Hollywood
The Liam Neeson Action Genre Starts to Wind Down

Liam Neeson recently said that he’s planning to retire from the action revenge genre that injected his career with a second life, starting with “Taken” back in 2008. Neeson was 55 when he shot that movie — old enough to play a hardened former CIA operative, ageless enough that we believed in his strength and speed and badass vigor. In the 16 years since, the Liam Neeson vigilante B-movie with attitude became its own genre. I’m one of many who look forward to these films and enjoy, in theory, their no-frills sadistic mayhem. But the truth is that Neeson, with his towering presence and sinewy resolve, is always better than the movies themselves.
In memory, most of them blur together, and it’s amazing how much they all still feel powered by that speech in “Taken” (“I can tell you I don’t have any money. But what I do have are a very particular set of skills. Skills I have acquired over a very long career. Skills that make me a nightmare for people like you…”). It’s Liam Neeson, in fact, who has a very particular set of skills. Playing lone-wolf Bronson and Bruce Willis knockoffs, he radiates such a dark intelligence — very Bond-like — that you take in each moment through his clenched precision.
But “Absolution,” his latest lean-and-mean production, isn’t like the others. It’s a movie that seems to know that it’s coming to the end of the Neeson pulp programmer road. He plays a gangster’s enforcer who is never named, which feels right, since for all his brutal efficiency he’s just a rusty cog in the Boston underworld machine. He lives in a spacious beat-up home rental in Winthrop, Mass., across the harbor from Boston’s Logan Airport, and he seems completely alone there (even the TV set doesn’t work), pouring out another bourbon to get through the afternoon.
Neeson, even as he’s aged, usually looks killer. In “Absolution,” though, he’s outfitted like a ruffian gone to seed. He lopes around in an ancient long brown leather coat, and his scraggly white-gray sideburns and mustache look like they’ve been hanging out on his face since the ’70s. The look reminded me of the late great sportswriter Frank Deford, but Neeson is playing a thug who is shambling and out-of-it, who has never changed and now finds himself running on empty.
The character started off as a boxer and has become a bum, like Brando’s Terry Malloy. He’s suffering from memory loss as a result of CTE (chronic traumatic encephalopathy), the condition that used to be called “punch-drunk,” and Neeson, face sunken with despair, makes you feel the suppressed anxiety with which he scrawls names in notebooks to remember them. The film is reminiscent, at moments, of “Knox Goes Away,” in which Michael Keaton played a hitman with dementia, but that movie (which Keaton directed, and beautifully) was far craftier than this one.
“Absolution” marks the second time that Neeson has collaborated with the Norwegian director Hans Petter Moland (they made “Cold Pursuit” in 2019), and Moland has a gift for setting and atmosphere. He knows how to exploit that whole second-tier Boston thing — that it’s the underworld that’s off to the side of New York, less showy and more prosaic in terms of how crime works. Neeson’s boss, played by Ron Perlman as an avuncular-but-really-affectless gangster, depends on him for a host of jobs, but Neeson now has to partner with Perlman’s son (Daniel Diemer), a hothead with a shit-eating grin who acts out his entitlement by getting into trouble. Neeson, by contrast, is the quiet professional, with a right hook that can still jab like a crowbar.
The movie sets the stage nicely, and Neeson doesn‘t make a false move. “Absolution” wants to be more than a dumb action film. Neeson takes you part of the way there, but in its atmospheric way the movie is cobbled together out of so many standard but disparate devices that it can feel as pumped-up as the cliché thriller it’s trying not to be.
Neeson’s lonely old violent henchman drinks cheap booze on the rocks around the clock. He falls into a fling with an effervescent barfly (nicely played by Yolonda Ross). He tries to reconnect with his adult daughter (Frankie Shaw), a sex worker who hates him for abandoning her. He tries to connect with his grandchildren — which means taking his mixed-race middle-school grandson to the gym to get him into boxing. He’s tasked with driving a mysterious truck back from New York, and when it turns out to be full of trafficked women, he decides to “save” one of them in the searing-Calvinist-guilt mode of “Taxi Driver” and “Hardcore.” Then he has a run-in with mysterious assassins. Did I mention that his other adult child died of a heroin overdose…and was gay?
There are dream sequences (the first one is good; they should have left it at that), along with some well-staged suspense bits, like the sequence of Neeson driving that truck back from New York. There’s a powerful scene in a ritzy restaurant, where his class anger comes pouring out. But “Absolution” wants so much to be a real movie — almost like one of Clint Eastwood’s elegies for his own legend — that it only makes you that much more aware that it’s an awkward pedestal for a great actor trying to turn slumming into art.
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Hollywood
‘No Different Land’, the movie in regards to the career of the West Financial institution, wins the Oscar for Best possible Documentary | Oscar awards | Cinema
No longer Different Landthe movie the place the Palestinian Basel Adra and the Israeli Yuval Abraham painting the career within the West Financial institution, has received the Oscar for the most productive documentary. In the USA, the movie has now not completed distributor, forcing the administrators to mission it in only a few rooms within the nation, even if he had received the prize for the most productive documentary on the Berlin Pageant of 2024. Because of the recordings in their authors (held till October 2023), reside murders are noticed by means of army and settlers; concreteras stuffed with cement that quilt water wells; excavators that wreck a humble college with a unmarried flooring; tears of babies within the face of violence and hatred of the ones in entrance. “I’m hoping my daughter does now not must reside the similar existence that I’m residing, all the time below surveillance, with invasions, displacements and an career. This movie displays the uncooked fact by which we’ve got been residing a long time. We ask for movements to finish this injustice and ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian folks, ”Adra stated upon receiving the prize.
The Palestinian director lives in Masafer Yata, the world of the south of the West Financial institution by which greater than 1000 citizens will also be legally expelled at any time (the Very best Israeli showed it in 2021 as a taking pictures zone), the military ends wells and demonstrates colleges, homes and electric posts, and masses of its population have diminished their hands and undone the village to settle in every other phase. The Palestinian met the Israeli journalist Yuval Abraham, who suffered demise threats after the triumph of his movie within the Berlinale of 2024, turned into buddies and recorded whilst his folks had been regularly destroyed by means of settlers supported by means of the Israeli military.
Already in his speech within the Berlinale, Abraham stated: “I reside in a civil and basel regime in an army one. We are living half-hour on each and every different, however I’ve the precise to vote and basel, no. I will be able to transfer freely across the nation, however Basel, like thousands and thousands of Palestinians, is stuck within the West Financial institution. This apartheid state of affairs between the 2, this inequality, has to finish. ” And that had been repeated once they received the most productive documentary movie within the Eu cinema, and that used to be accomplished once more on the Oscar gala. “Palestinians and Israeli we make our voices more potent. The atrocious destruction of Gaza and its folks have to finish, Israeli hostages in Gaza should be launched. Once I see Basel, I see my brother, however we don’t seem to be the similar. We are living in a regime the place I’m unfastened below civil legislation, whilst Basel will have to reside below army legislation that destroys his existence, ”stated the Israeli director. And he ended up pointing to the USA govt: “We want a political answer with out ethnic supremacy. The international coverage of this nation is helping to dam this trail, do not you spot that we’re intertwined? My folks can handiest make sure that if the Palestinians are actually unfastened. There is not any different strategy to do it, there is not any different way of life. ”
His speech used to be the primary to explicitly talk of the war within the strip and in relating to the USA govt and used to be gained with cheers within the theater. The movie will also be noticed in Spain in Filmin and Movistar Plus+.
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Karla Sofía Gascón, after the Oscars: “There were occasions when ache has been so overwhelming that I pondered the unthinkable” | Tradition
“As Albert Camus mentioned, ‘there’s just a really severe philosophical downside, and it’s suicide,” as a result of we are facing the very which means of life. I don’t quote those phrases to insinuate the rest or level to myself, however for the ones others who may just no longer endure what I simply persisted. ” This is a part of the in depth letter that actress Karla Sofía Gascón (Madrid, 52 years previous) has despatched to the American atmosphere The Hollywood Reporter. That is the primary statements of the interpreter after attending the Oscar gala, hung on March 2 in Los Angeles. Gascón was once a candidate for absolute best actress for Emilia Pérez and was once provide on the Dolby Theater after the talk over historical tweets racist and offensive.
Within the remark, and not using a probability of rejecting, the actress apologizes: “Simply as I’ve been the objective of destructive phrases, I’ve additionally mentioned hurtful issues all over my lifestyles that experience made others really feel angry. Issues made and mentioned from worry, from my very own lack of knowledge, from my very own ache, from outdoor that chilly and demanding protect. ” Later he proposes to open a debate on psychological well being: “For my daughter and for long run generations, I wish to open a good dialogue and mirrored image on psychological well being. During other phases of my lifestyles I’ve handed via darkish moments, episodes by which melancholy led me to surprising puts. ”
Despite the fact that Emilia Pérez gained 13 Oscar nominations, gained handiest two awards, for Very best Music, and Very best Allotted Actress, Zoe Saldaña. Gascón informs in her letter that false accounts attributed to her had been opened on social networks “so as to add ache and confusion.” “I used to be launched absurd and delusional accusations that deeply harm my spirit. Issues climbed to some degree, and so speedy, that I could not even breathe. In the course of this surprising and devastating typhoon, there were occasions when ache has been so overwhelming that I pondered the unthinkable. ”

