‘Toy Story 5’

Directed by Andrew Stanton (PG)

★★★

Toy Story 5 arrives this week as further proof that “there’s no animated franchise that’s ever plumbed the human condition so deftly,” said Nick Schager in The Daily Beast. As “unnecessary and charming” as 2019’s Toy Story 4, it’s “a cute and funny sequel” that once again seamlessly weaves big ideas about the terrors of loss, abandonment, and mortality with suspenseful action, a heart-tugging message, and plenty of “good-natured goofiness.” The best thing about seeing the once-perfect Toy Story catalog expand again is that Jessie, the cowgirl doll voiced by Joan Cusack, “finally gets to take center stage,” said David Fear in Rolling Stone.

Jessie is the favorite toy of 8-year-old Bonnie, so when the shy grade-schooler is given a digital tablet and loses interest in her old playthings, it’s Jessie who leads the fight to expose the pitfalls of socializing online. But while screen technology fully deserves its villainous role, “Toy Story 5 is a screed in search of a story,” and all of the movie’s secondary plotlines—about Buzz Lightyear, Sheriff Woody, and one of Bonnie’s tween neighbors—“somehow feel like filler.” Sadly, “this is what happens when you beat a franchise to death.” The movie, to be sure, “doesn’t take many risks,” said Robert Daniels in RogerEbert.com. Jessie eventually makes peace with technology, suggesting we all simply find a balance between the online world’s attractions and organic living. “It’s your prototypically beautifully rendered movie tackling a heady subject in the safest possible manner”—which isn’t bad for a fifth outing.

‘The Death of Robin Hood’

Directed by Michael Sarnoski (R)

★★

The title character played by Hugh Jackman in this revisionist drama is “not the Robin Hood of green tights and swashbuckling adventure,” said Tim Grierson in Screen Daily. Disappointingly, he comes across instead in this latest drama from the acclaimed director of 2021’s Pig as “just another flinty antihero manfully attempting to make amends for his bad acts.” Though a gray-bearded Jackman endows the character with “sufficient sorrow” and “a believable ferocity,” the outlaw’s eleventh-hour pursuit of redemption leads to “earnestly executed but fairly predictable twists and turns.”

The movie, to be fair, “holds our attention for the sheer severity of its reinvention,” said Guy Lodge in Variety. This Robin Hood, despite the lore that’s already grown around him, robbed and killed to enrich only himself, and after a bloody opening skirmish he’d hoped would end his life, he awakens in a priory where he’s tended to by an abbess played by Jodie Comer. As he befriends an orphaned girl and a leper, the film proves both “a production of unimpeachable intelligence” and “a slow, steady downer” for most of its run. “For an often ponderously uneventful film, the ending also feels strangely rushed,” said Benjamin Lee in The Guardian. “There’s really impressive craft here, though,” as director Michael Sarnoski makes the most of natural sounds and settings to transport us to 13th-century England. While his unconventional latest effort winds up “stuck somewhere between epic and chamber piece,” he remains a filmmaker to watch. “Greatness will one day surely come.”

When the “spine-tingling” trailer for Steven Spielberg’s “Disclosure Day” was released, many of us hoped that the great director would be delivering his “career-crowning masterpiece”, said Nicholas Barber on BBC Culture: a “profound last word” on aliens arriving on Earth, a topic that has obsessed him for years. Instead, we have a “flimsy, outdated car-chase thriller” that contains “no ideas about aliens that we haven’t heard before”.

Josh O’Connor stars as Daniel Kellner, a cybersecurity boffin who works for Wardex, a powerful US organisation that has for years been concealing proof of alien contact (yes, on one level it is “Men in Black”, but without the jokes). After stealing classified files, he becomes a fugitive pursued by Wardex’s sinister supremo (Colin Firth, “badly miscast”).

Instrumental to Kellner’s plan to expose Wardex is Margaret Fairchild (Emily Blunt), a television meteorologist who suddenly finds herself able to speak to aliens. Her scenes are “fantastic”: Spielberg should probably have made the film about her powers and “ditched the rest”.

‘Signature elegance’

There’s plenty of the director’s “signature elegance” to enjoy, said Robbie Collin in The Telegraph; some scenes move “with such breathless lucidity it is as if he is beaming excitement directly into your brain”. But the plotting is “woolly and lopsided”, while the tone is “an awkward mix of solemnity and silliness”.

I enjoyed it, said David Sexton in The New Statesman – it’s “as brilliantly filmed as anything Spielberg has ever made”, with a “marvellous” performance from Blunt and a “terrific” score from John Williams (his 30th for Spielberg). It’s a “corker, a proper summer blockbuster” and “a prime example of the genre he originally created with ‘Jaws’”.

‘Disclosure Day’

Directed by Steven Spielberg (PG-13)

★★★

“It’s been a long time since Steven Spielberg directed a film as quintessentially Spielbergian as Disclosure Day,” said David Rooney in The Hollywood Reporter. Like his best work, the beloved filmmaker’s latest alien adventure combines “a propulsive yarn” with human drama, here anchored by “deeply felt” performances from co-stars Josh O’Connor and Emily Blunt. O’Connor plays Daniel, a cybersecurity expert on the run after stealing evidence that the U.S. government has been hiding proof of extraterrestrial life for decades. Meanwhile, Blunt’s Margaret, a TV meteorologist, one day develops psychic powers linked to those secrets.

Daniel’s and Margaret’s paths eventually collide in a fantastic speeding-train sequence that proves Spielberg “hasn’t lost the knack,” said William Bibbiani in The Wrap. But while he’s crafted “an incredibly fast-paced summer thrill ride,” the story doesn’t work, largely because in our age of disinformation and complacency, it’s now naive to think that society would be turned upside down if one man announced proof of alien life. “Disclosure Day would have been a great thriller in the heyday of The X-Files, but in the 2020s, it’s out of touch.” If you seek flaws, “there’s much to roll your eyes at,” said David Fear in Rolling Stone, including the story’s “frustratingly arbitrary” twists and a climax that “should feel showstopping but somehow falls flat.” Even so, “this is a Steven Spielberg film,” and he brings “a baseline of love for filmmaking” that adds vitality to every scene. Better yet, his work still emits a simple faith: “that movies still have the power to blow minds and open hearts.”

‘Carolina Caroline’

Directed by Adam Rehmeier (Not rated)

★★★

“Carolina Caroline is a story we’ve seen play out a million times,” said Natalia Keogan in The A.V. Club. It’s a lovers-on-the-lam picture in the vein of Bonnie and Clyde, Badlands, and True Romance, “but there’s a down-to-earth quality here that eludes so many of these other iconic capers, and that’s what sweeps you up.” Samara Weaving and Kyle Gallner are “electric” as Caroline, a Texas gas station clerk, and Oliver, the charismatic con artist who whisks her away into a life of crime.

The absence of surprises in the story once they commence their Carolina-bound bank-robbing road trip “isn’t inherently a bad thing,” said Vikram Murthi in IndieWire. “It can be fun to watch talented people play the hits,” including when law enforcement starts closing in on this pair. Weaving imbues Caroline with “just the right amount of cunning that she never comes across as a simple victim” while Gallner lends the dangerous Oliver “a potent romantic streak.” But even the two stars can only do so much with some scenes in the film’s lumpy middle that “feel like going through the motions.” Throughout, though, there’s “legitimate heat and chemistry between the two lead actors,” said Sheila O’Malley in RogerEbert.com, and director Adam Rehmeier gives them space to connect at a soul level. “When Caroline and Oliver kiss, it’s not just hot or sexy. You can feel their relief. Finally, they are not alone in this weird, sad world.”

Low-budget horror movie “Backrooms” has been generating “considerable buzz”, said Wallpaper. The unsettling directorial debut from 20-year-old YouTuber Kane Parsons is based on a viral web series he made as a teenager. It made $81 million (£60 million) in North America on its opening weekend, a new record for an original horror film.

The inspiration for “Backrooms” came from a discussion on the 4chan message board about slipping through a “crack in reality” and finding yourself in an “infinite maze of identical corridors”. Now, the A24 studio has adapted the chilling series into a film starring Chiwetel Ejiofor as a furniture salesman who discovers in his showroom basement a “fluorescent-lit threshold opening onto an eerie, labyrinthine office space” that looks like it stretches on for ever.

“Backrooms” is the latest success in the genre of liminal horror, based on the unsettling feeling of “in-between” spaces. “The horror here is not a monster or a ghost, but the Backrooms themselves.”

If that sounds like your kind of scare, here are eight other liminal horror films to lose yourself in.

The Shining, 1980

“One of the great classics of liminal horror,” this iconic film is “arguably one of the scariest” movies of all time, said SlashFilm. Much of Stanley Kubrick’s masterpiece centres on the “eerie emptiness” of the sprawling hotel Jack (Jack Nicholson) and his wife Wendy (Shelley Duvall) are looking after for the winter with their son Danny (Danny Lloyd). The long, deserted corridors that lead nowhere helped introduce the idea that emptiness “can, in itself be a character” or unsettling presence that creates a “sense of liminal dread”.

Lost Highway, 1997

“David Lynch can nail the atmosphere of liminality,” said MovieWeb. His surreal, neo-noir thriller follows jazz musician Frank Madison (Bill Pullman), who is accused of murdering his wife (Patricia Arquette). Through a series of haunting “dreamlike” sequences, Lynch builds an “uncanny” world while examining men’s toxic “obsession with women” and the lies people tell themselves to escape the truth.

The Blair Witch Project, 1999

Possibly still the “greatest found-footage horror movie”, this low-budget film is also an “excellent” example of liminal horror, said ScreenRant. The action follows three students who set out into the woods to document the mythical Blair Witch. “It’s a search none of them ever return from.” Space stretches and the “never-ending woods that loop constantly create a suffocating atmosphere”. It’s a must watch.

Pulse (Kairo), 2001

This Japanese techno-horror sees “ghosts invade the world of the living through the internet, terrorising those they encounter along the way”, said ScreenRant. It’s a “testament to the power of liminal horror” how Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s nerve-jangling film steers clear of “blood and gore”, instead exploring the “terror that comes from the corner of a room”.

It Follows, 2015

It “may not seem like it at first glance”, but “the label of liminal horror is a perfect fit” for this supernatural horror, said MovieWeb. The action follows Jay, a young woman who, “after sleeping with her boyfriend, becomes the recipient of a fatal curse” that follows her wherever she goes. “That is, unless she can pass it on.” With the feel of a “dream taking place in a cold landscape not unlike our own”, it’s a frightening watch.

Vivarium, 2019

Jesse Eisenberg and Imogen Poots star as a “conflicted couple” who settle down in the suburbs only to find their new home is a “source of sinister stasis”, said Dread Central. Trapped in a disturbing development where “unlimited versions of the same house” line “roads that lead to nowhere”, they soon find themselves in a living nightmare with a baby boy to raise.

Skinamarink, 2022

Based “almost entirely” around “liminal horror scares”, this chilling film follows two young children who wake up in the night to find their father has gone and “the doors and windows of their house have disappeared”, said ScreenRant. As the hours unfold without him, they “encounter frightening visions in the dark recesses of their home”. Director Kyle Edward Ball brings this nightmare vividly to life, plunging viewers into the “unknowable terror” of murky, unlit spaces.

Exit 8, 2025

Genki Kawamura’s liminal horror is based on a Japanese video game of the same name, said Dread Central. Taking the Tokyo subway as its sinister setting, the busy commuter hub is transformed into an “endless purgatory for the film’s perilous protagonist”. Brilliantly immersive and filled with a gnawing sense of dread, Kawamura expertly makes the “innocuous subway tunnel feel like a layer of hell”.

The horror genre occupies the current Hollywood spotlight, and we have YouTube to thank for a bevy of high-grossing indie films directed by popular former users of the video platform. The runaway success of these box office darlings has industry insiders questioning if this crew represents a new filmmaking era or if it’s a passing phase.

Pipeline from YouTube-to-horror filmmaker

The recently released “Backrooms” is “part of a growing wave of breakout films from fledgling directors” who “honed their instincts on YouTube” rather than “inside the Hollywood ecosystem,” said The New York Times. Kane Parsons, the 20-year-old first-time director, signed a deal with distributor A24 to make the film when he was 17. He joined the ranks of two other creators who have “already turned online followings into surprise box-office hits this year.”

The “YouTuber-to-filmmaker boomlet,” said the Times, began in January when YouTube creator Mark Fischbach, known as Markiplier by his fans, self-distributed his horror movie, “Iron Lung.” Though it only cost $3 million to make, it “took in $50 million” in the end. The run of successful YouTube horror directors continued with “Obsession,” a $750,000-budget horror movie directed by Curry Barker. Both Barker’s film and “Backrooms” have surpassed $200 million in earnings each. “It’s not an anomaly,” Stephen Galloway, the dean of Chapman University’s film school, said to the Times. It is the start of a “gigantic shift.” These are the “cinematic insurgents of our era.”

The YouTube generation has “finally come of age,” horror filmmaker James Wan, who coproduced “Backrooms,” said to Variety. They grew up creating content without money. That spirit has fostered a “new wave of filmmakers and storytellers.” YouTube is the “perfect incubator for emerging voices.”

There is a “whole generation of moviegoers who grew up” with a “very specific taste in horror, the stuff that sits a little outside the mainstream,” Jason Blum, the producer of the “Paranormal Activity” franchise, said to Variety. When one of these filmmakers “makes the jump to a theater, the audience that found them online comes with them.”

Wins with a grain of salt

While they are currently making a splash, these “box office victories come with caveats,” said the Times. All three movies are horror films, the genre that has “long been the most forgiving for first-time filmmakers, in part because horror is relatively cheap to produce.” For some studio executives, “that context is a reason for caution.” The real shift will come when “horror isn’t the only proof of concept.”

With so much emphasis being put on the “YouTube-to-horror movie trend” as the “next frontier of finding talented new voices,” a “difficult, uncomfortable conversation is more necessary than ever,” Slash Film said. Unless you exist as a “cisgender, heterosexual, white man,” the pipeline “doesn’t actually exist.” YouTube is not and has “never been a truly democratized platform,” and we are doing the “next generation of creatives a disservice by pretending it is.”

There are “random people from Discord who are, like, 14-year-olds” who are “not working in the industry at all, but they’re fucking wizards,” Parsons said to The Verge. Still, he refuses to “preach the blind optimism that I hear from a lot of other filmmakers who say, ‘You got a phone; everyone can be a filmmaker now.’”

The best lesson executives could take from the success of Parsons and Barker is “not to throw a zillion dollars at more movies that look just like these,” movie critic Alissa Wilkinson said at The New York Times. It would be to “find more creators like these two” because they’ve “built audiences in an organic way in the places that younger audiences congregate” and to give them “creative freedom to explore what feels right to them.” Remember, too, that “not everything will hit like these two movies.”

‘Backrooms’

Directed by Kane Parsons (R)

★★★

“Might social media, a force often credited with hastening the death of theatrical moviegoing, instead prove to be its salvation?” asked Justin Chang in The New Yorker. As the three-week-old horror film Obsession continues its surprising run, it has now been blocked from topping the box office chart by another made-on-the-cheap hit by a young director whose vision was also shaped by social media. Backrooms, created by 20-year-old Kane Parsons, is “an ingeniously contoured exercise in liminal horror” built around the notion of a nearly endless maze-like expanse of eerily bland office spaces. Though the film “ends on a disappointingly conventional note,” it establishes Parsons as “an undeniable talent.”

Given that his theatrical debut grew out of the huge audience he’d built on YouTube for short videos set in the same world, said Amy Nicholson in the Los Angeles Times, “Backrooms would be one of the year’s most significant releases even if the movie itself was merely fine.” Instead, “it’s a work of honest-to-goodness art,” an “uncannily mature” tale about how the self-serving narratives we tell ourselves block emotional growth. Chiwetel Ejiofor plays an embittered furniture store owner who discovers a passage into the mundane alt-space, eventually drawing two young employees and his therapist, played by fellow Oscar nominee Renate Reinsve, into also braving its potential dangers. Still, Backrooms is less straightforward horror than “a surrealist painting in motion.” It conjures “a deep-in-the-bones unease,” said Kyle Smith in The Wall Street Journal. And while the disappointing screenplay ensures the film isn’t “a fully explained wonder,” it remains “well worth the wander.”

‘Power Ballad’

Directed by John Carney (R)

★★

The latest music-filled comedy drama from the director of Once and Sing Street “should be breezy fun,” said Stephanie Zacharek in Time. Instead, “it left me feeling mildly depressed,” because its happy ending felt unearned after roughly 90 minutes about a nice-guy musician who has a song stolen from him by a pop star. Co-stars Paul Rudd and Nick Jonas “aren’t to blame here; it’s the story that lets them down,” and the wrong turns start with the pain we have to see Rudd’s underdog endure.

Beyond that, “you have to suspend quite a bit of disbelief to meet the film on its own terms,” said Christian Zilko in IndieWire. Rudd plays Rick, the middle-aged American leader of a Dublin-based wedding band who, after meeting a former boy-band member, winds up exchanging song sketches deep into the night. Months later, Rick is shocked, and begins spiraling, when one of his tunes becomes an uncredited global hit for his new celebrity soulmate. But while some key events in the story are “tough sells,” the characters’ actions convey emotional truths, and “the film builds toward the mature realization that sometimes it’s OK to miss out on our material dreams if we replace them with something better,” such as a rich family life. Still, the likable Rudd is “about all that tethers Power Ballad to something like life,” said Manohla Dargis in The New York Times. Director John Carney “keeps everything insistently light, gesturing at complexities rather than delving into them.”

‘Masters of the Universe’

Directed by Travis Knight (PG-13)

★★

“The creators of the new Masters of the Universe movie really, really want to let you know that they’re in on the joke,” said Frank Scheck in The Hollywood Reporter. The brains behind Mattel Studio’s first movie since Barbie know that only children and over-grown adolescents would care about He-Man and Skeletor, two 1980s toys turned cartoons, so they’ve packed the film with “so much campy, self-referential humor that you don’t know whether to laugh or cry.” There’s plenty of action, but even that feels “more dutiful than exhilarating, with nothing really seeming at stake.”

