The Battlefield 6 battle royale mode is being tested in Battlefield Labs.

Soap-based injuries, bleak festive deaths, Hugh Bonneville vomiting blood: we look back on 15 years of highs and lows as the frothy period drama comes to an end with its final spin-off film Prepare for stiff upper lips to wobble. Clutch monogrammed hankies for period-appropriate eye-dabbing. After 15 years on our screens, the Downton Abbey saga is about to hop in its vintage Rolls and drive off into the soft-focus sunset. The third and final film spin-off, Downton Abbey: The Grand Finale, is released this Friday, accompanied by a forelock-tugging farewell ITV documentary. For six series, Downton bestrode the Sunday night schedules like a Grade II-listed colossus. Writer Julian Fellowes’s upstairs-downstairs creation followed entitled aristos and their salt-of-the-earth servants at a fictional country pile. Sure, the dialogue was clumsy, the plots soapy and the historical exposition clunked like a stately home’s antique radiators. Yet somehow, it didn’t matter. Continue reading...

The three-time Oscar winner, whose forthcoming film Anemone is his first since 2017, says he feared he ‘didn’t have anything else to offer’ Oscar-winning actor Daniel Day-Lewis has said he “never intended to retire” and “would have done well to just keep [his] mouth shut”. In an interview with Rolling Stone magazine, Day-Lewis was speaking about his return to acting after an eight-year break in Anemone, a film directed by his son Ronan Day-Lewis. “It just seems like such grandiose gibberish to talk about. I never intended to retire, really. I just stopped doing that particular type of work so I could do some other work.” Continue reading...

James Gunn says hiring Milly Alcock to play Kara Zor-El in the DCU "might be the best bit of casting" he's ever done.

The Eat Pray Love author’s account of her relationship with her late partner Rayya is solipsistic and self-indulgent The first chapter of Elizabeth Gilbert’s much anticipated new memoir closes on a four-page love letter to Gilbert from her late partner Rayya, who, dead for five years, comes to her in a “visitation”. In Rayya’s voice, Gilbert calls herself babe, baby, or “sunshine baby” multiple times, emotes in all-caps, and grants herself permission to write the details of Rayya’s terrible, humiliating final year. “Let me just look at you for a minute,” “Rayya” says to Liz. “Look at your little rainbow eyes! Look at your sparkling tears! You’re so beautiful!” The letter is deeply self-indulgent and excruciating to read. “You’re going all the fucking way this time – all the way to the enlightenment.” I believe that the dead are gone and that artists don’t need their permission to evoke them. But I was stunned that this solipsistic mess opens the book, because Gilbert is a terrific storyteller – Eat Pray Love, her memoir of self-acceptance and healing, was read by millions. So, I scrubbed the false start from my mind, reminding myself that great literature shows people as they are, which means that at some point in every good memoir, we should see the narrator being awful. Continue reading...

Tasmania Police are reviewing Facebook comments made in response to a Labor post on a pro-greyhound racing page, after the state's racing minister was subjected to slurs and threats.

Elden Ring Nightreign gets a massive balancing update alongside today's free Deep of Night expansion.

After a lacklustre response to the 2025 edition, the game has gone all out to engage players and respond to user feedback In an open office space somewhere inside the vast Electronic Arts campus in Vancouver, dozens of people are gathered around multiple monitors playing EA Sports FC 26. Around them, as well as rows of football shirts from leagues all over the world, are PCs and monitors with staff watching feeds of the matches. The people playing are from EA’s Design Council, a group of pro players, influencers and fans who regularly come in to play new builds, ask questions and make suggestions. These councils have been running for years, but for this third addition to the EA Sports FC series, the successor to EA’s Fifa games, their input is apparently being treated more seriously than ever. The message to journalists, invited here to get a sneak look at the game, is that a lacklustre response to EA Sports FC 25 has meant that addressing user feedback is the main focus. EA has set up a new Player Feedback Portal, as well as a dedicated Discord channel, for fans to put forward their concerns. The developer has also introduced AI-powered social listening tools to monitor EA Sports FC chatter across various platforms including X, Instagram and YouTube. Continue reading...

Man of Tomorrow's filming start date and first official story details have been revealed by DC Studios co-chief James Gunn.

Though Prime Video marketed The Girlfriend as a limited series, producers confirm season 2 has the possibility of happening after all.

Exclusive: Critics want Melbourne University Publishing to transfer ownership of Meanjin rather than dissolve it. But CEO says ‘the journal is not for sale’ Follow our Australia news live blog for latest updates Get our breaking news email, free app or daily news podcast The former Labor attorney general and foreign affairs minister, Gareth Evans, has sent a scathing email to the chief executive of Melbourne University Publishing, lambasting its decision to scrap the literary journal Meanjin as “bone-headed”. Several hundred protesters gathered outside MUP’s Swanston Street headquarters in Melbourne on Thursday protesting against the imminent closure of one of the cornerstones of Australian literary culture for 85 years. Continue reading...

A viral debut made her the next big thing, but rather than repeat herself, she’s followed her heart. The New Yorker talks about the virtues of indie label life, and how her latest record takes on the ‘girl violence’ she sees in lesbian communities Mikaela Strauss, the songwriter and producer who records as King Princess, describes her new album Girl Violence as “almost like a ‘ha ha’ to toxic masculinity”, although not in the way you may initially think. Informed by the drama and infighting that she suggests is inherent in many lesbian communities, Girl Violence touches on the idea that “in a world full of physical violence and anger and war and hypermasculinity, this is the really crazy violence that’s under the surface, that’s subliminal and emotional and thoughtful”, she says. She smirks a little, over Zoom from her home in Brooklyn: “You think that you’re the proprietor of the violence. [But] it’s the girls.” Girl Violence is the third King Princess album, and the most fully formed. It represents something of a clean break for 26-year-old Strauss, who went viral aged 19 with her debut single 1950, a plush but covertly bitter anthem about a complex queer romance. That single, released on Mark Ronson’s Sony imprint Zelig, broke through to the US charts and established Strauss as a pop sensation in waiting. Continue reading...

Martha Naranjo Sandoval’s intimate images of family and friends document her first years in NYC – from fire hydrant rainbows to epic views of the skyline Continue reading...

Enter the Tapocalypse as Christopher Guest, Michael McKean, Harry Shearer and Rob Reiner return in a still-funny, cameo-studded telling of the hapless band’s final gig Legendary faux rockers Spinal Tap, with Christopher Guest, Michael McKean and Harry Shearer as, respectively, lead guitarist Nigel Tufnel, lead singer David St Hubbins and bassist Derek Smalls, return in a cameo-studded rockusequel – or, rather, mockusequel – about the band’s contractually enforced and horribly ill-fated one-off reunion gig in New Orleans. It’s their first time playing together since a mysterious reported row between David and Nigel in 2009 brought the Tap bandwagon to a halt. And to paraphrase the Smiths: that joke is still funny … it’s not too close to home and it’s not too near the bone … but it is close, and you might have to work a little bit harder to remember how you felt the first time you saw the original. There’s lots of good stuff here, some witty reboots and reworkings of gags from the first film and sprightly update appearances from minor, half-forgotten characters currently residing in the “where-are-they-now?” file. (It’s sad not to see Anjelica Huston as Stonehenge designer Polly Deutsch, however.) And the single biggest laugh is a line right at the end about Bruce Springsteen. Continue reading...

Jaime Martín on how he fell in love with Melbourne, taking the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra home to Santander and championing Australian composers on world stages.

Who is running the government’s ‘growth school’ for civil servants? The answer surpassed my worst fears Forgive me if I’ve got this wrong, but I seem to recall the country voting the Tories out last year. Part of the reason, if I remember correctly, was their staggering incompetence and insouciance, epitomised by Liz Truss’s mini-budget. That catastrophe was, like Truss’s political career, formed and steered by the neoliberal junktanks of Tufton Street. But now I begin to doubt my recollections. We booted them out through the front door, right? Yet they still appear to be in the house. Perhaps they came round the back. After taking an interest in the Department for Business and Trade’s “growth school” speaker sessions for civil servants, I sent a freedom of information request. Given that Keir Starmer, like Truss, has placed his growth “mission” at the centre of policy, and that this department is responsible for delivering it, the instruction given to its officials is crucial to the economic and political direction the country takes. George Monbiot is a Guardian columnist The Guardian’s climate assembly with George Monbiot and special guests On 16 September, join George Monbiot, Mikaela Loach, Emma Pinchbeck and Zack Polanski as they discuss the forces driving the big climate pushback, with a welcome from Katharine Viner and special address from Feargal Sharkey Continue reading...

Star of Parks and Rec, The Last of Us and new crime thriller Sovereign, the master of deadpan, majestic facial hair and woodwork will answer your questions You can’t always work out where the line between actor and character begins and ends – as far as Nick Offerman is concerned, he says that his deadpan personality comes from when he was a Catholic choirboy and lector, where he would “read things with the utmost sincerity, and my cousin would be cracking up because he knew I was full of shit.” He’s a master of physical comedy: his character Ron Swanson in Parks and Recreation stole scenes using his eyebrows alone and, like Ron, Offerman is genuinely fond of woodwork, Japanese dance and playing the sax. To make things even more confusing, in Parks and Rec, his ex-wife Tammy, who he can’t stand, is played by his actual wife Megan Mullally. Many of his other great roles have been on TV: his performance in HBO’s The Last of Us, as a misanthropic survivalist who finds queer love and happiness in the post-apocalyptic world, was critically acclaimed as one of the series’ best. He was similarly great in 2020’s Devs, which explores the choice between free will and AI. Continue reading...

Puerto Rican rapper says he and his team were ‘very concerned’ that Ice agents might target his performances Get our weekend culture and lifestyle email Bad Bunny says he excluded the US from his forthcoming world tour due to fears that, as a prominent Latino musician, his fans would be subjected to immigration raids. In an interview with i-D magazine on Wednesday, the three-time Grammy-winning musician was asked whether he was skipping the US “out of concern about the [mass deportations of] Latinos”. Sign up for our rundown of must-reads, pop culture and tips for the weekend, every Saturday morning Continue reading...

An Australian media regulator investigation finds radio presenter Marty Sheargold's comments on Triple M "demeaning" and "demonstrated a level of contempt and disdain for women's sport".

Belvoir St theatre, Sydney Four trans and non-binary actors take on the role of Orlando in a feelgood adaptation focused on the fluidity of sexuality and gender Get our weekend culture and lifestyle email In the 1920s, modernist author Virgina Woolf was in love with writer Vita Sackville-West. Both were married and had affairs with women. Both felt the limiting effect society had then, and still has, on the life of those who aren’t cis men and have the audacity to live according to their hearts; dream bigger than their worlds allow, and love differently and with abandon. So Virginia wrote her beloved Vita into a new reality. The novel Orlando: A Biography, dedicated to Sackville-West, follows a young lord of Britain’s Elizabethan era, who lives for hundreds of years, trying on new selves. There’s poetry and adventure and women who are dazzled by him – the world is dazzled by him, just as Woolf was by Sackville-West. At one point, Orlando becomes a woman, and the poetry and adventure and dazzlement continues. It is a fantastical, satirical, flirtatious love letter, and since its publication in 1928, it has been adapted multiple times for screen and stage – most famously the 1992 film starring Tilda Swinton. Sign up for the fun stuff with our rundown of must-reads, pop culture and tips for the weekend, every Saturday morning Continue reading...

Acma rules the ‘demeaning and sarcastic’ comments broadcast on Austereo network showed a ‘level of contempt and disdain for women’s sport’ Follow our Australia news live blog for latest updates Get our breaking news email, free app or daily news podcast Four Southern Cross Austereo (SCA) radio stations breached decency rules when they broadcast Marty Sheargold’s “sexist” and “demeaning” comments about women’s sport and the Matildas, the broadcasting watchdog has found. Seven months after Sheargold lost his job after saying the Australian women’s national football team was behaving like “Year 10 girls”, an investigation by the Australian Communications and Media Authority (Acma) has ruled the “demeaning and sarcastic” comments demonstrated a “level of contempt and disdain for women’s sport, and more generally of women”. Continue reading...

Former AFL umpire Michael Pell and three others were allegedly involved in a $300,000 illegal Brownlow Medal betting scheme.

James Murdoch, Elisabeth Murdoch and Prudence MacLeod say they are "pleased" to have reached an agreement to settle litigation over the Murdoch family trust, saying the issue is "now behind them".

Aerial minimalism meets classical ballet in Brad Walls’ new exhibition, PASSÉ Continue reading...

It does have a trick or two up its sleeve, but the Creative Stage Pro’s best asset is its low price.

LG's stance on next-gen HDR is no longer a no, but is not yet a yes.

