12 h. ago Materialists review – Dakota Johnson torn between Pedro Pascal and Chris Evans in charming romcom

Johnson plays a matchmaker who has to choose between wealthy new suitor Pascal and broke ex Evans, but the outcome feels a little undramaticSay you are a single woman in New York and you are, in the words of the song, torn between two lovers: two handsome, intelligent, nice guys – one very poor and one very rich. All things being equal, who do you go for? The answer in real life is very different, in fact diametrically opposed, to the answer in a film. Few movie heroines have the candour of Jane Austen’s Elizabeth Bennet in Pride and Prejudice, who admitted to falling in love with Mr Darcy on seeing his beautiful grounds at Pemberley.But this is the choice, which never quite ascends to the state of a dilemma, in this charming and watchable – yet for me somehow anticlimactic – romantic comedy-drama from South Korean-Canadian film-maker Celine Song: a love-triangle confection to follow the much realer, truer love triangle of Song’s much acclaimed debut Past Lives. When the decision is...

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14 h. ago The Magician of Tiger Castle by Louis Sachar review – whimsical fantasy in a kingdom long, long ago

In this first adult novel from the acclaimed children’s author, an immortal magician returns to tell the story of a royal court where he cast his spells some 500 years beforeThe American author Louis Sachar’s most celebrated book, 1998’s YA novel Holes, was a huge word-of-mouth success on both sides of the Atlantic. Its short, punchy chapters tell the story of plump, hapless Stanley Yelnats, sent to a summer camp for wayward boys, where a terrifying Warden has peculiar ideas about character reformation. The 5ft-deep holes the boys are required to dig turn out to have a surprising purpose. Shifts of time, register and perspective render a simple premise mesmerisingly intricate. It has peril, love, crime, wickedness, redemption and friendship in, well, spades.A quarter of a century later, Sachar has written his first supposedly adult novel, in which many of the same ingredients reappear. A man “dressed like a typical American tourist”, but with an odd habit of storing cake crumbs in t...

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16 h. ago Oslo Stories Trilogy: Love review – gracefully grownup and breezy relationships drama

Doctor Marianne wonders if her gay colleague Tor’s approach to dating would work for her, in the second film of Dag Johan Haugerud’s absorbing trilogyHere is the second of Norwegian film-maker and novelist Dag Johan Haugerud’s seductive trilogy about affairs of the heart and mind, set in Oslo. (It comes between Sex and Dreams.) It is a thoroughly grownup and absorbing drama, acted with such sympathy and warmth, a ruminative and exploratory movie of ideas, and one that pays its audience the compliment of treating them as intelligent beings. Love is about a familiar question: can straight people learn from or even absorb the open and polygamous approach to sex that appears to come easier to gay people (and perhaps younger people of all sexualities), perhaps specifically gay men? Or is that idea stereotypical and naive?Andrea Braein Hovig plays Marianne, a urology consultant whose job it is to give bad news to a succession of men about their prostate cancer. She is single (though her p...

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16 h. ago Chasing the Dark by Ben Machell review – the original ghostbuster

An entrancing biography of Tony Cornell, who displayed a scientist’s commitment to impartiality as he investigated the paranormalMy first and only experience with a Ouija board occurred when I was 11, at a friend’s house. It was good, spooky fun until it wasn’t. I recall movement and the start of a message before we recoiled from the board. Later that evening, I learned that my grandfather had died. While I realise now that a boy with a terminally ill relative and a lurid imagination was not the most reliable witness, I remember wanting to believe that I’d had a brush with the uncanny.When Times journalist Ben Machell’s dying grandmother bequeathed him a crystal ball, he began idly searching for mediums and happened across the work of a man named Tony Cornell. Between 1952 and 2004, Cornell worked (unpaid and to the detriment of two marriages) for the Society for Psychical Research (SPR). Weeding out deception and delusion from accounts of paranormal activity to find out w...

