This intense feature based on Max Porter’s best-selling novel Shy features two Oscar-worthy performances. Cillian Murphy is his usual magnificent self as the title character, the compassionate, arguably overcommitted head teacher at a reform school for hard cases. Jay Lycurgo matches the 2024 Oscar winner, playing a deeply troubled student who presents both a special challenge and a risk. Friday, Oct. 3, Netflix.

by Elizabeth Gilbert

In Elizabeth Gilbert’s best-selling memoirs, including her latest, “whiplash is a feature, not a bug,” said Meredith Maran in The Washington Post. Millions of readers fell in love with the author’s voice in Eat Pray Love, the 2006 blockbuster that chronicled her globe-hopping, yearlong, postdivorce quest for individual fulfillment. But she followed that up with a book championing marriage, then publicly disclosed that she had left her second husband to be with the love of her life: a woman named Rayya Elias who had been her best friend for years. Elias had been diagnosed with cancer by then and given six months to live, and this new book details the dark drama that followed. In the tale’s strongest scenes, the couple’s “beyond beautiful and then beyond ugly” interactions prove “punch-to-the-gut powerful.” Gilbert admits to once even deciding she should murder Elias. Yet of course she also finds her way back to the light. It’s “classic Gilbert,” at once “insightful, wrenching, self-effacing, self-indulgent, and profoundly real.” 

“The funniest line in the book is one that was not meant to get laughs,” said Jia Tolentino in The New Yorker. Though Gilbert is more self-aware than she’s given credit for, she invites jeers by writing that any of us could have faced the same struggles she and Elias wrestled with. When Elias suggested that the pair should live “balls to the wall” in their short remaining time together, they went wild. Using Gilbert’s money, “they gorge on food, sex, travel, pleasure,” and once Elias’ pain escalates, their drug spree takes such a dark turn that Gilbert decides that overdosing Elias with fentanyl and sleeping pills would be the best way out. Fortunately, she drops that plan; unfortunately, she thinks she needs to turn each plot point into a teaching moment. While she retains obvious talent, her prose here is “often strangely flat and clipped,” like an Instagram post from the many content creators Eat Pray Love helped inspire. “The online writing that she influenced may now be influencing her.”

“Gilbert is undoubtedly a force,” said Rebecca Steinitz in The Boston Globe. “By the end of the book, she has achieved peaceful sobriety, at least until her next memoir,” and she does so by taking stock after Elias’ death, identifying her own problem as an addiction to love and sex, then undertaking therapy. The tale that precedes that latest epiphany is “absolutely bonkers,” both “brutally honest” and lurid as it reaffirms the author’s skill at observing and chronicling individual experience. “Does she go over the top? Sure. Does she do it well? Undoubtedly. Is she endlessly ‘balls to the wall’ in her own special way? Absolutely. After all, she is Elizabeth Gilbert.”

The Hollywood icon who founded the Sundance Film Festival

Robert Redford was constantly described as “golden.” The adjective applied to his wavy blond hair, his sunny all-American good looks—which once led co-star Dustin Hoffman to call him a “walking surfboard”—and his decades-long career as a movie star, as headline after headline dubbed him Hollywood’s “golden boy.” But Redford was, as director Sydney Pollack once said, “a golden boy with a darkness in him.” The classic Redford character had an easy charm but with darker currents beneath the surface. Among dozens of credits, his best-known roles include a wily outlaw in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969), a Depression-era grifter in The Sting (1973), a vacuous presidential contender in The Candidate (1972), and an aging baseball prodigy in The Natural (1984). A Utah resident who disdained Hollywood, Redford used his stardom as a stepping stone to other roles: as an Oscar-winning director, an environmental activist, and the founder of the Sundance Film Festival. Increasingly choosy about acting roles, he was drawn by the line “between what appears and what is,” he said in 1990. “There was always that tension, and the darker side is what interests me.” 

Charles Robert Redford Jr. was born in Santa Monica, Calif., where his family spent “years on the edge of poverty” before his milkman father became an accountant for Standard Oil, said The Washington Post. Alienated by his father’s cautious conformity, he was a self-described “f---up” who “channeled his restless energy into athletics.” He was recruited to play college baseball but dropped out after a year to study art in Paris and Florence. When he returned to the states, to study set design, he was required to take an acting class and discovered his natural talent. He switched focus and entered the American Academy of Dramatic Arts, where he turned heads “with the tightly coiled anger he brought to his stage auditions.” After stints on TV dramas, he landed the lead in Neil Simon’s 1963 play Barefoot in the Park, a Broadway hit that opened the door to film work. When he was cast alongside Paul Newman as the Sundance Kid in Butch Cassidy, Redford’s life took a turn, said The Times (U.K.). The revisionist Western proved 1969’s top-drawing film and made him a “bona fide movie star.”

Through the 1970s, Redford “starred in celebrated and award-winning movies,” said The Wall Street Journal. Another Newman pairing, The Sting, won seven Oscars and brought him his only nomination for Best Actor. The Way We Were (1973), a romantic drama with Barbra Streisand, and All the President’s Men (1976), with Redford and Hoffman as the reporters who broke the Watergate scandal, won several Oscars each. At his fame’s peak, he turned to directing, and film roles “became more sporadic,” said the Associated Press. His debut, Ordinary People (1980), about an upper-middle-class family wrestling with a son’s death, was a critical “triumph,” and won him Oscars for Best Picture and Best Directing. Other efforts included A River Runs Through It (1992), set in rural Montana, and Quiz Show (1994), about the TV game show scandals of the 1950s, which drew Best Picture and Best Directing nominations. 

Redford’s most lasting influence may have been as the man who “invigorated American independent cinema” through Sundance, said NBCNews.com. Based in Park City, Utah, since 1985, the festival emerged from an institute Redford founded to nurture “talent from outside the Hollywood system.” A launching pad for directors like Quentin Tarantino and Steven Soderbergh, it “grew into a cornerstone of the film industry” and, to Redford’s chagrin, one of its “most glitzy extravaganzas.” Such spectacle was not for Redford, who through decades of celebrity “led a remarkably private life,” said the Los Angeles Times. He was a loner who could be mercurial and aloof; even Newman, his longtime friend, once said he didn’t feel he really knew the man. Acting into his 80s, Redford spent much of his time on his 7,000-acre property in Provo Canyon, lobbying for environmental causes. “Some people have analysis,” he once said. “I have Utah.”