Mark David Chapman, 70, is serving 20-years-to-life sentence in New York after fatally shooting Beatle in 1980 The man who killed John Lennon outside the former Beatle’s Manhattan apartment building in 1980 has been denied parole for a 14th time, according to New York prison officials. Mark David Chapman, 70, appeared before a parole board on 27 August, and the decision was recently posted online by the state department of corrections and community supervision. Continue reading...

Social media platform also accused of failing to filter out obvious key usernames like ‘coke’, ‘weed’ and ‘molly’ Snapchat has been accused of leaving an “overwhelming number” of drug dealers to openly operate on Snapchat, making it easy for children to buy substances including cocaine, opioids and MDMA, by a Danish research organisation. The social media platform has said it proactively uses technology to filter out profiles selling drugs. But research by Digitalt Ansvar (Digital Accountability), a Danish research organisation that promotes responsible digital development, has found evidence of a failure to moderate drug-related language in usernames. It also accused Snapchat of failing to respond adequately to reports of profiles openly selling drugs. Continue reading...

The TCL C8K isn't quite best-in-class, but it still delivers exceptional value for money.

Musician Brian Eno and artist Malak Mattar, key figures in next week’s Together for Palestine concert, explain why artists are putting fears of a backlash aside and uniting in the call for action A red carpet event, especially one to promote the new Downton Abbey film, is not typically a place for radical political statements. But at the film’s premiere in London earlier this month, that movie’s star, Hugh Bonneville, spoke out about Gaza. “Before I talk about the fluff and loveliness of our wonderful film, what’s about to happen in Gaza City is absolutely indefensible,” he announced to a visibly shocked showbiz reporter. “The international community must do more to bring it to an end.” Bonneville’s words may have been surprising for some, but they’re actually part of a larger pattern of actors, musicians, artists and cultural figures who feel increasingly moved to speak out. This week hundreds of actors – including Olivia Colman, Aimee Lou Wood and Mark Ruffalo – signed a pledge promising not to work with Israeli film institutions they say are “implicated in genocide and apartheid against the Palestinian people”. From the Eurovision winner JJ using his victory to criticise Israel to footballer Mohamed Salah lambasting UEFA for announcing the death of Suleiman Obeid, the “Palestinian Pele”, without saying that he was killed in an Israeli attack, there is a sense that if people don’t use their platforms to speak out now, they may bitterly regret it later. Continue reading...

Late-night hosts discuss Donald Trump’s birthday letter to Jeffrey Epstein as Republicans scramble to deny its validity Late-night hosts reacted to Donald Trump’s birthday drawing for Jeffrey Epstein in 2003, and his visit on Monday to the Museum of the Bible. Continue reading...

From Abba to Supertramp, my taste in music has often inspired a rising sea of scorn. But whatever. I am cool with being uncool On a first date, relatively recently, I put on one of my favourite albums. It was only later that the woman in question described her distress. It wasn’t terminal, but it wasn’t far off. “I just had to accept that you weren’t the man I thought you were.” Blimey. “I thought you might have bad taste in a heavy metal kind of way, but I wasn’t prepared for this yacht rock.” This album I’d long loved was, apparently, irredeemably naff. It was Breakfast in America by Supertramp. Earlier this week, when I heard that the band’s co-founder Rick Davies had died, I was sad. Does this make me even naffer? I suspect it does. Continue reading...

Nintendo has confirmed its next Direct will take place this week.

From The Simpsons mauling George HW Bush to South Park’s current head-to-head with Trump, animations are no stranger to political battles. But sometimes, things get far, far more brutal It shouldn’t really be a surprise that South Park has become “the most important TV show of the Trump 2.0 era”. Trey Parker and Matt Stone have spent decades taking any potshot they like at whoever they choose, from Saddam Hussein to Guitar Hero to – thanks to their inexplicable 2001 live-action sitcom That’s My Bush! – other sitting presidents. But by using every episode in its latest series to focus their fury solely at the current US administration, hitting Trump with a combination of policy rebuttals and dick jokes (and daring him to sue them in the process), this is the strongest sense yet that Parker and Stone are out for nothing less than full regime change. Continue reading...

The standup shares his list of classic Australian japers – including Judith Lucy, Norman Gunston, Paul Hogan and Black Comedy Get our weekend culture and lifestyle email The internet for me started off as forbidden fruit. Attending a Steiner school meant anything online or online-adjacent was banned. It was the type of education where you don’t learn how to read or write until year 5 but the school made it mandatory to learn the violin and Chinese in year 1. What ensued was my peers and I graduating as an illiterate, Mandarin-speaking orchestra – at one of the only government Steiner schools in Australia. I assume if you put those skills into Seek.com, the computer explodes. I quite hope the government doesn’t find out – I can assure them I have contributed to the economy exponentially by selling mid-winter lanterns and beeswax at farmers markets in Nimbin and its surrounds to enlightened fluoride-free minds. Continue reading...

Dacre Montgomery and Vicky Krieps star as a pair of strangers tethered by a late mutual relative who begins to inhabit their bodies. It’s deadly serious – too serious Went Up the Hill is one of those stiff, formally austere films that critics feel obliged to describe as “meditative” or “cerebral”. It’s a deeply pensive ghost story with a difference, following Jack (Dacre Montgomery), a man who learns about his mother, Elizabeth – who abandoned him as a child – via unconventional means. She speaks to him through her widowed wife, Jill (Vicky Krieps), after her death by suicide. And vice versa, she can also enter Jack and speak to Jill, creating a strange dynamic with three characters in two bodies. In a more conventional horror production, these “from the grave” conversations might be staged with wild eyes, demonic voices, spinning heads and splattering fluids. But this is a steely, deadly serious work, directed by Samuel Van Grinsven with a hand so steady it could thread a needle in a hurricane. The film is pristinely controlled, though that pristineness often feels empty – like a skyscraper lobby or a vacant ballroom. Continue reading...

PC, PS5, Xbox, Switch 2; Bloober Team An intriguing setup sees an unnamed protagonist time-travel to discover the origins of a devastating outbreak, but a stingy inventory and one-sided battles lead to frustration Bloober Team, the Polish developer behind 2021’s hugely underrated psycho-thriller The Medium and last year’s excellent Silent Hill 2 remake, clearly understands that there is an established, almost comforting rhythm to survival horror games. It’s baffling, then, to see this latest game excel in so many areas while failing spectacularly on several of the genre’s most basic tenets. You play an unnamed traveller, the latest of many, sent to gather information about a devastating outbreak that transformed the citizens of a town called New Dawn into the sort of misshapen monsters that have become the staple of sci-fi-adjacent survival horror: contorted of limb, long of fang, and ample of slobber. As you explore the stark, often beautifully devastated aftermath of the outbreak, you search for places where you can travel back through time to when all hell was breaking loose, extracting persons of interest who may shed light on the disaster. A slow-burn story is revealed through the usual assortment of voice notes, missives and grim environmental clues (often, as is de rigueur, daubed in blood on walls). Continue reading...

After leaving the New York Times, she turned her Substack into a unshakeable pro-Israel voice. Now as Paramount eyes acquisition of her company, Weiss is poised to become Trump’s ally among media elites Last month, federal regulators approved the long-anticipated merger of Skydance Media and Paramount Global, positioning David Ellison – the founder of Skydance and the son of megabillionaire Larry Ellison – as one of the most powerful figures in US media. Paramount Skydance Corporation, as it is now officially known, is one of a small handful of American media conglomerates, with Paramount Pictures, cable networks such as Comedy Central and MTV, and CBS all under its umbrella. CBS, in turn, runs one of the major US news operations, with nightly news viewership in the millions and 60 Minutes still being the most watched news program on network television. The implications of the merger are far-reaching and were already being felt ahead of its final approval. In July, Paramount agreed to pay Donald Trump $16m to settle a lawsuit over a 60 Minutes segment the president disapproved of, and a few weeks later, CBS controversially cancelled The Late Show With Stephen Colbert, which many observers speculated was at least partly about jettisoning an outspoken critic of Trump in anticipation of the deal. Continue reading...

The RIP's first teaser has Ben Affleck and Matt Damon asking themselves if they're the good guys in the forthcoming Netflix crime flick.

In this week’s newsletter: the long-awaited release from the three-person Team Cherry studio has crashed gaming storefronts and put indie developers back in the spotlight Just one game has been dominating the gaming conversation over the past week: Hollow Knight Silksong, an eerie, atmospheric action game from a small developer in Australia called Team Cherry. It was finally released last Thursday after many years in development, and everybody is loving it. Hollow Knight was so popular that it crashed multiple gaming storefronts. With continual game cancellations, expensive failures and layoffs at bigger studios, this is the kind of indie triumph the industry loves to celebrate at the moment. But Silksong hasn’t come out of nowhere, and its success would not be easily reproducible for any other game, indie or not. If you’re wondering what this game actually is, then imagine a dark, mostly underground labyrinth of bug nests and abandoned caverns that gradually yields its secrets to a determined player. The art style and sound are minimalist and creepy (though not scary) in a Tim Burton kind of way, the enemy bugs are fierce and hard to defeat, your player character is another bug with a small, sharp needle-like blade. It blends elements of Metroid, Dark Souls and older challenging platform games, and the unique aesthetic and perfect precision of the controls are what make it stand out from a swarm of similar games. I rinsed the first Hollow Knight and I’m captivated by Silksong. I’ve spent 15 hours on it in three days, and it has made my thumbs hurt. Continue reading...

We go hands-on with upcoming horror game Little Nightmares 3 and discuss it with a developer.

Looking for NYT Connections answers and hints? Here's all you need to know to solve today's game, plus my commentary on the puzzles.

In 107 Days, the former vice-president breaks on certain points from her typically loyal public stance US politics live – latest updates Kamala Harris calls Joe Biden’s decision to seek re-election in 2024 “recklessness” in her new memoir and questions the former president’s judgment while revealing her own frustrations about being marginalized within the administration. In passages published by the Atlantic on Wednesday from 107 Days, her memoir chronicling her presidential campaign, Harris breaks on certain points from her typically loyal public stance. Continue reading...

There’s a new way to get a Peacock free trial thanks to Walmart’s expanding streaming partnerships.

When four Californian pre-teens made an album together it was just one of many creative adventures and quickly set aside, but its reputation as naive avant pop has quietly grown. Still friends, the band explain their odd rebirth Like an outsider art version of Sugababes, or kids singing over Depeche Mode ringtones, there’s something both familiar and odd about Summer 2000 by X-Cetra. Recorded by four preteens in Y2K California, the album distils sleepovers, crushes and butterfly clips into 11 tracks of bedroom pop and Windows 95 R&B, equal parts carefree and gravely serious. Only 20 CD-R copies were ever made. But a still-unknown person posted one of them online in 2001, and by 2020 the girls – now women – were astonished to find it being discussed on muso forum Rate Your Music. “Pure creative expression of these preteen best friends who love each other and wanted to make art together, and that’s so beautiful,” says one user there; “Definitely on the poppier side of ‘accidentally avant garde music made by children’,” says another. Continue reading...

Foundation season 3's final episode arrives this week – here's when you'll be able to stream it.

Cloud gaming has never been on my radar, but with a reliable internet connection, Nvidia's upgraded RTX 5080 plan makes it seem like GeForce Now is the future of gaming.

We're so close to a Conrad-Belly endgame we can taste it, but The Summer I Turned Pretty season 3 episode 10 still has me fuming.

Fifty young men compete in an endurance event, during which they are shot in the head at point-blank range if they slow down, in this horrific buddy story adaptation If you like your dystopian scenarios lean and extremely mean, then look no further than this Stephen King adaptation, which is surely one of the grimmest mainstream movies we’ve had for some time. The blunt premise is custom built for death and suffering: 50 young American men are selected by lottery for an annual marathon march. If any walker slows to less than three miles per hour, or strays off the road, they are removed from the competition – by being shot in the head at point-blank range. The final survivor wins whatever they want, they’re promised. Why these men would volunteer for a competition with such unfavourable odds we’re left to wonder, as the broader authoritarian society in which the story is set – which looks a lot like 1960s America – is barely seen or explained. It’s clear who we’re rooting for though: Cooper Hoffman’s Ray Garraty, who is dropped off at the starting line by his tearful mother (Judy Greer), then it’s off to the races. Garraty is an all-round decent soul, who befriends and encourages his fellow competitors, particularly Pete, played by British actor David Jonsson (who’s come a long way from Rye Lane). Their growing friendship is the film’s heart, and both actors are innately charming and natural, though both have deeper, darker histories and motivations to reveal. Continue reading...

