The pleasures of writer-director Jon Watts’ crime caper Wolfs are numerous: George Clooney and Brad Pitt play dueling fixers called in to clean up the accidental death of a young, adorable student—prior to his demise, occasioned by his jumping on a hotel bed, he’d been picked up by high-powered district attorney Amy Ryan in a bar. Clooney and Pitt have reached the age where they know it’s useless to pretend they’re something they’re not. Their faces look handsomely lived in; the whispers of gray in their artfully sculpted chin stubble feel honest and earned. Like Lucy and Ethel in the throes of a falling out, they’re fun to watch as they bicker and crab at one another, leaning heavily on their silver-fox charm. Still, what they’re offering feels as comfy as the worn-in leather jackets they wear. And in this late-2024 movie season, if you find yourself wishing for something more—for another view of what actors in the 50-to-60-ish age bracket can do—look to the women, who insist on pushing themselves out of the comfort zone rather than settling into it.

Demi Moore in Coralie Fargeat’s horror-of-aging black comedy The Substance, Nicole Kidman in Halina Reijn’s May-December sizzler Babygirl, Tilda Swinton and Julianne Moore in Pedro Almodóvar’s moving and provocative The Room Next Door: These big-name movie stars are pushing into new territory rather than just riffing on whatever may have made them appealing 10, 20, or 30 years ago. That’s a luxury no actress can afford, and these women know it.

Like lots of us, I will always love looking at guys: that includes Clooney and Pitt in Wolfs, both of whom are settling nicely into perfectly age-appropriate handsomeness. But as I watched Clooney’s character drive around nighttime New York with the silky strains of Sade’s 1980s hit “Smooth Operator” floating from his car stereo, it occurred to me that guys can afford nostalgia; women need to be modern every minute, or they risk being left behind. I also realized that months after first seeing Moore’s performance in The Substance—a movie that isn’t, overall, even very good—I’m still thinking about the shaky limb she crawled onto. There are no shaky limbs in Wolfs, though there are some creaky joints, and an Advil joke—because aches and pains are a thing men can joke about, charmingly, while women who do the same run the risk of coming off as crotchety old complainers.

Read more: The 33 Most Anticipated Movies of Fall 2024

In The Substance, Moore plays Elisabeth Sparkle, an aging movie star who—like Moore herself—has kept herself in fabulous shape. She’s also doing more than OK, hosting a popular 1980s-style exercise show. But she gets the sense that her boss, a leering Dennis Quaid, is looking to replace her with a younger model. Then she catches wind of a revolutionary new injectable known as The Substance, which stimulates the creation of a younger, and supposedly in all ways better, clone. The trick is that the original and the clone must switch roles every seven days, without exception, via some sort of mystery infusion. Elisabeth can’t resist giving The Substance a try, though she’s not prepared for how much she comes to resent her youthful, nubile clone, played by a vapidly effervescent Margaret Qualley.

The Substance devolves into a senseless jumble of body horror that panders to its audience rather than challenging it. Even so, Moore’s performance is naked and fearless in all ways. The years from 50 to 60 can feel perilous for women: men in that age bracket are often (though not always) viewed as more powerful and sexy than ever. Women can feel that way too, but the radical hormonal adjustments that hit during that period—amidst other challenges that might include raising kids, a marital breakup, or striving to remain relevant in the workplace—usually mean they have to fight harder for their confidence. In The Substance, we see Moore fighting that battle and looking great—but when her sense of self-esteem flags, as it does while she’s getting ready for a date with a nice guy, an old schoolmate who’s asked her out, we see how easily those undermining inner voices can triumph over us. At first, she looks at herself in the mirror and likes what she sees: she’s put on an amazing red going-out dress that looks sexy without trying too hard. But she can’t help comparing her fifty-something self to the younger Qualley version. She redoes—and in the process overdoes—her makeup. She wraps a massive scarf around her neck, clearly obsessed with wrinkled skin that only she can see. Moore turns Elisabeth’s increasing desperation into a hamster-wheel frenzy, and though she plays it for laughs, not pathos, you feel its power over her. In the end, Elisabeth spends so much time fussing with her appearance that she misses her date. It’s the finest, subtlest scene in a movie that’s largely a mess—but Moore gives it her all.

