4 h. ago Primavera 2025 review: eclipsed the hype in a blaze of glitter

With Charli, Sabrina, and Chappell as the pop girl headliners, Barcelona’s big festival was never going to fail

Politics

5 h. ago What is the spending review? Everything Rachel Reeves could announce to fix UK economy

The Independent looks at what the spending review is, why the government has launched one and what is expected to be in it

Economics

5 h. ago How to Train Your Dragon review – faithful yet utterly soulless remake

DreamWorks tries to find success with the Disney live-action remake template but falls shortIt was only a matter of time before DreamWorks jumped on the lucrative live-action remake bandwagon with its soulless new How to Train Your Dragon. Disney has been playing this cynical game since 1994 – releasing their Jungle Book remake (the one starring Jason Scott Lee) the same year DreamWorks was founded – and striking gold with Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland (2010), which arrived in theatres just weeks before the original How To Train Your Dragon landed.It also comes as no surprise that DreamWorks moved with Night Fury speed to revisit a movie that’s only 15 years old. As the recent Lilo & Stitch proved, there’s plenty box office gold to mine from introducing new children to a young and beloved property, while banking on the nostalgia that a generation without fully formed frontal lobes would carry for the not-so-distant animated films and TV spinoffs they were weaned on. Continue ...

Politics

6 h. ago Spending review latest: Fears ‘staggering’ cuts may be required by Rachel Reeves

Chancellor is set to unveil plans for all department funding on Wednesday

Politics

7 h. ago Lib Dems denounce new Reform UK chair as ‘Trump sycophant’ – UK politics live

Daisy Cooper says doctor and presenter David Bull once appeared on TalkTV with his ear bandaged after the assassination attempt against TrumpReeves is now taking questions.The first comes from a delegate who says the proposed welfare cuts are wrong. Will the government think again? Continue reading...

Politics

8 h. ago Echo Valley review – Julianne Moore and Sydney Sweeney suspense thriller stretches credulity

A mother and her drug-abusing daughter are entangled in a far-fetched crime plot involving scary dealers and hastily disposed bodiesBrad Ingelsby, creator of TV’s Mare of Easttown, has written an enticing-looking suspense thriller which Michael Pearce directs and Ridley Scott co-produces. And with the acting A-team of Julianne Moore and Sydney Sweeney in the leads, and rock-solid support from Fiona Shaw and Domhnall Gleeson, things look promising. But Sweeney is absent from the drama for too long for the central relationship to be satisfyingly dramatised. And after an intriguing opening, the convoluted narrative doesn’t merely jump the shark but lies down and lets the shark jump over it before the pair of them charleston their way across the rolling Pennsylvanian farmland where the film is supposed to be set.Moore plays Kate, a lonely and unhappy grieving woman who trains horses and gives riding lessons on the farm she now precariously owns. She is divorced from a testy and judgemen...

Politics

8 h. ago Spending review latest: Starmer says ‘no more dithering’ over nuclear power amid £14bn Sizewell C plan

Chancellor signs off on £14.2 billion of investment to build the new Sizewell C nuclear plant

Economics

10 h. ago Juliet & Romeo review – Rebel Wilson and Jason Isaacs cameo in syrupy Shakespeare musical

With bare-faced cheek, this bardless take replaces all the original language with olden-days-effect prose – adding singing, dancing and a pointlessly starry castDirector and former stage actor Timothy Scott Bogart is best known for having made Spinning Gold, a biopic of his father Neil Bogart, the New York music producer and founder of the 70s disco-era label Casablanca Records. Now he has confected a syrupy new musical take on Romeo and Juliet, with music by his brother Evan Kidd Bogart (who won a Grammy for his work on Beyoncé’s single Halo).Bogart retells the basic story but with Shakespeare’s language all removed and replaced with olden-days-effect prose: a kind of bardless Baz Luhrmann. Ultimately – with what I do have to admit is some amiable cheek – Bogart contrives to do for this play what Nahum Tate did for King Lear. It’s really pretty bland, and with each turn in the plot you have to ask what the point of it actually is. Continue reading...

