The photographer and her husband came across an abandoned boat while out walking and took the opportunity to float a surreal idea
Every September, Carla Vermeend and her husband go on holiday to Terschelling island, in the Netherlands.
“It has lots of nature, right in the middle of the Wadden Sea, which is listed by Unesco as a world heritage site,” says Vermeend, a Dutch photographer. During their visit in 2014, the couple were walking by the sea together.
The singer on eating junk food in bed, a $100k holiday he didn’t even go on, and the perks of fame
Born Montero Lamar Hill in Georgia, Lil Nas X, 25, rose to fame in 2019 with his single Old Town Road, which won many awards, including two Grammys. In 2021, he released his debut album Montero, which featured the hits Montero (Call Me By Your Name), Industry Baby and Thats What I Want. The following year, he completed his first worldwide tour. The documentary Lil Nas X: Long Live Montero – directed by Carlos López Estrada and Zac Manuel and released on digital platforms on 20 May – sees him navigating issues of identity, family and acceptance as he embarks on the tour. He lives in Los Angeles.
When were you happiest? Maybe on tour when I was in Argentina. Yeah, or Brazil: oh my God, those people out there.
Game-changing books that offer hope, as recommended by speakers at this year’s Hay festival, including Theresa May, Tom Holland, Helen Garner and Jon Ronson
A vivid cultural of digestion, from ancient Greece to All-Bran
Some people, observed Samuel Johnson, “have a foolish way of not minding, or pretending not to mind, what they eat. For my part, I mind my belly very studiously, and very carefully; for I look upon it, that he who does not mind his belly, will hardly mind anything else.” And while we are minding our belly, our belly minds us: so, at least, we are encouraged to think by modern hymns to the wisdom of the enteric nervous system and the gut microbiome, to which all manner of marvels are increasingly attributed.
Here, then, is a book-length exercise in minding the belly: a vivid cultural history of changing metaphorical, political and scientific visions of our guts. The stomach is a-flutter when we are in love, and the way to a man’s heart is through his stomach, though not for laparoscopic surgeons. (That phrase was apparently coined by the 19th-century American journalist Fanny Fern.) But our guts are also cerebral: the Greek physician Galen first observed that the stomach seemed to possess its own kind of intelligence, and to trust your gut is to tune into a more reliable source of truth. Donald Trump is here marvellously quoted as insisting that his gut can tell him more than other people’s brains can.
The author, a health historian, displays a touch of that academic tic whereby a book constantly narrates that it has just talked about something and is going to talk about something else next, but she is an engaging writer and adeptly traces a network of fascinating changes in ruling metaphors. “Today we speak in ecological terms – adverts for probiotics encourage us to nurture the microbial garden within – but in early modern Europe the stomach was imagined as being more alike to the bustling kitchen of a great country house, while 18th-century physicians fussed over it as a nervously afflicted invalid and through the Victorian period it was frequently condemned as an irascible foe, an enemy within implacably opposed to its owner’s comfort.”
In the long-running fable of the body politic, meanwhile, the digestive system has been two opposed things in series: first, an unruly populace to be kept in its place by a wise head; then the site of authentic proletarian value. The 20th-century American philosopher Stanley Cavell, discussing such metaphors in Shakespeare’s Coriolanus, concluded splendidly: “No one is in a position to say what the right expression is of our knowledge that we are strung out on both sides of a belly.”
For some, our ungovernable guts have always stood in the way of progress and humanity’s perfection, both technological and spiritual. The 17th-century hermit Roger Crab became famous for his ascetic diet of “herbes and roots”: only vegetarianism could lead to godliness. A prominent Victorian doctor, meanwhile, denounced the stomach as a “strangely wicked and ungrateful” organ that was “implacably opposed to man’s progress and comfort”. In the early 20th century, vivisectionists discovered new facts about the machinery of digestion by means of horrific experiments on living dogs in packed lecture theatres, and suffragists on hunger strike were force-fed by violence.
Women in particular, Richardson shows, have long been the focus of worries about digestion. Many accusations of witchcraft in the early modern period centred on allegations that women had spoiled food or milk; centuries later, constipation became coded as a particularly female complaint, to be cured by such quasi-medicinal products as Bile Beans (an Australian laxative introduced in 1899, to keep female customers “healthy, happy & slim”) and Kellogg’s cereals, which according to one 1930 advert for All-Bran would preserve a woman’s “bloom of youth” by keeping her regular. Contrariwise, to “have guts” in the sense of being tough is primarily thought of as a male virtue, while “intestinal fortitude” (coined by an American doctor after watching a football game in 1914) came to describe the warfighting capability of a nation’s men.