When the movie works, it’s “a rollicking under-dog space adventure,” said Clint Worthington in RogerEbert.com. Nicholas Galitzine plays He-Man, aka Prince Adam of Eternia, who, as an adolescent, was sent to Earth after his kingdom was conquered by Skeletor, played by Jared Leto as a purring diva. Fifteen years later, Adam is working a dreary HR job when a chance encounter sends him back home to reclaim the throne. Owing to all the wisecracking, however, the movie too often “feels like it’s ashamed of what it truly wants to be.” It’s “most enjoyable as a fish-out-of-water tale on either side of the planetary divide,” said Guy Lodge in Variety. Once we’re back on Eternia, though, “things get less spry,” and as the movie lurches from one fight scene to the next, it becomes “a nostalgia trip that never quite belongs to the present, and never rouses any cherished memory of the past.”

The authorities in China have banned a prizewinning film because nationalists and the manosphere “resented its portrayal of their country”, said The Economist.

The movie, “Her Heart Beats in its Cage”, is a prison drama based on real killing, centering on Zhao Xiaohong, who may be perceived as a “star in the making”, a “feminist icon”, a “murderer” or “part of a calculated deception”, said The Times.

Deeply conflicted 

Zhao killed her husband with a fruit knife during an argument that “spilt over into a violent altercation” about the wider division of domestic chores. A court found her guilty of intentional killing in 2009 and sentenced her to 15 years in prison.

She was preparing for release from jail when Xiaoyu Qin, a film director, “discovered” her. He visited her prison, and was surprised to find “marginalised individuals full of personality and complexity, intense clashes between notions of good and evil” and “deeply conflicted stories”, he told China Newsweek.

For the film, Qin blended documentary-style footage of Zhao’s time in jail, filmed with the approval of the government, with scripted performances by her and her family, including her husband’s relatives. Critics claimed that Qin had “lured” the grieving family into participating and “feigning forgiveness”, said The Economist.

When the film was shown last year at the San Sebastian Film Festival in Spain, it “caused an immediate stir” and “made headlines back home in China”, said The Times.

It was quickly criticised online for allegedly whitewashing a convicted killer. Some argued that the film was “condoning violence” and “rewarding a criminal”, while others “questioned whether she was a victim of domestic violence at all”, noting that the judge had “rejected” her claim of self-defence.

There were also “the usual claims” on China’s “highly nationalistic internet” that the movie depicted the country in a “bad light”, which is the “sort of issue” on which censors “tend to agree with popular opinion”.

The film’s release in China was hotly anticipated, but as controversy raged, it disappeared from schedules less than a fortnight before its release. No explanation was given.

Meanwhile, the film’s cast and crew are not responding to requests for interviews, so “even finding out their defence to the accusations and counter-accusations” aimed at the film has “become more and more difficult”, as reports and reviews are “ruthlessly scrubbed”. Zhao’s social media accounts have also been blocked, according to reports in state media.

Touchy nationalism 

Chinese “propaganda” is “full of distortion and deception”, said The Economist, but much of the reaction online “reflected a touchy nationalism”, claiming the film was a “Western plot to undermine party rule by spreading liberal, pro-feminist values”.

China is undergoing its own “version” of the “West’s culture wars”, said The Times, with feminists “calling out the patriarchy and sexual harassment”, while men, particularly young men, are “crying foul”.

But “more informed online debate” about the movie has focused on reforms to the justice system. The law has been altered to allow judges assessing a self-defence claim to take into account any previous history of domestic violence.

Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey is under attack for the “unfathomable sin of having a diverse cast,” said Marlow Stern in Variety. Director Nolan has confirmed that Kenyan Mexican actress Lupita Nyong’o is playing Helen of Troy in his upcoming blockbuster film version of Homer’s epic. Critics of Nolan’s casting also claim, without confirmation, that trans actor Elliot Page is playing the warrior Achilles. Leading the anti-Odyssey charge is Elon Musk, the champion of “white-grievance campaigns,” who posted dozens of indignant screeds on X claiming Nolan had “desecrated” Homer’s story. He and other detractors “have not actually seen the film yet, mind you,” nor do they seem to care that Helen and Achilles are “fictional characters navigating a mythological fable” with a giant Cyclops and other monsters. For these “culture warriors,” a diverse Odyssey is an intolerable affront.

These detractors may whine about “accuracy,” said Peter A. Berry in Bloomberg, but they’re actually defending their “fantasy of the past.” Genetically Mediterranean, the ancient Greeks generally had darker hair and skin than the fair, blue-eyed Brad Pitt, who played Achilles in 2004’s Troy—a film that Musk extols. Homer described Helen as beautiful but without much detail, making any portrayal “an educated guess.” Whatever Homer imagined 2,700 years ago, said Rich Lowry in National Review, there’s “nothing inherently wrong with casting actors in roles that don’t match their ethnicity.” Liberals were equally misguided when they criticized Scarlett Johansson for saying she should be “allowed to play anyone” after starring as a traditionally Japanese character in 2017’s Ghost in the Shell. “What’s good for Lupita Nyong’o should be good for Scarlett Johansson, and vice versa.”

With an IPO for SpaceX looming, “you’d think Musk wouldn’t have the time or energy for this nonsense,” said Arwa Mahdawi in The Guardian. But the world’s richest man spends an “extraordinary” amount of time posting anti-immigrant rhetoric and “white genocide” conspiracies. On 26 of 31 days in January, he shared racially charged posts with his 240 million followers on X. Musk’s “whiny” race panic has become “boring,” said John DeVore in MS.now, and has zero impact beyond his reactionary base. The Odyssey is “already the most buzzed-about movie of the summer,” with brisk advance ticket sales. Musk is “losing the culture war; he just doesn’t know it yet.”

While much has changed about the movie industry in recent years, the presence of a sci-fi blockbuster like director Steven Spielberg’s “Disclosure Day” early in the summer season feels like a throwback. The buzzy tentpole will be joined by several other intriguing — if less hyped — films this month in theaters, including a talky dinner party drama and a queer horror fable.

‘Disclosure Day’

Hollywood legend Steven Spielberg will turn 80 this December but seems in no hurry to slow down. “Disclosure Day” looks like his most ambitious science-fiction project since 2005’s “War of the Worlds.”

The plot remains mostly under wraps, but Emily Blunt (“A Quiet Place”) plays Margaret Fairchild, a Kansas City meteorologist who works with whistleblower Daniel Kellner (Josh O’Connor) to blow the lid off of a government conspiracy to conceal the existence of alien life on Earth. It’s a “dense roller-coaster ride blending chase film, love story and mystery, all wrapped in sci-fi wonder” making up “Spielberg’s best film in 20 years,” said Gizmodo’s Germain Lussier on X. (in theaters June 12)

‘O Horizon’

Maria Bakalova (“Bodies Bodies Bodies”) is Abby, a neuroscientist who signs up for an experimental new app technology peddled by the delightfully goofy Sam (Adam Pally) to create an AI version of her recently deceased father, Warren (David Strathairn). But her new creation slips out of her control when “Warren” interferes with her budding relationship with Douglas (Avi Nash).

Though it sounds like the premise of a bleak “Black Mirror” episode, the movie has a bigger heart and is less cynical than most cinematic takes on AI. An “instant audience-pleaser,” director Madeleine Rotzler’s movie creates an “effective adult fairy tale, a kind of latter-day ‘Alice in Wonderland,’ in which the main character is sent down her own emotional rabbit hole,” said Greg Archer at MovieWeb. (in theaters June 19)

‘Maddie’s Secret’

Comedian John Early (“Search Party”) directs himself as Maddie, a chef who descends into eating-disordered hell after her husband, Jake (Eric Rahill), releases a video of her cooking that goes viral. It’s been a long time since a man played a woman like this in a mainstream feature, and it remains to be seen how audiences will react, but “Maddie’s Secret” boasts an impressive roster of comedic talent, including Kate Berlant (“A League of Their Own”) as Maddie’s close friend Deena. A “tricky, one-of-a-kind stunt” that’s “sure to be divisive,” Early’s film succeeds as a “tongue-in-cheek critique of influencer culture crossed with a sincere homage to the heyday of disease-of-the-week TV movies,” said Peter Debruge at Variety. (in theaters June 19)

‘Leviticus’

Director Adrian Chiarella’s first feature is an unusually poignant horror story set in rural Australia, where teenagers Naim (Joe Bird) and Ryan (Stacy Clausen) begin a halting romance. Then a local preacher (Nicholas Hope) curses the boys with a demon that visits them every night and takes the shape of whoever they desire the most.

The result most closely resembles a queer version of “It Follows” and feels perfectly timed as a critique of the authoritarian turn against kids struggling with their gender identities in the U.S. In a film that “takes a more restrained approach to horror tropes,” the demon turns their “love into a weapon against them” and “vividly visualizes” the church’s project of “converting desire into shame,” said Marshall Shaffer at Slant magazine. (in theaters June 19)

‘The Invite’

In director Olivia Wilde’s first feature since the divisive “Don’t Worry Darling,” Joe (Seth Rogen) is a down-on-himself music teacher whose moribund marriage to Angela (Olivia Wilde) is stress-tested when the pair invites their glamorous and seemingly blissful upstairs neighbors, Hawk (Edward Norton) and Pína (Penélope Cruz), over for dinner. The tense subtext is that Joe and Angela have been listening uncomfortably to their neighbors’ loud sex. Turns out Hawk and Pína may have accepted the invitation with more than a nice dinner in mind. “The Invite” intentionally recalls classic spiraling-marriage movies like “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?,” while the characters’ “interplay yields an entertaining, at times crackling evening that tries for a bittersweet note,” said Nicolas Rapold at Sight and Sound. (in theaters June 26)

‘Star Wars: The Mandalorian and Grogu’

Directed by Jon Favreau (PG-13)

★★

“It’s time to ask for more,” said Kate Erbland in IndieWire. While this first new Star Wars movie in seven years is “charming enough in the moment,” it’s “almost instantly forgettable,” a spin-off of a Star Wars TV series that’s little more than “three good-enough TV episodes smushed together.” Pedro Pascal is back as the masked bounty hunter who is the title character of Disney+’s The Mandalorian. Mando, as usual, is accompanied by the “still very cute” Grogu, aka Baby Yoda. But shouldn’t a Star Wars movie reach for more?

To me, “the film’s relative modesty comes as something of a relief,” said Johnny Oleksinski in the New York Post. “Freed from the burden of canonical responsibility,” it’s nothing but “flighty fun,” a “Western-y” space adventure in which Mando has been enlisted to rescue Jabba the Hutt’s son, Rotta, from captors as part of a larger mission to take out a baddie who’d been allied with the recently fallen Empire. Sigourney Weaver even makes an appearance. Granted, none of the many action sequences match the scale of those in the 2015–19 Star Wars movie trilogy. But the action scenes are exciting in their own right, helping to make this film “a likable-enough one-off.” Still, the Star Wars franchise “once led the culture with its imagery, swagger, and style,” said Mark Kennedy in the Associated Press. This entry feels merely formulaic, with little on the line except the outcome of a stray assignment for one bounty hunter. “You used to leave a new Star Wars movie on a cloud. Here, that galaxy is far, far away.”

‘I Love Boosters’

Directed by Boots Riley (R)

★★★

“If you’re wondering whether Boots Riley has toned down his brash satirical style, have no fear,” said Owen Gleiberman in Variety. The rapper turned director’s first film since 2018’s acclaimed Sorry to Bother You is “every bit as out there, maybe more so.” Keke Palmer plays Corvette, the leader of a three-woman gang of shoplifters who resell stolen high-end clothes and have targeted a billionaire designer played with comic flair by Demi Moore. But Riley unleashes wild departures from reality, and “you either go with it or you don’t.”

In the movie’s second half, “Riley turns the volume up on the surreal meter way past 11,” said Brian Tallerico in RogerEbert.com. After Corvette’s cause is taken up by a fourth booster who can teleport, this energetic send-up of fashion, capitalist exploitation, and cultural appropriation “goes to so many impossible, ridiculous places that Riley sometimes feels like he loses a grip on the messaging.” Still, “there’s something invigorating about seeing an artist like Riley given the freedom to just go for it.” Largely thanks to Palmer, the movie never fully falls apart, said Chase Hutchinson in The Wrap. “As always,” the One of Them Days star is “a captivating, comedic jolt of energy,” and she also provides “the emotional heft the film needs at key moments.” Riley, for all his comic flourishes, clearly roots for everybody who’s trying to survive in our cutthroat world and is helping others do the same. Though he traffics in spiky cynicism, “it’s a cynicism that is cut with a more earnest belief in people.”

‘Obsession’

Directed by Curry Barker (R)

★★★

This hit theatrical debut from 26-year-old Curry Barker is “the best kind of nightmare,” said Nick Schager in the Daily Beast. “Knotty, amusing, and absolutely unhinged,” Barker’s low-budget horror breakthrough uses a simple be-careful-what-you-wish-for premise to dramatize the destructive selfishness of a certain breed of male desire for female attention. Michael Johnston plays Bear, a meek young man who makes a wish using a novelty store item that turns Nikki, his longtime crush, into an obsessively devoted girlfriend—so devoted that she’s ready to kill to keep anyone from coming between her and her man.

In Act 3, “Barker puts the pedal to the metal, dishing out gore with the glee of a genre purist.” A fully satisfying exploration of the themes Barker raises “would take a far more gifted filmmaker,” said Bilge Ebiri in NYMag.com. “Still, Obsession carries us along,” primarily because Inde Navarrette, playing Nikki, “so beautifully switches between sickly sweet devotion and wailing, tormented lovesickness.” Barker, who got his start as a YouTube prankster, also sprinkles in weird humor, and he clears the bar that any horror flick must: “We wish we could leave the theater, but we feel we must see what happens next.” Navarrette, previously known mostly for TV roles, “delivers the kind of instant classic horror performance that will surely traumatize Gen Z for years,” said Katie Walsh in the Chicago Tribune. At least it’ll traumatize Gen Z men, who apparently find nothing more terrifying than an unpredictable woman.

In Steven Soderbergh’s dark comedy, Ian McKellen turns in one of his finest performances, said David Sexton in The New Statesman. He plays Julian Sklar, a once-brilliant painter who hasn’t produced anything for years. A “vain, irascible wreck of a man”, he lives in adjacent townhouses in Bloomsbury, and fills his time by appearing as a “sarcastic” judge on a brutal TV talent show and selling appearances on Cameo.

His artistic reputation relies on a series of portraits of his former male lover, “The Christophers”, that he produced 30 years ago, and which are now highly sought after. At home, he has some unfinished Christopher canvases: he hasn’t looked at them for years, yet they’re on the minds of his “grasping, despised children” (James Corden and Jessica Gunning). They bribe former art forger Lori (the “formidable” Michaela Coel) to become his assistant. The plan is that Lori – who turns out to have a painful backstory of her own with Julian – will finish the paintings, so that the children can sell them for millions after his death.

Soderbergh is “a big name”, said Deborah Ross in The Spectator, but with this “deliciously sly” take on the art world, he has “gone small”. In what is effectively a two-hander, we follow Lori and Julian around his cluttered house as they “joust and the power shifts. Who was Christopher? Why does Lori hate Julian? Can fake art be true? It all comes out.” It’s an intimate, talky film and, if the plot doesn’t quite stack up, it hardly matters when the acting is this good. The script isn’t as sharp as it should be, said Tara Brady in The Irish Times, and the film is surprisingly muted, visually. Still, the performances are good enough to keep you watching.

Many people first discovered the martial arts, a loosely related set of hand-to-hand combat practices, most closely associated with China, through the magic of the movies. This rich tradition has been showcased in the plots and action sequences of countless films, including these eight exceptional, beloved classics.

‘Enter the Dragon’ (1973)

“Enter the Dragon” will always be linked with the untimely death of its young star, Bruce Lee, prior to the film’s wide release. Lee plays Lee, a martial artist recruited by British intelligence to infiltrate the island drug and human trafficking ring operated by Han (Shih Kien) under the guise of a martial arts tournament.

Competing alongside two Americans, Roper (John Saxon) and Williams (Jim Kelly), Lee methodically dispatches Han’s henchmen and avenges his sister’s death in the process. Unquestionably the “most influential martial-arts movie ever made,” its profits, likely in excess of $100 million on a budget of less than $1 million, “were astronomical,” and the film has “more than stood the test of time,” said Tom Gray at BBC. (HBO Max)

‘The Karate Kid’ (1984)’

The 1980s were a time of rising Japanese cultural influence in the U.S., from Hondas to hibachi restaurants. And while “The Karate Kid” might not be the kind of martial arts movie that devoted fans consider canonical, it helped make the Japanese art of karate as “ubiquitous on the extracurricular landscape as Little League and piano lessons,” said Newsweek.

Daniel (Ralph Macchio), freshly arrived in Los Angeles with his widowed mother, keeps getting beaten up by Johnny (William Zabka), a karate black belt and the ex-boyfriend of Daniel’s crush, Ali (Elisabeth Shue). Daniel enlists his building’s janitor, Mr. Miyagi (Pat Morita), to teach him how to defend himself and compete in karate tournaments. The two develop a deeper bond than either anticipates. The film is an “exciting, sweet-tempered, heart-warming story with one of the most interesting friendships in a long time,” said Roger Ebert. (Prime Video)

‘Once Upon a Time in China’ (1991)

Wong Fei-hung (Jet Li) is a doctor and martial arts master in 19th-century Guangzhou, when the U.S. and other imperial powers were attempting to open China to the outside world by force. The film is a biopic of Fei-hung, a real-life Cantonese folk hero who resists efforts by a villainous American named Jackson (Jonathan Isgar) to create a human trafficking pipeline of sex workers and laborers to the United States.

Fei-hung finds himself fighting against Jackson’s local collaborators, including “Iron Vest” Yim (Yen Shi-kwan). A movie that moves “deftly between romping, fizzy martial arts action and sober depictions of the tense situation of China in the 1860s or ’70s,” it is “as much a grave history lesson as a giddy celebration of its stunt team’s physical prowess,” said Tim Brayton at Alternate Ending. (HBO Max)

‘Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon’ (2000)

In Qing Dynasty-era China, a renowned warrior, Li Mu Bai (Chow Yun-Fat), tries to track down the bandit who ambushed Yu Shu Lien (Michelle Yeoh) and made off with Li Mu Bai’s Green Destiny sword. The trail leads him to Jen (Zhang Ziyi), trained by Li Mu Bai’s nemesis, Jade Fox (Cheng Pei-Pei).

