There’s a Portuguese phrase you’ll be hearing a lot over the next few months: o jogo bonito. No one is sure who first coined the phrase ‘the beautiful game’ to refer to football, but in Brazil, host of the 2014 World Cup and a country where only the Catholic Church can rival the sport in popularity, football and beauty are a natural pair. For your average Brazilian connoisseur, football is not...
There’s a scene near the beginning of Boogie Nights (1997), Paul Thomas Anderson’s nostalgic portrait of the 1970s LA porn industry, in which director Jack Horner (Burt Reynolds) sits in a diner across from wannabe star Eddie (Mark Wahlberg) and outlines his vision for a new kind of dirty movie: It’s my idea to make a film that the story just sucks them in… [so] they can’t move until they find...
In the height of summer 2013, Vince Gilligan, the creator of “prestige TV” phenomenon Breaking Bad, and fellow screenwriter Peter Gould, took a long walk around their offices in Burbank, California. The end was nigh for Breaking Bad, and they had just recently signed a deal to make Better Call Saul, a spin-off prequel series set around Bob Odenkirk’s popular shyster Saul Goodman, a criminal...
While Hollywood was still an anonymous LA suburb, one British seaside city was busy inventing the “language” of cinema, during a glorious decade from the late years of Queen Victoria’s reign into the start of the 20th Century. That place was Brighton and Hove on England’s south coast, and its role in helping found cinema as an art form has the colour, invention and striking characters of any big...
In the 1990 classic Pretty Woman, when Edward Lewis (Richard Gere) first picks up Vivian Ward (Julia Roberts) in the luxury silver sportscar he borrowed from his lawyer, there is an implication he is somewhat oblivious to the fact that the woman is a sex worker. The businessman, a New Yorker lost amid the vast highways of Los Angeles, is initially only interested in directions. In Sophie Hyde’s...
Classicist and broadcaster Professor Mary Beard explores a broad range of thought-provoking and sometimes controversial works of art that tackle unsettling subjects – works that have been fought over, removed from view, or simply ‘forbidden’. With her usual wit, warmth and forthright attitude, Mary delves into some tricky territory to ask what, why and how art gets forbidden, who gets to decide...
And that’s IT for Sunday nights on Strictly, and we’ve got the final three we predicted when Robert Webb left the show two months ago and we knew we were lining up for a three-way Grand Final – AJ and Kai, John and Johannes, and Rose and Giovanni. Thank you for joining me for a lovely season of Sunday fun, I will obviously be back next Saturday for the GRAND FINAL, which starts at 7pm and is...
It was always unlikely that Conversations with Friends, the new Hulu and BBC adaptation of Sally Rooney’s first novel, would be able to repeat the lightning strike of Normal People. The latter show, another Hulu/BBC production based on Rooney’s bestselling second novel and released in April 2020, was the rare combination of right material, right time. Its straightforward, though elegantly told...
David Tennant and Catherine Tate will return to Doctor Who for the show’s 60th anniversary celebrations, the BBC has announced. The duo have reunited after 12 years to film scenes that are due to air next year. Tennant, 51, first stepped into the Tardis in 2005 to play the 10th Time Lord, with his final episode airing on New Year’s Day in 2010. Comedic actor Tate, 52, starred as his companion...
There is a moment a few episodes into Conversations With Friends (BBC Three), the adaptation of Sally Rooney’s debut novel, when it seems as if the makers are deliberately trolling viewers. One of the characters is an actor and is asked what he’s doing at the moment. He’s starring in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof – “It’s a proper play,” he says, “where stuff happens.” Conversations With Friends is almost...