‘Acid’ comic thriller takes aim at Egypt’s military dictator

Though it is “convincingly set” in Cairo, there is a reason why “Eagles of the Republic” was filmed in Istanbul, said Danny Leigh in the Financial Times. “Tarik Saleh’s acid comic thriller is wrapped around a j’accuse aimed at Egypt’s military dictator, Abdel Fattah al-Sisi.”

In it, the Lebanese-Swedish actor Fares Fares plays a fictional Egyptian movie star, George Fahmy, who is no hero off-camera: initially, the film has some fun with this vain, “pampered matinee idol in the thick of middle age”. However, Fahmy discovers the limits of his star power when he is asked to play Sisi in a hagiographic biopic: he is not sure that he and the president look alike (they do not), but it becomes clear that this is not a role he can turn down. On set, his performance is supervised by “a chilling presidential aide” (Amr Waked), and the sardonic comedy of the early scenes “is slowly swallowed by the dark currents of life in a dictatorship – the ghouls and goons that man the system, their violence and terror”.

Saleh was asked to leave Egypt in 2015, and “judging by the strength” of this attack on the current regime, he isn’t planning a return, said Wendy Ide in The Observer.

This film is the third part of his Cairo trilogy, and with its astringent humour it represents a change in tone from the first two: 2017’s “The Nile Hilton Incident”, a police procedural, and 2022’s “Boy from Heaven”, a thriller. Fares starred in them too, said Nick James in The New Statesman, and he is brilliant as the actor drawn, “by slow-ratcheting degrees, into complicity with the state’s deadly doings”. The film is let down by some abrupt tonal shifts, and an ill-conceived action climax, but at its best it’s often “electrifying”.

by Lena Dunham

Lena Dunham “crashed into public consciousness” in 2012 when the first season of her comedy-drama “Girls” – often described as the millennial “Sex and the City” – aired on HBO/Sky Atlantic, said Sarah Ditum in The Times. The show “made her very, very famous” – the kind of fame which involved her face appearing on “building-sized billboards” – and “that in turn made her very, very hated”.

Dunham was attacked for many things – for embodying white privilege, for having the wrong body shape – and that “barracking” profoundly damaged her mental and physical health.

In her “melancholic” memoir “Famesick”, Dunham documents a seemingly unending range of afflictions. These include colitis, endometriosis, opioid addiction, “constant gynaecological issues”, OCD and PTSD, said Hannah J. Davies in The Guardian. At one point, she “accidentally sets herself on fire”; there’s also a horrifying incident involving cotton buds. Dunham isn’t always an easy person to feel sorry for – her decisions are “questionable”, and her name-dropping is shameless – but she writes honestly and fluently, and has a rare ability to discuss the “painful parts of life in a way that feels both intimate and universal”.

Weaving together the “funny, the heartbreaking and the grotesque”, this book (Dunham’s second memoir after 2014’s “Not That Kind of Girl”) “confirms her talents as a writer of prose as well as scripts”, said Hannah Williams in the Financial Times.

The strongest chapters are those that focus on “Girls”, which “time has cemented” as one of the most notable shows of the past two decades. Later on, the book becomes “a little bloated” and repetitive. “But in its portrayal of the ecstasy, heartbreak and sheer thrill of what it is to be young and lost, ‘Famesick’ reaffirms Dunham’s status as a generational voice.”

The engaging host of “Wish You Were Here…?”

When Judith Chalmers was a child in the 1940s, her family holidays were spent in the UK. “One of my most vivid memories was setting off in my father’s Morris Minor and going along the high-hedged roads to Cornwall and Devon and north Wales,” she recalled. There were no motorways then. Even after she became a successful broadcaster, she went no further than France, said The Times. Yet in 1974, she was asked to present a new travel show, capitalising on the growing appetite for holidays in the sun. Over the next three decades, Chalmers, who has died aged 90, presented more than 500 episodes of “Wish You Were Here…?”, which took her all over the world.

Each 30-minute show usually consisted of three parts, said The Telegraph: one featuring a young female presenter, sent somewhere hot to justify her wearing a swimsuit; one with a male presenter, who’d become embroiled in a comic incident, “often involving a camel”; and the third, in which Chalmers tended to fly “somewhere expensive to sink piña coladas, be garlanded with orchids and top up her year-round tan”. A warm and engaging presence, she became a household name. With her bouffant hair and “tennis-club manner”, she also provided material for comedians. Victoria Wood used to say that she was so old, she could remember Chalmers before she turned brown. One critic claimed, “somewhat uncharitably”, that the secret of her longevity was her ability to keep a straight face as she read out the show’s script. On “WYWH…?”, markets were always “bustling”, developing world countries were “exotic”, and hotels were “oases of peace and tranquillity”. At the Great Wall of China, Chalmers declared to camera: “Here I am, by a rather special stretch of masonry.” But the show was not intended to appeal to sophisticates, said Alexander Larman in The Telegraph. It was escapism, designed to make “abroad” look appealing to people who were not accustomed to overseas travel. In all her years on the show, Chalmers “never lost her poise”, said The Guardian, and in that era, long before people could scan Tripadvisor and easily book their own trips, the “industry hung on her judgements”, which were “invariably considered and fair-minded”.

Born in 1935, Judith Chalmers was brought up in Cheadle, the daughter of an architect and a medical secretary. When she was 13, and at Withington Girls’ School, she auditioned for the northern edition of BBC radio’s “Children’s Hour”. She made her TV debut on a regional magazine show in 1956, then moved to London, where she worked as a BBC announcer before moving into reporting. She was soon hosting a range of programmes, including “Come Dancing” and Radio 4’s “Woman’s Hour” (which her sister Sandra edited; they were, it was said, “a pair of Chalmers”). Later, “Jude the Dude”, as she was affectionately known, hosted Miss World for ITV, and covered the 1981 royal wedding. Married for more than 60 years to the sports commentator Neil Durden-Smith, who survives her with their two children, she had latterly been living with Alzheimer’s.