Cinema, Theater & TV news

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• Just Act Normal: the dark comedy drama that’s a TV feelgood joy

  12-04-2025 08:00 via theguardian.com
  
  This talent-packed Birmingham-set series follows three children with a missing mother and their attempts to stay out of care. It's amazing how much silliness they wring out of such a chilling premiseIt’s just the usual teenage girl japes: smoking, drinking, teaming up with your best friend to steal a chicken from an irate local farmer. But the motive behind 17-year-old Tiana’s decision to pinch some poultry is about as far from ordinary as you can possibly get. I’m not sure wha
  
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• The Four Seasons to Flintoff: the seven best shows to stream this week

  25-04-2025 08:00 via theguardian.com
  Tina Fey’s new cringe comedy tackles three couples whose lives unravel on a doomed holiday. Plus: an intimate documentary about the extraordinary life of the cricketer Three apparently stable couples, all deep into middle age and preoccupied with statins and second homes, go on an annual holiday together. It’s expected to be a gentle affair but Nick (Steve Carell) is about to drop a bombshell: he’s bored and frustrated and he’s leaving Anne (Kerri Kenney-Silver). Tina Fey
  
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• TV tonight: human remains are found in tense cold case drama Black Snow

  25-04-2025 07:20 via theguardian.com
  An upsetting moment as the search for missing Zoe continues. Plus: Cornish folklore in cosy crime series Beyond Paradise. Here’s what to watch this evening9pm, BBC Two
  The Queensland-set cold case drama continues. Zoe Jacobs (Jana McKinnon) vanished on her 21st birthday back in 2003, and we have come to know her hopes, fears and love of ecstasy and pop-punk via extended flashbacks. So it’s all the more upsetting that unkempt detective James Cormack (Travis Fimmel) and Zoe’s old
  
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• UK insurance tycoon Sir Clive Cowdery takes stake in Observer newspaper

  25-04-2025 06:00 via ft.com
  The 234-year-old Sunday newspaper will produce its first edition under new ownership this weekend
  
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• Flintoff review – so traumatised he can’t even speak to his ex-Top Gear pals

  25-04-2025 06:00 via theguardian.com
  
  The story of the former cricket prodigy and car crash survivor Freddie Flintoff is fascinating … but this documentary shows he has such extreme PTSD that he keeps slamming the shutters downFreddie Flintoff is numb. As the 98-minute Disney+ documentary Flintoff begins, we find its subject sitting in a hospital room. He can’t feel his lip, the one that was torn from his face in a nightmarish car accident on the Top Gear track in 2022. But more than that, he is mentally checked out. As
  
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• Review: Gilbert and Sullivan’s ‘Pirates,’ Now in Jazzy New Orleans

  25-04-2025 04:00 via nytimes.com
  A Broadway remake of the operetta, starring David Hyde Pierce, moves the plot to the Big Easy, where good times roll, even if some jokes don’t quite land.
  
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• Top Trump official in talks with Paramount over Skydance merger concessions

  24-04-2025 23:34 via ft.com
  
  Negotiations come as US president’s legal fight against studio’s CBS News nears conclusion
  
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• EU set to probe Universal’s planned acquisition of Downtown Music

  24-04-2025 23:00 via ft.com
  
  Independent labels have urged competition authorities to block the deal as they say it would make the music giant too dominant
  
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• Andrea Nevins, Who Made Touching Films on Quirky Topics, Dies at 63

  24-04-2025 21:54 via nytimes.com
  Her documentaries, one of which received an Oscar nomination, explored subjects like punk-rock dads and Barbie dolls.
  
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• ‘Havoc’ Review: Tom Hardy Is Primed for a Fight

  24-04-2025 20:00 via nytimes.com
  Tom Hardy is a crooked cop looking to make amends in Gareth Evans’s action-packed film.
  
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• Masahiro Shinoda, Leading Light of Japan’s New Wave Cinema, Dies at 94

  24-04-2025 19:41 via nytimes.com
  His films tapped into the fantasies of disgruntled youth by embracing brazen sexuality and countercultural politics. But unlike his peers, he did not shun tradition.
  
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• Mexico moves to change law over US anti-immigrant TV ads

  24-04-2025 18:58 via ft.com
  President Claudia Sheinbaum criticises spots in which Trump administration threatens to ‘hunt’ down ‘illegal’ migrants
  
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• Mexico seeks to ban foreign government ads after US anti-migrant campaign

  24-04-2025 18:35 via ft.com
  
  President Claudia Sheinbaum criticises TV ad in which Trump administration threatens to ‘hunt’ down ‘illegal’ immigrants
  
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• A New Requirement for Oscar Voters: They Must Actually Watch the Films

  24-04-2025 17:22 via nytimes.com
  The new rule, announced this week by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, was greeted with laughter and disbelief that it had not been required all along.
  
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• ‘Hold Me in the Water’ Review: Smitten, and Primed to Flirt

  24-04-2025 17:00 via nytimes.com
  Ryan J. Haddad follows up his Obie-winning “Dark Disabled Stories” with a rom-com.
  
