SHOW BIZ

A HAPPY Mondays star has been forced to cancel work and an Ibiza holiday – as they revealed their mother is in hospital after a fall.

The singer, 60, performed with the iconic alternative dance band across two stints.

Rowetta – ful name Rowetta Idah was part of the group from 1990 to 1993 and again from 2012 to 2024.

Taking to Instagram, she shared a photo of her mother lying in a hospital bed, sipping a drink.

Rowetta captioned her post: “Apologies to friends & family but my mum has had another fall.

“She has 3 broken ribs and her left lung needs to heal, so I won’t be on here much and studio & Ibiza are on hold.

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“She’s in a great place so hopefully back soon.”

One person commented: “Thinking of ye both. I hope she gets better soon.”

Another wrote: “Wishing her a speedy recovery and sending you lots of love, strength and courage.

“Please do get in touch if I can help with anything.”

A third said: “Hope she feels better soon.”

Aside from her work with the Happy Mondays, Rowetta is the vocalist on 1989 track Reach Out.

It has since been sampled by other artists including The Black Eyed Peas and Steve Angello.

Meanwhile, Rowetta competed on The X Factor‘s inaugural 2004 series, placing fourth and being the highest placed female contestant.

AS SHE counts down to the birth of her second child, Scarlett Moffatt enjoyed a sweet baby shower this weekend.

The former Gogglebox favourite – who already shares son Jude with her fiance Scott Dobinson – enjoyed a fun-filled ‘baby in bloom’ themed bash with her friends and family.

From baby bingo to hilarious games, the shower saw all of Scarlett’s nearest and dearest come together.

Guests were welcomed to a large pastel coloured balloon arch with a sign that read ‘Baby in Bloom, Scarlett’s baby shower’ inscripted on it.

A floral cake with the same colour scheme and an ‘oh baby’ topper was beautifully displayed for guests to enjoy too.

Scarlett donned a floral dress as she matched the day’s theme, whilst her other half Scott and their son Jude both opted for pastel blue shirts.

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Sharing a carousel of pictures from the day, Scarlett wrote to Instagram: “Baby in Bloom 🌸🌼🩵

“One last big celebration before our littlest love arrives. My heart (and belly 😂) are VERY full 🩵”.

She continued: “Thank you to my mam and bestie for organising it all especially getting up at the crack of dawn to make finger sandwiches lol, to everybody who came we love you so much.

“Honestly what a giggle I’ve had & @balloonsbymollyx as always for the beautiful display”.

Scarlett announced she and Scott were expecting their second child earlier this year, but recently told The Sun that the pregnancy has been far from smooth sailing.

After a very relaxing pregnancy with Jude, Scarlett says she was shocked this time around.

“This time, the first trimester I was still working and filming and I was getting bad travel sickness – I’ve never had that in my life before.

“I was also running off to throw up at work,” admitted the star.

Even had you never read Charles Dickens’ “A Tale of Two Cities,” or even known of its existence, the odds are good that you have somewhere encountered its much quoted opening and closing lines: “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times” and (spoiler) “It is a far, far better thing that I do, than I have ever done; it is a far, far better rest that I go to than I have ever known,” respectively, the latter possibly in the course of a Ronald Colman imitation. (Please do not ask who Ronald Colman is.)

Reckoned to be Dickens’ most popular novel, it has been several times filmed for the big and small screens, going back to 1911 — the big-budget Colman version came in 1935 — but has not been mounted in this century, until now, with a four-part adaptation premiering Sunday on MGM+ in a co-production with BBC One. It stars Kit Harington, whom “Game of Thrones” people know as Jon Snow, as Sydney Carton, a disheveled, cynical, self-loathing, alcoholic, yet clever London lawyer. London is one of the two cities whose tale this is. Paris, before and during the Revolution, is the other.

Daniel West’s adaptation hits the major plot points and select lines of dialogue, but has typically, unavoidably, been streamlined and compressed. Characters disappear, or have their attributes and actions assigned to different characters. But much has been added as well. Most of these alterations are trivial, although one major change, coming near the end, is a very bad idea. I can’t tell you what it is, though.

Francois Civil, left, and Kit Harington in “A Tale of Two Cities.”

(Marcell Piti / MGM+)

Other than that, the most substantial changes are to Lucie Manette (Mirren Mack), the female lead, in order to give her a more active, heroic role in the story, this being 2026. (Not that Dickens didn’t write a heroine or two.) So we meet her, a Frenchwoman raised in England, sneaking out at night to dissect corpses in a sort of one-woman underground medical school — knowledge that will come in handy when Charles Darnay (François Civil), a Frenchman living in London, shows up at the place where she lives, dying from a knife wound acquired in the process of chaperoning into England a young woman in danger from the French ancien régime (the king is still in his counting house); laying him out on the dining room table, she cauterizes the wound.

Darnay has also been tasked with delivering the message “Recalled to life,” which refers to the fact that the father Lucie believed dead has merely been languishing in the Bastille for 18 years and is now out. In the novel, he is simply released, but here he has escaped — or rather, has been escaped, since he is something of a wreck, as you might imagine — and is being hidden at the wine shop of the pre-revolutionary Defarges, Ernest and Thérèse. Like the novel’s first and last lines, Madame Defarge (Roxane Duran), with her knitting needles, has transcended the text into folklore.

“A Tale of Two Cities”

(Marcell Piti / MGM+)

But before a recovering Darnay can clear any of this up, he’s dragged away by English police, accused of spying for the French for the benefit of the Americans — our own revolution is in progress at this point — and put on trial. Lucie, having exhausted all other possibilities, and needing Darnay in order to find her father, hires a very reluctant Carton, who in a trick worthy of Perry Mason, gets him off when a witness cannot tell him and Darnay apart. (Make a note of their resemblance; it will be important later.) By this time, both men are in love with Lucie, which, historical action scenes and social commentary aside, is the real point of the story, which might as easily be titled “A Tale of Three Citizens.”

All this gets the miniseries off to an energetic start. After this, there will be a lot of going back and forth across the Channel; crimes of the aristocracy; Darnay’s own Big Secret revealed; more trials, more imprisonments. Still, though it wakes up when we get to the storming of the Bastille, economically but effectively rendered, and, later the Reign of Terror, in between it can turn into a murky, mopey slog. It is often dark, visually and temperamentally; the music tends to moodiness. The actors speak quietly, as if fearful of being overheard, whether or not there is anyone around to hear, and often regard one another with pained or stunned expressions. It’s not necessarily inappropriate — there’s a lot of death in the book, and in a love triangle, someone is bound to lose, at least in the pre-polyamorous 19th century. But this “Two Cities” does lean into the worst of times.

Nevertheless, as Lucie, Mack makes a consistently vital impression — one can see why everyone’s in love with her. (Harington, the big name here, is less vivid; he’s more interesting before Carton falls for Lucie, when he’s still a bit of jerk and not simply sad most of the time.) And as Madame Defarge , who will become the symbol of the revolution’s bloodthirsty overreach, Duran is splendid; she’s a monster, finally, but layered and human. She has her reasons.

A second celebrity has been eliminated from ITV’s The Box, after losing a duel on Gary Lineker’s new celebrity game show.

A contestant on The Box has spoken out after their exit from the gameshow, as they became the second star to be eliminated.

The ITV series, which premiered on Saturday (September 5), sees 10 celebrities take part in a variety of challenges. Fronted by former Match of the Day presenter Gary Lineker, the cast includes Danny Aarons, Ranvir Singh, Joey Essex, Ellie Taylor, JB Gill, Jenny Ryan, John Bercow, Sara Davies and Shakira Khan. During Saturday night’s debut episode, Graeme Souness became the first star to be eliminated, and now a second celebrity has been sent packing.

After losing out on The Duel, a head-to-head game after the main challenge, Sara Davies was confirmed to be going home. She shared how much she enjoyed her experience, adding that she was “dead proud” of putting herself through challenges, reports the Express.

She went on: “Where I’ve played this wrong is, I’ve shown my true colours a little bit. They’ve seen that actually, she’s playing this to win. And I think that’s what’s been my downfall.”

Sara continued by saying how much she’d enjoyed her time taking part in the show, adding: “I’d do it again in a heartbeat.” Each episode of the show sees a celebrity get enclosed in a yellow box, before finding themselves in mystery locations across the country.

“They will never know where they are, or what challenge is facing them on the other side. The challenges could be physical, mental, logical, funny, a bit daunting, or all of those at once,” the synopsis adds. “With minimal or no instruction, they must decipher and work out what to do. At the end of each episode, two players will battle it out in The Duel, a high-stakes head-to-head game to avoid elimination.”

Just a day earlier, when The Box premiered, Sara shared a message about filming the programme on social media. She shared: “So around this time last year, I was asked to take part in a brand new and totally different show for ITV called ‘The Box’.

“I received a phone call asking if I would take part and, because the show had never been made before, I didn’t really fully understand what I was letting myself in for. I just knew I was going to be put into a big yellow shipping container, transported SOMEWHERE, and then I’d have to work out what the hell was going on and what I needed to do about it the split second the box doors opened!

“What they did promise was that it would be a challenge, it would be unexpected, I’d be pushed well out of my comfort zone, and I’d have to challenge myself in ways I could never have imagined. Well, they weren’t wrong and I can’t wait to hear what you all think of it!”

She went on to say that unfortunately she’d be missing the show airing as she was walking the Great Wall of China with breast cancer charity CoppaFeel, but she wanted to share the “truly memorable experience” with her followers with some behind-the-scenes pictures.

