Carlos Alcaraz said Donald Trump’s presence at the US Open final will be “great for tennis” as the US president prepares to attend his first match at Flushing Meadows in a decade.
The 22-year-old Spaniard reached Sunday’s final by beating Novak Djokovic in straight sets on Friday afternoon at Arthur Ashe Stadium. He will face defending champion Jannik Sinner for a sixth grand slam title and a third in New York.
Toronto film festival: The rising star makes for a convincing boxer inside the ring in David Michôd’s by-the-numbers drama but flounders when outside
Even before Sydney Sweeney became better known for being in the centre of an increasingly absurd culture war, the unavoidable campaign to make her Hollywood’s Next Big Thing was showing signs of fatigue. The Euphoria grad, who gave a resonant performance in Reality, scored a sleeper hit with glossed up romcom Anyone But You but audiences were more impressed than critics, including myself (I found her performance strangely stilted). There was little interest from either side in her nun horror Immaculate, and earlier this summer her incredulously plotted Apple movie Echo Valley went the way of many Apple movies (no one knows it exists).
Post-thinkpieces, two of her festival duds (Eden and Americana) disappeared at the box office and she now arrives at Toronto in need of a win. And what better way to achieve that by going for an old-fashioned awards play, taking on the role of alternately inspiring and tragic boxer Christy Martin. It’s a role that’s already been buzzed about for months (Sweeney has been busy laying the standard “gruelling physical routine” groundwork) and at a time when movies about female sport stars still remain thin on the ground despite a swell of interest in them off screen, it’s a needed push in the right direction. But, as perfectly timed as this narrative might be, Christy just isn’t nearly good enough, a by-the-numbers slog that fails to prove Sweeney’s status as a one to watch.
Christy is screening at the Toronto film festival and will be released later this year
(BMG) Great 10th albums are rare – but that is exactly what the band’s killer riffs, eerie atmosphere and midlife reflections achieve
Suede’s fifth album since their 2013 reformation continues their creative resurgence. Singer Brett Anderson suggests that if 2022’s Autofiction – their best post-reunion album until now – was their punk album, Antidepressants is its post-punk sibling. Influences such as Magazine, Joy Division and Siouxsie and the Banshees feed into edgier but otherwise trademark Suede guitar anthems. Helmed again by longtime producer Ed Buller, Richard Oakes’s killer riffs maraud and jostle, Anderson’s moods run the gamut from impassioned to reflective and the rhythm section brew up a right old stomp.
The 57-year-old singer has spoken about his keenness to not be seen as a heritage act and to attract younger audiences. Antidepressants is no throwback. It’s thoroughly postmodern. The eerie background noises and sonic atmospheres chime perfectly with Anderson’s lyrics about what he calls “tensions of modern life, the paranoia, the anxiety, the neurosis” as the band extol the virtues of connection in a dislocated world.
First set: Sinner 4-1 Auger-Aliassime* (*denotes next server)
Auger-Aliassime is playing quite well tonight but Sinner is just too good in the extended rallies. The Italian gets the better of him in a 19-shot exchange to open the fifth game, before Auger-Aliassime takes a couple of points for 15-30. Might it be a chance for the Canadian? Sinner responds with a commanding 125mph service winner down the middle, then another off a short rally for 40-30. He then mixes in his first double fault of the night for deuce. (Notably, his first-serve percentage is below 50% in these early stages.) Sinner gets to game point when Auger-Aliassime nets a backhand, but Auger-Aliassime outlasts the Italian in a 12-stroke rally for deuce. Auger-Aliassime is able to force a third deuce point, but Sinner fights him off from there with a couple of quick points, including his third ace, to pocket the hold and maintain his break advantage.
Among other things, Anutin Charnvirakul, 58, is an advocate for cannabis legalisation, a pilot who has used his private jets to deliver organs to transplant patients, a saxophonist and street food enthusiast.
Toronto film festival: adapted by Max Porter from his novella Shy and co-starring Little Simz, Emily Watson and Tracey Ullman this brutal but ultimately hopeful story is fiercely affecting
Producer-star Cillian Murphy and director Tim Mielants last collaborated on a superlative adaptation of Claire Keegan’s Small Things Like These, and their new project together could hardly be more different: a drama suffused with gonzo energy and the death-metal chaos of emotional pain, cut with slashes of bizarre black humour. Max Porter has adapted his own 2023 novella Shy for the screen and Murphy himself gives one of his most uninhibited and demonstrative performances.