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• In Andor, the real world political parallels are impossible to ignore

  24-04-2025 16:17 via theguardian.com
  In its second season, what happens in the acclaimed Star Wars thriller is hard to separate from what’s happening in Gaza nowIn the new and final season of Andor, an occupied civilian population is massacred; their cries for help ignored by the Empire-run media who instead paint the victims as terrorist threats to public safety. Meanwhile, the politicians who have enough backbone to speak out, and use the word “genocide” to describe these aggressions, are met with violent suppre
  
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• ‘Until Dawn’ Review: They Keep Dying, You’ll Keep Shrugging

  24-04-2025 13:00 via nytimes.com
  Based on a video game, this movie is done in by mediocre monsters and muddled time loops.
  
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• ‘The Trouble with Jessica’ Review: Dinner Party or Crime Scene?

  24-04-2025 13:00 via nytimes.com
  This British black comedy, starring Indira Varma, centers on a group of wealthy middle-aged friends with fraught histories.
  
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• ‘Magic Farm’ Review: A Droll Delight

  24-04-2025 13:00 via nytimes.com
  Amalia Ulman’s playful second feature follows an American television crew that lands in rural Argentina.
  
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• ‘Cheech and Chong’s Last Movie’ Review: Rolling Another One for the Road

  24-04-2025 13:00 via nytimes.com
  The comedy duo celebrates a partnership that they just can’t quit in this celebratory documentary.
  
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• ‘The Accountant 2’ Review: Ben Affleck’s Revenge of the Killer Nerd

  24-04-2025 11:01 via nytimes.com
  Affleck returns as a brilliant C.P.A. who moonlights as a mysterious, gun-toting fixer and gets help from his little bro, played by Jon Bernthal.
  
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• ‘On Swift Horses’ Review: Putting It All on the Line

  24-04-2025 11:01 via nytimes.com
  Daisy Edgar-Jones and Jacob Elordi lead a melancholic drama about love and longing in the 1950s.
  
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• ‘Blue Sun Palace’ Review: A Whole World Inside

  24-04-2025 11:01 via nytimes.com
  A gorgeously intimate debut feature explores the lives of Chinese immigrants in a massage parlor in Queens.
  
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• ‘April’ Review: A Doctor’s Dilemma

  24-04-2025 11:01 via nytimes.com
  In this, her second feature, the Georgian filmmaker Dea Kulumbegashvili takes on the risks faced by an obstetrician who performs kitchen-table abortions.
  
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• Étoile review – a ballet show that’s absolutely not on pointe

  24-04-2025 08:00 via theguardian.com
  
  This drama about dancers could have been as fun as Fame in tutus. Instead, it is a jarring, cringe-inducing mess. Wait till you see Simon Callow as an evil billionaire!At first, Étoile looks as if it’s shaping up to be Fame in pointe shoes. One character even knowingly quotes the “This is where you start paying, in sweat” speech. This would be fine – great, even, because who didn’t love the quintessential 80s series about the high-energy kids from New York Ci
  
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• TV tonight: everything Trump did in his first 100 days as Potus 2.0

  24-04-2025 07:20 via theguardian.com
  
  From tariffs to tech bros, insiders examine the president’s spine-chilling actions. Plus: Sky’s new coming-of-age drama Penelope. Here’s what to watch this evening9pm, Channel 4
  Turbulent tariffs, forced migrations, tech bro best friends, accusations of “gambling with world war three” and every other spine-chilling action in between – by the end of April, Donald Trump will have proved that a lot can happen when you’ve been Potus for 100 days of your seco
  
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• Dea Kulumbegashvili’s ‘April’ Wont Be Shown in Georgia

  24-04-2025 06:01 via nytimes.com
  The director Dea Kulumbegashvili’s new movie, “April,” shines a light on the complicated situation for women seeking abortions in Georgia.
  
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• You final season review – an insultingly rubbish ending

  24-04-2025 06:00 via theguardian.com
  
  Penn Badgley’s ‘sexy’ serial killer story was once ludicrously fun. But despite plenty of fan-pleasing cameos and a propulsive twist, the show’s sign-off is so bad that it’s offensiveYou, in which a serial killer and stalker of women, but a sexy one, is somehow fashioned into the hero of the piece, is a fundamentally preposterous show. It washes its hands of plausibility in favour of vocal fry, phones without passwords and quasi-literary second-person monologues. Pe
  
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• Race Across the World review – would you really do this show with your ex?

  23-04-2025 23:00 via theguardian.com
  
  Five brave duos battle the epic 14,000km trek across Asia … and this time, there are teenage lovers and a separated couple. Warning: there will be tears and travel disastersIt’s hard to believe that Race Across the World has only been on TV since 2019, so integral is it to the BBC’s springtime schedules. In six short years, the reality competition has become a flagship format, skipping over from BBC Two to BBC One and scooping up Baftas for both its civilian and celebrity seri
  
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• After ‘Sunset Boulevard’ Malfunction, Nicole Scherzinger Sings With Bullhorn

  23-04-2025 22:56 via nytimes.com
  The “Sunset Boulevard” star briefly entertained the crowd when “a technical malfunction on the sound side” forced the cancellation of a matinee performance.
  
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