Rashid Masharawi, who produced the anthology of 22 short films that was Palestine’s official entry to the Academy Awards, has remarkable optimism about the future of Gaza Being a Palestinian under Israeli occupation will not help someone make a good film, according to Rashid Masharawi, but a good film-maker will help Palestine. With his anthology film From Ground Zero (in Arabic: From Zero Distance) he attempts to do just that by bridging the space between the Palestinians in Gaza who have endured a campaign of annihilation behind closed doors to those around the world watching as an incomprehensibly vast tragedy unfolds in real time. Continue reading...

The formidable Vogue boss said Meryl Streep’s subtle performance as a fictional fashion editor ‘had a lot of wit’ – adding that she attended the premiere wearing Prada without knowing its theme Anna Wintour, the outgoing editor-in-chief of Vogue, has addressed Meryl Streep’s performance as a formidable glossy fashion-mag editor widely perceived to be based on her in the 2006 comedy The Devil Wears Prada. Based on the novel of the same name by Lauren Weisberger, who previously worked as Wintour’s assistant, the film starred Anne Hathaway as an aspiring reporter who secures a post as a lackey to the ice-cold editor of fictional publication Runway. Continue reading...

Downton Abbey Celebrates the Grand Finale" will premiere on NBC on Wednesday, September 10 at 9 p.m. ET/PT.

Vancouver’s Drug User Liberation Front believes we shouldn’t blame users for the ills of capitalism: if so many people are self-medicating, why not give them the clean stuff? On 12 August 2017, I ran from the car that James Alex Fields, a white supremacist, plowed into a crowd of anti-racist organizers in Charlottesville, Virginia. Other peoples’ blood splattered on me. I lost my friends in the crowd and panicked. I thought I might die. A month later, I woke up on a work trip in a hotel room alone in Oakland, California, with my hands trembling, and an unshakeable feeling that I was being chased by a pack of wild animals. I was having a mental breakdown. Continue reading...

Bath museum celebrates varied ways illustrators of author’s work and adapters of her novels have portrayed her characters through history For the 21st-century Jane Austen fan, the images of Colin Firth’s Mr Darcy in the beloved BBC series Pride of Prejudice or Anya Taylor-Joy’s big-screen portrayal of Emma may be the first to leap to mind. But an exhibition opening in Bath celebrates the varied ways illustrators of Austen’s work and adapters of her novels have depicted some of her most cherished characters. Continue reading...

Prime Video thriller The Girlfriend had me hooked from the start, but its cast claim I’m not ready for its most challenging episode.

All the ways to watch England vs South Africa 3rd ODI live streams online from anywhere.

Pokémon Legends Z-A pre-orders are different across many retailers, with each offering their own exclusive free gifts.

Craig was an artist of literally towering achievements, in films from The English Patient to Harry Potter, whose kindness won the loyalty of the huge teams he led • Stuart Craig, Oscar-winning production designer, dies aged 83 Stuart Craig was a softly spoken, gentle soul – full of grace, tall, slender, willowy, polite and kind – but despite appearances he masterfully stewarded a gigantic industrial creative machine. The art department for Harry Potter was huge, and Stuart guided teams across multiple skill sets – concept artists, prop makers, construction workers, painters and decorators, plasterers and model makers – to realise the fabric and architecture of JK Rowling’s world. It wasn’t unusual to be standing with him on one of his enormous inspiring sets, the Magical Congress of the United States of America in New York or the courtyard of Hogwarts, which towered multiple storeys high, and for Stuart to suddenly be distracted and laser-focused on the texture of a tile, or the colour of the paint that had been applied to a window frame. Continue reading...

Extensive meetings in 2022 between Lewis, then vice-chair of AP, and Johnson were not disclosed in transparency records The publisher of the Washington Post, Will Lewis, is facing fresh questions over his independence after a cache of leaked files revealed he gave extensive support to Boris Johnson as a secret political adviser when Johnson was prime minister. The files shed light on how the media executive, who at the time was vice-chair of the Associated Press news agency, worked behind the scenes with Johnson as his premiership was engulfed by a series of scandals. Continue reading...

Xbox will broadcast a stream at TGS, and it might show the next Forza game.

Bad news: South Park season 27 episode 5 isn't on this week. The reason why is simple, but I've got a great Paramount+ binge in the meantime.

Actor promoting his directorial debut California Schemin’ at the city’s film festival is reported to have been punched by another drinker The actor James McAvoy was assaulted in a bar in Toronto, it has been reported. According to People magazine, McAvoy was “sucker punched” by another visitor to Charlotte’s Room bar on Monday evening, two days after the premiere of his directorial debut, California Schemin’, at the Toronto film festival. Continue reading...

Ben Bergquam was with Ice agents during a raid on Sunday and yelled at protesters that they were ‘the enemy within’ A rightwing influencer accompanied officials from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) in Chicago on Sunday as the agency ramps up arrests in the city. Ice agents arrested four people on the city’s south-west side. Ben Bergquam, the rightwing internet personality, was with agents, filming and making content as well as getting into altercations with local residents along the way, according to a video the Guardian viewed on X. In the video, he appears to be in the car with Ice agents and nearby as they arrest people; later on he yells at a group of Chicagoans who are gathered to prevent Ice operations that they are “the enemy within”. Continue reading...

Brandon Kramer’s documentary complicates any simple view of the Israel-Gaza war in its portrait of one family’s agonising divisions At the present moment, for pro-Palestinian campaigners, mention of the hostages and victims of Hamas’s 7 October attacks tends to be greeted with indifference, or even contempt. And yet this powerful and complex documentary, directed by Brandon Kramer (a distant relative of some of the people involved) and co-produced by Darren Aronofsky, is a reminder that the situation now can’t be understood without remembering the Hamas massacre – how it was calculated to provoke a rage-filled reaction that would discredit Israel internationally, what it meant and continues to mean within Israel and how the political and ideological connotations of the hostages have themselves evolved. At first, the hostages’ images were widely seen as a focus for outrage and a casus belli. Posters put up in cities showing the hostages were ripped down - to the fury of their families. But now the hostages’ images are associated more with anti-Netanyahu, anti-war-at-all-costs sentiment, with the families demanding real negotiating progress in getting them home. Continue reading...

Only two debut albums – including the ‘token’ jazz release – feature among this year’s list of nominations for the coveted UK and Irish music prize A raft of familiar names fill this year’s list of Mercury prize nominations, with only two debuts among the 12 shortlisted albums. In Limerence, the first full-length by the Scottish folk songwriter Jacob Alon, and Hamstrings and Hurricanes, the first by Welsh jazz musician Joe Webb, will compete with the likes of Pulp’s comeback album More, folk godfather Martin Carthy’s Transform Me Then Into a Fish and the UK’s biggest-selling new album of the year so far, People Watching by Sam Fender. The list is split 50/50 between male and female or mixed acts. The solo female artists on the list tend to the iconoclastic: Irish pop star CMAT’s acclaimed third album Euro-Country, Leeds jazz musician Emma-Jean Thackray’s Weirdo, FKA twigs’ Eusexua and PinkPantheress’s mixtape Fancy That. As for bands, as well as Pulp, the Irish band Fontaines DC (Romance) and London four-piece Wolf Alice (The Clearing) appear. Continue reading...

Of course The Girlfriend was going to be hot, but I didn't think Prime Video would go as far as it did... and nor did its cast.

Tarek Zahabe, 27, was charged in July for allegedly orchestrating four attacks in January, along with alleged accomplice Kye Pickering, 26 Follow our Australia news live blog for latest updates Get our breaking news email, free app or daily news podcast Police have charged the alleged mastermind behind four antisemitic attacks, including an arson attack on a childcare centre, that came amid a spate of other incidents that rocked Sydney’s Jewish community over the summer. New South Wales police said on Wednesday that 27-year-old Tarek Zahabe was charged in July for orchestrating four attacks in January. These included vandalising a Jewish school in Maroubra on 30 January, just nine days after he allegedly directed an arson attack on a nearby childcare centre. Continue reading...

If we don’t refuse and resist, not just our culture but our democracy will be irrevocably diminished Today’s large-scale AI systems are founded on what appears to be an extraordinarily brazen criminal enterprise: the wholesale, unauthorised appropriation of every available book, work of art and piece of performance that can be rendered digital. In the scheme of global harms committed by the tech bros – the undermining of democracies, the decimation of privacy, the open gauntlet to scams and abuse – stealing one Australian author’s life’s work and ruining their livelihood is a peccadillo. Continue reading...

US president says fifth-grade student forced to read aloud My Shadow Is Pink, a book about a boy who loves ‘things not for boys’ Follow our Australia news live blog for latest updates Get our breaking news email, free app or daily news podcast An Australian children’s author has fired back after Donald Trump singled out his book as promoting “radical gender ideology”. The US president appeared onstage with a school student, who said he was forced to read My Shadow is Pink by the Australian author and illustrator Scott Stuart. Continue reading...

Instead of recognising that social media harms mental health and democracy, the former deputy PM and Meta executive repeats company talking points Nick Clegg chooses difficult jobs. He was the UK’s deputy prime minister from 2010 to 2015, a position from which he was surely pulled in multiple directions as he attempted to bridge the divide between David Cameron’s Conservatives and his own Liberal Democrats. A few years later he chose another challenging role, serving as Meta’s vice-president and then president of global affairs from 2018 until January 2025, where he was responsible for bridging the very different worlds of Silicon Valley and Washington DC (as well as other governments). How to Save the Internet is Clegg’s report on how he handled that Herculean task, along with his ideas for how to make the relationships between tech companies and regulators more cooperative and effective in the future. The main threat that Clegg addresses in the book is not one caused by the internet; it is the threat to the internet from those who would regulate it. As he puts it: “The real purpose of this book is not to defend myself or Meta or big tech. It is to raise the alarm about what I believe are the truly profound stakes for the future of the internet and for who gets to benefit from these revolutionary new technologies.” Continue reading...

This flimsy tell-all about the actor’s decades-long addiction to pills, alcohol and crack-cocaine is far too light on contrition or self-reflection. You pity everyone around him If it comes as a shock to anyone that at some point in the grip of a decades-long addiction to pills, booze and crack cocaine the essentially heterosexual Charlie Sheen occasionally “turned over the menu” and had sex with men, then I am delighted. I did not know such pockets of naivety could still exist in this benighted world. You sweet things. Enjoy your time! That this is the fact that has made headlines (the few there have been) around the release of the two-part documentary AKA Charlie Sheen is testimony to how little new information there is in it. How, really, could it be otherwise? Every one of the three acts – which in the film he labels “Partying”, “Partying with problems” and “Just problems” – of his adult life has been comprehensively documented by the media in real time. Sometimes that was via stories sold by the people he partied with, sometimes via public hospitalisations and press conferences called by his father Martin Sheen to try to control the press interest. Sometimes it was thanks to Charlie’s own interviews or call-ins to the likes of Alex Jones’s Infowars shows, or ranting videos posted on YouTube about his “tiger blood” and “Adonis DNA” done under the influence, or as a result of the drawn-out divorce proceedings between him and Denise Richards as his substance abuse made their life together untenable. And sometimes it was an amalgam, as when in 2015 he gave an exclusive interview to NBC’s Today show revealing his HIV+ status, to end various extortion attempts people had made over the four years since his diagnosis. Continue reading...

Mae Martin's new Netflix series Wayward brings the troubled teen cult lore we've always wanted, and transforms it into unmissable TV.

Malthouse, Melbourne Tom Wright’s production is the best thing Malthouse has produced in years: shocking, chilling, funny and often breathtakingly beautiful Get our weekend culture and lifestyle email Homer’s Iliad isn’t just a foundational Hellenic text: it’s the great primal myth of war, sacred and eternal. Its gods and mortals alike are monstrous, heroic and pitiful, endlessly iterative and contemporary. We’ve been treading and retreading this same material for almost 3,000 years, not to exorcise violence but to ritualise and sanctify it. Only the Mahabharata can hold a candle to the Iliad’s immensity and continued intellectual relevance. While all that cultural weight is enough to make a modern playwright quake, Tom Wright – whose writing for the stage has encompassed the mythologies of Orestes, Medea and Oedipus, to name only a few – is made of sterner stuff. He launches headlong into the colossal tale with the brio and control of the old masters. While the Iliad is the primary text here, Wright also folds in details from Aeschylus, Euripides and Virgil, as well as inventions of his own. The result is shocking, chilling, funny and often breathtakingly beautiful, a grounded piece of epic theatre that fringes the divine. Sign up for the fun stuff with our rundown of must-reads, pop culture and tips for the weekend, every Saturday morning Continue reading...