Murphy is Steve, a stressed, troubled but passionately committed headteacher with a secret alcohol and substance abuse problem, in charge of a residential reform school for delinquent teenage boys some time in the mid-90s. With his staff – deputy (Tracey Ullman), therapist-counsellor (Emily Watson) and a new teacher (Little Simz) – he has to somehow keep order in the permanent bedlam of fights and maybe even teach them something.
Toronto film festival: the actor is a reliably committed presence in this gentle Alan Bennett-scripted first world war tale which might have worked better on stage
There are simple Sunday afternoon pleasures to be had in the gentle comedy drama The Choral, the latest collaboration for Nicholas Hytner and Alan Bennett. Their last was 2015’s The Lady in the Van, a slight, mostly unmemorable film blessed by a spiky Maggie Smith performance but cursed with an uneven tone. Unlike that, and their previous two works together on screen, this wasn’t based on a play but it often feels like it and, at too many points, that it also maybe should have been one instead. There are moments of creaky comedy and some bluntly emotional dialogue that one can more easily picture in front of a specifically catered-to live audience.
On a big screen, The Choral is a little out of place, its only moments of pure cinema courtesy of the spectacular Yorkshire scenery. Well, that and those when star Ralph Fiennes fully takes command, an actor who adds not just weight and class but also one who gives a more studied and delicate performance than many of those around him. The star is having a bit of a moment after both Conclave and 28 Years Later and while this project is in a far lower register, and far less likely to be meme-friendly, it’s further proof of his remarkable flexibility. He plays Dr Guthrie, a choir master hired by desperate locals in 1916, a time of loss and confusion, with many already dead or missing and many others waiting to be conscripted. It’s meddled with the social order and allowed for some to find space they might not have otherwise occupied, shown in the new makeup of the choir, which Guthrie must craft and control.
Countries including Fiji, Papua New Guinea and Tonga have given Israel vital backing at the UN
After almost two years of war in Gaza, tens of thousands of deaths and now the reality of famine, Israel has found itself increasingly isolated on the world stage, with alliances that date back to the country’s founding at breaking point.
Through the growing outrage however, a collection of island nations in the Pacific have stood steadfastly with Israel – with perhaps only the United States a more reliable international ally.
Victoria police have announced a million-dollar reward for information leading to the arrest of fugitive Dezi Freeman but given strict warnings to the public not to go searching, after the alleged murder of two police officers in Porepunkah last month.
The reward of “up to $1m” is the largest ever offered in Victoria for an arrest, said Det Insp Dean Thomas from the homicide squad. Thomas told media on Saturday morning that a number of “heavily armed” specialist police continued to search bushland in the Porepunkah area.
Toronto film festival: Steve Coogan and a knockout Éanna Hardwicke take on Mick McCarthy and Roy Keane in this involving workplace drama about a 2002 tabloid storm
If the average cinemagoer sits down to watch the movie Saipan, unaware of the incident that inspired it, then an immediate montage of frantic radio soundbites does a nifty job at setting the scene before we’ve even seen a single image. Premiering at the Toronto film festival, it’s likely that might be the case for many international attenders here, and the Irish directors Glenn Leyburn and Lisa Barros D’Sa set themselves the lofty task of translating the overwhelming scale of a very 2002 tabloid scandal for those who weren’t knee-deep in the hows and whys. Words like soap and drama are thrown around, while one commentator compares the public outcry to that seen after the death of Princess Diana. How did a fight over cheese sandwiches turn into such a frenzy?
At its heart, Saipan is a workplace drama about the danger of mismanagement and the inescapability of office politics, it pulses with the relatable anger that erupts from the feeling of unfair treatment. It just so happens that the workplace is the world of football and the warring employees are two highly paid household names reaching boiling point as the World Cup looms. Steve Coogan is Mick McCarthy, a player turned manager, taking charge of the Republic of Ireland team as they make a rare appearance in a global tournament they’re not typically associated with (it was their third, and to date most recent, World Cup). The media is perhaps rightfully crediting this to the involvement of Roy Keane, played by Éanna Hardwicke, whose success as part of Manchester United has levelled the national team up, whether McCarthy likes to admit it or not. They have a spotty history (we hear a brief reference to an on-pitch spar years prior) but both are entering a crucial period on best behaviour, aware of the many eyes on them. Longtime Shane Meadows collaborator Paul Fraser’s script lightly stacks up bones of contention in the months before flying us to Saipan, the location of a poorly defined team trip that’s part gameplay prep and part R&R. Keane, an often humourless workhorse, is already struggling to play ball, annoyed at the ostentatious excess of the Football Association of Ireland and unsure of McCarthy’s decision-making.
