“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”.

Christopher Nolan’s much-anticipated mythic action epic “The Odyssey” is out this week. Count down to its release by watching or rewatching some of the director’s greatest hits.

Oppenheimer (2023)

The word of the summer in 2023 was “Barbenheimer”, as the blockbusters “Barbie” and “Oppenheimer” both hit the big screen. “Oppenheimer”, definitely the darker half of the double feature, is Nolan’s “profoundly unnerving” retelling of the life of J. Robert Oppenheimer (Cillian Murphy) and the part he played in developing the atomic bomb, said Clarisse Loughrey in The Independent. Nolan is “committed to understanding the inner workings of his subject”, observing the chapters of Oppenheimer’s life with “sickly wonder” and painting a picture of a “man deep in denial”. The film is carried by Murphy and Robert Downey Jr., who both earned Oscars for their performances.

Inception (2010)

The one thing to know about Nolan’s 2010 thriller, “Inception”, is that “it is not a trick”, said Nev Pierce in Empire. “It is ingenious but not crafty, knotty but not duplicitous.” There is no “‘ta-dah!’ moment” where you find out everything was only a dream. The starry cast of actors is led by Leonardo DiCaprio who plays Dom Cobb – a spy-for-hire who steals his targets’ ideas from their subconscious minds as they sleep. Visually breathtaking, with cities folding in on themselves and zero-gravity fight scenes, it’s an “exhilarating” watch that fully immerses you in Nolan’s imagination. But it’s more than just spectacle: “this is about life and death and what might be beyond and between”.

Dunkirk (2017)

Nolan’s 2017 Second World War film about the evacuation of British troops from the French town of Dunkirk in the face of the German advance has a “heart-hammering intensity”, said Robbie Collin at The Telegraph. The movie features separate narrative strands following soldiers, pilots and sailors to bring the “single pivotal historical moment” powerfully to life on land, air and sea. With the “crisp” landscape shots, “meticulous” period detail, “superb Hans Zimmer score” and all-star cast, Nolan is able to capture the true “British ‘Dunkirk spirit’”.

Interstellar (2014)

Despite being one of Nolan’s more scientifically ambitious movies, “Interstellar” still has a massive “gravitational pull”, said Mark Kermode at The Guardian. Our unlikely hero, Joseph Cooper (Matthew McConaughey) is “prompted by ghostly forces to lead an exploratory mission through a wormhole beyond the rings of Saturn, abandoning his family in search of a future for all humanity”. With stunning shots of space and imagined planets, “Interstellar” is a “futuristic fable” that leaves viewers “awestruck” and reaffirms Nolan as “cinema’s leading blockbuster auteur”.

The Dark Knight (2008)

The second instalment of Nolan’s Batman trilogy “leaps beyond its origin and becomes an engrossing tragedy”, said Roger Ebert. “The Dark Knight” picks up in the months after its predecessor, “Batman Begins” (2006), with Bruce Wayne (Christian Bale) navigating the moral dilemmas that come with being the Gotham vigilante. Boundaries of good and evil are blurred even further with the introduction of Batman’s most iconic villain, The Joker, played by Heath Ledger, who died before the film was released. In his “key performance”, which earned him a posthumous Oscar, Ledger presented The Joker as “more than a villain”. Nolan’s gritty retelling of this iconic story redefined the “comic-book movie”.

“Empires fall. Glaciers melt and oceans rise. Monarchs and prime ministers are crowned and toppled,” said John Nugent on Empire. “But the Minions cannot be halted, will never cease, will outlive us all.” And so they are back, in the seventh instalment of the “Despicable Me/Minions” franchise.

As ever, these small yellow gibberish-spouting creatures are searching desperately for a “villainous master to serve, which sees them encounter everyone from the tyrants of revolutionary France to a fearsome cyclops”.

Eventually, the “ageless goofballs” land in silent-era Hollywood, where they try to make their own monster movie. The tone is “as juvenile as ever” – in a film that is “goofy and giggly and resolutely wedded to stupidity” – but happily for “cine-literate parents”, there are some “absurdist treats”, including “the first ‘Citizen Kane’-based fart joke in cinema history”.

