5 h. ago The Courageous review – rebellious mum on the edge will have you sobbing in sympathy

Call My Agent!’s Ophélia Kolb leads a Swiss drama with morally ambiguous realism reminiscent of the Dardenne brothersJust in time for the migration of children from their summer stations in front of phones, games consoles and laptops back to full-time education comes this Swiss-set tale of a mother on the edge. An outstanding Ophélia Kolb (arguably best known to anglophone audiences for playing the accountant Colette in Call My Agent!) stars here as Jule, a single woman trying to hold it together for her brood of three. Eldest child Claire (Jasmine Kalisz Saurer) is just entering puberty and is savvy enough to work out that mama isn’t always strictly truthful about why she wears an ankle monitor that beeps when she strays from certain areas. (Jule’s explanation that she has weak bones doesn’t really cut it.) But younger brothers Loic (Paul Besnier) and Sami (Arthur Devaux) just read it as normal that Jule disappears for long periods of time, leaving them abandoned at a cafe, for ins...

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5 h. ago Indignity: A Life Reimagined by Lea Ypi review – love, war and betrayal

Troubled by a photo of her grandmother living it up in Mussolini’s Italy, the author of Free delves into archive and memory to uncover the truthIt starts with a photo. A black-and-white image of a couple relaxing on a pair of sun loungers in front of a luxury ski hotel: him, squinting against the sun; her, smiling at the camera, wrapped in a white fur coat. It is their honeymoon in Cortina, up in the Italian Alps.The year is 1941, and the woman is Lea Ypi’s grandmother. Ypi saw the picture after it had been posted online by a stranger, gone viral across Albania, and attracted a stream of abuse. “Morally degenerate” was one comment. “Fascist collaborator” another. Continue reading...

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5 h. ago The best Inverness hotels for 2025, reviewed by a Scottish travel expert

These are the best Inverness hotels for trips to the Scottish Highlands or a Scotland city break that blends spectacular views with whisky drinking and castle hopping

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13 h. ago Football’s Financial Shame: The Story of the V11 review – so moving you’ll pity these poor footballers

This gripping documentary follows early Premier League footballers who lost it all following investment advice that went wrong. It perfectly captures the melancholy of being an ex-proSympathy for the financial plight of former Premier League footballers, you say? No, wait, hear us out. You might be surprised by this previously untold story. Richard Milway’s documentary, Football’s Financial Shame: The Story of the V11, is a gripping, moving and human enough tale to inspire more than a little fellow feeling.The V11 may sound like a fictional spy ring from a shonky airport novel but they’re actually a group of retired footballers whose careers spanned the 90s and early 00s. This era-specificity is crucial. They are members of the Premier League’s in-between generation. They’re mid-rankers: household names but it depends on the household. Danny Murphy. Rod Wallace. Brian Deane. Tommy Johnson. Michael Thomas. Craig Short. If you know, you know. And they played at a time when wages were ...

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15 h. ago Dead Man’s Wire review – Gus Van Sant calls the shots with surreal true

Venice film festivalAl Pacino, Colman Domingo and Myha’la excel in this gripping take on the events of 1977 when an Indianapolis businessman held his mortgage broker hostage With terrific chutzpah, black-comic flair and cool, cruel unsentimentality, screenwriter Austin Kolodney and director Gus Van Sant have made a true-crime suspense thriller set in the 1970s, tapping into the spirit of both Sidney Lumet’s Dog Day Afternoon and Network. Apart from anything else, it is a reminder that in that post-Kennedy, post-Watergate age, plenty of lawless and febrile things happened that would now be considered phenomena purely attributable to social media.In 1977, an Indianapolis businessman named Tony Kiritsis, with many acquaintances in the police department, kidnapped a mortgage broker named Richard Hall, and tied Hall’s neck with a “dead man’s wire” to his shotgun, which would therefore go off if police sharpshooters tried to kill him. Kiritsis even paraded his victim like this on TV while...

