Good luck to my fellow Toast the City award nominees! October 21, 2025 It is the day of City AM’s Toast the City Awards, celebrating the hospitality and placemaking that makes the Square Mile great. I could not be more proud to be attending, as both a judge and a nominee. I would like to reach out ahead of the event to wish all the best to everyone [...]
Fabulous! Pop these bottles this World Champagne Day October 20, 2025 A day worth celebrating, 24th October is World Champagne Day, as if anyone needs an excuse to pop a bottle! Hundreds of years ago the wine in Champagne was still and pinky-red – a world away from what we associate with the region now. Bubbles were considered a fault, exploding the weaker bottles made for [...]
Bugonia review: Emma Stone denies being an alien October 16, 2025 Since his 2015 breakthrough The Lobster, Yorgos Lanthimos has become one of Hollywood’s stranger indie darlings, known for injecting macabre tales with the adrenaline shot of star power, often in the form of Emma Stone. Bugonia, for the most part, is one of his more straightforward movies, certainly compared to the gothic weirdness of Poor [...]
& Sons review: Bill Nighy is immense in family drama with a twist October 16, 2025 In 2022’s Living, Bill Nighy played a dapper old gent grappling with his mortality amid the realisation life has largely passed him by. In many ways, Argentinian director Pablo Trapero’s English language debut & Sons is the equal and opposite of that film, following a broken, decrepit husk of a man who has long-since achieved [...]
Best of the fest: 9 of the best London Film Festival movies to book October 16, 2025 Anemone, After The Hunt, Is This Thing On? and much more: The best of London Film Festival, and when to catch these films in cinemas No Other Choice Dir. Park Chan-wook No Other Choice is a sprawling, pitch-black farce that starts out as a corporate satire and morphs into something so singular and distinct I’m [...]
Inside amazing new London restaurant in an old bank near Oxford Street October 16, 2025 New London restaurant Aki has opened in a quiet enclave a few minutes’ walk from Oxford Street A handsome, high-ceilinged former bank with all its beautiful ceiling cornicing and latticework from its 1825 opening has been refashioned as a Japanese restaurant. New London restaurant Aki is behind an unassuming door opposite The Phoenix pub a [...]
After the Hunt: Luca Guadagnino’s MeToo drama misfires October 15, 2025 Luca Guadagnino’s films tackle the big questions: “What if tennis players were sexy?” “What if Suspiria was boring?” “What if a man had sex with fruit?” His latest, After the Hunt, asks an altogether more controversial question: “What if we shouldn’t believe women?” This post-post-MeToo parable has the dubious honour of capturing the cultural crossroads [...]
Anemone review: Daniel Day-Lewis returns in his son’s debut film October 15, 2025 After starring in some of the most iconic movies of the last 40 years – Gangs of New York, There Will Be Blood, The Age of Innocence – Daniel Day-Lewis retired after 2017’s Phantom Thread. Perhaps the most famous of the method actors, his commitment to the bit – three years in the gym for [...]
No Other Choice review: Is Park Chan-wook satire a new Parasite? October 15, 2025 You could make a case for Park Chan-wook having the most absurdly varied CV of any living director. Coming to international attention in 2003 with cult classic revenge movie Oldboy, his oeuvre includes steamy psychological thriller Stoker, disturbing erotica The Handmaiden and romantic neo-noir Decision to Leave. Next up is No Other Choice, a sprawling, [...]
Is This Thing On? at London Film Festival: Bradley Cooper’s hilarious homage to John Bishop October 14, 2025 Is This Thing On? starring Bradley Cooper, review and star rating from the London Film Festival: ★★★★ It is the strangest-sounding premise of any of the films premiering at the London Film Festival 2025: in Is This Thing On?, Bradley Cooper directs a biopic inspired by the life of Liverpudlian comedian John Bishop. It is [...]