The Apartment: Billy Wilder’s Christmas classic is the blueprint for romcoms everywhere

For romantic comedies and Christmas movies alike, a little misery can go a long way. No one understood this balancing act more than Billy Wilder, whose films ran the gamut from bottomless cynicism (Ace in the Hole) to gender-bending farce (Some Like it Hot). His 1960 film, The Apartment, splits the difference.Like another yuletide classic, Carol, the film finds inspiration in David Lean’s Brief Encounter, which depicts an extramarital affair briefly consummated in the bed of a friend’s apartment. In an old interview, Wilder says he was compelled by a character “who comes back home and climbs into the warm bed the lovers just left”, and so The Apartment’s hero, CC “Bud” Baxter, was born

John Updike’s best books – Ranked!

Inspired by and drawing on three British novels (HG Wells’s The Time Machine, George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four and Henry Green’s Concluding), Updike’s debut imagines a near future where the residents of a care home stage a revolt in which two antagonists, John Hook and Stephen Conner, struggle for supremacy. A curio.Updike tropes Religion, deathOver the course of a single day, 79-year-old painter Hope Chafetz endures the determined attention of Kathryn D’Angelo, a young, ambitious art journalist. Updike had by this point been on the receiving end of many such encounters and the novel, told almost entirely from Hope’s perspective, bristles with resentment at the presumptions and blind spots inherent in the situation.Updike tropes Art, religionAn epistolary novel that draws on Nathaniel Hawthorne’s 19th-century story of adultery and hypocrisy, The Scarlet Letter, to ironise faith and fidelity in the 1980s

Unseen Tennessee Williams radio play published in literary magazine

As one of the 20th century’s most successful playwrights, Tennessee Williams penned popular works at the very pinnacle of US theater, including A Streetcar Named Desire and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof.Years before his almost unparalleled Broadway triumphs, however, the aspiring writer then known simply as Tom wrote a series of short radio plays as he struggled to find a breakthrough. One is The Strangers, a supernatural tale offering glimpses into the accomplished wordsmith that Williams would become, and published for the first time this week in the literary magazine Strand.It is a “significant find” according to scholars of Williams’s early days and upbringing in Missouri.“The play incorporates all the theatrical elements of early radio horror,” said Andrew Gulli, the publication’s managing editor

My cultural awakening: Love Actually taught me to leave my cheating partner

Emma Thompson’s quiet suffering in the hit Christmas movie helped me to realise that I didn’t need to stay with someone who had betrayed meI was 12 when Love Actually came out. In the eyes of my younger self it was a great film – vignettes of love I could only imagine one day feeling, all coloured by the fairy lights of Christmas. And there was even a cameo from Mr Bean himself, Rowan Atkinson. The film captured the romance I craved as a preteen, the idea that maybe a kid I fancied in my class would learn the drums for me and run through airport security to ask me out.I was young enough to think it was sweet for Keira Knightley’s husband’s best friend to turn up on her doorstep declaring his quite obviously unrequited love

The Guide #222: From Celebrity Traitors to The Brutalist via Bad Bunny – our roundup of the culture that mattered in 2025

It’s time to look back on a year of Traitors and Sinners, of Bad Bunnies and Such Brave Girls, with the Guide’s now annual roundup of the year’s best culture. As ever, the Guardian is already knee-deep in lists – of films (UK and US), albums (across rock and pop, and classical), TV shows, books and games, and theatre, comedy and dance. Some of those have already counted down to No 1, others will reach their respective summits in the coming days, so keep an eye on the homepage.Our list meanwhile is entirely, unapologetically partial, and definitely not as comprehensive as The Guardian’s many top 50s: there are numerous albums we never got around to hearing, and TV shows we’re still only halfway through. (Pluribus, Dope Thief and Blue Lights, I will return to you, I promise!) But hopefully it should give a flavour of a year that, despite so many headwinds, was a pretty strong one for culture

From Avatar to Amadeus: your complete entertainment guide to the week ahead

Avatar: Fire and AshOut now James Cameron comes down with a case of the Christmas blues, so to speak, as the director’s record-breaking franchise epic returns once more to planet Pandora for more internecine strife and respecting of the splendour of the natural world, rendered in dazzling motion-capture glory.Silent Night, Deadly NightOut now Actor Rohan Campbell graduates from Michael Myers wannabe in the fairly dire Halloween Ends, to main bogeyman Billy Chapman in the latest instalment of the Silent Night, Deadly Night franchise (second remake, seventh film overall, fact fans). Per franchise lore, he witnessed his parents’ murder-by-Santa aged five, and the rest is grisly history.Fackham HallOut now Jimmy Carr turns his hand to screenwriting with this parody of Downton Abbey-type films. Given the actual Downton Abbey films already play as a parody of Downtown Abbey-type films, there may not be much to add, but a cast including Thomasin McKenzie, Katherine Waterston, Damian Lewis and Anna Maxwell Martin are here to give it their best shot