{"id":103678,"date":"2025-08-30T20:08:08","date_gmt":"2025-08-30T20:08:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/103678\/"},"modified":"2025-08-30T20:08:08","modified_gmt":"2025-08-30T20:08:08","slug":"with-after-the-hunt-julia-roberts-gives-best-performance-in-years","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/103678\/","title":{"rendered":"With ‘After the Hunt,’ Julia Roberts Gives Best Performance in Years"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n\tLet\u2019s not bury the lede: \u201cAfter the Hunt<\/a>\u201d gives Julia Roberts<\/a> her best film role in at least 20 years. That\u2019s both a big statement \u2014 two decades is a long time by any standard, an eternity in movie-star years \u2014 and fainter praise than it should be for a star of Roberts\u2019 stature. In Luca Guadagnino<\/a>\u2018s charged, sure-to-be-debate-stirring moral drama, she gets to be, by turns, anguished and aloof, guarded and unhinged, intellectual and sensual, sexy and closed-off, a victim, a villain and an unreadable sphinx. In a film scene still tilted against substantial parts for older female actors, checking off just two of those conflicting notes would be a pretty good showing: Roberts\u2019 latter-day filmography, in particular, has wanted for such range.<\/p>\n

\n\tIt\u2019s the kind of tricky, prickly role that Tilda Swinton, one of Guadagnino\u2019s favorite leading ladies, has feasted on in her career. For Roberts, a onetime multiplex sweetheart, it feels like more of a flex. That factor of surprise is partly what lends the performance, and the film as a whole, its impact: A story of fraught campus politics rewriting themselves in real time in a post-#MeToo era, \u201cAfter the Hunt\u201d specifically pivots on the unexpected facets, impulses and weaknesses of people you only thought you knew. Now in her fifth decade on screen, Roberts is ready to surprise us again.<\/p>\n

\n\tAnyone who wasn\u2019t alive \u2014 or at least of moviegoing age \u2014 in the early \u201990s might not understand just what a big deal Julia Roberts was when she burst onto the scene. The spring of 1990, in particular, saw a fast-track movie-star inauguration the likes of which the industry rarely permits today. On March 20th, the 22-year-old ingenue arrived with then-boyfriend Kiefer Sutherland at the 62nd Academy Awards, where she was both a presenter and a Best Supporting Actress nominee, tipped by some pundits to win after taking a Golden Globe for her winsome part in the all-star ensemble of \u201cSteel Magnolias.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tShe lost to Irish character actor Brenda Fricker in arthouse sleeper \u201cMy Left Foot,\u201d but no matter: Three days later, a little Disney-backed romcom called \u201cPretty Woman\u201d opened in U.S. theaters. Perhaps you\u2019ve heard of it. Expectations weren\u2019t especially high, given that Roberts wasn\u2019t yet a household name and first-billed star Richard Gere was in a career slump. Yet it topped the box office that weekend, defying industry predictions to stick around in the Top Ten for a whopping 16 weeks. Budgeted at just $14 million, it wound up taking over $463 million globally. <\/p>\n

\n\tThe film, generically made and written, was cute enough on paper; Gere was perfectly fine in it. But it\u2019s Roberts who made it a phenomenon: her saucy comic timing, her girlish vulnerability, her big red hair and big white smile and big dirty laugh, all elevated a stock tart-with-a-heart character onto one of those supernova-making roles greater than the sum of its parts. Critics sneered when \u201cPretty Woman\u201d landed her a second consecutive Oscar nomination, this time in Best Actress, but some breakthroughs are too obvious to deny. She lost again, this time to Kathy Bates in \u201cMisery,\u201d but she was officially in the club: You\u2019d have bet the house back then on her winning one sooner or later.<\/p>\n

\n\tAs it turned out, it would take another decade \u2014 following a period of untouchability, a career dip, and a blazing comeback. For a while after \u201cPretty Woman,\u201d Roberts\u2019 name and face could sell anything, from subpar movies like \u201cDying Young\u201d and \u201cSleeping With the Enemy\u201d to millions of magazines fixated on her then-turbulent romantic life, tracked by the tabloids with a fervor to match the current Taylor Swift reporting industry. Audience interest waned by the middle of the decade, as duds including \u201cMary Reilly\u201d and \u201cI Love Trouble\u201d tanked commercially, before smart romcoms like \u201cMy Best Friend\u2019s Wedding\u201d and \u201cNotting Hill\u201d won it back.<\/p>\n

