Final Destination inspires yet another throwaway teen schlocker, this time with an increasingly risible astrological bent

As many of us impatiently wait for the sixth Final Destination film , slated for release next year over a decade since the fifth, here comes yet another limp attempt to recreate that specific, sadistic form of magic. Some curse, some teens, some shock deaths, a formula that’s been trotted out in so-what films like Wish Upon , Countdown and Truth or Dare , shrugs where shocks should be, franchise starters ending after the first round.

Which brings us to Tarot, a film wisely kept from critics until the very last second and one that audiences would be smart to keep themselves from too. It’s not quite as bad as these things can often be but flashes of competence are not enough to distract from a sense of crushing pointlessness, more watery slop served up lukewarm for undemanding Friday night horror fans, who really ought to be demanding so much more.

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The spooky comedy franchise may seem an unlikely place to find an ethnicity and faith adviser, but productions are increasingly aware of a duty to make sure communities are truthfully represented

The “sensitivity reader” is a well-established, if controversial, figure in the publishing world, offering advice on whether a book’s content might cause offence. The film and TV industry has also been forced to confront similar issues, with “intimacy coordinators” now widely employed to ensure that filmed sex scenes neither harm the actors nor outrage audiences. Perhaps less well-known, but now gaining ground in film and TV, is the role of a “cultural consultant” – advisers taken on by productions to help them navigate the choppy waters of sensitivities around ethnicity and faith.

Sajid Varda, founder and CEO of media charity UK Muslim Film and director of the UK’s inaugural Muslim international film festival , recently completed an assignment on Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire, the latest instalment of the popular and long-running series of supernatural comedies. Varda says the key to such roles is “authenticity”; it is, he says “not just saying what is wrong with this, but how can we make it better and improve it?”

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The much-derided film returns to cinemas for its 25th anniversay. Once a rare blot on the galactic landscape, these days it’s far from the only stinker in the canon

Can it really be that there are Star Wars fans who see George Lucas’s Episode I – The Phantom Menace, once considered the emblem of everything that went wrong with the long-running space saga, as a bona fide classic ripe for rehabilitation 25 years on? As the much-derided 1999 film returns to cinemas this weekend, there are rumblings in the ether that millennials, and perhaps those even younger, are completely unaware of just how much of a disaster it was. Then again, perhaps those of us who remember its debut in cinemas should be prepared to listen to voices from a new generation. Was it really so bad after all?

Part of the problem is that where it was once a rare blot on the galactic landscape, a Star Wars movie that failed to live up to the glories of the original trilogy, these days it’s far, far away from being the only rubbish film in the canon. In fact, it could be argued that when considering movies such as the execrable The Rise of Skywalker, the middling Solo: A Star Wars Story and the two painful prequel follow-ups, The Phantom Menace is closer to the mean average for the saga than it is to the bottom of the Dagobah swamp.

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Jerry Seinfeld’s origin story of Pop-Tarts is a riotous comedy full of starry cameos, and M Night Shyamalan’s thriller about a secret beach has all the twists you would expect from the maker of The Sixth Sense

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Simon Chambers’ film about his late uncle makes for candid and compelling viewing. Along with Juliet Stevenson and Julian Clary, he discusses care, contempt and infatuation

‘I’ve always liked the company of older people,” says Julian Clary, still smoothly beautiful at 64. “I like the fact they’ve lived a life they are often assumed not to have done.” He pauses. “What old people don’t know about recreational sex,” he continues, cadence familiar as a cuckoo, “you could write on the back of an incontinence pad.”

There are plenty of those knocking about in Much Ado About Dying , a documentary about Clary’s old drama teacher. But David Chambers – 86 when we first have the pleasure – does not put them to their intended use. They plug holes in the wall, drafts in the window. One becomes a tea cosy.

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The history of how the all-American breakfast snack was created is served up with lashings of goofiness in this comedy caper

Standup veteran Jerry Seinfeld makes his directing debut with this decent family comedy that puts a surreal twist on the history of Pop-Tarts, one of the US’s most beloved snacks: the sheer goofiness and disposable pointlessness are entertaining.

Seinfeld created the film with co-writers Spike Feresten, Andy Robin and Barry Marder, the same writing team that worked on Bee Movie , the animation that Seinfeld starred in, produced and co-wrote in 2007. Unfrosted doesn’t quite have the flair of Bee Movie, but there’s a steady stream of excellent gags, creating a rising crescendo of silliness similar in effect to Seinfeld’s own distinctive falsetto-hysterical declamation at the moment of ultimate joke-awareness. There are also nice supporting roles and cameos, including an extraordinary dual walk-on from Jon Hamm and John Slattery, recreating their ad exec Mad Men personae Don Draper and Roger Sterling.

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Shares in media giant, whose chief executive Bob Bakish was this week ousted amid reports of clash with Shari Redstone, spike 12%

Paramount Global’s share price soared on Thursday following a report that Sony Pictures and Apollo Global Management had made a $26bn offer for the troubled media giant.

According to the Wall Street Journal, the offer was made on Wednesday by Sony chief executive Tony Vinciquerra and Aaron Sobel, a partner at Apollo. Paramount’s shares spiked 12% on the news.

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Since the millennium, there is substantially less erotic content on our screens – with changing audience tastes and ‘intimacy coordinators’ to blame

The advent of explicit films such as Poor Things, Saltburn and All of Us Strangers has been heralded as marking a revival of sex on screen – in the face of a reported lack of interest from Gen Z audiences . However, a new report suggests that in fact the Hollywood sex scene is declining fast: there is almost 40% less sexual content in major films than there was at the start of the millennium.

Commissioned by the Economist from data analyst Stephen Follows , the report assembled data on the 250 highest-grossing films each year since 2000, and found movies released in 2023 had just over 60% of the erotic content found in the top 250 in 2000. Broken down by genre, the decline was steepest in action movies (a drop of approximately 70% over the same period) – while romantic films recorded much less change, with a drop of just under 20%.

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