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TV
If you only watch one, make it …
Last One Laughing UK
Prime Video
Summed up in a sentence The triumphant return of the unfailingly hilarious TV show featuring comedians trying to make each other laugh – while keeping a straight face.
What our reviewer said “This series leaves me helpless with laughter at least once an episode.” Rachel Aroesti
Further reading Last One Laughing contestant Diane Morgan’s honest playlist: ‘I was mesmerised by Kate Bush and the Smurfs, so I had great taste’
Pick of the rest
Inside the Rage Machine
BBC iPlayer
Summed up in a sentence Whistleblowers who once worked at Meta and X reveal the horrifying truth about the social media giants.
What our reviewer said “To see these companies’ machinations laid bare in under an hour, frequently by people who worked inside Zuckerberg’s factory or on the Twitter-to-X transition, until they couldn’t bear the guilt and fear any longer and left to become whistleblowers, is … quite something.” Lucy Mangan
The Plastic Detox
Netflix
Summed up in a sentence A startling documentary following an epidemiologist’s attempt to help couples conceive by reducing their exposure to plastics – raising some genuinely troubling questions.
What our reviewer said “Do viewers of documentaries like this one really change their own lifestyles after watching them? The Plastic Detox states it plainly: we really should, and most of us have a lot of work to do.” Jack Seale
Boarders
BBC iPlayer
Summed up in a sentence The hugely impressive final series of the BBC’s sharp sendup of boarding school in the UK is a riot of sex, scandals and final exams.
What our reviewer said “There is something about Boarders that feels very real.” Micha Frazer-Carroll
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The Fabulous Funeral Parlour
Channel 4
Summed up in a sentence A camp, light and touching documentary about a glamorous funeral director shaking up the death industry.
What our reviewer said “The Fabulous Funeral Parlour tries to make us feel something new about the most universal experience there is. And it succeeds.” Micha Frazer-Carroll
Film
If you only watch one, make it …
Dead Man’s Wire
In cinemas now
Summed up in a sentence Al Pacino, Colman Domingo and Myha’la excel in Gus Van Sant’s gripping take on the real-life events of 1977 when an Indianapolis businessman held his mortgage broker hostage.
What our reviewer said “The personae and performances of Pacino, Domingo and Myha’la complicate the psychopathic nastiness of the affair, and create something surreal and bizarre and often hilarious: a display of, not heartlessness, exactly, but a shrewd professional sense that pity and fear were emotions that could only benefit the kidnapper.” Peter Bradshaw
Further reading Gus Van Sant: ‘My assistant wanted to erect a statue of Luigi Mangione. My generation thought: this is murder’
Pick of the rest
La Grazia
In cinemas now
Summed up in a sentence The Great Beauty director Paolo Sorrentino works once again with actor Toni Servillo, who plays an Italian president looking back on a career of empty rectitude that amplifies the leader’s despair.
What our reviewer said “La Grazia is a stylish, soigné film, ruminative and enigmatic. Like The Great Beauty it broods on the Romanità of the capital; the Romanness, the way in which its history is inscribed on its buildings for those who understand it. And the set-piece moments are tremendous: Mariano is guest of honour at a veterans’ dinner for Italy’s mountain infantry, the Alpini, and suddenly bursts into song with them.” Peter Bradshaw
Further reading Paolo Sorrentino and Toni Servillo on smoking, cinema and secrets
Midwinter Break
In cinemas now
Summed up in a sentence Brilliantly acted portrait of rupture and rapture – directed by Polly Findlay and starring Lesley Manville and Ciarán Hinds – about interpersonal and religious tumult in late middle age.
What our reviewer said “The film creates space for Hinds and Manville to give substantial, intimate, complex performances of the kind that most movies (of whatever sort) do not allow their leads, and Manville in particular is very moving.” Peter Bradshaw
Further reading Lesley Manville’s finest films – ranked!
The Good Boy
In cinemas now
Summed up in a sentence Jan Komasa’s tale follows a couple, played by Stephen Graham and Andrea Riseborough, who plan to retrain a delinquent teen with a brutal regimen in a Kubrickian absurdist nightmare.
What our reviewer said “It’s a movie that could have been made at any time in the past 50 years, with high-concept provocations and talking points that feel like something from the age of Kubrick’s Clockwork Orange or Ôshima’s Max Mon Amour, or even, indeed, Skolimowski’s The Shout.” Peter Bradshaw
The Killer
In cinemas now
Summed up in a sentence Rerelease of John Woo’s 1989 Hong Kong action film starring Chow Yun-fat: a gun-filled melodrama of maximalist violence and surreal sentimentality.
