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They were loud, vivacious and gloriously un-PC. Sometimes they seemed to be learning how to cook as they went, barely one step ahead of the viewer. It didn’t matter. If anything, it only made the BBC’s Two Fat Ladies more watchable. And 25 years on – the last of the two dozen episodes pairing Jennifer
It’s Wednesday, which means my evening is booked up for Slow Horses. The usual protracted regime of children’s tea-bath-bed will be compressed into about 10 minutes (packet of crisps, cursory going-over with a wet wipe, withholding of bedtime story on thoroughly spurious grounds) before my husband and I leap onto the sofa like The Simpsons
Hollywood has been good to war photographers this year. First came the dystopian blockbuster Civil War, with Kirsten Dunst as a veteran photojournalist touring America at war with itself. Now comes Lee, starring Kate Winslet as second world war legend Lee Miller, who captured the liberation of Paris and the horrors of Dachau. Both demonstrate
When Sven-Göran Eriksson’s coffin was being paraded through the streets of his home town, ahead of his funeral, it was followed by a marching jazz band playing ‘The Bare Necessities’. The song, from Disney’s The Jungle Book, was intended to honour the former England manager’s request that his send-off should be celebratory rather than mournful.
Early in the first episode of Holding, an adaptation of Graham Norton’s novel of the same name, a young, ambitious, foul-tempered detective is called to a village in west Cork where human remains have been found. Before handing the investigation over and returning to the city, she spits out her contempt: ‘I’m not spending weeks down
Few franchises have the cult-like devotion of Harry Potter. One only has to watch the video of hordes of adults counting down the arrival of the Hogwarts Express at King’s Cross, and their fury when it didn’t arrive, to understand the religious fervour people feel for the wizarding world. Yet one announcement did come last
Can anyone name the actors in the new Alien: Romulus movie? No, me neither. Which seems odd for such a massive franchise, but then I struggle to name a single film star under the age of about 35, and I consider myself a movie buff. As is often the case with the release of a
The video game Star Wars Outlaws is to be released this week. The game is set between The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi – so in the universe of the original, still-greatest film trilogy – and has been several years in development. According to its ‘narrative director’ Navid Khavari, ‘We didn’t just
In a 1962 interview, Alain Delon pushes aside a carafe of red wine and explains that when offered his first cinema role, he didn’t really want it: je n’avais pas envie de faire spécialement ça. Delon, who died over the weekend at the age of 88, may not have been immediately seduced by cinema, but
It’s July 2024, and Netflix has decided we have to go back. In honour of the 20th anniversary of the pilot, all six series of Lost have been uploaded to Netflix in the US, and now younger audiences get to experience one of the biggest pop culture obsessions of the noughties for the first time.
I blame Brexit. In the aftermath of the 2016 referendum, when the whole nation was still in the throes of a collective nervous breakdown, I succumbed to the prevailing mood of madness and went on a TV dating programme. No, it wasn’t Naked Attraction, the Channel 4 show in which participants strip down to reveal
Sexy time at the cinema is becoming a thing of the past. That’s according to research on the prevalence of vices in top live-action films from film maven Stephen Follows. His study shows that drug taking and violence are as popular on screen as ever in the 21st century. Profanity has dipped only slightly, but
Fiona Harvey appears to be having the time of her life. She’s the ‘real Martha’ in the Netflix hit, Baby Reindeer, where she’s depicted as a convicted stalker with a rage problem. Denying almost everything, Harvey is suing Netflix for libel on a global scale, hoping to secure a tidy £133 million. Since the show
Last year, we got rid of our television. Pretty much, anyway: it lives in the attic of our increasingly cramped two-bedroom maisonette. The TV only comes down for mummy and daddy’s Friday night date nights and for occasional family film time. Any time gained by putting the television on was almost invariably lost (and then
Bridgerton is an American fantasy of ye olde England – right down to the absurd if enjoyably playful not-quite colour blind casting and its insinuation that Regency London was peopled with an equal number of Bame and white aristocrats. Even the casting of Queen Charlotte, played by half-Guyanese actress Golda Rosheuvel, is an allusion to
