Alexander Larman

After a spectacularly bad few weeks for the box office – with only the Predator sequel overperforming, probably because it was rated PG-13 – Paramount is no doubt eyeing the release of their Edgar Wright/Stephen King/Glen Powell would-be blockbuster The Running Man with unusual trepidation. As well they might. Although it has been marketed as an all-action thriller in the vein of the studio’s Mission: Impossible films, it comes with the slight air of tainted goods.

Say what you will about Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul creator Vince Gilligan, but there are few showrunners who are better at starting a series off with a bang. Who could forget the spectacle, from the pilot episode of Breaking Bad, of Bryan Cranston’s pants-less, intense-looking Walter White, addressing his family – and by extension, the audience – by saying “My name is Walter Hartwell White. I live at 308 Negra Arroyo Lane, Albuquerque, New Mexico, 87104. To all law-enforcement entities, this is not an admission of guilt?" Or Bob Odenkirk’s half-hapless, half-sly Jimmy McGill, aka Saul Goodman, leading a black-and-white half-life in Omaha, Nebraska, as we slowly, inexorably observe the circumstances that have led to his downfall?

Everyone can name JFK and his (probable) assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald, or Abraham Lincoln and everyone’s least favorite actor, John Wilkes Booth. But what of James A.  Garfield, America’s short-lived (in both senses) 20th President, and his murderer, Charles Guiteau? Both men have disappeared into obscurity, at least until Candice Millard’s award-winning 2011 true-crime history Destiny of the Republic, which skillfully unpicked the sheer strangeness of the backstory behind Garfield’s protracted death and Guiteau’s conviction and execution for the crime. Garfield won election in the 1880 presidential election almost by accident.

Big-name, all-star team-ups used to be the preserve of Hollywood blockbusters – perhaps reaching its peak in 2005 with Mr. and Mrs. Smith, when Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie met, fell in love and sold a billion copies of the National Enquirer in the process. But in our new era of superhero-driven slop, where it barely matters which actor is in what picture, such things have largely fallen into abeyance. Still, even in our jaded times, there remains an undeniable thrill from seeing Katniss Everdeen and Edward Cullen together on screen at last, as they are in Die My Love.

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.