They’re expensive, elaborate – and may not contain all the music. After Olivia Rodrigo, Charli xcx and more sent out incomplete or unfinished vinyl versions, fans are feeling shortchanged

It was one of the most anticipated collaborations of the year: Charli xcx teaming up with film-maker David Cronenberg for No One Lasts Forever, the closing track on her new album Music, Fashion, Film, which debuted at No 1 in the UK.

But for fans who pre-ordered what was advertised as the “full-length” album on vinyl, an unwelcome surprise awaits. The song doesn’t contain the spoken-word contribution from Cronenberg – an astonishing reflection on art, death and eternity – that is included on streaming platforms such as Spotify and Apple Music.

As his 12th feature film, I Want Your Sex, hits theaters, the cult gay film-maker is as fired up as ever

Is straight sex the most perverse sex of all? Gregg Araki’s new film makes a convincing case. Titled I Want Your Sex, the movie is a deliriously fun and often hilarious study of desire, power and art that features bondage, full-frontal and a vagina made out of pink chewed-up bubble gum. “For me, it is a very queer story,” the director says, speaking the week of the film’s release in a video call from his Los Angeles home. “It’s a take on kink and alternate sexuality that goes right across the straight-queer spectrum.”

While it is not the first heterosexual movie by Gregg Araki – that honor goes to his 1995 acid trip of a road movie The Doom Generation – it features the new queer cinema pioneer’s starriest cast in years, perhaps in a sign that Hollywood at large has caught up to the cult director’s anarchic vision. Forty years into his career, we still want Araki’s sex: the film is set to reach the director’s biggest audience to date, opening to 700 US screens this week, a stunning figure for an independent film and a wider opening than recent films by indie veterans like Nicolas Winding Refn and Jim Jarmusch.

Celebrities including Charli xcx and Gabbriette and avant-garde brands honour tradition while also rejecting it

If a wedding day brings to mind a bride dressed in a big white dress, the styles coming down the aisle in the near future may strike you as a little different. Whether it is through celebrity references, or new brands, wedding gowns are entering a more experimental era.

For Charli xcx’s marriage to the 1975 drummer George Daniel last year, the bride wore a minidress and sunglasses.

Pop star is celebrated as ‘one of the defining cultural figures of her generation’ by gallery, which acquires Brat-era portrait by Harley Weir

A portrait of Charli xcx has been added to the National Portrait Gallery’s collection, in the week that she hopes for a No 1 chart position for her new album Music, Fashion, Film.

The photograph by Harley Weir was taken in 2023 and became one of the key images associated with Charli’s Brat era: the 2024 album that became a pop cultural phenomenon for its candour and debauchery.

The glitch-pop great is back with a banger-stuffed new album, and reality TV may have some new stars thanks to Channel 4. Here’s the pick of the week’s culture, taken from the Guardian’s best-rated reviews

After a decade in the pop fringes, Charli xcx’s 2024 album Brat propelled her to global stardom: an acid-green ‘Brat summer’, a Glastonbury headline slot and brat as Collins’ word of the year.

But how do you follow up the album that made you a star?

Charli’s latest album Music, Fashion, Film has now been released – and as Guardian deputy music editor Laura Snapes tells Lucy Hough: it’s a pivot to guitar and a “meta masterpiece about the instability of identity.”

(Atlantic)
How do you follow up the album that made you a star – and a caricature? In classic Charli style: with a pivot to guitar and a meta masterpiece about the instability of identity

After a decade spent trailblazing a unique kind of pop freedom from the genre’s fringes, A-list success seemed like the thing that might finally trap Charli xcx. Her 2024 club-rat opus Brat spawned memes, embarrassing political bandwagoning, Collins’ word of the year and possibly terminal damage to the bra industry. Its ludicrous cultural impact looked set to pickle her as a caricature of a Parliament-toting bad girl; the question of whether “Brat summer” could last – whether Charli could sustain the interest – was so rife she turned it into a mockumentary, The Moment. It made success look miserable: your creation turned cringe by execs wanting to milk their prize cow dry of every last acid-green drop.

