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...

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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...

Whether you’re looking for a trim or a total restyle, top hairstylists reveal how to get the best cut for you Some people love going to the hairdresser while others dread it. How can you make the most of your visit and achieve the best possible look? Stylists share their tips for getting a cut that suits you – and avoiding a hairdo disaster. Continue reading...

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...

Darryl thinks Abi’s obsession is affecting her mental health. She says she’s just helping to save the planet. You decide whose argument is rubbish • Find out how to get a disagreement settled or become a juror Abi is an amazing person and full of heart, but litter-picking is dirty and makes her depressed Darryl thinks helping the planet is someone else’s problem. We all have a responsibility to muck in Continue reading...

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...

Legislative council voted down a bill that was introduced to comply with an order from the city’s top court Human rights groups have accused the Hong Kong government of failing to provide the “bare minimum” of rights to same-sex couples after it rejected a bill that was introduced to comply with an order by the city’s top court. The city’s unicameral legislative council (LegCo), on Wednesday rejected the bill by a vote of 71-14 after the second reading, following months of debate in the city between opponents who said it threatened family values and advocates who said the government was out of line with the majority of residents who supported same-sex relationships. Continue reading...

My mum gave me an old picture of me sitting on the cairn on Islay when I was 11. Forty years later, I set out to find it I don’t remember the picture being taken. Somewhere in Scotland, sometime in the 1980s. It has that hazy quality you get with old colour prints: warm but also somehow melancholy. I’m wearing blue jeans, white trainers, an army surplus jumper – and am perched on a standing stone. My mum gave me the photo when I turned 50. She found it up in the loft. Some of these childhood pictures, souvenirs of trips with my grandparents to historic sites, have the place names written on the back. This one was blank, a tantalising mystery. Though I didn’t recognise the location, something about the landscape and quality of light suggested it was Islay, an island I’d visited just once – when I was not quite 12. So I decided to see if I could find the spot, slipped the photograph into my notebook and set off. 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...

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...

Have you ever noticed a pink or orange-coloured substance in the tile grout or around taps in your bathroom? In most cases, it's one of two things.

The crowd that gathers in Amsterdam is exuberant. Pornography use is more common than ever, so earnings for many here are through the roof. But there is trouble afoot, from AI to chronic illness … Brittany Andrews, a cheerful American porn star, cuts to the chase in her workshop on how to succeed in the adult industry. “Do you think about how much money you’re going to make before you make a clip? Do you know what stuff sells the best? Or do you just follow your creative spark?” she asks. She points to a young Ukrainian model in a gold sequined bra and denim shorts. “I’m starting with you, girlfriend!” 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...

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...

An ALP victory would be significant for Chris Minns, too, demonstrating that the premier’s pragmatic, populist and transactional politics is working Follow our Australia news live blog for latest updates Get our breaking news email, free app or daily news podcast Byelections often have a simple story and, beyond that, a broader political message. The top line of Saturday’s Kiama byelection on the New South Wales south coast will be who replaces the convicted rapist Gareth Ward as the local MP in Macquarie Street. Continue reading...

As a close-knit regional NSW community reels in the wake of a fatal dog attack, the state government is finalising the first review of its dog ownership laws in more than 20 years.

SA Premier Peter Malinauskas meets with the sovereign on an official visit to the United Kingdom, during which he also signs an agreement with nuclear reactor manufacturer Rolls-Royce regarding the AUKUS submarine agreement.

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

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...

The prince has been in the UK for the past week amid speculation of a meeting with his father.

Ellison’s shares in the technology giant Oracle are currently valued at $389bn (£287bn), just ahead of Musk’s $384bn (£283bn) fortune US tech billionaire Larry Ellison has overtaken Elon Musk as the world’s richest person after shares in Oracle, the business he co-founded, rocketed in early trading on Wednesday. Ellison’s wealth has surged after the company, in which he owns a stake of 41%, reported better than expected financial results. Continue reading...

The creativity process has been divided into four phases – including one where you need to let your unconscious do the work AE Housman, the English classical scholar and poet, often took a walk after lunch. During one walk he was exceptionally creative – unconsciously. As he strode along, a stanza came to him, and almost immediately afterwards a second stanza wafted his way. He saw the words in front of him and had only to note them down. He knew he wanted to write a poem with four stanzas and after he’d written out the first two and had a cup of tea, he set off on a second walk. The third stanza occurred to him, and again he didn’t have to make any conscious effort. He waited on tenterhooks for the fourth and final stanza that would complete the poem. It failed to arrive. Continue reading...

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...

Apple's AirPods Pro 3 are officially available to preorder, and Best Buy has an incredible deal, offering up to $130 in savings with an eligible trade-in.

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...

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...

Exclusive: Unicef-commissioned report shows being unable to finish high school – and the associated wage loss – is the most significant impact of increasingly frequent disasters on young people Kangaroo Valley was hit by raging fires and floods three times in three years. In 2019, the black summer bushfires had forced Layla Wang’s family to flee their home. Then in 2022, after floods and landslides isolated the valley, she was trapped there, spending several “stressful” weeks isolated from school – in the middle of year 12, with no access to her classes and limited resources. Continue reading...

This year’s Sydney Contemporary art fair will premiere Photo Sydney, a space dedicated to contemporary photography. The fair is on show from 11-14 September at Carriageworks Continue reading...

Humidity, dirt and gravity can all cause damage to delicate wool or cashmere clothing. Here’s how to pack them away so they’re in good shape for next year Get our weekend culture and lifestyle email Although I thought it wasn’t possible, this winter my love of knitwear hit new heights. The hardest working item in my wardrobe was a black, oversized fine wool T-shirt. I wore it over my workout gear, with blazers to meetings and layered beneath a thick cable knit when writing at home. I took to sleeping in a cashmere-silk blended singlet – if that sounds lush, it really is. I rarely left the house without an enormous woollen scarf which often doubled as an umbrella in Sydney’s rain. As we come into warmer weather, it’s time to put these favourites away. From moths to mould, knitwear faces some perils while packed away, so I sought expert advice to ensure it can be retrieved in good condition next winter. 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...

