“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.”

It’s little surprise Rose Byrne has been nominated for an Oscar for her turn as a “beleaguered mother” in “If I Had Legs I’d Kick You”, said Clarisse Loughrey in The Independent. “It’s less performance, more self-administered open heart surgery.”

She stars as Linda, a psychotherapist with an absent husband whose infant daughter is suffering from an undisclosed chronic illness that requires a feeding tube and round-the-clock care. When a “great big watery hole” begins to appear in the ceiling of their home, Linda and her daughter are forced to move into a motel.

The film soon unfurls into a “psychological horror-comedy of postnatal depression and lonely parental stress”, said Peter Bradshaw in The Guardian. Byrne delivers a “barnstorming performance” as a “mother and therapist” who “must present at all times as keeping it together, but who in fact is losing it every day”.

“If I Had Legs I’d Kick You” is part of a “burgeoning genre” of films which reveal motherhood to be a “sinister trap, a social prison and, very literally, a trigger for psychosis”, said Kevin Maher in The Times.

Writer-director Mary Bronstein brings “passive-aggressive aplomb” to her cameo as the doctor treating Linda’s daughter: “Nurse Ratched for the self-care generation”. And Byrne elicits “enormous empathy”, bringing Linda vividly to life with her “lightning-fast double-takes” and “sharp monologues”. Producer Josh Safdie also leaves his mark, helping to infuse the film with a “manic energy” akin to “Marty Supreme”, his Oscar-tipped hit about a shoe salesman desperately trying to make it as a professional table tennis player.

Packed with “close-ups and close calls”, Bronstein’s “feverish film will have you sweating”, said Chris Wasser in the Irish Independent. But it’s a “hell of a ride” and Byrne is outstanding as a mother forced to cope with everything alone. “Exhilarating cinema.”

Robert Duvall disappeared into his characters. Over a six-decade career he approached highly diverse roles like “an ethnologist on a field trip into the soul,” as one critic put it. Among his memorable leading performances were roles as an explosive Marine pilot who tyrannizes his family in The Great Santini (1979) and as a fading, alcoholic country singer in Tender Mercies (1983), which won him a Best Actor Oscar. He also starred as an illiterate, deeply kind farmer in the Faulkner adaptation Tomorrow (1972), and as a fallen Pentecostal preacher in The Apostle (1997), which he wrote and directed. But many of Duvall’s best performances came in supporting roles: as a ruthless TV executive in Network (1976), the stoic mob lawyer in The Godfather (1972), and the maniacal lieutenant colonel in Apocalypse Now (1979) who loves “the smell of napalm in the morning.” Secondary roles suited Duvall just fine, he said, and were often more interesting. “Being a leading man is an agent’s dream,” he said, “not an actor’s.”

Born in San Diego, Duvall grew up in a series of Navy towns where his rear admiral father was stationed, said the Associated Press. An aimless youth, he attended Principia College in Illinois but “nearly flunked out.” His concerned parents steered him toward theater and he “flourished in drama classes.” After his Army service, he moved to New York City to study acting, falling in with fellow students Gene Hackman and Dustin Hoffman. Working odd jobs to support himself, he soon began landing stage and TV roles. He “got his film break” when cast as the misunderstood recluse Boo Radley in To Kill a Mockingbird (1962), said Rolling Stone, making an indelible impression without speaking a word of dialogue. Having built his reputation as a character actor over the next decade, he became “a central figure in the New Hollywood of the 1970s,” adding “grit and soul to legendary works” from directors such as George Lucas, Robert Altman, and Francis Ford Coppola.

An exacting performer who researched roles with “intense studiousness,” Duvall was also a private man who kept “Hollywood at arm’s length,” said The New York Times. He spent years living with his fourth wife on a horse farm in rural Virginia, though he acted into his 90s. Despite that intensity, he was unpretentious about his craft, which, he said, just boiled down to “talking and listening.” In acting, “there’s no right or wrong,” he said, “just truthful or untruthful.”

Forget the Valentine-friendly release of the new Wuthering Heights, said Nick Schager in the Daily Beast. In Hollywood, “the biggest film of the weekend, and maybe the year, is a 15-second short starring Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt.” The clip seems to show the two stars in a rooftop fistfight, but it was generated by Seedance 2.0, a new AI tool, and it’s “so lifelike that it’s virtually indistinguishable from reality.” The concerned Irish filmmaker who posted it on X said he’d created it with a mere two-sentence prompt. The video went viral when Rhett Reese, a top screenwriter, reposted it along with the following comment, “I hate to say it. It’s likely over for us.”

The reaction from the rest of Hollywood was “swift and fierce,” said Katie Kilkenny in The Hollywood Reporter. The Motion Picture Association, representing major studios, and SAG-AFTRA, the actors union, issued harshly worded statements condemning Seedance for its unauthorized use of copyrighted content and of actors’ likenesses. Soon after, both Disney and Paramount sent cease-and-desist letters to ByteDance, the Chinese tech giant that owns Seedance as well as TikTok. When Hollywood faced a similar scare in late 2025 from an AI video generator created by OpenAI, unions, studios, and talent agencies banded together to push for changes, including the signing of licensing deals. In this case, ByteDance promised within a week of Seedance 2.0’s release to strengthen safeguards against rights infringement before the global rollout of Seedance later this month.

Not everyone was worried by the fake Cruise-Pitt clip or the other star-studded short videos created last week using Seedance, said Derrick Bryson Taylor in The New York Times. Rick and Morty writer-producer Heather Anne Campbell said in an interview, “I haven’t seen anything good yet. It’s all just garbage.” But Reese’s comments spread widely, and the co-writer of the Deadpool movies held firm to his judgment that Seedance’s technology represents an existential threat to many film careers. “In next to no time,” he said in a post, “one person is going to be able to sit at a computer and create a movie indistinguishable from what Hollywood now releases.”

War remains an endemic human tragedy, and movies have long been one of the best ways to demonstrate its horrors to those who have never experienced it. With great power tensions rising in the real world, there has never been a better time for audiences to watch these films — if only to remind themselves of why peace is preferable to conflict.

‘Black Hawk Down’ (2001)

With the U.S.-led 1992-1993 intervention in Somalia struggling to relieve the country’s famine due to state failure, Major General Garrison (Sam Shepard) greenlights an operation to capture the warlord Mohamed Aidid in Mogadishu using U.S. Army Rangers dropped from helicopters. The operation goes awry when one of the Black Hawk helicopters is brought down and its crew, including Durant (Ron Eldard), killed or besieged. With journalist Mark Bowden’s book as the “guarantor of a horrendous authenticity,” director Ridley Scott’s film uses “immense technical skill and spectacular photography” to produce a gripping war film that has nevertheless justifiably taken criticism for its context-free depiction of Somalia’s plight, said Philip Strick at Sight and Sound. (Prime Video)

‘Letters From Iwo Jima’ (2006)

Famously conservative icon Clint Eastwood seems like an unlikely choice to make a subtitled film that takes the Japanese view of one of World War II’s closing battles seriously. But that’s exactly what happens in his magnificent “Letters From Iwo Jima,” which depicts the early 1945 American invasion of the strategic island and its airfields, which are about 750 miles from mainland Japan.

Ken Watanabe is General Kuribayashi, who is tasked with defending the island from the impending American assault, and Kazunari Ninomiya plays Saigo, a soldier digging trenches on the beach until Kuribayashi shifts strategy and orders the construction of a network of tunnels and fortifications inland.

The film grapples movingly with how commanders and soldiers understood their predicament, including an unforgettable scene in which a number of soldiers commit suicide. Eastwood’s epic operates in a “poetic mode,” finding a place “where the limitations of a war movie start to vanish” and resulting in the “best of both worlds: an art house combat picture,” said Tim Brayton at Alternate Ending. (Prime Video)

‘The Hurt Locker’ (2008)

So far the definitive statement about America’s decade-long misadventure in Iraq is director Kathryn Bigelow’s deservedly lauded “The Hurt Locker.” Staff Sergeant William James (Jeremy Renner, in a career-making performance) is the team leader of an explosives disposal unit whose predecessor (Guy Pearce) gets obliterated by an IED in the film’s opening minutes.

