Authorities say Reversed Front: Bonfire, which lets players ‘overthrow the communist regime’ advocates armed revolution and may lead to arrest

Hong Kong police have warned people against downloading a Taiwan-developed mobile game which they say is “secessionist” and could lead to arrest.

The game, Reversed Front: Bonfire , allows users to “pledge allegiance” to various groups linked to locations that have been major flashpoints or targets for China including Taiwan, Hong Kong, Tibet, Uyghurs, Kazakhs and Manchuria, in order to “overthrow the communist regime” known as the “People’s Republic”.

Camille Rutherford is endearing as a writer who wins a place on a Jane Austen retreat, but will she discover love or something more realistic?

It is a truth universally acknowledged that Jane Austen has inspired more romcoms than any other author – and nearly all of them feature a modern take on an Austen protagonist, a new Lizzie Bennet or Emma Woodhouse. But this funny and smart French comedy instead gives us a 21st-century Jane Austen. British-French actor Camille Rutherford is terrific as Agathe, an aspiring novelist working in a Paris bookshop who wins a place on a Jane Austen writing retreat run by the author’s descendants.

“I’m not living in the right century!” Agathe wails to her best friend and colleague Félix (Pablo Pauly). She’s not into dating apps (“I don’t want Uber sex!”). But she does have chemistry with Félix (he’s a player, but not at Wickham levels of caddishness), and it’s Félix who secretly submits Agathe’s writing to a Jane Austen society. The comedy takes a bit of an IQ dip when the film crosses the Channel and the dialogue switches to English. Still, it glides along on Rutherford’s performance as Agathe – witty, warm, keenly observant, a bit clumsy and Bridget Jones-ish, but never, not even for a moment, cringy.

This year’s event showcased gaming’s evolving landscape, from blockbuster titles to standout indie projects

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As protests exploded in Los Angeles last weekend, elsewhere in the city, a coterie of games journalists and developers were gathered together to play new games at the industry’s annual summer showcase. This week’s issue is a d ispatch from our correspondent Alyssa Mercante .

Summer Game Fest (SGF), the annual Los Angeles-based gaming festival/marketing marathon, was set up to compete with the once-massive E3. It’s taken a few years, but now it has replaced it. 2025’s event felt like a cogent reminder that the games industry has dramatically changed since the pandemic. Whereas E3 used to commandeer the city’s convention centre smack in the middle of downtown LA, SGF is off the beaten path, nestled among the reams of fabric in the Fashion District, adjacent to Skid Row. There are fewer game companies present, it’s not open to the public and there’s no cosplay, unless it’s for marketing purposes.

The Texas native’s flag-waving, bull-riding summer of rodeo marks the latest step in her reclamation of country music’s Black roots

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Hello and welcome to The Long Wave. Beyoncé’s Cowboy Carter tour, which kicked off in California in April, began its European leg in London last week. I went to the first show and considered the legacy-making significance of this latest evolution in the singer’s long career – and the part that left me cold.

Beatle wrote in 1962 letter to Cynthia Powell that he wished he was on his way to her flat with ‘chocies and a throbber’

John Lennon is considered by many to be a poet. But the Beatle revealed his more prosaic side in a letter penned in 1962 to his future wife Cynthia Powell, in which he declared: “I wish I was on the way to your flat with the Sunday papers and chocies and a throbber.”

The intimate missive, which includes a complaint about his bandmate Paul McCartney’s snoring, is now being sold at auction by Christie’s with a £30,000 to £40,000 estimate.

From a dark and death-haunted classic by Mike Leigh to Tom Cruise’s final highwire stunt and Timothée Chalamet’s brilliant embodiment of Dylan we rewind six months of sensational cinema – in order of their UK release date

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Adaptation of Colson Whitehead novel is an intensely moving story of two friends trapped in a racist reform school, told with piercing beauty by RaMell Ross.

Playhouse East, London
Lily Sinko rages, writhes, provokes and teases her way through the horrifying life story of her storyteller with cartoonish abandon

Magdalena appears from the dark, perched on a bar stool, cigarettes and liquor by her side, an array of hanging lamps casting a sultry glow. Her first words set the tone – “You want to fuck me,” she says – and lead us into an uncompromising introduction, littered with sex, violence and sideways jokes.

She is the creation of French-English actor and writer Lily Sinko, and as her character’s name suggests, we’re hurled through a life of saintliness and sin, despair and redemption, as Magdalena does the best with the hand she’s dealt. We travel to her childhood in Marseille with a hostile “Papa”, an airport abduction that sees her deposited at the Virgin Mary School for Bad Bad Girls (Cash Only), and a wild escape through the streets of France, finding fleeting refuge in a cathedral.

At Playhouse East, London , until 28 June

Much as I’m looking forward to the next instalment of the horror franchise I’m really not thirsty for a branded apocalypse-infused IPA to wash it down with

With ticket sales no longer a sure thing, additional income streams have become more important than ever to the movie business. If you want to know how much faith a studio has in a property, your best bet is to look out for licensed merchandise. This is why Wicked partnered with 400 corporate brands ahead of its release last year and why every shop on the high street is heaving with Lilo & Stitch merch. It’s why the last bag of Doritos you ate had Jack Black’s face on it.

But this strategy isn’t failsafe. Yes, if you’re promoting a big four-quadrant blockbuster, it’s easy to team up with companies who’ll paste their products with adverts for your film. However, if your film is too small, or too sad, or too weird, then any sort of brand collaboration is going to seem an extremely odd fit. In other words, can I interest anyone in a pint of 28 Years Later beer?

He’s already put out seven albums this year – a work ethic inherited, he says, from selling drugs in Detroit. But will we ever hear his tracks with the late great J Dilla?

In the brief window between my conversation with Detroit rapper Boldy James and you reading this sentence, it is likely that the 42-year-old MC will have surprise-released at least one new album on to streaming platforms. This year alone, he has already released seven records. A planned eighth is due in July, but who knows what might pop up in between.

“My father always told me you’ve gotta work twice as hard because you can’t expect something for nothing in this life!” Boldy says of a work rate that can easily result in 20 new songs being completed in the studio over a 24-hour period. His combative verses, as cutting and direct as Don Corleone whispering instructions to a made man, have earned him critical adoration and elicited high-profile co-signs from hip-hop figureheads including Earl Sweatshirt, Nas, Westside Gunn, the late Mac Miller and producer the Alchemist, while fans are intrigued to know how he remains so prolific.