Alive

Get our free weekly email for all the latest cinematic news from our film critic Clarisse LoughreyGet our The Life Cinematic email for freeRobin Williams “would still be alive” if Christopher Reeve hadn’t died in 2004, Glenn Close has claimed.Williams, who died by suicide in 2014, was close friends with Superman actor Reeve, who died from cardiac arrest in 200, nine years after a horse riding accident left him paralysed.A new documentary, titled Super/Man: The Christopher Reeve Story, explores many facets of Reeve’s life,…

Diana Quick makes a return to the big screen – after a six-year break – with a first-rate performance in a second-rate (perhaps third-rate) film. Forever Young is a ploddingly drab British sci-fi drama that really doesn’t have what it takes to keep up with Quick; she stars as a 70-year-old writer taking an unlicensed drug to reverse the ageing process. It’s impossible to take your eyes off her: intellectually engaged and emotionally transparent. It’s a pity then that the script is unserious and uninteresting, with nothing…

Poor Matt Damon. Sure, the Oscar winner is one of the most successful actors around, having most recently starred in the Christopher Nolan awards juggernaut Oppenheimer. Conversely, he's so often the butt of the joke when it comes to his old Ocean's Eleven buddies George Clooney and Brad Pitt. The dashing duo has been known to play pranks on the Good Will Hunting star throughout their decades-spanning friendship, especially the notoriously mischievous Clooney, who memorably photobombed his pal while they were promoting…

Dick Coffee attended 781 consecutive University of Alabama football games. Meg Roh surfed through illness, storms and nightfall to maintain a seven-year daily surfing streak. Jon Sutherland ran at least 1 mile every day for over 52 years. An activity streak has the power to compel behavior, and marketers have taken note. Marketing researchers Jackie Silverman and Alixandra Barasch recently documented 101 unique instances, including Snapchat, Candy Crush Saga, Wordle and the Duolingo language learning platform, of…

"This is our fond farewell to 2023," Chris says of Saturday Night Fever cover Just in time for any New Year’s Eve dance parties, Christine and the Queens have dropped their rendition of the Bee Gees’ “Stayin’ Alive.” The rendition — which arrives days after Barry Gibb was awarded Kennedy Center Honors — hues closely to the Saturday Night Fever classic, with the “Chris Version” putting their own reverbed flourishes on the track. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4zgzOxxZw54 “Art heals!…

Chris Christmas, a fourth-generation Black cowboy with Native American roots, considers the cowboy hat to be an indispensable part of his heritage. “I think I was born with a cowboy hat,” said the 57-year-old Denverite, whose family has resided in Colorado for 120 years. With dozens of hats in his collection today, “I buy them like sneakers,” he laughed. Christmas is pressing against the longstanding stereotype of a white-washed American West by working with hat shaper Parker Orms on a line of headwear stylized on “the…

As more greenhouse gases are released into the atmosphere, it becomes harder and harder for heat to seep into space. This causes the global temperature to rise, and could even result in more greenhouse gases being released. This runaway greenhouse gas effect is a massive danger to planets like Earth, and researchers have finally figured out how it might happen.Understanding the effect that runaway greenhouse gasses can have on our planet is exceptionally important, not only to protect our own home but also to…

Alex Batty was just 11 years old when he disappeared from a holiday in Spain, along with his mother and grandfather.In October 2017, all signs of Alex disappeared until a miraculous day, Wednesday (December 13), when he walked into a police station.The now 17-year-old from Oldham, Lancashire, UK, was allegedly abducted by his mother Melanie, then 37, and grandfather David, then 58, while on a vacation in Spain in 2017.Six years after his disappearance, French prosecutors say that Alex has been found alive and well near…

Fifteen years ago, Carrie Brownstein, one half of feminist punk band Sleater-Kinney, was getting her hair cut when rowdy guitars started blaring through the salon’s speakers. What is this song, she thought, and who is this woman screaming? It took her a further 15 seconds to realise that the roars belonged to her bandmate, Corin Tucker. Their sound was scrappier than Brownstein remembered. The song she’d struggled to recognise? Dig Me Out: a galloping three-minute track that catapulted the band to international acclaim in…

‘From the writers of Toy Story,” it says on the poster for this kids’ animation, and the plot is similarly based on the idea of toys coming to life – this time, old-fashioned marionettes in a puppet theatre. But proceed with caution because The Inseparables is not a Pixar movie and, aside from two of the writers, this boring, unfunny and somewhat soulless film shares no perceivable DNA with Toy Story.The setting is Central Park in New York, where the puppets in a children’s theatre have been running the show since their…