Even for a pop star renowned for reinvention, it put a higher price on her next move. Pivot and risk losing new fans and looking wilfully contrarian. When Charli released the sub-two-minute single Rock Music, many heard it as a middle finger. “I think the dancefloor is dead,” she drawls over guitars that buzzed like speakers weathering interference from a Nokia 5110, “so now we’re making rock music.” There were boring thinkpieces about the dancefloor being very much alive, actually (as if Charli had ever ridden culture for clout then binned it off), and about whether she was trying to eject fair-weather new fans. But the key to this cheeky song is surprisingly earnest: “Jump off the stage / I hope they catch you today / But if they don’t it’s OK,” she sings naively, an affirmation to take creative leaps, and to come with Charli – or not, as you like – as she takes this one.

Gigs by Gallagher brothers, Coldplay, Lana Del Rey and Beyonce gives £11bn boost to the economy

Big name artists including Oasis with their highly anticipated reunion tour, Coldplay and Beyoncé helped to attract a record number of fans to travel to watch live music last year, helped by a surge in overseas visitors at UK gigs.

A report from the industry body UK Music estimated that 24.7 million “music tourists” attended concerts and festivals last year, up 4.8% on 2024, leading to an unprecedented £11.2bn of spending across the UK economy.

In a collapsing world, artists like Slayyyter and Cobrah are chasing extreme highs with hyperactive music and debauched lyrics. Is their trashy vibe emancipating – or a bit contrived?

If any year demanded a soundtrack of self-aggrandising female mayhem, it’s 2026. Amid the terrors of war, AI and the climate crisis, women are expected to be symbolic vessels of order and stability: thin, beautiful and perpetually 25 – a state of perfection newly available for purchase thanks to weight-loss drugs and the deep plane facelift.

Covered unironically in leopard print and rhinestones, a cohort of young female pop stars are defying this familiar con with brash electronic pop, shamelessly hedonistic lyrics, anarchic sexuality and an obsession with what was once dismissed as “white trash”. It’s an aesthetic embraced by performers such as Slayyyter, Kim Petras, Cobrah, Demi Lovato, Snow Strippers’ Tatiana Schwaninger, Tove Lo and returning scene godmother Kesha.

(Atlantic)
The lyrics may argue the dancefloor is dead, but this funny, wilfully plasticky new single isn’t the total about-turn from Brat that fans expected

Last month, Charli xcx began the media campaign for her seventh studio album by giving an interview to Vogue magazine. The ensuing feature caused an impressive degree of online consternation, not because the 33-year-old star had said anything particularly controversial, but because she had suggested that the follow-up to 2024’s Brat would sound markedly different to its predecessor. “If I’d made another album that felt more dance-leaning, it would have felt really hard, really sad,” she said, not unreasonably declining to chase Brat’s vast success by attempting to replicate it. (Although, in fairness, you could have probably worked that out from House, the noisy, experimental collaboration with John Cale she released at the end of last year as the first single from her soundtrack to Wuthering Heights.)

She also played the interviewer a track that contained both “heavily processed guitars” and the lyrics “I think the dancefloor is dead, so now we’re making rock music”: Vogue duly ran with the idea, trumpeting Charli xcx’s “rock reinvention” in both the headline and on its cover and other news outlets picked up on the story – “CHARLI XCX CONFIRMS ROCK ALBUM”. What one journalist tactfully called “heated discourse online from some fans and artists within the music industry” followed, eventually prompting the singer to respond, posting “a video of me making a song called Rock Music that is not actually rock music which is funny because I never said I was making a rock album”.

Event chairs Nicole Kidman, Beyoncé, Venus Williams and Anna Wintour have guests dress to the theme ‘Fashion is art’ at the event controversially funded by new honorary chairs Jeff Bezos and Lauren Sánchez Bezos

The stars of David Lowery’s psychodrama on the secrets behind creating music for a fictional pop diva

As David Lowery, the director, was writing the fictional pop star Mother Mary for his new film of the same name, he spent a lot of time studying the last 25 years in music. He listened to Taylor Swift (whose Reputation concert film inspired the performances in the film), Lorde and FKA twigs, who appears on screen as a medium named Imogene. But as the film’s haunted love story between Mary (played by Anne Hathaway) and her former best friend and designer Sam Anselm (Michaela Coel) emerged, his listening habits shifted.

“The pop music fell away and other music started to enter that sphere,” he says in A24’s New York offices. He’s sitting beside twigs and Hathaway the day after the trio attended the film’s premiere in the city. “James Blake and Aldous Harding really captured the emotion that I was trying to type out between Sam and Mother Mary. They began to help me channel the feeling of the movie itself.”