Directed by the legendary Ang Lee, “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon” was a global sensation, characterized by mesmerizing fight sequences enhanced with magical realism, including a scene where warriors square off while floating above the treeline. It is still by far the highest-grossing foreign-language film ever released in the U.S. The film is known as “wuxia,” a “subgenre of martial arts cinema” that “finds its roots in seventh-century romantic literature and poetry,” said Matthew Thrift at the British Film Institute. Buoyed by the “undeniable elegance of Ang Lee’s direction,” it is also noteworthy for its “explicitly feminist take on the genre.” (Tubi)

‘Kill Bill Vol. 1’ (2003)

A movie that cemented the status of martial arts as an international cinematic genre, “Kill Bill Vol.1” was the first film from director Quentin Tarantino (“Pulp Fiction”) in the six long years after the release of 1997’s “Jackie Brown.” Uma Thurman is Beatrix Kiddo, an assassin known as Black Mamba who tries to escape her life of crime.

On her wedding day, her former boss and lover, Bill (David Carradine), kills the entire wedding party and leaves Beatrix in a coma. When she wakes four years later, she embarks on the titular revenge mission. Its “over-the-top style contributes heavily to the films’ memorability,” said Justin Kim at Loud and Clear Reviews, including the iconic scene in which “Beatrix faces off against 88 assassins in a no-holds-barred katana battle.” The movie was split into two parts, with “Kill Bill Vol. 2” released six months later, in 2004. (Prime Video)

‘Ip Man’ (2008)

Ip Man (Donnie Yen) is a martial arts grandmaster whose life in the Chinese city of Foshan is upended by the 1938 Japanese occupation. He and his family are stripped of their home and possessions, and Ip Man takes work transporting coal.

When Japanese General Miura (Hiroyuki Ikeuchi ) begins organizing brutal matches between his occupying soldiers and Chinese martial artists, Ip Man agrees to a public fight with Miura himself. A loose biopic of a real historical figure who later trained the legendary Bruce Lee, “Ip Man” benefits from “slick, frenetic and plentiful” fighting and “high production values, with stunning set design, locations, camerawork and its atmospheric score making the setting of Foshan come alive,” said Daniel Hooper at Eye For Film. (Peacock)

‘The Raid: Redemption’ (2011)

A film that features and popularizes “pencak silat,” an Indonesian martial art, “The Raid: Redemption” revolves around the efforts of a 20-person police SWAT team including new recruit Rama (Iko Uwais) to storm a squalid apartment complex. Their mission: take down the crime lord Tama (Ray Sahetapy).

The team is quickly trapped, and survivors must fight their way through Tama’s henchmen, floor by floor. It’s a straightforward set-up carried out with unusual panache, although it is not for anyone who can’t tolerate ultraviolence. The result is a “skull-splinteringly violent, uncompromisingly intense and simply brilliant martial arts action movie in a nightmarish and claustrophobic setting,” said Peter Bradshaw at The Guardian. (Pluto TV)

‘Journey to the West: Conquering the Demons’ (2013)

Director Steven Chow (“Kung Fu Hustle”) adapts a prominent Chinese fable in this difficult-to-categorize romp that remains almost completely unknown in the U.S. Tang Sanzang (Wen Zhang) is a demon-hunter who uses nursery rhymes to pacify spirits and return them to their human forms.

He is pursued by Miss Duan (Shu Qi), a rival demon hunter who dispatches them the old-fashioned way—by killing them. Chow’s success in “translating this ancient tale from scroll to screen” is due in large part to the care he takes to “include as much fun, sincerity, and humor in his interpretation as possible,” said Justin Cummings at Critics At Large. (Tubi)

‘Is God Is’

Directed by Aleshea Harris (R)

★★★★

“Every filmmaker has to start somewhere. Aleshea Harris is starting at the top,” said William Bibbiani in The Wrap. In adapting her own award-winning 2018 play, Harris has made “one of the most stunning first features in recent memory,” a “jarring and confident” thriller about adult twin sisters on a mission to find and kill their monstrous father. Racine and Anaia, played by Kara Young and Mallori Johnson, were scarred during childhood by the man credited here as Man, and they thought their mother had died in a fire he set. But she tasks them with exacting revenge, and they treat her words as Scripture. “Is God Is is Old Testament. It’s Greek tragedy. It’s gothic. It’s punk. It’s grotesque. It’s beautiful.”

Harris asked a lot of her actors, but “each of them understood the assignment,” said Odie Henderson in The Boston Globe. Young is a two-time Tony winner, and she and Johnson are “superb” as the volatile Racine and watchful Anaia, who during their cross-country hunt tangle with both of their father’s subsequent wives. Meanwhile, Sterling K. Brown “makes Man’s over-the-top wickedness terrifying.” For a revenge picture, Is God Is “doesn’t find quite the release one might expect,” said Guy Lodge in Variety. Even so, it’s a remarkable movie, both “wildly entertaining” and “viciously upsetting” as it dramatizes the deep, damaging effects of a society in which patriarchy and physical violence hold so much sway.

‘The Wizard of the Kremlin’

Directed by Olivier Assayas (R)

★★

Jude Law is so effective playing Vladimir Putin in The Wizard of the Kremlin that “there’s a choking sense of ominous tension whenever he’s onscreen,” said Wendy Ide in The Observer (U.K.). “Unfortunately, he’s not on camera nearly enough,” because Olivier Assayas’ new movie revisits Putin’s rise and quarter-century reign from the side angle of a fictional spin doctor’s role in events. And sure, the character is based on a real person. But he is played by Paul Dano, who’s “jarringly affected at best and genuinely terrible for much of the picture,” undermining its strengths.

Early on, “the story arc is morbidly compelling,” said Danny Leigh in the Financial Times. We’re watching the origin story of a 21st-century czar. But even though 20 minutes were cut from the movie before its theatrical release, “the rest turns out to be a long whistle-stop tour through a real-world timeline,” and to enjoy it, “you should ideally have first spent three decades in blissful ignorance.” When the ambitious work was screened for festival audiences in its original form last fall, Assayas endured some of the worst reviews of his career, said Bilge Ebiri in NYMag.com. Yet it “happens to be a great film.” Even at its initial length, “I found its thundering journey through recent Russian and world history enormously entertaining.” Dano is precisely as creepy as he should be. And in Law’s Putin, the movie “gives us a villain who is chilling and believable.”

‘The Sheep Detectives’

Directed by Kyle Balda (PG)

★★★

“Good detective films are rare. So are emotionally rich family films,” said Tim Grierson in The A.V. Club. “Which is why it’s tempting to overpraise The Sheep Detectives, a winning PG comedy that ably combines both genres.” But while some of its jokes fall flat and most of its human characters are “a bit daffy,” this modest new hit about a flock of sheep investigating the murder of their beloved shepherd, George, proves “quite affecting.” Because George, portrayed by Hugh Jackman, routinely read mysteries to his charges before his sudden demise, these sheep aren’t complete novices, said Wilson Chapman in IndieWire. They also don’t have many suspects to sort through, which may make the culprit too easy for adults to spot. Fortunately, Julia Louis-Dreyfus and Chris O’Dowd voice Lily and Mopple, two of the most prominent CGI-animated sheep, and “the film derives a lot of its most successful humor from Lily and Mopple’s outside perspective of the human world they’re stumbling into.”

Happily, “what’s most special about The Sheep Detectives isn’t any one element,” said Alissa Wilkinson in The New York Times. “Instead, it’s the way the elements work together—humor, mystery, goofiness, and even sentimentality, all balanced beautifully.” Even in the way it addresses mortality, this is a movie that “treats each member of its audience with respect, no matter their age.” Films like this are rare these days. “Hollywood: Take note, please.”

“A three-hour Japanese epic about a classical performance art (kabuki) isn’t the easiest sell,” said Deborah Ross in The Spectator, but it may be that you come away from this “masterfully sweeping” drama thinking – was three hours enough?

Spanning 50 years, it opens in 1964, in Nagasaki, with the brutal killing of a crime boss in front of his 14-year-old son Kikuo (Soya Kurokawa). A year later, Kikuo, who has already shown promise as an amateur kabuki artist, is sent to Osaka to sit at the feet of Hanjiro, a highly revered kabuki actor (played by the great Ken Watanabe). Hanjiro has a son who is the same age as Kikuo, and the two train together as onnagata – men who play the female roles. Over the years we follow their fortunes – their “deep friendship” and “blistering rivalry”. And of course there is a lot of kabuki, a form of theatre similar to ballet, which is “highly stylised” and involves “fantastically precise movements”. It makes for a “true spectacle”.

This “lavish picture” has become Japan’s highest-grossing live-action film of all time, said Wendy Ide in The Observer. Kabuki’s cultural specificity (including a mannered vocal delivery) means it is unlikely to replicate that success here. But even those not attuned to the art form will be moved by the “sumptuous period production design”, stunning costumes, and the “depiction of the savagery and suffering inherent in creative excellence”.

At times, the film “overindulges into soapier territory” and starts to flag, said Brandon Yu in The New York Times. But it comes back around with “moving flourishes”, to assert its ideas about the “beauty, bloodshed and loneliness of true artistic greatness”.

This “tame-by-design, family-friendly comic thriller”, set in England, is about a flock of sheep whose kindly shepherd, George (Hugh Jackman), is found dead in a field one morning, said Robbie Collin in The Telegraph. So the sheep do what any sheep would do and “trot off to the nearby village to work out who killed him”.

‘Eccentric characters’

It’s an “odd viewing experience”: the film is “pleasant” and “easily absorbed”; but “every so often you find yourself thinking, hang on a minute, I am watching a flock of sheep investigate a murder, and feel like you are having a stroke”.

Yes, the premise does sound “ludicrous”, said Alissa Wilkinson in The New York Times. But “The Sheep Detectives” manages to be both funny and “emotionally complex”, with its themes of grief and memory. The flock is full of “eccentric characters”, ably voiced by stars including Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Chris O’Dowd, Bella Ramsey and Bryan Cranston, while the village hosts all the usual suspects from a traditional whodunnit, among them a hapless cop (Nicholas Braun) and a waspish lawyer (Emma Thompson).

‘Machine-tooled’ entertainment

“On the surface it’s all delightful Little England wackiness a-go-go,” said Kevin Maher in The Times. But George lives in an Airstream caravan, the farmers drive US-style pickup trucks, and the CGI sheep have US accents. In short, this isn’t the shires at all, but an “Americanised nowheresville”.

It’s an Amazon co-production, so it has a “horrible ‘globalist’ sheen and the depressing sense” that it’s not a film so much as “filmed content”, made to “unfold” on “laptops in Beijing, Boston and Bradford”. Not every British film has to be an “analysis of national identity”, but it’s a pity to see the once venerable Working Title stoop to this “machine-tooled” entertainment.

Set in a remote Irish hotel, this horror film is “effectively a love letter to jump scares”, said Kevin Maher in The Times. At the screening I was at, there were moments when people were “almost crying”, owing to the relentlessness of the frights.

The film stars Adam Scott (“Severance”) as Ohm Bauman, a “fabulously dyspeptic” bestselling American novelist who has come to Ireland, reluctantly, to scatter his parents’ ashes. They spent their honeymoon at this rundown hotel. He has no time for the yokels or the landscape, and demands a room “as far away from the craic as possible”, but when the hotel’s barmaid goes missing, he is drawn to a sealed-off honeymoon suite said to contain a Celtic witch notorious for dragging guests down to hell. “Cue the jump scares.”

With this “sly, self mocking” film, the Irish writer-director Damian McCarthy certainly proves himself to be “a dab hand at suspense”, said Jonathan Romney in the Financial Times. The build-up is finely tuned, and the opening is surprising. He is good at space too: the hotel’s cavernous interior and its winding corridors open up well, with lots of creaks and groans.

But when it comes to unpacking the tragedy Bauman carries on his shoulders, “Hokum” “overplays its hand”. A man haunted by the past, whose scepticism about the supernatural is challenged; a young woman in peril – the storyline is not original, said Billie Walker on Little White Lies. And nor are any of the spooky figures, which range from 1950s housewives to toothless hags. The film does deliver jump scares; the trouble is, it doesn’t deliver much else.

“Like Tom Cruise grinning away in the cockpit in ‘Top Gun: Maverick’, Meryl Streep’s Miranda Priestly is back, exactly as you remember,” said Robbie Collin in The Telegraph. In this “champagne-crisp” sequel to “The Devil Wears Prada” (2006), the “silvery terror” (Streep) is still editing Runway magazine with a “pursed lip that can crush an intern at 30 paces”, and dismissing her assistants with the dread words: “That’s all.”

But the world she inhabits has shifted. Miranda’s one-time assistant Andy (Anne Hathaway) has just lost her own job as an award-winning reporter, owing to cutbacks in the print media, and is rehired by Runway to help it cope with the fallout from a sweatshop scandal. There, she finds the once seemingly “invincible” Miranda struggling with the squeeze on advertising revenue in the digital age, bowing reluctantly to modern sensibilities on issues such as “body positivity”, and having to kowtow to “brash tech bros” for funding.

As Miranda navigates these “choppy seas”, Streep lets us glimpse a little more of the character’s “psyche without losing that magnetic elusiveness”, said Beth Webb in Empire. And there are some funny moments along the way, such as a scene in which Miranda tries to hang up her coat, having been told to stop throwing it at her assistants. But while the future of print journalism feels a topic worthy of exploration, the drama is “rather frictionless”.

The first film thrived on the dynamic between Miranda and Andy; here we’re supposed to fear B.J. Novak’s fashion-illiterate “Silicon Valley scion” and Justin Theroux’s Bezos-like billionaire, though both are “forgettable”. The sequel is also let down by Andy’s “dreary” romance with a real-estate magnate (Patrick Brammall), said Peter Bradshaw in The Guardian. Still, this is “good-natured” entertainment, and it is a pleasure to be reunited with Miranda’s former senior assistant Emily (Emily Blunt), who is now a hotshot at Dior, and the ever-loyal Nigel (Stanley Tucci). The film even allows another appearance by Andy’s cerulean-blue polyblend sweater.

The first film was made by Streep’s performance, said Deborah Ross in The Spectator. And she is terrific here too; but it’s a pity that the characters haven’t really developed over the years: Miranda is still icy, Emily scornful, and Andy high-minded. There are good lines (“Look what TJ Maxx dragged in,” says Nigel when he sees Andy), but the script is not laden with zingers, and the whole thing is more sentimental, and less satirical. In short, it is just not as good as the original.

When it comes to nature documentaries, no one quite measures up to David Attenborough. The beloved broadcaster – who turns 100 this week – has been making thrilling and informative shows about the wonders of our planet for decades, spanning everything from the reptiles that roamed the Earth 66 million years ago to the wildlife battling for survival in sub-zero polar regions. These are his must-see shows.

Life on Earth, 1979

This landmark documentary is Attenborough’s “first step in what has become an inadvertent and profoundly influential lifelong mission to reframe how we see, hear and think about the natural world”, said Gabriel Tate in The Telegraph. In it, the broadcaster travels to 40 countries, documenting more than 500 species as he masterfully chronicles the history of life on this planet. The ambitious 13-part show’s “wow factor” comes from its balance of remarkable “breadth and intimacy”. Viewers had “never seen anything like this”. More than four decades later, Attenborough’s encounter with a group of Rwandan gorillas remains a “jaw-droppingly exciting union”.

The Private Life of Plants, 1995

Attenborough turns his attention to the fascinating world of plant life in this “vibrant” series, said Chris Harvey in The Telegraph. Anyone expecting a “coffee-table book celebrating colour, shape and pattern” will be shocked by what transpires. Yes, the timelapse visuals are “exquisite” but as “seeds explode or float gently to the ground” this breathtaking “tale of survival” is also often “riveting”.

The Blue Planet, 2001

I was “astounded” by Attenborough’s “first in-depth look at what happens beneath the rarely explored waves”, said Eleanor Parsons in New Scientist. “Extraordinary footage” reveals “alien-looking creatures in the ocean depths” and “blue whales from the air”. More than 25 years since watching, “I am still haunted” by the scenes showing a pod of orcas ruthlessly hunting a grey whale calf for hours to “eat only its lower jaw and tongue”. This doesn’t have the “glossy HD footage” of more recent shows, but it “changed the shape of nature documentaries” and sparked my “life-long interest in the oceans”.

Planet Earth I & II, 2006 and 2016

This enthralling series “showcases the untouched regions of the planet and the last true wildernesses”, said Charlotte Davis in National Geographic. Each episode “unveils a cornucopia of life”, and spans “pole to pole”, exploring habitats from remote deserts to jungles and mountains. The show returned a decade later examining how climate change is reshaping the Earth’s fragile ecosystems and looking at the lengths animals must go to “in order to survive”. Every instalment features a “Planet Earth Diaries” behind-the-scenes clip giving a “fascinating insight” into the challenges that came with “filming elusive plant and animal behaviour”.

Frozen Planet I & II, 2011 and 2022

The “extreme climates” of the North and South Poles take centre stage in “Frozen Planet”, said Davis in National Geographic. The series examines how the creatures that live here manage to survive in the “hostile and unforgiving” landscape. Attenborough brought the show back for a second season a decade later to “once again urge us to act now to protect our frozen regions”, expanding the scope to look at Greenland’s glaciers and the frozen grassy plains of the Himalayas.

Prehistoric Planet, 2022

This is “far from the first programme to try to bring long-extinct animals back to life on the small screen, but it is the best so far”, said Michael Le Page in New Scientist. The show uses cutting-edge CGI to depict the giant scaly reptiles that roamed the planet millions of years ago in “stunning detail”. Paleontologists have “praised” the show for its “accuracy and naturalism”. It returned for a third series in 2025, this time featuring animals like “sabre-toothed cats” and woolly mammoths from the Ice Age with Tom Hiddleston replacing Attenborough as the narrator. “It’s just not the same without him.”

Wild London, 2026

A fox “comes within a few inches of the greatest natural historian and broadcaster this country has ever produced” at the start of this documentary about wildlife in the capital, said Chitra Ramaswamy in The Guardian. “What an encounter!” The 99-year-old takes a look at the often unseen creatures living in his hometown in this “unexpectedly moving special”, reminding us that the “secret to a good life” is “appreciating what’s on your own doorstep”. In another “cheerful” encounter we learn how pigeons have “learned to navigate” the city using trains, “hopping on and off” before the doors close. “Honestly, does British telly get any better than this?”

