5 d. ago From Prince to Michael Jackson: why are the most controversial documentaries getting canned?

As Netflix scraps an epic series exploring the Purple Rain star’s complexities, and Max takes down Leaving Neverland, we ask: are celebrity-endorsed docs, such as the $40m Melania Trump hagiography, the future?It can be a painful thing, acknowledging that our heroes are both human and flawed, but Ezra Edelman spent five years doing just that. The film-maker behind 2016’s sprawling, Oscar-winning OJ: Made in America, was at work for Netflix on what, by all accounts, would have been the definitive Prince documentary: a nine-hour behemoth drawing upon dozens of interviews with the late icon’s associates and rare access to his personal archive.The film – according to the few who’ve seen a rough cut – built a layered portrait of Prince’s immense genius and complexities, including a darker side concealed by his playfully eccentric persona: his allegedly cruel treatment of girlfriends and female proteges; his demanding ruthlessness as a bandleader. “We’re asked to sit with Prince’s multipl...

Politics

1 week ago The dos and don’ts of good petiquette: four cardinal rules for dog owners

Dog walks can be a fraught time for both humans and their unruly friends, but follow these well-learned good behaviours and you’ll be the envy of the parkAcross the hours of the day and the seasons of the year, Naseby Park is the place we return to, my dog and I. Surrounded by red sandstone tenements in Glasgow’s West End, and roughly the size of a football pitch, this is where we first walked our four-year-old labrador Brèagha (Scots Gaelic for beautiful and she is, uncommonly so, thanks for asking). All I know about the etiquette of dog walking has been gleaned from the humans and animals who have paced its perimeter with us, and these are cardinal rules I have learned Continue reading...

Politics

2 w. ago The Accidental Spy review – remarkable story of CIA operative abandoned by his handlers

Anthony Wonke’s headlong documentary introduces Blerim Skoro, recruited in post-9/11 New York to become an inside man in the ‘war on terror’, then left in the fieldIn the movies, the classic hazard for the undercover operative is psychological meltdown after getting lost in their new identity. In real life, the dangers seem more prosaic: being treated as an expendable asset and dumped. That was the situation for Muslim Kosovan refugee Blerim Skoro who, despite years spent protecting US national security as a prison informant and al-Qaida mole, was threatened with deportation. His paymasters, the CIA and FBI, don’t emerge creditably from director Anthony Wonke’s headlong, if narrowly focused, account.Skoro seems to have a gift for being in the right or wrong place at the wrong or right time; it’s not obvious which. After deserting from the army during the 1990s Yugoslav war, he wound up as an asylum seeker in New York with a young family. But a new hustle, running drugs for the Alban...

Culture

3 w. ago First aid expert warns four ‘dangerous’ Easter treats with ‘high risk of choking’

Children could be at risk over the long weekend

Events

3 w. ago 'Creators are monetising cures': Gen Z warned against using social media to search for dangerous 'cancer treatments' as new study finds majority being touted by influencers may be FAKE

Researcher Dr Stephanie Alice Baker told MailOnline her initial study of 200 posts reveals a 'broader issue' with cancer misinformation on social media.

Events

3 w. ago King Charles says humanity ‘capable of both great cruelty and great kindness’ in Easter message

King to attend Royal Maundy service in Durham Cathedral

Politics

3 w. ago King Charles says world needs 'faith, hope and love' in Easter message

Charles says humanity ‘capable of both great cruelty and great kindness’

Politics

3 w. ago Could your wellness routine kill you? Paralysed for life, heart attacks and even DEATH...the horrifying dangers of trendy treatments revealed

Doctors across the UK and other nations have warned about the dangers of several wellness trends - prompting concerns about risk of heat stroke, injury and other dangerous conditions.

Events

3 w. ago Stop treating 'dangerous' AI bots like humans as eerie 'cross

Talking to bots like we do to each other is 'dangerous' as experts are convinced they will turn on us like James Cameron’s Terminator in a horrifying turn of events

Politics

3 w. ago The Blue Origin flight showcased the utter defeat of American feminism | Moira Donegan

The trip leaned on a vision of women’s empowerment that is light on substance and heavy on a childlike, girlish sillinessThere are some spectacles of US decadence and decline that almost seem too on the nose – the sort of orgies of vulgar provocation or fantastic lack of self-awareness that exceed the limits of parody, so that if they were in a novel, you’d think the writer was laying it on a little thick. Among these is the all-female flight by Blue Origin, the Jeff Bezos-owned rocket tourism company, which on Monday launched a phallically shaped pod full of women – including the pop star Katy Perry and Bezos’s partner, Lauren Sánchez – on a brief trip into space.The flight, which was promoted for months in advance, was touted as a triumph of feminism, a win for science and an embrace of the kind of expansive, curious human spirit of striving and possibility that once animated both. Instead, the flight served as a kind of perverse funeral for the America that once enabled both scie...

Politics