A small community on South Australia's Lower Eyre Peninsula has paid tribute to Jarred Wait, who died in an agricultural plane crash at Cummins.

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...

Pilots’ union says the issue has become a ‘worrying reality’ as a result of staff shortages and operation pressure A German pilots’ union has said that napping during flights has become a “worrying reality” for its members, as it sounded the alarm over “increasing fatigue” in the sector. The Vereinigung Cockpit union said it had carried out a survey of more than 900 pilots in recent weeks, which found that 93% of them admitted to napping during a flight in the past few months. 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...

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...

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...

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...

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?

Evidence of millions of animal bones at sites in West Country and Surrey points to ‘age of feasting’ These days, revellers converge on the West Country from all parts of the UK and beyond to take part in the wonderful craziness of the Glastonbury festival. It turns out that at the end of the bronze age – also a time of climatic and economic crisis – the same sort of impulse gripped people. Continue reading...

Australian travellers are spared flight cancellations or major disruptions, despite the deadly attacks on Doha in the Middle East.

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...

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.

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

Fifteen years after it was first earmarked for "pedestrian infrastructure", a 1 kilometre-long road in Darwin's north remains dangerously underdeveloped, according to residents and local politicians.

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: 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...

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...

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...

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...

The British Airways passenger flight BA16 was on its way to Singapore and made the emergency return to Sydney Airport about an hour after take-off this afternoon.

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...

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...

SA Police and emergency services are at the scene of a light plane crash at Yeelanna, north of Cummins, on the Eyre Peninsula.

World No 2 edges out Lagergren at third extra hole ‘I’m so lucky I get to do this in front of these people’ Rory McIlroy savoured “a pretty cool year” after adding a second Irish Open title to his Masters win. The world No 2 completed the career grand slam with his triumph at Augusta in April, and on Sunday he added to that by winning his home open for the second time with a thrilling playoff victory against Joakim Lagergren. McIlroy had to eagle the 72nd hole just to take it to a playoff after Lagergren’s own stunning eagle at the 16th. After the first two extra holes were tied in birdie fours, Lagergren found the water hazard third time around to allow McIlroy to win it with two putts. Continue reading...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

The Voice of Hind Rajab, a harrowing account of a Palestinian child’s death in Gaza, won the runner-up Silver Lion US indie director Jim Jarmusch unexpectedly won the coveted Golden Lion at the Venice film festival on Saturday with Father Mother Sister Brother, a three-part meditation on the uneasy tie between parents and their adult children. Although his gentle comedy received largely positive reviews, it had not been a favourite for the top prize, with many critics instead tipping the Voice of Hind Rajab, a harrowing true-life account of the killing of a five-year-old Palestinian girl during the Gaza war. In the end, the film directed by Tunisia’s Kaouther Ben Hania took the runner-up Silver Lion. Continue reading...

<p>Big brands use red carpets and gondolas in Italian city to show looks from newly installed designers</p><p>After a year of musical chairs in the fashion industry, September is poised to be one of its biggest show months ever, with debut collections from 15 creative directors.</p><p>Rather than waiting for the catwalk, over the past 10 days brands including Chanel and Dior have given themselves a head start at the Venice film festival, using its starry red carpets and even gondolas to soft launch looks from their newly installed designers.</p> <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/fashion/2025/sep/06/fashion-week-chanel-dior-soft-launch-new-designers-venice-film-festival">Continue reading...</a>

<p>Once considered progressive, then later derided, a new exhibition is exploring the developments’ place as part of a collective experience</p><p>Communist East Germany’s high-rise prefab residential blocks and their political and cultural impact in what was one of the biggest social housing experiments in history is the focus of a new art exhibition, in which the unspoken challenges of today’s housing crisis loom large.</p><p><em><a href="https://dasminsk.de/en/exhibitions/5899/wohnkomplex">Wohnkomplex</a></em> (living complex) Art and Life in Prefabs explores the legacy of the collective experience of millions of East Germans, as well as serving as a poignant reminder that the “housing question”, whether under dictatorship or democracy, is far from being solved.</p> <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/sep/06/why-the-legacy-of-east-germanys-prefab-housing-blocks-is-more-relevant-than-ever">Continue reading...</a>

<p><strong>Toronto film festival:</strong> Writer-director Curry Barker follows up $800 YouTube hit Milk &amp; Serial with a frighteningly effective, and head-smashingly gory, cautionary tale</p><p>This year’s Sundance saw the real-life couple <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/film/2025/aug/15/were-in-a-healthy-relationship-alison-brie-and-dave-franco-on-gruesome-body-horror-together">Dave Franco and Alison Brie</a> play with the grotesque reality of being literally stuck to one another in the body horror <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/film/2025/jan/28/together-review-sundance-horror-film">Together</a>, a wincingly effective lark that turned codependency into a curse. It didn’t really find its audience upon too-wide release this summer, a campaign that couldn’t succinctly explain the plot or convey a tone that went from horror to comedy and back again.</p><p>At <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/film/2025/sep/04/toronto-film-festival-knives-out-3-soderbergh">Toronto</a>, YouTuber turned film-maker Curry Barker’s similarly themed Obsession should be an easier sell when it gets swiftly bought and packaged (it’s entering the festival as a sure-to-be-fought-over sales title). It’s a cleaner, more concise pitch – love spell gone wrong – and its reaction-securing moments of horrible violence even more alarming, a Midnight Madness winner that will probably live on past the witching hour.</p> <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/film/2025/sep/06/obsession-movie-review-tiff">Continue reading...</a>