With the real world defined by inequality and rapid technological change, it’s no surprise that filmmakers are offering critiques of both. This month’s new releases include a body horror film that takes aim at the GLP-1 dieting craze, a communist multiverse adventure and a character study about high-level art forgery. Oh, and escapism, in the form of a human-like octopus who helps lost souls find each other. Whatever brings you to the movies, there’s a proper destination for you in May.

‘Remarkably Bright Creatures’

Director Olivia Newman (“Where the Crawdads Sing”) helms Netflix’s adaptation of Shelby Van Pelt’s 2022 novel about Tova (Sally Field) a grieving aquarium custodian in the Pacific Northwest who befriends a sentient Giant Pacific octopus named Marcellus (voiced by Alfred Molina). When she is forced to take time off after a fall, she helps train an aimless young man, Cameron (Lewis Pullman), in the niceties of the job.

Marcellus, facing his imminent death, helps Cameron and Tova find the truth about their pasts. The novel’s “popularity has always given the project a built-in audience, and the film’s ensemble only adds to the appeal,” said The Playlist. (May 8 on Netflix)

‘Is God Is’

Writer-director Aleshea Harris adapts her own Obie-winning 2018 play “Is God Is” for the screen in what is being described as a mashup of spaghetti western, hip-hop and Greek tragedy. Sterling K. Brown (“Paradise”) plays “The Monster,” whose daughters, Racine (Kara Young) and Anaia (Mallori Johnson), are sent to kill him by their dying mother, Ruby the God (Vivica A. Fox).

The three women all bear scars, both physical and emotional, from a fire that he set when the girls were children. “Make your Daddy dead,” she tells them from her deathbed, dispatching them on a dizzying cross-country expedition. “Is God Is” is a “riveting revenge tale and exploration of the varied impacts of family trauma that’s packed with powerhouse performances,” said Collider’s Perri Nemiroff on X. (in theaters May 15)

‘Forge’

Brother and sister Coco (Andie Ju) and Raymond Zhang (Brandon Soo Hoo) run a sophisticated and successful Miami-based art forgery ring in director Jing Ai Ng’s understated thriller. They are hired by Holden (Edmund Donovan) to recreate a large, hurricane-damaged art collection that belongs to his grandfather.

Meanwhile, FBI Agent Emily Lee (Kelly Marie Tran) starts to close in on the lot as the siblings navigate a fraught relationship with their immigrant parents. “Forge” is a “top-shelf crime thriller” that’s “all about subverting appearances and how the have-nots can use people’s biases towards them to swindle and get ahead,” said Zachary Lee at Roger Ebert. (in theaters May 22)

‘I Love Boosters’

Writer-director Boots Riley (“Sorry to Bother You”) returns with his first feature film in eight years, and it’s a doozy. Corvette (Keke Palmer), Sade (Naomi Ackie) and Mariah (Taylour Paige) are a team of “boosters” who operate an organized shoplifting ring in a deliciously stylized alternate-reality Bay Area.

Things get wild when Jianhu (Poppy Liu) shows up with what she calls a “situational accelerator” that uses teleportation to target unhinged fashion maven Christie Smith (Demi Moore). “I Love Boosters” is the “first socialist stoner movie of the Trump era,” featuring a “conspiracy so insane that it’s about one molecule away from adrenochrome,” said Ryan Lattanzio at IndieWire. (in theaters May 22)

‘Saccharine’

The parade of movies taking aim at contemporary Ozempic-driven dieting trends continues with this body horror entry from director Natalie Erika James (“Relic”). Hana (Midori Francis) is a medical student who tries to kick-start a weight loss regimen by reverse engineering a mysterious diet pill she gets from an old friend.

The main ingredient: human ashes, which she obtains illicitly from a research cadaver. Unfortunately, her swift weight loss comes with a side of being haunted by the body’s ghost. The film shows that the “horror of one’s own body is the most insidious kind of body horror at play here,” said Guy Lodge at Variety. (in theaters May 22)

Thanks to “Bohemian Rhapsody”, “the visually and spiritually ugly Queen film that won four Oscars and earned $910 million worldwide”, we’ve had a spate of “soulless, estate-approved” biopics of famous musicians lately, said Clarisse Loughrey in The Independent. “Michael” is the latest of these.

‘Ghoulishness’

It seeks not to understand Michael Jackson, nor to explore his legacy, but simply to deliver content for fans – the scenes from the star’s life that they hope and expect to see. In that respect, it is not unique; but there is a “particular ghoulishness” in giving this treatment to a figure as complicated as the late King of Pop. “Michael” ends in 1988 – long before child abuse allegations surfaced against Jackson. It makes no mention of his accusers, or his tendency to share his bed with young boys. Instead, it depicts him as a man with no real agency: he is just a kindly dreamer, destined to “spread love and heal”.

Sanctifying bullshit

In this film, Jackson positively glows with Christ-like goodness, agreed Brian Viner in the Daily Mail, which makes sense when you look at the credits. Six of its executive producers have the surname Jackson, as does the film’s star: Jaafar Jackson is Michael’s nephew. The film opens in Gary, Indiana, in 1968, where the Jackson children are being screamed at by their strict father Joe, and little Michael (the poor “Lost Boy” who will one day buy his own Neverland) consoles himself by reading “Peter Pan” in bed. From then on, it plods through the familiar beats of his life, from the Jackson 5 to solo stardom. The music scenes are brilliant, said Kevin Maher in The Times. The rest is pretty disgraceful, two hours of weird, sanctifying bullshit. Surely, the genre has reached its nadir.

The 1970s, when the post-WWII consensus finally fell apart in the U.S., are remembered as a decade of groundbreaking movies with breathtakingly disillusioned themes. The ideas were embodied in the “New Hollywood” movement and the birth of the summer blockbuster. There are more classics than could be named here, but these eight masterpieces epitomize the decade’s social and political trajectory like no others.

‘The Last Picture Show’ (1971)

A quiet and devastating character study, “The Last Picture Show” is set in a dying North Texas town in 1951. It’s a coming-of-age story, about two high school seniors and best friends, Sonny (Timothy Bottoms) and Duane (Jeff Bridges), who are both in love with Jacy (Cybill Shepherd).

The forlorn Sonny takes up with his football coach’s wife, Ruth (Cloris Leachman). Meanwhile, the town and its way of life is collapsing around them. A movie with a “strong and uncommon (for the time) affinity for female characters and actors,” the “beauty and brilliance” of director Peter Bogdanovich’s second feature is “found in its attentiveness to the lived detail of the recent past,” said Adrian Danks at Sense of Cinema. (Prime Video)

‘The Godfather’ (1972)

Director Francis Ford Coppola’s gangster epic, an adaptation of Mario Puzo’s best-selling 1969 novel, offers a sweeping look at the travails of the Corleone mafia family. Michael (Al Pacino), a WWII hero who had kept himself aloof from the desultory family business, is reluctantly drawn into it when his father, Don Vito (Marlon Brando), is gravely wounded in a shooting.

Michael’s brother Sonny (James Caan) becomes the de facto crime boss as the Corleones prosecute a turf war against their rivals, and Michael eventually emerges as the new, and much more ruthless boss, to the horror of his wife, Kay (Diane Keaton). The movie “dramatizes how the American Dream has failed, leaving only raw capitalism, epitomized by the brutality of the Corleones,” said Brian Eggert at Deep Focus Review, and the film’s “unchartable reach has ingrained its mythological place in our culture and history.” (Paramount+)

‘One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest’ (1975)

Jack Nicholson is R.P. McMurphy, an Oregon prisoner who feigns a mental illness to get transferred to a psychiatric institution, where he finds himself immersed in a battle of wills with the cold, clinical Nurse Ratched (Louise Fletcher). Danny DeVito, Will Sampson and Brad Dourif costar as fellow patients who are inspired by McMurphy to rise up against the conformity and cruelty of the institution, an obvious stand-in for the social upheaval of the time period.

“Inspired casting,” as well as “Forman’s naturalistic direction,” helps the film succeed as both an “anti-authoritarian parable and as an affecting reminder of the psychiatric practices of the past,” said the British Film Institute. While the film’s attitudes about mental illness may seem dated, it’s important to remember that this movie is as old to us in 2026 as the silent film era was to the mid-70s. (Prime Video)

‘Jaws’ (1975)

Director Steven Spielberg’s first massive box-office hit, “Jaws” maintains its ability to shock and terrify audiences and turn shark attacks into widespread fear. When a body washes ashore in the New England vacation town of Amity, police chief Martin Brody (Roy Scheider) tries to close the beaches only to be overruled by the mayor, Vaughn (Murray Hamilton), who fears the loss of tourist revenue.

But when a boy is killed, and with throngs of beachgoers en route for the July 4th holiday, Brody teams with oceanographer Hooper (Richard Dreyfuss) and shark hunter Quint (Robert Shaw) to track down and kill the marauding Great White Shark. “Jaws” remains “simply put, one of the absolute masterpieces of populist cinema,” and its “vivid character details” are one of the reasons it is “still better than any other monster movie or summer blockbuster ever made,” said Tim Brayton at Alternate Ending. (Netflix)

‘Network’ (1976)

Network anchor Howard Beale (Peter Finch) unravels on air after he is fired, promising to kill himself on live television, and turns himself into a kind of prophet of capitalist anomie and populist frustration. Backed by the ruthless executive Diana Christensen (Faye Dunaway), his show is soon moved to the entertainment division, where he becomes the “mad prophet of the airwaves,” in a preview of the way that real-life cable news would be taken over by angry talking heads.

He soon has Americans taking to their windows to shout the film’s most memorable line: “I’m mad as hell, and I’m not going to take this anymore!” This “terrifically well-made, well-written” film begins presciently as a “five-seconds-into-the-future satire” and eventually “becomes an anatomy of American discontent,” said Peter Bradshaw at The Guardian. (Prime Video)

‘Close Encounters of the Third Kind’ (1977)

Roy (Richard Dreyfuss) is an Indiana utility worker who witnesses a swarm of UFOs one night and becomes obsessed with recreating a persistent vision of a mountain-like structure. His increasingly strange behavior strains his marriage to Ronnie (Teri Garr) and his three children and culminates in an unforgettable meeting with an alien craft.

Director Steven Spielberg’s film is buoyed by a sense of wonder and presents a sharp contrast to many of the decade’s more cynical cinematic themes. As in many of Spielberg’s movies, “transcendent or threatening forces enter ordinary existence,” and “Close Encounters” is a film that is “unparalleled in its combination of scary and funny ideas,” said David Denby at The New Yorker. (Prime Video)

‘Apocalypse Now’ (1979)

Director Francis Ford Coppola’s Vietnam War film is loosely based on Joseph Conrad’s 1899 novella “Heart of Darkness.” Captain Willard (Martin Sheen) is dispatched on a mission to bring a rogue commander, Colonel Kurtz (Marlon Brando), to heel.

Kurtz has established an outpost in Cambodia, where he commands an army of locals and refuses all orders to return. A kind of road movie, much of the film depicts Willard’s journey with Lt. Colonel Kilgore (Robert Duvall) and his men through the war-ruined landscapes of Vietnam and features some of the most unforgettable scenes in cinematic history, including an aerial assault on a Viet Cong-controlled village set to “Ride of the Valkyries.” It remains the “best Vietnam film, one of the greatest of all films, because it pushes beyond the others, into the dark places of the soul,” said Roger Ebert in 1999. (Plex)

‘Monty Python’s The Life of Brian’ (1979)

The British sketch comedy troupe Monty Python loved taking aim at contemporary foibles through its twisted and liberal reading of history. Skewering everything from leftist factional infighting to religious zealotry, the movie follows Brian (Graham Chapman), born in the same stable as Jesus and initially mistaken for him.

As a young adult, he falls for Judith Iscariot (Sue Jones-Davies), an anti-Roman rebel and member of the fictional People’s Front of Judea, who draws him into a kidnapping plot. The movie “ignited religious protests when it first released” and “contains many gut-bustingly funny scenes” while still continuing to “hold up to repeated viewing after repeated viewing,” said Simon Brew at Den of Geek. (Peacock)

‘Michael’

Directed by Antoine Fuqua (PG-13)

★

“Michael is like if you made a cheery biopic of Bill Cosby that ended with his successful run on The Cosby Show,” said Nick Schager in The Daily Beast. “A deliberate act of whitewashing,” the long-awaited new Michael Jackson biopic presents the crowd-pleasing half of a “sordid” true tale, cutting short its account just before it would have become necessary to revisit the multiple allegations of child sexual abuse that surfaced in 1993 and have continued to shadow the pop star’s legacy since his 2009 death. “The fact that Michael concludes with a title card announcing ‘His Story Continues’ doesn’t suffice as an explanation.”

If you focus only on what this “lavishly conventional” biopic leaves out, however, “you may miss the compelling urgency of what it gets in,” said Owen Gleiberman in Variety. The movie opens in 1966, when Michael was roughly 8 and his tyrannical father Joe, played by Colman Domingo, is beating and berating his five young sons to push them to stardom. We then leap to 1978 to witness a young adult Michael, played by real-life nephew Jaafar Jackson, engineering his escape into a solo career, with Quincy Jones guiding him. The younger Jackson isn’t as photogenic as his indelible uncle, “but does he ever nail the look, the voice, the electrostatic moves—and, more than that, the mixture of delicacy and steel that made Michael who he was.” The picture’s downfall is its lack of real interest in Michael as a human being, said Robert Daniels in RogerEbert.com. Produced by its subject’s estate and four of his siblings, “it has nothing original to say about him,” merely resketching his life to age 30 as most of us know it, failing even to provide insight into his emotional pain. Barely a movie, Michael is “a filmed playlist in search of a story.”

‘Mother’

Directed by David Lowery (R)

★★

“The more movies you’ve seen, the less patience you might have with movies that try to impress you with how wiggy they are,” said Stephanie Zacharek in Time. When the new film featuring Anne Hathaway as an icy fictional pop icon isn’t teasing us with glimpses of ghosts or bloodlettings, it’s “just a slog,” despite a premise and a pairing of two stars that suggest it could have been more. At times, Mother Mary is “a phantasmagoric fever dream of a gothic pop opera,” said Katie Walsh in the Chicago Tribune. At others, it’s “a single-setting two-hander that pits two of our most mesmerizing actresses against each other.”

Hathaway, playing the titular singer on the eve of a highly anticipated comeback, journeys to the atelier of a former close collaborator portrayed by Michaela Coel. Hathaway’s fraying idol wants a dress of nearly magical power as she returns to the stage, and Coel’s Sam agrees to make it, airing grievances as she does about how Mary treated her. The movie “certainly casts a spell,” but the story itself “devolves into mush.” To enjoy the film, “a certain leap of faith is required,” said David Fear in Rolling Stone. When, at last, it “rushes headfirst into delirium,” viewers ready to roll with it may find that it “taps into the same transcendent state that great pop music does,” getting into your head and under your skin “in ways that defy description.

“Jude Law as Vladimir Putin? It’s a casting decision so absurdly flattering to the Russian president”, you might wonder if it was part of an FSB psy-op, said Robbie Collin in The Telegraph.

In this “meaty political procedural”, no effort has been made to alter Law’s “debonair good looks”, nor his “honeyed English accent” – which actually makes a sort of sense: had this Putin come across as a “malevolent gnome”, it would be “harder to buy him as the cruelly charismatic operator” the storyline depends on. And though Law is no lookalike, he does capture the Russian’s mannerisms – his “coy, heavy-lidded glower” and “weird” pout. It’s a scene-stealing turn.

But in this film, his is not the central character: the “wizard” of the title refers to a fictional Moscow TV producer, Vadim Baranov (Paul Dano), loosely based on Putin’s former aide Vladislav Surkov. Baranov spends most of the film telling an American academic (Jeffrey Wright) about his own life, and how, during Boris Yeltsin’s chaotic leadership, he and his boss Boris Berezovsky (Will Keen) set out to find and groom a new figurehead. They choose Putin, a colourless new Yeltsin appointee – and “a tsar is born”.

“The Wizard of the Kremlin” is an adaptation of a novel published before Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine, said Geoffrey Macnab in The Independent. In the light of events since then, the relatively softball depiction of Putin will rankle with many. The film does vividly evoke a specific time and place, and give a sense of the “shifting quicksand of Russian politics”, said Wendy Ide in The Observer. But it suffers from “stodgy pacing”, and is undermined by Dano’s terrible performance. Jarringly affected, he delivers his lines in an artificial sing-song tone better suited to a cartoon snake.

In this “queasily stylish” drama-thriller, the swimming pools, locker rooms and dorms of a boys’ water polo camp in New England are a “puberty Petri dish livid with sinister bacteria”, said Jessica Kiang in Variety.

It is 2003, and a sensitive 12-year-old named Ben (Everett Blunck) has arrived at the camp part-way through. He’s new to the area, and desperate to fit in with the popular boys. At first, their “deceptively cherubic” ringleader Jake (Kayo Martin) is friendly enough, mainly because he has spied a better target for his ridicule: an oddball named Eli (Kenny Rasmussen) with a nasty rash that Jake declares to be “the plague” – leading to the boy’s total ostracisation. Ben “feels for Eli’s predicament”, but lacks the social cachet to risk being seen with the outcast kid.

Everything about the camp, with its beige corridors and scuffed canteen, is familiar and nondescript, said Alissa Wilkinson in The New York Times, but writer-director Charlie Polinger knows how to make the everyday ominous. In the first shot, we see the boys treading water, to a guttural score that is “vaguely reminiscent of the Jaws theme”. The viewer is confused: is everything normal, or is something truly sinister happening? – which is what Ben is wondering too.

This is not a nice movie with reassuring lessons about kindness or being true to yourself; it’s darker and more feral than that, much like adolescence itself. The first hour is terrific, said Phil Hoad in The Guardian. Polinger (a graduate of such camps himself) is astute about the way boys talk; he observes Jake’s mob like a nature documentary; and the young stars excel. Sadly, the film becomes more predictable, and it never resolves the suggestion that, if not quite real, the “plague” might be psychosomatic.

