3 h. ago Greg Larsen: Geggy review – a very funny standup on why he’s quitting comedy

Melbourne international comedy festival, then SydneyAssured performer leads a chaotic journey through his career’s highs and lows – and the decisions that led him to a McDonald’s drive thru Greg Larsen is broke. Having his card declined at a McDonald’s drive thru just weeks before this year’s Melbourne international comedy festival was a watershed moment for him. He is 41. He’s been performing comedy for more than a decade. This, he says, is his last festival show. He’s done.Geggy is his swan song, a chaotic journey through his career’s highs and lows and the decisions that led him to that drive thru. For those who have followed Larsen’s career, this show is a treat, offering a hilarious insight into the chaos behind the scenes of the various projects he’s been involved in. It includes a cast of others who rose through the circuit with him, many of whom are doing pretty well for themselves, including Larsen’s early collaborator Sam Campbell.Sign up for the fun stuff with our rundown...

Politics

16 h. ago Delusions of Paradise by Maiwand Banayee review – a compelling rejection of fundamentalism

An Afghan exile’s account of life in war-torn Kabul and a Taliban-dominated refugee camp is an unflinching study of how radicalisation takes root, and his own renunciation of itBorn in Kabul, Maiwand Banayee aspired to become a Talib when he was 16. In 1994, living in a Pakistan refugee camp, there was little to do except sleep, eat, pray and dream of the afterlife: “Islam dominated every aspect of life in Shamshatoo. Even during the volleyball and cricket games the spectators were prevented from clapping because it was seen as un-Islamic.” Banayee joined the camp’s madrasa when he was 14 in an attempt “to fit in”. The only educational opportunity open to Afghans at that time, the religious school offered structure and purpose, although “instead of teaching us to live, they were teaching us to die”.In this illuminating book, Banayee, now resident in England, describes the circumstances that led to his indoctrination, and what eventually saved him. Brutalised by conflict, his Pashtun...

Politics

18 h. ago Blue Road: The Edna O’Brien Story review – richly bittersweet portrait of an Irish literary great

The dizzy highs and painful lows of the late writer’s life are laid bare in Sinéad O’Shea’s moving documentaryHer raw, sexually and emotionally frank prose made her a sensation and got the Irish Catholic church hot under the cassock. She was an eloquent wit, a provocateur who could hold her own in literary circles and in the glittering party circuit of 1960s London. It’s now widely acknowledged that she was one of the greats of Irish literature. But the slightly bitter aftertaste left by this otherwise richly enjoyable documentary portrait of the writer Edna O’Brien comes from the decades of bullying and ridicule she had to endure before her talent was fully recognised.Much of it originated uncomfortably close to home: Blue Road, which features interviews with the 93-year-old O’Brien shortly before her death last year, tells of her tumultuous marriage to fellow writer Ernest Gébler, who was not a man able to graciously accept the fact that his wife’s success had eclipsed his own. Je...

Politics

19 h. ago Sister Europe by Nell Zink review – ramshackle wanderers in Berlin

Zink’s seventh novel, about a night of conversation and adventure, is full of wit and marvellous writing, but ultimately trails offCalifornia-born, Berlin-based Nell Zink is an idiosyncratic writer. You never quite know where her sentences are going to go. “Oh God, Toto, you won’t believe what just happened,” says Avianca, a character in her new novel. “This angel stole my hat. Like a winged monkey. It was blue and kind of glowing and had feather wings.”Such delightfully surprising lines are frequent in Sister Europe, Zink’s seventh novel, which follows acclaimed titles The Wallcreeper, Doxology and Avalon, and is set over the course of a Tuesday night in 2023.Sister Europe by Nell Zink is published by Viking (£14.99). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply Continue reading...

Politics

23 h. ago The North Road by Rob Cowen review – the poetry and pain of Britain’s backbone

A beautifully written study of our longest numbered route, the A1, is full of rich asides and haunting explorations, conjuring the visual pleasure of a road movieMost people know the North Road of this book’s title as the London-to-Edinburgh A1. But, as Rob Cowen writes, A1 is a cipher for a 400-mile multiplicity of roads – a historically diverse bundle that includes ancient trackways, a Roman road, the “Old North Road” and the “Great North Road” (the name generally applied to what became the A1 in the road-numbering scheme of the 1920s). This collective forms, as Cowen has it, our primary road – the “backbone” of Britain.As a frequent shuttler between north and south, I prefer the North Road to its rival, the bland, homogenous M1. It has verges and laybys, eccentric pit-stops where the coffee is not necessarily Costa, and a scruffy, improvised air, suggesting something organically arisen from the landscape. But whereas I have merely driven along the road, Cowen has communed with it...