Now, however, our guts are peaceful: the alimentary system has been colonised anew by the wellness-industrial complex, with its probiotics and experimental faecal transplants. Dr Johnson might be tickled to learn that to mind one’s belly has become a cornerstone of mindfulness.
Long-distance couples meet for the first time, including a pair who started out in a Game of Thrones roleplay chatroom. It is bizarre but strangely sweet to witness
When the internet was invented nobody used their real names on it, and I am starting to wonder if breaking that covenant was a mistake. “Starting to wonder” – correction, I am fully sure that was an error. We need to go back to usernames – xX_tha_0rin0c0_Xx, that sort of thing – and anonymity and no webcams and, ideally, screeching 56k modems. The internet is too fast, too accessible, too always-on. Our phones can suck internet out of the sky and the idea of “logging off” is extinct. I am planning to start one of those one-topic political parties that always get obliterated at London mayoral elections about this, by the way, so keep your eyes out.
Anyway. As we all know, what Channel 4 excels at is documentaries that can be described as “sweet but weird”, and this week The Nevermets starts (Friday 24 May, 10pm), which is a classic of the genre. The Nevermets follows a series of, as narrator Dawn French keeps describing them, “ordinary Brits”, as they look at their phone screens and smile in bed. This is because they are all in love with someone across the world who they met in a chatroom or on Snapchat, or from extended Instagram or Facebook conversations, and – despite, in many cases, the couples professing to be in love with each other – they have never actually, you know, met. So we get to see them meet.
Cannes film festival Completed just before his assisted death, the French New Wave master director talks through his ideas as illustrated in his hand-drawn scrapbook
Here is an intriguing footnote to Jean-Luc Godard’s extraordinary career - a docu-textual movie collage lasting just under an hour in two parts, or maybe two layers, completed just before his assisted death two years ago in Switzerland at the age of 91. His collaborator and cinematographer Fabrice Aragno calls it not the “last Godard” but a “new Godard”. In its way, this little double film shows us a very great deal about Godard’s working habits, and it’s a late example of Godard speaking intimately in his own person about his own creative process.
Scénarios appears to have grown out of thoughts generated by his last film, The Image Book, which emerged in 2018. Godard sketched out his storyboarded or scrapbooked ideas for a short piece, which would juxtapose images, quotations, musical cues and clips in his distinctive manner. Aragno edited and curated the film from this blueprint, then came back to see Godard and to shoot a brief sequence of the director reciting a text from Sartre to go at the end. This is the first short film we see.
An office drone must suffer the machismo of an Australian coastal town in this barmy, low-budget thriller about a would-be wave-chaser
Here is a gloriously demented B-movie thriller about a middle-aged man who wants to ride a big wave and the grinning local bullies who regard the beach as home soil. “Don’t live here, don’t surf here,” they shout at any luckless tourist who dares to visit picturesque Lunar Bay on Australia’s south-western coast, where the land is heavy with heat and colour. Tempers are fraying; it’s a hundred degrees in the shade. The picture crash-lands at the Cannes film festival like a wild-eyed, brawling drunk.
The middle-aged man is unnamed, so let’s call him Nic Cage. Lorcan Finnegan’s film, after all, is as much about Cage – his image, his career history, his acting pyrotechnics – as it is about surfing or the illusory concept of home. The Surfer sets the star up as a man on the edge – a sad-sack office drone who desperately wants to belong – and then shoves him unceremoniously clear over the cliff-edge. Before long, our hero is living out of his car in the parking lot near the dunes, drinking from puddles, foraging for food from bins, and scheming all the while to make his way down to the shore.
John Krasinski and Ryan Reynolds go family-friendly in their new imaginary-friends comedy, while the singer swaps introspection for lust on her long-awaited new album
If Out now In what has to be one of the more enviable showbiz lives, John Krasinski has played Jim in The Office, married Emily Blunt, and written and directed acclaimed horror franchise A Quiet Place. Now he turns his hand to family entertainment, writing and directing this part-animated fantasy about imaginary friends made visible with a little help from Ryan Reynolds and Steve Carell.
Cannes film festival A dying director who fled from the US to Canada agrees to make a confessional film in Schrader’s fragmented and anticlimactic story
Muddled, anticlimactic and often diffidently performed, this oddly passionless new movie from Paul Schrader is a disappointment. It is based on the novel Foregone by Russell Banks (Schrader also adapted Banks’s novel Affliction in 1997) and reunites Schrader with Richard Gere, his star from American Gigolo. Though initially intriguing, it really fails to deliver the emotional revelation or self-knowledge that it appears to be leading up to. There are moments of intensity and promise; with a director of Schrader’s shrewdness and creative alertness, how could there not be? But the movie appears to circle endlessly around its own emotions and ideas without closing in.