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18 h. ago A House of Dynamite review – Kathryn Bigelow’s nuclear endgame thriller is a terrifying, white

Idris Elba, Rebecca Ferguson and Tracy Letts star in this immaculately constructed nightmare procedural that ticks down the minutes from an atomic bomb’s launch to its detonationKathryn Bigelow has reopened the subject that we all tacitly agree not to discuss or imagine, in the movies or anywhere else: the subject of an actual nuclear strike. It’s the subject which tests narrative forms and thinkability levels. Maybe this is why we prefer to see it as something for absurdism and satire – a way of not staring into the sun – to remember Kubrick’s (brilliant) black comedy Dr Strangelove, with no fighting in the war room etc, rather than Lumet’s deadly serious Fail Safe. Bigelow, with screenwriter Noah Oppenheim, broaches one of the most frightening thoughts of all: that a nuclear war could or rather will start with no one knowing who started it or who ended it. I watched this film with translucently white knuckles but also that strange climbing nausea that only this topic can create.Th...

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19 h. ago Portobello review – Marco Bellocchio’s glorious saga of TV stars, mafia prisoners and lace doilies

Venice film festivalIn the first two episodes of a six-part series, the stardom of 80s primetime host Enzo Tortora is cleverly crosscut with the scramble of a mob secretary who implicates him – and his parrot – in drug traffickingMarco Bellocchio, the tireless warhorse of Italian cinema, kicks up a swirling dust cloud of corruption with this fabulous, stranger-than-fiction account of an 80s TV star convicted of conspiring with the Camorra. Shot for the streaming service HBO Max, it is the director’s second historical miniseries after 2022’s Exterior Night, about the kidnapping of Aldo Moro, and features the same lead player in Fabrizio Gifuni, an actor who has surely cornered the market in playing glossy public figures whose lives are about to take a hellish turn. Bellocchio’s dramas typically inhabit this kind of shonky, venal moral universe. The ground is liable to drop away pretty much at any moment.Gifuni stars as Enzo Tortora, a primetime TV presenter in the twinkling Terry Wog...

Events

22 h. ago Scot visits supermarket in Peru and finds something unexpected on shelves

Scottish travel enthusiast Craig Ferguson went in search of a familiar soft drink as he explored the city of Arequipa in Peru and was astounded by what he found in the supermarket

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23 h. ago Row review – impressive, largely unknown cast keep seagoing horror afloat

A woman washes up on the Orkney island of Hoy, the only survivor of a transatlantic sortie in Matthew Losasso’s debut feature, a twisty if murky chillerWater, like the human psyche, is unpredictable and full of beasts lurking in the depths, and so it says a lot about our primal fear of the ocean that boat movies often offer threats either under the surface, in the shape of sharks, or psychosis or both. With Row, a smattering of startling jump cuts showing blood splashed around a boat and flashbacks of the protagonist Megan (Bella Dayne, very impressive) screaming, but the viewer needs to wait out a somewhat unreasonably long running time to find out if the antagonists here are biting fish or knife-wielding killers.All we know at first is that Megan is the only survivor of an attempt to break the record for rowing across the Atlantic from Newfoundland to the UK with four crew members, two men and two women. Having washed up on the Orkney island of Hoy, Megan spends most of the film’s...

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23 h. ago Straight Circle review – boisterous border guard satire from a director to watch

Venice film festivalOscar Hudson’s feature debut, starring twins Elliott and Luke Tittensor as ritual-performing representatives of fictional warring nations, is an absurdist nightmareBritish documentary and ad director Oscar Hudson makes his feature debut in the Venice critics week sidebar with this high-concept anti-war satire, a through-the-looking-glass absurdist nightmare about realising that the otherness of your enemy is an illusion. There are some bold and ambitious images here, and some interesting split-screen work. Maybe there’s an issue about the style and substance ratio and perhaps the running time is indulgent, but this is a strong piece of work.Twins Elliott and Luke Tittensor play two soldiers of equal rank in opposing armies, called Pte Warne and Pte Arthur. They represent two nations of fictional Ruritanian weirdness, formerly at war but who have evidently concluded a tensely unstable peace treaty. Warne has a resplendent white uniform and, like the rest of his co...

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24 h. ago David Squires on after review, this week’s cartoon is a VAR special

Our cartoonist on chaos at Craven Cottage, Nicolas Jackson’s gap year and Howard Webb’s apology muffinsBuy copies of David’s cartoons in our Print ShopDavid’s latest book, Chaos in the Box: buy it now Continue reading...

