After a turbulent few years, she is now hearing voices from the other side. Has the creator of This Country lost her mind?

• ‘I tried to get jiggy with a ghost’: read an exclusive extract from Daisy May Cooper’s new book

Daisy May Cooper is being haunted. Her first ghost sighting was two years ago – a disembodied pair of child’s legs, running around the bedroom of her new-build house. Then there was an invisible presence, tugging her duvet off her. She’s been hearing voices, too – a Spanish woman, and an ethereal voice in a hospital room offering words of comfort. “It’s like a veil has been lifted,” she says.

You sound crackers, I say. Not something I’d usually voice in an interview – but there’s an infectious, gossipy ease to being in Cooper’s company. “I do! Completely,” she sighs. Then she opens the door of the glass room we’re in, and shouts down the spiral stairs to the photo studio below for her partner to bring his phone up. She wants me to hear something.

Continue reading...

Sebastian Stan gets real (estate) in Donald Trump’s origin story, and Iannucci, Mendes and co have fun on a superhero movie set

The Wild Robot
Out now
Using a hand-painted aesthetic, this warm-hearted family animation tells the story of a shipwrecked robot who becomes the adoptive mother of an orphaned goose. Lending her dulcet tones to the robot is Lupita Nyong’o, with Heartstopper’s Kit Connor as the goose.

Continue reading...

The unknown Bram Stoker story Gibbet Hill, published soon before the author began working on Dracula, has eerie echoes of his vampire classic

In a Dublin library once frequented by James Joyce and WB Yeats, beneath a turquoise and white domed ceiling and surrounded by oak shelving, Brian Cleary stumbled across something by Dracula author Bram Stoker he believed no living person had ever read.

Cleary, who had taken time off from his job at a maternity hospital after suffering sudden hearing loss, was looking through the Stoker archives at the National Library of Ireland when he came across something strange. In a Dublin Daily Express advert from New Year’s Day 1891 promoting a supplement, one of the items listed was “Gibbett Hill, By Bram Stoker”. He had never heard of it, and went searching for a trace. “It wasn’t something that was Google-able or was in any of the bibliographies,” he said.

Gibbet Hill by Bram Stoker is published by The Rotunda Foundation on 26 October. Paul McKinley’s exhibition Péisteanna is now on at Casino Marino, Dublin. More information on the Dublin City Council Bram Stoker festival can be found at bramstokerfestival.com

Continue reading...

The death of Yahya Sinwar, tributes to Liam Payne, Comet Tsuchinshan-Atlas and the world twins festival: the past seven days as captured by the world’s leading photojournalists

Continue reading...

Call Me by Your Name and Challengers film-maker to bring new interpretation to hit novel to the screen

Luca Guadagnino, the Italian film-maker, will bring a new interpretation of Bret Easton Ellis’s novel American Psycho to the screen.

According to Deadline , the acclaimed director of Call Me by Your Name and Challengers will work with screenwriter Scott Z Burns to find an updated way into the material. Burns is known for his many collaborations with Steven Soderbergh including Contagion, Side Effects and The Informant.

Continue reading...

Former X Factor judge says he feels ‘empty’ in Instagram post after death of ex-One Direction singer in Argentina

Simon Cowell, the former X Factor judge, has said he is “heartbroken” and feels “empty” in a statement posted on Instagram after the death of the former One Direction member Liam Payne.

More details soon …

Continue reading...

Peter Dinklage, Josh Brolin, Glenn Close, Marisa Tomei and Brendan Fraser are lost in this brief and silly Amazon caper about low-level criminals

One thing among many that Joel and Ethan Coen seem to instinctively understand is the art of giving their characters funny names: when and how to drop something pleasingly ornate, when to pull back a little, how to toss them off so they don’t sound self-consciously ostentatious. It’s a delicate art; on paper, a character like Moke Munger (Josh Brolin) or his brother Jady (Peter Dinklage) might sound funny and distinctive. But if you’re not careful, your screenplay will soon be over-explaining them as childhood mispronunciations that stuck, and nonetheless surrounding them with other characters sporting similarly nonsensical names like Farful, Freddie Unk, or Uncle Crabcake. The differences between those monikers and genuine Coen creations like HI McDunnough (from Raising Arizona) or Burt Gurney (from Hail Caesar!) are as precise and important as the difference between, say, actual Coen brother Ethan Coen, and veteran screenwriter Etan Cohen, who has a story credit on Brothers – the new movie about Moke and Jady Munger pulling off one last job.

Like Ethan Coen’s Drive Away Dolls from earlier this year, Brothers is a road-trip crime comedy. Unlike Dolls, it is not a consistently daffy delight, though it telegraphs those aspirations with its colorful backstories and wannabe-wry narration from Dinklage. Jady, just out of prison for a job the brothers pulled together, has been sprung by crooked, connected guard Farful (Brendan Fraser) on the condition that he cut him in on some missing loot long-hidden by the boys’ criminal mother. Moke, who escaped their last job unharmed, feels guilty about his brother’s time served, and wants to provide some extra money for his growing family; his wife Abby (Taylour Paige) is pregnant, and her well-heeled parents already suspect that he may not be able to provide for the baby. So the brash, scheming brother and the cautious, more emotional brother bicker through some cartoonish, outlandish, unfunnyish antics. A smoking ape is involved at one point.

Continue reading...

From the 1:1 scale Colosseum to the marauding model rhino, Ridley Scott’s forthcoming sequel screams conspicuous spending – but how bullish is Hollywood feeling, and what do we know about the film so far?

An actual-scale model of the Colosseum, flooded and filled with longboats. A two-tonne, eight-wheeled, lifesize rhino that can spin, snarl, wag its head and do 40mph. And as much minced beef, sweet potato and personal training as Paul Mescal can stomach. Such were some of the huge costs involved in the production of Gladiator II, which comes to cinemas next month, 24 years after Ridley Scott’s blockbusting original.

Such conspicuous spending might be assumed to be making studio executives sweat, but Hollywood is banking on the film being a commercial success – particularly given the calamitous box office returns for another recent sequel, Joker: Folie à Deux, Todd Phillip’s follow-up to his $1bn 2019 hit, now fast-tracked to streaming and projected to lose $200m.

Continue reading...

MK Gallery, Milton Keynes
Usually relegated to the roles of hostess, lover or muse, the painter’s independent spirit shines through in the power of the patterns and colours in this, the largest solo show ever devoted to her work

Vanessa Bell has seduced me. She has offered nothing fancier than bottles and a bowl, by a window that looks out on terracotta roofs and wooded hills. The frame of the window runs just inside the frame of the painting, squeezing the table and its contents into a narrow strip. The stout blue flask is clear as a Cornish sky in May, the delicate stoppered bottle the colour of a midsummer sea. Beyond the claustrophobia of the room lie buildings licked with all the rich red pinks of a rose garden.

She was aptly named, Bell. At her best, her colours ring with clarity – chiming one against the other yet held distinct. She luxuriates in it, but the spaces she conjures are lived. This is not a mere still life, but a space for bodies, a home. For all its tonal richness the constraints of the interior space also delineate Bell’s position: a young mother, gazing through the window into a world through which she cannot move with freedom.

A World of Form and Colour is at MK Gallery, Milton Keynes from 19 October until 23 February

Continue reading...