Independent venues struggle to survive amid low footfall as disposable incomes fall

Independent nightlife venues across the UK are struggling to survive amid a cocktail of high costs, low footfall and oppressive regulation that is squeezing them out of city centres.

Last week, the Night & Day bar in Manchester won a partial victory in a legal battle over a noise abatement notice that began when a neighbouring flat complained about gigs and DJ sets going on late into the night.

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A wedding with a dark secret is at the heart of this strange, silly action movie, dragged out by abrupt flashes forward and back

You can’t say the title doesn’t warn you. Quoting the darkest part of the traditional wedding vow and revolving around both matrimony and mortality, this quite silly, rather weird action movie starts with an unnamed bride (Natalie Burn) and groom (Ser’Darius Blain) preparing to walk down the aisle. But before the Wedding March can start, the film cuts to a different point in time where the couple in question are frolicking on the Puerto Rican beach where the film is set and shot. They go to a bar where they meet another, older couple (Jason Patric and Nicole Arlyn) and then another crash cut jumps us to yet another point in the story when the bride is running away from her husband, but is pursued by all seven of the groomsmen from the wedding – including the menacing, misogynist best man (Cam Gigandet) who keeps insisting on reciting his big speech, even as he prepares to kill the bride herself.

Turns out – and stop reading here if you don’t like spoilers – that the bride, groom, and everyone in the wedding party, even the randoms met in the bar, belong or have belonged to another one of those insidious assassination networks like the one in the John Wick franchise and other movies. This one is called the University, which is mildly droll given how dim-witted many of the groomsmen assassins turn out to be. Our girl, still in her skintight lace wedding dress, which gets progressively more blood-stained as the film goes on, battles each one in turn as they stalk her around a fancy villa where she’s hiding out. One starts to wonder who the film-makers think their ideal viewer is supposed to be – perhaps survivors of abuse who dream of wielding broken bottles and chainsaws on men who’ve wronged them?

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MPF is a progressive punk festival that plays to a younger crowd. It promotes startup/DIY bands led by women, people of colour and LGBTQ+ people by putting them on the same stage as more established acts

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It made TV culinary showdowns fun – and it shows no signs of stopping. From the spinoffs to new rounds, there’s no danger of this televisual institution going off the boil

Recently, at a friend’s house, I was given the remote control and told to “put something on”. This is a big responsibility and the sweaty-palmed pressure might explain how I ended up on a channel they didn’t know they had, with no idea of what combination of buttons I pressed to get there. More importantly, it’s how we all ended up watching several episodes of a series of MasterChef from at least five years ago. Note “several episodes”: we might have arrived there by accident, but we stayed by choice.

MasterChef is about to enter its 20th season, and the BBC is, rightly, in a celebratory mood. In 2005, the format was revived, jazzed-up and modernised. The Loyd Grossman days, from 1990 to 2000, were fussier and far more formal. In 2005, Gregg Wallace and John Torode came along. Over almost two decades at the helm, they’ve made “buttery biscuit base” happen and competitive TV cooking fun again. I say fun. I’m not sure how much fun the contestants are having when they serve a sloppy collapse that was supposed to pay homage to their mother’s cherished recipe to three tight-lipped former champions, but if they aren’t having fun, at least the viewers are. The tension is palpable. Give me a scrappy, raw talent who can’t plate-up for toffee but makes exceptional-tasting food and I’m all in.

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Best known for her work in 1950s sci-fi, the actor also took supporting roles in films including Bigger Than Life and Magnificent Obsession

Barbara Rush, the female lead of 1950s sci-fi horror It Came from Outer Space, has died aged 97. Her daughter Claudia Cowan, a reporter for Fox News, told Fox News Digital : “My wonderful mother passed away peacefully at 5:28 this evening. I was with her this morning and know she was waiting for me to return home safely to transition.”

Born in Denver in 1927, Rush grew up in Los Angeles and, after studying theatre at the University of California, Santa Barbara, was signed to Paramount Pictures . After making her screen acting debut in The Goldbergs – a big-screen spinoff of the popular radio and TV series – Rush’s breakthrough role came in 1951 in the Oscar-winning sci-fi picture When Worlds Collide , as the daughter of an astronomer attempting to warn humanity they are doomed by a rogue star on a crash course with Earth.

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Every pop star gets his own special power in this delightfully goofy Hong Kong action caper

Make no mistake, this caper-heist comedy from Hong Kong, starring all 12 members of the Cantopop outfit Mirror, is pure nonsense, but deliciously so. Presumably intended to tickle the fancy of Mirror’s many fans all over the world, even viewers who’ve never heard of this massive-selling pop group might be amused by the sheer silliness and unintentional campness of it all. As a plus, it’s practically a lookbook for a number of current menswear fashion brands.

The main conceit is that the lads are all members of a secret crime-busting fraternity called the League of Kaito who apparently, per the subtitles: “Hustle in hush, make everyone’s life better.” Which is nice. They are dispatched on missions by an unseen boss, sort of like Charlie’s Angels but with more tracksuits and (fractionally) less eyeliner. An opening montage introduces each of member of the league in turn, who all happen to have the same first names as the Mirror group members in real life, making it easier for the fans to follow their favourite.

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A horrifying story of racial violence told from the point of view of an oak tree bough is all the more disturbing for its imitation of the ballad form

The Haunted Oak

Pray why are you so bare, so bare,
Oh, bough of the old oak tree;
And why, when I go through the shade you throw,
Runs a shudder over me?

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There’s no reason to give up your favourites, whether that’s flavoured yoghurt, white sliced bread or cookies. The key is to make them yourself

The reasons to avoid ultraprocessed foods just keep coming. The largest review of evidence to date , published earlier this year in the British Medical Journal, highlighted 32 ways in which UPFs are doing us dirty, from obesity and heart disease to type 2 diabetes and cancer. As Dr Chris van Tulleken, one of the world’s leading experts on UPFs, put it at the time, an “enormous number of independent studies … clearly link a diet high in UPFs to multiple damaging health outcomes, including early death”.

And yet still we buy them. In the UK and US, they now account for more than half of the average diet.

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After being catapulted to the big time with Drive My Car, the director’s next film Evil Does Not Exist has helped him escape the pressure of his success – and is designed to retain an air of the unknown

The winter sky in the opening shot of Ryûsuke Hamaguchi’s Evil Does Not Exist is a brilliant white, seen through a tangle of spindly tree branches. Set against a radiant orchestral score, the scene looks sublime. But then a dissonant note is heard in the music. Then another. Not everything is as it seems.

“I started from a place of not knowing anything,” Hamaguchi says of his new film, which sets up a paradisal image of nature to then unsettle it. He speaks with a humility that belies his standing as one of Japan’s most celebrated auteurs. It was late 2021, he recalls; his previous film, Drive My Car , had been released (and would soon be the surprise hit of awards season, walking away with the Oscar for best international feature film). The musician Eiko Ishibashi, who scored Drive My Car, asked the director if he could provide background visuals for her tour. Hamaguchi, a longtime city-dweller, visited her at her studio in the countryside. Inspiration struck as he listened to her music against the sweeping landscapes.

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