This article contains spoilers for The Favourite.

When speaking with the filmmakers and cast of The Favourite, Den of Geek posed a simple yet impossible question: Who in this darkly hilarious tragedy is the protagonist? Or, just as easily, who is the lead character? It’s a preposterous query, because the answer between its triumvirate of acerbic performances is all of them. Or none of them.

At different points, Rachel Weisz’s Lady Sarah, Emma Stone’s Abigail Hill and Olivia Colman’s not-so-regal Queen Anne dominate the film’s narrative and our sympathies. But at no point do any of them maintain their ownership of that power, which is all the more remarkable since Yorgos Lanthimos’ film is entering an awards season that is compelled to simplify art to categories, and performance to titles.

“For me, there was never one protagonist between the three of them,” Yorgos Lanthimos says when asked who is at the center of the film’s triangle. “From starting to write the screenplay with Tony McNamara, we knew that we wanted to create these three very complicated and complex women that, in different times within the film, they would kind of take the lead or have the upper hand.”

It’s a fair assessment, even as it flies in the face of the arbitrary discussion that film culture is currently having around this film: “Who should the Academy nominate for the Best Actress Oscar and who should be nominated for the Best Supporting Actress Oscar?”

With three fantastic lead performances between Colman, Stone, and Weisz, it’s inevitable to want to discuss award recognition, but as film culture continues to be divided between prestige and blockbuster, art and commerce, so too does the ostensible high-quality work get reduced to a political analyst’s spreadsheet of vulnerabilities and assets after the latest poll.

In the actual film, Colman gives a supremely scene-stealing performance that reclaims Queen Anne from historical obscurity and makes a compelling case that she was every bit as mercurial and peculiar as the infamous, and oft Hollywoodised, Henry VIII. Yet while Henry is able to freely indulge his excesses and whims, the feminine Queen Anne is relegated to the shadows of her own court.

Stricken with gout and a seeming legion of bodily weaknesses, Anne is emotionally vulnerable and paranoid throughout. Weisz is right when she tells us that the queen is quite toddler-like and lashes out, looking for distraction and some form of familial love after suffering 17 miscarriages.

She finds it in Weisz’s Lady Sarah, who in turn is as much a protagonist as her wrathful and insecure queen. Lady Sarah is the woman who has been closest to Anne since girlhood, and when Anne inexplicably comes into the crown, Sarah situates herself as Anne’s right-hand woman, usurping the men of the early 18th century English court to essentially run the realm while Anne preens over her pet rabbits – 17, one for each dead child.

“They were childhood friends and they’ve been best friends since before they were famous,” Weisz says. “But Sarah, my character, loves England and loves the Queen. But the Queen is England, and England is the Queen.”

It is a less bombastic turn than Colman’s, nor is it as deliciously duplicitous as Stone’s Abigail, who comes to court as a distant relation of Sarah begging for employment… but somehow winds up threatening Weisz’s status as the queen’s favorite courtier. Yet it is arguably the centerpiece as both women apply pressure on Sarah’s status. It’s also the position that Hollywood would traditionally enjoy most, as she reflects the golden star whose winning streak is threatened by a new ingénue, à la Anne Baxter in All About Eve.

Still, Abigail is hardly a villain. Much of the first half of the film is viewed from her perspective, as she gets the lay of the land at court, and then starts making her moves. In a lesser period piece, those power plays would be seen as even a moment of heroic triumph, but in this film, Stone laughs at the idea of Abigail as a heroine.

“She’s no Joan of Arc,” Stone deadpans about her character. “She’s using any means necessary to survive. I think she’s a heroine unto herself for sure… But the protagonist [aspect] is hard, because you see the development of all three stories in a pretty equal way.” Stone even invites the All About Eve comparisons between her character and the eponymous Eve. “Near the end, some pretty irredeemable things, I think, start to occur.”

This also plays into how Weisz succinctly sums up all three central characters in the film: “Vulnerable and cruel and sadistic and manipulative and bitchy.”

How Lanthimos’ grandiose compositions, and McNamara’s prose, contrast these three women’s journeys and sensibilities is what makes The Favourite a sardonic delight and one of the year’s best films. It is also what reveals the limitations of when film journalism and film culture reduces all works of art to the dated parameters of an institution nearing its centennial.

