As the US gears up for a major anniversary, a new expansive exhibition looks at history in a range of objects, from an 18th-century gunboat to a Maga hatTo paraphrase the musical Rent, 131,487,300 minutes – how do you measure, measure 250 years? Especially in a country navigating an election year fraught with divisions and disagreements over basic facts?That is the challenge facing the Smithsonian National Museum of American History in Washington DC as it marks the semiquincentennial of US independence. Continue reading...

13 May 2026 14:22 ✍️ RSS THE GUARDIAN

Cannes film festival: Léa Drucker gives a bravura performance as a brilliant surgeon whose already chaotic life is further complicated by a same-sex affair with a journalistCharline Bourgeois-Tacquet’s new film is a hectic, garrulous, breezily agreeable comedy of midlife emotional upheaval, unencumbered by any serious or permanent concern about any of the passion and heartache that it briefly encounters. It’s also a movie that declines to allow its characters to be changed in any way by the excitements and disappointments that life has to throw at them. Léa Drucker carries off the lead with terrifically competent elan; there’s hardly a scene in which she is not interrupted by a call on her mobile, going into bravura walk-and-talk acting on the phone while on the street, arriving at the office or getting into or out of her car.She plays Gabrielle, a brilliant surgeon – what other sort is there in the movies? – who specialises in maxillofacial reconstruction. Gabrielle is battling budget cuts, scolding her idle interns, doing outstanding work and is heavily reliant on her assistant Kamyar (Laurent Capelluto). At home, she has a tricky relationship with her partner Henri (Charles Berling), whose teen children from his previous marriage she has raised while resenting his ingratitude for this, as well as for his somewhat semi-detached attitude to their relationship. She is also deeply concerned by her elderly mother Arlette (tenderly played by Marie-Christine Barrault) who is entering the twilight of dementia. Continue reading...

13 May 2026 18:39 ✍️ RSS THE GUARDIAN

Cannes film festivalSet in a beautifully filmed provincial Japanese town, what could have been a soapy drama is told with poetic restraint and subtlety by Kôji FukadaJapanese film-maker Kôji Fukada has created a film of great lucidity and calm, a walking-pace drama set in the quiet town of Nagi in the south of the country; this is a provincial place of seclusion and restraint, notable for its military base but also an interesting contemporary art gallery. The movie is less overtly sensational and emotional than Fukada’s previous pictures such as Love Life or Goodbye Summer, though it has the same Rohmeresque gentleness, the same considerate and caring mien, the same palate-cleansing wash of cool daylight. These are factors which do not however preclude intensity, even passion and a feeling that a dreamlife of yearning is taking place underneath innocuous waking reality.At the centre of the film is an enigma: Yoriko (Takako Matsu) is a single woman who runs a dairy farm in Nagi, but her real passion is art. She draws and sculpts, but entirely for her own pleasure. None of her pieces get exhibited or sold. One warm spring day – the movie is elegantly interspersed with chapter-heading closeups in which different kinds of calendar get the days torn off – Yoriko is visited by her good friend Yuri (Shizuka Ishibashi), an architect who after some time in Tokyo, moved to Taiwan to start a practice there with her husband Masato but returned to Japan after her divorce. What makes their friendship interesting is that they are sisters-in-law, or perhaps ex-sisters-in-law. Masato is Yoriko’s brother. So how exactly has their friendship survived and thrived for so long? Continue reading...