The Melbourne-based interior designer reflects on the past 10 years of Flack Studio and reveals the inspiration and stories behind the rooms that launched it to international fame Flack Studio: Interiors is out from 16 September (Rizzoli: A$180, US$75) 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...

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...

‘There was only room for one band member on each stepping stone. When they saw me standing in the middle of the River Wear, I imagine they just thought, “Here he goes again”’ I joined the Amber Film & Photography Collective in 1983. Amber’s aim was to capture working-class life in north-east England, and over nearly 30 years I amassed a body of work documenting life in the upper Durham Dales – a project I later called People of the Hills. In 1994, I moved with my young family into a derelict plumber’s workshop and yard in Stanhope, Weardale. Living there over the next six years meant I met people in all kinds of circumstances – I got to know and photograph many local owners of smallholdings because my kids befriended theirs at school. The members of the Stanhope Silver Band, seen in this photograph, were well known in the village. One was a joiner who paid us five quid a month to use our outbuildings as workshop space. I don’t know how many of those in the picture are still in the band – a fair few, I’ll bet. Continue reading...

Vote to neutralise Wednesday’s stage 17 ‘Racing to an undefined finish line is not fair sport’ Vuelta a España riders voted to neutralise Wednesday’s stage 17 if protests disrupt the stage rather than race to an “undefined finish line”, which has been a feature in stages disrupted by pro-Palestine supporters. They could even quit the race altogether, a riders’ union (CPA) senior official said. After a group of protesters holding Palestinian flags stopped the Israel-Premier Tech team in the stage five team time trial, more stages – including stage 16 – ended before the scheduled finish due to protests. Continue reading...

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...

Whether you prefer miniskirts or floor-skimming dresses, here’s the long and short of looking good Bye bye summer. Time to switch up the mood music and get back to business. Keeping the holiday spirit alive by sitting at your desk in sandals feeling sorry for yourself will only prolong the agony. It is much better to rip the plaster off quickly and start dressing properly again. In the spirit of which, I would like to run you through a few hemline rules. I love a fashion rule – anything that helps pull an outfit together is fine by me. But if you don’t, then think of them as prompts to guide you by walking you through the best combinations of print, fabric and length. They don’t curtail what you can wear. In fact, they might expand it. By giving you a formula for how to wear each different length of skirt or dress, they might help you find a way of wearing whatever hemline it is that you think doesn’t suit you. We all have one of those, right? Continue reading...

Choi Mal-ja’s appeal gained momentum after #MeToo movement inspired her to seek justice A court in South Korea has acquitted a woman convicted six decades ago for biting off part of a man’s tongue during an alleged sexual assault, after she challenged the ruling, inspired by the country’s #MeToo movement. Choi Mal-ja was 19 in 1964 when she was attacked by a 21-year-old man in the southern town of Gimhae. He pinned her to the ground and repeatedly forced his tongue into her mouth, at one point blocking her nose to stop her from breathing, according to court records. Continue reading...

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...

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...

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...

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...

The Husqvarna Automower 305E NERA is an efficient mower with excellent edge cutting, but it's also temperamental and confusing to use.

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...

In the past we would just deodorise our armpits, but now a huge wave of products are aimed at our most intimate areas. Do these serve a need – or just encourage paranoia? Earlier this year, the deodorant brand Sure launched a product to be used on “ta-tas”, “trotters”, and “marbles” (AKA breasts, feet and testicles). “Whatever you call them, wherever you smell”, Sure Whole Body deodorant can help, a playful TV advert promised. It’s not a completely new concept: many of us will remember the intense whiff of a liberally applied “body spray” – the deodorant-cum-fragrances brought out by brands such as Lynx, Charlie and Impulse that were popular in the 00s. But specific deodorants for body parts other than the armpits weren’t really a thing until 2018, when an American obstetrics and gynaecology doctor founded Lume Whole Body Deodorant, after repeatedly seeing patients who were worried about odour “below the belt”. Sold as a roll-on, cream, spray or wipes, it can apparently be used on “pits, underboobs, belly buttons, butt cracks, vulvas, balls, feet and more!” On its website, it has more than 200,000 five-star reviews – and now the mainstream deodorant brands are following suit. Continue reading...

A study will work with Indigenous researchers who will map cultural assets and integrate traditional healing to improve outcomes in remote centres.

Betty Gregory kicks off her birthday celebrations by jumping out of a plane 3,600 metres above the Gold Coast surf.

This summer, locals and tourists enjoyed new river-bathing sites. As global heating escalates, we need more of these ‘cool islands’ Sign up for our new weekly newsletter Matters of Opinion, where our columnists and writers will reflect on what they’ve been debating, thinking about, reading and more After la rentrée, when adults and children alike across France head back to work and school after the seemingly endless summer holidays, you would be forgiven for thinking autumn is upon us. But, weather permitting, enthusiastic swimmers in Paris will be able to prolong that holiday feeling into September – by taking a dip in the River Seine. For nearly 100,000 swimmers, one of the highlights of this summer in the city has been being able to take a splash in the cool river waters at one of the three free public bathing spots, made available this year for the first time in over a century. Helen Massy-Beresford is a journalist based in Paris 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 brilliantly slippery beast of a drama pits an adult son’s girlfriend against his mother in all-out war. Robin Wright is excellent as the parent with an … interesting dynamic with her child. Yikes! ‘This one’s different,” a son says to his mother when she teases him about his latest girlfriend. Clever, he says. Stunning, ambitious, funny – “you remind me of her”. Something flickers across Mummy’s face. “She reminds you of me?” she says, and it is not really a question. Welcome, friends, to The Girlfriend, an adaptation of the excellent psychological thriller by Michelle Frances, and an answer to the question many of us have surely pondered – just how much of an incest vibe can one get away with instilling in a shiny prestige miniseries, and can anyone get Robin Wright to star and make the whole thing disturbingly credible? Continue reading...