The film is “a hoot”, said Ed Potton in The Times, with “world-class slapstick” and a plethora of enjoyable movie references, not just to “Citizen Kane”, but to everything from Harold Lloyd and Buster Keaton to “Jaws”. And it boasts a “tremendous” voice cast: Jesse Eisenberg features as a deluded robot, Trey Parker as a small monster, Allison Janney as a museum curator, and George Lucas (as himself) and Jeff Bridges as a pair of Warner brothers-like studio bosses.

It has been billed as returning director Pierre Coffin’s “love letter” to old Hollywood, said Rafaela Bassili in The Guardian, but the pleasures of this set-up prove short-lived. Later acts are “cluttered with extraneous characters and absurd situations”, and you feel you are just watching more of the same Minions fare.

Couple-swapping dramas had their heyday during the sexual revolution, said David Sexton in The New Statesman. And even the most famous of them, such as 1969’s “Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice”, look like “curiosities from another era” now. “Yet somehow, sexual perplexities remain in 2026.” “The Invite” started life as a play, by the Catalan writer/director Cesc Gay, which has since been turned into a film everywhere from Italy to South Korea. Now we have an American version, from director Olivia Wilde, and it is “not to be missed”.

Seth Rogen is “better than ever” as Joe, a failed musician unhappily married to frustrated housewife Angela (Wilde). One day he comes home to find that she has invited their hot upstairs neighbours – Hawk (Edward Norton) and Piña (Penélope Cruz) – to dinner. Joe is furious. He doesn’t want their company, he wants them to stop having noisy sex, which is keeping him awake at night.

The dinner is a disaster: Angela has failed to check Piña’s dietary needs (“no gluten, no dairy, no meat, no sugar”) and Joe didn’t get any wine in. As the evening descends into “mayhem”, Hawk and Piña reveal that they are into sex parties, and have come to see if their hosts are open to one. Brilliantly executed, “The Invite” is “the funniest film so far this year”.

“If there is more pleasure to be had than watching great actors behaving badly, I would genuinely wish to know about it,” said Deborah Ross in The Spectator. Cruz is wonderful, as sexy and charismatic as you could hope; Norton is “insufferably smug”; and Rogen proves he can do “emotional depth” when he tries.

The film is “hilarious”, said Brian Viner in the Daily Mail, but it is also profound, “offering a genuinely insightful peek into the human, and marital, condition”.

If you are after a good cry, these films will have you reaching for the tissues. From stories of survival and life-changing decisions to heartbreak and hope, here are some of the best tragic tales brought to the big screen.

Titanic (1997)

Director James Cameron became “king of the world” in the 1990s with this “wildly over-the-top weepie romance” between Rose (Kate Winslet) and Jack (Leonardo DiCaprio) on the so-called unsinkable ship, said Peter Bradshaw in The Guardian.

Our heroine is “not suited for life in the gilded cage”, said The Hollywood Reporter, and finds herself saved by Jack, “whose joy for life and eagerness for living it to the fullest soon revitalise the young Rose”. Their love is not only tested by class boundaries, but with the “horrible outcome” of the voyage.

If the story was “made of showbiz and hype”, said Roger Ebert, “well – so was the Titanic”. The 194-minute, $200 million (£151 million) epic was “flawlessly crafted, intelligently constructed, strongly acted and spellbinding”.

It’s a Wonderful Life (1946)

Frank Capra’s Christmas classic is repeatedly voted Britain’s favourite festive film for a reason. It is an “uplifting story of family, love and hope”, said the BBC. It’s “also the story of one man’s struggle with life’s knockbacks”. George Bailey, played by James Stewart, is brought back from the brink of suicide with the help of an angel, Clarence, played by Henry Travers.

George is shown how “worthwhile his life has been and what treasures, largely intangible, he does possess”, said Bert Briller in Variety, when the film first came out in 1946. This recounting of his life is “just about flawless in its tender and natural treatment”.

