He made Daniel Radcliffe’s Harry Potter fart, left Judi Dench unable to control herself and told a fry-up fantasy about Helen Mirren. A new biography details the star’s mischief

Jasper Rees’s authorised biography of Michael Gambon, published three years after the great actor’s death, has nuanced accounts of his performances in Shakespeare, Beckett and Pinter as well as The Singing Detective and the Harry Potter films. There are even chapters devoted to his hands (“the biggest you’ve ever seen on anybody” – Brian Cox) and similarly enormous feet. But, Gambon being Gambon, there are also dozens of accounts of tomfoolery on and off stage …

This Guy-Ritchie-directed gangland drama is deathly dull. It’s a charm-free watch with awful characters and humour so genital-based that at one point Helen Mirren yells a penis joke at a sausage

MobLand. It sounds like a regional nightclub. Or a boyband. But it’s not. It’s a Paramount+ crime drama starring Pierce Brosnan as an Irishman unable to speak in a convincing Irish accent. This is his tragedy. His cross to bear. And now it’s ours, too, because MobLand is back for a second series, with Brosnan – as the veteran gang boss Conrad Harrigan – once again battling other gang bosses while attempting to say things like “Oi love ye loike a tramp loves paraffin” without his vowels shrivelling into tiny raisins of pseudo-Hibernian shame. Does he succeed? Oi tink not! But there are bigger problems afoot, to be sure.

Created by Ronan “Top Boy” Bennett and directed by Guy Ritchie, the first series of the London-set MobLand (feel the width of that capitalised L!) was a sustained roar of nothing much; a rumble through every possible modern gangster drama cliche in the Every Modern Gangster Drama Cliche book. You know the sort of thing: car chases through suspiciously empty city streets; convoluted drug deals with mumbling eastern Europeans; tiny-eyed endomorphs in flat caps bellowing “Oi” in slow motion as they hurtle through the air to the strains of something unconscionable by Kasabian.

Toronto film festival: A fictionalised version of the cantankerous crime author plots a murder with an ambitious editor in a story in need of a sharper edge

The restrictions of Covid led to an inevitable rise in safely contained chamber-piece movies, where a handful of characters find themselves in a usually remote house, dialogue taking obvious precedence over action. There were some highlights, such Kevin Williamson’s timely slasher Sick, and some considerable low points, such as Sam Levinson’s vapid drama Malcolm & Marie, but while we had plenty of them, none of them rivalled some of the greatest and smartest pre-pandemic examples. The very best tended to be based on plays and quite often starred Michael Caine.

He was in Anthony Shaffer’s Sleuth, which went from Tony to Oscar success back in the 1970s, and then the arguably even better Deathtrap in the decade after, which Sidney Lumet adapted from Ira Levin’s deviously plotted play. In between there was also an under-seen TV movie called One of My Wives Is Missing, based on 60s play Trap for a Single Man, which was notably lesser but still delivered a similarly specific brand of twisty, talky thrills. There would be secrets, surprises, reversals and usually at least one dead body by the end of it, a subgenre entirely indebted to the work of Agatha Christie (who reportedly loved Sleuth on stage so much that she dedicated a picture of herself to be hung in the house used in the big screen adaptation). The bar is therefore held rather high, a puzzle that requires an ingenious level of writing that needs to be smart without smug and shocking without feeling cheap.

This year’s festival offers an unusual Patricia Highsmith thriller, an adaptation of a hit stage show, a harrowing prison drama and a new way into the Rocky franchise

Defining Toronto’s place within the fall festival season has become a little harder in recent years. As fewer studios and film-makers want to brave the risks that come attached to premiering on such a stage (last year’s best picture winner One Battle After Another skipped festivals entirely and went straight to cinema), those that do tend to prefer Venice, Telluride and, especially this year, New York.

Last year’s biggest Toronto breakout was Obsession, a micro-budget, up-for-sale horror that played as part of the midnight madness strand, and while that film is now being pushed as an awards contender, it’s not what crowds and pundits typically expect from the starry, prestige-first festival. Is it best viewed now as a rough-and-ready genre hub or maybe a sales market, where perhaps we can still expect some Oscar contenders to be unveiled. It can make figuring out what to see and what to avoid a little harder – but here are some films to keep an eye on over the next week or so.

In this week’s newsletter: A non-exhaustive list of the films to keep an eye out for this autumn

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The next three months or so is one of my favourite spells in the film calendar, as a load of Oscar hopefuls with big stars and auteurs attached come out of hiding. You can catch a decent movie at the cinema every week until Christmas – but you might want a guide to direct you to the right ones. This week’s Guide does exactly that.

What’s more, it’s not exhaustive: there will be films landing from the autumn festivals that haven’t yet been given a release date and a host of big awards movies due in the UK in January (Danny Boyle’s Murdoch movie Ink, Robert Eggers’s Werewulf, Jesse Eisenberg’s The Debut). But, this should keep you going until the days start getting longer again.