Politics

10 h. ago Spending review latest: Government accused of not ‘coming clean’ over full costs of Sizewell C nuclear plant

Chancellor signs off on £14.2 billion of investment to build the new Sizewell C nuclear plant

Economics

12 h. 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

12 h. ago Against Identity by Alexander Douglas review – a superb critique of contemporary self

A philosopher challenges us to forget about ourselves in this powerfully strange counterblast to identity fetishismIdentity is something socially negotiated, both claimed and given. I cannot be French if that nation does not exist; I can’t be a doctor if no one will grant me a medical degree. Social media, however, promises that we can don or doff identities like so many digital masks. We may become persuaded that identities are private goods over which we have rights of ownership and choice, that we can freely select what we “identify as”. The heightened salience of identity in modern political discourse thus represents an unwitting internalisation of the neoliberal view of humans as atomised individuals who navigate life purely by expressing consumer preferences.The idea that the identity of the speaker should count when assessing his or her argument is what the right used to denounce as “identity politics” (now subsumed under the general concept of “wokeness”), tho...

Politics

14 h. ago Saraswati by Gurnaik Johal review – an ambitious Indian panorama

In the first novel from the author of We Move, descendants of a proscribed intercaste marriage are connected across continents and centuriesGurnaik Johal’s first book, 2022’s We Move, demonstrated how rewarding it can be for a gifted young writer to ignore conventional wisdom. Writers who land in agents’ inboxes with collections of stories are invariably told to come back when they have a novel, and to write about what they know. Johal’s stories were set in a world he knows intimately – the immigrant communities of west London – but they moved between professions and generations with thrilling confidence.Saraswati is also populated by a large cast of diaspora Punjabis. But where Johal’s collection stood apart from the landscape it was published into, his first novel is a representative example of a ubiquitous 21st-century genre. That genre lacks a name – in 2012, Douglas Coupland proposed “translit”, which didn’t catch on then and certainly won’t now – but its features are all ...

Politics

14 h. ago Blix Not Bombs review – former UN weapons inspector revisits the Iraq war

Greta Stocklassová’s documentary films Hans Blix, aged 97, and asks about his role in the war, WMD, and why his world of diplomacy has now disappearedAt the age of 97, entirely lucid, still writing books and physically spry enough to be shown swimming in a Norwegian lake, former UN weapons inspector Hans Blix has given an extended interview to the Czech-born Swedish film-maker Greta Stocklassová about his life and times, about George W Bush Jr, Saddam Hussein and the weapons of mass destruction that were not there. The result is insightful and a vivid time capsule for the grim and mendacious era of the “war on terror”, during which Blix was tasked with discovering the truth about Saddam’s supposed weapons. The film is also unexpectedly spiky, with Blix at one stage threatening to walk out, as Stocklassová presses him on his apparent fence-sitting, then as now, insisting on an absence of evidence for WMD but also reluctant to commit himself definitively to this being evidence of abse...

Events

14 h. ago Mario Kart World review – a riotous road trip for every player

Nintendo Switch 2; NintendoThe Nintendo Switch 2’s flagship game is a winner, and often feels more like a journey with your friends than a straight competitionI realised that we might have a Mario Kart World problem in our house when my sons ran up to me after our first few hours with the game, proudly showing off circular indentations on their little thumbs from holding down the accelerator button so hard. Mildly alarmed, I examined my own thumb to find the same evidence of getting over-absorbed in the knockabout, chaotic fun of our tournaments. You can play Mario Kart online now – even with video chat, in World – but it’s just not the same as playing with people on the couch next to you. I imagine this game will revive living-room multiplayer for millions of families.God only knows how many hours I have spent racing Mario and his pals around their cartoon wonderland circuits since 1992 – this series has accompanied me through my entire life, the reliable mainstay that everyone wan...

Sport

23 h. ago Governors Ball 2025: Olivia Rodrigo and Hozier reign over New York festival

While there were less zeitgeisty moments in this edition, acts like Young Mikoand Benson Boone still brought energy to New York’s cheaper CoachellaFor the past year, I have dined out on the story of being in the Sunday crowd at last year’s Governor’s Ball. That sweltering afternoon in the sun, the largest crowd of New York’s premier music festival – more than could fit on the lawn of Flushing Meadows Corona Park in Queens – gathered at an unusual hour for a mid-bill set. If you’re lucky, there are a few times in the life of a regular concertgoer when it is not just another great show, when you can feel the gravity of the zeitgeist shift. Chappell Roan, dressed as the Statue of Liberty and ferried to the stage in a giant apple, belting Red Wine Supernova to a sea of pink cowboy hats in one of the loudest sing-backs I have ever heard, is one of those times, a clear sonic boom of a cultural rocket taking off.Roan’s star-making moment turned out to be a stake in the ground of a tentpole...

