6 h. ago MindsEye review – a dystopian future that plays like it’s from 2012

PC, PlayStation 5, Xbox; Build a Robot Boy/IO InteractiveA lot of work and ambition have gone into this strange, sometimes likable cover-shooter throwbackThere’s a Sphere-alike in Redrock, MindsEye’s open-world version of Las Vegas. It’s pretty much a straight copy of the original: a huge soap bubble, half sunk into the desert floor, with its surface turned into a gigantic TV. Occasionally you’ll pull up near the Sphere while driving an electric vehicle made by Silva, the megacorp that controls this world. You’ll sometimes come to a stop just as an advert for an identical Silva EV plays out on the huge curved screen overhead. The doubling effect can be slightly vertigo-inducing.At these moments, I truly get what MindsEye is trying to do. You’re stuck in the ultimate company town, where oligarchs and other crooks run everything, and there’s no hope of escaping the ecosystem they’ve built. MindsEye gets this all across through a chance encounter, and in a way that’s both light of touc...

Politics

8 h. ago The best recent science fiction, fantasy and horror – review roundup

Awakened by Laura Elliott; Bury Our Bones in the Midnight Soil by VE Schwab; Immaculate Conception by Ling Ling Huang; Esperance by Adam Oyebanji; The Quiet by Barnaby MartinAwakened by Laura Elliott (Angry Robot, £9.99)A debut novel set in an apocalyptic 2055, following the development of a neural chip dispensing with the need for sleep. At first it seemed a blessing: it ramped up people’s metabolisms, made them stronger and more productive workers, but when they ignored the advice to turn it off and sleep for at least a few hours a week, they turned into ravenous monsters. Thea is one of a group of scientists who developed the chip and are now barricaded in the Tower of London, struggling to reverse the damage they have caused, when two survivors turn up seeking shelter: a silent, traumatised woman and her protector, a nameless man who shows signs of having once been Sleepless himself. Thea comes to question her own values and past actions in a dark and gripping gothic tale with e...

Events

11 h. ago Dâdalus & Bikarus: Off the Shelf review | Safi Bugel's experimental album of the month

(Lío Press)Zurich-based musicians Benedikt Merz and David Hänni meld krautrock, punk and big beat into tripped-out, swampy grooves that reach dizzying heightsAfter almost three decades of friendship, Zurich-based musicians Benedikt Merz and David Hänni moved into a studio together in 2019. They found common ground over their shared love of psychedelic music and spent long, woozy nights jamming together. But while one wanted to focus on live electronics, the other secretly wanted to start a band. The outcome was Dâdalus & Bikarus, a project which sits somewhere between these two worlds, welding elements of krautrock, punk and big beat into tripped-out dancefloor rhythms.Their second album, Off the Shelf, captures the obsessive energy of those early nocturnal experiments, which they’ve since built a reputation for in their live shows. Anchored by drawn-out loops, each track slowly builds tension to dizzying, near-erotic heights. On Erebros, this takes place across a hefty 11 minut...

Politics

13 h. ago A Trick of the Mind by Daniel Yon review – explaining psychology’s most important theory

An immensely readable dive into the ‘predictive processing’ hypothesis, our best guess as to how the mind really worksThe process of perception feels quite passive. We open our eyes and light floods in; the world is just there, waiting to be seen. But in reality there is an active element that we don’t notice. Our brains are always “filling in” our perceptual experience, supplementing incoming information with existing knowledge. For example, each of us has a spot at the back of our eye where there are no light receptors. We don’t see the resulting hole in our field of vision because our brains ignore it. The phenomenon we call “seeing” is the result of a continuously updated model in your mind, made up partly of incoming sensory information, but partly of pre-existing expectations. This is what is meant by the counter­intuitive slogan of contemporary cognitive science: “perception is a controlled hallucination”.A century ago, someone with an interest in psycholo...

