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The New Yorker at 100: Netflix documentary dives inside a groundbreaking magazine

Film-maker Marshall Curry pulls back the curtain on the beloved institution in a revealing and celebratory new film

When young film-makers ask Marshall Curry what makes a documentary idea, he tells them: “There are some stories that make great New Yorker articles, but they’re not movies.” It was only a matter of time before the director found himself testing his own wisdom with The New Yorker at 100, a new Netflix film about the magazine. “Somebody said to me that trying to make a 90-minute movie about the New Yorker was like trying to make a 90-minute movie about America. Ken Burns does that with one war.”

The film pulls back the curtain on the mystical media shop. Curry and his crew spent a year rummaging through the archives, listening in on production meetings, shadowing famous bylines – none more venerated in the industry than editor David Remnick, the magazine’s abiding leader. Curry had hoped to make a meal out of staffers pushing to meet the February 2025 publishing date, the magazine’s centennial anniversary issue, but the scenes he found didn’t quite approximate anything from the boiler room-centered dramas of film fiction or even The September Issue doc on Anna Wintour’s clannish Vogue operation. “I wanted to see people running around each other and saying, ‘We’ve got to get this thing done before the deadline!’” Curry says. “But they don’t do that.”

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© Photograph: Courtesy of Netflix

© Photograph: Courtesy of Netflix

© Photograph: Courtesy of Netflix

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En plus d’être cool, cette borne d’arcade rétro est en promotion

[Deal du jour] Comme disait Lamartine : « Un seul être vous manque et tout est dépeuplé »… surtout quand il s’agit d’une borne d’arcade, Ces dernières ayant disparu progressivement, laissent derrière elles un petit vide difficile à combler. Alors quand l’une d’elles apparaît en promotion, pourquoi ne pas enfin en installer une chez vous ?

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‘They can’t take away your imagination and creativity’: Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe on how sewing helped her in Iran jail

Zaghari-Ratcliffe made clothes for her daughter while waiting for her eventual release. Now, the idea of creativity as a form of resistance is the theme of a new collaboration between London’s Imperial War Museum and the fabric department of Liberty.

When Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe returned home to London after six years of arbitrary detention in Iran, she brought back with her a small patchwork cushion. Pieced together from scrap material and made with the single sewing machine available in the prison, it was the product of a communal craft circle.

“It’s something very, very precious to me,” she said. So precious, in fact, that she has worked on a new collaboration between London’s Imperial War Museum (IWM) and the fabric department of Liberty, creating three new prints that explore experience as a prisoner.

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© Photograph: Liberty

© Photograph: Liberty

© Photograph: Liberty

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Brian Cox on Tom Stoppard’s sensational Rock’n’Roll: ‘I looked through the curtain and saw Mick Jagger and Václav Havel’

The actor, who starred as a Marxist academic in the acclaimed 2006 play at the Royal Court, remembers an astonishing writer of ideas and elegance

By the time I was cast in Rock’n’Roll in 2006 I had been following Tom for years. I saw Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead when it came to London in 1967 with the wonderful Graham Crowden as the Player King. It was a big sensation. The Real Thing was a great play and Arcadia was extraordinary.

Rock’n’Roll was at the Royal Court in London, directed by Trevor Nunn, and starred Rufus Sewell as Jan, a Czech student who returns to Prague in 1968. I played Max, a Marxist academic. It was a fascinating experience, because there were two plays there: the play about Sappho, the Ancient Greek poet, and the play about the Soviet takeover in Czechoslovakia.

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© Photograph: Lucas Jackson/Reuters

© Photograph: Lucas Jackson/Reuters

© Photograph: Lucas Jackson/Reuters

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En plus d’être cool, cette borne d’arcade rétro est en promotion

[Deal du jour] Comme disait Lamartine : « Un seul être vous manque et tout est dépeuplé »… surtout quand il s’agit d’une borne d’arcade, Ces dernières ayant disparu progressivement, laissent derrière elles un petit vide difficile à combler. Alors quand l’une d’elles apparaît en promotion, pourquoi ne pas enfin en installer une chez vous ?