Politics

30 h. ago Nectar mattress review 2025: A comfy and versatile option for every type of sleeper

The brand’s eco-credentials and warranty impress, but can its mattresses rival the bed-in-a-box leaders?

Politics

30 h. ago Yoshitomo Nara review: cutesy terrors swear, smoke, play guitar and burn down houses

Hayward Gallery, LondonThe Japanese artist’s instantly recognisable delinquent infants fill a huge show that also includes more sombre – and still angry – work made since the Fukushima disasterThere’s a video online of 100 kids playing football against three adult pros. The kids get absolutely annihilated. But they’d do a whole lot better if they were more like the menacing, knife-wielding little terrors who populate Japanese artist Yoshitomo Nara’s world. Try dribbling past a toddler when he’s just jabbed a shiv in your calf, Lionel Messi.For 40 years now Nara has been dealing in cutesy kitsch with a vicious edge. His paintings and drawings of adorably bug-eyed little nippers are singularly Nara: love it or hate it, he’s carved out his own instantly recognisable aesthetic path. Continue reading...

Events

31 h. ago Saul review – probing, dark and engrossing staging of Handel’s oratorio

Glyndebourne, SussexBarrie Kosky’s remarkable 2015 production returns to the summer festival with Christopher Purves and Iestyn Davies superb in the lead rolesThe Glyndebourne season continues with a revival by Donna Stirrup of Barrie Kosky’s 2015 staging of Handel’s Saul, widely regarded as one of the festival’s finest achievements and the production that cemented Kosky’s reputation in the UK as a director of remarkable originality. This is the first time I’ve seen it, having missed both its opening run and the 2018 revival, and it strikes me as an example of Kosky’s work at its finest: probing, insightful, sometimes witty, sometimes dark, always utterly engrossing.Premiered in 1739, Saul has often been compared to King Lear. There is much of Shakespeare in this portrait by Handel and his librettist, Charles Jennens, of the Old Testament king whose mind slowly disintegrates under the challenges presented to him politically and privately by David after the death of Goliath. Continue...

Politics

32 h. ago Mythica: Stormbound review – new chunk of swords and sorcery tale ripe for avid franchise audience

The sixth instalment in this low-budget series has a meagre plot and shonky visual effects but the director and cast clearly care about the franchise’s audienceThis low-budget but reasonably competent swords and sorcery yarn is the sixth instalment in a series of Mythica films that goes back to 2014. It seems they were first bankrolled partly by crowdfunding, and then presumably kept going by the production’s low overheads and straight-to-retail distribution to an audience that clearly grooves to quasi-Tolkienian, Dungeons and Dragons-style quests featuring a motley band (there is usually an elf or dwarf). If you like your necromancy tales spiked with huge chunks of nattering as the characters endeavour to bulk out the running time with lots of banter and exposition, this may be just the ticket. Don’t worry too much about not having seen the other five films because this is reasonably watchable, especially as so much time is devoted to filling newbies in on the backstory via dialogu...

Events

33 h. ago Pitbull review – like a children’s party, but with loads of booze

Co-Op Live, ManchesterWith a hedonistic seize-the-day message, the pop-rapper resembles a cult leader or motivational speaker – and his followers are willing to overlook the faults in his live showPitbull is trying to give over 20,000 people a language lesson. “I want to teach you a little bit of Spanish,” he says to the crowd, about 90% of whom are dressed in Mr Worldwide cosplay of bald caps, aviators and squiggly hand-drawn facial hair. The phrase he’s teaching? “Yo no quiero agua, yo quiero bebida”, which in English translates to “I don’t want water, I want a drink”. As people used to say: yolo.This is the vibe of Pitbull’s Party After Dark tour, which returns to the UK for its second run this year. It’s a relentless ride through the era of hedonistic and carefree EDM pop that sprouted up after the 2008 financial crisis, and given renewed economic uncertainty and horrific global events, it’s unsurprising that people are still seeking escapism. Why shouldn’t that be delivered by ...

Society