Floating teens at summer camp, sleeping students in Georgia, rollerskaters at Venice Beach … Mark Steinmetz’s stunning black and white shots capture kids across America Continue reading...

The German city is celebrating the renowned art school’s centenary with exhibitions, digital tours and bike and bus routes connecting landmark Bauhaus buildings The heat hits me as soon as I open the door, the single panes of glass in the wall-width window drawing the late afternoon sunlight into my room. The red linoleum floor and minimalist interior do little to soften the impact; I wonder how I’m going to sleep. On the opposite side of the corridor, another member of the group I’m travelling with has a much cooler studio, complete with a small balcony that I immediately recognise from archive black and white photographs. Unconsciously echoing the building’s past, we start using this as a common room, perching on the tubular steel chairs, browsing the collection of books on the desk and discussing what it must have been like to live here. At night, my room stays warm and noise travels easily through the walls and stairwells; it’s not the best night’s rest I’ve ever had, but it’s worth it for the experience. Continue reading...

When I opened my first restaurant, just before the war began, I was a perfectionist. My time in an army unit taught me about discipline and what’s really important Every chef longs to open their own restaurant so, when I did, it felt like a dream. I had been away working in some of the best restaurants in Europe. My business partner had a great spot for a restaurant in the centre of Dnipro, my home city in Ukraine, and we opened to rave reviews. My team and I were all a similar age and we had a shared vision: to create modern Ukrainian food. But by February 2022, just three months later, we knew war with Russia was likely. I was already in touch with friends in the army and, if Russia invaded, I knew I would fight. When the war started, all the team gathered in the restaurant and I said I would understand if anybody wanted to leave Dnipro and move west, where it was safer, which lots of people were doing. Nobody wanted to. We decided that anyone who wasn’t going to join the army would keep the restaurant going. The team started cooking for hospitals and the national guard, and making up food packs for people who needed them. Continue reading...

Aspiring journalism students with autism are back to grill some of Australia's most prominent figures, and this time they've got seasoned peers behind the camera cheering them on.

The incident involving Navya Nair highlights a common concern facing many visitors to Australia — what can be brought in without the risk of breaching strict biosecurity laws?

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...

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...

The tiny lamb that captured the hearts of Australians during COVID has died, leaving a heartbroken family behind.

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...

A single-dose koala chlamydia vaccine is granted approval for frontline use across Australia.

Friends Gem and Renata have saved money buying a home together with their respective families in Wollongong, and say the pay-off goes much further.

Thanks to today's Apple event, there's a massive sale on older devices, and I'm rounding up the best deals on AirPods, Apple Watch, and iPads starting at $117.

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.

Music and art therapists will be able to bill NDIS participants at the same rate as counsellors, after a review found the therapies could be effective in the right circumstances.

On 27 March 1986, Debra Richardson was at her desk at Russell Street Police Headquarters in Melbourne when a car bomb detonated on the street outside. The former senior constable says the explosion, that killed fellow officer Angela Rose Taylor, changed her life forever.

A comparison group examined the cost of 20 staple items at two major supermarkets. Here's what it found.

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...

Colombian outsprints Landa; Vingegaard retains lead Stage shortened by 8km after protesters blocked road Pro-Palestinian protesters continue to disrupt the Vuelta a España, with Tuesday’s stage 16 ending 8km before the scheduled finish at Castro de Herville due to protests close to the line. The Colombian Egan Bernal won the stage, with Jonas Vingegaard retaining the overall race lead. “We have a big protest at three kilometres before the line. We will decide the stage winner and take times at eight kilometres before the line,” the race directors announced on Radio Vuelta. Continue reading...

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...

Police do not rule out possibility of finding more as incidents raise alarm over increase of anti-Muslim hatred At least nine pigs’ heads were found outside several mosques in the Paris region on Tuesday, the city’s police chief said, prompting alarm over rising anti-Muslim hatred. “Pigs’ heads have been left in front of certain mosques ... Four in Paris and five in the inner suburbs,” Laurent Nuñez told a press conference, adding that officers were not “ruling out the possibility of finding more”. Continue reading...

A couple in the US convinced nearly 300 people – some of whom they’d never met – to pay to come to their nuptials Name: Wedding tickets. Age: Marley Jaxx is 34, Steve J Larsen is 37. 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...

With six friends and multiple kids in tow, Sarah Ayoub tests 10 brands of frozen sausage rolls to find the ones with crisp exteriors and convincingly meaty flavours If you value our independent journalism, we hope you’ll consider supporting us today With spring picnics and footy finals on the horizon, sausage rolls – one of the pinnacles of frozen celebration foods – are in order. But with up to a dozen varieties in your local supermarket freezer, it’s hard to make an informed choice. I rounded up six friends (plus a couple of kids) with discerning frozen-food palates: people who love a sausage roll and see it as a culinary staple, whether it comes from the servo or a bakery, and parents used to baking them in a pinch for dinner or for a crowd at birthday parties. 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...

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...

Wiltshire landmark assessed for damage after red fabric pinned across it to form England flag A 53-metre white horse cut into a Wiltshire hillside about 350 years ago is to be assessed for damage by heritage experts after red fabric was pinned across it to form a St George’s cross. English Heritage said the fabric has been removed from the Westbury white horse, which, according to local records, was originally cut in the late 1600s, possibly to commemorate the Battle of Ethandun, thought to have taken place nearby in AD878. Continue reading...

