Though she didn’t support the president, the performance nearly destroyed her career. Not so for Snoop Dogg in 2025

The Grammy-winning singer Chrisette Michele keeps her phone switched off, a habit that stems from her long stint in cancellation purgatory. Her brother barely got through last month to relay the news that Snoop Dogg had been DJing at a party for Donald Trump’s second inaugural, and many in the Black community were irate. Longtime fans were calling Snoop a sellout, she learned, and were unfollowing him online by the hundreds of thousands .

Snoop remained defiant in the face of this controversy, which really peeved the hordes who well remember when Snoop was regulating Maga support in the music industry. That defiance “was the thing that resonated with me”, says Michele when I initially reach her the week after Trump’s second inauguration. “We live in a different era where you can say what you think and not feel like you might die.”

A single mother is terrorised by an evil entity sapping her lifeforce and threatening her child in this decent horror with a genre fan’s dream cast

This one starts very strong. Mindy Vogel (Krsy Fox), a single mother, is summoned to her basement by the ringing of a bell. A barely glimpsed monster with a lugubrious but threatening voice demands that she feed him. They engage in a dialogue from which we infer this is something of a long-term dynamic, with the grim beast nibbling from her arm on a regular basis. She tells him she’ll need to go to the hospital if this carries on much longer; the abusive relationship parallels are not accidental. This monster is dangerous, but he’s also a parasite, standing in contrast to the horror genre’s typical one-munch-and-you’re-done type beast.

Unfortunately, from this point on the drama sags. Fox’s performance is top-notch, but there are a number of plot points that don’t really stack up. That might not matter in a loopier story-world, but Little Bites is a horror movie where everything is fairly grounded, other than the actual creature. Chief among the dud notes is the unlikely idea that Child Protective Services would so aggressively hunt down a single mother on the flimsy grounds given here (seemingly amounting to the fact that Mindy’s child is staying with her grandmother).

French director Guillaume Ribot’s new film shines a light on the making of Lanzmann’s nine-hour Holocaust opus – a tale of obsession, deception and danger

Forty years after its release, Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah (1985) is regarded not just as one of the greatest documentaries ever made, but a film that had to be made in order to shake the world into engaging with its still recent trauma. A new documentary, however, shows how the French director’s seminal “fiction of the real” was almost never completed.

In preparation for All I Had Was Nothingness , which premiered this week at the Berlin film festival, French director Guillaume Ribot revisited the entire 220 hours of raw footage that Lanzmann filmed between 1976-81, before he then edited it down into the nine-and-a-half hour film released in cinemas. The outtakes reveal unseen insecurities and self-doubt on behalf of an auteur famed for his subsequent grandeur, all while coupled with an earth-shattering persistence and determination. It also frames Shoah as a classic case study of how the rules of journalistic ethics must sometimes be bent to expose the truth.

Denis Villeneuve has already done the well-nigh impossible, making two brilliant big-screen versions of Dune, but given the history of sci-fi film sequels, another could be a terrifying sandworm too many

Hollywood has a long history of making great first sci-fi instalments that slowly turn into pompous, inconsequential, and increasingly mind-numbing dross as the sequels keep rolling. The Matrix went from a revolutionary cyberpunk masterpiece to an interminable slog of a philosophy dissertation in which both humans and machines alike seemed to be forever fighting a losing battle with a CGI hurricane. The Terminator franchise started out as a brutally sleek and sinuous time-travel thriller that plucked at the very heartstrings of the eternal fear of the unknown at the heart of the human condition – yet ended up as the living embodiment of what happens when Hollywood repeatedly tears the living skin off its own dead-eyed robo-franchise, as if stuck in some kind of endless corporate judgment day doom-loop. Let’s not even mention Jurassic Park, which began life as an awe-inspiring blockbuster about the dangers of unchecked scientific hubris and ended up as the prosaic tale of dinosaurs just sort-of existing in the background while we all focused heavily on a dull corporate espionage subplot about genetically modified locusts.

All of which is why Denis Villeneuve’s current efforts to bring Dune back to life on the big screen (more than four decades after the late, lamented David Lynch’s version poured psychedelic spice-soaked fever dreams into our quivering mid-80s retinas) are the subject of so much breathless anticipation and existential dread among fans. Because, damn it, Villeneuve has (as anyone who watched any of his previous films expected) done a simply incredible job of adapting Frank Herbert’s sprawling, monolithic space fantasy into not one but two synapse-crushingly epic movies of almost impossible power and majesty – operatic, awe-inspiring spectacles that somehow make interstellar feudalism, giant sandworms, and psychic drug trips feel utterly essential to the very fabric of existence, as though humanity’s ultimate destiny was always to brood majestically in the dunes while contemplating the crushing weight of prophecy.

Ravey, ominous and sending fans into meltdowns: the third series of HBO’s luxury resort drama isn’t delighting viewers with its musical choices. But might the sonic update be a wise move?

The second season of The White Lotus was so rapturously received that the third was always going to be a big deal. The new cast is probably the best yet, HBO has been carefully stoking the flames of anticipation since August and early reviews have been positively vibrating with praise . For a moment there, it felt like The White Lotus could do no wrong.