Sara was widely supported from fans after her post, with one writing: “Love this can’t wait to watch.” Another said: “Just watched 1 and 2 episodes big love from another Northern Gal.” Someone else wrote: “I’m watching the second episode now and it’s brill xx.”

Sara’s exit from The Box comes after she quit Dragons’ Den last year. She had become the youngest ever female Dragon when she joined in 2019.

She shared at the time: “Little update from me… As this last run of Dragons’ comes to an end I have to say l’ve loved every minute of this series so far and I’m so proud of the businesses l’ve invested in this year!

“As a lot of you will know, l’ve taken up my position again as CEO of Crafter’s Companion and my business is my big priority this year. And when I commit to a business, I really commit, which is why I find Dragons’ Den such a rewarding role.

“As well as filming an incredible show, being a Dragon requires so much dedication and time behind the scenes as you join the life of each business you invest in. It means seeing through your investment and committing to your part in that organisation. It’s so much more than a TV show.

“That’s why l’ve taken the decision to step away from the Den for now, to focus on my own business, which was my first baby! So I won’t be filming with the team this year for the next series.

“Sending so much love to my fellow Dragons and the amazing team behind it all. In the meantime, you can still catch me in the second half of this series of Dragons’ Den later in the year – it will not disappoint!”

The Box is available to watch on ITVX

TELLURIDE, Colo. — For four days every Labor Day weekend, the Telluride Film Festival turns this tiny mountain town into something of a refuge from the outside world. Tucked into a box canyon and far from the usual machinery of Hollywood, moviegoers spend their days seeing films they may have known little about before arriving and talking about them almost nonstop.

Artificial intelligence, apparently, did not get the memo.

This year, even Telluride’s usually self-contained movie bubble couldn’t keep out the existential anxieties surrounding AI. On Saturday, the festival devoted two events to the subject, beginning with “The Humanity Dilemma,” an hourlong multimedia presentation mixing dire warnings with live music and imagery, and continuing with a panel bluntly titled “AI AI AI,” featuring Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates.

Introducing “The Humanity Dilemma” at the nearly packed Sheridan Opera House, festival executive director Julie Huntsinger acknowledged that Telluride normally steers clear of taking political sides. “We just let the program speak for us,” Huntsinger said.

But on AI, she made an exception.

“We are a very humanist festival — that’s how we identify,” Huntsinger said. “AI is a threat.” While acknowledging potentially beneficial applications, she urged the audience to become more engaged in the debate over its development.

“We all need to be very alert and vigilant and loving and kind and stop this s—,” she said, earning loud whoops of approval from some in the crowd.

AI already occupies an uneasy place in Hollywood, where filmmakers and studios are experimenting with the technology even as actors, writers and other creative workers fight to protect their jobs and likenesses from being exploited or replaced.

For all of Huntsinger’s warnings, Telluride is not treating AI as off-limits. Its program includes “Love, Rendered,” a short documentary directed by Liz Garbus and produced by Darren Aronofsky about an elderly couple confronting the husband’s memory loss. Using AI along with family photographs and stories from loved ones, the filmmakers recreate the moment the couple first met and fell in love 70 years earlier. On Sunday, the film’s creative team is scheduled to discuss the project at an event titled “Filmmaking and Technology With Empathy: AI for Societal Benefit.”

“The Humanity Dilemma” was presented by Tristan Harris and Aza Raskin, co-founders of the Center for Humane Technology, who appeared in the 2020 documentary “The Social Dilemma,” along with artist and researcher Joy Mauthe and violinist Andrei Matorin. Harris and Raskin also appear in this year’s “The AI Doc: Or How I Became an Apocaloptimist.”

The presentation was designed to work on the emotions as well as the intellect. Original songs about humanity’s relationship to AI ran through much of the hour, with Mauthe singing and playing guitar and Matorin on violin, as Harris and Raskin delivered warnings accompanied by images of environmental devastation, poverty and figures in the AI race including Elon Musk, Sam Altman and Larry Ellison.

Their argument was stark: The race to build more powerful AI is moving far faster than governments or the public can keep up. Their deepest fear is that humans could eventually lose control of increasingly capable AI systems altogether.

At the same time, they acknowledged the technology’s potentially transformative benefits.

“AI is confusing because it represents both simultaneous utopia and dystopia,” Raskin said. “Just imagine having to reason about a nuke that could also solve cancer.”

By the end, Harris was calling for a halt to the development of more powerful systems.

“We need to pause frontier AI development and pivot and steer towards a pro-human future,” he said.

The hour concluded with Mauthe leading the audience in a final refrain, singing that the future is “still in our hands.” It was the kind of unabashedly earnest moment that could easily have tipped into awkwardness, but many in the room seemed to embrace it.

A few hours later, Harris and Raskin returned for “AI AI AI,” held outdoors at the Abel Gance Open Air Cinema in Telluride’s Elks Park, joined by Gates and filmmaker Joshua Oppenheimer, director of the Oscar-nominated documentaries “The Act of Killing” and “The Look of Silence,” who served as a moderator.

From left, Bill Gates, Aza Raskin, Tristan Harris and filmmaker Joshua Oppenheimer discuss the risks and potential benefits of artificial intelligence at the Telluride Film Festival on Saturday.

(Josh Rottenberg)

For Gates, who has spent decades focusing much of his philanthropy and public advocacy on global health and poverty, the rise of AI has forced him to make room for a new priority. In an essay published last week, he warned that the technology was improving faster than he anticipated and called for a new framework to manage its risks.

At Telluride, Gates said he now feels compelled to devote some of the political influence he has long used to advocate for causes such as malnutrition, polio and malaria to raise alarms about AI as well.

“Is this the greatest problem humanity has ever faced?” Gates said. “That is just a fact.”

Gates said his concerns have grown as AI systems have become more capable, particularly at writing computer code, something he has been obsessed with since he was 13.

“The AIs are superhuman, i.e., better than I am at writing code,” Gates said.

He laid out five broad areas of concern: jobs, biotechnology, cyberattacks, psychosocial harms and whether humans will be able to maintain control over the systems they are building.

Oppenheimer said that after spending hours digging into AI risks ahead of the panel, he had come away “absolutely terrified.” He read aloud an answer he had received after asking ChatGPT to estimate the risks if the race toward increasingly powerful AI continued with little regulation.

The chatbot put the chance of “persistent dystopian outcomes for all humanity” at 25% to 40%, a civilization-scale catastrophe at 5% to 15% and human extinction or permanent loss of human control at 5% to 10%.

“That’s what AI thinks,” Oppenheimer said.

Gates stressed AI’s potential upside, citing advances in medicine, education and assistance to farmers in poor countries. But pressed on whether development should be slowed until safety measures catch up, he said he would be open to the idea.

“If there was a credible plan that would cause this to be either slowed down or, you know, even held in stasis for a period of time, I would likely support that,” Gates said.

The difficulty, he said, is that multiple developers in both the U.S. and China are pushing closer to the technological frontier. Still, Gates rejected the argument that competition with China makes meaningful regulation impossible.

“China does not want cyberattacks, bioattacks or loss of control,” Gates said.

The discussion was punctuated by a pair of outbursts from the audience. At one point, as Gates discussed the economic incentives driving AI development, a man shouted that they represented “everything that’s wrong with America” and invoked Jesus Christ. Gates paused before responding dryly: “Anyway, not everything is wrong with America, according to me.”

Gates argued that government and civil society need to move much more quickly.

“This five-year period, in my view, is a very critical period,” he said, adding that responses that take five or six years to get underway could come too late.

Despite the dire warnings, Harris pointed to signs that pressure for safeguards is growing, including calls from AI-industry employees to limit the development of more powerful systems. Just last week, Meta agreed to pay $17 billion to settle claims by 29 states that Facebook and Instagram harmed young users while also agreeing to new child-safety measures on the platforms.

“I just want to leave you with not naive optimism, but momentum,” Harris said.

Near the end, Raskin suggested that President Trump’s well-documented desire to win the Nobel Peace Prize might provide an incentive for him to pursue a U.S.-China pause on more powerful AI systems.

“What’s better than solving one war?” Raskin said. “Saving all of humanity forever from uncontrollable AI.”

Gates, with a wry smile, called the Nobel angle “smart.”

“Whoever really takes the step to solve this AI problem would deserve the Nobel Prize,” he said.

Later that night, the festival would hold an outdoor screening of Stanley Kubrick’s “2001: A Space Odyssey,” featuring HAL 9000, one of cinema’s most famous rogue artificial intelligences.

Gates framed the current stakes in similarly cinematic terms.

“There are these movies where the aliens are coming, and you see unprecedented levels of cooperation between China and the U.S.,” he said. “Well, believe me, the aliens are here.”

Game of Thrones’ Rose Leslie still remembers what she learnt when winter was coming.

Rose Leslie has shared some handy behind the scenes Game of Thrones tricks she used for Vigil season three.

Vigil continues to air every Sunday and Monday night on BBC One as DI Kirsten Longacre (played by Rose Leslie) heads up the latest murder investigation.

But in a complete 180 degrees move to series two which was mostly set in the Middle East, season three takes place in Svalbard, Norway, which is located in the Arctic Circle.

And with Svalbard having an average annual temperature between minus 11 and minus 16 degrees, it wasn’t the easiest of conditions to work in.

Nevertheless, Leslie did pick up a few helpful tips while shooting in Iceland’s freezing temperatures for Game of Thrones.

“Filming back then, I was given a brilliant hack that I also used for Svalbard as well.

