Latest Time Out worldwide features

Like the universe itself, Star Wars is constantly expanding. Almost half a centuryafter the release of the first film, the galaxy that writer-director George Lucas createdhas grown to encompass nine saga movies, multiple big-screen spin-offs and a wholehost of TV series, with new ones arriving all the time.But while the name ‘Star Wars’ may conjure images of epic starscapes, swift-movingspaceships and exploding battle stations, Lucas’s film and its many sequels onlyreally work because of one thing: the characters.Whether they’re human, alien or droid; noble, treacherous or somewhere in between(we’re looking at you, Lando), these iconic figures are able to inspire devotion,passion, hatred and, yes, extreme nerdiness in audiences around the world.Here, in an entirely subjective list compiled by Time Out’s resident Gonk-geek TomHuddleston, are the 62 best Star Wars characters in order of greatness, from the veryfirst movie to the most recent Disney+ series. RECOMMENDED: Read our full guide to Star Wars

It’s 7am in Copenhagen airport. The departures board lists the destination for my 9.25am flight as ‘unknown Schengen’ while my boarding card, when I get it, lists the destination as ‘fictitious’. I have a suitcase full of probably the wrong clothes, and a few concerns, but I’m still excited for a trip into the unknown. I’ve joined SAS’s inaugural ‘Destination Unknown’ trip, a voyage where the final destination is a closely guarded secret and the 180 passengers boarding the flight have no idea where we’re going. All we’ve been told is it’ll be 20C and we should pack swimwear. ‘In the old days, travel was an adventure,’ said Alexandra Kaoukji, Head of Media Relations at SAS. ‘But these days it has become a commodity. So how do you make it special again?’ SAS decided to offer a mystery trip to their EuroBonus members. Flights were purchased using EuroBonus points, racked up through being a frequent flyer, and included contributions towards biofuel; hotel accommodation was arranged for an extra cost. It instantly proved popular: 6,000 applied for the four-day trip. Even before the trip, SAS considered adding mystery travel to their range of options – after the success of the debut, they’re planning to run the trips regularly. What is mystery travel?   Mystery travel is a rising trend in Europe and beyond, where customers – whether as part of a group or as individual travellers – purchase (or win) air tickets and travel packages without knowing where they’re headed.  In an event t

Last year we bid farewell to Succession, Barry and Top Boy, fell hard for Beef, Colin From Accounts and Blue Lights. The next 12 months should help us move on – the potential impact of 2023’s writers’ strike notwithstanding – as early hits like World War II epic Masters of the Air and Mr and Mrs Smith, Prime Video’s intoxicating mix of witty marital drama and zippy espionage caper, are already proving. Ahead are hotly-anticipated new runs of Bridgerton and Squid Game on Netflix, a third season of Industry, a sci-fi prequel in Dune: Prophecy, HBO’s barbed political satire The Regime, Park Chan-wook spy thriller The Sympathizer, and The Franchise, the latest from telly genius Armando Iannucci – among many other potentially binge-worthy offerings. But there’s only so many hours in the day and you can’t spend all of them on the sofa. Here’s our guide to the shows most worthy of your time.RECOMMENDED: 🔥 The best TV and streaming shows of 2023🎥 The best movies of 2024 (so far)📺 The 100 greatest ever TV shows you need to binge

Every time you think you’re finally ready to cancel your Netflix subscription, they pull you back in – and it’s usually not an exclusive Adam Sandler or Lindsay Lohan movie that does it (although maybe sometimes). Most of the time, it’s because of a must-binge new series. Original episodic programming has been the streamer’s calling card ever since it stopped being the DVD rent-to-mail service and went entirely online. It changed the game with House of Cards in 2013 and has continually elevated it since, with the likes of Stranger Things and Russian Doll and the world-dominating Squid Game. Sure, there have been some creatively fallow periods, but then it always seems to bounce back with sometime leftfield, like Beef or One Day. Since it’s continually adding hours of essential content to its catalogue, there’s more high-quality content than you possibly have time for. That’s we’ve put together a list of the 41 Netflix originals series you absolutely have to see before finally deleting your account – and of course, once you think you’ve exhausted all your options, something else will get added just as you’re about to press ‘cancel’.  And before you get all upset about the absence of Black Mirror or Cobra Kai, we’ve left out shows that originated elsewhere before the platform picked them up. We’re also sticking to scripted series – sorry Tiger King and the countless other true-crime docs. That’s a list for another time. Recommended: 🎥 The 35 best movies on Netflix right now🔎 

No movie is ever truly, definitively ‘bad’. Yes, a movie may arrive at a critical consensus that may deem it rotten, trash, a flaming diaper of bad ideas. But somewhere, if a film ever makes it out into the wider world, you’re guaranteed to find at least one person who appreciates it. Whether the appreciation is ironic or genuine scarcely matters – if someone is deriving any kind of joy from a piece of art, that means it was worth the effort to create. Of course, some bad movies are better than others – which is to say, they’re worse. The dialogue is more stilted, the directorial choices more curious, the effects more laughable. And yet, those deficiencies make them far more memorable than a competent snoozefest. And so, let us celebrate 40 of the best bad movies of all time. Many of them – OK, all of them – can be described as trainwrecks. But who can look away from a trainwreck?    Recommended: 💩The schlock and awe world of brilliantly bad movies🤘The 40 best cult movies of all-time🫠 20 great movies to watch when you’re high😵 The 15 most monstrous vanity projects ever made

