5 d. ago Gavin and Stacey star reveals he 'suggested' turning beloved comedy series into a movie

Fans were in agreement that the recent final episode was the perfect ending for the show

Culture

5 d. ago ‘Don’t you besmirch Super Mario Bros!’: how video game adaptations became prestige TV

From The Last of Us to Fallout, the days of ropey dramas stemming from consoles is over. Television insiders open up about why high-end shows and gaming now go hand-in-handTwo teenagers plan how to dispatch their latest undead enemy: a kill-shot to the head, or a knife in the side of the neck? One of them throws a glass bottle, distracting their prey. Then she goes in for the kill with all the breezy confidence of a kid playing a video game on easy.It’s a rare moment of playfulness in the second-season opener of The Last of Us, a show that generally takes its storytelling deadly seriously. While the wildly lucrative Minecraft movie strip-mines its IP for laughs, this celebrated HBO series, adapted from the PlayStation titles of the same name, is as focused on taut character drama as the thrills and spills of the zombie genre. Continue reading...

Culture

6 d. ago ‘Beautifully, awfully funny’: why Withnail and I is my feelgood movie

The latest in our ongoing series of comfort movies is a pick for Bruce Robinson’s cult British comedyIn the words of its writer and director, Withnail and I is a comedy that “doesn’t know it’s funny”. To its star, it’s about “the nobility of failure”. It ends with its title character alone in the rain, his one friend gone, delivering a Hamlet soliloquy to an indifferent wolf. It’s my feelgood movie.Bruce Robinson’s British classic was released in 1987. He and Richard E Grant made the remarks above in 2007, at the British Film Institute. I was there, eager to hear Robinson discuss a movie based on his own experience. Themes abide. As he said recently about The Peculiar Memories of Thomas Penman, his imperishable novel about his brutal childhood: “It’s very funny but also sad as fuck.” Robinson’s first film was a novel before it was a screenplay. At the BFI, he said he knew he’d got his film right at an early screening, when a “girl sort of threw up, laughing”. She had a point. Withna...

Politics

8 d. ago What to watch on Netflix: The best movies, series and shows to stream right now in April 2025

Are you stuck on what to watch on Netflix right now?From hard-hitting dramas to easy-watch reality TV , the streaming service has a great range of shows for everyone to enjoy.

Culture

9 d. ago One of the best movies of the 2000s is becoming a series... but fans are divided

The action/adventure film, released in 2000, is based on Wang Dulu's book of the same name.

Culture

1 week ago Netflix now streaming 'perfect' conclusion to 'the best movie trilogy of all time'

You can now enjoy all three films in one of the best family movie series of all time on Netfli

Politics

1 week ago Downton Abbey star reveals on The One Show ‘this is the end’ ahead of final movie

Fans of the series are anxiously awaiting the third and final movie based on the ITV show

Culture

1 week ago Paul Auster’s The New York Trilogy review – a classic that will be read for decades to come

Sketched in cinematic black and white, this illustrated interpretation of the late author’s postmodern detective novel is a ‘stone-cold masterpiece’It was a wrong number that started it – literally in the case of The New York Trilogy. In 1980, or thereabouts, Paul Auster twice answered the phone, only to hear a voice ask: “Is this the Pinkerton Agency?” (Pinkerton is a legendary American detective bureau.) He told the caller they had a wrong number, yet he was soon filled with regret. Here, surely, was a story: why hadn’t he asked any questions? But never mind. While a third call never arrived, in its place came inspiration. Out of the disappointing silence, Auster spun the first volume of his trilogy, City of Glass, a literary hall of mirrors that made him famous.City of Glass was published in 1985. Nine years later, under the brilliant eye of Art Spiegelman, the author of Maus, Paul Karasik and David Mazzucchelli created a graphic adaption of the book, produced with Auster’s appro...

Politics

2 w. ago A Minecraft Movie review – Jack Black and Jason Momoa star in seriously cobbled

Napoleon Dynamite director Jared Hess’s adventure based on the world’s favourite video game feels like one big cash-inIt’s a curious choice of title. A Minecraft Movie implies that this cynical intellectual property-rinsing exercise is one of numerous film adaptations of the enduringly popular sandbox video game. Perhaps there’s an alternative out there, a sharper, smarter, funnier version of a Minecraft movie. One with actual jokes. Or, God forbid, there may even be a worse iteration, although that’s hard to imagine. What becomes clear is that one of the key elements in the game’s popularity – the latitude it affords gamers to create their own experience – is a big stumbling block for any film adaptation of Minecraft.In the absence of a single fixed storyline the screenplay can follow, A Minecraft Movie has a cobbled-together feel, borrowing a device from Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle – and, in Jack Black, a star – and superimposing an all-purpose quest-for-an-artefact structure o...

