Jafar Panahi’s Palme d’Or-winning revenge thriller was made in secret 

“Brave” is an overused word in film reviews, said Wendy Ide in The Observer – applied to anything from an actor’s weight gain for a role to “an unconventional editing decision”. But Iranian director Jafar Panahi really is brave. His films have been acclaimed abroad, but at home they have put him at odds with the authoritarian regime in Tehran: accused of being an anti-state “propagandist”, he has twice been jailed, and for a long time he was banned from making films. Yet he continued to make movies in secret, and his latest – “It Was Just an Accident” – is a “direct attack on the regime”.

It tells the story of Vahid (Vahid Mobasseri), a car mechanic who meets by chance a man he believes to be the sadistic guard who had previously tortured him in jail. Vahid was blindfolded during these ordeals, but he has recognised the squeaking sound made by his suspect’s prosthetic leg.

The next day, he abducts this man on the street, and drives him into the desert. His plan is to exact retribution by burying his prisoner alive, but the man insists he is not the guard, and Vahid starts to have doubts.

From here, things get complicated and surprisingly funny, said Manohla Dargis in The New York Times. Vahid puts his detainee back into his van, and goes off to find fellow torture victims, who he hopes will confirm his suspicions. But they’re also unsure about the man’s identity. So, with echoes of “Waiting for Godot”, they take a circuitous route back to the desert, bonding and sharing stories as they go, while also fretting about what to do next.

Real events have cast a shadow over this film, said Clarisse Loughrey in The Independent: while promoting it abroad, Panahi was sentenced to jail again, in absentia. The film, however, is a triumph – “striking”, “unexpected” and darkly humorous.

by Elizabeth Goldring 

If the Tudors “exercise a stronger hold on the public imagination than their Plantagenet precursors or Stuart successors”, it is largely “because we can all picture them so clearly”, said Peter Marshall in Literary Review. And that, in turn, is down to one man: the German artist Hans Holbein. Between the late 1520s and the early 1540s, Holbein lived mostly in England and produced an “extraordinary sequence of portraits and drawings” of Henry VIII, his wives and courtiers. Today, as Elizabeth Goldring explains in her “superb and groundbreaking biography”, it is hard to “appreciate just how novel Holbein’s portraits appeared to the first people who saw them”.

Before he emerged, portraiture was a fairly underdeveloped art form in northern Europe. Yet suddenly, as Goldring puts it, here was a painter who made viewers feel that they’d been “granted access to the sitter’s inner thoughts and feelings”. No wonder that Holbein – a “workaholic” and also a “relentless pragmatist, willing at the drop of a brush to change artistic direction or abandon sinking patrons for rising ones” – thrived in the cut-throat Tudor world.

Holbein was born in Augsburg in 1497, the son of an artist, Hans Holbein the Elder, who specialised in altarpieces. He got his “big break” in 1523, when the humanist scholar Erasmus commissioned him to paint his portrait, said Alastair Sooke in The Telegraph. Erasmus introduced Holbein to Henry VIII’s courtier, Thomas More, who became his chief patron during an early stint in England in the late 1520s.

Returning a few years later, Holbein had to navigate More’s execution in 1535 – at which point he “shrewdly pivoted towards the new man Thomas Cromwell” – and then Cromwell’s downfall in 1540, said Kathryn Hughes in The Guardian. Despite such ructions, Holbein remained in Henry’s favour until his death, from the plague, in 1543. Thanks to Goldring’s “careful analysis” of his work, aided by more than 250 high-quality reproductions, “Holbein the artist comes vividly to life”, said Katherine Harvey in The Times.

The man himself remains more elusive, but “there are glimpses of a less than exemplary private life”: Holbein effectively abandoned his wife, Elsbeth, and their children in Germany while he pursued success in England, and while here he “fathered at least two children”.

In both life and art, Holbein had a “talent for catching every rising tide”, said Mathew Lyons in The Spectator. Goldring’s “superbly scholarly biography” will surely prove the “definitive account” of this remarkable figure “for many years to come”.

Jamaican singer who helped bring reggae to the world

“Only Bob Marley took precedence over Jimmy Cliff as the most successful singing star to emerge from the island of Jamaica,” said The Times. Cliff, who has died aged 81, enjoyed a career spanning six decades, with hits such as “You Can Get It If You Really Want” and “Many Rivers to Cross”, while his lead role in the 1972 film “The Harder They Come” helped propel Jamaica’s “unique ghetto-based reggae culture to global attention”. 

Jimmy Cliff was born James Chambers in 1944, in the Adelphi district of the parish of Saint James in rural Jamaica, one of nine children who grew up in relative poverty. His father, Lilbert, a tailor and farmer, and his mother, Christine, a domestic worker, separated when he was a baby. He was raised by his father and his grandmother. Cliff was a star singer at his local church; but he also lived near the Monkey Rock Tavern, which he said “pumped out music all day and night”, and which he called “my heaven”. His father, a disciplinarian, often scolded him for singing the songs of the devil. “Leave the boy alone. He’s going to come to something one day,” his grandmother would answer. Aged 14, Cliff moved to Kingston to attend technical school, lodging with a cousin in a tenement yard. He had long composed his own songs, and in Kingston, he became determined to enter the music business, taking the stage name Cliff – an allusion to the career heights he hoped to scale. 

It didn’t take long for Cliff to break through, initially singing R&B and ska songs, said The New York Times. He had his first hit in 1962 with “Hurricane Hattie”, and in 1965 Cliff signed with Island Records, founded by Chris Blackwell, the scion of a prominent white Jamaican family. Cliff moved to Britain, and his commercial breakthrough came in 1969, with “Wonderful World, Beautiful People”, which reached No. 6 in the charts. His follow-up single, “Vietnam”, a protest song that Bob Dylan later declared one of the best he had ever heard in the genre, failed to land, partly owing to its controversial subject matter. He was homesick in Britain: he said he “experienced racism in a manner he had never experienced before”; some of his feelings found expression in the elegiac “Many Rivers to Cross”. He returned to Jamaica to film “The Harder They Come”, about a young singer who travels to the capital and is then exploited, and in despair becomes a “gun-toting outlaw”. Both the film and the soundtrack, which featured four Cliff songs, were a huge critical and commercial success.

Cliff could have been a major global star, but he “refused to be pigeonholed”, said The Telegraph. Instead of recording more reggae songs, he left Island Records and experimented with rock and R&B; he also joined the Nation of Islam. Blackwell instead turned his attention to Bob Marley – who walked into his London office a few weeks after Cliff left his label. He “marketed Marley as a rebel outlaw modelled on Cliff’s film character”, said The Guardian. And the reggae boom, which Cliff had done so much to launch, somewhat passed him by. But he continued to record and tour throughout his life. He often lived and worked in west Africa – he eventually embraced a form of Senegalese Sufism – and in Brazil. He had a hit with a cover of “I Can See Clearly Now” for the film “Cool Runnings” in 1993; and he won two Grammy Awards. Cliff is survived by his wife, Latifa Chambers, as well as their children, Lilty and Aken, and other children from previous relationships, including the Brazilian actor and singer Nabiyah Be.