For over a decade, it often seemed like the only movies being made were Marvel movies. Beginning in 2008 with the introduction of Robert Downey Jr’s Iron Man, new offshoots, franchises and ensemble pictures arrived with the sun, each raking in more cash than the last – a testament to both the comic monolith’s meticulous world-building and, of course, its marketing budget. Things have changed recently, however. Ever since peaking with Avengers: Endgame, the MCU has been on a downward trajectory, commercially and creatively – and it’s not just the Martin Scorseses of the world saying so. In truth, though, even in its glory days, not all Marvel movies were created equal. For every box-office-dominating event picture, the studio would churn out a few inessential space-fillers. So while we wait to see if upcoming entries Deadpool & Wolverine, Captain America: Brave New World and Thunderbolts manage to pull the franchise out of its doldrums, we decided to see what’s worked best and what has fallen flat by ranking all 33 official MCU flicks released so far. As the list demonstrates, the glory days are still where the gold/vibranium lies. Recommended: 🦸🏿 The 50 best comic book movies of all time💣 The 101 best action movies ever made🕵️ 40 murder mysteries to test your sleuthing skills to the max

It’s still early days, but 2024 is already shaping up to be a gala year at the multiplex. Last year was a cracker – thanks to Oppenheimer, Barbie, Past Lives et al – but the next 12 months promise plenty, with Denis Villeneuve delivering a long-awaited Dune sequel, George Miller back at the bullet farm with Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga, a resurrection of the Alien franchise, and a tonne of other big-screen fare to get excited about. So far, we’ve been spoiled rotten, with the achingly lovelorn All of Us Strangers, Yorgos Lanthimos’s riotous Poor Things, and Dev Patel’s eye-wateringly violent debut Monkey Man just a few of the good reasons to get to the cinema. So, the criterion for entry: some of these movies came out in the US at the back end of 2023 – Oscars qualification required it – but we’re basing this list on UK release dates to include the best worldwide releases from between January and December. We’ll be updating it with worthy new releases as we go, so keep this one bookmarked. RECOMMENDED: 📺 The best TV shows of 2024 (so far) you need to stream🎥 The 100 greatest movies ever made🔥 The best movies of 2023

Last year, a genre usually filled with shambling zombies and sentient mounds of carnivorous goo birthed leftfield successes like M3GAN and Skinamarink, low-budget horror hits that elbowed their way to viral status, even amid the giddy fluorescence of Barbie and prestige awardsiness of Oppenheimer.  By contrast, this year’s slate of scares probably won’t catch too many people sleeping. 2024 is loaded with genre prequels, sequels and spin-offs, from MaXXXine, the third instalment of Ti West’s cult-fave franchise, to the alien-invasion terror of A Quiet Place: Day One, to the extremely-long-awaited Beetlejuice 2. But given that horror is historically a genre of small expectations and big surprises, there’s bound to be something that pops up to frighten the bejeepers out of us when we least expect it. Here’s the best of what’s freaked us out so far.  🎃 The 100 best horror films ever made 😱 The scariest movies based on a true story 💀 The best horror movies of 2023

Has movie music ever been better? With legends like John Williams and Howard Shore still at work, Hans Zimmer at the peaks of his powers, and the likes of Jonny Greenwood, AR Rahman, Mica Levi, and Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross knocking it out of the park, the modern film score is a Dolby Atmos-enhancing feast of modernist compositions, lush orchestral classicism and atmospheric soundscapes.What better time, then, to celebrate this art form within an art form – with a few iconic soundtracks thrown in – and pay tribute to the musicians who’ve given our favourite movies (and, to be fair, some stinkers) earworm-laden accompaniment? Of course, narrowing it all down to a mere 100 is tough. We’ve prioritised music written for the screen, but worthy contenders still missed out, including Dimitri Tiomkin’s era-defining score for It’s a Wonderful Life and Elton John’s hummable tunes for The Lion King.To help do the narrowing down, we’ve recruited iconic movie composers, directors and broadcasters like Philip Glass, Carter Burwell, Max Richter, Anne Dudley, AR Rahman, Emilie Levienaise-Farrouch, Edgar Wright and Mark Kermode to pick their favourites. Happy listening!Recommended: 🔥 The 100 best movies of all time.🪩 The 50 best uses of songs in movies.💃 The greatest musical movies ever made.

Of all the many things that have been upended since 2020, office life is one of the biggest. Tools like email and video chat apps have (at least in theory) untethered many of us from the workplace, meaning there may be very little need for many restless workers to stay rooted in one place. And that makes moving somewhere sunnier, cheaper or just more fun sound incredibly tempting. Now that travel has officially bounced back to 2019 levels, many destinations are emphasising longer-term stays over short-term breaks. And at the very extreme end, some are even trying to sell themselves as idyllic remote-working spots, with ‘digital nomad’ visas that allow you to live and work there for up to a year – or sometimes even longer. Here’s a guide to the countries offering digital nomad visas right now, and how you can qualify. And here’s what it’s actually like to be a digital nomad – and how to become one yourself.