<p>On the border with Slovenia, the Italian region of Friuli–Venezia Giulia continues a centuries-old tradition of farms opening their doors and serving up a feast to the public</p><p>In <a href="https://guardianbookshop.com/trieste-9780571204687/">Trieste and the Meaning of Nowhere, </a>travel writer Jan Morris described the city’s many faces and “ambivalence”, maintaining that, unlike most other Italian cities, it has “no unmistakable cuisine”. But I had come to Trieste to experience, if not a cuisine, then a culinary tradition which, to me at least, does seem unmistakable: the <em>osmiza</em> scene of the surrounding countryside.</p><p>An <em>osmiza</em> (or <em>osmize</em><em> </em>in the plural) is a Slovene term for a smallholding that produces wine in the Karst Plateau, a steep rocky ridge scattered with pine and a patchwork of vineyards that overlooks the Adriatic Sea. Visiting <em>osmize</em> is a centuries-old tradition in which these homesteads open their doors to the public for a fleeting period each year. Guests order their food and wine at a till inside – where a simply tiled bar, often set into local stone, might boast family photos, halogen lights and a chalkboard menu – before heading outside to feast at long Oktoberfest-style tables and benches.</p> <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/travel/2025/sep/06/farmers-table-foodie-trip-to-trieste-italy">Continue reading...</a>

<p><strong>Toronto film festival:</strong> The rising star makes for a convincing boxer inside the ring in David Michôd’s by-the-numbers drama but flounders when outside</p><p>Even before Sydney Sweeney became better known for being in the centre of an <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/film/2025/aug/05/sydney-sweeney-controversy">increasingly absurd culture war</a>, the unavoidable campaign to make her Hollywood’s Next Big Thing was showing signs of fatigue. The Euphoria grad, who gave a resonant performance in <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/film/2023/feb/24/reality-review-word-for-word-replay-of-fbi-interrogation-is-uncannily-brilliant">Reality</a>, scored a sleeper hit with glossed up romcom <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/film/2023/dec/21/anyone-but-you-movie-review-sydney-sweeney-glen-powell">Anyone But You</a> but audiences were more impressed than critics, including myself (I found her performance strangely stilted). There was little interest from either side in her nun horror <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/film/2024/mar/20/immaculate-sydney-sweeney-review">Immaculate</a>, and earlier this summer her incredulously plotted Apple movie <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/film/2025/jun/10/echo-valley-review-julianne-moore-sydney-sweeney">Echo Valley</a> went the way of many Apple movies (no one knows it exists).</p><p>Post-thinkpieces, two of her festival duds (Eden and Americana) disappeared at the box office and she now arrives at Toronto in need of a win. And what better way to achieve that by going for an old-fashioned awards play, taking on the role of alternately inspiring and tragic boxer Christy Martin. It’s a role that’s already been buzzed about for months (Sweeney has been busy laying the standard “gruelling physical routine” groundwork) and at a time when movies about female sport stars still remain thin on the ground despite a swell of interest in them off screen, it’s a needed push in the right direction. But, as perfectly timed as this narrative might be, Christy just isn’t nearly good enough, a by-the-numbers slog that fails to prove Sweeney’s status as a one to watch.</p><p>Christy is screening at the Toronto film festival and will be released later this year</p> <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/film/2025/sep/05/christy-review-sydney-sweeney">Continue reading...</a>

<p><strong>Toronto film festival:</strong> adapted by Max Porter from his novella Shy and co-starring Little Simz, Emily Watson and Tracey Ullman this brutal but ultimately hopeful story is fiercely affecting</p><p>Producer-star Cillian Murphy and director Tim Mielants last collaborated on a <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/film/2024/feb/16/small-things-like-these-review-magdalene-laundries-cillian-murphy">superlative adaptation of Claire Keegan’s Small Things Like These</a>, and their new project together could hardly be more different: a drama suffused with gonzo energy and the death-metal chaos of emotional pain, cut with slashes of bizarre black humour. Max Porter has adapted his own <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2023/apr/05/shy-by-max-porter-review-lyrical-study-of-troubled-youth">2023 novella Shy</a> for the screen and Murphy himself gives one of his most uninhibited and demonstrative performances.</p><p>Murphy is Steve, a stressed, troubled but passionately committed headteacher with a secret alcohol and substance abuse problem, in charge of a residential reform school for delinquent teenage boys some time in the mid-90s. With his staff – deputy (Tracey Ullman), therapist-counsellor (Emily Watson) and a new teacher (Little Simz) – he has to somehow keep order in the permanent bedlam of fights and maybe even teach them something.</p> <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/film/2025/sep/05/steve-review-cillian-murphy-is-outstanding-in-ferocious-reform-school-drama">Continue reading...</a>

<p>Countries including Fiji, Papua New Guinea and Tonga have given Israel vital backing at the UN</p><p>After almost two years of war in Gaza, tens of thousands of deaths and now the reality of famine, Israel has found itself increasingly isolated on the world stage, with alliances that date back to the country’s founding at breaking point.</p><p>Through the growing outrage however, a collection of island nations in the Pacific have stood steadfastly with Israel – with perhaps only the United States a more reliable international ally.</p> <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/sep/06/as-censure-increases-over-war-in-gaza-israel-finds-support-among-pacific-islands">Continue reading...</a>

A broken leg fails to stop a West Australian woman and her brother from taking on the gruelling La Petite Trotte à Léon through France, Italy and Switzerland.

