10 Marcel the Shell With Shoes On
This wildly popular stop-motion animation is the ultimate beneficiary of the new hunger for something real and organic in the movies.
Dean Fleischer Camp and Jenny Slate's film is so airy, so tiny, so eccentric, so exotic, that it appears to break every rule of instant relatability. It whimsically avoids the easy grasp and the elevator pitch. Even the title is baffling and forgettable
- are the first and third words supposed to rhyme? - requiring two or three repetitions before it can be committed to memory.
It's a movie with a grassroots fanbase that had already been cultivated online, as it was developed from a wacky YouTube series. The premise is that the director has moved into an Airbnb after the breakup of his marriage to discover that someone or something is already in the house: a seashell the size of a thumbnail called Marcel.
Marcel has a big blinking eye and dinky little shoes. And he is looking after his seashellgranny (voiced by Isabella Rossellini) who loves the poetry of Philip Larkin.
It is an intensely likable and lovable movie that alchemically converts bafflement or exasperation into affection. The quirky, funny relationship between real-life grownup Dean and the imaginary tiny, childlike seashell Marcel is the bromance of the year. Peter Bradshaw
9 All the Beauty and the Bloodshed
The Sackler family wanted their name to be synonymous with art, high-brow prestige and patrician good taste. But it became synonymous with something else: pain.
Part of the Sackler family were behind the Purdue Pharma corporation marketing the ruinously addictive OxyContin opioid pill, which physicians across the US were persuaded to prescribe for essentially non-serious issues.
Denne historien er fra December 22, 2023-utgaven av The Guardian Weekly.
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Denne historien er fra December 22, 2023-utgaven av The Guardian Weekly.
Start din 7-dagers gratis prøveperiode på Magzter GOLD for å få tilgang til tusenvis av utvalgte premiumhistorier og 9000+ magasiner og aviser.
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Finn family murals
The optimism that runs through Finnish artist Tove Jansson's Moomin stories also appears in her public works, now on show in a Helsinki exhibition
I hoped Finland would be a progressive dream.I've had to think again Mike Watson
Oulu is five hours north from Helsinki by train and a good deal colder and darker each winter than the Finnish capital. From November to March its 220,000 residents are lucky to see daylight for a couple of hours a day and temperatures can reach the minus 30s. However, this is not the reason I sense a darkening of the Finnish dream that brought me here six years ago.
A surplus of billionaires is destabilising our democracies Zoe Williams
The concept of \"elite overproduction\" was developed by social scientist Peter Turchin around the turn of this century to describe something specific: too many rich people for not enough rich-person jobs.
'What will people think? I don't care any more'
At 90, Alan Bennett has written a sex-fuelled novella set in a home for the elderly. He talks about mourning Maggie Smith, turning down a knighthood and what he makes of the new UK prime minister
I see you
What happens when people with acute psychosis meet the voices in their heads? A new clinical trial reveals some surprising results
Rumbled How Ali ran rings around apartheid, 50 years ago
Fifty years ago, in a corner of white South Africa, Muhammad Ali already seemed a miracle-maker.
Trudeau faces 'iceberg revolt'as calls grow for PM to quit
Justin Trudeau, who promised “sunny ways” as he won an election on a wave of public fatigue with an incumbent Conservative government, is now facing his darkest and most uncertain political moment as he attempts to defy the odds to win a rare fourth term.
Lost Maya city revealed through laser mapping
After swapping machetes and binoculars for computer screens and laser mapping, a team of researchers have discovered a lost Maya city containing temple pyramids, enclosed plazas and a reservoir which had been hidden for centuries by the Mexican jungle.
'A civil war' Gangs step up assault on capital
Armed fighters advance into neighbourhoods at the heart of Port-au-Prince as authorities try to restore order
Reality bites in the Himalayan 'kingdom of happiness'
High emigration and youth unemployment levels belie the mountain nation's global reputation for cheeriness
