A movie doesn’t have to be set on Halloween to be scary, but it doesn’t hurt. The holiday atmosphere can provide an extra element of suspense when done right, as in these four notable films.

‘Halloween’ (1978)

Horror legend John Carpenter’s lean franchise-launching slasher deftly adds a supernatural aspect to his unkillable knife-wielding mental institution escapee, Michael Myers. The classic puts “viewers through a troubled nightmare of suspense and uncertain dread,” said Brian Eggert at Deep Focus Review. (AMC+)

‘Ginger Snaps’ (2000)

In this Canadian cult classic that doubles as a coming-of-age story, a sardonic goth transforms into a werewolf in the days leading up to Halloween and terrifies her younger sister. The movie, through character-building and atmosphere, “has fun with its own premises without turning into an empty camp exercise,” said Dave Kehr at The New York Times. (Peacock)

‘Trick ’r Treat’ (2007)

Arguably the best horror anthology ever, the movie features four intersecting segments centered around a demonic, pumpkin-headed trick-or-treater seeking to avenge sins of the town’s past. It’s a movie that “feels less like it was merely set on the holiday and more like it was built out of everything people love about it,” said Arleigh at Through the Shattered Lens. (HBO Max)

‘Hell House LLC’ (2015)

In this found footage gem, a documentary team seeks the truth about a haunted house massacre by tracking down its sole survivor, who has tapes. With a slow-burn buildup, this “genuinely suspenseful” movie “carefully sets up its scares in a way that actually contributes to the story,” said Luiz H.C. at Bloody Disgusting. (AMC+)

For his new crime drama, director Dominik Moll found inspiration in the real-life cases of protesters who were badly injured by French police during the 2018 “gilets jaunes” demonstrations, said Peter Bradshaw in The Guardian. Léa Drucker stars as Stéphanie, a conscientious police internal-affairs investigator, whose routine life is upended when she is handed the case of the title – that of a young man who was left with brain damage as a result of being struck in the face by a rubber bullet during anti-tax protests in Paris.

Sifting through the evidence, she discovers that he is from her own home town, in the “left behind” northeast, and her mother knows his. She comes up against other complications too, including the resentment of her police officer ex-husband, who thinks she is a traitor to the force. The film is “nowhere near as complex” as Moll’s dark psychological thriller “Harry, He’s Here to Help” (2000), but it is serious and often compelling.

Moll “expertly maps how justice can stall in a near-broken system”, said Danny Leigh in the Financial Times. Stéphanie initially pursues the case with vigour but soon finds herself caught in an impossible position: loathed by her colleagues but, to “a sceptical world”, just another cop.

I was gripped by Stéphanie’s painstaking efforts to uncover the truth, said Hadley Freeman in The Times, but what stuck with me were the long conversations she has, with her family and other officers, about the “morality of it all” – the police’s actions, and those of the protesters. Moving and intelligent, “Case 137” makes a “strong argument for less gloss and more reality” in films.

Most of us have access to “thousands of films” at home but there is something special about the “big-screen communal experience”, said Tim Robey in The Telegraph.

“Shockwaves from the pandemic” saw 150 operating cinemas close permanently but there are still many “British movie palaces” to explore. Here are our favourite independent cinemas worth paying a visit to.

The Odyssey, St Albans, Hertfordshire

In 2014, this “single-screen, 500-seat arthouse” became the town’s first cinema to open in years, said Robey in The Telegraph. The historic building has been used as a picture palace since 1908 and has been renovated to highlight its “1930s Art Deco glory”. It is now called The Odyssey to honour Stanley Kubrick; the famed director was known to be a “St Albans habitué” in his later years.
odysseypictures.co.uk

Campbeltown Picture House, Argyll & Bute

Constructed in 1913, this charming cinema is one of the first “purpose-built” venues in Scotland and is known locally as The Wee Pictures, said Madeleine Silver in Country Life. Architect Albert Gardner designed the “Art Nouveau spectacle”. In 1935, the cinema was revamped by Gardner, who gave it the “ambiance of a Mediterranean courtyard” by projecting a blue sky “complete with moving white clouds” onto the ceiling of the auditorium.
campbeltownpicturehouse.co.uk

Aldeburgh Cinema, Suffolk

The history of this cinema dates back to 1919, when it was opened by local draper Walter Hill. Back then, it was up against the “silent films and magic lantern shows” at nearby Jubilee Hall but it managed to survive the competition, said Silver in Country Life. Today, Aldeburgh Cinema offers a vibrant programme that balances “offbeat films with blockbusters”.
aldeburghcinema.co.uk

The Magic Lantern, Tywyn, Gwynedd

As a community cinema, this venue is flourishing, said Shaurya Thapa in Time Out. The Magic Lantern was crowned winner of Cinema of the Year Award at last year’s British Independent Film Awards. The cinema was built in 1893 to be used as the Town Assembly Room but it has embraced today’s technology and some of its screens are “equipped with state-of-the-art 4K projection and Dolby Atmos sound”.
tywyncinema.co.uk

Barbican, London 

This “fiercely independent” venue is “unrivalled”, said Mike Daw in The Standard. With a line-up of films that is “impossible to overlook”, the Barbican makes the most of its “power” as a bigger arts establishment to help keep “even the most niche tickets relatively affordable”. It also manages to book “fabulous enriching names for Q&A sessions and talks”. This is “independent cinema at its finest”.
barbican.org.uk

Many horror hits are more fascinating or engrossing than terrifying. But these four films manage to create genuinely unnerving atmospheres of dread.

‘The Exorcist’ (1973)

Director William Friedkin’s classic brought demonic terror straight to the heart of the postwar American suburbs with this story of a young girl’s possession. It retains its capacity to unsettle, leaving the “audience subject to devilish, claustrophobic torment,” said Brian Eggert at Deep Focus Review. (HBO Max)

‘The Blair Witch Project’ (1999)

The film that invented the “found footage” trope is also viscerally scary, following a group of students into the woods to investigate a local supernatural legend. Relying on atmosphere instead of flashy special effects, it “set up a convincing everyday reality and furtively sneaked the horror in,” said Steve Rose at The Guardian. (HBO Max)

‘Session 9’ (2001)

A group of workers is sent to clear asbestos from an abandoned mental hospital and slowly succumbs to claustrophobia, paranoia and fear. This “character-driven take on the classic haunted house movie” is “one of the great American horror films of the 21st century,” said Matthew Monagle at Roger Ebert. (AMC+)

‘The Witch’ (2015)

Director Robert Eggers delivers a taut, terrifying period piece with this tale of a 17th-century New England family expelled from their village and stalked by a witch — a movie that also put the then-fledgling studio A24 on the map. Suffused with “quiet, tangible malevolence,” the tale “carefully strips you of modern sensibilities, pulling you into a world without irony or awareness,” said David Crow at Den of Geek. (Prime Video)

‘You Can See Everything’

Directed by Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim (R)

★★★★

“No two people will draw the same conclusions from this movie. That is part of what makes it a masterpiece,” said Shane O’Neill in The Washington Post. Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim’s unsettling portrait of convicted Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes became “the most anticipated documentary of the decade” when an “unnerving” teaser was released last month showing a smiling, unblinking Holmes in extreme close-up staring at Fielder and insisting on her guilelessness. Word spread that shortly before she reported to prison in 2023, she had invited Fielder, the idiosyncratic mastermind behind The Rehearsal, to bring his cameras into her home, and in the resulting three-hour film, “she doesn’t get any less weird or more scrutable.”

Somehow “more shocking, thornier, and revealing than billed,” You Can See Everything “plays like an unraveling of certainty in real time,” said Adrian Horton in The Guardian. Holmes continues to insist she did nothing wrong when she became a billionaire a decade ago by touting a breakthrough medical device that her company couldn’t build, said Owen Gleiberman in Variety. Yet when she heads to prison halfway through, bidding goodbye to her husband and two children, this already riveting film “truly takes wing.” Bringing in a stand-in for Holmes, Fielder keeps pushing to understand his subject’s apparent detachment from reality, until the movie becomes “an intricate investigation into, among other things, the incomprehensibility of love,” said Nick Schager in The Daily Beast. In the end, “it’s not just the film of the year.” It’s also “a documentary that stands shoulder to shoulder with the form’s all-time greats.”

‘Sense and Sensibility’

Directed by Georgia Oakley (PG)

★★★

The new screen adaptation of Sense and Sensibility is “not the lush, buttoned-up period drama of tradition,” said Nikki Baughan in Screen Daily. Director Georgia Oakley, coming off an acclaimed 2022 art house debut, clearly wanted to foreground relatable emotions over Regency-era costumery with her take on Jane Austen’s tale of the cash-strapped Dashwood sisters. “That’s not to say the film doesn’t look gorgeous.” But compared with Ang Lee’s “candy-colored” 1995 version, Oakley’s is “decidedly more grounded” as it once again lets us watch sensible Elinor and free-spirited Marianne pursue husbands after their father’s death lands them in relative financial peril. “For those of us who adore the 1995 film, unfavorable comparisons seem inevitable,” said David Rooney in The Hollywood Reporter.

Despite a “more than capable cast,” led by Daisy Edgar-Jones and Esmé Creed-Miles, the new movie has “a low-energy feel” in part because Oakley and her screenwriter “lean so heavily into Elinor and Marianne’s crushing disappointments and the forces holding them back in a period of vast gender inequality.” Fortunately, none of Oakley’s tweaks “dim the roiling passions of the sisters as they approach love from opposite ends of the emotional spectrum,” said Derek Smith in Slant. By focusing on Elinor and Marianne’s bond and how it’s tested by their different outlooks, this Sense and Sensibility “manages the difficult feat of breathing new life into these familiar characters’ interior lives.”

‘Misty Green’

Directed by Chris Rock (R)

★★★

“If Misty Green never comes apart at the seams,” it’s because Rosalind Eleazar “simply won’t let it,” said David Ehrlich in IndieWire. The Slow Horses actress is “never less than great” in the title role of Chris Rock’s new drama about a hot-mess Hollywood has-been who might just land a comeback role nearly 20 years after her peak if she can refrain from sabotaging herself for once. Rock’s “unkempt” script strains to combine a poignant character study with a scalding takedown of L.A.’s dream factory, and its excesses might have tanked the film if Eleazar didn’t hold it all together by “sheer force of will.”

The movie has “nothing insightful” to tell us about Hollywood’s dark corners that we haven’t heard already, said Alison Willmore in NYMag.com. The despicable side characters “feel a little easy,” starting with a producer, played by Adam Driver, who tempts Misty with drugs and lucrative sex work. Only one industry player comes across as noble—“probably because he’s played by Rock himself.” Fortunately, none of Rock’s misfires matter “once you lock into what Eleazar is doing,” said David Fear in Rolling Stone. She brings “nuance, shade, and emotional depth” to every story beat in Misty’s quest for redemption. “Eleazar doesn’t just make the movie work; she is the movie.” The TV veteran has never previously landed such a robust role, and “dear god, does she make the most of it.” She “deserves every accolade and every bit of the spotlight that Misty Green affords her.”

The best crime thrillers consider the way violence, an endemic feature of human societies, can spiral out of hand. These four superb films approach that reality from very different vantage points.

‘The French Connection’ (1971)

A pulse-pounding narrative follows hard-nosed New York City cops Jimmy Doyle (Gene Hackman) and Buddy Russo (Roy Scheider) as they try to bust up a heroin ring based in France. It’s a “story about ugly things and awful people, headlined by one of the era’s finest antiheroes,” said Tim Brayton at Alternate Ending. (Prime Video)

‘Fargo’ (1996)

In this mordantly funny parable, Jerry Lundegaard (William H. Macy) hires two inept sociopaths to kidnap his wife and puts himself on a collision course with small-town cop Marge Gunderson (Frances McDormand). The film “rotates its story through satire, comedy, suspense and violence, until it emerges as one of the best films I’ve ever seen,” said Roger Ebert at the time. (MGM+)

‘Memories of Murder’ (2003)

Director Bong Joon Ho’s iconic procedural follows a sometimes hilariously inept investigation into a series of small town murders. The film “challenges and subverts the serial killer procedural in its entirety,” said Peter Bradshaw at The Guardian. (Prime Video)

‘Blue Ruin’ (2013)

Macon Blair stars as Dwight Evans, a man living on the margins of society who learns that his parents’ killer is being released from prison. Dwight then sets off to seek revenge. The movie succeeds by “probing deeper than usual into the effects (and practicalities) of violence,” said Kim Newman at Empire. (Peacock)

The films Monica Dolan tends to appear in “aren’t massively high profile”, said David Jenkins on Little White Lies, though she is “one of the finest and most thoughtful actors working today”. In this true-life drama, she plays Galway-based amateur historian Catherine Corless, who in 2010 chose the former Bon Secours Mother and Baby Home, in her home town of Tuam, as the subject of an assignment for her evening class in local history.

In the course of her research, Corless discovered that, over four decades, 800 babies and infants had died at the home. Their deaths had been concealed, and their remains buried on site. Some were dumped in a disused septic tank. Dolan “tamps down the melodrama and ups the raw emotion” in a film that “carefully hits all of its expected beats”.

The scandal was the subject of a 2017 New York Times article, said Kevin Maher in The Times, which is adapted here by screenwriter Rebecca Lenkiewicz.

Sensitively directed by Frank Berry, the film “advances clearly and respectfully” through the investigation, as Corless insists on answers from the religious order that ran the home, and the Catholic establishment, and so uncovers evidence of systemic abuse and appalling cruelty. Yet she is herself an “unexpectedly complex” figure, who is recovering from depression – and also haunted by the cruelty that she meted out to the Bon Secours children she met in her youth.

It is “a painful, devastating film”, said Cath Clarke in The Guardian. Dolan really excels here, as do the actors who play the survivors. Some appear only briefly, “but their faces stayed with me”. You’d expect a drama like this to be “a difficult watch”, but with such assured performances, it is the opposite: you can’t look away.

‘Musk’

Directed by Alex Gibney (R)

★★★

“As a character study, Musk is fascinating,” said Bilge Ebiri in NYMag.com. “As a warning about our future, it’s terrifying.” Alex Gibney’s nearly four-hour long documentary, which has drawn insults and legal threats from its subject, “gives us both the myth and the reality,” turning back the clock on Elon Musk’s story to revisit all the pitches he’s made for his business ventures that have obscured troubling truths—such as the deadly unreliability of the self-driving software in Tesla’s cars. Viewers will come away convinced the world’s richest man mostly excels at self-promotion; they’ll also be frightened by the power he’s accrued. Still, you have to wonder: “Will it speak primarily to the converted?” Though Gibney’s film will surely spawn viewer nightmares, said Ben Croll in The Wrap, “it takes some time getting there.” The first half, which covers Musk’s early history as an entrepreneur, “charts a trajectory of upward failing” that enriches him enough to fund SpaceX, his reputation-making breakthrough.

The “more scabrous” post-intermission second half paints him as a man undone by the pandemic shutdown, but turns devastating only when it details how many millions will die as a result of his detour into slashing government jobs and aid programs for President Trump. When Ashley St. Clair, a recent Musk ex and the mother of one of his 14 known children, calls him “a nuke,” it chills. Some of Gibney’s daring formal choices, including having many of his subject’s past public statements spoken by a computer-animated Musk avatar, prove distracting, said David Fear in Rolling Stone. Still, once Musk builds its case that a man with a god complex has built an empire whose satellites, rockets, social media platform, and personal wealth give him enormous sway over our present and future, “it’s hard not to feel a deep sense of despair.”

‘Your Mother Your Mother Your Mother’

Directed by Bassam Tariq (R)

★★★

With his latest screen turn, twotime Oscar winner Mahershala Ali has given Hollywood “a new kind of action hero,” said Stephanie Zacharek in Time. Latif, a hitman who’s also a father of three and a practicing Muslim, faces compounding crises when his wife dies, leaving him with a newborn who can’t tolerate formula. The role gives Ali “plenty to work with,” because Latif’s quest to secure breast milk for his youngest helps pull him into the middle of a war between a porn king and a gold-toothed Christian fanatic played with aplomb by John Cho. And while the film is “most entertaining when it indulges its tawdry side,” it tangles credibly “with complex issues of faith.”

Your Mother Your Mother Your Mother “doesn’t completely cohere,” said Nick Schager in The Daily Beast. Writer-director Bassam Tariq is good at bringing out Latif’s struggles with faith and rapport with his children, but “there’s far too little focus on the adrenalized action,” and the hero’s compelling story arc is “sabotaged” by a “too-comforting” finale. Still, this picture, named after an Islamic hadith, “lives a notch above most action films,” said Alissa Wilkinson in The New York Times. While its violence is “shockingly graphic in places,” the film is beautifully shot, “crackles with tension,” and features standout performances from Ali and the actress Adia, who plays Latif’s teenage daughter. This is a movie that asks if a person who strives to be good can be forgiven for the worst they’ve done, and “when it’s in its rhythm, it’s a great story.”

Molly Manners directed four episodes of Netflix’s “One Day”, the hit adaptation of David Nicholls’ bestselling novel; now, she has made an impressive feature debut, said Tara O’Brady in The Irish Times.

