Joy review – warm and intensely English portrayal of the birth of IVF

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London film festival Bill Nighy, James Norton and Thomasin McKenzie form the unlikely trio who doggedly, quietly and courageously made the discovery that would change lives around the world There is sympathy, warmth and directness – though perhaps not much in the way of explicit joy – in this intensely English true story that made headlines and changed lives around the world. Screenwriters Jack Thorne, Emma Gordon and Rachel Mason, and director Ben Taylor, dramatise the heartache and strain and triumph that led to the first ever birth of what the press with a mixture of hostility and awe called “a test-tube baby” – that is, a baby conceived through in vitro fertilisation – on 25 July 1978: a little girl called Louise Brown (middle name Joy). Continue reading... from Film | The Guardian https://ift.tt/02cION4 via IFTTT
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‘I need to feel alive’: Julianne Moore on family, friendship and mortality

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Few actors are as endlessly versatile and compelling as Julianne Moore. Ahead of her extraordinary performance in the latest Pedro Almodóvar film, she opens up about love, death and the complexity and richness of ordinary lives

Yesterday Julianne Moore was on the subway in New York, listening discreetly to strangers. “I was sitting there and I heard one woman say, ‘Well, I know that’s exactly what you’d do, I know that’s what you’re like.’ And the other woman said, ‘It’s true, I just don’t like confrontation, I don’t!’” Perhaps it’s distracting, the idea that Moore, not only an Oscar-winning actor, but one whose airy beauty and long red hair (red hair that an early director warned would limit her career, ha) makes her one of the most recognisable people in the world, could pass unnoticed through a carriage of chattering commuters. But please remember – or trust me – that part of Moore’s talent is the ability to transform, to step back from herself. She is a 63-year-old character actor in the body of a movie star. Anyway: “It was so amazing, because it was these two female friends,” Moore goes on, “and one was saying, ‘I know you, I see you’. And the other was affirming that she saw the right thing. It was fascinating. I thought, nobody’s gonna make a movie about these two, but that’s who most of us are. Right?”

In her 40-year career, which has spanned auteur’s art films like the exquisite Safe, to huge blockbusters like The Hunger Games, as well as award-winning dramas like Still Alice (for which, after many nominations, she won her Oscar in 2014) and recent TV work like the audacious Mary & George, Moore has played characters who are defiant and struggling, sometimes deviant, trapped in an often-gorgeous prison of domestic horror.

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