Victoria Pendleton is one of Britain’s greatest ever athletes, but has often felt like a failure and fraud. She tells Simon Hattenstone about her Olympic golds, the misery that came with them, and the joy she has found since she retired. And Twisters is the tornado blockbuster that almost has it all. But its two hot stars – Glen Powell and Daisy Edgar-Jones – avoid a climactic smooch. Is Steven Spielberg to blame?

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Hammersmith Apollo, London
Played at the volume of a pantomime, this makeover of the fairytale favourite is flatly unadventurous

You might have walked into the Emerald City. The art deco auditorium of Hammersmith’s Apollo is bathed in green light, the stage dressed with a curtain of ivy. But we’re meeting an ogre not a wizard and, this being Shrek, he’s in the outhouse taking a dump.

There’s plenty more toilet humour to come in this revival of Jeanine Tesori and David Lindsay-Abaire’s 2008 musical, based on the 2001 Oscar winner and William Steig’s book, now in London after a UK and Ireland tour. With booming narration, it is played at the volume of a pantomime and comes with panto’s random topical references (to Jude Bellingham and Baby Reindeer ). There are some game performances – and Cherece Richards is on fire with a sensational singing voice as the Dragon – but the show becomes bogged down by its sludgy monotony and often unmemorable songs.

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The film-maker has been accused of acting inappropriately on the set of his self-funded sci-fi epic Megalopolis

Videos have emerged of director Francis Ford Coppola trying to kiss female extras on the set of his new film Megalopolis.

Variety obtained footage of the film-maker taken by a crew member during a nightclub scene on set last year. The Guardian had originally reported that the 85-year-old was seen as “old school” in his behaviour around women while shooting, pulling women to sit on his lap and kissing extras to get “them in the mood”.

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Documentary expertly follows the only woman to have climbed the mountain 10 times through spectacular scenery and a traumatic personal life

This portrait of title subject Lhakpa Sherpa , the only woman to have summited Mount Everest 10 times, is so densely packed with uplifting moments that at times it feels like emotional mountaineering – but the climb has terrific views. British director Lucy Walker ( Waste Land , Blindsight , Bring Your Own Brigade ) toggles back and forth between on-the-snow-face footage of Lhakpa’s latest ascent and interview material where she recounts her life, a story full of extraordinary achievement but also the most tragically quotidian misfortune when she gets married to an abusive alcoholic. Interestingly, like a climb, the getting-to-the-top part is only half the story and as Lhakpa heads back down, footage shot at other times hints at a complex parallel story about an immigrant woman and her daughters’ struggles to process trauma and multicultural life. In some ways, that second strand is more interesting but doesn’t have such soaring landscapes.

The daughter of yak farmers who grew up in the shadow of the world’s tallest mountain, Lhakpa was drawn to the climbing life from a young age, despite the lack of encouragement from her parents and society at large which didn’t see climbing as something women did. But, as they say, she persisted and was soon setting records. When she met Romanian George Dijmarescu, a climber like herself, they became both a romantic and climbing partnership. But George had a very dark side, one that was exposed when Michael Kodas, an embedded journalist, wrote about Dijmarescu’s violence towards Lhakpa while they were in the middle of an ascent; these reports were published while the climb was going on, which made things even worse for Lhakpa. (The reportage eventually produced a book, High Crimes, and Kodas is interviewed here.) Eventually, Lhakpa realised the situation was untenable for her and her two young daughters, Sunny and Shiny, who in the film’s present are still working through what went on.

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Marvel, DC and others try everything from standalone films to sequels stuffed with stars. But could genre experimentation be the trick that keeps the action going – and audiences watching?

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“The superhero movie is dead.” “Actually, cinema is dead! (And superhero flops are to blame).” “Can Deadpool save Marvel?” “Can James Gunn save DC?” “Can anyone save us from our own conjecture?!” Those are just some of the increasingly, hyperventilatingly high-stakes headlines that have accompanied each dud superhero release of the last few years (and there have been plenty).