The title is partly a reference to the national anthem of that nation, which is a place of freedom and opportunity which may have an almost Rosebud-type significance for the chief character, an avowed draft-resister refugee from the US in the late 60s, who becomes an acclaimed documentary film-maker in his chosen country. Maybe Vietnam was his real reason for fleeing and maybe it wasn’t. This central point is one of many things in this fragmented film which is unsatisfyingly evoked.
Exclusive: FoI request reveals Arts Council updated guidance after discussing Gaza conflict with DCMS
Arts Council England (ACE) issued a warning that “political statements” could break funding agreements after discussions with the government about artists speaking out over the Israel-Gaza war, newly released documents suggest.
A freedom of information request made by the actors’ union Equity has revealed that the conflict was discussed in a meeting between ACE and the Department for Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) in December.
Cannes film festival Yorgos Lanthimos reinforces how the universe keeps on doing the same awful things with a multistranded yarn starring Emma Stone, Willem Dafoe and Jesse Plemons
Perhaps it’s just the one kind of unkindness: the same recurring kind of selfishness, delusion and despair. Yorgos Lanthimos’s unnerving and amusing new film arrives in Cannes less than a year after the release of his Oscar-winning Alasdair Gray adaptation Poor Things. It is a macabre, absurdist triptych: three stories or three narrative variations on a theme, set in and around modern-day New Orleans.
An office worker finally revolts against the intimate tyranny exerted over him by his overbearing boss. A police officer is disturbed when his marine-biologist wife returns home after months of being stranded on a desert island, and suspects she has been replaced by a double. Two cult members search for a young woman believed to have the power to raise the dead.
Cannes film festival A drama of despair plays out in a remote village, as a debt-ridden father is mortified to discover his son is gay
Here is a self-laceratingly painful tale of repression and denial in a remote Romanian village in the Danube delta, directed by Emanuel Parvu. It’s in the gimlet-eyed observational and satirical style of the new Romanian cinema, a kind of movie-making that in extended dialogue scenes seeks out the bland bureaucratic language of the police and church authorities; their evasive mannerisms, their reactionary worldviews and lifelong habits of indicating opinions in quiet voices and in code, things they don’t want to be held responsible for, and for things they want to keep enclosed in silence.
The drama concerns a careworn guy, Dragoi (Bogdan Dumitrache), who owes money to a local tough guy and is badly behind with the debt. Then he discovers that his 17-year-old son Adi (Ciprian Chiujdea), the apple of his eye – whom he is planning to send to military school next year, and whom he fondly imagines to be dating a local girl – has been badly beaten up by the money-lender’s sons. With icy rage, Dragoi takes this to be the man’s unforgivably violent way of demanding his money.
Jane Fonda in an animal print coat, Lily Gladstone in Gucci and Chris Hemsworth in an old Hollywood jacket – there was a lot to enjoy on the Croisette this week
In this week’s newsletter: Even if Francis Ford Coppola’s long-awaited passion project is the turkey some critics say it is, the French film festival remains the most exciting date in cinema
The Cannes film festival is raging away on the Riviera, and, for me, the fomo is strong. I went to Cannes a handful of times in what now seems like ancient pre-Covid history, and always had a blast. Admittedly, much of its appeal comes from the slightly elitist thrill of getting to see a hotly anticipated film – Once Upon a Time in Hollywood or Parasite – long before the rest of the world.
But it’s all the weird ephemera around those premieres that I really miss: the gaudy super yachts parked alongside the Palais des Festivals with man from Del Monte-attired businessmen doing deals on the front deck; the giant billboards that would usually be advertising McDonald’s or H&M instead trumpeting the latest arthouse effort from Jacques Audiard; and, of course, the Marché du Film, the festival’s evil twin, locked away in the basement of the Palais, where distributors try to drum up interest in the likes of Killer Sofa, Tsunambee or Santa Stole Our Dog.
Firm run by the ‘Ticket Queen’ sold tickets worth more than £6.5m on sites including Viagogo and StubHub
Ticket touts who conspired to “fleece” fans of artists including Ed Sheeran, Liam Gallagher and Lady Gaga have been jailed for operating a “fraudulent trading” scheme worth more than £6.5m.
Judge Batiste sentenced four touts, who fraudulently bought and sold hundreds of tickets through a business called TQ Tickets, to up to four years in prison each on Friday.
The US, whose founders tried to emulate the laws and governmental structures of the Roman republic, is headed for a similarly self-inflicted collapse, director Francis Ford Coppola has said at the premiere of his first film in more than a decade.
“What’s happening in America, in our republic, in our democracy, is exactly how Rome lost their republic thousands of years ago,” Coppola told a press conference at the Cannes film festival on Friday. “Our politics has taken us to the point where we might lose our republic.”
