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Narrated by James Marriott
Some performances are like car crashes – you can’t look away. Rupert Pupkin is a sociopathic pest who would bore you solid if you sat next to him in a bar, but in Scorsese’s King of Comedy, Robert De Niro gives him the hypnotic pathos of Lear’s fool. In The Shining, Shelley Duvall’s Wendy Torrance is such a squeaky-voiced victim, swinging that baseball bat like a flyswatter, that you can’t wait for Jack Nicholson to catch her. Charisma has its place, but in the hands of a great film-maker, so does plain old “annoying”.
Take Tomas (Franz Rogowski), the central character of Ira Sachs’s wonderfully seductive, sharp new film Passages. Tomas is a film director and, by the sound of it (“All
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