The recent Oscar nominee plays a cop investigating the brutal death of a teen in this noble but clunky retelling of a horrifying crime on Hulu

As a true crime drama in the year 2024, Hulu’s Under the Bridge at least knows the giant potholes of the genre to avoid. The eight-episode limited series starring Lily Gladstone and Riley Keough, an adaptation of Rebecca Godfrey’s 2005 book on a sensational murder in Canada, knows not to glorify law enforcement as hyper-competent, or to privilege perpetrators’ emotional lives over a faceless victim’s, or to depict gratuitous violence. “I think people should be remembered for who they were, not what happened to them,” Keough, as Godfrey, tells the parents of Reena Virk, a 14-year-old girl horrifically beaten to death and drowned by both strangers and her so-called friends. As an exercise in how to make entertainment out of a real crime with real perpetrators and victims – particularly Virk, ably embodied by Vritika Gupta – Under the Bridge is self-aware and empathetic, clearly thinking through implications, its heart in the right place.

Unfortunately, as a television show, it often has the feeling of flat cola – tepid, stale and reminiscent of something buzzier and brighter. Though it assiduously dodges some of the worst of the so-called “dead girl” tropes, it falls prey to the most irksome ones of prestige streaming TV: bloated episode counts, multiple timelines, blurry formal shifts, portentous voiceovers, mistaking correct politics (on racism, incompetent law enforcement, trauma and more) for nuanced, compelling craft.

The character of the journalist continues to be a trusty mainstay on both the big and small screen, but noble intentions aren’t enough to overcome cliche

If you grew up watching film and TV, you could be forgiven for believing that journalism was a popular, vaunted career. For nearly as long as writers have written movies, they have written about their jobs, and journalism – the work of chasing tips and collecting facts and creating news – is good for plot and some moral gristle. It’s also easy shorthand for a host of character traits, particularly for women – obsessive, frazzled, ambitious, independent, intelligent, perfectionist.

Media is also a famously self-obsessed industry, and for as long as there have been journalism movies, journalists like me have quibbled about their portrayals. The stereotypes nearly write themselves. In the serious journalism picture, such as Bombshell, She Said or Spotlight: female journalists doing their jobs well, confirming liberal sensibilities of the work’s importance (and of giving most of one’s life to it). In the romcom, a workaholic striver who can’t Type A their way to happiness, à la Anne Hathaway in the Devil Wears Prada or Reese Witherspoon’s frantic news anchor in Apple TV+’s the Morning Show. Sometimes the depictions are just laughably ridiculous – Anna Chlumsky’s New York mag reporter typing at her desk while going into labor , Amy Adams’s local crime reporter sleeping with the lead detective in Sharp Objects, Kate Hudson’s groundbreaking women’s magazine column titled “How to: Bring Peace to Tajikistan” in How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days.

Former American footballer and actor who was acquitted of the murder of his former wife, Nicole Brown, and her companion, Ron Goldman, in the 1995 ‘trial of the century’

On the American football field, OJ Simpson ran around, past and through defenders with almost unmatched success. “The Juice” had legendary status, as both a collegian and a pro.

Undeniably handsome and charismatic, he appeared in films and on TV, and was known in the US for a Hertz television commercial in which he sprinted through an airport, hurdling all obstacles.

From helping out with a buddy’s sex life to becoming an accomplice to graffiti, there’s almost no lengths that Larry and his pals wouldn’t go to for each other – and it was a pleasure to watch

• Warning: this article contains spoilers for the series finale

How far would go for a friend? A favour, a white lie, pretend to be Orthodox to help them skip the line for a kidney replacement? Lend your skills as a plain-speaking “social assassin” to tell their girlfriend to stop saying “L-O-L” out loud or their mother to cease smacking her lips in pleasure after sipping her drink? Conspire with them to steal a doll from their daughter’s bedroom? Claim to have had vaginal rejuvenation surgery to encourage their hated girlfriend to get it so your friend can – of course – avoid having sex with her for the six to eight weeks during which he still needs her political influence?

In Curb Your Enthusiasm, as the season finale made very clear, there was no hugging and absolutely no learning, a continuation of the ethos behind creator Larry David’s previous show, Seinfeld. (“I’m 76 years old and I have never learned a lesson in my entire life,” the fictional Larry told a child.) It ended with the core gang on a plane, bickering furiously over whether Susie Greene’s open window blind counts as a “community shade”. But in Curb, there were also no limits on the lengths to which this dysfunctional group of friends would go to help one another out of a fix, or even just in pursuit of a good wheeze, from mooting the viability of a car that runs on urine to starting quick-fix businesses that always backfired. The notion would probably make Larry sick, or at least strain one of those famous eyebrows, but Curb’s legacy is as much about friendship as it is the most frivolous aspects of social intolerance.

The successful clothing store is the focus of a new film that uncovers shadowy business practices and a bigger picture of environmental damage

If you haven’t heard of Brandy Melville, you probably don’t have a teenage girl in your life. The clothing brand – confusingly named for two characters, an American girl named Brandy and an Englishman named Melville who fall in love in Rome – is synonymous with a certain large swath of Gen Z, very online and inundated since consciousness with images of very skinny celebrities like Bella Hadid. As one ex-store associate puts it in a new HBO documentary on the brand: Brandy Melville was for the kinda basic, but very trend-aware, girl.