It’s true, too, that all actors in their 50s and beyond pour a great deal of effort and money into preserving their good looks. We know that Clooney and Pitt surely benefit from, at the very least, the best skin care money can buy. But one of the unfair double standards of biology is that men often look better when they’re a little weatherbeaten; unless women fix up in some way, even if that just means moisturizer, concealer, and lipstick, they often end up fielding backhanded noncompliments like “You look tired.” You can argue that we shouldn’t care at all—of course, we shouldn’t. But to some degree, most of us do, and you can’t blame actresses, whose faces are subject to constant scrutiny, for caring even more.

In Babygirl—which opens in the States on Christmas Day—Nicole Kidman plays Romy, a married past-middle-aged executive who becomes involved with a much younger intern, played by Harris Dickinson. He doesn’t gaze into her soul so much as stare right into the heart of her unspoken sexual desires—he’s got a kind of intuitive erotic clairvoyance. This both rattles and thrills her; his attentions become a drug she can’t kick. All the while, of course, you’re looking at Kidman, with her marble visage, and thinking, Well, thanks to any combination of money, cosmetic intervention, time at the gym, and good genes, she’s perfectly gorgeous. Why wouldn’t any character she plays land the hot young guy?

But that line of thinking misses the point. Kidman plays Romy’s fears and insecurities as free-floating, all-powerful forces that are divorced from how great she looks. Though beauty and money may make life easier, they can’t solve every problem, and an expectation of happiness is often the very thing that kills its possibility. Kidman’s performance in Babygirl shows that principle in action. Romy has no reason to believe that her handsome, attentive, theater-director husband (played by Antonio Banderas) shouldn’t automatically make her happy. So why is she miserable? People often act surprised when Kidman gives a fearless performance—how quickly we forget that, in Lee Daniel’s The Paperboy, she once peed on a jellyfish-stung Zac Efron. But that may be one of her secret gifts: her ladylike façade is a shell that she herself cracks again and again, and somehow, we’re always surprised by what she chooses to reveal.

Read more: 15 of the Sexiest Movies You’ve (Probably) Never Seen

Admittedly, we tend to reflexively lament the lack of serious roles for “older” actresses, though in a perfect world, those actresses would be able to make their share of old-school crime capers, as the boys do. Now and then we get one, a la Ocean’s 8, though most of our so-called serious actresses (even when they’re great at getting laughs, as Meryl Streep has always been) tend to put comedy on the back burner until their golden years. It’s our over-70 actresses—Jane Fonda, Lily Tomlin, Diane Keaton—who seem to be having more fun with that genre. Maybe that’s because those actresses are long past the point of having to prove themselves. And performers in their fifties, particularly but not only women, may still feel they have so much to prove.

Even so, there’s pleasure to be found even in the most serious subjects. Pedro Almodóvar’s The Room Next Door—opening in the States in late December—is adapted from a 2020 Sigrid Nunez novel, What Are You Going Through, and stars Tilda Swinton as Martha, a woman suffering from terminal cancer who enlists a long-lost friend, Julianne Moore’s Ingrid, to help her die on her own terms. That sounds like a downer if ever there were one. But if Almodóvar is sometimes a serious director, he’s never a morose one—there are always strata of joyousness in his movies, and The Room Next Door is no exception.

Moore’s Ingrid is a mildly high-strung writer; at first, she balks at taking on the responsibility of helping her friend with this seemingly unsavory task. But as the two women spend more time together, she frees herself of the gravity of this mission and comes to see it as a way of helping Martha take flight. Swinton’s Martha, an accomplished war correspondent who has also raised a daughter on her own, moves through the movie like an Earthling who’s been in space for a long time, only just now realizing what it means to truly touch ground—she’s like a version of Bowie’s homesick alien in The Man Who Fell to Earth, though the home she’s moving toward is a truly final resting place.