James is a renegade constantly at odds with his rule-bound team, short-timers Sergeant J.T. Sanborn (Anthony Mackie) and Specialist Owen Eldridge (Brian Geraghty), who worry with some justification that James’ unorthodox, bespoke and often impulsive bomb-defusing tactics are going to get them all killed. A film that “doesn’t engage the politics of the war in Iraq per se,” it is a “totally immersive, off-the-charts high-anxiety experience from beginning to end,” said Amy Taubin at Film Comment. (Netflix)

‘Waltz with Bashir’ (2008)

Based on his experiences as a soldier during Israel’s 1982 invasion of Lebanon, director Ari Folman voices his character as he interviews fellow veterans of the conflict — most of whom play themselves. The gorgeous, haunting animation allows the filmmakers to precisely recreate the Lebanese battlefield and grapple with the events that led to the infamous massacre of Palestinian refugees at the Sabra and Shatila refugee camp outside of Beirut at the hands of Lebanese Christian extremists. Simultaneously a “history lesson, a combat picture, a piece of investigative journalism and an altogether amazing film,” the result is a “work of astonishing aesthetic integrity and searing moral power,” said A.O. Scott at The New York Times. (Prime Video)

‘Hacksaw Ridge’ (2016)

Desmond Doss (Andrew Garfield) is a religiously devout pacifist who get drafted in 1942 and becomes an army medic but refuses to carry a rifle or engage in combat, drawing intense scrutiny from his peers and superiors in director Mel Gibson’s engrossing film. Based on a true story, “Hacksaw Ridge” follows Doss from childhood through the war, culminating in his heroic rescue of 75 soldiers during the Battle of Okinawa.

Buoyed by a searing performance from Garfield, the film was nominated for Best Picture at the Academy Awards — a triumph for Gibson, whose life and career had been mired in controversy for years. The film, “though corny at times, treads close to madness and majesty alike, and nobody but Gibson could have made it,” said Anthony Lane at The New Yorker. (Disney+)

‘Dunkirk’ (2017)

A structurally daring look at the miraculous evacuation of some 400,000 British expeditionary forces from France who were pinned down by German forces early in the war, “Dunkirk” marked director Christopher Nolan’s departure from his familiar science fiction and fantasy territory. The film is told from three perspectives: Tommy (Fionn Whitehead) is an infantryman making his way to the beach for evacuation; George (Barry Keoghan) joins the crew of an unarmed civilian trawler that heroically volunteers to help transport the fleeing forces; and Farrier (Tom Hardy) is an Royal Air Force pilot helping provide cover for the evacuation.

Unlike many ultraviolent war movies of the contemporary era, Nolan’s film “does not revel in realistic depictions of wartime death, with all its blood and viscera,” said Brian Eggert at Deep Focus Review. Instead, it creates an “impressive tribute to the survivors and the grand-scale efforts of the British people” during one of the country’s finest hours. (BritBox)

‘1917’ (2019)

Director Sam Mendes’ World War I drama is composed of long, unbroken shots assembled together by cinematographer Roger Deakins to give the illusion of being a “oner.” Late in the war, British Lance Corporals Will Schofield (​​George MacKay) and Tom Blake (Dean-Charles Chapman) are ordered by General Erinmore (Colin Firth) to carry a message to a British battalion warning them not to fall into a deadly trap that the seemingly retreating Germans have set for them.

Like “Saving Private Ryan,” it is essentially a road narrative, in which Schofield and Blake see the carnage of war along with the audience. A “ghost train ride into a day-lit house of horror,” the film conveys the “nihilist elation that comes with the moment-by-moment experience of survival, fiercely holding on to life with every eardrum-splitting sniper shot,” said Peter Bradshaw at The Guardian. (Netflix)

‘All Quiet on the Western Front’ (2022)

Though it divided critics, director Edward Berger’s bold, bleak and propulsive adaptation of Erich Maria Remarque’s groundbreaking 1929 novel more than serves its purpose as a fierce statement against war. It opens cleverly with the journey of a German uniform, stripped from a dead infantryman and sent to be cleaned, repaired and rehomed onto Paul Baumer (Felix Kammerer), an idealistic volunteer pumped full of nationalist propaganda about adventure and brotherhood and thrust instead into an unceasing and pointless nightmare of trench warfare, deprivation, suffering and death. The “vast machinery of total war has rarely been depicted as viscerally or as coldly” as in Berger’s film, which “almost wades into horror territory, helped in no small part by the booming, anachronistic synths of Volker Bertelmann’s score,” said John Nugent at Empire. (Netflix)

‘Chipotle just saw its worst year ever. It may not get any better.’

Gustavo Arellano at the Los Angeles Times

Chipotle’s “core problem is its stagnant approach and underwhelming food, which no longer justifies its premium pricing to budget-conscious consumers,” says Gustavo Arellano. Restaurateurs have been “capitalizing on the insatiable American appetite for nearly any foodstuff from south of the border. But as all empires inevitably do, the good times stop.” Chipotle CEO Scott Boatwright “would be wise to heed this history and either take Chipotle into new frontiers or prepare for its inevitable irrelevance.”

Read more

‘Does “Wuthering Heights” herald the revival of the film romance’?

Richard Brody at The New Yorker

Emerald Fennell’s “Wuthering Heights” is an “unabashedly romantic movie emerging at a time when few such films are being made — at least, for theatrical release and by directors with some artistic cachet,” says Richard Brody. The “silliness of the movie falls short of camp — it’s neither intentionally self-parodic nor exaggeratedly theatrical.” What Fennell “really appears to be adapting is less Brontë than a cinematic genre that has more or less fallen into oblivion: the romantic drama.”

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‘Kids are using AI. Here’s what adults need to do right now.’

Sarah Sword and Shai Fuxman at Newsweek

When “new technology lands in children’s hands, they don’t read the manual. And they don’t tell their parents,” say Sarah Sword and Shai Fuxman. Kids “push every button, test every limit and try to break it,” and “millions of kids are doing that with AI tools like ChatGPT.” Parents are the “most influential figures in shaping children’s decisions and habits,” and should “make AI part of your family’s conversations, just as you would with social media.”

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‘Trump’s planned visit to Venezuela would be a catastrophic mistake’

Andres Oppenheimer at the Miami Herald

President Donald Trump is “planning a historic trip to Venezuela,” but “visiting Caracas before opposition leader María Corina Machado is allowed to return would legitimize a dictatorship and be a shameless reward for repression,” says Andres Oppenheimer. Trump’s “priorities in Venezuela are stability and increased oil exports to the United States, not democracy.” If Trump “goes before Machado’s return, Venezuelans will get the worst of both worlds: massive deportations from the United States and a fortified dictatorship at home.”

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“There’s a terrific charm and sweetness in this debut from Iraqi filmmaker Hasan Hadi, a Bake Off-style adventure about a little girl in early-90s Iraq required by her school to make a birthday cake in Saddam Hussein’s honour,” said Peter Bradshaw in The Guardian. The task sounds innocuous enough but, because the country is in the grip of sanctions, every single ingredient that nine-year-old Lamia (Baneen Ahmad Nayyef) might use to make her cake is near-impossible to come by. Undeterred, she and her pal Saeed (Sajad Mohamad Qasem) set off to find what they need and, along the way, they meet a string of “vivid characters”, from a “grocer who gives rare treats to a pregnant customer in exchange for sexual favours” to a postman who helps them, declaring cake “the greatest invention in human history”. The film “saunters and meanders along” but, throughout, placards and posters of Saddam pop up, “as if to spoil every happy moment and intensify every sad one”.

At times, the mood of this “sweet tragedy” of a movie is almost larky, said Danny Leigh in the Financial Times: Lamia travels everywhere with her cockerel, Hindi, for instance, who is a bona fide “star”. But the actress’s “small, grave face” – she has never acted before, and is superb – is the film’s soul. In this Iraq, not every adult is a monster but fish rot from the head down, and the evil of the president is catching.” At once “a road movie, a magic realist fable and an incisive portrait of the seldom-seen Iraq of the 1990s”, this film feels “distinctly Iraqi”, said Joseph Fahim in Sight and Sound. To its director’s credit, it never slips into “misery porn” but is instead infused with humour, even as it shows how its characters’ transgressions “are inseparable from their declining society”.

