Adored by Madonna and Charli xcx and buoyed by finding true love, the Londoner is branching out into rock and breaking the mainstream. She explains how her working class upbringing made her so fearless

Leaving the important stuff to chance isn’t Shygirl’s style. First aid kit, wind-up radio, batteries: earlier this morning, the singer filled her online shopping basket in preparation for impending disaster. She had read a news article advising households to put together an emergency kit. “I’m that kind of person,” she says, grinning. She woke her boyfriend, who was asleep in bed next to her. “I was like: babe, we’re sorted! I’ve got the water purifying tablets, everything!”

It’s a sticky September afternoon in east London, and the singer, whose real name is Blane Muise, introduces herself as “Shy” and slides into the booth opposite me at an Italian trattoria. She first burst on to the club scene with the naughty, pulsating Want More in 2016, and in the decade since, the singer, rapper and DJ has applied the same rigour to her career as she has to her emergency prepping, going from cult underground artist to rising pop star, opening arenas for Beyoncé and Charli xcx, winning a Mobo award in 2024, and appearing in Madonna’s recent Confessions II – The Film, in which she shared a toilet stall with Arca and Richard E Grant.

After her role in the fantasy series, the actor felt lost. Now she’s getting relationship advice from Sandra Bullock and Nicole Kidman, and following a Sex and the City star’s mantra: never be anywhere you aren’t enjoying yourself

Maisie Williams has dabbled in witchcraft exactly once. The actor was getting ready to audition for a part in a film. “I wanted it so badly that I went on to Etsy, and I paid a witch to manifest me the role,” she says, poker-faced.

“It didn’t work, and that was where my days of witchcraft ended,” she adds, breaking into an infectious cackle.

The confessional classic opened the floodgates for a generation of brilliant female showrunners. But as risk-averse streamers tighten their purse strings, is the industry forcing women’s stories back into a box?

Ten years ago, Phoebe Waller-Bridge locked eyes with the camera and asked her audience: “Do I have a massive arsehole?” An unexpected punchline to a monologue about a booty call that went surprisingly – and literally – south, it announced Waller-Bridge as a new star of British telly. The half-hour comedy series Fleabag broke the fourth wall, and the internet. Its second season was even bigger, spawning countless thinkpieces discussing Andrew Scott as the “hot priest” and the sold-out Topshop jumpsuit worn by Waller-Bridge, which had a keyhole cutout revealing an aspirational slice of boob.

Both Fleabag and Waller-Bridge were praised for blazing a path that female showrunners and their feminist creations could later stomp down. It secured Waller-Bridge an exclusive deal with Amazon worth a reported $20m (£16m) a year. The show’s success certainly changed Waller-Bridge’s life. But, a decade on, as the British television industry has been reshaped by the rise of streamers, budget cuts and dwindling opportunities for new talent, how did it change TV?

From franchise hits to historical epics, joyous musicals to autobiographical family sagas: Steven Spielberg has done it all. As his latest sci-fi film Disclosure Day is released, film-makers, authors and Guardian critics reveal which of his movies means the most to them

Steven Spielberg is often described as the inventor of the “event movie” – or as the creator of our new age of IP supremacy, in which the genre property is more important than any above-the-title film star. But that isn’t quite it. He came of age in the American new wave era but in spirit belonged neither to that nor fully to Hollywood’s golden age studio system that preceded it.

In fact, he synthesised both into a directing style that was audacious and fluent. He availed himself of the subversiveness of the new wave, and yet was classically oriented, drawing upon his love of – and alienation from – the all-American suburb, making him the Edward Hopper or the Andrew Wyeth of the movies. Tellingly, it was François Truffaut, the most emollient and Hollywood-friendly of France’s Nouvelle Vague masters, whom Spielberg cast in a cameo in Close Encounters of the Third Kind.

Swerving the child abuse allegations, the new Michael Jackson film is yet another revisionist music movie in a long line. We know what’s in it for their subjects. What about the viewers?

As a giant glittering ferris wheel dissolves into a closeup of Michael Jackson’s face, legendary producer Quincy Jones explains to him that what people want is “pure escapism”. Michael, a new biopic about Jackson’s rise to fame directed by Antoine Fuqua, is certainly that: a fantastical greatest hits playlist scrubbed clean of the darkness that tarnished the singer’s reputation. The songs, which were licensed by Sony and the Jackson estate, remain glorious, transporting and indelible.