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Nick Cave’s Veiled World: the starry tale of how sometimes the devil doesn’t have the best tunes

This documentary on the musician interviews everyone from Flea to … Rowan Williams. It’s a thoughtful take on his songs and Christianity

Devouring the new Nick Cave documentary on Sky, I am reminded how critics go wild for arty musicians who constantly change direction and dabble in everything. This is its own kind of myth. I know plenty of artists who keep moving – one week they’re sewing fish scales on to jackets, the next they’re painting mirrors or putting seahorses in samovars. The problem is, no one cares. If poet and ceramicist Nick Cave didn’t also write classic songs, he’d just be a local weirdo. I definitely wouldn’t buy a hardcover transcription of conversations he’d had with a mate about God. I’m glad I did, though.

The documentary, Nick Cave’s Veiled World (Saturday 6 December, 9pm, Sky Arts), is timed to promote the TV adaptation of his filthy novel The Death of Bunny Munro. It’s a glorious opportunity to revisit his early, intense masterpieces: electric chair confessionals, murderous duets with pop princesses, profane love songs. They’re still in my head, days later. It’s also a reminder that, in a joyfully perverse career, the assertion of his Christian faith has been his most divisive move. Audiences love biblical imagery in rock songs, provided the singer doesn’t actually believe.

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© Photograph: Samir Hussein/WireImage

© Photograph: Samir Hussein/WireImage

© Photograph: Samir Hussein/WireImage

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My cultural awakening: Jonathan Groff inspired me to overcome my stammer

Watching the Broadway actor’s joyous energy, along with his calmness and openness, I was convinced that I could step out into the world and be myself

My first encounter with Broadway actor Jonathan Groff was innocuous. Stuck in the wilds of Donegal for two weeks as part of teacher training, I listened to Broadway musicals while the rest of the lads watched the Gaelic fixtures and got drunk. I stumbled upon the recent production of Merrily We Roll Along with Jonathan Groff and Daniel Radcliffe and like most of the internet, I became obsessed.

Afterwards, I went down a Groff rabbit hole tracking down interviews and cast recordings. I was drawn to how bubbly he was, how smiley he was. Groff had a joyous energy that was infectious. His voice was like melted chocolate. I both loved – and envied – his calmness and his openness to the world.

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© Illustration: Martin O'Neill/The Guardian

© Illustration: Martin O'Neill/The Guardian

© Illustration: Martin O'Neill/The Guardian

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The best fiction of 2025

New novels from Ian McEwan and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, a high-concept debut and remarkable short stories are just some of the best new titles of the year

There aren’t many giants of 20th-century literature still writing, but 2025 saw the first novel in 12 years from American great Thomas Pynchon, now in his late 80s: Shadow Ticket (Jonathan Cape) is a typically larky prohibition-era whodunnit, set against rising nazism and making sprawling connections with the spectre of fascism today. Other elder statesmen publishing this year included Salman Rushdie with The Eleventh Hour (Cape), a playful quintet of mortality-soaked short stories and his first fiction since the 2022 assault that blinded him in his right eye; while Ian McEwan was also considering endings and legacy in What We Can Know (Cape), in which a 22nd-century literature scholar looks back, from the other side of apocalypse, on a close-knit group of (mostly) fictional literary lions from our own era. In a time of climate terror, the novel is both a fascinating wrangle with the limits of what humans are able to care about – from bare survival, to passion and poetry, to the enormity of environmental disaster – and a poignant love letter to the vanishing past.

But perhaps the most eagerly awaited return this year was another global figure: Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, whose first novel in more than a decade, Dream Count (4th Estate), follows the lives of four interconnected women between Nigeria and the US. Taking in love, motherhood and female solidarity as well as privilege, inequality and sexual violence, it’s a rich and beautifully composed compendium of women’s experience.

