The Moment review – Charli xcx struggles through defanged Brat summer satire

There’s a smart idea at play here, with the star playing a hellish version of herself fighting against corporate forces, but there’s not a lot else In April 2025, the pop singer Charli xcx posted a TikTok reflecting on nearly a year of her seminal album Brat : “It’s really hard to let go of Brat and let go of this thing that is so inherently me and become my entire life, you know?” she said. “I started thinking about culture, and the ebbs and flows and lifespan of things … ” She acknowledged that over-saturation is perilous, and that maybe she should stop, but “I’m also interested in the tension of staying too long. I find that quite fascinating.” The frank, informal admission fit with Brat, a pop culture-shifting album that channeled, with stunning immediacy, the imperious ego and bristling insecurity of an artist keenly aware of her own precarious level of fame . Her ambivalence was understandable – Brat rapidly turned Charli, who spent over a decade as a fixture of pop’s so-call...

Nandor Fodor and the Talking Mongoose review – mysterious mammal in period hoax yarn

Peculiar true story of 1930s media sensation becomes an even odder, laboriously serious drama featuring Simon Pegg with Freudian facial hair

Here is a peculiar film based on a peculiar real-life case: the “talking mongoose” hoax that became a newspaper sensation in the 1930s, the crop circle story of its day. The Irvings, a farming family in the Isle of Man, claimed there was a mongoose called Gef in their farmhouse that could speak – although no independent observer ever saw the creature, but only heard its bizarre voice in the walls or under the floorboards. The obvious explanation was close at hand: the daughter of the family made no secret of being a talented ventriloquist.

Despite this, it amused the press to maintain a deadpan attitude to the possibility of “Gef” being real, and there was no shortage of credulous and excitable spiritualists who were excited by the idea. One was the Hungarian-born paranormal investigator Nandor Fodor who came to Man, convinced that Gef was not a con trick precisely, but a manifestation of group hysteria. He is played here with commitment and sincerity by Simon Pegg, sporting tailoring and facial hair like a young Sigmund Freud. Writer-director Adam Sigal imagines an assistant for him: Anne, played by Minnie Driver.

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