Loughborough university and ONS study of 1 million schoolchildren reveals risks increase with longer absence School absences “significantly contribute” to children’s mental ill health, according to research backed by the Office for National Statistics (ONS) that shows the risks increase the longer a child is absent. “Our research shows that the more times a child is absent from school, the greater the probability that they will experience mental ill health,” the authors, from Loughborough university and the ONS, concluded. 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...

Two of world’s largest copper producers to combine, retaining London listing but raising prospect of job cuts Business live – latest updates The London-listed miner Anglo American has agreed to merge with its Canadian rival Teck Resources, in a deal that will create a $53bn (£39bn) global copper group after both companies saw off takeover attempts. The merger to form one of the biggest copper producers in the world is expected to bring hundreds of job losses at Anglo’s London office as the company prepares to move its headquarters to Vancouver, Canada. Continue reading...

Google is tipped to announce new smart home devices integrated with Gemini on October 1 – here's what we know about the new Nest Doorbell so far.

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...

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...

From pairing with fried fish, to being the reviver of a leftover Sunday roast, brown sauce doesn’t just have to be in a bun I like my bacon sandwich with brown sauce, but that means keeping a bottle for a long time. What else can I do with it? Will, via email In the early 1980s, Tom Harris, co-owner and chef at the Marksman in east London, made a beer mat from penny coins for his dad (and in the quest to secure a Blue Peter badge): “The instructions said to put the dirty coins in brown sauce overnight,” he recalls. “The next morning, they were all shiny and looked brand new, so there’s another use for it right there!” Brown sauce is “an absolute marvel”, agrees Sabrina Ghayour, author of the recently published Persiana Easy, and not just for its cleaning prowess: “If you break it down, the sauce is packed with some pretty interesting ingredients, including my beloved tamarind.” It’s worth exploring your bottle options beyond HP, too, not least because there was much controversy back in 2011 when the brand gave its recipe, which had remained unchanged for more than a century, a tweak. “They reduced the salt [from 2.1g per 100g to 1.3g] and it completely upset the balance,” Harris says, “and that’s a great sadness.” That’s why Ghayour’s go-to these days is Tiptree: “It has a slightly less vinegary punch and a more rounded sweetness,” which comes with the added bonus of making it “even more versatile”. Got a culinary dilemma? Email [email protected] Continue reading...

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...

Experts are concerned about people emotionally depending on AI, but these women say their digital companions are misunderstood A young tattoo artist on a hiking trip in the Rocky Mountains cozies up by the campfire, as her boyfriend Solin describes the constellations twinkling above them: the spidery limbs of Hercules, the blue-white sheen of Vega. Somewhere in New England, a middle-aged woman introduces her therapist to her husband, Ying. Ying and the therapist talk about the woman’s past trauma, and how he has helped her open up to people. Continue reading...

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...

I’ll acknowledge young people in love, anyone in hi-vis and a dad who seems to be pulling his weight. The rest of the time, I have a face like thunder I just smiled at a middle-aged woman on a pushbike, and she looked at me as if to say, “do we know each other?”, and I thought, good point, we don’t know each other, why am I smiling? That was a straight solidarity smile – you are on a bike, I also have a bike. I wouldn’t just smile willy-nilly at anyone the same age as me, they would have to be doing something that not all of us do: vaping; cycling; whistling. I’ll always smile at a baby in a pram, but I won’t smile at the mum, because I remember how much I used to hate it when people assumed that, just because I had a baby, it meant I was nice. You’ve already lost so much identity, so fast. I will, however, smile at a dad, because if he’s pushing a pram, he’s pulling his weight. I know that walking to the nursery is the absolute bare minimum and doesn’t tell you anything about the distribution of household chores. I can’t help it! I was born in the 70s. Zoe Williams is a Guardian columnist Continue reading...

Clever and convenient yet simple to use, this dazzling discount on the Govee Smart Light 2 is not to be missed.

I am happy to give him oral sex, but feel disrespected when he fails to reciprocate. Does this mean the end of our relationship? I am a 56-year-old widow. My husband died two years ago, and I am now in a long-distance relationship with a 55-year-old man. We have been dating for six months. Our sex life is really good, but he will not give me oral sex. I love pleasuring him but when he doesn’t reciprocate I feel disrespected and as if something is wrong with me. When I broached the subject, he said he wanted to wait to see if we got serious enough for marriage and that he would do it then. He says he has done it in the past without being married so I don’t understand. I am going to stop giving him oral sex, but I’m afraid this will end our relationship. I know I need to set boundaries but I don’t know how. He is a great cuddler when we sleep and he never takes his hands off of me, which is very important to me. My late husband, who was very disrespectful to me, wasn’t really affectionate unless we were being intimate but he was always happy to give me oral sex. I see myself as a strong woman; I take care of myself and do not look my age, so I’m not sure what is wrong. Pamela Stephenson Connolly is a US-based psychotherapist who specialises in treating sexual disorders. If you would like advice from Pamela on sexual matters, send us a brief description of your concerns to [email protected] (please don’t send attachments). Each week, Pamela chooses one problem to answer, which will be published online. She regrets that she cannot enter into personal correspondence. Submissions are subject to our terms and conditions. Continue reading...

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...

Tiny insects called thrips feed on the leaves, weakening the plant. Here’s how to discourage them What’s the problem? My peace lily has recently developed silver and grey streaks on its leaves. It hasn’t been moved and there haven’t been any changes to its routine – it gets watered and misted once or twice a week. Any advice? Diagnosis Silver or grey streaks on peace lily leaves often signify thrips. These are tiny slender insects that feed by scraping the surface of leaves and sucking out the sap, leaving behind a silvery sheen or streaking. They enjoy warm, dry conditions, and can go unnoticed until damage becomes obvious. Continue reading...

