‘From the father of the guy who made Obsession’: is the nepo dad the new nepo baby?

With Dane Cook set to star in his new film, Curry Barker’s dad joins Lana Del Rey’s dad and Tom Holland’s dad in a new wave of nepo daddies

‘He annotated my letter from Spielberg’: readers pay tribute to Sam Neill

From teeing up a marriage to inspiring a career and giving 144 bottles of wine to his birthday band, the star’s admirers share their fondest memories

A voyage of discovery: an idiot’s guide to reading The Odyssey

Christopher Nolan’s film adaptation of the ancient Greek epic has sparked a new appetite for an old classic. Here are the translations, podcasts and audiobooks that make the Homeric world more approachable

‘Cool, suave and weirdly shy’: Miranda Richardson remembers Sam Neill

Sam had such ease about him and I just loved the way he seemed to cruise through life. But he confronted his mortality with real courage

Christopher Nolan’s Odyssey used occupied land as a film set. That feels like a betrayal

The decision to shoot in Moroccan-occupied Western Sahara, where the Indigenous people can’t tell their stories without fear of imprisonment, helps erase our own brutal journey

‘The minute I had success, I stopped taking drugs’: John Waters on 60 years of screen carnage

As Hairspray and his ‘angriest movie’ Desperate Living are rereleased, the ‘Pope of Trash’ reflects on dead dogs, dirty rats, ‘that lunatic RFK’ and why there are no novelty dances any more

Sam Neill’s cause of death revealed to be pneumonia

Neill’s longtime representative says the actor’s family agreed to release the information due to ‘inaccuracies and outright falsehoods’ in media

A classicist’s verdict on Nolan’s Odyssey: a soulful hero flatters our times as women and nuance pushed overboard

Matt Damon’s sensitive and repentant Odysseus might come as a surprise to Homer, likewise some significant omissions concerning the poem’s female characters

The Odyssey review – Nolan goes god-tier with breathtaking epic of men, monsters and moral metamorphosis

Doing full justice to the Homeric legend, Christopher Nolan amasses an epic cast to convey the true cost of war with film-making of thrilling ambition

George Lucas likens AI sceptics to luddites clinging to horses and carts

Star Wars director calls AI technology ‘the future’ of film-making and says ‘there’s nothing you can do about it’

Ali G is back. I really wish he wasn’t

Back in the day, he was funny. But that day was 24 years ago – and the character sits uncomfortably in a post-shame world, writes Arwa Mahdawi

A Close Shave/A Matter of Loaf and Death review – Wallace and Gromit knit together a cracking double bill

These two half-hour classics of stop-motion pack in nods to more earnest cinema but are never distracted from producing pristinely beguiling family entertainment

Animal Farm review – Andy Serkis’ Orwell adaptation slaughters the classic farmyard satire with sugar

The passionate allegory on Stalinism is outrageously reduced to happy-ending panto in this defanged animation featuring the voices of Seth Rogen, Laverne Cox and Glenn Close

The Day She Returns review – another Hong Sang-soo round of slow, reflective boozing really hits the spot

No film-maker shows more day-drinking than Hong, and this study of an actor returning from a career break is the same again – as mysteriously addictive as ever

Gillian Armstrong remembers Sam Neill: ‘I can’t believe that the very next day he was gone’

The Australian director who gave the actor his big break in My Brilliant Career remembers ‘a smart, gentle, decent, passionate, loyal, surprisingly funny man’