Scrolling through TikTok, you may have noticed what appears to be an episode of a TV show with no notable actors, filmed entirely vertically and clocking in at just one minute. That's because entertainment has been moving from the big screen to the small screen in the form of microdramas. These shows are consumed in multiple parts and meant to be viewed on a cell phone. And their growing popularity is creating new opportunities in the entertainment industry.

Pocket pictures

Microdramas originated in China, where they are known as “duanju.” There, they have become a massive success, surpassing $6.9 billion in revenue in 2024. This prompted the U.S. to open its doors to the mini movies, which earned $1.4 billion in revenue in 2025. Microdramas are “perfectly suited for the shorter attention spans of today's online users,” said Hello! magazine. The scripted dramas are “typically broken down into minute-long episodes designed to be watched on smartphones, mirroring the way we consume TikTok and Instagram content.”

Microdramas are similar to soap operas, focusing on common tropes and over-the-top theatrics. Their total duration can be the length of a feature film, but split into 80 parts. The episodes “often end on cliffhangers, making viewers want to binge the whole thing,” said Hello!. A person can come across one episode and then the “next thing you know, a half an hour or two hours went by, and you just watched a whole movie,” said Marc Herrmann, an actor in several microdramas, including “Billionaire CEO’s Secret Obsession” and “My Sugar-Coated Mafia Boss,” to NPR.

While these shorts appear on TikTok and Instagram, platforms like ReelShort and DramaBox are growing in popularity as apps dedicated to microdramas. They can be quite profitable, as while the “first few episodes are typically free to watch,” but “once you want to see more, you’ll have to pay up,” said NPR. This could “cost viewers $10 to $20 a week or up to $80 a month.” Microdramas are cheaper to create, too, banking on “little-known actors, tight budgets and accelerated production timelines to churn out content drawing in millions of viewers and dollars.”

Big business

Microdramas are “sort of the ‘Triple Crown’ of the modern entertainment industry,” said Tomm Polos, the director of creator arts at the University of Southern California, to NBC News. “They’re social-friendly, they’re cost-effective and they’re data-driven. That is what everyone wants.” The potential microdrama profit prompted the Los Angeles City Council to vote to consider a $5 million subsidy for their production. “There are a lot of empty sound stages in Hollywood. There are a lot of empty studio spaces in Hollywood,” Polos said. “It should not surprise anyone if, in the coming quarters or years, those studio spaces get converted to be laboratories for microdramas, and that’s going to really help the economy of Los Angeles.”

Most microdramas are non-union productions, but that may soon change, as one studio in LA is “producing what has been termed one of the first ever SAG microdramas, which features an Oscar-nominated actor,” said Deadline. This could impact the industry, “proving that new formats can deliver top-tier creative work while upholding strong labor standards,” said Duncan Crabtree-Ireland, the national executive director of SAG-AFTRA, to the outlet.

“Sporting matching signet rings” engraved with “poetics about their twinned souls”, Margot Robbie and Jacob Elordi are the latest on-screen lovers hinting at off-screen romance, said The Times. As publicity for the much-awaited new film adaptation of “Wuthering Heights” reaches “fever pitch”, its leads have been leaning into the fantasy with a series of “entwined” interviews and touchy-feely red carpet moments.

“This is not a case of life imitating art” – Robbie has been married to producer Tom Ackerley since 2016, and they had their first child in 2024 – but a particularly shameless “showmance”, “a relationship cultivated by two stars to catapult a film into the zeitgeist”.

‘Planet Vomit’

Even before the film hit UK cinemas, the “Byronic showmance” between its stars was “moving at warp speed to Planet Vomit”, said The Telegraph. During the promotional campaign, Elordi and Robbie have been “wrapped around each other like poison ivy, waxing lyrical about their ‘mutual obsession’”.

They have “tried really, really hard to make everyone think they are besotted lovers”, rather than “professional colleagues with a product to sell”, said The Guardian. Is this how stupid the film industry thinks we become? Something’s “badly wrong” if we all have to watch them “go moony-eyed over each other, knowing full well they’ll drop the artifice like a stone when they each get something new to promote”.

Even platonic friendship isn’t safe from this Hollywood hysteria. While promoting “Wicked” and its sequel, Ariana Grande and Cynthia Erivo were “clinging to each other” and “sobbing like they’d just watched their childhood houses burn down”. Did we not once understand that “an actor’s performance began with the opening credits and ended when the lights went up”?

‘Fabricated pairings’

Hollywood has actually been here before – when “the old school studios ordered a young starlet to marry her co-star to promote a new release or a pair of teen sensations were asked to prolong a spent relationship”, said Tatler.

In the Golden Age, big studios like MGM and Universal “locked in” stars with “golden-handcuff contracts”, said The Times. They made them sign morality clauses to control their off-screen love life, and forced them to participate in “fabricated romantic pairings” to promote movies – or even sometimes to “deflect rumours”. In 1955, Universal arranged for closeted gay heartthrob Rock Hudson to be married off to his agent’s secretary amid swirling speculation about his sexuality.

Today’s showmances are less formally planned, Hollywood marketing agent Stacy Jones told the paper. The idea is to generate speculation without explicitly confirming a romance: “never lie, but don’t rush to clarify either”. It’s all “about amplifying chemistry that already feels believable”.

But toying with audiences like this can backfire. Many people “seemed genuinely moved” when Liam Neeson and Pamela Anderson appeared to have fallen for one another while making “The Naked Gun”, said Slate – only for the whole affair to be revealed as a “sloppily executed” showmance the moment the promotional tour was over. “If you’re going to fake a relationship, celebs, could you just be prepared to stick it out at least until the movie goes to streaming?”

‘Wuthering Heights’

Directed by Emerald Fennell (R)

★★

“Wuthering Heights is Emerald Fennell’s dumbest movie,” said Alison Willmore in NYMag.com. “It also happens to be her best.” In her adaptation of Emily Brontë’s classic novel, the director of Saltburn and Promising Young Woman “throws off the burden of trying to say
something significant” and instead makes the legendary romance of Catherine and Heathcliff simply the story of two drama whores who can’t quit each other. “Fennell has an incredible talent for extravagant scenes that bypass all higher thought functions to spark a deeper lizard-brained pleasure,” and she leans fully into that talent here.

To me, Fennell’s “gleefully self-conscious” film style proves “an awkward fit for Brontë’s roiling, tormented saga of passion, cruelty, and doom,” said Nick Schager in the Daily Beast. Her “Cathy” and Heathcliff aren’t doomed to unrequited longing. Instead, even after Cathy marries for money and security, she and the poor-born Heathcliff “get down and dirty in bedrooms, carriages, and out on the moors,” squandering the talents of co-stars Margot Robbie and Jacob Elordi and reducing the tale
to “florid, horny, juvenile fan fiction.” This is a movie that “should sell heaps of tickets,” said Daphne Merkin in Air Mail. “Influenced by the aesthetics of soft porn and high fashion,” it aims to win over Gen Z viewers, and in its own “edgy, stylistic” way, “it works.” Still, by allowing the lovers to act on their hunger for each other and by leaving out Catherine’s post-mortem haunting of Heathcliff, Fennell’s Wuthering
Heights turns out to be “a less radical rendering of the otherworldly desire that Brontë captured almost two centuries ago.”

‘Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die’

Directed by Gore Verbinski (R)

★★★

“There’s zero doubt, watching this film, that it was made by a madman,” said Eric Vespe in The Film Stage. From the moment Sam Rockwell bursts into a busy Los Angeles diner as a wild-eyed character claiming to be a time traveler from a grim future, “it’s clear you’re not in for a movie
made by committee.” Instead, the ride you’ve strapped in for is the first from Pirates of the Caribbean director Gore Verbinski in nearly a decade, and though the 134-minute adventure runs long, “it’s never dull, in part because it’s so hard to predict what’s coming next.”