“Essentially, if you get a heat pack and you place them on both your kidneys, you are then heating up your blood because your blood is going through your kidneys and then whizzing everywhere else in your system.

“So if you’re heating up the blood going through your kidneys, you’re actually going to warm yourself up.

So I was like ‘Guys, you’ve got to listen to me on this!’ And it works!

“That really helped me on every single day we were filming outside on the mountain tops.”

Vigil season three returns for its third episode tonight, Sunday, September 6, where Kirsten will finally be reunited with DCI Amy Silva (Suranne Jones).

It’s been teased that Amy travels to Svalbard to “clear Kirsten’s name” as she faces the “wrath of the Russians”.

The official synopsis continues: “Together, they dig into the complex motivations within the hub whilst something more sinister bubbles beneath its surface.

“The truth of Hodge’s murder may be closer to home than they thought, but the situation threatens to combust before they can get to the truth.”

Vigil is available to watch on BBC One and BBC iPlayer.

CARA Delevingne has shared a picture of herself topless while cuddling her pet cat in a new Instagram post.

The supermodel, who is a doting pet-parent to two male cats, posed in bed as one of her Persian shorthair cats covered her chest.

Donning just a pair of grey boyshorts, Cara showed off her natural complexion with her hair scraped back in the snap.

She also shared a myriad of other pictures in the post, including a loved-up snap with her partner Minke.

Cara has been with Minke, whose real name is Leah Mason, since 2022.

Whilst Cara is best known for her successful modelling career, the star has recently turned to music.

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Earlier this month, she stripped down for a sexy new music video for single Crazy, Baby to launch her move to music in style.

The video saw Cara embrace her rock side with leather knee-high boots and matching shorts, with the star going topless for several scenes.

Cara officially launched her music career earlier this year after signing with Warner Records.

She followed this up with the release of her first two electropop/rock singles, ‘I Forgot’ and ‘Out Of My Head’.

Crazy, Baby is Cara’s latest release.

Her debut studio album, Not Normal, is expected to be released over the coming weeks.

An adaptation for Graham Norton’s best-selling novel has just been given a major update

Channel 5 viewers have said they “can’t wait” as the release date for an exciting new series has been announced.

Graham Norton’s best-selling novel, Forever Home, is set to be released as a six-part drama, and is due to air in just days. It was earlier revealed that the cast includes Amy Nuttall, Douglas Henshall, Denise Welch, Kevin Whately, Samantha Bond, Lewis Cope, Jenny Walser, Shane Zaza and James Baxter.

Channel 5 has now teased: “Would you still want the house if you knew what it was hiding?” The broadcaster also confirmed that the series would begin airing from Monday, September 14.

“I’m really excited to watch! Looks so good! Proud of you always Lewis,” one fan said. Another commented: “Not long to go!! I can’t wait to watch.”

A third echoed: “Looking forward to this,” as another said: “Can’t wait.” Yet another wrote: “Ohh this looks good.”

Someone else said: “Cannot wait to see this, I’ve almost finished the book, what a fab writer Graham Norton is….” Another fan echoed: “Read the book hopefully it be as good.”

The synopsis had previously revealed: “The six-part series follows the story of a second wife dealing with the memories of the woman who went before her. When Carol discovers a long-dead body hidden in the basement of her home, the horrific realisation is undeniable – she’s living with a killer.

“The story that her husband’s first wife ran away never to be seen again now looks like a lie, and the fact he’s insisted on never selling the house suddenly makes sense. But one dark family secret is soon to be replaced by another…”

After the series was commissioned, chatshow host and author Graham shared: “In writing Forever Home, I was initially inspired by the simple idea of packing up a home later in life, and the ‘what if’ scenarios and complexities that come with later-life relationships. The novel soon evolved into a funny, twisted, ‘dark-romp’ full of farcical scenes and it’s wonderful to see the depth and richness of Carol’s story realised as a screenplay.”

Commissioning editor Paul Testar also commented: “We’re delighted to partner with FilmNation and The Mediapro Studio to bring Graham Norton’s compelling novel to UK screens, supported by an outstanding cast. Working with North East Screen again to champion local filming has been a pleasure, and we can’t wait for viewers to immerse themselves in Forever Home.”

Creative director of FilmNation TV UK, Kirstie Macdonald, added: “From the moment I read the always-hilarious Graham Norton’s brilliant novel, I knew I wanted to bring Forever Home to the screen. It’s a story full of twists and turns, secrets, and emotional depth that we can’t wait to bring to life for 5 audiences. We’re proud to collaborate with Clara Salaman, 5, and our partners at The Mediapro Studio on this thrilling adaptation and are grateful for the support of North East Screen.”

Forever Home airs premieres 5 on Monday, September 14 from 9pm.

FROM #ad posts to children launching their own fashion lines, the world of influencing is no longer reserved for reality stars and celebs – but their mini-mes too.

Amy Childs became the latest star to cash in on her daughter Polly when she revealed last month that the nine-year-old was launching her own fashion range – with a crop top-clad Polly telling the camera all about her new venture.

The announcement didn’t go down quite as positively as Amy had hoped, with many fans slamming her for ‘exploiting’ the youngster for the money-spinning venture – leaving her ‘devastated’.

It comes as a whole host of celebs have welcomed their offspring into the world of business.

Ferne McCann’s daughters Sunday and Finty often feature in her social media brand deals, Molly-Mae’s three-year-old Bambi joined her in fronting a campaign for laundry detergent brand Comfort and Persil, and Rochelle Humes’ three children often appear in front of the camera for her brand, My Little Coco.

But why are so many celebs turning to using their children for new cash-grabbing ventures?

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PR expert Luana Riviera says celeb parents are a ‘goldmine’ when it comes to money-making, as she says: “Being seen with their children makes even the most famous faces seem more down-to-earth and relatable.”

However, fans have been left concerned over the rise in celeb children on their screens.

Amy Childs’ was flooded with comments about ‘exploitation’ after revealing daughter Polly’s clothing brand.

Something feels off about this. Sorry but it’s a money making thing and doesn’t seem right.

“She isn’t old enough to do this sort of thing and have the maturity to understand,” said one.

Another echoed: “God let her be a child a little longer.”

Molly-Mae faced similar backlash after showing daughter Bambi in the bath on her Amazon Prime series and taking part in campaigns together.

“From a PR point of view, the use of families is appealing and will certainly get people talking about the brand and the marketing campaign,” explains Launa, who is the founder of Dauntless PR.

She continued: “But it is important to remember that these decisions are forever and when children get older they may wish they had been given more privacy and normality in their younger years.”

“Whether or not celebrities SHOULD put their children in the public eye in this way is an area which people will have lots of opinions on.

“Some will argue it is a safety risk and that the children themselves aren’t old enough to fully consent or understand the implications of establishing a level of fame in their own right.”

With the move such a controversial one, will the young stars see any of their hard-earned profits?  

PR expert Carla Speight believes they will reap the rewards, just not anytime soon.

“These industry savvy parents will be making sure their kids won’t work for free, especially in the case of Molly Mae’s Bambi in the Comfort ads.

“Bambi will have been paid for that and the money will sit in a trust earning interest until she’s at least 16, which gives her a good financial head start.

“Just like most of the celeb children, they’ll either have shares in the brands or they’ll get a wage for each time they showcase the brands and in the case of their parent’s brands, it’s likely they’ll get both.”

VENICE, Italy — “My actual personality is not very friendly, I’m afraid,” claims Korean actor Jeon Do-yeon. “Myself and actor Sul Kyung-gu, we can be a little bit brusque. We don’t really have the talent to make the set fun.”

As she says it, though, Jeon and co-star Cho Yeo-jeong are laughing — making the assertion rather harder to believe when it arrives in English from Korean via an interpreter. Throughout our conversation, in fact, the pair chuckles, nods along to each other’s answers, interjects sounds of assent. Enough for me to understand that their chemistry comes naturally, whatever Jeon’s protestations.

“In the film I play a character that chases [Jeon’s character] and it really suited me, almost to the point where I didn’t really need to try and act this role,” as Cho puts it. “I was almost like a sunflower, constantly facing and chasing actor Jeon.”

The actors needed every ounce of the sublime chemistry they forged to portray the magnetic but fatally flawed relationship at the heart of auteur Lee Chang-dong’s first film in eight years, “Possible Love,” which premiered Sunday at the Venice Film Festival. South Korea’s international feature submission for the 2027 Oscars, the Netflix film sees Ye-ji (Cho), a documentarian married to a wealthy businessman (Zo In-sung), cozy up to Mi-ok (Jeon), whose husband (Sul) has been seriously injured in a brutal crackdown on striking factory workers, in order to secure an interview with him — only for divisions of class and professional ambition to expose the fault lines in their relationship, and in turn their marriages.

“It seems like they want to be friends with each other, but then there seems to be a line that just cannot be crossed between them,” says Lee, also through an interpreter, of the actors’ accomplished double act, referring to a scene in which Ye-ji bristles at Mi-ok’s suggestion that her high-end clothes are out of place interviewing unemployed laborers. “[Jeon and Cho] knew of that and they went into shooting that scene knowing that it was quite challenging to express. There were, of course, some things that were up to the camera in bringing that about, but I think that was a scene where the two were able to express just how nuanced and quite strange the relationship can be.”

The film itself is just as slippery and multi-layered, down to Lee’s heady admixture of documentary and dramatic aesthetics. Inspired by real-life labor conflict in South Korea, “Possible Love” uses Ye-ji’s nonfiction study of laid-off workers as a window into the lives of ordinary people swept up in large-scale social change, against the backdrop of which the two women’s competing priorities are thrown into stark relief. Can a filmmaker who totes a $4,000 Lora Piana backpack, however well-intentioned, truly understand the plight of the working class? Is a subject eager to publicize a political struggle prepared for the risk that her personal privacy will be invaded in the process?

