The 1975 drama, one of the only films to ever receive the big five Oscars, remains a touchstone of American cinema with a resonant message of resisting conformity
A movie winning the big five Academy Awards – best picture along with honoring the lead actor and actress, writing and directing – happens so rarely that there’s not much use in examining the three movies that have pulled it off for common ground. But among It Happened One Night, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, and The Silence of the Lambs, it may be Cuckoo’s Nest, released 50 years ago on Wednesday, that feels like the unlikeliest across-the-board triumph. It Happened One Night and The Silence of the Lambs both belong to rarely awarded genres (romantic comedy and horror, respectively), which makes their big wins unusual but also clearcut: here is an example of the best this type of movie has to offer. Cuckoo’s Nest, meanwhile, is potentially much thornier. It’s a comedy-drama made at least in part as allegory – an anti-conformity story of fomenting 1960s social rebellion, disguised as a movie about lovable patients at a mental health facility.
The Ken Kesey novel that the movie is based on was published in 1962, chronicling some of what Kesey saw as a hospital orderly and anticipating some of the coming pushback against postwar American conformity. The major change in Miloš Forman’s film is to shift the narrative away from Chief (Will Sampson), a towering Native American who presents himself as deaf and mute. Chief narrates the book, while the movie hews closer to the perspective of RP McMurphy (Jack Nicholson), who enters the facility having faked mental illness in the hopes that he can avoid serving out a prison work-camp sentence. Though the doctors don’t seem entirely convinced by his ruse, his behavior is apparently erratic enough for him to stay at least a little while. His attempts to bring more individualism and fun to his cohabitants runs afoul of Nurse Ratched (Louise Fletcher), who exercises tight control over the ward.
A skilled interpreter and social justice champion, Gaughan is a hero to the likes of Richard Hawley and Billy Bragg. Yet much of his work has been stuck in limbo for decades – until a determined fan stepped in
‘It felt to me as if the world had forgotten about the Frank Sinatra or Elvis Presley of folk, or a singular figure in the mould of Willie Nelson, Johnny Cash or Richard Thompson.” So says Colin Harper, curator of a slew of new releases celebrating the stunning music of Scottish musician Dick Gaughan. Harper had recently reconnected with his music after several decades, “and I couldn’t believe the quality of it. His singing and guitar playing were astonishing – he performed traditional songs and championed social justice so powerfully.”
But if you haven’t heard of the 77-year-old Gaughan, it’s not surprising: much of his work has been unavailable for years, the rights to it having been claimed by the label Celtic Music, who have not made it available digitally. Gaughan doesn’t recall receiving a royalty statement from the company in 40 years. He is battling for ownership and, in turn, hopes to help other veteran folk artists regain control of their catalogues. “To find that the music I made, that I put a lot of work into, is just not available – it’s like your life isn’t available,” he says.
La série fantastique phare de Netflix reviendra bientôt pour une saison 5, trois ans après la précédente. Bandes-annonces, date de sortie, casting... Voici tout ce que l'on sait sur la conclusion épique de Stranger Things.
La saison 5 de Stranger Things approche à grands pas sur Netflix, avec la mise en ligne des 4 premiers épisodes, dès le 27 novembre 2025. D'ici là, les frères Duffer, les créateurs de cette série culte, reviennent sur cette ultime aventure et sur l'un des personnages très appréciés des fans, qui possède une importance toute particulière à leurs yeux.
Whether it’s vibe-setting dance and rap for house parties or soothing dream-pop for when you’re contemplating the clear-up, reach for these ready-made playlists
Let’s face it: when everyone’s two improvised cocktails deep, they’ll be hollering for Pink Pony Club, and after two more, they’ll be doing Fairytale of New York in a male-female karaoke face-off. But for the early part of the party, here’s some 2025 pop, dance and rap to keep the mood buoyant.
Tom Cruise has been “running in movies since 1981.” So when Glen Powell was tapped to star in a reboot of The Running Man, he of course reached out to his Top Gun: Maverick co-star for advice. Read More
Malgré le contexte, entre appels au boycott et défection de maisons d’édition, le ministère de la Culture veut que le festival de BD d’Angoulême se tienne en l’an prochain.
The actor said he wrote wishing 11-year-old Dominic McLaughlin ‘an even better time’ growing up in the role than he had
Harry Potter star Daniel Radcliffe said that he wrote to 11-year-old actor Dominic McLaughlin, who has been cast in the title role of the new Harry Potter TV series.
Radcliffe appeared on Good Morning America on Tuesday and said: “I wouldn’t say that anyone who is going to play Harry has to [call me],” adding: “I wrote to Dominic and I sent him a letter and he sent me a very sweet note back.”