“Extra Geography” is set in a boarding school in North Yorkshire in the early 2000s, and “follows two close friends (newcomers Marni Duggan and Galaxie Clear) “who decide that academic success is not enough”. They must also become “worldly”. So they assign themselves a project to fall in love, and alight upon their geography teacher (Alice Englert). However, a complication arises in the form of an interschool production of “A Midsummer Night’s Dream”, which “brings boys into their previously closed world”, and tests the girls’ bond.

Adapted from a story by Rose Tremain, “the film treats adolescence as a nerve-racking rollercoaster of exaggerated stakes and cringe comedy, allowing both girls to be selfish, mean, insecure and, simultaneously, endearing”.

A “frothy, funny coming-of-ager”, featuring “uncommonly good” performances from its two young stars, “Extra Geography” is quite simply “sublime”, said Kevin Maher in The Times. It has touches of the US high-school comedy “Booksmart”, with added class tension because we’re in the UK. The script contains plenty of “zingers”, but the ending is “bittersweet”.

The film “plots a safer route” than Tremain’s novel, in which the girls project “colonial fantasies of New Zealand onto their part-Maori teacher”, said Hanna Flint in Time Out. It’s a shame it detours around that rocky terrain but this barbed satire about female friendship and rivalry is still “a road worth taking”.

In August 2022, author Salman Rushdie was being interviewed at an event in upstate New York when a man rushed onto the stage and stabbed him 15 times in the neck, chest, eye, hand and stomach. His assailant, Hadi Matar, a 24-year-old from New Jersey, later said he had been motivated in part by the 1989 fatwa issued by Ayatollah Khomeini over Rushdie’s book “The Satanic Verses”. This “excellent” documentary, directed by the Oscar-winning Alex Gibney, tells the “terrifying, inspiring story” of how he survived that ordeal, said Peter Bradshaw in The Guardian.

It is narrated by Rushdie himself and makes use of “intimate” hospital-bedside video footage shot by his wife, the poet Rachel Eliza Griffiths, as well as archive footage of his life and career, and of the attack. “What emerges is Rushdie’s courage and his remarkably level-headed, calm and unafraid writerly voice”, insisting on the “primacy of literature” and “freedom of expression”.

It is not an easy watch, said Philip Concannon in Sight and Sound. Rushdie lost an eye in the frenzied, 27-second attack, and the sight of it bulging out of its socket is “truly shocking”. The archival footage, too, of the “vociferous” reaction to “The Satanic Verses” is “astonishing”.

“Knife” attempts to be an “incisive anatomy of the stabbing”, yet it shows “little interest in understanding the psyche” of Matar, said Shaurya Thapa in Time Out – a man so consumed by extremism “that he’d barely glanced at ‘The Satanic Verses’ before he picked up the knife”. And its “near-hagiographic framing” of Rushdie becomes “monotonous”. Still, the film is surprisingly lively, and the clips of him in hiding in the 1990s – sitting in a safe house playing Nintendo – are fascinating.

Unless they are holding back some last-minute surprises, studios have not timed their best horror releases to coincide directly with Halloween this year. They are instead distributing them over the course of the larger pumpkin, sweater and apple-picking season. Whether you are looking for a zombie apocalypse, ghost story or blood-soaked slasher, you won’t be disappointed.

‘Never After Dark’

Airi (Moeka Hoshi) is a sought-after traveling medium who specializes in releasing tormented spirits so they can move on to the next plane of existence. She is hired by Teiko (Tae Kimura) to clear a ghost from his sleek countryside hotel while her son, Gunji (Kento Kaku), brings a Dana Scully energy as the supernatural skeptic. The spirit is called The Gaping Mouth Man (Mutsuo Yoshioka), and he is more than the icily competent Airi bargained for. Anchored by Hoshi’s “deeply present, engaged performance,” writer-director Dave Boyle’s film “builds atmosphere and tension to a truly insane final act,” said Brian Tallerico at Roger Ebert. (in theaters now)

‘Resident Evil’

Even hardcore fans of the 90s-era Capcom game would admit that most of the “Resident Evil” movies have been pretty mid. Now, with “Weapons” and “Barbarian” director Zach Cregger on board, the franchise has been given new life.

“Resident Evil” follows, often from the first-person vantage point like in the game, disheveled hospital courier Bryan (Austin Abrams) as his late-night organ delivery is waylaid by a viral outbreak that swiftly turns people into tentacled, zombie-like nightmares. Cregger’s “lean, gripping and relentless” film shows “how movies and video games can merge in a way that makes them stronger for sharing their DNA rather than disfiguring them both,” said David Ehrlich at IndieWire. (in theaters now)

‘Verity’

Anne Hathaway and Dakota Johnson headline director Michael Showalter’s adaptation of Colleen Hoover’s best-selling— and originally self-published — novel. Johnson plays Lowen Ashleigh, a down-on-her-luck ghost writer hired to complete a bestselling thriller series for the novelist Verity Crawford (Hathaway) after she is rendered comatose in an accident. But when Lowen starts digging around, she unearths terrifying secrets about Verity and her husband, Jeremy (Josh Hartnett). It looks like a “thrilling movie that promises a ton of mystery,” said Anthony Nash at ComingSoon.net. (in theaters now)

‘Other Mommy’

Rob Savage (“Host”) helms this tale of Bela (Arabella Olivia Clark) an eight-year-old menaced along with her father (Jay Duplass) by a sinister, shapeshifting doppelganger of her mother (Jessica Chastain) whom she calls “Other Mommy.” Based on a novel by Josh Malerman (“Bird Box”), this nutty-looking movie is almost guaranteed to be the commercial horror hit of the fall by virtue of Chastain’s presence. The film’s theme “explores the limits of family and how fragile the bonds built within it can be if parents don’t guarantee their children a safe and stable homelife,” said Ricardo Serrano Denis at The Beat. (in theaters Oct. 9)

‘The Cycle’

Is the latest film from writer-director Jordan Downey (“The Head Hunter”) a creature feature? Psychological horror? Whatever it is, the trailer will make your skin crawl.

When three bodies are found brutally torn apart in a house, Meg (Deborah Ann Woll) is informed by Ian (Will Hochman), the detective working the case, that one of them is her dad, who has been missing for 36 years. After the discovery of the body, Meg finds herself at the “center of a mystery involving an estranged father, a horrifying crime scene and secrets that apparently refused to stay buried,” said Hannah Hunt at Collider. (Oct. 23 on Shudder)

‘Victorian Psycho’

The best way to describe “Victorian Psycho” might be “Saltburn” meets “The Texas Chainsaw Massacre.” Maika Monroe plays Winifred Notty, an unrepentant sociopath who takes a job as a governess for the two children of Mr. and Mrs. Pounds (Jason Isaacs and Ruth Wilson) at their secluded manor and swiftly begins butchering the staff.

Monroe, known for her quietly understated performances in horror classics like “It Follows” and “Watcher,” really lets loose here. A movie that refuses to “take itself or its form too seriously,” it delivers a “nasty, happy little surprise with grotesque kills and a staunch refusal to pull back on the promises of its title,” said Josh Korngut at Dread Central. (in theaters Nov. 13)

‘Digger’

Directed by Alejandro G. Iñárritu (R)

★★

“It’d be a mistake to judge Digger by the standards of a normal film,” said Amy Nicholson in the Los Angeles Times. Alejandro G. Iñárritu’s over-the-top new satire, featuring Tom Cruise in “his riskiest role in eons,” offers viewers no hope, “only a seductive, mischievous malevolence that, by design, feels empty as soon as the end credits roll.” But maybe that’s intended, because the subject is climate collapse and the Oscar-winning director of Birdman and The Revenant doesn’t seem to think there’s any way to avoid the catastrophe. Cruise plays Digger Rockwell, a greedy oil baron who has unleashed an environmental disaster, and Cruise is so committed to the villainous role, “we can’t take our eyes off him,” said Bilge Ebiri in NYMag.com.

Unfortunately, “the only other actor besides Cruise I enjoyed watching was Riz Ahmed,” in the role of a science consultant to Digger. The rest is so aggravating that “it’s like being trapped inside a tuba for two hours.” Here’s the thing, though: Except for a major twist that backfires, “the movie knows what it’s doing.” It’s meant to horrify. I found it “rage-inducing” for a different reason, said Johnny Oleksinski in the New York Post. Cruise and Iñárritu think they’ve made an urgent film but are “blinded to their baby’s badness” by their egos. Despite having “all the makings of a prestige hit,” Digger “lacks a single funny joke or even half-believable moment.” At least it’s likely to vanish quickly. “Nobody will be debating this movie. It’s not worth the time.”

‘The History of Concrete’

Directed by John Wilson (Not rated)

★★★

Fans of How To With John Wilson, the acclaimed 2020–23 TV docuseries, will be pleased that Wilson’s big-screen debut is “essentially a 100-minute version of an episode,” said Adrian Horton in The Guardian. Consistently compelling, surprising, and “laugh-out-loud funny,” The History of Concrete follows the documentarian as he again takes a mundane subject and uses it to spin out intriguing detours, memorable visual jokes, and insightful ruminations about the human condition. Yes, Wilson’s “casual, ambling” film provides a lot of information about concrete—possibly the most-used human-made substance on the planet, said Stephanie Zacharek in Time. Mostly, though, “it will show you how Wilson’s mind works, how it jumps from one seemingly random thought to the next and miraculously connects them.”

Wilson’s curiosity takes him to some far-off places, including Rome, but the best segments grow out of his encounters with fellow New York City–area eccentrics, including an aging musician he befriends and helps guide through personal loss. In truth, much of this “weird, fun” film is about the difficulty of securing financing to make a documentary, “especially if it’s about concrete,” said Alissa Wilkinson in The New York Times. But because Wilson’s wanderings eventually lead to a poignant conclusion that ties all the loose threads together, “you’re left wondering how a movie about concrete could leave a lump in your throat.” Of course, “that’s how Wilson works, making us see what we might not have otherwise.”

“Sometimes it feels as if all human life is contained in this deeply moving documentary from the veteran American filmmaker Ross McElwee,” said Kevin Maher in The Times. “Grief and loss, marriage and family, work, success, failure and fame are all embraced.”

McElwee started making the film in 2008 as a light-hearted personal piece about an attempt by Hollywood producers to turn his 1986 indie documentary “Sherman’s March” into a drama series for streaming.

That project stalled but, following the death of his 27-year-old son Adrian from a fentanyl overdose in 2016, he went back to the footage he had shot for it – and created this documentary. It also makes use of home-movie clips, previous documentaries that Adrian had appeared in, and Adrian’s own work as an aspiring filmmaker.

“Remake” serves as a eulogy for Adrian, but McElwee also asks whether, in constantly filming his son instead of interacting with him directly, he let him down as a parent.

This is “one of the most outstanding films of this year”, said Jonathan Romney in the Financial Times, and easily the “most unapologetically personal”. And while it seeks to celebrate Adrian’s life, it is desperately sad.

“Every shot of Adrian – a cute, chatty little kid, fishing off a pier, pretending to run a restaurant, and slowly getting older and bigger – becomes painfully charged,” said Leslie Felperin in The Guardian.

“It’s not just that the little kid is gone”; Adrian himself is gone. “Remake” slowly reveals what led to Adrian’s death. The result is a “profoundly moving work”, about parenting and about art, which “lingers in the mind long after the tears have dried”.

Who wants to see the new, nearly four-hour documentary about Elon Musk? Not Musk.

The former trillionaire is threatening a defamation lawsuit over explosive claims in Alex Gibney’s film “Musk.” Social media companies are hesitant to allow promotion on their platforms, and Hollywood is whispering that the tech mogul’s power might keep the public from opportunities to see the film.

What did the commentators say?

“So much for free speech,” said The Hollywood Reporter. Social media platforms YouTube, TikTok and Meta’s Instagram and Facebook all initially declined to run the trailer for “Musk,” though YouTube and Meta later backtracked. (Musk-owned X is not accepting ads for the movie.) A hesitance to provide publicity is a problem for the film because “traction on social media is key” to the success of most modern documentaries.

The social media freeze-out comes amid “concerns” that “political considerations are influencing the rollout” of the film, said The New York Times. “Musk” is set for an Oct. 9 release in the United States, but Universal “has yet to announce any release dates” overseas. The studio counters that it “simply needs more time” to schedule foreign markets.

Audiences at this month’s Venice Film Festival “loved” the documentary that depicts Musk as a “plutocrat with questionable judgment and unchecked power,” Lorraine Ali said at the Los Angeles Times. There was a time when Musk would have been featured as a forward-thinking entrepreneur. Now audiences want to see depictions of the “dark side of wealth, fame and alleged genius.”

What next?

“Musk” is scheduled to stream on HBO Max after its theatrical run. But Gibney is nervous the streamer “may not be inclined to back the film” following the merger of Paramount with HBO parent company Warner Bros. Discovery, said The Atlantic.

Paramount is reportedly seeking funding from Musk to help complete the merger. The tech mogul, meanwhile, is making his feelings clear about the film and its future. “Musk” is a “hit piece that misses,” he said on X. The documentary is guilty of the “fatal sin of being boring for four hours.”

To create the illusion of “movie magic”, cinema has always relied on “smoke, mirrors and sleight of hand”, said Evelyn Richards in National Geographic. With the help of cutting-edge technology and behind-the-scenes brilliance, “monsters tower over cities, broomsticks take flight and hand-drawn sketches become fantastical worlds”. The film industry spans all continents, which means there are many fascinating museums where you can learn all about what it takes to “make the impossible look real”. Here are some of the best.

Lumière Museum, Lyon, France

If you want to understand cinema, it “helps to visit where it all began”, said Richards in National Geographic. The Lumière family’s photographic plate factory is aptly located on the Rue du Premier-Film. This was the setting for “Workers Leaving the Lumière Factory”, filmed in 1895 by Louis Lumière, and “considered one of the world’s first real motion pictures”. In the “ornate art nouveau” Lumière family home, you can look at early cameras, objects and archive material that chart the moving-picture experiments the Lumière brothers conducted. And the “Hangar du Premier-Film, where that pioneering footage was filmed, fittingly houses a cinema today”.
institut-lumiere.org

Museo Nazionale del Cinema, Turin, Italy

The “vertical museum” in northern Italy “takes visitors on an elevator ride through cinema history”, said Chonx Tibajia in Tatler Asia. It is housed in the “striking” Mole Antonelliana, once the tallest masonry building in Europe. One of the museum’s main draws is its variety: “expect vintage cameras, interactive installations and rare stills, from Italian neorealism to spaghetti westerns”. And, once you’ve climbed 500ft to the top, you can sit back and enjoy an extraordinary, panoramic view – a “real-life establishing shot of the city”.
museocinema.it

Museum of Narrative Art, Los Angeles, US

This new museum, created by Star Wars filmmaker George Lucas, gets “five out of five (death) stars from me”, said Kinvara Balfour in The Telegraph. Its “sleek and spaceship-like” design is “comfortable and spacious” both outside and in: “rather like an Apple headquarters on Mars, with a big garden and some Yoda statues on plinths”. There are more than 40,000 exhibits, including a digital Sistine Chapel, silent films, archive material and, of course, plenty of Star Wars and Indiana Jones costumes, props and vehicles. You can also venture beyond film to see art from Banksy, Norman Rockwell and Diego Rivera. It’s a “once-in-a-century kind of a public offering”.
lucasmuseum.org

Sound of Music Museum, Salzburg, Austria

For fans of the cult 1965 film who wish to “start at the very beginning”, this new Austrian museum “could be a very good place to start”, said Joshua Thurston in The Times. The exhibitions celebrate both the singalong classic and the story of the real-life Von Trapp family, who fled the Nazis in 1938. In the 17th-century Hellbrunn Palace, “where many scenes from the film were shot”, you can see “nearly 450 objects, including props, costumes and recordings of the music”. The highlight is a replica of the pavilion used as a backdrop when Liesl von Trapp and her suitor Rolf Gruber sing “Sixteen Going on Seventeen”.
salzburg.info

Ghibli Museum, Tokyo, Japan

Even if you haven’t seen “My Neighbour Totoro” or “Spirited Away”, a tour of this museum dedicated to Studio Ghibli’s work will leave you “mesmerised”, said Gregory Wakeman in Smithsonian Magazine. It’s a “children’s, technology and fine arts museum all rolled into one”, and a love letter to animation. The space is designed by Hayao Miyazaki, the studio’s co-founder, so that both adults and kids “can aimlessly walk around and get lost”. The architecture is “gorgeous”, with bridges, balconies, buildings and a rooftop garden. Superfans can also take a trip to Ghibli Park, four hours south of Tokyo, which “brings to life” many of the settings of Ghibli movies, including Mononoke Village from “Princess Mononoke” (1997) and Howl’s Castle from “Howl’s Moving Castle” (2004).
ghibli-museum.jp

‘Primetime’

Directed by Lance Oppenheim (R)

★★★

“I’ve admired Robert Pattinson for years,” said Bilge Ebiri in NYMag.com. Still, “nothing quite prepared me” for his maniacal turn as Chris Hansen, host of the notorious 2000s network reality show To Catch a Predator. In Primetime, a movie “shot to look like something between an unearthed videotape and a bad nightmare,” we see Pattinson’s Hansen become increasingly obsessed with using the promise of sex with minors to lure pedophiles into home settings where they could be confronted on camera. As the TV host unravels, Pattinson shows such “stunning” range that “you can’t imagine any other performer of his generation pulling it off.” At the same time, “it’s not exactly clear what Primetime is aiming for,” said Stephanie Zacharek in Time.

