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EntertainmentWoman says she 'closed eyes and tried not to be there' during alleged Russell Brand rape
The 51-year-old faces three counts of rape, three charges of sexual assault and one of indecent assault.
EntertainmentTom Cullen says he does not take playing LGBT roles lightly
Welsh actor Tom Cullen says he approaches queer roles "exactly the same" as he would a straight character.
EntertainmentCNN anchor Christiane Amanpour to leave network after 43 years
The network's chief international anchor has covered wars including Rwanda, Afghanistan, Ukraine and Iran.
Entertainment‘They pulled a guy’s face off. It’s my favourite bit!’ Linda Cardellini on Freaks and Geeks, Mad Men and slasher horror Crystal Lake
She got to torment Don Draper in Mad Men and has just won an Emmy for DTF St Louis. But nothing prepared the star for all the gore as she switched to horror with the Friday the 13th prequel‘The first time I had the tooth in my hand,” says Linda Cardellini, “I thought, ‘Oh my God, this is what I’m doing.’” The star of Freaks and Geeks, ER, Dead to Me, Mad Men and DTF St Louis (for which she recently won an Emmy) is talking about her pivot towards full-blown horror. In Crystal Lake, the prequel to the Friday the 13th movies, Cardellini plays Pamela Voorhees, the original slasher of the 1980 film. The tooth, by the way, is human and gets embedded in Pam’s knuckle – until she yanks it out with a gruesome, revolting slurping sound.Casual filmgoers may associate Friday the 13th with Jason, the hockey-mask-wearing serial killer. But aficionados will know that Pam, Jason’s mother, is the villain of the first movie. “He didn’t even have the mask until the third movie,” says Cardellini, who has clearly done her homework. “Pam is the original killer, in vengeance of his death.” (There is some massaging of previous storylines in Crystal Lake, such as moving Jason’s drowning from the 1950s to the early 70s, but since the franchise is flexible enough to have sent Jason into space at one point, a bit of timeline tweaking feels fair game.) Continue reading...
EntertainmentFreud confirms Beatles' songs to star in musical
The Beatles agree for their songs to feature in a stage version of Yesterday, says the co-producer.
EntertainmentKevin Bridges review – steamroller standup is a joy but what’s with the £10 cloakroom charge?
Hammersmith Apollo, LondonIn his tour Here If You Need Me, the comic makes laugh-out-loud look easy with jokes about conjugal argy-bargy, smutty downloads – and a bit of politicsIs there a better no-frills standup at work today than Kevin Bridges? You’d struggle to find a more unfussily funny demonstration of the art form’s traditional virtues than at the Glaswegian’s new touring set. It’s a consistently laugh-out-loud suite of observational material on subjects comics have addressed since time immemorial: nostalgia, marital dispute, the latest cultural trends – alongside, as Ben Elton used to have it, a little bit of politics, too. Bridges really does have the X factor, and – without him ever seeming to stretch himself – Here If You Need Me is a steamroller 75 minutes of standup.For me, it needed to be, after being hit by a £10 – 10 pounds! – cloakroom charge because my innocuous wee bag (a notebook, a novel, a pair of glasses) was apparently too incendiary to be allowed into the venue. Oh that Bridges would turn his satirical eye on that racket. But the show starts with more obvious targets: Donald Trump, whose “negotiating” techniques our host burlesques in a violent dialogue with his electrician; and Benjamin Netanyahu, pausing before another act of destruction to check out Bridges’ Instagram feed. Continue reading...
EntertainmentWith nine new recordings of Mahler’s epic Resurrection Symphony this year alone, which rises above the rest?
The second – the ‘Resurrection’ – was the first Mahler symphony ever to be recorded, and it is still today an essential work in any conductor’s catalogue. But with hundreds of recordings, from Ormandy to Bernstein and Rattle, which does our reviewer recommend?Is it something in the water? Or is it simply that triumph over adversity sells in today’s uncertain world? Whatever the reason, Mahler’s Resurrection Symphony has already received four major UK performances this year: a season finale for the BBC Philharmonic in Manchester, a season opener for both the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra and the London Symphony Orchestra, and an 80th season celebratory concert for the Philharmonia Orchestra in London. Next month the London City Orchestra perform it in Croydon’s Fairfield Halls.On disc, the field of Mahler 2s is even more crowded. Apple Music Classical currently throws up 222 listings; Presto Music’s search engine returns 260 results, many of them complete recordings to download or buy on CD or vinyl (some of these, of course, are reissues of recognised classic accounts). Continue reading...
EntertainmentThe reviews are in! Is You Can See Everything the greatest film ever?
Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim’s headspinning documentary about Elizabeth Holmes is an unprecedented critical success – even with a three-hour runtimeName: The best reviewed film in history.Age: Not even out yet, except in the US and Canada. Continue reading...
EntertainmentHow we made Come Dine With Me: ‘Someone served sushi off a guy’s naked chest!’
‘We’re not there to humiliate or to sneer. Channel 4 insisted everyone had to be a decent cook – the threshold was that contestants had to know what coriander was’It all started in the early 00s when I tried to throw a dinner party. I was an executive producer during the early days of reality TV – and a house-proud young mum. My posh cousin and her even posher husband came for a meal. I was rushing to get the kids to bed and tidy up, so the food was an afterthought. I’d never made couscous before but decided to serve it with chicken. It was awful. Dry chicken with congealed couscous. At one point, my cousin’s husband stuck his fork in this rock-solid lump, lifted it up and said: “What actually is this?” Continue reading...
EntertainmentLight and Magic: The Birth of Art Photography review – a rhapsodic show to stop you in your tracks
Tate Modern, LondonFrom a Singapore construction worker to a loincloth-wearing Sri Lankan, this awe-inspiring and truly global exhibition finds epic beauty in the everydayI don’t remember the last time I saw such a well-researched and truly globally representative exhibition that doesn’t patronise but quietly makes its case unapologetically, fearlessly and through sheer quality. Apart from being the first retelling of the international, pluralistic pictorialism movement, Tate’s new show allows for some refreshing encounters with unknown works for British audiences – around half of the works included here have never been shown in the UK. The effect is to radically deepen and widen our understanding not only of art history but the human impulses that drive us to make images in the first place.We move seamlessly from the sudden shock of colour in three-colour carbon prints of flowers in a London garden in the 1920s to works born of the photographic salons, circles and clubs of Sydney, Hong Kong and Brazil. Historical moments collide; the epic emerges from the everyday. A man rows home across the Norfolk Broads, another works on a construction site in Singapore. None of it feels out of place. It all belongs. It is all extremely, almost ecclesiastically, beautiful. Continue reading...