28 h. ago Woman and Child review – drama of rage and pain in the Iranian marriage market

Cannes film festivalSaeed Roustaee’s new film takes aim at a slippery, entitled male who thinks he can lord it over a widow he plans to marryA strange, sad, sombre movie from Iranian director Saeed Roustaee whose last entry at Cannes was the family drama Leila’s Brothers in 2022. This is a story about the randomness of life in the big city, a melodramatic convulsion of grief, rage and pain which has a TV soap feel to its succession of escalating crises. Like Leila’s Brothers, it is about the entitlement of Iran’s menfolk, and how a man – however shiftless, casual and low-status – can somehow pull rank on a woman in the marriage market.Payman Maadi (from Asghar Farhadi’s A Separation) plays Hamid, an ambulance driver in his late 40s with a certain roguish ladies-man charm whose unmarried status raises eyebrows among some of his acquaintances, but who is now engaged to Mahnaz (Parinaz Izadyar). She is a smart, hardworking hospital nurse who is widowed and lives with her sister Mehri (...

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32 h. ago Man who posed as pupil to go to school arrested and accused of forgery

Anthony Emmanuel Labrador Sierra was arrested on Monday after he posed as a teenager in January 2024 after a woman revealed he was the father of her child.

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40 h. ago Sirens review – Julianne Moore’s utterly addictive cult drama is preposterously fun

This endlessly entertaining study in class and family is a witty, star-packed treat that zips through five tight episodes. Here’s hoping for a second seasonAre you ready for some fun? Don’t you deserve it? I think we all do – life’s awful – so I gladly present to you Sirens, which is The White Lotus meets all the good series that Nicole Kidman has been in, with just a dash of Ryan Murphy-esque camp to make it all go with an especially zingy swing! Welcome!It is a tale of two sisters and a superrich villain whose cult-like lifestyle threatens to come between them. Older sister Devon (Meghann Fahy – yes, of White Lotus fame, taking a much meatier part this time and running with it) is a semi-functioning alcoholic who is caring for their increasingly difficult father while working a minimum wage job at the local falafel joint and banging her married boss on the side. When she sends little sister Simone (House of the Dragon’s Milly Alcock and astonishing child actor in Tim Minchin’s hea...

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53 h. ago Child among 2 migrants who died attempting to cross English Channel to Britain in small boat

A woman and a child have died on an attempted illicit overnight sea crossing from France to Britain

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3 d. ago The Secret Agent review – brilliant Brazilian drama of an academic on the run in the murderous 1970s

Cannes film festivalKleber Mendonça Filho’s study of a man attempting to escape corrupt politics is a tremendous, novelistic study of corruption in high and low placesDirector Kleber Mendonça Filho’s new film is set in the Brazilian dictatorship of the 1970s and its visual brilliance, sensual big-city intrigue, shaggy-dog comedy, gruesome lowlife walk-ons and epically languorous mystery combine to create something special. It’s about the everyday nastiness of political tyranny, high- and low-level, and with its subject matter and present-day perspective, could be compared with Walter Salles’ I’m Still Here. Yet this is more ambitious, more totally complex and elusive. As the movie progressed, I found myself comparing it to Sergio Leone, to Antonioni’s The Passenger in its unhurried progress to some terrible violent denouement, to Elmore Leonard via Quentin Tarantino, to Meirelles and Lund’s City of God and Alfonso Cuarón’s Roma.Wagner Moura plays Marcelo, a man on the run, or prepar...

