Leaf Arbuthnot

1 week ago | newstatesman.com | Leaf Arbuthnot

The Scottish director John Maclean’s austere second feature film opens halfway through the story, with its heroine, Tornado (played by the Japanese singer Kōki), trying to save herself from a group of hideously threatening men. The year is 1790 and the setting somewhere in the British Isles; the group chasing her is following the orders of head honcho Sugar (an enjoyably dead-eyed Tim Roth). We don’t know yet why these ne’er-do-wells are after Tornado, but they obviously mean business.

2 weeks ago | newstatesman.com | Leaf Arbuthnot

The BBC’s second series of its crime drama The Gold, about the 1983 Brink’s-Mat heist, picks up where things left off: about half the loot that the robbers stole from a security depot near Heathrow remains unaccounted for. The gold – worth over £110m in today’s money – turned out to be rather more than the six lads could handle, and in the first series they all (more or less) ended up paying for their greed.

2 weeks ago | dailymail.co.uk | Leaf Arbuthnot

Good Anger by Sam Parker (Green Tree £20, 256pp)When the journalist Sam Parker told friends and colleagues that he was writing a book about anger, they were surprised. ‘You’ve never struck me as an angry person,’ was a common response. One colleague declared him to be ‘the most calming human’ she’d ever worked with. But Parker had struggled with anger for years. As a child growing up in Newcastle, he would play mediator between his warring parents.

3 weeks ago | newstatesman.com | Leaf Arbuthnot

The first John Wick film was an unexpected success in 2014, and saw Keanu Reeves playing a retired hitman who goes on the rampage after a group of low-IQ thugs break into his house and shoot his puppy. It was followed by three more films (each with a chunkier budget than the last) – and now we have Ballerina, a spin-off set sometime between Wicks 3 and 4, with Ana de Armas in the lead.

1 month ago | spectator.com.au | Leaf Arbuthnot

We Would Have Told Each Other Everything Granta, pp.208, 12.99 The German writer Judith Hermann burst on the literary scene in 1998 with her short story collection Summerhouse, Later, and was soon heralded as one of a new wave of Fräuleinwunder – girl wonders who were writing fiction that felt fresh and uninhibited. Now she has produced a memoir of sorts – in parts slyly moving, in others so stony-faced and self-serious as to border on the parodic.