News

Ready to enjoy the best of British television? Now, you can enjoy Britbox at a great discount. Subscribe by November 18 and you can get 20% off the annual subscription plan. You’ll save $35 over the course of the year with this limited-time deal.

Get the Deal! $5.99/month with annual plan BritBox.com Save nearly $3/month with code Secretsale - Offer ends Nov. 18

When you subscribe to Britbox, you’ll get access to popular series like “The Curse,” “Shetland,” “Pride and Prejudice,” “Doctor Who,” “Downton Abbey,” “The It Crowd,” “The Buccaneers,” “The Night Manager,” and “Midsomer Murders.”

You’ll also see movies like “Women of World War One,” “The Slab Boys,” “Coronation Street at Christmas,” “The Wedding of the Century,” “A Royal Scandal,” “When the Queen Spoke to the Nation,” and “An Interview with Brian Cox.”

From mysteries to histories, comedy to cookery, BritBox brings you the best of British television, direct from the UK.

Well, looks like it’s time to take another break from the Summer movie multiplex mayhem and settle in for something a tad more staid and much more somber. Like last May’s Far From The Madding Crowd, this new release feels closer to an “end of the year” award and critics’ ten best contender. Like that earlier film, we’re back across the pond amongst the “veddy, veddy” British, plus it’s also based on a revered piece of literature. The time period is taken up about 50 years, so the horse-drawn carriages have given away to motorized vehicles (and lots and lots of trains). The big change is that this one doesn’t spring from the imagination of a writer, such as Mr. Hardy. Everything really happened to these very real people chronicled in an acclaimed memoir. Happily, like Far, this new work balances rising young stars of cinema...

A royal scandal is shaking the Swedish design world, after claims that prince Carl Philip Bernadotte, son of the current King of Sweden, has signed off on objects he may not have designed himself. Since his design studies in Sweden and at the Rhode Island School of Design, the prince has launched a series of design projects, some of which have been criticized for plagiarism. Now it turns out that he may not even have designed the objects himself.

Our royal curiosities were rewarded on Feb. 19, when Kate made her first public appearance in months at an addiction treatment center, because we got a great glance at her sizable baby bump!

Kate Middleton is about four and half months through her pregnancy, and it’s finally starting to show! As her belly grows, so does our royal baby fever, which is why we were thrilled to get a look at her as she visited an addiction center in southwest London, and debuted her baby bump, as promised, on Feb. 19.

Kate Middleton’s Royal Baby Bump

There were plenty photos taken of Kate during her first public appearance since before Christmas, but one was especially revealing. As you can see, the bump is really starting to take shape! Sitting in a chair in a stately tweed dress, Kate’s bump was fully formed and visible.

Kate’s visit to the...

Catch up with the last seven days in the world of film

The big story

For a horrible moment, it looked like Skyfall would be the big story three weeks in a row. After it, it whomped every other 007 film at the box office, got the Vatican on its side, and even got a seal of approval (sort of) from the Guardian's Women's

desk.

But – and I can safely say this particular combination of words will never be mentioned again – thank God for George Lucas. The sale of his Star Wars production company Lucasfilm to Disney sparked an immediate frenzy of speculation, analysis and debate – much of it reflecting on the fact that Lucas had managed to piss on the oceans of goodwill his initial three Star Wars films had created, and made the prospect of Episodes 7, 8 and 9 something to dread.

The response varied from cautious optimism that Disney could...

Fact would have been more fun than fiction in this overblown big-screen biopic of Russia's 18th-century empress

A Royal Scandal (1945)

Director: Otto Preminger

Entertainment grade: B-

History grade: C

Catherine II "the Great" was Empress of Russia from 1762 to 1796.

International relations

Anna (Anne Baxter), a lady in waiting, emerges from Catherine (Tallulah Bankhead)'s chambers to tell the chancellor of Russia (Charles Coburn) that the empress is fighting with the commander of the palace guard. The chancellor is known in the film simply as Nikolai Ilyich, with no surname, though since the film seems to be set in 1763 he should probably be Nikita Ivanovich Panin. In her rage, Catherine smashes a porcelain horseman – a gift from Frederick the Great, king of Prussia. "Even in her most furious moments, her majesty has exquisite taste," says the chancellor.

Romance

Anna's fiance, a young soldier called Alexei Chernoff (William Eythe), bursts into the...

Hammer Blu-rays The Devil Rides Out (1968, dir. Terence Fisher)

Hammer applies its trademark Gothic veneer with considerably greater care than usual in this, the second and best of the company's three stabs at the satanic stylings of author Dennis Wheatley. Christopher Lee comes over to the light for a rare foray as central hero the Duc de Richleau, teaming up with friend Rex van Rijn (Leon Greene) to prevent the evil Satanist Mocata (Charles Gray) from enmeshing the son of his old friend (Patrick Mower) into a devil-worshipping cult.

The Devil Rides Out is perhaps best remembered for what Lee argues in his commentary to be Hammer's most enduring image, that of our heroes fighting a series of spectral and psychological nemeses from within the protective confines of a ritual circle. And yet the most chilling scene contains no special effects, but is instead a simple conversation between the wife...

Tyrone Power III: Gay Rumors, Errol Flynn So if Tyrone Power was off having gay liaisons while he was at Fox, it was in another part of the world in someone’s sub-sub-basement (while he was working 18 hours a day at Fox), because if Darryl Zanuck even had so much of a whiff of it, that would have been itsville. Case in point: William Eythe. Heard of him? Most haven’t. He was being brought along as a leading man by Fox in the ’40s, working in The Ox Bow Incident, The Song of Bernadette, A Royal Scandal, etc. It was all systems go, since everyone else was in the service. He could have established himself the way that Dana Andrews had. When [...]...