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25 h. ago Above the Knee review – man struggles with body integrity dysmorphia in gory amputation horror

A man grapples with an overwhelming desire to remove his leg in a lingering psychological interrogation from Norwegian film-maker Viljar BøeNorwegian director Viljar Bøe has been hacking out an interesting niche for himself in the horror genre, specialising in a variety grounded more in psychology than supernatural jiggery pokery. For example, Good Boy from 2022 revolved around a man and his “dog” (who is obviously a guy in a dog costume) acting like a mutt at all times. Similarly, his new feature features a character called Amir (Freddy Singh) with a psychological fixation that’s so unusual he feels he must keep it a secret from his girlfriend and all acquaintances: he has body integrity dysphoria (BID), which in his case means he has an overwhelming desire to amputate his left leg even though there’s nothing physically wrong with it.Amir lives with his super-nice, cheerful girlfriend Kim (Julie Abrahamsen) in hyper-tolerant, Scandi-socialist quasi-utopia Norway, so when he drunken...

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27 h. ago The Two Roberts by Damian Barr review – lost story of a gay art duo

The lives of Scottish artists Bobby MacBryde and Robert Colquhoun, who found love and fame and lost it all, are vividly reimaginedWhat if the protagonist of a novel was not a single person but a couple? Damian Barr takes on this challenge, and he’s found a historic couple who make the ideal source material. Working-class Scottish artists Bobby MacBryde and Robert Colquhoun were rarely apart after they met in 1933. They lived and worked together, became famous together and then declined into desperate squalor together – even poorer than when they began.Barr knows what it’s like to conquer Glasgow from a small, working-class town on its outskirts; he knows what it’s like to find yourself feted for your portraits of the place you’ve left irrevocably behind. His memoir, Maggie and Me, was a hard-hitting yet rambunctious tale of growing up gay near Motherwell under Thatcher, uneasily aware that the woman who pushed his parents deeper into poverty also taught him that the ruthless ex...

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27 h. ago Sanatorium review – Ukraine health resort guests seek sanctuary amid shelling

Poignant documentary by Irish director Gar O’Rourke peers into a faded Soviet-era institution where visitors search for relief while war grinds on outsideThere is something ever so slightly Martin Parr-like about this documentary, filmed inside a shabby rundown health resort near Odesa, in Ukraine. It’s not the colour palette, which is Soviet-era pale beige, but the images of holidaymakers: elderly men strutting about in thongs and playing ping pong in their vests; retirees of both sexes glad-ragged at the disco. Like Parr’s photos, the images are funny but not unkind; everyone retains their dignity. The director is Irish film-maker Gar O’Rourke, who planned Sanatorium before the war, but filmed it after Russia invaded Ukraine, which adds a layer of melancholy to the guests’ search for health and happiness.The huge Kuyalnik sanatorium is a time warp with its brutalist architecture and institutional interiors. Back in its glory days, people must have come here in their thousands. Now...

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27 h. ago A Short History of Stupidity by Stuart Jeffries review – comfortably dumb?

From Shakespeare’s fools to Donald Trump, this exhilarating read considers stupidity in its many formsStupidity, no question, can be just as rich and subtle as its opposite. Three and a half decades on, I still sometimes meditate on what a school friend of mine said in a here’s-a-profound-thought tone of voice: “I’d rather be stupid than happy”.In this clever book, Stuart Jeffries starts out at a double disadvantage, though. First: he has an excellently snappy title but it’s open to question whether stupidity can be said to have a history in any meaningful sense. The quality of stupidity is just, sort of, there; and there’s lots of it. Could you write a history of happiness, or bad luck, or knees? You’d be on firmer ground, as he recognises, historicising the concept of stupidity: a short history, in other words, of “stupidity” – how successive societies and thinkers have defined and responded to reason’s derr-brained secret sharer. As an intellectual historian w...