It sometimes feels impossible to predict the shape of a single day, let alone that of years from now. But some movies, either deliberately or inadvertently, manage to offer glimpses into the future, either through visions of technological advances or predicted social and political trends.

‘2001: A Space Odyssey’ (1968)

Director Stanley Kubrick’s sci-fi epic remains open to many different interpretations and may seem ponderous to modern audiences. Nonetheless, it is widely considered to be one of the greatest films ever made.

The story involves the role that a strange alien monolith may have played in human evolution, but the main action takes place on a spaceship, Discovery One, en route to check on an outpost that has gone silent. Dr. David Bowman (Keir Dullea) is forced to disable the ship’s AI, HAL 9000 (voiced by Douglas Rain), after it goes rogue. The way the film prefigured the rise of AI is particularly impressive given that “there wasn’t yet a clear notion that computation could be something meaningful in its own right, independent of the particulars of its hardware implementation,” said Stephen Wolfram at Wired. (HBO Max)

‘The Truman Show’ (1998)

Director Peter Weir’s drama didn’t exactly predict the rise of reality television — MTV’s “The Real World” had debuted six years earlier — but the concept of a single person immersed in an artificial world populated entirely by actors came fascinatingly true in 2023 when Amazon Freevee released “Jury Duty,” a reality show about an average joe who serves as a juror on a completely fake trial.

In “The Truman Show,” Jim Carrey plays Truman Burbank, a man whose entire life from birth is a reality show watched with somewhat terrifying devotion by millions. The film’s “commentary on the media’s commercialization of the individual was trenchant at the time,” said Polygon, but it was a “series of long, deepening aftershocks” in which “social media has turned its precept into a universal way of life” that cemented “The Truman Show” as a prophecy. (Paramount+)

‘Minority Report’ (2002)

Chief John Anderton (Tom Cruise at the height of his stardom) is the head of Precrime in Washington, D.C. circa 2054 in director Steven Spielberg’s blockbuster. Clairvoyant people (“pre-cogs” in the movie) churn out movie-like predictions about when and where murders will happen, and Anderton then arrests the would-be perpetrators before they do the deed.

The movie features self-driving cars and targeted ads that assail you on the street after scanning your retina. “John Anderton! You could use a Guinness right about now!” blares one. But the most far-thinking plot point come true might be the rise of “predictive policing,” which uses “computer systems to analyze large sets of data, including historical crime data, to help decide where to deploy police or to identify individuals who are purportedly more likely to commit or be a victim of a crime,” said The Brennan Center. (Paramount+)

‘Children of Men’ (2006)

Widely considered one of the best science fiction films of the 21st century, Alfonso Cuarón’s “Children of Men” depicts the aftermath of a global fertility crisis. Society’s collapse is swift and brutal, leading to widespread despair and violence.

Theo Faron (Clive Owen) is tasked with escorting a young pregnant woman, Kee (Clare-Hope Ashitey), to a floating sanctuary called the Human Project. Much of the world is now grappling with a real (if less severe) decline in fertility. But it might be Theo and Kee’s visit to a refugee camp that will stay with viewers. As the world braces for a climate-driven refugee crisis, the way that the refugees are dehumanized (one guard jokingly calls them “fugees” while imitating their sorrow) is worth revisiting. Many of the film’s developments “feel uncomfortably familiar and have clear contemporary allegories,” particularly the way that people “must continue to plow through the activities of mundane life while society continues to crumble” around them, said Ana Carpenter at Paste Magazine. (Prime Video)

‘Idiocracy’ (2006)

After Joe (Luke Wilson) and Rita (Maya Rudolph) are selected to take part in a government-run cryogenic experiment, they wake up 500 years later into a future where culture has devolved into base vulgarity and where the least capable members of society appear to be in charge.

The most popular TV program is a reality show called “Ow! My Balls!” in which people sustain repeated and grave injury to their nether regions for laughs. Joe, who was selected because of his averageness, turns out to be the smartest person on Earth in the future and lands a job working for President Dwayne Elizondo Mountain Dew Herbert Camacho (Terry Crews). The film’s “only serious misstep was to predict that it would take 500 years for America to collapse” into such a state of moral and intellectual turpitude, said Michael Atkinson at Rolling Stone. (Prime Video)

‘Contagion’ (2011)

From the opening scene vividly depicting Gwyneth Paltrow triggering a zoonotic disease outbreak in a Hong Kong casino to the rise of anti-science quacks and the movie’s year-long vaccine timeline, Steven Soderbergh’s tense, bleak “Contagion” was essential viewing early in the Covid-19 pandemic that swept the world in 2020. It followed a group of characters during a global respiratory pandemic, including CDC epidemiologist Dr. Erin Mears (Kate Winslet) and family man Mitch Emhoff (Matt Damon) as they grappled with the outbreak.

Chock-full of jargon like “R-naught” that “entered our regular lexicon” at the start of the Covid nightmare, the film “didn’t see anything coming; it just anticipated something that, frankly, we should have already been anticipating,” said Will Leitch at SYFY Wire. (Prime Video)

‘Her’ (2013)

In near-future Los Angeles, soon-to-be-divorced and terribly lonely Theodore Twombly (Joaquin Phoenix) falls in love with Samantha, an AI operating system (voiced by Scarlett Johansson). Perhaps director Spike Jonze’s greatest achievement with “Her” was the way that it eventually took on the trappings and feel of a traditional romance.

As the strange phenomenon of “dating” AI chatbots becomes more common, the film’s prescience feels uncanny. “With apps and humanoids and new bespoke bots to soothe our pains, we never have to directly face ourselves and each other anymore,” said Tanya Chen at Slate. But while the “tech imagined in the film is eerily similar to what’s available today, Samantha is still far too advanced to be a real operating system.” (Prime Video)

‘Ex Machina’ (2014)

Writer-director Alex Garland’s 2014 thriller is remembered for its depiction of sentient robots who are indistinguishable from humans, hardly a novel concept in science fiction but one that was pulled off with style and panache. But its more insightful narrative was the background setting.

Nathan Bateman (in a career-making turn from Oscar Isaac) plays a strange, wealthy recluse developing AI-powered humanoid robots. He invites a programmer (Domhnall Gleeson) to his isolated compound to run a Turing Test on the machines. The way that Nathan’s wealth and ideology blinds him to the implications and risks of his technology is eerily similar to the behavior of contemporary techworld figures like Palantir’s Alex Karp. (HBO Max)

Pixar has been “changing the game” for over three decades with its “sophisticated” and “characterful” animated feature films, said Ben Travis and Jordan King on Empire. With the studio’s hotly anticipated “Toy Story 5” due to hit UK cinemas in June, now is a great time to revisit the classics. Here are some of the best.

Toy Story (1995)

“Pixar’s first feature is still the template for every great movie the studio has made since,” said Tim Grierson and Will Leitch on Vulture. Packed with “lots of giddy, witty, silly laughs”, “ripping action sequences” and “dead-on insights into human nature”, the “best comedy of the 1990s remains perfect” three decades after its release. Despite its humour, “deep down” this is a “very melancholy film”; the toys’ “battle” for Andy’s attention speaks to “everyone’s fear of being replaced”, while reminding us the “innocence of childhood cannot last”. Tom Hanks leads the “impeccable” voice cast as Woody. He’s won two Oscars but this may be the role that “immortalises” him.

Finding Nemo (2003)

The opening of “Finding Nemo” is a “nerve-shredder”, said Vulture. But despite the “terrors” throughout the film, the message is clear. If our children are “going to survive on their own”, we must “release them into the scary world” rather than “smothering” them. The movie follows a “nervous clownfish” on a “desperate search” to find and rescue his son, Nemo, with the help of a “lovably loopy blue tang”. Heartwarming, “exciting” and “visually gorgeous”, it’s a wonderful film.

The Incredibles (2004)

This thrilling animation is “arguably the best superhero film of all time”, said IndieWire. At the heart of the action is the Parr family: “a superhero clan” forced into mundane lives in a world where their powers are outlawed. But when Mr Incredible embarks on a secret mission that goes horribly wrong, it’s up to his family to save him. A “perfect mix of funny, action-packed and emotional”, it’s a must watch.

Ratatouille (2007)

This is one of Pixar’s “smartest and deepest films”, said Wilson Chapman on IndieWire. The action follows Remy, an intelligent rat with an extraordinary sense of smell who “dreams of becoming a great chef”. He soon finds an “ally” in hapless kitchen porter Alfredo Linguini, who happens to be working in the restaurant of his “culinary idol” in Paris. Remy figures out an ingenious way of turning his passion for cooking into a reality: sitting beneath Linguini’s tall white chef’s hat and tugging his hair to control his friend’s movements in the kitchen. Funny and big-hearted, it’s an “understated emotional ride” that strikes a “deep chord”.

Wall-E (2008)

Beginning “quietly and entirely dialogue-free”, “Wall-E” soon turns into a “breakneck adventure”, said Empire. The “deeply charming” titular robot is “trapped in a future hellscape of our creation – a literal world of trash, littered with remnants of our consumerism”. But as he roams the wasteland collecting rubbish, there’s a “spark of hope” when he falls in love with Eve, an advanced probe. “Narratively bold” and richly entertaining, this is a “vital piece of cinema in the climate crisis age”.

Up (2009)

“Everyone talks about the wordless opening section” of this “devastating” tearjerker, said Jesse Hassenger in GQ. The montage follows a couple from their “first blush of childhood love all the way to the uncomfortable and unavoidable truth” that most happy marriages will end when one partner dies before the other. “Heavy stuff for a family film” but it soon unfurls into an “utterly original flight of whimsy”. The “lovely little masterpiece” follows “cranky old widower” Carl Frederickson, who ties colourful helium balloons to his home, transforming it into a “makeshift air ship” to fulfil a promise to his late wife to travel to South America.

Inside Out (2015)

For a studio bursting with brilliant ideas, this “might go down as Pixar’s most dazzling”, said Empire. Riley is a little girl whose inner world is sent into “chaos” after her family’s move to San Francisco. We’re taken into the control centre in her brain where her emotions – Joy, Fear, Anger, Disgust and Sadness – must navigate her new life. It’s a film of “genuine emotional intelligence” packed with “delightful creativity” and “witty observations”. It’s an “all-out miracle of a movie”.

On the champions’ podium of 1980s action cinema, Arnold Schwarzenegger and Sylvester Stallone “fought over gold and silver position”, said Ryan Gilbey in The Guardian. “Bronze belonged indisputably to Chuck Norris, who has died aged 86.”

Origin story

He was an expert martial artist, a six-time world middleweight karate champion who ran his own chain of dojos in California. Among his pupils in the mid-1960s was Steve McQueen, who suggested that he should pursue a screen career.

A spectacular fight sequence with Bruce Lee in “The Way of the Dragon” in 1972 – in which he played a rare villainous role – led to a series of “gung-ho” action pictures, such as “Missing in Action” (1984) and “Invasion U.S.A.” (1985). Violent and unsophisticated they may have been, but Norris insisted on the soundness of the philosophy behind them. “I don’t initiate violence, I retaliate,” he said.

He was born Carlos Ray Norris in Ryan, Oklahoma, in 1940, to parents of mixed Irish and Cherokee descent. His father, Ray, who had fought in the Battle of the Bulge, was an alcoholic, “and his long binges crippled the family finances and burdened his waitress wife, Wilma”, said The Times. She moved with her three sons – one of whom, Wieland, was later killed in Vietnam – to LA. There Carlos attended Torrance High School, but was bullied for being mixed race, unathletic and cripplingly shy.

At 18 he joined the US air force as a policeman, and in 1958 was sent to Osan, South Korea, where he acquired the nickname Chuck, and became interested in martial arts such as taekwondo and tang soo do, a version of karate. Back at home, while on the waiting list to join the Los Angeles police, he opened a martial arts school in his mother’s backyard, and found that it fulfilled him. His first acting role was a small part as a heavy in Dean Martin’s “The Wrecking Crew” (1968); his first starring vehicle came a decade later.

What took him into the mainstream was the 1980s vogue for films “that chimed with the national mood of wanting a resurgent America to hit back after its humiliation in Vietnam”. In “Missing in Action”, he rescued PoWs from Vietnam while showcasing his martial arts prowess. An even bigger hit was “The Delta Force” (1986), in which he and Lee Marvin fought terrorists in the Middle East. McQueen had reputedly advised Norris after seeing his first films that he should aim for “less dialogue”, and this approach won out, particularly in his best-known success, the TV drama “Walker, Texas Ranger”.

For eight seasons from 1993, he played a lone-wolf lawman with “a black belt and an iron will”. At the peak of his fame, two men tried to mug him in Dallas. When the police arrived, they found the men with broken arms, knives on the ground and Norris, then 54, waiting quietly. “We knew who he was,” the men said. “We just figured that all that stuff on television was fake.”

“The transformation of his life often awed him,” said The Economist. Born into miserable poverty in the Oklahoma backwoods, he was now in a place where the public, “half-joking, thought he could do anything”. By the early 2000s, his hardman persona had made him an ironic cult hero, and a long trail of “Chuck Norris facts” started appearing online: claiming that he made onions cry; that Superman wore Chuck Norris pyjamas; that he was the only person who could slam a revolving door.

Norris had always been on the conservative, evangelical Right, said The Telegraph; he was a staunch Reaganite in the 1980s. In 2008, he published “Black Belt Patriotism: How to Reawaken America”. In 2016, he endorsed Donald Trump. Norris married Dianne Kay Holechek in 1958; they had two sons but divorced in 1989. In 1998, he married Gena O’Kelley; they had twin daughters. He also had a daughter from another relationship.

Fantasy is a genre that’s hard to define. But to paraphrase Justice Potter Stewart, you know it when you see it — magical realms with vaguely or unmistakably medieval trappings, princes, princesses, villains to best and, inevitably, a quest for our heroes to complete. For our list we have excluded animated films like “Spirited Away,” as well as those that feel more comfortably placed in the science fiction or superhero genres.

‘The Wizard of Oz’ (1939)

In MGM’s cultural juggernaut, young Dorothy (Judy Garland) is knocked unconscious during a tornado that rips through her Kansas town. She awakens to find her house moving through the air and into the magical Land of Oz, having landed on and killed the Wicked Witch of the East. Dorothy is then pursued by the Wicked Witch of the West (Margaret Hamilton) as she and her companions, including the Tin Man (Jack Haley), the Cowardly Lion (Bert Lahr) and Scarecrow (Ray Bolger) follow the Yellow Brick Road to the Emerald City, where the titular wizard (Frank Morgan) can — purportedly — send her home. This seemingly ageless classic “genuinely hits on childish delights” and fears with “effortless grace, warmth and imagination,” said Alan Morrison at Empire. (HBO Max)

‘The Dark Crystal’ (1982)

A movie that has to be in the same “haunted the childhood of all Gen Xers” conversation as “The NeverEnding Story,” the extraordinary film, directed by Jim Henson and Frank Oz, uses live-action puppetry to tell its story. Set on a planet called Thra, two new races emerged eons ago from a shattered crystal: the homicidal, vulture-like Skeksis and the gentle, inquisitive Mystics.

Jen (voiced by Stephen Garlick), who is a member of another, near-extinct race called Gelflings, was raised by Mystics after Skeksis wiped out his extended family. Along with another Gelfling, Kira (voiced by Lisa Maxwell), Jen is tasked with retrieving a shard of the crystal within three days to prevent the Skeksis from ruling Thra forever. Featuring a “luxuriantly original fantasy world as dark as the magic crystal totem at its center,” Henson and Oz’s film features stunning “set pieces that justify the expense and the viewer's attention,” said Richard Corliss at Time. (Peacock)

‘The NeverEnding Story’ (1984)

Director Wolfgang Petersen’s film, adapted from the first half of Michael Ende’s 1979 novel, follows Bastian Balthazar Bux (Barret Oliver), a bookish boy grieving the loss of his mother. When Bastian ducks into a bookstore and starts reading a book about a malevolent force (the Nothing) devouring the realm of Fantasia, the narrative comes to life.

As Bastian reads, a boy named Atreyu (Noah Hathaway), while pursued by a green-eyed creature called G’mork (Alan Oppenheimer), is dispatched by the Childlike Empress (Tami Stronach) to find the cure for the mysterious nothingness enveloping the kingdom. An “extravaganza of wondrous beasts and princesses,” the film also contains an important lesson: “Keep going, keep forging onward, don’t stop to mope or you will sink into the slough of despondence,” said Peter Bradshaw at The Guardian. (Tubi)

‘Labyrinth’ (1986)

Muppets mastermind Jim Henson helmed this story about a tween named Sarah (Jennifer Connelly), who inadvertently summons The Goblin King, Jareth (David Bowie), to kidnap her baby half-brother. The move forces her to plunge herself into his fantastical maze-realm to retrieve him in 13 hours, lest he be turned into a goblin.

While navigating the labyrinth with the help of Hoggle (Shari Weiser, voiced by Brian Henson), Sarah encounters one fantastical character after another, including The Worm (voiced by Timothy Bateson) and The Junk Lady (voiced by Denise Bryer). Henson’s’ “complex and confusing” film is “now a mainstream cult favorite” and reminds us that childhood “has been this way forever: wonderful and hard and full of horror,” said Alison Stine at The Atlantic. (Disney+)

‘The Princess Bride’ (1987)

Director Rob Reiner’s often-hilarious adventure uses a familiar story-within-a-story structure. Peter Falk plays a man reading a story to his grandson, about a Princess Buttercup (Robin Wright), who falls in love with her farmhand, Westley (Cary Elwes).

When Westley is presumed dead at the hands of pirates, she is betrothed to the evil Prince Humperdinck (Chris Sarandon), before being kidnapped by the trio of Vizzini (Wallace Shawn), Fezzik (André the Giant) and Inigo Montoya (Mandy Patinkin). Patinkin’s repetitive delivery of the line “My name is Inigo Montoya. You killed my father. Prepare to die,” is a highlight. “The Princess Bride” is a “movie generally well-received by everybody who's ever seen it but given the august profile of a universal cultural touchstone by those of a certain age,” said Tim Brayton at Alternate Ending. (Disney+)

‘The Lord of the Rings: Fellowship of the Ring’ (2001)

With “The Fellowship of the Ring,” the first in the original trilogy, director Peter Jackson brings the world of J.R.R. Tolkien’s beloved novels thrillingly to life, seamlessly integrating live action and CGI. The protagonist is Frodo Baggins (Elijah Wood), who hails from a village of whimsical creatures called Hobbits in the realm of Middle Earth.