To choreograph the film within the film — so compelling that I almost missed seeing its conclusion when “Possible Love” shifts the focus to interpersonal fireworks in the third hour — Lee cast a real-life documentary director and cinematographer as Ye-ji’s crew, lending what Cho calls their “natural energy” to the movements of the camera. Cho herself prepared by consulting the late master of the form, Frederick Wiseman, who was unabashed about the tension between documentary filmaking’s often radical politics and the privilege required to turn it into a profession.

“[Wiseman] was posed the question by some students studying film and documentary: ‘How can I pursue this work in reality?’” she recalls. “And he replied with the immortal words, ‘Marry a rich man.’ And you know, I was preparing for the role of Ye-ji, so it was such an apt response for her situation.”

Jeon, left, and Cho in “Possible Love.”

(Joo Jae-bum/Netflix)

The potential for conflict bursts into the open at a seaside home that has been in Ye-ji’s husband’s family for years, where the group has decamped for a supposedly restorative holiday. Reminded of the setting by the location of our conversation — a set of green-curtained, pink-carpeted suites at the Hotel Excelsior, overlooking the northern shores of the Adriatic — I ask the actors what’s going through their characters’ minds when Mi-ok and Ye-ji’s promising connection ultimately severs.

Mi-ok “doesn’t really want to reveal to anyone else what’s going on in the family … She only wants to show the good side that they are trying to live their best life and trying to improve and move forward with hopefulness,” Jeon says, citing an early scene in which Mi-ok asks the crew not to film her son’s awkward taekwondo at a school field day. When the camera’s prying eye becomes more intrusive, though, she “feels a great sense of betrayal, that her family is being used and exploited.”

For Cho, who says Ye-ji is “constantly balancing the ethical dilemma” between documenting the truth and treating her subjects with care, the break was always inevitable, and no amount of Ye-ji’s remorse or guilt can repair the damage.

Against this microcosm of the class war Lee sets the emergence of artificial intelligence, which threatens to further destabilize labor across a range of industries — including his own. Although he’s uncertain if, when or how AI will “intrude” on the “entirely creative” filmmaking process, the “Poetry” and “Burning” director is already using it for everyday tasks.

“Before going to see the doctor, I like to ask AI all the symptoms that I have, ask what’s wrong with me. Or I would ask, you know, ‘What’s the weather like in Venice?’” he says. “AI gives us instant answers, and it goes even beyond that to where it gives you advice these days. And in that sense, AI has indeed really gotten deeply intertwined in my daily life.”

Similarly, Jeon is open to using AI for more “trivial” matters, such as simultaneous translation from English to Korean and vice versa. But she admits to more “extreme thoughts” than Lee about the technology’s role in the future of screen acting.

“I’m going to be starring in a [Korean-language adaptation] of Anton Chekov’s “The Cherry Orchard” upcoming in New York. And I was wondering, actually, is the stage the last place that cannot be conquered by AI, and will not be replaced by AI?”

Perhaps. But the scene in “Possible Love” that best captures the finely honed chemistry of its female leads, in which Mi-ok and Ye-ji drunkenly bond over soju and Korean barbecue as their bemused husbands look on, seems to me beyond the capabilities of AI — it’s too warm, too meticulously rendered to be anything other than fully human, the sort of acting one hopes the Venice jury will remember when it hands out the Volpi Cup for best actress on Saturday.

“It is quite difficult technically and practically — it was a scene that we shot all night long,” Cho says. “But I remember shooting it with a lot of pleasure.”

No protest there.

Many true crime fans said it was a ‘wild’ watch as they tune in for the first time

An “insane” true crime documentary available to stream online is guaranteed to have your jaw on the floor.

There is an abundance of documentaries and films to watch on Netflix, but there is one particular watch that viewers say did not get “enough recognition” when it was first released.

Premiering in 2019, Bikram: Yogi, Guru, Predator examines the dramatic rise and fall of the controversial founder of hot yoga, Bikram Choudhury.

Directed by Academy Award winner Eva Orner (Taxi to the Dark Side), the film details how the controversial founder built a global fitness empire before it collapsed following numerous sexual abuse allegations.

An official synopsis on Netflix reads: “Arriving in Beverly Hills from Calcutta, India in the early 1970s, Choudhury quickly cultivated a celebrity following and built a global fitness empire that furnished him with extreme wealth.

“But by the 2010s, as numerous sexual abuse allegations emerged and stories of his aggressive, cult-like training environment surfaced, the lawsuits started to mount and Choudhury’s unorthodox teaching style became front-page news.”

It later adds: “BIKRAM: YOGI, GURU, PREDATOR, a Netflix original documentary, shines a light on the stories of the women who took him down and explores the contradiction of how this healing discipline could simultaneously help and hurt so many.”

Recently, one true crime reviewer took to social media having recently watched the documentary film, as they branded it an “insane” watch.

Sharing a video explaining the synopsis of the documentary, they wrote: “This true crime documentary will have your jaw on the ground.”

In the clip, they added: “This insane true crime documentary didn’t get enough recognition when it first came out.” One person replied: “Ohhh I loved this one crazzzyyyy”, as another commented: “Yes this was WILD!!!!”

A third added: “There’s a podcast about this too. Very strange, weird story.” A fourth wrote: “Oh yea this was a good one lol.”A fifth said: “That was a b***** crazy doc!! Too cray cray!!” Another stated: “I saw this already and I screamed at that ***!!! Absolutely insane!!”

Over on IMDb, one reviewer previously said: “The documentary was impeccably put together and a must watch for any yogi.”

Another wrote: “‘Bikram: Yogi, Guru, Predator’ is an exceptionally well made and well constructed documentary. It’s also one that, by the end, will probably also make you very angry for a variety of reasons.”

Bikram: Yogi, Guru, Predator can be streamed on Netflix

The Gentleman actress Jasmine Blackborow appeared on Sunday Brunch to promote the second season and conversation quickly turned to her co-star Maya Jama

One of Maya Jama’s The Gentleman co-star’s has revealed what the Love Island host was really like behind the scenes.

The presenter has has made her major scripted acting debut in the second series of Guy Ritchie’s comedy-drama Netflix’s The Gentleman as Aisha, a gangster’s moll and the wife of Prince Amir bin Abdullah al-Hadidi (Amra Mallassi).

She makes appearances during key moments of the season, notably featured in Episode 1 and Episode 4 and it has been reported that Maya will return for season three.

Actress Jasmine Blackborow, who plays Lady Charlotte “Charly” Horniman, the younger sister of the protagonist Eddie Horniman in The Gentleman, appeared on Sunday Brunch on September 6 so promote the show.

Conversation turned to Maya joining the cast with hosts Simon Rimmer and Tim Lovejoy keen to find out what the Celebrity Traitors was like when the cameras stopped rolling.

Jasmine said: “She was absolutely gorgeous on set and she was nervous because she’s not done this before. She was there running her lines again and again and when she did it she was just such a pro.”

Maya, who has been the host of Love Island since 2023, previously opened up about joining cast of the hit Netflix series and say director Guy made her feel comfortable while filming.

Speaking to Variety, she said: “He’s really kind and nice. He doesn’t feel as intimidating as you’d think, being who he is. He’s very personable and he would be like ‘yeah, you’re doing well’, and reassure me, which was really nice.

“He’s just really involved and kind of a genius to watch, because everyone’s practicing their lines and then he says something that’s way better than the original. You just feel like you’re in the presence of greatness.”

Hugh Bonneville and Michele Morrone are among other names joining season two of The Gentlemen, which is based on Guy’s film of the same name and explores the criminal underbelly of high society Britain.

The first series of The Gentleman premiered with an audience of 3.5 million and secured a place as one of UK’s most-watched TV shows of 2024.

The only other acting experience that 32-year-old Maya has had was in a brief cameo role for Katherine Ryan’s The Duchess on Netflix six years ago.

Speaking about the role at the time, Maya said: “I did the tiniest little cameo in a Netflix series called The Duchess” referring to her appearance as a dental nurse.

“But it was like one day filming, whereas this was my first one where I had to properly learn lines and be on set for a few days. But I was so, so excited because I loved the series.”

The Gentleman is now streaming on Netflix

Strictly stars Katya Jones, 37, and ex-husband Neil, 44, were both injured and forced to pull out of rehearsals

Rehearsals for the new Strictly series didn’t get off to the best start last week after two fan favourites were unable to take part.

Katya Jones, 37, and ex-husband Neil, 44, were both injured and forced to pull out of rehearsals, it has been reported.

It came at the worst time for the former couple, as it also meant that they missed out on a number of pre-recorded group routines.

While they both returned to dancing on Friday, the damage could have already been done as it may jeopardise their chances of being paired with a celebrity. This will be particularly devastating for Neil, who didn’t get a partner last year.

A source told The Sun: “There was a real crisis on set when both Neil and Katya were injured at the same time and there were concerns they wouldn’t be able to recover in time for the series start in two weeks.”

They added that Katya and Neil were “gutted” to miss out on the group dances as it “guarantees screen time if they don’t get a partner, which Neil often doesn’t”.

The Mirror has reached out to the BBC for comment.

It comes after Strictly released its very first trailer on Saturday introducing the new hosts with as much glitz and glamour as expected.