What is it like to be in a room full of artists who are observing and drawing your naked body? Sitters discuss the freedom and healing they have experienced Craig, 54 (@tattooed_nude) I started life modelling 18 months ago. My mum said: “You’re getting all these tattoos and no one gets to see them.” That triggered something in me. I’ve always loved art and I wanted to see how artists would respond to my tattoos. ‘I feel a responsibility to get into interesting and adventurous poses that will inspire the artists.’ Photograph: @garygeezerphotoart Continue reading...

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...

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...

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...

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...

Nancy Honey’s candid portraits capture girls between 11 and 14, when their bodies start to change and they begin challenging accepted codes of behaviour Continue reading...

With the help of a droll local guide, we managed to enthuse our two sons on a wild camping adventure in the mountains of south-west France ‘So, it’ll be like a DofE camping expedition, but without any of my friends?” Lying on his bed in our stone gite in Lescun, a picturesque mountain village beneath a towering glacial cirque, it’s fair to say the 15-year-old isn’t leaping with enthusiasm for our bivouac hike. He and his 13-year-old brother would rather have stayed at the beach, where we spent the first part of our holiday. My husband and I last hiked with the kids in the French Pyrenees when they were five and three, yet they barely fussed on that trip despite walking for two full days. Back then we had a secret weapon – a donkey called Lazou who carried our packs, and the youngest when he got tired, and proved a great distraction. Continue reading...

It's a basic cordless vacuum cleaner, but the Dreame U20 will clean up after your pets without cleaning out your wallet.

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...

The new Banksy mural appeared to be a commentary on the arrest of hundreds of demonstrators in London for their support of proscribed terrorist organisation, Palestine Action.

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.

There's a lot to love about the V16 Piston Animal, but it's not a slam-dunk from Dyson.

Victoria's historic treaty is promising to "reckon with the past" and empower the state's First Peoples — and explicitly declares it will not take anything away from the broader community.

AI-enabled sentry hives will soon line the main route to Western Australia from South Australia, using cameras and 4G to detect varroa mite.

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.

Nearly 2,000 people visit the Riverland town of Berri for the region's first Punjabi sport and culture festival, which organisers hope to make a major event.

From retired teachers to builders and ringers, these seniors are fixing fences and homes, and restoring hope, in the outback.

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...

Figures released today reveal there has been a slight decrease in the number of deaths by suicides by serving and former Australian Defence Force members.

Prince Harry returns to London — a rare trip home — and pays tribute to his late grandmother on the third anniversary of her death, but whether he'll meet with the king during his quick visit remains unclear.

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...

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...

President calls Hanks ‘woke’ in vitriolic post after US Military Academy calls off ceremony with little explanation US politics live – latest updates Donald Trump launched a vitriolic attack against Tom Hanks for supposedly being “destructive” and “woke” after one of America’s most beloved actors was snubbed without much explanation by West Point last week. On his social media site on Monday, the US president applauded the alumni association of the US Military Academy (or West Point) for abruptly calling off a ceremony honoring Hanks, twice an Academy award winner who has played numerous military characters and also has a long history of advocating for veterans. 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...

Can one really relax while being prodded by large robotic arms? I am alone in a dimly lit room, splayed face down on a table. Megan Thee Stallion’s Mamushi is bumping from a speaker, and on a large screen, two white circles roam up and down an outline of my body. Am I at an exclusive German sex club at 2am? Continue reading...

Carlos Alcarez in Barbie pink, Naomi Osaka crowned with rosebuds – tennis is becoming a hot ticket in the fashion world. And this time it is emerging not heritage brands dominating play It has been one of the breakout stories of the US Open: not the surprising second-round exits, nor the at-the-net spats, but the freshly shorn head and Barbie-pink tank top of the winner, Carlos Alcaraz. The outsize reaction to the Spanish phenomenon’s new look is the latest example of the final grand slam of the year attracting attention not just for sporting prowess, but for the style moments it serves. Take, for instance, former champion Naomi Osaka, who crashed out to Amanda Animisova in Thursday’s semi-final, but not before sparkling under the night lights in a custom Nike indigo zip-up jacket embellished with Swarovski crystals, worn over a bubble-hem minidress. For her opening match, she wore a rose headpiece. (Also present throughout Osaka’s tournament: a series of bejewelled Labubu dolls, created by accessories line A-Morir, with monikers including “Billie Jean Bling” and “Andre Swagassi”.) The getup was “really elaborate”, Osaka admitted in a press conference, but it’s the kind of statement outfit her fans have come to expect and appreciate. Continue reading...

The JBL Tune 510BT are my favorite headphones with over 80,000 positive reviews on Amazon, and they're on sale for an incredible price of $29.95.

The Nest Cam Outdoor, Nest Cam Indoor, and Nest Doorbell were all spotted at a Home Depot store - but the new Nest smart speaker is no where to be found.

Australian businesses do not have to offer a cost-free way of paying, policy professional Kat George writes. But it’s a good time to make your voice heard on this issue Read more Australian customer service questions I rented a car and paid with a Visa debit card and was advised there would be a card fee of one point something per cent. I asked if they accepted cash, only to be told no. Is it legal to charge card fees without offering a fee-free way of payment? – Adam, New South Wales Letter has been edited for length and clarity 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...

‘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...

Concerns over such sentiment outside US rise after Levi’s says UK sales could be hit by president’s decisions An effortlessly cool Nick Kamen strolls into a launderette, strips to his boxer shorts and washes his jeans in front of a stunned clientele, soundtracked by Marvin Gaye’s I Heard It Through the Grapevine. The 1985 Levi’s 501 advert made a star of its model, and presented an image in keeping with the clothing brand’s all-American style. But could that deep-seated association with the US prove an achilles heel? Last week, in its UK accounts, Levi’s issued a warning that “rising anti-Americanism as a consequence of the Trump tariffs and governmental policies” could affect its sales in Britain. The idea is not unique – attitudes towards Tesla in the UK and Europe deteriorated when Elon Musk was closely associated with Trump. However, the Levi’s warning raises the question – could fashion become the latest sector affected by anti-American sentiment outside the US? Continue reading...