Yet this last leg of her journey—one that Ingrid, with all her fluttery-butterfly energy, will partly share with her—isn’t an inconsequential one. She’s stepping out of own adventure and into another, and because this is Tilda Swinton, she looks great doing so: even as her illness takes its toll, she wraps herself—with the help of Almodóvar’s magic wand of color—in rainbow hues that reinforce all the possibilities of life. Maybe this movie is a caper, of sorts, though it’s a caper with a capper. No one gets out of this world alive. The entreaty of The Room Next Door is to use every second wisely, and to help others as best you can. That’s a lot for a movie, and a duo of actresses, to carry. But these two pull it off, literally, with flying colors.

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At first glance Jack Schlossberg seems like your average Ivy League lunkhead. Tall and handsome, his lanky six-foot-two frame has rangy athleticism, he boasts a thatch of hair that geneticists should task with study and he can always bust a camera-ready, doe-eyed, heartbreaker grin. He’s urban, he’s part of the liberal cognoscenti; he skates about the parks like a real New Yorker in his singlet, cap set backwards with its peak against his nape. 

Take a closer look, however, and you start to see the resemblance: the chiselled cheekbones, the glowering brow. He has all the hallmarks of his ancestral bloodline. Jack Schlossberg is unmistakably a Kennedy.

John “Jack” Bouvier Kennedy Schlossberg was born in 1993, the youngest child of Caroline Kennedy and designer and artist Edwin Schlossberg. He is named after his maternal grandfather, the 35th US president John F Kennedy. Ted Kennedy was his godfather and great uncle. He bears an uncanny likeness to his uncle, John F Kennedy Jr, the attorney, socialite and publisher who died in 1999. Schlossberg was a ring bearer at JFK Jr’s wedding, and shares the same proclivity for writing and wearing not too many clothes.

Schlossberg has degrees from Yale and Harvard in history, law and business administration, briefly worked in the Bureau of Oceans and International Environmental and Scientific Affairs and has turned his hand to journalism. He’s written for the Washington Post, New York magazine and People but his chief achievement since graduation has been creating content and cultivating his social media presence with a slew of TikTok films. Some half a million followers now tune in regularly to watch him singing ditties from behind the steering wheel, cogitating on the park run, providing “hot takes” about Big Tech and, increasingly, “memeing for democracy”.

Some observers might find Schlossberg a bit peculiar, his goofy brand of humour comes across as slightly odd. Watching him crooning feels like being on a Tinder date that you’d like to exit. And I think it’s a red flag he doesn’t like to shower, wash his hair or brush his teeth. But in spite of this, or perhaps because of it, the 31-year-old has been adopted to help explain politics to the young and disaffected. US Vogue signed him up as a political correspondent in July, while Kamala HQ has been using him as an interlocutor to get the vote out and energise Gen Z. 

His content is now pivoting away from moochy explainer videos to find him chatting deep dish pizza and policy with Josh Shapiro, the governor of Pennsylvania, hanging out with swing-state senators and doing porch-side interviews with major figures in the Democrat community. His access is formidable: most Democratic elders seem to treat him as you might a hyperactive nephew — an inevitable fixture whom you are fond of but sometimes wish would go away. Schlossberg carries with him the golden privilege of being a Kennedy. He may be a smelly skater-boi crossed with a puppy, but he’s still a scion of the mythic Camelot. He got the chance to remind everybody of that connection at the Democratic National Conference, in Chicago, during which he gave a two-minute speech. He told the assembly why his grandfather was his “hero”: because “he inspired a new generation to ask what they could do for our country. Today, JFK’s call to action is now ours.” 

Schlossberg may lead with a unique brand of “silly goose”, but of the current crop of Kennedys he’s probably the sane one. Few things are stranger than the spectacle of his cousin Robert F Kennedy Jr’s late career in politics: the now retired presidential candidate and Trump supporter revealed this week he is being investigated for collecting a whale specimen 20 years ago: he cut its head off with a chainsaw and then bungee-roped it to the family car. Following the brain worm, and the story of the dead bear cub (he planned to skin it but then dumped it in Central Park, you remember?), and an allegation of sexual assault (over which he apologised without admitting guilt), RFK Jr’s reputation for being a bit zany has now been reclassified as dangerously mad. 

