Adaptation of hit comedy quiz will be aired by CNN on Saturday nights to coincide with presidential election

Arch, ironic and understated, Have I Got News for You is the quintessential British comedy quiz, but its creators are hoping that a US version of the show can translate its particular brand of political humour across the Atlantic.

A US adaptation of the show will be broadcast by CNN in the autumn, to coincide with the presidential election. It will hit screens on Saturday nights – part of a double-bill with Bill Maher’s Real Time.

Continue reading...

I thought this would finally be the year – but no. Oh well, I can’t find my way from my house anyway

Nice weather is here! The sun is out and the papers and the internet are filling with their annual offers of help. This is my year, at last – I can feel it! The Summer Style Dilemmas Solved are finally going to work for me! I peruse them eagerly, as I have done for the last 30 years and more, hope undimmed in my increasingly mottled and scraggy breast. But no – no, my hopes are quickly dashed. One again, this year, it seems that my Summer Style Dilemmas can only be solved by losing half my body weight and/or going back in time and making sure one of my parents mates with a gazelle instead.

Continue reading...

The manuscript behind the US feminist’s monumental Dinner Party is finally published, Elton’s photography obsession returns and some woodcuts warn of disaster – all in your weekly dispatch

Judy Chicago: Revelations
An illuminated manuscript that Chicago started in the 1970s and is only now being published reveals the thinking behind her renowned work The Dinner Party.
• Serpentine North, London, 23 May to 1 September

Continue reading...

Writer and peer Daniel Finkelstein narrates his family’s extraordinary story with a mixture of horror and wonder

In this remarkable family memoir, the political journalist and Conservative peer Daniel Finkelstein documents the lives of his parents and grandparents under Hitler and Stalin, and “how the great forces of history crashed down in a terrible wave on two happy families; how it tossed them and turned them, and finally returned what was left to dry land”.

His mother Mirjam’s family, who were German Jews, survived the Dutch holding camp Westerbork, and a spell in Bergen-Belsen. Meanwhile his paternal grandfather, who was from Lwów in Poland (now Lviv, Ukraine), which was occupied by the Soviets in 1939, was arrested and sentenced to hard labour at one of Stalin’s gulags, while his wife and child were dispatched to a Siberian farm. Moving back and forth between their respective stories, Finkelstein’s account of his grandparents’ efforts to evade death and protect their children unfolds like a wartime thriller.

Continue reading...

Hunted by Abir Mukherjee; Bonehead by Mo Hayder; When We Were Silent by Fiona McPhillips; The Mystery of the Crooked Man by Tom Spencer

Hunted by Abir Mukherjee (Harvill Secker, £14.99)
For his first standalone novel, Mukherjee, author of a crime series set in 1920s India, has turned his attention to contemporary America. During the last week of a toxic presidential campaign, a bomb in a California shopping mall claims 65 lives. A group called the Sons of the Caliphate claims responsibility, but when FBI agent Shreya Mistry begins to close in on them, she discovers not jihadists, but something altogether more complicated. Meanwhile, the parents of two group members – Carrie, whose son Greg is a former US soldier, and British Muslim Sajid, whose daughter Aliyah was radicalised after her activist sister received life-changing injuries during a demonstration – team up to find their children before any more atrocities are committed, becoming fugitives themselves in the process. With multiple narrators, a fast pace and a horribly credible storyline, this white-knuckle ride across a catastrophically fractured country grips from start to finish.

Bonehead by Mo Hayder (Hodder & Stoughton, £22)
Hayder’s untimely death in 2021 robbed us of an imagination unparalleled in both its darkness and its audacity. Her final novel, Bonehead, is as haunting and distinctive as its predecessors. In a Gloucestershire community years after a coach crash in which six teenagers were killed, blame and rumour still abound. Dogs go missing and the eponymous faceless woman, thought to be a ghost, drifts through woods where nature itself seems entirely malevolent. Survivor Alex, now a police officer, is determined to discover what really happened on the night of the crash, when she glimpsed Bonehead seconds before the coach left the road. Although there is an imbalance to this book, presumably because of the circumstances in which it was written – the ending seems rushed in contrast to the expertly paced ratcheting of tension in the first half – the final page is a classic Hayder shocker.

Continue reading...

The best outfits, the looks that might trickle down and styles that should stay on the riviera

An unofficial fashion week, Cannes film festival has been turning the southern French city into one big photo opportunity this week.

Always considered the most fashionable of all the film festivals, the connection was confirmed this year: the relatively new film production division of the fashion house Saint Laurent will premiere three titles.

Continue reading...

The blockbuster franchises are showing signs of serious wear and tear, so why don’t the studios take on newer worlds created by the likes of Christopher Nolan and Alex Garland?

Some of the greatest genre movies of all time are sequels. Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back; Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan; The Godfather Part II; The Dark Knight; Police Academy 7: Mission to Moscow. OK, maybe not that last one, but you get the idea. There is absolutely no reason that lightning can’t strike twice, or even three, four, five, six times, if the will and creative verve are in place.

And yet there is also a law of diminishing returns. This week Planet of the Apes writer-producer team Rick Jaffa and Amanda Silver revealed that they are planning another five films in the dystopian sci-fi series, after the barnstorming box office and critical success of latest instalment Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes. Last week we discovered that Lord of the Rings legend Peter Jackson is overseeing a new movie about Gollum that will retread territory skipped over in the Oscar-winning trilogy from the turn of the century. The Mandalorian and Grogu, which this week announced that sci-fi scream queen Sigourney Weaver is joining its cast in an undisclosed role, will be the 12th full-length live action Star Wars film to hit the big screen. The Marvel Cinematic Universe currently stands 33 movies strong. And these are the big budget, tent-pole franchises, the ones with the bucks to hire the top talent. Can any of us honestly say they are all getting better?

Continue reading...

Exclusive: The director of The Seed of the Sacred Fig details how he discarded electronic devices and fled over the mountains on foot after authorities sentenced him to eight years in prison and flogging

Iranian director Mohammad Rasoulof escaped imminent imprisonment in Iran by discarding all trackable electronic devices and walking across a mountainous borderland on foot, the film-maker has told the Guardian in an exclusive interview.

But even though he has found shelter in Germany and is optimistic about attending next week’s Cannes premiere of the film that nearly saw him jailed for eight years , Rasoulof said he still expects to return to his home country “quite soon” and sit out his sentence.

Continue reading...

V&A, London
From glossy celebrity portraits through raw news shots to AI-driven abstracts, this epic show captures half a century of iconic images

The latest exhibition of works from Sir Elton John and David Furnish’s gargantuan photography collection is everything you’d expect it to be: spangly, iconoclastic – and a little bit basic. The entry point to the V&A’s largest ever exhibition of photography promises, as the title Fragile Beauty suggests, the frisson of danger in the pursuit of creating something beautiful: the first shot that greets us is a portrait of beekeeper Ronald Fischer, skin crawling with his beloved insects. Richard Avedon found Fischer by putting an ad in the American Bee Journal. He issued two instructions to his sitter: don’t smile and don’t move. Remarkably, Fischer was only stung four times.

The Avedon portrait smacks you in the face with the premise of this show: suffering for one’s art (or making others suffer for it). The seemingly never-ending exhibition unifies 300 works drawn from about 7,000 in the collection, but it is far more personal than the 2016 Radical Eye show at Tate , moving from the 1950s to now, and so spanning John’s own life, as well as the couple’s enduring interests.

Continue reading...