High-octane from the off, fans were treated to energetic performances by the pro dancers down the backstage of Elstree as glitter was thrown in the air and chandeliers rolled into shot. The infamous Glitterball also made an appearance, with judge Craig Revel Horwood attempting to smash it with a sledge hammer while co-stars Shirley Ballas and Anton Du Beke showed off their dance skills.

The trailer concluded by introducing its brand news hosts Johannes Radebe, Emma Willis and Josh Widdicombe, who held hands as they made their way down the brightly lit stairs. The trio are taking over from Tess Daly and Claudia Winkleman after they quit the BBC show last year.

As part of a huge revamp, bosses also axed long-standing professionals, Karen Hauer, Gorka Márquez, Nadiya Bychkova, Luba Mushtuk, and Michelle Tsiakkas in favour of new talent. While former Strictly contestant Ellie Taylor replaces Janette Manrara and Fleur East.

Sharing the trailer online, Strictly declared: “Let’s get this party started!”

Fans were ecstatic, flocking to the comments to share their thoughts, with one writing: “So, so excited for this to start, I literally look forward to strictly every year..” While another commented: “YES YES YES WE ARE SO BACK.”

The BBC competition kicks off with a pre-recorded show on September 19 with the star-studded line-up – including EastEnders’ Lacey Turner, Love Island winner Dani Dyer and singer Delta Goodrem – learning who they will be partnered up with.

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WHEN it comes to girl groups going solo, there can only ever be one really successful member, while the others trail behind pretending to be happy for them.

Beyoncé is the obvious example – her Destiny’s Child bandmates Kelly Rowland and Michelle Williams never stood a chance. 

In terms of their UK counterparts, Cheryl led the way for Girls Aloud and – although she’s not known for her music – Victoria Beckham will always be the standout Spice Girl. 

As for Little Mix, it’s Jade Thirlwall who’s come out on top after her debut releases were met with huge critical and commercial success.  

While her bandmates Leigh-Anne Pinnock and Perrie Edwards haven’t totally flopped – all three girls landed at number three with their solo albums – 33-year-old Jade’s highs have unfortunately highlighted their lows. 

The Sun revealed last week how Perrie, 33, has split with her management company of 15 years and also parted ways with Columbia Records. 

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And Leigh-Anne, 34, has turned her attention to reality TV after a lukewarm reception to her solo music. She’ll appear on Celebrity Traitors later this year and is also set to star in an episode of Who Do You Think You Are?.

A well-placed insider told The Sun: “Perrie and Leigh are ready to come back now.

“They’ve done what they needed to do and would announce a Little Mix tour tomorrow if they could.

“It’s kind of ironic that Jade didn’t want the hiatus but she’s had the most success.

“But as much as she is, in her own words, Little Mix’s biggest fan, for Jade it’s just not the right time. She knows she’ll never get this chance again.”

Speaking of a possible Little Mix comeback, Perrie confessed recently she’s “ready and raring” while Leigh insisted she’s “a hundred per cent” behind getting back together. 

Meanwhile, Jade has been a bit more coy in terms of timings. The Angel of My Dreams hitmaker said recently: “There will be a Little Mix reunion.” 

But, suggesting her focus is elsewhere for now, she added to Capital: “It doesn’t matter how long that takes.” 

We’re told that there is nothing but love between the three girls and they are as close as ever but Perrie and Leigh know that the more successful Jade becomes the longer they’ll have to wait to be back on stage with her. 

She’s full-steam ahead with the follow up to debut solo album That’s Showbiz Baby! and has spent the last two summers performing at the likes of Glastonbury and Reading and Leeds festivals.

Our source added: “Perrie and Leigh are super proud of Jade. 

“They always knew she’d go on to do great things. They’ve each found the perfect balance as working mums but Jade doesn’t have kids so, for now at least, it’s all about her career. 

“Perrie and Leigh just hope that it won’t be too much longer before Jade can clear some space in her schedule so they can be together again.” 

It’s been a remarkable year for Bad Bunny, one of pop music’s biggest stars. After winning multiple trophies earlier this year at the Grammys, including album of the year for “Débi Tirar Más Fotos,” he can add another accolade: Emmy winner.

The Puerto Rican rapper and singer, also known as Benito Antonio Martínez Ocasio, won his first Emmy for variety special (live) on Saturday for his historic Super Bowl halftime show. It was the first Spanish-language halftime show, a 13-minute spectacle that transformed a football field into a variety of scenes including a sugar cane field, bodega, wedding party and casita, like the one in his 2025 San Juan residency. It also featured performances by Lady Gaga and Ricky Martin. Mikael Wood, The Times’ pop music critic, called it “a busy and colorful performance that drew lines between the traditional folk forms of his native island and the throbbing reggaeton beats that have made him an icon to young people around the globe.”

Bad Bunny served as a producer on the show. It won seven Emmys overall, including for directing for a variety special and music direction.

Also honored at Saturday’s ceremony was Mariska Hargitay for her documentary “My Mom Jayne,” about her mother Jayne Mansfield, a Hollywood actor who died in a car accident when Hargitay was 3 years old. Hargitay also received an Emmy for directing the film and Tony Hardmon won for cinematography. The movie, which premiered at the Cannes Film Festival last year, had a limited theatrical run before being released on HBO in June 2025. Hargitay won an Emmy in 2006 for lead actress in a drama for playing Det. Olivia Benson in “Law & Order: Special Victims Unit.”

In an interview with The Times last year, Hargitay said, “Making this film has been so extraordinary to me and totally reframed the narrative for me,” about Mansfield and the struggles she encountered over her brief but celebrated career. The film also revealed that Hargitay’s biological father was Nelson Sardelli, a former entertainer, and not Mickey Hargitay, the man who raised her and Mansfield’s second husband.

Mariska Hargitay will host the Primetime Emmy Awards on Sept. 14 in Los Angeles.

The first pair of Emmy ceremonies, formerly called the Creative Arts Emmys, are held over two nights, two weekends before the Primetime Emmy Awards, and honor many of the behind-the-scenes workers and craftspeople in television. An abridged version of the ceremonies will be broadcast Sept. 12 on FXX and stream on Hulu the following day.

Here is a list of winners from Saturday’s ceremony:

Variety special (live)
“The Apple Music Super Bowl LX Halftime Show Starring Bad Bunny”

Variety special (pre-recorded)
“The Muppet Show”

Documentary or nonfiction series
“Mr. Scorsese”

Documentary or nonfiction special
“My Mom Jayne: A Film by Mariska Hargitay”

Unstructured reality program
“Love on the Spectrum”

Structured reality program
“Antiques Roadshow”

Host for a reality of reality competition program
Alan Cumming, “The Traitors”

Game show
“Jeopardy!”

Game show host
Jimmy Kimmel, “Who Wants to be a Millionaire?”

The complete list of winners for Saturday’s ceremony can be found at televisionacademy.com.

Michelle Keegan has reportedly quit a drama just weeks before she was set to begin filming and now a former Doctor Who star has is said to have taken over the role

Michelle Keegan has quit a drama just weeks before she was set to begin filming.

The actress, 39, is said to have been gearing to take on the part of a working class barrister in a new series that has been penned by Sherlock creator Steve Thompson, with cameras set to roll from November.

But it’s now thought that Michelle, who has to Palma, 18 months, with husband Mark Wright, has pulled out of the project in what is being called a “huge blow” for the production.

A source said: “Michelle was really keen to take on the meaty role, but the heavy filming schedule would take her away from daughter Palma for too long.

According to reports, former Doctor Who actress Jodie Whittaker has been drafted into the role instead but fans of Michelle will soon be able to see her in in Netflix drama The Woods, which is based on the Harlan Coben thriller of the same name.

Speaking to The Sun, the source added: “The hours were quite intense and the project was starting straight after her Netflix drama The Woods and she just couldn’t commit. She is dedicated to her acting career, but like all working mums has to prioritise being there for her family, juggling work, parenting and being present for Palma.”

Michelle shot to fame when in 2008 when she was cast as Tina McIntyre on Coronation Street, and stayed with the soap for seven years before making a permanent exit when the much-loved Rovers barmaid was killed off as part of a whodunnit plot. Since then, she has Michelle has become one of the most famous actresses in Britain, starring in top-rated programmes like Brassic and Ten Pound Poms.

Michelle previously starred in Fool Me Once for Netflix, which was based on Coben’s 2016 thriller, but this time round, she will play Lucy Silverfield, who helps her former partner, played by Tom Bateman. In

When the latest adaptation of The Woods was first announced, Coben said in a statement: “The Woods is a haunting and very personal story. It has everything you expect from us – twisty, turning, gasp-inducing – but at the core is a story of old love and yearning.

“Working with a cast led by Tom Bateman, Michelle Keegan, Mandeep Dhillon, Pearce Quigley, James Buckley, Tom Allen – it’s an embarrassment of riches.”

Penned by Danny Brocklehurst, the upcoming eight-part thriller begins with a mysterious disappearance 20 years ago that leaves a family devastated.

When new evidence comes to light that convinces barrister Paul ‘Cope’ Copeland (played by Bateman) his missing sister could be alive after all, he begins a relentless investigation to unearth the truth.

The Mirror has contacted Michelle’s representatives for comment

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TELLURIDE, Colo. — Do you believe in ghosts?

Andrew Scott considers the question and looks at me with a mischievous grin, retreating to a corner of the restaurant booth where we’re catching up a few hours before his new movie, “Elsinore,” the most personal film he has ever made, premieres at the Telluride Film Festival.

Scott turns over the question again. “Do I believe in ghosts?”

