Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic Unlock the Editor’s Digest for freeRoula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.Happily, we have reached the point where movies and prestige TV series can coexist peacefully at film festivals without immediately sparking a “death of cinema” panic. Still, seven episodes is a big ask in an already tightly packed schedule. Most of us at the Venice Film Festival made time for at least the opening few hours of Alfonso Cuarón’s Disclaimer, which finds the Roma director adapting a thriller by Renée Knight that combines the domestic, tragic and erotic. Cate Blanchett leads a high-wattage, eclectic cast as prizewinning British documentarian Catherine Ravenscroft, famed for championing the truth until a novel apparently written by retired schoolmaster Stephen Brigstocke (Kevin Kline) lifts the lid on a chapter of her life that she has strenuously repressed.Leila George (daughter of Greta Scacchi) as the breathily seductive young Catherine reduces the even younger Jonathan (Louis Partridge) to a quivering wreck while quizzing him about his Kylie fantasies. Just as the thought “Are we watching highly polished soft porn?” occurs, a parallel story concerning the death of Stephen’s son serves as a cold shower, Lesley Manville breaking hearts as his inconsolable wife.Kodi Smit-McPhee (Callas’s interlocutor in Maria) turns up again as Catherine’s underachieving Hoover-selling son. Most jarring is the presence of Sacha Baron Cohen, playing a deeply bourgeois and boring husband who dotes on Catherine with the doggedness of a hungry Labrador. But nothing is boring for long in this tangled knitting ball of a tale in which everyone seems to have a double life or hidden agenda.Despite some clunky exposition and an often superfluous voiceover, it is all undeniably compelling. This is the kind of show that snobs will sniff at even while embarking on midnight binges — the streaming equivalent of a frothy but irresistible page-turner.★★★☆☆On Apple TV+ from October 11