By virtue of political opportunity, Fox Searchlight will have had to make some prudent decisions about which star they placed in the Best Actress category and which they campaigned for a Best Supporting statuette in, as two or three nominations in one category inevitably cancel each other out (or turn off nominating Academy voters during the ballot process).

But the reductive nature of this horse race becoming the focal point to The Favourite‘s target audience not only fails to celebrate films that land outside the box of Academy tastes, as fluctuating as those may be, but even deprives much of film criticism to freely evaluate cinema on its own terms.

Colman, Stone, and Weisz all provide awards-worthy performances and should all be recognised, but the obsession with who gets what award or is placed in which category risks robbing The Favourite of playing on its own terms. It is a film about women who do not play by the rules of the patriarchy; much of cinema culture is all too eager to place them back inside that box.

This section of the review is free of spoilers. If you venture below Daphne the spoiler-squirrel, beware…

11.8 The Witchfinders 

If you’ve yet to see this week’s instalment of Doctor Who… well, you probably weren’t an American fan streaming it on Amazon Video. Last week’s adventure, Kerblam!, somehow managed to displace itself in the archives of the very corporation it was lampooning, meaning that a few confused viewers found themselves with early access to tonight’s historical outing. As such, it’s probably been slightly harder than usual to avoid spoilers this week, but if – like us – you managed to do so, we’ll begin with some overall impressions before delving into specifics.

So far this year, the historical episodes have been a deliberately slow-paced and measured look at a pivotal situation, leaving the Doctor and her companions skirting cautiously around the boots of history, eager not to damage the footprints. There’s none of that restraint on display this week, though. For reasons as emotive as they are intellectual, Team TARDIS have cause to throw themselves whole-heartedly into the fray and sort the timeline out afterwards. 

This gleeful abandon lends itself to a tale that isn’t just pacey, it’s sometimes poorly-paced. The first moments of dialogue happen in voice-over, for instance, and there are a number of conversations and encounters that seem almost brutally rushed, but then there’s also a lot of time spent showing the gang tramping through the forests of Lancashire when there really isn’t that much to talk about. If you’ve enjoyed the greater emphasis on meaning and character that Rosa and Demons Of The Punjab provided, you may be left with a mostly-empty stomach following tonight’s episode. Conversely, if you’re a Whovian who’s been itching for the stakes to be raised and a proper peril to present itself, you might find yourself remembering the old adage: be careful what you wish for…

From now on, here be spoilers.

Here be monsters! We’ll get to the Morax later – or the Moracks, as it may be. Or the Moraqs, perhaps. It’s hard to say for sure when they weren’t namedropped in the credits, so for now we’ll go with the x as it’s clearly the most extra-terrestrial intruder in the alphabet. Firstly, though, it’s time to address a grumble that, just like the muddy malcontents this week, has been bubbling under the surface for far too long.

The various incarnations of Star Trek have often been jokingly accused of taking long strings of technobabble and then immediately having another character simplify them into a single, easy-to-digest analogy. The kind of explanation, in other words, that keeps the more casual viewer up to speed.  This year, Doctor Who has repeatedly gone one step further; it’s taken to reiterating the same very basic plot points over and over again within a single conversation.

This tendency to have the regular characters state and restate what’s happening, so that the writing team are absolutely sure everyone’s on the same page, has permeated this season, but it seems particularly obnoxious this week. There’s the moment, for example, where the alien convicts lunge forward, shouting “Morax!” only for the Doctor to retaliate with a stern “Who are you?” Later, the Doctor posits that the Morax must have been imprisoned on Earth, presumably for war crimes – an observation that would have seemed a lot more intuitive had they not bellowed that exact confession at her five minutes previously. (There’s an awful lot of bellowing this episode, from pretty much everyone concerned.) 

While this heavy-handed approach to storytelling is doubtlessly effective, it does mean that even the swiftest script suddenly feels bloated and a little bit patronising if you’ve been enjoying the unapologetically convoluted storylines of recent years. There is absolutely nothing wrong with wanting to ensure Doctor Who is something the entire family are capable of appreciating, but there are ways and means of doing so that don’t have to come from repetition of dialogue. Sometimes, a single look from one of the main cast is all you need, but it’s been rare to see that level of trust in the actors on display this year.

