5 d. 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

7 d. ago The secrets behind Ralph Fiennes' startling transformation into a buff and bronzed Greek hero at 62 years old

The personal trainer behind Ralph Fiennes remarkable and now viral physical transformation for his new film The Return has shared the common-sense secrets that unlocks potential for everyone.

Politics

1 week ago ‘The grief takes your breath away’: how death transformed a loving family – and shaped a remarkable film

Nik and Maria Payne were raising their ‘wild and free’ children in the Norwegian countryside when cancer turned their lives upside down. The reluctant stars of A New Kind of Wilderness talk about a world without MariaPeace hangs over a farm in rural Norway. The last of the melting snow lingers in hummocks and bikes are strewn outside the Payne family’s small rented cottage. Nik Payne materialises from behind the barn where he has been feeding the cows. One of his three children, Falk, 12, is lying on the sofa with a fever and a Biggles novel; later, Freja, 15, and Ulv, nine (known as Wolf or Wolfie), return from school. Their home is as warm and chaotic as any family’s – boots and coats strewn in the hallway, a fridge covered in photos, shelves of books – but with a few differences: there is no television and behind the living room door is an unobtrusive, very personal shrine.The Paynes find themselves the reluctant stars of a film, A New Kind of Wilderness, which has won awards at ...

Events

1 week ago ‘Beautifully, awfully funny’: why Withnail and I is my feelgood movie

The latest in our ongoing series of comfort movies is a pick for Bruce Robinson’s cult British comedyIn the words of its writer and director, Withnail and I is a comedy that “doesn’t know it’s funny”. To its star, it’s about “the nobility of failure”. It ends with its title character alone in the rain, his one friend gone, delivering a Hamlet soliloquy to an indifferent wolf. It’s my feelgood movie.Bruce Robinson’s British classic was released in 1987. He and Richard E Grant made the remarks above in 2007, at the British Film Institute. I was there, eager to hear Robinson discuss a movie based on his own experience. Themes abide. As he said recently about The Peculiar Memories of Thomas Penman, his imperishable novel about his brutal childhood: “It’s very funny but also sad as fuck.” Robinson’s first film was a novel before it was a screenplay. At the BFI, he said he knew he’d got his film right at an early screening, when a “girl sort of threw up, laughing”. She had a point. Withna...

Politics

2 w. ago The hidden garden shaped like a teddy in one of Cardiff's best parks

Uncover Cardiff’s hidden jewel – a perfect family day out in the Welsh capital

Politics

3 w. ago Journalist Graydon Carter: ‘If there was another 9/11 this week, I don’t think the world would rush to support us’

The former Vanity Fair editor on how #MeToo changed Hollywood, what Christopher Hitchens would make of the US today, and the value of a handkerchiefGraydon Carter, 75, is a Canadian-born journalist. He co-created the satirical magazine Spy, edited the New York Observer, and from 1992 until 2017 was the editor of Vanity Fair. In 2019 he founded Air Mail, an online newsletter for “worldly cosmopolitans”. His memoir, When the Going Was Good: An Editor’s Adventures During the Last Golden Age of Magazines, has just been published. He lives in New York with his third wife, not far from the Waverly Inn, the restaurant he co-owns, and has five children. Donald Trump has called him a “dummy” and “a real loser” who has “no talent and looks like shit”.Before we talk magazines, as a Canadian-born non-fan of Trump, how’s the view over there?Well, I think very highly of Mark Carney [the new Canadian prime minister]. He’s not going to take any grief. But the sad thing is that in two months, Trump ...

Politics