Atonement (2007)

Another romance set during a tragic historical period, “Atonement”, reflects on how a single error “destroys all possibility of happiness in three lives”, said Roger Ebert. Based on Ian McEwan’s book of the same name, the film begins with a “breathless celebration of pure heedless joy”, as heiress Cecilia (Keira Knightley) falls in love with the housekeeper’s son, Robbie (James McAvoy), on an English country estate.

But the actions of Cecilia’s younger sister Briony (Saoirse Ronan) and then the couple’s separation during the Second World War force us to “think deeply about what betrayal and atonement might really entail”.

The Pursuit of Happyness (2006)

In this “truish story set in 1980s San Francisco”, Will Smith’s Chris Gardner is a “newly single dad juggling bankruptcy, childcare, and high hopes of an internship” at a stockbrokers for no pay, said Tim Robey in The Telegraph. Smith is “sublime and moving” in this “tailor-made, sweetly serio-comic, Julia-Roberts-in-‘Erin-Brockovich’ Oscar vehicle”.

Chris and his son Christopher Jr. (played by Smith’s own son Jaden) navigate poverty, eviction and homelessness, but the hope portrayed in the movie is enough to “turn even the strongest of viewers into a puddle of tears”, said Harper’s Bazaar.

Graveyard of the Fireflies (1988)

Isao Takahata’s animation about two orphaned siblings in Japan during the Second World War is “one of the greatest films to have ever been made about children in wartime”, said Robbie Collin in The Telegraph. Made at Studio Ghibli, it has a “quiet but devastating power that breaks every heart it finds”.

The film creates “magical moments of natural beauty and childish delight” that only make the tragedy of Seita and his little sister Setsuko “even more harrowing”, said Steve Rose in The Guardian. It’s a “war story as wrenching as any live-action movie”.

Never Let Me Go (2005)

On the surface, the three main characters – played by Carey Mulligan, Andrew Garfield and Keira Knightley – are embroiled in a love triangle, but “this romantic drama tells an entirely more complicated story than you might expect”, said Entertainment Weekly. Based on Kazuo Ishiguro’s “devastating dystopian novel”, the film “dives into heavy themes of mortality and ethics with striking clarity”.

The characters are “expertly acted” and played “with such conviction” that “we get caught up in their doomed romance”, said The Hollywood Reporter.

Hotel Rwanda (2004)

The first mainstream film to approach the subject of Rwanda’s genocide, “Hotel Rwanda” focused on the story of hotel manager Paul Rusesabagina (played by Don Cheadle), who sheltered more than 1,200 people.

Turning such a “brutal and heart-wrenching subject” into “entertainment” has its risks, said the BBC at the time. But director Terry George’s decision to choose the “One Man Who Made A Difference” angle, as seen in “Schindler’s List”, gave “filmmakers the freedom to inject suspense, humour and romance – all the stuff that an audience actually wants to see – into otherwise sombre material”. Cheadle offers a “thrilling portrait of ordinary heroism, a performance that’s matched only by the magnificent Sophie Okonedo as his wife Tatiana”.

Sophie’s Choice (1982)

Meryl Streep delivers a performance “of such measured intensity” that encapsulates the “tragic, voluptuous” heroine of William Styron’s novel “Sophie’s Choice”, that “the results are by turns exhilarating and heartbreaking”, said Janet Maslin in The New York Times when the film first came out.

Sophie, a Polish immigrant, is forced to make an unconscionable decision which will have life-changing and haunting consequences. It’s not a flawless film, but it is a “unified and deeply affecting one” that “casts a powerful, uninterrupted spell”, thanks largely to Streep’s “bravura performance”.

Dancer in the Dark (2000)

A “dreadfully sad musical”, said Vogue, “Dancer in the Dark" is “painfully bleak, but very beautiful”. Björk stars as Selma, an immigrant mother losing her vision while trying to provide for her son.

Director Lars von Trier “pushes the limits of modern film-making”, said the BBC, combining the “extreme styles” of “hand-held documentary melodrama” and an “all-singing, all-dancing Hollywood musical shot in vibrant Technicolor-style”. There are “many moving and heartfelt scenes, if you can cope with the burst of a song or two”.