The Chinese American author of The Book of Goose pays tribute to the late writer, reflecting on the rich rewards of revisiting her stories over many years
Two days after Alice Munro died, I went to an event in New York, and found myself among strangers. A woman asked me if I’d heard that the great “Janet Munro” had died. Janet? The confusion was cleared up, and a man told me about Munro’s life story, with a detailed description of the photo used for her obituary in the New York Times. Another woman told me that, unlike most writers, Munro did not write novels, only stories. “Isn’t that interesting?” Next came the inevitable question, which people often ask of someone who writes novels and stories: “Which is easier for you?”
Easy? That’s an adjective that I’ve never associated with literature.
Big-name ballet dancers and rising choreographers have found a new home in the superclub where the after-party goes on until 5am
“It’s the easiest rider we’ve ever done,” says the Ministry of Sound’s Mahit Anam. “Normally it’s five bottles of Patrón, four bottles of vodka … ” And this time? Water, bananas and protein bars. It’s not your usual green room at the south London superclub, because this is not your usual show: the dancefloor is about to be taken over by professionals. Ballet Nights – a monthly production usually held in a Canary Wharf theatre and featuring the country’s top ballet stars and rising choreographers – is moving into clubland. So now amid the speaker stacks and DJ decks you’ll see Royal Ballet dancer Joshua Junker and work from Olivier award-winning choreographer James Cousins. It’s a whole different kind of podium dancing.
“Everything’s got too formulaic, too samey, and that’s why we want to do this stuff,” says Anam. “Pushing boundaries is something we should always be doing.” Ballet Nights was hatched by former Scottish Ballet soloist and choreographer Jamiel Devernay-Laurence in 2023. The idea was to give audiences an up-close view of big-name ballet dancers like Steven McRae and Matthew Ball as well as nurturing a stable of young artists. But he was itching to expand, and eager to attract younger audiences, people who are the same age as the dancers who perform. Devernay-Laurence had met with all sorts of venues – theatres, concert halls – and it was always a “let’s talk again in the future” situation. But when he walked into Ministry of Sound: “They had open arms, they were so excited. We walked out the same day with an agreement and a date.”
History project tells stories about the lives of women who ran B&Bs in Morecambe
It is true that a postwar northern seaside landlady could be direct, insist on full-board guests being back for tea at 5pm or get nothing, and have no plug sockets in case someone had the wild idea of using a hairdryer.
But were they the unflinching, arms-folded battleaxes often depicted in popular culture? “They generally weren’t,” said the local historian David Evans. “They were firm with their rules but they were fair, they were kind and the important thing for them was that someone enjoyed their holiday and would come back again.”
Popularity of traditional holiday memento hit by smartphones, ‘rude rock’ and rising price of stamps
A trip to the British seaside may not always have been something to write home about, but these days you might struggle even if you wanted to.
At the Little Gems gift shop in Blackpool town centre, all the usual seaside wares are on display – beach towels, plastic buckets and spades, sticks of rock – but one item is notably missing.
Barclays’ analysis may be slightly off the mark, but the megastar is tapping into a new trend in spending
Taylor Swift has long been credited with an outsized influence on music, celebrity culture – even politics. But reviving the UK’s flagging economy may be too much to ask, even of the sequinned megastar.
Research published this week by analysts from Barclays pointed to the extraordinary spending surge that ensues when Swift touches down, and suggested she could bring a £1bn boost to the UK.
Beneath the famous hats was a prime mover in a British golden age, as a biopic is about to show
The legendary fashion editor Isabella Blow is remembered by her hats. A jewel-encrusted lobster which snaked back from her brow like a crustacean mohican. A miniature Chinese garden, complete with tiny eaved pagodas and lilliputian cherry trees with quivering blossoms. Her trademark was so distinctive that Princess Margaret once greeted her at a party with the words: “Good evening, Hat.” At her funeral in 2007, an 18th-century black galleon headpiece with delicate lace sails cascading from its lofty prow, created for her by her favourite milliner Philip Treacy, crowned her coffin on a bed of white roses.
But The Queen of Fashion, a newly announced biopic directed by Alex Marx with the Oscar-nominated actor Andrea Riseborough cast in the title role, is set to highlight Blow’s more serious role as a central figure in a golden age of British fashion, a kingmaker who launched the career of Alexander McQueen, and a powerhouse who helped put 1990s London at the centre of the creative world.
The country has been hit by decades of crises and catastrophe, but its culture continues to thrive across the diaspora. Here, Haitian musicians celebrate its ’sounds of freedom’
Even before March this year, when gun-toting gangs overran the Haitian capital of Port-au-Prince, dictatorships, poverty, health crises and earthquakes had defined the country in the eyes of global media. It passes for the archetypal failed state, a place where Unicef has declared that 3 million children urgently need humanitarian aid. Yet there is an alternative to this narrative of disaster and chaos: the beauty of Haitian culture. Music and visual art remain enduring symbols of hope.
