https://www.scmp.com/rss/310413/feed en https://assets.i-scmp.com/static/img/icons/scmp-meta-1200x630.png https://www.scmp.com Police have removed a “pet” python more than three metres long from a residential compound in eastern China, according to a local newspaper. The giant snake was discovered by a family taking a stroll after dinner on Saturday in Wenzhou, Zhejiang province on Saturday, the Hangzhou Daily reported, and their screams drew security guards and other residents to the scene. Chinese man recoils in horror as he finds snake inside gas water heater The snake was lying on the pavement under a residential... https://www.scmp.com/news/china/economy/article/1973539/police-remove-pet-three-metre-python-chinese-residential-compound?utm_source=rss_feed https://www.scmp.com/news/china/economy/article/1973539/police-remove-pet-three-metre-python-chinese-residential-compound?utm_source=rss_feed Sun, 12 Jun 2016 07:06:26 +0000 Forty years ago this month, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre was released in cinemas. Yet even as it enters its fifth decade, Tobe Hooper's horror film remains a master class in terror, having lost little of its power to shock, fascinate and repulse - often at the same time - since it appeared in 1974. Enthusiastically introducing a screening of a restored version of the movie at the Cannes Film Festival this year, Denmark-born Nicolas Winding Refn ( Drive; Only God Forgives) said seeing The Texas... https://www.scmp.com/lifestyle/arts-culture/article/1623719/horror-film-genres-defining-moment?utm_source=rss_feed https://www.scmp.com/lifestyle/arts-culture/article/1623719/horror-film-genres-defining-moment?utm_source=rss_feed Sat, 25 Oct 2014 15:32:25 +0000 Expectations were low when Paul Potts took to the stage in the auditions for the first season of Simon Cowell's TV talent contest, Britain's Got Talent. In line with our cynical, looks-obsessed times, the pudgy and timid Carphone Warehouse salesman was immediately pegged as a loser. "He was the first of those guys where we're sat at home with our dinners on our laps going, 'Oh, here we go. This will be funny'," comedian James Corden recalls. However, from the moment Potts opened his mouth and... https://www.scmp.com/lifestyle/arts-culture/article/1581711/postcard-london?utm_source=rss_feed https://www.scmp.com/lifestyle/arts-culture/article/1581711/postcard-london?utm_source=rss_feed Sat, 30 Aug 2014 14:13:26 +0000 There's always been something otherworldly about Tilda Swinton, so the role of a 3,000-year-old vampire called Eve in Jim Jarmusch's Only Lovers Left Alive is one that she looks to have been born to play. That said, she is a consummate shape shifter. Whether the character she is portraying is a mother at war with her son, as in We Need to Talk About Kevin, or a C.S. Lewis fairy tale villain in The Chronicles of Narnia film series, the androgynously dressed and coiffured actress brings conviction... https://www.scmp.com/magazines/48hrs/article/1557430/tilda-swinton-plays-vampire-jim-jarmuschs-only-lovers-left-alive?utm_source=rss_feed https://www.scmp.com/magazines/48hrs/article/1557430/tilda-swinton-plays-vampire-jim-jarmuschs-only-lovers-left-alive?utm_source=rss_feed Wed, 23 Jul 2014 15:15:30 +0000 Canadian filmmaker Atom Egoyan didn't know what he was letting himself in for when he decided to make a dramatised account of the West Memphis Three case. It had been explored from different angles before - most notably in a trio of acclaimed documentaries by co-directors Joe Berlinger and Bruce Sinofsky, and another by Amy J. Berg - but Egoyan felt the story of the latter-day "Salem witch hunt" in a small, deeply religious neighbourhood known as Robin Hood Hills in West Memphis, Arkansas,... https://www.scmp.com/lifestyle/arts-culture/article/1513487/unresolved-child-murders-give-atom-egoyan-storyline-fits-his?utm_source=rss_feed https://www.scmp.com/lifestyle/arts-culture/article/1513487/unresolved-child-murders-give-atom-egoyan-storyline-fits-his?utm_source=rss_feed Sun, 18 May 2014 07:46:00 +0000 When New York filmmakers Allison Berg and Frank Keraudren were struggling to find funding for their documentary The Dog, their subject, John Wojtowicz, offered to rob a bank for them. Instead, they took 11 years to complete the project. "We should have thought about it," Berg said at the Berlin International Film Festival. It wouldn't be the first time Wojtowicz had robbed a bank for altruistic reasons. On August 22, 1972, he held up a Brooklyn branch of Chase Manhattan to pay for his troubled... https://www.scmp.com/lifestyle/arts-culture/article/1459209/postcard-new-york?utm_source=rss_feed https://www.scmp.com/lifestyle/arts-culture/article/1459209/postcard-new-york?utm_source=rss_feed Sun, 30 Mar 2014 08:21:23 +0000 Wes Anderson's meticulously designed films heighten and twist reality, creating worlds that look like ours, but different. When I meet the 44-year-old Texan at the 64th Berlin Film Festival, the day after his dazzling The Grand Budapest Hotel opens the event, the tall and wiry auteur looks as if he has just stepped out of one of his own creations. The illusion is reinforced by the retro brown suit Anderson is wearing, which looks suspiciously like the one worn by Tom Wilkinson in the film. "It... https://www.scmp.com/lifestyle/arts-culture/article/1448567/us-director-gives-hotel-caper-his-five-star-treatment?utm_source=rss_feed https://www.scmp.com/lifestyle/arts-culture/article/1448567/us-director-gives-hotel-caper-his-five-star-treatment?utm_source=rss_feed Sun, 16 Mar 2014 01:43:14 +0000 Hugh Jackman knows how to please an audience. While facing journalists at a press conference for his new thriller, Prisoners, at the Zurich Film Festival recently, he declared that without Switzerland, "I literally wouldn't be here. My parents met at Interlaken. My father was a ski and dance instructor, and completely swept my mother off her 19-year-old feet." He wasn't actually conceived there - that happened after his English parents emigrated to Australia as "£10 Poms" - but he still thanked... https://www.scmp.com/magazines/48hrs/article/1339798/hugh-jackman-explores-dark-side-prisoners?utm_source=rss_feed https://www.scmp.com/magazines/48hrs/article/1339798/hugh-jackman-explores-dark-side-prisoners?utm_source=rss_feed Wed, 30 Oct 2013 14:45:30 +0000