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4 d. ago Parsifal at Glyndebourne review: Wagnerian drama at its most gripping

Jetske Mijnssen’s risky yet revelatory production of Wagner’s enigmatic opera centres compassion and critiques negative sexual stereotypes

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7 d. ago The Little Sister review – a discerning drama of queer Muslim coming

Cannes film festival Hafsia Herzi manages sexuality with confidence in her first Palme d’Or competition film, featuring an affecting lead performance from newcomer Nadia MellitiActor turned director Hafsia Herzi presents her first feature in the Cannes competition: a coming-of-age story of queer Muslim identity, with all the painful, irreconcilable imperatives that this implies, complicating the existing insoluble agonies of just getting to be an adult. It is adapted from La Petite Dernière, or The Last One, the autofictional novel by Franco-Algerian author Fatima Daas about growing up as the kid sister, the youngest of three girls, in an Algerian family in a Paris suburb with her mum, dad and siblings.Non-professional newcomer Nadia Melliti plays Fatima, a smart kid battling with asthma who likes books, likes football, likes freestyling, likes running – and likes girls. (This last interest is secret.) As Fatima prepares to leave school and start her first year at university (while ...

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9 d. ago Sperm donor who claims he fathered more than 180 children loses custody battle

UK judge rejects Robert Albon’s application for parental right of three-year-old girl he had with woman in DurhamAn unregistered sperm donor who says he has fathered more than 180 children has failed to gain custody of a three-year-old child he had with a Durham woman, who said she was left “broken” and “suicidal” by their encounter.Robert Albon, who goes by the pseudonym “Joe Donor” and has appeared on This Morning and in a Channel 4 documentary, applied to have the girl live with him after a court deemed her mother was unable to look after her. Continue reading...

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1 week ago Baby in pram ‘snatched in front of parent’ at popular UK seaside town for families

A 51-year-old woman has been arrested on suspicion of child abduction and police assault after the incident in Blackpool, Lancashire, on Saturday morning, police said

Society

1 week ago Horror as baby in pram ‘snatched in front of parent’ at UK seaside hotspot

A 51-year-old woman has been arrested on suspicion of child abduction and police assault after allegedly trying to walk off with a baby in a pram near Blackpool promenade

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2 w. ago Review: Hamlet Hail to the Thief is unmissable drama at Aviva Studios

The world premiere production fuses Shakespeare with the music of Radiohead - and the results are achingly cool, writes Dianne Bourne

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2 w. ago A woman who called a Black child a slur has raised a backlash but also thousands of dollars

A video showing a Minnesota woman at a playground admitting to using a racist slur against a Black child has garnered millions of views

Politics

2 w. ago Man, 49, charged with murdering woman and trying to kill five others including child after 'hit and run attacks' in Rochdale

Keith Micheal Knight, 49, of no fixed abode, was arrested after a black BMW was driven into people at two locations in Rochdale, Greater Manchester on Saturday afternoon.

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2 w. ago Five retired Greater Manchester Police officers arrested for alleged sexual abuse of woman who was pimped out as a child

EXCLUSIVE: Two other suspects are deceased, Neal Keeling reports

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2 w. ago Driver 'suffering mental health episode' killed woman and injured mother and child in pram after 'deliberately' ploughing into pedestrians

Greater Manchester Police (GMP) confirmed a 49-year-old man was arrested after a black BMW was driven into people at two locations on Saturday afternoon.

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2 w. ago Woman hurls racial slur at child and then launches relocation fundraiser after backlash

Shiloh Hendrix, from Minnesota, US, has faced backlash after she called a five-year-old boy the N-word. She is now pleading for people to give her money so she can go into hiding

Society

2 w. ago There's a reason they used to call gin mother's ruin. After my third child, this 'classy' spirit slowly tightened its grip on me and I almost lost everything

It was the cry no woman wants to hear from her young child, especially in the dead of night: a helpless wail that meant only one thing: 'I need my mother.'

Politics

2 w. ago Woman dead and child among three people injured as car ploughs into pedestrians

"The lone offender has been arrested on suspicion of murder and it is being treated as an isolated incident."

Events

2 w. ago Woman dead and three others including a child injured after car ploughed into pedestrians: Man, 49, arrested over 'murder'

A woman has died and three others - including a child - have been injured after a car reportedly ploughed into pedestrians during a horrifying incident in Rochdale.

Events

2 w. ago Rochdale crash: Woman dies after car ploughs into pedestrians injuring three including child

Police were called to reports of a crash at two locations in Rochdale which left three people injured, including a child, with the male driver arrested on suspicion of assault and attempted murder

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