Over the years, the population and its diaspora in North America have been extraordinarily creative. In the 80s, Jean-Michel Basquiat, whose father was Haitian, took the art scene by storm with his outre graffiti, otherworldly painting and barbed political commentary, while today Haitian-born artists Myrlande Constant and Frantz Zephirin are producing exhilarating canvases. Between the 1950s and 80s, musicians Nemours Jean-Baptiste, Coupé Cloué and Boukman Eksperyans excelled in genres such as compas, manba and rasin, which all have entrancing dance rhythms derived from Africa and provocative lyrics in the Creole language born of contact between French settlers and enslaved people.
Theatre Royal Stratford East, London The second, strikingly physical part of Lanre Malaolu’s trilogy that began with Samskara explores bereavement with lightness as well as anguish
It is hard to define this arresting drama. It is a play that might also be a dance with words or a psychological musical. Whatever it is, movement is key to a show that is remarkable for its emotional punch, gut-wrenching performances and formal invention – even if it is sometimes opaque and leaves loose threads.
Glyndebourne, East Sussex Opening the 2024 festival, Diane Paulus’s staging relocates Bizet’s tragedy to a grim present day. Rihab Chaieb is a strong Carmen, Dmitry Cheblykov’s Escamillo shines but Dmytro Popov’s José doesn’t convince
‘A woman of deep courage and life and vitality who is struggling against the system for her freedom and will scale anything for that,” is how US director Diane Paulus describes Carmen in a programme interview for her new staging of Bizet’s masterpiece.
The production, which opens this year’s Glyndebourne festival and dominates it with a season-long, double-cast run is an uneven piece of theatre, unsubtle and in-your-face where Bizet, one of opera’s great realists, is complex and probing, and at times curiously passionless for a work that can still present enormous challenges in its depiction of the irrational nature of desire.
Daf James’s life was upended when he and his husband adopted three kids – and he knew he had to write about it. As Lost Boys & Fairies hits the screen, the writer and cast talk about queer lives, Welshness and what makes a family click
Lost Boys & Fairies is not a true story. But like most drama and fiction, it draws heavily on the real-life experiences of the people who made it. Daf James, the Welsh playwright and screenwriter behind the story, also adopted three children with his husband when those children were aged between two and five. As in the show, he went to activity days to meet children who needed carers, got interrogated by social workers and had plenty of sleepless nights. So when we see his protagonist Gabriel getting hit in the head with a football by a seven-year-old in a Cardiff park, are we watching fiction here or reality?
“Everything I write is personally inspired,” Daf tells me, over Zoom from his attic bedroom, just minutes after we have both put our children to bed. “But I’ve learned how to adapt my lived experience into fiction. Andy is a fictitious character; the father is a fictitious character; the children are fictitious characters.” Andy, the saint-like husband of Gabriel, is played by Hawkeye star and Northern Irish actor Fra Fee, who tells me that his role in Lost Boys & Fairies was “genuinely the honour of my life”. It’s a statement that, like the show itself, hits a note of radical sentimentality. “I’ve never played a gay man on screen before,” Fee goes on, “which sounds a bit mad as a gay man myself. So to get the opportunity to do something that felt so positive was such a gift.”
Adaptation of hit comedy quiz will begin airing on CNN on Saturday nights to coincide with presidential election
Arch, ironic and understated, Have I Got News for You is the quintessential British comedy quiz, but its creators are hoping a US version of the show can translate its particular brand of political humour across the Atlantic.
A US adaptation of the show will be broadcast by CNN in the autumn, to coincide with the presidential election. It will hit screens on Saturday nights – part of a double-bill with Bill Maher’s Real Time.
I thought this would finally be the year – but no. Oh well, I can’t find my way from my house anyway
Nice weather is here! The sun is out and the papers and the internet are filling with their annual offers of help. This is my year, at last – I can feel it! The Summer Style Dilemmas Solved are finally going to work for me! I peruse them eagerly, as I have done for the last 30 years and more, hope undimmed in my increasingly mottled and scraggy breast. But no – no, my hopes are quickly dashed. One again, this year, it seems that my Summer Style Dilemmas can only be solved by losing half my body weight and/or going back in time and making sure one of my parents mates with a gazelle instead.
V&A, London From glossy celebrity portraits through raw news shots to AI-driven abstracts, this epic show captures half a century of iconic images
The latest exhibition of works from Sir Elton John and David Furnish’s gargantuan photography collection is everything you’d expect it to be: spangly, iconoclastic – and a little bit basic. The entry point to the V&A’s largest ever exhibition of photography promises, as the title Fragile Beauty suggests, the frisson of danger in the pursuit of creating something beautiful: the first shot that greets us is a portrait of beekeeper Ronald Fischer, skin crawling with his beloved insects. Richard Avedon found Fischer by putting an ad in the American Bee Journal. He issued two instructions to his sitter: don’t smile and don’t move. Remarkably, Fischer was only stung four times.
