The Talented Mr Ripley gets an upgrade in a buzzy and biting film about a desperate outsider who infiltrates the inner circle of a singer on the riseIf Tom Ripley lived in LA in 2018 and was really into lo-fi bedroom pop, he might look something like the main character of Lurker. The debut feature from Alex Russell, The Bear and Beef writer-producer, is an elegantly creepy thriller about one super-fan’s scheme to become close to his musical idol, transposing author Patricia Highsmith’s “two-man theme” into a murkier grey territory, with parasitic attachment giving way to co-dependence that blooms into something that looks like a twisted kind of love.The lurker of the title is Matthew (Théodore Pellerin), an isolated twentysomething who lives with his grandma and works shifts at a local vintage boutique to make ends meet. After a chance run-in with his idol Oliver (Saltburn’s Archie Madekwe) at the vintage store where he works, Matthew worms his way into Oliver’s entourage and makes himself indispensable – first as a videographer, then confidante and then as someone who has the power to make Oliver’s enviable life come crashing down. “The thing I found relatable is that no one tells you how lonely being any version of an artist is,” says Madekwe. “Oliver needs someone outside the paid [members of his team] to say ‘Yeah, I fuck with it. I get it. You’re so real.’ He needs it because he knows that he’s a bit of a fraud anyway.” Continue reading…

‘I don’t want players that don’t want to come to the club’Mikel Arteta echoes importance of desire to join a teamThomas Frank has made it clear that he only wants players at Tottenham who are committed to the club’s “fantastic badge” as the dust begins to settle on the Eberechi Eze saga.Spurs reached an agreement with Crystal Palace for the transfer of the England forward on Wednesday and believed they had one with the player as well. Yet hours later, Arsenal swept in to gazump them and are primed to confirm his arrival in a £67.5m deal. If it is a coup for Arsenal and a dream move for Eze, who supported the club as a boy, it has been an episode Spurs would rather forget. They failed in a bid for Nottingham Forest’s Morgan Gibbs-White in July and are without their two main central attacking midfielders, Dejan Kulusevski and James Maddison. Both have long-term injuries. Continue reading…

From Compton outsider to American nonpareil, she came to embody resistance to toxic norms. But her embrace of GLP-1 drugs feels like capitulation to ideals she once rejectedWhen Serena Williams was featured in a People magazine story on Thursday morning discussing her 31lb weight loss, the rollout had all the hallmarks of an advertisement draped in the thin veil of an all-caps EXCLUSIVE.Vogue’s social channels amplified their own access, NBC’s Today show gave her a one-on-one segment and Elle published a carefully packaged interview in which Williams declared she wanted to break the stigma around weight-loss drugs, each of them in lockstep with what appeared to be a hard 9am press embargo. This vintage Jill Smoller quadrafecta was not a spontaneous confessional; it was a coordinated media blitz pegged to the US Open, the tentpole event of American tennis, which kicks off on Sunday in earnest. Continue reading…