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Stephen Spielberg’s original Jurassic Park film (1993) instilled awe and trepidation in his characters and audience alike. As his protagonists wrestled with the unintended consequences and ethical dilemmas of reanimating extinct apex predators, viewers marvelled at the novel use of CGI. At a keystroke it seemed to consign the hand-crafted stop-motion wonders of dinosaur films past to the archive.

Alongside pulse-pounding action set pieces delivered with trademark Spielberg panache, that first film flamboyantly inaugurated a new era in fantasy effects. And it solicited delight and wonder from its audience. On opening day in New York the dinosaurs’ first appearance prompted a spontaneous ovation: I was there and clapped too.

Thirty-two years, six Jurassic iterations and countless monstrous digital apparitions later, that initial wow factor is a distant memory. By Jurassic World: Rebirth (set nearly 35 years after the original film) dinosaurs are treated by their human prey as barely more than inconvenient obstacles. They’re dangerous, of course, but certainly not wondrous.

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Palaeontologist Dr Henry Loomis’s (Jonathan Bailey) delight in coming face-to-face with his objects of study is a pale echo of the giddy euphoria that overtook Sam Neill and Laura Dern’s characters all those years ago.

In fact, early in the film we’re told that the public have since lost all interest in dinosaurs. Wildlife parks and museum displays are closing and the animals themselves have mostly died off outside their quarantined tropical habitat.

As this has information has little bearing for the plot, it’s hard not to sense some ironic commentary from screenwriter David Koepp (returning to the franchise for the first time since 1997) on the exhaustion of the Jurassic Park model. Always incipiently reflexive – as a blockbuster set in a theme park – by this stage in the game, the franchise machinery is inescapably visible.

Almost as ironic is a plot line promoting the open-source sharing of intellectual property for the benefit of the whole world rather than exploitative corporations. I doubt NBCUniversal-Comcast would agree.

The Jurassic franchise

The Jurassic Park format is among the most unforgivingly rigid of any current film franchise.

Each instalment (bar to some extent the last, the convoluted 2022 Jurassic World: Dominion, whose characters and story the new release completely ignores) places humans in perilous proximity to genetically rejuvenated sauropods. And generally does so in a remote, photogenic tropical location with minimal contact with the outside world. (Will the franchise ever run out of uncharted Caribbean islands where demented bio-engineers have wreaked evolutionary havoc?)

The human characters in this new film are the usual pick-and-mix of daredevil adventurers, amoral corporate types and idealistic palaeontologists. And there are the mandatory school-age children too – important to keep the interest of younger viewers. The real stars of course, are the primeval leviathans who grow larger and more fearsome – though not more interesting – with each new episode of the franchise.

How this human-dino jeopardy comes about tends not to matter very much. Jurassic World: Rebirth produces one of the least interesting MacGuffins in movie history (meaning something that drives the plot and which the charcters care about but the audience does not). Blood drawn from each of the three largest dinosaur species in the aforesaid remote tropical island will produce a serum to cure human heart disease (dinosaur hearts are huge, you see, so … never mind).

This feeble contrivance suffices for sneery Big Pharma suit Martin (Rupert Friend) to hire freebooters Zora (Scarlett Johansson) and Duncan (Mahershala Ali) for his expedition. Along the way they encounter a marooned family (dad, two teens, one winsome but plucky grade-schooler) who subsequently have their own largely self-contained adventures before reuniting for the big climax.

Franchise filmmaking is generally an auteur-free zone. Welsh blockbuster specialist Gareth Edwards is no Spielberg (though he pays homage at several point, notably in a waterborne first act studded with Jaws references). But he handles the action with unremarkable competence.

In truth, Jurassic World: Rebirth suggests that the intellectual property so expensively vested in the franchise would benefit from some genetic modification.

This week, the 2025 Wimbledon tournament kicked off in London. Just a few days in, a number of celebrity tennis enthusiasts are already sitting courtside in their VIP seats while taking in the matches—including Cate Blanchett, David Beckham, Priyanka Chopra, and Nick Jonas, to name a few. This morning, A-list couple Olivia Rodrigo and Louis Partridge were also spotted at the All England Lawn Tennis and Croquet Club.

While the American singer and English actor typically have a grungier style sensibility, they both played into the signature preppy Wimbledon aesthetic for the outing. (For attendees, dressing up in a country club vibe is half the fun, after all.) Rodrigo traded in her love of mini lace and slip dresses—which she loves pairing with combat boots—in favor of a buttoned-up gingham shirt dress. She added itty-bitty shades. Partridge, meanwhile—who can often be spotted off-duty in baggy trousers or athleisure—went the snazzy route in a navy blazer, khaki trousers, and striped shirt-and-tie combo.

While there is no official Wimbledon dress code that is enforced, it goes without saying that attendees are encouraged to wear smart-casual pieces—including elegant dresses and smart tailoring. Clearly, Rodrigo and Partridge did their homework before attending the event. While it proved to be a total style-180 for them, their complementary preppy outfits totally work for them. Should this be their new summer fashion mood? Something tells us they will be going back to their downtown-cool wardrobes very soon. But, for now, it’s fun to see them cosplay as posh tennis lovers.

Metallica just landed in Birmingham, the venue for this weekend’s Back to the Beginning concert.

The metal titans, who would be performing at the show which would also mark the iconic Black Sabbath’s final live comeback, wasted no time in taking in some of the Paranoid hitmakers’ landmarks.

Taking to their official Instagram, the Fade To Black hitmakers posted a photo featuring their bassist Robert Trujillo standing in front of the Black Sabbath logo on Mr Murals’ astonishing Sabbath mural on Navigation bridge.

They captioned the image: “The kids have landed in Birmingham.”