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© Composite: Debora Szpilman

© Composite: Debora Szpilman

© Composite: Debora Szpilman

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Sean Combs: The Reckoning to It Was Just an Accident: the week in rave reviews

A documentary so damning it surely marks the end for Diddy, and grotesquery of a different kind in a Palme d’Or-winning film. Here’s the pick of the week’s culture, taken from the Guardian’s best-rated reviews

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© Composite: LANDMARK MEDIA / Alamy Stock Photo

© Composite: LANDMARK MEDIA / Alamy Stock Photo

© Composite: LANDMARK MEDIA / Alamy Stock Photo

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Forget festive schmaltz, the best Christmas film this year is a gay biker dom-com | Kitty Grady

Die Hard isn’t a Christmas film, claims the British public. But Pillion reminds us that the finest festive films reflect the complexities of the season

Can Die Hard – the 1988 action movie starring Bruce Willis as an NYPD detective hoping to reconcile with his estranged wife on Christmas Eve – be called a Christmas film? The annual debate had officially reached my street WhatsApp group when a happily married couple decided to launch a poll. With 18 votes against four, the result from my road was a landslide “yes”. One neighbour even shared a picture of their Die Hard tree baubles to prove the point.

But an official poll by the British Board of Film Classification has now asserted the contrary – with 44% deciding that Die Hard should not be designated a Christmas movie, against 38% in favour. To some, even with the odd tinsel-strewn tree thrown in, the gun fights, violence and hostage-taking just don’t feel festive. For an admirable 5% of respondents, it remains their favourite Christmas film of all time.

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© Photograph: Element Pictures/BBC Film/BFI

© Photograph: Element Pictures/BBC Film/BFI

© Photograph: Element Pictures/BBC Film/BFI

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‘True activism has to cost you something’: Bridgerton’s Nicola Coughlan on politics, paparazzi and parasocial fandom

The diminutive Derry Girls star isn’t afraid to speak her mind, even if it costs her fans and followers

Back in 2008, when Nicola Coughlan was at drama school, a guy in her class swaggered over and, with all the brimming confidence of young men in the noughties, asked her, “Do the Irish think the English are really cool?” Coughlan, born in Galway, mimes processing the question. “Well,” she said, “it’s quite complicated. Like, there’s a lot of history there, between the two countries. Like, there’s a lot going on.”

Today, people are more knowledgable about the history of the English in Ireland. Coughlan is happy about that. She’s also happy about the explosion of Irish storytelling in popular culture – Normal People, Trespasses, Small Things Like These, not to mention the series that made her name, Derry Girls. And she’s proud of young Irish actors – Paul Mescal, Barry Keoghan and Lola Petticrew, to name a few. She listens to bands such as Fontaines DC, CMAT and Kneecap. “It’s such a small country and the amount of creativity that comes out of Ireland is really extraordinary.”

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© Photograph: Rosaline Shahnavaz/The Guardian

© Photograph: Rosaline Shahnavaz/The Guardian

© Photograph: Rosaline Shahnavaz/The Guardian

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Why is Timothée Chalamet suddenly everywhere? Seven things you need to know – from Oscars to puppies

The 29-year-old star is getting his best reviews ever for the upcoming film Marty Supreme – but he’s also making waves with his idiosyncratic approach to celebrity and maintaining his status as the internet’s boyfriend

Everybody’s talking about Timothée! The gen-Z French-American heart-throb and original “internet boyfriend” is receiving the best reviews of his career for Josh Safdie’s frenetic ping-pong flick Marty Supreme, while also making waves for his idiosyncratic approach to celebrity in an age somewhat lacking in star power. He has even got Gwyneth Paltrow’s seal of approval. Here are seven reasons why “Chalamania” is back.