Expositional grumblings aside, though, tonight became a marked departure from the previous two historicals courtesy of Alan Cumming and his portrayal of James I, a ruler who famously became intrigued with witch trials while travelling and soon ensured they were in vogue back at home. Honestly, he could well have been auditioning for a Blackadder revival tonight. Doe-eyed and plum-cheeked, Cumming’s campy performance rests upon all of the prevalent preconceptions about King James, whether that’s his latent, distracted paranoia or taking a fancy to random male courtesans. A tonal whiplash surrounds him, to the point that you’re never quite sure whether he’s to be hated, pitied or taken as a figure of fun. Like many a monarch in Doctor Who, he certainly carries precious little authority when things kick off.

And speaking of authority – while the subject’s had its edges nibbled before, this week we run headlong into the elephant in the room. It was obvious from the get-go that tonight, sooner or later, Jodie Whittaker’s portrayal of the Doctor was going to be tried as a witch when a male regeneration might not have been. There’s definitely some fun to be had with the notion that, having spent half-a-dozen episodes insisting that her sex doesn’t matter, the Doctor is huffily forced to acknowledge that, at least in the presence of a foppish and possibly delusional sovereign, his guards and some swords, it absolutely does.

It’s unfortunate, however, that in the first plot to really acknowledge the Doctor’s physical change, we saw more of the fallible tendencies and distracted nature that have characterised Whittaker’s regeneration thus far. Maybe because she’s part of a larger ensemble or maybe because there’s a renewed effort not to portray her as a superhero, this Doctor stumbles in ways that her predecessors didn’t. As this episode focuses strongly on new-found female appearance, it’s hard not to imagine that people might conflate the two and come away feeling that this new, less assertive Doctor is part and parcel of her being a woman, even if that was never the team’s intention. 

For example, here the Doctor is so excited by the prospect of living mud in a specimen jar that she allows the bad guys to loom up behind her, even while Yaz intones “Doctor… Doctor…” like we’re watching Scooby-Doo. She’s unable to bring King James on-side with one of her trademark speeches, and in fact it’s he that leaves her speechless this week. Having a more vulnerable Doctor is absolutely not a bad thing, but in an episode where the guest cast repeatedly state that women can only accomplish so much, this feels like a missed opportunity for Whittaker’s personification to step up and prove to all concerned that she’s still the universe’s one-and-only cosmic hobo. There were no glass ceilings for the sonic to shatter this week, not when King James ultimately ignored the Doctor’s protests and chose to put the final ‘witch’ to the torch before her eyes. 

All of which brings us back around to the Morax, ambiguously-spelled Monsters of the Week. Whether you consider them evocative of the Gelth thanks to their desire to inhabit dead bodies, or some kind of offspring of the Flood that so effectively terrorised Bowie Base One back in The Waters Of Mars, we certainly received our long-awaited alien threat. Unfortunately, the phrase ‘paper-thin’ would be heaping too much praise upon this particular menace, even if they are basically from a tree.

Why? “Kneel before the Morax, feeble human!” That was a line, an actual line of dialogue roared by an alien criminal in a year that has left us desperately craving a meaty antagonist. Despite all of the shouting this week it’s hard to see what threat the Morax really posed. Okay, so they can’t be shot, but they’re not exactly nimble. They’re also not very clever, given that Ryan and co. are able to hide from them using the impenetrable cloaking device of a seventeenth century staircase railing. Their leader possesses a woodcutter’s axe, yes, but so did my old garden shed, and I was never afraid that that was going to suddenly rise up and murder me. (I am now, though. Bugger.)

When the supposed threat-of-all-threats, the King of the Morax, finally starts to form, it’s a very odd moment indeed. Since this week has struggled to coherently deliver a message about female empowerment, having this ‘King’ – never before mentioned nor apparently really needed – suddenly pop up out of nowhere feels like a bit of a stumble. He never even manifests beyond a vaguely-ominous CG cloud, so you’re forced to wonder why anyone bothered with him at all. Certainly, Siobhan Finneran was more than capable of carrying the danger of the Morax through to their defeat, though that’s damning with faint praise.

