The Room Next Door review – Almodóvar’s English-language debut is extravagant and engrossing

Julianne Moore and Tilda Swinton give luxuriously self-aware performances as two old friends who are reunited in a doggedly mysterious drama

Peter Bradshaw

Wed 23 Oct 2024 07.00 BST

When this film won the Golden Lion for Pedro Almodóvar at the Venice film festival this summer, there were three kinds of surprised critic. Some were surprised to learn that this was Almodóvar’s first ever major European festival award; others that this should be the film to finally bag it … and then there were those who were politely surprised that it should have won anything at all. I myself found it as extravagant and engrossing and doggedly mysterious as anything he has done recently, with luxuriously self-aware performances from Julianne Moore and Tilda Swinton, and an undertow of darkness often overlooked by yeasayers and naysayers.

Roman Polanski: lawsuit alleging director raped teenager in 1973 settled and dismissed

Civil suit that claimed the now 91-year-old sexually assaulted a 16-year-old in Los Angeles in 1973 has been settled to ‘mutual satisfaction’ of both parties

Sian Cain and agencies

Wed 23 Oct 2024 02.14 BST

Review

The Drowned by John Banville review – death and drizzle in 50s Ireland

Tight-lipped humour thrums through the latest in the Booker winner’s Strafford and Quirke crime series, which centres on a university professor and his missing wife

Anthony Cummins

Sun 13 Oct 2024 15.00 BST

 

The books of my life

Karl Ove Knausgård: ‘The book that changed me as a teenager? The History of Bestiality’

The Norwegian author on the magic of Ursula K LeGuin, returning to Virginia Woolf, and the insight of Jorge Luis Borges

Friday 18 October 2024

My earliest reading memory
One of the most intriguing books, when I was around six years old, was Gangles by Ronald McCuaig. The main character, a wild girl from Australia, could stand on top of fountains and travelled around with a whale by balancing on the water spray the whale exhaled. Reading that book was one of the great experiences of my childhood. That is completely impossible to understand when I leaf through it now: how could something so small grow into something so huge? Pure magic

 

Books

Siri Hustvedt to write a book about her late husband Paul Auster

The American writer is 120 pages into a memoir about her relationship with the New York Trilogy author, entitled Ghost Stories

Lucy Knight

Thu 17 Oct 2024 15.41 BST

Karla’s Choice: A John le Carré Novel by Nick Harkaway review – the Circus is back in town

John le Carré’s son does him proud in an excellent spy thriller about a Soviet agent that faithfully bridges two of his father’s classic tales

Anthony Cummins

Sun 20 Oct 2024 07.00 BST

Considering the drift of those books, it’s maybe unsurprising if we’ve lost sight of le Carré’s achievements as a novelist, especially in his early years. His first big hit, The Spy Who Came in from the Cold (1963), which mapped a thwarted romance on to geopolitical intrigue in divided Berlin, accelerated the spy genre’s 20th-century breakaway from jingoistic tub-thumping and gung-ho adventure. By the time of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (1974), an ensemble psychodrama in which the British plot against one another as much as against the Soviets, le Carré’s narrative energy is generated more by gnarly workplace tensions rather than conventional derring-do, which is nonetheless tinglingly present in the book’s shattering finale.

Beam Stoker / Reader stumbles on Dracula’s ancestors in a Dublin library

 

Bram Stoker

Reader stumbles on Dracula’s ancestors in a Dublin library

The unknown Bram Stoker story Gibbet Hill, published soon before the author began working on Dracula, has eerie echoes of his vampire classic

Ella Creamer

Sat 19 Oct 2024 00.00 BST

In a Dublin library once frequented by James Joyce and WB Yeats, beneath a turquoise and white domed ceiling and surrounded by oak shelving, Brian Cleary stumbled across something by Dracula author Bram Stoker he believed no living person had ever read.

 

Cuba

Cuba suffers second total power blackout in two days

Authorities had said they were re-establishing electricity service after a power plant failed on Friday

Reuters in Havana

Sat 19 Oct 2024 14.08 BST

Cuba was plunged into blackout for a second time on Saturday after its electrical grid collapsed again hours after authorities announced they had begun re-establishing service.