Travolta and a team of misfits are forced to raid a tawdry gambling den, but the stakes are disappointingly low in this ineptly made work

Here is a cheap-ass knockoff of Ocean’s Eleven starring John Travolta that makes the Soderbergh film look like something by Andrei Tarkovsky or Ingmar Bergman. High Rollers is a heart-slowing work of staggering stupidity and charmlessness, ineptly made and quite frankly dull except when its flaws become so egregious you can’t help but guffaw.

The idea is that Mason Goddard (John Travolta, who has finally given up on hairpieces and embraced the bald) leads a rodent pack of skilled thieves and conmen. The gang is first met at the beach wedding of two of the group’s younger members, tech whiz Link (Natali Yura, mouth permanently agape) and dim hunk Caras (Swen Temmel). Alas, the nuptials are interrupted when international criminal Salazar (Danny Pardo) and his henchmen swoop in and kidnap Mason’s wife Amelia (Gina Gershon, somehow surviving this with dignity intact). Salazar demands that Mason and his crew, which also includes his gormless safecracking brother Shawn (Lukas Haas) and sidekicks Anton (mononymed Quavo) and Hector (Noel Gugliemi), must steal the contents of a safe in the suite of casino owner Zade Black (Demián Castro) at his supposedly classy New Orleans casino the Scarlet Pearl.

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The director’s immersive look at the Nashville music scene remains an audacious narrative experiment that continues to influence film-makers

Released smack-dab in the middle of the 70s, like some gravitational mass at the center of the galaxy, Robert Altman ’s Nashville is the defining work of a decade when iconoclasts upended Hollywood and took stock of the country during a turbulent stretch.

For Altman, it was the culmination of a film-making style he had been refining since M*A*S*H in 1970, one built on spontaneity, a rich evocation of time and place, and actors empowered to create characters who seem to simply exist in their worlds, rather than impose themselves on it. The offhand magic of Nashville is that it feels modest, despite a who’s who of two dozen stars convening for an epic that offers Music City as a microcosm for America herself. Rarely are great films this casually profound.

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There’s a lot to take in at the yearly live video event: from Paralives to Felt That: Boxing, Dosa Divas to Resident Evil Requiem, here are our favourites

The ninth mainstream instalment in the survival horror series returns us to the wreckage of Racoon City and promises a blend of cinematic action and psychological horror. FBI agent Grace Ashcroft appears to be the main character, but is anything in this series ever what it seems?

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Stories within stories give fascinating depth to the prize-winning author’s third novel, about a woman’s return to her family home in the west of Ireland

Elaine Feeney’s third novel, following the success of her prize-winning debut As You Were and the Booker-longlisted How to Build a Boat , focuses on Claire O’Connor, a woman who has moved from London back to Athenry in the west of Ireland in the wake of her mother’s death. Her new life is disturbed when she finds her ex-partner Tom has moved in down the road. Or rather, that’s one thread in a story that becomes steadily more interesting than this simple set-up from the romance novelist’s playbook, as layers of family memory and trauma build up to form a portrait of the wider O’Connor family: all their history, the way it has shaped them and the traces it has left on the places around.

Claire shows herself to be unusually attuned to the history of her home place, telling stories about nearby Thoor Ballylee, where Yeats lived; Lady Gregory’s Coole Park; the place where Cromwell used to stable his horses. At first it seems a bit forced, a writer shoehorning in their research. But the tic begins to make sense as the marks of the past on Claire’s family are revealed; slowly, one realises that the enumeration of these histories is crucial to the way the O’Connors live. Central to this gradual discovery is Feeney’s use of stories-within-the-story; the novel is enlivened by a series of smaller, contained memories from Claire’s childhood, and tales reaching back a century to the time when the O’Connors first lived in the family home.

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Purest hokum, of course, but what hokum! Real pride has gone into crafting this set of shocks, and it’s very well acted in beautiful locations

This is the way the world ends, not with a bang but a wimple. In this well-crafted horror movie, a young woman called Grace (Jena Malone) finds herself up against a bunch of nuns who may or may not be trying to do something extremely dodgy with an unknown relic, and as with last year’s Omen prequel, there’s a nice line in casting here from the Ladybird Book of Horror Nuns. There’s dotty young nun who pops up going “peekaboo” (Eilidh Fisher), an arrogant mother superior (Janet Suzman), a hardliner weapon-of-Christ sort (Jolade Obasola), and the rather rarer spooky nun with one eye hidden behind an ominous white bandage (Alexandra Lewis). Their acting is uniformly excellent, as is that from Danny Huston, who plays a priest who introduces himself thusly: “I’m Father Romero, I’m here from the Vatican,” which announces him as probably up to no good from the get-go.

Grace arrives to identify the body of her brother (Steffan Cennydd), seemingly involved in a murder-suicide, has reasons of her own for being less than a fully paid-up God squad member, and while the reasons may not be much of a surprise if you’ve seen a few of these kinds of films, this is a very nicely put together example. Sure, it’s purest hokum, but real pride has gone into crafting it..

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Looking for a new reading recommendation? Here are some brilliant new paperbacks, from moving memoirs to sequels of beloved novels

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Tate Britain, London
Colquhoun’s surrealism and Burra’s pro-fascist war paintings and Hogarthian scenes of Harlem nightlife are all brilliant. But they have nothing in common – so why handcuff them together?

They make a truly odd couple. She’s an occultist who once appeared on BBC television explaining to the nation how to make surrealist art at home. He’s a jazz enthusiast whose slices of modern – and often queer - life are full of roly-poly grotesques. What on earth have Ithell Colquhoun and Edward Burra got in common, and why has Tate Britain handcuffed them together for an uncalled for, unneeded and ultimately baffling double header?

I loved Colquhoun’s exhibition at Tate St Ives when I reviewed it earlier this year, but this version of it is much more flatly laid out and her experiments in releasing the unconscious are shouted down by all the drunken, drugged, omnivorously shagging people in Burra’s 1920s and 30s clubs and bars. Yet he also gets edited and reinvented in a way that left me largely cold.

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From gay penguin parents to snake orgies, a biology professor looks at sexual adaptation in the animal world

In 1998, Roy and Silo, a pair of male chinstrap penguins at Central Park Zoo in New York, were given an abandoned egg to incubate after zookeepers observed them performing mating rituals together. For 34 days, they took turns sitting on it. When the egg hatched, the story became a viral sensation. The New York Times celebrated “A Love That Dare Not Squeak Its Name”. Roy, Silo and their daughter Tango became the subject of a LGBTQ-friendly children’s book, And Tango Makes Three by Justin Richardson and Peter Parnell.

Biology professor Nathan Lents remembers receiving copies of Tango as a gift when he and his husband became foster parents. Fast-forward to the present day, and Tango tops Pen America’s list of the most frequently banned picture books in the US. It was part of a high-profile lawsuit in Nassau County, Florida, and was designated for pulping by officials in Singapore. In 2025, it’s apparent that “conventional categories for gender identity and expression, and sexual attraction and romanticism, are just not cutting it any more”, Lents writes. Queer, non-binary, transgender, polyamorous – terms that were perhaps once obscure are here to stay. But at the same time, a powerful backlash is under way.

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During a period of deep personal turmoil, Marjolein Martinot took her camera down to the riverside in southern France – and began to feel connected again

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