As for character development of the regular cast… there was precious little to be found this week. No confrontations, no attempts at inter-generational fist-bumps, none of it – apart from one moment where the Doctor looks to Yasmin to determine Granny Morax’s pulse rather than waving her sonic about. While we’re starting to get ideas of where Yaz, Ryan and Graham’s respective strengths might lie, these are all very formative arcs. Is Ryan the muscle? Is Graham the mole, ingratiating himself while picking up on the finer details? The jury’s still out. 

What we’re left with, when all is said and done, is a pell-mell but flawed episode that abandons the history lessons in favour of an old-fashioned, monster-driven romp.  If only the aliens had been given the same nuance, care and screen time that the human villains have enjoyed so far, this could have been a classic episode. Instead, what we’re left with is a passable story that not only highlights some of the shortcomings every script has suffered from this year, but struggles to define who, exactly, this Doctor is, not to mention her place in the universe she’s defended all of her lives.

Read Chris’ review of the previous episode, Kerblam!, here.

The first teaser trailer for Jon Favreau’s new Disney back catalogue CG revamp, The Lion King, arrived late last night. The Iron Man director and puppet master behind the first of Disney+’s live action Star Wars series, The Mandalorian, previously made nearly a billion dollars for Disney with his 2016 remake of The Jungle Book. We’ll have to wait and see whether he strikes gold again here, but it seems extremely likely.

If you’ve not had chance to check out the Lion King teaser yet, we’ve got you covered…

Donald Glover is the older voice of Simba, while Beyonce is Nala. Rounding out the rest of the impressive voice cast are James Earl Jones (once again as Mufasa), Chiwetel Ejiofor as Scar, Alfre Woodard as Sarabi and our own boy done good John Oliver as Zazu.

The Lion King is set to be released on 19th July, 2019.

To say that a Fallout game is barren, demoralising, and largely free of life is usually to its credit. After all, part of the ‘appeal’ that comes from stepping into a post-apocalyptic world so bleak is the promise between developer Bethesda and its player base, that they can be its one glimmer of hope. Previous entries have delivered on this promise by setting you on a journey in search of your father, son, or in the case of fan-favourite spin-off Fallout New Vegas, revenge. Fallout 76 strips away all this purposeful appeal, instead pitching itself as a multiplayer-focused prequel. The result is a misjudged MMO that forces you to find your own fun – a hard task given myriad technical glitches.

Red flags that the technical performance of Fallout 76 wasn’t quite up to scratch were raised early, when Bethesda itself prepped beta players to expect numerous bugs. “We need your help finding them, and advice on what’s important to fix,” read the studio’s elaborate Twitter post. “We’ll address all of it, now and after launch.” We don’t doubt this was meant in earnest. But even now, roughly a week after release, it’s all too clear that Fallout 76 simply isn’t in a completed state.

Issues arise almost immediately after the game’s opening cutscene. As with most Fallout titles, the story begins with your player-created character awakening from the confines of a comfy vault – this time home to America’s best and brightest minds. Only in Fallout 76 there are plenty more walls and objects to clip through and get stuck in than before. 15 minutes into our playthrough, and the simple act of exploration had us caught within an alcove that proved impossible to get out of. We were forced to restart our console and see if a second attempt fared better. Not the best first impression.

Getting into the meat of Fallout 76 proper, and the post-apocalyptic depiction of Appalachia, West Virginia set roughly 25 years after the bombs fell is quite stunning at times. Areas of the map are luscious and varied, with the beauty of seeing the light pass through the trees hauntingly contrasted with the dilapidated buildings that surround. Much of your time spent exploring and completing objectives involves combing through said areas for resources, feeding into this iteration’s larger emphasis on survival.

Staying alive in Fallout 76 is, naturally, all about preventing your thirst and hunger levels rising. This means constantly drinking, eating, and not just doing that, but ensuring that everything you do consume is clean and free of radiation. As such, what were previously mechanics used to keep your health up in prior games is now a constant ticking clock that only serves to annoy for the most part. Thankfully, the game’s base camp system is a nice addition. It’s here where you get to dig deep into the nitty gritty of surviving, setting up shop wherever suits before purifying water via boiling and cooking healthy meat.