The Avedon portrait smacks you in the face with the premise of this show: suffering for one’s art (or making others suffer for it). The seemingly never-ending exhibition unifies 300 works drawn from about 7,000 in the collection, but it is far more personal than the 2016 Radical Eye show at Tate, moving from the 1950s to now, and so spanning John’s own life, as well as the couple’s enduring interests.
Ruth Paxton’s psychological horror is a gut-wrencher, and Leonardo DiCaprio invades your dreams in the Christopher Nolan gobsmacker. You’ve not lived until you’ve seen a Paris arrondissement fold in on itself …
One night at a party, teenager Betsey (Jessica Alexander) walks into the woods and walks out a changed person. She stops eating and shows all the signs of a mental health crisis, but tells her worried mum Holly (a convincingly frazzled Sienna Guillory) that she has been gifted prophetic, apocalyptic visions. Ruth Paxton’s disquieting psychological horror teases a supernatural answer to Betsey’s symptoms, but it is mainly a gut-wrenching tale of anorexia and how it can affect those around the patient. Guillory is fantastic as the single mother striving to hold her family together but being drawn into her child’s fantasies – at the cost of her own sanity. Friday 24 May, 11.10pm, Film4
Cannes film festival The choreography is impressive as people are hurled through walls, thrown off rooftops and otherwise beaten to a pulp, but the editing is frenetic and the characters cartoonish
Hong Kong’s Kowloon Walled City – once the most densely populated place on Earth – is the perfect movie setting: a Piranesian labyrinth of squalid high rises and dark, cramped alleys, teeming with crooks, lowlifes, addicts and impoverished families running small businesses, legit and otherwise. This 1980s-set action epic lovingly, meticulously recreates the notorious neighbourhood (which was demolished in 1994), but sadly, the backdrop is more interesting than the story.
At heart it’s a tale of a Chinese immigrant caught between rival gangs. Street fighter Chan Lok-kwan (Raymond Lam) is initially scammed by local triad boss Mr Big (a cigar-smoking caricature from veteran Jackie Chan sidekick Sammo Hung). Chan retaliates by stealing a package and, after a great bus-top chase scene, he stumbles accidentally into the Walled City, a no-go area for Mr Big’s goons as it’s ruled by local boss Cyclone (Louis Koo). As well as running a barber shop, and smoking like a chimney even though he is dying of a lung disease, Cyclone rules over the giant slum like a benign dictator, collecting rents but also looking out for its citizens and maintaining some kind of order. He and the rest of the Walled City community take Chan under their wing, and this hard-working orphan starts to feel at home for the first time – until a highly unlikely twist of fate puts all the factions on a path to all-out gang warfare.
The annual showcase of the best in photography features an unprecedented number of women working across all genres – from impressive up and comers to establishment names such as Nan Goldin and Sarah Moon
• Photo London is at Somerset House, London, to 19 May
What seemed like another lazy nostalgia cash grab became a favorite, with lessons that Marvel’s universe could learn from
It should have been what Magneto refers to as a “nostalgic parlor trick” – reviving the X-Men cartoon that aired on Saturday mornings throughout much of the 90s for the Disney+ streaming service. Isn’t this what all streaming services do? They comb through their back catalog to see what IP can be exploited, promising both nostalgia and, of course, a fresh new spin on whatever thing you’ve already seen before. So while it was a given that a certain number of X-Men fans would be on board for X-Men ’97, which just completed its 10-episode first season with a second already on the way, it’s still a bit surprising that a revival of an ambitious, sometimes-clunky 90s-kid object of obsession would become one of the year’s most beloved TV shows.
Some of it may be hunger for any kind of ongoing X-Men series outside of the comics, which remain, as ever, a relatively niche interest. (For every restart at issue no 1, there’s several volumes of backstory that must be summarized to even begin to understand what the hell is going on.) After the Fox network aired the X-Men cartoon, the live-action movie studio adapted the characters into the first major superhero movies of the new millennium, helping to kickstart a major cultural trend. The Fox X-Men movies ran for an impressive 20 years, but Disney’s purchase of the studio coincided with a couple of box office flops in the form of Dark Phoenix and the much-delayed, pandemic-released The New Mutants. A curtain call of sorts is coming this summer with Deadpool & Wolverine, but that movie will also integrate the wisecracking Ryan Reynolds mercenary (who spun off from the X-Men movies) into the broader MCU. As such, it’s been four years since there was an X-Men movie in theaters – and longer since the last one that really connected with audiences, 2017’s Logan.
