John Lennon: The Last Interview review – Soderbergh imagines there’s no people with bland AI clipshow

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Succession of pointless AI-generated snippets does nothing for film about the artist’s final interview, which took place on the day of his murder Coming just after his superb feature The Christophers , Steven Soderbergh has now made a surprisingly moderate documentary, dominated and frankly marred by uninteresting and pointless AI. It is about the inadvertently poignant final interview given by John Lennon and Yoko Ono on 8 December 1980 in New York’s Dakota apartment building, hours before his death. The interviewers were Dave Sholin, Laurie Kaye and Ron Hummel from San Francisco’s KFRC radio station. On their way out of the building with the conversation on tape, they were accosted by a creepy stalker-fan; in attempt to calm the man down, Kaye gave him a brand new copy of John and Yoko’s new album Double Fantasy. This sinister man was Lennon’s future murderer who got him to sign an album – perhaps this very album – and later shot him dead. It is a chilling, stomach-turning twist of f...
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This is the year the Oscars found God – but can they keep the faith?

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From Conclave to The Brutalist to A Real Pain, films about religion are unusually well represented at the Academy Awards – some with decidedly unorthodox themes
• Warning: contains spoilers

What Tony Blair’s former spin doctor Alastair Campbell said of New Labour – “We don’t do God” – applies also to the Academy Awards. The secular gong-dispensing rite annually sweeps religion off its proverbial red carpet. The last best picture winner to deal with the subject was 2015’s Spotlight, which hardly proselytised for organised religion – it dramatised the Boston Globe’s investigation into sexual abuse in the Catholic church. You have to go back to 1973 to find a movie with a priestly protagonist that really beguiled the Academy: William Friedkin’s horror movie The Exorcist received 10 Oscar nominations, winning awards for screenplay and sound.

This year, though, may be different. Two leading contenders, The Brutalist (10 nominations) and Conclave (eight), put faith front and centre. And let’s not forget the perversely charming Holocaust road-trip movie, A Real Pain, shortlisted for best original screenplay and best supporting actor, for Kieran Culkin. If not exactly a meditation on Judaism, Jesse Eisenberg’s film is a beguilingly thoughtful musing on Jewish identity from a self-consciously privileged actor-director whose ancestors survived the Holocaust. A Real Pain serves as a reflection on transgenerational trauma and the meaning of religion after Nazi genocide.

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