House of Gucci is ‘painful and insulting’, says Gucci family

Heirs of Aldo Gucci issue statement taking issue with Ridley Scott’s film but have stopped short of legal action

Surviving family members of the Gucci fashion dynasty have expressed unhappiness with their representation in the new film House of Gucci.

In a statement issued on Monday, the heirs of Aldo Gucci – who ran the fashion house for 33 years until the mid-1980s – said they were aggrieved by the lack of consultation by film-makers, as well as their portrayal as “thugs, ignorant and insensitive to the world around them”.

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House of Gucci review – Lady Gaga steers a steely path through the madness

Gaga rules in Ridley Scott’s at times ridiculous drama based on the true-life sagas of the Italian fashion dynasty

“The most Gucci of them all” is how Patrizia Reggiani described herself in a 2014 interview and, judging by this entertainingly ripe, comedically tinged tragedy, she has a point. Variously known as “Lady Gucci” and “Black Widow”, Reggiani became the centre of a very 1990s scandal involving lust, money, fashion, murder… and a clairvoyant. To that tabloid-friendly cocktail, Ridley Scott’s latest “true story” potboiler adds a dash of pop superstardom, with Lady Gaga (Oscar- nominated for her close-to-home performance in A Star Is Born) relishing the chance to find the human cracks beneath a larger-than-life, femme fatale surface.

Adapted by screenwriters Becky Johnston and Roberto Bentivegna from the nonfiction book by Sara Gay Forden, House of Gucci charts a crowd-pleasing course from the Milanese party scene of the 1970s to a high-profile, end-of-the-century trial. At its heart is the doomed romance between Patrizia and Maurizio Gucci, the latter played behind stylishly studious glasses by cinema’s sexy nerd de nos jours, Adam Driver. “I want to see how this story goes,” says Patrizia, embarking upon a twisted fairytale romance with the grandson of Guccio Gucci that starts with masked balls and talk of midnight chimes and pumpkins and ends with family back-stabbings, jealous rages and deadly rivalries.

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Adam Driver’s 10 best film performances – ranked!

Ahead of the release of Annette, we rank the actor’s greatest roles, from the insufferable hipster of While We’re Young to his severe missionary in Silence

The movie might be flawed, but Driver’s performance (playing opposite the similarly excellent Alba Rohrwacher) is outstanding, winning him the Volpi Cup at the Venice film festival. He plays Jude, a young man who meets his future wife Mina (Rohrwacher) in New York when they are bizarrely locked in a restaurant toilet together. They marry, have a baby and at first everything is wonderful – but then she begins to show symptoms of postpartum psychosis and Jude has an agonising dilemma: if and when to take the baby away from her. Driver plays it with overwhelming sincerity and force.

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‘We have a hostility to being boring’: Sparks, still flying in their 70s

Their Adam Driver musical sent Cannes into raptures and Edgar Wright has made an all-star documentary about them. The Mael brothers explain why they’ll always be hopelessly in love with pop

In 1974, John Lennon was startled as he was watching Top of the Pops. He rang Ringo Starr. “You won’t believe what’s on television,” he reportedly said. “Marc Bolan is playing a song with Adolf Hitler.”

This was Sparks, performing their glorious pop opus This Town Ain’t Big Enough for Both of Us. “It was equidistant between the Beatles on Ed Sullivan and the Daleks on Doctor Who,” says Edgar Wright, the director of Baby Driver and Shaun of the Dead, and now a documentary about the duo, The Sparks Brothers. “Fifteen million people saw it. Think of the next generation of bands watching: the Sex Pistols, Siouxsie and the Banshees, Duran Duran, Joy Division, Squeeze, Vince Clarke. They’re all watching and they’re all thinking the same thing.”

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Oscars 2022: who might triumph at next year’s ceremony?

After a year of delays, the next 12 months offers a wealth of big, awards-aiming movies from intimate dramas to historical epics

It’s not often that the word unusual gets attached to the Oscars, one of the most staid and predictable nights of the year, as sober as the Golden Globes is drunk. But after an unusual year, the awards season followed suit, extended by two months, films dropping in and out of the race and some that might otherwise have been ignored instead taking centre stage.

Related: And this year’s Oscar for inclusivity goes to … the Academy!

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‘Short, fat, ugly’: Gucci family lashes out at cast appearance in new film

Ridley Scott biopic tells story of Patrizia Reggiani’s doomed marriage to Maurizio Gucci

The Gucci family has hit out against the “horrible, horrible” and “ugly” casting of the House of Gucci film, starring Lady Gaga and Adam Driver.

The film, which is now in production and directed by Sir Ridley Scott, tells the story of Patrizia Reggiani and her doomed marriage to Maurizio Gucci. Reggiani was convicted of his assassination in 1998 after hiring a hitman to kill him.

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Golden Globes: who will win and who should win the film awards? | Peter Bradshaw

Will The Irishman clean up? Or Marriage Story? And how will Once Upon a Time in Hollywood fare? Peter Bradshaw offers a lowdown of the main categories and his predictions and omissions

The best film category is dominated – just like everything else in the cultural conversation around movies – by Netflix, which has the majority of the nominees: Martin Scorsese’s The Irishman, Noah Baumbach’s Marriage Story and Fernando Meirelles’s The Two Popes.

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