There seems to be a low-key competition within the culture at the moment as to who can produce the worst sort of fan. For years, Star Wars has been the far and away winner, with fans bitching and crowing like wounded animals any time the series dares

As a teenager Lorn “Leak” Sreyleak looked forward to playing football every week with friends in his home town of Kampong Chhnang. But the 15-year-old couldn’t help but envy another team that sometimes practised on an adjacent pitch. Led by a gruff

Austin Butler sparkles in the lead role, but perhaps Baz Luhrmann’s high-octane, live-action graphic novel should not be called a “biopic” at all. For a start, if you want to talk about the life of Presley, there are plenty of omissions: his time at

As we know from having had our senses pounded by various glitter-filled, hyperactive and blindingly bright spectacles, Baz Luhrmann’s films don’t talk – they shout. The Sydney-born auteur practises a film-making ethos he and veteran editor Jill Billc

This week, Drake treated fans to a surprise drop of his new album Honestly, Nevermind. Its release, just nine months after his last record, Certified Lover Boy, received lukewarm reviews from critics, was unexpected. Fans had hoped for a return to th

Civilisation comes in many sizes and, for Dr Samuel Johnson, compiler of A Dictionary of the English Language (1755), his home town of Lichfield was a microcosm of educated and ordered society. He once wrote of a visit to the Staffordshire city with

Heather Renée Sweet, better known as Dita Von Teese, is the 1950s-inspired model and performer who helped repopularise burlesque. Raised in West Branch, a working-class rural town in Michigan, she started her career as a fetish model and stripper bef

There’s a downside to “till death us do part” – it does. For example, 60s model Jan de Souza, co-host of Tramp nightclub with her husband Johnny Gold, died recently: of loneliness, her obituary said. He’d died a year earlier, after 50 years of marria

‘Every day will be a perfect shopping day,” cooed the adverts for America’s first indoor mall when it opened in Edina, Minnesota, in 1956. Edina is blanketed by snow and ice in winter, and baked by unbearably humid heat in summer. The Southdale Cente

When JJ Abrams began rebooting Star Trek with a fresh cast and crew of the Enterprise in 2009, many hardcore Trekkers complained that the new movies lacked the Apollo-era optimism and vision of space adventure as one giant cosmic morality tale that,

Headlining Glastonbury’s Pyramid stage – the most recognised festival platform in the world – has always been a career-defining moment. When 20-year-old Billie Eilish makes history as the youngest ever solo headliner on Friday, one familiar face is g

I first went to Glastonbury to play in a band [Kenickie], then with friends, and then for work. I’ve covered each event since 2002 and it’s a huge privilege to bring the festival into people’s homes. Glastonbury has shaped my life. I went from stayin

The sight of Gene Wilder blacking-up under the tutelage of Richard Pryor is enough to get this lightweight comedy-thriller cancelled faster than a train on strike day. But there’s still plenty to enjoy, from a sleeping-compartment scene between Wilde

Terrible jobs are a staple of literature. But it is a somewhat loaded term inviting images of scrubbing toilets, cleaning vomit, etc, when, really, all jobs are terrible, otherwise they would not have to pay us to do them. I knew I wanted to write a

“I have read some really fantastic fiction about queer women, but I have quite often felt that it leans towards the slightly gloomier side,” says author Laura Kay. For the London-based writer, it was natural that her debut novel, The Split, would be

Katy Perry, Lady Gaga, Beyoncé, Taylor Swift, Billie Eilish, Charlie XCX, Olivia Rodrigo: over the past decade, there has been a boom in documentaries about female pop stars. These glossy, behind-the-scenes films promise to share an unfiltered and au

Later this week, my friend and mentor Horace Ové will head to Buck House to be made a knight of the British empire. Those of us who know Horace rejoice at this richly deserved honour. We are also amused by the deep irony. For the very empire that wil

There is a scene towards the end of Star Wars: Episode III – Revenge of the Sith that encapsulates everything that went wrong with the prequel trilogy. Anakin Skywalker, Force wunderkind turned emo Jedi slayer, and Obi-Wan Kenobi, his former chum and

If you haven’t heard it yet, Bradley Cooper’s recent appearance on the SmartLess podcast is a total doozy. Not only does he reveal he was once heavily addicted to cocaine – and that he ended the habit when one of the podcast’s hosts, Will Arnett, cal

There are a few things you can count on in a British summer: two or three days of sunshine, an afternoon spent burning sausages to a crisp at a mate’s barbecue, and the cultural ubiquity of music festivals. Pitching a tent in a field to watch some of

The question of whether we are responsible for the harm we cause goes to the heart of who we think we are, and how we believe society should run. Guilt, blame, the existence of evil, and free will itself can complicate this question to the point of n

Patrick Radden Keefe is among the hallowed practitioners of American long-form journalism. Every year or so at the New Yorker, he comes up with the eminently bingeable, religiously fact-checked and seductively globetrotting piece of narrative reporta

“He’ll be famous – a legend – every child in our world will know his name.” So predicts Professor McGonagall in the opening chapter of Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone. Breaking sales records from the beginning, Harry Potter is the biggest su

Shortly before Vincent van Gogh cut off his left ear and had a breakdown after quarrelling with his fellow artist, Paul Gauguin, in the French city of Arles in 1888, he created a pair of extraordinary paintings. One, Gauguin’s Chair, depicts a couple

Any misgivings about terseness at a Q&A panel dedicated to Heat, a film in which men prefer to let their automatic rifles talk about their feelings for them, were quickly put to one side last night at the dazzling United Palace theater in Manhattan’s

At the end of March, a book that had been condemned to die came back to life. There was no star-studded launch, and no great fanfare, although this book is now somewhat famous. The new publisher of the poet Kate Clanchy’s memoir Some Kids I Taught an

1. Lucas Cranach the Elder – Judith With the Head of HolofernesThe Burrell Collection, Glasgow The culture clash that underpinned Cranach’s art – German courtly splendour and strait-laced religious reformation – powers a magnetic imagining of Jewish

There’s a lovely scene in Peter Jackson’s recent documentary The Beatles: Get Back that sums up the taken-for-granted brilliance of Paul McCartney. It’s another day in Twickenham studios, where McCartney is single-handedly wrestling the Beatles into

Only a genius of longform plotting could have planned the sting in the tail of the royal 2022. In the rolling melodrama of the British monarchy, the platinum jubilee was always slated for this year, gratitude splashed across the Daily Express. But no

‘The road goes ever on”, wrote Tolkien in The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit. But the esteemed Oxford don and creator of the high fantasy genre probably wasn’t expecting it to lead to a billion dollar multimedia franchise to rival Marvel and Star W