Jackie Kennedy may have coined the expression Camelot to help mythologise her late husband’s presidency, but the myth gets ever stranger and more powerful by the year. One wonders whether a Kennedy can ever be an ordinary mortal or must always cultivate an outsize personality to live up to their famous name. Schlossberg is harnessing more statesmanlike authority while cruising on his hunky affability and adjacent fame. His schtick can feel as though it has been cynically workshopped to “play” with next gen voters, but at other times his uncensored edits seem spectacularly untamed. 

As a representative of Camelot 2.0 he ticks all the boxes. He’s politically aspirational, charming, non-confrontational and looks cute in a suit and in running shorts. For a voting sector that has been put off by the relentless negativity of recent politics, Schlossberg is the perfect spokesman: he sandwiches his easy-peasy calls to action — “vote blue” (hell, you don’t even need to know the names on the ballot), “reproductive freedom”, “don’t cry, vote!” — and then gets back to the stuff of life, like moonwalking in the supermarkets in his filthy dirty socks.

And, yes, he isn’t hugely funny, or even amusing, but he’s got that rare ancestral glow. Camelot 2.0 is the same but different and while our collective weakness for Kennedy connections might smooth his transition into more serious politics, as with so many of his brethren it’s hard to work out where the focus starts and the charisma ends.  

jo.ellison@ft.com

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South Carolina has executed its first death row inmate in 13 years, administering a lethal injection to Freddie Owens.

Owens, 46, was found guilty by a jury of killing shop worker Irene Graves during an armed robbery in Greenville in 1997.

He was executed despite his co-defendant signing a sworn statement this week claiming Owens was not present at the time of the robbery and killing.

The South Carolina Supreme Court refused to halt Owens’ execution, saying the claims were inconsistent with testimony made at his trial.

Owens was executed at the Broad River Correctional Institute in Columbia, South Carolina, on Friday evening.

He was pronounced dead at 18:55 local time (22:55 GMT) after being injected with a drug called pentobarbital. He made no final statement.

His death followed a pause in executions in the state because prison officials were unable to procure the drug required for lethal injections.

Owens was sentenced to death in 1999, two years after killing Graves, after being convicted of murder, armed robbery and criminal conspiracy.

The day after he was found guilty, he killed his cellmate in jail, reports CNN affiliate WHNS.

According to reporting on his trial by South Carolina newspaper The State, Owens was 19 when he and Steve Golden, then 18, held Graves at gunpoint while attempting to rob the convenience store where she worked.

Owens shot and killed Graves after she failed to open a safe below the counter, according to testimony provided by Golden at Owens’s trial.

At the time of her death, Graves was a 41-year-old single mother of three.

Lawyers for Owens tried to halt his execution a few times, including twice in September. But the court denied each request.

In the latest attempt, lawyers pointed to an affidavit signed by Golden on Wednesday, which claimed Owens was innocent.

The court denied the request to halt the execution by saying that the new affidavit was “squarely inconsistent with Golden’s testimony at Owens’s 1999 trial” and the statement he gave to police right after their arrest.

Other witnesses testified that Owens had told them he shot Graves, prosecutors said.

Advocates against the death penalty and Owens’s mother also appealed to the state for clemency, which was denied by Governor Henry McMaster.

Hours before his execution, Owens’s mother said in a statement it was a “grave injustice that has been perpetrated against my son”.

“Freddie has maintained his innocence since day one,” his mother, Dora Mason, said, according to local news outlet the Greenville News.

Inmates in South Carolina are allowed to choose whether they want to die by lethal injection, electric chair or firing squad.

Owens deferred the decision to his lawyer, who chose the lethal injection option for him, according to the Greenville News.

Journalists who witnessed the execution said members of Graves’ family were also present.

My family moved recently. A change of address occasions much administrative work, one task of which was to calculate the value of the art collection my husband and I have cobbled together. Seems likely I was displacing some emotion — leaving our home of 14 years was not easy — but this exercise made me philosophical. I could enumerate the prices I had paid for various works; I could extrapolate about the current art market by checking recent auction results. But what did that tell me? The insurance company wanted to know about dollar amounts, but I was stuck on the thornier question of value.

