Murderous unicorns run amok in Alex Scharfman’s gory American horror that gleefully embraces a lo-fi aesthetic but lacks sufficient bite

What if unicorns were badass? What if, rather than the twee, sparkly fairy creatures that distribute magic and glittery microplastic at kids’ themed birthday parties, unicorns were fearsome beasts with deranged amber eyes, huge tombstone teeth that could sever a man’s arm, and horns covered in the entrails of their victims like flesh pennants? It’s an appetising central premise. And this Paul Rudd and Jenna Ortega-starring horror comedy, produced by the achingly hip boutique studio A24, certainly delivers on the grisly, torso-skewering gore. Maybe the jokes could have been sharper, but at least the unicorns’ horns make their point.

Killer unicorns are not an entirely novel concept. The ultraviolent 2022 cult feature animation Unicorn Wars – described by its director as “ Bambi meets Apocalypse Now meets the Bible” – pitted unicorns against teddy bears in a savage battle for supremacy. But it’s a sufficiently distinctive selling point for this pulpy feature debut from producer turned director Alex Scharfman. What’s less original is the messaging that underpins the blood-sodden mess: that the real monsters are not the unicorns, but the evil representatives of big pharma – in this case, company boss Odell, played by Richard E Grant , his trophy wife, Belinda, played by Téa Leoni, and their idiot son, Shepard, a role that allows Will Poulter to hog the lion’s share of the best jokes – plus most of the recreational drugs.

In UK and Irish cinemas

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The actor talks about getting excited at the cinema, being lured to kids’ parties and buying amazing breakfast samosas from the farmers’ market

Sunday highlights? Spending time with Eric Cantona, my dog. He’s a nine-year-old grey French bulldog. I meet my friends for a chatty run on the heath, then my husband, Matt, will meet me and we’ll walk Eric. The dog hates walking around our park because he finds it boring.

What do you chat about? Gossip. DIY. My friend Becca is renovating her kitchen. We’re trying to move, so there’s quite a lot of very dull chat about conveyancing.

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All her life Jean Hannah Edelstein had tried to feel comfortable with her breasts, battling unwelcome attention and breastfeeding woes. But then came cancer and a double mastectomy – and she realised she was losing something she loved

Let me tell you about my breasts, of blessed memory. That’s not something I would have said while I still had them. I was quite prim, you see, and maybe I still am, but a double mastectomy gives you license to say “‘breast” over and over again, without the usual consequences. My breasts were real, and they were spectacular.

That’s a Seinfeld reference, if you’re not familiar. Seinfeld was one of the shows that I watched often in my adolescent years when my breasts first asserted themselves. It was among our key texts. We were in late-20th-century America, my breasts and I. It was a time and place that taught me that women’s bodies – breasts, specifically – were objects of desire, and jokes, and danger. Friends , Baywatch , Melrose Place . Clueless , Scream . Britney, Beyoncé. Monica Lewinsky.

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The American photographer​ captured life​ behind the wheel ​across the US and elsewhere over three decades, using a vehicle’s angles to frame the world outside

It’s 3.35pm in Beijing and everything is happening. The wide street, bathed in slanted afternoon sun, is filled with traffic. We are in the back seat of a taxi, paused at the mercy of the traffic controller atop his tiered stand, like a figurine on a wedding cake. The edges of the road are clogged with cyclists rushing towards and away from us, but mostly what we see is cars, cars and more cars, including the interior of our own.

The four-wheeled automobile is the subject and the vehicle , so to speak, of American photographer Clark Winter’s Here to There: Photographs from the Road Ahead , which chronicles three decades of road life across the US and beyond. As a youth, Winter was offered a rare place to study at the prestigious Rhode Island School of Design under American photography luminaries such as Aaron Siskind and Harry Callahan. Realising he wanted to know more about the world before fixing it with his lens, he instead took an entry-level job at JP Morgan, who funded a year of education in finance and then sent him across the world to learn about global markets. He took his Leica with him.

