aaron

NEWTOWN SQUARE, Pa. — Aaron Rai shifted into high gear Sunday and pulled away from a world-class field with one amazing shot after another until he became the first English-born player in more than a century to capture the PGA Championship.

Rai, who dreamed of being a Formula 1 driver until he turned to golf as a boy, was three shots behind and approaching the turn at Aronimink Golf Club when he delivered a performance worthy of a major champion.

He made a 40-foot eagle putt on the par-5 ninth during a stretch when he one-putted seven straight greens to take the lead.

And on the closing holes when the contenders needed him to stumble, Rai holed a birdie putt of some 70 feet across the 17th green for the clincher.

The 31-year-old Rai, the first player of Indian heritage to win a major, closed with a 5-under 65.

Jon Rahm, Rory McIlroy, Xander Schauffele, Justin Rose, they all had their chances and until they were undone by untimely mistakes or failure to get good looks at birdie. McIlroy, who closed with a 69, played the par fives in even for the week and he chopped up the reachable par-4 13th for a bogey.

Rai, who finished at nine-under 271, is the first player from England with his name on the Wanamaker Trophy since Jim Barnes in 1919, the second edition of this major and the first after World War I.

He wound up winning by three shots over 54-hole leader Alex Smalley and Rahm, who had his best finish in a major since defecting to LIV Golf at the end of 2023. Rahm was slowed by a pair of bogeys on the front nine, and managed only one birdie on the back nine for a 68.

Aaron Rai and wife Gaurika Bishnoi hold the Wanamaker Trophy.

(Frank Franklin II / AP)

Smalley lost the lead with a messy double bogey on the sixth hole, and his best golf was too late. Rai already had his eye on the Wanamaker Trophy.

Justin Thomas made a 16-foot par putt on the final hole for a 65 and pulled him within one shot of the lead as the final group was in the second fairway. For the longest time, as Aronimink got tougher and the pressure got tighter, it looked like Thomas might have a chance.

Like everything else on this final day, Rai ended those hopes, too.

So ended a most remarkable week in the Philadelphia suburbs, where no one could separate themselves on Aronimink. The 22 players within four shots of the lead going into the final round was a PGA Championship record.

From that pack emerged the 31-year-old Rai, with one PGA Tour title, three on the European tour, and no finishes inside the top 15 at any of the majors.

He might not be well known among casual observers, but he is a star in the eyes of his peers for his humility and gracious personality.

“You won’t find one person on property who’s not happy for him,” McIlroy said.

“Super pumped for him and his team,” Schauffele said. “All-world gentleman, no doubt.”

Rory McIlroy hits from the bunker on the 16th green.

(Carolyn Kaster / AP)

He wears two gloves, a habit he started as a kid in England to battle the cold winters when he was practicing — and he was always practicing. Even more unusual for Rai is the plastic covers on each iron, a reminder of his roots.

He once said his father sacrificed to buy the nicest golf clubs and then would clean the grooves with baby oil after his son was done playing. Rai has left the iron covers on since then “to remember where I cam from and to respect what I have.”

Now he has his name on the Wanamaker Trophy and his place in history.

To describe a movie as including a ski mask, a camcorder and $50,000 in cash would certainly lead one to imagine a specific type of story. Add two men and sex work and the brain might roll around more pointed scenarios.

But none of that can prepare you for what micro-indie “Blue Film” has in store. The nexus of perversion, pain and sexual purpose driving writer-director Elliot Tuttle’s dark, discursive chamber drama is of a stripe rarely attempted in even the most self-consciously daring movies. Should you need a self-imposed break afterward from intimate two-handers, even Tuttle might understand, then wink in the general direction of his Pasolini posters. (I’m guessing at this provocateur’s wall art.)

Is it clear yet that “Blue Film,” set primarily in a house in Los Angeles over the course of a revelatory night, isn’t for everybody? Some of that “everybody,” incidentally, includes the festivals and distributors who rejected the queer filmmaker’s debut feature, despite having critical buzz, Tony-winning actor Reed Birney as one of its stars and indie guru Mark Duplass as a mentoring producer.

