The Guardian
Tape review – reverential Hong Kong remake of Richard Linklater drama of toxic masculinity 16 septembre 2025 à 08:00

Tape review – reverential Hong Kong remake of Richard Linklater drama of toxic masculinity

16 septembre 2025 à 08:00

Linklater’s ahead-of-the-curve adaptation of a 1999 play about an alleged rape is reconfigured to try and reflect current concerns

Richard Linklater’s 2001 movie Tape, and Stephen Belber’s 1999 play that preceded it, were ahead of the curve in their targeting of male sexual violence, blurred lines of consent, performative apologies and self-victimising aggressors. Now comes a remake from Hong Kong for the post-#MeToo era. It makes a few updates, such as situating the film in an Airbnb apartment (instead of a motel room), where two old high-school friends convene. But, somewhat too reverential towards the original, this new version from director Bizhan Tong doesn’t do enough either conceptually or aesthetically to dig down into today’s shifted gender battle lines.

In Tong’s scenario, flippant lifeguard and small-time drug-dealer Wing (Adam Pak) invites his straight-laced school buddy Chong (Kenny Kwan) over to shoot the breeze at his apartment. Initially they smoke spliffs and banter testily about their diverging life paths; the latter, now going by the anglicised name of Jon, has become a promising low-budget film-maker. But steering the conversation to a touchy subject – Wing’s former sweetheart Amy (Selena Lee), whom Jon later slept with – Wing goads his so-called friend into confessing he raped her. Then he delivers the coup de grace: the room has been sprinkled with webcams that have videoed their exchange.

The Guardian
What We Can Know by Ian McEwan review – the limits of liberalism 16 septembre 2025 à 08:00

What We Can Know by Ian McEwan review – the limits of liberalism

The Guardian

Par :Kevin Power

16 septembre 2025 à 08:00

A century from now, a literature scholar pieces together a picture of our times in a novel that quietly compels us to consider the moral consequences of global catastrophe

The sheer Englishness of Ian McEwan’s fiction may not be fully visible to his English readers. But it is clearly, and amusingly, visible to at least this Irish reader. It isn’t just McEwan’s elegiac, indeed patriotic, attentiveness to English landscapes – to the wildflowers and hedgerows and crags, to the “infinite shingle” of Chesil Beach, to the Chilterns turkey oak in the first paragraph of Enduring Love. Nor is it merely the ferocious home counties middle-classness of his later novels, in which every significant character is at the very least a neurosurgeon or a high court judge, everyone is conversant with Proust, Bach and Wordsworth, and members of the lower orders tend to appear as worrying upstarts from a world in which nobody plonks out the Goldberg Variations on the family baby grand. No, McEwan’s Englishness has most to do with his scrupulously rational, but occasionally and endearingly purblind, liberal morality: England’s most admirable, and most irritating, gift to politics and art.

These thoughts were provoked by a brief passage in McEwan’s future-set new novel that describes the “Inundation” of Britain after a Russian warhead goes off accidentally in the middle of the Atlantic, causing a tsunami that, combined with rising sea levels, wipes out everything but a Europe-wide archipelago of mountain peaks. In these entertainingly nihilistic pages, the fate of that other major chunk of the British Isles is not mentioned. Presumably Ireland, with its dearth of high peaks, fared badly as Europe drowned. But from McEwan’s future history, you’d never know it. I began to think of What We Can Know as another of McEwan’s deeply English stories. It has, I thought, the familiar partialities of vision. Has Brexit, endlessly backstopped by those pesky six counties, taught English liberals nothing?

The Guardian
Lemmy, Leigh Bowery and ‘the two Georges’: 80s stars in the Limelight – in pictures 16 septembre 2025 à 08:00

Lemmy, Leigh Bowery and ‘the two Georges’: 80s stars in the Limelight – in pictures

The Guardian

Par :Mee-Lai Stone

16 septembre 2025 à 08:00

It was the place to be through the 1980s, a nightclub where Johnny Rotten and Kim Wilde rubbed shoulders with the Beastie Boys and, er, Mel Smith. David Koppel’s new book captures it all

The Guardian
‘We’re insanely hubristic’: how The Rest Is History became the world’s biggest history podcast 16 septembre 2025 à 07:00

‘We’re insanely hubristic’: how The Rest Is History became the world’s biggest history podcast

The Guardian

Par :Sian Cain

16 septembre 2025 à 07:00

Tom Holland and Dominic Sandbrook on storytelling, their strangest interactions with fans and bonding over The Lord of the Rings

How does one measure success? For Tom Holland and Dominic Sandbrook, the historians behind the hit podcast The Rest Is History, it could be the number of unexpected and overly familiar conversations with strangers. On a holiday high up in the mountains of Bulgaria, Holland was wandering around a secluded monastery when someone called out, “Love the podcast!”

Sandbrook, meanwhile, is used to getting weird looks from fans who find it hard to compute that the man in front of them is one half of the soundtrack to their dog walks and commutes. “The weirdest thing that people say – which I’ve heard more than once – is, ‘My wife and I listen to you in bed every night,’” he says, looking mildly appalled.

The Independent
The brilliant Emmy-winning drama yet to be released in the UK 16 septembre 2025 à 06:29

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