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...

Hanging around: how Planet of the Apes became Hollywood’s most resilient franchise

The success of Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes shows how, for almost 60 years, the series has managed to sustain audience interest

By pure hot-streak longevity, the most impressive feat in Hollywood franchising is the Mission: Impossible series, which began in 1996 and may – may – finally wrap up next year, after eight entries and nearly 30 years without a single continuity reboot. But true to the fictional history of the Planet of the Apes series, it may be the apes who ultimately inherit this title from the petty, small-minded humans. The original Planet of the Apes came out in 1968 – and based on first weekend box office and positive reviews for Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes, the latest installment of a rebooted series that began in 2011, the series will probably remain when the first movie reaches its 60th anniversary in just four years. This may be the most purely resilient series in Hollywood.

Yes, when you factor in reboots, the James Bond series has been kicking around for longer (though not by all that much). But the Bond movies have a lot of things that a lot of people traditionally like in their motion pictures: cars, guns, globe-hopping locations, attractive human beings triumphing over supervillains. The majority of the Planet of the Apes movies have little of this, and instead feature – multi-spoiler alert? – humans losing, badly. It’s a hallmark of the series, whether through the psychological damage inflicted by the original movie’s now-famous twist ending (the ape world isn’t a far-flung planet at all, but Earth!), the deadly Covid-like flu that spreads over the end credits of Rise of the Planet of the Apes, the savage beatings and killings administered for 30 solid minutes at the end of Conquest of the Planet of the Apes, or the total destruction of all life on Earth – amazingly, that last one happens in the second film.

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