The Notebook (2004)

A romance that “transcends obstacles, space, and time”, said Marie Claire, “The Notebook” follows the romance between Allie (Rachel McAdams) and Noah (Ryan Gosling) from “youthful intoxication to old age”, said Vogue.

Switching from scenes showcasing the “urgency of young romance” to the tragedy of an older Allie “disappearing into the shadows of Alzheimer’s”, it’s a “sentimental fantasy”, said Roger Ebert.

The story builds a relationship that will make you “root for the pair to beat the odds against them”, said Stephen Holden in The New York Times.

Jodie Foster has appeared in several French films, said David Sexton in The New Statesman – she speaks the language fluently, having attended the Lycée in Los Angeles as a child and lived in France for nine months, shortly after her breakthrough role in “Taxi Driver”. But this is her first lead role in French, and “it is her casting that makes this movie, a teasing melee of genres, work – more or less”.

Foster plays Lilian Steiner, a bad-tempered Jewish-American psychoanalyst, living in an elegant apartment in Paris, but now separated from her French husband Gaby (the “ever enchanting” Daniel Auteuil).

Things are not going well for her. One of her former patients has seemingly died by suicide using drugs that Lilian had prescribed her illicitly. She is being blamed, but Lilian suspects foul play by the patient’s partner and daughter, and recruits her ex to help her with some “dodgy sleuthing”. The set-up is good, and for the first few minutes it is “hugely enjoyable and promising”, and you wonder where it’s heading: “a satire on therapy? A family romance? A murder mystery?” Alas, the film tries to embrace them all, while never quite fulfilling any.

There are points when the story “probes potentially rich psychological territory”, touching as it does on Lilian’s suppressed childhood memories and her Jewish identity, said Philip Concannon in Sight and Sound. But ultimately, this “convoluted mystery, cluttered with red herrings and signifiers, doesn’t grip”.

Still, it is worth watching for Foster’s performance alone, said Deborah Ross in The Spectator. “She is Lilian through and through – and there isn’t a single scene where she doesn’t make an interesting choice or something doesn’t flicker over that face that keeps you hooked.”

“‘Toy Story 5’ – do we need it?” asked Deborah Ross in The Spectator. It’s been 31 years since the first film came out, and “one worries for the narrative integrity of characters when an IP is thrashed to death like this”.

The latest instalment, however, does at least bring the franchise up to date by addressing one of the “pressing dilemmas of modern childhood”: screen time, and whether it will be the end of toys (“Extinction... Not again!” cries Rex, the dinosaur).

‘Delicious touches’

Our favourite toys still belong to Bonnie, but while Bonnie loves them still, all the other eight-year-olds now play in the digital world. To help her make friends, her parents grudgingly buy her a frog-themed tablet called Lilypad. It does not, however, go to plan: Bonnie not only gets hooked on Lilypad (Greta Lee), she ends up being cyberbullied via it. So the toys contact Woody (Tom Hanks), who left Bonnie’s room at the end of ‘Toy Story 4’, to ask for his help.

The film contains some “delicious” touches – Woody now has a bald spot and a paunch – and it is “superb” to look at – but it does all “feel a little generic”.

‘Loses its nerve’

The plot is “amazingly timely”, said Nicholas Barber on BBC Culture, and may be a bit “triggering” for some parents: this is the only Pixar cartoon that dwells on a child being “crushingly lonely”. But compared with the “peerless” first three films, it is short on good jokes, and heavy on subplots: one of them, about 50 Buzz Lightyear toys making their way across the country, could have been scrapped altogether.

The film also “loses its nerve with its own big idea”, said Peter Bradshaw in The Guardian: the “creepy” tablet turns out to be capable of “self-sacrificial heroism”. “Really? At least Lots-o’-Huggin’ Bear, the villain from ‘TS3’, had the courage of his evil convictions.”

Production of a film adaptation of Jane Austen’s novel “Northanger Abbey” has collapsed, leaving crew members owed “potentially hundreds of thousands of pounds”, said Deadline.

The project began as an ambitious reimagining of Austen’s gothic novel but it fell apart before cameras could roll. Some of the “hardest hit” workers have even been “left having to borrow petrol money to return home”, said The Times.