No need to panic, though – these films are unlikely to ever go away. But they do need to go somewhere. And Marvel’s Deadpool & Wolverine, out now and predicted to have the biggest opening weekend in history for an R-rated movie, has left me wondering where.

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The 72-year-old convicted rapist was transferred to a prison hospital with multiple health complaints, four years into his 23-year sentence

Jailed Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein was moved to a New York hospital on Thursday with multiple ailments including Covid, his representatives said in a statement.

New York City Department of Correction records showed on Thursday that Weinstein, 72, was at the Bellevue hospital prison ward.

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Don’t read this article if you would like to watch Deadpool & Wolverine or Alien: Romulus completely unsullied. Or Total Recall. Or Lord of the Rings. In fact, please go away now!

Trailers have been responsible for ruining a whole lot of movies. More than three decades ago, if you happened to be watching Paul Verhoeven’s classic sci-fi romp Total Recall but had already seen the promo material, you probably wouldn’t have been particularly shocked at the moment when memory-addled Arnold Schwarzenegger guns down his own wife and utters the immortal line: “Consider that a divorce.” Nor would you be surprised to note that Benny the Martian driver is really a mutant, that our hero was once much more than a lowly construction worker, or that Schwarzenegger does eventually release oxygen on to the surface of Mars in the film’s denouement.

That’s because all these moments are either given away completely or heavily hinted at in the trailer . And unfortunately things have only got worse since 1990. This week Marvel boss Kevin Feige was forced to advise fans to avoid watching advance publicity altogether for the studio’s films after the newly released Deadpool & Wolverine trailer gave away one of the meta-tastic movie’s many juicy cameos, in this instance the return of Dafne Keen’s X-23 from 2017’s Logan .

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This summer’s Deadpool & Wolverine uses the superhero’s alleged pansexuality as queerbait, but turns it into a punchline

Even by the standards of opportunistic franchise cross-pollination that has fed the superhero film genre in recent years, Deadpool & Wolverine is a business merger disguised as a movie: two Marvel Comics characters previously under the jurisdiction of 20th Century Studios, now folded into the Marvel Cinematic Universe by Disney in the wake of the company’s 2019 acquisition of Fox. What fun! For the stern, steel-fingered Wolverine, this union entails more of an identity compromise than glib jokester Deadpool – a character already well-versed in the kind of wink-wink irony the MCU trades in. Co-written by Ryan Reynolds himself, Shawn Levy’s film certainly feels a more obvious extension of the first two Deadpool films than any of Wolverine’s previous vehicles. Played with an air of grizzled get-the-job-done exhaustion by Hugh Jackman , the latter often feels like an accessory to a louder, lewder protagonist.

For an MCU that has, in its post-Avengers era, increased its focus on minority representation and inclusivity, Deadpool brings more to the table than the hetero-masculine Wolverine. Introduced into the Marvel comics stable in 1992, the character was conceived as openly pansexual. “[Deadpool’s] brain cells are in constant flux,” explained Fabien Nicieza, Deadpool’s co-creator, on Twitter back in 2015. “He can be gay one minute, hetero the next, etc. All are valid.” Citing neurodivergence to explain a character’s sexuality may not be radically progressive, but in the world of mainstream superheroism, queer fans will take what scraps they can get.

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Olivia Colman and Jessie Buckley indulge in some sensational swearing in a hugely enjoyable comedy, while Stanley Kubrick’s iconoclastic horror still packs a punch

When a series of anonymous poison pen letters are sent to prim coastal town resident Edith (Olivia Colman), suspicion immediately falls on her neighbour Rose (Jessie Buckley), an Irish single mother with a boisterous, proto-feminist attitude. There is something inherently hilarious about Colman swearing, and Thea Sharrock’s fact-based 1920s comedy ladles on the creative insults as the writer’s vitriol widens to take in the whole community. Hidden behind the curtain-twitching scandal is a cautionary tale about how the victims of bullying and repression can find distorted outlets for their rage, but watching Colman and Buckley go at it is almost enough in itself.
Out now, Netflix

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