Mille Petrozza was born in 1967 to a Calabrian father, and a mother who was a refugee from Communist East Germany. He grew up in the Altenessen district of Essen, in Germany’s industrial Ruhr Valley, where his father worked in the coal mines. As a young teenager, inspired by a KISS concert, he and school friends Jürgen "Ventor" Reil (drums) and Rob Fioretti (bass) started a band.By 1984, after going by various names, the band was called Kreator, with Petrozza the frontman and rhythm guitarist. Their raw 1985 debut album Endless Pain was followed by 1986’s seismic Pleasure to Kill. The latter Read more ...

Sky Atlantic’s new thriller, Prisoner, is a tense and twisty story involving a sinister crime syndicate called Pegasus, whose boss is a sneery tycoon called Harrison Dempsey. This bunch are planning to cause mayhem and chaos across Europe.However, there is one man who might be able to throw a spanner in Pegasus’s works. He is Tibor Stone, a professional hitman who worked for Pegasus, and is said to have killed at least 47 victims. Now, assisted by dogged prison guard Amber Todd (Izuka Hoyle), he’s prepared to give evidence in court which could bring down Dempsey and scupper the Pegasus Read more ...

The main female characters in Christian Petzold’s films are kindred spirits – sisters in subversiveness. Petzold and Nina Hoss collaborated on six movies together, from the made-for-TV thriller Something to Remind Me (2001) to Phoenix (2014), the harrowing story of an Auschwitz survivor. Both those films drew on Alfred Hitchock's Vertigo (1958). So does his new one, Miroirs No. 3, in which a troubled Berlin piano student walks out of her unhappy ordinary life into a kind of fairy tale. Played by Paula Beer – previously Petzold's muse in Transit (2018), Undine (2020), and Afire (2023) – Read more ...

Cate Blanchett is not a diva, but a star. Thanks to her boundless versatility and yen for risk-taking, she's at home in arthouse films as she is in Hollywood blockbusters. The greatest secret of her appeal is her elusiveness: she's always fully present and yet strangely ethereal at the same time – whether she's playing a character like Lydia Tár (in Tár) or Galadriel in The Lord of the Rings movies.Her portrayal of Timothea in Jim Jarmusch's Father Mother Sister Brother feels somewhat different, however. Blanchett has specialized in playing extroverted or strong women, but Timothea is Read more ...

François Ozon has typically filtered his version of Albert Camus's existential novella The Stranger through his cool, ironic sensibility, the film's fluidity recalling at times the raw poetry of Fellini's and Pasolini's early work. Set in the French Algeria of the 1930s, it follows Meursault (Benjamin Voisin) as he visits his mother’s funeral, meets his old lover Marie (Rebecca Marder) on a beach, and gets drawn into the domestic melodrama of his violent neighbour Raymond (Pierre Lottin). Meursault's sudden ruthless murder of an Arab turns the stark drama into an absurd judicial farce. Read more ...

Sergei Loznitsa's historical drama Two Prosecutors, which he adapted from the novella written by the onetime Gulag prisoner Georgy Demidov (1908-87), confronts the horrors inflicted by Stalinism. A Kafkaesque parable, it asks the rhetorical question what can an idealist achieve in a system marked by arbitrariness and terror, where laws are either ignored or reinterpreted? Needless to say, the film invokes the Russia of today.Loznitsa describes it as a "typical Russian fairy tale", one that evolved as the bureaucratic nightmarishness evoked by Gogol, as well as Kafka, kept creeping into his Read more ...

In director Paolo Sorrentino’s new film La Grazia, Tony Servillo portrays a fictitious Italian president, the ageing Mariano De Santis, who – in the last six months of his successful seven-year term – must grapples with two moral dilemmas. De Santis must decide whether to sign into law a bill legalizing euthanasia, certain to end his friendship with the Pope, and whether to pardon two prisoners who killed their partners. He is meanwhile haunted by the knowledge that his late wife, for whom he grieves, was unfaithful.Grazia (the word means "grace" and "pardon" in Italian) is the seventh Read more ...

Phil Campbell, guitarist for Motörhead from 1984 onwards, died on Friday 13th March after a "long and courageous battle in intensive care following a complex major operation". He was 64. While Motörhead's "classic line-up" is often eulogised, Campbell was their riffing heartbeat for over three decades, longer in the band than anyone but Lemmy himself. He played amped-up rock as well as any rocker out there but was, at least in later life, a quiet-spoken, unpretentious and down-to-earth man. Below, is a piece I wrote in 2013, presented as it was then.Phil Campbell (b 1961) has been guitarist Read more ...

Fans of Call the Midwife (which is currently “taking a break” after the conclusion of Series 15) will no doubt recall, with a nostalgic tear, Ella Bruccoleri’s performance as Sister Frances, which she sustained from 2018-2022. Some said she was nuts to walk away from such a well-loved show, but Ms Bruccoleri sensed that it was time to strike out for pastures new.She has also previously appeared in The Last Kingdom, Bridgerton, Bookish, Down Cemetery Road and Agatha Christie’s Seven Dials, but her career is about to go up a gear or two. Viewers will be able to see why when she appears in Read more ...

Talking to Dave Stewart is like being on a psychedelic roller-coaster. He’ll start with one thought, spin it round and turn it upside down a few times, and just at the point when you’re feeling completely disorientated, whirl you to its conclusion. His is a mind in constant motion – you don’t have to spend long in his company to understand how he has emerged as one of the great musical chameleons of our time. Though most people know him from his partnership with Annie Lennox in The Eurythmics, the whistle-inducing rollcall of his collaborators includes Bob Dylan, Aretha Franklin, Mick Jagger Read more ...

Few dancers have the luck to find a permanent place in history through their role in a new creation as Matz Skoog did in 1987. The Swedish star of the then London Festival Ballet, who died last weekend aged 69 from cancer, was one of the mesmerising original trio in a protest ballet that touched a nerve in its own era, and would then travel across four decades to become a classic. Swansong, choreographed by Christopher Bruce for Festival Ballet in a conscientious response to rising world protests at the disappearance of loved ones into the oblivion of Chilean prisons, seemed to portray a Read more ...

Kaouther Ben Hania's The Voice of Hind Rajab caused an international outcry at last year's Venice film festival – a fact that the Oscar-nominated Tunisian director prefers to play down. "I'm a director. I don't usually like to talk about my films," she said. But this time was different. There was an unusually heavy burden of responsibility.Awarded the Grand Jury Prize at Venice, the film was inspired by tragic real events. On 29 January 2024, Palestinian Red Crescent staff received an emergency call from Gaza. A five-year-old girl called Hind Rajab was trapped in her aunt and uncle's car, Read more ...