The use of AI in the surprise game-of-the-year contender has sparked a heated cultural and ethical debate, and raised existential questions for artists, writers and voice actors
Arc Raiders is, by all accounts, a late game-of-the-year contender. Dropped into a multiplayer world overrun with hostile drones and military robots, every human player is at the mercy of the machines – and each other. Can you trust the other raider you’ve spotted on your way back to humanity’s safe haven underground, or will they shoot you and take everything you’ve just scavenged? Perhaps surprisingly, humanity is (mostly) choosing to band together, according to most people I’ve talked to about this game.
In a review for Gamespot, Mark Delaney paints a beguiling picture of Arc Raiders’s potential for generating war stories, and highlights its surprisingly hopeful tone as the thing that elevates it above similar multiplayer extraction shooters: “We can all kill each other in Arc Raiders. The fact that most of us are choosing instead to lend a helping hand, if not a sign that humanity will be all right in the real world, at the very least makes for one of the best multiplayer games I’ve ever played.”
Malgré le contexte, entre appels au boycott et défection de maisons d’édition, le ministère de la Culture veut que le festival de BD d’Angoulême se tienne en l’an prochain.
Jackie Siegel has spent two decades building a 90,000-square-foot replica of the Palace of Versailles in Florida. As ‘The Queen of Versailles’ becomes a Broadway musical, Caitlin Hornik joins Siegel to explore the spectacle and the sorrow behind the story that made her famous
The London gallery’s new show features a wealth of items from across the Texan filmmaker’s idiosyncratic career. This exhibition of oddities might sound a little predictable, writes Louis Chilton – but Anderson has always been more complicated than he’s given credit for
When Austrian philosopher Otto Neurath invented the visual language of Isotypes, it was to democratise education. As a new exhibition shows, it ended up influencing pop art, graphic design and electronic musicians from Kraftwerk to OMD
When Otto Neurath died in Oxford some 80 years ago, far away from his native Vienna, he was still finding his feet in exile. Like many a Jewish refugee, the economist, philosopher and sociologist had been interned as a suspected enemy alien on the Isle of Man, along with his third wife and close collaborator Marie Reidemeister, having chanced a last-minute life-saving escape from their interim hideout in the Netherlands across the Channel in a rickety boat in 1940.
Thanks to Neurath’s pioneering use of pictorial statistics – or “Isotypes” as Reidemeister called them, an acronym for “International System of Typographic Picture Education” – he left behind an enormous legacy in the arts and social sciences: it is the language through which we decode and analyse the modern world. But his lasting relevance would have been hard to predict at the time of his death at the age of 63.
Almost everywhere I go, I am asked about Sudan. The questions are partly from concern for family and my birth country, and partly from a genuine desire to understand how the conflict there has turned into something so intense and seemingly unstoppable. This week, I break down what is happening in the country, and why it has escalated to catastrophic proportions.
Wojciech Has’s slice of 1960s surrealism is set in 18th-century Spain, as an officer careens through farcical encounters and erotic episodes in a wild ride that could be a series of Monty Python sketches
This epic picaresque comedy from 1965 is a head-spinning period-costume adventure of 18th-century Spain from Polish film-maker Wojciech Has. It is a surrealist film whose surrealism resides not merely in the bizarre parched landscape of the Sierra Morena mountain range with its bleached skulls, hanged bandits, crows and mysterious inns in which seductive encounters are to be had, but also simply in the bewildering juxtaposition of individual tales and anecdotes, stories which grow out of each other. The surrealist effect (and the comedy) is in the jolt from one micro-narrative to the other, and the realisation that the overall story is thwarted and undermined.
The premise is that in the Spanish town of Saragossa during the Napoleonic wars, one officer tries to arrest another, who is apparently reading an old book – but is then distracted by the fact that this book is about his own grandfather, the nobleman Alfonse Van Worden. (Later we discover that the passages about this grandfather have been added by hand, in pen-and-ink, hence Saragossa Manuscript.) Then we flash back to the this preening aristocrat-soldier himself, played by prominent Polish actor Zbigniew Cybulski.
11 chefs-d'œuvre du studio Ghibli disponibles gratuitement en streaming légal en France ? C'est ce que va proposer France Télévisions à partir de décembre. Ce sera donc littéralement Noël avant l'heure.
11 chefs-d'œuvre du studio Ghibli disponibles gratuitement en streaming légal en France ? C'est ce que va proposer France Télévisions à partir de décembre. Ce sera donc littéralement Noël avant l'heure.
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