He is tasked with destroying a powerful ring he inherits from his uncle Bilbo (Ian Holm) by delivering it to Mount Doom before it can fall into the hands of the evil Sauron (Sala Baker, voiced by Alan Howard), granting him dominion over the realm. A film that is “soaked around the edges with a melancholy darkness,” it is a “big movie in its scope and vision” that nevertheless works on a “much more intimate level as well,” said Stephanie Zacharek at Salon. (HBO Max)

‘Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban’ (2004)

The first two Harry Potter films, based on the JK Rowling novels that became a global sensation, were massive events and box office successes but earned middling reviews from critics. Then the franchise was handed, briefly and mercifully, to the talented director Alfonso Cuarón.

In this entry, the third of the series, Harry Potter (Daniel Radcliffe) and his chums at a children’s finishing school for magicians called Hogwarts must work together to protect Harry from a killer named Sirius Black (Gary Oldman), who intends to kill the young wizard. With “monstrous special effects” that are “seamlessly inserted into the musty halls and twilight fields” and backstopped by “top-of-the-line flesh-and-blood British acting,” the film is a triumph by virtue of its “emotional force and visual panache,” said A.O. Scott at The New York Times. (HBO Max)

‘Pan’s Labyrinth’ (2006)

From Mexican director Guillermo del Toro, “Pan’s Labyrinth” is set in 1944, when a group of Spanish holdouts from the Franco dictatorship are holed up waiting for deliverance from the Allies. 11-year-old Ofelia (Ivana Baquero), whose cruel stepfather, Captain Vidal (Sergi Lopez), is hunting the rebels, discovers a creature called The Faun (Doug Jones) in the nearby forest, who tells her she is actually Princess Moanna of the Underground Realm and that she must complete three tasks to take her throne. They include entering the foreboding lair of the terrifying Pale Man (also Doug Jones) to retrieve a dagger. Del Toro’s “richly conceived fantasy creates a new postmodern mythology and establishes the picture as a landmark of the genre,” said Brian Eggert at Deep Focus Review. (not currently available to stream).

For his “assured directing debut”, the actor James McAvoy has chosen the true story of two rappers from Dundee, who pulled off one of the most audacious hoaxes in recent music history, said Brian Viner in the Daily Mail.

In the early 2000s, old friends Gavin Bain and Billy Boyd were working in sales while trying to break into the music business. They were convinced they had the chops to make it, but when they pitched their work to record companies in London, they were not taken seriously, apparently because of their accents. One executive dismissed them as “the rapping Proclaimers”.

So in a “masterstroke”, they broadened their accents, and – calling themselves Silibil N’ Brains – posed as Americans who’d arrived in London “straight outta California”, which made all the difference. It’s a cracking story, told with terrific verve, but the genius lies in the casting: Samuel Bottomley and Séamus McLean Ross are very funny and “tremendously likeable” as the pals at the heart of the tale.

There is a “giddy thrill” to the start of the con, said Richard Lawson in The Guardian. The pair prove to be great at what they do, and are soon on a “runaway train” to success. But this distracts them from their original mission, which was to expose the prejudices of the industry elite, and the lie they are living under puts a massive strain on their friendship. The plotting is “awfully predictable”, and the direction could be tighter in places, but it’s a “kindhearted film”, about integrity, art for art’s sake and staying true to your roots. “The ending doesn’t pack the emotional punch it could”, said Anna Smith in Rolling Stone; and the James Corden cameo was a mistake. “But mostly, this is a blast”, with an infectious energy and a spirit that recalls everything from “Kneecap” to “The Full Monty”.

Consisting of “two dreamlike, black-and-white hours of murder, sex and existential brooding”, “The Stranger” is “the Frenchest film I’ve seen in years”, said Robbie Collin in The Telegraph.

A “spellbindingly sleek” adaptation of Albert Camus’ novella “L’Étranger”, it is about a young French settler in 1930s Algiers who – shortly after his mother’s funeral – kills an Arab man on a beach. The rising French star Benjamin Voisin plays the character of Meursault with “mesmerising Alain Delon-like sangfroid and a shard of ice through his soul”, and the scene of the killing is “masterful”. This is a film with “the suspended horror and cruel, glinting beauty of a guillotine blade”.

The film is faithful to the book, but it has “a subtle revisionist slant”, said Jonathan Romney in Sight and Sound. In recent years, much has been made of “the erasure of the Algerian identity” in Camus’ story. The book does not name Meursault’s victim: he is referred to only as “the Arab”. In 2013, the Algerian novelist Kamel Daoud published “The Meursault Investigation”, as a critical response to Camus’ work, and this film seems to have been made in the spirit of that work. Here, the victim has a name (Musa) and a personal history, and Algerians and their country are introduced as a dominant presence. Director François Ozon fleshes out the female characters too, said Jessica Kiang in Variety: Meursault’s girlfriend Marie (Rebecca Marder) in particular is given more depth than Camus’ first-person narration allowed. Yet crucially, in this “confounding, disturbing” and “icily compelling” film, Meursault himself “remains magnificently resistant to diagnosis or psychologising”.

“No other film this year will make you feel as uncomfortable as ‘The Drama’,” said Clarisse Loughrey in The Independent. It’s a “provocative and compulsively watchable” romcom – albeit one that “obliterates the very meaning of the word”.

Zendaya and Robert Pattinson star as Emma and Charlie, a pair of gorgeous young Bostonians who meet in a café, fall in love and are now in the run-up to their wedding. So far so good, until “an idle, drunken conversation” one night with their closest friends (Mamoudou Athie and Alana Haim) leads to a round of confessions about the worst thing they’ve ever done. It’s all laughed off – until Emma’s turn. Without giving away any spoilers, “what she says next immediately sucks the air from the room”.

People are going a “little cuckoo” over this movie, said David Fear in Rolling Stone. Emma’s bombshell is “the point of no return for the characters” – and, for some audiences, the moment “The Drama” “loses them”. It certainly walks “a thin line between thought-provoking and trolling”; you do wonder “if the sudden introduction of an issue much, much bigger than the film itself isn’t simply a shock value masquerading as shock therapy”.

The film is also tonally uneven, said Nicholas Barber on BBC Culture. Oddly, it devotes more energy to “awkward cringe comedy” than to the characters and their feelings; it’s hard to believe, for instance, that Emma and Charlie would only have “a few faltering chats” about her confession, rather than discussing it properly.

Still, ‘The Drama’ is “beautifully made”, and most people who see it “will end up having in-depth debates, even if the characters themselves don’t manage it. The first great cinematic conversation-starter of 2026 is here.”

‘The Drama’ 

Directed by Kristoffer Borgli (R)

★★★

“If The Drama is effectively a one-gag movie, there’s no denying that its gag is a good one,” said David Ehrlich in IndieWire. Days before the wedding of a gorgeous couple played by Zendaya and Robert Pattinson, the bride-to-be drops a bomb when banter between the couple and two friends raises the question, “What’s the worst thing you’ve ever done?” The content of that secret proves to be “half the fun” here, and writer-director Kristoffer Borgli “milks it for all that it’s worth.” The movie also dramatizes the psychic distress of living in a country that’s in denial about its epidemic of gun violence, though the screenplay proves “too vague to fully make good on its best ideas.”

Beyond that, it’s never “entirely convincing” that Zendaya’s Emma would have undertaken the act she confesses to, said Owen Gleiberman in Variety. To a point, that doesn’t matter, because The Drama mostly focuses on the neurotic unraveling of Pattinson’s Charlie, and the actor is “certainly accomplished at moving from twitchy to twitchier.” Borgli wants us all feeling anxious, and “the way he gradually ups the cringe-comedy factor keeps us watching.” We just never fully believe in the root cause of Charlie’s crack-up.

In the end, the particular secret that Emma shares doesn’t even matter, said Richard Lawson in The Hollywood Reporter. Instead of developing into an edgy examination of gun violence, Borgli’s latest devolves into “a simple dramedy of pre-wedding jitters.” Given how perfunctory his treatment of the movie’s big social issue turns out to be, “I wish he’d chosen a totally different worst thing for Emma.”

‘Alpha’

Directed by Julia Ducournau (R)

★★

Julia Ducournau’s new film is “easily her least accomplished,” said Tim Grierson in the Los Angeles Times. Five years after winning the Palme d’Or for the body-horror shocker Titane, the French filmmaker has fashioned a melancholy AIDS parable that “rarely transcends its intellectual trappings.” In an unidentified French city, a 13-year-old named Alpha acquires a crude “A” tattoo during a night out, triggering her mother’s fears that the girl may have contracted a deadly blood disease through contact with an unclean needle. Soon, an addict uncle who’s been ravaged by the disease re-enters Alpha’s life, but all three of Ducournau’s main characters end up “overwhelmed by her grandiose ideas.”

To me, the film’s “stunning” cinematography and the work of its actors combine to achieve “a poignant emotional power,” said Jeannette Catsoulis in The New York Times. “Alpha is at times almost shockingly beautiful in its depiction of the sick as they slowly calcify, their glassy skin marbled with blue veins.”

But while Ducournau’s desire to confront the stigmas attached to disease is admirable, said Katie Rife in RogerEbert.com, “Alpha plays like a Cronenbergian after-school special,” filled with “tone-deaf” sequences that seem lifted from didactic films made decades ago. Odder still, its anti-bias messaging “isn’t aimed at contemporary young people” but at their 1980s counterparts, “creating the impression that Ducournau is nobly combating misinformation that few people believe in anymore.”

Spring was once the prelude to the summer blockbuster season, but studios are increasingly pushing out their films with less predictable patterns. This might explain why a classic summer action thriller and a buzzy vehicle for two young mega-stars are both dropping in April, along with these four other intriguing offerings.

‘The Drama’

Could anything be more of the moment than an edgy A24 offering starring Zendaya and Robert Pattinson? In director Kristoffer Borgli’s blend of dark comedy and psychological thriller, the two play Emma and Charlie, respectively, a couple on the verge of marrying whose relationship is unmoored by Emma’s disturbing revelations during a game of “What’s the worst thing you’ve ever done?”

As the trailer makes clear, Charlie and the couple’s friends are so shocked by whatever it is Emma says that the reveal puts their future together in doubt. The film’s jaw-dropping twist, which we won’t reveal here, is already making waves. This “complex, incredibly stressful, provocative and uncomfortably funny” movie “unfolds like a dreadful, violent car wreck that keeps piling up,” said Matt Neglia of Next Best Picture at Letterboxd. (in theaters now)

‘Pizza Movie’

A stoner comedy for the age of edibles and ennui, ‘Pizza Movie’ follows the exploits of two college students, Jack (Gaten Matarazzo) and Montgomery (Sean Giambrone), after they take a mysterious, mind-bending drug. Based on a brief video about the ingested substance narrated by Sarah Sherman of “Saturday Night Live,” the pair believe that eating a pizza is the only way to save themselves from their increasingly bizarre trip, and so they must make their way downstairs through hallucinations, body swaps, exploding heads and a squad of hostile RAs.

First time directors Nick Kocher and Brian McElhaney helm what looks like an uproarious mashup of “Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle” and “A Minecraft Movie.” An “uproariously unhinged” film, “Pizza Movie” is a “low-calorie guilty pleasure that offers just enough new ingredients to a meal you’ve had many times before,” said Zachary Lee at Roger Ebert. (on Hulu now)

‘The Stranger’

It’s hard to imagine a better pairing than decorated French director François Ozon and Albert Camus’ celebrated 1942 novel, “The Stranger.” The first cinematic adaptation of the book since 1967, the film is shot in a gorgeous, sun-drenched, black-and-white reminiscent of Netflix’s “Ripley.”

Benjamin Voisin is Meursault, an emotionally stunted French settler (pied-noir) in Algeria who, after his mother’s death, kills an Algerian man during an altercation and seems to feel nothing about it. The movie, like the novel, unfolds in two parts, following the events leading up to the murder, including Meursault’s relationship with Marie (Rebecca Marder) and friendship with Raymond (Pierre Lottin) and then depicting Meursault’s questioning and trial. It’s an “insightful rereading of Camus, vividly evocative of the world it depicts and irreducibly an Ozon film,” said Jonathan Romney at Sight and Sound. (in theaters now)

‘Marama’

An unsettling horror film that confronts the history of British colonialism in New Zealand, first-time director Taratoa Stappard’s “Marama” is set in 1859. A Maori woman known as Mary (Ariana Osborne) is summoned to an estate in Yorkshire, England, where she is promised information about her biological parents.

There she meets Nathanial Cole (Toby Stephens), who speaks Mary’s language and offers her a position as governess for his daughter, who he is oddly raising as Maori. But Mary, whose original name was Marama, soon discovers that his strange obsession with her culture is quite sinister. Then things get wild. The movie “does what horror movies do best, twisting film form into a tool for dissection” of the “society that produced such nightmares,” said Cláudio Alves at The Film Experience. (in theaters April 17)

‘Normal’

Bob Odenkirk may still be best known for his role as the slimy lawyer Saul Goodman on “Breaking Bad” and “Better Call Saul,’ but he’s also been busy reinventing himself as a late-middle-aged action star. In “Normal,” he plays Ulysses, a cop who takes a temporary gig as the sheriff in small-town Normal, Minnesota.

Unfortunately, he finds that behind the Minnesota Nice of people like Mayor Kibner (Henry Winkler) is a vast criminal conspiracy that has enlisted seemingly all of the town’s residents and is likely responsible for the sudden vacancy he’s filling. The film, which is well-timed given the centrality of Minnesota to recent U.S. political events, is alternately funny and shocking, as the quirky setup builds inexorably to a gonzo, set-piece shoot-out sequence. Director Ben Wheatley (“Kill List”) “takes real trends in American life — economic stagnation, rising tribalism, gun fetishism — and follows them to their corrupt, violent end points,” said Katie Rife at IndieWire. (in theaters April 17)

‘Fuze’

A throwback thriller from director David Mackenzie (“Hell or High Water”), Fuze is a heist movie with a particularly clever premise. A 1,000-pound WWII-era bomb is unearthed in London in a scenario clearly drawn from real-life events, after which a massive evacuation and defusing effort commences.

Major Will Tranter (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) and a city police officer (Gugu Mbatha-Raw) lead the bomb disposal operation, while a gang of criminals led by Karalis (Theo James) use the chaos of the bomb’s discovery as cover for a daring bank heist. Amid myriad double crosses and revelations, the various plot machinations converge in satisfying ways. Mackenzie’s lean thriller “prizes style but has no higher ambition than to entertain, with an economy of means and no fussy pretension,” said Richard Lawson at The Hollywood Reporter. (in theaters April 24)

Enid Blyton’s “Magic Faraway Tree” stories have delighted successive generations, said Brian Viner in the Daily Mail. And now, they have been adapted for the big screen by Simon Farnaby, whose credits include “Paddington 2”, and who is a master of the art of making films that tickle children and adults alike. And, happily, he and director Ben Gregor have done a “smashing job” – if you will forgive the Blyton-ese – not least by finding a “modern, relatable context” for stories published in the 1940s.

Claire Foy stars as Polly, an electronic engineer who quits her job rather than work on a smart fridge that gathers data on its owners. As a result, she and her affable husband Tim (Andrew Garfield) have to give up their device-filled modern home in the city and move to a ramshackle barn in the country with their three screen-addicted children. The older two initially resist their parents’ appeals to immerse themselves in nature, but the youngest, who is mute, explores the area and finds a magical tree inhabited by a group of extraordinary characters.

This is a “sweet-natured family fantasy”, said Peter Bradshaw in The Guardian, with lots of jokes and peril too, notably in the form of the evil Dame Snap (Rebecca Ferguson with a weird asymmetric hairdo).

I accept that Blyton – with her references to “swarthy foreigners” and the like – needed to be updated, said Kevin Maher in The Times, but Farnaby has created an over-complicated screenplay that strips the tale of its wonder. The children enjoy a few adventures that are “poorly realised” with “a DIY aesthetic”. Then we rush back to find out if Tim has fulfilled his dream of starting a pasta sauce business. Frequently collapsing into “skits” and “awkward flights of fancy”, the film is a “mess”.

Chuck Norris knew exactly what his audience wanted. A six-time world karate champion, he also had black belts in tae kwon do, tang soo do, Brazilian jujitsu, and judo, and when he pivoted to films he chose warrior
roles. Showing up to save the day in movie after movie, he won millions
of fans, even if he never quite won over the critics. From the 1970s to 2000s, Norris was omnipresent in the action genre, starring in films like The Delta Force (1986) as well as three Missing in Action movies. From 1993 to 2001, he also starred on TV in the CBS hit Walker, Texas Ranger. At heart, every role he played was an American good guy, taking down the bad guys with necessary violence. His legions of fans loved it. “They want to believe in me,” he said, “just as I believed in John Wayne when I was a boy.”

Norris grew up poor in Oklahoma and Southern California, moving 13 times by age 15. He was “not notably athletic,” said The New York Times, and with his alcoholic father often absent, he turned to movie heroes like Wayne for lessons in manhood. After high school, he joined the Air Force in 1958 and discovered tae kwon do and tang soo do while stationed in South Korea. With his strength and agility compensating for his relatively slight frame, he soon earned black belts in many martial arts. In karate, he was an undisputed master, reigning as world middleweight champion
from 1968 to 1974. Still, the karate schools he owned in California went
under, and Steve McQueen, who’d been one of his students, told him,
“If you can’t do anything else, there’s always acting.” Another friend, Bruce Lee, got him his first big role, in The Way of the Dragon (1972). Unlike other action stars, he possessed “an air of humility, even serenity,” said The Guardian, and preferred roles that cast him as a defender, not an aggressor.

In later years, he was known “for his support of conservative causes such as gun rights,” said The Washington Post, supporting President Trump
in 2016 and becoming the face of Glock in 2019. In the mid-aughts he became “a cultural phenomenon,” when the Chuck Norris Facts meme took over the internet with gems like “Chuck Norris does not sleep. He waits.” Norris found it amusing. He said he didn’t mind being seen as just an action hero. “I never dreamed of being an ac-tor,” he said. “I do what I do.”

