Black Bag is about as good as mainstream filmmaking gets
See it, now
Thriller
Monday
Thursday
Scott Turow’s latest novel attempts to understand humanity
If Presumed Guilty seems slightly hollow, that may be because it’s all been done before so many times that it’s difficult to be original
Thursday
This month in culture: January 2025
What to watch this month
Monday
The late Quincy Jones, a man of many talents
He delighted and occasionally shocked the world throughout his seventy-five-year career
Wednesday
‘Slow Horses’ is thriller television at its best
It’s not funny, but it’s terrific
Tuesday
Affluent white female killer
I Care a Lot reviewed
Saturday
Stacey Abrams’s new novel is a love letter to lawyers
While Justice Sleeps by Stacey Abrams reviewed
Thursday
The genius of Stephen King
Stephen King, 69, has sold more than 350 million books, and tries not to apologise for being working-class, or imaginative, or rich. The snobbery has ebbed a little, though; in 2003 he won the National Book Foundation’s Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters, and now the BFI is screening a series of adaptations of his novels, which show how versatile he is. Why can’t you write stories like Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption, a woman asked him once. I did write it, he told her, but she did not believe him. King has published 59 novels, but he is a recovering addict and can’t remember writing them all. Most
Is Darren Aronofsky taking the piss? Mother! reviewed
The film-maker Darren Aronofsky says he wrote Mother! in five days as if in a ‘fever dream’ and, as a general rule, what happens in a fever dream should stay in the fever dream, as the content will be plainly nuts. This is plainly nuts. This is even plainly nuts with an exclamation mark. Plainly nuts! However, it’s never plainly dull, so it does have that going for it. I think. Described as a psychological horror thriller, the set-up has a poet and his younger wife living in a magnificent, isolated house in the countryside that she is doing up. She is Mother (Jennifer Lawrence) and he is Him (Javier