Music from Charli xcx can’t save David Lowery’s dour chamber piece, despite some flashes of dazzling style

For a certain stripe of pop fan, diva worship comes along with having a high tolerance for their unique flavor of psychobabble. So when Anne Hathaway, as the titular singer in David Lowery’s Mother Mary, declares that her new single Spooky Action is about Einstein’s “transubstantiation of feelings”, I ignored the snorts from those in the theater beside me. Finally, I thought, fondly casting my mind back to when Lady Gaga would talk about her music as a reverse Warholian explosion: a pop star who is not afraid to lean into high-concept nonsense. My generosity quickly faded when I began to realize that Mother Mary – the character and the film – was missing a crucial component for any modern pop star worth their salt: self-awareness.

Mother Mary is a one-time music A-lister in search of a comeback after a mysterious event that has taken her out of commission. She seems … haunted, and is experiencing a fashion emergency to boot, unable to find anything to wear for her imminent return to the stage. Three days before she is due to make her big appearance she turns up in the rain at the gothic mansion of fashion designer Sam Anselm (an enjoyably over-the-top Michaela Coel), looking like a rat caught in a monsoon, begging for an outfit that “feels like me”. Sam has moved on considerably since she was Mother Mary’s partner in fashion, and perhaps her lover behind closed doors too. In fact, she entirely loathes the pop star. “You are a carcinogen, you are a tumor,” Sam says in an amusingly ominous voiceover. “The bile is rising.”

Spoof documentaries once skewered subjects by dialling comic ingenuity up to 11, but the genre has stagnated – replaced by showbiz puff pieces and right-wing provocations. Has their time passed?

In the satirical mockumentary The Moment, Charli xcx fears (and eventually embraces) the death of Brat summer, the cultural sensation that made her sixth album a phenomenon. But the film – which stars the singer as a fictionalised version of herself – strains to land jokes out of Charli’s identity crisis and lacks the giddily intoxicating rush of that 2024 album. Watching The Moment shortly after its lukewarm reception at Sundance, I sensed something dying, but it wasn’t Brat – it was the mockumentary style itself.

How did mockumentaries grow so … tiresome? Once a novel narrative format brilliantly deployed by directors such as Christopher Guest and the late Rob Reiner, the mockumentary now feels nearly as stale as the formulaic films it aims to lampoon. It’s a sad state of affairs. For much of the last half-century, faux-documentary film-making flourished under the perverse minds of countless comedy greats, from Monty Python’s Eric Idle, who lampooned Beatlemania with 1978’s wackily irreverent mock-doc The Rutles: All You Need Is Cash, to Albert Brooks, who made his directorial debut with 1979’s proto-reality television spoof Real Life.

It’s not about John Bishop, Anna Wintour or Bill Clinton, but … Screen stories about pop stars, actors, sporting heroes or politicians bend fact by steering close to the deeds, or misdeeds, of real celebrities. What’s behind their rise?

Any self-respecting cinemagoer will know the phrase by heart: “The characters and events portrayed in this film are fictitious.” It’s cinema’s ritual boilerplate disclaimer. “Any similarity to actual persons, living or dead, or to actual events is purely coincidental and unintentional.”

Lately, however, film-makers have been treating the fine print like a challenge. A clutch of recent releases has taken up a curious middle ground: not quite biography, not quite fiction, but something more slippery in between. Marty Supreme, for instance, spins 1950s table tennis wildcard Marty Reisman into Marty Mauser, borrowing Reisman’s forename and forehand while rewriting the rest. Bradley Cooper’s Is This Thing On? mines the early career of standup comic John Bishop, only to rebrand him as New Yorker Alex Novak. And later this year The Prince, directed by Cameron Van Hoy and written by David Mamet, will refract aspects of Hunter Biden’s life through proxy Parker Scott.

(Atlantic)
Casting off her Bratty cigarettes and sunglasses, the pop visionary channels the torments of Heathcliff and Cathy and the tumult of the Velvet Underground on her latest captivating pivot

In the catalogues of rock and pop artists, film soundtracks usually seem like interstitial releases. For every career highlight Shaft or Superfly, there’s a plethora of soundtrack albums that carry the tang of the side-hustle. It was doubtless flattering to be asked in the first place – who doesn’t want to feel like a polymath? – but the results are doomed to languish in the footnotes, alongside the compilations of B-sides and outtakes, where only diehard fans spend extended amounts of time.

