Christopher Connor

Released: 20 March 2026
Director: Iain Forsyth, Jane Pollard
Starring: Marianne Faithfull, George MacKay, Tilda Swinton, Zawe Ashton, Edith Bowman, Nick Cave, Warren Ellis
Marianne Faithfull was a pioneering 60s icon, part of the British invasion, closely associated with The Rolling Stones and in particular Mick Jagger. Faithful passed away in January 2025; her story is now brought to life in Broken English in rather unique fashion with a blend of performance, talking heads and archive footag...

The film adaptation of Andy Weir’s The Martian was a huge hit in 2015, grossing over $600 million worldwide and earning seven Oscar nominations, including Best Actor and Best Picture. Drew Goddard, who worked on the screenplay for that film, now turns his hand to Weir’s most recent novel, 2021’s epic sci-fi Project Hail Mary. It is directed by Phil Lord and Christopher Miller and stars Ryan Gosling as Dr Ryland Grace, a schoolteacher drafted in to help on the titular mission to save Earth fro...

Len Deighton was a writer who, alongside the likes of John le Carré, helped redefine the British spy novel in the 1960s and beyond. The Ipcress File and its nameless protagonist the basis for an era defining film with Michael Caine. le Carré died in 2020 and now Deighton has left us. While his last fiction novel was published in 1996, his legacy hasn’t waned, with a new interpretation of The Ipcress File produced for ITV in 2022.
Deighton was more than simply an espionage novelist. He was a p...

Gus Van Sant was one of the most critically acclaimed directors of the 1990s, particularly the New Queer movement with the likes of My Own Private Idaho, To Die For and especially the award-winning Good Will Hunting. Since then, he’s made plenty of films, but nothing that’s left quite the same cultural imprint. Dead Man’s Wire, his first film in seven years, marks one of his impressive features in the 21st Century, a throwback to the paranoid thrillers of the 1970s.
Set in Indianapolis in 197...

Thirty years on from the first War Child charity LP ‘The Help Album’, which featured Suede, Massive Attack, Paul McCartney and Portishead, among others, ‘Help(2)’ brings together a similarly impressive ensemble spanning several generations and genres. The result is an eclectic mix of new material, unreleased tracks, and, in the case of Oasis, a huge live version of Acquiesce taken from their triumphant Wembley shows in 2025.

Released: 6 March 2026
Director: Tom Harper
Starring: Cillian Murphy, Rebecca Ferguson, Tim Roth, Barry Keoghan, Sophie Rundle, Stephen Graham
Since its first series premiered in 2013, Peaky Blinders has become something of a phenomenon, inspiring fashion, music, and making creator Steven Knight a household name. In the decade-plus since it first aired, he has gone on to create a string of shows for Apple TV, Disney Plus and the BBC, but nothing has had quite the same cultural impact or stayi...

Blending indie pop, rock, post-punk and elements of other genres, Halifax’s The Orielles have built a dedicated fanbase since releasing their debut LP ‘Silver Dollar Moment’ in 2018. The eclectic trio now returns with their fifth studio album, another beguiling blend that is hard to categorise.
Opener ‘Three Halves’ encapsulates this melange with a swaggering opening that quietens down with Esmé Dee Hand-Halford’s vocals softly shining through. There are elements of shoegaze to it. There is a...

From their first feature film, Toy Story in 1995, through to COVID-19, Pixar was untouchable, with the odd blemish on an otherwise spotless resumé. However, a string of films released straight to Disney+, questionable reviews, and weak box office numbers for several of its original titles, along with a far greater sequel production line than previously, have led some to wonder if the Pixar brand has deteriorated, with strong performances from other animation studios. Does Hoppers, Pixar’s 30t...

Photo: Lexie Alley
With a sound that spans jazz, rock and indie-folk, Mitski has proven to be one of the most eclectic artists of her generation. Fresh from the huge acclaim that greeted 2023’s ‘The Land Is Inhospitable and So Are We’, her eighth album is, once again, a genre-hopping masterwork that shows a wonderful songwriter at her very best.
One of the first tastes of the album was the single Where’s My Phone, built around gritty guitars in a manner that felt like a return to Mitski’s ear...

As The BRIT Awards 2026 moved from the capital to its new home in Manchester – culminating in a week that transformed the city into a cultural playground – CLASH has pooled together a list of best albums from pantheon rockers and lesser known, but no less impactful artists, birthed in the North West.
The city’s musical lineage can be traced back to the revolving punk scenes of the ’70s, the Madchester/Hacienda club era of the 1980s and ’90s, and the anthemic pop tendencies of modern millennia...

Chris Connor reviews Prime Video’s action mystery series Young Sherlock…
There have been many iterations of Arthur Conan Doyle’s detective Sherlock Holmes both on the big and small screens, from Basil Rathbone to Peter Cushing and Benedict Cumberbatch. The most successful big screen version of late has been Robert Downey Jr. and Jude Law’s Victorian-set escapades as Holmes and Watson, directed by Guy Ritchie. While fans still wait for the long-gestating third instalment in the film series, Gu...

Never ones to stand still, Damon Albarn and Jamie Hewlett’s ninth album with Gorillaz is a sprawling genre-hopping affair, with glam-rock, post-punk and soul thrown into the melting pot. The title track really underlines how different this will be, with Albarn fading into the background on an almost entirely instrumental track studded with traditional Hindustani instruments.

The Monsterverse, which launched in 2014 with Gareth Edwards’s Godzilla, has proved a huge success with audiences, with five films to date grossing over $2.5 billion. It has covered everything from Kong on his native Skull Island in the 1970s to Godzilla and others battling it out in the present day. In 2023, the franchise expanded with a live-action spin-off, Monarch, which filled in some of the gaps between the films, particularly in the aftermath of Edwards’s film. The Apple TV+ series now...

Paul McCartney: Man on The Run, 2025.
Directed by Morgan Neville.
SYNOPSIS:
An intimate portrait of Paul McCartney’s trajectory after The Beatles, as he and his wife Linda form Wings.
The Beatles have had no shortage of films and TV shows made about them, with everyone from Ron Howard to Peter Jackson tackling various chapters of the Fab Four’s journey, and of course Sam Mendes’ four-part cinematic event to come. The post-Beatles days have been given less attention, although they still have t...

Don Winslow is one of the foremost names in contemporary US crime fiction, his Border trilogy earning particular acclaim. Even though he’s been publishing at a prolific rate since the early 1990s, surprisingly, there are relatively few adaptations of his work. Bart Layton’s Crime 101, marks just the third silver screen outing for a Don Winslow story. It is taken from the novella of the same name, drawn from his 2020 short story collection Broken – highly rated by our site.
This is far from ju...