The despair conveyed by the actors who play the would-be sex offenders “underscores the show’s legally questionable entrapment methods,” but those characters are still terrible people, and the members of the TV team also come across as immoral and “all-round unpleasant.” Add in the film’s “grubby, grainy look,” and “you feel dirty watching it.” The screenplay’s omissions, inventions, and embellishments “might give viewers a misleading impression of what actually happened, and how,” said Matt Zoller Seitz in RogerEbert.com. But as director Lance Oppenheim advances toward a fatal climax, he’s “going for something stylized, bordering on operatic.” Meanwhile, as strong as Pattinson is, “the film’s secret engine is Skyler Gisondo,” portraying an unknown young actor enlisted to play one of the series’ underage decoys. We’re watching a nice young man lose his soul, and the experience “gets under your skin and stays there.

‘Heart of the Beast’

Directed by David Ayer (PG-13)

★★★

“Spoiler alert: The dog does not die,” said Ryan Lattanzio in IndieWire. Animal lovers will appreciate that David Ayer’s “nimbly directed” new survival drama opens by showing us that the canine co-lead, an Army-trained German shepherd named Odin, survives the multiday ordeal we’re about to witness. We’re left less sure about Odin’s owner, a taciturn special forces soldier played by Brad Pitt. But we’re soon immersed in a tale about the pair crossing 50 miles of Alaskan wilderness after their small seaplane goes down. Though their trying adventure sometimes plays like military agitprop, “you can also just enjoy Heart of the Beast as a nice story about a man and his very good dog.”

Pitt proves to be “the right guy in the right film,” said Peter Bradshaw in The Guardian. “His acting chops are tested” when, in one dramatic scene, “he has to sob and then laugh with joy.” But mostly he’s required to simply be “tough, self-reliant, and laconically good-humored” as he and Odin encounter perilous cliffs, treacherous rapids, and ferocious bears and wolves that, unlike Odin, are CGI animations. You might not expect a man-dog picture from the director of End of Watch and other studies in urban nihilism, said Owen Gleiberman in Variety. But Ayer has crafted a movie that’s stirring in its primality. Pitt, meanwhile, does something most actors can’t pull off in a wilderness drama: “He gives a true performance.”

‘Resident Evil’

Directed by Zach Cregger (R)

★★★

In a world littered with terrible video-game movies, “Zach Cregger has finally cracked the cheat code,” said Scott Tobias in The Reveal. Resident Evil, a 30-year-old horror game series, has previously spawned seven film adaptations, but it’s taken the director of Barbarian and Weapons to give us one that actually works. Cregger’s “first and best idea” is to make his movie an exercise in slapstick horror. Weapons’ Austin Abrams stars as Bryan, a slacker medical courier who’s working late one snowy night when he suddenly must contend with an outbreak of mutating, tentacle-laden, undead beasties. Bryan has “an affable, slow-on-the-uptake personality,” but he’s also just resourceful enough to survive.

“The film’s first act is its most satisfying,” said Jacob Oller in The A.V. Club. Bryan, tasked with delivering a high-priority package to a city hospital, runs into one nightmare scenario after another. But while “Abrams’ magnetism and Cregger’s cynical wit” never flag, the movie loses energy as the visual effects and story stakes grow. Still, this new Resident Evil feels like “the ideal midnight movie,” said Kyle Smith in The Wall Street Journal. It’s “an adroit balance of the funny and the macabre, the frightening and the ridiculous.” See it “with someone you enjoy scream-laughing with,” and be ready to give Cregger his flowers. He’s now “three for three.” These days, “no one is more consistently turning out first-rate horror movies.”

What surprised me, watching the documentary, “wasn’t the massive scale of the killing, or even the coldness of it, but the proficiency”, said Mahmoud Mushtaha in +972 Magazine (Tel Aviv). The 24 Israeli soldiers and intelligence officers interviewed for “NAZA”, a new film, coolly described destroying people’s lives as if they were discussing “a routine errand”; one likened it to a “video game”.

Their testimonies form the basis of the documentary, whose title comes from an Israeli military acronym for “collateral damage”; it is a term used to indicate how many civilians are likely to die in each air strike. The film shows that, guided by AI and automated surveillance, thousands of Palestinian civilians were knowingly killed during the war in Gaza.

‘Factory-scale’ killing

The film received a record 25-minute standing ovation at the recent Venice Film Festival, where it won a jury prize. And in Israel, it has whipped up a storm of outrage, said Michelle Goldberg in The New York Times. Miki Zohar, the culture minister, accused its directors, Rachel Szor and Yuval Abraham, of “treason” and called for them to be stripped of their citizenship, a demand endorsed by PM Benjamin Netanyahu.

“After seeing it, I can understand why Israel finds it so threatening.” It describes “factory-scale”, AI-enabled targeting. Interviewees claim that “20 Naza” – 20 civilians killed for one Hamas member – is the basic benchmark. But to kill one Hamas fighter, one source claims, 500 civilian deaths were approved. (The Israel Defense Forces denies this.) The film shows how indifference to civilian death shades “into deliberate mass killing”.

The allegations warrant serious scrutiny, said Ariel Oseran on i24News (Tel Aviv). But the very fact that the IDF calculates “Naza” figures shows that it assessed, and tried to minimise, civilian fatalities while fighting the war in Gaza. Besides, some of the film’s claims seem very dubious. According to Hamas’ own figures, the largest single strike during the conflict killed 132 people – far below the 500-death figure claimed in the film.

Reality under attack

We need to examine “NAZA” carefully, said The Jerusalem Post. The interviewees speak anonymously; we don’t know their rank or their motivation for speaking out. Their testimony cannot be a “final judgement on Israeli conduct”. And “if ‘NAZA’’s case is flawed, the flaws should be demonstrated in public”. But attacking the filmmakers does not help. “It weakens Israel’s argument by replacing a factual dispute with a loyalty test.”

In Israel, the debate is being played out “purely on the basis of emotion”, said Eli W. Kowaz in Haaretz (Tel Aviv). No ministers have even watched the film, as it is yet to be released here. Nor have the public; yet there have been angry protests outside one of the filmmakers’ parents’ homes. It shows “how detached Israelis are from the global conversation about the Gaza war”.

While the world outside has seen reams of coverage of the war – and seems to have largely forgotten that it started with Hamas’ massacre of some 1,200 people – Israel’s media has mostly averted its eyes from the suffering in Gaza. Consequently, to many Israelis, the film feels like an attack on their country, and “an attack on their reality”.

When it comes to “Britain’s greatest cultural export”, forget James Bond or Doctor Who, said John Nugent in Empire. The accolade surely belongs to Shaun the Sheep, the “claymation lamb with a heart of gold”, whose “silent-movie-esque antics” have made him a “hero in over 170 countries”.

This is Shaun’s third big-screen outing, spin-offs from the TV series he was awarded after making his debut in a supporting role in the 1995 Wallace and Gromit short “A Close Shave”.

In “The Beast of Mossy Bottom”, Shaun and his flock are desperate to make Jack-o’-Lanterns for Halloween. So when a freak accident knocks out their crop of prize pumpkins, Shaun decides to play mad scientist, and concocts a growth potion. Alas, it goes terribly wrong when his beloved Farmer (John Sparkes) accidentally drinks it and turns into a Bigfoot-like monster who terrorises the local village. Think “Frankenstein” crossed with “The Wolf Man”, “only with Plasticine farmyard animals”.

Aardman has delivered “another excellent family film”, said Peter Bradshaw in The Guardian – “crammed as ever with top visual gags” and blessed with a sparklingly fun screenplay. There are clever references here to everything from “Psycho” and “The Archers” to “The Simpsons”. Look out for a hairdressing salon called Barber Black Sheep and the Stephen King pun hanging outside the pub in Mossy Bottom.

It takes Aardman’s animators a whole day to make just two seconds of footage, said Hadley Freeman in The Sunday Times, but “you would never guess how painful the process is from the high-energy joyfulness of the result”. “I honestly can’t remember the last time I laughed more in a cinema, or wished more that I could stay for a second screening to enjoy it all again.”

Aardman Animations is back with its third feature starring Shaun the Sheep, “the claymation lamb with a heart of gold”, said Empire. The latest, a Halloween-themed film – “The Beast of Mossy Bottom” – sees Shaun and his loyal flock accidentally turn their “beloved if ungainly farmer” into a “Bigfoot-like monster who terrorises the local village”.

It’s 50 years since Peter Lord and David Sproxton set up Aardman, but the stop-motion animation remains “as sharp as ever” and the “commitment to silliness is genuinely admirable”. Here are some of the studio’s other prime films.

Chicken Run (2000)

Like every Aardman film, the premise is straightforward – “The Great Escape” with chickens – but “such is the animators’ ability to humanise the birds’ plight that it turns into an improbably emotional epic”, said The Guardian. Julia Sawalha gives what is arguably her best performance as the “feisty” hen Ginger who “practically forces her dozy fellow chickens to save themselves” from the “dreaded pie machine”. An instant hit, the film proved Aardman could “hold its own” in Hollywood.

Wallace and Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit (2005)

The first full-length Wallace and Gromit film won Best Animated Feature at the 2006 Academy Awards. The action follows the best friends as they attempt to “subdue an enormous rabbit who terrorises Tottington Hall’s vegetable gardens in the nights leading up to their annual Giant Vegetable Competition”, said Vulture. With a star-studded cast of British actors including Helena Bonham Carter and Ralph Fiennes, it’s packed with humour “teetering on the line between silly and absurd”.

Arthur Christmas (2011)

This festive film about Santa Claus’ clumsy son trying to deliver a misplaced present to a little girl is “impeccably put together and goes down a treat”, said The Guardian. Filled with “terrific action sequences” including a “legion of elf-ninjas slamming millions of presents across the planet on Christmas Eve”, the story is a “little more conventional” than other Aardman films but remains a pleasurable watch.

Shaun the Sheep Movie (2015)

Inspired by Aardman’s TV series about a “clever, enterprising” sheep, the film takes the show’s “bare-bones premise and runs wild with it”, said Vulture. Shaun and his flock must travel to the city to save their amnesiac farmer “before Animal Control nabs them all”. Featuring “kid-friendly sight gags” and “adult-friendly puns”, it’s a fun watch for the whole family. But its meditation “on urban alienation” also makes it potentially “the most emotionally mature film in Aardman’s catalogue”.

Wallace and Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl (2024)

The beloved man-and-dog pair returned for this “perfectly made” feature that sees their relationship start to strain when Wallace “begins relying too much on his robot garden gnome”, said IndieWire. Beyond its “glossy and gorgeous” claymation, what really makes the film stand out is the return of the “terrifyingly evil” Feathers McGraw – the criminal penguin from the greatest Wallace and Gromit short, “The Wrong Trousers”. It’s a must-watch.

“There’s no shortage of worthy films about D-Day,” said David Sexton in The New Statesman. To name just a few, there are “The Longest Day”, “Saving Private Ryan”, “Overlord”, “The Big Red One” – and, of course, we also have TV’s “Band of Brothers”. Yet “Pressure”, from the producers of “Darkest Hour” and based on a play by the actor and writer David Haig, “finds a niche not yet occupied”. Uniquely, the drama focuses on the days immediately before the Normandy landings of 6 June 1944, and the “momentous” weather forecasts made by Scottish meteorologist James Stagg. Eisenhower had decided Operation Overlord should go ahead on 5 June. Stagg, however, became convinced the day would be stormy – bringing swell and poor visibility that would spell disaster. But on 4 June, Stagg forecast a calm interlude for 6 June. In Pressure, Stagg, played by Andrew Scott (“the film’s main attraction”) must persuade Eisenhower (Brendan Fraser), the “irascible” General Bernard Montgomery (Damian Lewis), and Stagg’s US counterpart, Irving P. Krick (Chris Messina) to trust the data he has gathered, and delay the seaborne invasion by 24 hours.

“Dramatically speaking, this is all a bit more interesting in theory than in practice,” said Adam White in The Independent. The film is “largely confined to a series of identikit studies and war rooms”, and the eventual recreation of the landings sparks “unflattering comparisons to ‘Saving Private Ryan’, budget constraints on full display”. Thank goodness, then, for Scott, said Danny Leigh in the Financial Times, in whose “every pained expression, we see the gravity of the situation – and an allergic inability to simply smile and nod”. His performance “really is superb”.

The best psychological thrillers use their characters’ paranoia and uncertainty to create similar feelings of dread and doubt in their viewers. These nine classics skillfully keep audiences guessing while depicting different kinds of waking nightmares, making the protagonists’ traumas our own for a few entertaining hours.

‘Rear Window’ (1954)

Endlessly imitated but rarely, if ever, equaled, director Alfred Hitchcock’s “Rear Window” stars James “Jimmy” Stewart as Jeff, a photographer laid up with a broken leg trying to pass the time people-watching from his window during a stifling New York City summer. One night after hearing a woman scream and the sound of breaking glass, Jeff notices his neighbor, Lars Thorwald, behaving strangely.

When Thorwald’s wife is nowhere to be seen the next day, Jeff is convinced that Thorwald murdered and dismembered her. Jeff enlists his nurse, Stella (Thelma Ritter), and his girlfriend, Lisa (Grace Kelly), to help confirm his suspicions. “Witty, suspenseful, sad, funny and wise,” it is “at once accessible to a mass audience and deep enough to be worth dozens of reviewings and critical analyses,” said Kim Newman at Empire. (Prime Video)

‘Vertigo’ (1958)

Possibly the best-known and beloved of director Alfred Hitchcock’s library of psychological thrillers, “Vertigo” is both a literal rendering of the main character’s syndrome as well as a description of what you feel as you watch the film. Jimmy Stewart plays Scottie Ferguson, a retired detective with a well-earned fear of heights, who is hired by Gavin Elster (Tom Helmore) to surveil Elster’s wife, Madeleine (Kim Novak), who Ferguson instead falls for.

After she jumps to her death in front of him, Scottie sees a woman who looks just like her, making him question his sanity and reality itself. A “strange, drifty, hallucinatory romance,” it “keeps “bringing us back to the same places, turning us in relentlessly on ourselves,” said Terrence Rafferty at The New York Times. (Prime Video)

‘Jacob’s Ladder’ (1990)

Tim Robbins is Jacob Singer, a Vietnam veteran and postal worker who lives with his girlfriend, Jezzie (Elizabeth Peña), in mid-1970s New York City. When he begins to experience hallucinations and seemingly unexplainable phenomena (like being told by his VA clinic that they have no record of him being a patient), he comes to believe that a haunting memory from the war might help explain the strange things occurring around him.

This disturbing film was prescient in its deployment of trauma as a plot device in psychological thrillers as well as a unique entry in the anti-war canon. Director Adrian Lyne’s movie “enters into the hallucinations of a desperate mind and lives there,” while it “evokes a paranoid-schizophrenic state as effectively as any film I have ever seen,” said Roger Ebert at the time. (Paramount+)

‘Open Your Eyes’ (1997)

Memory, or the absence thereof, plays a prominent role in so many of the most effective psychological thrillers, including director Alejandro Amenábar’s “Open Your Eyes,” which was remade in the U.S. as “Vanilla Sky.” After he meets Sofía (Penélope Cruz in her breakout role) at a party, César (Eduardo Noriega) is disfigured in a car crash that kills his ex-girlfriend, Nuria (Najwa Nimri).

Sofía can’t bear to see him, and during one evening of self-medication, he awakes into what appears to be a different reality, with his good looks restored and an adoring Sofía at his side. Which reality is the real one? This is an “ambitiously complex, disturbing and terrific-looking thriller” whose “nightmarish, demanding plot giddily leaps from past to present, from fantasy to reality and back again,” said Jonathan Holland at Variety. (HBO Max)

‘Memento’ (2000)

The twisty, mind-bending hit that began director Christopher Nolan’s journey to Hollywood royalty, “Memento” stars Guy Pearce as Leonard, a man whose difficulty forming new memories means that he has to scribble notes on his skin and mirrors. While looking for his wife’s killer, he gets involved with Natalie (Carrie-Anne Moss), a bartender who may be helping or manipulating him. Teddy (Joe Pantoliano) is a cop with his own agenda.

Told in reverse chronological order, “Memento” is more than its central gimmick. Nolan’s “neo-noir puzzle box plays like one of the key artworks of the 21st century, predicting an era where reality is more a personal, selective construct of comforting biases than a widely agreed-upon set of facts,” said Scott Tobias at The Guardian. (Netflix)

‘Mulholland Drive’ (2001)

Director David Lynch’s audacious, trippy classic is like two movies in one. You think you’re watching a dreamlike story about an aspiring actress named Betty (Naomi Watts), who helps and falls in love with Rita (Laura Harring) after a car wreck leaves her with amnesia.