‘Uniquely vulnerable’

“A lack of money is at the root of many of the issues”, as funding “proved catastrophic” for the independent company behind the adaptation of the 19th-century book.

The £7 million production, “mounted in the UK by a team of inexperienced US producers”, got under way in Bath and Bristol but “fell apart during advanced prep” early last year, said Deadline. The company has collapsed and “failed to deliver on its promises to pay workers what they are owed”, so a “handful” of crew are taking legal action.

It’s thought that around 50 freelancers could be owed up to £200,000 after signing contracts with the independent business Northanger Limited. In a leaked recording, David Alan Ruben, the company’s chief who is also credited as the film’s writer, director and producer, said that its investors had failed to provide funding. “It has been the most brutal, horrible experience, and I’m just so sorry,” he told staff in February last year.

The UK has “no rules” around putting crew cash in an escrow account, so freelancers here are “uniquely vulnerable” when films run into financing issues, said Deadline.

Philippa Childs, head of the broadcasting union Bectu, said that “this kind of thing happens all too often” when production companies commission work without “secure funding for the project in place”.

Austen’s ‘most nuanced’ works

Austen is “one of the most adapted authors of all time” with her life and novels dramatised for film and TV from “every angle imaginable”, said Amy Wilcockson, from Queen Mary University of London, on The Conversation.

But when it comes to “Northanger Abbey” and “Mansfield Park” filmmakers seem “happy to leave these stories be”. “Northanger Abbey” offers a “harsh criticism of the conventions of marriage, wealth and social status faced by young women”, while “Mansfield Park” shows that Austen was “interested in questions of slavery and race”.

Perhaps this “serious and timely subject matter”, which is “unlike the usual” Austen narrative, “puts off filmmakers”, but they’re her “most nuanced works”, which focus “not just on romance” but on society’s “wider issues”. They “deserve their time in the limelight”.

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

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

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

‘Signature elegance’

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

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

Keith Jarrett’s “The Köln Concert” is not only the bestselling jazz solo album of all time; it is the bestselling piano album of any kind, said Demetrios Matheou on The Arts Desk. Yet the concert it records would never have taken place had it not been for the determination of a local teenager.

Ido Fluk’s film takes that story and “improvises the hell out of it”: it focuses not on Jarrett (we don’t hear even a note of the album) but on Vera Brandes, the charismatic 18-year-old promoter who booked him, and then – when the exhausted, and notoriously testy, musician threatened to walk away – all but dragged him onto the stage. “The result is a jaunty, charming, highly enjoyable paean to both artists and the many who support them.”

The film opens at Brandes’ 50th birthday party, said Ben Nicholson on Little White Lies; then takes us back to the 1970s, a “freer, simpler time”, when the spirited young Vera (Mala Emde) has stumbled into organising German tour dates for Ronnie Scott. At a jazz festival in Berlin, she sees Jarrett (John Magaro) improvise, and is so mesmerised that she resolves to bring him to Cologne.

The action follows a familiar trajectory (Vera faces various obstacles, including the disapproval of her stern father), and Fluk resorts to familiar devices (including fourth-wall-breaking lectures to the camera about jazz) but “it’s absorbing and fun”, if not fresh or impactful.

“Köln 75” has a “self-aware swagger” that sometimes feels effortful, said Leila Latif in Empire, and some of the broad comedic moments jar. But Emde is superb – and in the final, suspenseful stretch, the film becomes exhilarating.

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

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

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

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

The Shining, 1980

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

Lost Highway, 1997

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

The Blair Witch Project, 1999

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

Pulse (Kairo), 2001

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

It Follows, 2015

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

Vivarium, 2019

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

Skinamarink, 2022

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

Exit 8, 2025

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

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

Pipeline from YouTube-to-horror filmmaker

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

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

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

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

Wins with a grain of salt

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

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

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

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

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

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

Deeply conflicted 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Touchy nationalism 

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

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

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

“Irish writer-director John Carney delivers an aspartame rush of enjoyment with this terrific comedy of bromance and betrayal in the world of music,” said Peter Bradshaw in The Guardian.