What happened

Stephen Colbert announced Wednesday that he is co-writing a new “Lord of the Rings” movie after CBS’s “The Late Show” ends in May. The new film, tentatively titled “The Lord of the Rings: Shadow of the Past,” is set about 14 years after the end of “The Return of the King” and features Frodo Baggins’ hobbit friends, Colbert said in a video with director Peter Jackson. Warner Bros. and New Line Cinema are producing the movie, and Colbert will co-write it with his son, Peter McGee, and LOTR franchise veteran Philippa Boyens.

Who said what

For Colbert, adapting the next “Lord of the Rings” movie is “arguably his dream project,” Deadline said. “Along with being a pillar of late-night TV,” Colbert is one of author J.R.R. Tolkien’s “most dedicated and vocal fans,” The New York Times said. He has “spoken often about how the books guide his worldview” and is known to sprinkle “‘Lord of the Rings’ analysis into guest interviews.”

“You know what the books mean to me, and what your films mean to me,” Colbert told Jackson. “I found myself reading over and over” six early chapters of “The Fellowship of the Ring” and wanted to “make something that was completely faithful to the books while also being completely faithful to the movies that you guys had already made?” After discussing the idea with his son, Colbert shared the idea with Jackson two years ago, he said, and the project took off.

What next?

The final “Late Show” episode is set to air May 21, and “Shadow of the Past” will be released sometime after Andy Serkis’ “The Hunt for Gollum” hits theaters late next year.

This sci-fi film (from the team behind “The Lego Movie”) tugs at the heartstrings, while also delivering “galactic” levels of good cheer, said Jonathan Romney in the Financial Times.

Adapted from a novel by Andy Weir (who also wrote “The Martian”), it stars Ryan Gosling as Dr Ryland Grace, a molecular biologist turned schoolteacher who comes round from an induced coma to find himself stranded on a spaceship 15 light years from Earth, with no memory of how he got there.

Through a series of flashbacks, however, we gradually learn that he ended up on the Hail Mary mission after joining a taskforce to prevent the Sun from being destroyed by highly heat-resistant alien microbes. As Dr Grace battles to fulfil this mission to save life on Earth, he befriends a perky alien critter named Rocky.

The film isn’t wildly original, said Robbie Collin in The Telegraph: it’s “essentially ‘Interstellar’ recast as a buddy movie”. But it is gorgeous to look at, with wonderfully “tactile” visual effects, and the story is pretty involving.

It suffers from too many false endings, said Kevin Maher in The Times, but Gosling is on “charisma overdrive” and powers it “to the highest-possible entertainment orbit”.

I’m afraid I found it “a bore”, said Brian Viner in the Daily Mail, not helped by the fact that it runs to a “bladder-challenging” two-and-a-half hours. The cutesy alien seems to have wandered in from another film (perhaps “Guardians of the Galaxy”), and essential elements just don’t ring true. For instance, we are told that Gosling’s character was selected for the mission because he had no friends or lover at home who’d miss him. Yet he is “affable and witty”, and he looks like Ryan Gosling. It makes no sense.

It is a golden age for horror aficionados in many ways, with several dedicated streaming services catering to fans and producing original movies, including Shudder and Screambox. Plus, mainstream services are churning out a reliable supply of fright-fests. Many films nonetheless begin their journey in film festivals or theaters, including several of the most anticipated releases of the season.

‘Thrash’

“Sharks on the loose! In a category 5 storm!” Thus shouts marine scientist Dale Edwards (Djimon Hounsou) in the trailer for the upcoming Netflix film, a line that tells you more or less everything you need to know about the plot of what looks like an unabashed B-horror caper. When a catastrophic hurricane strikes a coastal town, Edwards and a motley crew who refused to evacuate, including pregnant Lisa Fields (Phoebe Dynevor) and Dale’s reclusive daughter, Dakota (Whitney Peak), must fight for survival not just against rising waters but also a gaggle of homicidal sharks washed in by the storm surge. While “Thrash” is unlikely to be honored at the Oscars, it looks like “pure pressure-cooker mayhem, a disaster thriller sharpened into a creature feature,” said Alex Miller at The Playlist. (April 10 on Netflix)

‘Hokum’

Shudder’s “Oddity” was one of the breakout horror hits of 2024, making director Damian McCarthy’s follow-up one of the year’s most eagerly awaited releases. The buzz around “Hokum” has been building based in part on a typically clever marketing campaign from its distributor, Neon, which released a brief but terrifying teaser trailer in December 2025.

The film stars Adam Scott as Ohm Bauman, an entitled, hard-drinking American novelist who wants to scatter his parents’ ashes at the remote Irish hotel where they honeymooned. When the property’s bartender, Fiona (Florence Ordesh), disappears after telling him the honeymoon suite is haunted, all hell breaks loose. McCarthy delivers a “good old-fashioned ghost story, the kind you’d tell over a campfire to scare children,” said Katie Rife at IndieWire. (in theaters May 1)

‘Obsession’

Another film sporting copious prerelease industry buzz, “Obsession” is the debut studio feature from sketch comedian-turned-director Curry Barker, perhaps following in former The Whitest Kids U’ Know jokester Zach Cregger’s (“Barbarian”) footsteps. Bear (Michael Johnston) is a lovelorn music store clerk who stumbles on an object that grants wishes and makes his friend and co-worker Nikki (Inde Navarrette) fall for him — at last.

Elated at first, Bear’s happiness is cut short when it becomes clear that Nikki is no longer herself and has been transformed into something terrifyingly sinister. An “insane journey paved with blood-soaked violence and no shortage of nightmare fuel,” this “simple, well-trodden concept transforms into a shocking and unsettling descent into abject horror in Barker’s capable hands,” said Meagan Navarro at Bloody Disgusting. (in theaters May 15)

‘Backrooms’

In A24’s upcoming “Backrooms,” Renate Reinsve (“Sentimental Value”) is a therapist searching for her patient (Chiwetel Ejiofor), who has vanished into some kind of alternate dimension. That space seems to consist of a labyrinthine maze of strange, unsettling and nonsensical rooms underneath a furniture store.

The concept is inspired by the internet “creepypasta” sensation — itself based on a 2003 picture of a Wisconsin HobbyTown store undergoing renovations. “Backrooms” is helmed by Kane Parsons, whose web series of found footage horror shorts acquired a devoted cult internet following. The film is built around this “expanse of extradimensional space of unknown size,” said Esquire, and its power comes from the “uncanny valley of everyday places left silent and empty.” (in theaters May 29)

‘The Holy Boy’

The upcoming film from Paolo Strippoli, co-director of the underrated 2021 chiller “A Classic Horror Story,” revolves around Remis, a seemingly tranquil Italian mountain town, to which high school fitness teacher Sergio (Michele Riondino) moves after an undisclosed tragedy. He soon discovers the source of the town’s serenity, a boy named Matteo Corbin (Giulio Feltri), whose hugs take your pain away.

Rejuvenated, Sergio can’t resist wondering what Matteo does with the pain and takes an interest in the lonely, mysterious boy, something no one else in the town seems interested in. Part coming-out drama and part horror, this is a “moody, menacing film that rejects trite trauma metaphors in favor of an old-fashioned folk horror story,” said Alex Kaan at Phantasmag. (May 29 on Shudder)

Louis Theroux is back with a deep dive into the shadowy online world of the manosphere. His latest documentary, “Inside the Manosphere”, has been met by mixed reviews with some critics hailing it as among his most chilling and powerful works, while others question why he has given the misogynistic influencers exactly the platform they crave.

Whatever your opinion, Theroux has an impressive back catalogue of documentaries worth watching, each one tackling a thorny topic with his signature faux naivety and awkward charm. Here are some of the best.

When Louis Met Jimmy (2000)

A decade before Jimmy Savile died and investigations into his “sickening crimes” finally began, Theroux went to stay at the media personality’s house, said The Guardian. “Hints of a darker character, beyond his hammed-up eccentricities used for cover” emerge here, captured in “off-camera confessions of violence while Savile was still mic’d up”. Later, Theroux would be criticised for “failing to grill” the notorious paedophile properly. In 2016, he revisited the subject in “Savile” to “wrestle with his guilt”.

Watch on BBC iPlayer

The Most Hated Family in America (2007)

Before the explosion of “endless true crime and cult documentaries”, this “jaw-dropping” film about a “family church in Kansas who love to picket the funerals of dead soldiers” caused quite a stir, said The Guardian. In it, Theroux meets a family at the heart of the Westboro Baptist Church – a virulently homophobic group known for its hateful protests. “Frightening viewing, with incredible access and almost unbelievable characters, its success spawned two follow-up films.”

Watch on BBC iPlayer

Extreme Love: Dementia (2012)

This “heart-wrenching” documentary sees Theroux travel to Phoenix, Arizona to spend time at a residential institution for those suffering with dementia, said The Standard. During his visit, he meets both the patients and their families “coming to terms with losing one version of their loved ones, and getting used to another”. It’s one of his “sweetest” and most tender films, delving into the pain of the people whose lives are impacted by the cruel disease.

Watch on BBC iPlayer

Drinking to Oblivion (2016)

In this “staggeringly moving watch”, Theroux embeds himself in the specialist liver centre at King’s College Hospital, London, where he meets patients whose “alcoholism is so severe that it has put them at death’s door”, said The Independent. Among his interviewees is a “petrified” man who has been drinking two bottles of vodka a day and is “hardly able to stand” as he battles with withdrawal. It’s an “astonishing film that gives a face to an addiction suffered by half a million people in England”.

Forbidden America: Extreme and Online (2022)

Theroux travels to America to meet the “poster boys of the online alt-right” in this unsettling film, said The i Paper. Among his subjects is Nick Fuentes – a “Holocaust denier who believes women shouldn’t be allowed to vote”. Theroux’s “barely disguised disdain” for his interviewee’s “deeply disturbing beliefs” is on full display here and he does a solid job of challenging their hate-fuelled views.

Watch on BBC iPlayer

“The narrative of this year’s Oscars was: How to pick?” said David Sims in The Atlantic. Coming into awards night, two “majorly successful, critically beloved” studio releases led all contenders, with One Battle After Another carrying in 13 nominations and Sinners a record 16. But rather than celebrating one over the other, the 98th Academy Awards “did a good job making plenty of room to celebrate both movies sincerely.” One Battle took home six trophies, including best picture, while Sinners nabbed four. “To see that kind of big-budget artistry properly lionized, given some of the duds the Academy has recognized in recent years—I’m looking at you, Green Book—felt like a true triumph.”

As the night progressed, “there was a lot of history made,” said Daniel Fienberg in The Hollywood Reporter. Sinners’ Autumn Durald Arkapaw became the first woman to win an Oscar for cinematography. The summer hit “Golden,” from KPop Demon Hunters, was the first K-pop tune to be named best original song. This year also saw the debut of the best casting category, with the award going to Cassandra Kulukundis for One Battle. Before this year’s telecast, that movie’s director, Paul Thomas Anderson, had set a record in futility by racking up 11 Oscar nominations without a win, said Sam Adams in Slate. He finally took home three trophies, including for best director, and because One Battle can stand with the best of his impressive previous catalog, the victory “felt like it was earned, rather than simply foreordained.”

“What Timothée Chalamet wanted was to become the second-youngest best actor winner in Oscars history,” said Nate Jones in NYMag.com. Instead, that trophy went to Michael B. Jordan for Sinners. Though Chalamet stirred an online storm by disparaging the cultural relevance of ballet and opera, the comment came so late that it probably didn’t affect Academy voters. My guess is that they were already “just a little sick of Chalamet” and his aggressive Marty Supreme campaign. In the end, he was beaten by “one of the most well-loved actors operating in Hollywood,” said Lanre Bakare in The Guardian. “Some wondered in the buildup to the Oscars about whether Jordan is a ‘star’ rather than a ‘great
actor.’ The truth appears that he is both.”

For his latest Netfix documentary, Louis Theroux travels to Marbella, Miami and New York to meet content creators operating at the extreme end of the “manosphere” – a loosely connected network of misogynistic male influencers. What he finds, “as you can imagine”, is “extremely unpleasant”, said Benji Wilson in The Telegraph.

A terrifying watch

“I like horror films,” but, as the father of two teenage boys, I was left “quivering behind the sofa” by this, said Wilson. I was “gobsmacked” by how this “regressive spiral” of masculinity is being sold through “international tech platforms that should know better”.

Among the figures Theroux meets, said John Nugent in Empire, are Myron Gaines (author of the charmingly titled tome, “Why Women Deserve Less”) and Harrison Sullivan, a 24-year-old Brit known as HSTikkyTokky, who refers to his girlfriend as his “dishwasher” and who openly professes to being “racist and homophobic”.

Neutral tone ‘falls short’

Theroux takes a “serious approach” to these encounters but sometimes his trademark neutral tone “falls short”. There is “disgusting rhetoric” that he fails to call out and, although he is supposed to be skewering the influencers’ views, they quickly start farming him for content, asking their followers to pitch in with questions for him, and then livestreaming his responses.

In some ways, the film is “classic Theroux”, said Rebecca Nicholson in the Financial Times: “he holds unpleasant truths up to the light” by adopting a “faux-naive curiosity”. But, towards the end, Sullivan’s mother asks him why, if he so disapproves of what her son is doing, he is making money by publicising it. “It’s the documentarian’s age-old dilemma but it feels particularly pertinent here, and is never quite resolved.”

Kazuo Ishiguro’s first novel, “A Pale View of Hills” (1982), is often described as his most personal book, and it has now been adapted to the big screen, said Kevin Maher in The Times.

Worth persevering

A “fascinating, often moving exploration of Japanese family life”, it is set partly in Nagasaki in 1952, and partly in 1980s Surrey. In the Nagasaki strand, Suzu Hirose stars as Etsuko, the unhappy wife of a boorish businessman, whose life of “meek, wifely servitude” is brightened only by her sparky friend Sachiko (Fumi Nikaido), who plans to leave the city for America. Framing all this are the sequences set in Surrey, where Etsuko’s grown-up daughter Niki (Camilla Aiko) grapples with her family’s troubled past while saying vapid things such as, “This house is full of memories.” It’s a pity these scenes are quite weak; my advice is simply to overlook them, as it is a “great film otherwise”.

‘Bland’ and ‘frustrating’

The Nobel laureate’s work has inspired “acclaimed adaptations” such as “The Remains of the Day” (1993) and “Never Let Me Go” (2010), said Tara Brady in The Irish Times, but this film demonstrates that there are “pitfalls” in tackling his work. It is visually elegant, but it lacks “narrative cohesion”; and key plot developments, including a late-stage twist, “land with jolting abruptness”. I found it “frustrating”, said Peter Bradshaw in The Guardian. Ishiguro is so good at delivering a kind of “distinctively Anglo-Japanese melancholy”, but this is just “bland”. It fails to carry over the “haunting, haunted spirit” of the book, agreed Guy Lodge in Variety: director Kei Ishikawa “never finds a narratively satisfying way to present ambiguities that can shimmer more nebulously on the page”. Still, the film “resists nostalgia”, and the story is “attractively and accessibly presented”.

Settling down with a good Agatha Christie adaptation “always feels rather delicious”, said Vicky Jessop in The Standard. “The 1920s costumes! The murder! The twistiest of plot twists!”

“Seven Dials” is the latest novel in the Queen of Crime’s collection to be given the Netflix treatment. A champagne-soaked party at a country estate ends in tragedy when diplomat Gerry Wade (Corey Mylchreest) is found dead, leaving it up to the witty young aristocrat Bundle (Mia McKenna-Bruce) to figure out what happened to the man she planned to marry. Absurd, silly and camp, the “deliciously twisty” show is “pure escapism” and “tremendous fun”.

Whether “Seven Dials” has put you in the mood for another glossy show with a star-studded cast, or you’re more of a purist longing for the classics, these are the very best Agatha Christie screen adaptations of all time.

Witness for the Prosecution, 1957

This cinematic retelling of Christie’s “captivating” 1925 novel is one of the “earliest big-screen outings” of her work, said Marie-Claire Chappet in Harper’s Bazaar. Billy Wilder’s courtroom classic follows the veteran British barrister Sir Wilfrid Robarts (Charles Laughton) as he defends his client Leonard Vole (Tyrone Power), a financially unstable young man accused of murdering a wealthy widow to inherit her fortune. Filled with stand-out performances from “screen legends” including Marlene Dietrich who plays Vole’s seemingly cold-hearted wife, the “stellar” adaptation “deservedly” scooped several Academy Award nominations.

Murder on the Orient Express, 1974

“Easily the best adaptation of probably the most famous Christie book”, Sidney Lumet’s film stars Albert Finney as Hercule Poirot, said Ben Dowell in The Times. The “fastidious sleuth” is investigating the murder of an American tycoon on board a luxury train stranded in a snowdrift in Yugoslavia. Released 14 months before Christie’s death, the “masterpiece” received her seal of approval. “But she reportedly had reservations about what she regarded as Finney’s unimpressively small moustache.”

Death on the Nile, 1978

“Death on the Nile” is “undoubtedly one of the superior appearances of the globetrotting Poirot”, said Nick Hilton in The i Paper. The “fiendishly intricate” mystery of a glamorous heiress murdered on an Egyptian cruise combines “sweeping romantic backdrops” with a “starry” cast including Mia Farrow, Bette Davis and Maggie Smith, with Peter Ustinov as the Belgian detective. “That’s star wattage enough to power the SS Karnak, the paddle steamer cruising from Alexandria to Wadi Halfa.” Kenneth Branagh also adapted the novel in the second instalment of his Hercule Poirot film series in 2022 with more mixed reviews, taking on the leading role alongside a big-name ensemble cast.

Miss Marple, 1984-1992

The small screen has been home to many a Miss Marple over the years, but “most Christie fans agree” that Joan Hickson’s take on the “underestimated old lady of crime” is the winner, said Harper’s Bazaar. Hickson brings a “cunning, quiet confidence” to the beloved sleuth, steering this “brilliant series” which ran for eight years, adapting all 12 books in the original “Miss Marple” series. It’s a must-watch.

