Director Nicole Chi Amén embarks on a journey to learn more about her own mixed cultural heritage after the death of her Guangdong-born grandma
Nicole Chi Amén, a Costa Rican woman of Chinese descent, has always been on the outside looking in. The opening scene of her moving debut feature replicates this predicament visually: her face pressed against a metal barricade, she looks through a hole in the opaque facade with interest. The camera is observing, too, and the sight of a house being torn down gradually comes into view. This was once the home of her maternal grandmother, a Guangdong native who emigrated to Costa Rica more than 60 years ago. Conceived in the aftermath of her passing, Amén’s film probes the fragility as well as the resilience of cultural heritage as she embarks on a journey of self-discovery.
Since neither Amén nor her grandmother speaks the other’s native language, a barrier looms large in their relationship. Even “guián”, the name Amén used to call her grandma, is a linguistic hiccup; the word refers to a paternal grandmother in the Enping dialect, a variation of Cantonese. In fact, miscommunication surrounds Amén wherever she goes. In a revealing sequence stitched together from various taxi rides, she is constantly queried by drivers confused by her multicultural identity. Seemingly innocuous, their prying betrays startling ignorance and racist prejudice. The same situation recurs when she travels to Guangdong to get closer to her roots, only this time the people asking these questions look like her.
The performative male was over at the 2026 Golden Globes, where even risk-takers like Timothée Chalamet, Jacob Elordi and Jeremy Allen White did little to temper the black tie stuffiness
Timothée Chalamet was the final clue. As he arrived in good time on the Golden Globes red carpet, the star of Marty Supreme put pay to speculation as to whether the chromatic marketing of the film’s ping pong balls would have him wearing orange. Instead, he wore a black T-shirt; vest, jacket and Timberland boots with silver buttons by Chrome Hearts, souped up with a five-figure Cartier necklace. Kylie Jenner, his partner and sartorial foil, was nowhere to be seen. The reaction was generous, and broadly uncritical. Still, if we thought the penguin suit had gone extinct, we were wrong. The performative male is over – welcome to the return of the staid black suit.
There were exceptions, but it was down to the women. Bella Ramsey wore a Prada suit tied with a pink bow that was positively shocking. At her very first Golden Globes, Chalamet’s co-star Odessa A’zion went for a monochromatic trouser suit of sorts with a froufrou vintage Dolce & Gabbana jacket and satin gloves. A nice bit of era-dressing came from Sinners star Miles Caton’s chestnut pinstripe suit by Amiri. Still, the usual flies in the ointment – Jacob Elordi, Colman Domingo and Jeremy Allen White – towed the line in contemporary twists on ye olde tux by Bottega Veneta, Valentino and Louis Vuitton respectively. Between them, Globes newbie Dwayne Johnson and red carpet veteran Leonardo DiCaprio did little to temper the black tie stuffiness.
Complaint against Cécile Desprairies over Nazi collusion novel alleges that ‘resentment permeates the entire work’
The Polish poet Czesław Miłosz is famously credited with the line: “When a writer is born into a family, the family is finished.” In contemporary European literature, a book these days is often the beginning of a familial feud. With thinly disguised autobiographical accounts of family strife undergoing a sustained boom across the continent, it can increasingly lead to family reunions in courtrooms.
Such was the case with the French historian Cécile Desprairies, who on Wednesday was sued for defamation by her brother and a cousin over the depiction of her late mother and her great-uncle in her 2024 novel La Propagandiste.
It is poised to sweep Oscar season, but Chloé Zhao’s tale of Shakespearean grief – starring Jessie Buckley and Paul Mescal – is less a masterpiece than a blunt spade designed to whack you over the head until you weep from the pain, writes Patrick Sproull
He has survived loss, breakdown and schooling by ‘scary nuns’, but the anguish is still there in his art. As his new show thrills Paris, the US-based, Irish-born artist talks about the pain that drives him
When I ask Sean Scully what an abstract painting has over a figurative one it’s music he reaches for. “You might ask, what’s Miles Davis got over the Beatles? And the answer is: doesn’t have any words in it. And then you could say, what have the Beatles got over John Coltrane? Well, they’ve got words.”
It’s clear which choice he has made. Scully, who paints rectangles and squares and strips of colour abutting and sliding into each other, is an instrumentalist in paint rather than a pop artist. The meaning of his art is something you feel, not something you can easily describe. He has more in common with Davis and Coltrane than with the Beatles. In addition to improvisational brilliance, his new paintings even colour-match with Coltrane’s classic album Blue Train and Davis’s Kind of Blue. For Scully, the greatest living abstract painter, is playing the blues in Paris. In his current exhibition at the city’s Thaddaeus Ropac Gallery, long, textured blue notes as smoky as a sax at midnight alternate and mingle with black and red and brown in a slow, sad, beautiful music that doesn’t need words, art that doesn’t require images.
One Battle After Another and Adolescence have led this year’s Golden Globes with four wins apiece.
Paul Thomas Anderson’s counterculture epic took home best comedy or musical film. It also earned him best director and screenplay, marking his first-ever Golden Globe wins.