Nothing in Verbinski’s sci-fi action comedy would work without Rockwell, said Peter Debruge in Variety. The Oscar winner’s crackpot interloper
announces that he needs help to avert AI’s future uprising against humanity, and as he picks his team from the diner’s patrons, a routine he’s ostensibly carried out 117 times before in precisely the same location, Rockwell “makes a great avatar for the cavalier stance that nothing
matters when you get endless lives.” Soon, the mission team includes Juno Temple’s single mom and Haley Lu Richardson’s sad-eyed punk, and we’re treated to a “virtuoso” orchestration of Everything Everywhere
All at Once–style time-travel anomalies. The screenplay lacks the sharp teeth that would elevate Good Luck to a high-concept classic, said David Rooney in The Hollywood Reporter. Still, “Verbinski’s flair for kinetic action set pieces make it a reasonably entertaining entry in the canon of gonzo sci-fi comedies.”

‘Sirat’

Directed by Oliver Laxe (R)

★★★★

“You might have a few reasonable guesses where this story is headed. They’re probably wrong,” said Amy Nicholson in the Los Angeles Times. Spain’s “punkish, prankish, and strangely existential” contender for the Best International Feature Oscar opens with a rave in the
Moroccan desert at which we see a father and his young son asking the whacked-out revelers whether any have seen the boy’s missing older sister. The party is then broken up by soldiers bearing the news that something like World War III has broken out, and suddenly, Oliver Laxe’s “taut and riveting” drama is tracking the father, his son, and a break-off group of ravers racing farther into the desert.

Though the movie “begins in exhilaration and concludes in despair,”
said Justin Chang in The New Yorker, its narrative “takes off like a shot” and never flags while its “mysterious” power emanates from the makers’
“tough-minded understanding” that human kindness is “rare yet persistent,” even in the direst circumstances. “Laxe offers a much too
literal takeaway during the film’s final moments,” said Natalia Keogan in the A.V. Club. “But as the cliché advises, it’s the journey Sirat takes us on that merits appreciation.” And if the world is truly ending, “maybe one last party, one last dose of serotonin, isn’t such a bad send-off.”

Amazon’s fawning documentary “Melania” opened in January to withering reviews and receipts unlikely to offset its $75 million budget. But losing tens or even hundreds of millions of dollars on a movie isn’t easy or particularly common.

For our list, we took a list of the movies that lost the most money since 2000, adjusted for inflation, and highlighted the top eight with Rotten Tomatoes critical scores of less than 30%. This avoids ensnaring perfectly serviceable movies that never found an audience, like 2012’s “John Carter,” or ones caught up in culture-war drama, like Disney’s 2022 “Strange World.”

‘Mortal Engines’ (2018, $219M loss)

Young adult dystopias have been a cash cow ever since “The Hunger Games,” but they aren’t guaranteed success. In “Mortal Engines,” a cataclysmic war has led cities, including London, to mount themselves on wheels (don’t ask how this works because it’s never explained), prowling around “absorbing” smaller towns for fuel and resources.

In one settlement set to be devoured by London, Hester (Hera Hilmar) is waiting to exact revenge against Thaddeus Valentine (Hugo Weaving) for killing her mother, and young historian Tom Natsworthy (Robert Sheehan) joins her incipient rebellion. After a promising first act, director Christian Rivers’ film “devolves rapidly into a generic YA story with bland characters, poorly set up motivations and plans, and a general lack of personality,” said Tom Bedford at Film Inquiry. (Prime Video)

‘Pan’ (2015, $199M loss)

This dreadful prequel of sorts to J.M. Barrie’s classic children’s story is set in Blitz-era London, where an orphaned Peter (Levi Miller) is sold by the crooked orphanage housemother Barnabas (Kathy Burke) to pirates and whisked off in some kind of floating steampunk vessel that dodges Spitfires en route to the magical world of Neverland.

There, Peter is forced to mine fairy dust and meets a young James Hook (Garrett Hedlund), and together they fight their evil overlord Blackbeard (Hugh Jackman). Featuring bizarre anachronisms (at one point the Neverland child laborers sing Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit”), it is an “embarrassing pastiche” whose plot mechanics and mind-numbing CGI effects “leech the wonder out of the material and leave it bone dry,” said Andy Crump at Paste Magazine. (HBO Max)

‘The Adventures of Pluto Nash’ (2002, $168M loss)

This 2002 Eddie Murphy vehicle features one of the lowest Rotten Tomatoes scores (currently 6%) of any major studio release ever — and deservedly so. Set in 2087 on the moon, it involves nightclub owner Pluto Nash (Murphy) trying to defend his establishment against encroachment from greedy casino owners led by Mogan (Joe Pantoliano).

He eventually goes on the run with one of his waitresses, Dina (Rosario Dawson). The reviews were so bad that “anyone involved with ‘Pluto Nash’ has tried to absolve themself of any responsibility,” said Nick Rogers at Midwest Film Journal. (Tubi)

‘X Men: Dark Phoenix’ (2019, $167M loss)

The 12th installment in Marvel’s “X-Men” franchise and another box office bomb whose struggles were telegraphed by production and release delays. Sophie Turner plays a young Jean Grey, who may have been responsible for the car crash that killed her parents and orphaned her years ago.

Under the tutelage of Professor Charles Xavier (James McAvoy), her telekinetic powers become difficult to control after she is struck by solar flares while rescuing the space shuttle Endeavor. She flees as factions vie to use her powers for their own ends. The “worst movie ever in the X-Men series,” director Simon Kinberg’s film is so wretched that it “suggests the X-Men series is played out and beyond saving,” said Peter Travers at Rolling Stone. (Disney+)

‘Jupiter Ascending’ (2015, $159M loss)

Expectations were understandably high for a big-budget science fiction film from “The Matrix” creators the Wachowskis. Mila Kunis plays Jupiter Jones (one of the film’s least silly character names), a Chicago housecleaner who discovers that she shares identical DNA with a dead intergalactic monarch and may be the heiress of her malevolent empire.

Channing Tatum is Caine Wise, a half-wolf, half-human being who joins forces with Jupiter to save the human race from its destiny of getting harvested for a liquid that makes the galaxy’s rulers immortal. An unwatchable movie that is “inane from first frame to last,” it is festooned with “squiggly CG aliens and actors in costumes that would be laughed out of a Greenwich Village Halloween parade,” said David Edelstein at Vulture. (Prime Video)

‘Ben-Hur’ (2016, $157M loss)

It’s not at all clear why Lew Wallace’s 1880 novel, “Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ,” needed a fifth film adaptation (to say nothing of a lackluster 2010 limited series). Jack Huston plays Jewish prince Judah Ben-Hur, who is betrayed to the Romans by his adopted brother, Messala (Toby Kebbell), and sold into slavery and then returns years to Jerusalem seeking revenge.

This somehow involves competing against Messala in an elaborate and brutal chariot race, with Morgan Freeman serving as Ben-Hur’s trainer Ilderim. This “Ben-Hur” is an “epic fail,” and a film ”that should be seen on a plane, on the 6-by-8 screen on the back of an airline seat, probably at 2 a.m. on a transatlantic flight, accompanied by a complimentary sachet of salty cashews, a vodka and tonic and then a meal of mechanically reconstituted chicken in a fillet-style serving,” said Peter Bradshaw at The Guardian. (Prime Video)

‘The Alamo’ (2004, $156M loss)

Disney’s historical epic was plagued by production delays after its original director Ron Howard departed the project. Emilio Echevarría plays the Mexican General Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna, who led the brutal, 13-day, 1836 siege of the rebel-held Alamo fort.

Dennis Quaid and Billy Bob Thornton play, respectively, Sam Houston and Davy Crockett in a film that bombed spectacularly at the box office despite competent execution of the titular battle. For better or worse, “every generation gets the movie it deserves,” said Keith Uhlich at Slant Magazine, including this “candidate for worst movie of the year.” Its depiction of Mexicans proves that “racism can be as much an unintentionally passive act as an intentionally active one.” (Prime Video)

‘Stealth’ (2005, $155M loss)

Lt. Ben Gannon (Josh Lucas), Lt. Kara Wade (Jessica Biel) and Lt. Henry Purcell (Jamie Foxx) are fighter pilots assigned in the near future to fly a new stealth strike fighter for the U.S. Air Force, which they inexplicably use to bomb a terrorist meeting in Myanmar and then to avert a vague nuclear catastrophe in Tajikistan before a showdown with some kind of nefarious AI embedded in an unmanned version of the craft.