In some other a part of the temporary, the actress denounces a marketing campaign of loss of life threats and explains what has made transparent from a level of her lifestyles that qualifies as “the worst”: “Now that the typhoon is being relax somewhat, and the worst already came about (or I am hoping), I start to see obviously what I’ve realized. I’ve realized that detest, like fireplace, can’t be grew to become off with extra hate. The offenses can’t be erased with extra offenses, and mistakes can not blank different mistakes, particularly when lies and falsehood proliferate in all places and when the one factor they ship me again is natural anger, shameless harassment, vexation, contempt or even loss of life threats. ” “Thankfully, I’ve stored my apex of sanity to peer the sunshine on the finish of this hate tunnel and keep in mind that I will have to be and do higher, and proper my previous faults, with out getting desirous about extra darkness,” he says.
The actress’s remark ends like this: “Most effective via working out, compassion, forgiveness and empathy we will be able to construct an international the place the variation isn’t synonymous with condemnation, however of wealth. A global the place we will be able to be told and develop as we advance. A global the place we will be able to all set aside our shields and be ourselves. Thank you from the again of my middle. ”
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Penelope Cruz, white within the Oscars: its favourite colour to step at the pink carpet

The Spanish actress has dressed once more in Blanco-Nochia to visit a very powerful rite of the 12 months. It’s not the primary time that he trusts the colour, his favourite to shuttle pink carpets for greater than 25 years
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