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Avenue 5 season 2 is finally here, breathing new life into the HBO sci-fi comedy that first hit screens in 2020. Starring Hugh Laurie and Josh Gad, the series is set on a luxury tourist spacecraft that was diverted off-course, turning an eight-week cruise into an eight-year journey. Avenue 5 is full of the trademark wit and humor of series creator Armando Iannucci. Iannucci is perhaps best known for creating the fantastic show Veep, which won 17 Emmy awards and was nominated for 59 over its seven-season run, but has also penned hit comedy films In the Loop and The Death of Stalin.

The second season of Avenue 5 is a testament to the resilience and professionalism of its writers, actors, and directors alike, as the show's signature set burned down in a 2019 fire at the Warner Bros. U.K. studio lot. Scripts and edits were changed to adapt to the loss which, coupled with the Covid-19 pandemic,...

“Yesterday” director Danny Boyle asked composer Daniel Pemberton to help actor Himesh Patel become comfortable with the Beatles material he’d be performing. Pemberton hesitated until Boyle promised the job would only last three or four weeks.

So Pemberton said yes, and was on the film for a year and a half.

In the film, Patel plays Jack Malik, a struggling singer who is about to give up on his career when an unexplained phenomenon erases all memory of the Beatles from the entire world — except, amazingly, for him. He starts playing Beatles songs that nobody else knows and is acclaimed as a songwriting genius.

Pemberton recruited a singer-songwriter friend, music supervisor Adem Ilhan, and together they turned the “EastEnders” actor into a credible musical performer who (in the romantic-comedy script by “Love Actually” writer Richard Curtis) turns his memories of Beatles songs into a meteoric rise to pop stardom.

Perhaps aware that the comparisons to “Rosemary’s Baby” will arrive from the start, playwright and theatre director David Farr, making his feature film debut, acknowledges the allusions to Roman Polanski’s picture from the first frames. Our first look of Clémence Poésy in the film bears a similar fragility to Mia Farrow, and the score by Adem Ilhan (“In The Loop”) evokes lullabye-style tones not unlike Krzysztof Komeda’s work on Polanski’s picture. However, Farr doesn’t simply trod over similar ground of its predecessor, but offers an intriguing proposition: what if Rosemary Woodhouse became a mother to a perfectly healthy baby, but was driven mad not by a satanic cult, but by “The Ones Below”? Kate (Poésy) and Justin (Stephen Campbell Moore) are the picture of a perfect couple. They each have successful careers, a lovely London flat, and a baby on the way. However, their little...