8 h. ago ‘You can make really good stuff – fast’: new AI tools a gamechanger for film

Instead of spending millions and taking years to complete, creative directors are producing high-grade work using the latest software, but critics voice copyright concernsA US stealth bomber flies across a darkening sky towards Iran. Meanwhile, in Tehran a solitary woman feeds stray cats amid rubble from recent Israeli airstrikes.To the uninitiated viewer, this could be a cinematic retelling of a geopolitical crisis that unfolded barely weeks ago – hastily shot on location, somewhere in the Middle East. Continue reading...

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24 h. ago Superman director says Henry Cavill was fired from DC in ‘terrible’ way

‘It was really unfair to him,’ director and co-DC boss said

Events

24 h. ago Disneyland at 70: artists on the park’s five best rides – and why they still captivate

The California theme park is busier than ever. We asked artists, designers and historians to weigh in on the attractions that stand the test of timeA visit to Disneyland can be an exhausting experience. The line for a ride can be hours long; there are hordes of overstimulated children and the sheer quantity of gift shops is overwhelming. When the park first opened, on 17 July 1955, an adult ticket cost $1 and kids were 50 cents: now a single day’s entry for one person can easily run $200 or more.Despite all the kitsch and cartoon capitalism, though, Disneyland still delivers moments of actual magic, and that’s largely due to the inventiveness of its theme park rides. Continue reading...

Politics

29 h. ago ‘I love England so much’: From TV to pop, film to fashion, the UK is enjoying a cultural resurgence

Three decades on from Blur and Oasis, a new and more diverse wave of stars is celebrating British identityIn the opening episode of Lena Dunham’s Netflix show Too Much, a heartbroken New Yorker moves to London to live out her fantasy of British life and love stories. Jess is quickly swept up in her feelings for an indie musician, dreamily referring to him as “My Mr Darcy, my Rochester, my Alan Rickman”.Produced by the team behind Bridget Jones, Notting Hill and Love Actually, the show was inspired by Dunham’s own move to London in 2021. Continue reading...

Culture

30 h. ago ‘The entire industry said no’: the story behind seminal teen comedy Clueless at 30

Amy Heckerling, Alicia Silverstone and more involved with the defining 1995 movie talk about their memories of making a film that Hollywood kept passing onIn the early 1990s, the writer-director Amy Heckerling was feeling down. Heckerling had burst on to the scene a decade earlier with Fast Times at Ridgemont High, a groundbreaking coming-of-age comedy of libidinous teens, and scored a surprise box office hit with 1989’s Look Who’s Talking. But she was struggling to fit Hollywood demands. “I was thinking: ‘Oh, I’m never going to make a film that’s what I want it to be, because you can’t have protagonists that are female, you have to do slob comedies, but there’s only a few actors that they accept in those roles, and you don’t get a chance to work with them if you’re a female,’” Heckerling told me recently.With little interest in catering to the prevailing tastes of the day, Heckerling went back to the drawing board: what did she want to write? A true native New Yorker with the accen...

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48 h. ago Whiteboard warrior: Marvel is priming Mister Fantastic to be the new leader of the Avengers

The guy who treats collapsing timelines like a crossword puzzle has one extra superpower this time around: he’s played by Pedro PascalThe Avengers need a new leader, and given how many potential candidates for the gig have either died, retired, or turned evil, they need it soon. The multiverse is collapsing, timelines are unravelling, box office numbers are wobbling, the Kang plan is in tatters and Blade is on its ninth script. So, naturally, Marvel’s answer is to hand the reins to a stretchy man in sensible shoes who once broke the entire multiverse.Yes, according to The Fantastic Four: First Steps director Matt Shakman, the awesome foursome’s Reed Richards is being lined up as the new leader of Earth’s mightiest heroes. Or at least, he is (at times) in the comics, and it looks increasingly like he might be the only reality-straddling, buttoned up polymathable to take on this job on the big screen. Continue reading...

Events

51 h. ago ‘The hot tar splashed everywhere’: remembering the dark magic of Derek Jarman

In 1989, the artist was living on the Kentish coast when he created a series of mysterious paintings with a bonfire and tar. A new exhibition brings these so-called Black Paintings to life – and shows why they still resonate todayIn Modern Nature, his journals, published two years before his death in 1994, Derek Jarman described the time his friend David arrived for lunch at Prospect Cottage, Jarman’s home, some time in the summer of 1989. David was carrying an enormous block of pitch.The cottage and its boundless garden sits on the shingle at Dungeness, a place of immeasurable strangeness and beauty on the Kentish coast. “After swimming,” Jarman wrote, “we built a brick hearth, lit a bonfire, and melted the pitch in an old tin can.” The two men then rushed back and forth between the studio and the pot, fetching brushes, gloves, pillows, barbed wire, crucifixes, prayer books, bullets, a model fighter plane and a telephone and set about tarring and feathering objects a...