But the plot loops and falls in on itself, rendering the dreamlike first half open to interpretation, and leaving viewers to sort through its many possible explanations. A film that offers “certain truths about the grotesque desires at the heart of the American project,” it simultaneously asks viewers to “interrogate ourselves, again and again, in search of some kind of absolution,” said Suzanne Enzerink at the Los Angeles Review of Books. (Prime Video)

‘Caché’ (2005)

Anne and Georges Laurent (Juliette Binoche and Daniel Auteuil) are comfortable Parisians who begin receiving videotapes of the house they share with their teenage son, Pierrot (Lester Makedonsky), being surveilled. Then more arrive, with increasing menace, turning husband and wife against one another and leading to inevitable revelations, both about an incident from Georges’ childhood as well as France’ brutal colonial past. Renowned director Michael Haneke brilliantly “transforms the viewer into both the author and the participant” in its central mystery and the film stands as an “astounding unification of form and content,” said Brian Eggert at Deep Focus Review. (Prime Video)

‘Black Swan’ (2010)

Natalie Portman is Nina Sayers, an obsessively dedicated ballerina who wins the role as the lead in Tchaikovsky's Swan Lake for the New York City Ballet after the aging Beth (Winona Ryder) is forced into retirement. But she faces a new rival in the mysterious Lily (Mila Kunis), who triggers hallucinations, jealousy and desire in Nina.

Director Darren Aronofsky’s chilly mind-bender is mesmerizing, terrifying and perplexing in equal measure. A “witchy brew of madness and cunning,” it moves deftly between being “deadly serious, downright goofy and by turns shocking, funny and touching,” said Manohla Dargis at The New York Times. (Prime Video)

‘Watcher’ (2022)

In this slow burn, Maika Monroe is Julia, a young woman struggling to figure out what to do with herself when she moves with her husband, Francis (Karl Glusman), to the Romanian capital of Bucharest, where there is a serial killer on the loose. Convinced that a neighbor is stalking her, she tries in vain to convince Francis, and the police, that she is in danger.

Director Chloe Okuno builds an atmosphere of dread, keeps the audience guessing and subtly underlines the film’s message about gaslighting and misogyny. It makes viewers “just as anxious as Julia, staring into the faces of every man that walks by,” and stands as “one of the best thrillers of this style to come out in decades,” said Stephen Rosenberg at Horror Geek Life. (AMC+)

“There’s a marvellous tenderness and generosity to this elegant tale of autumnal regret; an intimate movie acted with effortless grace by Willem Dafoe,” said Peter Bradshaw in The Guardian.

Dafoe plays Ed Saxberger, an ageing New Yorker who works for the post office, living alone in a small, book-filled room, drinking and playing pool with his friends in the evening.

One day, he is amazed to be accosted by “a dandyish young hipster” outside his apartment building; this is Meyers (Edmund Donovan), who has found Saxberger’s long-since out-of-print volume of poems. He declares him a neglected genius; he and his rich, “callow and excitable” literary friends take up his cause, and want to use their connections to get him republished.

Amused, and more thrilled than he wants to let on, Saxberger finds the attention of these young people dizzying – particularly because one of them, a beautiful and volatile actress (the “superb” Greta Lee), has “a kittenish crush” on him.

Director Kent Jones has great fun with these “achingly mannered” aesthetes, said Danny Leigh in the Financial Times. They call themselves the “Enthusiasm Society”, and describe their meetings as “fermentations”; one of them even “wears a cape”. But “drama pulses under the comedy, too”, and a “cool astringency” grows.

“Late Fame”, adapted from a novella by the Austrian author Arthur Schnitzler, is “razor-sharp on class and art”, said Kevin Maher in The Times. Unearned riches, it tells us, “are mostly for the rich”.

In the end, “it’s Dafoe’s film”. It’s a reminder that he’s often at his best when he’s not at full stretch in “loony mode” (as in “Poor Things” or “The Northman”). “He’s in nearly every frame, quiet and serious, achingly sympathetic. It’s worth watching just for him.”

Pedro Almodóvar has explored his own profession before, said Helen O’Hara in Empire, notably in “Pain and Glory”, in which Antonio Banderas starred as a suffering film director. But, in his new movie, in which he looks at the way artists cannibalise the lives of those around them – to the detriment, perhaps, of their own relationships – there is an added sense of self-flagellation.

The film opens over Christmas in 2004, with Elsa (Bárbara Lennie), a sometime filmmaker and commercials director, being hospitalised with an appalling migraine. Fortunately, she has a supportive boyfriend (Patrick Criado), a firefighter who moonlights as a stripper. We later learn, however, that Elsa is actually the fictional creation of Raúl (Leonardo Sbaraglia), an urbane filmmaker who is drawing heavily on incidents in his own life, and that of his long-time female assistant (Aitana Sánchez-Gijón).

A “witty and sensitive mea culpa”, the film will delight Almodóvar fans, said Vanessa Thorpe in The Observer. While the tension between fiction and reality is a theme, “Bitter Christmas” is also an examination of profound grief, and a “belated, guilty tribute to all the older women who do much of the caring and facilitating of artists’ lives”.

This drama has many fine qualities, said Donald Clarke in The Irish Times, but its postmodernist structure drains it of a certain “emotional weight”. At times, it “feels like an exercise: a challenge the director has set for himself”. And yet, Almodóvar still delivers an “attractive package”: the shots “flow with poetic discipline”; the locations are bleakly beautiful. Even when he is coasting, Almodóvar “cannot help but charm and entertain”.

The British and Americans have been making big-budget films about the Second World War for decades, said Ed Potton in The Times but, “Gallic cinematic triumphalism has been more muted”. So “bravo” to Antonin Baudry for producing this “entertaining, and sometimes moving portrait, of Charles de Gaulle”.

The first part of a two-part epic (the second comes out later this month), it is focused on his flight to London in 1940, and the founding of his Free France movement, and culminates in a lavish recreation of the Battle of Bir Hakeim. Simon Abkarian plays the general, steering a “delicate path between pathos, comedy and dignity”; Simon Russell Beale once again takes the role of Winston Churchill (speaking mainly in French).

Perhaps because its source is a biography by a British historian – Julian Jackson – “this very enjoyable and gallopingly eventful” biopic has an “element of amused detachment”, said Peter Bradshaw in The Guardian. It is naturally sympathetic to the “lofty” and faintly preposterous general who refused to accept the dishonour of Vichy France’s capitulation to the Nazis; Churchill, his great supporter and, in some ways, creator, found him exasperating but also saw in him a kindred spirit, “a romantic maverick and patriot”.

For reasons that become clear, the film’s narrative is split between de Gaulle and the resistance fighter Fernand Bonnier de la Chapelle. This “lumbers” the film with another story to tell, and leaves less time to explore de Gaulle’s “strange, dislocated life in wartime London”, said Phil de Semlyen on Time Out. As a result, the future president remains an elusive figure. Hopefully, part two will focus more on the man, and less on the myth.

His Ali G character is “a cover to laugh at Jamaican culture”, said media-monitoring site NewsCord, as it launched a campaign for cinemas not to show Sacha Baron Cohen’s new film. Returning to the screen after 20 years, Ali G “is a white man pretending to be Jamaican”, so he “smokes weed, is a misogynist, and does nothing meaningful in life”. And while “the world laughs at Ali G”, the “real butt of the joke are Black people”.

‘Fun police’

“Ali G: Who Iz I?” is due for release in October and the trailer features “some of the escapades and pranks” in Baron Cohen’s second feature-length comedy “starring the academically challenged west Staines rude boy character”, said The Guardian. “Sporting new dreadlocks”, Ali G says that in the two decades since we last saw him, “the world went to crap: there was Covid, wars and Ed Sheeran”.

Within days of the trailer’s release, activists responding to NewsCord’s urgings had sent more than 40,000 emails to 15 major cinema chains. “The fun police are already out in force” with their efforts “to cancel the leader of Da West Staines Massif”, said The Telegraph’s culture writer, Liam Kelly. The letters of complaint are “AI-generated” and “tweaked” for each cinema chain but “one thing is consistent: Ali G is beyond the pale”.

It’s the British Board of Film Classification which “ultimately” decides whether a film is “fit to be shown on the UK’s big screens” and “it would be a massive surprise” if this one “were not given a certificate”. So all this outrage is “ludicrous”.

Cinemas are not censors, Phil Clapp of the UK Cinema Association told Variety. “They are there to engage and entertain the widest possible audience”; they are not “arbiters of public taste”.

‘Moribund culture’

“Any sensible person” can “see straight away” that Baron Cohen “does not depict or intend to depict Black men of any description”, said Zimbabwean author Masimba Musodza in The Times of Israel. He’s actually “poking fun at white youth” who have “consumed caricatures” of Black British masculinity in popular culture and “mistaken them for reality”.

There’s something “uncomfortable” in the assumption that “reproducing those stereotypes” in order to ridicule the person reproducing them “constitutes an attack upon Black people themselves”. Besides, “the answer to bad ideas in art” isn’t always censorship; “sometimes, it is simply to watch the bloody thing and understand the joke”.

Baron Cohen himself has acknowledged the censoriousness of today’s culture. “In an age where a comedian’s career can be ended by a single un-PC joke, I thought I’d play it safe and bring this guy back”, he said on X.

For others, though, Ali G’s return is less shocking than tedious. It’s “nah, you’re alright thanks” news, said Laura Martin in Esquire. When the vintage comedy character “crashed” Wimbledon fortnight this summer, “claiming to be the tournament’s official weed dealer” and joking that the royal box has nothing to do with the “queen’s punani”, the “three-decade-old gags” had not “aged well”.

The reappearance of the “bling-bedecked denizen of the West Staines Massive” is a “disquieting symptom” of a “moribund culture” that’s stifled by the grip of “ultra-progressive cliques” and “the dead hand of Bluesky thinking”, said Gareth Roberts in The Spectator. “We just have to go patiently through, however long it takes, and hope that the big film of 2052 is not Ali G in a retirement home.”

“Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma” is “a title so good you feel the film to which it’s attached should really have to earn it”, said Robbie Collin in The Telegraph, and “happily it does”.

Starring Gillian Anderson as “fading horror queen”, it is both “extravagantly funny” and “recklessly bizarre”. Hannah Einbinder plays Kris, an “earnest yet self-loathing” director who has been asked by a Hollywood studio to reboot “Camp Miasma”, a fictional 1980s US slasher franchise.

The original is now regarded as “embarrassingly non-PC”, chiefly because its villain, Little Death, is the spirit of a gender-nonconforming child killed by other campers. As a celebrated, self-styled “queer filmmaker”, Kris is just the person to make the rebooted film: she’s a horror nerd who has been obsessed with the original since childhood, particularly with Squeak, its “final girl” (the last female character left alive). She tracks down Billy Presley (Anderson), who played Squeak and now lives, in creepy “Norma Desmond-esque” seclusion, at the former summer camp where the original was filmed.

As Kris tries to convince Billy to appear in the reboot, the pair form a bond, said David Sexton in The New Statesman. And as their relationship deepens, fiction and reality begin to blur, and the film turns into something both “sexy” and “slaughterous”.

“Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma” “won’t be to everyone’s taste”, said Larushka Ivan-Zadeh in the Daily Mail – the title gives a fairly good sense of whether it’s for you or not. “It gets messy. It gets pretentious.” And it’s not particularly scary (the violence is “almost cartoon-like”). But it is beautifully shot, funny and “marvellously camp – in both senses of the word”. “Either way, Anderson is terrific.”

Filmgoers love sports movies for the same reason that networks linger on players celebrating championships after the big game, then cut to the losers to capture their heartbreak: Sports narratives are innately moving. These nine superb dramas keep audiences riveted because they are about much more than winning or losing.

‘Bang the Drum Slowly’ (1973)

John D. Hancock’s largely forgotten “Bang the Drum Slowly” is the story of a friendship between New York Mammoths star pitcher, Henry Wiggen (Michael Moriarty), and his unsophisticated catcher, Bruce Pearson (Robert De Niro), a frequent target of his teammates’ cruelty who receives a terminal diagnosis and plays brilliantly through it for one last season.

“From here on in, I rag nobody,” Henry announces at the end of this quiet, moving character study, a mantra more people could stand to adopt. Its “mixture of fatalism, roughness, tenderness and bleak humor” hit home despite the lack of “telegraphed big moments on the field,” said Roger Ebert at the time. (Prime Video)

‘Rocky’ (1976)

For a niche sport, boxing has produced an outsized share of the greatest sports movies, including “Rocky,” a movie that still inspires countless people to run up the stairs at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Sylvester Stallone (“Rambo”) is Rocky Balboa, a down-on-his-luck Philly boxer who gets an unexpected shot at greatness when reigning champion Apollo Creed (Carl Weathers) chooses him to fight in the exhibition bout that comprises the film’s final set piece. A movie that features “some of the most wildly exciting fight footage ever put on the screen,” its most winning element is Rocky himself, a “character of enormous appeal and charm,” said Arthur Knight at The Hollywood Reporter. (Netflix)

‘Raging Bull’ (1980)

The turbulent life of boxer Jake LaMotta gets the biopic treatment in director Martin Scorsese's instant black-and-white classic. Robert De Niro plays LaMotta as almost tortured with kinetic jealousy and bottomless insecurity, at one point pummeling another boxer in front of his wife, Vickie (Cathy Moriarty), because she had said he was handsome.

“Raging Bull” is also a groundbreaking film in the depiction of domestic violence, one of the first commercial films to take the scourge seriously. This “brutally nihilist tale” is told in a “stunning, dreamlike series of episodes in and out of the ring,” with the boxer ultimately “brought down by his own toxic machismo,” said Peter Bradshaw at The Guardian. (MGM+)

‘Hoosiers’ (1986)

Gene Hackman delivers one of the best performances of his long, storied career as Norman Dale, a fallen college basketball coach who steps in to lead the high school basketball team in tiny Hickory, Indiana. Tasked with transforming a motley crew of unseasoned players into a contender, he hires the recovering alcoholic Shooter (Dennis Hopper) as assistant coach, and the team gels and starts winning.

“Hoosiers” sounds like a hundred other sports films. But its attention to detail sets it apart, produced in large part by casting mostly unknown local actors as the players. In director David Anspaugh’s film, the “emotions it asks us to feel are genuine and fairly achieved,” so its “artful familiarity becomes a balm instead of a stumbling block,” said Kenneth Turan at ESPN Classic. (YouTube)

‘Bull Durham’ (1988)

Annie Savoy (Susan Sarandon) is a baseball groupie who picks one ballplayer a year on the minor-league Durham Bulls to sleep with and tutor. She picks the gloriously named Nuke Laloosh (Tim Robbins), a fireballer with an unfortunate lack of depth and wisdom but comes to prefer the aging veteran Crash Davis (Kevin Costner).

Full of timeless observations like Crash noting that “strikeouts are boring and besides that they’re fascist,” it is uproariously funny but also succeeds as both a romance and a baseball film. Written and directed by former minor-league ballplayer Ron Shelton, it is a “long, smart kiss to baseball” with the “loping narrative rhythm of a baseball season,” said Richard Corliss at Time. (Mubi)

‘Million Dollar Baby’ (2004)

After spending the bulk of his career on Westerns and vigilante films like “Dirty Harry,” Clint Eastwood underwent an astonishing transformation into a widely respected directing auteur. Here he also stars as Frankie Dunn, an aging, dyspeptic coach who agrees to take on the unpolished Maggie Fitzgerald (Hilary Swank), as she seeks to rise through the ranks of women’s boxing.

The film’s turning point is a tragedy during a fight arranged by Frankie, making its second half more of a dirge than a sports film. A “rueful rumination on sin and absolution,” Eastwood’s “striking framing has the muscular simplicity and directness of Ernest Hemingway's prose,” said Colin Kennedy at Empire. (Paramount+)

‘Moneyball’ (2011)

A movie about the data analytics revolution in baseball is an unlikely contender for one of the best sports movies, but director Bennett Miller’s take on Michael Lewis’ 2003 book gets it done. Brad Pitt stars as Billy Beane, the general manager of the woebegone Oakland Athletics, who hires data wizard Peter Brand (Jonah Hill) to revolutionize the team’s scouting and gain an edge over the team’s better-funded peers. Featuring a “sharp, sleek script,” it is as much about a “fundamental cultural shift and the rise of the information elite” as it is about baseball, said Manohla Dargis at The New York Times. (Netflix)

‘The Fire Inside’ (2024)

Ryan Destiny (“Grownish”) anchors “The Fire Inside” as Claressa Shields, the two-time Gold Medal-winning boxer from Flint, Michigan, and her coach, Jason Crutchfield (Brian Tyree Henry). Written by Barry Jenkins (“Moonlight”) and directed by Rachel Morrison in her feature debut, it is both an unflinching look at the obstacles faced by a community that would soon be plunged into a national news-worthy water crisis and an unusually well-shot sports film whose boxing sequences jump off the screen. It asks a question rarely posed in sports films: “If you don’t come from privilege, what happens when you fight your way to the top, only to realize that it looks a lot like where you started?” said Alissa Wilkinson at The New York Times. (MGM+)

‘Marty Supreme’ (2025)

One of the only feature films about the niche sport of ping-pong, “Marty Supreme” is a character study of the distinctly unlikeable antihero Marty Mauser (Timothée Chalamet), one of those people who leaves a wake of chaos, heartbreak and destruction wherever he goes. He also happens to be a truly gifted table tennis player who pursues his dream of becoming the world’s top-ranked with savage self-interest, running cons on everyone from his own love interest, Rachel Mizler (Odessa A’zion), to Gwyneth Paltrow’s depressed, aging film star Kay Stone. Buoyed by Marty’s “endless slippery charm,” it is also a “very unconventional coming of age story,” said Kieran Battams at Voice. (HBO Max)

Westerns are often thought to glorify the violence and vigilantism of the 19th-century towns on the expanding American border. But the best films of the genre, including these eight superb entries, generally interrogate rather than reinforce that mythology.

