Two decades after its release and with a remake about to land, the cast of Hideo Kojima’s stealth blockbuster reflect on what made this cold war caper a gaming classic

You never forget your first Metal Gear – yet there’s one title in Konami’s legendary stealth series that is universally heralded as its pinnacle: 2004’s Snake Eater. This prequel-cum-threequel was something of a reset. Originally intended as a PS3 game thanks to its sheer technological ambition, but then released on PS2, writer and director Hideo Kojima yearned to take gravelly voiced protagonist Solid Snake away from dimly lit military bases and have him slither outdoors. Featuring hunting for food and snapping broken bones back into place, Snake Eater felt more grounded and immersive than any of its 2000s PlayStation peers.

Yet for all Snake Eater’s sweeping changes, one classic element remained intact – the stellar voice acting. It’s telling that as Konami releases its remake, Metal Gear Solid Delta: Snake Eater , every wonderfully absurd line of the original script remains untouched. Boasting modernised controls and lavish new visuals, Delta feels closer to a 4K restoration of a cherished film than a maximalist Resident Evil-style remake.

Ready or Not’s Samara Weaving is a getaway driver tasked with saving her dirtbag ex in a slick yet inconsequential caper

Back in the 2000s or early 2010s, a film like Eenie Meanie would have been a late summer theatrical play, a mid-budget star vehicle with enough genre elements to hopefully lure back the blockbuster crowd. There are car chases and shootouts with absurdly attractive people in the middle of them and recognisable “that guy from” faces surrounding. But even back then it would have been a gamble without an A-lister attached, the film probably going the way of the many non-Fast & Furious car flops like Driven, Speed Racer, Drive Angry and Need for Speed.

Now, it’s a much more obvious, and far safer, fit for streaming, with Disney wisely nudging this one to a Hulu/Disney+ premiere. Eenie Meanie still has the feel of something that was once on a bigger screen, though, with a reported $50m budget edging it above many of the season’s multiplex offerings (more than say Weapons, Nobody 2, Materialists or Freakier Friday). Exactly how and why this particular package was deemed worthy of such an unusual spend (in this climate!) is a bit of a head-scratcher, as the film is a mildly diverting yet strangely dated caper, a watered-down Tarantino rip-off without a soul of its own.

There’s much to enjoy in this adaptation of Osman’s ingenious book, with Helen Mirren, Ben Kingsley, Celia Imrie and Pierce Brosnan as the senior-citizen X-Men

Richard Osman’s phenomenal bestseller from 2020 was an ingenious, accessible, good-natured book, which helped rebrand the English detective novel as “cosy crime”, started a celeb-copycat publishing trend and, being about four elderly people in a retirement community rising above ageist condescension to solve crimes, spoke eloquently to the shut-in frustrations and escapist yearnings of the Covid age.

Now it has been adapted as a funny and likable, if slightly bland, comedy-drama for Netflix, which as one character amusingly and pre-emptively comments, feels just like a Sunday teatime TV crime drama. There is nothing new about these nostalgist leanings: Agatha Christie has after all been a solid film and TV export for more than half a century. Screenwriters Katy Brand and Suzanne Heathcote adapt the novel and director Chris Columbus robustly delivers the C-major chords of mainstream entertainment. The result is some undemanding enjoyment, even if the film does appear finally to be saying something rather bold, even controversial, on the subject of assisted dying.

Whether it’s Robbie Williams’ new album, a Blur v Oasis play or Britpop romance novels, Alex James and others explain why we’re all still in thrall to the ​m​ad-fer-it 90s

It is a Tuesday evening, and in the suitably 1990s environs of Soho’s Groucho Club, Robbie Williams, resplendent in pair of dungarees, is in the process of launching his new album. It’s called Britpop, features some songs co-written with Gaz Coombes of Supergrass, and is, he attests, “the album that I wanted to write and release after I left Take That in 1995”. This was the brief period where he attempted to establish himself as an adjunct to the mid-90s wave of hugely successful UK alt-rock, releasing a string of audibly Oasis-influenced solo singles, palling around Glastonbury with the Gallaghers and temporarily employing one of the band’s inner circle, Creation Records’ former managing director Tim Abbot, as his manager. “I’ve been musically aimless for a little while,” Williams said to the assembled press. “I’ve just spent the last 15 years looking backwards. I think with this album, if I am gonna look backwards, I might as well just clear the decks and go back to the start and head off from there.”

