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

Jimmy Kimmel on a tumultuous year: ‘Don’t know what the American way even is any more’

Late-night hosts reflected on a rollercoaster 2025 and Donald Trump’s combative, primetime year-end address to the nation.Jimmy Kimmel opened his final monologue of 2025 with an emotional reflection on a tumultuous year. “This has been a strange year. It’s been a hard year,” he said. “We’ve had some lows

Jimmy Kimmel on Trump’s speech: ‘Surprise primetime episode of The Worst Wing’

Late-night hosts discussed – or ignored – Donald Trump’s surprise primetime address and dug further into the explosive new interview the White House chief of staff, Susie Wiles.Jimmy Kimmel opened his Wednesday night show with an acknowledgment of the president’s 9pm ET national address, also known as a “surprise primetime episode of The Worst Wing tonight on every channel”.Trump announced only on Tuesday that he would deliver an impromptu fireside chat during the season finales of Survivor and The Floor. “It’s weird to think that had a couple of states just gone the other way, he’d be hosting one of those shows,” Kimmel joked. “Trump shouldn’t be pre-empting The Floor

Arts funding in England must be protected from politics, Hodge report urges

Arts Council England must ensure funding is protected from politicisation and simplify its application process in order to regain trust, a damaging report has found.The investigation into the national body for arts funding found there had been a “loss of respect and trust” for ACE among those it backed, in part because of “perceived political interference in decision-making”.The report was written by the Labour peer Margaret Hodge, who recommended that ACE be retained but with the arm’s-length principle strengthened at all levels of government “to ensure that arts funding is protected from politicisation”.She said: “There have been attempts to exert more political control over ACE decisions in recent years and this has to stop. The Arts Council must remain free from political interference

Jimmy Kimmel on Trump’s Rob Reiner comments: ‘So hateful and vile’

Late-night hosts reacted to the murder of legendary director Rob Reiner and his wife, Michele Singer Reiner, as well as Donald Trump’s 10-minute tangent about Christmas snakes.“This is the kind of weekend that makes you wonder if things will ever feel good again,” said Jimmy Kimmel on Monday evening, after a couple days of horrific news: the terror attack at a Hanukkah celebration on Australia’s Bondi Beach, a mass shooting at Brown University in Rhode Island, and the “murder of one of our greatest directors and patriots, Rob Reiner, and his wife, Michele Reiner”.“What we need in a time like this, besides common sense when it comes to guns and mental health care, is compassion and leadership,” he continued. “We did not get that from our president, because he has none of it to give. Instead, we got a fool rambling about nonsense

The Vietnam War ended 50 years ago. But its lessons live on in The Quiet American

Alden Pyle (Brendan Fraser) was a “quiet American”, says Thomas Fowler (Michael Caine) to a French policeman. “A friend,” he adds, as the lifeless corpse of Pyle stares back at him with a wretched expression.This is the scene that opens Phillip Noyce’s Vietnam-set political drama before the film flashes back a few months earlier to 1952 Saigon, where Fowler, an ageing Englishman, lives leisurely as a journalist reporting on the first Indochina war. When Pyle, a young American aid worker advocating for US intervention, falls for Fowler’s 20-year-old Vietnamese lover, Phượng (Đỗ Thị Hải Yến), the jaded reporter’s tranquil existence begins to unravel.At Pyle and Fowler’s first meeting at the Continental hotel, it is clear that Pyle is anything but “quiet”: handsomely bespectacled, the American idealist is attentively reading Dangers to Democracy, a book on foreign policy