The Harry Potter and Death of Stalin actor has found fame with a new audience in hit TV show

He has worked in the industry for more than three decades, and appeared in blockbusters, but for a long time Jason Isaacs had managed to eschew the limelight.

Then came The White Lotus, and suddenly the 61-year-old Liverpudlian became an internet sensation. He presented an award at the Brits, and was part of ITV’s Oscars coverage last month, bemusing viewers with his refreshing honesty. “Whoever at ITV decided to get Jason Isaacs as part of their coverage is a genius,” one fan commented .

Our industry must reckon with how we’ve trivialised activism by turning it into comms strategy – only to abandon it

Nobody likes to admit we need marketing, but the discipline has always been necessary to match people with the products and services that fulfil their needs and desires.

It started simply enough, with us focusing primarily on brands’ features and tangible benefits. But as consumer society evolved, we moved on to symbolic benefits: identities, lifestyles. Finally, we began selling values: an ideology that hit its zenith between 2015 and 2022 in the era of “brand purpose”.

Eugene Healey is brand strategy consultant, educator and creator

The recent Bridget Jones sequel, a big hit at the UK box office, celebrates the romance between its middle-aged star and her gen-Z lover, but from Babygirl to The Mother, how do women on screen with younger partners usually fare?

At this admittedly early stage of 2025, with all the noisy blockbusters of summer still ahead of us, the UK’s box-office report tells a nostalgic story. The year’s highest-grossing new release, raking in more than double its nearest rival, Captain America , is Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy – a sequel in which its American distributors had so little confidence that they booted it straight to streaming. Brits who missed it in cinemas can finally access it on VOD this week. The film itself is something of a pleasant surprise too: a tender-hearted, flannel-cosy romcom – easily the best in the series since the first, 2001’s Bridget Jones’s Diary – now suffused with the gentle melancholy of middle age.

Age, of course, is a critical concern of this instalment, which offers Renée Zellweger’s ever-plucky Bridget, now a widowed mother of two, a pair of romantic choices: Chiwetel Ejiofor’s nice, matchingly middle-aged schoolteacher, and Leo Woodall’s flashier gen-Z Lothario. You can probably guess who prevails, though the film seems pleasingly amenable to either option: the possibility of dating across a generation or two isn’t played for shaming comedy. In that respect, this otherwise familiar bit of comfort viewing is relatively fresh.

This exhilarating debut about working-class girls growing up in the hope-starved atmosphere of a small northern English city feels essential

Sometimes you need to leave a place before you can write about it, and Colwill Brown’s Doncaster from the late 90s to 2015 is that place. This lacerating, exhilarating debut novel, written almost entirely in South Yorkshire dialect, spans nearly 20 years in the lives of its protagonists Kel, Shaz and Rach, from the Spice Girls to the drug spice. It manages to be both boisterous and bleak, life-enhancing and life-denying, familiar and yet wholly original. It feels essential. You will probably read nothing else like it this year.

“Remember when we thought Donny wut whole world? Before we knew we wa Northern, when we seemed to be central, when we carved countries out ut farmers’ fields, biking through neck-high rapeseed, cutting tracks … ask anyone non-Northern, they’ll only know Donny as punchline of a joke, or place they changed trains once ont way to London.” The novel begins as a chorus, musing and retrospective, forcefully acerbic. Each chapter relays a separate, nonlinear, intensely involving incident. Sometimes a rueful, omniscient plural “we” is used; more often second- and first-person narratives spill out from one of the trio. In one chapter the girls’ names are changed to the characters they play in a school production of Romeo and Juliet, without identifying who is who.

This blackly comic, propulsively fun tale of a disgraced hedge fund manager turned crook is all about the one-time Don Draper. He lifts the whole thing

Jon Hamm has one of the great TV faces. Square-jawed and ruggedly suave, it’s the face of a matinee idol with a dangerous edge. The quiff is well-coiffed but grey-flecked. That Marlboro Man chin looks unshaven by lunchtime. Those hooded eyes have a weary, lounge lizard quality. One of his first Hollywood parts was a 1997 episode of Ally McBeal, where he played the aptly named “Gorgeous Guy at Bar”. A decade later, Hamm became the alpha face of a certain prestige drama. Ad Men, was it? Mad Dogs? Something like that.

Your Friends & Neighbors (Apple TV+, 11 April) is a fitting new vehicle for Hamm’s slippery good looks. The launch episode is bookended by shots of his big, mildly befuddled face in screen-filling closeup. This show knows exactly what’s it’s doing. It is blackly comic, frothily fun and highly moreish.

After his dad died at 67, the 12 Years a Slave film-maker knew it was only a matter of time before he would get prostate cancer, too. The disease kills 12,000 men a year in the UK – a disproportionate number of them black. Now, in a bid to save lives, he is speaking out about his own diagnosis, alongside the doctors who successfully treated him

Steve McQueen felt relieved when he was diagnosed with prostate cancer. He had no symptoms, was perfectly fit, at the peak of his game. Yet the Oscar-winning film-maker and artist believed it was inevitable. After all, his father had died from it, and he is a black man. The statistics speak for ­themselves. They are as overwhelming as they are bleak. One in eight men will get prostate c­ancer. They are two and a half times more likely to get it if their father or brother had it. They’re twice as likely to get it if they’re black – and they’re two and a half times more likely to die from it, too.

McQueen is here today with his urology specialist Prof Suks Minhas and surgeon Ben Challacombe to talk about the nitty-gritty of the disease that is killing so many men. But he believes he might easily not have been. If he had known as little as his father had, he may well be dead. McQueen feels grateful and guilty, and is determined to make people more aware. After all, prostate cancer is eminently treatable. And yet more than 12,000 men die from it in the UK every year – well over one an hour. Simply unacceptable, he says.

Jason Momoa and Jack Black get building in the video game spinoff, while Charlie Brooker’s dystopian anthology goes onboard the USS Callister again

A Minecraft Movie
Out now
You know how it is – you’re hanging out minding your own business when you’re pulled through a random portal into a three-dimensional world made up of voxels. That’s the fate that befalls Jason Momoa, Sebastian Hansen, Emma Myers and Danielle Brooks, where they meet Jack Black in this adaptation of the popular game.

Mussorgsky’s Khovanshchina – set in the troubled 1680s – can almost describe current events, say directors

A Russian political leader sings about war with Ukrainians and the need for a “durable peace”. The fractured political elite argues over whether they should pursue closer ties with Europe or embrace Russian traditions.

The plot of Modest Mussorgsky’s opera Khovanshchina was written in the 1870s and is set in the 1680s. But, as the characters lament the fact that their homeland is mired in an endless cycle of violence and unhappiness, the dark and brooding work can feel alarmingly contemporary.