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56 h. ago First tickets to Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey sell out – a year before its 2026 release

The blockbuster adaptation of Homer’s epic has not finished filming and has no official runtime. But super fans – and scalpers – already have seatsThe first tickets to Christopher Nolan’s take on Homer’s Odyssey have gone on sale – before he’s even finished filming it and a year before the film is even out, in what is likely the longest pre-sale in cinematic history.The Odyssey, which stars Matt Damon as the cunning Odysseus as he fights his way home after the end of the Trojan war, will be released on 17 July 2026. But on Thursday, Imax released tickets to the first screenings at the 26 Imax cinemas around the world that have the staff and equipment required to project in 1570 format. Continue reading...

Politics

3 d. ago ‘In the world of psychiatry, all your certainties are shattered’: has cinema’s champion of kindness run out of patience?

Nicolas Philibert completes his triptych of films about mental health centres with a documentary about where patients go on their darkest daysLaurence is a woman in desperate need of an act of human kindness. A hug, a cuddle: that is all she needs to keep at bay the nightmarish visions that haunt her day and night, the grey-haired patient urges her psychiatrist, words pressed through a clenched jaw, eyes bulging in panic. Yet on her ward at the Esquirol hospital centre in Paris, such simple gestures are impossible to come by. “When I asked for a hug,” Laurence laments, “they gave me a jar of yoghurt.”This scene, from Nicolas Philibert’s new documentary At Averroès & Rosa Parks, is as hard to watch as anything you are likely to see on a cinema screen this year. But it is especially remarkable coming from perhaps the world’s pre-eminent maker of humanist documentaries. The Frenchman Philibert is one of modern cinema’s great champions of kindness. Aged 74, he has built a career mak...

Politics

3 d. ago A real wag: Superman gets the bleak realities of dog ownership spot on

Hollywood has hitherto been ridiculously soppy over canines. The scrappy, wild and disobedient beast here is as annoying as the real thingSuperman might be one of the most confusing blockbuster films to hit the big screen this year. The tone, as you might expect from a goofball superhero movie that is plainly about the invasion of Gaza, is all over the shop. Too many characters contribute too little to the plot. There are moments when it feels like it was written specifically to provide work for the silly-glasses and ironic-haircut industries. It is a bit of a mess.But that said, one thing is demonstrably true: the dog is cool. As shown in the trailer, Krypto the superdog is Superman’s secret weapon. A mile away from his last screen outing, where he was muscular and proud and voiced by Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson, Superman’s Krypto is scrappy and wild. He doesn’t obey commands. He destroys whatever equipment is put in front of him. Whenever he may or may not save the day, it seems lik...

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3 d. ago A thrilling 2025 film that slipped under the radar with Superman star arrives on Disney+

The film features an Oscar winning actor and a Matrix star

Politics

3 d. ago I Know What You Did Last Summer review – fun 90s slasher revival hooks us back in

Jennifer Love-Hewitt and Freddie Prinze Jr return for a gory, slickly made legacy sequel stuffed with fan serviceRushed into production after the surprise success of 1996’s Scream, I Know What You Did Last Summer has forever lived, and suffered, in the same bracket. Sure it’s another slasher with another cast of unblemished faces and sure it’s also written by Kevin Williamson but it’s always been a far simpler, straighter, sillier film. Scream was trying to reinvent the wheel while I Know What You Did Last Summer was just trying to keep it going.As a franchise, it then quickly became the very thing Williamson was poking fun at in the first place with a rubbishy Bahamas-set sequel (I Still Know What You Did Last Summer!) and, at the time, an inevitable, tossed off, straight-to-video follow-up (I’ll Always Know What You Did Last Summer!). People quickly gave up caring what anyone had been up to during any summer on record and as the subgenre died, it wisely followed. But as Hollywood ...

Politics

3 d. ago Smurfs review – Rihanna is star turn of the new generation of floppy

James Corden and John Goodman join the singer voicing the Belgian creatures in this uninspired, unengaging kids’ animationThe star vocal turn of the very moderate new Smurfs film is Rihanna, phoning in an undemanding audio contribution as the female character named “Smurfette”. But there is little to no music in this laborious slice of content, one of the many frustrating and disconcerting things about it. And for me, this film shows yet again that there is something about the Smurfs, those little Belgian creatures with blue skin and floppy-protuberant hats, which is basically kryptonite to comedy and entertainment.The script by Pam Brady (justly respected for her work on South Park and Team America: World Police) follows the template of being pretty bland for the sweet Smurfs themselves, but is sharpened up with one or two properly funny lines for the all-too-brief scenes featuring the evil wizard characters Razamel and Gargamel (both voiced by JP Karliak) whom the Smurfs are up ag...