It feels like a reasonable thing to ask. Three years ago at Telluride, the yearning romantic fantasy “All of Us Strangers” memorably premiered, featuring Scott playing a character who worked through unresolved trauma by talking to the dead. Ghosts are elsewhere in his work, metaphorical (“Vanya”) and literal (“Hamlet”).

“If I had a gun put to my head — which you don’t have to — I would say that I don’t believe in them,” Scott says. “But the idea of the afterlife and where we will go is still really fascinating to me. Dreams and the subconscious, too. I don’t know what went on consciously in the world outside my hotel room here last night. I was perfectly content to be asleep. And I like the idea of thinking about death that way. I’ll just be asleep. It’ll be OK. It’s the undiscovered country.”

“The movie for me is about time,” says Andrew Scott. “What are you going to do with your time? Ian decided to to live and to be a light and to be around people for the glory of the theater.”

(Anthony Dickenson / Focus Features)

Dropping a line from Hamlet’s “to be or not to be” soliloquy in this context feels unavoidable. In the powerfully moving “Elsinore,” Scott plays the real-life actor Ian Charleson, who, as he was secretly dying from AIDS, played Hamlet in a 1989 Royal National Theatre production, still considered one of the great performances in London theater history. Charleson was 40 at the time, known for playing Scottish Olympic athlete and missionary Eric Liddell in “Chariots of Fire.” He died eight weeks after leaving the National Theatre stage. “Elsinore” captures that journey in all of its glories and taxing challenges.

“That he would go for treatment in the morning and then play this Olympian role is just endlessly moving,” Scott says. “I don’t know how he did it.”

With our pint glasses filled with water as we adjust to Telluride’s altitude, we try to figure it out.

Charleson playing Hamlet, scaling the Everest for actors, reminded me of David Bowie making “Blackstar” as he was dying. As an artist, you’re not often given the chance to shape the narrative of your own end.

Being offered Hamlet doesn’t happen to every actor. To take it and turn it into something generous and useful — useful is a word I love about acting, that it’s useful to people.

When people are feeling down, they can watch a movie they love.

And see themselves. That can’t be underestimated.

What’s your go-to movie?

I will always watch “Bridesmaids” when it comes on TV. Comedy is precious to me. Laughing is precious to me. I don’t see it as the antithesis of tragedy. I think they’re one and the same.

The last time we talked, around the time of “Ripley,” you wanted to put out into the universe the idea of starring in a musical or a comedy. That hasn’t happened by the strictest definition. But you seem to be saying that genre labels don’t matter.

The reason, hopefully, that “Elsinore” is moving is that we approach some of the stuff with quite a bit of lightness. The effect is tragic and there are some heavy things in it. But my job, what I prioritized, is keeping it light.

You are seen dancing to Ethel Merman’s disco album. It doesn’t get much lighter than that.

My favorite actors are the ones that are funny. I worked with Lisa Kudrow last year on “The Comeback,” and yes, of course, she’s very funny. But if you look at that performance she gives toward the end, it’s so moving. People come away from things that are labeled comedies and go, “I just laughed at that.” Or people come away from things that maybe were really sad and say, “I was just devastated by that.” I think the job is to get rid of categorizing and make it more fluid.

Like life. Sometimes you eat the bear and sometimes, the bear, he eats you.

Exactly! I don’t love things that are overly serious. One of my big dreams for this film — and I do wish so much for this film because it’s so personal — is that people don’t feel like that they’re going to see something that’s depressing. I didn’t want to fetishize Ian’s death.

What do you hope audiences take away from watching it?

That they see themselves in it. You know, it doesn’t end well for any of us. The movie for me is about time. What are you going to do with your time? Ian decided to to live and to be a light and to be around people for the glory of the theater.

Speaking of time, next month you’re going to be celebrating a milestone, turning 50. Or not celebrating. I don’t know how you feel about birthdays.

I don’t love my birthday.

Any year?

My friends have said to me, “You gotta make some plans.” I love a party. Which is to say, I love other people’s parties. What I usually do is I leave it to the last minute and send texts around, saying, “I understand if you don’t want to come, but I might do this.” And then you do something small. I read something yesterday where you should go to your own parties like you’re a guest. I think that’s a very good way to to do it.

What about just being around for half a century? Is that in your head? You’re the one who just said it doesn’t end well for any of us.

I’ve definitely thought about it more. Sometimes in the middle of the night, I’ve thought, “Jesus, what?” I’m sure that’s because of my mom dying and that I’m approaching my mortality. Again, how am I going to use my time? One of the reasons I was so ferocious about getting “Elsinore” made was that I would put all of myself into this and then maybe I can chill out a bit more.

Andrew Scott in the movie “Elsinore.”

(Anthony Dickenson / Focus Features)

The personal aspects of this movie are striking. In addition to producing “Elsinore,” you yourself have played Hamlet on stage. You’re also a gay actor portraying someone who, at the time, would have torpedoed his career by coming out.

When I was a kid, I was obsessed with the movies and would read Premiere and Empire magazine. Around 16 or 17, I started to realize that maybe if you’re gay, you wouldn’t be invited to movies. And I wasn’t wrong in thinking that, because there weren’t many examples. So I would omit things in interviews. I wouldn’t lie, but I really understood that about Ian’s generation.

There’s a melancholy moment in the movie where he says, “I wanted to be in the movies. I didn’t scale the heights.”

What a gorgeous little dream. A young boy goes, “I want to be in the movies.” And then to have that knocked out of you bit by bit. You’re not even going to be seen for the audition. Or, “Are you being a little fruity there?”

Did people tell you not to talk about being gay?

Very well-meaning people said to me, “Just keep that [private] because you’re not obviously gay,” which I often think is such an insult to say to people. “So maybe you can get away with it.” And I was like, OK. And I did that for awhile. But it was so insidious. When audiences think of acting, they think of actors pretending, like you’re putting yourself in somebody else’s shoes. So the fact that there was this whole section of gay actors who weren’t allowed to do that is awful. I’m so grateful that I get to do that.

What do you remember about the late ’80s and early ’90s in terms of navigating the AIDS epidemic?

It makes me emotional. It was extraordinary just to to have lived through that time and to be completely abandoned by your government, who wouldn’t even say the name of the illness. When I was a young adult, that’s what I was scared of. If you go for a sexual health screening, you go, “My God, am I going to die?” I remember going into those situations, and with no cause for such concern, feeling like I’m going to be punished for expressing myself in that way, because that’s the way the world was set up.

Let’s get back to Ethel Merman.

Please! [Laughs]

There’s that stanza in “There’s No Business Like Show Business” that goes: “There’s no people like show people / They smile when they are low.” Would you say that sums up the spirit of “Elsinore” about as well as any couplet could?

Yes, it’s so much about the power of community and show people. It’s about show people and smiling and getting on with the show.

When did you first feel that power of community?

Putting on “The Wizard of Oz” in a school play when I was about 10.

What part did you play?

Guess.

Dorothy?

[Laughs] No, a friend of Dorothy. Oh, come on. One more guess.

The Cowardly Lion?

No. The Tin Man. My mom sprayed me silver, in my hair and everything. We had a probably bit of aluminum foil and I had a funnel. I loved it so much. And I remember having a really extraordinary feeling of surprise, knowing the audience was there. For such a shy boy, when I had to do the big number, “If I Only Had a Heart,” it went to another level, better than rehearsal. I suppose the little showman, the little 10-year-old silver showman, came out.

A contestant on The Voice UK shared the inspirational support he’d received behind the scenes.

A coach on The Voice UK was left in tears moments before Saturday’s episode came to an end.

The ITV competition has returned, with Kelly Rowland joining will.i.am, Sir Tom Jones and duo Tom Fletcher and Danny Jones. During the third round of the blind auditions on Saturday (September 5), viewers saw a show-first, as a Scottish singer made history, becoming the first contestant to be given the Rewind. ITV had earlier teased the game-changing format, saying: “If a coach realises they have made a mistake, they can hit Rewind, bring the act back, and offer them a place on their team.

“However, with only one Rewind available to each coach, they must choose their moment wisely. For an act who thought their journey was over, it could change everything…”

Elsewhere during the show, an emotional final audition left Kelly wiping back tears. 24-year-old Aaren was the last performer that day, hoping to impress the coaches.

Before taking to the stage, the ambulance care assistant, from Warrington, opened up about the support he’d received behind-the-scenes. He shared: “I live with my nan, she means the absolute world to me, she’s like a second mum.”

He went on to reveal that his nan had been diagnosed with breast cancer, adding: “There was a level of uncertainty there, whether we would have to say goodbye, when that would be, so I moved over to look after her.”

Aaren’s nan went on to praise him as “such a lovely person, inside and out”. “This is all you’ve wanted to do,” she added, talking about his audition.

Aaren shared: “This is one of the most nerve-wracking things I’ve done, and probably ever will do. But the amount of times my nan will say, I wish I’d have done this when I was younger. I don’t ever want to get older and have any regrets, I want to be able to say that I’ve tried.”

After his performance, both Kelly and Sir Tom turned around, hoping to win Aaren onto their team. Kelly shared: “I turned around because I love a male soulful voice, that wants to croon. Like nobody sings from their gut, heart and soul anymore… it’s a talent.”

As she heard about Aaren’s nan, she broke down in tears. She said: “That was sweet, to watch him love his grandmother like that, I love that.” She added: “You always want them to have this really sweet space for a woman who is a rock in their life.”

After the auditions came to an end, Kelly added: “Aaren had me moved to tears, he just makes me kind of putty. He’s so honest, he was a really special guy so I’m really excited.”