Politics

39 h. ago Sinners review – Ryan Coogler’s sexy southern gothic horror is a blast

Michael B Jordan stars as twin 1930s mobsters in the Black Panther director’s phenomenal-looking, blues-infused supernatural taleIn Black Panther (2018) and its sequel, Wakanda Forever (2022), Ryan Coogler directed two of Marvel’s most satisfying and textured recent movies. His 2015 Rocky spin-off Creed represents the gold standard when it comes to franchise-wrangling, honouring the original series yet standing up and fighting its own corner as a distinct movie. If anyone has earned the chance to make a passion project, it’s Coogler. But who knew that this would result in something as wild, untrammelled and thrillingly unpredictable as Sinners? Starring Michael B Jordan in the dual role of 1930s gangster twins Smoke (surly, threatening) and Stack (charming, reckless), it’s a sweltering, sexy southern gothic horror, a blues-infused vampire flick in which the music flows as freely as the blood.The brothers leave Chicago with the kind of cash that usually comes with a body count. Back ...

Events

40 h. ago Now Play This 2025 review – the end of an era of experimental game design

Somerset House, LondonAfter 10 fun-packed years, it’s a wrap for the UK’s biggest celebration of indie, communal gameplay. But the folk games at the heart of this year’s edition have now filtered into the mainstream, from Taskmaster to The TraitorsWhen she was a child growing up in Adelaide, Australia, Holly Gramazio made up a game with her friend Summer. The two girls would lie back on swings with their eyes closed. When someone made too much noise nearby, they’d sit to attention and yell as loudly as they could: “Don’t wake me up!” The game captured a child’s view of grownups and their irksome inconsistencies – the self-defeating idea, or perhaps threat, that an adult could scream themselves awake amid their stated efforts to remain asleep. It was a co-operative game: the two girls “won” if they shouted in unison. If only one yelled, they lost. “This is the first game I remember playing,” records Gramazio in the printed guide (which also doubles as a delicious compendium of folk g...

Politics

45 h. ago In the Rhododendrons by Heather Christle review – back to the mother land

A poet’s memoir of family, trauma, and Virginia Woolf pulses with feeling and intelligenceLike most kids, Heather Christle was drilled about “stranger danger”. Like some, she had a family codeword designed to show that an adult picking them up from school when her mother was busy could be trusted. But, in her American home town in the 1980s, no other kid’s word was a bygone British sweet. And so “Dolly Mixture” joins the growing list of things learned from her English mother that Christle, looking back, finds out of place. Things such as dining etiquette, cardigans, M&S outfits, margarine. But also bigger stuff: beliefs and behaviours. Assumptions. Silence. Shame.With her mother in her 70s and their relationship strained, Christle, a poet and academic, embarks on a quest for new understanding – of her mother, of “Englishness”, and of herself. In a memoir that pulses with feeling and intelligence, she excavates the past to expose difficult truths. As she proved with her acclaimed...

Events

47 h. ago The Homemade God by Rachel Joyce review – portrait of a patriarch

The mysterious death of an artist causes havoc among siblings in a novel that astutely observes family dynamicsWhat would writers do without problematic patriarchs? From King Lear to Logan Roy, they are the linchpins of countless family dramas: adored fathers who dominate and damage their children in equal measure.The new novel from Rachel Joyce, bestselling author of The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry, Miss Benson’s Beetle and others, revolves around one such man: Vic Kemp, a successful artist with four grown-up children. Vic is a widower who raised his offspring alone, and the story begins with him summoning them to a noodle bar to announce that he’s in love with a twentysomething called Bella-Mae he met online. He’s also the proud owner of a goatee, a surefire sign of an identity crisis. The offspring are aghast. “If he’s so lonely, he could get a cat,” says one. Continue reading...

Politics

66 h. ago Lost Records: Bloom & Rage (Tape Two) review – love, grief and self

PC, PS5, XBox; Don’t NodThe concluding half of this two-parter may be lacking in interactive challenges, but is profound, sensitively structured and emotionally resonantOne thing you realise as you get older is that memories are plastic and that the stories you tell about your life change with every recollection, depending on who you are at the time. This is one of the themes – and indeed the mechanics – of Lost Records, a narrative adventure about four teenage girls who develop an intense friendship in rural Michigan during the summer of 1995. In the first instalment, they form a band, discover an old shack in the woods to use as a clubhouse, and encounter a supernatural force emanating from a deep hole they discover nearby. But as autumn draws in and the girls plan a climactic rock gig, tragic secrets are uncovered.Cleverly, the story is told mostly in flashback, as the characters meet again, decades later, in their long-abandoned home town – they’re older, wiser and with new pers...