His determination to revisit the Britpop era feels slightly odd. His Oasis-influenced singles met with declining public interest, nearly scuppering his solo career before Angels and Let Me Entertain You came to the rescue. His relationship with Abbot ended with each suing the other in a dispute over Abbot’s contract (they settled out of court), he later said Oasis were “gigantic bullies” ( Liam Gallagher replied that he’d “never bullied anyone in my life”) and when he talked about the period when I interviewed him in 2016, it was in terms of trauma: “There was an indie fundamentalist mentality … I was looked down on when I was in conversation with a lot of people … [it] starts to make you feel agoraphobic and second-guess everything you do”. But his appearance at the Groucho is the latest in a series of 90s-themed publicity stunts by Williams – he’s also unveiled fake blue plaques in Camden, proclaiming it “the home of Britpop”, and Soho’s Berwick Street, where the photograph on the cover of Oasis’s (What’s the Story?) Morning Glory was taken.

The best of this week’s wildlife photographs from around the world

The poet’s moving exploration of deafness, difference and identity

Raymond Antrobus is not the first poet in his family: on his mother’s side, he is descended from Thomas Gray, whose most famous poem, Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard (1751), is filled with sounds – lowing cows, the droning of a beetle in flight, twittering swallows and a crowing cock among them. These are the noises that, if he’s not wearing hearing aids, might escape Antrobus, who was born with what he often characterises as “missing sound” in the upper and lower registers: a whistling kettle or a doorbell disappears at one end, while at the other, syllables might get elided, rendering, for example, “suspicious” as “spacious” – words with problematically different meanings.

If this idea of a continuum of sound seems straightforward, as Antrobus points out in this compact, powerful exploration of his experience, it is often hard to explain to those who understand deafness as an inability to hear anything. Many imagine deaf people existing entirely in silence, cut off from communication with the hearing world except through lip-reading, sign language and equipment. For Antrobus, this aspect of “audism” can be as effortful to navigate as conversations and soundscapes in which he uses practised strategies to compensate for what his ears do not pick up.

Spike Lee’s revisiting of the Katrina tragedy 20 years on is not afraid to call out the incompetence behind its handling. Plus, the likes of Kylie are tutored by South Korean music stars in a high-energy battle of the bands

Spike Lee executive produces a part elegy, part polemic commemoration of one of 2025’s saddest anniversaries: two decades have now passed since the brutal Hurricane Katrina laid waste to both the physical reality and also, somehow, the soul of New Orleans. The first part of this tragedy may have been unavoidable, given the force of the storm; the second element certainly wasn’t. Via some beautiful footage of pre-Katrina New Orleans at Mardi Gras time, this documentary series remembers the city as it once was. It also doesn’t hesitate to call out the trail of mendacity, negligence and incompetence that made the disaster – and its aftermath – so much worse than it needed to be.
Netflix, from Wednesday 27 August

Any documentary with the adored, uncensored actor is always a treat. Plus: John Cena returns as a hulking hero. Here’s what to watch this evening

9pm, BBC Two
After her great series exploring Australia , Miriam Margolyes is now in New Zealand, shooting a film in which she plays a nun. She invites the cameras to follow her as she asks how being a New Zealander is different from being Australian. (“I haven’t got a flying fart of an idea.”) Any show with Margolyes is a guaranteed hoot and serves up wisdom, too. Hollie Richardson

The stars and makers of a new version of The War of the Roses discuss modern dating, swearing in America and the problem with Mr Tickle

At the start of The Roses, a counsellor asks a couple to list what they love about each other. It’s a struggle. “He has arms,” is about as good as it gets. The actors who play them are less reticent. Highlights are itemised before I’ve even asked. “I love your hair,” Olivia Colman tells Benedict Cumberbatch. “Short at the sides! Brilliant!” It’s their first time together in ages. They compare half-terms and weeding. She coos over his dislocated shoulder. He admires her suit.

OK, enough mush. What do they hate about one another?