58 h. ago Goldbeak review – kids cartoon sends baby eagle to live in a chicken coop

Low-budget visuals drain the charm from this animated tale strangely reminiscent of Jonathan Livingston SeagullBirds of a feather flock together, unless you’re an eagle being raised in a community of chickens, per this animated family adventure. Orphaned in a plane crash (yes, eagles use planes), young Goldbeak is from a prominent political family and, naturally enough, he comes to realise he doesn’t exactly fit in with the hens and roosters with whom he is living. Notably, chickens are not known for their prowess at flying, and so he finds his literal wings metaphorically clipped, though he is desperate to soar above his contemporaries.Thematically, this is vaguely reminiscent of 1970s publishing hit Jonathan Livingston Seagull, a short allegorical fable about a frustrated gull who refuses to accept the limitations of his community and yearns to go beyond the limits of what seems possible. Here, though, Goldbeak’s exceptionalism is firmly rooted in biology, so maybe he’s more like ...

Politics

7 d. ago Badenoch calls for broader review of equality and gender recognition laws – UK politics live

‘These laws were written 20 years ago plus when the world was different,’ Tory leader saysThe chair of the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) has suggested that there may be legal challenges around the efficacy of gender recognition certificates (GRC) ahead.Asked on the BBC Radio 4 Today programme if yesterday’s supreme court ruling had rendered the legal document worthless, Kishwer Falkner said:I think the next stage of litigation may well be tests as to the efficacy of the GRC, and or other areas. We don’t believe they are [worthless]. We think they’re quite important.But I think there will be other areas, I mean, the Government is thinking of digital IDs, and if digital IDs come in, then what documentation will provide the identity of that person? So it’s going to be a space that we’ll have to watch very carefully as we go on.It’s a victory for common sense, but only if you recognise that trans people exist. They have rights, and their rights must be respected – then it ...

Politics

1 week ago Live Review: The Delines + Peter Bruntnell, Union Chapel, London – 4th April 2025

Live Review: The Delines + Peter Bruntnell, Union Chapel, London – 4th April 2025  Americana UK

Politics

1 week ago The Balcony Movie review – funny/sad film that offers a view into strangers’ lives

Pawel Lozinski’s documentary collects conversations with passers-by he talks to from the window of his Warsaw flatPolish film-maker Pawel Lozinski has curated this amusing, cumulatively melancholy documentary which he has shot from the first-floor balcony in his flat in the Saska Kępa district of Warsaw. Over a number of years, and with a microphone discreetly attached to the chainlink fence at street level, he simply calls down to people going past and asks them to stop and talk about something, anything.There are a lot of dog-walkers and people with babies; most people smile or grimace politely and say they are not special enough to be featured in a film. A priest says he can’t talk because he is carrying the Holy Sacrament. Others obligingly talk: one woman sings a rather beautiful song, a man talks about being homeless, having just got out of prison. People confide their sadness at the loss of a loved one, though one woman sheepishly confesses her profound happiness that her abu...

Culture

1 week ago Sugababes live in London review: Iconic girl group’s first arena tour brings career

Sugababes live in London review: Iconic girl group’s first arena tour brings career-spanning pop nostalgia  Rolling Stone UK

Society

1 week ago Live Review: Hattie Whitehead + Tessa Rose Jackson + Edward Randell, St Pancras Old Church, London – 3rd April 2025

Live Review: Hattie Whitehead + Tessa Rose Jackson + Edward Randell, St Pancras Old Church, London – 3rd April 2025  Americana UK

Events

2 w. ago A national prostate cancer screening programme is a step closer after Wes Streeting supports plan and orders review in major boost to Mail's campaign to save lives

The health secretary told MPs he would like to see the NHS proactively offer men tests for the disease in a move that could prevent thousands of needless deaths.

Politics

2 w. ago Fulham end Liverpool’s unbeaten run and Southampton sink – Football Weekly podcast

Max Rushden is joined by Barry Glendenning, John Brewin and Nooruddean Choudry as Fulham beat Liverpool 3-2 and Southampton are relegatedRate, review, share on Apple Podcasts, Soundcloud, Audioboom, Mixcloud, Acast and Stitcher, and join the conversation on Facebook, Twitter and email.On the podcast today; Liverpool suffer a second Premier league defeat of the season thanks to a great Fulham performance. Thwere were three goals in 13 first-half minutes as Liverpool at times looked they were already on the beach. Continue reading...

Politics

2 w. ago ‘Something to be proud of’: how an Irish town got a sewage makeover – and stopped discharging its waste into the sea

Arklow’s sleek new wastewater treatment plant is a collaborative triumph between engineers, contractors and architects Clancy Moore. And it’s amazingly unsmelly “Who’d want to live next to a sewage treatment plant?” asks the architect Andrew Clancy, who with his business partner Colm Moore runs the Dublin-based practice Clancy Moore. Who indeed, yet they have had to find a way to overcome precisely this difficulty. In the coastal town of Arklow, 40 miles south of the Irish capital, they have designed a wastewater facility that seeks to act as a landmark for the town, an agent of its renewal and growth, and a good neighbour to the homes and shops and places of work that it is hoped will be built alongside. The plant consists of two calm oblongs of mysterious scale, their long horizontals echoing the line where the sea meets the sky, plus a third more domestic structure alongside, all in a marine blue-green colour you could call pale teal.The project is in illustrious company. The tra...