‘My Darling Clementine’ (1946)

Director John Ford’s classic — perhaps better known to modern audiences by way of 1993’s retelling of the same story in the excellent “Tombstone” — is well worth revisiting. Henry Fonda stars as Wyatt Earp, one of three brothers en route to California when they encounter Old Man Clanton and his sons.

While Wyatt goes into the rough-and-tumble town of Tombstone, the Clantons murder his brother James. Wyatt then takes the open job of marshal in Tombstone and sets his sights on revenge — and on Clementine Carter (Cathy Downs), the ex-fiancee of local gambler Doc Holliday (Victor Mature). The movie’s themes of transition from lawlessness into civilization on the frontier are explored with “elegance, poignancy and dexterous economy,” and the film builds its world by “eschewing clear-cut character rivalries in favor of more complex emotional and social configurations,” said Matthew Connolly at Slant Magazine. (Prime Video)

‘High Noon’ (1952)

Gary Cooper is Marshal Will Kane, who receives word that Frank Miller (Ian MacDonald), an outlaw he banished to prison, is coming back on the noon train with his gang to exact revenge. Kane’s wife, Amy (Grace Kelly), begs him to reconsider, but he feels duty-bound to show up.

He tries to rally support from the town’s citizens but finds that they would prefer to let him face the music alone, a plot machination widely regarded as a commentary on how Hollywood treated those blacklisted during the McCarthy era. Director Fred Zinnemann’s “unusually circumspect and politically loaded” film “stands out as the proto antiwestern, questioning the conventions of a genre long before doing so was in vogue,” said Scott Tobias at The Guardian. (MGM+)

‘The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance’ (1962)

Part romantic triangle, part political parable about the underbelly of pushing the frontier westward, director John Ford’s “The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance” might be his finest work. Told in the form of an elaborate flashback, the narrative follows newly minted lawyer Ransom Stoddard (Jimmy Stewart) from his arrival in a freewheeling town in unincorporated territory through his deepening friendship with Tom Doniphon (John Wayne), their love of Hallie (Vera Miles) and his final confrontation with the nefarious Liberty Valance (Lee Marvin).

The give and take between the institutionalist Ransom and the take-matters-into-your-own-hands Tom mirrors long-running debates in American society about law and order and justice. The film is a “somber reflection on what was lost when education and morality” moved westward with the U.S. government and its “civilizing influences,” said Sight and Sound. (Prime Video)

‘The Good, the Bad and the Ugly’ (1966)

Director Sergio Leone popularized a new subgenre of frontier cinema: the spaghetti Western, named as such in honor of the Italian filmmakers who dominated the format, including Leone himself. The final and best entry of Leone’s trilogy, “The Good, the Bad and the Ugly,” is an origin story for Clint Eastwood's sharp-witted antihero “Blondie.” It’s a preautomotive road movie, as Blondie, Angel Eyes (Lee Van Cleef) and Tuco (Eli Wallach) race across the Civil War-era American West in search of a trunk full of Confederate gold. Featuring characters “united by their greed and virtually shorn of any humanity,” it “makes a mockery of any conception of good and evil,” said John Naughton at Empire. (YouTube)

‘The Grey Fox’ (1982)

Much less well known than most films on this list, director Phillip Borsos’ “The Grey Fox” stars Richard Farnsworth as Bill Miner, a stagecoach bandit who heads to the Pacific Northwest in Canada to rob trains when he is released from prison after thirty years. He falls in love with a radical, Kate Flynn (Jackie Burroughs), as he tries to stay ahead of Detective Seavy (Gary Reineke).

Setting the film on the Canadian frontier rather than the American sets it apart from its peers, and the more languid pacing and character-driven plotting continue to distinguish it as a mannered classic. Featuring a “smorgasbord of wide shots of the Pacific Northwest,” the movie’s “slower pace works, challenging the audience to appreciate not only the nuanced performances of its actors” but also the “natural beauty,” said Thaddeus Buttrey at Loud and Clear. (Kino Film Collection)

‘Unforgiven’ (1992)

Clint Eastwood directed 40 films, but it is this riveting Western that will be remembered as his masterpiece. He also stars as Will Munny, a retired outlaw with a checkered past who is talked into pursuing one last bounty. He enlists his friend, Ned (Morgan Freeman), to help track down and kill the men who brutally scarred a prostitute named Delilah (Anna Thomson). To do so, he must go through Big Whiskey’s corrupt sheriff, Little Bill Daggett (Gene Hackman).

“Unforgiven” is full of both quotable quips and savage violence, in the process upending sentimental notions about the American frontier. A film that explores a “range of moral ambiguities and profound historical questions,” it also challenges the “history of the American West and furthermore Eastwood’s own role in defining the West in cinema,” said Brian Eggert at Deep Focus Review. (Prime Video)

‘The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford’ (2007)

Despite containing a plot summary in its title and a tepid reception when it was released, director Andrew Dominik’s meditative film manages to be both suspenseful and insightful. It narrates the last months of the notorious Jesse James (Brad Pitt), whose gang is riven by suspicion and rivalry. Robert Ford (Casey Affleck) is a young gunslinger who joins James’ gang along with his brother, Charley (Sam Rockwell), but grows resentful of the legendary outlaw. Offering a “kaleidoscope’s prismatic tunnel vision on the Old West,” this is an “immaculately conceived, perfectly cast epic” that “patiently and meditatively observes an outlaw’s obsolescence,” said Nick Rogers at Midwest Film Journal. (Prime Video)

‘True Grit’ (2010)

Once upon a time, the Hollywood landscape was littered with Westerns of varying quality, but today they are somewhat scarce, making gems like directors Joel and Ethan Coen’s remake of the 1969 original all the more notable. When her father is murdered by the bandit Tom Chaney (Josh Brolin), 14-year-old Mattie (Hailee Steinfeld) hires U.S. Marshall Rooster Cogburn (Jeff Bridges) to track him down.

The hard-drinking, washed-out Cogburn is joined by LaBoeuf (Matt Damon), who is after Chaney for a different reason. It “adheres to many of the familiar touchstones of the Western genre, while remaining unmistakably Coenesque” and full of “all kinds of wonderful exchanges, unforgettable scenes and moments of weirdness,” said Ryan Lambie at Den of Geek. (Paramount+)

“Those of us pining to see more Sian Clifford since the end of ‘Fleabag’, in which she played Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s fierce sister”, have been rewarded with this “barnstorming” mockumentary comedy, said Peter Bradshaw in The Guardian.

Clifford plays Lady Isabella, a “haughty, but troubled” aristocrat who lives on a grand country estate (the movie was filmed at Somerleyton Hall in Suffolk), where she hosts an annual children’s talent competition, Stately Stars. Desperate to prove that she has artistic talent of her own, Isabella decides to compete against the youngsters, staging an elaborate multimedia performance, which includes poetry, action art and photographs of her “apparently dead body around the grounds”.

On hand to witness the mayhem is Sam (Laurie Kynaston), a “pushy, insecure young director” who shows up at the stately home to make a documentary. Funny, poignant and increasingly bizarre, “Lady” plays like a psychedelic “B-side to Saltburn”.

There is plenty of David Brent in this “frequently hilarious” film, said Kevin Maher in The Times, along with “bits of Alan Partridge and a dash of ‘This Country’”. The twist comes when the action suddenly veers into science fiction, and Isabella begins quite literally to disappear. The metaphor is clear – Isabella has become invisible to her husband, her peers and herself – and at times, her desire to be seen is almost “unbearably poignant”.

The shifts “from quirkiness to horror to tragedy” aren’t always seamless, said Gayle Sequeira in Sight and Sound, and some of the jokes go on too long. But by the end, the silliness gives way to something “meaningful and life-affirming”. “‘Lady’, much like the aristocrat at its centre, is an odd duck: erratic, but possessed of a tender heart and scrappy spirit.”

Whether the ’80s were “morning in America” or the beginning of the end for the post-war political consensus, there is no question that the decade produced its share of landmark cinematic achievements as well as seat-filling blockbusters. These nine memorable films include huge box office hits as well as gems known mostly to dedicated cinephiles.

‘The Shining’ (1980)

Novelist Stephen King famously despised director Stanley Kubrick’s take on his story of hard-drinking writer Jack Torrance (Jack Nicholson), who slowly loses his mind when he serves as the winter caretaker at the snowy Overlook Hotel with his wife, Wendy (Shelley Duvall), and son, Danny (Danny Lloyd). Beyond its now-iconic scenes, including Danny scribbling “murder” backwards on a door and Jack announcing “Wendy, I’m home!” as he chops his way through a door with an axe, Kubrick’s visionary film continues to lure in new generations of viewers with its mixture of technical wizardry and delirious performances. It’s a film that succeeds in “elevating horror to a different plane, removing its camp wiggeries and bogeymen to infuriate and bedazzle,” said Ian Nathan at Empire. (Prime Video)

‘Blade Runner’ (1982)

Harrison Ford, at the peak of his fame, plays Rick Deckard, one of the titular agents who hunt and retire rogue synthetic “replicants” in a bleak, polluted future Los Angeles set in 2019. Deckard is tasked with eliminating a band of rebellious replicants led by Roy (Rutger Hauer) who have returned to Earth to confront their creator, the CEO of the Tyrell Corporation.

In the process Deckard meets and falls in love with Rachael (Sean Young), a replicant programmed to believe that she is human. Director Ridley Scott’s sci-fi masterpiece raises still-relevant questions about the nature of synthetic consciousness, wrapped in a stylish noir casing. A “visionary” film that presents the “future as a black market, made up of scrambled sordid aspects of the past,” its unforgettable visual canvas gives it its “place in film history,” said Pauline Kael at The New Yorker. (YouTube)

‘Amadeus’ (1984)

A gripping biopic of Mozart (Tom Hulce), told from the perspective of the envious Antonio Salieri (F. Murray Abraham), “Amadeus” is one of director Milos Forman’s two masterpieces, along with “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.” Salieri plots to destroy the arrogant, often-unhinged Mozart, upend his relationship with Emperor Joseph II (Jeffrey Jones) and steal his final composition, “Requiem.” It gives us a “surprisingly true Mozart — young and tragically flawed, riddled with childlike tendencies whilst possessing the beautiful voice of God through his music” while “exploring themes of legacy, success, betrayal and the nature of talent,” said Victoria Vireikyte at Voice. (Prime Video)

‘Paris, Texas’ (1984)

Director Wim Wenders helms this slow, often surreal drama about a man, Travis (Harry Dean Stanton), who suddenly appears in the desert four years after going missing following the dissolution of his troubled marriage to Jane (Nastassja Kinski). His brother, Walt (Dean Stockwell), and his wife, Anne (Aurore Clément), have been raising Travis and Jane’s son, Hunter (Hunter Carson), in Los Angeles, and Travis decides he wants to try to find Jane in Houston. It’s a film that “shreds the emotions, leaving the viewer as raw and wounded as Travis,” while also being a “wholly American piece of storytelling in that the country’s ethos is rooted in self-discovery and redefinition,” said Brian Eggert at Deep Focus Review. (HBO Max)

‘Back to the Future’ (1985)

The ’80s were full of enjoyable pulp science fiction films, including E.T., but it is director Robert Zemeckis’ “Back to the Future” that left the most enduring mark on cinematic culture. Michael J. Fox is Marty McFly, a high school student whose mad scientist mentor, Emmett “Doc” Brown (Christopher Lloyd), accidentally sends him back in time to the 1950s in a DeLorean.

While there, Marty inadvertently interrupts the meet-cute that brought his parents together and threatens to snuff out his own existence if he can’t fix it. A movie that turned Fox into a superstar, it is the “modern era’s zippiest comedy about the collapse of the American dream” that might also be “Hollywood’s richest, cleverest blockbuster,” said Amy Nicholson at the Los Angeles Times. (Starz)

‘The Sacrifice’ (1986)

While certainly not the best-known 1980s film about nuclear war, celebrated Russian director Andrei Tarkovsky’s “The Sacrifice” remains one of his finest. Erland Josephson is Alexander, an actor and journalist celebrating his birthday at his family’s Swedish estate when he and his family get word that World War III has broken out, with much of the world likely already destroyed.

Desperate to avoid the coming nuclear holocaust, he agrees to a bargain with God — to give up all of his earthly loves and possessions if the disaster can be reversed. An “extraordinary and rich film with profound depths,” it represents a “bravely uneasy capstone to a titanic career,” said Tim Brayton at Alternate Ending. (Prime Video)

‘Full Metal Jacket’ (1987)

Hollywood’s belated reckoning with the disastrous Vietnam War reached its apotheosis in the late 1980s, with two classic films released within a year of one another, first “Platoon” in 1986 and then Stanley Kubrick’s “Full Metal Jacket” in 1987, which follows a platoon of Marines including razor-witted Private Davis (Matthew Modine) and much-ridiculed Private Lawrence (Vincent D’Onofrio) from basic training through the ordeal of combat in Southeast Asia. The first half of this “astonishingly assured piece of film-making” depicts the “steady dehumanization of Marine recruits” at the hands of the abusive Gunnery Sergeant Hartman (R. Lee Ermey) while the second half builds to a tragic climax that is a “mini-inferno of sniper fire and gushing bullet wounds, hard to live through but impossible to forget,” said John Patterson at The Guardian. (Prime Video)

‘Do the Right Thing’ (1989)

Writer-director Spike Lee’s groundbreaking film made him a household name, and Lee was only the second Black writer nominated for Best Original Screenplay at the Academy Awards. He stars as Mookie, a young father and delivery man at the eponymous neighborhood pizza joint run by Sal (Danny Aiello), a flashpoint for racial tensions between the largely black community and the restaurant’s racist owner. When Radio Raheem (Bill Nunn) is killed by police after a confrontation with Sal, the neighborhood erupts in violence. Lee’s seminal film is a “virtuoso act of creation, a movie at once realistic and symbolic, lighthearted and tragic, funny and savage,” said Roger Ebert at the time at The Criterion Collection. (YouTube)

‘When Harry Met Sally’ (1989)

The standard against which all modern romantic comedies are measured, director Rob Reiner’s “When Harry Met Sally” is more than the sum of its well-known vignettes, including Sally (Meg Ryan) publicly demonstrating to Harry (Billy Crystal) the ability to fake an orgasm, and Harry’s unforgettable riff about how men and women can’t be friends. Harry and Sally are thrown together for a car trip from Chicago to New York after they graduate from college and dance around one another for years into their 30s as friends before taking the plunge into a romantic relationship. A movie that “treasured its characters, atmosphere, and setting,” it is also a “collection of finely hewn set pieces — nearly all of which pivot around nothing more than a conversation,” said Sonia Saraiya at Vanity Fair. (Prime Video)

There are many stretches from Anthony Bourdain’s “gritty” and “well-chronicled” life that could work for a biopic, said Tim Robey in The Telegraph. But in “Tony”, Matt Johnson sticks with “just one summer” in 1975, when the celebrity chef was 19 – long before he found fame and fortune.

Based on the opening chapters of Bourdain’s bestselling memoir, “Kitchen Confidential”, the film opens as Tony – Dominic Sessa, the “deeply talented” young actor from “The Holdovers” – leaves home after failing to get a prestigious summer writing fellowship. He follows the “girl he fancies”, Nancy, to Cape Cod and gets “self-pityingly drunk” when he finds out she has a boyfriend.

After being thrown out of an oyster shack, a kindly chef (Antonio Banderas) gives him a job washing dishes and Tony finds himself in the “cramped, all-male milieu of flying expletives and cruel practical jokes”.

Johnson effortlessly mixes the “toxic camaraderie” of these scenes with montages of Bourdain’s slow-but-steady daily improvements. “It plays like ‘Rocky’ with kitchen knives”.

Gradually, Tony’s “insufferability” is “hosed away”, said Danny Leigh in the Financial Times, and Sessa dazzles in the “contradictory” role of the “charismatic sad-sack”. Johnson has made a “funny, sun-kissed biopic” that is “spry” and “enjoyable” despite the “complicated brief”. “Tony” is aimed at those who know that the chef’s life story will lead to both “glory and tragedy” (Bourdain died by suicide in 2018). The film “isn’t the whole story”. But that’s “probably fitting” – the chef was “nothing if not a spinner of yarns”.

I found it a bit “strange”, said Peter Bradshaw in The Guardian. “Tony” is an “entertaining” watch but the “feelgood trajectory is compromised by what we know” about Bourdain’s troubled life and death. A scene in which Banderas tells Tony about a chef to Louis XIV who “killed himself in shame when the key ingredients didn’t arrive for a banquet” is “presumably there tacitly to acknowledge Bourdain’s heartbreaking fate. It sits oddly.”

Mostly, though, it’s a “rollicking, surprisingly sunny coming-of-age tale”, said Larushka Ivan-Zadeh in The Times. “Picture ‘The Bear’ with less angst and more innocence.” Johnson manages to capture the “blistering, sizzling energy” of Bourdain’s memoir and Leo Woodall is “succulently charismatic” as Tony’s “cocksure, coke-snorting” co-worker, Sal.