The ruthless female characters of The Gentlemen, Beef and Peaky Blinders bring new depth to the evil matriarch stereotype

Television loves a gangster story – and apparently so does the Duchess of Sussex. This week, Netflix’s The Gentlemen – Guy Ritchie’s latest addition to the gangster canon, which stars Theo James as a distractingly handsome aristocrat who becomes embroiled in the world of organized crime – returns for its second season. And in August, the show hit the headlines after rumors that Meghan was reportedly in early talks to join its third season when she and Prince Harry made their highly unexpected return to the UK.

At first, Meghan’s potential role seemed like a random pivot for the former Suits star, who now seems far more at home holding a jar of her Montecito-made jam than brandishing a gun. But really, these casting rumours are indicative of a wider shift in the traditionally machismo-fueled gangster genre, where it’s now more common to see women stealing the spotlight – and calling the shots.

The 51st edition of the Canadian festival will also feature world premieres starring Taron Egerton, Amanda Seyfried and Chase Infiniti

World premieres of films led by Helen Mirren, Seth Rogen and Chris Rock lead the lineup for this year’s Toronto film festival.

The September festival, taking place after the Venice film festival, has previously seen the premieres of Oscar-winning movies such as Green Book, The Eyes of Tammy Faye, Still Alice, Dallas Buyers Club and Silver Linings Playbook.

Footballers, charity founders, actors and musicians among those celebrated for service to Britain

Six members of the Lionesses’ victorious Euro 2025 squad have been made MBEs in King Charles’s birthday honours list, while the actor Dame Helen Mirren has been made a Companion of Honour for services to drama.

They are joined by the former rugby league player Kevin Sinfield, who has been knighted for his campaigning and fundraising to tackle motor neurone disease.

Responding to an incident in which she was verbally abused, the actor said that ‘evil forces are rising everywhere’, as well as expressing support for MobLand co-star Tom Hardy

Helen Mirren has commented on being called an “evil Zionist bitch” while being harassed in the street in London, saying she was “attacked by mistake by a man who was maybe a little over passionate or maybe mentally not quite stable”.

Footage circulated last month of an incident, believed to have taken place last year, while Mirren was walking with her husband, film-maker Taylor Hackford. They were approached and filmed by an unidentified person, who commented on Mirren’s support of Israel and then launched a volley of abuse at her.

Guardian photographer David Levene was at the Royal Albert Hall to photograph the stars and the special performances at London’s biggest night of theatre

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In Kate Winslet’s Goodbye June, Timothy Spall, 68, plays the father of Toni Collette, who is 53 – and pregnant. But those liberties are nothing compared with North by Northwest, The Manchurian Candidate or Thanksgiving

To be able to enjoy Kate Winslet’s new Christmas movie, Goodbye June, you have to be able to do a couple of things. First, if you’ve ever suffered any form of bereavement, you may have to approach it slowly, since the film is explicitly about the death of a parent. But the other thing you need to do is not Google the age of any of the cast.

This is for good reason. The titular June is played by Dame Helen Mirren, and her husband is played by Timothy Spall. Fine actors and national treasures, the pair of them. However, Mirren is 80 years old, and Spall is 68. Again, this is fine. You have undoubtedly met couples with bigger age gaps than this, and in all probability they are perfectly happy together.

Star turns from Helen Mirren, Andrea Riseborough and Toni Colette can’t stop cartoony sentimentality smothering this film directed by Winslet and written by her son Joe Anders

Kate Winslet’s feature directing debut is a family movie, scripted by her son Joe Anders; it’s a well-intentioned and starrily cast yuletide heartwarmer, like a two-hour John Lewis Christmas TV ad without the logo at the end. There are one or two nice lines and sharp moments but they are submerged in a treacly soup of sentimentality; in the end, I couldn’t get past the cartoony quasi-Richard Curtis characterisation and the weird not-quite-earthlingness of the people involved. Having said this, I am aware of having been first in the queue to denigrate Winslet’s Christmas film The Holiday, that is regarded by many as one of the most successful films of all time.

Helen Mirren is the June of the title, an affectionate but sharp-tongued matriarch who is diagnosed with terminal cancer in the run-up to Christmas, and her entire quarrelling clan will have to assemble in her hospital room. June, with a kind of benign cunning, realises that she can use her last days as a cathartic crisis that will cure her adult children’s unspoken hurt. They are a stressed careerist (Winslet), a stay-at-home mum (Andrea Riseborough), a hippy-dippy natural birth counsellor (Toni Collette) and a troubled soul (Johnny Flynn), plus all their various kids. There is also June’s daft old husband Bernie, played by Timothy Spall, who likes a drink and can’t talk about his feelings, and whose scatterbrained goofiness has a sad origin. Stephen Merchant plays Riseborough’s lovably useless husband and a gentle hospital nurse, played by Fisayo Akinade, is the ensemble’s self-effacing guide to a wiser future.