From the plans for a Major Tom movie to the Aladdin Sane mask and some wild ‘artworks’ sent by fans, this Bowie treasure trove is now open to the public – and it’s the freakiest show! In the 1990s, David Bowie started assembling an archive of his own career in earnest. There seems something telling about the timing. It happened on the heels of 1990’s Sound+Vision tour, when Bowie grandly announced he was performing his hits live for the final time – a resolution that lasted all of two years. It also followed the bumpy saga of Tin Machine, the short-lived hard rock band that Bowie insisted he was simply a member of, rather than the star attraction, and whose work has thus far escaped the extensive campaign of posthumous archival Bowie releases. These include more than 25 albums and box sets in the nine years since his death, with another – the 18-piece collection I Can’t Give Everything Away – due this Friday. Having attempted to escape the weight of his past with decidedly mixed results, Bowie seems to have resolved instead to come to some kind of accommodation with it. “I think you’re absolutely right,” says Madeleine Haddon, lead curator at the V&A in London, which is about to open the David Bowie Centre at its East Storehouse, drawn from his archive. “And that capacity for self-reflection was just tremendous.” Continue reading...

Cheap ultra-processed food behind rise in overweight children, with one in 10 now obese globally, says Unicef More children around the world are obese than underweight for the first time, according to a UN report that warns ultra-processed junk food is overwhelming childhood diets. There are 188 million teenagers and school-age children with obesity – one in 10 – Unicef said, affecting health and development and bringing a risk of life-threatening diseases. Continue reading...

Turok: Origins has a strong understanding of the series’ aesthetic, but I have concerns over the co-op game’s longevity.

After losing two years of her life to a poker machine addiction, Bec Healy wants the SA government to put its revenue from gambling into harm reduction.

Looking for NYT Connections answers and hints? Here's all you need to know to solve today's game, plus my commentary on the puzzles.

Just a month after learning of a remote observatory run by a single volunteer, Rebecca Tayler and Richard Wilkin were handed its keys. These days, the observatory is part of a "star trail" for astronomy enthusiasts.

Krishna Istha has made a habit of turning to performance to solve a problem. So when they needed help to find a sperm donor, the solution was obvious.

Watch as Bolivia take on Brazil in a key World Cup qualifier for the home team – here are the Bolivia vs Brazil TV channels, broadcasters and free streams.

Severance has wowed fans all over the world, but is Vince Gilligan's upcoming new show about to beat its record?

Toronto film festival: the Oscar winner is adrift in Alice Winocour’s uninvolving film about three thinly written women involved in a Paris fashion week show The otherworldly beauty and consuming, tattoo-strewn look of Angelina Jolie hasn’t always allowed for a great deal of versatility as an actor, a difficult face to seamlessly slot into most stories. The star hasn’t seemed to be all that interested in acting for a while anyway (since 2012, she has physically appeared on screen just seven times) and has preferred to spend time behind the camera and focusing on both her family and her philanthropic pursuits. Her films as a director have been of both genuinely noble intention and minimal cinematic value (her last effort, Without Blood, premiered at last year’s Toronto film festival but still doesn’t have US distribution) and as she enters her 50s, it seems like she’s rediscovered her passion for acting again. The catastrophic box office for her ill-advised entry into the Marvel universe – Chloé Zhao’s fantastically boring Eternals – has at least freed her from the hell of superhero sequels, and while last year’s Maria Callas biopic didn’t secure her the Oscar nomination it was clearly designed to, it gently pushed the star further out of the shadows, and she’s since been lining up projects with more speed than we’re used to seeing. It’s a shame she’s not picking better though – her latest effort, Couture, premiering here in Toronto and failing to work on any of the levels it is limply trying to, is a film about high fashion that’s as thin and disposable as something bought on the high street. Continue reading...

Rupert Murdoch's family has always been close. But if you really want to trace the extent of filial and sibling affection, you need to follow the money.

Marvel has released a mysterious new image for Avengers 5, and its caption includes an intriguing call back to Thanos.

A new leak suggests Grand Theft Auto 6 will feature parodies of real-life websites and mobile apps like Uber and WhatsApp.

Hollow Knight: Silksong players are struggling to beat Savage Beastfly, with some claiming it to be the hardest enemy they've encountered yet.

Gallery secures huge investment at a time when many arts institutions are struggling to raise funds The National Gallery has lifted its ban on collecting modern paintings made after 1900 as part of a revamp that will include a new wing, made possible after it secured a landmark investment of £375m. A new part of the gallery will be built behind the Sainsbury building as part of Project Domani– “tomorrow” in Italian – after two donations of £150m each from Michael Moritz’s Crankstart foundation and the Hans and Julia Rausing Trust. Continue reading...

Late-night hosts discuss speculation over Trump’s health, his rebranding of the Pentagon and his alleged lewd birthday letter to Epstein Late-night hosts react to speculation over Donald Trump’s health and the newly released screenshot of Trump’s alleged lewd birthday letter to Jeffrey Epstein. Continue reading...

This award-winning Australian feature mixes madcap comedy with a who’s who of queer performers to produce a magical, joyful gem Get our weekend culture and lifestyle email It’s hard being a lesbian space princess. In this buzzy and giddily ambitious new Australian animated film, Saira (Shabana Azeez) – once voted the most boring royal in gay space – is a perpetually single introvert with a passion for closeup magic (she’s “good with her hands”). After her heart is thoroughly broken by Kiki (Bernie Van Tiel), all finger-guns and sapphic swagger, Saira is devastated – but there’s no time to cry, because Kiki has been kidnapped by the Straight White Maliens (played by Mark Bonanno, Broden Kelly, and Zachary Ruane of Aunty Donna) and only Saira’s legendary magical labrys can save her. Except Saira has never been able to summon the labrys which is her birthright. And also, of course, a lesbian space princess can cry while she fights to not just save her ex but also win her back: it’s her quest – she can cry if she wants to. Sign up for the fun stuff with our rundown of must-reads, pop culture and tips for the weekend, every Saturday morning Continue reading...

Starring Joseph Gordon-Levitt as a teen detective in a world of high school drug rings and two-bit thugs, Johnson’s first film is a fine showcase of his now-trademark thrills, chills and twists Find more from our Stream team series here Before Benoit Blanc, there was Brendan Frye. At first glance, the teenaged gumshoe at the heart of Brick doesn’t share much with the gentleman sleuth from Knives Out, Glass Onion and the upcoming Wake Up Dead Man. Benoit Blanc (Daniel Craig) styles himself as a lost Agatha Christie character, while Brendan (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) is a jaded teen who spits Dashiell Hammett dialogue before starting fights he can’t win. Continue reading...

I didn't expect to be so excited for The Strangers: Chapter 2 but this fake tourism website has got me feeling like a private investigator.

Screenwriters’ guild of Israel says campaign that has now won backing from 1,800 film-makers will only ‘deepen the darkness’, while representatives of the country’s documentary and directors’ guild also voice concern Representatives of the Israeli film industry are redoubling efforts to caution against the wisdom of a pledge signed by some 1,800 significant professionals vowing not to work with Israeli film institutions they say are “implicated in genocide and apartheid against the Palestinian people”. The pledge, announced on Monday, was initially signed by 1,200 film-makers including Yorgos Lanthimos, Ava DuVernay, Asif Kapadia, Boots Riley and Joshua Oppenheimer; and actors Olivia Colman, Mark Ruffalo, Tilda Swinton, Javier Bardem, Ayo Edebiri, Riz Ahmed, Josh O’Connor, Cynthia Nixon, Julie Christie, Ilana Glazer, Rebecca Hall, Aimee Lou Wood and Debra Winger. Continue reading...

Cow | Deer gets ‘between the ears’ of animals, creating mouse noises with polystyrene balls and comparing wild creatures with industrialised ones. So if there’s no dialogue, what did its writer do? Director Katie Mitchell reveals all ‘I’m really into cow farming,” says Katie Mitchell. It seems an unexpected interest for one of Europe’s most rigorous, eco-conscious theatre directors. But she was “brought up in the 1970s self-sufficiency movement, in the Brecon Beacons”, and now has “a little place in Wales, opposite a cow farm”. Mitchell is talking dairy farming in a dressing room in London’s Royal Court theatre. We’re sitting with sound artist Melanie Wilson and playwright Nina Segal, her collaborators on a radical wordless project, Cow | Deer, which goes “between the ears” of its title characters. Tucking into Ottolenghi takeout during a rehearsal break, they describe how they are putting animals at the play’s centre and making sound its medium. Continue reading...

Former PM’s private office forwarded business proposal from peer to owner of X in June 2024, leaked files suggest Boris Johnson contacted Elon Musk on behalf of the Evening Standard owner, Evgeny Lebedev, as part of an attempt to get the US tech billionaire to support the ailing newspaper, leaked files suggest. Johnson’s private office, which is taxpayer-subsidised, emailed an executive close to Musk in June 2024, forwarding a business proposal from Lord Lebedev. Continue reading...

Here's the Skate Early Access roadmap, detailing when major updates are set to be added into the new skating game.

Confronting the historic trauma of forced assimilation, a wave of artists are rejuvenating hyper-diverse Indigenous cultures in the kinds of festivals that were once forbidden On a sunny, breezy August afternoon in Mani-Utenam, a reservation on the Quebec coast for the Innu people, a powwow ceremony is under way. Two sets of drummers beat out a steady rhythm while chanting in tandem, as dancers sway in their traditional, colourful regalia, ringing with the sound of small bells attached to their clothing. It is part of Innu Nikamu, one of the largest Indigenous festivals in North America, but this joyful performance is taking place on troubled ground. This was once the site of a residential school where children were taken away from their families to force them to assimilate to western culture and forget their heritage. Active from the 1800s, such schools were run by the Canadian state and the Catholic church, who would inflict severe punishments on children who spoke their Indigenous languages and practised their customs. Beyond the thousands of traumatised survivors, 3,200 children are documented to have died (unmarked graves have also been discovered), and in 2022, Pope Francis made a “penitential pilgrimage” to Canada to atone on behalf of the church. Continue reading...

Two members of Foundation's cast preview the finale of the Apple TV+ sci-fi epic's third season.

Team Cherry has announced that the first post-launch Hollow Knight: Silksong patch will arrive next week and address the early game difficulty complaints.

After the death of co-frontman Rick Davies, we survey the best of the songwriting partnership with Roger Hodgson that propelled them to mass success in the 70s • Rick Davies, Supertramp frontman and co-founder, dies aged 81 Supertramp spent their early years exploring, developing a flair for soft-focus introspection and muscular adventure without quite finding melodic hooks for their stylistic acumen. Crime of the Century, their third album, is where things started to change for the group and School provides the bridge between their art-rock beginnings and the clever pop polish that brought them fame. One of the rare full collaborations between Rick Davies and his singer/songwriter partner Roger Hodgson, School takes flight once Davies’ jazz-inflected piano pushes Hodgson’s sarcastic swipes at educational bureaucracy toward an open-ended space, the sweeping solos suggesting worlds far away from dreary institutions. Continue reading...

In his reverse-chronology play about a married couple dealing with an affair, Harold Pinter asked the audience to find meaning in unspoken words I didn’t see Harold Pinter’s Betrayal on stage until after I’d read it. I’m pleased about that – it means I’d “seen” it for myself first. The play is about a married couple, Robert and Emma, and the affair that she has with his best friend, Jerry. It has a reverse chronology, starting in the present day when the affair is over and ending years earlier as it begins, and shows what each of them knows or doesn’t know over the course of that time. I immediately thought: this is how I want to write. I loved its spareness and economy. How taut the language was. Unspoken words filled the room, giving it energy and unpredictability and drama. It showed me how much you can leave for the actors to work out and play with. How much the words matter, but the silences, too. Continue reading...

Toronto film festival: a new film follows women who claim to have been abused by a former Jesuit priest A complicated stain on Pope Francis’s legacy is further explored in Nuns vs the Vatican, a sensitive and unsettling documentary following women whose sexual abuse allegations were long ignored by the Catholic church, and the broader system that protects and enables predators within. Nuns, which is directed by Emmy winner in Lorena Luciano and executive produced by Law & Order: Special Victims Unit star Mariska Hargitay and premiered at the Toronto film festival on Saturday, largely centres around Gloria Branciani and Mirjam Kovac, who are among dozens allegedly victimized by Marko Rupnik, a former Jesuit priest currently awaiting canonical trial for sexual, spiritual and physical abuse. Continue reading...

PC Gaming Show has announced a special Tokyo Direct broadcast for Tokyo Game Show 2025.