The plot makes zero sense, nor is it ever explained why these three pilots are used like some kind of global SWAT team. The film is an “offense against taste, intelligence and the noise pollution code” with a story that “doesn’t merely defy logic, but strips logic bare, cremates it and scatters its ashes,” said Roger Ebert at the time. (Prime Video)

A “coming-of-age film” with “inspired” casting, this Nigerian drama is set during that country’s turbulent 1993 presidential election, said Jonathan Romney in the Financial Times.

Mainly told over the course of one day, it opens with two boys aged eight and 11 (played by the brothers Godwin Egbo and Chibuike Marvelous Egbo) mucking around at home, when their father (Sopé Dìrísù, known for TV’s “Slow Horses”), whom they barely know, turns up – and to their delight, takes them on a trip to Lagos.

The film (in English, Yoruba and pidgin English) “is made in a mode that you might call Hallucinatory Realism: events and images flashing before the camera in the same rush that the boys experience them”. We get a “panorama of 1993 Lagos, but also fleeting, arresting details (ants on a cracked wall, sand-specked crabs on the beach)”. The overall effect is of a dream, and one “you want to experience again right away”.

Director Akinola Davies Jr co-wrote the script with his brother, Wale Davies, said Thomas Page on CNN. Their father died young, and so they were never able to spend the day scampering around after him in Lagos. The result is a “sad, serious and tender” film that also feels like a “devastating act of wish fulfilment”.

Yet the father here is more than just a “ghostly ideal”, said Tim Robey in The Telegraph. The way he interacts with his sons is just one of the highlights of a “magically nimble” film.

Sam Raimi “is the furthest thing from a one-note director”, said Brian Viner in the Daily Mail: his “many credits” range from the Tobey Maguire “Spider-Man” trilogy to the “Evil Dead” franchise.

“Send Help” is a further testament to his versatility, blending “comedy, social satire, survivalist-thriller and gross-out body-horror”, to often “compelling” effect.

Rachel McAdams stars as Linda, a mousy office worker who is flying to a meeting in Thailand when the private jet she is in crashes into the ocean, and she becomes stranded on a desert island with her new boss – an “entitled, sexist, slimeball” (Dylan O’Brien) named Bradley.

The narrative seems to be following a familiar trajectory, as Bradley learns to appreciate his underling’s survival skills (Linda is a dab hand at building shelters). But then the story swerves into new territory – and for those with “a reasonably strong stomach”, what follows is good fun.

I’m afraid I wasn’t entertained by the plot twists, which seemed “derivative”, said Peter Bradshaw in The Guardian. And I found Raimi’s need “to juice everything up with spurious ‘horror’ flourishes” somewhat wearing.

This “eat the rich” parable is undeniably gory, said Clarisse Loughrey in The Independent: its stars are variously drenched in vomit, “bug innards, fish innards, and, of course, several power showers’ worth of spattered blood”. But the story is told with real “wit and viscera”; and McAdams – who initially seems too “glamorous” for the role – acquits herself superbly.

Superhero movies aren’t for everyone, but a core of dedicated fans that seems to replenish itself when each new generation reaches adolescence keeps the genre at the top of Hollywood’s box office hierarchy. It certainly wasn’t always that way, but these eight smashes helped put the superpowered on top.

‘Superman: The Movie’ (1978)

While its pacing feels positively laconic by modern standards, the original “Superman” was a groundbreaking feature, giving the superhero genre its patina of seriousness and Hollywood credibility. Superman’s status as the most recognizable character from the superhero canon — with new iterations to this day — has much to do with the success of director Richard Donner’s gamble.

One bold decision included casting coups like nabbing Gene Hackman to play Superman’s nemesis Lex Luthor, who plans to destroy the West Coast with missile strikes, a plot that Superman (Christopher Reeve) must disrupt while maintaining his alternate identity as Daily Planet reporter Clark Kent. “Superman” is an effective, effects-driven film that “pointed the way for a B picture genre of earlier decades to transform itself into the ruling genre of today,” said Roger Ebert in 2010. (HBO Max)

‘Spider-Man 2’ (2004)

Marvel’s “Spider Man” has been through many adaptations, including the live-action late-70s television series “The Amazing Spider Man.” But the best regarded remains director Sam Raimi’s early aughts trilogy starring Tobey Maguire as Peter Parker/Spider Man.

In the second installment, the overcommitted and stressed Peter gives up on his superhero side gig, in part to pursue his love interest, Mary Jane (Kirsten Dunst). But he is roped back into the game when Dr. Otto Octavius (Alfred Molina) botches a fusion power experiment and turns himself into a kind of mutant, AI-operated octopus. Raimi’s film “not only outstrips its predecessor but has a perversity and quick-wittedness that hardly seem to belong in a comic-book movie,” said Anthony Quinn at The Independent. (Disney+)

‘The Dark Knight’ (2008)

Director Christopher Nolan’s second installment in the gloomy, atmospheric reboot trilogy based on the iconic DC Comics character remains justifiably beloved today, thrilling both ardent fans of the franchise as well as critics wowed by the intricate plot mechanics and powerhouse performances, particularly from the late Heath Ledger, who died tragically before the film’s release.

Christian Bale reprises his role as Batman, locked in a power struggle along with District Attorney Harvey Dent (Aaron Eckhart) against the Gotham mafia that worsens when The Joker (Ledger) — depicted in the film as a darkly funny and bloodthirsty sociopath — threatens to destroy the city if Batman doesn’t reveal his true identity. Nolan’s masterpiece “embeds symbolic drama worthy of Greek tragedy into an erupting crime story, tinged with a burning shower of distrust toward the absoluteness and simplicity of good and evil,” said Brian Eggert at Deep Focus Review. (HBO Max)

‘Iron Man’ (2008)

The culmination of Robert Downey Jr.’s return to stardom after years of substance abuse and personal struggles, “Iron Man” cemented his Hollywood superstar status and turned the films into his own vehicle. He plays Tony Stark, the head of defense contractor Stark Industries, who is gravely wounded and then captured by terrorists in Afghanistan.

Fellow captive Yinsen (Shaun Toub) implants an electromagnet in his chest to prevent shrapnel from killing him, eventually building a small “arc reactor” and powered suit to help them escape, thus creating the Iron Man character. Gwyneth Paltrow and Jeff Bridges also shine in supporting roles. But Downey’s performance is the “beating heart that makes the whole movie tick, mixing humor and a slightly desperate edge and scuzzy charm all up in a cocktail of character psychology that is rarely seen in a comic book movie and never as much fun as it is here,” said Tim Brayton at Alternate Ending. (Disney+)

‘Guardians of the Galaxy’ (2014)

Many films in the Marvel Cinematic Universe take themselves far too seriously, which is what makes director James Gunn’s “Guardians of the Galaxy” such a refreshing and often hilarious spectacle. Quill (Chris Pratt) is an Earthling raised by aliens who by happenstance unearths a sphere capable of destroying the universe. He ends up working with bounty hunters, including a cybernetically altered racoon named Rocket (voiced by Bradley Cooper) and a humanoid tree named Groot (Vin Diesel) to prevent the sphere from falling into the hands of Ronan the Accuser (Lee Pace), a genocidal maniac.

Gunn’s “palpable directorial” brilliance gives the film a “pulse, wit, beauty and a real sensibility” that separates this “latest Marvel cash grab from a lot of off-the-rack movie cartoons,” said Manohla Dargis at The New York Times. (Disney+)

‘Deadpool’ (2016)

Years before Prime Video hit it big with the antihero superhero series “The Boys,” director Tim Miller explored similar terrain in this mordantly funny Marvel adaptation. Ryan Reynolds is the titular Deadpool, a mutant with a disfigured face who has the ability to heal any injuries and is bent on hunting down the people, including Ajax (Ed Skrein), who turned him into what he is.

