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”.
Billionaire populist Andrej Babiš insists he will meet legal obligations before taking office but does not explain how
Andrej Babiš, the self-proclaimed “Trumpist” billionaire who won last month’s Czech election, has refused to sell his huge business empire, but insisted he will resolve a conflict of interest that threatens to bar him from becoming prime minister.
Babiš, whose ANO party finished a comfortable first in the October vote but failed to secure a majority in parliament, said in a social media post on Thursday he would not sell his Agrofert farming, food processing and chemicals conglomerate.
Metals firm denies allegations as more problems emerge for founder Sanjeev Gupta after loss of key UK operation
Sanjeev Gupta’s Liberty Steel is under investigation in Romania for embezzlement and tax evasion, adding to the metals tycoon’s difficulties after the loss of his key British operation.
Romania’s prosecutor’s office said in a statement last week that they raided seven homes and the registered office of an unnamed company. The office published a video – blurred to make identification more difficult – which appeared to show officers in helmets and body armour entering a property at night.
Lots include the annotated shooting script for Die Hard and a hand-drawn Halloween card from his Harry Potter co-star Rupert Grint
Alan Rickman’s obsessive attention to detail is revealed in the copious annotations he made on all his scripts, as a number of film-related items from the late actor’s personal collections are put up for auction including screenplays from Die Hard and Harry Potter.
Propstore, the Los Angeles and London-based auction firm that specialises in entertainment industry memorabilia and recently sold a Star Wars lightsaber for £2.7m, is staging a three-day sale in which a number of lots originating from the Alan Rickman archive will be available.
Some content created with advertisers is no longer visible, which could mean loss of revenue, officials say
The EU has opened an investigation into Google Search over concerns the US tech company has been “demoting” commercial content from news media sites.
The bloc’s executive arm announced the move after monitoring found that certain content created with advertisers and sponsors was being given such a low priority by Google that it was in effect no longer visible in search results.
Two problems stand in the way of the party’s efforts: their policies and their president
Try as they might to present Zohran Mamdani as the exemplar of their opponents’ radical-left lunacy, the platform the New York mayor-elect and other Democrats won on was affordability – the same platform on which Trump ran, and has spectacularly failed to deliver.
So in their panic, Republicans are scrambling to reclaim affordability.
Judith Levine is a Brooklyn-based journalist, essayist and author of five books. Her Substack is Today in Fascism
Remix of old and new material from TV series includes tremendous battle sequences but there’s an awful lot of lore for new viewers to catch up with
Here’s an unusual proposition: a film that opens with a kind of super-edit, cutting together chunks culled from many hours’ worth of plot and spectacle from the Jujutsu Kaisen TV series, which is then followed by some all-new episodes of the TV series; playing together in full as a movie, in the cinema. Is it a movie borrowing bits from a TV show? A TV show dressed up as a movie? Does it matter? It certainly doesn’t, if all you need is spectacular and imaginatively staged battle sequences – though for non-initiates, it’s difficult to see it adding up to much more than that.
One thing that would be very helpful – and is regrettably lacking – is a Star Wars-style scroll plainly laying out the backstory in simple terms for unfamiliar viewers. Sure, the TV show compilation does a bit of that, but it also feels like trying to download a thousand years of lore into your head, while simultaneously having your mind boggled by wild visions of conflict in the underworld. A bit more context for the long-running struggle between good and evil, involving sorcerers and “curses” (which seems to mean something closer to “demon” here), would be of great help to the normies over here.
The Damascus suburb became Assad’s killing field. But some of the perpetrators are still around – and even working with the new government
Abu Mohammed still remembers the smell. It usually came at dawn, as the mosques sounded the first call to prayer. By the time he sat down for breakfast, it would fill the air around his home in Tadamon, a working-class district in the south-east of Damascus. The smell was hard to define. Whenever he noticed it, Abu Mohammed felt on edge. He had his suspicions about what it might be, but like so many Syrians who lived under the dictatorship of Bashar al-Assad, he knew to keep such thoughts to himself.