But certain subjects (spoilers ahead) are bound to trigger a different kind of scrutiny. Initially, our attention is on macho-posturing tattooed camboy Aaron (“Boots” star Kieron Moore), graphically boasting to his followers online of the big payday he’ll receive that evening from a submissive client. What he later encounters, however, at the door of a Craftsman on a quiet street is a masked, polite, older host (Birney) with a camera and, once it’s turned on, a lot of personal questions, the kind that begin to crack the facade of a young man used to being in control of his transactional life.

Then his client’s face is revealed and Aaron recognizes it’s his middle school teacher Hank, a convicted pedophile who once coveted him. Hank, who completed prison time for the attempted assault of a different boy, has made a cross-country trip to seek out the adult version of someone who could have been his first victim. He is still processing what he is, wondering if desire, even love, is available to him anymore.

The question is, will you care? Even viewed through Aaron’s cautious, clear-eyed empathy, it’s a steep ask. But you should. Tuttle’s fearless inquisition won’t insult your intelligence, ask your mercy or hogtie your feelings. Honestly, it’s refreshing to be repulsed and intrigued by a movie willing to plumb these psychological depths when Hollywood won’t. In its commitment to unvarnished talk — even if that leads to a clunky staginess — “Blue Film” has thoughts about identity, choice, sin and salvation. There’s a sincere engagement with humanity’s more difficult realities.

Needless to say, this type of graphically articulated exchange wouldn’t work if the performances didn’t land. Thankfully, Moore’s affecting portrayal of jumbled masculinity mixed with situational curiosity is well-calibrated, while Birney, a pro with a challenge, eases us into Hank’s weary self-possession (if not always the nauseating facts of it) before coloring outside the lines with a believably interesting philosophy about reckoning.

But “Blue Film” is tough, make no mistake. Awkward and searching, it exists in a filmic space that you could argue was opened up by last year’s courageous documentary “Predators.” And sometimes that gaze is just discomfiting, full stop. Tuttle wants that. He has room to improve but he’s someone to watch, plumbing the hard-to-fathom.

Now his playing days are done, Ramsey is aiming to make it as a coach.

He has most of his qualifications and has already had a taste of senior management, having taken charge of his boyhood club Cardiff City for three games at the end of last season as they were relegated from the Championship.

Having since been a part of Wales head coach Craig Bellamy’s staff in an unofficial capacity, Ramsey is being touted for a bright future.

“[I]100% want to go into coaching. That’s something that really excites me,” he says.

“I had that experience with Cardiff and loved it, even though the circumstances were difficult. I felt like I got a really good reaction from the team.

“I’ve been in the Welsh camps now with Bellers and his incredible staff as well, and I’ve worked with Cardiff’s Under-18s.

“We’ll just have to see which opportunities may arise soon and we’ll go from there.”

First, Ramsey has a marathon to run.

Ceri Menai-Davis, who has run the London Marathon before, reckons Ramsey has raised more than £25,000 for his charity – and that is before you count donations for Sunday’s race.

They have been friends for more than a decade and Ramsey’s shows of support for the charity – as well as his fundraising – include the butterfly symbol he used as a goal celebration during his career.

On Sunday, the most powerful reminder of Hugh’s life will be his father’s huge physical effort – and his son’s shoes draped around his shoulders.

“He was the most amazing, brave, courageous young boy,” Ceri says. “The reason I do marathons is, just before Hugh died, I stupidly put myself in for a marathon in 2021.

“I never thought I’d get in but I got in, started training for it and Hugh never got to see me run that marathon because I did it two weeks after he died, and we buried him the next day with my medal.

“Last year I carried a 22-kilo rucksack, which was the weight Hugh was when he passed away. That was to display what grief weighs on you as a parent.

“This year, with Hugh’s shoes, he walked into hospital in these shoes and sadly never came out. I wanted him to cheer me on when I did it in 2021 but sadly he never did.

“I did Paris with his shoes. He never got to see Paris so I showed him the Eiffel Tower and we had a chat all the way round. In London, he’ll be there with me on my shoulders and we’ll cross the finish line together.”

David Mackenzie’s “Fuze” springs to life in a millisecond.

In central London, a construction digger unearths an unexploded World War II bomb, and it starts to tick. The blast radius could be a half-mile wide. Outside the cordon, Chief Supt. Zuzana (Gugu Mbatha-Raw) oversees the evacuation of thousands of residents to Hyde Park. Inside the cordon, a military explosives expert, Maj. Tranter (Aaron Taylor-Johnson), marshals his squad to disarm the weapon. Also inside the cordon, a heist crew headed by thieves Karalis and X (Theo James and Sam Worthington, respectively) uses the dangerous distraction to rob a bank.