But the real star is Sessa who “nails Bourdain’s annoying young Turk braggadocio” while giving us a peek at the “unformed vulnerability beneath”. In all, it’s a portrait of the fiery young chef that’s “spicy, salty, and just sweet enough. I’d happily have second helpings.”

A woman is “torn between motherhood and selfhood, duty and freedom” in this “brutal custody drama” based on a bestselling work of autofiction by the French writer Constance Debré, said India Lawrence on Time Out.

Vicky Krieps plays Clémence, “a make-up-free, short-haired, scooter-riding ex-lawyer” who has abandoned her successful legal career to become a writer. She has an amicable relationship with her former husband Laurent (Antoine Reinartz), with whom she shares custody of their eight-year-old son, Paul. But when Clémence tells Laurent that she is now dating women, he claims she is an unfit mother and files for sole custody. There follows a years-long battle “fuelled by Laurent’s infuriating, and borderline evil, determination to take Paul away from Clémence entirely”. It makes for a “compelling” film that is “utterly enraging” too.

The film “hits its mark with painful accuracy”, said Jessica Kiang in Variety. While Clémence tries to carry on with her professional and romantic life, she is consumed by the “near full-time job of fighting through a legal quagmire”. For 18 months, she is denied access to her son – and even after that, she’s restricted to brief sessions under supervision.

I wasn’t totally convinced, said Larushka Ivan-Zadeh in The Times. Clémence’s passivity sometimes feels “implausible”, and the lengthy scenes set in queer techno nightclubs could have done with a “good snip”. Yet Krieps keeps it all “compelling”, as her character “contracts into something pale, shaven-headed and almost saint-like”, a “warrior, victim and fugitive from feeling”; and the relationship between mother and son is “heartbreakingly vivid”. You will be hooked “right up to its unpredictable, provocative ending”.

Anime is a unique version of animated storytelling indigenous to contemporary Japan, a style that exploded in international popularity during the 1990s. With the ongoing proliferation of streaming services, international audiences have greater access to the large and diverse catalog of anime films than ever before, including these eight classics.

‘Grave of the Fireflies’ (1988)

A harrowing anti-war film, “Grave of the Fireflies” follows Seita (Tsutomu Tatsumi) and Setsuko (Ayano Shiraishi), siblings struggling to survive the final cataclysms of World War II after their mother is killed in the firebombing of Kobe. They move in with an indifferent, cruel aunt and then escape to an empty bomb shelter, where they try to survive by the light of fireflies.

To say that “Grave of the Fireflies” does not soften the cruelty of the children’s fate is putting it lightly, but even in sorrow the movie offers viewers breathtaking beauty. Watching the film is an “emotional experience so powerful that it forces a rethinking of animation” and leaves its haunting impression “not by reproducing reality but by heightening and simplifying it,” said Roger Ebert. (Netflix)

‘Akira’ (1988)

Kaneda (Mitsuo Iwata) is a teenaged motorcycle gang leader in 2019 “Neo-Tokyo,” a postnuclear apocalypse megalopolis. When his friend Tetsuo (Nozomu Sasaki) is abducted by military elites bent on turning him into a supernatural killer, Kaneda tries to rescue him. But Colonel Shikishima (Taro Ishida) finds that Tetsuo could become as powerful as the being Akira, rumored to be capable of destroying the world. Director Katsuhiro Otomo’s “Akira” is “one of the most important flashpoints in the history of animation,” and its depiction of a “rotting society held together with cruelty and desperation” has ongoing relevance today, said Tim Brayton at Alternate Ending. (Prime Video)

‘Kiki’s Delivery Service’ (1989)

Kiki (Minami Takayama) is a 13-year-old witch-in-training who leaves home for the first time with her talking cat, Jiji (Rei Sakuma). Settling into a seaside hamlet, she uses her new broom-riding skills to work as a kind of analog flying Uber Eats for the baker, Osono (Keiko Toda), who gives her a free place to stay while she trains.

Kiki also befriends a boy, Tombo (Kappei Yamaguchi), who yearns for her ability to fly — until she loses her magic altogether. Whimsical, beautiful and quietly moving, it is a coming-of-age masterpiece. Director Hayao Miyazaki’s “timeless” movie is “made for young hearts but also has a way of growing up with us, taking on new meaning when viewed at different life stages,” said Melanie McFarland at Salon. (HBO Max)

‘Ghost in the Shell’ (1995)

Major Motoko Kusanagi (Atsuko Tanaka) is an agent with Public Security Section 9, which tracks cybercriminals in the dizzyingly futuristic New Port City circa 2029, where people can wire their brains directly into the Internet. She’s tasked with apprehending The Puppet Master (Iemasa Kayumi), a hacker who appears to be tapping directly into these networked minds and altering memories. Director Mamoru Oshii's “hugely influential cyberpunk classic” is a heart-racing thriller that also “dialed deep into the potential of the information age, advances in robotics and subsequent philosophical questions” about digital consciousness, said Ben Travis and Luke Bradley at Empire. (Prime Video)

‘Princess Mononoke’ (1997)

In 15th-century Japan, Ashitaka (Yoji Matsuda), the prince of a dying kingdom called Emishi, is infected by a forest demon and travels west searching for a forest god that provides a cure. Instead, he stumbles into a war between the rapacious smelters of Iron Town, led by Lady Eboshi (Yuko Tanaka) and a coalition of forest spirits and creatures led by the wolf god, Moro (Akihiro Miwa), and her human daughter, San (Yuriko Ishida).

Crafted by Hayao Miyazaki, it is a film that “stands against intolerance in all its forms, political or social, and demands coexistence and understanding from its audience,” said Brian Eggert at Deep Focus Review. It is also a “sprawling, perceptive wonder” that “could not be told through another medium.” (HBO Max)

‘Spirited Away’ (2001)

By winning the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature in 2003, “Spirited Away” gave an art form known to Americans mostly through Saturday morning cartoons and the Pokémon phenomenon the kind of prestige previously reserved for high-end Disney and Pixar films. While 10 year-old Chihiro (Rumi Hiiragi) and her parents are en route to their new home, they take a wrong turn and wind up in what at first appears to be a derelict amusement park.

There, her parents are transformed into pigs and Chihiro is thrust into a vibrant but terrifying underworld. She is forced to take on a job in a spirit world bathhouse, as she tries to retrieve her parents and return them to their human form. The film is generally regarded as director and animator Hayao Miyazaki’s finest work. A “tremendously original and beautiful film,” it gives viewers the feeling of a “nightmare that’s not at all frightening but instead marvelous in its alienness,” said MaryAnn Johanson at Flick Filosopher. (HBO Max)

‘The Girl Who Leapt Through Time’ (2006)

If you associate anime with only one kind of genre — futuristic science fiction or magical realism — you’re in for a surprise with the moving coming-of-age story “The Girl Who Leapt Through Time.” When adolescent Makoto (Riisa Naka) discovers that she can travel back in time, she uses her new powers to hold her friendships with two boys in suspended animation, traveling back again and again to short-circuit any developing romantic feelings and to preserve their childhood relationships. This “sweet, credible study” has a “fantastical premise” and succeeds with “subtle character studies rather than large-scale effects,” said Kim Newman at Empire. (HBO Max)

‘The Colors Within’ (2024)

Anime filmmaking remains dominated by men, making Naoko Yamada’s “The Colors Within” a triumph on multiple levels. It not only plants a flag for women in the industry, but as a gentle musical driven by character development rather than plot, it is also a departure from the kind of storytelling most commonly associated with the art form.

Totsuko (Sayu Suzukawa) is a boarding school outsider who has a kind of synesthesia, seeing other people’s auras as vibrant colors. When she links up with fellow misfits Kimi (Akari Takaishi) and Rui (Taisei Kido), they form a band and face the challenges of adolescence and growing up together. Yamada’s film “paints an exquisite rainbow of adolescent blues in this gentle tale of music and friendship,” and its “musically diverse songs beautifully channel the personalities of each member,” said Phuong Le at The Guardian. (HBO Max)

Tove Jansson is best known for the Moomins – “the melancholy hippo-like creatures” now seen everywhere from mugs to baseball caps, said Jonathan Romney in the Financial Times. But the Finnish writer also published books for adults. Her 1972 novel “The Summer Book” is a modern classic in Scandinavia, and became a cult hit elsewhere after being reissued in English in 2003. Now, it has been adapted for the screen.

Directed by Charlie McDowell (son of Malcolm), this “atmospheric film” will transport you to the “breezy calm of a small island in the Gulf of Finland”, where earnest eight-year-old Sophia (Emily Matthews) is spending the summer after her mother’s death. For company, she has her artist grandmother (Glenn Close) – a “placid powerhouse of twinkling wisdom” – and her grieving, distant father (Anders Danielsen Lie).

Not much happens and, at times, the story feels “pathologically benign”. But it is “beautifully photographed... all sunsets and wildflowers, knitwear and moss”. There are “strong performances at either end of the age spectrum”, said Jenny McCartney in The Sunday Times but the “necessary sense of Finnish originality” and “oddity” has been lost. The pace is slow, the score is “overly insistent” and the visual metaphors – repeated shots of dying pipe-tobacco embers, and a sapling being held up – are “heavy-handed”.

Still, the element that is central to Jansson’s book – the natural world – is beautifully observed, said Wendy Ide in The Observer. Gradually, the father emerges from his own grief to help his daughter, while the grandmother makes peace with the fact that the last season of her own life is almost at a close. It is a “muted but moving picture”.

What does Enid Blyton’s Land of Spells have in common with the Bay of Pentos in “Game of Thrones”? asked The Guardian. Both were portrayed by the same “sunny archipelago in the Mediterranean”: Malta.

The EU’s smallest country, “no bigger in size than Sheffield”, has over the past decade become “one of the most popular places” for American and British filmmakers to work. It has hosted more than 30 film and TV productions in each of the past three years, including “Jurassic World Rebirth” and Ridley Scott’s “Gladiator II”. The “microstate” just south of Sicily has stood in for Greece, southern France and even the Caribbean – in Guy Ritchie’s upcoming “Viva la Madness”.

Malta is “really punching above its weight”, said Adrian Wootton, the chief executive of the British Film Commission. It’s been “very aggressive, in a positive way”.

Small but mighty

Over the last century, the “small but mighty” republic has become “an appealing global destination for major film productions”, said Variety in 2024. After the Hollywood actors strike the previous year, requests to film came in “like crazy”, said co-founder of Valletta Pictures Joshua Cassar Gaspar. “The strikes didn’t affect us because the independent productions kept going, and many of us in Malta service TV shows, which were also unaffected.”

Providers were also less “Hollywood-dependent” than some European countries, such as the UK, said the news site. And productions benefited from a “hefty 40% tax rebate”. It’s probably “the most generous cash rebate in the world”, the producer of “Gladiator II” said on Deadline.

“Every euro that we invest in the rebate, the industry generates back four,” Malta’s film commissioner Johann Grech said in June. Today, film production is one of Malta’s “most effective” sources of investment, he said in MaltaToday. According to an independent report published this year, the industry contributed 0.28% of Malta’s gross value added between 2005 and 2017. That reached a record 2.16% in 2023. Since 2018, film production has contributed €1.2 billion to the GDP.

And “the economic effect is felt throughout the country”, driving infrastructure development, boosting hospitality and tourism, and attracting “numerous high-net-worth individuals” to the island. Film production is “one of Malta’s economic engines”.

A parallel universe?

As ever with “generous rebates”, there has been “some local pushback”, said Deadline. Malta’s infrastructure is “being tested to the limits as its cities, towns and villages regularly turn into film sets”, said The Guardian. Road closures and parking restrictions “have become a bugbear” for locals.

Critics say Malta’s rise as a filming location has “come at the cost of neglecting local cinematic talent”. The Malta Film Commission is “focused on courting international productions”, while domestic production is dependent on the arts council and its much smaller budget. Examples of Maltese films reaching international audiences are “few and far between”. With local crews in demand from international companies, Maltese directors “often find themselves being outbid by Hollywood”.

“There’s a bit of a parallel universe,” said Teodor Reljić, a Malta-based screenwriter. “People in servicing are thriving, but local filmmakers can’t pay a DOP [director of photography] because they are expecting ‘Jurassic World’ fees.”

“It is tempting to sit back and believe the local film industry to be ‘strong’ simply because many foreign productions shoot in Malta,” said producer Malcolm Scerri Ferrante in The Times of Malta. But volume alone “does not constitute a robust film industry, and certainly not an indigenous one”.

The 1990s were a period of transition for the film industry, seeing the rise of both smaller, independent studios and the spectacular growth of home movie-watching. Despite this tumult, the decade produced countless films of enduring artistic and commercial significance, including these eight memorable classics.

‘The Silence of the Lambs’ (1991)

Both Anthony Hopkins as the cannibalistic serial killer Hannibal Lecter and Jodie Foster as FBI trainee Clarice Starling turn in iconic performances in Jonathan Demme’s downbeat procedural. She is tasked with interviewing Lecter, imprisoned in an asylum for the criminally insane and one of the few characters in the film who doesn’t treat her with knee-jerk misogyny, who may have insights that could help catch “Buffalo Bill,” an active serial killer.

The film’s bleak aesthetic shaped a generation of noir-ish procedurals on the big and small screens. It endures as a classic because it is a “multifaceted interwork of classical storytelling, horror conventions and procedural standards, together reshaped into both a feminist landmark and a powerful study of transformation and identity,” said Brian Eggert at Deep Focus Review. (MGM+)

‘Boyz n the Hood’ (1991)

The late director John Singleton’s drama follows three childhood friends, Tre (Cuba Gooding, Jr.), Doughboy (Ice Cube) and Ricky (Morris Chestnut), first briefly as children and then as teenagers struggling to navigate the endemic violence and poverty of South Central Los Angeles. As one of the first mainstream films to depict the plight of urban neighborhoods with sympathy, humanity and nuance, it stands as a true cinematic landmark. A film that “showed how white supremacy set the conditions that ended in neighborhoods devastated by crime and, ultimately, violence,” it depicts an almost “post-apocalyptic world,” in which “what was destroying their landscape wasn’t an alien invasion or a virus” but racism, said Lawrence Ware at The New York Times. (Starz)

‘Groundhog Day’ (1993)

While time loops are a now-familiar part of the sci-fi landscape, director Harold Ramis’ “Groundhog Day” is the first English-language feature film to highlight the concept. Bill Murray plays Phil Connors, an irritable, cynical weatherman sent to Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania, to report a story about the town’s quaint groundhog ceremony.

Trapped there by a massive snow storm, he realizes he is living the same day over and over again. After fruitlessly trying to kill himself in increasingly clever fashion, he gradually falls for his producer, Rita (Andie MacDowell). By avoiding “sentimentality and smalltown stereotypes in favor of one genuinely hysterical set-piece after another,” it is “not only one of the finest comedies of the 90s, but actually remains fresh, funny and original after repeated viewings,” said Caroline Westbrook at Empire. (Prime Video)

‘Pulp Fiction’ (1994)

Director Quentin Tarantino’s era-defining, endlessly quotable and propulsive thriller popularized the use of nonlinear narratives in mainstream filmmaking. The impossible-to-summarize plot follows multiple sets of characters over the course of three (very, very eventful) days.

Tarantino uses a “chapter” structure to tell the loosely intersecting tales, including one about philosophizing hit men Vincent (John Travolta) and Jules (Samuel L. Jackson), sent on a job for their boss, Marsellus Wallace (Ving Rhames), that goes hilariously awry. Uma Thurman’s career-making turn as Marsellus’ wife, Mia, is just one of many heart-stopping performances in a movie that is simultaneously ultraviolent and side-splittingly funny. An “absolute classic,” it is a project that “set the bar for cinema cool and redefined independent filmmaking,” and in the process “forever changed Hollywood,” said Jordan Crucchiola at Wired. (Paramount+)

‘Big Night’ (1996)

Tony Shalhoub and Stanley Tucci are brothers Primo and Secundo, immigrants operating a failing Jersey Shore restaurant during the 1950s. Primo is the stubbornly perfectionist gourmet chef, a character who prefigures the 2000s-era celebrity chef boom, and Secondo is the slick businessman who regards the popular Olive Garden-esque restaurant up the road, run by Pascal (Ian Holm), with envy while carrying on a secret affair with Pascal’s wife, Gabriella (Isabella Rossellini).

Pascal, who covets Primo’s culinary genius, tells Secundo he can get jazz great Louis Prima to make an appearance at their restaurant, and the brothers plot one last big, extravagant dinner to save the business. A film of “great wisdom and delight,” it is “about food not as a subject but as a language — the language by which one can speak to gods, can create, can seduce, can aspire to perfection,” said Roger Ebert at the time. (Paramount+)

‘Breaking the Waves’ (1996)

A film that was a kind of spiritual precursor to the aesthetically austere and hugely influential Dogme 95 film movement, Danish director Lars von Trier’s haunting masterpiece also shaped a generation of independent filmmakers. When oil-rig worker Jan (Stellan Skarsgard) is paralyzed in a work injury, he encourages his new wife, Bess (Emily Watson), to sleep with other men and tell him about it.