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27 h. ago Live Review: The Libertines, Gunnersbury Park, London 09/08/2025

Live Review: The Libertines, Gunnersbury Park, London 09/08/2025  When The Horn Blows

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29 h. ago Fixed review – Netflix’s raunchy horny dog comedy wears thin

A filthy animated comedy about a dog preparing to be neutered offers some ribald humor but not much elseDogs dry humping humans, and whatever else they can get between their legs, is always good for a laugh – at least when we’re looking down on these adorable house pets, as they satisfy their base instincts, from above. Fixed, the filthy animated comedy unleashed on Netflix with a content warning that should apply to this review as much as the movie, both indulges in and tests our limits when it comes to that humour, largely by getting down (on all fours) and dirty with its hand-drawn canines.Here’s a movie with talking pets that rarely rises above a bull terrier’s vantage point. Humans remain mostly out of frame. We see their legs – a regular scene of the crime – but never their faces. In the opening minutes, we’re right there with Bull (voiced by Pitch Perfect’s Adam DeVine), the movie’s pudgy un-neutered protagonist, as he works hard to bust a nut on his household’s nana. Continu...

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36 h. ago Unmoored review – Scandi thriller delves into hidden truths of a toxic marriage

Atmospheric but unresolved drama pits a seedy academic against his ill-used wife, uneasily staying by him as he faces a rape chargeExpectations are raised high, but not satisfyingly met, in this initially intriguing and certainly atmospheric Scandi thriller that ranges from Sweden to Poland and Exmoor in England; it teases hints of Gone Girl and Patricia Highsmith. Screenwriter-producer Michèle Marshall has adapted 2014 novel The Living and the Dead in Winsford by veteran Swedish crime writer Håkan Nesser, and Caroline Ingvarsson makes her feature directing debut.The scene is the stylish home of a Swedish power couple. Maria (Mirja Turestedt) is the presenter of an popular TV talkshow, and she is married to the older Magnus (Thomas W Gabrielsson), a star academic with a drinking problem and a seedy reputation for infidelity. Maria is a former student of Magnus and has, in fact, surpassed him intellectually, now faintly despising herself for her middlebrow job as well as for editing ...

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36 h. ago Sziget 2025 review – Post Malone is a lively, unserious showman, while Chappell Roan is at the top of her game

Watching the 30-year-old ping between country rock, pop-rap, and balladic R&B ought to be whiplash-inducing, but there’s a strange unity to his set

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37 h. ago Flow Festival 2025, review – Charli xcx, Burna Boy and FKA Twigs headline but Finland’s own hold their ground

Finnish artists went toe-to-toe with some of the world’s biggest headliners at the European festival last weekend, and often had a bolder reception

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38 h. ago The Benson Diary by AC Benson review – musings of an Edwardian elitist

At four million words he beats Pepys, but the daily jottings of a judgmental don fail to transcend his rather stuffy millieuAC Benson is remembered today, if at all, for having edited three volumes of Queen Victoria’s letters and for writing Land of Hope and Glory to accompany Elgar’s first Pomp and Circumstance march – though, like Elgar, he came to dislike the vainglorious imperial sentiments that the words express – “vulgar stuff and not my manner at all”. Born in 1862, he began his working life as a school master at Eton, before moving on in 1904 to Magdalene College, Cambridge, where he was first a fellow and then master.Notably, he left voluminous diaries – over four million words, filling 180 bound volumes – four times the length of the diaries of Samuel Pepys, who had been an undergraduate at Magdalene. Benson was well connected and knew most of the political and literary elite of late Victorian and Edwardian Britain, so one might have expected him to offer a similarly ...

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50 h. ago Lucy Letby: Who to Believe? review – just when you thought this case couldn’t get any more confusing

Panorama’s new investigation into the convicted nurse is muddled and stuffed with conflicting theories. It feels more like radio phone-in bickering than serious journalismIn May 2024, the New Yorker published an article with the headline “A British nurse was found guilty of killing seven babies. Did she do it?” Access to the online version of Rachel Aviv’s piece was banned in the UK due to reporting restrictions, with Letby’s retrial on an additional count of attempted murder then imminent. Rules aside, asking whether Letby was in fact innocent also felt taboo at the time, a pursuit for social media conspiracy theorists. Fast forward 15 months, and “did she do it?” is merely par for the course when it comes to the case, with even experts cited by the prosecution apparently unconvinced of Letby’s guilt.This new Panorama comes hot on the heels of an ITV documentary that aired earlier this month, Lucy Letby: Beyond Reasonable Doubt?. That programme focused on holes in the evidence that...