\n\tBy the time \u201cErin Brockovich\u201d came along in early 2000, the 32-year-old star seemed practically like an industry veteran \u2014 and Steven Soderbergh\u2019s small-scale but high-impact legal drama like the summation of her career to date. It remains the quintessential Roberts vehicle: the role of Brockovich, an all-American everywoman achieving extraordinary things in extraordinary circumstances, called on both her whipcrack comic skills and her warm onscreen empathy, and coasted on her megawatt star quality while pushing her dramatic range into slightly grittier, earthier territory. It was a commercial smash, of course, sticking in the popular imagination all year: When Roberts finally took the Best Actress Oscar the following spring, it felt like one of the most preordained wins in Academy history. <\/p>\n

\n\tWhere to go from there but down? Roberts\u2019 21st-century film career has had its moments \u2014 among others, she was a game team player in the \u201cOcean\u2019s Eleven\u201d movies, had vampy villainous fun in Tarsem Singh\u2019s underrated \u201cMirror Mirror,\u201d and showed a different, chillier side in Mike Nichols\u2019 thespian hothouse drama \u201cCloser\u201d \u2014 but it\u2019s fair to say she hasn\u2019t had another \u201cErin Brockovich.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tShe scored a fourth Oscar nod (in supporting, though it was really a co-lead role) for an admirably steely turn opposite Meryl Streep in the disappointing \u201cAugust: Osage County,\u201d but her big-screen appearances in the last decade have been infrequent and unremarkable. Sensitively played mom roles in \u201cWonder\u201d and \u201cBen is Back,\u201d goofing around with George Clooney in \u201cTicket to Paradise,\u201d grimming up for the dour Netflix oddity \u201cLeave the World Behind\u201d \u2014 it\u2019s all felt like suboptimal use of one of America\u2019s great living movie stars.<\/p>\n

\n\tEnter \u201cAfter the Hunt,\u201d which you might call a return to form, except we\u2019ve never quite seen Roberts in quite this form before: her smile tight and infrequently deployed, beneath a set frown of tense exhaustion, beneath brittly shellacked blonde waves. She plays Alma Imhoff, a Yale philosophy professor who winds up the hazardously placed middle-woman in a volatile sexual assault dispute between Andrew Garfield\u2019s louche career academic and Ayo Edebiri\u2019s anxious Ph.D student. It\u2019s not for this piece to divulge what secrets or uncertainties Alma is harboring, though Roberts\u2019 performance gives her both an impressive poker face and panicked, reckless flashes of terror and need: Alma\u2019s various younger, less assured selves keep jumping out from behind her pristinely composed middle-aged mien.<\/p>\n

\n\tFrom Roberts\u2019 filmography, the temperature here may be closest to that of \u201cCloser,\u201d though in its themes of cancel culture, august institutional paranoia and cross-generational feminist allyship \u2014 or not \u2014 \u201cAfter the Hunt\u201d will surely invite comparisons to Todd Field\u2019s dazzling \u201cT\u00e0r,\u201d which netted Cate Blanchett an eighth Oscar nomination (and very nearly, one suspects, a third win) three years ago. You can certainly imagine Lydia T\u00e0r and Alma Imhoff as dinner-party seat neighbors, while it\u2019s not a stretch to envision how Blanchett might have played Alma in all her folded, withholding complexities. <\/p>\n

\n\tBut it\u2019s a thrill to watch Roberts, an actor whose dialed-up charisma and lovability has been her signature for much of her career, burrow into these deep-gray areas, to play up the weary irony that comes with age, and to wield the knowledge \u2014 35 years after the naive Cinderella fantasy of \u201cPretty Woman\u201d \u2014 that sex can be a weapon, a currency or an increasingly rare commodity. The actor\u2019s warmth is plenty present still; Alma, after all, is a woman whose status rests on others\u2019 admiration and friendship. But it\u2019s conditional here, and turns on a dime. \u201cNot everything is supposed to make you comfortable,\u201d she says to Edibiri\u2019s character at one point in the film, and the line may as well sound a warning to longtime fans of Roberts the romcom queen. Let\u2019s see how the Academy, and indeed Hollywood at large, responds to her in hard mode \u2014 and how far the star, unlocked after too many less challenging projects, is willing to travel down this path.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Let\u2019s not bury the lede: \u201cAfter the Hunt\u201d gives Julia Roberts her best film role in at least…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":103679,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[49423,96,26396,18737,2839,56,54,55],"class_list":{"0":"post-103678","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-movies","8":"tag-after-the-hunt","9":"tag-entertainment","10":"tag-julia-roberts","11":"tag-luca-guadagnino","12":"tag-movies","13":"tag-uk","14":"tag-united-kingdom","15":"tag-unitedkingdom"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/103678","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=103678"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/103678\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/103679"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=103678"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=103678"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=103678"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}