Comedians Tom Palmer and Tom Stourton made their names with the YouTube hit High Renaissance Man, in which they sent up clueless toffs at university, said Peter Bradshaw in The Guardian. It was “very funny”, but their jointly scripted debut feature film is a “dark satire”, and it doesn’t quite come off.
Pete, an entitled 31-year-old (played by Stourton), has just returned from doing charity work abroad, and decides to reconnect with his old gang from university, one of whom offers to host a birthday weekend for him at his “colossal country estate”. There Pete starts to sense that his chums have an unspoken agenda, and that he’s the punchline to an unkind joke that he doesn’t understand. It’s an interesting enough premise, but the film leads up to “a big reveal that feels anticlimactic and undeveloped”, and seems a bit of a waste of Stourton’s natural comic talent.
If you have a university reunion on the horizon, I wouldn’t go and see All My Friends Hate Me, said Deborah Ross in The Spectator. This is “social anxiety as horror (almost), and you won’t just cringe for the full 90 minutes, you will violently cringe”. I’m not sure what the film’s message is – “once a jerk always a jerk?” – but it creates a horrible “vortex of tension and anxiety”, and it is extremely compelling, and surprising.
The Week
Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.
Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters
From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.
From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.
I liked it very much, said Kevin Maher in The Times. It’s largely a drama about the class system, and takes “raw swipes at the persistent inequities” within it; but the “nuanced and sophisticated script never once degenerates into needless posh-bashing”. Instead, it asks “bleak questions about the primitive nature of most social relationships (who’s using whom?). And it ultimately finds that human beings, of all classes, are severely lacking.”
-
‘All of these elements push survivors into silence’Instant Opinion Opinion, comment and editorials of the day
-
A running list of US interventions in Latin America and the Caribbean after World War IIin depth Nicolás Maduro isn’t the first regional leader to be toppled directly or indirectly by the US
-
How to rekindle a reading habitThe Week Recommends Fall in love with reading again, or start a brand new relationship with it
-
Avatar: Fire and Ash – third instalment feels like ‘a relic of an earlier era’Talking Point Latest sequel in James Cameron’s passion project is even ‘more humourless’ than the last
-
The Zorg: meticulously researched book is likely to ‘become a classic’The Week Recommends Siddharth Kara’s harrowing account of the voyage that helped kick-start the anti-slavery movement
-
The Housemaid: an enjoyably ‘pulpy’ concoctionThe Week Recommends Formulaic psychological horror with Sydney Sweeney is ‘kind of a scream’
-
William Nicholson: a ‘rich and varied’ exhibitionThe Week Recommends The wide-ranging show brings together portraits, illustrations, prints and posters, alongside ‘ravishing’ still lifes
-
Oh, Mary! – an ‘irreverent, counter-historical’ delightThe Week Recommends Mason Alexander Park ‘gives the funniest performance in town’ as former First Lady Mary Todd Lincoln
-
The ultimate films of 2025 by genreThe Week Recommends From comedies to thrillers, documentaries to animations, 2025 featured some unforgettable film moments
-
Into the Woods: a ‘hypnotic’ productionThe Week Recommends Jordan Fein’s revival of the much-loved Stephen Sondheim musical is ‘sharp, propulsive and often very funny’
-
The best food books of 2025The Week Recommends From mouthwatering recipes to insightful essays, these colourful books will both inspire and entertain