Abu Mohammed, a retired engineer who asked to be identified only by his nickname, first noticed the smell in the winter of 2012, nearly two years after the start of the uprising against Assad. At the time, he was living in a modest flat in the heart of Tadamon with his wife and their five children. The house stood just off a busy road named Daboul Street. Before the fighting started, Abu Mohammed enjoyed sitting on his balcony after work, sipping his tea as he watched the yellow minicabs and honking motorbikes compete for space in the streets below.
The actor and comedian was Oscar-nominated for her film debut 40 years ago, then won an Academy Award just five years later. As she turns 70, we rate Goldberg’s greatest hits
Or: Winona, Overshadowed. Predominantly, that is, by Angelina Jolie, whose movie-stealing turn as one of Ryder’s fellow patients at a late-1960s US psychiatric hospital won her an Oscar. Don’t discount Goldberg’s contribution, though. Soothingly understated as Valerie, the chief nurse, she and fellow staff members, played by Vanessa Redgrave and Jeffrey Tambor, provide the emotional grounding over which their younger co-stars (also including Elisabeth Moss and Brittany Murphy) can soar.
France pays tribute to the 130 people killed during a rampage by Islamic State gunmen and suicide bombers targeting cafes, restaurants and the Bataclan concert hall in 2015.
The attacks were the deadliest on French soil since the second world war, prompting emergency security measures, many of which are now embedded in law
Announcement by first minister John Swinney comes after Moody’s and S&P give country same credit rating as UK
The Scottish first minister John Swinney has said Edinburgh is on track to issue its own government bonds, nicknamed “kilts”, after the country was given the same credit rating as the UK.
Two ratings agencies Moody’s and S&P Global gave Scotland a score of Aa3 and AA respectively, echoing their judgment for the UK as a whole.
There’s an investigation into a child sex trafficking ring, plus the US President and his deputy engage in some of the most disturbing scenes the show has ever put on screen. It’s quite the episode
This week’s episode of South Park opens with Santa Claus peeing in the face of a fourth-grade girl. It turns out to be an AI-generated video created by Butters as revenge against his former crush, Red, who cruelly manipulated him in a recent episode by pretending to like him in exchange for a rare Labubu doll. After learning of the video, Red decides to fight fire with fire, making her own AI footage of Butters molesting beloved Studio Ghibli character Totoro.
This kicks off a war of attrition among South Park Elementary’s student body, who use the Sora 2 OpenAI video generator – a real-life tool that allows users to create customised videos – to churn out videos of one another engaging in all manner of sexual and scatological behaviour with the likes of Popeye, Bluey and Droopy Dog (who poos in Kyle’s mouth). The adults of South Park can’t distinguish between AI and reality, so the town’s hapless police force think they have stumbled on a vast child sexual abuse ring.
Deborah Cohen says she is not aware of any attempts within corporation to stop or shape her reporting on trans issues
A reporter at the heart of the BBC’s coverage of gender dysphoria has questioned claims that the corporation shows “systemic bias” on trans issues, saying it ran a series of reports without any interference.
Claims that the BBC had failed to properly cover gender and trans issues formed part of a memo alleging “serious and systemic problems” of bias at the corporation.
As he moves into film production with the thriller Game, the musician – also known for Beak> – answers your questions on Myspace rappers, Bristol greats and whether Portishead will ever make new music
What made you decide to make a film, Game, and can you tell us a little bit about it? Zoe2025 As I’ve grown older, I’ve found myself having more film ideas than musical ones. Having an independent label, Invada Records, I wondered if I could actually make a film. I was at school with [co-writer and actor] Marc Bessant, I’ve worked with [director] John Minton for 20 years and I met [co-writer] Rob Williams – a scriptwriter for Judge Dredd and stuff – when he moved to Portishead [Somerset]. The idea of someone trapped in an upside down car comes from JG Ballard’s Concrete Island. Initially it was gonna be a horror film where the character was attacked by rabid dogs, but instead we set it during the end of rave culture. I immediately thought of Jason Williamson from Sleaford Mods for the role of a poacher and it turned out that his dad had rabbited. He’s brilliant in it.
