Movies

• The GuardianSex, drugs and washing dishes: inside Anthony Bourdain’s unruly younger years

  In the acclaimed new drama Tony, the early career of the late food writer and chef is brought to life, and those who knew him best are now also looking backThe novelist Michael Cunningham has described Provincetown, on the tip of Cape Cod, as “the only small town I know of where those who live unconventionally seem to outnumber those who live within the prescribed bounds of home and licensed marriage, respectable job, and biological children. It is one of the places in the world you can disappear into.”This idiosyncratic bohemia has attracted the likes of Edward Hopper, Eugene O’Neill, Mark Rothko and Tennessee Williams along with poets, dropouts, drag queens and drifters. In the summer of 1975 came a lanky, restless 19-year-old from New Jersey with no job and no money, sleeping on the floor of a shared cottage while his roommates worked to pay the rent. His name was Anthony Bourdain, who would later become a celebrity chef, author and television globetrotter. Continue reading...

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• The GuardianStockard Channing: ‘I cried at the election of Joe Biden, thinking we were out of the woods. Wrong!’

  The actor on being told she was no Ingrid Bergman, forgetting her lines on stage, and not caring about getting olderBorn in New York City, Stockard Channing, 82, played Rizzo in the 1978 film Grease. In 1985, she received a Tony for her performance in A Day in the Death of Joe Egg, and in 1994 was Oscar-nominated for her role in the film Six Degrees of Separation. She has three Emmys for her TV work, which includes The West Wing. She makes her directorial debut at the Edinburgh festival with Krapp’s Last Tape, in aid of the Wembley to Soweto Foundation, Upstairs at the Roxy until 31 August. Her latest film is Practical Magic 2. She lives in London.What is your greatest fear? Climate change. Continue reading...

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• The GuardianHuman Centipede director Tom Six reveals multiple sclerosis diagnosis in ‘final film’

  The Dutch creator of the controversial trilogy set to detail struggles with neurological disease in homemade documentary, after spending six years ‘as a recluse’Tom Six, the film-maker behind schlock horror phenomenon The Human Centipede, has revealed that he has been living as “a full-blown recluse” in a darkened Amsterdam apartment for six years after being diagnosed with multiple sclerosis.In The End of Tom Six, a homemade documentary that the Dutch director said would be his final film, he says that the stress over his failure to find a distributor for the follow-up to the Centipede trilogy significantly exacerbated his condition. Continue reading...

  08/08/2026
• The Guardian‘I’ve always felt too old and too young at the same time’: The Last of Us star Bella Ramsey on swapping child stardom for cult television – and Celebrity Traitors

  At 22, Ramsey has already been on our screens for a decade, and nominated for every award going. So why do they find it strange to be called an actor?Bella Ramsey often feels more comfortable around older people. The actor, 22, who is non-binary and uses they/them pronouns, has been working professionally since they were 11, when they got their first TV job as the child noblewoman Lyanna Mormont in Game of Thrones. For half of their life, they have been in adult environments, talking to adults, working with adults. Even so, the London cafe in which Ramsey has chosen to meet makes any retirement home look like a creche. It is full of old men with their dogs, popping in for a cup of tea and a morning chat.“It feels like it belongs in the Midlands. It feels a bit, like, shit and familiar,” says Ramsey, who grew up in the East Midlands and can say that with affection. Their curly hair is short, pushed back off their face, and they have a single gold hoop in one ear. The plan had been to go for a walk this morning, but it is raining so we have a cup of tea and wait for the drizzle to pass. Ramsey seems both younger and older than 22, depending on the moment. Sometimes, within a single sentence, they sound ancient and wise, and also like a bookish teenager, discovering with amazement how they think they might feel about the world. Continue reading...

  08/08/2026
• The GuardianTony Jones: ‘I’m very far from being an activist’

  The journalist turned film-maker on empathy, his investigation into animal testing, and life in one of Australia’s most enduring media power couples It’s a blindingly bright day in Sydney. Sunlight glitters on the calm harbour waters, and moored sailboats gently sway beyond the boardwalk at Murray Rose Pool in Double Bay, known by most as Redleaf.The harbour pool is where journalist and former Q+A host Tony Jones likes to swim when he’s not doing laps in the heated Prince Alfred Park pool, or at the jewel-like waters of Shark beach in Vaucluse. Continue reading...

  08/07/2026
• The GuardianSam Neill filmed role in Legend of Zelda film adaptation before his death

  The New Zealand actor, who died last month aged 78, will appear in live-action movie of popular video game, which is set for release next yearThe New Zealand actor Sam Neill completed filming of a role in the forthcoming adaptation of The Legend of Zelda video game before he died, which will be one of his final screen appearances.According to a report in Deadline, Neill, who died of pneumonia last month aged 78, will appear in the live-action movie, which finished filming in April this year and is set for release next May. Which role Neill plays has not been announced, but fans of the games have suggested that he would be a good casting choice for the King of Hyrule, the fictional fantasy realm in which the Zelda games are primarily set. Continue reading...

  08/07/2026
• The GuardianOut of the blue: James Cameron’s surprise departure would be good for Avatar

  The director has yet again hinted that he may step away – but if he does actually relinquish control, it would likely benefit the franchiseAfter directing the highest-grossing film trilogy of all time, and having spent more than two decades bending technology, studio executives and several hundred million dollars’ worth of underwater motion capture to his will, James Cameron this week signalled that he may be ready to hand the future of the Avatar franchise to another director. Indeed, he bent Hollywood to his will so completely that it became almost impossible in the early 2010s to watch a blockbuster without uncomfortable plastic glasses, and without objects on the screen being hurled pointlessly towards the audience. Still, the Canadian film-maker now appears to be seriously considering handing over everyone’s favourite multibillion-dollar bioluminescent space jungle to someone else.“There’s been momentum in the Avatar universe for 21 years at this point because we started in 2005,” Cameron told Denise Donlon in an interview for Canada’s governor general’s performing arts awards. “It’s been kind of an unbroken continuum. So this is the point where I’m looking at the landscape and asking, ‘What are the other stories I want to tell? How many of them do I need to direct myself versus writing and/or producing with other film-makers?’” Continue reading...

