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What to see and do this weekend: From Cillian Murphy and Oppenheimer leading the pack at the Oscars to a terrific Michael Sheen on stage in Nye, the Mail's critics pick the very best of film, theatre and music
The best Oscar nominees to catch in cinemas before Sunday's glitzy ceremony, spectacular stage performances and some marvellous new music - our critics' pick the best of film, theatre and music.
I can't speak for the book but on screen the story really has four components: the race to create atomic weapons ahead of the Nazis; the attempt to stop nuclear secrets falling into the hands of America's wartime ally, Soviet Russia; the post-war campaign to besmirch Oppenheimer for his own alleged Communist affiliations; and finally, his messy private life. Based on a novel by the Scottish writer, Alasdair Gray, it begins with the apparent suicide of an unhappy, pregnant young woman... only to resume in the Art Deco-meets-steam-punk London residence of the celebrated surgeon Godwin Baxter (Willem Dafoe), a man whose digestion is aided by machine and who routinely belches up, er, huge floating bubbles. One of them is a bright but rebellious lad called Angus (superbly played by newcomer Dominic Sessa), who ends up as the only holdover, resentfully holed up in a big, otherwise empty building in the strangest of menages-a-trois, with Mr Hunham and the African-American school cook, Mary (Da'Vine Joy Randolph, also terrific and, like Giamatti, a Golden Globe winner and Oscar nominee).
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