The veteran actor will be reprising his role as a priest who helps Diesel’s immortal warrior stop the plague in The Last Witch Hunter 2 The actor Michael Caine has again come out of retirement for one last job – in this case, Vin Diesel sequel The Last Witch Hunter 2. Caine will be reprising his role as a priest who assists the immortal warrior played by Diesel to stop the plague ravaging the planet. Caine, 92, first retired in 2009, after shooting gang crime drama Harry Brown and then again, 24 films later, in 2021, after starring as novelist in Best Sellers. He returned for little-seen Croatian historical drama Medieval in 2022 and, the following year, starred in The Great Escaper as a D-Day veteran who travels to Normandy solo from his care home for the 70th anniversary. Continue reading...

From star-studded thrillers to bold sci-fi adaptations, Apple TV+ has an exciting slate of new shows and movies heading our way through the rest of 2025 and into 2026.

Borderlands 4 is getting a big day one patch, but it won't help those on older PCs.

From turning up in person for all of three minutes a series, to beaming in skits via iPad, reality TV hosts are going absolutely minimal effort. Nice work if you can get it To watch BBC One’s new reality series Stranded on Honeymoon Island is to be hit with a barrage of questions. To be fair, the main question is, “Weird, I thought I was watching BBC One, but this is clearly an ITV2 show. Does this mean my television is broken?” However, the more pressing one is probably, “Where’s Davina?” To look on iPlayer, Stranded on Honeymoon Island – in which a bunch of strangers get married to each other and are then shipped off to a remote island with only each other for company – is absolutely a Davina McCall show. There are five figures on the show’s thumbnail, but four of them are pushed back into the middle distance, while McCall looms heavily in the foreground, towering over everyone else like a preternaturally delighted Godzilla. And that would be fine … were McCall actually part of Stranded on Honeymoon Island. Continue reading...

Eldest son has the succession Rupert craved after agreeing a payout to his siblings far higher than previously offered As a keen rock climber, Lachlan Murdoch knows a thing or two about the importance of clinging on to perilous terrain. After the toughest ascent of his life – rising to the top of his father’s business empire – he has finally ensured that his place at its summit is assured. The deal Rupert Murdoch’s eldest son has struck with his oldest siblings Prudence, Elisabeth and James will mean they give up their shares in the family business, handing Lachlan the long-term control that he and his father craved. Continue reading...

Groth and wife Brittany are suing a News Corp paper for defamation and breach of privacy over incorrect claims of inappropriate relationship Get our breaking news email, free app or daily news podcast The Herald Sun failed to seek a response from Brittany Groth, the wife of Sam Groth, the Victorian Liberals deputy leader and former tennis star, before wrongly outing her as a victim of child sexual assault who was preyed upon by her now-husband when he was her coach, the couple allege in federal court documents. The Herald and Weekly Times, along with reporter Stephen Drill, who wrote the articles, and his editor Sam Weir, are being sued in the federal court by Brittany Groth, in the first test of a new statutory tort for serious invasions of privacy, and by Sam Groth for defamation. Continue reading...

Despite the recent success of Indiana Jones and the Great Circle, MachineGames has said that it's interested in making another Wolfenstein game.

Gavin & Stacey creators Ruth Jones and James Corden are bringing a brand-new show to Apple TV+, and it could be the streamer's best yet.

The faded resorts and coastal towns of Tendring in Essex offer few job opportunities but many of its 20-somethings are set on finding their way in an area with one of England’s oldest populations Share your experiences of living in a coastal town Photographs by Polly Braden The village where 22-year-old Millicent has lived all her whole life is often her most closely guarded secret – at least until first impressions have been established. “It’s almost like a superpower,” she says. “I wait until people are comfortable with me, and then I’ll do the big reveal.” It doesn’t matter where she goes, the story is always the same. “I’ll go to meet new friends and at some point I’ll tell them I’m from Jaywick,” says Millicent. “And it’s as if they go through the five stages of grief. They’ll say: ‘Oh, you’re not … oh, I’m so sorry’.” Kyle, Matt and Finn at Jaywick’s Martello Tower, now an arts site Continue reading...

The plot brief for Tim Robinson's mysterious, awkward comedy series is already making me sit uncomfortably ahead of its mid-October launch.

The tension between co-founders Roger Hodgson and Davies – who has died aged 81 – was the driving force of a band who refused to fit into any genre It must be odd to have been a band’s co-founder and joint frontman and to know that when thousands of people came to see you, they did so on condition that not only did you play songs you neither wrote nor sung, but had also initially agreed not to perform. That was what happened to Rick Davies, who formed Supertramp with Roger Hodgson in 1970. Hodgson left the band in 1983 – on the agreement that he took his songs, and Davies took the name. But touring as Supertramp is impossible without The Logical Song or Dreamer or Breakfast in America, and so, to Hodgson’s irritation, Davies played the songs. It was fitting though, because the tension between Davies and Hodgson was very much the driving force of Supertramp. Davies loved jazz and blues, whereas Hodgson was in love with pop. And it was in the combination of their two impulses that Supertramp found their greatest success. If you were to define a “Supertramp sound” it would be Hodgson’s keen tenor backed by Davies’ burbling keys: Hodgson may have written the band’s biggest hits, but Davies supplied their shape. And he had plenty of his own songs to sing. Continue reading...

If you somehow thought your first Silksong playthrough wasn't hard enough, here's how you can unlock Steel Soul mode without beating the game.

The PC Specialist Defiance II 16 offers a powerful spec at a low price point – but does it live up to expectations?

Protesters in Nepal set fire to homes of some of the country's top political leaders in opposition to a social media ban that was lifted a day after deadly anti-government protests.

The resignation came after protesters set fire to homes of some of the country's top political leaders in opposition to a social media ban that was lifted a day after deadly anti-government protests.

Code-breaking hero Robert Langdon is back for another conspiracy thriller, featuring underground laboratories and new thoughts on the nature of consciousness He’s back, baby! Dan Brown’s first novel in nearly a decade reunites readers with the world’s only professor of symbology, Robert Langdon – a man whose most distinctive quality of character is teaming a loafer-and-turtleneck combo with a Mickey Mouse wristwatch. Do we learn more about Langdon? Not much. He is still so world-renowned that, as doesn’t happen for most academics, fancy hotels monogram his slippers for him. His password for most things is Dolphin123, because he’s good at swimming. He is too old-fashioned to like texting or videogames, and just a little prudish. He has never seen When Harry Met Sally, but has “heard about the famous ‘sex scene’”. At this stage, everything that needs to be said about Brown’s sentence-by-sentence ineptitude as a prose writer has been said. Fear not: he’s still hopeless. It may be counted as a metafictional joke that in a novel where a favoured adjective like “elegant” can appear in two consecutive sentences, where bells are said to “blare”, and where we’re asked to parse “The elevator doors rumbled open, and Langdon felt an instantaneous surge of relief to see open air, but that emotion was instantly dampened by disappointment”, both the dedicatee and a minor protagonist are editors at Penguin Random House. Continue reading...

Only Murders in the Building season 5 is back and better than ever – and there's one cameo I can't wait to see more of.

Brandon Kramer’s documentary Holding Liat follows an Israeli family torn apart by the Hamas attacks, but clinging to hopes of reconciliation When Hamas attacked southern Israeli communities on 7 October 2023, unleashing a devastating retaliation against Gaza that is still under way nearly two years later, those few who still hoped for peaceful coexistence were among the first to die. The hardest-hit kibbutz, Nir Oz, has nearly 70 year-old roots in the Jewish socialist youth group, Hashomer Hatzair, which advocated for equal rights for Jews and Arabs in a binational state. Before the attack, volunteers from the kibbutz transported critically ill Palestinians from Gaza to Israeli hospitals for treatment. Continue reading...

Viral footage of a US social media star handling a deadly saltwater crocodile in Far North Queensland has sparked calls to deport misbehaving influencers.

Toronto film festival: the actors play off each other beautifully in an intimate London-set comedy drama about art, commerce and the mess in-between It seems like Steven Soderbergh might have developed a late case of anglophilia, the retirement-teasing director situating himself in London for three films within the last two years. The first was a needless, throwaway Magic Mike sequel, but then this spring he gave us the delicious spy caper Black Bag, a juicy riff on both John le Carré and Agatha Christie that dared to imagine a monogamous and supportive marriage as the epitome of sexiness. Unlike Woody Allen, who cursed us with a string of London-set clunkers after Match Point (Cassandra’s Dream, a film that cast Colin Farrell and Ewan McGregor as cockney brothers, easily the most heinous), Soderbergh seems to be sticking around for reasons other than a nice holiday, his second offering of 2025 also feeling notable. It’s a quieter project than his last, a delicate two-hander closer to an intimate stage play, but it finds him playing in yet another unexpected part of the sandpit, a director thrillingly seeking new challenges. Like that film, it seems inspired more by storytelling than simple technique (unlike the fantastic Covid-set surveillance thriller Kimi or the hard-to-love ghost story Presence) and again he’s reunited with a screenwriter he’s previously worked with before. Like the frequent Soderbergh collaborator and Jurassic Park scribe David Koepp, writer Ed Solomon has also mastered the art of taking a blockbuster cheque. His credits include Charlie’s Angels, Men in Black, Super Mario Bros and, more recently, the Now You See Me movies, but his first film with Soderbergh was 2021’s ensemble crime drama No Sudden Move, and he’s brought another smaller, more character-driven story his way. The Christophers is a talky, at times incredibly funny, comedy drama with plot reversals that make it feel like it’s on the verge of a thriller. It doesn’t end up there, at least not strictly, but it’s unpredictable enough to never make us entirely sure just where it’s heading. The Christophers is screening at the Toronto film festival and is seeking distribution Continue reading...

The deal secures Rupert Murdoch's legacy as the founder of the world's most powerful conservative media empire.

Eldest son will now be what Rupert Murdoch has described as ‘protector of the conservative voice in the English-speaking world’ Follow our Australia news live blog for latest updates Get our breaking news email, free app or daily news podcast Lachlan Murdoch, now flying solo without the constraints of his more progressive siblings, has taken control of his father’s global media empire, securing the future of the Australian stable of newspapers, magazines and news channels. An Australian resident who raises his two children with his wife, Sarah, in the affluent Sydney suburb Bellevue Hill, Lachlan is committed to the Australian business which includes Sky After Dark’s lineup of rightwing pundits. Continue reading...

Longlisted for the Booker, this capacious story of love, work and family set between India and the US is both dizzyingly vast and insistently miniature On a trip to see his grandparents in the Indian city of Allahabad, journalist Sunny Bhatia flicks through the morning papers, and is immediately at sea: what can the convoluted sentences before him – “TTIM files complaint against MSL at JM Rastra. MP(LTTK) holds GL Mukti strike to blame for Vasudev debacle. BORS reverberates in KLM(U) case” – possibly mean? His bewilderment at an India he cannot decode is, equally problematically, mirrored by the incomprehension he experiences in New York, where he occupies a junior role at the Associated Press. Fortunately, there are other more readily accessible stories: a woman sold at a cattle fair in Rajasthan, and a retired railway clerk in Mysore who has grown his fingernails so long that they reach across the room and oblige his family to attend to his every physical need. They do not mind, the clerk tells Sunny when he interviews him over the phone, because they understand his determination to do something that nobody else has done: “The point is not about having longer fingernails than anyone; what is important is that I am firing up the younger generation to be ambitious. If I can do it, I tell them, I who used to have no discipline, then you can also reach your dream of fame.” Continue reading...

After their beloved doorman dies, Charles, Oliver and Mabel suspect foul play. Here’s how you can watch Only Murders in the Building season 5 online and from anywhere.

When Mel C first auditioned for a new girl group in 1994, she had no idea what kind of journey she was about to embark on. She talks to Zan Rowe about the moments that made the Spice Girls.

There are still many things to love here, but the cracks are well and truly appearing. Too many moments feel laboured … and Meryl Streep should be kept away from comedy In the mid-90s, Bonnie and Terry Turner created a TV sitcom about a group of aliens (led by John Lithgow as their self-regarding High Commander) on a research mission to Earth. As they attempted to integrate into human life by posing as an ordinary family, gentle, charming hilarity ensued for six seasons – an unexpectedly long time, and 3rd Rock from the Sun became known as “the show they couldn’t cancel”. The fondness everyone felt for it endured past the show’s technical peak and kept it on our screens until the commercial inviability became too stark and/or the actors’ interest in participating waned. It was a rare pocket of sentimentality in the otherwise ruthless world of television programming. Only Murders in the Building is in all respects a much better show than 3rd Rock. It manages to fold in a cosy whodunnit, social media satire, zippy one-liners, sight gags, physical comedy and intergenerational friendships and commentary. An undertow of melancholy is ameliorated by optimism as its trio of main characters bond over their love of true-crime podcasts, then start their own, forging connections with the assorted misfits in the apartment building they live in, and the wider world. But as the fifth season begins, the memory of 3rd Rock begins to come back to me more strongly. Continue reading...