Politics

67 h. ago Tunde Adebimpe: Thee Black Boltz review – a sparkling solo debut

(Sub Pop)The TV on the Radio frontman’s sharp pop instincts kick in on a multifaceted synth-punk-funk set born out of deep personal lossYou would not know, on first listen, that this effervescent debut solo album by the sometime frontman of TV on the Radio was steeped in grief. Tunde Adebimpe’s sister died during the pandemic when these songs were taking hesitant shape in an LA studio that Adebimpe, now a successful actor, shares with multi-instrumentalist and co-producer Wilder Zoby.Those difficult feelings – and others, about living in “a time of tenderness and rage” – became snaggle-toothed synth-punk cuts and bouncy synth-pop sounds. On Drop, there’s beat-boxing; on The Most, a Sleng Teng reggae riddim ambush; while on Somebody New, you can hear a punk-funk echo of New Order. Only ILY, a finger-picked folk song addressed to his sister, breaks character, adding “balladeer” to Adebimpe’s varied CV (former stop-motion animator, illustrator). “How’d you get so low?” asks God Knows, ...

Politics

69 h. ago Various artists: Disk Musik – A DD Records Compilation review | Safi Bugel's experimental album of the month

(Phantom Limb)The 80s label released hundreds of oddball DIY recordings. Their final compilation, now repressed, jerks from folk to punk to ambient – with moments worthy of great kids’ TVIn 1980, a group of friends in Japan started DD Records, a platform for amateur musicians to share bizarre homespun recordings across their network. The label released an impressive 222 cassettes and a handful of vinyl records in five years, then disbanded and faded into relative obscurity. Their last known release, the compilation Disk Musik – a multi-genre compilation bringing together 13 Japanese artists – is so rare that even the prolific music catalogue database Discogs bears little trace of it.Four decades on, it’s been re-pressed – and it still sounds as mind-warping as it probably did to its small circle of listeners back in 1985. The opening track by trio Circadian Rhythm may as well be three songs in one, drifting haphazardly from stray humming vocals to wistful coda, by way of a tangle of...

Culture

2 d. ago Chopping Onions on My Heart by Samantha Ellis review – can you save a culture?

A woman tries to cling on to her parent’s Judeo-Arabic language – and the food, feeling and history that goes with itSamantha Ellis yearns to eat the nabug fruit that her Iraqi-Jewish parents recall from Baghdad back gardens. Yet when she asks for it in London’s Iraqi shops, she’s met only with blank looks. It took much effort for her to find the English name for the nabug – the Christ’s thorn jujube – and even then she’s unable to source seeds online. Eventually an Iraqi Muslim friend brings her a bag of the fruits. She shares them with her mother, who lights up: “It’s nabug!”. She tells her grandson she hasn’t eaten one in 50 years, and despite wanting a Haribo, he joins his grandmother and mother in enjoying the taste, “like a cross between an apricot and a date”.This story in Ellis’s memoir is, like the book itself, about many things – loss, the distance between generations, nostalgia for a place one has never been, and the power of food to evoke memory – but perhaps most fundam...

Politics

3 d. ago The Narrow Road to the Deep North review – Jacob Elordi’s fine turn in complex, confronting war drama

Justin Kurzel’s adaptation of Richard Flanagan’s novel eschews battleground spectacle for a rich meditation on trauma that unfolds in three timelinesGet our weekend culture and lifestyle emailMany great directors have been attracted to war movies – or, as is the case with Australian auteur Justin Kurzel, a war-themed series, adapting Richard Flanagan’s novel The Narrow Road to the Deep North.Film-makers of a certain calibre seem to view this genre as a rite of passage. Some productions – including the recent Apple TV+ series Masters of the Air – have a retrograde flavour, painting war (perhaps problematically) as a great big adventure. Many lean into spectacle, attempting to recreate the smoke and fury of battle, but in the process running the risk of celebrating or ennobling war. “Every film about war,” declared François Truffaut, “ends up being pro-war.”Sign up for the fun stuff with our rundown of must-reads, pop culture and tips for the weekend, every Saturday morning Continue r...

Events

3 d. ago The Wedding Banquet review – muddled gay comedy remake plays it too straight

Fire Island director Andrew Ahn’s update of Ang Lee’s seminal 1993 film works hard to differentiate itself but it’s awkwardly stuck between serious and sillyMany remakes are utterly pointless, whether they’re disregarding what made a movie good or interesting in the first place, or paying such slavish homage that a second version becomes redundant, rather than a worthy variation. If nothing else, the contemporary reconfiguration of The Wedding Banquet passes the remake test handily. Ang Lee’s original 1993 film is about a bisexual Taiwanese immigrant, living happily with his male partner, who hastily arranges a lavish (and, emotionally speaking, fake) wedding to a woman to please his visiting parents; director/co-writer Andrew Ahn, who shares screenplay credit with original co-writer James Schamus, relocates the story from 1993 Manhattan to 2025 Seattle, and contends with a whole different set of social rules and actual laws in the process.Ahn is so acutely aware of how times have c...