Science

29 h. ago The Lost Tapes, Beethoven sonatas 18,27, 28 & 31 album review – Richter always found something fresh to say

Sviatoslav Richter(Deutsche Grammophon)Sviatoslav Richter’s already huge catalogue is enriched by these rediscovered recordings of recitals of Beethoven’s piano sonatas from 1965Though he claimed to dislike performing in a studio, Sviatoslav Richter became perhaps the most intensively recorded pianist of the 20th century. But while his studio work was extensive, it was the huge volume of recordings made officially and unofficially at his recitals across more than 40 years that really bulked out his discography, with multiple versions available of many of the core works in his repertory. For those reasons the rediscovery of “Lost Tapes” might not initially seem so remarkable. The performances, of four Beethoven piano sonatas, Opp 31 no 3, 90, 101 and 110, are taken from recitals that Richter gave in 1965. Op 110 comes from a performance at the piano festival he had founded the previous year at La Grange de Meslay near Tours, the others are taken from a concert in Lucerne three months...

Politics

30 h. ago Haim: I Quit review – the messiest breakup album of recent times, in every sense

(Polydor)The three LA sisters dwell on the bitter end of a relationship in tracks that range from replayable valley-girl rap to plodding country-popHaim’s 2013 breakthrough single The Wire was a swaggering, high-spirited breakup anthem. The slick, twanging pop-rock was correctly identified at the time by Portishead’s Geoff Barrow as echoing the oeuvre of Shania Twain (though this wasn’t the sick burn he thought it was), over which the LA trio copped to commitment phobia, communication issues and having their heads turned, before skipping into the California sunset with their hearts intact. Well, to commandeer the title of Haim’s debut album: those days are very much gone.I Quit, the sisters’ fourth album, still has plenty of breakup songs, but these are no cheerful odes to dumping dudes in your 20s. Instead, the record fixates on the bitter end of a deeply flawed long-term relationship; at least some of these songs are informed by the love lost between lead vocalist Danielle Haim an...

Politics

31 h. ago Reeves only a ‘gnat’s whisker’ from having to raise taxes in autumn, says IFS – UK politics live

Institute for Fiscal Studies says figures for projected departmental efficiencies savings from Treasury are not credibleReeves gambles on ‘renewing Britain’ to win voters’ trustRachel Reeves is now on ITV’s Good Morning Britain. Susannah Reid and Richard Madeley are interviewing her.Q: You must be disappointed about the growth figures? Continue reading...

Politics

34 h. ago Brotherless Night by VV Ganeshananthan audiobook review – love and conflict in Sri Lanka

The civil war transforms a young trainee doctor’s life as she copes with her feelings for a Tamil Tiger in last year’s Women’s prizewinning novelBrotherless Night opens with 16-year-old Sashi Kulenthiren, who hopes to be a doctor like her eldest brother, making tea when the kettle slips out of her hand, causing her to pour boiling water on herself. When a neighbour, K, hears her screams, he rushes over to help, cracking raw eggs over the scalds to soothe the pain. “So I began as K’s patient though he ended as mine,” Sashi reflects.Set in 1980s Sri Lanka, VV Ganeshananthan’s coming-of-age novel – which won the 2024 Women’s prize for fiction – is an epic and hard-hitting tale of family and survival as it documents life during the civil war between Tamil separatists and the Sinhalese majority that lasted three decades. Before fighting breaks out, Sashi’s most pressing problem is whether she will pass her exams at school. But soon violence and kidnapping become the norm, communities are...

Events

35 h. ago Cal review – grieving Helen Mirren superb in compassionate Troubles romance

Mirren won best actress at Cannes in 1984 for her role as Marcella, who forms a relationship with John Lynch’s Cal – a man complicit in her husband’s murderPat O’Connor’s Northern Irish movie from 1984, adapted by author Bernard MacLaverty from his own novel, holds up very well for its rerelease; better in fact than most of the movies and TV drama made about and during the Troubles. It has an unhurried, thoughtful and very human quality; Helen Mirren won the best actress award at Cannes for her performance here and in fact it is very well acted across the board by a blue-chip cast.Mirren plays Marcella, a woman from a Catholic background, married across the sectarian divide to a reserve police officer murdered at his parents’ farmhouse by an IRA man who had bullied a bewildered local guy into being his getaway driver; this is Cal, played by the gauntly intense John Lynch. Cal lives with his widowed father; a gentle performance by Donal McCann, who was Gabriel Conroy in John Huston’s...

