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Culture

The latest published reporting in this category.

Entertainment

‘Life is like a heartbeat. It’s up and down, up and down’: Michelle Yeoh on casting cliches, marriage at 60 and playing a robot in Blade Runner 2099

Ballet dancer, action hero, Bond girl ... The actor won an Oscar for Everything Everywhere All At Once but she’s been through some challenges on the way Before agreeing to appear in Blade Runner 2099, Michelle Yeoh received a letter – “an amazing letter, a love letter” – from Silka Luisa, the project’s creator, imploring her to be involved. Yeoh, who is 64, has played grandes dames, action heroes and a low-income Chinese-American battling the tax authorities in an infinite multiverse, but Blade Runner was different. The sci-fi series, a follow-up of sorts to Ridley Scott’s 1982 movie classic a

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Entertainment

‘They’re just live experiments’: the dark and deadly world of looksmaxxing

A disturbing new docuseries delves deep into a world where men are pushing their bodies to the extreme – and some of them are dying for it If you’ve heard the term looksmaxxing – the manospheric pursuit of male aesthetic beauty via steroids, peptides, cosmetic surgery and total commitment – you probably know the name Clavicular. With more than 2 million followers and a cluster of mainstream media profiles, the 20-year-old streamer born Braden Peters has become the chiseled face of a once fringe movement to achieve algorithmically defined good looks by any means necessary, from daily methamphet

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Entertainment

Narrative threads: How to write a Booker-shortlisted novel, by Marlon James, Douglas Stuart, Elizabeth Strout and more

A trip to the Scottish islands, a psychological experiment, a chance encounter in a drugstore… the finalists for this year’s Booker prize reveal their inspirations Who knows where a novel really comes from? I spend years gathering loose threads and then, when I feel like the cloth will hold, I start to weave them into a narrative. I suppose I began internalising John of John back in 1994, the year I went to college and chose to become a weaver myself. Continue reading...

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Entertainment

The Good Daughter: Rose Byrne’s legal thriller is so full of calamity it borders on Mr Bean-like farce

This slightly preposterous psychological drama – featuring Byrne and Meghann Fahy as sisters – is a show about trauma where everyone somehow looks astonishingly beautiful at all times At first glance, The Good Daughter (Thursday 12 November, 9pm, Sky Atlantic) should make you a little worried about Rose Byrne. Here is an actor not only at the top of her game, but quite frankly at the top of anybody’s. Her Apple TV show Platonic all but depends on her combination of emotional nuance and flawless slapstick to exist, and earlier this year she won a Golden Globe (and was nominated for an Oscar) fo

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Entertainment

The Guide #268: Laptop twee is the gloriously awkward sound giving British music a new lease of life

In this week’s newsletter: From wonky electronic production to painfully earnest lyrics, a new wave of artists are embracing nostalgia, cute vibes and DIY pop If you’d told me back in January that one of my favourite tracks of 2026 would count noughties new rave outfit Hadouken! and goofy Kesha parodists The Midnight Beast among its influences, I would have looked at you skeptically, at the very least. I’m all for the nostalgic reappropriation of the most neglected and deeply uncool relics of pop music past, but these particular reference points would have seemed like a step too far. I would h

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Entertainment

From Wild Horse Nine to Kings of Leon: your complete entertainment guide for the week ahead

John Malkovich and Sam Rockwell team up in a typically offbeat Martin McDonagh comedy, and the Followill brothers reach album No 10 in rustic mode Wild Horse Nine Out now John Malkovich looks set to be nominated for an Oscar for his portrayal of an ageing CIA agent with terminal cancer who is sent to Easter Island with his younger colleague (Sam Rockwell) in this dark comedy drama from Martin McDonagh (The Banshees of Inisherin). Continue reading...

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Entertainment

Eurovision’s Asia experiment gets under way in flamboyant Bangkok

Organisers hope extravagant attempt to transplant song contest will be a success Thailand is about to get a glitz-infused injection of pop culture, with crews starting construction of a large stage in Bangkok as part of an extravagant attempt to transplant Eurovision to Asia. Organisers have promised the world’s longest-running music competition will launch “a new chapter in Asia” next weekend, when 11 contestants from across the region will sing and dance for votes. Continue reading...

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Entertainment

Russell Brand suspected to have attacked at least 10 other women

Met police chief says ‘many more’ victims could come forward, as actor and comedian awaits sentencing Police are bracing themselves for more victims of Russell Brand to come forward, with at least 10 more women suspected of having been attacked by the disgraced star. Brand, 51, will be sentenced on Monday to what is expected to be a lengthy jail sentence for rape and sexual assaults after he abused his fame to become a “predator” targeting women, and got away with it for years. Continue reading...

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Entertainment

‘It’s the final goodbye’: Monty Don bows out with a blissful last Gardeners’ World

TV’s most soothing gardener bids viewers farewell in his own inimitable style: poetically, and with barely a hint of fuss Monty Don paces through his garden, slowly and deliberately. “Welcome to a beautiful day,” he announces. Autumn has hit and the greens of Longmeadow have modulated into soft yellows and oranges. He’s right. This is as idyllic as his place will get. “But,” he warns, “we know winter will come.” And with winter comes change, and death, and a final loss before regrowth. Don is talking about gardens, about how it won’t be long before the first frosts arrive. But maybe, just mayb

The Guardian
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Entertainment

Sebastián Lelio was a fascinating film-maker of great passion and poetry

Chilean director of films including Gloria and A Fantastic Woman could expertly capture both the personal and political Sebastián Lelio, director of A Fantastic Woman and Gloria, dies aged 52 The last 20 years have seen an amazing flowering of creativity from Chilean film-makers. The standard bearers of the Novisimo Cine Chileno, or New Chilean Cinema, have included Pablo Larraín, Patricio Guzmán (who sadly died this year) and Sebastián Silva, directors who brought to global audiences news of what it has been like in their country to have submitted to Augusto Pinochet’s rule, a tinpot tyranny

The Guardian
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Entertainment

Macklemore says that nine US arenas turned down his Free Palestine tour

Rapper called out ‘intimidation and suppression’ in post, claiming major arenas refused to host him after he was dropped from Ed Sheeran’s tour Macklemore says that nine leading US arenas have refused to host his Free Palestine fundraising tour, calling out “intimidation, manipulation and suppression” tactics. In an Instagram post, the rapper says that he hoped to bring the tour to the US, but nine top arenas refused to host the event, including New York City’s Madison Square Garden, Los Angeles’s Crypto.com Arena and Brooklyn’s Barclays Center. Continue reading...

The Guardian
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