Politics

3 d. ago The Next Day by Melinda French Gates review – Melinda on life, before and after Bill

The philanthropist offers sensible advice about moving on and ditching perfectionism, but you get the impression she is struggling to take it herselfMelinda French Gates is a woman who seemingly leaves little to chance. From girlhood she would write down goals for herself to reach, and she was just as driven at college and in her early career at Microsoft, where she famously met and married its billionaire co-founder Bill Gates. The couple divorced in 2021.There is a small, sad moment in her memoir The Next Day where she writes of happily gaining weight in pregnancy because it was the first time she’d felt so free “from perfectionism the crushing relentless societal pressure to look a certain way”. Only well into middle age, when a friend gently questions her constant self-improvement projects, does she wonder whether in her conscientiousness she had “missed opportunities to embrace spontaneity, lean into the unexpected”. Continue reading...

Politics

3 d. ago The Elephant in the Room by Liz Kalaugher review – how we make animals sick

From frogs to ferrets, an eye-opening account of the ways we affect the health of other species – and vice versaBefore entering Edinburgh’s Royal Botanic Garden, visitors must walk over disinfecting mats to rid their shoes of bacteria or other pathogens. Next to the mats is a sign whose admonition seems at once both practical and religious: “Cleanse your soles.” Whenever I visit, as I often do, this sign always makes me smile: this ritualised cleaning is an important measure to prevent outbreaks of disease among the garden’s 730 species, but it also seems to be some kind of spiritual act.Anyone tempted to jump that mat should read Liz Kalaugher’s new book, a wide-ranging, thorough and persuasive investigation of the ways in which we have made non-human animals sick. Her book reads as a kind of shadow history of human endeavour and innovation, tracing the calamitous price that trade, exchange and intensive farming have exacted on everything from frogs to ferr...

Politics

4 d. ago #1 Happy Family USA review – a truly special comedy that’s packed with 00s nostalgia

Ramy Youssef’s surreal tale of a Muslim family in post-9/11 America is quietly subversive TV that’s full of laughter – and painfully realNot content with co-creating the brilliant (albeit frequently watch-through-your-fingers) dramedies Mo and Ramy, and starring in the latter, Ramy Youssef has turned his attention to a riotous animation for adults. Like the Egyptian-American comic’s previous work, #1 Happy Family USA is all about the modern Muslim experience, feeling adrift from the world, and the extent to which you should change yourself to fit in. And what better way to underscore this often excruciating, existential experience than to make our lead an insecure, hormone-plagued teen, coming of age in the wake of the September 11 attacks.For real Ramy heads, this show will almost certainly call to mind the flashback episode from the first season of his self-titled series, set during 9/11. There, we saw a young Ramy anxiously fight off accusations that he was a terrorist (“Egypt’s ...

Politics

4 d. ago The Correspondent review – Richard Roxburgh is excellent as jailed journalist Peter Greste

Based on Greste’s account of his time in an Egyptian prison, this is an important story powerfully toldGet our weekend culture and lifestyle emailLatvian-Australian journalist Peter Greste became the story when he was arrested in Cairo in 2013 on trumped-up terrorism charges with two of his Al Jazeera colleagues. In a sham trial the following year he was found guilty and sentenced to seven years in prison, ultimately spending 400 days there. It’s no spoiler to say that director Kriv Stenders’ grittily immersive film about Greste’s story has a happy ending – Greste was returned to Australia in 2015 and freed – capping off a tense and twitchy viewing experience, where the pressure valve is released only at the very last minute.Richard Roxburgh is in fine form as Greste, eschewing the slippery charisma he does so well (in TV shows such as Rake and Prosper) to depict the protagonist as a pragmatic but deep-thinking individual, navigating a crisis in which he’s close to powerless. At one...

Events

4 d. ago The Diamond Heist review – Guy Ritchie’s thrilling tale of the failed Millennium Dome jewel robbery

This three-part documentary about the attempt to steal hundreds of millions of pounds’ worth of diamonds is pacey and stylish – but it definitely didn’t need to glamorise the real-life violenceI suppose the wonder is that it has taken Guy Ritchie so long to get around to telling the story of the Millennium Dome robbery, in which – way back at the turn of the century, children – a group of south-east London criminals ram-raided a national joke in pursuit of the 203-carat Millennium Star diamond worth £200m, which De Beers had unaccountably agreed to display in the capital’s gangster heartland.Strictly speaking, Richie himself is not telling it; the three-part documentary The Diamond Heist comes from Oscar and Emmy award-winning company Lightbox and is executive produced by Ritchie. But the subject matter is so perfectly him that any meaningful separation in your mind as you watch it collapses quicker than a Greenwich exhibition venue’s shutters under the weight of a JCB driven at spe...

Events