Jackson’s songs are back on charts and biopic trailer racked up 116m views in 24 hours, yet there is a certain hesitation
Michael Jackson’s voodoo classic Thriller was high on Billboard’s Hot 100 in the week of 15 November, handing the 16-years-gone King of Pop a record for having a Top 10 hit across six different decades. Simultaneously, Jackson also broke records for receiving 116m views in 24 hours for the trailer of a new biopic, Michael, set for release in April.
Millions of fans may be excited and primed for a Jackson biopic. For comparison, the trailer beat out Taylor Swift’s Eras tour preview and it will join a procession of recent music biopics about Bruce Springsteen, Amy Winehouse, Bob Dylan, Elvis Presley and Elton John. The most successful of all – the Freddie Mercury and Queen biopic Bohemian Rhapsody – took in nearly a billion dollars at the box office.
A grim, grave-faced look at Jesus realising he is in fact the son of God is a bafflingly acted and messily made bore
It’s hard to know how seriously one should take a film that casts Nicolas Cage as Joseph, the carpenter who acted as the adoptive father of Jesus. One might expect, with the actor still relying on his trademark California intonation and histrionic outbursts, that this would be another one of his late-stage career larks, like playing Dracula or himself. But in The Carpenter’s Son, a bafflingly serious stew of horror, drama and fantasy, it slowly starts to dawn on us that this is in fact, not a joke. What it is I couldn’t tell you but entertaining it most definitely isn’t.
The film, from Egypt-born, London-raised writer and director Lotfy Nathan, is inspired by the Infancy Gospel of Thomas, a text seen as heretical by some, which offers highly debated “insight” into the early years of Jesus. Nathan begins by clueing us into the fact that this isn’t your vicar’s Sunday school biblical drama, as a screaming cave-based birth sequence is followed by a bonfire of babies, King Herod’s men throwing on more and more as mothers wail at the side. Cage’s unnamed carpenter and the new mother at his side (FKA twigs) escape and we leap forward to see them moving into a remote village with their teenage offspring, known as the boy (Noah Jupe).
Closeup of studded stilettos in trailer for The Devil Wears Prada 2 causes fashion debate on social media
Posting the first trailer for The Devil Wears Prada 2 on Instagram on her birthday this week, the film’s star Anne Hathaway captioned the video with “it’s everybody’s birthday”, prompting copious comments featuring emojis of flames, hearts and – of course – the red shoe now associated with the film’s poster.
But with the trailer circulating on social media, it’s the shoes that have become the focus of fashion debate – and not in a good way.
(Young) After 2018’s mellow Honey, the beloved Swede’s heady comeback pairs production worthy of Daft Punk and Moroder with deep romantic realism
At the end of last year, during her triumphant gig at the O2, Charli xcx brought Robyn out onstage. In a sense, it was just the latest in a series of guest appearances on the Brat tour: a string of collaborators from the album and its ensuing remixes – Lorde, Billie Eilish, Troye Sivan and Addison Rae among them – had turned up at different shows to perform their parts live. But as well as contributing her verse to their remix of 360, Robyn also took centre stage, performing her peerless 2010 single Dancing on My Own. Released when at least some of Charli xcx’s audience were still in nappies, it didn’t sound remotely like a throwback even in the context of a gig based around one of 2024’s most acclaimed and agenda-setting pop albums: the star of the show’s willingness to cede the spotlight to her felt like evidence of Robyn’s influence over contemporary pop.
You can see why the Swedish singer-songwriter carries so much clout among pop stars of the mid-2020s. When she opened an album with a track called Don’t Fucking Tell Me What to Do, she wasn’t joking: after launching as a 90s teen-pop star produced by Max Martin, she rejected the usual strictures placed on female pop – walking away from not one but two major label deals due to lack of artistic control – and seemed intent on following a more idiosyncratic, complex, messy path. She never saw being in the centre of mainstream pop as antithetical to making music with depth, or that touched on contentious issues. Despite the worldwide success of her debut, Robyn Is Here, her second album, My Truth, went unreleased outside Sweden because her US-based label baulked at Giving You Back, a song about an abortion she’d had in 1998: when asked to remove the song, Robyn refused.