“Power Ballad” is “about making it and dreaming big”, but it’s also about something that is often unacknowledged in films about showbiz: the binary nature of success and failure. For every star, there is an army of people who tried and failed to make it.

Paul Rudd plays Rick Power, a likeable American who was once in a promising band but, on tour, he fell in love with an Irish woman, stayed with her in Dublin and now fronts a wedding band. Secretly depressed that he sabotaged his own career, he is initially resentful when, while performing at a fancy venue, he meets Danny Wilson (Nick Jonas), a “preening” ex-boyband star trying to go solo and searching for a hit song. But Rick is flattered by the star’s attention, and “rashly” plays him a song he has been working on. Later, Rick is in his car when a familiar tune comes on the radio. Soon he is hearing it everywhere.

At this point, most films would “morph into a frantic comedy of revenge”, said Danny Leigh in the Financial Times. “Power Ballad” is no exception but Carney (known for “Once” and “Sing Street”) adds that rare thing: nuance. “Danny isn’t a cartoon villain”; just a weak man in a cut-throat business. And Rick only goes ape when other options are exhausted.

Also, it is refreshing that the women – Rick’s wife (Marcella Plunkett) and daughter (Beth Fallon) – are sardonic and self-possessed, while “the men do the emoting”.

Still, “Power Ballad” mixes in quite a lot of familiar Carney themes, said Kevin Maher in The Times. It’s “solid, sweet, smartly crafted entertainment”.

“Here is an old-school thriller – the sort they don’t make any more – that makes cunning use of two fine actors born 59 years apart,” said Donald Clark in The Irish Times.

British actor Leo Woodall – “so good in ‘The White Lotus’ and ‘Nuremberg’” – plays Niki, a piano tuner with “perfect pitch and painful oversensitivity to everyday sound”. Dustin Hoffman, now 88 and “just as sharp as he was when jousting with Anne Bancroft in ‘The Graduate’”, stars as his mentor, Harry.

You could just have sat back and enjoyed two hours of their “gently amusing dialogue”. But “there must be a plot”, so at work one day, Niki discovers that his super-hearing makes him good at safe-cracking. To pay Harry’s medical bills, he starts working for a gang targeting Manhattan’s super rich. The Russian gangster stuff “becomes a bit overheated”, and Niki’s slide into criminality is implausible; rather better is the “tentative romance” he starts with a gifted pianist (Havana Rose Liu). But even in the messy second half, the film remains very watchable, thanks to its witty script and fine performances.

This easy-to-like movie has given Woodall his first “star vehicle”, and he proves himself “ready to take the wheel”, said Harry Stainer in Empire. Niki is confident at work but less assured around people, and Woodall switches between these two modes with quiet confidence.

Another star here is the sound design. “Not since ‘Whiplash’ has a film made audiences so aware of every note, key or click.” We hear the world as Niki hears it, and it makes for “nerve-crunching tension”. The story has gasp-worthy twists, but “Tuner” is more than just a heist thriller, said Katie Walsh in the Los Angeles Times. Director Daniel Roher adds “layers of culture, character and music”. This is intelligent, adult filmmaking.

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

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

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

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

‘Disclosure Day’

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

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

‘O Horizon’

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

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

‘Maddie’s Secret’

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

‘Leviticus’

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

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

‘The Invite’

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

Although it is “convincingly set” in Cairo, there is a reason why “Eagles of the Republic” was filmed in Istanbul, said Danny Leigh in the Financial Times. “Tarik Saleh’s acid comic thriller is wrapped around a j’accuse aimed at Egypt’s military dictator, Abdel Fattah al-Sisi.”

Lebanese-Swedish actor Fares Fares plays a fictional Egyptian movie star, George Fahmy, who is no hero off-camera: initially, the film has some fun with this vain, “pampered matinee idol in the thick of middle age”. However, Fahmy discovers the limits of his star power when he is asked to play Sisi in a hagiographic biopic: he is not sure that he and the president look alike (they do not) but it becomes clear that this is not a role he can turn down. On set, his performance is supervised by “a chilling presidential aide” (Amr Waked), and the sardonic comedy of the early scenes “is slowly swallowed by the dark currents of life in a dictatorship – the ghouls and goons that man the system, their violence and terror”.