The Voice UK is available to watch on ITVX

Dianne Buswell has addressed the notion that she could have been axed from Strictly Come Dancing when she was pregnant as bosses decided to add fresh talent to the show

Dianne Buswell has insisted she never worried about getting the axe from Strictly Come Dancing while she was pregnant. The TV star, 37, has served as a professional on the BBC Saturday night favourite for almost a decade and in March, she and her partner Joe Sugg became parents to son Bowden.

Around the same time, as part of a huge revamp, bosses also axed long-standing professionals Karen Hauer, Gorka Márquez, Nadiya Bychkova, Luba Mushtuk, and Michelle Tsiakkas in favour of new talent.

But now Dianne has insisted that whilst there is always a slight worry that she won’t be asked back to the programme, she wasn’t particularly concerned that she would be axed amid the “bloodbath” because of how much support she had received from the BBC in the first place.

She said: “We’re so lucky to be there every single year and you’re never guaranteed that you’ll be back. Of course, you always hope, but they’re putting on a show, and sometimes they will have to change it up.

Speaking to The Sun, she added: ““You always think: ‘Am I going to be back or not?’ But because of how supportive they were to me when I was pregnant and talking about me coming back, I didn’t feel like they would do that [axe her]. They were very aware that being a working mum while still dancing was possible and they wanted to accommodate that.”

This year’s Strictly Come Dancing will have a different feel entirely, with brand news hosts Johannes Radebe, Emma Willis and Josh Widdicombe having taken the reins from Tess Daly and Claudia Winkleman.

Dianne claimed that the decision of new presenters was “quite genius” and opined that if bosses had simply chosen two women, it would only lead to comparisons of Tess and Claudia. When it comes to the new trio Dianne said she is particularly excited to talk all about babies with Emma Willis, who previously trained as a maternity care assistant and has also fronted Emma Willis: Delivering Babies.

The star competed on Strictly Come Dancing last year alongside Neighbours legend Stefan Dennis, who eventually had to withdraw from the show over an injury, but prior to that Dianne was subject to criticism for performing whilst pregnant.

On her Instagram Stories, she shared a comment from a viewer that read: “I get so uncomfortable watching Dianne run down the stairs in heels, cartwheel and do tricks while pregnant.

“Your centre of gravity is off while you’re pregnant, just takes one slip to fall on the precious bump. She is a true professional and fabulous dancer but I think it might have been wise to sit this season out. She is 36 so classed as advanced maternal age mother regardless of how fit she is, I think BBC made a mistake here,

They continued by noting that Amy Dowden also took part in the BBC competition last year whilst facing health issues, adding: “It just doesn’t make sense. Like it didn’t make sense to give Amy a celebrity partner last year and look what happened there.” Fed up, Dianne shared her own thoughts as she reposted the comment, writing: “I have honestly had enough of comments like these.”

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In a way, the directors of Don’t Look Back In Anger have set themselves an impossible task.

The Oasis reunion shows of 2025 have created memories of a lifetime for hundreds of thousands of people. The incredible nights, or as some might say, biblical gigs, saw friends and loved ones grinning or crying tears of joy as they witnessed something they feared would never happen again.

With their film, creator Steven Knight and directors Dylan Southern and Will Lovelace are trying to bottle that up and recreate the greatest musical comeback ever seen in Britain on a flat screen. But then, this isn’t any old concert documentary.

It tells some of the story behind the Oasis tour and then it also allows you to relive some of those moments again. And just when you think it might be flagging a bit, they have a joint interview with Noel and Liam which is entertaining and also illustrates how their relationship has come full circle.

The tour rehearsal footage is dynamite, adding scenes of tension and comedy. As the band wait for Liam to arrive, Noel paces nervously and technicians look edgy.

Liam is then portrayed as some kind of gun slinging cowboy pushing open the saloon doors as he strides in. No sooner is he inside than the band are off and Liam is belting out the hits and attacking the microphone as if his life depends on it.

And then, almost as quickly as he stormed in, he picks up his black Adidas bag and leaves again, with the rest of the band almost in a stunned silence at this whirlwind they are working with.

Noel must have had doubts at this point about if the tour would go smoothly, but he admits despite some last minute drama he was wowed by Liam’s performance in Cardiff.

And for the majority of fans who weren’t at the Principality Stadium on July 4, 2025, the footage and sound used gives you a real taste of what that moment felt like when the Gallaghers walked back on stage holding hands – a moment that even took Noel by surprise.

It is an iconic moment, and they capture it brilliantly, leaving me close to tears as I recalled one of the greatest nights of my own life.

Lots of captivating footage is then given over to different gigs around the world and the filmmakers have found fans with poignant and interesting stories about why they love Oasis and are going to see the shows.

There’s also time for a touching tribute to their friend Mani from the Stone Roses and a section about Don’t Look Back In Anger taking on extra meaning after the 2017 Manchester bombing.

But the documentary really excited me again when it revealed Noel and Liam sat next to each other for a joint interview, the first time in two decades. It can’t compete with some of their old chats with Steve Lamacq on Radio 1 after an afternoon of cigarettes and alcohol, but Liam and Noel are older and wiser now.

However there are still some great lines and fun to be had. Liam jokes about his two hip operations and is glad he stays still rather than running around like Mick Jagger on stage.

Noel admits he would look stupid with a tambourine on his head but his brother makes it look the best thing ever. And then at the end there is the forgiveness and signs of a new chapter for the Gallagher brothers.

“The music brought us back together,” Liam says. Noel agrees things are “fixed” and admits for the first time in their lives they regularly text each other. The bond even goes way beyond them as their kids are now all great mates and enjoyed getting hammered at the Oasis gigs.

The Gallaghers are not looking back, but forwards, and the anger between them has gone. Rather than betray the Oasis memories I made or compete with them, I tried to let the songs wash over me as much as I could. The film allowed my mind to flash back to last summer, and hopefully it will for other fans too.

It is definitely worth going to the cinema to watch it too for the sound quality, as streaming it at home is unlikely to be the same.

As Oasis fans, all our dreams were made in the Summer of 2025, and this documentary is filled with reminders of that. It ensures those wonderful memories live forever on screen.

It’s also the perfect appetiser for when tickets go on sale shortly to do it all again in 2027.

* Oasis: Don’t Look Back In Anger opens in IMAX and UK Cinema on September 9.

As a young sportswriter studying journalism at the University of Missouri, Seth Wickersham looked to Los Angeles for inspiration. At the campus bookstore, Wickersham bought his first sportswriting anthology, “The Last of the Best,” a collection of columns from the Los Angeles Times’ Jim Murray, one of four sportswriters ever to win a Pulitzer Prize.

Collections of work from Murray, Rick Reilly, Frank Deford and others offered Wickersham a road map for the career he wanted to build — and he has, with 26 years’ worth of work at ESPN meriting an anthology of his own. “Be on That Hill: Stories From the Summits of Sport,” which will hit bookshelves Sept. 22, is Wickersham’s third book. He said assembling an anthology is both “the coolest thing you could ever imagine happening” and “this weird mind warp.”

“When you’re just on a treadmill like I’ve been, the years just go,” says Wickersham, who’s been covering sports since he was hired by ESPN The Magazine straight out of college. “You don’t realize it, but then you take stock of it, and you’re like, ‘Holy cow, I’ve been doing this 26 years …’ It’s surreal to go back and look at it.”

A premier investigative and feature reporter primarily covering the NFL, Wickersham has also written “It’s Better To Be Feared: The New England Patriots and the Pursuit of Greatness,” and “American Kings: A Biography of the Quarterback.” Both books combine new, headline-generating reporting with intel Wickersham has gathered over decades covering football. With “Be on That Hill,” Wickersham selected stories that he hopes, taken together, “tell a bigger story not only about the games that we love, but the ways we consume them, and even about the country.”

Football has always been Wickersham’s first love — he weaved his journey as a high school quarterback into “American Kings” — but his latest book features stories about a college basketball coach on the job hunt and an NHL enforcer’s attempts to avoid head injuries.

“I’m trying to write about people who have a certain level of inner turmoil,” Wickersham says, “whether it’s Sean McVay after he wins the Super Bowl, or Jerry Jones when he’s threatening to sue the NFL to stop Roger Goodell from signing a contract extension.”

The sports media industry has changed dramatically since Wickersham’s career began. ESPN The Magazine no longer exists. Access to coaches and players is increasingly hard to secure. But Wickersham’s journalistic goals are the same today as they were when he bought Murray’s anthology.

“I want to be a link on a chain,” he says. “It’s hopefully an installment of a body of work that one day might help me be a link on a chain of the best who did this.”

This Q&A was edited for length and clarity.

✍️ Author Recommendations

In addition to Jim Murray’s anthology, here are some other sports books that have inspired Wickersham.

• “The Breaks of the Game” by David Halberstam: This is the Pulitzer-winning Halberstam’s first sports book, following the 1979-1980 Portland Trail Blazers. “When it comes to trying to decode a team, that’s the standard,” Wickersham says.
• “Joe Namath and the Other Guys” by Rick Telander: Namath, the Hall of Fame New York Jets quarterback, serves as an example of quarterbacks’ rising celebrity profile in “American Kings,” and Telander is one of Wickersham’s favorite sportswriters. “The portrait he gave of Joe Namath in his twilight was just so rare,” Wickersham says. “I don’t think a book like that has ever been done.”
• “When Nothing Else Matters” by Michael Leahy: Another book about an athlete in his twilight. This one documents Michael Jordan’s time with the Washington Wizards. “He worked his tail off as a reporter and really gave a brutally honest glimpse into what it was like to live and play with Michael Jordan the last few years of his career,” Wickersham says.
• “The Franchise” by Michael MacCambridge: Wickersham read this history of Sports Illustrated in college. “It really not only gave a glimpse into how so many of these great stories by my heroes … were done,” he says, “but also how those guys got hired at Sports Illustrated. It was like a job road map.”

