Writer and director Jed Hart’s debut psycho-thriller is very nearly a decent film but is let down by a script that goes completely awry

First-time feature director Jed Hart starts with a great premise for a low-budget psychological thriller about a very real subject, and he gets good performances from his three actors. Hart’s direction is strong, but it’s better than his script; for me the movie, having established its realist credentials, is let down by a completely unreal and silly ending.

Nicky, played by Lyndsey Marshal, is a hard-working agency nurse who is all alone, a single mum to a son away at uni. She lives a lonely but reasonably content life, listening to classical music, doing yoga and vaguely dating a clueless but nice man called Kevin, played by Barry Ward. But all this is utterly destroyed when a lairy and aggressive guy moves into the property next door and has loud parties with his mates every night until four in the morning; this is the unspeakable Deano (Aston McAuley), who responds with hostile contempt to Nicky’s timidly polite requests to turn the music down – along with some belligerent self-pity: “I’ve had a tough couple of years with my mental health.”

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A breezy but ambiguous allegory arranges its symbols with appealing wit

Digging the Well

On our plot between the river
and the railroad track,
there is a well. We discovered
it by chance — weeds had covered
all but a sliver
of its rim
which time had filled to the brim
with soil and rock.

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Exhibitions at this year’s Milan Furniture Fair, a guide to green wood carving and funeral urns by Alessi

This is the final monthly design news round-up, so we’ve made it a bumper edition. As well as previewing some shows that will be this year’s Salone del Mobile in Milan, there’s pyjamas from Grayson Perry and Greek mythology reinterpreted by conceptual artist Maurizio Cattelan. Enjoy.

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Irish-set remake of Italian film about a bachelor who cares for his elderly mum never quite matches the charm of the original, despite occasional shimmers

Gianni Di Gregorio’s modern Italian classic Mid-August Lunch from 2008, about a middle-aged bachelor caring for his ageing mum and other elderly ladies, has inspired this loose remake: a broad comedy amplifying what could be seen as the original’s queer subtext. Despite one or two sweet touches and game performances, it never comes close to matching the gentleness, subtlety and charm of the original.

The action is transferred from Rome to Dublin and the gay theme perhaps effectively replaces the importance of food in the Italian film. James McArdle is Edward, a YA author and gay man on the verge of major literary stardom, for which an upcoming US publicity tour is vitally important. But he has to take care of his widowed mum Alma (Fionnula Flanagan) who cannot speak after suffering a stroke, and there is some droll comedy with the Stephen Hawking voice enunciating her crisp commands from her iPad.

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Only a few statues remain, with thousands of priceless artefacts from Nubian and Kushite kingdoms missing

Videos of Sudan’s national museum showing empty rooms, piles of rubble and broken artefacts posted on social media after the Sudanese army recaptured the area from the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) in recent days show the extent of looting of the country’s antiquities.

Fears of looting in the museum were first raised in June 2023 and a year later satellite images emerged of trucks loaded with artefacts leaving the building, according to museum officials. But last week, as the RSF were driven out of Khartoum after two years of war, the full extent of the theft became apparent.

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The latest in our series on writers’ top comfort films is a reminder of why Preston Sturges’s 1941 comedy is unbeatable

I shudder to think who I would have become had I never once been a 13-year-old girl roaming the stacks of a suburban Blockbuster Video. I fell in love with movies mostly because I wanted to impress the older high school boys who worked behind the counter. The nicer ones took time to recommend their favorite films. So I must thank the beautiful, near clone of OC-era Adam Brody who enthusiastically sold me on Sullivan’s Travels, Preston Sturges’s 1941 classic. I’ve seen it so many times that I’ve come to consider it an old friend.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, what initially drew me, a boy-crazy middle schooler, to the film is the sheer hotness of its two leads. Even by our current standards of eerily plump, airbrushed faces and Ozempic-toned bodies, Veronica Lake and Joel McCrea sparkle onscreen together. Her peekaboo curls and low, sultry delivery demand attention, making it impossible to half-watch this film. If anything commands you to put down your phone and stop doomscrolling, it’ll be Lake’s dominant, ahead-of-its-time sensuality, the perfect foil to McCrea’s earnest everyman.

