Film & Television

John Maguire on film & TV: Leonard Bernstein’s wife steals the show in masterful biopic

Elsewhere, Anne Hathaway puts the bombshell back into blonde in Eileen and Gary Oldman is magnetic in the third season of Slow Horses

Bradley Cooper wears a prosthetic nose as Leonard Bernstein in Maestro. Picture: Netflix.

“The world wants us to be only one thing, and I find that deplorable,” says Leonard Bernstein in Maestro, as played by Bradley Cooper from behind a prosthetic nose and directed by the actor from behind a mobile, probing camera. Bernstein, in his mid 20s when we first meet him in the early 1940s, has already been many things to that point: a piano prodigy, a sought-after teacher and a popular light composer. What he ...