The 1995 adaptation of Jane Austen’s classic, starring Colin Firth, has its own fan group, has inspired university courses and was even featured in the Barbie movie. What’s behind its enduring appeal? I was born in the wrong century – or so my mother says, while I protest from my writing bureau, wax seal in hand, ready to dispatch an Austen-style letter to a friend. But as I put out the candle flame with my antique snuffer, I wonder if she might be right. For me, the past has always felt like home – I grew up on a literary diet of classic fiction, seasoned with a love of my Regency hero, Jane Austen. So when the BBC dramatisation of her most popular novel, Pride and Prejudice, first aired in 1995, it was manna from heaven for me, especially as an A-level English literature student. My pre-binge-era classmates and I delighted in the weekly suspense. We chattered of Mr Darcy’s intense looks, so sizzling they could fry an egg; laughed over the unfiltered comments of a dramatic Mrs Bennet; hummed that glorious title music on repeat. It played in my head whenever I sauntered around the open fields of my local Kent countryside. I felt like – nay – I was Elizabeth Bennet. Continue reading...

With India, Pakistan and Sri Lanka all playing, the continent's best cricketers clash in the UAE – watch Asia Cup 2025 live streams online and from anywhere.

Thousands joined the ‘Gen Z’ demonstrations, which protesters said reflected their frustration with the ban and anger over alleged corrupt officials Nepal’s government has lifted its ban on 26 prominent social media apps and messaging services after at least 19 people were killed and more than 100 injured in clashes on Monday. The country’s communication and information minister announced the ban would be rolled back hours after demonstrators protesting against the block surged towards the parliament complex in the capital, Kathmandu. Continue reading...

The 55-year-old actor has been playing Emcee in Cabaret, which will now shut a month earlier than planned Billy Porter is “recovering from a serious case of sepsis”, forcing the early closure of Broadway’s revival of Cabaret in which he played a leading role. The show’s producers announced on Sunday that Porter “is recovering from a serious case of sepsis” that will prevent him from returning to the stage. Continue reading...

Melbourne University Publishing, which has housed the magazine since 2007, has cited "purely financial grounds" for the decision to close Meanjin.

A social media ban has been revoked after violent protests in Nepal left 19 people dead and more than 100 injured.

Unknown Number gave us the twist of all twists, but there's a new Netflix movie you need to stream next, and it's jaw-dropping.

Company accused of manipulating virtual reality research as senator attacks Meta’s ‘disgusting web of lies’ A group of six whistleblowers have come forward with allegations of a cover-up of harm to children on Meta’s virtual reality devices and apps. They say the social media company, which owns Facebook, Instagram, and offers a line of VR headsets and games, deleted or doctored internal safety research that showed children being exposed to grooming, sexual harassment and violence in its 3D realms. “Meta knew that underage children were using its products, but figured, ‘Hey, kids drive engagement,’ and it was making them cash,” Jason Sattizahn, one of the whistleblowers who worked on the company’s VR research, said in a statement. “Meta has compromised their internal teams to manipulate research and straight-up erase data that they don’t like.” Continue reading...

Family announces Rupert Murdoch’s eldest son, Lachlan Murdoch, will secure control of business The succession battle at Rupert Murdoch’s media empire has ended. The family announced on Monday that Lachlan Murdoch, Murdoch’s eldest son, will secure control of the Murdochs’ sprawling media empire that includes Fox News, The Wall Street Journal and The Times in the UK, with his three oldest siblings receiving an estimated $1.1bn each for their shares in the business. Continue reading...

Writer, director and star Eva Victor's honest and hilarious portrayal of time before, during and after sexual assault has made Sorry, Baby one of the most talked about films of 2025.

Daemon X Machina: Titanic Scion offers a lot to like, but also plenty to make the experience feel lacking.

This box-ticking exercise from the maker of the exceptional Mare of Easttown has bloody shootouts, bags of fentanyl and bodies – but very soon it becomes inescapably boring Do you feel it? There is a ripple in the firmament, a vibration in the foundations, a bracing of the cosmos … yes, Mark Ruffalo is preparing to Act again. This time, he stars in crime drama Task, created by Mare of Easttown’s Brad Inglesby, as a former priest turned FBI agent nursing a great sorrow in the suitably grey environs of suburban Philadelphia. Tom Brandis ends every day in a drunken semi-stupor and begins every morning with prayer and a head-dunk into an ice-filled sink. Do you think we might be in for a meditation on guilt, sin and the possibility of redemption? Yes, I wearily agree. So. Brandis is taken off the desk duties he has been assigned since his great sorrow. This is evidently connected to the sentencing hearing for a third-degree murder conviction he is due to attend next week, where his daughter Emily may be giving a family impact statement – but we will have to wait just long enough for it to feel outright manipulative before we get the full explanation of who killed who and how. Brandis is assigned to a new taskforce to investigate a series of armed break-ins at drug houses owned by the Dark Hearts biker gang, in the hope that arrests can be made before Philly is consumed by a turf war. He has three youngsters to help him: the charmingly arrogant, Catholic-raised Anthony (Fabien Frankel); the supremely competent Aleah (Thuso Mbedu); and the supremely incompetent Lizzie (Alison Oliver). Their single characteristics allow Brandis to prove his priestly credentials (God-talks with the lapsed Anthony), his generosity of spirit (this middle-aged man is not threatened by youthful ability!) and patience (I would return her to Quantico instantly, bearing a large label that read “Not fit for purpose”) and not much else. Continue reading...

Phantom Blade Zero is a kung-fupunk character action game where players fight through a mythical world as an elite assassin.

Always have free space on your Xbox thanks to this awesome Seagate 2TB Xbox Storage Expansion Card deal at Amazon.

Crowe and Malek are hugely watchable but this ultimately fails to deliver an authentic version of events If the Nuremberg trials were political theatre, writer and director James Vanderbilt leans into the spectacle of it. His new movie Nuremberg, about the show put on for the rest of the world to indict Nazi war criminals, is packaged like old-fashioned entertainment. There are movie stars (chiefly Rami Malek and Russell Crowe) with slicked-back hair, trading snappy barbs and self-important monologues in smoky rooms, meanwhile the gravity of the moment tends to be kept at bay. All the bureaucratic and legal speak around fine-tuning an unprecedented process, where one country prosecutes the high command of another, goes down easy in an Aaron Sorkin sort of way. It is riveting when its urgency is defended by an actor as great as Michael Shannon. It is all so watchable, to a fault, especially when dealing with the unspeakable. There’s some rhyme and reason to the director’s approach. Vanderbilt (who wrote the screenplay for David Fincher’s Zodiac, a masterpiece about the impossible pursuit for truth) has made a movie about two figures so narcissistic, opportunistic and caught up in the showmanship that they leave very little room for the gravity of the moment to sink in. Continue reading...

Toronto film festival: Conclave director Edward Berger makes a less cohesive follow-up with an over-stylised adaptation of Lawrence Osborne’s novel sold by a killer central performance It was easy to understand why Edward Berger’s name was being bandied around in relation to the reinvention of 007, the director having shown himself to be more than capable of both extravagantly staged action (his Oscar-winning breakout All Quiet on the Western Front) and knife-edge intrigue (his Oscar-winning follow-up Conclave). He dismissed speculation at the time (with some mild annoyance) and the job has since landed at the feet of Denis Villeneuve – but his latest, China-set gambling drama Ballad of a Small Player, adds flashy bombast to his résumé and helps to explain why even though he might have passed on Bond (and recently Ocean’s too), he’s in development on a Bourne. Berger is a canny commercial director, confidently switching between genre, language and location, the kind of able film-maker studios are desperate to entrust a franchise with, but I hope he’s sparing with the time he chooses to spend under the studio thumb. Ballad of a Small Player, an operatic adaptation of the Lawrence Osborne novel, is not quite him at his best – it is far more bark than bite – but it’s made with such force and finesse and is so distinctively separate from his other films that I look forward to seeing what other non-sequel journeys he chooses to take us on in the future. Continue reading...

Lilo & Stitch has quickly become one of the best live action movies on Disney+.

Toronto film festival: The two stars are knockouts in Chloé Zhao’s poignant adaptation of Maggie O’Farrell’s 2020 novel with a stirring tearjerker ending Maggie O’Farrell’s lauded 2020 novel Hamnet is a dense and lyrical imagining of the lives of William Shakespeare’s family, full of interior thought and lush descriptions of the physical world. It would seem, upon reading, near impossible to adapt into a film. Or, at least, a film worthy of O’Farrell’s so finely woven sensory spell. Film-maker Chloé Zhao has attempted to do so anyway, and the result is a stately, occasionally lugubrious drama whose closing minutes are among the most poignant in recent memory. Zhao is a good fit for the material. She, too, is a close observer of nature and of the many aching, yearning people passing through it. But she has previously not made anything as traditionally tailored and refined as this. The humbler dimensions of her films The Rider and Nomadland are missed here; Hamnet too often gives off the effortful hum of prestige awards-bait. Continue reading...

The singer, who died from a heart attack on 5 September, ripped up the two-minute hardcore song blueprint and won over a legion of fans including Kurt Cobain and Jane’s Addiction As the blitzing tempo and mosh pit violence of hardcore swept the US in the early-80s, San Francisco punks Flipper – whose frontman, Bruce Loose, died this weekend of a heart attack – assumed a provocative stance, choosing sarcastic nihilism over dumb machismo and swapping high-velocity thrash for menacing, slow-as-sludge post-punk jams. In an era of 7in singles packed with 30-second screeds, Flipper would draw their tunes out to 20-or-more minutes of grind, fielding spiteful comparisons to hated hippies the Grateful Dead as bassist and founder Will Shatter warned audiences, “the more you heckle us, the longer this song gets”. But the true “culprit for any pissing off of audiences”, as drummer Steve DePace told Scene Point Blank in 2022, was Loose. Born Bruce Calderwood, in the late 70s Loose cashed in a life insurance policy his mother bought for him and spent the money on a bass guitar and amplifier. He soon joined an embryonic version of Flipper in 1979, assuming the nom-du-punk “Bruce Lose” (which he later switched for “Bruce Loose”, because he wanted to be “less negative”) and sharing bass and vocal duties with Shatter. The pair laid down heavy, industrial bass lines, while guitarist Tim Falconi, a Vietnam vet Loose later alleged had PTSD, fired off abrasive, trebly guitar lines. Continue reading...

Last Week Tonight host looks into the administration’s attacks on universities’ public funding in the name of ‘fighting antisemitism’ On the latest Last Week Tonight, John Oliver looked into the Trump administration’s assault on higher education in the US. “Trump has long held a grudge against higher education, and now that he’s in power, he’s acting on it,” Oliver explained. Among other things, Donald Trump has targeted the billions of dollars granted to universities for scientific research “in order to bend them to his will”. Trump’s “war on higher education” continues a long tradition of conservative distrust of universities. Back in 1972, Richard Nixon said “the professors are the enemy,” and as Oliver noted, Republicans have railed for years against higher education for supposedly wasteful spending on scientific research – think the Fox News fixation on the alleged “shrimp on a treadmill” study – and for being supposed bastions of liberal indoctrination. “Conservatives have long sought to orient universities sharply to the right,” he said. “And in recent years, they’ve seized upon a new justification for doing this – specifically, to ‘combat antisemitism’ in the wake of student protests over Gaza.” Continue reading...

His account kept being deactivated, even though he had spent thousands of dollars to use the social media site for advertising. Just one of the perils of sharing a name with the world-famous tech billionaire ... Name: Mark Zuckerberg. Age: Unknown. Continue reading...

From dark fairy tales to cult horror classics, these free streaming picks will help you swap summer sunsets for early, spooky season movie nights.

Only Murders in the Building season 5 might be the best installment of the series to date, and that's no mean feat.

Measures to protect children from harmful content such as AI chatbots to be implemented at the same time as the under-16s social media ban Get our breaking news email, free app or daily news podcast Australia’s eSafety commissioner says none of the big technology companies are doing enough to stop images of “the most heinous abuse to children” from being shared online. The criticism comes as the commission registers six new industry codes designed to better protect children from “lawful but awful” age-inappropriate content, including the “clear and present” danger posed by AI driven companion chatbots. Continue reading...

Netflix made him an overnight sensation but he says fame ‘scared the shit out of me’. Now he’s back with Went Up the Hill – in a role that feels personal Two years after Stranger Things transformed the Australian actor Dacre Montgomery into an overnight heart-throb at 22, he retreated home to Perth. From there he said no to every role that came his way for four years, bar a season-four cameo and a small part in Baz Luhrmann’s Elvis. “I lost my anonymity overnight and it scared the shit out of me,” Montgomery, now 30, says. He speaks fast and taps the table in time with those last words, a brimmed cap sitting low over his face. “That was a big driving force for stepping back.” Continue reading...