Michael is the latest addition to a new canon of authorised music biopics including films about and featuring the official music of Elton John, Aretha Franklin, Elvis Presley, Whitney Houston, Amy Winehouse, Bob Marley, Robbie Williams, Bob Dylan and Bruce Springsteen. The genre was revived by the success of the 2018 Freddie Mercury biopic Bohemian Rhapsody, which was made with Queen’s involvement and took home four Oscars and $911m at the box office. Never mind that it was dismissed by critics; the boost it gave to the band’s streaming figures set a new precedent for hungry estate holders keen to cash in – and to control the narrative.

His multi-hyphenate career has made him one of Britain’s most versatile recognisable stars – but hasn’t stopped him facing some seriously awkward moments…

Riz Ahmed was multitasking. It was February in London, and the actor was doing an interview with a men’s magazine en route to collect his kid from school. So far, so starry. “Here’s the reality,” says Ahmed today, palms slamming down hard on the table. “I’m late for the school run. I’m stuck in traffic. I’m meant to be at my laptop, but I’m having to do it on my phone, in my car. I’m double parked on a double yellow line, doing the interview, looking over my shoulder. The traffic warden’s coming, it’s rush hour. He tries to move me along. I try to get out of there while I’m talking on the phone to this guy.”

Distracted, Ahmed hit another car. The driver jumped out of his vehicle, incensed. “He’s like, ‘What the fuck are you doing?!’” says Ahmed, who had been attempting to continue the interview. “I’m now going off video, like, ‘Oh, my signal’s a bit bad!’ while going on and off mute negotiating car insurance details. On the phone, I’m going, ‘Absolutely, it was just such an honour getting to tell my story with these amazing collaborators,’” he says, his voice lowering an octave and turning smooth.

The actor and musician’s first film role was the musical prodigy in the surprise hit horror. Now he’s up for a Bafta and about to perform live at the Oscars – and it’s all still sinking in

It’s lunchtime in New York City, and Miles Caton is still in bed. That morning, the 20-year-old star of Sinners set his alarm for 8.30am so he could watch the Oscar nominations live. “As soon as I woke up, I went straight to YouTube,” he says, where he learned Sinners had been nominated for 16 Academy Awards, more than any other film in Oscars history. Unsurprisingly, his phone has been blowing up: he’s been so busy responding to messages, he’s yet to get out of bed.

A southern gothic horror musical set in the 1930s, about the bloodsucking of Black culture, Sinners was the unexpected box office smash of 2025, earning $368m in ticket sales globally. The film co-stars Michael B Jordan and comes from the imagination of Ryan Coogler, the writer-director behind Marvel’s Black Panther franchise and the Rocky reboot, Creed. “I watched Black Panther for the first time when I was 12 years old,” says Caton, who remembers going to the cinema to see the director’s Afrofuturist superhero movie with his whole family. “It was ‘Wakanda Forever!’ We was putting our fist up!” he says, motioning a Black power fist at the screen. “To me, a Ryan Coogler film was culture,” he says.

After experiencing the strangeness of the Academy Awards with her last film The Brutalist, the indie actor has reunited with its creators for period curio The Testament of Ann Lee. But what she’d really like to get her teeth into is a certain dino franchise

Stacy Martin is “not a religious person”. Still, the actor insists things have happened in her life that have made her realise there’s “a whole expanse of things that are unexplainable”. Once, at home in north London, she noticed a lightbulb flickering. She couldn’t solve the mystery: no matter how many times she changed it, the bulb continued to blink. Instead of consulting the internet, Martin went to see her psychic, a tea leaf reader she meets annually, booking in under a fake name.

The psychic suggested that someone was trying to communicate with her. “I was like: ‘What if I just start talking to this person that apparently wants to talk to me?’” says Martin. “And so I did. And that light never flickered again.” Martin prefers not to use the word ghost, but she’s aware there are things the mind can’t make sense of; things the body somehow knows.

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.

Swift’s six-parter charting her Eras tour began with some riveting revelations – but the drama ebbed away, leaving another piece of mere product for fans

In the behind-the-scenes documentary series Taylor Swift: The End of an Era, the singer Florence Welch ascends to the stage to perform their duet Florida!!! to a crowd of 90,000 people. Welch later reflects on their duet at Wembley Stadium with a mix of awe and bemusement. “Taylor is my friend,” she says. “I know her as this very cosy person, and I came out of that lift and I was like, ‘Oh my God, it’s fucking Taylor Swift.’”

If Swift is a cosy person, The End of an Era – now complete, with its concluding episodes dropping today – is certainly a cosy watch; the sort of lighthearted, low-demand viewing that feels especially welcome in the lazy days leading up to Christmas and stretching towards the new year. Viewers will be familiar with the story. The Eras Tour was great, it tells us. It broke records, burst hearts and boosted the economy. We know she pulled it off. This is only a problem insofar as it means there is almost zero jeopardy in the series, which feels repetitive and thinly stretched over its six hour-long episodes.