Alexander Larman

It may be coincidence or clever record company marketing, but the two current reigning queens of the British pop music scene, Lily Allen and Florence Welch, have released their two latest records within a week of one another. Allen, who has admittedly been more involved in acting and selling pictures of her feet on OnlyFans of late, brought out the excoriating and autobiographical West End Girl, which is said to explore the compromises and difficulties of her short-lived marriage to Stranger Things actor David Harbour. And, not to be outdone, Welch and her band Florence and the Machine have come back with her first album since 2022’s excellent Dance Fever; it promises another smorgasbord of operatic vocals, soaring choruses and BIG tunes. Does it work?

If you want to see Guillermo del Toro’s no-expense-spared adaptation of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein this Halloween, you’ll have to hope that you’re living in a major city with an arthouse cinema. That is because, as part of the Faustian deal that Netflix strikes with the filmmakers whom it gives blank checks to realize their dream projects, the pictures that they make get only the most token of cinematic releases before they are sent onto the streaming service, there to become part of the algorithm for all eternity.

Ever so often, a film project – especially one that never ended up happening – emerges into the public domain to a mixture of disbelief and disappointment. So it has proved with Steven Soderbergh’s Star Wars film, tentatively entitled The Hunt for Ben Solo. The picture was to have been a sequel to the little-loved The Rise of Skywalker and focused on Adam Driver’s character Kylo Ren, aka Ben Solo, the son of Han Solo and Princess Leia who finds himself torn between the noble impulses of the Force and the more dastardly influence of the Dark Side. Given that Soderbergh is nobody’s idea of a conventional blockbuster director, the results would, at the very least, have been interesting.

If you’re a big Bruce Springsteen fan, then this weekend’s new release, Deliver Me from Nowhere, will be one of the year’s most eagerly awaited releases. But more-casual fans of the Boss – and I include myself in this category, despite a great admiration for a vast amount of the Springsteen recorded canon – may find the film, which focuses on the recording of his notoriously sparse Nebraska album in the early Eighties, a strange mixture of hard-going and unedifying.

If you watched The Paper and, like most of its viewers, remained unimpressed by its comparatively limp updating of The Office – and I’m still haunted by the sheer awfulness of Sabrina Impacciatore’s performance in it – then you’ll be delighted to hear that Tim Robinson’s new show, The Chair Company, which is made by HBO, is the dark workplace comedy that the world needs right now. While it’s too early to say whether it’s a true classic along the lines of The Office, or a less impressive but still enjoyable achievement, it represents another success for Robinson, who is inexorably turning himself into one of the most interesting comedians and writers in the industry.