Longlegs director Osgood Perkins takes us on a dark journey to the woods in a creepy and visually inventive nightmare with a killer lead performance
For the past few years, horror cinema has sometimes felt as fraught with toxic romance as a particularly cursed dating app. From manipulated meet-cutes (Fresh; Companion) to long-term codependence (Together) to the occasional success story (Heart Eyes), it’s clear that romantic relationships are mostly blood-stained hell, and a couple going to a secluded location together is a fresh level of it.
So it’s not surprising when Liz (Tatiana Maslany) starts to feel uneasy on her weekend away with Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland) early on in the new and much-concealed horror movie Keeper. Liz and Malcolm have been together for about a year, which we gather early on has marked the time Liz has bolted from past relationships. Still, she seems optimistic about this one. She thinks she knows Malcolm pretty well, and their early scenes together are neither as dotted with red flags nor as suspiciously idyllic as other recent characters in the doomed-couple genre. Liz has a wary, deadpan sense of humor, and Malcolm has a slightly slurred-together accent as he explains some oddities about his family-owned cabin in the woods (like the fact that he has a creepy cousin who lives nearby). But their awkwardness levels are complementary. They seem comfortable together.
(Polydor) It’s a difficult second album for the chart-topping singer, in more ways than one – but her sombre songcraft ends up being spectacular
In theory, the making of Celeste’s second album should have been plain sailing. Boosted by a win in the BBC Sound of 2020 poll, and her single A Little Love appearing on the John Lewis Christmas ad the same year, her debut album Not Your Muse entered the charts at No 1, spawned two big hits – Stop This Flame and Strange – and ultimately went gold. That’s the perfect starting place from which to make a second album: success, acclaim and attention, but not on the kind of overwhelming scale that seems ultimately paralysing, where it’s impossible to work out how you can follow it up.
And yet, the making of Woman of Faces has clearly been attended by some difficulty. Celeste has talked openly about butting heads with its producer, Jeff Bhasker, whose hugely impressive CV includes work with Harry Styles, Taylor Swift and Kanye West: she commissioned string arrangements from British composer and conductor Robert Ames, but Bhasker “didn’t let me use [them]”. Last month, she was on Instagram, protesting that her label was showing “very little support of the album I have made” and had threatened to drop her entirely if she “didn’t put two particular songs” on its track list. This accusation caused a certain degree of eyebrow-raising, not least because Celeste is signed to the same label that singer Raye complained about in 2021, insisting they had refused to allow her to release a debut album: Raye subsequently left the label, released the album herself to vast success and noted that record companies might be better served allowing artists to “always create with a sense of purpose, rather than the means to sell”.
The reviews are in for the long-awaited adaptation of Suzanne Collins’ dystopian novel, presented in a purpose-built theatre in Canary Wharf
The Super Bowl optics are all there from the off: a wardrobe of great gaudy glory (the 1960s, with twists of commedia dell’arte, the Palace of Versailles and alien-chic, designed by Moi Tran), a fast-changing set by Miriam Buether and energetic choreography from Charlotte Broom. The first half, prepping us for the gameshow, lacks tension, nonetheless. “We are just hours away from being mortal enemies,” Katniss says. But you don’t feel the dread.
Mia Carragher, daughter of ex-footballer Jamie, is an energetic central presence as Katniss Everdeen, the warrior who fights off rivals in the gory contest that’s the ratings equivalent of Strictly Come Dancing in Panem, the grim state ruled by a foppish elite. But the fact that she’s required to narrate much of the story while sprinting here and there is a distinct flaw.
Playwright Conor McPherson and director Matthew Dunster have set this dystopian tale in a drab, delicately evoked version of Depression-era America, where the inhabitants of District 12 eke out a living amid coal-mining disasters and food shortages. A chorus of townsfolk sway like sun-bleached clothes on a washing line, powerless and adrift, in choreographer Charlotte Broom’s evocative movement sequences.
In the chrome-and-glass dystopia of Canary Wharf in east London, most of the money looks like it’s been blown on creating a hi-tech colosseum. Eight vertiginous banks of seating – some of which move during the performance – open out into a runway, or close in to form the killing fields … Martial arts, modern dance, and hand-to-hand combat are what drive the pageant, heightened by strobe lighting and nasty white noise.
Set pieces rise up from beneath the arena-like stage, and props are lowered from above. Ian Dickinson’s sound design sends the flutter of birds’ wings around the auditorium, bringing us closer to the action; Kev McCurdy’s fight direction orchestrates gasp-worthy duels; and Chris Fisher’s illusions send arrows flying into the bullseye of their targets.
