Tense Indie noir about a mother struggling to cope with her 'crumbling mind' 

A "genuine skin-crawling unease" haunts every moment of this elegant, "paranoid noir chiller", which was shot on 16mm on the "mean streets of Jersey City", said Peter Bradshaw in The Guardian. Ariella Mastroianni (who also co-wrote the script) stars as Frankie, a woman living on the edge of poverty who suffers from the neurodegenerative disorders ataxia and dyschronometria; these leave her both disoriented and unable to accurately judge the passing of time – an affliction she tries to manage (in a nod to Christopher Nolan's "Memento") by recording memos to herself on 30-minute cassette tapes and gazing in through strangers' windows.

She is struggling for money when, at a group therapy session, she meets a mysterious woman, whom she remembers seeing through a window. The woman confides that she is being abused by her bullying cop brother, and offers Frankie $3,000 to break into the flat they share, and retrieve her car keys.

Naturally, the offer "proves too good to be true", said Larushka Ivan-Zadeh in The Times: there is a body in the car's boot, and Frankie is "sucked into a murky mare's nest of paranoia, crime and conspiracy", her ability to cope compromised by her "crumbling mind". In the first part of the film, Mastroianni and director Ryan J. Sloan build "a palpable air of dank menace", said Manohla Dargis in The New York Times; but the plot becomes murky before going fully off the rails. Sloan has seen a lot of films and cribs freely from the likes of Coppola's "The Conversation". This works well at times; in the end, however, "an amusing low-fi thriller" gets lost in the "thickets of cinematic allusion".

by Giorgia Meloni

When Giorgia Meloni became Italy's first female PM in 2022, many commentators dubbed her the "far-right heir of Benito Mussolini", and claimed that she wanted "to dismantle democracy", said Nicholas Farrell in The Spectator. 

Three years on, Italy remains a democracy, and Meloni's party, Fratelli d'Italia, is more popular than when she came to power – an "almost unheard of" feat for a governing party in the West today. Meloni's memoir, "I Am Giorgia" – "already a bestseller in Italy" and now translated into English – describes how a "short, fat, sullen, bullied girl" from a single-parent family in Rome transformed herself into a prominent figure on the "largely male-dominated world stage".

There are some frustrating omissions: given Meloni's past membership of Italy's "long-dead post-fascist party" Movimento Sociale Italiano (MSI), she "should have spelled out why" she considers herself a conservative and not a fascist.

Even so, her book tells an "amazing story". Meloni has a "candid, self-deprecating streak", which is "amply illustrated" here, said Tom Kington in The Times. She admits that her father's lack of love – he walked out on the family when she was a child – drove her to succeed in male environments. Her writing is full of "pop and literary culture references": she learnt English by listening to Michael Jackson; she is a fan of "The Lord of the Rings", and as a young MSI activist, dressed up as a Tolkien character to entertain children.

Like most political autobiographies, this one is "self-serving", and glosses over sensitive episodes, said Colin Freeman in The Telegraph. For example, her break-up with TV host boyfriend Andrea Giambruno – after he was recorded making lewd comments to female colleagues – is barely mentioned. Still, with its mix of "humour and bluntness", this is a "punchy memoir". 

Heavy metal wildman and lovable reality TV dad

As the frontman of Black Sabbath, Ozzy Osbourne, who has died aged 76, did not only help invent heavy metal, said The Telegraph, he also pioneered its outrageous lifestyle: "preposterous theatrics", rumours of satanism and shocking excesses. He bit the head off a dead bat during a concert in 1982; he snorted a line of ants while partying with Mötley Crüe; and he was banned from performing in Texas, for urinating on the Alamo Cenotaph while wearing a dress (his wife Sharon had hidden his clothes to stop him going out, so he had borrowed hers). He was serially unfaithful to Sharon: he slept with his children's nannies; on tour in Japan he took a fan to bed in his hotel room, forgetting that Sharon was there already. And in 1989, he was accused of trying to strangle her.

Nevertheless, both with Black Sabbath and as a solo artist, he managed to release several hit albums, and to tour solidly, before finding a new level of fame in the 2000s as a reality TV star. "The Osbournes" proved a revelation, said Spencer Kornhaber in The Atlantic. The supposedly demonic, self-styled Prince of Darkness turned out to be a doting (foul-mouthed) family man, bumbling around a mansion in LA. Yet this "cognitive dissonance" was at the heart of his success. He'd invented a sound and an identity "with terrifying connotations", but "that identity was rooted" in the thing it superficially obscured – the warm "human core inside each of us. Although accused of promoting satanism, Black Sabbath had no sympathy for the devil. And most of the terrible things Osbourne did were as a result of being addled by drink and drugs. He had thought the bat was a plastic toy; he apologised to and was forgiven by the state of Texas; and he'd woken up in a jail cell with no memory of strangling Sharon. He was horrified when he was told that he had nearly killed her and went into court-mandated rehabilitation after that incident.

Born in Birmingham in 1948, John Osbourne grew up in Aston. His parents both worked in nearby factories, but with six children, money was tight. At school, he struggled with dyslexia and left at 15. It was his love of The Beatles that inspired him to join a band. Black Sabbath was formed in 1968. Their distinctive sludgy sound was partly the result of guitarist Tony Iommi slicing off his fingertips at work at a sheet metal factory, and making false ones out of plastic and leather. But they'd also resolved to exploit the new popularity of horror films. Osbourne sang in a howl; their lyrics contained references to Satan, war and insanity. In 1970, their first album reached the Top 10. Osbourne suddenly had more money than he'd ever imagined. As a rock star, he could, he recalled, "get drunk morning, noon and night, and nobody would care". Then he found cocaine. He admitted to having been a terrible husband to his first wife, Thelma Riley.

Sabbath fired him in 1979. It was Sharon – whose father Don Arden had been their manager – who steered his solo career. Numerous hits followed, but Osbourne's addictions intensified. He was badly affected by the death of his guitarist Randy Rhoads in a plane crash in 1982, and he faced lawsuits over claims that one of his songs had been a factor in two suicides (the suits were dismissed). In the 1990s, he took time out to try to sober up. He stormed back with 1995's album "Ozzmosis", and the launch of the Ozzfest metal festival. Soon, he was playing with Sabbath again. He and Sharon seemed devoted, but in 2016 they temporarily separated: she'd discovered that he'd had a long affair. In 2019, he was diagnosed with Parkinson's. Last month, he returned to Birmingham to take part in a farewell concert – Back to the Beginning. He'd told Rolling Stone in 2023 that as his health declined, "I just want to be well enough to do one show where I can say, 'Hi guys, thanks so much for my life…' If I drop down dead at the end of it, I'll die a happy man."