Saleh was asked to leave Egypt in 2015 and, “judging by the strength” of this attack on the current regime, he isn’t planning a return, said Wendy Ide in The Observer.

This film is the third part of his Cairo trilogy and, with its astringent humour, it represents a change in tone from the first two: 2017’s “The Nile Hilton Incident”, a police procedural, and 2022’s “Boy from Heaven”, a thriller. Fares starred in those, too, said Nick James in The New Statesman, and he is brilliant as the actor drawn, “by slow-ratcheting degrees, into complicity with the state’s deadly doings”. The film is let down by some abrupt tonal shifts, and an ill-conceived action climax but, at its best, it’s often “electrifying”.

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

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

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

Cannes has recently become a “launchpad for Hollywood blockbusters” from “Top Gun: Maverick” to “Killers of the Flower Moon”, said The Times. But in its 79th year, a “strange thing has happened”: it’s once again all “about the art”.

Major studios wary of rocking the box-office boat with negative early reviews have shunned the French festival, and instead the 2026 line-up is filled with indie collabs, and what the Oscars call “foreign-language” films. Here are some of our top picks.

Fatherland

Polish director Paweł Pawlikowski’s film about “exile and betrayal” is “an impossibly elegant, poised historical vignette”, said Peter Bradshaw in The Guardian. Shot in “lustrous monochrome” by Lukasz Zal, it follows German novelist Thomas Mann as he returns home to Frankfurt in 1949, having fled the Nazis before the war “for California exile”. He is accompanied by his “long-suffering” daughter, Erika, played with the “usual bayonet of intelligence” by Sandra Hüller. But the Germany they find is “dead”, and “perhaps Mann himself, with his American passport, is now a ghost”.

When the Night Falls

Daniel Auteuil directs and stars in this “taut drama, set in occupied Lyons in 1942”, said Ed Potton in The Times. It’s based on a true story of efforts to save hundreds of Jewish people in an internment camp “from being sent somewhere much worse”. The Nazis never appear on camera; they remain ominously out of shot, adding to the “sense of dread”. Auteuil plays an “intrepid” Catholic priest, desperately searching for reasons to save prisoners. “Acted with restraint” and “atmospherically directed”, the film builds to a “perilous rain-lashed finale which reminds you that this war had plenty of French heroes”.

Hope

Na Hong-jin’s sci-fi horror is “crazy good” fun, said David Rooney in The Hollywood Reporter. Right from the opening scenes, it’s clear you’re “in the hands of an assured genre auteur”. Police are called to a remote village in South Korea where “vicious slaughter” has left a “bull dead in the middle of the road with massive claw marks gouged deep into its fur and flesh”. As officers try to hunt down the mysterious predator, viewers are treated to “set piece after kickass set piece” and “superbly choreographed clashes”. It’s a “wildly entertaining assault of turbo-charged thrills” with “virtuoso camerawork” and a “pulse-pounding score”.

Fjord

This “magnificently controlled yet blood-boiling drama” stars Sebastian Stan and Renata Reinsve as a devoutly religious Romanian couple who move with their children to a remote Norwegian village, said Robbie Collin in The Telegraph. But their “strict attitude to discipline raises their neighbours’ hackles” and they soon find themselves “sucked into a serpentine child protection nightmare”. Writer and director Cristian Mungiu has made a “slow-burn provocation that knows exactly which buttons it is pressing”; he isn’t afraid to “grapple” with the “thorny” issues he’s raising. And the lead performances are “superb”.

Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma

It was always going to be tricky following up the “meta-oddness” of “I Saw the TV Glow” but director Jane Schoenbrun has pulled it off with this “unqualified triumph”, said Donald Clarke in The Irish Times. Hannah Einbinder stars as Kris, “a queer feminist director” tasked with rebooting a slasher movie franchise that began in the 1980s. She tracks down the “reclusive” original star (Gillian Anderson having “fabulous fun”), and the film descends into a “decadent reverie that is all Schoenbrun’s own”.