(Verve) Mercurial and moody soundscapes are infused with wistful romance in one of the Grammy-winning singer and composer’s most spirited records to date
Few singers can match the delicate warmth and quiet power of Arooj Aftab’s voice. Over the past decade, the Pakistani-American singer has released four albums that showcase her gossamer cadence in ever-quieter settings, from jazz to Sufi qawwalis and finger-picking folk. Her debut Bird Under Water in 2014 paired Urdu poetry with sitar and drums, while 2021’s Grammy-winning breakthrough Vulture Prince replaced percussion with lively strings, and 2023’s collaborative record Love in Exile with Vijay Iyer and Shahzad Ismaily used only synth trills and piano to create an ambient backing for Aftab’s whispers.
If she were to continue on the same trajectory, fifth album Night Reign might be so subtle as to verge on silence. Yet, across its nine tracks, Aftab presents one of her most spirited and experimental records to date, aiming to embody the nocturnal setting that provides the inspiration for her music.
Directors Jared Hess and Lynn Wang craft a solid piece of family fun with the tale of a pony aiming for success in disguise
Thelma the Unicorn, a new Netflix animated family movie, has plenty of successful tricks aimed at kids: glitter and cotton-candy pink, a pile of manure jokes, a mini-album of catchy original songs, an endearing hero in its titular singing pony-turned-unicorn. But perhaps its greatest asset is its parable of fame, easy enough for young minds reared on phones to grasp, but winking to those who understand a matching-double-denim-outfits on the red carpet reference.
I have to imagine that it is bewildering to grow up aware of or aspiring to viral fame – Instagram celebrities, TikTok trends, overnight Youtube stars –before you even really know yourself. In the grand tradition of kids movies peppered with adult references and talking donkeys, Thelma the Unicorn, directed by Lynn Wang and Napoleon Dynamite’s Jared Hess, offers up plenty of glitterified, thoroughly silly fun over a decent, sunny message on staying true to yourself in the spotlight.
Trio of plays co-created by Roy Williams explores British identity in the era of Brexit, Covid and Black Lives Matter
The co-creator of the Death of England series of plays has said the decade-long project has endured because, alongside difficult conversations about race and immigration, the plays have a sense of pride in being English.
Three of the plays are to be performed together at Soho Place in London this summer, taking a project that started life as a “microplay”, commissioned by the Guardian in collaboration with the Royal Court, to the West End.
She’s won two Brits and rivalled Dua Lipa and Adele for streams, but the public is still getting to know the ex-reality TV singer. She explains why snobbery has held her back, but trauma won’t
Becky Hill Hill glides up on an ebike in full pop star clobber: leather flares, black strap top with enormous silver buckles, immaculately tousled hair, light green contacts that bestow a feline air. We were supposed to be meeting at her tour manager’s flat in London, so she seems slightly alarmed when I approach her on the street. It’s a feeling that quickly becomes mutual: as we wait to be buzzed inside, Hill directs most of her chat towards her phone screen or the wall. I wonder, perhaps, if she is all interviewed out; she is now knee-deep in promo for her second album, Believe Me Now?. “Well, the job is 80% press,” she says, matter-of-factly, once we are safely on a sofa inside. “But I wouldn’t want it any other way,” she adds, unconvincingly.
Hill is one of the UK’s most successful musicians. She has two Brit awards and 12 Top 20 singles to her name, an almost sold-out arena tour in the pipeline and some incredible listening stats (in 2021, she was the third-most streamed British female solo artist after Adele and Dua Lipa). Yet while her instantly memorable dance anthems have soundtracked the big nights out of millions of Britons, the 30-year-old is keenly aware that she doesn’t have the public profile to match her vocal ubiquity.
Benediktas Gylys admits he was surprised by the rowdy behavior that came from the exhibit connecting people in the two cities
The artist behind the controversial “Portal” art exhibit that visually linked New York and Dublin in real time, but was then closed due to rowdy and extreme behavior by the public using it, has admitted he was surprised by the reaction.
Benediktas Gylys also vowed to continue with his project, which has the aim of connecting people and communities all over the world and is hoped to reopen soon.
A compelling debut digs into the conflicting emotions at the heart of an aristocratic family in 2010s England
The cast of Allen Bratton’s debut may sound familiar. Hal, the young heir to the house of Lancaster, wastes his hours in the Boar’s Head pub with his friends Poins and Falstaff. His father, Henry, tries to curtail his son’s bad behaviour, while seeking alliances that might shore up his troubled household. As the pair circle, enter Harry Percy, a dashing family friend who looks set to lock horns with Hal.