  08/07/2026
• The GuardianThe Last House review – post-Covid apocalyptic lockdown thriller is a solid night in

  Oscar nominee Wagner Moura and Greta Lee lead Netflix’s sci-fi tale of a family trapped in their house as something sinister arrivesMost of us aren’t truly ready for films that directly cover the recent horrors of Covid and, well, why would we be? There was a need back in 2021 for something strict and journalistic like Matthew Heineman’s excellent documentary The First Wave and there have been other variously illuminating docs since, but it’s been tough for narrative storytellers to address and confront – and even tougher for audiences to engage. It’s partly why Ari Aster’s intermittently excellent 2020-set satire Eddington fizzled at the box office, released five years after the pandemic began but still five years too soon.The most effective ways in have usually been through the back door. Mike Leigh’s 2024 drama Hard Truths might have only mentioned the pandemic once and included just one mask but its portrait of a psychologically fractured, permanently on-edge woman, terrified of what lies outside her chillingly sterile house, was very much about the difficult after-effects of the disease. Next week sees the release of The End of Oak Street, an 80s-set fantasy adventure about a family trying to survive a prehistoric invasion from the safety of their own home and this week, sneaked out by Netflix just days before is The Last House, another high-concept genre tale that sees homes across the world locked off from the outside as something terrifying attacks. Continue reading...

  08/07/2026
• The Guardian‘These cooks ripped each other apart’: Dominic Sessa on playing Anthony Bourdain, kitchen bullies and the joys of being a 70s barfly

  After his breakthrough in The Holdovers in 2023, Sessa has gone back to the 70s again for Tony, the biopic of bad-boy chef and Kitchen Confidential author Bourdain. And, he says, a big part of him would like to stay thereDespite being just 23, Dominic Sessa is perhaps as intimately acquainted with the 1970s as those who grew up then. Although the New Jersey-born actor has only starred in five films, two of them are marinated in the fashions, sounds and mores of the decade. In his new movie, Tony, he plays the 19-year-old Anthony Bourdain, future bad-boy celebrity chef, bestselling author of Kitchen Confidential and host of its hit TV spin-off. Tony restricts itself to one summer in 1975, when Bourdain bummed around the coastal resort of Provincetown, Massachusetts, falling in love, scrubbing pans in a seafood joint and catching the cooking bug. “For a rootless young man with sensualist inclinations,” he wrote, “it was the perfect getaway.”A 70s retro vibe also hung over Sessa’s debut film. In Alexander Payne’s Oscar-winning 2023 comedy-drama The Holdovers, he played Angus Tully, a surly student forced to board at school over Christmas with only his classics teacher and the cook for company. That picture wasn’t merely set in 1970; it seemed, with its faded palette and fake crackles on the print, to have been made then. Continue reading...

  08/07/2026
• The Guardian‘James Dean has got nothing on that kid’: River Phoenix films – ranked!

  As Stand By Me is re-released for its 40th anniversary, we look at the late actor’s most intense, enduring roles – from a goofball boffin to a narcoleptic hustlerIssue-of-the-week TV movie about elder abuse, with Tuesday Weld as a harried mum taking out her frustrations on her own ageing mother. Phoenix slaps on the hair gel as the essentially decent son who blasts his music too loud, lets his rowdy if unusually spiffy pals put their feet on the furniture and resents the new house guest: “Grandma is really getting on my nerves!” Continue reading...

  08/06/2026
• The GuardianSuper Troopers 3 review – misfiring cop comedy threequel

  The return of the country’s most incompetent police force fails to bring enough laughs or any real justification for its existenceSuper Troopers occupies a sacred corner of the millennial DVD shelf, a goofy rebuttal to the endless procession of just-the-facts-ma’am TV cops that reimagined America’s most mythologized authority figures as incompetent brats.The original is a testament to Y2K friendship – the college comedy troupe Broken Lizard, after losing out on an MTV show to The State, pooled their money to make a scrappy indie that became a cult classic. It had Brian Cox gleefully playing against his capital-A Actor persona (a novelty for American audiences in 2001) and offering a glimpse of the Logan Roy fury he would later perfect on Succession, only with lines such as “I’ll believe ya when me shit turns purple and smells like rainbow sherbet.” After generating more than $60m in post-release sales on a reported $3m budget, a film franchise was born. Continue reading...

  08/06/2026
• The Guardian‘They slammed their M16s against his skull’: inside the film about Amy Goodman’s fearless reporting

  As Steal This Story, Please! charts her astonishing reports on everything from climate summits to earthquakes to massacres, Goodman talks about dissent, censorship – and her ‘magic moments’‘I consider an exclusive a failure,” Amy Goodman says. It is not a typical observation for a journalist to make, but it is the approach at the heart of a documentary about her career, Steal This Story, Please! If an article, item, narrative or interview is significant enough “it should be shared around the world,” she insists.This time, however, her goal is not to share a particular news story, but rather an entire professional philosophy. To do so, Goodman had to let “two Oscar-nominated stalkers into my life” in an effort to “spread the word about this critical form of independent journalism” that she has practised over four decades. Continue reading...

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Headlines aggregated from major international newsrooms (BBC, Al Jazeera, The Guardian, NPR, France 24, Fox News) and linked back to the publishers.