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A genetically modified mouse goes on the rampage in bloody Disney pastiche that offers Sharknado-level performances and kill scenes hindered by poor lighting

Here’s another draining bout of horror opportunism, spawned in this instance by the copyright expiring on Disney’s Steamboat Willie , the 1928 landmark animation that launched Mickey Mouse into the world. Scurrying on to screens months behind the similarly motivated The Mouse Trap , Steven LaMorte’s bloody pastiche opens with a quote coyly ascribed to “Walt D” before plodding mirthlessly in the pawprints of those recent Winnie-the-Pooh carve-ups , demonstrating no greater brio, invention or wit. Its mock Mickey is a genetically modified super-violent pipsqueak (played by Terrifier breakout star David Howard Thornton, in mangy rodent costume), let loose from the sewers by blundering engineers; rather than the jaunty steamboat his predecessor commandeered, he wreaks murderous havoc on a grimy approximation of the Staten Island ferry, whistling while he works.

The whole never recovers from its leaden opening half-hour, devoted to lugging potential corpses onboard leaving us to wonder who, if anyone, will survive the lacklustre carnage. (Hopes are lowered like a flag for the airheaded bachelorette party.) LaMorte notionally expands the scope of his non-satirical attack by having the critter’s victims mouth familiar Magic Kingdom phrases. “Can you feel the love tonight?” says one topless passenger, shortly before being hosed down with gore. One point in favour of these cheap-and-cheerless cash-ins: in an era of dead-eyed data scraping, they may yet radicalise a generation of sleepover attenders to pursue ways of toughening up copyright law.

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Two enjoyable debut novels put fresh meat on Fitzgerald’s deathless classic – one a modern-day retelling in which Gatsby becomes a female influencer, another a pacy murder mystery in the vein of Agatha Christie

It might seem unfathomable to us now, but F Scott Fitzgerald’s third novel was something of a let-down when it was published 100 years ago; his previous books, This Side of Paradise and The Beautiful and Damned – there had also been a novella, The Diamond As Big As the Ritz , and short stories including The Curious Case of Benjamin Button – had been more commercially successful and found greater favour with critics. Fitzgerald’s tale of obscure origins, extreme wealth and obsessional romantic desire appeared too unlikely, too contrived and, perhaps, too uncomfortable a reminder of class and financial inequality and its consequent social schisms to be recognised for what it was: a masterly exploration of delusion, self-delusion, myth-making and complicity.

Fitzgerald himself died 15 years after its publication believing it to have been a worldly failure and unconsoled by any hint of its future cultural ubiquity. But literature, as we know, is studded with these anomalies, burials and rebirths and now, in an age of recycling and rebooting, it seems perfectly natural, if ironic, for The Great Gatsby to spawn a number of tribute acts.

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She was the overshadowed member of the iconic group. But now, with a major exhibition not far from the house she turned into a work of art, Bell is finally getting her due. And she’s not the only one

When you think of the Bloomsbury Group – the writers, artists and intellectuals who congregated at 46 Gordon Square in London in the early 20th century – you might think of Virginia Woolf; the Omega Workshops, which brought fine art to modernist designs; Charleston , a farmhouse in Sussex, frequented by core members who painted every available surface in blazing hues; or the famous phrase about their unorthodox sex lives – they “painted in circles and loved in triangles”.

But do you ever think – or know much – about a woman at the heart of the group, Vanessa Bell, sister of Virginia and co-director of the Omega Workshops? If Bloomsbury member John Maynard Keynes was the economics pioneer, and Woolf its literary star, then Bell was the painter equivalent. Yet it seems Bell has too often been overshadowed by her contemporaries, or pigeonholed by her domestically scaled work. No longer. A new exhibition at Charleston’s gallery spaces in nearby Lewes brings together the largest number of Bell works in history, 136 in total.

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