From Covid misinformation to climate denialism, understanding the divergent paths of Australia and the US can help us fight the powerful forces that threaten our world As two scientists who lived through Australia’s black summer bushfires and the Covid-19 crisis in the United States, we have seen firsthand how science in modern societies is under siege from an even more insidious “antiscience virus” of weaponised disinformation that undermines our ability to confront these crises. There are five primary, interconnected forces behind the assault on science and reason. We call them the “five Ps”: the plutocrats, the petrostates, the pros (eg paid promoters of anti-science), the propagandists and – with important exceptions – the media. Together they have generated a perfect storm of antiscientific disinformation that now threatens humanity. Continue reading...

Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery's first teaser has been unveiled – and critics are already praising the whodunit movie to the high heavens.

‘I wanted something more interesting than a key change. So when someone walked by the studio with a husky, I said, “Do you want to howl with your dog?”’ I wrote I Feel Just Like a Child when I was 18, but it wasn’t until I was 23 or 24 and making the Cripple Crow album that it made sense to record it properly. As a teenager I’d thought of myself as an old blues guy and demoed it on an unplugged electric guitar as a slow blues. When we recorded it for Cripple Crow I’d found my musical family, people like [producer-musicians] Andy Cabic from Vetiver, Noah Georgeson and Thom Monahan. Along with the likes of Joanna Newsom and Adam Green from Moldy Peaches, we were doing a sort of anti-folk that was labelled “freak-folk”. Continue reading...

Looking for NYT Connections answers and hints? Here's all you need to know to solve today's game, plus my commentary on the puzzles.

The latest mural from the British street artist depicts a judge beating a protester and is being seen as a reaction to the arrest of hundreds of demonstrators supporting banned group Palestine Action.

On the run across Europe, like in the old days Tiva are trying and failing to keep it professional. Here's how to watch Tony & Ziva season 1 from anywhere.

Toronto film festival: The four-time Oscar nominee is as strong as ever playing a teacher in a shocking situation, but the film can’t quite rise to her level Though criminally underpaid and disrespected, teachers are nonetheless held to rigidly high standards of care, compassion and rectitude. They are to be exemplary stewards of our children, while unflinchingly enduring the battering of parents, administrators and outside agitators. Which is why it’s often so compelling, in a dark and squirmy way, to watch them break bad on film. We have, of course, seen plenty of ill-advised (or illegal) sexual relationships between teacher and student, in myriad movies and TV programs. Beyond that hoary trope, though, we’ve observed with alarm the drug-addled overstepping of Ryan Gosling in Half Nelson; we’ve been guiltily thrilled by the obsessive opportunism of The Kindergarten Teacher; we’ve pried nosily into the shifty criminality of Hugh Jackman in Bad Education. These stories all present a grimly alluring vision: carefully maintained professionalism giving way to baser impulse. Continue reading...

Could this movie made using OpenAI's generation tools really cause a stir in the world of Hollywood?

New Prime Video thriller The Girlfriend has enough sex and scandal for a lifetime, but does it always land?

Show, ending in May 2026 after CBS’s controversial decision, won Creative Arts award for directing in a variety series The Late Show with Stephen Colbert won its first-ever Emmy on Sunday, less than two months after news of its cancellation elicited a gleeful reaction from Donald Trump. Colbert’s program won at Sunday’s Creative Arts Emmys in the category of outstanding directing for a variety series for an episode featuring actors David Oyelowo, Finn Wolfhard and Alan Cumming as well as a musical performance by the rock band OK Go. Continue reading...

Bille Brown theatre, Brisbane festival The refugee family’s fight against deportation to Sri Lanka and the successful grassroots campaign to bring them home made headlines for years – but this play widens a story often focused on trauma Get our weekend culture and lifestyle email Even if you don’t know their name, you’ve probably heard of the Nadesalingams: the family of Tamil refugees living in the small Queensland town of Biloela, whose dramatic seizure by border police in 2018, incarceration on Christmas Island and fight against deportation to Sri Lanka made national headlines. Back to Bilo, premiering as part of Brisbane festival, dramatises this story and the successful grassroots campaign by members of the Biloela community to bring the family home, using the words of the people involved as well as news and documentary footage. Sign up for our rundown of must-reads, pop culture and tips for the weekend, every Saturday morning Continue reading...

Free speech demonstrations came after government said Facebook and others failed to follow new regulations At least 16 people have been killed during protests in Nepal over a government ban on dozens of social media platforms including Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and X. The government, led by the prime minister, KP Sharma Oli, has faced mounting criticism after imposing a ban on 26 prominent social media platforms and messaging apps that it says have failed to comply with new regulations. Continue reading...

Exclusive: Hundreds of film workers sign pledge they say draws inspiration from South African boycott over apartheid Hundreds of actors, directors and other film industry professionals have signed a new pledge vowing not to work with Israeli film institutions they say are “implicated in genocide and apartheid against the Palestinian people”. “As film-makers, actors, film industry workers, and institutions, we recognise the power of cinema to shape perceptions” the pledge reads. “In this urgent moment of crisis, where many of our governments are enabling the carnage in Gaza, we must do everything we can to address complicity in that unrelenting horror.” Continue reading...

Daniel Lee Barnett goes into the woods in search of the big shy guy, but the real story here is his family’s devotion to supporting their autistic son’s passion Fifteen-year-old Daniel Lee Barnett has been called Britain’s youngest cryptozoologist, sniffing out signs of Bigfoot in the woods near his home in Somerset. Daniel has a YouTube channel and a podcast, and he’s mates with A-listers in the Bigfoot community. He’s spoken in front of a crowd of 3,000 enthusiasts. Which is even more impressive given Daniel is autistic, and as a young child had selective mutism; his dad says he would turn and face the wall if people came into the room. Daniel also co-directs this documentary about his adventures looking for the big shy guy. He first hit the headlines in his local area after finding a large footprint in woods near his home while out walking with his nan Jill. Demonstrating just how persistent he is, Daniel contacted DNA companies; eventually one offered to test his environmental DNA for free. In among the squirrel and dog DNA they found traces of ancient ape. Continue reading...

Toronto film festival: Judd Apatow’s actor daughter Maude directs her mother Leslie Mann in a smart, charming film about a woman adrift finding unlikely younger friends One could cynically look at the credits for the film Poetic License and dismiss it outright. It was directed by Maude Apatow, daughter of Judd, and stars, among others, Apatow’s mother, Leslie Mann, Cooper Hoffman (son of Philip Seymour Hoffman), and Nico Parker (daughter of Thandiwe Newton and film-maker Ol Parker). On paper it all looks like a make-work project to keep the well-connected busy and creatively fulfilled. But the film itself – Apatow’s debut – is rich and lively enough to make none of the nepo stuff really matter. Written by Raffi Donatich, Poetic License concerns a family who have moved from Chicago to a sleepy university town where economist James (Cliff “Method Man” Smith), has secured a plum professorship. He’s busy getting started, which leaves his wife Liz (Mann) a bit lonely and unmoored in her new life. Making matters worse is the inevitable drifting away of her high school-senior daughter, Dora (Parker), whose effort to make friends at her new school means she has to spend a little less time with mom. Liz is prone to a little risk, and so when two college boys, Sam and Ari, who are in the poetry class she’s auditing begin soliciting a friendship, she throws caution to the wind and accepts. Poetic License is screening at the Toronto film festival and is seeking distribution Continue reading...

Outlander: Blood of My Blood episode 6 was the biggest shock yet, but there's a good reason why it's all unravelling.

Australian children will be prevented from having sexual, violent or harmful conversations with AI companions in a world-first move expected on Tuesday.

On this year’s Video Music awards red carpet, pop’s biggest stars opt for underwear as outerwear and a surprising amount of facial hair Continue reading...

There's a secret message in a recent Starfield social media post...

Toronto film festival: The Oscar-winning star of The Whale makes another awards play with a beautifully shot yet emotionally inert comedy drama Brendan Fraser is an actor performing characters who help people achieve a sense of emotional healing, affirmation or comfort. That could describe who he tends to be in “real” life (whatever that means in this context) but it’s also what he’s playing in Rental Family. The feelgood dramedy – or at least that’s what it tries so hard to be – is about an actual service in Japan that supplies actors who perform as bit players in everyday people’s lives. They’re hired by clients to fake it in roles as a family member, a friend or even the cheering audience at a karaoke bar. The premise packs meta layers and gives Fraser the opportunity to inhabit multiple roles, while turning the lens back on the audience to consider what we’re looking for in the movie(s). Unfortunately, when it comes to Rental Family, it’s just not that deep. Continue reading...

(Def Jam) Part two of Bieber’s seventh album adds very little: it’s largely bland pop with glimpses of quality thanks to a buzzy supporting cast including Dijon and Bakar Justin Bieber’s Swag II adds 23 tracks to his already over-stuffed Swag project, and it’s not just the title that lacks imagination. Like its predecessor, released just two months ago, Swag II unites a buzzy team of producers and writers known for freshening up R’n’B and hands them a precisely curated Pinterest board: Dangerous-era Michael Jackson, D’Angelo’s lush arrangements, Jai Paul’s glitchy, retro-futurist sonics and the sun-bleached textures of current collaborators Mk.gee and Dijon. But with unadventurous songwriting, the result is (another) album that’s all vibe and voguish production, and very little substance. Opener Speed Demon reheats Bieber’s “is it clocking to you” meme for the second time across both albums, albeit with a bright, funky bravado and a memorably bonkers chorus about “checking these chickens”, AKA leaving his critics in the dust. But for a song bragging about ambition, it lacks adrenaline – like many of Swag II’s safe, repetitive tracks. Continue reading...

After years of partying, I realised the exhaustion and anxiety weren’t worth it, and turned my back on Friday night Fomo. I still enjoy the dancefloor, but I always know when to leave Most of my adult life has revolved around music: clubs, bars, festivals, house parties – anywhere I could dance to loud music. I loved how energising and cathartic it was to get immersed in it, to lose myself a little and move my body expressively without judgment. I’d get so absorbed that I would lose track of time; once, at Burning Man, I was awake for 36 hours exploring the festival, meeting new people and partying. When I became a DJ, these kinds of events increased. Late nights out would last until the morning. Often, they became marathon weekend sessions, which ran from Friday night to Sunday lunchtime. It wasn’t all dancing and shenanigans – there would be moments to sit around and chat with people, too. I’d be out at least three times a week. Even though I’d get tired, I would always find some way to push through to the early hours because I was scared to miss out on things. Fomo (fear of missing out) drove many of my decisions. Continue reading...

Silksong players in China aren't happy about the game's translation, but Team Cherry promises improvements 'over the coming weeks'.

The original may have sold out and is long gone, but this new Astro Bot DualSense is going to be hot stuff when it launches next week.

Rick Davies, the co-founder and lead singer for British rock band Supertramp, has died aged 81 after a decade-long battle with cancer.

(Sony) Jade Thirlwall offers a wild ride through electroclash, Eurovision drama and emotive synth-pop – albeit one she can’t quite maintain for a whole album Last month, the indefatigable Vice magazine published a piece on the “summer of British chaos”, documenting a scene of deranged social media provocateurs existing at the crispiest fringes of our nation’s cooked identity. Writer Clive Martin defined these graven images of the algorithm as being regionally specific, lurid, rowdy, funny and hedonistic. As a former member of Little Mix, a girl band put together via public vote on The X Factor, Jade Thirlwall might not seem like the likeliest bedfellow of this unhinged movement. But the South Shields pop star’s debut solo single, last year’s Angel of My Dreams, dodged focus-grouped smoothness to present a sublimely whacked-out, thoroughly British pop vision that felt like spinning through someone else’s for you page and realising they exist in a markedly different universe from your own. It started with a wound-up sample of Puppet on a String, exploded into a falsetto-spiked power ballad, then grinding electroclash paired with a withering rap, then sped through each mode again, variously at double and half speed. Its wild energy was fuelled by contradiction: Gucci glamour paired with lines such as “If I don’t win, I’m in the bin”. And while Jade dissed Syco and X Factor boss Simon Cowell (“selling my soul to a psycho”), the song’s vaulting soundclashes defying his bland vision of pop, Angel was also her love letter to the toxic paramour of fame: a status that might be easier to sustain with more conventional fare than whiplashing Sandie Shaw into growling synths. It was crackers and brilliant: no former boy- or girl-bander has come close to making such an arresting reintroduction since – and I mean this as the highest possible praise – Geri Halliwell burned bright through a short-lived fit of dadaist genius. Continue reading...