Believing this to be a kind of divine mission, she presses on with her struggle despite hostility from church elders and her sister-in-law, Dodo (Katrin Cartlidge), until a truly unforgettable ending leaves viewers stunned. A “raw, crazy tour-de-force,” it dares to “fuse true love with lurid exploitation and pure religious faith,” said Janet Maslin at The New York Times. (Mubi)

‘The Big Lebowski’ (1998)

Joel and Ethan Coen made several 1990s classics, including “Fargo.” But it is “The Big Lebowski” that remains the enduring cultural touchstone. Jeff Bridges is Jeffrey “The Dude” Lebowski, a middle-aged burnout whose apartment is ransacked by nihilist enforcers who are actually after a different person with the same name.

When The Dude tries to get reimbursed for the damage from the intended Jeffrey Lebowski (David Huddleston), he gets caught up in a lurid slacker-noir kidnapping caper, encountering a series of memorable goofballs including Lebowski’s daughter, Maude (Julianne Moore). A film that “warns us from the start not to expect any of its narrative threads to lead anywhere,” it takes the audience on a “labyrinthine route followed solely for the diversions encountered along the way,” said Jonathan Romney at Sight and Sound. (Netflix)

‘The Matrix’ (1999)

The brilliance of directors Lilly and Lana Wachowski’s “The Matrix” has been diluted over time by its inferior sequels and many imitators, but its inventively choreographed action sequences and dystopian narrative endure. Keanu Reeves plays Neo, a computer hacker who discovers that his reality is an illusion maintained by rogue AI overlords who keep humans in a state of permanent suspended animation while harvesting them for resources.

Neo joins a rebellion led by Trinity (Carrie-Anne Moss) and Morpheus (Laurence Fishburne) while evading Agent Smith (Hugo Weaving). The movie is also the source of the concept of “red-pilling” that plays such a prominent role in contemporary cultural discourse. “The Matrix” is a film of “immense scale and complexity” that “understood where things were headed far better than any film did at the time,” said Scott Tobias at The Guardian. (Peacock)

While promoting his latest blockbuster, filmmaker Christopher Nolan listed scholar Emily Wilson’s translation of “The Odyssey” as one of his influences. Now, Wilson’s scathing critique of Nolan’s cinematic take on the epic poem has gone viral, inspiring additional backlash from critics and academics alike. Amid the heated controversy over one of the year’s biggest films, there may be a silver lining to the discourse.

Why Wilson trashed Nolan’s adaptation

Wilson’s expertise in the classics is undeniable. She is also no stranger to backlash. In 2017, she became the first woman to translate “The Odyssey” from ancient Greek into English, an interpretation “widely celebrated in academia and the literary world” as “comprehensive, modern in sensibilities and faithful” to Homer’s almost 3,000-year-old classic, said The New York Times. Her translation departs from the “masculine framing used by her male predecessors,” a move that has “subjected her to online harassment and misogyny from men and far-right figures.”

Before Nolan’s movie premiered, Wilson was “pumped” to see how the epic played out on the big screen, she said on The New York Times’ The Daily podcast. However, after seeing Nolan’s adaptation, Wilson said she would be “ashamed to have written any part of this script” at The London Review of Books. The film had “nothing convincing to say,” it lacked “psychological, emotional, political and ethical depth,” and the “writing is abysmal,” Wilson added. It was a “family-friendly audiovisual spectacle” comparable to an “elaborate Fourth of July fireworks display.”

Most of the nonwhite actors “play versions of the Black best friend, whose only role in the drama is to provide aid to the white protagonist,” Wilson said in her LRB review. She has since expressed regret for this “paragraph about the uses of the POC actors — who are all great, but IMO under-utilized,” Wilson wrote on social media. She still thinks the film “largely wastes its strong cast,” but she “framed it badly.”

A debate reminiscent of the golden era of critics

One of the most prominent figures to come to Nolan’s defense against Wilson was Joyce Carol Oates, a retired professor of the humanities and a prolific writer who has won a National Book Award. Wilson’s “tone of dismissal & haughty superiority strike a sour note,” Oates said on X. Instead of “disagreeing with interpretations of Homer in a collegial manner,” Wilson, who has “benefited enormously from Nolan’s film,” speaks in the “crude language of MAGA folks attacking someone with ideas that differ from hers.” Within the world of translators, Wilson’s review “seems all the more surprising since all translations are, presumably, subjective & not equivalent to the original text.” One would expect a translator to be “just a wee bit more thoughtful & respectful of others who are acting in good faith just as (she would claim) she is.”

Wilson used “baffling arguments” to “flay” Nolan’s adaptation of Homer’s poem, classicist Theo Nash said at Slate. She criticizes Nolan for deviating from the text, “as if the filmmaker’s choices were not also an act of interpretation.” The close attention that informs her translation is “lacking in her reading of the movie,” and the “idea that Nolan might have something new to say about ‘The Odyssey’ is denied.”

Whether or not you agree with Wilson’s perspective, it’s “always exciting to read a particularly full-throated pan,” said critic Kathryn VanArendonk at Vulture. Even if you don’t believe Wilson did her job as a critic, she has “done her job as a writer,” which is to “be a compelling read who makes her argument unmistakably clear.”

Figuring out “who is punching down here is really interesting,” VanArendonk added. Since Wilson has “academic authority” and is “writing with such vigor,” it is “easy to forget that she has less power” than Nolan, a Hollywood darling. That is also “part of the pleasure of the conversation.” Wilson is not interested in “softening any of it.” Still Nolan’s the one who “walks away unscathed, no question.” Of all the topics we could watch people fight about online, “how someone adapted ‘The Odyssey’ is such a good one.”

“Someone give Tom Holland a holiday,” said Kevin Maher in The Times. Not only did he just give “The Odyssey” its “beating heart”, the 30-year-old Londoner has also been tasked with rescuing the “ailing superhero genre”. The latest – 38th! – instalment in the Marvel Cinematic Universe opens not with the usual montage of Avengers clips but with images from Holland’s hugely successful appearances as Spider-Man.

After a series of expensive misfires for the most commercially successful film franchise of all time, the message is clear: “Marvel is now the house that Tom built.” “Brand New Day”, Holland’s fourth outing in the role, picks up where 2021’s “No Way Home” left off, with mild-mannered Peter Parker having arranged for the world to forget that he ever existed.

So we find him back at square one, living in a scuzzy New York apartment, “lost and broken” – not least because his sweetheart MJ (Holland’s real-life wife Zendaya) and his best buddy Ned (Jacob Batalon) have been “cruelly memory-wiped out of his life”.

Those opening 20 minutes are “the strongest of the film”, said John Nugent in Empire. Holland is “brilliant” as the once puppyish Peter, “bruised by grief and solitude”. But what rescues the film is Zendaya’s performance, said Peter Bradshaw in The Guardian. Playing a non-superhero, she is able to bring a grown-up acting presence to the fore to cut against the silliness.

In other respects, it is the same old Spideyworld, with lots of swinging between skyscrapers and leading, as in all MCU films, to “apocalyptic but weirdly temporary destruction in the digitally confected big city”. It makes for an “entertaining spectacle” – but we could have done with “a more radical reboot”.

In 1985, Wham!’s manager Simon Napier-Bell came up with a “cunning plan”, said Peter Bradshaw in The Guardian. To help George Michael and Andrew Ridgeley break America, without them having to embark on a lengthy US tour, he’d send them to China, to become the first Western pop act to perform on the mainland. This, he calculated correctly, would create a blizzard of publicity that would propel the duo to fame in the States.

After months of delicate negotiations, Napier-Bell confirmed concerts in Beijing and Guangzhou as part of a 10-day tour. Veteran director Lindsay Anderson was hired to make a fly-on-the-wall documentary about the trip but Michael and Ridgeley didn’t like him or his film, and it was shelved. Now, his footage has been re-edited, and spliced with interviews with Ridgeley and others, to give a glimpse of a “strange and riveting moment in pop and political history”.

“Everything you could possibly want in a rock doc” is here, said Kevin Maher in The Times. In places, it’s “alarmingly” like “This Is Spinal Tap”: the two young stars are dragged to a reception at the British embassy, where Ridgeley is asked “squirm-inducing” questions about cricket; Anderson pontificates grandly about capitalism; and, at Beijing’s Workers’ Stadium, party apparatchiks look horrified when Michael says Wham!’s next song is called “Freedom”. It’s “quite brilliant”.

The trip, we learn, had an unexpected legacy, said Phil de Semlyen in Time Out: the film includes interviews with locals whose lives were transformed by two hours of “kitsch pop heaven”. Wham! split less than a year later but, in this “surreal cultural collision, something genuinely meaningful happened”.

What happened

“Spider-Man: Brand New Day” brought in $932 million worldwide over the weekend, delivering the second-biggest opening in global box office history after 2019’s “Avengers: Endgame,” which earned $1.2 billion. The new Marvel blockbuster, released almost five years after its predecessor “Spider-Man: No Way Home,” made $360 million domestically. This marks the “biggest opening ever at the North American box office,” surpassing the “Endgame” total of $357 million, said Deadline.

Who said what

This weekend’s opening was a “perfect storm” for a major blockbuster, combining a familiar character, established intellectual property and strong reviews, box office analyst Chris Colombo told CNN. This was a “mind-blowing” result for the new Tom Holland-led movie, said Variety. “With great power comes truly heroic ticket sales.”

The film’s success fueled the biggest collective weekend in North American box office history, with total takings of about $430 million. Christopher Nolan’s “The Odyssey” also had another good weekend, pulling in $51 million domestically, while “Toy Story 5” earned $6.3 million.

What next?

Analysts are predicting another bumper month for U.S. movie theaters. Industry expert Paul Dergarabedian suggested on X that the “$4 billion mark” for this summer’s total takings could “be within reach.”

Written and directed by Warrington-born Helen Walsh, “On the Sea” is a “yearningly tender” drama about sex and love set in a small fishing community in north Wales, said David Sexton in The New Statesman. Jack (Barry Ward) is a careworn middle-aged man who has spent his whole life here, working for the family mussel-farming business, and the film opens with a “lovely, rhythmic sequence” – showing the work of gathering and cleaning mussels – which “masterfully” establishes the world he inhabits. Jack is married to his teenage sweetheart Maggie (Liz White), with whom he has a wayward son, and has never acknowledged that he is gay. Then he meets Daniel (Lorne MacFadyen), “a hunky young itinerant deckhand” who “has no such qualms about his sexuality”. Soon, they are going out fishing together, and on the sea, they gradually “find a world of their own”.

Shades of “God’s Own Country” and “Brokeback Mountain” “hover above this thoughtful” tale of forbidden love in a tough community, said Kevin Maher in The Times. You might wonder how long we can keep producing dramas that depend for their tension on a level of “foam-flecked homophobia” more redolent of 1960s Wyoming than the UK in 2026. Still, “gay panic” persists in this village, and “On the Sea” amounts to a carefully observed study of “masculinity under pressure”, as Jack must try to “juggle his multiple fragile identities”. There are some pacing issues, said Alex Davidson in Sight and Sound: too much time is devoted to Jack’s relationships with secondary characters. But the connection between the two men is “sensitively portrayed”, the performances are strong, and the film makes excellent use of its Anglesey locations.

“E. Jean Carroll has had quite a life,” said Alissa Wilkinson in The New York Times. She made her name as a gonzo journalist, writing first-person features for Esquire and Playboy, before becoming an advice columnist at Elle magazine: her long-running “Ask E. Jean” column became so popular that it was turned into a chat show.

Then, in 2019, she made international news headlines when she accused President Trump of having raped her in a department store changing room in the mid-1990s. Trump branded her a liar, insisting she was not his “type”. Carroll sued him for sexual abuse and defamation, leading to two civil court trials, which she won. Trump recently paid her $5.6 million (£4.1 million) in damages over one; he has yet to pay a penny for the other.

In this documentary, Carroll guides viewers through her career, her decision to break her silence about Trump’s abuse, and the “harrowing experience of going up against one of the most powerful men in the world – twice”.

This is a “solid, unshowy” film, said Wendy Ide in The Observer, which contains some extremely powerful moments, including a present-day conversation in which Carroll talks to her best friend about how she felt immediately after the attack, and her decision not to report it. Yet we learn that, back in the 1990s, she advised abused women to “always press charges” – which creates a “jarring dissonance”.

Still, the documentary is sympathetic to its subject, who comes across as unexpectedly “magnetic” – “curious, mischievous and candid”, said Angie Han in The Hollywood Reporter. In the public imagination, Carroll, now 82, has been defined by someone else’s crime; the film paints a broad portrait of “a figure far more interesting than the bad thing that happened to her”.

For more than 50 years, David Thomson has been “watching and writing about movies and hanging out with movie people”, said Ed Potton in The Times. The author of more than 40 books, including the highly influential “The New Biographical Dictionary of Film” (1975), he is “unique in his field”, being “intellectual, opinionated, informed and funny”. Now, at the age of 85, Thomson has written a book “billed as the capstone of his career”. A history of the movies, “from the Lumière brothers to the Coen brothers”, from “Psycho” to “Pretty Woman” to Jean-Luc Godard, it also covers much else besides: “we get detours to John Keats, Gustav Mahler, Werner Heisenberg and Tracey Emin, none of which feels dilettantish”. Thomson also celebrates the “written word”, and suggests that novels are in many ways superior to films. Written in a style that “veers between conspiratorial and donnish”, this book has the “learning of an encyclopaedia, the wisdom of a novel and the zingers of a screwball comedy”.

While he remains as obsessed by film as ever, Thomson is increasingly fearful that “movies may be bad for us”, said Mark Glancy in Literary Review. There is, of course, nothing new about claims that they shorten attention spans and flatten our sense of evil. But Thomson suggests such anxieties have been “given new weight and immediacy by the rise of Donald Trump, with his constant demand for our attention and his indifference to morality”. It’s an argument which seems, alas, a bit of a “rabbit hole”. Fortunately, such “wintry and sombre ponderings” don’t take up too much space, said Peter Bradshaw in The Guardian. For the most part, this book is a “straightforwardly rapturous, rhapsodic celebration of the extraordinary adventure of cinema”, written by an author who, despite his advanced age, is as “eccentric, exasperating and absorbing as ever”.

If you have watched Christopher Nolan's adaptation of “The Odyssey” and feel inspired to embark on an epic journey of your own, consider visiting these stunning locations where key scenes of the movie were filmed. The director and his crew shot in six countries to bring Odysseus’ voyage to life, from the sand dunes of Morocco to the rugged cliffs of Scotland.

Italy

Begin your journey where it started for Odysseus, at his home, Ithaca. Instead of filming on the actual Greek island in the Ionian Sea, Nolan chose to shoot the scenes on Favignana, off the coast of Sicily. Known as the “butterfly island” because of its shape it’s an “easy” ferry ride from Sicily’s Trapani port, said Wanderlust.

The 15th-century “ruined fortress” on the top of the hill “made for the perfect stand-in” for Odysseus’ palace. It had the “most epic landscape” where you could “see the water everywhere you were and the ships [used for filming] could pull up”, said the film’s production designer, Ruth De Jong, for Condé Nast Traveler. However, getting these shots of the water and ships required a 30-minute hike. Despite the “daily challenge”, the crew soon “got into it”. The actual interior for the film’s palace was a set in Los Angeles.

Greece

If you’re reliving a Greek epic, a visit to Greece is, of course, a must. For those feeling brave, visit Nestor’s Cave in the Peloponnese region, which was the filming site for the Cyclops sequence. The crew had to “haul a 60-foot animatronic monster” up to the cave every day because of Nolan’s “aversion” to using green screen, said Wanderlust.

The homecoming of King Agamemnon was filmed in areas outside Messenia and near Athens where the windiness “worked well” with all the flags and the banners in the sequence, De Jong told Condé Nast Traveler. The area gives visitors a holiday that “blends history, mythology, nature and luxury”, with “dramatic beaches” and “ancient palaces”, said Travel and Tour World.

Morocco

Next stop were the “undulating sand dunes” and “mud-brick buildings” of Morocco, said British Vogue. The country brought an “authentically ancient atmosphere” to the film, with the Unesco-listed village of Aït Benhaddou, used as the city of Troy. The group of “earthen buildings surrounded by high walls” has been a “desirable” filming location for many other historical blockbusters including “Gladiator” and “Lawrence of Arabia”.

Scotland

Even though Odysseus “would never have gone to Scotland”, the location “just happened to have the look that we liked”, De Jong told Condé Nast Traveler. The “craggy rocks” and verdant cliffside just outside Cullen in the Highlands, were the perfect place for the witch Circe’s home. And the “atmospheric ruins” of the Findlater Castle, by the Moray Firth, became the backdrop for one of the “most unnerving scenes” of the film when Circe “turns Odysseus’ crew into gluttonous pigs”, said Wanderlust. Visitors can see the site by walking the Moray Coastal Trail. Consider heading west to the sprawling Culbin Forest, too. Although you won’t encounter Laestrygonian giants, you can still enjoy the “wonderful views” and “biodiversity”.

Iceland

This was the one country Nolan knew he wanted to “shoot in from the jump”, said Condé Nast Traveler. The “black sands” and caves of the Hjörleifshöfði mountain were perfect for the “remote” and “otherworldly scene” where Odysseus “journeys to the underworld to consult with the blind Theban prophet, Tiresias”, said British Vogue.