What our reviewer said “With The Killer, Woo somehow became the Douglas Sirk of Hong Kong action cinema, in a gonzo melodrama that borrows from Magnificent Obsession … about the redemption of an assassin falling in love with a woman whose sightlessness he has inadvertently caused.” Peter Bradshaw
Books
If you only read one, make it …
When the Forest Breathes by Suzanne Simard
Reviewed by Mythili Rao
Summed up in a sentence The maverick ecologist sets out her vision for the future.
What our reviewer said “When she’s not getting taken away from protests by the authorities, she’s dodging the flames of forest fires in the Cariboo mountains of British Columbia, exploring the Haida Gwaii archipelago (“Canada’s Galápagos”), or off learning Indigenous practices in the Amazon.”
Further reading ‘My ideas are a little revolutionary’: ecologist Suzanne Simard on intelligent forests, the climate and her critics
Pick of the rest
Solidarity by Rowan Williams
Reviewed by Joe Moran
Summed up in a sentence The former archbishop of Canterbury on what it really means to stand by someone.
What our reviewer said “For Williams, solidarity is hard work. It takes time and emotional labour to recognise our fellow humans, in both their implacable otherness and their commonality with us.”
The Delusions by Jenni Fagan
Reviewed by M John Harrison
Summed up in a sentence A cosmic satire set in the afterlife.
What our reviewer said “The Delusions fizzes with impatience, invention and humour. Fagan’s targets are exactly what we’d hope: greed, politics, celebrity. Smartphone culture … anyone who thinks that by giving themselves up to the digital simulacrum they can evade not just inevitable death but actual life.”
The Infinity Machine by Sebastian Mallaby
Reviewed by Tim Clare
Summed up in a sentence Inside the mind of an AI wunderkind.
What our reviewer said “Demis Hassabis was unusually bright from an early age. He started playing chess – and beating adults – at four. By five, he was competing in tournaments, sitting on a phone book on top of two stacked chairs so he could see the table.”
You may have missed …
The Book of Records by Madeleine Thien
Reviewed by Xan Brooks
Summed up in a sentence A dazzling near-future fable about refugees with cameos from Spinoza, Hannah Arendt and the Chinese poet Du Fu, this novel is shortlisted for the 2026 Climate Fiction prize.
What our reviewer said “This rich and beautiful novel is serious but playful; a study of limbo and stasis that nonetheless speaks of great movement and change.”
Further reading Madeleine Thien: ‘I ran in blizzards and -20C – all I wanted was to listen to Middlemarch’
Albums
If you only listen to one, make it …
Underscores: U
Out now
Summed up in a sentence Performing, writing and producing everything herself, April Grey pares back her hyperpop electronics for an album in thrall to 90s pop-R&B.
What our reviewer said “Grey certainly isn’t the only artist to look to that genre, in that era, for inspiration, but her take on it works incredibly well.” Alexis Petridis
Pick of the rest
Huw Marc Bennett: Heol Las
Out now
Summed up in a sentence The multi-instrumentalist puts his magical spin on traditional Glamorgan tunes, fusing the past, present and future.
What our reviewer said “As Bennett’s album drifts from the industrial valleys to the Gower peninsula, it thrums with a fitting beauty and energy.” Jude Rogers
Kitty Whately and Julius Drake: Through the Centuries – Songs of Madeleine Dring
Out now
Summed up in a sentence Mezzo-soprano Whately and pianist Drake perform the fervent, fun and intoxicating works of a British musician whose fresh assessment is richly deserved.
What our reviewer said “This wide-ranging survey puts paid to any idea that Dring was not a serious composer.” Clive Paget
Grace Ives: Girlfriend
Out now
Summed up in a sentence The New Yorker’s third album leaves behind her DIY origins to channel cult pop classics by Lorde and Sky Ferreira.
What our reviewer said “Girlfriend abandons caution in windswept, hyperdetailed songs that streak by like big city streetlights and shimmer with cosmic awe.” Laura Snapes
Now live
Siegfried
Royal Opera House, London, to 6 April; in cinemas from 31 March
Summed up in a sentence The third opera of Barrie Kosky’s take on the Ring cycle is a thoughtful and deft production.
What our reviewer said “It’s gratifying to see and hear the unfolding of a Ring cycle that’s so serious in its intent yet so deft in its touch.” Erica Jeal
Further reading ‘Siegfried wants to have fun, kill the dragon, meet the girl’: Andreas Schager on Wagner’s young bully