Dunster and McPherson’s unexciting production fails to reimagine and revitalise its source material. Moreover, they don’t critique the queasy subject matter. There’s simply never enough sense that we, the audience, are complicit in what we are seeing … Given that the story is about children killing each other in the name of TV entertainment, the failure properly to characterise the tributes themselves is almost a moral problem.
One aspect that cannot be faulted is the energy, stamina and athleticism of the performers, many of whom come from dance backgrounds. Carragher herself must run tens of miles during each performance; her indefatigability is commendable, even though McPherson’s bewilderingly clunky script leaves her with far too much exposition to plough through.
I wasn’t sold on the casting of a pre-recorded John Malkovich as the manipulative President Snow – it’s somewhat disorientating to have a famous American actor appear at massive scale on the screens every now and again, and the scenes where Malkovich is ‘talking’ to a live performer just feel a bit of an odd thing to be watching.
On Tuesday 7 October the winner(s) of the 2025 Nobel Prize for Physics will be announced. The process of choosing the winners is highly secretive, so looking for hints about who will be this year’s laureates is futile. Indeed, in the immediate run-up to announcement, only members of the Nobel Committee for Physics and the Class for Physics at the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences know who will be minted as the latest Nobel laureates. What is more, recent prizes provide little guidance because the deliberations and nominations are kept secret for 50 years. So we really are in the dark when it comes to predicting who will be named next week.
If you would like to learn more about how the Nobel Prize for Physics is awarded, check out this profile of Lars Brink, who served on the Nobel Committee for Physics on eight occasions.
But this level of secrecy doesn’t stop people like me from speculating about this year’s winners. Before I explain the rather lovely infographic that illustrates this article – and how it could be used to predict future Nobel winners – I am going to share my first prediction for next week.
Inspired by last year’s physics Nobel prize, which went to two computer scientists for their work on artificial intelligence, I am predicting that the 2025 laureates will be honoured for their work on quantum information and algorithms. Much of the pioneering work in this field was done several decades ago, and has come to fruition in functioning quantum computers and cryptography systems. So the time seems right for an award and I have four people in mind. They are Peter Shor, Gilles Brassard, Charles Bennett and David Deutsch. However, only three can share the prize.
Moving on to our infographic, which gives a bit of pseudoscientific credibility to my next predictions! It charts the history of the physics Nobel prize in terms of field of endeavour. One thing that is apparent from the infographic is that since about 1990 there have been clear gaps between awards in certain fields. If you look at “atomic, molecular and optical physics”, for example, there are gaps between awards of about 5–10 years. One might conclude, therefore, that the Nobel committee considers the field of an award and tries to avoid bunching together awards in the same field.
Looking at the infographic, it looks like we are long overdue a prize in nuclear and particle physics – the last being 10 years ago. However, we haven’t had many big breakthroughs in this field lately. Two aspects of particle physics that have been very fruitful in the 21st century have been the study of the quark–gluon plasma formed when heavy nuclei collide; and the precise study of antimatter – observing how it behaves under gravity, for example. But I think it might be a bit too early for Nobels in these fields.
One possibility for a particle-physics Nobel is the development of the theory of cosmic inflation, which seeks to explain the observed nature of the current universe by invoking an exponential expansion of the universe in its very early history. If an award were given for inflation, it would most certainly go to Alan Guth and Andrei Linde. A natural for the third slot would have been Alexei Starobinsky, who sadly died in 2023 – and Nobels are not awarded posthumously. If there was a third winner for inflation, it would probably be Paul Steinhardt.
Invisibility cloaks
2016 was the last year when we had a Nobel prize in condensed-matter physics, so what work in that field would be worthy of an award this year? There has been a lot of very interesting research done in the field of metamaterials – materials that are engineered to have specific properties, particularly in terms of how they interact with light or sound.
A Nobel prize for metamaterials would surely go to the theorist John Pendry, who pioneered the concept of transformation optics. This simplifies our understanding of how light interacts with metamaterials and helps with the design of objects and devices with amazing properties. These include invisibility cloaks –the first of which was built in 2006 by the experimentalist David Smith, who I think is also a contender for this year’s Nobel prize. Smith’s cloak works at microwave frequencies, but my nomination for the third slot has done an amazing amount of work on developing metamaterials for practical applications in optics. If you follow this field, you know that I am thinking of the applied physicist Federico Capasso – who is also known for the invention of the quantum cascade laser.
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