8 d. ago House of Guinness on Netflix review: this 'stout Succession' is no Peaky Blinders

Peaky Blinders creator Steven Knight is back with a period drama that applies his tried and tested formula to 19th-century Ireland

Politics

8 d. ago House of Guinness on Netflix review: this Stout Succession tries and fails to split the G

Peaky Blinders creator Steven Knight is back with a period drama that applies his tried and tested formula to 19th-century Ireland

Events

8 d. ago House of Guinness review – James Norton’s pheromones positively sizzle off the screen

With smarts, heart and serious sex appeal, this fine drama from Peaky Blinders’ Steven Knight is an irresistible romp – like Succession, only over a booze empire. Knight has never made a better show than thisYou may judge a show’s success by the number of imitators that follow: to see how much TV commissioners envied the popularity of Slow Horses, look at the recent uptick in wry dramas about spies and/or shambling outcasts who work in a grotty basement but get the job done. Another show with that status is Peaky Blinders, writer Steven Knight’s swaggering epic about a (real) Birmingham crime gang between the wars.What’s unusual about the post-Blinders shows is that the author of the towering original has tended to write the pretenders to the throne himself: Knight sought to develop the formula earlier this year with A Thousand Blows, a series about a different historical crime gang, and with his new Netflix show House of Guinness, he seems to be mining the same seam. The family her...

Politics

2 w. ago Swiped review – Lily James leads a girlboss Social Network that is half film, half Bumble advert

This Disney+ biopic treats Whitney Wolfe Herd’s often harrowing experiences in the male-dominated tech industry with appropriate seriousness, but ultimately becomes a bland PR exercise

Economics

2 w. ago Kerry James Marshall review – astonishing visions of black America, from bar

Royal Academy, London Kidnappings, enslavement, cops and squad cars, golfers, picnics, croquet-players, interstellar travellers the US artist’s largest ever European show takes in an extraordinary range of experience in a breathtaking showBiting, funny, astonishing, difficult, surprising, erudite and hugely ambitious, Kerry James Marshall’s The Histories is the largest show of the black American’s work ever held in Europe. Its effects are cumulative. The Histories charts the 69-year-old painter’s intellectual as well as practical development, his themes, his switches of media and of focus and attention. Everything is here for a reason.How engaging Marshall’s art is, from the first. He takes us from the bar to the bedroom, to the Middle Passage, from the studio to the academy, from the beauty parlour to the dancehall. He paints scenes of kidnappings and of enslavement in Africa and of a black cop sitting on the hood of his squad car – I love the jagged stylised flare of the streetlig...

Politics

3 w. ago James McAvoy allegedly assaulted in Toronto bar after promoting directorial debut

Actor was in city for its annual film festival when he was reportedly attacked

Events

3 w. ago James McAvoy assaulted in Toronto bar after promoting directorial debut

Actor was in city for its annual film festival when he was reportedly attacked

Events

3 w. ago James McAvoy 'attacked by stranger' in bar with wife while in Canada for film premiere

James McAvoy was reportedly attacked by a stranger in a bar in Toronto, Canada, while in the city for the premiere of his directorial debut film California Schemin'

Politics

3 w. ago James McAvoy 'attacked by stranger' while in Canadian pub with wife

James McAvoy has reportedly been attacked while visiting Toronto for the premiere of his directorial debut California Schemin'.

Events

3 w. ago James McAvoy 'punched by man in Toronto bar as security intervene to help him'

The actor, 46, was in Canada for the premiere of his directorial debut California Schemin' at the Toronto International Film Festival on Sunday.

Events

3 w. ago Brave the Dark review – delinquent teen drama comes off as if James Dean met Mr Chips

Warmly drawn melodrama based on a true story follows a delinquent teen taken under the wing of his kindly drama teacherHere is a sincere and traditional melodrama that opens with a brief sequence that slightly wrongfoots the audience: a small child running at night through a setting that calls to mind little Danny in the hedge maze in The Shining. But this is no horror movie; there is past trauma and tragedy a-plenty, but for the most part, this is a warm-hearted drama that plays out like a modern Mr Chips story.Based on the real life of the protagonist Nate (Nicholas Hamilton), a delinquent youth in 1980s America, the film’s focus is on his relationship with drama teacher Mr Deen (Jared Harris); Deen is a likable but lonely man whose tendency to generosity reaches its apogee when he takes on Nate as a personal project after a series of bad choices by the troubled teen. Deen reveals at one point that as a youngster he harboured acting ambitions, with James Dean a particular touchsto...

Events

3 w. ago California Schemin’ review – James McAvoy’s directorial debut is an unlikely rap tale

Toronto film festival: the actor makes for a hit-and-miss first time film-maker with the undeniably involving true story of Scottish rappers who pretended to be AmericanAt the start of the century, a struggling Scottish rap duo decided to overhaul their image in extreme fashion: they began posing as two Americans from California, and managed to secure themselves a record deal with a label in London. Eventually the hoax was revealed, and one of them released a memoir about the charade. That wild story has now been adapted into a film, California Schemin’, which marks the alternately confident and unsteady directorial debut of actor James McAvoy.McAvoy is a son of Scotland himself, and perhaps feels some kinship with rappers Gavin Bain and Billy Boyd, who found the cultural tastemakers of the south to be indifferent or even hostile to Scottish artists. Though McAvoy has fared just fine as an actor, Bain and Boyd – who would come to be known as Silibil N’ Brains – had a much tougher go...

Politics