Politics

2 w. ago Stirrings of lust and a ginger bush: the Jilly Cooper sentence that sent me down a rabbit hole

I quoted a single smutty line by the queen of bonkbusters in the manuscript for my debut novel. I never expected the strange yet heartwarming journey that followedGet our weekend culture and lifestyle email“Wondering if she had a ginger bush, he felt the stirrings of lust.” It’s an electrifying sentence, penned by – who else? – the English novelist Dame Jilly Cooper in her 1985 novel Riders appearing during a charged encounter between a flame-haired socialite and bad-boy aristocrat Rupert Campbell-Black.It’s a sentence I admire for many reasons. Starting in a ruminative, almost philosophical mood, it gains a thrilling momentum, before landing with erotic authority on that final, unholy syllable: lust. Impeccable stuff; classic Cooper. If you’ve watched Rivals, the recent TV adaptation of other Cooper books, you’ll be familiar with her world: puerile, horsey, abundantly filthy and terribly English.Sign up for the fun stuff with our rundown of must-reads, pop culture and tips for the ...

Politics

2 w. ago Aidan Turner says Rivals cast ‘became pals’ and filming was ‘so much craic’

The Poldark actor plays Declan O’Hara in the Disney+ adaptation of Jilly Cooper’s book.

Politics

2 w. ago Every movie and TV series leaving Netflix in April 2025, including scariest horror of last 10 years

Full list of every single title being taken down in next 30 days

Culture

3 w. ago ‘Their voices had been overlooked for so long’: the shocking hunt for the Gilgo Beach killer

The long and often shocking journey to finding the alleged killer of young women in Long Island is brought to a wider audience in a damning new Netflix seriesThe film-maker Liz Garbus was on vacation in July 2023 when she got the call that an arrest had finally been made in the case of the Long Island serial killer. Since 2010, when the bodies of four women were found along an isolated stretch of highway near Gilgo Beach, authorities had looked for a presumed serial killer with little progress and plenty of consternation. Garbus was one of the most prominent chroniclers of the grassroots effort to force authorities into action; her 2020 feature film Lost Girls, an adaptation of Robert Kolker’s book of the same name, depicted the fight by a group of working-class women to figure out what happened to their loved ones – all women who participated in sex work on Craigslist – with or largely without police help.It was the star of that film, Amy Ryan, who alerted Garbus to the arrest of R...

Events

3 w. ago So many souvenirs for JD Vance to take home from Greenland: oil, gas, minerals – and that’s just the start | Marina Hyde

The widely reviled veep and his wife may not see much of the island they’d like to annex, but the US military base will be lovely at this time of yearThere’s a Gerard Butler movie called Greenland, which – via a series of cataclysmic events handled incredibly Butlerishly – ends with Gerard cocooned in a remote secure bunker in Greenland. As the week has worn on, this has increasingly become the mood of today’s supposedly super-fun tourist trip to Greenland by the second lady of the United States, Usha Vance, and her husband, the vice-president, JD Vance. Who, come to think of it, does actually look like the Cabbage Patch Gerard Butler.Anyway: Greenland. Like I say, the trip has evolved this week both in style and substance. Originally, it was announced that the second lady was going to take one of her sons, immerse herself in various local events – she’s apparently simply fascinated by Greenland’s culture – and attend the famous Avannaata Qimussersua dog sled race. No more. Now, it’...

Society

3 w. ago Naomi Watts' pride for her teen child Kai who is 'everything to me': Glamorous model's path to stardom as actress gushes she's 'so lucky to be your mum'

The model, raised in New York by parents Naomi and Liev Schreiber, 57, who amicably split in 2016 after 11 years together, launched their career in the 2016 adaptation of The Jungle Book.

Culture

4 w. ago Harlan Coben reveals what it's like to write a novel with Reese Witherspoon after his Fool Me Once show amassed 100 million views on Netflix

HARLAN COBEN is one of the world's most successful thriller writers and his book-to-screen adaptations draw mega audiences.

Culture

4 w. ago Zac Efron risks being upstaged by his handsome lookalike brother Dylan as fans brand influencer their 'favourite' sibling after The Traitors stint: 'Can we give the parents a round of applause?'

But after starring on - and going onto win - the third series of the hit TV series The Traitors, Dylan has threatened to overshadow his movie star sibling's popularity with his rapidly growing fanbase.

Events