68 h. ago Google Christmas advert 2025 review: a breathtakingly cringe Love, Actually rip off

All of the Richard Curtis IP, none of the festive charm

Politics

3 d. ago The Beatles Anthology review – the incredible audio shows exactly why the world fell in love with this band

This update of the 1995 documentary series is utterly authoritative. And its tweak of the Fab Four’s songs is a thing of wonder – their music absolutely thumps! It would be wrong to go into The Beatles Anthology expecting another Get Back. Peter Jackson’s 2021 documentary did such a miraculous job of recontextualising the glum old footage from Let It Be, by setting it against an ingenious ticking clock device and expanding it out to become a maximalist feelgood avalanche, that it felt like you were watching something entirely new.But The Beatles Anthology is not new. If you saw the original series on television in 1995, or on YouTube at any point since, you’ll know what you’re in for. It is almost the exact same thing, only the images are sharper and the sound is better.The Beatles Anthology is on Disney+ now. Continue reading...

Culture

4 d. ago Dracula review – Luc Besson’s romantic reimagining of Gothic classic is ridiculous but watchable

While we don’t necessarily need another film version of Bram Stoker’s story, Besson’s has ambition and panache, and Caleb Landry Jones and Christoph Waltz are perfectly castPerhaps there is no great enthusiasm out there for a new version of Dracula from Luc Besson, the French maestro of glossiness and bloat. And yet it has to be said: his lavishly upholstered vampire romance has ambition and panache – and in all its Hammer-y cheesiness, I’m not sure I wouldn’t prefer to it to Robert Eggers’s recent, solemnly classy version of Nosferatu. There are some very bizarre touches, including one shot that appears to show a land border between France and Romania.Christoph Waltz plays a witty yet careworn vampire-hunting priest – I can’t believe he hasn’t played this role before – who finds himself in Paris in 1889 for the French Revolution centenary celebrations. So does the evil Count Dracula, played by the body-horror veteran Caleb Landry Jones with a mangled central European accent reminis...

Politics

2 w. ago The Secret Santa Project review – festive romcom tries for the Love Actually style multiple story strands

Set in a London council office, this clunky Christmas comedy interweaves a handful of storylines but musters only a brief flicker of cosy charmFeelgood Christmas romcoms are like school nativity plays: you can forgive a lot in return for a toasty warm festive glow. The Secret Santa Project, based on a book by Tracy Bloom and set in a London council’s accounting department, manages a brief flicker of cosy charm in places but in truth it’s bit of a Christmas clunker.Like Richard Curtis’s Love Actually this is a film with a handful of interwoven storylines. Samantha Giles plays Diane, the grinchy head of accounts who in the tradition of London romcoms walks to work over Westminster bridge past Big Ben; she would love to see Christmas cancelled and save the council a few pounds. Her husband Leon (Mark Williams) is a panto director, and Diane suspects he’s got a thing going on with Snow White. This plot line is not a million miles from Emma Thompson’s in Love Actually, but it bungles alo...

Politics

2 w. ago Die My Love review: Jennifer Lawrence goes bonkers brilliant in Lynne Ramsay’s wild return

Opposite husband Robert Pattinson, Lawrence is superb (and, yes, fun) as a new mother in mental meltdown

Events

2 w. ago Trespasses review – an intoxicating, rousing and heartbreaking love story

This adaptation of Louise Kennedy’s masterly novel, set in 70s Belfast, sees a Catholic teacher drawn into a dangerous affair with a Protestant barrister. It really hits a nerveWe could be happy together, if only we weren’t here and it wasn’t now: the tragedy of sweethearts caught up in conflict, their love overcome by others’ hate, is an old and powerful story. Trespasses, an adaptation of Louise Kennedy’s novel, written by Ailbhe Keogan, hits that nerve.A small town outside Belfast, 1975: rancour, suspicion and grief shadow every moment in the thwarted life of Cushla (Lola Petticrew), a Catholic primary-school teacher in her mid-20s who is giving up her spare time to work shifts in her brother’s pub. The priests at the school are hollering bigots, telling the children that every Protestant is an evil enemy, despite one of the kids being the son of a Catholic father and Protestant mother. Cushla takes an interest in the boy, who tends to arrive at school without a coat, and his eld...

Events

2 w. ago Trespasses review – Lola Petticrew’s captivating performance elevates this tale of forbidden love during the Troubles

Channel 4’s adaptation of Louise Kennedy’s novel, which also stars Gillian Anderson, feels like grown-up fare in tone and substance

Events

3 w. ago In Love With Love by Ella Risbridger review – a sexy celebration of romantic fiction

From Pride and Prejudice to Fifty Shades, a writer’s paean to the literature of desireEva Ibbotson, a doyenne of 1980s romantic fiction, once said self-deprecatingly that her books were aimed at “old ladies and people with flu”. To which Ella Risbridger, who is in her early 30s, sniffle-free and a devotee of Ibbotson’s “sexy and sweet” novels, has this cracking comeback: “If love is the most important thing, and to me it was and is, I want books that think that too.”From here Risbridger plunges into what she charmingly calls “a field guide to delight”. Jane Eyre rubs shoulders with Ice Planet Barbarians (the bright blue aliens who inhabit the ice planet turn out to be sexy in a Mr Rochester kind of way). Pride and Prejudice makes its inevitable appearance, flanked by its many modern iterations, including the ones with dragons. Mills & Boon novels of every stripe are accorded the kind of sustained attention more usually given to Proust, while Ju...

Politics

4 w. ago I Love LA review – Rachel Sennott’s HBO comedy finds itself but takes its time

The Shiva Baby and Bottoms star gets her own glossy sitcom which offers us a bumpy ride until it begins to take shape in the final stretchFor most of its public existence, I Love LA, HBO’s new comedy series created by Rachel Sennott, was known online as Untitled Rachel Sennott Project. One wonders if they should have kept the temporary moniker, which befits the show better than its actual title; though I Love LA does go to Erewhon, it’s less a love letter to the city, nor a portrait of its precarious creative class, than a glossy, prestige brand bet on Sennott, an internet It Girl with a distinctly modern indistinction between actor and celebrity, and the popular, chaotic, very online sensibility that she embodies.The logic of the project flowed downhill: Sennott, one of the few internet-bred comedians with real movie mettle (see: Shiva Baby, I Used To Be Funny and Bottoms), given eight whole episodes; HBO, continually losing younger viewers to YouTube, appealing to extremely online...

Culture

last month Heart the Lover by Lily King review – a love story to treasure

A companion novel to the brilliant Writers & Lovers, this delightfully witty tale of college romance matures into midlife poignancyThe university experience is a risky business in fiction. Generally, the feelings are intense, but the stakes are low; it’s all very formative for the individual character, but it can feel a bit trivial to anyone else. In fact, reading an account of someone’s university days is surely only one or two stages removed from having to hear about the dream they had last night.So my heart initially sank at Heart the Lover’s cover promise that our main character would soon be “swept into an intoxicating world of academic fervour, rapid-fire banter and raucous card games” – good grief, save me from the raucous card games! But obviously the caveat here is what it always is: a good writer will make it matter. I had faith, therefore, that everything would be all right, since Lily King is an exceptionally good writer. Indeed, she could probabl...

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