Nail-biting nuclear-strike thriller starring Rebecca Ferguson 

Kathryn Bigelow’s new film, scripted by Noah Oppenheim, confronts a truly terrifying possibility, said Peter Bradshaw in The Guardian: “that a nuclear war could or rather will start with no one knowing who started it or who ended it”.

It imagines a scenario in which a nuke has been launched from the Pacific and is heading for Chicago. Its predicted impact time is just 19 minutes. Blindsided, the US military at various bases scrambles to try to intercept the missile and figure out who launched it and how best to respond. They could launch a counterstrike – but that decision, which only the president (Idris Elba) has the authority to make, is very much complicated by the fact that, although North Korea is a suspect, they don’t know for certain who the enemy here is.

The action takes place mainly within this crucial 19 minutes, but to build tension and stretch out the running time, Bigelow examines the nail-biting countdown from three perspectives, said David Sexton in The New Statesman. In the first, we follow Captain Olivia Walker (Rebecca Ferguson), a mother with a sick child at home who finds herself in charge of the White House Situation Room; the second is set at US Strategic Command, where a bullish general (Tracy Letts) is urging a counterstrike. These sections are fast-paced and tense; but it all gets a bit slack in the third, from the perspective of the president, who comes across as unconvincing and clownish.

Bigelow allows herself the odd indulgence, said Danny Leigh in the Financial Times, but she is “a virtuoso talent”. Her film is a highly effective “symphony of dread” – which creates a catch: “I don’t remember the last time I saw a film this formally brilliant that I also wanted to stop.”

by Thomas Pynchon

The US novelist Thomas Pynchon has had “one of the last A-list literary careers”, said Megan Nolan in The Telegraph. His first three novels – “V”, “The Crying of Lot 49” and “Gravity’s Rainbow” – were published to the “kind of rapt audience we all worry doesn’t exist for serious literature today”. Each novel since has been a “major event”. Now aged 88, Pynchon has published what could well be his final work.

A typically zany (and complex) whodunnit, it centres on a private eye in 1930s Milwaukee who is assigned to investigate the disappearance of a cheese heiress – a quest that takes him across the Atlantic, where he encounters “Nazis, Soviets, biker gangs, molls”, and a “good deal of the supernatural”. “If you asked me to relay in precise detail what takes place on every page,” I “wouldn’t get full marks.” But I enjoyed “Shadow Ticket”, with its “Raymond Chandler-esque dialogue” and exuberant humour, more than any other Pynchon novel. And if it is his “last hurrah”, then “what a way to go out”.

None of Pynchon’s novels since the masterly “Gravity’s Rainbow” (published in 1973) have come close to equalling that book’s “controlled chaos”, said Mark Sanderson in The Sunday Times. And sadly, “Shadow Ticket” is no exception. A “long goodbye” that “seems far longer than its 300 pages”, it reads at times like a “box-ticking exercise”. Pynchon serves up what his fans expect: “zany-monickered characters” (Dr Zoltan von Kiss etc); literary allusions; puns; silly songs; a sense that “everything and nothing is connected”. Unfortunately, the narrative quickly fizzles out in a “sequence of tall stories and narrow escapes”.

Conservationist who spent decades studying wild chimps

The primatologist Jane Goodall was partway through a speaking tour when she died in Los Angeles last week. A few days earlier, she had been in New York, where she was the keynote speaker at an event running alongside the UN General Assembly. She was 91 years old, yet still maintaining a “daunting calendar”, said Joseph Akel in the Financial Times, spending most of the year travelling “to share her message of environmental conservation and social activism”. She had dedicated decades to that effort – and it had made her a global icon. Having won acclaim in the 1960s for her pioneering research on chimpanzees in Tanzania, she had become a bestselling writer, a Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire, a UN Messenger of Peace, and the subject of dozens of documentaries. 

Jane Goodall was born in London in 1934. When her father, Mortimer Morris-Goodall, an engineer and racing driver, went off to war, her mother – Margaret, known as Vanne – took Jane and her sister to live with her own mother in Bournemouth. Morris-Goodall filed for divorce in 1950, so Jane grew up in an all-female household, encouraged to believe that she could do anything she wanted, if she tried hard enough. What Jane chiefly wanted to do was move to Africa to live with animals. It was a childish dream, said Dale Peterson, her biographer, in The Guardian – but she took it seriously. After leaving school, she was working as a secretary when a letter arrived from an old school friend, whose father had bought a farm in Kenya, inviting her to stay. She arrived in 1957, aged 23. 

After a happy month on the farm, she started to think about how to get closer to the animals. Eventually, she got in touch with the paleoanthropologist Louis Leakey, at the Coryndon Museum of natural history in Nairobi, who was so impressed by her knowledge, he immediately hired her as his secretary. Leakey was studying chimps, as he believed that this would deliver insights into our human ancestors. The difficulty was in getting close enough to the creatures to do so. Having already taken her on expeditions into the Serengeti, he asked Goodall if she would start a study of them, in a forest on the edge of Lake Tanganyika – a five-day journey away in what is now Tanzania’s Gombe National Park. As the authorities would not allow a woman to travel alone into the forest, Goodall, then 26, asked her mother to join her, and a cook. So began in July 1960 “the world’s most improbable scientific expedition”. 

She said that Leakey had hired her partly because she had patience, said The Daily Telegraph – and she needed it. For weeks, she left camp at dawn, and tried to inch her way towards the apes; but as soon as she got close, they would flee. Eventually she found a clearing from which she could watch them from a distance; they slowly got used to her presence and came closer, allowing her to make crucial observations. The first was that chimps eat meat; the second was that they use tools. Some in the scientific establishment were sniffy about Goodall – a young woman who didn’t even have a degree, working alone in the bush. Nevertheless, Leakey was able to secure funding from National Geographic so that she could carry on with her work; and “to silence her detractors”, he also helped her to get on a PhD programme at Cambridge, said The Times. In 1965, she appeared on the cover of National Geographic. She started appearing on TV, and in 1971 she published her first book, “In the Shadow of Man”. In 1964, she’d married the wildlife photographer Hugo van Lawick. They had a son, known as Grub, before divorcing in 1974. Her second husband, Derek Bryceson, was a director of Tanzania’s national parks. He died of cancer in 1980. 

She based herself in the reserve for two decades, documenting the chimps, said Michelle Nijhuis in The Atlantic. Then, in 1986, she attended a conference of primate researchers where she listened to report after report of populations collapsing owing to deforestation. “I arrived at the conference as a scientist,” she said. “I left as an activist.” Although she was loath to leave her peaceful, often solitary, life in the bush, she dedicated most of her time thereafter to promoting the need to protect biodiversity and local communities at events around the world. She founded the Jane Goodall Institute, to conserve primates with the help of local people, and Roots & Shoots, which encourages young people to get involved in conservation projects. During the pandemic, she launched a podcast called Hopecast, in which she interviewed other activists. Imagine hope, she once said, as a star at the end of a tunnel. “There’s no good sitting at the mouth of the tunnel and wishing that that hope would come to us. We’ve got to roll up our sleeves.”