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58 h. ago Malqueridas review – blurry phone footage takes us inside Chile’s prisons with incarcerated mothers

Video shot by inmates opens the doors on the often painful realities of having children in the country’s jailsThis documentary about motherhood in Chile’s prison system is edited down from 4,000 photos and nearly 2,000 videos shot entirely on mobile phones by inmates of the country’s largest women’s jail. Phones are banned, so the images are often fuzzy and blurred, clips ending abruptly – sometimes with a hiss of “Hide the phone!” or “The guard is coming!”. At times, it can be hard to make sense of what is happening on screen. The voiceover is spoken by Karina Sánchez, who spent more than six years in prison, and she also voices the experiences of other incarcerated women. It’s not immediately clear she is telling multiple stories, however, so the voiceover becomes mildly disorientating.It’s estimated that 95% of women in Chile’s prisons are mothers, and their children can stay with them in jail until they turn two years old. A woman describes staying awake all night the night befo...

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61 h. ago Tiny Bookshop review – a truly cosy escape made with readers in mind

PC; Neoludic GamesReal titles from Shakespeare to John Green line the shelves of your seaside shop in a rhythmic, mellow management simulator worth relaxing intoIt is a rare thing in my experience that a resource management simulator, set in a retail or service environment, can strike the precise tone and pace that manages to evoke both interest and relaxation. As a player who previously worked as a bookseller, and currently is a novelist, I am poised to be extremely stressed out by a game set in a mobile bookshop. However, Tiny Bookshop is crafted with such care and balance that I found myself losing hours to the gentle pace and tiny puzzles and sheer escapism of the world it presents.The setup is simple, and one that is common to many games in the post Stardew Valley era of “cosy” games. You throw in your old life and open a shop selling tiny things you are passionate about to a bustling little community full of interesting characters who you progressively develop relationships wi...

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62 h. ago Dawn Dusk review – handbag designer deals with grief over murdered sister and dead friend

Not long out of high school, Chelli is finding her way through awful grief for her best friend, and for her sister, but this documentary loses sight of its subjectChicago-based Chelli Look, the subject at the centre of this diffuse documentary, seems like a nice person, with a talent for designing and making minimalist leather handbags. Not long out of high school, the best friend with whom she planned to start a business died in a car accident. Then her elder sister, Megan Henneberg, was murdered in 2007 by her husband Brian, leaving Chelli, her parents, siblings and extended family to deal with the harrowing loss.And yet, no matter how much sympathy you might feel for Chelli and her family’s trauma, or interest you might have in her bagmaking skills, or engagement with her as a person, somehow those core components don’t coalesce to make this feature-length documentary feel vital or even especially necessary. A self-described introvert, Chelli herself is a pretty opaque figure alt...

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62 h. ago The Adversary by Michael Crummey review – dark humour and depravity at the edge of the Earth

This prize-winning take on a biblical tale set in 1800s Newfoundland is grim, but has energy, empathy – and a wickedly colourful way with wordsSeveral years have passed since Michael Crummey’s last novel The Innocents was published in the UK in 2020. A pandemic has since occurred and, appropriately perhaps, The Adversary begins on a dark note of contagion. “There was a killing sickness on the shore that winter and the only services at the church were funerals,” runs the opening line, setting the tone for a book that plumbs the depths of depravity but – thanks to its energy, and its ripe and adventurous language – never loses a black sense of humour. Having now won the 30th annual Dublin Literary award, worth €100,000, The Adversary is proof that Crummey is beginning to garner the accolades he deserves beyond his native Canada.Crummey hails from Newfoundland; all six of his novels are set there. He understands the power of lashing sea, scouring wind, an eked-out existence far from wh...