But the release of House, the first single taken from Charli xcx’s soundtrack to Wuthering Heights, strongly suggested that its author saw Emerald Fennell’s take on Emily Brontë as a chance for a reset. In 2024’s Brat, she made an album you could genuinely call era-defining without fear of embarrassment: if an album makes an impact on the US presidential campaign and its title ends up refashioned as an adjective in the Collins English Dictionary, then it’s definitely era-defining.

Emerald Fennell’s take on Emily Brontë is an emotionally hollow, bodice-ripping misfire that misuses Margot Robbie and Jacob Elordi but makes the most of Martin Clunes

Emerald Fennell cranks up the campery as she reinvents Emily Brontë’s tale of Cathy and Heathcliff on the windswept Yorkshire moor as a 20-page fashion shoot of relentless silliness, with bodices ripped to shreds and a saucy slap of BDSM. Margot Robbie’s Cathy at one stage secretly heads off to the moor for a hilarious bit of self-pleasuring – although, sadly, there are no audaciously intercut scenes of thirst-trap Heathcliff, played by Jacob Elordi, simultaneously doing the same thing in the stable, while muttering gruffly in that Yerrrrrkshire accent of his.

This then is Fennell’s Wuthering Heights, or rather “Wuthering Heights”; the title archly appears in inverted commas, although the postmodern irony seems pointless. Cathy is a primped belle quivering in the presence of Heathcliff, who himself is a moody, long-haired, bearded outsider, as if Scarlett O’Hara were going to melt into the arms of Charles Manson. However, he does get substantially Darcyfied up later on, rocking a shorter and more winsome hairstyle, his gossamer-thin shirt never dry.

She’s the edgy British brat who conquered the world with her hard-partying, electro-banging aesthetic. But can the star now go where Beyoncé and Harry Styles stumbled – and smash the silver screen?

In the back of a cab, Charli xcx drags a makeup wipe across her face. A closeup of that face, with its distinctive halo of dark hair, the lipstick-smeared pout and lush, overgrown eyebrows, is perhaps the most striking scene in her new film The Moment. Charli peels a strip of ugly stick-on gems from her lower lash line, regret and shame flashing across her face. It’s a rare raw few seconds in Aidan Zamiri’s clever and knowing satire of 21st-century pop stardom, which wonders what would have happened if the singer had lost her head after the success of her 2024 album Brat. The film is billed as a mockumentary, but its ambition to be taken seriously is no joke.

The Moment is already being positioned as Charli’s pivot from pop to the silver screen, after a buzzy premiere at the Sundance film festival last month. Charli was there to promote it, alongside two other films she’s starring in. I Want Your Sex, a dark romp of a comedy from new queer cinema pioneer Gregg Araki was mostly warmly received, though early consensus has declared The Gallerist, which stars Natalie Portman, something of a dud.

Sundance film festival: 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-called middle class, into a main pop girl, an artist played at midwest sorority weddings and used by a US presidential campaign. But her interest in “the tension of staying too long” also felt a little trite, the type of smart-sounding musing that dead-ends in self-awareness. Brat summer was heady, hedonistic, fun – a meme, an aesthetic, a vibe, a moment. That said moment passes? Well … yeah.

The first Sundance without founder Robert Redford and the last to take place in Park City, Utah, will see new films starring Natalie Portman, Ethan Hawke and Courtney Love

This year’s Sundance film festival will be notable for a major first as well as a major last. It’ll be the first to take place without its founder, Robert Redford, who died last September at the age of 89, and it’ll be the last to take place in Utah, where it has been since the very beginning back in 1978.

Emotions, which are often on display regardless thanks to films often ruthlessly designed to elicit them, will be high, with events planned to commemorate a figure who helped create a launchpad and then an ecosystem for American indies. But while saying goodbye to both Redford and Park City will be front and centre, Sundance isn’t Sundance without a roster of films to also get attenders talking. Last year, it felt like that chatter was less effusive than usual because while there were films that continued evoking conversation throughout the year (Sorry, Baby, If I Had Legs I’d Kick You, Train Dreams, Lurker, Twinless, pretty much every documentary premiere) there were more that either died on arrival or crawled toward a slow death months later.