Seven years ago, I saw a retrospective of the artist Agnes Martin, at New York’s Guggenheim Museum. I was familiar with Martin’s minimalist paintings, which I admired, and was unprepared to be surprised by the exhibition, let alone deeply moved. I love the experience of communion with films, books, canvases on the wall, but I am rarely overcome by it, and certainly did not expect to cry over an artist known for her cool geometries. But there we were, my companion and I, considering Martin’s final finished painting with tears in our eyes. 

I’ve tried to make sense of my state on this day. I was hungry, or tired, or thirsty, or some combination of these — my diagnosis when dealing with my children’s emotional outbursts. Maybe Frank Lloyd Wright’s building had something to do with it, the pitch of the floor making me feel unsteady, the open rotunda making me feel dizzy. Or my response was purely emotional — I’d have to be made of stone to feel nothing after hearing the sobering facts of Martin’s life. Perhaps all this is true, or a factor, anyway, in my tears. 

It’s also possible that I experienced something too rare in my secular life in our profane culture — call it the sacred. Already a cliché to say museums are modern cathedrals, built to dwarf the body and awe the senses; worth pointing out that quiet contemplation of anything that’s not my iPhone feels profound, and that the progress I made up the ramp of the Guggenheim was rather like the devout Catholic’s observation of the Stations of the Cross.

I think art is one of the last provinces of the sacred for me, maybe for most of us. A work of art’s price can’t tell us anything about it, and there’s no point in talking about art in terms of dollars or euro or yen, but perhaps there’s no other metric available to us.

The most expensive thing I’ve ever bought is a painting. It’s a small work, a minor effort by one of the world’s most celebrated artists. I bought it at auction, spending far more than I had intended to, caught up in the competitive fervour, my desire for this work somehow apart from what I would pay for it, by the magical thinking that governs most of my shopping. The way my insurance company judges this untitled painting’s worth is by referring to the record of what I spent on it. That’s the market in a nutshell; things are worth what someone is willing to pay.

When I look at this painting, I don’t think about that number. I think about what a genius can do with paint, and I think about this particular genius’s ability to make images that are at once horrific and beautiful, and I think about the hands of this particular genius touching this artefact that I now possess. But I’m not an underwriter. 

This is the most expensive painting in our collection, but I don’t know if it follows that it is also the most valuable. I have a framed watercolour that my older son did when he was three — bless the Montessori teachers who wrote the date on it. It’s a splash of light blue and is, according to the artist, a whale. Children’s art rarely looks like what it’s meant to depict, but in this case, the thing, perhaps only accidentally, truly resembles a breaching whale. Obviously, there’s no way to convert sentimental value into actual currency. 

It’s a great privilege that I’m in a position to spend any money on art, though I possess more sentiment than currency. It’s still possible to buy the work of artists at the start of their career, or editions by more well-known names at small auction houses, or even minor work by true masters.

I think about the money, because I’m working within the constraints of a budget, but only when I’m in the act of transaction. Then I forget that altogether. I cannot, as George Lucas did, spend $15mn on a painting by Robert Colescott. I could, though, spend about one month’s rent on a small, early work by the same artist. Living with it affords me a pleasure to which I cannot affix a price tag, even though my insurer has asked me to.

Sometimes a work of art is described as priceless. In my imagination this implies more zeroes than one can count, but it’s more accurate to say that with art, numbers aren’t salient. We should call a masterpiece unpriceable instead. 

Still, money is so essential a factor of contemporary existence that we cannot help but bring it in. Money borders — even if it should not enter — some of life’s most serious provinces. Family life, religious faith and romantic love may be all that are left to us that are exempt from the logic of buying and selling. 

Sometimes a work of art is described as ‘priceless’, but with art, numbers aren’t salient. We should call a masterpiece ‘unpriceable’ instead 

The art market is one matter, but even the urge to photograph or otherwise document a museum visit, very common at the moment, is, I think, an economic activity. We reach for our phones from some insipid urge to participate in a culture too attuned to pointless connectivity, yes. But to Instagram a Pollock or a Van Gogh transforms that moment of pleasure into work. We think this ennobling; it’s sadly debased. 

