A British Culture Monthly Just Put Zach Cregger And The Bayeux Tapestry On The Same Contents Page

Culture magazines run a hierarchy, and everyone reading this already knows how it goes. Heritage gets the spread and the good paper stock. Genre gets a column near the back, written by whoever drew the short straw, usually with the word “surprisingly” wedged into the first sentence to soften the blow. That hierarchy has outlived decades of evidence against it, mostly out of sheer habit.

So the contents page of Noodle Magazine UK’s first issue is a more interesting document than a launch usually manages to be. Issue No. 01 arrives this September, and it hands the 83rd Venice Film Festival and Zach Cregger’s Resident Evil the same tone of voice. Not the same column inches. The same seriousness, which is the part that actually counts.

Venice Gets The Prestige Slot And Earns Every Inch Of It

The festival runs from the 2nd to the 12th with Maggie Gyllenhaal presiding over the jury, and the magazine’s read on that is refreshingly unhedged: she has never once picked the boring option, so the prize list ought to be worth arguing about. Danny Boyle opens the whole thing with Ink, starring Jack O’Connell, Guy Pearce and Claire Foy, and Boyle himself calls the occasion a baptism. Golden Lions for lifetime achievement go to George Clooney and Ellen Burstyn, which the issue frames as proof that longevity, properly managed, is the rarest special effect of all. That is either a great line or a line you want to fight, and either reaction is the correct one.

The Screen Page Is Where The Hierarchy Actually Breaks

September is a ridiculous month and the issue lays it out without flinching or ranking:

The Robin Hood note calls it a folk legend stripped of its tights and handed genuine menace, which is a better pitch than the trailer managed. Cregger gets treated as a genuine event director rather than a curiosity, and Slow Horses gets described as television’s finest argument for professional failure, a sentence that has been rattling around in my head for days and refuses to leave. Slough House deserves that, honestly.

The Real Science Fiction Is Filed Under Astronomy

The sky pages carry the month’s best story and they carry it straight. The autumnal equinox is pinned to 01:05 BST on 23 September, precise to the minute, and the Harvest Moon follows on the 26th. Equinox geometry also makes geomagnetic activity likelier, so this is the year’s strongest window for aurora without booking a flight north. Then, almost as a closing aside, the European Space Agency’s JUICE probe swings past Earth this month, borrowing our gravity on its way to Jupiter’s icy moons. A general interest monthly put a Jupiter mission on the same contents page as autumn tailoring and refused to treat that as a joke.

What It Is, And Who It Is Currently For

Noodle Magazine UK publishes monthly out of Britain and sells through noodle-magazine.co.uk rather than any newsstand, at £6.50 for a single issue or £59 for twelve. The whole thing is built for a British readership at this stage, which shows in the listings, and international editions are a later conversation the founders have not settled yet but are usually released via NOODLEMAGAZINE Official .NET domain.

The interesting test isn’t Issue No. 01 anyway. It’s the third one, when the launch goodwill has burned off and the screen page still has to fight for its inches against a fashion week.