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...

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...

Artist’s latest work at Royal Courts of Justice in London is thought to refer to pro-Palestine demonstrations A painting by Banksy of a judge using a gavel to beat a helpless protester appeared on the walls of the Royal Courts of Justice before quickly being covered up by guards. Banksy confirmed the artwork was his by posting a picture of it on Instagram on Monday morning. Continue reading...

Erroneously putting map of Sunderland on medals for Tyneside event is latest in long line of cartological mishaps ‘Newcastle map’ medals actually show Sunderland The organisers of the Great North Run have apologised for using a map of Sunderland, rather than Newcastle, on this year’s finisher medals, but this was just one in a long line of map mistakes. Other blunders have included phantom supermarkets, dangerously misleading mountaineering routes and geopolitical blunders. 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...

It’s not enough any more to cover just ‘the birds and the bees’ as many more children are seeing adult content before their teens Jess Melendez is an educator and the author of Porn is Not Sex Ed! It’s not exactly every parent’s dream dinner-table conversation: “Mum, what’s porn?” But whether we like it or not, many children stumble across mainstream internet pornography. A recent study in the UK found that more than a quarter of children encounter porn online before the age of 11. In the US, studies show the average age of first exposure to online porn is 12, with some encountering it earlier. For many parents, that knowledge can spark panic: “What if this is the first place my child learns about sex? What if they think that’s what real intimacy looks like?” Here’s the good news: you don’t need to panic, but you do need to prepare. The truth is, your child will be exposed to ideas about sex, whether through peers, media or yes, pornography. And it will happen – long before you’d ideally want it to. The most protective factor isn’t monitoring phones or giving lectures. It’s you showing up as an honest, calm and approachable parent. Jess Melendez is an educator and the author of Porn is Not Sex Ed! Sign up for our new weekly newsletter Matters of Opinion, where our columnists and writers will reflect on what they’ve been debating, thinking about, reading and more 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...

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...

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...

The 24 Carrots kitchen garden program founded by Tasmanian artist Kirsha Kaechele aims to integrate ‘art and lifestyle into every aspect of the project’ Sign up for the Rural Network email newsletter Undaunted by the chilly midwinter’s morning, groups of year six kids at Tasmania’s Moonah primary school are digging out last season’s sweetcorn plants, sieving compost, planting seedlings and harvesting vegetables for a shared lunch. Meanwhile in the warmth of the kitchen, aprons on, young minds are focused on preparing broccoli balls with zesty lemon dip, pea and leek tart and vegetarian dumplings. Guided by their kitchen and garden specialists, the students are engaged and confident, quietly chatting as they work on allotted tasks. The group are among the 2,000 students in 24 primary and high schools across Tasmania who are part of 24 Carrot Gardens, a kitchen garden program for low socioeconomic schools founded in 2014 by Mona artist and philanthropist Kirsha Kaechele. Continue reading...

(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...

We are used to skimming the surface of our emotions, distracting ourselves with endless doing. To discover what we really need, we must move beyond the shallows Ever since I discovered the mating dynamics of the deep-sea anglerfish, where the male fuses with the female, and how closely this mirrors some disturbing human relationship patterns, I have been chewing over the idea that everything that exists in our unconscious also exists in the ocean. From the methodical violence of sharks, to dolphins who mourn their dead and jellyfish whose pulsating contractions remind me of my labour, the only phenomenon on Earth that is as rich and colourful and dark and fascinating as the deep sea is the deep unconscious. My problem, as I realised in a session not long ago with my psychoanalyst, is that I have been swimming in shallow waters. This is something I have seen many times in myself, and perhaps these moments of recognition help me to see it in my patients – the unconscious pull to stay in the emotional shallows, not to delve deeper into your own internal experience and understand the more profound wishes and hungers that drive us. Instead, we scroll away our difficult feelings, staring at whatever screen is in front of us rather than looking inwards. We cheapen our relationships with others, craving and offering a particular kind of emotional stroking that keeps things at surface level. We buy things, we watch things, we listen to things, we squeeze things, we try things on and send things back, and we do, do, do – we do to stay in the shallows, so we don’t have to be in the depths. 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.

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...

From BLACKPINK's Rosé to Stray Kids' Bang Chan and Felix, Australia is slowly making its presence in Korean pop music felt.

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...

Orchards, dairies, vineyards and farm shops are among the delicious pit stops on a new series of ebike tours around the county It’s farm-to-fork dining at its freshest. I’m sitting at a vast outdoor table in Herefordshire looking out over rows of vines. On the horizon, the Malvern Hills ripple towards the Black Mountains; in front of me is a selection of local produce: cheeses from Monkland Dairy, 6 miles away, salad leaves from Lane Cottage (8 miles), charcuterie from Trealy Farm (39 miles), cherries from Moorcourt Farm (3 miles), broccoli quiche (2 miles) and glasses of sparkling wine, cassis and apple juice made just footsteps away. This off-grid feast is the final stop on White Heron Estate’s ebike farm tour – and I’m getting the lie of the land with every bite. Before eating, our small group pedalled along a two-hour route so pastorally pretty it would make Old MacDonald sigh. Skirting purple-hued borage fields, we’ve zipped in and out of woodland, down rows of apple trees and over patches of camomile, and learned how poo from White Heron’s chickens is burnt in biomass boilers to generate heat. “Providing habitats for wildlife is important, but we need to produce food as well,” says our guide Jo Hilditch, who swapped a career in PR for farming when she inherited the family estate 30 years ago. 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...

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...

I thought the Dedica Style couldn't be beaten, but it looks like I might have been wrong.

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...