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64 h. ago Alexandrian Sphinx by Peter Jeffreys and Gregory Jusdanis review – the mysterious life of Constantine Cavafy

The enigmatic queer poet admired by EM Forster and Jackie Onassis takes centre stage in this unconventional biographyThe second floor of 10 Rue Lepsius, tucked away in the old Greek quarter of Alexandria above a brothel, was, for three decades, the literary focal point of the city. Entering the apartment, out of the Mediterranean sun, visitors would need a minute to adjust to the dimness, gradually perceiving faded curtains and heavy furniture, every surface covered with antiques and whimsical objects. There was no electricity, only candlelight. The host, proffering morsels of bread and cheese from the shadows, was an older man with “enigmatic eyes” beneath round spectacles – the poet Constantine Cavafy.What kind of person might be discerned amid the gloom? This is what Peter Jeffreys and Gregory Jusdanis set out to discover in their deeply researched and engaging biography, the first for 50 years. They brilliantly recreate his world – two chapters about Alexandria are especially go...

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3 d. ago Lily Phillips: Crying review – laughing through the toxic positivity around childbirth

Monkey Barrel, EdinburghAmusing vignettes about arrogant consultants and undignified poos keep things light as Phillips documents a harrowing hospital experienceExpectations and reality don’t always align when it comes to childbirth. Lily Phillips (not that one, she assures us, getting good mileage from her porn star namesake) thought she was well informed. She’d gone through a long process of IVF to get there, attended NCT classes, and, when labour started, she was ready for the if not serene then empowering birthing experience and magical moment of immediate love that would follow.Instead, she discovered that “birth is barbaric and early motherhood is brutal”. Yet even her NCT WhatsApp group, where she turned after a harrowing hospital experience, requested “no negative birth stories, please”. Crying does a lot to redress the balance and cuts through the “toxic positivity” surrounding childbirth that left Phillips feeling alone. Continue reading...

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3 d. ago Trump administration threatens to strip Harvard University of lucrative patents

White House escalates offensive on Ivy League university by calling for review of federally funded researchThe latest phase of the Trump administration’s offensive against Harvard University is a comprehensive review of the university’s federally funded research programs, and the threat to strip the school’s lucrative portfolio of patents.In a letter to the Harvard president, Alan Garber, posted online on Friday, Donald Trump’s commerce secretary, Howard Lutnick, accused Harvard of breaching its legal and contractual requirements tied to federally funded research programs and patents. Continue reading...

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4 d. ago Mektoub My Love: Canto Due review – gobsmackingly weird series drops another surreal sex shocker

Locarno film festivalBlue Is the Warmest Colour director Abdellatif Kechiche’s latest erotic melodrama delivers another heady dose of flirting, farce and bafflementSo here it is – the third but, incredibly, perhaps not the final episode in the most bizarre arthouse franchise in film history, and which, for its sheer melodramatic ker-aziness it commands attention. So, as it were, previously on Mektoub My Love The first film in the series from Tunisian-French director Abdellatif Kechiche, who had won the Cannes Palme d’Or for Blue Is the Warmest Colour (for which he was famously required to share the award with his two acting leads Adèle Exarchopoulos and Léa Seydoux), arrived in 2017. This first MML (called Mektoub My Love: Canto Uno) turned out to be an epic erotic summer romance set in the early 90s about a guy called Amin (Shaïn Boumedine) who comes back from Paris to his hometown of Sète, having abandoned his medical studies to follow his dream of being a screenwriter, and finds ...

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4 d. ago Mare’s Nest review – an opaque, challenging reflection on the end of the world

Locarno film festivalBen Rivers’s cine-poem, based on Don DeLillo’s climate crisis play The Word for Snow, follows a child’s strange encounters as she wanders in a postapocalyptic world devoid of adultsEnglish experimentalist Ben Rivers offers up another challenging, intriguing cine-poem, this time on the nature of existence and the end of the world. It is opaque but with flashes of strange brilliance, an adaptation of The Word for Snow, a one-act stage play by Don DeLillo from 2007 that reflected on the climate crisis.A child called Moon (Moon Guo Barker) wanders around a strange world, entirely peopled by other children, except for one eerie monochrome sequence in which Moon sees adult figures in some kind of underground tunnel, frozen in attitudes of dismay similar to the citizenry of Pompeii. In the course of her travels, bookended by clambering out of a crashed car and finally driving happily off, Moon has dreamlike encounters with these children who speak with the tongues of a...

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