Saturday, January 4, 2025

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TV | Lockerbie: A Search for Truth

It is strange the way that certain television genres gravitate to particular times of the year. High fantasy in the scorching summer, murder mysteries in the Christmas gloom, and, now, complex historical injustices to kick off the new year. Following in the footsteps of Mr Bates vs the Post Office, which galvanised the public discourse in January last year, comes Lockerbie: A Search for Truth, a new Sky Atlantic five-part dramatisation of the fallout from the worst terror attack in the history of the United Kingdom.

Nick Hilton | Chief TV critic

Film | Nosferatu

In Robert Eggers's Nosferatu, the vampire is reincarnated. He has shed his sparkle, his languid melancholy, his cobweb-speckled absurdity. He comes for you now – yes, you – as the murmuring voice in the dark, the one that calls your desires perverse and your soul unnatural. This creature feeds on shame, of both the faithful and the faithless. And he is as true to us as he was to FW Murnau, director of 1922's original Nosferatu, or to Bram Stoker, whose novel Dracula provided the (unofficial, legally ruled as copyright infringement) source material. "Does evil come from within us or from beyond?" asks Ellen Hutter (Lily-Rose Depp), the convulsing, hysteric target of vampiric attention. Eggers's interpretation of the classic novel, via the classic silent film, is not only a luxurious, Gothic revelation – it's also one of the most profoundly, seductively frightening horrors in years, all because its terrors seem to crawl right out from our own stomachs

Clarisse Loughrey | Chief film critic

TV | The Split: Barcelona

A beautiful young couple rushing headlong into marriage. A sun-soaked location. Romantic complications trailing the mother of the bride. There's more than a dash of Mamma Mia! to The Split: Barcelona, the two-part special that picks up on BBC One a couple of years after Abi Morgan's divorce lawyer drama came to an end – although given that our protagonists are a family of high-flying solicitors, everyone has considerably worse work-life balance than they do in Abba-world. Indeed, the hustle never stops for Hannah Defoe, played by the magnificent Nicola Walker. She's barely touched down in Spain before she's fine-tuning the details of a prenuptial agreement, although this particular legal document is closer to her heart than most.

Katie Rosseinsky | Senior culture and lifestyle writer

Film | Nickel Boys

Where does history live? In documents, artefacts, bones? Or in memory, that fragile, boundless state we try to express in fragments, in talk or on the page, but ultimately take to our graves? It's the question that shapes RaMell Ross's Nickel Boys, a more artistically daring literary adaptation than almost any other of its peers. His film is a feat of full-bodied immersion, using a point-of-view camera, finely tuned sound design, and cinematic illusion to create a reality that takes hold of and then never quite leaves its audience's souls.

Clarisse Loughrey | Chief film critic

As one quarter of Little Mix, Jade Thirlwall breathed life into British pop. Now, newly solo, she's looking back at her ascent to the top – and taking no prisoners as she does. The singer-songwriter sits down with Annabel Nugent to talk about this new chapter, her conflicted feelings towards 'The X Factor' and her biggest regret in life

Read an extract from our Saturday Interview below…

Thirlwall is a student of pop, studying at the feet of giants: Britney, Madonna, Gaga, Beyoncé. "With Little Mix it was break-up songs and female empowerment music, which I love, but I'm doing it in my own way now. Now it's a lot more personal to me," she says. "It's for the gays and the gals."

That last part has quickly become a running joke among fans. It's not intentional, Thirlwall says, "it just naturally happens. I've been heavily influenced by that culture, whether it's the club scene or my family and friends around me in London". She is wary of ever coming off as performative. "Like 'yas queen' and all that s***," Thirlwall cringes. "It's a tricky tightrope to navigate because I think as an ally you don't want to do too much."

It helps that Thirlwall has spent much of her career championing the LGBT community; in 2021, she won the Allyship award from Gay Times. And when she has got it wrong, she's the first to admit it. When Little Mix were called out for their "Confetti" music video, in which the bandmates dressed up in drag but failed to platform any actual drag artists, Thirlwall took it on the chin. "We are in a scary time now, what with cancel culture – which obviously some people are more deserving of," she says, "but when you're just trying to exist as a human, you're going to slip up and sometimes the key is to say, yeah that's f***ed up and that's my fault. I'm sorry."

Read the full interview here

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