Just in time for NFL Sunday, Amazon has LG's all-new 65-inch C5 OLED TV back down to a record-low price, thanks to a $1,240 discount.

London-born Italian, who died in 2006, built websites to spread Catholic teaching and is credited with two miracles A London-born Italian teenage computer whiz who died in 2006 age 15, has been declared the Catholic church’s first millennial saint during an open-air mass in a packed St Peter’s Square. Carlo Acutis, who died of leukaemia, built multilingual websites to spread Catholic teaching, later earning him the nickname “God’s influencer”. He was canonised by Pope Leo XIV alongside Pier Giorgio Frassati, another young Catholic activist, who died a century ago. Continue reading...

I had cancer and I was alone in hospital when it all suddenly hit me. I have never needed a hug more in my life Read more in the Kindness of strangers series In 2024, I was unexpectedly diagnosed with leukaemia. I was 34. I had no symptoms (none!) and it came at the worst possible time, although there is never a good time. I am a musician and was one week away from flying to New Zealand to be in a show. I was extremely excited about the show and, to be organised, I thought I’d get a blood test to check my iron levels before I left the country for five weeks. Continue reading...

What would our philosophers and spiritual leaders have to say about ‘virtue signalling’? They might be in agreement Making sense of it is a column about spirituality and how it can be used to navigate everyday life Some commentators blame James Bartholomew for coining the term “virtue signalling”. But admonishments against blowing one’s own trumpet date back at least 2,000 years earlier. In Christianity it’s taught that virtue should not be performative, but active. To be good, a person had to do good. Jesus was very vocal when it came to his criticism of the Pharisee sect and their showy, costly acts of piety, in the absence of what he considered to be genuine virtue. Continue reading...

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...

It's time to wave goodbye to your neighborhood barista – soon you'll be brewing cafe-quality coffee at home with zero effort.

Growing up in South Australia's Riverland, Jake Stoeckel never imagined one day he would be playing college football for the Kent State Golden Flashes in the United States.

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...

Expensive fitness facilities might seem a tough sell in a cost of living crisis. But for young people in crowded or dilapidated house shares, the high price for a haven can be worth paying The best part of Owen Willis’s day is his morning shower. Notes of lavender and eucalyptus waft through his private, stone-tiled shower room as he uses a £32 bottle of Cowshed bodywash. He dries off with a fluffy white towel before slathering on Cowshed body lotion (£24). This isn’t Willis’s home, however. It’s his gym. He belongs to Third Space in London, which calls itself a “luxury health club”. Memberships start at £230 a month for an individual site and go as high as £305 for access to all of its branches, including the Mayfair club, where gym-goers can expect “UV-treated fresh air” and “a Himalayan sea-salt walled sauna and steam room”. Continue reading...

Toronto film festival: after Glass Onion underwhelmed, Rian Johnson’s self-aware, star-packed Benoit Blanc series makes a barnstorming return to form If Glass Onion wasn’t quite the deserving follow-up to Knives Out that many of us had hoped it would be (it was more focused on the bigger rather than better), it was at the very least a deserved victory lap. Writer-director Rian Johnson’s 2019 whodunnit brought us back to the starry, slippery fun of the 70s and 80s, when films like this would be a dime a dozen and it was a surprise hit, making almost eight times its budget at the global box office. While Kenneth Branagh had seen commercial success already with his Poirot revival two years prior, his retreads felt too musty, and the actor-director too miscast, for the genre to truly feel like it was entering an exciting new period. Johnson’s threequel, Wake Up Dead Man, is the second as part of his Netflix deal (one that cost an estimated $450m) and arrives as the whodunnit genre has found itself close to over-saturation on both big but mostly small screen. Yet as many murders as there might have now been in buildings or residences involving couples and strangers of questionable perfection, nothing has quite captured that same sense of kicky, sharp-witted fun that Johnson had shared with us way back when. His first Knives Out film premiered at the Toronto film festival to one of the most buzzed audience reactions I can remember, a thrill I was able to feel once again as he returned to unveil his latest chapter, a rip-roaring return to form that shows the series to be confidently back on track and heading somewhere with plenty more places to go on the way. Continue reading...

Ken Paxton, who is running for US Senate, is urging schools to say the Lord’s Prayer as a Republican law goes into effect Ken Paxton, the Texas attorney general running for US Senate, has long believed in school prayer. Now, he’s prescribing precisely what type of prayer he wants the state’s 6 million public school students to recite. “In Texas classrooms, we want the Word of God opened, the Ten Commandments displayed, and prayers lifted up,” Paxton said in a statement on Tuesday, encouraging students to say “the Lord’s Prayer, as taught by Jesus Christ”. Continue reading...

Many felt Kaouther Ben Hania’s Gaza docufiction was robbed when Jim Jarmusch’s latest took the top prize. Yet accusations of moral cowardice on the part of the jury are naive and unfair There are standing ovations and there are jury decisions. Jim Jarmusch’s droll, quirky, very charming film Father Mother Sister Brother got a mere six minutes for its standing ovation at Venice – though one day we’re going to have to introduce some Olympic-style standardisation to these timings. But it got the top prize, the Golden Lion, from Alexander Payne’s jury. Continue reading...

Utilita Arena, Sheffield The singer announces he is thrilled to begin his first tour since taking time off for his mental health, but is visibly nervous and at one moment breaks into tears Lewis Capaldi is a pop star known for his patter. But tonight, he warns the crowd he is feeling too overwhelmed to perform his usual funnyman routine. “I probably won’t say lots this evening because I don’t know what to say,” he says. “I’m just genuinely thrilled that this is still a possibility for me.” The 28-year-old being lost for words tonight is understandable. In 2023, Capaldi announced he was taking a hiatus from touring, after sharing his struggles with his mental health and his diagnosis in 2022 of Tourette syndrome. Having disappeared from the spotlight for the better part of two years, he made a triumphant return at Glastonbury earlier this summer for an unannounced and emotional set on the Pyramid stage. Tonight’s Sheffield show, however, marks the Scottish singer’s first headline performance since his extended break. “We’re back baby,” he tells the crowd at one point. Continue reading...