Here to There. Photographs from the Road Ahead is published by Damiani (€50)

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Adrien Brody, Paapa Essiedu and Romola Garai are some of the big stars of the night. Plus: Bruce Parry watches a teeth-removal ritual. Here’s what to watch this evening

10.15pm, ITV1

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Writer and director behind Taxi Driver and American Gigolo accused by former employee in lawsuit

Paul Schrader , the writer of Taxi Driver and director of American Gigolo, has been accused in a lawsuit of sexually assaulting his former personal assistant, firing her when she wouldn’t acquiesce to advances and reneging on a settlement that was meant to keep the allegations confidential.

The former assistant, identified in court documents as Jane Doe, sued the filmmaker and his production company on Thursday. She is seeking a judge’s order to enforce the agreement after Schrader said he couldn’t go through with it. The terms, including a monetary payment, were not disclosed.

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The 83-year-old played his first date of an intimate 20-city tour after quitting live performances back in 2018

Paul Simon largely avoided mention of the health problems that had kept him off the road for the previous seven years when the storied singer-songwriter kicked off his return – and evident farewell – tour in New Orleans on Friday.

Yet, having strummed and crooned his way through some of his catalogue’s more discreet entries, and having reached a part where he treated the audience to a closing salvo of three of his mega hits, Simon made apparent reference to them by letting some lyrics from The Boxer hang in the air.

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It's difficult to underestimate the massive influence that Disney's 1982 cult science fiction film, TRON , had on both the film industry—thanks to combining live action with what were then groundbreaking visual effects, rife with computer-generated imagery—and on nerd culture at large.  Over the ensuing decades there has been one sequel, an animated TV series, a comic book miniseries, video games, and theme park attractions, all modeled on director Steve Lisberg's original fictional world.

Now we're getting a third installment in the film franchise: TRON: Ares , directed by Joachim Rønning (Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales, Maleficent: Mistress of Evil) , that serves as a standalone sequel to 2010's TRON: Legacy . Disney just released the first trailer and poster art, and while the footage is short on plot, it's got the show-stopping visuals we've come to expect from all things TRON .

(Spoilers for ending of TRON: Legacy below.)

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The Irish author on his new ‘violent seafaring epic’, his appetite for body horror and living his entire life book-first

Oisín Fagan, 33, grew up in County Meath and lives in Dublin. In 2020 he was shortlisted for the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse comic fiction prize with his first novel, Nobber , about the Black Death’s arrival in the Irish village that gives the book its title. His other books include the 2016 story collection Hostages , described by the Spectator as “DayGlo-Breugelish nightmares”; Ferdia Lennon calls him “one of the most strikingly original Irish writers working today”. His new novel, Eden’s Shore , is a violent seafaring epic centred on a Spanish colony in Latin America at the end of the 18th century.

How did this book begin for you?
It’s a confluence of things I’ve been interested in all my life: Latin American literature, history, revolutionary politics, spirituality. Like Nobber , it’s about a dying town with a proliferation of characters, which I like. That’s not new – it’s Balzac, it’s Dickens – but for some reason we’ve distilled novels down to chamber pieces of six or seven characters; to me, that’s theatre, which I also love, but novels can proliferate horizontally in a way that other forms can’t.

What draws you to set your novels in the past?
You can do things with language and form that might not be as accepted in contemporary work, but I don’t see myself as a historical novelist. Literary fiction seems quite contemporary at the moment; historical fiction seems to be slipping into “genre”, like fantasy. In other parts of the world, it’s just part of literary fiction. We’re living through a moment in Irish literature with a lot of very good Irish writers who are all very different and talented, but maybe they’re not experimenting in genre as much as they would do elsewhere in the world. Because I find myself an Irishman among these people, you’re like, ‘Oh, he’s different.’ In the 1960s in America, or Latin America in the 50s and 70s, you’d be like, ‘Oh, he’s just one of the lads.’

There are some pretty grisly scenes here. What were they like to write?
The nuts and bolts of novel formation are difficult for me – setting up a scene, getting from one place to another – but give me someone picking bullets out of someone’s gut and I think: here we fucking go. I’m writing for these moments where the body becomes real. Like, the eyeball scene... you should’ve seen the 300 words that were deleted; you’d have been seeing it for the rest of your life. I love my cousin to bits, but he had this fear of eyes as a child; mention the word “eye” and you’d see him kind of flinch. I tapped into that.

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