Disney’s animated super-hit Moana from 2016 – having been followed up by a dull sequel two years ago – now gets a competent but basically pointless and unexciting back-to-basics live-action remake. Screenwriter Jared Bush modifies his original script, Broadway stage veteran Thomas Kail makes his movie directing debut and Lin-Manuel Miranda’s songs are revived. Nineteen-year-old…
There are, MR James tells us, five conditions that must be met for a perfect ghost story: the pretence of truth, a “pleasing terror”, no explanation of the machinery, no gratuitous horror, and that the story belong to the writer’s (and reader’s) “own day”. In Lauren Mooney’s sharply observed debut novel, Danielle lives a precarious existence…
‘The future of architecture,” pronounced Salvador Dalí on meeting Le Corbusier in 1922, “will be soft and hairy.” Fast forward over 70 years to Tokyo, and his surrealist prophecy was the stimulus for the Soft and Hairy House, one of a series of startlingly expressive dwellings designed by the talented Scottish-Japanese architectural partnership of Kathryn…
The public will be asked who should receive social care and how it should be paid for as part of a review into the system. Baroness Louise Casey, who is leading a commission into adult social care in England, described the system to the BBC’s Radio Four Today programme as “impossible” to navigate and called…
When I first wrote my guide to the best handheld fans in 2025, familiar electronics brands in the space were hard to come by. But, like buses, two have arrived at once this summer. The Dyson HushJet Mini Cool provided plenty of power, but missed the mark on the “hush” part of its branding, and…
Danish actor Trine Dyrholm gives a magnetic performance with all guns blazing in this intensely painful, uncomfortable but also sometimes uncomfortably funny film from writer-director Mads Mengel; it is about a dysfunctional family and is shot in a freewheeling handheld style with lots of looming extreme closeups, a film in the spirit of Thomas Vinterberg’s…
Dave Eggers, the author of more than a dozen novels as well as a steady stream of children’s and nonfiction books, grew up wanting to be an artist.As a child he took lessons with a Japanese watercolourist, studied painting at college, worked as a magazine cartoonist and illustrator, even curated a New York show entitled Lots…
Police leadership is not consistently of a high enough standard and requires a fundamental overhaul, a landmark independent review has warned. The report by the Police Leadership Commission, published on Monday, found the system for identifying and developing leaders was too weak, with chief constable roles in England and Wales often attracting a single suitable…
How do you feel about exclamation marks? Otherwise known as gaspers, screamers, dog’s cocks, or shrieks. In his Modern English Usage, Fowler said that using too many betrays an “uneducated or unpractised writer”. Martin Amis called them “joke badges”, and Theodor Adorno “soundless cymbal-crashing”. The novelist Elmore Leonard specified that you were allowed only two…
Yrsa is a young Black undergraduate supervisor who is studying for a sociology PhD at Cambridge. She is tired of the disappointing men in her orbit: the ones she works with, sleeps with and who abuse her trust and that of her friends. She is also heartily sick of the students who attend her lectures…
