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Baron Cohen’s live-ammo prankster is back, 20 years on, but has to battle with his own irrelevance in search of big laughs and the approval of a new generation • Exclusive: Republican leader embarrassed by film says he plays to sue Sacha Baron Cohen: ‘A liar and a pervert’ If you liked Sacha Baron Cohen’s Ali G the first time around, you’ll like this less; if you disliked it, you’ll dislike this more; if you suspected it was racist, you’ll be more emboldened to say so – especially as Baron Cohen has dreamed up a whole new character apparently to pre-empt and mock precisely that objection. Broad and crass as it often is – in fact always is – this Ali G sequel is sometimes funny: the athletic vigour of our hero’s pranking and punking is like the umpteenth Jackass film at which you might find yourself laughing, and Baron Cohen blunders with the semi-intentional force of an XL bully into the issue of whether jokes are still allowed. Unlike the first film, Ali G in Da House from 2002, this is not a full written-through narrative. It is basically another live-ammo series of hoaxes with some spectacular bad taste perpetrated upon the deserving and less deserving; it satirises the shamelessness of anti-woke free speech martyrs, punching up and down with grossout cringe, and the targets include some big names who shouldn’t be revealed here. There are two other subordinate characters: Erran Morad, a sinister Mossad/IDF officer turned US security consultant (who appeared in Baron Cohen’s Who Is America? TV series ), and a new figure: Dr Nira Cain-N’Degrocello, a grotesquely supercilious white liberal who is the self-appointed scourge of cultural appropriation. The dupes are built into a big silly climax fabricated with body doubles and (presumably) covert reshooting. Continue reading...

This Silicon Valley satire follows a CEO in trouble after the collapse of an acquisition deal. Created by Succession writer Jonathan Glatzer, each character is more awful than the next – and it is stuffed with twists and treacheries What if Mike Judge’s cult hit sitcom Silicon Valley were remade as a dramedy and we had in the meantime come to appreciate tech and its titans as existential threats to humanity, I hear you ask. Well, wonder no more – the answer is here, and it is The Audacity. It comes at you in hour-long episodes, which rush past at breakneck speed and leave you panting and deeply unsettled in their wake. Rather like modern life itself, of course, except for the relief available while the credits roll, before the next chunk of horrors arrives. The Audacity has a sprawling cast (especially in the opening episodes, which really are frenetic) but the figure around which most of the narratives move is Duncan Park (Billy Magnussen). He is the part-bullish, part-neurotic and wholly unbearable CEO of Hypergnosis, a data brokerage company he founded with a friend, who has since been struck by tragedy. Continue reading...