Gurinder Chadha’s leaden update of the hardy seasonal chestnut with Kunal Nayyar is joyless and nausea-inducing
Keen though I always am to indulge any and every new riff on Dickens’s A Christmas Carol, and keen also to hear from Bend It Like Beckham director Gurinder Chadha, this cynically Christmassy movie is leaden, unconvincingly acted and about as welcome as a dead rat in the eggnog. It’s the worst Christmas film since last year’s Red One, in which Dwayne Johnson played the head of security for Santa Claus and more or less had us all rooting for anyone who could beat up Father Christmas.
In this one, Big Bang Theory star Kunal Nayyar lifelessly and joylessly plays a Scrooge variant called Mr Sood, part of the Ugandan south Asian community expelled by Idi Amin in his childhood, and embittered by early poverty. An early romance soured because of his obsession with money, and he has become a grasping and unpleasant old guy in London (cue stock footage of the London skyline) in the rather quaintly imagined business of moneylending, with his now dead partner Jacob Marley, played by Hugh Bonneville. But after petulant displays of boorish meanness with his nephew, employees and the cheerful Cockney Christmas-jumper-wearing cabbie played by Danny Dyer (surely Mr Sood knows that Ubers are cheaper?), he is visited by Marley’s ghost and then the spirits of Christmas past, present and future (played by Eva Longoria, Billy Porter and Boy George).
Charlotte Jones, daughter of Cowboys owner Jerry Jones, praised the NFL’s choice of Bad Bunny for the Super Bowl halftime show, saying it celebrates America’s immigrant roots.
Country explores taking part in the glitzy song contest as it distances from the US and seeks to deepen ties with Europe
When Canada released its federal budget this month, much of it was standard fare, from the plans to downsize the public service to the boost in defence spending.
But one line tucked in the nearly 500-page document has captured imaginations on both sides of the Atlantic: a mention that the government is working with Canada’s national broadcaster to explore participation in the Eurovision song contest.
The singer will star alongside Adolescence breakout Owen Cooper, Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Colin Firth, Thandiwe Newton and Nicholas Hoult in an Anne Rice adaptation
Adele is set to make her acting debut in the new film from Tom Ford.
According to Deadline, the fashion designer and film-maker’s third feature will be an adaptation of Anne Rice’s 1982 novel Cry to Heaven, a drama set in 18th century Italy.
A hit Netflix documentary about Germany’s favourite rapper demonstrates how popular the aesthetics of migrant life are – just as politicians debate how to remove it from inner cities
If you want to understand the state of Germany in these last weeks of 2025, grasping the meaning of two entries in the German dictionary are essential: stadtbild and haftbefehl.
The first term technically means “cityscape”. But since chancellor Friedrich Merz gave a speech in the state of Brandenburg on 14 October, it has taken on a new political meaning. “We have come far with migration,” he said, “but of course we still have this problem in our stadtbild.”
Having worked alongside everyone from Laurence Olivier to a French circus, the 89-year-old is still composing, learning church bells, and using AI to resurrect a lost epic
Mike Westbrook is reflecting on his 89-year life from his cottage by the sea in Devon. Sitting with him in his cosy, book-lined sitting room under a signed picture of Duke Ellington, and next to his Broadwood grand piano, the experience is calm and peaceful.
His version of jazz is anything but. For more than six decades, Westbrook has been composing vast, cinematic works. He was the first jazz artist to play at the BBC Proms, created theatre alongside Laurence Olivier, and in the 1970s merged his entire ensemble with the avant-rock band Henry Cow to form the groundbreaking Orckestra. The result is music full of brass fanfares, unusual time signatures, poetry, free improvisation, and genre-bending jazz that invites the listener into a continental circus full of elephants, acrobats, and clowns.
Praise be for The Sound of Music, Ordinary People and It’s a Wonderful Life! But the sinfully twee and queasy Life is Beautiful must be renounced
Robert Wise’s The Sound of Music, Frank Capra’s It’s a Wonderful Life, Robert Redford’s Ordinary People and Roberto Benigni’s Life Is Beautiful.
These are a few of his fav-our-ite films … Pope Leo’s that is. This white-bread movie playlist has been released in advance of His Holiness’s “meeting with the world of cinema” on Saturday, part of a longstanding Vatican policy of engaging with creatives.
The pope has, according to a Vatican statement “expressed his desire to deepen the dialogue with the world of cinema, and in particular with actors and directors, exploring the possibilities that artistic creativity offers to the mission of the Church and the promotion of human values.” The pope will chat with movie notables including Cate Blanchett, Spike Lee, George Miller, Gus Van Sant and Giuseppe Tornatore.
Cleto Escobedo III on the set of “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” in 2016. He had led the show’s house band, Cleto and the Cletones, since the show’s inception in 2003.
Benson Boone jokes about Grammy snub on Instagram after "Mystical Magical" gets zero nominations, calling it "pure lyrical genius" in hilarious reaction.
Medical examiner says Kiss founding member’s death was accidental, caused by blunt force injuries from a fall
Ace Frehley, the original lead guitarist and founding member of the glam rock band Kiss, died from blunt force injuries to the head that he suffered in a fall earlier this year, an autopsy has determined.
Frehley died peacefully on 16 October surrounded by family in Morristown, New Jersey, a few weeks after the fall occurred, according to his agent.
Michael Jackson's daughter Paris opens up about six years of sobriety and the lasting effects of addiction in a brutally honest social media confession to fans.
In celebration of “a hard fought battle to reclaim their name,” The Guess Who — led by singer and keyboardist Burton Cummings and founding guitarist Randy Bachman for the first time in 23 years — will tour Canada next year. Read More
OpenAI ordered to pay undisclosed damages for training its language models on artists’ work without permission
A court in Munich has ruled that OpenAI’s chatbot ChatGPT violated German copyright laws by using hits from top-selling musicians to train its language models in what creative industry advocates described as a landmark European ruling.
The Munich regional court sided in favour of Germany’s music rights society GEMA, which said ChatGPT had harvested protected lyrics by popular artists to “learn” from them.
Kelly Clarkson fires back at former manager who suggested plastic surgery, delivering a fierce response during her Las Vegas residency show to body-shaming comments.
(Atlantic) Featuring a lugubrious monologue from the Velvet Underground legend, its jagged strings are more reminiscent of that band than anything on Brat
When Charli xcx says her first new material in more than a year is “something entirely new, entirely opposite” to the sound she pursued on the era-defining Brat, she isn’t joking. Taken from the soundtrack to director Emerald Fennell’s forthcoming adaptation of Wuthering Heights, the darkly gothic House bears almost no relation in sound or mood to the contents of Brat: it was, she says, inspired by John Cale’s description of the sound of his old mob the Velvet Underground as “elegant and brutal”.
Always skilled and generous at collaboration, here Charli xcx cedes two-thirds of the track’s vocal to Cale. He delivers a monologue – oblique and initially conversational, it turns increasingly ominous – in a voice that’s rich, sonorous and, to a certain kind of music fan at least, immediate recognisable. Weathered by time at age 83, it’s still audibly the same voice that recounted Lou Reed’s grisly short story The Gift on White Light/White Heat 57 years ago.
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