ONE OF THE MOST GRIMLY FUNNY POEMS OF the past century is Philip Larkin’s “This Be the Verse,” with its opening salvo about how our parents invariably mess us up. Larkin used a saltier word for “mess,

Julia Ducournau’s Alpha is a shiver-inducing AIDS-adjacent drama

Dir Dean Puckett, UK 2025 On digital platforms Folk horror has been a thing for a long time, but it’s an over-used term these days. In film terms it appears to mean something heavily influenced by Wit

Welcome to the second of our special Review Of The Year joint interviews. Here, indie provocateur BAXTER DURY and Sleaford Mods’ splenetic frontman JASON WILLIAMSON turn their attentions to the landscape, musical or otherwise, of 2025. Stand by for a bleak, brash, honest and often humorous assessment of the year just gone. Their conclusions? “We’re just flogging this dead horse, aren’t we?” they tell Mark Beaumont

SOME DAYS IT SEEMS WE LIVE IN A HORRID WORLD where most humans couldn’t give a fig about art. How many people in that world are going to care about a 65-year-old black-and-white movie—one that, for an

For anyone who came of age in the glow of a Noughties laptop screen, Kaya Scodelario defined our teenage years. As Effy Stonem in Skins, she had main character energy long before the term existed; the