Politics

2 w. ago A Minecraft Movie review – Jack Black and Jason Momoa star in seriously cobbled

Napoleon Dynamite director Jared Hess’s adventure based on the world’s favourite video game feels like one big cash-inIt’s a curious choice of title. A Minecraft Movie implies that this cynical intellectual property-rinsing exercise is one of numerous film adaptations of the enduringly popular sandbox video game. Perhaps there’s an alternative out there, a sharper, smarter, funnier version of a Minecraft movie. One with actual jokes. Or, God forbid, there may even be a worse iteration, although that’s hard to imagine. What becomes clear is that one of the key elements in the game’s popularity – the latitude it affords gamers to create their own experience – is a big stumbling block for any film adaptation of Minecraft.In the absence of a single fixed storyline the screenplay can follow, A Minecraft Movie has a cobbled-together feel, borrowing a device from Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle – and, in Jack Black, a star – and superimposing an all-purpose quest-for-an-artefact structure o...

Politics

3 w. ago The Rest of Our Lives by Ben Markovits review – a quietly brilliant midlife roadtrip

Once your kids are at university, what’s next for you? This compelling depiction of life at a crossroads is a male counterpart to Miranda July’s All FoursBen Markovits’s quietly excellent new novel begins with the most mundane of middle-class crises. The book’s narrator, 55-year-old law professor Tom Layward, is taking his youngest child to university. For Tom and his wife Amy, the major tasks of parenting are about to vanish in the rear view mirror. The question is: what’s next?It’s a moment of change and re-evaluation for any couple. But within Tom and Amy’s marriage an unexploded bomb is ticking. Tom tells us in the first paragraph that, 12 years earlier, Amy had an affair. He managed his heartbreak by making a deal with himself that he would leave when his youngest went to college. Continue reading...

Politics

3 w. ago LIVE REVIEW: MULIMBA + GIFTHORSE + Charlie Noordewier + Jack Gray at The Social, London

LIVE REVIEW: MULIMBA + GIFTHORSE + Charlie Noordewier + Jack Gray at The Social, London  Joyzine

Politics

3 w. ago Trump administration announces review of Harvard University’s federal contracts and grants – live

Education department announces review of Harvard’s $255.6m contracts and $8.7bn multi-year grant commitments amid allegations of antisemitism Immigration remains a strength for Donald Trump, but his handling of tariffs is getting more negative feedback, according to a poll from the Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research. About half of US adults approve of Trump’s approach to immigration, the survey shows, but only about four in 10 have a positive view of the way he’s handling the economy and trade negotiations. The poll indicates that many Americans are still on board with Trump’s efforts to ramp up deportations and restrict immigration. But it also suggests that the Republican president’s threats to impose tariffs – which have been accompanied by tumbling consumer confidence and wild stock market swings – might be erasing his advantage on another issue that he made central to his winning 2024 campaign. The economy was a drag on then president Joe Biden, who saw th...

Politics

3 w. ago Living Together review – how Austrians teach immigrants to find their place in society

New arrivals sit in drab spaces and are learn how to fit in, in a film that quietly addresses the costs of integration to minority groupsThomas Fürhapter’s documentary sheds light on the challenges of adjusting to a new culture as it follows a series of “integration classes” offered to immigrants in Vienna. The film opens in the nondescript corridors of an administrative building, which lead into sun-filled but impersonal meeting rooms where these sessions take place. As the participants discuss their worries and uncertainties, these colourless spaces transform into sites of passion and community.Conducted in multiple languages, the seminars grapple with culturally specific issues faced by different minority groups. Topics of discussion range from Austrian ways of greeting, to more serious concerns such as racism and domestic abuse. In talking about the present and the future, people also reveal pieces of their past: some moved to Austria for love, others fled the horrors of war. De...

Events

3 w. ago Sikandar Movie Review & Release Live update: Salman Khan's London fans dance in the theatre

Sikandar Movie Review & Release Live update: Salman Khan's London fans dance in the theatre  TOI Etimes

Culture

3 w. ago Our Beautiful Boys by Sameer Pandya review – teenage lives at the crossroads

A night of violence exposes the dynamics of race, masculinity and privilege at play in America’s schools The Marabar caves in A Passage to India represent the breakdown of order and communication as well as provoking the terrible accusation that drives EM Forster’s story. Sameer Pandya plays with a similar plot device in his compelling US-based novel, including an epigraph from Forster’s classic.It is set in southern California, where three teenage boys on the brink of adulthood – stars of their high school American football team with promising college careers ahead of them – attend a party at an abandoned house in the hills. Vikram is an Indian American, while Diego, who is Latino, lives with his academic mother. MJ is white with wealthy parents. Part of the pleasure of Pandya’s writing lies in his unravelling of identity politics – a theme explored in his debut, Members Only.Our Beautiful Boys by Sameer Pandya is published by Bloomsbury (£16.99). To support the Guardian and Observ...

Politics