Politics

4 d. ago Did Superman kill the press junket? How TikTok clips conquered movie publicity

From the new Superman geeking out on Star Wars to the Wicked cast crying, actors’ personality insights are now distilled into reel-friendly clips and internet boyfriend-baiting soundbitesThe new Superman is a tricky proposition to market. Not only does it represent a new reimagining of an 87-year-old character, but it also has to tell everyone who David Corenswet is. The new Superman is a complete unknown to many of us, and you suspect that a hefty slice of the film’s promotional budget has been given over to selling the guy to the world.In the old days, this would have been achieved with wall-to-wall press interviews. Big, hefty cover stories in key publications in every territory, where interviewers would attempt to plumb the depths of his psyche to see if he can pass muster. But that hasn’t really happened. Instead, there is a very big chance that – if you’re the right age – you will have learned everything you need to know about David Corenswet from a couple of TikToks. Continue...

Events

4 d. ago Friendship review – male inadequacy barbecued in Tim Robinson and Paul Rudd’s comedy bromance

Robinson is magnificently cringeworthy as a man in thrall to his cool neighbour Rudd in Andrew DeYoung’s film, as divisive as a Vimto/Marmite cocktailHere is a goofy-surreal comedy from first-time feature-maker Andrew DeYoung starring sketch comic Tim Robinson and Paul Rudd; it is potentially as divisive as a Vimto-Marmite cocktail. It is a shaggy dog tale of ineffable silliness, operating ostensibly on the realist lines of indie US cinema but sauntering sideways from its initial premise, getting further and further from what had appeared to be a real issue: how difficult it is for grown men to make new friends.In this case, a beta-male chump attempts to be mates with his supercool new neighbour and you might even suspect that the film’s progressive excursion into stoner unseriousness itself enacts men’s avoidant nature, their inability to find an emotionally intelligent connection with each other. The result is not unlike the darkly wacky entertainments of Jim Hosking or Todd Solon...

Politics

4 d. ago BBC Rich List 2025: Here are the 15 biggest earners at the Beeb according to latest figures

The salaries were revealed this week as part of the BBC's annual report.

Politics

4 d. ago The Spin | Why is KL Rahul’s average so low? Here are some explanations

A walking wicket on the 2018 tour of England, stats suggest Rahul’s average of 35 is more impressive than it seemsThe Guardian’s over-by-over coverage is built on reader interaction. We probably receive more than 1,000 emails during an average Test, hundreds of which are published. As an epic Lord’s Test unfolded, the same question kept dropping into our inboxes. “This is the second innings of the series that has left me baffled as to how KL Rahul averages only 35 in Tests,” began one such email from Ned Blackburn. “He seems to have the temperament, technique and discipline to be absolutely elite. What am I missing?”Rahul’s Test average has become the unsolved mystery of the English summer. But after a day in the statistical dirt – and Ben Stokes thought he went to some dark places on Monday – we can offer some potential explanations. The simplest reason is that after a fine start to his career he became a superstar of Indian cricket, a status that is Kryptonite for an overthinker. ...

Politics

4 d. ago Emmy Nominations 2025: Severance, The Penguin and White Lotus lead 77th Emmy Nominations

Apple TV+’s Severance dominates the 2025 Emmy nominations.

Events

5 d. ago Harry Potter TV Series Cast Latest 2025: Here are all 22 actors confirmed for the reboot

We now also know when the eagerly-anticipated series will be released.

Culture

5 d. ago Dora and the Search for Sol Dorado review – plucky teen explorer goes looking for lost Incan magic

Inoffensive adventure story updates Dora the Explorer as she goes in search of the legendary golden sun that will grant one wishIf you have a bunch of eight-year-olds over for a sleepover and you’re looking for something to stick on the TV, you could do worse than this straight-to-streaming live-action adaptation of the animated show Dora the Explorer. It’s a follow-up of sorts to Dora and the Lost City of Gold from 2019, with a new star in the shape of Samantha Lorraine, and aimed at slightly older kids than the cartoon. There are action sequences looted from Raiders of the Lost Ark that had my eight-year-old squealing at the screen, though as it’s determined to be undemanding and inoffensive, it’s got that plasticky quality that middling kids’ films tend to have.Lorraine plays Dora, a teenage explorer who’s grown up in the Amazon, raised on her grandfather’s stories about the Incas. For years, Dora has been searching for clues to find Sol Dorado, a legendary golden sun that will g...

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