1. He seems a cert for an Oscar

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© Composite: Guardian Design; Todd Williamson/Shutterstock

© Composite: Guardian Design; Todd Williamson/Shutterstock

© Composite: Guardian Design; Todd Williamson/Shutterstock

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The best music books of 2025

From an enraging indictment of Spotify to Del Amitri frontman Justin Currie’s account of Parkinson’s and a compelling biography of Tupac Shakur, here are five titles that strike a chord

Mood Machine: The Rise of Spotify and the Costs of the Perfect Playlist
Liz Pelly (Hodder & Stoughton)
Enraging, thoroughly depressing, but entirely necessary, Mood Music offers a timely, forensically researched demolition of Spotify. In Pelly’s account, the music streaming giant views music as a kind of nondescript sonic wallpaper, artists as an unnecessary encumbrance to the business of making more money and its target market not as music fans, but mindless drones who don’t really care what they’re listening to, ripe for manipulation by its algorithm. Sharp business practices and evidence of its deleterious effect on the quality and variety of new music abound: the worst thing is that Pelly can’t really come up with a viable alternative in a world where convenience trumps all.

Men of a Certain Age: My Encounters With Rock Royalty
Kate Mossman (Bonnier)
There’s no doubt that Men of a Certain Age is a hard sell, a semi-autobiographical book in which the New Statesman’s arts editor traces her obsession with often wildly unfashionable, ageing male artists – Queen’s Roger Taylor, Bruce Hornsby, Steve Perry of Journey, Jon Bon Jovi among them – through a series of interviews variously absurd, insightful, hair-raising and weirdly touching. But it’s elevated to unmissable status by Mossman’s writing, which is so sparkling, witty and shrewd that your personal feelings about her subjects are rendered irrelevant amid the cocktail of self-awareness, affection and sharp analysis she brings to every encounter. In a world of music books retelling tired legends, Men of a Certain Age offers that rare thing: an entirely original take on rock history.

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© Illustration: Debora Szpilman

© Illustration: Debora Szpilman

© Illustration: Debora Szpilman

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Zootopia 2 bucks trend for Hollywood releases in China as it breaks records for foreign animation

Now China’s highest-grossing foreign animation, the films, known as Zootropolis in some countries, comes amid a boom for domestic productions

A comedy about animal cops investigating a reptilian mystery has become the highest-grossing foreign animated film ever in China, bucking the trend of declining interest in overseas productions that has resulted in Hollywood films struggling in the Chinese box office.

Zootopia 2 (called Zootropolis 2 in some European countries), a hotly anticipated and widely marketed sequel to 2016’s Zootopia, was released in China last week. In its first seven days, it made about 2bn yuan (£213m) in ticket sales, making it one of the best-performing films of the year.

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© Photograph: Go Nakamura/Reuters

© Photograph: Go Nakamura/Reuters

© Photograph: Go Nakamura/Reuters

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Lady Gaga review – the Mayhem Ball shows Mother Monster is still the reigning queen of spectacle

Marvel Stadium, Melbourne
The pop star’s first Australian show in a decade comes after years of physical and mental pain – so it’s a great relief to see her having a good time again

As Lady Gaga is carted on stage atop a crinoline structure that resembles both a red velvet cake and a toilet roll doll cozy she states her dictum: “Dance or die”.

Mother Monster’s ruling sets into motion an operatic 150-minute show – her first in Australia since the artRAVE in August of 2014. For the entirety of the Mayhem Ball, Gaga careens between dancing and dying in what she calls her “gothic dream” – although it often reads more Halloween. Skeletons abound – no doubt a homage to the late Gaga muse Rick Genest, otherwise known as Zombie Boy. At times it’s downright Hitchcockian, Gaga a veritable Kim Novak as she switches between blond and brunette selves with each wig change.

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© Photograph: Kevin Mazur/Getty Images for Live Nation

© Photograph: Kevin Mazur/Getty Images for Live Nation

© Photograph: Kevin Mazur/Getty Images for Live Nation

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Fackham Hall review – Downton Abbey spoof is fast, funny and throwaway

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.

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© Photograph: Paul Stephenson/© 2025 Elysian Films

© Photograph: Paul Stephenson/© 2025 Elysian Films

© Photograph: Paul Stephenson/© 2025 Elysian Films

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