How easy was it to recreate the sense of the 90s rave scene on film? k4ren123 There are only a couple of sequences, but we wanted to capture the way the rave scene went from free festivals to something more corporate where the drugs were really organised. All my mates in Portishead [the town] were ravers. I wasn’t. I went to a couple, but for the film I looked at lots of old footage and bought most of the clothes for the film on eBay. Nineties rave wasn’t fluorescent outfits. They were ordinary kids in street gear, so I’d think: what kind of trainers were they wearing?
The use of AI-generated campaign videos – labeled or unlabeled – is likely to permeate future US elections
The New York City mayoral election may be remembered for the remarkable win of a young democratic socialist, but it was also marked by something that is likely to permeate future elections: the use of AI-generated campaign videos.
Andrew Cuomo, who lost to Zohran Mamdani in last week’s election, took particular interest in sharing deepfake videos of his opponent, including one that saw the former governor accused of racism, in what is a developing area of electioneering.
Cities in the grip of urban warfare are being pushed to collapse by an influx of people fleeing hunger in rural areas as crops fail
Émile Charles fled Kenscoff in September when armed men overran his land. Leaving everything he owned behind, the farmer found refuge above Turgeau, one of the few neighbourhoods of Port-au-Prince still beyond the gangs’ reach.
New arrivals to Haiti’s capital climb ever-high to claim a few square metres and throw up a makeshift shelter of planks and rusty corrugated iron. To reach his, Charles scrambles up a steep path. Glasses perched on his head, he gazes across the hills at scattered shacks. “They arrived without warning and burned our crops,” he says. “We ran for our lives. Those who didn’t leave were killed. Two of my brothers were murdered.”
Émile Charles, who fled his land when it was overrun by armed men
England’s keeper and a 19-year-old French forward are part of our selection of players who are essential to their clubs
Unless his arms suddenly enjoy a miraculous growth spurt the T rex jibes will never fully be banished, but Jordan Pickford has been one of the Premier League’s most reliable goalkeepers for some time. His long passing and shot-stopping have always been of decent standard, but, over time, he’s developed his short game, able to keep the ball moving and begin attacks by picking out teammates at closer range. His handling is tidier, meaning mistakes are fewer, and he is no longer as affected by his emotions as he was in his youth.
While there are promising signs of Swiss growth, there is some way to go to cement lasting legacy for the tournament
Switzerland were the toast of the continent this summer as hosts of the Women’s European Championship. The national team reached the quarter-finals for the first time and a total of 623,088 were in attendance at the 31 matches, a tournament record. The hope within Switzerland was for a boost at club level similar to what England experienced three years previously. Those heights have not been reached, but there has been a definite bump.
According to Switzerland’s football association, their Women’s Super League has enjoyed a 62% increase in attendances this season, with an average attendance of 787. While that does not compare with the huge spike England’s Women’s Super League had after Euro 2022 – an average attendance increase of 172% the following season – it is still encouraging.
This is an extract from our free email about women’s football, Moving the Goalposts. To get the full edition, visit this page and follow the instructions. Moving the Goalposts is delivered to your inboxes every Tuesday and Thursday.
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.
The showdown channels centuries of Spanish tension and pride – and may soon collide with the NBA’s ambitions to expand into Europe
Scores of fans filed past the silhouettes of cranes and construction work surrounding Barcelona’s Camp Nou last Friday night. But they weren’t there for the world famous soccer stadium. Instead, the sea of Barça jerseys was heading for the club’s basketball arena, the Palau Blaugrana. There was an expectant but apprehensive buzz in the air – the night marked a big occasion: Real Madrid were in town.
It’s widely accepted that the biggest rivalry in basketball is between the Los Angeles Lakers and Boston Celtics; between them they have won almost half of all championships in NBA history. The Lakers-Celtics showdowns of the 1980s went beyond basketball and embodied different Americas: West Coast glitz versus East Coast grit; flashy fastbreak basketball versus fundamentals; and, frankly, though perhaps sometimes oversimplistically, Black versus white.
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