The pop star and her talent agency say reports that she sacked David Levy for allegedly signing a letter urging Glastonbury to drop the pro-Palestine Irish rap group from lineup are untrue

Dua Lipa has denied a “deliberately inflammatory” MailOnline report claiming that she fired one of her live agents after he attempted to prevent Kneecap from performing at Glastonbury.

Her agency, William Morris Endeavour, called the story “categorically false” and clarified that the agent, David Levy, stopped working with the British-Albanian pop star in 2019.

Exclusive: Kirsty Innes made statement in now-deleted post on X seven months before taking up role as Liz Kendall aide

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A senior ministerial aide said AI companies will never have to compensate creatives for using their content to train their systems, in a statement that has alarmed campaigners demanding Labour delivers a fairer deal for musicians, artists and writers from the tech industry.

Kirsty Innes, recently appointed as a special adviser to Liz Kendall, the secretary of state for science, innovation and technology, said “whether or not you philosophically believe the big AI firms should compensate content creators, they in practice will never legally have to”.

The legendary Essex DJ, who died earlier this month, was a cultural influencer before there was such a thing. He democratised the dancefloor, fearlessly blended genres and understood the power of personality

If you are a fan of club culture, soul, Brit funk, acid house, all-dayers, the radio edit of Kraftwerk’s Autobahn, weekenders or Sinéad O’Connor then – whether you know it or not – you are part of the world shaped by Chris Hill, who died on 11 September after a short illness .

Hill was an Essex-born, working-class DJ who loved Black music so much he made it his mission to bring it to the pubs, clubs, airwaves, pop charts and record shops of England by any means necessary. He started out in the 1960s trading blues records and landed a residency in 1967 playing jazz at The Orsett Cock in Essex; later came a soul residency at the Goldmine nightclub on Canvey Island, Essex, and from there to the Lacy Lady in Ilford, east London, and headlining the Caister Soul Weekender in Norfolk.

Theatre Royal Stratford East, London
Matthew Xia directs a consummate adaptation of the 1972 Jamaican thriller, whose irresistible soundtrack is bolstered by new songs

Scene-setting doesn’t get much better than this. As the band build up the driving reggae skank of Toots and the Maytals’ Funky Kingston, the Jamaican capital awakens. A workman’s hammer and a cleaner’s brush help tap out the tune, the stage bustles with life and in one comic vignette a banana is brandished like a gun.

Later in the show, a tamarind-switch punishment will provide a more brutal percussion and real pistols will be drawn – one in each hand, as in the iconic poster for the 1972 Jamaican movie. Part of the phenomenal achievement of this musical adaptation is how the story is propelled from sun-kissed comedy to elegiac tragedy with the same front-footed energy as that opener, one of several reggae standards bolstering the film’s genre-defining soundtrack featuring Jimmy Cliff, the Melodians and Desmond Dekker.

Viewers outraged after same-sex wedding scene changed in Together, starring Dave Franco and Alison Brie

An Australian horror film featuring a scene with a same-sex wedding was reportedly digitally altered for release in mainland China, transforming the gay couple into a heterosexual one, provoking outrage from viewers who spotted the change.

The critically acclaimed film Together, starring Dave Franco and Alison Brie, was released in selected cinemas in China on 12 September. It follows the journey of a young couple who move to the countryside and encounter mysterious and grotesque changes to their bodies.

Emma Watson hasn’t been on screen for six years and says she is better for it – for any one else tired of the Hollywood circus, here’s how to walk away with your dignity intact

In a recent interview with Hollywood Authentic, Emma Watson described herself as “the happiest and healthiest I’ve ever been”. And this is for one reason and one reason only: she isn’t an actor any more.

The last time Watson appeared on film was in Greta Gerwig’s adaptation of Little Women six years ago. Since then, she has decided to lay low, largely because she considered the act of promoting her movies “soul-destroying”. And good for her; not just for refusing to strap herself to the machine, but also for slipping away so quietly that nobody had actually even noticed that she’d gone.

Neeraj Ghaywan’s film benefits from excellent lead performances, strong cinematography and an apparent mentorship from Martin Scorsese

Having screened earlier this year at the Cannes film festival, this Indian drama has already drawn inevitable comparisons with All We Imagine As Light, an Indian film at Cannes the year before – but they are only glancingly similar. Payal Kapadia’s woozy, dreamy, femme-centric tale was primarily an urban-set story sprinkled with magical realist fairy dust. This is a much more four-square, on-the-nose, realist work about impoverished young men from a rural northern Indian town struggling to get ahead, and loosely based on a New York Times story published in 2020 .

But director Neeraj Ghaywan, whose 2015 debut Masaan was well-regarded , has a fairy godfather in Martin Scorsese no less, who apparently mentored Ghaywan through the script development and editing. Who knows who is responsible for which choices, but the end result is pretty damn good. It’s an emotionally rich study of friendship that ought to play as a bit syrupy given the story, but the musical score, usually very to the fore in more mainstream Indian films, has been smartly stripped down to let the excellent lead performers and strong cinematography bring the drama on their own.

Nightmare will appear in the Strand magazine and portray an ‘incredibly sentimental’ side of the 20th century writer

An unpublished short story from one of the 20th century’s greatest authors is appearing for the first time in the Strand magazine this week, offering the suggestion that Raymond Chandler suffered from previously unknown insecurities over his writing talents.

Nightmare is an intriguing vignette that portrays Chandler, creator of the gritty fictional private detective Philip Marlowe, on the wrong side of the law, in a cell on death row awaiting execution for murder.

At 20, Marc Brew was the sole survivor of a terrible crash that killed his fellow dancers. Paralysed from the chest down, he had to learn to live in a new, uncharted reality

Marc Brew was sitting in the back seat of a car on a motorway near Johannesburg, telling jokes and laughing with his friends, when a pickup came hurtling down the wrong side of the road towards them. “Out of nowhere, I just remember seeing this white flash,” says Brew, who was 20 at the time. The truck, which he later found out had a drunk driver at the wheel, drove straight into the car he was in. The crash killed everyone else in the vehicle.

Nine months previously, Brew had moved from Australia to South Africa to join the Pact ballet company, based in Pretoria. That Saturday, he had attended his usual morning dance classes, before he and his friend Joanne, another member of the company, set off with her brother, Simon, and Simon’s fiancee’s brother, Toby, towards a game reserve where they had planned to go bush walking. When the truck hit, “it was like time froze”, Brew, now 48, recalls. “I remember my ears were ringing really loud, like I’d been at a concert.”