Politics is the art of human beings solving problems without killing each other. Sometimes those efforts fail, never more memorably than in these classic political thrillers. They run the gamut from true storytelling about presidential corruption and the rescue of American diplomats in Iran to entirely fictional yet still believable stories about predatory drug companies and communist surveillance operations.

‘Foreign Correspondent’ (1940)

Hotshot New York Globe crime reporter John Jones (Joel McCrea) is dispatched by his editor, Mr. Powers (Harry Davenport), to Europe on the precipice of WWII to figure out what is about to envelop the continent in director Alfred Hitchcock’s thriller. There Jones discovers an espionage ring bent on selling out the U.K. and the Netherlands to their adversaries.

While the movie functions superbly as a “bold call to action to stop the looming threat of Nazism in Europe,” it also “boasts some of Hitchcock’s most memorable sequences and technical tricks, making for one set piece after another of formal virtuosity” despite the era’s technical limitations, said Brian Eggert at Deep Focus Review. (HBO Max)

‘The Conversation’ (1974)

Arriving the same year that a wiretapping scandal brought down the administration of President Richard Nixon, director Francis Ford Coppola’s quietly devastating thriller follows Harry N. Caul (Gene Hackman), a surveillance wizard hired to record a conversation between Ann (Cindy Williams) and Mark (Frederic Forrest) at the behest of the shadowy Director (Robert Duvall). Harry’s growing suspicion that the young couple is in danger fuels a twisty narrative that keeps both him and the audience guessing and appraising their relationship with technology. A film that is more than just a “product of its Watergate-era anxieties,” Coppola’s haunting masterpiece is a “chillingly prescient and masterfully crafted character study with themes that echo louder than ever in our hyper-surveilled world,” said Andy Punter at InSession Film. (Prime Video)

‘All the President’s Men’ (1976)

While it may seem quaint by today’s standards, the Watergate scandal consumed American politics for more than a year, ended Richard Nixon’s presidency and permanently decreased the public’s level of trust in the government. Director Alan J. Pakula’s film recreates the sleuthing of Washington Post reporters Bob Woodward (Robert Redford) and Carl Bernstein (Dustin Hoffman) that blew the conspiracy wide open.

“All the President’s Men” mesmerizes by faithfully depicting the banal proceduralism of good journalism. A film that “intentionally underplays the enormity of the central conspiracy and eludes any histrionic moralizing,” this “subversive detective story” brilliantly “rejects mythologizing the pivotal history behind it,” said Wes Greene at Slant Magazine. (Prime Video)

‘The Official Story’ (1985)

Alicia (Norma Aleandro) and Roberto (Héctor Alterio) are middle-class Argentines with connections in government and business and an adopted daughter, Gaby (Analia Castro), that they adore. But Alicia soon begins to suspect that her daughter is one of the children grotesquely stolen from the desaparecidos, dissidents disappeared by the country’s authoritarian junta, and that her husband might be in on the repugnant scheme.

Director Luis Puenzo has made a “must-see film that, in light of the real events, paints a haunting picture of the cruelty humans inflict on one another” and also delicately “honors the memory of those affected by the tragedy that unfolded in Argentina,” said Matthew Jones at Philosophy in Film. (Tubi)

‘The Constant Gardener’ (2005)

“The Constant Gardener” is the first great paranoid thriller of the 21st century. When his wife, Tessa (Rachel Weisz), dies mysteriously, British diplomat Justin Quayle (Ralph Fiennes) gradually discovers layers about who she really was, first suspecting her of being unfaithful and then unraveling a conspiracy to test a new drug on unwitting African patients. Helmed by the great Brazilian director Fernando Meirelles (“City of God”), it is a “brainy thriller” whose “visuals create an overwhelming sense of the world gone mad, the world falling down around the hero just as he's beginning to understand the way it works,” said Tim Brayton at Alternate Ending. (Prime Video)

‘The Lives of Others’ (2006)

At once both chilling and moving, director Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck has created what may stand as the most enduring indictment of the 20th century authoritarian surveillance state. Set in East Germany near the end of its communist regime, it is about Stasi officer Gerd Wiesler (Ulrich Muhe), who begins surveilling a prominent playwright, Georg Dreyman (Sebastian Koch), and his mistress, Christa-Maria Sieland (Martina Gedeck).

The monastic Wiesler eventually comes to believe Dreyman is harmless and in the process doubts the very foundations of autocracy itself. A film that is “alert to the Kafkaesque absurdity of everyday life” in communist regimes, it “has a maturity and breadth of vision rarely found in a debut feature,” said Geoffrey Macnam at Sight and Sound. (Prime Video)

‘Argo’ (2012)

Ben Affleck directs and stars in this zippy thriller about the clandestine efforts to exfiltrate six American diplomats who managed to escape before they became hostages at the U.S. embassy during the Iranian Revolution. Affleck stars as CIA officer Tony Mendez, who concocts a creative cover story about how the diplomats are in Iran working on a Canadian science-fiction film. Affleck “displays a fearlessness when it comes to mixing genre” in this “part-comic, part-thriller narrative” whose mostly-but-not-entirely-true twists and turns “ensure your nails are down to the quick by the end credits,” said Amber Wilkinson at Eye for Film. (Prime Video)

‘Manuscripts Don’t Burn’ (2013)

Iranian director Mohammad Rasoulof’s haunting “Manuscripts Don’t Burn” had to be smuggled into the Cannes Film Festival to protect its cast and crew, who remain anonymous to this day. It follows two government assassins, Khosrow and Morteza, who are tasked with tracking down, torturing and killing a group of dissidents suspected of distributing a manuscript.

That document pertains to what became known in Iran as the “Chain Murders,” a series of assassinations of intellectuals and dissidents in the 1990s. A “harrowing masterpiece,” it is an “unflinching look at creative oppression” that stands as an “entirely singular film experience,” said Joshua Brunsting at CriterionCast. (Prime Video)

‘Official Secrets’ (2019)

The combination of arrogance and doctored intelligence that led the United States and its allies into the 2003 Iraq War is almost made for Hollywood. In “Official Secrets,” real-life British intelligence officer Katharine Gun (Keira Knightley) uncovers evidence of a joint British-American conspiracy to spy on and then pressure diplomats from countries on the U.N. Security Council to secure their votes for a resolution authorizing the war.

Martin Bright (Matt Smith) and Peter Beaumont (Matthew Goode) are journalists at The Observer who wrestle with the implications of publishing the story. The film turns a “historical footnote with potent resonance” into a “compelling tale of injustice on an individual and global level,” said Peter Travers at Rolling Stone. (Netflix)

Christopher Nolan is “hardly a stranger to ambition”, said John Nugent on Empire. His first major film, “Memento”, told its story in two sequences – one that moved forward in time, the other backwards. Since then he has tackled wars, “dreams, wormholes, the nuclear apocalypse and Victorian teleportation machines”. But his adaptation of Homer’s “Odyssey” – the 8th-century BC Greek poem that is the definition of epic – may be his most ambitious yet.

The first feature to be shot entirely on giant Imax 70mm cameras, it is “jaw-detaching” in its scope and scale. Plunging the viewer into a world of both “divine fantasy and grounded realism”, this is filmmaking “at a magnitude” few directors could imagine, let alone execute.

Nolan has produced a “mythic spectacle” that honours its ancient source material, “while also addressing more topical themes of exile, war trauma and survivor’s guilt”, said Wendy Ide in The Observer.

Like the poem, the film unfolds in multiple timelines. The present-day framing takes place on the island where an exhausted Odysseus (Matt Damon) washed up 10 years after the Battle of Troy, and is now held captive by the nymph Calypso (Charlize Theron).

In the same time frame, we meet his sad queen Penelope (Anne Hathaway) who – back in Ithaca – is being besieged by “power-hungry suitors”, including Antinous (a marvellously venomous Robert Pattinson), while her restless son Telemachus (Tom Holland) waits for the return of the father he has never known. Incidents from the previous decade are then woven in as Odysseus recovers his battered memory – the deception at Troy, and his adventures in the years after that, including an encounter with the enchantress Circe (Samantha Morton), and a diversion through Hades.

Nolan has conjured some “tremendous” scenes, said Deborah Ross in The Spectator, some of which would not be out of place in a horror film (the cyclops is “truly terrifying”). I had my doubts about Damon’s casting, but in the end he does make you care about the man broken by the years he has lost. And though some may find the modern speech jarring, what’s the alternative? We’d struggle if they spoke in ancient Greek.

But for two hours the film is just set-piece after set-piece, backed by a deafening score, which becomes rather wearying. Yes, it’s short on jokes, said Kevin Maher in The Times; but “The Odyssey” – with its extraordinary cinematography and big ideas “about the impossibility of home” and “the absurdity of heroic individualism in a boundless universe” – is a masterpiece nonetheless.

Film fans are embarking on “epic journeys of their own” to see Christopher Nolan’s adaptation of “The Odyssey” in one of the “few surviving” Imax 70mm cinemas, said The Guardian.

That’s because it’s the first feature film to be shot entirely on 1570 film – “named for the width of the film stock (70mm) and the 15 perforations on each frame”. It’s “the highest-resolution film format in existence”, so it makes sense for fans to watch the Oscar-winning filmmaker’s masterpiece in his “preferred format”, right?

‘Very exclusive’

But getting your hands on “summer’s hottest ticket” is far from easy, said Mashable. Fans are spending “hundreds of dollars”, travelling thousands of miles, and even planning pregnancies around seeing Nolan’s film in Imax 70mm cinemas: the only format that lets you watch “The Odyssey” with the “fullest image possible”.

Those who opt for other cinemas, with formats like the standard 70mm, or 35mm, will have a “sizeable chunk” of the frame cut off. So some of the “sheer vastness of the landscapes that Nolan and cinematographer Hoyte van Hoytema are capturing” will be lost.

Most cinemas shifted to digital around a decade ago and there are just 41 worldwide that are able to show Imax 1570 film, eight of which are in California. The UK is home to three of them: two in London and one in Manchester. No theatres in Asia, Africa or South America can screen Nolan’s film in his intended format, making it a “very exclusive – and very Western – affair”.

I thought the “buzz” around “The Odyssey” being shot on Imax 1570 cameras was “clever marketing hype”, said Charles Pulliam-Moore on The Verge. But to “get a true sense of the story Nolan is telling” you really do need to watch it in an Imax. Many of the scenes are “perfectly fine” in the 35mm format; however, those that feature the film’s “gargantuan monsters” take on a “different gravity” when displayed in the Imax 70mm’s 1.43:1 ratio.

Nolan has made a film that is “immersive” in a way most modern features aren’t. But the higher ticket price coupled with the fact that the “vast majority” of people will never get to watch his film in the way he intended it has prompted accusations that the director is “anti-art and contributing to the culture of obsessive format purism”.

‘Far more fiddly and expensive’

Shooting on 1570 cameras is no easy task as they’re “notoriously heavy, loud and require frequent reloading”, said The Guardian. During “The Odyssey” shoot the film stock had to be changed “every three minutes” and Nolan worked closely with Imax to create a “soundproofing ‘blimp’ to house the 180kg camera to make it quiet enough for him to record dialogue on 1570 for the first time”. Projecting the finished film is also “far more fiddly and expensive” as a highly trained projectionist needs to be present for the entire screening.

But Nolan’s popularity has risen alongside 1570’s “mini comeback”. The number of cinemas able to project these films has risen from 30 to 41 since the release of “Oppenheimer” in 2023. And it’s not just Nolan who has helped spark interest in the format: several other big-name directors have followed suit including Denis Villeneuve who shot “Dune: Part Three” on Imax cameras.

“There’s certainly more demand,” Imax CEO Richard Gelfond told Variety. But adding more 70mm screens isn’t that simple as new Imax film projectors haven’t been made in “about 50 years”. Sources at Imax said many of the parts needed to build them “simply no longer exist”.

Even if Imax does “magically” figure out a way to manufacture more 70mm projectors, there aren’t many cinemas where they could be installed as “exhibitors aren’t building enough auditoriums that are capable of housing its towering 1.43:1 screens because of high construction costs”.

The company remains one of the movie industry’s few “reliable bright spots”, with attendances having “languished” since the pandemic, said Rebecca Rubin in Variety. Buyers have been “circling” and in May it was reportedly in the “early stages of exploring a sale”. For now, Imax is in an “enviable position”.

Sam Neill’s chameleonic charm carried him across screens for five decades. Over 150 films and TV shows, the New Zealander played scoundrels as effortlessly as scientists, proving himself comfortable in supporting or starring roles, in blockbusters or indies. His dashing allure helped jump-start a new wave of Kiwi cinema with 1977’s Sleeping Dogs, yet he could also be terrifying, as in horror films Omen III (1981) and Event Horizon (1997). He won accolades as the jealous husband in The Piano (1993) and as a menacing cop in the BBC series Peaky Blinders. But his best-known role was Alan Grant, the awestruck, resourceful paleontologist in Jurassic Park (1993). Neill said he initially assumed the Steven Spielberg blockbuster wouldn’t do much for his career because the CGI dinosaurs would outshine the actors. Instead, the Oscar-winning film earned him global acclaim. “People just know me all around the world,” he said in 2013. “And they’ll start roaring like dinosaurs.”

Nigel John Dermot Neill—he started going by Sam in childhood— was born in Northern Ireland and raised in New Zealand, his father’s homeland. A stutterer as a child, he began acting at boarding school as a ploy to meet girls and found his speech impediment disappeared onstage. After studying at Wellington’s Victoria University, he landed his first TV part in 1971 and quickly became his country’s biggest acting talent of the day. Neill “combined a credible Everyman quality with rugged good looks and a hard-to-place accent,” said The New York Times, which allowed his roles to span continents and genres. His idol was the equally versatile James Mason, and it showed: “Critics praised him for nuanced performances even in forgettable projects.”

“Neill became a full-fledged movie star” after Jurassic Park, said Rolling Stone, but he made just as much impact with his “jovial persona.” During the Covid pandemic, he built a huge online following sharing videos of animals at his New Zealand vineyard, and himself singing and playing ukulele. Though constantly performing, he never considered himself a celebrity. He was consistently “self-deprecating and unpretentious,” said The Washington Post. “I’ve never had an image,” Neill said in 1995, “nor have I fostered one or wanted one, which has meant that I’ve had fantastic freedom to do whatever it is that appeals at the time.”

“I wanted to walk out of ‘Life Support’ many times,” said Danny Leigh in the Financial Times, and “I mean that as the highest recommendation.” This “essential” documentary, told from the perspective of international doctors who volunteered to help civilians in Gaza between October 2023 and September 2025, offers a rare glimpse into life – and death – in the besieged enclave.

It is particularly vital considering that, since the war began, no independent foreign journalists have been allowed into Gaza. Using interviews and video footage, director Daniele Rugo weaves together the testimonies of surgeons, paediatricians and other medical staff as they confront “nightmarish wounds” in hospitals that double up as shelters, while bombs fall. In its “stark simplicity” it is “deeply racking”.

Doctors tend to be careful with their words and don’t reach for “overstatement or exaggeration”, said Cath Clarke in The Guardian. But their “measured accounts of hell on earth” make this “devastating film almost unbearable to watch”. The doctors pay tribute to their Palestinian colleagues, who work marathon shifts, often while grieving personal losses. One surgeon takes sitting-down breaks during an operation to avoid blacking out from hunger. Another brings her teenage children to work, reasoning that, if they die, they will die together.

We see “the erosion of life” in Gaza first-hand, said India Lawrence on Time Out, from the “heartbreaking footage” of people relaxing and lounging under beach umbrellas in 2022, to the nightmarish reality of life in wartime. There is no dramatic climax, just the slow, relentless descent towards Gaza’s “total devastation”. “Life Support” is “not a happy watch”, but it is “an urgent and essential piece of reportage”.

“Here we are again,” said John Nugent in Empire. Since 2010, Disney has produced more than 20 remakes “adapting old, animated material into shiny live-action form” – more than one a year. But few have used source material so recent – “or seemed so pointless” – as “Moana”.

‘Shot-for-shot remake’

It is practically a “shot-for-shot remake” of the 2016 animation, which was a “high point” for Disney. Once again, we are in ancient Polynesia, as Moana, a spirited chief’s daughter, goes on an oceanic quest to save her dying island of Motunui, enlisting the help of the narcissistic demi-god Maui.

But whereas the animated version was “fun, funny” and had “fantastic music”, this feels “flat”. It barely counts as live-action, either: a good two-thirds or so is animated, with the CGI often retaining a “cartoon aesthetic”, in a way that feels “awkward” and jarring next to flesh-and-blood actors. At one point, a character marvels at a “sacred place” surrounding them, while pointing to what is plainly a green-screen studio.

‘Exquisite form of agony’

“You will wonder why they bothered to make a replica,” said Brian Viner in the Daily Mail, “except insofar that you won’t wonder at all.” Disney can “hardly be bothered to conceal the fact that their overwhelming priority is to generate dollars”.

There are, though, “flickers of warmth”. Catherine Laga’aia is “engaging” as Moana, and creates “a lively chemistry” with Dwayne Johnson, reprising the role of Maui.

Johnson’s performance is “oddly lacklustre”, said Kevin Maher in The Times, and his wig is ridiculous – he looks like a “demented extra from ‘Hairspray’”. Lin-Manuel Miranda’s songs remain catchy, but mostly the film provokes only “an exquisite form of agony”.