Clarissa

“Exquisite and moving, ‘Clarissa’ is Virginia Woolf’s ‘Mrs Dalloway’ transported to present day Lagos,” said Tim Robey in The Telegraph. The cast is led by the “luminous” Sophie Okonedo in the title role: a hostess getting ready for a party and “micromanaging every detail”. Directed by Nigerian twin brothers Arie and Chuko Esiri, the themes of Woolf’s novel are made to “vibrate, resonate, and dance before us, 100 years later, in a time and place far beyond the author’s reach”. It’s an “elegant” film that beautifully brings to life a “bittersweet reunion in which the sobering passage of time is on everyone’s minds”.

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

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

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

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

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

‘Eccentric characters’

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

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

‘Machine-tooled’ entertainment

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Life on Earth, 1979

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

The Private Life of Plants, 1995

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

The Blue Planet, 2001

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

Planet Earth I & II, 2006 and 2016

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

Frozen Planet I & II, 2011 and 2022

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

Prehistoric Planet, 2022

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

Wild London, 2026

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

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

‘Ghoulishness’

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

Sanctifying bullshit

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

It is “hard not to love” the Cornish auteur Mark Jenkin, said Kevin Maher in The Times. That isn’t just because he is a “one-man film industry” who writes, directs and edits his own work. Nor is it because of his remarkable signature style, which involves shooting on a hand-cranked 16mm Bolex camera, then hand-processing the stock to make it scratched and grainy, before adding “deviously complicated” sound design in post-production. The result is films – such as 2019’s “Bait” – that feel as if they were found in a rusted biscuit tin in a Cornish attic. “No, I love Jenkin because his films represent a startlingly distinctive expression of a certain English, indeed Cornish, identity – one seemingly lost yet cherished, fading from memory yet vitally present if only as a troubling recurring dream.”

This “terrifically atmospheric” drama opens in a decaying fishing village in the 2020s, said Deborah Ross in The Spectator. One day a trawler appears in the harbour. It is the Rose of Nevada, a boat that was lost 30 years earlier. The owner is mystified, but decides to put it back to use, so he hires two hands (George MacKay and Callum Turner) and sends them out with an old sea dog (Francis Magee). The trio catch an abundance of fish, but something is not right, and when they bring their haul in, they find the village not in their own time, but in 1993 – when it was thriving. Yet more weirdly, the younger men are greeted as though they are the boat’s original deckhands. One of them accepts this new reality; the other is desperate to get back to his young family in the present. An “almost biblical tale of sacrifice and loss”, the film is as “moving as it is unnerving”, said Rafa Sales Ross on Little White Lies. By the end, you will feel “quietly stunned” by Jenkin’s ethereal creation.

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

‘The Last Picture Show’ (1971)

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

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

‘The Godfather’ (1972)

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

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

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

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

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

‘Jaws’ (1975)

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

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

‘Network’ (1976)

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

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

‘Close Encounters of the Third Kind’ (1977)

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

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

‘Apocalypse Now’ (1979)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘2001: A Space Odyssey’ (1968)

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

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

‘The Truman Show’ (1998)

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

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

‘Minority Report’ (2002)

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

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

‘Children of Men’ (2006)

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

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

‘Idiocracy’ (2006)

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

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

‘Contagion’ (2011)

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

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

‘Her’ (2013)

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

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

‘Ex Machina’ (2014)

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

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

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

Toy Story (1995)

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

Finding Nemo (2003)

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

The Incredibles (2004)

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

Ratatouille (2007)

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

Wall-E (2008)

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

Up (2009)

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

Inside Out (2015)

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

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

Origin story

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘The Wizard of Oz’ (1939)

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

‘The Dark Crystal’ (1982)

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

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

‘The NeverEnding Story’ (1984)

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

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

‘Labyrinth’ (1986)

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

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

‘The Princess Bride’ (1987)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Pan’s Labyrinth’ (2006)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘The Drama’

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

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

‘Pizza Movie’

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

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

‘The Stranger’

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

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

‘Marama’

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

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

‘Normal’

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

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

‘Fuze’

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

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