affordable pieces ($3,000 or less).
Running alongside its sister fair, Red Dot Miami will offer the unique opportunity to connect with blue-chip galleries and emerging artists under one roof. Their featured programming includes SPOTLIGHT Galleries, which will provide collectors with a focused look at several cutting-edge galleries and their artists, who are recognized for their skill and achievement in the visual arts.
This Artist is Using Elaborate Line Work to Call Forth Your Inner Child
Years ago, Luis Coelho had taken a long creative break. Looking to get back into the process of creating, Coelho revisited material he had been exposed to as a child. This exploration led him back to a love of pens and the things one can construct through the mass collection of simple pen lines. Harboring this rediscovered love, Coelho asked his two nieces to decide what animals they wanted to see appear out of these lines on fresh pieces of paper, telling them that the animals would guard their dreams and lead them out of nightmares whenever they needed. In that moment, Coelho found his style in his desire to “breed sweetness," focusing on creating renderings of animals for children and the inner child in all of us, leading to a popularity with people of all ages.
Luis Coelho speculates that because of the dream guarding mission statement his work was birthed from, that all his animals take on an out of dreams-like quality and I’d have to agree. Take ‘Floofle’ for example. Under the banner of his Purr.In.Ink it’s natural that many of Coelho’s illustrations are of cats and ‘Floofle’ is the quintessential Coelho cat. Countless little ink lines coalesce into a black and white bundle of fur with stringy frayed whiskers playing from its face. Coelho expertly shades through the intensity of his line work to build the subtle impressions of the cat’s front legs. Floofle seems to exist in and appear from a dream-like shadow that permeates even the best of dreams. It’s adorable like all his felines but don’t discount his other critters like ‘Papami.' Papami is a sugar glider where the line work is simultaneously denser while done with a lighter touch. The shape is more defined to show the gliders body stretching into wavy points as it takes excitable flight. Its ears are like miniature bunny ears while a lightly lined patch by the glider’s eye shows like a rosy cheeked fairy tale creature. It makes me want to leap in the air and hug every animal I see. Luis Coelho’s creations never fail to delight and tickle the cute animal needs in all of us. After seeing his work, I know it’ll live on in my imagination and I can’t wait for the day that Floofle comes to bat away the darkness in my dreams.
The Man With a Thousand Faces review – triumphant takedown of international dating scammer | Movies
‘When he said he was in Toulouse for paediatric training, he was in Krakow seeing his other wife.” This is the moment when a Parisian woman called Marianne discovered that her partner had a second life. And a third, and a fourth … The Man With a Thousand Faces slots neatly into the mini-genre of dating scammer documentaries – but this is the French-intellectual version. There are some jaw-droppers in the story of how Ricardo (sometimes Alexandre or Daniel), a Portuguese (sometimes Argentinian or Brazilian) man conned numerous women. But it’s an emotionally literate, lo-thrills film from film-maker Sonia Kronlund, who casts actors to play some of the women to protect their privacy.
And really, it’s the women that Kronlund finds compelling. Marianne (played by Aurelie Gasche) had a baby with Ricardo, supposedly a surgeon who’d spent years in Africa with Médecins Sans Frontières. She was five months pregnant when suddenly she couldn’t reach him; the phone numbers he’d given her were fake. Another woman discovered the truth after finding a photo that he’d sent to the mother of his baby daughter – only they didn’t have a baby. Ricardo’s typical exit strategy at the end of a relationship was to vanish after getting a phone call to say that one of his parents was dead or in a coma.
Director Sonia Kronlund hires a detective to find Ricardo, who is married and living in Krakow. Her revenge will feel like an anticlimax for anyone gearing up for a showdown. But Kronlund understands men like Ricardo; she gets that he is untroubled by shame. It would be impossible to make him feel guilty about how his lies have devastated his former partners. So instead she makes him look silly, showing him up as a needy narcissist desperate for attention. It’s a masterstroke, although her film leaves a fair few questions unanswered.