<p>Poet and gay rights activist Peter Sipeli wants tourists to see beyond the ‘Bula’-fied resorts in his two-hour walking tour</p><p>“My tours are overtly critical. This isn’t a gorgeous city – it’s a broken-down city, but it’s the city of my birth,” says Peter Sipeli, a Fijian poet, gay rights activist and our tour guide. “But you’re frustrated and have problems with the things you love the most,” he adds.</p><p>I’m on a walking tour of Suva, Fiji’s thronging, fractured capital. This tour isn’t for travellers looking for the cheery, “Bula!”-fied version of Fiji, nor is it about discovering the city’s hidden gems or hole-in-the-wall cafes. Really, it’s an anti-tour: unravelling Fiji’s complicated, postcolonial past and present; its racial tensions and religious dogma.</p> <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/travel/2025/sep/06/suva-fiji-peter-sipeli-walking-tour-shows-visitors-another-side">Continue reading...</a>

<p>From a herring festival in The Hague to the best pizza in Rome, our tipsters share their perfect foodie travel moments<br>• <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/travel/2025/sep/01/tell-us-about-a-travel-experience-that-benefited-the-local-community"><strong>Tell us about a community travel experience</strong></a><strong> – the best tip wins a £200 holiday voucher</strong></p><p>Despite its name, Flag Day (<em><a href="https://vlaggetjesdag.com/">Vlaggetjesdag</a></em>) in Scheveningen – a seaside resort close to The Hague – is actually more about fresh herring. Fishmongers bring in the first catch of the year in June, the <em>hollandse</em><em> </em><em>nieuwe</em>, and mark the start of the herring season with festivities, marching bands, wearing traditional costumes, and even an auction of the first vat of fish to raise money for charity. Don’t miss the chance to share a <em>jenever</em> (gin) with a Scheveninger, who will tell you how this year’s herring compares with last year’s.<br><strong>Olivia</strong></p> <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/travel/2025/sep/05/readers-favourite-food-experiences-meals-europe">Continue reading...</a>

The national carrier's annual report shows Alan Joyce will pick up his final bonus — a stash of shares worth millions — on Friday's market.

<p>Byron Waller, accompanied by instructor but doing all the flying, stops off in England on way round back to Australia</p><p>At 15 years and 10 months of age, Byron Waller can’t order a pint and has never driven a car, but on Wednesday afternoon he landed his small plane at an airport in Brighton, on England’s south coast. It was the 16th or so stop (he can’t quite remember) of a remarkable airborne odyssey that he hopes will make him the youngest supported pilot to fly around the world.</p><p><a href="https://www.teenpilotdownunder.com/about">The adventure</a> began at his home in Brisbane, Australia, four weeks ago and has taken the teenager across the Indian Ocean and through the Middle East to Europe, from where he will venture around the other half of the globe back home. Though he is accompanied by an instructor – global aviation rules not easily permitting children to fly around the world on their own – Byron does all the flying of their tiny single-engined Sling TSi aircraft.</p> <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/sep/03/teenage-pilot-byron-waller-round-the-world-record">Continue reading...</a>

<p>The Brisbane project, now in its seventh year, started as a whim – but has developed a cult following, with hundreds signing up each year</p><ul><li><p><a href="https://www.theguardian.com/newsletters/2019/oct/18/saved-for-later-sign-up-for-guardian-australias-culture-and-lifestyle-email?CMP=cvau_sfl">Get our weekend culture and lifestyle email</a></p></li></ul><p>Growing up in Brisbane, Bryony Walters asked her mum if she could do ballet. “She just straight up said, ‘You’re too fat for a leotard’,” she recalls. “I know that’s a reflection of her relationship with her own body, but that kind of thing had me pretty fucked up for a pretty long time around body and food.”</p><p>It also affected her relationship with exercise, and movement in general. “It always seemed like a punishment that I was inflicting upon myself,” Walters, now in her late 30s, tells the Guardian. “It wasn’t a thing you were engaging with to have fun or to feel good.”</p><p><strong><a href="https://www.theguardian.com/newsletters/2019/oct/18/saved-for-later-sign-up-for-guardian-australias-culture-and-lifestyle-email?CMP=copyembed">Sign up for the fun stuff with our rundown of must-reads, pop culture and tips for the weekend, every Saturday morning</a></strong></p> <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2025/sep/04/common-people-dance-eisteddfod-dancing-competition-snowballed-into-juggernaut">Continue reading...</a>