diverting

“This book doesn’t work. It must be destroyed.” Not a one-star rant from the bowels of Amazon or Goodreads, but rather the verdict of Colombian Nobel laureate Gabriel García Márquez on his now posthumously published novel, Until August, a breezy romp brewed in his 70s and previously excerpted by the New Yorker in 1999 after he read from it on stage in Madrid with the late José Saramago.The erotic adventures of a middle-aged mother, it was originally conceived as a five-part narrative more than 600 pages long, but was set…

Taking age-old expectations of how a fairytale is supposed to play out and giving them a brisk shuffle is by no means as fresh as some film-makers often like to think, upending cliches with a tired wink and a smug smirk. But Netflix’s Damsel, itself loosely similar to Hulu’s 2022 offering The Princess, doesn’t require our astonishment at its wheel reinvention to pass the bar and is far too sprightly to get overly bogged down in the self-satisfaction of such an endeavour.There are, in fact, very few surprises in store here…

Credit: Shutterstock Prison is no place for a child. Putting children in youth justice facilities can have long-lasting consequences for their physical, psychological and emotional health, well-being and development. Prison can aggravate existing health conditions and result in new ones, such as depression, suicidal thoughts, and…

Subtlety and reticence are the keynotes of this diverting if insistently downbeat new picture from Kelly Reichardt, photographed in the soft, indie-stonewashed colours that are part of this director’s signature. An artist and ceramicist in Portland, Oregon is on the verge of an important new show, but she’s plagued with personal problems. Her neighbour-slash-landlady (a fellow or rival artist, as it happens) is failing to fix the hot water in her apartment. Her cat has almost killed a pigeon in their street and she feels…