The author’s blackly comic breakout novel won her awards and tattooed superfans. As she releases a follow-up, she talks about growing up as an outsider – and the best advice she received from Margaret Atwood Mona Awad was trying on a forest-green, deer-patterned dress when she realised that the psychotically twee characters from her 2019 novel, Bunny, had burrowed back into her psyche. “I looked in the mirror and thought: This isn’t a dress for me, this is a dress for Cupcake,” she says, referencing one of the antagonists from her breakout book. “I started thinking about her, and the other bunnies,” says the Canadian author, “and I was like: I have to go back.” Continue reading...

A medical charity worker and an oncologist delved into the NHS, obesity and assisted dying. But could they agree on hiring doctors from abroad? Thakshayini, 40, Birmingham Occupation Oncologist Continue reading...

Having been ill for a long time, Scott’s life turned around when he met Maria. But as a single working mum, she needed to set the pace • How do you do it? Share the story of your sex life, anonymously I put off meeting Maria because of my insecurities about how I looked, after my illness. But once we met, I wanted to spend all my time with her Continue reading...

Metroteka aims to encourage people to read more in country that lost majority of libraries in second world war An “express” library has opened in a new metro station in Warsaw, aiming to provide an appealing cultural space to encourage residents and commuters to forgo smartphones in favour of books and, thanks to fresh herbs growing in a vertical garden, a dash of subterranean greenery too. The stylish Metroteka, which opened this week in the Kondratowicza M2 line metro station in the Polish capital’s Targówek district, offers two reading areas for adults and children, as well as a space for public readings and events. Continue reading...

Police recruitment drives in response to chronic shortages have led to more people applying to join their local force. But what were the factors that led to the shortages in the first place?

The celebrated US photographer was catapulted into America’s culture wars with her photobook Immediate Family. Now she’s written a book of ‘how not-to’ advice for artists Sally Mann is chatty and open about nearly any subject imaginable. The photographer easily gets carried off in conversation, finding it hard to resist sharing stories about anything from her friend’s mother who had a lobotomy, to the time the poet Forrest Gander happened to drop by unannounced (the moment turned into a lifelong friendship). A large-format camera at Sally Mann’s Lexington studio; tools and objects on a workbench; mask of a face Continue reading...

Tuck into great food and drink at hotels, farms and B&Bs in France, Ireland, Portugal and beyond A hamlet of restored rural buildings in the Ortolo valley in Corsica reopened in June as A Mandria di Murtoli. Guests can stay in a former sheepfold, stable or barn, or one of five rooms in the main house. Three of the smaller properties have private pools, all rooms have terraces and there is a big shared pool. The buildings have been refurbished by Corsican craftspeople in a minimalist Mediterranean style, using local materials. Continue reading...

Growing up dirt poor in Arizona’s Church of Immortal Consciousness, I showed an early talent for the game. Soon the cult’s leader began grooming me to become a grandmaster – even if it meant separating me from my mother … When I first discovered chess, after watching the movie Searching for Bobby Fischer on HBO, I was a nine-year-old kid living in a tiny village in the mountains of Arizona. Because of its title, many people think the film is about Bobby Fischer, the reclusive chess genius who bested the Soviet Union in 1972, defeating Boris Spassky to become the first US-born world chess champion in history. Really, it’s about how the American chess world was desperate to find the next Bobby Fischer after the first one disappeared. The story follows Josh Waitzkin, a kid from Greenwich Village in New York, who sits down at a chess board with a bunch of homeless dudes in the park one day and miraculously discovers that he’s a child prodigy – at least that is the Hollywood version of the story. Searching for Bobby Fischer was to me what Star Wars was for kids a few years older. I didn’t simply love the movie. I was obsessed with it. Any kid who’s ever felt lost or misunderstood or stuck in the middle of nowhere has dreamed of picking up a lightsaber and discovering the Jedi master within. That was me in the summer of 1995, only with chess. Continue reading...

This is a horrible situation. It would be difficult even for an adult, so your daughter definitely needs action Our 11-year-old daughter is in a “friendship” with a classmate, which we have come to realise is unhealthy and controlling. She was very shy and self-conscious through the early years of school and struggled to make friends, so we were initially delighted that she had found a close friend. However, we’ve become aware that there is a consistent pattern of control from this girl: demands about when and where they meet, or what our daughter can and can’t wear. If our daughter goes against her, she risks being shunned and ignored or spoken to aggressively. This girl does not let our daughter interact with others without her. There is a barrage of demanding messages and calls at home about arrangements, and we see our daughter being vigilant and tense, having to respond immediately. Sometimes there is unkindness, for example saying our daughter’s clothes are babyish. Around the controlling behaviour, they seem to interact more normally, having fun, playing and chatting – it is this Jekyll and Hyde pattern that makes it so difficult to know how to support our daughter. Continue reading...

Samuel McLennan spent two years salvaging for his ocean-going vessel and has slowly made his way to Victoria. Otis Filley jumps aboard for part of the journey Sign up for the Rural Network email newsletter Word spread through French Island’s WhatsApp group before we’d even docked – there was a boat made of rubbish heading their way. By the time Samuel McLennan secured his vessel built from marine debris at Tankerton Jetty, a small crowd had formed. Alan Pentland, editor of Off-the-Grid, the island’s newsletter, was already waiting to get a photo and eager for a story. A constant stream of people came down over the next two hours – to have a chat, come onboard, ask questions and share their excitement. French Island residents gather to inspect the unusual vessel after word spread through the island’s WhatsApp group about the arrival of a boat made of rubbish. Continue reading...