Entertainment
Latest entertainment news and analysis from around the world.
Latest Stories
EntertainmentLatcho Drom director Tony Gatlif dies aged 77
Film-maker acclaimed for his celebrations of Roma culture had been working on a ‘historical film project’ in ProvenceTony Gatlif, the French director of more than 20 films that mostly concentrated on celebrating Roma culture across the world, has died aged 77.His family said in a statement to AFP that Gatlif died on Wednesday of “a health issue” while working on a “historical film project” in Arles in Provence, France. “The beauty of his films, his generosity, his joy, his poetry, and his love of music will remain with us forever.” Continue reading...
Entertainment‘I’m used to doing the impossible’: George Lucas unveils new LA museum – what’s its story?
Spaceship-shaped gallery, featuring works from Banksy, Norman Rockwell and Frida Kahlo, is devoted to ‘visual storytelling’ – and is finally ready to open“I’m used to doing the impossible,” George Lucas said on Wednesday. But “this one almost broke my will”.The film-maker was describing the decades of work that went into his latest project, the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art, as it was unveiled to the press in Los Angeles eight years after breaking ground, following attempts to build it in two other cities. Shaped like a spaceship and towering over the nearby University of Southern California – Lucas’s alma mater – the long-awaited institution finally opens on 22 September. It aims to be a testament to visual storytelling across all kinds of media – paintings, comics, murals, photography, sculpture. Continue reading...
Entertainment'Not only did I survive, I thrived' - Meera Syal
The Wolverhampton-born comedian and actress shares her experiences in her new memoir.
EntertainmentHow Oasis fans cracked the Celtic Park gigs code in chip shop video
Internet sleuths spotted sets of numbers in posters suggesting the map co-ordinates for Celtic's Parkhead stadium in Glasgow.
Entertainment‘I didn’t know if I’d ever have sex again’: inside Sharon Horgan’s excruciating post-divorce comedy
Horgan’s hilarious new show probes the perils of ageing and the horror of being single again – and it has sex scenes so wild you’ll be laughing for weeks. The creator and her co-stars open up about YouthWhen Sharon Horgan walked into HBO to pitch her new series, Youth, she basically just said “sandwich generation” to them. Alex, the protagonist, is squished between a teenage son and two elderly parents. That’s the classic; the rest of it – the recent divorce, the dating hell, the busy, creative professional life full of pricks – is the icing on the sandwich (if you like). Horgan had been incubating some of the characters for five years, but “honestly”, she tells me, “I said about three sentences and a week later, they said yes. I’ve never had that experience before.”You might think you can imagine it, but Youth is unlike any portrait you’ve ever seen in the gallery of (for brevity) menopausal women doing everything for everyone. There’s an urgency and valour to it that is very much drawn from Horgan’s own experience. “Everything just changed for me when I hit my 50s,” she says. “I was very bamboozled but I really had a hunger to make time count.” Not every situation is lifted directly from her own life, post-divorce – she’s also borrowing from her friends, she emphasises – but in general terms, the pressures, the worries, the outrages, the surprise and the delight are all so exquisitely drawn that even if it’s not Horgan herself, you hope someone, somewhere, is living this in real life. Continue reading...
EntertainmentQueer Edward II review – funny, touching time capsule of Derek Jarman at work
Venice film festival: Filmed during the making of his queer royal feature, while the director was living with HIV, the candid footage includes uproarious scenes at a Cliff Richard rehearsalThere could hardly be a more vivid time-capsule film about the publicly funded British arts scene in the early 1990s than this engrossing fly-on-the-wall documentary about Derek Jarman and his movie Edward II. Based on the play by Christopher Marlowe, it is about the 14th-century English king and his love affair with his court favourite, Piers Gaveston, with Steven Waddington and Andrew Tiernan as the leads and Tilda Swinton as Queen Isabella.This film uses the tremendously funny and candid making-of footage shot at the time by Seamus McGarvey, who had worked as a camera assistant on earlier Jarman films War Requiem and The Garden, and whose distinguished career as a cinematographer lay ahead. Jarman emerges as an effortless leader with a beaming patrician authority, rather like David Lean or Richard Attenborough, the kind of chief whom subordinates instinctively wish to please while keeping from him the grubby problems that they themselves have to deal with, such as paying quarrelsome extras or handling tabloid press questions. Jarman had had his HIV diagnosis for five years at this stage, managing the situation with meds which McGarvey’s camera notices. Continue reading...
Entertainment‘Men calling us woke need our show more than most’: punks Piss on finding strength in visceral confrontations of sexual violence
The Vancouver band earned a cult fandom for their uncompromising gigs. As they ready their brutal debut album, they discuss subverting audience expectations and the nightly toll of excavating trauma onstageYou’d be hard pressed to find a band with fewer airs and graces than Piss. First, there’s the unavoidable matter of their name, which they style in all caps, no nonsense; a word that scans as vulgar and combative but also somewhat facetious when displayed on their merch in loopy cursive, sometimes decorated with bows. The Vancouver quartet’s music is a merciless cyclone of hardcore, poetry, sound collage and performance art that revolves entirely around singer Taylor Zantingh’s experiences with sexual violence.On stage at Eindhoven’s Hit the City festival in late August, the band greets the stacked crowd with a trigger warning before drummer Garreth Roberts, bassist Gavin Moya and guitarist Tyler Paterson launch into pulverising fits of noise-punk, broken up by audio samples of children laughing and feminist writer Andrea Dworkin talking about pornography. Zantingh hurls herself around, clutching at her stomach and flinging her pigtails before winding down to a nervous, twitching standstill. The intense set is finely tuned to present a narrative of gender-based violence not as entertainment, but as lived experience. They play it exactly the same every night, and have done for the last two years. Continue reading...
Entertainment‘Many of us in Israel live in a state of shock at the savagery’: veteran director Amos Gitai returns to Gaza
The writer-director once called Israel’s ‘one-man New Wave’ is in Venice with The Road to Jericho, a new and poetic attempt to highlight the plight of those in the occupied West BankThe Palestinian village of Khan al-Ahmar sits off dust-blown Highway-1, between Jerusalem and Jericho in the Israeli-occupied West Bank. At the village centre is the “school of tires”, a fragile construction of rubber, wood and adobe which is attended by around 300 Bedouin boys and girls. The Israeli authorities denied the villagers an official building permit and ruled that the entire settlement is illegal. For the past eight years the school has been operating under threat of imminent demolition, a symbol of resistance to widespread settler violence.It is only international pressure, says the veteran Israeli writer-director Amos Gitai, that has kept the place upright and still open. “The school has become a litmus paper. It is a test of how far the international community will go [to protect the rights of the people of Khan al-Ahmar]. For once, on this issue, Europe stood up and said no.” As for the future, who can tell? Continue reading...
EntertainmentRussell Howard 'devastated' after his baby son died shortly after birth
The comedian says his son Felix died earlier this year shortly after his wife Cerys had given birth.
EntertainmentThe must-see Bayeux masterpiece, Colombia’s chronicler and a Manchester odyssey – the week in art
The Bayeux tapestry arrives, the Americas go mainstream and modern, and Manchester threads its way to Korea and India – all in your weekly dispatchThe Bayeux tapestryBlood and thunder, friendship and betrayal, marginal monsters and raw sex – all human life and more is depicted in this medieval artistic masterpiece that tells an epic national story with unrivalled punch and power. • British Museum, London, from 10 September until 11 July 2027 Continue reading...