📰 The Week(s) in Books

Our fall book recommendations answer your call for learning and discovery this season.

(Kissi Ussuki / For The Times)

Our Fall Preview includes 29 books to keep on your radar this fall, as well as television and movies we’re excited about.

Mark Athitakis reviews Marlon James’ “The Disappearers,” a Booker Prize longlisted novel that follows gay men in Jamaica across seven decades.

Can’t get enough of “The Odyssey”? Acclaimed classicist Emily Wilson, who eviscerated Christopher Nolan’s cinematic take on the epic, is translating the Greek poem for a second time.

📖 Bookstore Faves

Sons and Daughters is a new bookstore on Melrose.

(Photo from Sons and Daughters)

This week, we caught up with Raine De Leon, owner of Sons and Daughters Books, a formerly online bookstore that opened a brick-and-mortar location earlier this year. Here’s what they had to say about their IRL location, the local bookshops that inspired them and more.

This interview was edited for brevity and clarity.

Your bookstore began as an online store in 2024. What motivated you to open an online store? How did it grow from there?

A brick-and-mortar was always the end goal, since I wanted a physical space for writers, readers and other artists to come together for events and community building. Originally, the online store was actually an online poetry journal, where I published poets from around the world, wrote reviews, and held virtual readings. I wanted to translate that into an in-person experience.

What other bookstores, in Los Angeles or elsewhere, served as inspiration for the type of bookstore you wanted to open?

Skylight Books in Los Feliz and Village Well Books and Coffee in Culver City really inspired how I wanted the store to feel: warm, inviting and dynamic enough to serve both a neighborhood and a larger L.A. audience. I took inspiration from the Painted Porch in Texas in regard to curating the selection of books in the store. City Lights in San Francisco was also a huge inspiration for not only my store, but my life in general. The place it holds in the history of its community, the history of publishing and the history of poetry are profound, and I am trying to emulate that legacy as best I can.

What inspired the name Sons and Daughters Books?

The poet Charles Olson wrote a landmark essay, “Projective Verse,” in 1950. In it, he talks about poetic lineage and influence, and he says something to the effect of “We are the sons of the poets who came before us,” and that really spoke to me. I expanded it out to “Sons and Daughters,” with that same sentiment, to be a little more inclusive.

What type of selection can people expect at Sons and Daughters Books?

Our selection is almost all new books with focus on fiction, poetry, social sciences and more. We also have a cart of used books out on the floor every day, and on Sundays I bring out two more carts of used books.

For the new books, I selected each book in the store myself. I may not have read every book on these shelves, but I went line by line in our inventory sheets to select books that I wanted people to be aware of. Even though I am the only staff member, our “Staff Rec” table features reviews and picks from those closest to me. I wanted our selection to be extremely specific to me, my loved ones and the community the store is now in.

In the time you’ve been open, what events have been the most popular? Any particular upcoming events you’re excited about?

Our two most popular events are definitely our weekly stand-up comedy open mic night and our thriller book club.

September is our fullest month yet in regard to events, and I’m very excited for a few. We have two book launch events. The one on Sept. 26 is for “Valley Girl Manifesto” by Noelle Cope, a collection of both poetry and prose. The other, on Sept. 19, is for “Anger Is a Gift,” a new poetry anthology from FlowerSong Press. Both celebrate poetry, locality and connection.

Our full events calendar, which continues to grow, also features community workshops, silent reading clubs and more.

Sons & Daughters is located at 7817 Melrose Ave., Los Angeles.

VENICE, Italy — When Skyler Gisondo turns up in “Primetime” as “Decoy Dan” Plum, an aspiring 23-year-old actor cast to play teenage bait for an unsuspecting pedophile, the camera can’t take its eyes off him.

The second trap set in director Lance Oppenheim’s lurid sweeps-ploitation drama about “To Catch a Predator” follows Gisondo’s face, most often in extreme close-up, as Dan processes what he’s gotten himself into, attempts to make small talk with the predator and finally flees off set, where he sits down, steadies himself and sheds a shaken tear. The suspect, meanwhile, is an afterthought, or more accurately a punchline: He only truly captures the camera’s attention when he drops trou, rips the top off a canister of whipped cream and sprays.

It’s an arresting formal choice, repeated from the opening sequence — that of the viral “You see how this looks, right?” moment from the trailer — to the climatic suicide of Rockwall County, Texas, Assistant Dist. Atty. Bill Conradt Jr., whose case is explored in the Esquire magazine article on which Ajon Singh’s screenplay is based. With rare exception, “Primetime” doesn’t have the guts to look its predators in the eye.

And perhaps it doesn’t need to. The film directs its most gleeful energies instead to taking “To Catch a Predator” host Chris Hansen (Robert Pattinson) down a peg. The former “Dateline NBC” correspondent, who turned a newsmagazine segment about men soliciting teens for sex online into a hidden-camera sensation in the mid-aughts, comes off here as a self-serious showboat who’s mistaken tabloid trash for accountability journalism. (As one audio technician complains, “Guy thinks he’s f— Mike Wallace.”) It’s not just that stentorian voice, either. Envy of “Dateline” co-anchor Stone Phillips provides as much motivation as ratings pressure from TV executive Jeff Zucker (playing himself), with Hansen micromanaging his crew, insulting his producer, Andie (Merritt Wever), and neglecting his wife and kids in the process.

At least in the film’s early going, this yearning for adulation is played for cringeworthy comedy, and effectively so; my hardest laugh came when Hansen screens the rough cut of a new episode for his young sons and brags to them about “To Catch a Predator” being moved to a better time slot. As the tone moves toward horror, though, the decision to make the host the story quickly stops paying dividends. Indeed, though the real-life broadcaster may not find all the ego-deflation very funny, even Hansen — who told my colleague Stephen Battaglio that he objects to the film using his name and likeness under the label “inspired by true events” — would have to admit that “Primetime” avoids the thorniest questions about the true-crime empire he built.

Robert Pattinson as Chris Hansen in “Primetime.”

(A24)

Compared with David Osit’s superb 2025 documentary “Predators,” a kaleidoscopic examination of the phenomenon from the perspective of Hansen, the decoys, the suspects, law enforcement, journalistic ethics and the filmmaker’s own experience as a survivor of child sexual abuse, “Primetime” seems remarkably incurious about “To Catch a Predator” and its consequences. It would probably be too much to ask a scripted feature to explore the challenge of achieving convictions against defendants ensnared on an episode of “Dateline,” or to delve into the legal niceties of surreptitious recording. But the suspects here are so anonymized — seen in profile or steep angles through a hidden camera lens, spied at a distance on a monitor in video village, heard as a disembodied voice on a phone or read via text in an instant message — that there’s not much to argue over anyway. The predators are reduced from people to “perverts,” of scarcely more interest to “Primetime” than to the bloodthirsty viewer Hansen meets on a plane.

When an entrapped rabbi attacks Hansen during a sting, screaming in his own tight close-up, “You don’t have the right to do this. Who do you think you are?” the film briefly, mercifully breaks this pattern, and generates an electric moment of moral uncertainty. But it doesn’t last. Instead, in its depiction of the Conradt case — ostensibly meant to underscore “To Catch a Predator’s” worst extremes — “Primetime” stumbles into some of the very same gutter sleaze tactics as the original series, transforming what was in reality a grim mid-afternoon standoff into a tense, pitch-dark operation punctuated by lightning strikes, power outages and night-vision cameras.

Such poetic license offers little new insight into a topic that has already been picked over for two decades, but it might be forgiven were Hansen as easily dramatized as he is made fun of. Alas. “Primetime” itself seems to know this — why else hire Gisondo to play Jimmy Olsen to Pattinson’s unlikable Man of Zeal — yet proceeds to construct its second half around Hansen’s unraveling: an extramarital affair, about to be exposed in the National Enquirer; ratings losses to ABC competitor “Lost”; desperation to reel in a “whale” and willingness to cut corners to do it. By the time the film again confronts the specter of something wicked under “To Catch a Predator’s” glossy surface, it comes in the form of Hansen’s own phantoms, introduced in a grueling flashback to India in the 1990s and carried through to the film’s conclusion. Why we’re to care about this apparent flash of horror, if not of conscience, remains unexplained. What about the faintly ludicrous figure of the foregoing 100-plus minutes was supposed to make me care about his moral compass?

In the final estimation, then, “Primetime” isn’t a Chris Hansen hit piece. In fact, it’s so in love with its flawed protagonist that it can’t see he’s the least compelling character in the movie, an ambitious, arrogant, grasping, unscrupulous man we’ve met countless times before. Which may explain the film’s final bit of poetic license. The last we last see of Hansen, muttering lines from his script as the police process the Conradt crime scene, suggests a man disturbed, perhaps even chastened, by what he has witnessed. But of course the real-life Hansen continues his sting operations to this day under the banner of “Takedown,” a series on his streaming service TruBlu, and both there and in “Predators” he appears utterly unshaken, unhaunted, unbowed. So for all the tension between the film and its subject to come through in the press of late, the gulf between them is not so wide as one might suspect.

Maybe they deserve each other.