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29 h. ago Borderline review – Raymond Nicholson shines as a deranged fan in comedy thriller

It’s the 1990s and a famous pop star is taken hostage by a fan in Jimmy Warden’s stylish but confused film, loosely inspired by a real-life stalker case involving MadonnaPaul Duerson (Raymond Nicholson) has got it bad for world famous pop star and actor Sofia (Samara Weaving). It being the 1990s, he doesn’t have the option of simply being creepy on social media; instead, he takes her hostage and attempts to marry her, as you do, in a period-comedy-horror-thriller that is entertaining enough moment-to-moment, but doesn’t add up anything very substantial overall. Standing in the way of Paul’s deranged scheme is bodyguard Bell (a grounded and nicely judged performance by Eric Dane), and rounding out the men in Sofia’s life is her NBA player boyfriend Rhodes (Jimmie Fails).Screenwriter Jimmy Warden knows a grabby real-life premise when he sees one. In 1985, a bear ate a massive amount of cocaine and fatally overdosed, leading, in 2023, to the release of the Warden-scripted movie Cocaine...

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29 h. ago The Hallmarked Man by Robert Galbraith review – a terrific, tightly plotted romp

With four murder inquiries in play, JK Rowling’s eighth Cormoran Strike novel avoids the page-padding longeurs of previous volumes – but will he finally tell Robin how he feels about her?In his popular BBC series Just One Thing, the late Michael Mosley made the case for resistance training. Lifting weights, he explained, not only builds stronger muscles, it also boosts the immune system, maintains a healthy heart and improves brain function. Best of all, it can be done in your kitchen, using ordinary domestic items: pints of milk in place of dumbbells, say, or squats wearing a backpack full of books.Anyone intending to use Robert Galbraith’s Strike novels for this purpose would be advised to seek the advice of a GP. The Hallmarked Man may not be the heftiest of the eight so far – it does not even make it into the top three – but it still clocks in at a cool 912 pages. Galbraith’s tendency to whopperdom has in the past elicited a fair amount of griping from critics, me among them, wh...

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38 h. ago The Guest review – a gloriously ridiculous thriller that slips down a treat

When a cleaner starts working for a wealthy woman, she gets sucked in by a luxury mansion bursting with secrets. Get the popcorn ready for a preposterous world of locked rooms, creepy gardeners and bodiesThe writer Matthew Barry and director Ashley Way gave us one of the highlights of 2023’s television output in Men Up, a witty, moving, compassionate treat of a drama about the development of the drug that would become known as Viagra and the group of Welshmen who were among its first guinea pigs.Their new offering is a more straightforward one, and if it doesn’t achieve the same success Men Up did, they can hardly be condemned for having set their bar so high. Continue reading...

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40 h. ago The Smashing Machine review – Dwayne Johnson only possible casting for crisis

Former pro wrestler Johnson takes on the role of man-mountain Kerr who goes into meltdown when the unthinkable happens – he losesBenny Safdie has written and directed a solid bro drama for the UFC fanbase and maybe a little way beyond. It is about the central crisis in the life of man-mountain Mark Kerr, America’s pioneering MMA and ultimate fighting champ, who in 1997 found himself in the ring, or maybe the cage, with his demons after the unthinkable humiliation of losing for the first time.This feature is in fact developed from a 2002 documentary about Kerr with the same title. He confronted his substance abuse, relationship anxieties and the question of what the heck life is for if you can’t simply win all the time. Kerr is played by Dwayne Johnson, a colossus of muscle topped off with a head the size of Indiana Jones’s boulder, a body on which the only visible fat is rippling at the nape of his neck. Johnson’s appearance is modified by close-cut frizzy hair and facial prosthetic...

Politics

40 h. ago The Smashing Machine review – Dwayne Johnson only possible casting as crisis

Former pro wrestler Johnson takes on the role of man-mountain Kerr who goes into meltdown when the unthinkable happens – he losesBenny Safdie has written and directed a solid bro drama for the UFC fanbase and maybe a little way beyond. It is about the central crisis in the life of man-mountain Mark Kerr, America’s pioneering MMA and ultimate fighting champ, who in 1997 found himself in the ring, or maybe the cage, with his demons after the unthinkable humiliation of losing for the first time.This feature is in fact developed from a 2002 documentary about Kerr with the same title. He confronted his substance abuse, relationship anxieties and the question of what the heck life is for if you can’t simply win all the time. Kerr is played by Dwayne Johnson, a colossus of muscle topped off with a head the size of Indiana Jones’s boulder, a body on which the only visible fat is rippling at the nape of his neck. Johnson’s appearance is modified by close-cut frizzy hair and facial prosthetic...

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