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‘Amoral, evil’: vitriolic backlash builds against comics who played Riyadh festival

Xan Brooks @xanbrooks.bsky.social · 7d

Good, stringent piece, Hannah Jane Parkinson taking no prisoners here (as opposed to Saudi, which takes literally thousands)
www.theguardian.com/stage/2025/o...

Murder by bone-saw, lashings for rape victims, punishment amputation, jail for satirists … these are the Saudi human rights abuses fuelling the fury being directed at the likes of Louis CK, Dave Chapp...

Xan Brooks @xanbrooks.bsky.social · 12d

40 years old this week. One of those rare life-changing albums when I first heard it at 16; the whole wild world kicking in the front door. ‘We sail tonight for Singapore …’

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Xan Brooks @xanbrooks.bsky.social · 13d

The one trait shared by all the worst people I’ve ever worked with was their habit of brazenly framing their disasters as triumphs.

MeidasTouch @meidastouch.com · 13d

Absolutely bizarre. Trump takes credit for a judge blocking HIS OWN PLAN to cut $34 million in funding for counterterrorism in New York.

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Xan Brooks @xanbrooks.bsky.social · 16d

Thanks Robert - & I think your calculations are sound.

Shadow Ticket by Thomas Pynchon review – his first novel in 12 years tunes into rising fascism in the US

Xan Brooks @xanbrooks.bsky.social · 16d

Thomas Pynchon's Shadow Ticket. An antic noir adventure that plays like a postmodern Tintin story. A portrait of 1930s fascism that reminds us a little of now www.theguardian.com/books/2025/s...

The 88-year-old’s jaunty whodunnit, set during the prohibition era, features clowns, Nazis and a missing cheese heiress

Extreme weather and extreme politics go hand in hand – Trump and Musk are pushing both

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Xan Brooks @xanbrooks.bsky.social · 20d

This is an excellent, clarifying article that points out pretty starkly where we are all standing right now
www.theguardian.com/environment/...

Rabble-rousing of far-right demagogues is a reminder that the battle for a fair and habitable planet cannot be fought alone

a woman in a pink sweater is talking on a telephone

Xan Brooks @xanbrooks.bsky.social · 23d

Claudia Cardinale: the only actor to star in three of Sight & Sound's 100 best films of all time, but who also played the princess in The Pink Panther, destoyer & rebuilder of adolescents the world over. The cause of & cure for all our problems. No better legacy. RIP

ALT: a woman in a pink sweater is talking on a telephone

media.tenor.com

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Xan Brooks @xanbrooks.bsky.social · 24d

Birds, Strangers & Psychos, an anthology of Hitchock-inspired short stories, is the Times's "thriller of the month". We're launching it at the BFI Southbank, 6.30pm next Monday. Drop by if you're free, or need a place to lie low. Still some vacancies. All mod cons
whatson.bfi.org.uk/Online/defau...

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Xan Brooks @xanbrooks.bsky.social · 29d

Hell is other people, specifically these people www.nytimes.com/2025/09/17/w...

Behind Castle Walls, the Rich and Powerful Celebrate Trump

www.nytimes.com

American independent cinema owes much to Sundance king Robert Redford | Adrian Horton

Xan Brooks @xanbrooks.bsky.social · 29d

Loved PTA’s One Battle After Another for its sheer antic, rolling lawlessness. It’s the red-state blue-state 21stC Pudd’nhead Wilson father-daughter coming-of-age comedy-horror mashup the world (& specifically America) needs right now

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Xan Brooks @xanbrooks.bsky.social · 29d

The Great Robert Redford: “arguably the film industry’s most consequential American over the last fifty years”
www.theguardian.com/film/2025/se...

With his Sundance film festival and institute, Robert Redford used his considerable power to bring generations of talented film-makers to a bigger audience

The Long Walk is 2025’s most brutal film – and a reminder of Stephen King’s roots

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Xan Brooks @xanbrooks.bsky.social · Sep 16

Robert Redford, 1936-2025.
“If personality is an unbroken series of successful gestures, then there was something gorgeous about him”

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Xan Brooks @xanbrooks.bsky.social · Sep 16

Damn it, he’s gone. I met him once years ago & he was everything you’d hope he’d be. Courteous & thoughtful & entirely comfortable with who he was & what he represented; neither downplaying his status nor exulting in it. Robert Redford, what a man

www.nytimes.com

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Xan Brooks @xanbrooks.bsky.social · Sep 15

Latest Indy column: on the posh streets & dodgy estates of Stephen Kingstown, a sprawling film franchise that has the MCU beat
www.independent.co.uk/arts-enterta...

Too many King adaptations have been cautious, fastidiously reverent affairs, which is why it’s so gratifying to find one that has been allowed some breathing room – and space to be a little lurid, wri...

Xan Brooks @xanbrooks.bsky.social · Sep 10

The Arthur remake & the divergent paths of Greta Gerwig & Russell Brand

Xan Brooks @xanbrooks.bsky.social · Sep 3

A Wizard of Earthsea, Huckleberry Finn & A High Wind in Jamaica.

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Xan Brooks @xanbrooks.bsky.social · Sep 2

I know her very slightly & she’s a good, impressive person

www.theguardian.com/global-devel...

Reposted by Xan Brooks

Simon Hattenstone @shattenstone.bsky.social · Sep 1

The deadly toll on journalists in the Gaza war

With foreign media barred, Palestinians have reported alone, facing the ‘most deliberate effort to kill and silence’ them ever

The mad Euro genius who conquered Hollywood – and convinced Emma Stone to go bald

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Xan Brooks @xanbrooks.bsky.social · Sep 1

Indy column: on the Yorgos Lanthimos career arc, from Dogtooth to Bugonia, & how we’re all Greek Weird Wave now

Against all odds, and via hits including ‘Poor Things’, ‘The Favourite’ and ‘The Lobster’, the Greek auteur Yorgos Lanthimos has brought his bizarre, berserk eye to mainstream British and American cin...

Late Fame review – Willem Dafoe is a natural poet in a slice-of-life New York fable

Xan Brooks @xanbrooks.bsky.social · Aug 30

My review of Kent Jones’s Late Fame, a slight, flawed film that has nonetheless stayed with me #Venice2025

A postman’s forgotten poetry collection finds new admirers in a tale of how the mystique of the past filters to the present

‘The 90s were remarkable – we weren’t all living in existential terror!’ Darren Aronofsky on Caught Stealing, his love letter to New York

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Xan Brooks @xanbrooks.bsky.social · Aug 27

First in line at this year’s Venice film festival.

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Xan Brooks @xanbrooks.bsky.social · Aug 25

Darren Aronofsky, on the grubby old joys of 1990s New York & the (potential) new pleasures of the brave new world of AI

Famed for intense dramas like Black Swan, the director’s latest film is a riotous retro crime caper. He explains why he’s battling TikTok – but embracing AI

Spike Lee is a living master – so why does no one care about his new film?

Xan Brooks @xanbrooks.bsky.social · Aug 18

Listening back to this, I misattribute a quote to Ezra Pound when it was actually Nathanael West. "Forget the epic, the masterwork. You only have time to explode"

Xan Brooks @xanbrooks.bsky.social · Aug 18

This week’s Indy column is on Spike Lee, the brilliantly awkward square peg of American cinema (even when he’s trying not to be)

‘Highest 2 Lowest’ is a punchy thriller with one of the world’s biggest actors, Denzel Washington, as its lead. Lee hasn’t lost his touch, writes Xan Brooks, but the world is forcing him out to the ma...