As you’d expect, the switch to multiplayer means that the story takes a back seat, sensibly to encourage you to party up with other players and complete objectives interspersed throughout the map. Most of these take the form of standard, multi-part missions designed to reveal more about this place and time, but it’s really Fallout 76’s randomly generated public events that are ripe for tackling with friends and/or strangers. These range from something as simple as escorting an AI bot across the map as it unlocks safe rooms full of useful goodies, to taking down an infected horde of mutated enemies known as scorchers. All of which would be fun, were it not for the constant framerate dips and clipping, coupled with the game’s clunky ranged and melee combat.

This is because Fallout’s love-it-or-hate-it VATs system – where players slow down time and target specific body parts of enemies, before assessing the percentage chance of a hit – has been replaced with a dumbed-down version. Fallout 76 still allows you to gauge the likelihood of you damaging enemies where intended, but it all must be considered in real-time due to the game now being an online space shared with other players. In this manner, Bethesda’s ambition to make Fallout 76 primarily an MMO hinders the pure thrill of landing a perfect shot between a mutant’s eyes.

Customising your character is at least stronger than ever – both in terms of physical attire and skill attributes. The more objectives you complete and the more enemies you kill, the faster you will rank up. Every time you do level up, however, Fallout 76’s revised SPECIAL system allows you to place points in one of seven categories: Strength, Perception, Endurance, Charisma, Intelligence, Agility and Luck; each one geared towards a particular style of play. Want to get the most resources out of a safe? Boost your intelligence. Want to run farther for longer? Skill up your agility. You get the idea!

Whereas this extra layer of customisation was an appreciated touch in past Fallout games, the added survival elements now mean that a lot of your time is spent in menus micro-managing stats. Rather than present you with an interesting world for you to run around in and enjoy amongst other like-minded survivors, Fallout 76 too often descends into tedious bouts of frustrating micro-management – leaving just the general act of playing feel like busywork. And broken busywork at that.

Fallout 76 is an odd MMO in that it proves challenging to work out who it’s actually for. If you want an interesting story, you won’t find it. If you want a fun co-op experience with friends, there are more suitable choices. Its nature as an online, ‘living’ game does mean that it has a chance at salvation by way of future updates, but that does little to help satisfy those seeking a stable Fallout right here, right now. The franchise mantra famously states that “war never changes”, but we can only hope that Fallout 76 as it stands eventually will.

Fallout 76 is available now for PC, PS4 and Xbox One.

Warning: contains spoilers for Luther series one to four

It’s been a long three years without Idris Elba’s DCI John Luther, everyone’s favourite good cop who rarely sticks to the book to do what’s right. With series five just around the corner, not only do we get to revel in Elba’s charismatic screen presence once more, there’s also hope that we may get some much-needed answers.

Series four didn’t go down brilliantly. While it was widely agreed that John Luther was as tortured and compelling as ever, the plot just went a bit barmy and left audiences with far too much to keep track of. Luther had taken to the coast to live a quiet life away from the Force until news of the death of Alice Morgan (Ruth Wilson) and a cannibal killer loose on the streets of London encouraged him to don his famous coat once again.

From there, Luther found himself in a complex web of criminal doings. While his hunt for Alice’s killer led him to supposed clairvoyant Megan Cantor (Laura Haddock), who teased Luther with the possibility that she murdered Alice, it also led him to George Cornelius (Patrick Malahide), a wheeler dealer who wanted some diamonds Alice had in her possession and who puts a bounty on Luther’s head when Luther chains him to a radiator. All that, and there was the small matter of the cannibal. Oh, and a cold case that is reopened amid the madness.

Series four’s two-parter seemed to frustrate fans who felt too much had been crammed into what was essentially a short Luther special with less of the choppy pacing and thrill of the first three series. So, what do we want to see from the fifth instalment? Short of resurrecting the wonderful, loyal Justin Ripley (Warren Brown) and he and Luther setting up a nice brewery in the country somewhere, it’s really quite simple…

Alice Morgan

We want Alice Morgan back! Killing off this formidable character so easily in series four didn’t sit right, but there may still be hope as the series’ closing scenes suggested that Megan wasn’t behind the murder of Ruth Wilson’s narcissistic mastermind. Maybe Alice is still out there somewhere. She’s been the thread throughout Luther, her murderous nature and the pair’s sexual chemistry making a thrilling cocktail for audiences to get nicely tipsy on. As the show has progressed, she’s also come to be the tormented copper’s rock while he’s lost everyone else close to him. Whether Alice is back in the flesh or in the form of flashbacks prior to her death, we want to know where she is and if there’s hope of happiness for her and Luther.

