Comedy film loosely based on lives of Belfast hip-hop trio missed out on nominations for best international feature and original song

Hollywood may not have been quite ready to see Kneecap “walking down the red carpet smoking a joint” but the makers of the comedy biopic about the hip-hop trio say it has shown there is a “bright future” for Irish-language cinema and an indigenous industry in Belfast.

The producers of the film – which is named after the group – and their family and friends turned out to watch the Academy Awards nominations announcement in Madden’s bar in Belfast with the band tuning in on Zoom from London, where they are recording a new album.

Continue reading...

With a new album next month, the singer-songwriter opens up about accepting life, anticipating grief and grieving when a snake killed his beloved dog

Mike Hadreas feels that he had self-destructive tendencies as young as seven. “I saw a white van with no windows go by,” he says. “And I remember waiting around, hoping that I was going to get kidnapped. I wanted the story. I wanted the intensity of it.”

As he got older, that urge never quite went away. “I would put myself in situations that were dark or demoralising, kind of for research, or to be able to say that I did that crazy thing,” he says. In a Row, a highlight from Glory, Hadreas’s new album as Perfume Genius, makes fun of that impulse, slyly skewering the idea that you have to suffer for your art: “Think of all the poems I’ll get out,” his narrator sings, trapped in the boot of a car.

Continue reading...

Game performances from Mark Wahlberg, Michelle Dockery and Topher Grace lift this silly but diverting action movie set almost entirely on a small plane

Irritating though it is to be conceding anything to the objectionable Mel Gibson (whose 2006 film Apocalypto is very good), his new film does serve up a fair bit of entertainment value. It is an action suspense thriller set almost entirely on board a rickety small-prop plane, flying in a desperately dangerous situation through the Alaska wilderness. First-time feature screenwriter Jared Rosenberg had his script on the Black List of unproduced screenplays for four years before Gibson picked it up.

Michelle Dockery plays Madelyn, a deputy US air marshal who arrests a bespectacled mob accountant called Winston, played by Topher Grace; this white-collar malefactor had been hiding out in a squalid, remote Alaska hotel room. The cringing Winston is persuaded to turn state’s evidence against his capo paymaster and so Madelyn has to transport him to the nearest city for the trial, fully chained up as a flight risk. The only way of getting him there through this snowy wasteland is in an alarmingly tiny plane piloted by the cheerful Daryl Booth, a Texan good ol’ boy played by Mark Wahlberg.

Continue reading...

Director of recent horror remake set to revisit Jim Henson’s beloved classic starring Jennifer Connelly and David Bowie

Robert Eggers is set to write and direct a sequel to the 1986 fantasy Labyrinth.

According to Deadline , the Nosferatu director has just closed a deal to follow up the Jim Henson-directed film for Tristar Pictures. The original starred Jennifer Connelly and David Bowie.

Continue reading...

The Brutalist is the next most favoured choice, with its mesmeric drama, currently neck-and-neck with the sugary charm of Wicked

• News: Emilia Pérez breaks record with 13 as The Brutalist and Wicked both trail with 10
• Oscars nominations 2025: the full list

So the strange process of Oscar-night groupthink consensus begins, and a certain film becomes mysteriously garlanded as the obvious choice to be preferred over the others as the big winner. Jacques Audiard’s baffling, amusing, preposterous and (to some) artlessly offensive Mexican trans crime musical Emilia Pérez leads the field with 13 nominations. But for me, Emilia Pérez is pretty much the weakest movie on the best picture list, certainly not as good as, say, Nickel Boys, which doesn’t get much of the conversation.

But Emilia Pérez could be heading for the same kind of tulip-fever acclamation that greeted the phantasmagoric Everything Everywhere All at Once from 2022 which cleaned up on Oscar night . Awards season connoisseurs know how, in the world of bland streaming content, films that are different, which get Oscar voters excitedly alerting each other to their unusualness – without being too unusual – can generate their own momentum. It’s certainly a remarkable success story for Audiard, a French director in the classic mould, entirely and magnificently unaware of liberal Anglo-Hollywood squeamishness over whether or not certain stories are “his to tell”. A French auteur’s prerogative covers everything.

Continue reading...

Brat scores the British pop star five nominations, while male acts make up 53% of the overall field and mixed acts 12%

Charli xcx leads this year’s Brit awards with five nominations for her 2024-dominating record Brat – the Guardian’s album of last year . With four nominations apiece, Dua Lipa, the Last Dinner Party, Ezra Collective and Myles Smith are close on the pop star’s trail.

xcx is nominated for album, artist and song of the year – the latter for the remix of Guess featuring Billie Eilish – and in the dance and pop genre categories.

Continue reading...

In leaked memo to culture minister, Laurence des Cars sounds alarm over state of Paris art gallery

Visiting the Louvre has become a “physical ordeal” as the throngs of tourists, leaks and substandard catering take a toll on the world’s most-visited museum, its director has said in a leaked memo.

The document, written by Laurence des Cars for the French culture minister, Rachida Dati, but leaked to the media on Thursday, sounded the alarm over the state of the Paris museum.

Continue reading...

The historical action series has taken us to Baghdad, ancient Greece and the pyramids of Egypt. As it moves to feudal Japan, the stakes for its developer have never been higher

It’s no secret that the video game industry is struggling. The last two years have seen more than 25,000 redundancies and more than 40 studio closures. Thanks to game development’s spiralling costs (blockbuster titles now cost hundreds of millions to make), overinvestment during the Covid-19 pandemic, and a series of failed bets to create the next money-printing “forever game”, the pressure for blockbuster games to succeed is now higher than ever.

It’s a predicament that feels especially pertinent for Ubisoft. Employing in the region of 20,000 people across 45 studios in 30 countries, its most recent big licensed games Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora and Star Wars Outlaws underperformed commercially. It has had two expensive, failed live-service experiments in the past year, Skull and Bones and X-Defiant . With Ubisoft share prices plummeting and investment partners circling like sharks , rarely have the fortunes of a massive games company relied so heavily on a single release. It has already been delayed multiple times, to ensure its quality.

Continue reading...

Part of a gifted generation of writers from Northern Ireland, Longley also gave years of service to the province’s arts council

Northern Irish poet Michael Longley, whom Seamus Heaney described as “a custodian of griefs and wonders”, has died aged 85, his publisher has confirmed. The writer, who won the TS Eliot prize in 2000 for his collection The Weather in Japan, died in hospital on Wednesday due to complications following a hip operation.

Robin Robertson, Longley’s longstanding editor, said it was “an honour to work with him … Not that I had to work very hard, as every poem was close to perfect.”

Continue reading...