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Forget Seberg, forget Mank, forget Judy — Andrew Dominik’s Venice Film Festival competition entry Blonde takes a blowtorch to the entire concept of the Hollywood biopic and arrives at something almost without precedent.

Gus Van Sant, at the height of his Béla Tarr period, achieved something remarkable and kind of similar with 2005’s Last Days, an immersive but fictional rumination on the events preceding rock star Kurt Cobain’s suicide in 1994. But then, Blonde’s closest antecedents are all in fiction — anyone expecting an idiot’s guide to Marilyn Monroe will be surprised or even appalled to see the late star’s life presented as a horror movie in the surreal, nightmarish style of David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive, another film about a blonde actress struggling with the boundaries between fantasy and fiction and whose star, Naomi Watts, was attached to this movie way back in the day.

‘Blonde’ Venice...

The word “tabloid” has a sleazy mystique. It’s such a potent word that it can influence the way you think about the subjects that fall into that category. “The Mystery of Marilyn Monroe: The Unheard Tapes” is a documentary that dives into what we think of as the most tawdry and sensational aspects of the Marilyn Monroe story: her death, on August 4, 1962, from an overdose of barbiturates; the hideous downward spiral of depression and narcotics that led up to it; and, buried deep in the weeds of all of that, the most scandalous piece of gossip ever connected to Marilyn Monroe — her clandestine affairs with John F. Kennedy and Robert F. Kennedy.

This is dark, squalid, squinting-through-the-keyhole stuff, and it can make a film like “The Mystery of Marilyn Monroe” sound like a guilty-pleasure piece of true-crime trash, one of those glorified tabloid-tv exposés with a patina of investigative credibility.

With the Christmas season over and a fresh new year open before us, you might want to cosy up to 2021 with some classic films. From the 5th of January Sony Movies Classic will be living up to its name as the home of classic cinema by playing host to some of the greatest films in history.

Every day you’ll have the chance to see hand picked classics from the 1940s onwards, featuring some of the brightest stars of Hollywood and beyond. Films from Alfred Hitchcock, Elizabeth Taylor, Faye Dunaway, Gene Wilder and many more will be played, and we’ve taken a look at the very best the channel has to offer.

To get your fix of classic cinema you can tune in to Sony Movies Classic, which is available on Freeview 51, Freesat 303, Sky 319 and Virgin 424.

On launch day Sony Movies Classic is starting as it means to go on,...

The actress is mostly remembered for her good looks, but what about her impressive performances?

In Richard Dyer’s book Heavenly Bodies: Film Stars and Society, he writes that Marilyn Monroe was “the most visible star”: an actress whose life was put on display, and remains so over 50 years after her death. She is one of the most iconic Hollywood stars of all time, her face instantly recognizable to even those who have never seen any of her movies. She is a symbol of beauty, glamor, cinema, femininity, blondness, sexuality, and tragedy. While the world speculates about her personal life — who was she romantically involved with? How did she die? What was she really like? — her career as an actress is overshadowed by her fame.

While she may not have been the greatest actress of all time, she certainly had her fair share of talent and intelligence, and always worked incredibly hard to bring her...

Gone With the Wind actor Rand Brooks has died at the age of 84. The screen star - who played Scarlett O'Hara's ill-fated first husband Charles Hamilton in the 1939 classic - succumbed to cancer at his Santa Barbara, America home on Monday. Ironically, Brooks didn't hold his most famous role in the multi Oscar-winner with high regard though, saying, "It didn't help my career. It hurt it at the time. It was such an asinine role. He was so in love it was sickening. I got typecast that way." Despite his reservations, Brooks became a successful leading man and provided screen siren Marilyn Monroe with her first screen kiss in 1948's Ladies in the Chorus. He retired from acting in 1966 to start Professional Ambulance Service, which became the largest private ambulance 9-1-1 paramedic provider in Los Angeles County.