Saipan is screening at the Toronto film festival and will be released at a later date
By the final stages of a tense second-set tie-break, Novak Djokovic had left no stone unturned as he tried to cling on. He attempted to serve and volley, he threw in drop shots and vainly tried to take the first strike from his opponent. On more than one occasion, Djokovic’s miraculous defensive efforts drew 23,000 spectators to their feet.
Yet this time, in this late stretch of his glorious career, he simply did not have the level to match one of the new standard bearers of the sport he has dominated for so long. Across the net, Carlos Alcaraz continued his imperious form by maintaining his composure and holding his nerve to return to the US Open final with a 6-4, 7-6 (4), 6-2 victory.
It’s a clear early spring afternoon and Ngununggula gallery, five minutes from Bowral in the southern highlands of New South Wales, shimmers as if dressed in sequins for Mardi Gras.
This is Belong, a work by the multimedia Aotearoa New Zealand artist Lisa Reihana, designed to draw the audience into Voyager: her gallery-spanning survey of evocative, immersive work, which opened on Saturday.
A new season, a new opposing manager, new signings, but the same old story: a Chelsea win. Only just, but a win is a win, especially in a tricky opening-night fixture, as Sonia Bompastor’s side embark on a quest for the club’s seventh consecutive Women’s Super League title.
It saw Andrée Jeglertz lose his first game in charge of Manchester City; Bompastor, by contrast, is still yet to lose a league fixture in English football and Chelsea remain unbeaten in the WSL since May 2024, a run of 26 league games.
A penny for the thoughts of Christian Eriksen. Denmark could justify leaving the 33-year-old out of their squad for the meetings with Scotland and Greece on the basis he remains unemployed. Yet as the hosts huffed, puffed and failed to unpick a magnificently drilled Scotland defence, the issue of what Eriksen could have contributed was such an obvious one. Denmark in this form will not play at next summer’s World Cup.
Steve Clarke’s Scotland were worthy of their point. But for a lack of composure in front of goal, they would have departed Copenhagen with all three. The winners from this opening night of a truncated section were the Greeks, who swept Belarus aside 5-1, but Scotland richly deserved their full-time ovation from an appreciative support. Denmark were booed off.
Domhnall Gleeson stars as a clueless local newspaper editor in the mockumentary comedy’s latest creation. His talents can’t outdo the one-note dialogue and lack of hilarity
Two years after the British version concluded with a second brilliantly mortifying Christmas special in 2003, American viewers got their own take on The Office. Set at the Dunder Mifflin paper company in Scranton, Pennsylvania, it was very much in the spirit of the original, at least initially: a deadpan mockumentary centred on a megalomaniac manager (Steve Carrell’s Michael Scott), who like Ricky Gervais’s David Brent before him was “a friend first, and a boss second … and probably an entertainer third”. The Office: An American Workplace ran for nine seasons, setting aside some of the original’s cringe comedy aspects in favour of something with a little more heart. By the timeit ended in 2013, it was an award-winning sitcom juggernaut in its own right – hugely popular but bearing little resemblance to its Slough-based sibling.
It is in this US Office universe that showrunner Greg Daniels’s new spinoff is set, with the camera crew that followed Dunder Mifflin for a decade now decamping to a floundering local news outlet a state away (Oscar Nunez’s judgy accountant Oscar Martinez is the only character to transfer from Pennsylvania to Ohio). The Toledo Truth Teller is a newspaper struggling to survive in the digital age: cue the arrival of plucky new editor Ned Sampson (a very un-Irish Domhnall Gleeson). Ned hasn’t actually worked for a newspaper before, but he has risen the ranks selling high-end cardboard at the Truth Teller’s parent company, Enervate, which specialises in different types of paper (hence the link with Dunder Mifflin, and cue a recurring bit about the Truth Teller being less popular than toilet roll).
