Post your questions for Imelda Staunton

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She’s acting royalty – literally, having played Queen Elizabeth II in The Crown – but what questions would you ask her? It is perhaps fitting that Imelda Staunton ended up playing Queen Elizabeth II in the last two series of The Crown, considering she has been acting royalty for years. Her film career has seen her voice champion egg-layer Bunty in 2000’s Chicken Run, followed by roles in Mike Leigh’s 2004 drama Vera Drake and the 2005 comedy Nanny McPhee. In 2014, she played the formidable Welsh miners’ strike campaigner Hefina in Pride . She also plays Lady Maud Bagshaw in the first two Downton Abbey films, and voices Paddington’s beloved Aunt Lucy in all three Paddington films. For a whole generation, however, she will always be Dolores Umbridge in two of the later Harry Potter films, where she somehow made a pink cardigan almost as frightening as Voldemort. On TV, she has cropped up in everything from Little Britain and Doctor Who to Psychoville, Brassic and a memorable guest appear...
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In Short, Europe: Best of Best review – heady celebration of European short film-making

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This year’s edition of the festival, Best of Best, will show a collection of 28 award-winning short films across five strands offering dystopian visions and ideological bite

With the EU recently passing the world’s first artificial intelligence law, this year’s trawl of European shorts from cultural organisation Eunic London doesn’t miss a trick by dwelling on matters algorithmic in much of its first section, Smile You’re on Camera – most prominently the ongoing wrangle between tech and labour in the workplace. It’s the one overtly topical strand alongside four others (Hard Decisions; People on the Precipice; Psychodrama; and the kids’ animation section Why’s the Sky Blue?) that stick to the more abstract themes into which Eunic typically packages up Europe’s film-making grassroots.

The longest work here, the 23-minute I’m Not a Robot, by the Netherlands’ Victoria Warmerdam, doesn’t quite live up to a canny premise: the music-company worker whose inability to pass a Captcha test means that she is, in fact, a robot. Ellen Parren, in a sharp performance, twitches with affront at the suggestion in this sitcom-y spin on Blade Runner’s existential riddle. But, as her boyfriend weighs in and mansplains her newfound dronedom, it devolves into a talky slog that adds little beyond MeToo frills to the black box of the sentience question. And – through no fault of the film-makers – it’s also the one most tenuously related to the theme of being watched.

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