13 May 2026 14:50 ✍️ RSS THE GUARDIAN

Soapy, spicy and incredibly moreish, there’s a new hockey romance in town and I love it. Move over, Hudson Williams and Connor Storrie!Off Campus is, in all senses, a straight copy of Heated Rivalry. The latter was based on the wildly popular gay romance novel series by Rachel Reid. The former is an adaptation of the wildly popular heterosexual romance novel series by Elle Kennedy. It’s a slick, soapy, spicy load of fun set in the world of hot twentysomething hockey-playing college students instead of pro-hockey teams and their hot twentysomething rising stars. I can recommend it to all who appreciate hot twentysomethings, bums, boobs, hockey (though as with Heated Rivalry there’s only a bit of that and mostly to get them naked in the showers again) and perfectly made trash TV. Sit back with your beverage of choice, turn off your brain and relax. As with its progenitor-competitor, Off Campus knows exactly what it’s doing, where it’s going and why – and so do you. It is deeply soothing and incredibly moreish.First up is Garrett Graham (Belmont Cameli), captain of the Briar University hockey team and son of a hockey legend, Phil Graham (Steve Howey). He appears to have it all – but does he? He has his quota of sex but refuses to let anyone become his girlfriend. Is he a playa as opposed to a player, simply being fair to them as he claims, because his heart belongs to hockey, or could there be a deeper reason for his emotional unavailability? Is it to do with his mother, who died from cancer years ago? What are we to make of the hostility he has towards his father? Or the flashbacks to a childhood full of raised voices and bruised knuckles? Hmm. Maybe he’ll have another shower while we ponder. What a handsome – I mean complicated – young man. Continue reading...

13 May 2026 04:00 ✍️ RSS THE GUARDIAN

David Tennant and Michael Sheen are still a dazzling demon and angel double act – but everything else about this controversial finale is smug, grating and staleThe omens for Good Omens have been bad from the start. A litany of abandoned dramatisations of Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman’s 1990 fantasy novel finally came to an end when Prime’s TV version debuted in 2019, but by then Pratchett was dead and the show was awkward and mannered, too in awe of the source material, yet dogged by uncertainty about how Pratchett might have altered it.Four years later, season two told a new story that acknowledged the dominant energy of the show’s lead performers, David Tennant and Michael Sheen. Without the book to draw on or Pratchett to consult, Gaiman seemed unsure what to do with his stars, but a fan-pleasing finale converted the chemistry between Tennant’s boisterous demon Crowley and Sheen’s thoughtful angel Aziraphale to romance, confirmed with a kiss before being stymied by cosmic obligations. Continue reading...

13 May 2026 07:00 ✍️ RSS THE GUARDIAN

All kinds of musical riches by formerly overlooked composers may be languishing in lofts and dusty archives. The discovery of a new work by Ralph Vaughan Williams has set the world alight this week. Well, not quite, but it’s a great story. In a box in the archives of London’s Morley College Elaine Andrews came across a previously unknown Vaughan Williams song. Titled Before the Mirror, it sets a Swinburne poem that itself was inspired by a Whistler painting.Hearing it played on Radio 4’s PM on Monday [58 mins in] reveals music of surprising tonal adventure and expressive ambiguity, written shortly after Vaughan Williams married Adeline Fisher in 1897. And the manuscript’s workings, its crossings-out and corrections, are a fascinating insight into Vaughan Williams’s creative process. Continue reading...

13 May 2026 13:53 ✍️ RSS THE GUARDIAN

From Édith Piaf to Charli xcx, a moving study of the ways women express themselves – and the obstacles they faceWhen Lauren Elkin was a child, she took lessons with a voice teacher in Northport, Long Island, who would get her to perform in front of a mirror. Singing songs from the Italian classical repertoire, Elkin – who was a soprano – was required to smile and lift up her eyebrows as she sang since “it helps with placement”. She was told her breathing should come not from the chest but the diaphragm, and that she must smooth over the vocal break, which is where the chest voice changes into the head voice.Elkin practised hard to make her voice “nearly featureless”, even though she secretly wanted to rebel. Looking back, she wishes she’d understood that she could “work with, not against the imperfections in my voice … with its different colours and resonances, its scratches and cracks like skips on a record, its atmospheric flaws … Embracing the flaws can strengthen the work; through vulnerability can come power.” Continue reading...

13 May 2026 08:00 ✍️ RSS THE GUARDIAN