Culture

From Harry Potter to The Crying Game, Susie Figgis’ explosive enthusiasm makes her an indispensable casting director film

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💥 Read this insightful post from Culture | The Guardian 📖 📂 Category: Film,Books,Culture,Film industry,Business ✅ Key idea: I I first met Susie Figgis over 40 years ago when I interviewed her for The Company of Wolves, my first film production with Neil Jordan. We met at the Scala cinema where I was working at the time, it was a busy and noisy office, but it was a sunny day, so we went up to the roof. Susie, already a legend having starred in Stephen Frears' Bloody Kids, Laura Mulvey's groundbreaking films and Ben Kingsley's Gandhi, unleashes a volcanic eruption…

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Prashasti Singh: Divine Feminine review – A captivating hour of absurdly intelligent stand-up | comedy

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💥 Read this must-read post from Culture | The Guardian 📖 📂 Category: Comedy,Comedy,Culture,Stage,Soho theatre ✅ Key idea: MOdesti: “I don't speak for all women...” Swagger: "...but I speak for many." Prashasti Singh's novel The Divine Feminine moves between these two poles, now denouncing her vulnerabilities as an unmarried woman in her thirties in modern India, now running the pedestal of twenty-first-century gender politics. A deft balance is struck, with enough self-mocking silliness to endear itself and keep us entertained, but also some engaging reflection on Singh's home country and the progress she has made towards women's liberation.This is the…

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“To be really successful, you have to be straight-up sexy”: Ben Whishaw in New York voluptuousness as Peter Hogar | the biography

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🔥 Discover this trending post from Culture | The Guardian 📖 📂 Category: Biopics,Film,Ben Whishaw,Peter Hujar,Art and design,Culture,Rebecca Hall,Drama films,Photography,Art 💡 Here’s what you’ll learn: HeyOn December 19, 1974, writer Linda Rosencrantz went to her friend Peter Hujar's apartment in New York and asked the photographer to describe exactly what he had done the day before. He spoke in great detail about Allen Ginsberg's photo shoot for the New York Times (it did not go well—Ginsberg was too performative for the kind of intimacy Hugar craved). He also described the Chinese takeaway he ate and how his friend Vince Aletti…

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The latest in the sci-fi adventure series is the longest and worst yet

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✨ Check out this awesome post from BBC Culture 📖 📂 Category: ✅ Here’s what you’ll learn: The third installment in James Cameron's hugely successful franchise is "197 minutes of screensaver graphics, heavy-handed dialogue, loose plotting, and New Age hippie spirituality."Avatar and Avatar: The Way of Water are two of the highest-grossing films of all time, so you can't blame James Cameron for continuing his sci-fi adventure series. But the third episode, Avatar: Fire and Ash, strongly suggests that he should quit while he's still ahead. Every Avatar movie to date has been longer and worse than the last, and…

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Behind the Scenes of the Spectacular Turandot at the Royal Opera – Photo Essay | Opera

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✨ Read this awesome post from Culture | The Guardian 📖 📂 Category: Opera,Classical music,Culture,Music,Royal Opera House 📌 Main takeaway: ANedri Zerban's show, with dazzling designs by Sally Jacobs, debuted in 1984 and is the Royal Opera's longest-running production. This is its 19th revival: the show on 18 December will be its 295th showing at Covent Garden. Turandot addresses grand emotions and even grander themes: love, fear, devotion, strength, loyalty, life, and death in a fictionalized version of imperial China. And of course, there is certainly the most famous moment in the opera, the wonderful aria Nessun Dorma."If the opera…

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10 of the biggest movie flops of 2025

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🔥 Check out this insightful post from BBC Culture 📖 📂 Category: 💡 Here’s what you’ll learn: Makol Bollay(Credit: McCall Pollay)7. Springsteen: Save me from nowhereSpringsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere could have been this year's answer to A Complete Unknown, a drama about a respected American singer-songwriter who focused on one major point in his career. The Bear's Jeremy Allen White made an effort to sing and play like Bruce Springsteen, and writer-director Scott Cooper had already made an Oscar-nominated film about an American singer-songwriter - albeit a fictional one - Crazy Heart (2009). Despite all this, audiences could not…

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Now that’s a callback! Could old jokes become the new trend of comedy? | comedy

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✨ Explore this must-read post from Culture | The Guardian 📖 📂 Category: Comedy,Stage,Comedy,Culture,Theatre,Soho theatre ✅ Main takeaway: forHe tours classic albums in their entirety. Movies are being re-released to celebrate big anniversaries. Great plays are performed over and over again. But in live-action comedy, revival is no big deal. It is an art form based on surprise, the surprise of the new. Recycling old materials is not something that has been done. But could that be about to change? I saw two Soho Theater shows being revived to celebrate their 10th anniversary, by comedians who clearly saw the value…

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Musicians are deeply concerned about AI. So why are the major labels embracing it? | Music

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💥 Explore this awesome post from Culture | The Guardian 📖 📂 Category: Music,Artificial intelligence (AI),Computing,Culture,Technology,Music industry,Business 💡 Here’s what you’ll learn: This was the year that AI-generated music went from jokey curiosity to mainstream force. Velvet Sundown, a wholly AI act, generated millions of streams; AI-created tracks topped Spotify’s viral chart and one of the US Billboard country charts; AI “artist” Xania Monet “signed” a record deal. BBC Introducing is usually a platform for flesh-and-blood artists trying to make it big, but an AI-generated song by Papi Lamour was recently played on the West Midlands show. And jumping up…

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Review of “The Innocents of Florence” by Joseph Lozzi – How Abandoned Children Spurred the Flourishing of Renaissance Art | History books

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🔥 Read this awesome post from Culture | The Guardian 📖 📂 Category: History books,Books,Culture,Children 💡 Main takeaway: CJoseph Lozzi, a professor at Bard College in New York, is a Dante scholar whose books argue for the relevance of the great Italian art and literature of the late Middle Ages and the Renaissance to our time. He was a great champion of the humanities in public life, and did for Dante what his fellow poet Daniel Mendelssohn did for Homer in the Odyssey and other books.This short volume tells the story of the Hospital of the Innocents in Dante's hometown…

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The Protein Dance: The Magic Flute Review – An Enchanting Family Show Inspired by Mozart’s Opera | Dance

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🚀 Read this must-read post from Culture | The Guardian 📖 📂 Category: Dance,Stage,Children's theatre,Opera,Culture,Classical music,Music 💡 Here’s what you’ll learn: HeyOne of the things that makes this all-ages version of The Magic Flute so successful is the way it effortlessly brings together all its components – dance, text, operatic arias, and a dreamy folk reinterpretation of Mozart's music – in service of the story. This fantastically twisted narrative is presented clearly enough for everyone to understand (recommended age is five and up, and it's fun for adults, too).The magic of the flute... Pamina, Tamino, and the Queen of the…

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