Saturday, January 18, 2025 |
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Hello and welcome to the gazillionth week of January. There is a reason why people say it's the longest month of the year, but we're finally nearing its end and plenty has already happened in the year 2025. This week, we said goodbye to the late, great David Lynch who died aged 78. In a brilliant tribute, Louis Chilton remembers a visionary artist who made films that no one else could.
"How do you articulate such a loss – to cinema, to art, to the world?" asks Chilton. "It feels like we cannot. But the truth is, Lynch has always seemed to operate in a realm beyond articulation – from his very first feature-length film, Eraserhead (1977), through to later masterpieces Blue Velvet (1986) and Mulholland Drive (2001), or Twin Peaks (1991-92; 2016), the show that revolutionised television two times over. Nouns, verbs and adjectives can only skirt the edge of Lynch's strange, disorienting shadowplay, as if around the perimeter of a black hole."
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David Lynch, director of 'Blue Velvet' and 'Twin Peaks', died this week at the age of 78 (Getty) |
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New Paramount+ thriller The Crow Girl, based on a cult hit book by Håkan Axlander Sundqvist and Jerker Eriksson, is all about tracking down a serial killer – with the action moved from Stockholm to Bristol in this adaptation. The show imports a satisfying Scandi chill to the West Country, as it juggles a torrid sexual abuse storyline with a flinty performance by Eve Myles as a sardonic copper investigating the apparently ritualised deaths of a number of young men. The result is a gripping drama that's unafraid to get much darker than the average streaming whodunit. |
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Posthumous albums often seem to have goosebumps engineered into the mix. Balloonerism – the second Mac Miller record to be released since his death, aged 26, in 2018 – feels spookier than most. It comes billowing out of the speakers on strange, loose scattered clouds of woozy reverb, jazzy keyboards and trippy percussion. Snatches of studio banter crackle through the static like dreams and memories; Miller's voice coils softly around notions of death like smoke rings. |
Helen Brown | Chief music critic |
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Finally, following Hollywood strikes, rewrites, and reshoots, Severance is back. In the first episode of its second season, a shrunken office corridor opens out into a stark white, windowless room. Inside are grassy knolls, dotted with sheep grazing under the unforgiving glare of fluorescent lights. It's the sort of deeply strange scene viewers have come to expect from the Apple TV+ sci-fi series, which was hailed as a sharp and funny comment on office life when it was released back in 2022 – before disappearing for three years. The show's return is strange, stylish and totally engrossing. | Annabel Nugent | Features writer and commissioning editor |
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The first Bank of Dave film was a huge hit for Netflix, and now the sequel is here, with Rory Kinnear's community bank owner Dave and a team of eccentrics take on a ruthless payday loan company. The films themselves are what I'd call classic three-star movies, in the most complimentary way possible. They're solidly made, with a great, multi-generational ensemble cast of British actors, and the scripts are funny but aren't exactly drowning in subtlety. Essentially, they're the sort of likeable, not-too-taxing films that are often a much more appealing prospect than the arthouse awards favourite you'd vowed to watch this weekend. Think of them as the cinematic equivalent of a big bowl of pasta. |
Katie Rosseinsky | Senior features writer |
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'I always think I'm so chill, but my kids have told me that I'm laser-focused, too. So bloody hell, I must be then' (Getty Images) |
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Secrets & Lies made her the first Black British woman to be nominated for an Oscar. Now, nearly 30 years and 160 episodes of the 'factory-like' US cop drama Without a Trace later, she has reunited with Mike Leigh for the Bafta-nominated, Oscar-tipped Hard Truths. She speaks to Adam White. |
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Complex curmudgeon: Jean-Baptiste, with Michele Austin, in Mike Leigh's 'Hard Truths' (StudioCanal) |
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Read an extract from our Saturday Interview below… |
I meet Jean-Baptiste in a publicity office in north London. Her handbag sits next to her chair, as if she's primed to dash off. She's not that fussed about interviews. "They're tricky because I don't talk a lot," she says. "I'm a loner, a moocher and a potterer. I do like to chat, but with people I know." She eyes me up, somewhat suspiciously. I tell her I get it – we're about to have an artificial conversation for a brief period of time and then never see each other again. "Well I might see you again," she says, "depending on what you write." She throws a closed fist my way, then hoots with laughter. "I'm joking! I'm joking!" Ahh, to be around a Mike Leigh woman. The last time an interviewee threatened to deck me through lairy cackles, it was another of his most prolific female collaborators: Lesley Manville. There's clearly something in the water. "It's just the women he's drawn to," Jean-Baptiste thinks. "He loves women. I hate to use the term 'strong women', but we are. And just look at his films!" Pansy, the complex curmudgeon of Hard Truths, is one of the pantheon of Mike Leigh characters in dire need of a hug but so exhausting to be around that you wouldn't dare. Think Manville's boozy depressive in Another Year, or the late Katrin Cartlidge as the vulnerable flatmate in Naked. Pansy, whether she's in the supermarket checkout line or at the dentist's office, can't seem to avoid getting into arguments. She rants about society, her life, her ailments, her morose plumber husband, and her (as she sees it) feckless twentysomething son. At times she shuts down completely, often while around her younger sister Chantelle (a radiant Michele Austin), whose life is comparatively blissful: she has her own business, a serene flat, and two beautiful daughters making their way in the world. Read the full interview here |
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| Gladiator 2 gets its UK digital release – here's where to watch from home. |
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