Events

36 h. ago Government Spending Review 2025: Economy shrinks as NHS spending surges and struggling councils miss out

From a surprise economic slump and warnings of a “National Health State”, to council funding concerns, a 74 per cent house price surge, and rising Tesco sales - here are today’s top UK business stories.

Politics

37 h. ago Love Forms by Claire Adam review – the power of a mother’s loss

Forty years on, a Trinidadian woman has never stopped looking for the daughter she gave up for adoption, in a quietly devastating novelClaire Adam’s 2019 novel Golden Child was her debut, but it felt like the work of a master. It was tender, ravishing, shattering – you believed every word of it. The book had an effortless narrative authority that most first-time novelists would kill for.Love Forms is every bit as alive and convincing, and returns us to Trinidad, with its potent fizz of colour, heat and political instability. But unlike the earlier book, it’s also set partly in south London – the writer’s own home turf – and has a mother, rather than a father, at its heart. Continue reading...

Politics

37 h. ago Deep Cover review – Bryce Dallas Howard leads improv actors into London’s underground

Howard, Orlando Bloom and Nick Mohammed star in an entertaining odd-trio crime caper with turns by Sean Bean and Paddy Considine Producer and screenwriter Colin Trevorrow has co-created this amiable, high-concept action comedy about three hapless improv actors dragooned into going into deep cover to bust a drug ring. It’s entertaining, though I think some of the cast understand comedy better and more instinctively than others. It’s set in London (though Trevorrow might originally have imagined it set in LA or New York) and the credit is shared with his longtime writing partner Derek Connolly, and also with Ben Ashenden and Alexander Owen, the funny British double act known as the Pin, who also amusingly appear as two squabbling coppers with a Mitchell and Webb energy. The director is the talented Tom Kingsley, who has a substantial TV career and with Will Sharpe got a Bafta nomination in 2012 for the dark comedy Black Pond.Bryce Dallas Howard plays Kat, an American actor whose caree...

Events

38 h. ago Rachel Reeves seized her moment – whatever the future brings, Labour’s economic course is now set | Martin Kettle

The chancellor is no mere technocrat: her spending review revealed a visceral commitment to social and economic mobilityThe consensus has long been that the 2025 spending review would be a defining moment for Keir Starmer’s government. For once, the consensus proved spot-on. The government’s main priorities were set out on Wednesday in a blizzard of Commons announcements from Rachel Reeves, some economically substantive, others more for show. The upshot is that the shape of the British state, as Labour intends it, is now decided until the eve of the next election.There are further crossroads still to come, some of them major, as the years covered by the review unroll. Taxes are likely to rise, probably as soon as the autumn budget, to pay for Reeves’s big ticket boosts on Wednesday for defence, health and housing. Council tax could rise too, with possibly dramatic results. The review’s emphasis on capital spending means current spending could be squeezed again, perhaps heralding pay...

Economics

39 h. ago Confessions of a Parent Killer review – a grisly tale of the murderer who lived with her mum and dad’s corpses

This look at Virginia McCullough tells a deeply strange story. Unfortunately, it also leaves the viewer in suspense about her motive for so long it feels horrifically manipulativeWell, what do you think a 90-minute documentary entitled Confessions of a Parent Killer is going to be about? That’s right, well done! It’s the story of a murder by an (adult) child of her parents. Virginia – Ginny – McCullough killed her mother, Lois, and father, John, and confessed immediately to police when they raided her home in 2023 that she had done so four years previously. The twist was that she had been living with their bodies ever since. “She was weird at school,” says a childhood friend. “But not ‘kill your parents and hide the bodies’ weird.”You can probably tell from such unimpeachably phlegmatic commentary that this case occurred in England. Great Baddow, Essex, to be exact, and the film paints a portrait of quintessential small-town, almost-rural life in these sceptred isles that has gone u...