The latest in our series of writers highlighting their go-to comfort films is an ode to Gurinder Chadha’s 2004 spin on the Austen classic We’ve never been short of Jane Austen film adaptations. In fact, it seems a new one arrives every decade – two were announced recently, including Netflix’s spin on Pride & Prejudice. Yet, one adaptation has been shamefully overlooked: Gurinder Chadha’s Bride & Prejudice. A cross-cultural, British-and-Bollywood-meets-Hollywood take on Austen’s most famous novel, the film is pure joy – a riot of original musical numbers, colourful costumes, chaos, culture clashes and, of course, romance. Continue reading...

An emblem of medieval pilgrimage gains fresh resonance in a more recent time of plague Scallop Shell See them at low tide, scallop shells glittering on a scallop-edged shore, Continue reading...

The Coconut Children by Vivian Pham is one of six literary adaptations to be staged at the Sydney theatre next year, alongside The Birds, A Room With a View and the Craig Silvey bestseller Runt Get our weekend culture and lifestyle email Vivian Pham hadn’t seen even a single contemporary Australian play before her own was commissioned by Sydney’s Belvoir Theatre. Now the 24-year-old’s debut play, The Coconut Children, based on her novel of the same name, is not only set to premiere on one of Australia’s most prestigious main stages but, with a cast of 12 (including Boy Swallows Universe’s HaiHa Le and Heartbreak High’s Gemma Chua-Tran), it’s the largest production of Belvoir’s 2026 season. “In some ways, it’s the major work,” says Belvoir artistic director Eamon Flack. Pham, who has concurrently been working on a film adaptation of her novel, says she has relished discovering “the particular magic that can only happen in theatre”. Continue reading...

In the first of a film trilogy, teenage Tanjiro seeks vengeance for his murdered family in what is a great taste of things to come The first part of a trilogy that will conclude the massively popular anime series Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba, this latest smash hit from Ufotable, directed by Haruo Sotozaki, is a spectacular treat. For those new to the franchise, the story is set during a mythical imagining of the Taisho era, where hordes of carnivorous demons descend on innocent civilians. Fighting in the name of his massacred family and a sister infected with demon blood, teenage protagonist Tanjiro Kamado joins the Demon Slayer Corps, determined to wipe these ruthless beasts off the Earth. The film picks up from a thrilling cliffhanger of the fourth season, where Tanjiro and his fellow comrades are thrust into the lair of the demon-in-chief, the cunning and all-powerful Muzan Kibutsuji. Much of the film is structured around various battles between the series regulars and their sworn enemies. The challenge of sustaining the narrative is tempered by the use of flashbacks, providing a backstory for each of the formidable foes. Though packed with emotional impact, such detours occasionally hamper the pacing of the combat sequences, which are the film’s visual highlights. Each demon slayer is armed with a specific breath and fighting technique, which manifests into flows of water, fire, and thunder imagery, providing a striking contrast to the cavernous design of Muzan’s Infinity Castle. The latter, evoking perhaps the endless staircases of MC Escher albeit with a Japanese flair, is a handsomely animated spectacle where corridors and hallways fold into one another like endless labyrinths, while fusuma and shoji screens function as trap doors used to throw the demon slayers into unimaginable dangers. Continue reading...

Runt earned a slew of awards for younger readers and was turned into a movie. Ahead of the release of the sequel, a theatre adaptation is in the works.

Don’t want to scratch your Switch 2? This Belkin screen protector is affordable and does an excellent job of defending that gorgeous display.

The CRKD Gibson Les Paul Guitar Controller is a modern version of the Guitar Hero controllers of old, and it nails it

Toronto film festival: The two stars do their share of heavy lifting in Derek Cianfrance’s intermittently effective comedy drama about a deceitful prison escapee There’s considerable movie star charm powering Roofman, a mid-level comedy drama set in the mid-2000s and starring two actors who were stars around that time. It’s also reminiscent of a film that would have been released then too, a brief glimpse of a Blockbuster Video store making it easy to imagine picking this one up for a rainy afternoon rental. On those terms, it’s perfectly watchable, engaging enough to keep us from pressing stop, if not quite enough to make us want to press rewind once it’s over. It’s based on the stranger-than-fiction tale of Jeffrey Manchester, played by Channing Tatum, an ex-military father-of-three who just can’t quite find his place in the civilian world. His old army buddy Steve (Lakeith Stanfield) reminds him of his particular skill for observation, urging him to put it to good use. Instead, after disappointing his daughter once again with an underwhelming birthday present, he decides to use it for something less well-advised, robbing not one but 45 McDonald’s, going in through the roof and making enough to give his family the life they deserve. Continue reading...

The global fashion star chats to famous musicians about her friend – the man behind Ziggy Stardust. Plus, a comedian borrows a Hollywood celeb’s car for off-the-wall interviews Kate Moss has transformed into Ziggy Stardust for the cover of Vogue, but her connection to David Bowie isn’t just sartorial. They were also friends. The supermodel hosts her first podcast about Bowie’s chameleonic period from 1970 to 1975, when he morphed into an androgynous alien, a glam rock god, a purveyor of blue-eyed soul and everything in between. Elton John, Iggy Pop and Twiggy are among the starry interviewees. Hannah J Davies Widely available, all episodes out on Wednesday 10 September Continue reading...

Images chosen by 24 international newspaper picture editors will compete at this year’s Visa pour l’Image, the festival of photojournalism in Perpignan, France, for the Gökşin Sipahioğlu by Sipa Press Daily Press Visa d’or award. The festival is on until 14 September War, wildfires and child workers: Visa Pour l’Image highlights – in pictures Continue reading...

Ariana Grande and Lady Gaga took home the biggest awards at this year's MTV VMAs with several nineties stars honoured for their musical legacy.

Toronto film festival: the bombastic director’s second film about the music legend shows the singer at his most mesmerizing but the picture remains incomplete Baz Luhrmann now has two Elvis movies under his bedazzled belt. The first is his epic biopic starring Austin Butler and now he has unleashed another called EPiC: Elvis Presley in Concert, remixing archival material with never-before-seen footage from the singer’s residency in Las Vegas. What’s remarkable about them both, apart from the director’s obvious affinity for his subject’s showmanship, is his refusal across so many hours of jiggling and swivelling to meaningfully hold Elvis to account. Luhrmann’s Oscar-nominated 2022 film acknowledged Elvis’s cultural appropriation: how his phenomenal success owed so much to the R&B, gospel and rock he grew up around and the racist institutions that put him on a pedestal while holding down the Black artists that birthed and gave that music its soul. The movie also painted Elvis as a bleeding heart for the Black community, projecting so much torment on the crooner over the injustices he witnessed, despite his refusal to say anything publicly – for the community he benefitted from – during the civil rights era. It was all the craven and exploitative Colonel Tom Parker’s fault, according to Luhrmann’s Elvis, depicting the leery and controlling manager (played by Tom Hanks) as the reason for the singer’s strict silence, and the root of so many sins. EPiC: Elvis Presley in Concert is screening at the Toronto Film Festival and will be released at a later date Continue reading...

Singers took home two trophies each as Mariah Carey won a lifetime achievement award, in a night that largely celebrated female artists Lady Gaga, Ariana Grande and Sabrina Carpenter triumphed at the MTV Video Music awards, taking home two moonman trophies each in a relatively muted show that once again largely celebrated female pop artists and legacy acts. Gaga, the most nominated artist of the evening with 12 nods, took home the first award at Long Island’s UBS arena, for artist of the year, winning over fellow superstars Taylor Swift, Bad Bunny and Beyoncé, all of whom were not in attendance. Continue reading...

For sometimes up to 12 hours a day, I was falling prey to rage bait and the comparison trap. I wondered what it would be like to live without that noise.

Can two world-famous actors and auteur Simon Stone bring 19th-century Norway screaming into the modern world? They talk mean directors, bathtub revelations and reinventing Ibsen’s The Lady from the Sea Entering the almost silent rehearsal room, I fear I’ve blundered into a private moment. The Lady from the Sea cast are seated in a tight circle and at least two of them have tears in their eyes. The quiet murmur of conversation suggests something heavy has just gone down. So I’m relieved when I realise they’re reading a scene – and stunned to discover the scene was written only yesterday. Simon Stone’s modern take on Ibsen’s play is still under construction, and he has had his actors together for less than a fortnight. “Most people really take six weeks to connect to scenes,” the Australian writer-director says during the lunch break. “Often an entire rehearsal process can be the slow marking out of stuff, and it takes until your first run-through to feel anything at all. We are connecting faster, because we’ve been talking about it so much.” Continue reading...

Death of British singer, who wrote and sang hits including Goodbye Stranger and Bloody Well Right, comes ‘after a long illness’, band says Rick Davies, the co-founder, vocalist and songwriter for the British band Supertramp, has died aged 81. Davies died at home on Long Island last week “after a long illness”, the band said in a statement released on Sunday. Continue reading...

Exclusive: A Second Life will feature My Bed and never seen before pieces that reflect on artist’s experience of cancer Tracey Emin will open her biggest ever exhibition at the Tate Modern next spring, showcasing her best artworks from a 40-year career. A Second Life will include some of Emin’s most famous works, including the headline-grabbing and Turner prize-nominated My Bed, from 1998, alongside never-before-seen pieces. Continue reading...

Whether it is an 80s classic or a Disney favourite, many of us watch old TV shows and films when we crave comfort, but there is a downside.

Toronto film festival: The multi-hyphenate’s directorial debut has noble intentions in its timely class commentary but his brand of humour makes for an awkward fit The absence of big-screen comedies, once an almost weekly occurrence, has become such a widely complained-about issue that the rare novelty of one actually being made has turned into a marketing tool. Last month’s remake of The Naked Gun employed a campaign that directly addressed this problem, with an ad that played like a PSA about such a lack and why supporting one was of societal importance (the plea only mildly worked, with the film finishing with decent, but not quite decent enough, box office). At the Toronto premiere of Aziz Ansari’s Good Fortune, festival chief Cameron Bailey made reference to the now unusual sensation of laughing with an audience, and the actor-writer-director himself has been impressing upon people his desire to make a theatrical comedy in the billion-dollar wake of Barbie. He believes in its importance so why doesn’t the industry? A raft of recent green lights suggests that Hollywood is finally realising the demand is more than misty-eyed nostalgia but there’s still a certain unfair pressure on the few that are coming out to prove the genre’s commercial viability (Adam Sandler’s giant Netflix numbers for Happy Gilmore 2 just served to show where audiences have learned to expect their comedies to be). There are noble intentions to Good Fortune, in ways related to both the resurrection of the big-screen comedy and its of-the-moment through-line about the increasingly untenable class divide in America, but also not a lot of laughs, the idea of its existence more appealing than the experience of watching it. Continue reading...

The US Open men's final will be streamed for free on 9Now – here's how you can watch for absolutely no cost at all.

In the combat zone of the supermarket duopoly, Tennilles_deals is our protector, guiding us through each aisle with her weekly videos of sale products Read more in the Internet wormhole series Maya Angelou once said “a hero is any person really intent on making this a better place for all people” and when she said that, I can only assume she had Australian TikToker and micro-influencer Tennilles_deals in mind. Who exactly is Tennilles_deals? Firstly, she’s the Mother Teresa of Aussie supermarkets. Secondly, I don’t know anything about her personally because this savvy queen doesn’t market herself like your average influencer. She lets her work speak for itself. Continue reading...

Gilmore Girls is everyone's go-to Netflix show for autumnal bingeing, and I've just started my annual rewatch.

A little motion smoothing when needed, all-natural the rest of the time

From powerhouse portable 4K models to one of the smallest beamers on the market, here are the 6 coolest projectors we saw at IFA 2025

Looking for NYT Connections answers and hints? Here's all you need to know to solve today's game, plus my commentary on the puzzles.

The archetype of this ideal man is Mr Taylor Swift, Travis Kelce. Maybe Swift is on to something How do you like your men? Yes, obviously, we shouldn’t be dismissively taxonomising a whole gender like boxed Barbies. But in the era of tradwives and nu-gen gold diggers, in which the manosphere remains alive and kick(box)ing, telling teenage boys lies about women, I reckon there’s a way to go before we reach reductive objectification parity. Does that make it OK? No. Am I going to do it anyway? Yes, a bit. So, returning to the question, my answer is “like my coffee”: small, strong, dark and highly over-stimulating, brewed by my sister’s boyfriend in Scarborough … No, hang on, this is falling apart. Regardless, my ideal man is wildly at odds with the zeitgeist and my husband needs to punch up his protein intake and stop having opinions, because the New York Times claims a new dream man has dropped and he’s “beefy, placid and … politically ambiguous”. Continue reading...