Over the past decade and a half, the brand built a giant following via Instagram, Tumblr and TikTok posts of and by teenage girls channeling a certain recognizable aesthetic: tiny outfits accentuating pre-adult metabolisms, exposed midriffs so taut they seem to be begging for a tape measure, long hair flowing cheerily in motion, overwhelmingly white. Most of the brand’s pieces sold for less than $40, in “one size fits all”, that size being small. What Abercrombie & Fitch was to millennials at the mall, Brandy Melville was to teenage girls on their phone – organically popular, ubiquitous and reinforcing existing, retrograde ideas of what’s cool and popular. A divisive status symbol spotted on such rail-thin celebrities as Kaia Gerber and Kendall Jenner that many people love to hate, and also secretly want.

After 120 episodes of beaming misanthropy, the comedy that changed TV bows out in exactly the right way – by doing so in the most personal manner possible to Larry David

Larry David has never been particularly good at endings. Time and time again, he has attempted to draw the curtain on Curb Your Enthusiasm . In 2005, his character died, only to be booted out of heaven by a pair of irritated angels. In 2011, the show went on extended hiatus, only to return six years later. Another death scene was filmed in 2011, but never used. Famously, David declares that each season of Curb will be the last, only to blink when it comes to actually pulling the trigger.

You can probably forgive his reticence on being definitive, since the last time David wrote an actual ending to something was the 1998 Seinfeld finale, which is still one of the most divisive bits of TV ever to air. Watched by 76.3 million viewers, it was used by David to cast moral judgment on his characters, sentencing them all to jail for essentially being ghastly and self-interested. It was a bummer of an ending, and the stink of it has followed David around ever since.

They’ve torn up the rulebook, left no taboo unbroken and freestyled one of the greatest comedies ever. As the finale airs, the Curb team reveal all about success, Springsteen – and Larry David’s soft side

For 25 years, Larry David has boldly, repeatedly gone where no one else would dare. His fictionalised alter ego has besmirched the honour of an unsuccessful kamikaze pilot who survived the second world war until the man’s son tried to kill himself (“He grazed the ship!?! … Did he say: ‘Jesus, this kamikaze business might not be for me?’”). He has hosted a dinner party featuring a contestant on the reality show Survivor having an explosive row about hardship with an actual Holocaust survivor (Survivor contestant: “I couldn’t even work out!”). At one point, despite his social circle’s protests, he even ended up befriending a sex offender. It has been outrageously funny, so toe-curlingly awkward that it’s borderline painful, but never less than utterly unique, spellbindingly watchable TV.

And this weekend, it comes to an end. After a quarter of a century spent portraying the most amusing curmudgeon in TV history, David is ready to retire Larry once and for all with Curb Your Enthusiasm’s finale. It comes off the back of one of the show’s funniest seasons ever – in which David has variously tried to buy a racist statue off a Black employee after accidentally breaking someone else’s ornament (“I just have to replace it!” “So you already have one?”). Or knocked Academy Award-winning actor Troy Kotsur clean off his feet by driving a golf ball into his back, then flashed his testicles to escape the consequences. Will we see Larry doing jail time in the finale for having unwittingly violated a law about bringing water to voters waiting in line? We’ll have to wait and see – but it’s sure to be funny.

We all know self-proclaimed Samanthas, Mirandas and Carries. I predict my generation will claim the most maligned character

If you’re uninhibited and prone to monologues about your pelvic floor, you’re a Samantha. If you’re a narcissist who’s knee-deep in Klarna loans for your RealReal purchases, you’re a Carrie. And if you subscribe to the revisionist take that Miranda’s pragmatic, no-nonsense approach to life makes her an unsung hero of feminism – then your choice is obvious.

Any woman with a television has at some point in the past two decades played “which Sex and the City character are you?” I’ve met self-proclaimed Carries, Samanthas and Mirandas. But very rarely does one ever meet a willing Charlotte.

American actor best known for his role as Gunnery Sergeant Emil Foley in the 1982 film An Officer and a Gentleman

The actor Lou Gossett Jr, who has died aged 87, is best known for his performance in An Officer and A Gentleman (1982) as Gunnery Sergeant Emil Foley, whose tough training transforms recruit Richard Gere into the man of the film’s title. He was the first black winner of an Academy Award for best supporting actor, and only the third black actor (after Hattie McDaniel and Sidney Poitier ) to take home any Oscar.

The director, Taylor Hackford, said he cast Gossett in a role written for a white actor, following a familiar Hollywood trope played by John Wayne , Burt Lancaster , Victor McLaglen or R Lee Ermey , because while researching he realised the tension of “black enlisted men having make-or-break control over whether white college graduates would become officers”. Gossett had already won an Emmy award playing a different sort of mentor, the slave Fiddler who teaches Kunta Kinte the ropes in Roots (1977), but he was still a relatively unknown 46-year-old when he got his breakthrough role, despite a long history of success on stage and in music as well as on screen.