Directive will make Department of War secondary title and is way to get around need for congressional approval
Donald Trump signed an executive order on Friday to rebrand the Department of Defense as the Department of War, a callback to the department’s original name used from 1789 to 1947.
The directive will make Department of War the secondary title, and is a way to get around the need for congressional approval to formally rename a federal agency, an administration official said.
Settlement could be pivotal after authors claimed company took pirated copies of their work to train chatbots
The artificial intelligence company Anthropic has agreed to pay $1.5bn to settle a class-action lawsuit by book authors who say the company took pirated copies of their works to train its chatbot.
The landmark settlement, if approved by a judge as soon as Monday, could mark a turning point in legal battles between AI companies and the writers, visual artists and other creative professionals who accuse them of copyright infringement.
Singer had said he was open to offers for stake in former band although email address never appeared to work
In a sullen episode befitting some of his more gloomy lyrics, Morrissey, lead singer of the Smiths, has abruptly shut down an email address he was promoting to sell his business interests in the band.
The notoriously saturnine frontman blamed “disagreeable and vexatious characters” involved with the band for his sudden decision, and claimed he had endured decades of misery, in a post on Friday on his website morrisseycentral.com.
Women’s rugby is proving that it can offer a greater sense of belonging and diversity than other sports
There will be more attention on Villa Park where England play Andorra and more celebrities at Monza for the Italian Grand Prix, but it’s long odds you’ll find a better party in any corner of world sport than the one being thrown in Brighton this weekend. That’s not because of the fanzones, free concerts, and fireworks, but who’s coming. These dates have been ringed ever since the fixture list was released. Everyone who’s anyone in a sport where everyone is someone seems to be planning to make a big weekend of it. England play Australia on Saturday, New Zealand play Ireland on Sunday. Both matches are sold out.
“An international at Twickenham is more than a mere spectacle,” Alec Waugh once wrote, “it is a gathering of the clan.” It’s true in Brighton, too, although it will be a very different sort of crowd from the one who used to fill the West Stand in Waugh’s day.
Russian leader was caught musing about immortality with Xi Jinping but his fascination with long life is nothing new
It was the stuff of Bond villains. Two ageing autocrats, their younger ally in tow, ambled down a red-carpeted ramp before a military parade in Beijing when a hot mic picked up a question that seemed to be on their minds: how long could they keep going – and, between the lines, might science allow them to rule for ever?
With advances in technology, Russia’s Vladimir Putin assured Xi Jinping via his translator that “human organs can be constantly transplanted, to the extent that people can get younger, perhaps even immortal”.
Denmark: Despite having scored in each of Denmark’s past three games, Christian Eriksen has been dropped from tonight’s squad. Brian Riemer decided to leave the 33-year-old out because he hasn’t managed to find a club since leaving Manchester United in June. He is believed to have been keeping himself fit by training with the Swedish club Malmo, but Riemer clearly feels he has not done enough to merit inclusion tonight.
Scotland: It’s no great surprise that Steve Clarke has made seven changes to the experimental side that hammered Liechtenstein in a friendly in June. Rarely one to inspire huge confidence while playing for his country, Angus Gunn is back in goal in place of the injured first choice Craig Gordon, while it’s great to see Brentford’s Aaron Hickey back in defence after a near two-year absence with various injury issues. John Souttar and Grant Hanley also come into the back four.
3 min City have started well. Bunny Shaw collects the ball on the left side of the area, shifts the ball to the side and blasts a shot that is pushed away the diving Hampton. Good save.
2 min City captain Alex Greenwood has started at left-back, with Gracie Prior and Jade Rose as the centre-backs. Prior moves forward and gets her head to Hasegawa’s free-kick without being able to direct it on target.
Here’s Novak. He’s asked before stepping on to court how his body is feeling. “It’s feeling alright, let’s see. I’m expecting a very physical battle. I look forward to it, the challenge.”
And then it’s Carlos. “To be honest in the grand slams having two days to rest [before this semi-final], to feel fresh, is great. I recharged the battery physically and mentally. I’ve been really consistent this tournament [on serve], which I’m really happy about. But now I’m facing one of the best returners, it’s going to be tricky.”
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