knotty

Simon Ross’s capable debut can be hung in a gallery of films featuring unnerving paintings, from The Picture of Dorian Gray to Ghostbusters 2 and In the Mouth of Madness. Wife turned carer Sofia (Natalia Córdova-Buckley) stumbles across an uncanny canvas in the attic of the mansion to which she has brought her catatonic husband Alex (Ryan Kwanten); it is supposedly a self-portrait of his great-grandfather, but she is startled to find that it is a spitting image of Alex. While this gothic chestnut, and the psychodrama that…

It’s a slippery thing, the latest film from Darren Aronofsky. And not just because of the air of general clamminess that pervades this claustrophobic theatre adaptation (although if it were possible for a camera lens to sweat, then cinematographer Matthew Libatique’s would probably do so throughout). More, it’s due to the effortlessly duplicitous way the director pushes and pulls the audience of this story of grief and self-destruction, starring a fat-suited Brendan Fraser as Charlie, a chronically obese shut-in who is…

The shock of Salman Rushdie’s horrific onstage maiming last August made it hard not to feel that we had somehow let our guard drop. After all, hadn’t the world’s most famous living writer long been a figure of fun? We scoffed at his thin-skinned tweets bizarrely comparing a female New York Times critic to Shakespeare’s Iago after she panned one of his novels; we giggled when a model leaked his out-of-the-blue message (“you look so gorgeous and hottt!”) and called him a “horny jerk”. By the time Rushdie made a cameo on…

Folks blessed with a soft touch seem to have no problem getting to grips with delicate objects, but it can be a tough ask for robots. Researchers at the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) have taken a strength-in-numbers approach with a gripper that curls multiple thin tubes around a fragile object.The SEAS team notes that many of the robotic grippers in use or in the lab combine machine-learning algorithms, complicated feedback control systems and numerous sensors with operator…

Ernst & Young’s tax experts bring in lots of cash and are highly valued by the firm’s clients. Many members of the 70,000 strong group don’t know where they will be working next year, or if they will be competing against each other.The proposed breakup of EY into a steady firm focused on auditing companies and a faster-growing consulting business has reached the nitty-gritty phase after its top executives approved the split. More than any other large group at the firm, the tax team will be dismembered in the split.…

Whose emotions are these, anyway? Cass McCombs’s 10th album is an easy, rolling record that grapples with inner complexity, telling stories about musicians and soldiers, lovers and seekers. Even as this seasoned US singer-songwriter butts up against philosophical quandaries or quotes from Sufism, he never loses track of the everyday. When he isn’t making singular records, McCombs has worked in demolition and crashed on couches; his is a landscape of fast-food restaurants and karaoke machines, where vans break down, people…