Sense and Sensibility review – blue-chip cast decorates Emma Thompson’s pleasurable Austen adaptation

Thirty years later, this richly enjoyable film is back with its quality lineup including Kate Winslet and Hugh Grant alongside Thompson herself Emma Thompson won a screenplay Oscar for this buoyant, vibrant, richly enjoyable adaptation of Jane Austen’s novel. Released in 1995, it was directed by Ang Lee and is a movie with the pleasures of a golden age studio picture of the kind made by William Wyler. It was the second half of Thompson’s Oscar double – she won her first one in 1993 for acting in Howards End – and she is still the only person in Academy Award history to win for acting and writing. With marvellous lightness and gaiety, Thompson found a response to Austen’s comic register, expertly marrying it up to the romance, and 1995 now looks like the golden age of Austen adaptation, having also seen the Colin Firth/Jennifer Ehle Pride and Prejudice on television and Amy Heckerling’s Emma-homage Clueless at the movies. Thompson paid due attention to Austen’s unique and toughly real...

‘I’m not a saint’: Abel Ferrara on his wild career, rehab and nightclubbing with Donald Trump

The last time our writer interviewed him, the drugged up director dozed off then asked for coke. Now sober, he reflects on #MeToo, Italian fascism and his fight for the final cut

The last time I met Abel Ferrara, he dozed off in the middle of our interview then woke up and asked me to score him some coke. It was 1996, and he was in the UK promoting his gangster drama The Funeral – which the actor Vincent Gallo alleged Ferrara had been too blitzed on crack to direct properly – and his vampire horror The Addiction. He was on a roll, his reputation fortified by King of New York, starring Christopher Walken as a flamboyant crime boss, and the gruelling Bad Lieutenant, with Harvey Keitel as a bent junkie cop. Ferrara was the scuzzball Scorsese: no matter how celebrated he became, he never shed the patina of grime from his early days as the star and director of porn film The Nine Lives of a Wet Pussy and the infamous “video nasty” The Driller Killer.

“You were the guy I fell asleep with?” he gasps now from his bright, high-ceilinged living room in Rome. He is calling via Zoom, his laptop resting on a shelf so he can pace around as he speaks, drinking from a bottle of San Pellegrino that he clutches by the neck. “You’re the guy? I’m sorry, man! Really, really.” Then he switches tack. “You let me down! You were 24, living in London, and you didn’t know where to score?” He shakes his head in disbelief. “All right. So where could we get some now?” A sandpapery cackle fills the air as he rocks on his heels. His hunched posture and jutting jaw make him the spit of the cartoon dog Muttley. He laughs like him, too.

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