Events

45 h. ago Flight 149: Hostage of War review – a tale so staggering you couldn’t write it

This excellent documentary tells the tale of a BA plane’s Kuwait stopover just as Saddam Hussein invaded. It’s a crucial tale of a four-month nightmare that is barely believableIf it were a work of fiction, the story of Flight 149 would probably be deemed too horrifying – or too unbelievable – for television. Indeed, as a documentary interspersed with dramatic reconstructions, at points it is almost unbearable to watch. But it is a crucial piece of work: a one-off film that goes deep into a bizarre and increasingly hideous ordeal to ask how and why it happened.On 2 August 1990, a British Airways plane carrying nearly 400 passengers and crew from London to Kuala Lumpur touched down for a scheduled stopover in Kuwait. Those on board knew nothing of the unfolding Iraqi invasion of the country and the brutality Saddam Hussein was inflicting on his neighbours (this would, of course, soon lead to the Gulf war). British Airways maintains that it, too, was unaware of what was taki...

Events

49 h. ago The Guardian view on Labour’s spending review: the chancellor tightened belts and loosened seams | Editorial

The government offers capital investment and fiscal prudence but real-terms department cuts and grand promises could strain political credibilityBrexit’s ghost haunts a Labour spending review intended to lay the foundations for a second term. Its headlines echo the twin themes of the referendum campaign: control immigration, fund the NHS. The chancellor, Rachel Reeves, said she would end the use of hotels for asylum seekers “in this parliament” saving £1bn a year, while NHS spending will rise by 3% a year. Ms Reeves framed it as a politics of security and compassion. Yet it reads as Brexit’s populist promises, filtered through Westminster orthodoxy.The risk is that this is all slogan and very little solution. The asylum savings are speculative, and the annual increase in NHS budgets is below its historical average. There are also real-terms cuts or essentially flat budgets for key departments such as transport, education and local government. The Home Office faces cuts deeper than a...

Politics

49 h. ago Labour promised people we would rebuild Britain – and that’s what we’re doing | Keir Starmer

This week’s spending review marks a new stage in the mission of national renewal, built on the foundations laid last yearKeir Starmer is the prime minister of the United KingdomThe mandate we received from the British people could not have been clearer. First, we had to stop the chaos and return Britain to economic stability. Second, we had to turn the page on Tory decline with clear Labour choices. Third, we were instructed to rebuild our country.Wednesday’s spending review turbocharged that rebuilding. It is an investment in Britain’s renewal, so working people have more money in their pocket, more pride in their community and more hope for their children’s future. It’s what people voted for. An NHS cutting waiting lists, with care closer to the community. Wealth and opportunity no longer hoarded by only a few towns and cities. Continue reading...

Politics

51 h. ago Treasury minister dismisses claims spending review will lead to autumn tax rises – UK politics live

Darren Jones says such claims are ‘incoherent’ and the government is allocating money that has already been raisedSpending review: key points at a glanceGreen party MPs and activists joined a protest outside parliament today saying the government should use the spending review to announce a wealth tax. In a post on social media, Adrian Ramsay, the party’s co-leader, said:We expect the chancellor to take another axe to public spending today: decline by design from a govt that refuses to tax wealth to properly fund our overstretched public services & support the most vulnerable. We need to invest in a secure & fairer future. #TaxExtremeWealth Continue reading...

Politics

51 h. ago Reeves pledges funds for northern rail but London left short | Spending review 2025

Reeves pledges funds for northern rail but London left short | Spending review 2025  The Guardian

Economics

52 h. ago Reeves says use of hotels for asylum seekers to end ‘in this parliament’ – UK politics live

Chancellor delivers spending review, claiming asylum move will save £1bn and says health spending represents a record cash investmentSpending review: key points at a glanceGreen party MPs and activists joined a protest outside parliament today saying the government should use the spending review to announce a wealth tax. In a post on social media, Adrian Ramsay, the party’s co-leader, said:We expect the chancellor to take another axe to public spending today: decline by design from a govt that refuses to tax wealth to properly fund our overstretched public services & support the most vulnerable. We need to invest in a secure & fairer future. #TaxExtremeWealth Continue reading...

Politics