I don’t know whether it’s fair to consider faith a realm wholly uncorrupted by money — it’s certainly possible to enumerate the assets of, say, the Catholic Church (some of which are what we would call priceless). Nevertheless, art can provide an encounter with the mysterious, a territory that borders the mystical. Perhaps that is why I so often find it a balm. 

Only a few months ago, on a day I found personally difficult, I fled to the Museum of Modern Art in need of distraction or solace. I saw an exhibition by the video and performance artist Joan Jonas. I spent a surprisingly long time watching black-and-white footage of a performance she’d staged decades ago, in the then-wasteland of lower Manhattan. In those minutes, I truly forgot the worries that had sent me to the museum in the first place.

Last summer, I pulled some strings and was invited behind the scenes at Christie’s Rockefeller Center outpost. I was writing a book in which one character, a billionaire, buys a painting by Helen Frankenthaler. (No deeper meaning in choosing this artist than the personal, as she’s one of my favourite abstract expressionists.) I wanted to see the rooms to which serious collectors are sometimes invited to kick the tyres of the masterpieces they might buy. 

A Christie’s staffer led me down a long hall, threw open massive doors to intimate, soundless rooms, simply but strongly lit, containing nothing at all. I thought they felt like chapels. I loved imagining the Warhols and Picassos that had once stood there, ready for inspection. 

My guide seemed surprised to discover that the last room we entered was not empty at all. In my recall, it, too, was bright and silent, but there, on the wall, was a painting. It sounds like something out of fiction but it’s true; it was by Frankenthaler. There are many words applicable: happenstance, coincidence, luck, kismet.

I find that when I’m immersed in the writing of a novel there will be uncanny resonances in my real life. I’ll be served a meal like one I imagined, or meet someone with the same name as a character I invented. There’s no deeper meaning in it, just a funny thing that has happened to me often enough that I understand it as part of the novel-writing process. Maybe this is part of the experience of seeing art, too. There’s some frisson that can’t be put into words, a sense of recognition or kinship. 

I don’t know what happened to the Frankenthaler I saw that day. (Christie’s sold a Frankenthaler this spring for more than $4mn, but that’s a detail of interest mostly, I think, to insurance companies.) I like to imagine the person who bought it: that they went into the very room I did, that they smiled with some private pleasure at the thought of being alone with this painting. I like to imagine that they knew and cared about Frankenthaler, that they were tempted to touch the painting, that they had questions about its provenance, that they got close enough to the canvas to smell the paint itself.

I like to imagine that moment brought them joy, a joy they feel every time they glimpse the painting, wherever they’ve chosen to hang it. I cannot bear to think that it went into storage, or hangs in a guest bedroom in a rarely visited vacation home. I prefer to imagine it is with someone who would agree with me that art’s value is not calculable, albeit someone with enough money to say something like this and still be taken seriously. I’d like to tell that painting’s owner how I stole two minutes alone with their painting, and I like to imagine they’d know that is worth everything.

Rumaan Alam’s new novel ‘Entitlement’ is published by Bloomsbury

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Churchdown School said on social media that it was “with regret” it had to close.

The school will conduct an electrical survey to assess the damage, before being able to open again safely.

It added it was due to “significant” water damage, caused by a flash flood on Friday night.

“We apologise for any inconvenience caused as a result of this unforeseen and extreme event. We have made this decision now in order to provide you with as much notice as possible to make alternative arrangements,” the school posted.

Leisure At Cheltenham has posted on Facebook that it had to stay closed on Saturday due to weather-related damage.

“We apologise for any inconvenience caused and thank you for your patience,” the leisure centre added.

Fundamental Movement Academy, another leisure centre in Cheltenham, has also had to stay closed on Saturday due to damage caused by flooding.

On Facebook, the centre posted: “We will be giving you updates as much as we can whilst trying our best to get everything clean and ready for our re-opening.”