Elastic limbs, fantastical accents and crackling sexual chemistry: Dick Van Dyke turns 100

The goofy star of Mary Poppins becomes a centenarian on Saturday. And what a precocious performer he has proved, sustaining scrappy mischief through seven decades of mainstream entertainment All Hollywood stars grow old and die except perhaps one - Dick Van Dyke - who turns 100 today. The real world Peter Pan who used to trip over the ottoman on The Dick Van Dyke Show is still standing. The man who impersonated a wind-up toy in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang hasn’t wound down just yet. He has outlived mentors, co-stars, romantic partners and several studios. He’s even outlived the jokes about his performance in Mary Poppins. These days his mangled cockney accent is regarded with more fondness than contempt. It’s seen as one of the great charms of the 1964 classic, along with the carousel chase or the cartoon dancing penguins. Charm is the magic ingredient of every popular entertainer and few have possessed it in such abundance as Van Dyke, the impoverished son of a travelling cookie salesm...

Sasquatch Sunset review – Riley Keough and Jesse Eisenberg suit up for ingenious Bigfoot comedy

Four mythical hairy creatures, communicating in grunts, inhabit what could be a post-apocalyptic world in the Zellner brothers’ witty and unnerving film

The Zellner brothers, David and Nathan, take their absurdism and futurism to the next level with a brilliant and radical comedy about the secret life of the legendary Sasquatch, AKA Bigfoot, creatures rumoured to be living in the North American wilderness. Sasquatch Sunset is a film to compare with Planet of the Apes, or Watership Down, or even the days of silent cinema. Nonverbal cinema anyway. It’s a plaintive, echoing wail of fear in that big empty forest where no one is around to hear a falling tree; fear of climate catastrophe, fear of the ongoing environmental destruction in which we don’t even fully know what’s getting destroyed; fear of humanity’s own extinction.

And as the movie begins, maybe humanity is already extinguished. We see four Sasquatch loping across a forest clearing: great, hairy, grunting, whooping, ape-like creatures: a female and three males, played without dialogue and in full prosthetic makeup by Riley Keough, Jesse Eisenberg, Nathan Zellner and Christophe Zajac-Denek. Two are in a couple and their sexual activity is observed impassively by the other two. One would-be dominant alpha appears to make a sexual move on another, having observed them in the midst of masturbatory self-discovery. He also bullies the others away from a blackberry bush he wants all for himself, on which he appears to get drunk and then hungover. Mushrooms are another dangerous stimulant. At moments of drama and stress they shriek and caper and clap their clenched fists together.

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