“Deadpool” features a lot of delirious fourth-wall breaking, like when Deadpool turns to the camera and says, “And yeah, technically this is a murder. But some of the best love stories start with a murder” after dispatching one of Ajax’s henchmen. A “scabrously funny big-screen showcase for the snarkiest of Marvel’s comic-book creations,” the film “pulls off that very postmodern trick of getting away with formulas and cliches simply by pointing them out,” said Justin Chang at Variety. (Disney+)

‘Black Panther’ (2018)

One of a handful of superhero movies to break genre containment and influence the broader culture, director Ryan Coogler’s “Black Panther” was a genuine sensation when it came out in 2018. When his father dies, T’Challa (Chadwick Boseman) becomes the King of Wakanda, an African country that projects an image of underdevelopment to the outside world but is secretly a technologically advanced society powered by an alien element called Vibranium.

Wakandan exile Erik Killmonger (Michael B. Jordan) wants to dethrone T’Challa and export Wakanda’s technology — and dominance — to oppressed Black societies around the world. Its vision of a “Black utopia, a place at the root of all Blackness, self-sufficient and untouched by slavery or colonialism,” is part of what made it an international sensation, but it was also “Marvel’s first genuine masterpiece,” said K. Austin Collins at The Ringer. (Disney+)

‘The Avengers: Endgame’ (2019)

In “Avengers: Endgame,” directors Anthony and Joe Russo were working with a “weight of expectations” that was “fairly unprecedented” in the superhero genre, said Rosie Fletcher and Richard Jordan at Den of Geek. That’s because Marvel’s “Avengers: Endgame,” a “bravura piece of filmmaking” set five years after the events of 2018’s “Avengers: Infinity War,” ”was the final piece in a 22-movie sequence known as the “Infinity Saga.”

You would need to be deeply steeped in the plot mechanics of the earlier films for any kind of summary to make sense, so suffice it to say that this is the film that provides closure on a number of character arcs, including Iron Man, Captain America and Ant-Man after the Red Wedding-like “Infinity War” saw the plot armor of several beloved characters fatally pierced. After “Black Panther,” it is the highest-rated film of the saga, according to Rotten Tomatoes. (Disney+)

Catherine O’Hara portrayed ridiculous eccentrics with equal parts hilarity and humanity. Beginning her five-decade career as a member of Canada’s Second City troupe, which launched fellow stars like John Candy, Martin Short, and frequent collaborator Eugene Levy, she earned a reputation as a scene stealer who found the emotional heart of zany characters. These included Delia Deetz, a pretentious sculptor and malevolent stepmother in the film Beetlejuice (1988), and Moira Rose, a self-absorbed and bankrupt soap star who moves with her family to small-town Ontario in TV’s Schitt’s Creek (2015–20), which earned O’Hara her second Emmy. She was a highlight in a string of Christopher Guest mockumentaries, with roles including a travel agent cast in a small-town musical in Waiting for Guffman (1996) and an aging actress pining for an Oscar in For Your Consideration (2006). O’Hara found her highest-profile role in Home Alone (1990), as a harried suburban mom who accidentally abandons her 8-year-old son. It was a relatively straight role for O’Hara, who reveled in characters lost in their own vanity and delusions. “I love playing people who have no real sense of the impression they’re making on anyone else,” she said. “The more I say it, the more I realize that’s all of us.”

Born in Toronto, Catherine Anne O’Hara was the sixth of seven kids in an Irish immigrant family that “prized storytelling and theatricality,” said The Telegraph (U.K.). Her jokester father worked for a railway; her realtor mother was a gifted mimic whose impressions of clients enlivened family dinners. O’Hara studied theater at Toronto’s Burnhamthorpe Collegiate Institute. After graduating she waitressed at the Second City revue theater, where she was inspired by her brother’s girlfriend Gilda Radner; eventually, she became Radner’s understudy. When Radner left to join the founding cast of Saturday Night Live, O’Hara replaced her, and the troupe became her “second university.” In 1976, it spawned Second City Television, the cult sketch series that “established her as a master of absurdist comedy and outsize characters,” said The Washington Post. She impersonated Katharine Hepburn and Brooke Shields, and played recurring characters including the “bespangled, melodramatic singer” Lola Heatherton and Sister Mary Innocent, a sadistic nun.

After SCTV’s run ended in 1984, O’Hara began landing small film parts, said The Times (U.K.). She made a “scene-stealing appearance” as an ice cream vendor in Martin Scorsese’s After Hours (1985) and played a dishy journalist in Mike Nichols’ Heartburn (1986). But it was Tim Burton who “elevated her to the A-list” with the horror-comedy Beetlejuice, which showcased her bold comic energy. That led to her memorable turn as the frantic mom in Home Alone, which director Chris Columbus credited with giving the film its “emotional depth.” Some of O’Hara’s best work was done alongside Levy, who matched her “in oddball charm,” said The New York Times. The two “functioned as a de facto comedy team” in movies including numerous Guest mockumentaries. They were a married couple in Best in Show (2000), a dog-show send-up in which O’Hara played Cookie Fleck, a bottle-blond with an amorous past, and a former ’60s folk duo who reunite in A Mighty Wind (2003).

Schitt’s Creek, created by Levy and his son Dan, proved a “career-capping triumph” for O’Hara, said the Associated Press. Her over-the-top portrayal of Moira Rose, a verbose narcissist with a unique, affected accent and extensive wig collection, was “the perfect personification of her comic talents” and brought her a new generation of fans. (“What have I told you about putting your body on the internet?” she tells her daughter in one scene. “Never without proper lighting.”) Her final roles were as a widowed therapist on HBO’s postapocalyptic drama The Last of Us and an ousted studio head in the Hollywood satire The Studio. A long-married mother of two and self-described “good Catholic girl at heart,” she called her humor an essential “survival” tool. “It’s one of God’s greatest gifts, because life is full of the dark and the light,” she said. “You gotta look for the light.”

It was “sensible” of Emerald Fennell to put quotation marks around the title of her film adaptation of Emily Brontë’s “Wuthering Heights”, said Matt Maytum in NME. It’s a “fair warning” this won’t be a faithful retelling of the 1847 novel.

Instead, the scene is set for something “a little more arch, playful and scandalising” that’s sure to “stir up heated discourse among literary purists”. But if you embrace Fennell’s “bold vision” and accept her film on its own terms, it’s difficult not to get “swept up in this gothic tale of toxic attachment”.

‘Resplendently lurid’

Fennell’s film is “far from faithful to the original book”, said Caryn James on the BBC. But if you think of it as a “reinvention not an adaptation”, it’s an “utterly absorbing” film. Brontë’s ill-fated lovers are still present, but Fennell’s approach is “sexy, dramatic, melodramatic, occasionally comic and often swoonily romantic”.

Like the book, the action takes place against the backdrop of the rugged Yorkshire moors, but “contemporary” touches have been added, from the sex scenes to extravagant outfits “fit for an Oscar red carpet”.

We’re first introduced to Cathy (Charlotte Mellington) as a young girl living in a “crumbling” old house with her “increasingly drunken, destitute father” Mr Earnshaw (Martin Clunes), said Robbie Collin in The Telegraph. One night, he brings home a “foundling”, Heathcliff (Owen Cooper), who soon becomes a playmate for his daughter. But the children’s sibling-like relationship soon develops into “something dark and taboo”.

The narrative jumps forward a decade and the chemistry between Cathy (Margot Robbie) and Heathcliff (Jacob Elordi) is palpable. “Resplendently lurid, oozy and wild”, the “central illicit affair” between the pair begins to unfold, their encounters accompanied by a series of “breathy electro-ballads by Charli XCX”. This is an “obsessive film about obsession, and hungrily embroils the viewer in its own mad compulsions”.

‘Astonishingly hollow’

I found it “whimperingly tame” when compared with Fennell’s earlier films like “Promising Young Woman” and “Saltburn”, said Clarisse Loughrey in The Independent. She has used the “guise of interpretation to gut one of the most most impassioned, emotionally violent novels” in history. “Adaptation or not, it’s an astonishingly hollow work.”

Even the “much-vaunted trysts” between Cathy and Heathcliff are short-lived and perfunctory, said Danny Leigh in the Financial Times. “Sorry people, but the kink proves mostly straitlaced, the S&M more M&S.” But the “biggest shock” is the “damp” chemistry between the stars.

