↩ Accueil

Vue lecture

Metroid Prime 4: Beyond review – Samus Aran is suited up for action again. Was it worth the 18-year wait?

Nintendo Switch/Switch 2 (version tested); Retro Studios/Nintendo
The bounty hunter – Nintendo’s most badass and most neglected hero – returns in an atmospheric throwback sci-fi adventure that’s entirely untroubled by the conventions of modern game design

In a frozen laboratory full of cryogenically suspended experimental life forms, metal boots disturb the frost. A lone bounty hunter in a familiar orange exosuit points her blaster ahead. Making my way towards the facility’s power generator, scanning doors and hunting for secret entrances, broken hatches and hidden keys, I suspect that I know exactly what’s going to happen when this place begins to thaw; every clank and creak sounds sounds as if it could be a long-dormant beast busting out of one of those pods. And yet Samus Aran delves deeper, because she has never been afraid of anything.

This section of Prime 4 is classic Metroid: atmospheric, eerie, lonely, dangerous and cryptic. Samus, Nintendo’s coolest hero, is impeccably awesome, equipped here with new psychic powers that accent her suit with pulsing purple light. (I have taken many screenshots of her looking identically badass all over the game’s planet.) She is controlled with dual sticks, or – much better, much more intuitive – by pointing one of the Switch 2’s remotes at the screen to aim. Or even by using it as a mouse on a table or your knee, though this made my wrist hurt after a while. She transforms into a rolling ball, moves statues into place with her mind, and rides a futuristic shape-shifting motorcycle across lava and sand between this distant planet’s abandoned facilities, unlocking its dead civilisation’s lost knowledge.

Continue reading...

© Photograph: Nintendo

© Photograph: Nintendo

© Photograph: Nintendo

  •  

Sean Combs: The Reckoning review – you can see why the musician is fighting to ban this horrific documentary

Netflix’s series feels like the point of no return for the rapper and mogul. It’s so thorough in its harrowing detail that it will surely block any chance he ever had of a return to stardom

If its subject gets his way, the new documentary series Sean Combs: The Reckoning might not be available on Netflix for long. On Monday, lawyers on behalf of Combs sent a cease and desist letter to the streamer, demanding that the series be withdrawn based on the inclusion of footage that they claim violates copyright, and involves discussions of “legal strategy that were not intended for public viewing”.

After watching the series, you can see why Combs might be rattled. This is a man whose fall from grace last year was sudden and comprehensive, and yet Sean Combs: The Reckoning feels like the moment of no return for him. It does such a thorough job of laying out and backing up so many horrific allegations that his way back to stardom is surely blocked for ever.

Continue reading...

© Photograph: Shareif Ziyadat/Getty Images for Sean "Diddy" Combs

© Photograph: Shareif Ziyadat/Getty Images for Sean "Diddy" Combs

© Photograph: Shareif Ziyadat/Getty Images for Sean "Diddy" Combs

  •  

‘He asked me what I’d done sexually with a woman’: how Joy Gharoro-Akpojotor turned her asylum grilling into a film

The rising star has made her debut film, Dreamers, a semi-autobiographical love story set in an immigration detention centre. She talks about fleeing persecution in Nigeria – and what she learned from French new wave

Joy Gharoro-Akpojotor had a little wobble when she stepped on to the stage after the screening of her debut feature, Dreamers, at the London film festival. The Nigerian-British director’s film is a love story set in an immigration detention centre. It had already premiered in Berlin earlier this year. But showing her semi-autobiographical film to a home crowd in London felt exposing. “I suddenly had this feeling: Oh my God, everyone can see me. Everyone knows everything about me.” She laughs.

Gharoro-Akpojotor has built a reputation as a rising star producer. Her company Joi Productions makes films telling black, female and gay stories. (“All of the above, sometimes individually.”) Her credits include Rapman’s Blue Story and Aml Ameen’s romcom Boxing Day, and she is currently working on Ashley Walters’ directing debut Animol.

Continue reading...