Names and themes from Shakespeare’s Henry IV echo through Henry Henry, which explores family, faith and aristocratic succession in 2010s England. Hal heads to pubs, kebab shops and parties, washing down cocaine with gin and beer. He is a rare visitor to the thinktank that nominally employs him, although he does manage to shuffle to morning mass and his father’s private members’ club, which he roguishly visits without a jacket and tie, so that the porter must dress him with whatever spares are available.
(A24 Music) Cult film company A24’s tie-in merch to its rerelease of seminal documentary Stop Making Sense sounds either like karaoke or disconnected from the source material
Responsible for indie hits like Midsommar, Moonlight and Everything Everywhere All at Once, American film company A24 has created a vast lifestyle brand around its cultish reputation, flogging everything from branded shorts ($48) to a Hereditary gingerbread kit ($62). Now, following its rerelease of Jonathan Demme’s seminal Talking Heads documentary Stop Making Sense, its tie-in merch includes a tribute album, featuring all 16 tracks from the film’s soundtrack covered by appropriately vogueish musicians.
The tracks largely use one of two distinct approaches. The acts choosing a karaoke-esque run-through include Toro y Moi (Genius of Love), the National (Heaven) and Paramore, whose faithful version of Burning Down the House includes a barnstorming vocal from Hayley Williams, but isn’t particularly compelling.
Campaigners say move to use the arts to reinforce economic ties with Riyadh may help to launder Gulf state’s human rights record
It was an unusual gig for YolanDa Brown, the saxophonist and composer who this week performed high above the clouds for a UK delegation on a private British Airways plane bound for Saudi Arabia.
The flight was part of a trade offensive for British businesses and institutions in Riyadh, with Brown’s performance part of a new focus for Saudi-UK relations – international arts.
Owners of historic buildings used in likes of Bridgerton warned of potential damage to possessions and reputations
When the owner of Drayton House in Northamptonshire was approached to allow his 127-room mansion to be the location of a film called Saltburn, it was “100%” the generous fee on offer that swayed his decision, he said, adding: “These houses don’t run on water.”
But there were unintended consequences of Charles Stopford Sackville’s decision after the movie’s release last year. The popularity of Emerald Fennell’s class satire led to a rush of selfie-taking trespassers after TikTok videos giving directions to the estate went viral.
This drama about a fake movie fabricated to let Black Panther fugitive Huey P Newton flee to Cuba in the 70s not only dilutes the story of a Black leader – it centres the white characters. Eyes will roll
A few years back, in conversation with three Chicago-area Black Lives Matter activists, I brought up the then-forthcoming film Judas and the Black Messiah, starring Daniel Kaluuya as Fred Hampton, the deputy chairman of the Black Panther party in Illinois, who was assassinated by Chicago police, with help from the FBI, in 1969, aged 21. Were they excited to see this hometown hero brought to the big screen? Their collective eye-roll was so hard it nearly put a hole through the wall. “I mean, the CIA has a liaison office in Hollywood,” said one. “It’s impossible to go through that system and expect an authentic portrayal of an anticapitalist revolutionary.”
The Big Cigar is the latest attempt to pull off such a portrayal, regardless. It stars Moonlight’s André Holland as Black Panther Party co-founder Huey P Newton and tells the (sort of) true story of Newton’s 1974 flight to Cuba to escape a murder charge, with the help of Hollywood producer Bert Schneider (Alessandro Nivola) and an entirely fake movie codenamed The Big Cigar. It sounds similar to the plot of 2012 Oscar-winner Argo, because it is, and because both were originally optioned from magazine features written by the same hot-shot long-read reporter, Joshuah Bearman.
Yes, there were more flame-throwers, but working on Furiosa was pretty similar to starring in Joanna Hogg’s The Souvenir, says the actor. So how does he duck the crossfire that comes with playing JK Rowling’s Strike?
When Tom Burke was cast in Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga, the prequel to the crash-bang spectacular Mad Max: Fury Road, he sat his 77-year-old mother down in front of the television and showed her the previous film in that post-apocalyptic series, just to give her some idea of what he was letting himself in for. Afterwards, she looked concerned. “Will you be mainly inside or outside?” she asked.
Any parent would worry. As Praetorian Jack, he helps the young Furiosa (Anya Taylor-Joy) take revenge against the pharaoh-like warlord (Chris Hemsworth) who killed her mother. Jack’s job is to sit at the wheel of the War Rig, one of those whopping great tankers without which any Mad Max movie would be underdressed, and shoot high-speed pursuers off their motorbikes. The character is kitted out in battered black leather, not unlike Mel Gibson in the original trilogy, with a smudge of grease across the top third of his face like the mask on a cartoon burglar. In addition to the actor’s own scar from childhood surgery on a cleft lip, which has left a jaunty crimp on the upper right side of his mouth, he sports as Jack a crooked duelling scar under one eye.
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