There are issues, too, with the casting of Elordi that go far beyond the controversies around “‘whitewashing’ a character of ‘dark skin’”. Heathcliff is meant to be a “wild” and dangerous character; “here, he has the sad eyes of a Labradoodle locked out of the front room”.

By the end it feels as if Brontë’s tale has been repurposed into a “20-page fashion shoot of relentless silliness, with bodices ripped to shreds”, said Peter Bradshaw in The Guardian.

“It’s all wildly fun, a fever dream come to life,” said Vicky Jessop in London’s The Standard. But I was left feeling disappointed. “When the sexy sugar rush passes, what’s left?”

Amazon’s new Melania Trump documentary promised it would reveal the real woman behind the first lady’s steely exterior, said Monica Hesse in The Washington Post. But after sitting through this 104-minute exercise in superficiality, I can report “there’s nothing to see.” Melania, which follows the first lady as she prepares for Donald Trump’s second inauguration, is filled with scenes of the inscrutable ex-model trying on hats, strutting down hallways “in stilettos that never come off,” and attending meetings “about place settings and invitations.” Director Brett Ratner—exiled from Hollywood after being accused of sexual misconduct by multiple women—never unearths what Melania actually thinks about her return to the White House, or anything else. It doesn’t matter. Hiding her true personality “is, in fact, her personality.” Despite its vapidity, Melania took in $7 million in its first weekend, “the strongest opening for a documentary in a decade,” said Sam Adams in Slate. That would be impressive, if Amazon hadn’t spent an unprecedented $40 million buying the documentary and another $35 million marketing it. There’s an old Hollywood term for “a $75 million movie that opens with $7 million in box office: a flop.”

Melania isn’t a documentary, said Alexandra Petri in The Atlantic, it’s “a horror movie.” This is the tale of a woman who experiences none of the things that make life worth living: “meaningful conversations, shared laughter, petting a dog, casual interactions with someone who is neither an employee nor a family member.” In their place are “Fittings! More fittings! Pomp! Private jets! Expensively attired billionaires being served—I am not making this up—golden eggs.” Melania is trapped in an invisible bubble she will never be able to escape, “and she hasn’t even noticed.” Please don’t mistake her for a victim, said Maureen Dowd in The New York Times. The “Slovenian Sphinx” is not, as some liberals have fantasized, “Rapunzel in the tower, pining to be saved from the ogre imprisoning her.” She is comfortable with her husband’s authoritarianism, and “comfortable in the frosty vertical solitude of the tower, swaddled in luxury.”

“There is no reason for Melania to exist outside of rank corruption,” said Sonny Bunch in The Bulwark. Amazon founder Jeff Bezos spent $40 million buying this hagiography—$28 million of which went to Melania—in the clear hope of protecting his companies from government interference. “It’s all quite disgusting.” But it’s also quite fascinating to see just how many Americans will trek to a theater to “bask in the golden glow of Trump Tower,” and how such a “pure and naked instrument of graft and propaganda can be deployed to great effect on an audience happy to lap it up.”

“Melania Trump – born Melanija Knavs – has led an undeniably fascinating life,” said Nick Hilton in The Independent. Raised in a housing complex in what is now Slovenia, she started modelling in her teens, and in the 1990s landed up in the US, where she eventually met Donald Trump.

Hers is “an aspirational story” of how “a little girl with nothing but a perfect jawline” conquered America; but oddly, none of these biographical details make it into Amazon’s documentary about her, which was released last week. Instead, “Melania” – for which the First Lady was paid a reported $28 million (£20 million) – focuses on the 20 days leading up to Trump’s inauguration last year. We learn next to nothing about Melania herself; she is mainly shown “preening and scowling”, her face “a mask of pure nothingness”.

‘Designer taxidermy’

There are some revelations, said Janice Turner in The Times: that Melania “hires only people ‘who serve my veeesion’”, that she takes crockery very seriously; and that she finds black and white stuff “classy”.

This is less a documentary than an “elaborate piece of designer taxidermy, horribly overpriced and ice-cold to the touch”, said Xan Brooks in The Guardian. Deadly, dispiriting and “spectacularly unrevealing”, it’s “one of those rare, unicorn films that doesn’t have a single redeeming quality”.

Grovelling billionaires

Well, I was quite interested by how much “crawling” the Trumps’ flunkies do, said Robert Hutton in The Critic. At one point, an aide tells Donald that there will be “the standard presidential parade” before hastily correcting himself: “I shouldn’t say standard. It’s a little bit bigger and a little bit better.”

Then there are the billionaires we see grovelling to the president: how sad, that with all that money, they still have to abase themselves. Which brings us round to Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, who forked out $40 million (£29 million) for the film, the most ever paid for a documentary, and then spent a further $35 million (£25 million) marketing it. Even the richest have things to fear from its subject’s husband. It is this, not the film’s content, that makes it “an important document in the decline of American public life”.

The film has played to largely empty cinemas, but it does have one fan, said Chas Danner in New York Magazine. I loved it, said Trump on Truth Social. “Check it out – A MUST SEE!”

Films about films can alienate the “non-cinephile viewer”, said Kevin Maher in The Times. But happily, Richard Linklater’s “visually lush and frankly encyclopaedic account” of the making of Jean-Luc Godard’s “Breathless” (“À bout de souffle”) doesn’t depend on the viewer picking up on every reference: its “fundamental beauty” lies in “the lightness and the love that Linklater brings to the material”.

Set over the course of the 23-day “Breathless” shoot in the summer of 1959, “Nouvelle Vague” is focused on the “tense” relationship between Godard (Guillaume Marbeck) and his producer Georges de Beauregard. It also examines “the sweetly unfolding relationship between the leads”, Jean Seberg (Zoey Deutch) and Jean-Paul Belmondo (Aubry Dullin). It all builds into “a film of great passion” that is “full of unexpected tenderness” – and which shouldn’t appeal only to aficionados.

“Linklater certainly recreates the look, feel and sound” of Godard’s masterpiece, said Deborah Ross in The Spectator: as in “Breathless”, the dialogue is almost entirely in French; it is shot in black and white; and many New Wave innovations are on show, such as natural light, handheld cameras and choppy cutting. But while “Nouvelle Vague” is “intelligent and funny” and rather fascinating, it is also “far too celebratory to be revelatory”: Godard remains an enigma, and it fails to examine the old-school misogyny on display in his film and others like it. Still, the impact of the French New Wave is hard to overstate, said Robbie Collin in The Telegraph. And it seemed to me that this homage could have done with more of the movement’s “reactive, incautious, free-range” approach. Instead, “its light touch starts to feel uncomfortably like a lack of substance”.

The first two films made by the actor-turned-director Bradley Cooper – “A Star Is Born” and “Maestro” – were rich in “showy pizzazz and ostentatious directorial flourishes”, said Wendy Ide in The Observer. By contrast, his latest, which is loosely based on the life of the British comedian John Bishop, is “refreshingly informal and intimate”. With the story relocated to New York, it stars Will Arnett (“Arrested Development”) as Alex, a “slightly crumpled middle-aged man” whose marriage is running out of steam. He stumbles into comedy when he goes to a West Village bar and signs up to an open-mic night as a way of avoiding the $15 (£11) cover charge. After a couple of minutes on stage, he draws “a few laughs” from his audience – which is enough to spur him on to do more. Arnett, whose voice alone “speaks of two-day stubble, cigarettes and disappointment”, is excellent, as is Laura Dern as his wife; and Cooper pops up too in a “scene-stealing” role as Will’s best friend. Alex’s comedy isn’t “based on jokes”, it is “rambling, dislocated and droll”, and the film’s screenplay (by Cooper) “takes the same approach”. The result is “unassuming, amiable storytelling that sneaks up on you”.

This is a “likeable and spirited” movie featuring a typically “committed” central performance by Arnett, said Peter Bradshaw in The Guardian. But I did find myself wondering: shouldn’t a film about comedy be, well, funny? It struck me as “perfectly watchable”, said Matthew Bond in The Mail on Sunday, but the dialogue is annoyingly “mumbled” and the camera work “wobbly”. Overall, “Is This Thing On?” is “very slight and a tad slow too. The result is not quite comedy but not quite drama either, and while you’ll leave undeniably heart-warmed, you’ll also feel slightly short-changed.”

