Chickenhare and the Secret of the Groundhog review – time-travel fun for plucky hybrid critters

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A half-chicken half-hare, a skunk and a tortoise go in search of a 3,000-year-old groundhog in this wholesome animation with a surprisingly complex plot Although this animated feature doesn’t have a title as utterly awesome as its predecessor, Chickenhare and the Hamster of Darkness , it’s still a perfectly adequate 90-ish minutes of creamy pastel-coloured picaresque entertainment. It feels like it’s skewed in the direction of younger viewers given the simple character designs, general wholesomeness and easy-on-the-jokes tone, but the plot is surprisingly complicated. The lead character is named Chickenhare because of course he is half-chicken half-hare, although in practice he looks more like a hare than a chicken other than a tuft of feathers on the crown of his head. He is best friends with a skunk named Meg, equipped with the awesome power of stink and who is very butch-coded with her waistcoat, faux-hawk and tomboy characteristics; there is also a tortoise named Abe, who as you mi...
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Maria review – Angelina Jolie plays the diva in magnificent stroll around the cult of Callas

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Venice film festival
Jolie is a painting to be stared at in Pablo Larraín’s opulent drama, tottering around Paris in the 70s and drawing us in to tragedy as thoroughly as Bellini or Pucchini

Hide the overflowing ashtrays and move that infernal grand piano – Maria Callas, La Diva, is granting a valedictory TV interview. She’s pacing the halls of her Paris apartment, feeding her poodles and strung out on pills. The visiting journalist is called Mandrax, named after her favourite medication. He takes a seat and checks the mic. By way of introduction, he says, “I’d like to walk with you through your life.”

Callas’s life whisked her from the slums of Nazi-occupied Athens to the concert halls of Europe and the US, through a torrid relationship with Aristotle Onassis to collaborations with Pasolini and Zeffirelli. But Pablo Larraín’s opulent Maria shrewdly homes in on the soprano’s final days, showcasing a stiffly dignified Angelina Jolie as the lioness in winter, four years retired and a legend in her own lunchtime. “Make me an appointment with a hairdresser who doesn’t speak,” she orders her doting servants. “Book me a table at a restaurant where the waiters know who I am.” She is in the mood, she adds, for adulation.

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