More episodes

We’ve waited long enough, surely we’ll get more than two episodes this time? Well, luckily, screenwriter Neil Cross has announced that series five will consist of four episodes. Whether this will be two individual two-part stories is unclear, but this fan would love to see at least one self-contained episode in the style of the first series where we get to meet and apprehend a ‘monster of the week’ all in the space of one hour.

Returning players

We fans get attached to characters in Luther. They’re brilliantly written and expertly performed, hence why we fall about sobbing when they’re shot in the chest in a dark industrial estate. Perhaps what made the fourth series feel more sterile is the number of new characters that we had very little time to get to know and love, so it would be a wise move on the writers’ part to have some of the newly established characters further developed in this new series. We wouldn’t sniff at the return of an old villain, either.

It’s a relief to hear the confirmed return of DSU Martin Schenk (Dermot Crowley) and the lovably geeky Benny Silver (Michael Smiley). The return of series four gangster George Cornelius, too, promises to continue Luther’s respect/hate relationship with a fellow born and bred Londoner. With news of Wumni Mosaku joining the cast as John Luther’s new partner, however, it’s looking unlikely we’ll see Rose Leslie’s DS Emma Lane again. Just when Luther’s bad habits were starting to rub off on her, too…

A good reason to return

Most crucially for fans, we don’t want John Luther’s story to be picked up for the sake of it. Last series felt like a cobbled together story that would suffice while Ruth Wilson had other acting commitments, so Luther’s return has a lot to tidy up and needs to tantalise its audience to keep us on side. It would feel like a misstep not to pursue Megan Cantor as Luther had promised at the end of series four, so we can only hope that by coming after Megan we discover Alice’s whereabouts. We’ve also come to expect some truly horrifying criminals and it would be an exciting change of pace to have a female serial killer at large. We’ll have four episodes to get to know the wrongdoers that are in need of a good John Luther thrashing, so fingers crossed for some worthy adversaries to test Luther’s talents.

More of Luther at his best

The show wouldn’t be half as compelling as it is without Idris Elba’s powerhouse performance as the lone wolf who fights for justice. We can’t wait to have this effortlessly cool maverick back in our lives. Let’s hope we get more genius, terrifying and memorable moments like the highlights below…

When Luther lets Henry Madsen fall

There was no better scene to set up the show and Luther’s character. Child killer Henry Madsen is hanging by his fingertips from a beam in a disused warehouse, pleading for his life, while Luther stands on the edge of the drop. He tells Madsen how he attended the scene of one of his murders and refers to Madsen’s victims by name… just long enough for the criminal to plummet to the ground.

When Luther hangs a man over a balcony

Fed up of questioning Sean Beamish, suspect number one in a murder case, Luther stops him fleeing the scene by flinging him over the balcony to his block of flats, holding him by the scruff of the neck and firmly telling him what’s what. 

When Luther plays Russian roulette

Luther is first forced to play Russian roulette when he comes face to face with a tormented soldier who is killing police officers in a terrifying, high-stakes showdown. The next time we see him play this game is shortly after the death of his wife Zoe, when we get a glimpse into his mental state as he spins the barrel of a handgun and pulls the trigger on his temple. It doesn’t fire, so he heads off to work.

When Luther blowtorches a gun in his boss’ office

Luther is certain that Alice Morgan stashed the gun she used to kill her parents in her dog, which was then cremated, destroying all evidence. To drive his point home, he acts out the events in his boss’ office with the plastic shell of a handgun, then starts a blowtorch on it, promising it will melt.  

When Luther clobbers two assassins with a dustbin

It doesn’t get more badass than this. With two assassins approaching Luther on a motorbike, Luther calmly picks up a metal dustbin to shield himself against their gunfire before clobbering the culprits around the head with the bin, knocking them off their bike, and holding them at gun point. Yes, Luther!

Luther series five is coming soon to BBC One.