‘Send Help’

Directed by Sam Raimi (R)

★★★

“The most purely enjoyable Sam Raimi film in years,” Send Help is a horror-comedy that has “the potential to be timeless,” said Alison Foreman in IndieWire. A “rigorously committed” Rachel McAdams stars as a corporate underling who becomes marooned on a deserted island with her company’s new CEO shortly after the pampered young exec, played by Dylan O’Brien, denied her a promotion. Because O’Brien’s Brady is injured and McAdams’ Linda is far more resourceful, the power balance flips, throwing the pair into a survival drama that’s “ghastly without being grim and morally queasy without being mean.”

But Raimi undermines the movie’s “shrewd satire” because he chooses to “juice everything up with spurious horror flourishes,” said Peter Bradshaw in The Guardian. Apparently, he’s still playing to fans of his 1981 breakthrough, The Evil Dead, and the eruptions of gore “undermine the film’s believability, turning everything into silliness.” Still, McAdams shines as a dweeb who transforms into a badass survivalist, and “seeing the actress let her freak flag fly is a delight,” said Frank Scheck in The Hollywood Reporter. O’Brien “matches her step for step” as he transforms from “enjoyably hissable” to possibly humbled. Meanwhile, Raimi “attacks the material with a joyous ferocity,” getting gruesome when needed and relishing every plot twist. Send Help does lose steam toward the end. “But the surprising climax, plus an amusing coda, brings it all home.”

‘Private Life’

Directed by Rebecca Zlotowski (R)

★★★

“Jodie Foster can do just about anything,” said Nick Schager in The Daily Beast. In her latest feat, the two-time Oscar winner fills the lead role in a French-language film for the first time and her anxious performance proves to be the movie’s “undisputed highlight.” Foster plays Lilian Steiner, a Paris psychiatrist who begins chasing clues that could prove that the supposed recent suicide of a client was instead murder. But while there’s never much chance that Lilian’s suspicions will pan out and the movie itself “never quite comes together,” Foster’s turn is “more than enough reason to embark on this off-kilter investigation.”

The movie is “slippery to categorize,” said Naveen Kumar in The Washington Post. It toys with being a psychological thriller yet “manages to dwell in uncertainty” as we wonder if Lilian is onto something or losing her marbles. “Still, there’s something less than satisfying about a story that’s peculiar but not exactly funny” and “low-key unsettling but far from provocative.” Foster easily navigates each tone shift, said Manohla Dargis in The New York Times. She’s also surrounded by strong co-stars, including Virginie Efira as the deceased and Daniel Auteuil as Lilian’s ex-husband, who joins Lilian’s inquiry. Auteuil and Foster “fit together seamlessly, his soft presence working contrapuntally with her sharp edges,” and their pairing both “sweetens the story” and “points to a potential film franchise that I would like to see happen.”

As Hollywood gears up for the March 15 Academy Awards ceremony, the film world continues to turn with February releases. Whether these five features will be part of next year’s Oscar conversation is anyone’s guess, but audiences reeling from a particularly brutal winter could certainly do worse than spending an evening with one of them.

‘Honey Bunch’

After Diana (Grace Glowicki) wakes up from a coma, struggling to remember what happened, her husband Homer (Ben Petrie) whisks her off to an eerie, remote rehab facility. As she begins to recover her memories, she also begins distrusting the motives of the staff, including the coldly clinical Farah (Kate Dickie) and even Homer himself.

Directors Dusty Mancinelli and Madeleine Sims-Fewer (“Violation”) deliver a deliberately disorienting slow burn that erupts into chaos in the movie’s second half, delivering a film that is “thrilling but ponderous, darkly comedic but genuinely disturbing, thoughtful but deeply silly, and 100% weird at all times,” said Jim Vorel at Paste Magazine. (Feb. 13 on Shudder)

‘Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die’ (Feb 13)

Sam Rockwell is an outstanding actor who rarely gets the chance to headline a project, but in “Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die,” he sizzles as a nameless man from the future who takes a group of strangers hostage in a Los Angeles diner and tries to enlist them to stop what he claims is an impending AI apocalypse. It’s a kind of tongue-in-cheek, sci-fi “Groundhog Day.” As “bold as it is clever,” this time loop thriller from director Gore Verbinski (“The Ring”) is “dizzily ambitious in its gallows-tinged nihilism about the technology ruling and ruining our lives,” said David Crow at Den of Geek. (in theaters Feb. 13)

‘Redux Redux’

Irene (Michaela McManus) uses a device that allows her to jump around the multiverse, hunting iterations of her daughter’s murderer, a serial killer named Neville (Jeremy Holm). She can’t seem to save her daughter, but gladly kills Neville over and over, confronting the limits of vengeance — until she has the chance to save someone else.

Directors Kevin and Matthew McManus (who helmed the 2021 cult classic “The Block Island Sound”) have created a “smart, terrifying” thriller that “takes elements of the serial killer genre, aspects of grief drama and a splash of multiverse storytelling and mixes them into something that feels fresh and new,” said Brian Tallerico at Roger Ebert. (in theaters Feb. 20)

‘The President’s Cake’

A parable about ordinary life under dictatorship has never been more relevant than in 2026, even if the subject matter ostensibly focuses on 1990s Iraq. At the direction of the country’s brutal dictator, Saddam Hussein — who would be overthrown in a 2003 US-led military intervention—ordinary Iraqis are ordered to bake cakes to honor his birthday.

In director Hasan Hadi’s first full-length film, 9-year-old Lamia (Baneen Ahmad Nayyef) is put in charge of gathering the supplies for her school’s offering, a daunting task given the punishing sanctions that were imposed on the country at the time. Lamia encounters corruption and predation at every turn, and her “cake becomes a classic MacGuffin” in this “darkly comic odyssey through scarcity, fear and moral erosion,” said James Murphy at The Scoop. (in theaters Feb. 27)

‘Dreams’

Jessica Chastain plays Jennifer, a socialite and philanthropist whose hush-hush romance with a much younger Mexican ballet dancer named Fernando (Isaac Hernández) spirals out of control when he illegally crosses the border and turns up at her San Francisco condo. Jennifer operates an arts foundation for her ultra-wealthy family and met Fernando on one of many trips to Mexico to distribute grants, but his sudden presence in her carefully curated American life triggers a crisis. A “clear-eyed and detail-focused moral drama” from director Michel Franco (“Sundown”) offers “provocative social critique with an extra-sharp sting in the tail,” said Peter Debruge at Variety. (in theaters Feb. 27)

When any “beloved work of literature” is made into a film, there’s always a “niggling worry” that the book will not be “fully realised” on screen, said Wendy Ide in The Observer. But happily, this adaptation of Helen Macdonald’s bestselling 2014 memoir does ample justice to its source material.

The film stars Claire Foy as Helen, an academic whose life falls apart when her photographer father (Brendan Gleeson) dies.

With her career derailing, she buys a goshawk she names Mabel, and becomes “obsessed” with the idea of training it. Her falconry buddy Stuart (Sam Spruell) has warned her that hawks are “perfectly evolved” psychopaths, but she starts to feel a deep connection with Mabel.

Foy, “who seems undaunted by having her face well within gouging distance” of the bird’s beak and claws, gives a “terrific, committed performance”, and the film cleverly “streamlines the multi-stranded structure of the book ... without diminishing its candour and emotional heft”.

The film is rather slow, said Matthew Bond in The Mail on Sunday, but “I liked it”. The flying sequences are “fabulous” – though you pity the rabbits and pheasants that get in Mabel’s way – and the ending is “unexpectedly lovely”.

“Foy is excellent”, said Deborah Ross in The Spectator, and the film isn’t too “Hollywood”: there are no “flashes of sudden insight”, for instance. But I did find myself wondering, “is it right, keeping a wild animal captive”?

For a lot of the film, this “magnificent” bird just sits in Helen’s living room, “tethered to her perch, ankles in chains, wearing one of those creepy hoods that blocks all vision”. Macdonald’s story is told perfectly well, “but if you are #TeamMabel, your empathy may not be where the film wishes it to be”.