Then it actually began and all hell broke loose. The problem? The theme tune. In seasons one and two, The White Lotus had the best theme tune on television. Aloha!, Cristobal Tapia de Veer’s season one title music , was a beguiling mix of tribal drums and a form of vocalisation that lived somewhere between throat singing and gargling. Season two’s theme song miraculously managed to improve on the formula, remixing the vocal melody into a track that was simultaneously more operatic and clubby than the first. The theme tune won an Emmy. It was such a banger that Peloton instructors started playing it in class; you could never say that of something like Homeland.

There’s a lot to grab your attention here, but strong performances struggle to save Ariane Labed’s adaptation of Daisy Johnson’s novel Sisters

Award-winning French star Ariane Labed directs her first feature film, a self-aware and self-conscious work she has adapted from the novel Sisters by Booker-shortlisted author Daisy Johnson . Johnson’s own debts to Shirley Jackson and Stephen King are acknowledged in the film with a quote from The Haunting of Hill House, “No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality”, and a visual quote from The Shining. It’s made in a style clearly influenced by the Greek new wave in which Labed made her name in films such as Attenberg and Alps.

There’s an awful lot to grab the attention here: a story of an intense sisterly bond in a private shared world, a lot of set-pieces, big performances, dysfunctional violence and a hallucination involving lemurs. And yet I felt it didn’t really come together; this is an international coproduction in which something is lost in translation. The action takes place in Oxford and Yorkshire in the book; in the film it apparently starts somewhere in the UK as there is a preponderance of English accents (certainly among the main characters) although one scene is evidently set in the National College of Art and Design in Dublin. Then the action moves to rural Ireland with Irish accents.

Despite the controversy this is a wildly inventive and ambitious film. Completely absurd, subversive and never, ever boring, it still deserves to be in the discussion

Emilia Pérez, then. It’s the film set in Mexico that angered a whole load of Mexicans. The film with a transgender lead that offended many trans criticviewers. And the film that was tipped to scoop up a bag load of Oscars – a whopping 13 nominations! – before everything came crashing down around revelations that the aforementioned lead had made some truly hideous comments on social media several years ago.

From Academy darling to toxic mess nobody wants to touch with a 10-foot statuette in the space of one short Oscars campaign. And now you expect me – a white cis male who has never even been to Mexico – to tell you why Emilia Pérez should win the award for best picture? There’ve been easier gigs.

PC, PS5, Xbox; Don’t Nod
Friends gather in 2022 to relive a haunting 1995 summer in the woods in Don’t Nod’s fascinating two-parter with excellent period details

Ten years ago, Parisian studio Don’t Nod effectively crafted a new sub-genre of narrative adventure with its teen mystery Life Is Strange. Part thriller, part relationship drama, it used music, art and relatable characters to create a touching paean to unshakeable friendship. After a series of sequels , Don’t Nod’s Montreal studio has crafted a new tale about teenage relationships, split into two episodes, or Tapes, the first of which will doubtless have fans on tenterhooks for the concluding part.

It’s 1995 and introverted teen Swann is facing a final quiet summer alone in the rural town of Velvet Cove, Michigan, before her family moves to Vancouver. But in the parking lot of the local video store, she meets fellow 16-year-olds Nora, Autumn and Kat, and the four girls bond over their boredom and frustration with small-town life. Soon, they are inseparable, spending their days hiking in the nearby forests, making camp fires, confessing their secrets – until they discover a spooky shack hidden out among the trees and decide to make it their base. Here, they form riot grrrl band Bloom & Rage, channelling their dreams, desires and fears into fantasies of fame and revenge on shitty boys and repressive parents. But when their swirling emotions seem to awaken a supernatural presence in the woods, something terrible happens and the girls swear each other to a lifelong secret.

Amazon’s hugely successful extreme competition series is the latest attempt to lure younger online viewers to TV

Beast Games, Amazon Prime Video’s reality competition series hosted by the YouTuber known as MrBeast , is not a well-made show. It is certainly an expensive show, something Mr Beast, the alter ego for 26-year-old Jimmy Donaldson of Greenville, North Carolina, likes to frequently remind viewers. The series is a feat of scale shocking to audiences outside the realm of YouTube, and especially Donaldson’s fiefdom: 1,000 contestants, filmed by a system of 1,107 cameras, battling each other for a $5m cash prize – the largest in entertainment history, according to Donaldson. For the competition, Donaldson and his posse designed a warehouse war zone modeled on the Netflix dystopian series Squid Game, constructed a bespoke city and purchased a private island (also to be given away, along with a Lamborghini and other lavish prizes). Contestants eliminated in the first episode are dropped through trap doors to unseen depths; there is a pirate ship with cannons.

Yet for all the ostentatious displays of wealth, the show still looks terrible – garishly lit, frenetically edited, poorly structured, annoyingly loud and tackily designed. Many have pointed out that the show’s central conceit – broke Americans duking it out and playing psychological warfare for luxury prizes, many in the name of paying their bills – is as dystopian as the Netflix series it’s based on, a depressing spectacle of aggro-capitalism for our neo-Gilded Age times, with Donaldson as a self-styled Willy Wonka figure .