© Photograph: Album/Alamy

© Photograph: Album/Alamy

© Photograph: Album/Alamy

  •  

Anne Hathaway and Michaela Coel face off in first trailer for pop star epic Mother Mary

‘Psychosexual pop thriller’ comes from The Green Knight’s David Lowery and will feature new music from Charli xcx

Anne Hathaway plays a pop star and Michaela Coel her estranged fashion designer in the first trailer for highly anticipated drama Mother Mary.

The film comes from David Lowery, whose previous films range from The Green Knight to A Ghost Story to Pete’s Dragon. His last film was Disney+ original Peter Pan & Wendy starring Jude Law.

Continue reading...

© Photograph: A24

© Photograph: A24

© Photograph: A24

  •  

The Outsiders: why Francis Ford Coppola’s coming-of-age drama is secretly gay

It’s about rival gangs of straight boys in 60s Oklahoma fighting it out – but the abundance of male beauty in this 1983 adaptation of the SE Hinton novel tells another story

While serious film lovers reach for Francis Ford Coppola’s Rumble Fish as their favourite screen adaptation of an SE Hinton novel, I can never go past The Outsiders, as much for what it did to me as a gay kid growing up in the mid-80s who was terrified of being discovered as for any artistic merit.

There are cheesy things about the movie, for sure – it’s superficial wash of nostalgia for the 60s, there are a few egregious continuity errors, some rawness in the performances – but none of that matters as the opening strains of Stevie Wonder’s Stay Gold hit your ears and the cinematographer Stephen H Burum’s montage of overexposed sunsets fills the screen. The story of kids from the wrong side of the tracks in Tulsa, Oklahoma, always makes me, a kid who grew up in the leafy suburbs of south-east Melbourne, feel entirely at home.

Continue reading...

© Photograph: Publicity image

© Photograph: Publicity image

© Photograph: Publicity image

  •  

Dommage que Metroid Prime 4: Beyond soit un jeu Switch 1

Attendu de très, très longue date, Metroid Prime 4: Beyond est plombé par sa position à la croisée des chemins, entre une Switch 1 trop vieillissante pour assumer plus d'ambitions, et une Switch 2 qui, justement, en méritait davantage. Voici notre test.

  •  

Oui, le livre d’Holly dans la saison 5 de Stranger Things nous donne des indices sur la suite

Le personnage d'Holly, la petite sœur de Mike et Nancy, possède un rôle central dans la saison 5 de Stranger Things, disponible sur Netflix depuis le 27 novembre 2025. Et son livre préféré, Un raccourci dans le temps (A Wrinkle in Time), pourrait bien avoir une importance cruciale pour la fin de la série horrifique.

  •  

Netflix avec pub, Standard ou Premium : quel abonnement choisir ?

Netflix reste aujourd’hui la plateforme de streaming la plus populaire. Son immense catalogue fait souvent pencher la balance, mais entre l’abonnement avec publicités, le Standard et le Premium, il est parfois difficile de choisir la bonne formule. Voici un récap clair des trois offres, avec leurs prix et celle qui correspond le mieux à vos besoins.

  •  

Prime Minister review – portrait of Jacinda Ardern shows a fully human being in charge for once

Documentary about New Zealand’s former leader records a shrewd but likable premier who did without the usual politician’s defences

New Zealand’s former prime minister Jacinda Ardern emerges from this documentary portrait the way she did when she was in power from 2017 to 2023 … as a human being. More than any politician anywhere in the world in my adult lifetime, she looked like an actual member of the human race who was catapulted to office too fast to have acquired the defensive carapace of the professional politician. She was vulnerable and scrutable and likable in ways utterly alien to everyone else.

Obviously this sympathetic film has been edited in such a way as to omit most of the hard business of internal politics and to foreground this humanity, although there is one fascinating moment at the very end when her partner Clarke Gayford gently asks if she might be doing too much; with a tiny flash of temper she asks if he is telling her to “delegate”. Gayford got his Denis Thatcher closeup there. Did we see a subliminal moment of the non-niceness vital for all successful politicians?

Continue reading...

© Photograph: Magnolia Pictures/Everett/Shutterstock

© Photograph: Magnolia Pictures/Everett/Shutterstock

© Photograph: Magnolia Pictures/Everett/Shutterstock

  •