Riley keough

Wednesday

Deborah Ross

Nothing can save Rosebush Pruning 

Rosebush Pruning is one of those films where you’ll say to yourself at the end: what the hell have I just seen? And not in a good way. It’s about a wealthy family who are into fratricide, parricide, incest and blood. No quiet evenings playing Trivial Pursuit or charades for this lot. Mercifully, it is only 90 minutes long but, on the other hand, there are images you won’t be able to scrub from your mind for a lifetime. Swings and roundabouts, my friends, swings and roundabouts. When it comes to the eat-the-rich genre, this does make Saltburn look like child’s play Inexplicably, it has a knockout cast: Callum Turner, Jamie Bell, Tracy Letts, Pamela Anderson, Riley Keough, Elle Fanning, Lukas Gage. (You will want to pull each aside to ask: ‘Why? Did you piss off your agent?

Thursday

Christopher Sandford

Lisa Marie Presley’s posthumous book exposes the horrors of celebrity

From our US edition

The title of this book may offer a clue to its prevailing tone. There’s a certain amount of showbiz gossip involved, but it is essentially a protracted rumination of the “What’s it all about, Alfie?” variety, with plenty of unflinching discourse on matters such as spirituality, depression, addiction and the precariousness of the human condition. “I wondered how many times a heart can break,” the authors write near the end of their tale of untold material privilege and wrenching emotional grief. All too often, is the inescapable answer. The book is freighted with a certain amount of woe from the start, because its principal author, Elvis Presley’s only child, herself tragically died in January 2023, aged fifty-four, due to weight-loss surgery complications.

Lisa Marie

Thursday

Zoe Strimpel

Mesmerising and monstrous: @zola reviewed

The distinction between on and offline life blurred long ago. The greatest spats, sexual self-fashionings and mad soliloquies now unfurl on social media. The splenetic rhythms and fundamental shallowness of this medium make it a questionable source for art, but Janicza Bravo’s @zola — the first film ever released based entirely on a series of viral tweets — makes a tight, original fist of such material. @zola is A’Ziah ‘Zola’ Wells King, who in 2015 as a 19-year-old exotic dancer and stripper living in Detroit unleashed a 148-tweet thread, billed as #thestory, which detailed a chain of nasty but fascinating events during a surreal trip to Tampa.