A second photo was uploaded minutes later, where the legendary front man, James Hetfield, could be seen throwing the devil horns while sitting between Ozzy Osbourne and Tony Iommi on the Black Sabbath Bench on Black Sabbath Bridge.

The rock band’s guitarist and co-founder, Iommi replied to both these posts with the devil horns emoji.

Back to the Beginning, which will be hosted by actor, Jason Mamoa, is set to take place at Villa Park on Saturday, a place where all four original band members of Black Sabbath grew up.

The upcoming concert also boasts arguably the greatest line-up in metal history where alongside Sabbath, Ozzy and Metallica, sets from Guns N’ Roses, Slayer, Pantera, Gojira, Halestorm, Alice in Chains, Lamb of God, Tool, Rival Sons, Anthrax and Mastodon, would all be featured in the show.

Additionally, the Back to the Beginning promoter and producer, Andy Copping, confirmed to Planet Rock that there will be an additional “two or three” surprise acts as well as a revolving stage. 

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There’s something bewitching about a glimpse of near-tranquillity, a feathery ripple of emotion or a chuckle in a dark room. Vermeer died young, broken by catastrophe on an enormous scale. Yet we revere him now for the way he savoured instants that would otherwise have gone unnoticed, the skill with which he chronicled flickers of deep but inconspicuous feeling.

For the first exhibition in its freshly refurbished home, the Frick has assembled a trio of blazing, murmuring Vermeers, composed of the simplest ingredients: a pair of women, a pen, a table, a sheet of paper, a ray of light. Each of these scenes of letters being written or delivered provides a tantalising peek into an inner life. We don’t know who is using what words to communicate what thoughts, but we can easily imagine how envious the painter must have been of the serenity he depicted. His own home was deluged with children — 11 of them — and his wife Catharina was surely too busy rousting, feeding, bathing and herding them to enjoy much contemplative hush. 

The three paintings are deceptively alike. A splendidly clad woman sits, a maid dressed in practical brown stands, and a letter passes between them, or is about to, on its way to or from the outside world. These works give off the poetic emanations of life’s ordinary prose, the grandeur of stilled actions, half thoughts and interrupted daydreams. The act of writing takes on a numinous halo; even a few seconds of nothing much seem saturated with significance. When you’ve come in off the boiling, roiling, stinking Manhattan streets, these immaculate domestic vignettes, hanging in the Frick’s sort-of-domestic setting, offer an interval of private grace.

In the most characteristic of the three, “Woman Writing a Letter with Her Maid” (on loan from the National Gallery of Ireland, Dublin), an elegant, bejewelled lady in a lace-trimmed bonnet and a bodice of pale-gold silk bends over her correspondence. She is focused on the task, her concentration heightened by the sunshine that spills through stained glass, spotlighting the hand that draws the quill across the gleaming page.

The other character has something else on her mind. She turns towards the window, watching out of the corner of her eye, her lips parted in mute curiosity. The writer’s absorption and the attendant’s distraction are both encapsulated in the stick of sealing wax that’s tumbled to the floor, a lone flourish of messiness that neither of them notices.

While the maid looks out, we look in, observing from our position on this side of a curtain that now reads as a muted brown but that in Vermeer’s time shone a bright shade of green. The drape pulls back to reveal a tableau that casts viewers as voyeurs — or detectives. We can’t tell what kind of letter the woman is writing (to a shopkeeper? a lover? a family member far away?), what event in the street has caught her maid’s attention, or what hidden meaning lies in the painting on the wall depicting baby Moses being snatched from the Nile. Vermeer doles out information in drops of mystery.

The Frick’s larger “Mistress and Maid” treats the same subject in a contrasting manner. The action glows against a background so dark that it verges on the crypt-like. Vermeer first adorned the wall with a tapestry and then painted over it to keep attention on the human drama. There’s no visible window, yet light shoots in from the left, glinting off the protagonist’s globular earring and the pearls around her neck.

You can see a trace of Caravaggio in the battle between sunshine and shadow and in the theatrical composition that pushes the figures forward into the viewers’ space. And yet there’s no violence or strain, no bolt of revelation, just a polite encounter across class lines. A maid opens her mouth to speak and passes the letter to her employer, who’s sumptuously dressed in yellow and ermine. The wealthy woman has been writing, but she lays down her pen and glances up, fingers thoughtfully grazing her chin. Perhaps her life is about to change, or maybe the moment will be immediately forgotten. What remains is the exquisiteness of not knowing.

In the “The Love Letter”, which comes from the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, we have been exiled from the room entirely. By accident or in secret, we peer through a darkened anteroom, spying on an intimate exchange. The fur-trimmed yellow outfit is familiar and maybe we’ve seen the model before, too, but now she’s playing the cittern — or was, until her maid popped in with a note. Vermeer charges the scene with urgency and hope. The servant reassures the mistress with a soothing smile. A fair-weather seascape on the wall signals smooth sailing ahead.

That was wishful thinking on Vermeer’s part. In 1672, two years after he painted “The Love Letter”, harsher news arrived in the form of a French invasion of the Netherlands. Suddenly unable to sell his own paintings, saddled with those of other artists that he had on consignment, and burdened with a gaggle of children, he fell apart. “He lapsed into such decay and decadence, which he had so taken to heart that, as if he had fallen into a frenzy, in a day and a half he went from being healthy to being dead,” his widow recounted. He was 43 years old.

Catharina soldiered on by trading art for bread. “The Love Letter” was one of two paintings she handed over to a local baker, hoping to redeem them later. She never did. And so this gently optimistic interior became a form of sustenance in a war zone, the instrument of physical as well as spiritual nourishment. Its survival seems like a miracle, but then man-made beauty, even the quiet kind, turns out to be a sturdy shield against desperation.

To August 31, frick.org

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