18 h. ago Super Happy Forever review – glowing love story in reverse with echoes of Before Sunrise

In this beautifully acted film, a man returns to the Japanese seaside town where he met and fell in love with his wifeFor the first 40 minutes, this film’s title feels like a poke in the eye. There is nothing remotely happy about twentysomething Sano (Hiroki Sano). His wife has just died suddenly in her sleep, and Sano is visiting the sleepy Japanese seaside town where they met five years ago. He is rude and sullen, and obsessive about finding a red baseball cap he lost on that first visit. In the pain and anger of his grief, everyone sounds vapid and dumb, their words meaningless blah-blah-blah.It’s hard to see where the happy fits in, until the film flips back in time. In the same hotel five years ago, Sano first claps eyes on his wife Nagi (Nairu Yamamoto) in a chance meeting in the hotel lobby. Yamamoto gives the performance of the film as aspiring photographer Nagi: funny, scatty and earnest. She plays it so naturally, so true to life, that Nagi feels like someone you might hav...

Politics

68 h. ago Oasis at Cardiff review: killer setlist, brotherly love, history made

Oasis are back, and this first show of the reunion tour was suitably biblical

Events

4 d. ago Review: A Single Man is a beautifully raunchy display of lust, love and loss

There's not really many other tales of grief that can feature a sexy game of tennis, skinny-dipping and a bit of Bob Fosse

Politics

1 week ago Amol Rajan Goes to the Ganges review – ‘I miss his love. Oh god, I loved him so much’

In this deeply moving and cathartic film, the presenter confronts his father’s death by going on a holy pilgrimage and ends up releasing his soul in the sacred river. BeautifulThree years ago Amol Rajan’s father died unexpectedly of pneumonia. Ever since, as the BBC journalist and broadcaster puts it at the start of Amol Rajan Goes to the Ganges, “I’ve been in a bit of a funk.” I get it. As a fellow second-generation kid of Indian immigrants (and journalist from southwest London to boot) I, too, have been in a funk since my mother died (two years before Rajan’s father, at the same age, 76, as him). In Rajan’s case, his grief plunges him into a search for belonging and an attempt to reconnect with his Hindu roots. Where might such a quest take him? To the largest gathering of humanity on earth. The Kumbh Mela, where over 45 days at the start of this year half a billion Hindus gathered on the sacred banks of the Ganges. The question Rajan poses, and it’s a pertinent one for many, is w...

Events

2 w. ago Hotline TNT: Raspberry Moon review – love lights melodies through the fuzz

(Third Man Records)Will Anderson opens up on the NYC group’s third album, revealing an expansive articulacy to his take on 90s indie-rockThe third album by these New York-based indie-rockers rings some crucial changes. First, bandleader Will Anderson is in love, which alleviates some of the gloom that pervaded earlier records. And while the lyrics don’t amount to much on the page, when sung in unaffected deadpan and robed in artfully embellished shoegazey noise, Anderson’s elliptical poetics carry a compelling weight.Second, and more importantly, Anderson invited his bandmates into the studio to record Raspberry Moon. Where previous albums had been one-man affairs, with Anderson overdubbing layer upon layer of guitar and synth on his lonesome, the presence of other musicians in the room has shaken up the paradigm. Their trademark walls of fuzz remain, but Raspberry Moon also fields tracks such as Break Right, on which the happy/sad melodies flourish with space to breathe, and the lu...

Events

2 w. ago Ordinary Love by Marie Rutkoski review – some of the best sex scenes I’ve read this year

In this page-turning romance, teenage sweethearts reunite as thirtysomething womenSex is notoriously difficult to write. Some authors avoid it entirely; even those who have been called great can come a cropper. Which is why I want to start this review by saying that the sex scenes in Ordinary Love are some of the best I have read this year, and that Marie Rutkoski has a facility for writing physical intimacy that can elude even some of our most gifted authors. Her voice has been compared to that of Sally Rooney. I don’t see much of that in this novel beyond a Rooneyesque ability to write sex well, but that is a talent worth noting.Ordinary Love is a queer romance that tells the story of Emily and Gen, teenage sweethearts who break up in college and reunite in their 30s, their paths having diverged dramatically. Emily marries Jack, who is wealthy and emotionally abusive. When she sees Gen again, she is in the process of leaving him for the second time (the novel opens with ...

Politics

3 w. ago We Love Green: What London can learn from the Parisian version of All Points East

From location to lineup (and a fabulously French food offering), here’s why you should sack off one of your London day festival for Paris next summer

Politics

3 w. ago Brotherless Night by VV Ganeshananthan audiobook review – love and conflict in Sri Lanka

The civil war transforms a young trainee doctor’s life as she copes with her feelings for a Tamil Tiger in last year’s Women’s prizewinning novelBrotherless Night opens with 16-year-old Sashi Kulenthiren, who hopes to be a doctor like her eldest brother, making tea when the kettle slips out of her hand, causing her to pour boiling water on herself. When a neighbour, K, hears her screams, he rushes over to help, cracking raw eggs over the scalds to soothe the pain. “So I began as K’s patient though he ended as mine,” Sashi reflects.Set in 1980s Sri Lanka, VV Ganeshananthan’s coming-of-age novel – which won the 2024 Women’s prize for fiction – is an epic and hard-hitting tale of family and survival as it documents life during the civil war between Tamil separatists and the Sinhalese majority that lasted three decades. Before fighting breaks out, Sashi’s most pressing problem is whether she will pass her exams at school. But soon violence and kidnapping become the norm, communities are...

Events

3 w. ago Love Forms by Claire Adam review – the power of a mother’s loss

Forty years on, a Trinidadian woman has never stopped looking for the daughter she gave up for adoption, in a quietly devastating novelClaire Adam’s 2019 novel Golden Child was her debut, but it felt like the work of a master. It was tender, ravishing, shattering – you believed every word of it. The book had an effortless narrative authority that most first-time novelists would kill for.Love Forms is every bit as alive and convincing, and returns us to Trinidad, with its potent fizz of colour, heat and political instability. But unlike the earlier book, it’s also set partly in south London – the writer’s own home turf – and has a mother, rather than a father, at its heart. Continue reading...

Politics

3 w. ago Love & Rage: Munroe Bergdorf review – trans activist opens up about the toll visibility takes

Essex-born model and activist shows remarkable grace, resilience and honesty in the face of online vitriol and hostile TV interviewersWhen she was younger, Munroe Bergdorf didn’t want to be queer or black. “I just wanted to fit in. Now those are the two things that I love most about myself.” It would be almost impossible to watch this documentary about the trans model and activist without feeling a surge of admiration for her resilience and grace. Bergdorf hit the headlines with a hiring-and-firing scandal in 2017 when L’Oréal sacked her as the face of a UK campaign following Facebook comments she wrote in response to a white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia.Watching the backlash in Love & Rage, we see that Bergdorf didn’t hide away. She went on Good Morning Britain, where Piers Morgan snapped at her like an angry yorkshire terrier. Bergdorf is willing to share a platform with people who deny her existence, and it looks incredibly bruising at times. There’s a clip ...

Politics

3 w. ago Nico Raskin earns swooning review as Rangers mate showered in love amid £5m transfer exit push

The 24-year-old capped off the best season of his career with a game-changing cameo in the 4-3 win over Wales

Economics