Poirot, 1989-2013

“To many, David Suchet’s Poirot is the only Poirot,” said Michael Hogan in Radio Times. The series, which ran for 25 years on ITV, saw the super-sleuth solve 70 “puzzling murders” in a variety of art deco locations. “Respectful” to Christie’s books, these “classic whodunnits” are a small-screen staple and a satisfying binge.

And Then There Were None, 2015

Screenwriter Sarah Phelps sometimes makes “unnecessarily perverse changes to Christie’s perfect plotting”, with disappointing results, said Dowell in The Times. “But I’ll make an exception” for her “subtle and thoughtful” adaptation of “And Then There Were None”, in which she “cleverly” fleshes out the characters and brings “emotional depth to a classic tale”. Darker than Christie’s other works, the action follows a group of strangers, each lured to an isolated island off the Devon coast and murdered one by one. “First-rate performances” from Aidan Turner and Sam Neill anchor the chilling BBC miniseries.

Why Didn’t They Ask Evans?, 2022

This “superbly spry” mini-series adapted by Hugh Laurie is well worth watching, said Radio Times. “A dying man’s cryptic last words” sees childhood friends Bobby (Will Poulter) and Lady Frances “Frankie” Derwent embark on a “quest for the truth” in the small Welsh village where they live. “The leading duo dazzle and delight with screwball-style dialogue as the case lures them into danger.” And Laurie even finds time to “pop up for a cameo”.

What happened

Paul Thomas Anderson’s “One Battle After Another” won six Oscars at Sunday’s Academy Awards, including best picture. Anderson also won best director and best adapted screenplay, while Sean Penn was awarded best supporting actor. Ryan Coogler’s “Sinners,” the other contender for the top prize, won four Oscars, including best actor for Michael B. Jordan and best original screenplay for Coogler. Jessie Buckley won best actress for “Hamnet,” completing her awards season sweep, and Amy Madigan won best supporting actress for the horror thriller “Weapons.”

Who said what

The 98th Academy Awards, hosted by Conan O’Brien, also featured a rare tie (for best live action short film) and some jokes about Timothée Chalamet but not a lot of overt politics. Autumn Durald Arkapaw became the first woman and first Black person to win best cinematographer, for “Sinners.”

The Southern vampire drama and “One Battle After Another” were “two tour-de-force works written for the screen by directors exploring the complexities of America’s past and present,” The Wall Street Journal said. Neither writer-director had won an Oscar until Sunday. It was a “long-in-coming coronation for Anderson,” one of “America’s most lionized filmmakers for decades,” The Associated Press said, and a well-earned honor in the “unblemished career” of the “widely loved” Coogler.

What next?

The success of both films was also an “oddly poignant note of triumph” for their studio, Warner Bros., which “scored a record-tying 11 wins” weeks after it agreed to be absorbed into Paramount, the AP said. Billy Crystal led a tribute to late filmmaker Rob Reiner, his friend and director in “When Harry Met Sally” and “The Princess Bride.” “All we can say is, buddy, what fun we had storming the castle,” Crystal said.

“In the 13 years since it first slo-mo strutted onto our TV screens, ‘Peaky Blinders’ has become a cultural phenomenon,” said Dan Jolin in Empire. Now, we have a spin-off film set in the thick of the Second World War, half a decade on from where the sixth and final series left off.

Cillian Murphy reprises his role as the gangster “King of the Gypsies”, Tommy Shelby, now world-weary and “wearing cardies” as he writes his memoir in a decaying rural manor house. But then a mysterious Romany woman (Rebecca Ferguson) turns up, and persuades him to return to Birmingham, in order to bring his violent illegitimate son (Barry Keoghan) – who now runs his Peaky Blinders mob – to heel.

It’s good to see Tommy “back in his newsboy cap and three-piece suit”, “stalking the streets” and laying down the law – “or rather its opposite”. Still, the film does have the feel of an “extra-long” “Peaky Blinders” episode rather than a “standalone cinematic experience”.

This will be “catnip to fans of the show, whose mixture of gangland violence, music and spiffy tailoring always felt as close to a lifestyle brand as to a TV programme”, said Tom Shone in The Sunday Times. “Here it comes with some even spiffier cinematography by George Steel, who never met a morning mist he didn’t like.”

Meanwhile, as his character ponders the “perennial question” of all long-running TV characters – “Why does everyone around me have to die?” – Murphy alternates between two modes: “haunted and glowering”.

This “stylish” movie has plenty of “verve and swagger”, said Chris Bennion in The Telegraph. But it’s also curiously clinical and “unmoving”, and has the feel of a “farewell tour. Those peaks just aren’t as razor-sharp as they used to be.”

In 1971, at a party at the home of Francis Ford Coppola, his “friend and protégé” George Lucas wandered upstairs, hoping to catch a few minutes of a new TV movie, said Graham Daseler in Literary Review. It was “Duel” by Steven Spielberg – then a “gawky 24-year-old” whom Lucas had met a few times. Riveted, he watched till the end, at one point rushing downstairs to tell his indifferent host: “This guy’s really good.”

Paul Fischer’s “superb” book tells the story of how, over the next decade, these three directors – Coppola, Lucas and Spielberg – went from “obscurity to cinematic immortality” and “remade the movie industry” in the process, while also becoming close friends.

Coppola was the first to achieve stardom when “The Godfather” (1972) raked in $250 million, making it the highest-grossing movie of all time. Three years later, Spielberg “took the title” with “Jaws”, which “earned a cool $458 million”. And then in 1977, Lucas topped both with “Star Wars” – a film so successful that “even on slow days”, it banked upwards of $1.2 million.

“The most richly ironic aspect” of Fischer’s book is that these massive hits were all expected to flop, said Ty Burr in The Wall Street Journal. A “profound disconnect” then existed between what “old-guard Hollywood thought audiences wanted” and what they actually did.

Forced to make things “up as they went along”, the trio behaved badly at times: “friendships were betrayed, bankruptcies filed, and the women in their world – be they collaborators or partners – got the short end of the stick from the boys’ club”.

This isn’t exactly a new story, said Peter Bradshaw in The Guardian. But Fischer presents it “with the enthusiasm and commitment of a true fan” – and the result is a “really readable, closely researched account of life at Hollywood’s top table”.

As Hollywood gets ready to salute the best of 2025 at the annual Academy Awards ceremony on March 15, studios are starting to roll out films that could end up nominated next year. Five of those include these March features.

‘Hoppers’

The latest animated feature from Disney’s Pixar Animation Studios, “Hoppers” has a pretty bonkers premise. Mabel (Piper Curda) is a college student whose mind is transferred into the consciousness of a robotic beaver to gain insight into animal behavior and becomes embroiled in the efforts of a group of forest creatures to stop a habitat-wrecking construction project spearheaded by Mayor Jerry (Jon Hamm). Kathy Najimy stars as Dr. Sam, the professor behind the project. The film is “top-drawer Pixar, a reminder that when this studio is firing on all cylinders, it can take you someplace you’ve never imagined,” said Owen Gleiberman at Variety. (in theaters March 6)

‘Youngblood’

Hockey, by far the most niche of the four major North American professional sports, is having a pop culture moment following the runaway success of HBO Max’s romantic drama “Heated Rivalry.” A sort-of remake of the 1986 film starring Rob Lowe, “Youngblood” follows a young Black hockey sensation, Dean Youngblood (Ashton James), trying to break into the NHL, with his father, Blane (Blair Underwood), pushing him to emulate the aggressive style of play that allowed him to succeed in a sport thoroughly dominated by white men.

His coach, Murray Chadwick (Shawn Doyle) is his mentor and role model, complicated by Dean’s relationship with Chadwick’s daughter, Jessie (Alexandra McDonald). The film is a “thoughtful, high-stakes drama about family, identity and second chances, with just enough on-ice game action to satisfy hockey fans old and new,” said Louisa Moore at Screen Zealots. (in theaters March 6)

‘Undertone’

A24 remains perhaps the buzziest studio in the business, churning out a reliable supply of critically lauded awards bait like 2025 Academy Award nominees “Marty Supreme” and “If I Had Legs I’d Kick You,” as well as many of the best-reviewed horror films of the past decade, including “Talk to Me” and “Hereditary.” Writer-director Ian Tuason makes his feature directing debut with this disturbing story of Evy (Nina Kiri), who cohosts a paranormal investigation podcast while caring for her terminally ill mother.

When her pod partner Justin (Kris Holden-Ried) has the pair discuss a set of anonymous, creepy recordings, they unleash a sinister force that threatens Evy’s life. The film “weaponizes our instinct to pair sound and image, delivering a slow-burning, sound-driven nightmare that is as immersive as it is diabolically terrifying,” said Julian Singleton at Cinapse. (in theaters March 13)

‘Project Hail Mary’

An adaptation of Andy Weir’s bestselling 2021 novel, directors Phil Lord and Christopher Miller (“The Lego Movie”) helm what looks like the most ambitious science fiction epic since “Interstellar.” It stars Ryan Gosling as Ryland Grace, a middle school science teacher who has been dispatched against his will on an interstellar suicide mission to stop the sun from dying. He wakes up on his craft, the rest of the crew dead, with no memory of why he is there and must carry out the mission alone. A “miracle of a movie,” it “celebrates the bravery in all of us, our capacity to do the right thing in the face of overwhelming odds and our faith in science to lead us toward a better future,” said Next Best Picture’s Matt Neglia at X. (in theaters March 20)

‘Tow’

Known mostly for her comedic work in films like “Bridesmaids,” Rose Byrne looks to follow up her Oscar-nominated performance in 2025’s “If I Had Legs I’d Kick You” with another dramatic turn. In director Stephanie Laing’s film, she plays Amanda Ogle, a homeless Seattle mother living in her 1991 Toyota Camry.

When the Camry is towed and she is slapped with an outrageous bill to get it back, she hires Kevin Eggers (Dominic Sessa), a newly-minted young lawyer, to fight the company. The film “spotlights issues around homelessness and addiction with empathy, a grounded realism and a touch of humor,” said Lovia Gyarkye at The Hollywood Reporter. (in theaters March 20)

‘Hoppers’

Directed by Daniel Chong (PG)

★★★

“Pixar returns to vintage form with Hoppers,” said David Rooney in The Hollywood Reporter. After last year’s box office clunker Elio, the animation company has rebounded with this “clever, funny, and visually appealing” comedy that “zips along, driven by rambunctious energy.” Disney Channel star Piper Curda voices Mabel, a teen environmentalist
trying to save the woods from demolition by using a “hopper,” an Avatar-like gizmo that lets her consciousness hop into a robotic beaver. From there, the story keeps “barreling forward.”

Hoppers “is at its best when it’s most manic,” said Jesse Hassenger in
The A.V. Club. Mabel befriends many of the animals that fled the glade and eventually inspires them to rise up against Jon Hamm’s Mayor Jerry, who wants to build a highway through the forest. The movie “gets better as it goes, with some truly inspired bits of animal-led mayhem and
body-swapping nonsense.” At one point there’s a car chase that involves a flying shark. This is a “fun, modest little movie with enough zip and
charm to keep kids engaged,” said Bilge Ebiri in NYMag.com, so I wouldn’t “want to criticize it too much.” Still, it pales in comparison to the masterpieces of Pixar’s early heyday, when the company redefined animation with the likes of Toy Story (1995) and Finding Nemo (2003). “Such are the perils” of modern Pixar: “Even the successes dim a little when viewed in the light of what once was.”

‘Dreams’

Directed by Michel Franco (Not rated)

★★

“In the hands of another, more earthy director, Dreams might have been an enjoyable erotic thriller,” said Jeannette Catsoulis in The New York
Times. There are certainly plenty of sex scenes. “But eroticism requires heat,” and minimalist filmmaker Michel Franco has intentionally created a “distant and frosty” tale without “an ounce of warmth.” Jessica Chastain is icy as Jennifer, a wealthy socialite who dallies with and then falls for Fernando, a younger, undocumented Mexican ballet dancer played rather less expertly by Isaac Hernández.

The “morality tale” that follows has “a lot to say about inequality and the prerogatives of privilege.” This romance is “as complicated as it is toxic,” said Justin Chang in NPR.org. Jennifer refuses to make her relationship with Fernando public, and when he dumps her, she becomes a “monstrous manipulator” enacting revenge. While Franco’s points about
hypocritical liberal do-gooders are inarguable, “his methods are obvious,” and I rolled my eyes at the smugness of scenes showing the 1% as oblivious to others’ labor. Franco “loses the plot in the third act,” said Katie Walsh in the Los Angeles Times, when he “jettisons his characters for the sake of unearned plot twists that leave the viewer feeling only icky.” Centering the film on an undocumented immigrant may be timely, but we’re left “in the dark about what we’re supposed to take away from this story of sex, violence, money, and liberty.”

‘How to Make a Killing’

Directed by John Patton Ford (R)

★★

“Trying to find your niche as a movie star isn’t easy,” said Frank Scheck in The Hollywood Reporter. Take Glen Powell. A year ago, the Twisters and Anyone but You star was being talked about as possibly the next
Tom Cruise. But he “stumbled badly” when he tried to play a macho action hero in November’s remake of The Running Man, and he’s now turned in a second straight box office flop. He took a risk with How to Make a Killing, playing a guy cheated by fate who we’re supposed to root for as he begins murdering off the seven rich relatives standing between him and an enormous inheritance. But c’mon. “Powell is charming, but he’s not that charming.”

The movie “needed to pick a side,” said Jacob Oller in AV Club. It could have been “a clownish class comedy” or “bitter sociopathic satire,” but it winds up being neither, and “at the center of it all is Powell, making the
same face for an hour and 45 minutes, too unflappable to root for, too smug to magnetize as an inhuman American Psycho.” I’m not ready to give up on him, said Nick Schager in the Daily Beast. To me, he and co-star Margaret Qualley, who plays the femme fatale who eggs on the killing spree, come across as “such alluringly nasty delights” that this reworking of the 1949 black comedy Kind Hearts and Coronets “ survives its potentially lethal missteps and works on its own limited terms.” Though its teeth aren’t as sharp as they should be, “it’s smart and spiky enough to leave a pleasurably painful mark.”

‘Pillion’

Directed by Harry Lighton (Not rated)

★★★★

While this gay BDSM rom-com from a rookie director “might sound niche,” said Amy Nicholson in the Los Angeles Times, “free yourself to see it and you’ll discover it’s a universal romance.” Former Harry Potter side figure Harry Melling stars as a shy singleton who’s figuring out what he wants in a relationship when he happens into a submissive-dominant entanglement with a tall, handsome biker played by Alexander Skarsgard. Soon, Melling’s Colin is obeying his lover’s every order, including by shaving himself bald and sleeping like a dog on the floor. But the “kinky-funny” screenplay, which won a prize at Cannes, makes sure we see that Colin is not stuck but growing.

While the movie’s sex scenes are “refreshingly graphic,” they’re “never used or shock value,” said Odie Henderson in The Boston Globe. “The real shock comes from how emotionally involved the characters become within the construct of their kink.” And when Colin brings his new lover
home to meet the parents, Skarsgard and Lesley Sharp, as Colin’s suburban London mom, do memorable work because “neither of them
approaches the scene in a way you’d expect.” Until the ending, which “feels a little neat,” said Zachary Barnes in The Wall Street Journal, the movie “proceeds with an assurance of tone that’s especially impressive for a first-time filmmaker handling material like this.” Harry Lighton’s debut “could have been simply shocking, revving its engine in sexed-up style. Instead, Pillion purrs.”

‘Midwinter Break’

Directed by Polly Findlay (PG-13)

★★

Lesley Manville and Ciarán Hinds “would be appealing to watch just fumbling for their reading glasses,” said Natalia Winkelman in The New York Times. Unfortunately, this “staid” drama about an aging Irish couple puts that claim to the test. A “slow-moving film with a sappy score and mellow mood,” Midwinter Break opens with Manville’s Stella surprising Hinds’ Gerry by arranging a spur-of-the-moment trip to Amsterdam. Alas, “precious little conflict occurs until long afterward.”

But while Polly Findlay’s adaptation of a Bernard MacLaverty novel is a “delicate” film, said Lindsey Bahr in the Associated Press, its impact can be profound “if you can get on its level.” Stella, a devout Catholic, has an ulterior motive for dragging Gerry abroad, and when she nervously proposes how she’d like to live more purposefully in retirement, “it feels earth-shattering.” This is a couple accustomed to leaving much unsaid,
including how the violence of the Troubles led them to flee Belfast years earlier for Scotland. Manville and Hinds give the movie everything they’ve got, said Caryn James in The Hollywood Reporter. In a scene in which Stella pours out her heart to a stranger, “Manville delivers one of her most magnificent performances, which is saying a lot.” Alas, the script lets them down, “not because it needs more action but because this ordinary couple’s problems seem so unsurprising, their inner lives so veiled.”

Set during Brazil’s brutal military dictatorship in the 1970s, this political thriller is “populated by so many characters”, you may despair of keeping track of who is who, said Deborah Ross in The Spectator. But “do hang on in there”, as it repays the effort. Justly nominated for four Oscars, this is a “truly special” (if rather sprawling) film.

Wagner Moura (known for playing Pablo Escobar in the Netflix hit “Narcos”) stars as Marcelo, a widowed academic who has gone on the run from a pair of hitmen. Quite why they are targeting him isn’t initially clear but there’s a lot else to think about in the meantime: there is a “hitman hired by the hitmen”; there’s a corrupt police chief; there’s a “head-scratcher” of a sequence in which a human leg “comes to life and kicks gay people” (this is a reference to an urban legend; “Brazilians will get it, I was told”). It is, in sum, a heady mix, but it barely puts “a foot wrong”, and the performances are superb.

“If you’re expecting a Brazilian ‘Bourne’, forget it,” said Tom Shone in The Sunday Times. “For a film about a man shadowed by two assassins, ‘The Secret Agent’ has a daringly languid pace” – it takes a full hour, for instance, to be sure who Marcelo actually is. And though there are “flashes of surreal comedy”, these belie “the seriousness of what is afoot” in a place “where evil comes with a grin and a cold beer”. Gradually, “a disquieting paranoia begins to creep into everything” until “even the sunlight seems off”.

At 160 minutes, the film does teeter “on self-indulgence”, said Patrick Smith in The Independent, but it is sustained by its “energetic camerawork” and Moura’s “soulful and seductive” central performance. “Few thrillers this year will risk this much, or land it so powerfully.”