Three skilled teams, three goals. Meanwhile, a displaced neighborhood resident named Rahim (Elham Ehsas) is cooling his heels in Hyde Park very aware of an evening flight that his family is supposed to be on. His clan will factor into the plot too, although his wheelchair-bound father flusters, “Nobody ever tells me what’s going on.” Join the club, old man.

“Fuze” was one of my favorite treats at last fall’s Toronto International Film Festival, although unlike many of the other films it premiered alongside, it has no pretensions of being an awards contender. (Mackenzie’s 2016 modern western “Hell or High Water” did make a moderate Oscar splash.) This is just quality popcorn filmmaking that spins the audience in circles as we watch experts do their jobs. I left the theater feeling giddily put through the wringer by its contrarian depictions of heroes and fiends.

A mechanical exercise more than a character piece, the script by Ben Hopkins (of the 2023 Willem Dafoe existentialist art burglar drama “Inside”) functions like an elaborate contraption. First, you’re impressed by the scale. Then, it reveals how its small moving parts fit together — and at the very end, just when you think you’ve clinched it, there’s a surprise coda that makes you unpack everything again to reassemble the story from a completely different perspective.

It’s a film with a few strong opinions about how the world is being run. Yet, they’re rarely said out loud. Everyone on-screen is a person of action, not words — particularly Taylor-Johnson’s major, a veteran of the War on Terror, who is so calm under pressure that he’s introduced sniping a bull’s-eye at Lord knows how many meters. He’s the sort of character who tends to come across either bland or unconvincingly cocky-funny. Here, he’s compellingly focused on the task at hand and, like all the leads, never pauses to fill in the audience on exactly what he’s doing.

The performances are all from the grip-and-grin school of acting: neat and precise with a minimum of bluster. “Fuze’s” version of a joke is when an anxious underling pipes up to ask for permission to speak. “No,” Tranter snaps, and his gruffness is so confident that it makes you chuckle. Yet even he has a boss, Gen. Minton (Iain Fletcher), who storms into one scene to yank on Tranter’s chain of command and disrupt the power balance again.

Instead of bothering much about dialogue, “Fuze” is a blueprint of how stress and deference exert themselves upon a workplace. The robber clique turns out to have its own bosses, too, as well as the most visible fractures in their unit. You’d be correct to guess that within their grand scheme lurks at least one or two self-interested ruses run by either James’ Karalis or Worthington’s X. The other crooks don’t have names worth learning, but the actors playing them, Shaun Mason and Nabil Elouahabi, do have memorable faces.

There are no flourishes onscreen other than Matt Mayer’s editing, which is relentless. Mackenzie barely gives the audience a pause to ask questions, although he does get around to answering them (mostly). All this competence puts us in a strange state — a suspenseful trance — in which you feel on edge while also relaxing into the idea that the characters have things under control. Unpredictable twists are afoot. But the pace moves so fast that you can only observe, not outguess, the surprises, putting us in the same fix as a heavy, played by Dragos Bucur, who moans that he knows he’s getting screwed over, “but I don’t know how.”

Coming at cross purposes, some of these people will fail. One unit — it would be a spoiler to specify which — evaporates toward the climax and, oddly, isn’t missed. While the outro feels tacked on, upon reflection, it’s the missing piece that transforms the movie from a puzzle into a proclamation on group cohesion. Only afterward does it hit us that Mackenzie has really made a thriller about trust. Each of these groups (and shadow groups) is united by either duty, blood or circumstance. Of those factors, one proves more adhesive than the rest.

“Fuze” does smack a bit of an excellent episode of TV. Everyone in the cast is a little too pretty for their jobs. Likewise, the score by Tony Doogan leans too heavily on generic electronic thuds, the kind that segue into a commercial break cliffhanger and an ad for blood pressure medicine. When his techno beats kick in during the most fraught sequences, however, the effect is dynamite. As the closing credits kick in, Mackenzie lets off some well-earned steam with an apropos punk rock anthem, the Clash’s cover of “Police & Thieves.”