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Melissa Denes

@melissadenes.bsky.social
1.1K followers 82 following 19 posts

Journalist and writer. Formerly Guardian, New Statesman, Times and Sunday Times

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Melissa Denes @melissadenes.bsky.social · 12/07/2026
JD Salinger always said no to a film of The Catcher in the Rye, but his son and co-executor Matt is thinking about it. Nineties Jake Gyllenhaal would have made a ‘really, really good’ Holden Caulfield, he says www.thetimes.com/article/092b...
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Melissa Denes @melissadenes.bsky.social · 01/07/2026
From Cuba to Mexico to NYC to Rome, the people who knew Ana Mendieta best recall a funny, exacting friend and thrilling artist who was only getting started www.theguardian.com/artanddesign...
theguardian.com
‘I thought of her as a volcano’: the triumphant art and very troubling death of Ana Mendieta
Her shocking performances and stunning images made Mendieta the talk of the art world in the 1970s and 80s. Then she fell from a New York apartment block in 1985 – and her husband was charged with mur...
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Melissa Denes @melissadenes.bsky.social · 13/06/2026
‘Madonna wanted to sign me to her label. We came close, we met, but I swerved that world’ Beth Orton on surviving the 90s, the benefits of MDMA, Norwich and her great new album www.thetimes.com/article/d11f...
thetimes.com
Verifying Device
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Reposted by Melissa Denes
The Guardian @theguardian.com · 28/04/2026
‘The doorbell went at 5am. Six masked men were outside’: Belarus Free Theatre bring totalitarian terror to the Venice Biennale
theguardian.com
‘The doorbell went at 5am. Six masked men were outside’: Belarus Free Theatre bring totalitarian terror to the Venice Biennale
They’ve been imprisoned, tortured and spied upon. Now dissidents from Europe’s last dictatorship are bringing the sights, sounds, smells and even tastes of brutal repression to the world’s biggest festival of art
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Melissa Denes @melissadenes.bsky.social · 13/03/2026
I wrote about Sean Penn’s face, One Battle After Another and why the only woman over 46 nominated for an Oscar this year plays a witch observer.co.uk/culture/film...
observer.co.uk
Why can’t film’s leading women age like Sean Penn?
The star of One Battle After Another is capitalising on his lived-in look, but Hollywood actresses are held to a different standard
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Melissa Denes @melissadenes.bsky.social · 15/10/2025
Spoke to Nora Garrett, the very smart screenwriter of After the Hunt, about Hollywood, MeToo, Johnny Depp, and her past lives assisting Rosamund Pike and training AI for Meta www.thetimes.com/article/9184...
thetimes.com
After the Hunt’s Nora Garrett: from LA assistant to Hollywood’s most wanted
The screenwriter behind the explosive new film, starring Julia Roberts, talks MeToo, cancel culture and power struggles
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Melissa Denes @melissadenes.bsky.social · 27/09/2025
So good I had to read it twice: @jtcbooks.bsky.social gets her ‘farm to table face’ on for Woody Allen’s debut novel www.thetimes.com/article/256f...
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Melissa Denes @melissadenes.bsky.social · 20/07/2025
Prima Facie was extraordinary and I hear good things about Suzie Miller’s Inter Alia too. We spoke about raising boys, porn, emotional labour and rattling cages again Can’t wait to see Rosamund Pike bring this to life www.thetimes.com/article/5ada...
thetimes.com
How do you follow Prima Facie? With a play about boys, porn and parents
Suzie Miller’s hit drama starring Jodie Comer changed the conversation around sexual crimes. Now Inter Alia, starring Rosamund Pike, tackles the root of the problem
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Melissa Denes @melissadenes.bsky.social · 16/03/2025
Five pieces from today’s @thetimes Culture magazine, all free to air: Grayson Perry @Alan_Measles talks to @JANUSZCZAK about upsetting the art world, @MaskedSingerUK, his boomer era and new alter ego www.thetimes.com/article/5c94...
thetimes.com
Grayson Perry: I like to shock the ‘unshockable’ art world
From frocks to pots and a spot on The Masked Singer, the Turner prize-winning artist lets loose on breaking taboos, turning 65 — and his best show yet
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Melissa Denes @melissadenes.bsky.social · 15/03/2025
The Times is free to read all weekend but tomorrow’s Culture also nice in print, featuring the 25 best albums of the 21st century, Steven Bartlett, Michael Morpurgo on the farm and more
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Melissa Denes @melissadenes.bsky.social · 18/01/2025
One of the luckiest, funniest gigs of my life - interviewing David Lynch in his beloved LA garden, featuring squirrel-proof bird-feeders, seagull roadkill and a world premiere of Dead Mouse with Ants www.thetimes.com/article/5887...
thetimes.com
David Lynch v the squirrels — at home with the Blue Velvet director
The American auteur, who died this week, took sanctuary in a vast modernist complex off Mulholland Drive where he painted, smoked … and perfected his rodent-proof bird feeder
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Melissa Denes @melissadenes.bsky.social · 04/12/2024
Solidarity with friends and former colleagues at the Guardian and Observer, whose loss or dilution would put a huge hole in news, comment, cultural coverage and Sundays. The two papers have been fully blended on the site for so long that few readers realise how much will go
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Reposted by Melissa Denes
The Times and Sunday Times @thetimes.com · 29/11/2024
These are the 19 best books of 2024, according to our critics 📚 Do you agree with their picks? Let us know 👇
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Melissa Denes @melissadenes.bsky.social · 20/11/2024
Terrific long read by my former fellow New Stateswoman @SEMcBain on the science, optimism and parents driving a big increase in the survival rate of babies born at 22 weeks - in ‘the grey zone’ www.theguardian.com/society/2024...
theguardian.com
‘Look, they’re getting skin!’: are we right to strive to save the world’s tiniest babies?
The long read: Doctors are pushing the limits of science and human biology to save more extremely premature babies than ever before. But when so few survive, are we putting them through needless suffe...
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