Charlie Cox and Zooey Deschanel co-parent a depressed dog in a serviceable attempt to appeal to animal lovers during the festive period

It is a truth universally acknowledged, at least in my social circles, that co-parenting a dog is a bad idea. Most will tell you: shared canine custody arrangements prevent exes from moving on. It’s a logistical headache. It causes fights. It’s annoying for all involved (and then some). And apparently, in a revelation worthy of a straight-to-streaming movie, it makes dogs depressed.

Not to minimize the mental health of dogs – I’ve listened to my mother boast about our family chihuahua’s “EQ” enough to know that man’s best friend has the capacity for great emotional sensitivity. (And the ability to convey it on command – for a truly outstanding performance of doggie depression, please see Bing the bereft great dane in 2024’s The Friend.) I have no doubt that a dog like Merv, a wired-hair terrier sort played by Gus the Dog in Merv’s eponymous Amazon movie, would struggle to adjust from life in a single family unit to split homes. Whether or not the ill-advised dog-sharing arrangement can sustain a whole Christmas romcom, however, is a dubious proposition.

Hollywood is still trying to court younger audiences but this year’s crop of new comedies, from Adults to I Love LA, have yet to prove essential

This year, despite not particularly liking the show nor wanting to, I have thought a lot about the opening scene to Adults. The FX half-hour comedy about a group of recent college graduates in New York begins, naturally, on the subway; what seems like an over-studied portrait of early adulthood intimacy – tangled limbs, in-group references, aggressively relaxed banter – quickly devolves into a standoff between a creepy subway masturbator and the group’s instigator, Issa (Amita Rao), trying to out-masturbate him to make a wildly off point about feminism. “Is this the world you want?!?” she shouts at him, hand vigorously in pants.

The moment is intentionally off-putting, perhaps too much so – I’m as ripe as anyone for surprise, but found the try-hardness of this shock memorably irksome. Yet it’s also unintentionally revealing: this, it implicitly screams, is a show to get young people’s attention. A similar anxiety courses through the opening of I Love LA, HBO’s west-coast rejoinder to Adults that is similarly pitched as a zeitgeist-y take on the thrilling chaos of young adulthood. We meet Maia, played by creator and co-writer Rachel Sennott, mid-sex with her boyfriend, heedlessly determined to come before going to work, even if it means ignoring an earthquake.

Actor, who starred in The Passion of the Christ, will play the disgraced ex-Brazilian president in film written by his one-time secretary of culture

Jair Bolsonaro, the former Brazilian president now in prison for plotting a coup, is getting the biopic treatment.

Jim Caviezel, who played Jesus in Mel Gibson’s 2004 film The Passion of the Christ, is reportedly filming a “heroic” portrait of the rightwing ex-politician in secret. Dark Horse, directed by Cyrus Nowrasteh and written by Mário Frias, who served as secretary of culture under Bolsonaro, started shooting three months ago in Brazil, where Bolsonaro served as president from 2019 until 2023. He was sentenced to 27 years and three months in prison in September 2025 for leading a criminal conspiracy to stop his leftwing rival, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, taking power, though his supporters deny the allegations and have compared the prosecution to the “lawfare” allegedly faced by Donald Trump before he was re-elected.

Period drama parody has some decent and often smart gags and benefits from a game cast including Damian Lewis and Thomasin McKenzie

Perhaps it’s the feeling of end times in the air: after years of inactivity, spoofs are making a comeback. This summer saw the resurgence of the lighthearted genre, which at its best sends up the pretensions of overly serious genre with a barrage of pitched cliches, sight gags and stupid-clever puns. The Naked Gun, starring Liam Neeson and Pamela Anderson in a spoof of a buddy-cop spoof, opened to moderate box office success; the hapless rock band dialed it back up to 11 in Spinal Tap II: The End Continues. Reboots of the horror spoof gold-standard Scary Movie and the Mel Brooks Star Wars rip Spaceballs were greenlit, and there were rumors of a return for international man of mystery Austin Powers. Unserious times, it seems, beget appetite for knowingly unserious, joke-dense, refreshingly shallow fun.

The latest of these goofy parodies, which premieres on the beyond-parody day that Fifa awarded Donald Trump an inaugural peace prize and Netflix announced its plan to buy Warner Bros, is Fackham Hall, a Downton Abbey spoof that pokes at the very pokeable pretensions of gilded British period dramas. (Yes, Fackham rhymes with a crass kiss-off to the aristocracy.) Co-written by British Irish comedian and TV presenter Jimmy Carr and directed by Jim O’Hanlon, Fackham Hall has plenty of material to work with – the historical soap’s grand finale just premiered in September, 15 years after Julian Fellowes’s series started going upstairs-downstairs with ludicrous portent – and wastes none of it. From ludicrous start (servants rolling joints for the household and responding to calls from the “masturbatorium”) to ludicrous finish (someone manages to marry a second cousin rather than a first!), this enjoyable silver-spoon romp packs all of its 97 minutes with jokes and bits ranging from the puerile to the genuinely funny, proving that there may yet be more to wring from eat-the-rich satire.