The greatest movie ever made celebrates its 75th anniversary this year and I’ll be watching it – for the umpteenth time – with appropriately fine fizz at hand. Sorry, what? Oh, come on, I’m talking about The Third Man. There’s no finer film. I thought everyone knew that. You know, written by Graham Greene, directed by Carol
Colombian pop singer Shakira caused quite the stir earlier this month when she revealed that her sons ‘absolutely hated’ the Barbie movie, which had a major cultural moment last year. Hot pink came back in fashion, people were hosting Barbie-themed parties and everyone was obsessing over lead Margot Robbie’s vintage Barbie-inspired clothing on the movie’s press tour. It
There should be a salacious German word for the blissful relief one feels at not being in another’s uncomfortable situation. Not pleasure at their misfortune, as in schadenfreude, just toe-stretching- and-dancing joy that you are safely under a blanket on the sofa while others are undergoing intense public scrutiny. First impressions suggested earnest, caring individuals
Last month, the BBC offered an apology of sorts after a red-carpet reporter at the Baftas asked Andrew Scott, star of the film All of Us Strangers, about fellow Irish actor Barry Keoghan’s appendage. This had been the subject of conversation thanks to Keoghan’s naked dancing in the film, Saltburn, in which Keoghan’s floppy bishop
Marvel is at death’s door. What’s next? Some say we can track an incoming recession by the length of women’s skirts, others by the popularity of dance music. Film, as the composite of a million images, comes out as a more sophisticated forecaster – and not just of the economy, but of lifestyles and mentalities.
Late last year, Martin Scorsese’s epic Killers of the Flower Moon switched from cinema to living room on the Apple TV streaming service. An increasingly popular tactic, the move from big to small screen draws in a whole new audience, many of whom deliberately waited to see it for the price of a monthly subscription rather than spend
The other day I met a young woman wearing a crop top emblazoned with the words Waystar/Royco – the media conglomerate at the heart of Succession, HBO’s cult television drama about the nasty Roy family and their insane attempts at one-upmanship for control of their father’s company. It won Emmy and Golden Globe awards three
Having just watched the overwhelmingly underwhelming Bob Marley: One Love, I have decided that Hollywood’s obsession with biopics must be stopped. Biopics have become so ubiquitous, so pervasive, so unoriginal, that Kingsley Ben-Adir, who plays Marley in the film, has already starred in two other biopics: The Comey Rule as Barack Obama and One Night in Miami as Malcolm X.
The original Mean Girls premiered 20 years ago this spring, but it might as well have come out yesterday. The Middle East is, again, still, at war with the West. Britney Spears looks out from every tabloid. After years of cancel culture, being controversial is great again. And, just as in 2004, Mean Girls is everywhere. Walmart’s Christmas ad
Hooray, I thought. There’s a new season of The Tourist. I remember liking that, I thought. It was that thing with the bloke in Australia, wasn’t it? And I was all set to settle down for a good binge, when I realised that I had almost literally no idea what had happened in the first season. This is
It is a great mystery how Zulu, a tale of imperial derring-do from the Anglo-Zulu war of 1879, has avoided being cancelled. On the face of it, this is a film that revels in one of the most heinous, most blood-thirsty chapters of our colonial past, one tinged with technologically enabled white supremacy. Here is
One small but significant loss to culture that streaming sites like Netflix or Amazon Prime have ushered in is the slow death of the DVD commentary. Usually given by a film’s actors or director (or both), they could be played over the film and were packed with insights on filmmaking, the artists’ take on life
The first decade of this century, following Al Qaeda’s attack on the Twin Towers and the Pentagon in September 2001, was something of a golden age for films about terrorism, a spate of them following in quick succession. In the light of Hamas’s 7 October mass-killing of innocent Israelis, it’s interesting and informative to watch
Dream Scenario is a film about modern celebrity culture and the terror of losing yourself to the internet’s virtual mob. It’s the story of evolutionary biology professor Paul Matthews, a balding, befuddled, bespectacled everyman who is the walking embodiment of anonymity – played by Nicholas Cage, the face that launched a thousand memes. At the start
