Christina Newland

As a European filmmaking capital, Italy is second only to France in historical importance. In terms of the kind of movies it’s given the world, though, there may not be a country more diverse. The masterpieces of Italian cinema range from hot-blooded romances to surrealistic dreamscapes, gut-busting commedia d'italia to gritty neorealist docudramas, spaghetti westerns to giallo horror. (Italian-Americans still have the edge on gangster flicks, though the mother nation has produced a few classics of the genre on its own.)  The big names still exert a massive influence on filmmaking culture: Fellini, Visconti, Pasolini, Argento, Leone. But Il Bel Paese is still producing major talents, from Alice Rohrwacher to Paolo Sorrentino. Clearly, narrowing down the greatest Italian movies of all-time is a tall task. But for our lira, these are the 50 best the country has to offer.RECOMMENDED: 📽️ The 50 best foreign-language films ever made.🇫🇷 The greatest French movies of all time.🇰🇷 The best Korean films ever made.

Unlike many of its monsters, vampires and virus-y Alphas, the horror genre is alive and well. It is, you might even say, well-endowed. Because anyone who loves that shivery sensation of being spooked witless in a cinema is being a lot better served than anyone searching for big laughs. The biggest stories in horror this year – Robert Eggers’ Nosferatu, Ryan Coogler’s Sinners, Zach Cregger’s Weapons – have packed in audiences and birthed a million memes along the way, but don’t sleep on the following flicks either.Best horrors of 2025 at a glance: 📍 28 Years Later – Netflix (US); also on Prime Video/Apple TV+📍 Nosferatu - US: streaming on Prime Video; US & UK: rent/buy on PVOD📍 Sinners – US: streaming on Max; UK: rent/buy on PVOD📍 Weapons – Rent/buy now on Prime Video/Apple TV (PVOD); still in some cinemas📍 Final Destination: Bloodlines – Max (US); US & UK: rent/buy on PVOD

We’ve all heard the phrase ‘TV’s golden age’ enough times over the past couple of decades to get wary of the hyperbole, but this year does seem to be shaping up to be a kind of mini golden age for the TV follow-up. Severance, Andor, Wednesday and Poker Face have all built on incredibly satisfying first seasons with equally masterful second runs. The third season of The White Lotus has proved that, whether you love it or find it a touch too languorous, there’s no escaping Mike White’s transgressive privilege-in-paradise satire. Likewise for season 7 of Charlie Brooker’s dystopian-flavoured sci-fi Black Mirror. More recently, HBO’s Task hit the spot with a blue-collar crime series that wasn’t afraid to get down and dirty. Watercooler viewing is everywhere at the moment, and that’s not going to change anytime soon, with Stranger Things coming to an end and about a zillion other things still come. Here’s everything you need to see... so far.  Best TV and streaming shows at a glance: 📍 The Pitt (Emmy Best Drama winner) – watch on HBO Max in the US📍 Adolescence (Best Limited Series winner) – watch on Netflix worldwide📍 Severance season 2 (multiple acting wins) – watch on Apple TV worldwide📍 The Studio (Best Comedy winner) – watch on Apple TV worldwide📍 Andor season 2 (Emmy-winning writing) – watch on Disney+ worldwide 

In Helen Macdonald’s bestselling memoir H is for Hawk, a young woman named Helen trains an ill-mannered goshawk and eventually sees it off to an aviary for moulting season. Part meditative exploration of grief in the wake of the sudden loss of her father, part exhaustive detailing of the process of training a complicated and challenging creature, the film adaptation hews closely to the same description. You don’t need a PhD to understand that the two processes feed into one another in alarming and honest ways; so in BAFTA-winning director Philippa Lowthorpe’s moody adaptation, the visual metaphors are striking – even as the running time outstays its welcome.  The film stars Claire Foy as a rather stiff-upper-lipped protagonist, an academic who avoids moping at all costs even after her beloved photojournalist father passes away suddenly of heart failure. He’s played by Brendan Gleeson with warmth and humour in occasional mournful flashbacks, and the relationship between dad and daughter is poignantly sketched as a special one: supportive, cerebral, and one of shared hobbies like ornithology. The goshawk Helen adopts is one she might have found on a bird-spotting trip with her dad; she names it Mabel, and a new relationship of sorts springs out of the depths of her loss of another. Difficult, alienating, and even violently gauging Helen in the face, it’s hardly a fluffy companion; this is as good a metaphor for living with loss as any. Helen’s friend Christina (Denise Gough) ad

Joachim Trier (The Worst Person in the World) understands something deep and complex about the human spirit. Sentimental Value proves it afresh, but with all the fangs and vanity of show business attached. The story mines the psyches of two sisters, Nora (Renate Reinsve, wound like a clock) and Agnes (Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas), when their mother passes and their estranged, egotistical father Gustav (Stellan Skarsgård) steps back into their lives. A once-famous filmmaker, Gustav now insists upon his rights to descend on their ancestral family home to make a new movie. Nora is a successful stage actor but a nervous wreck, carrying on an affair with her married co-star (Trier regular Anders Danielsen Lie), while Agnes, a mother to a young boy, seems better-adjusted but is deeply unsettled by childhood memories of being used in one of her father’s productions. Both were abandoned by Gustav when they were young, and have little patience with his demands on their time as adults.  It’s a slowly unfurling film, full of words and recriminations in the manner of Scandi master Ingmar Bergman, but with a good deal more dark humour. Gustav, for instance, typically tone deaf and self-absorbed, brings hilariously inappropriate DVDs to his grandson’s tenth birthday – including Gaspar Noé’s rape drama Irreversible. And since Gustav insists on casting Nora as her own grandmother in the film, and Nora resists, he turns to a Hollywood starlet (Elle Fanning) to play the part instead, igniting tens

Ash is a man with a strange job. For one thing, it’s illegal; for another, he is curiously well-suited to its anonymity and moral grey areas. Played by Riz Ahmed with terse meticulousness in David Mackenzie’s New York-set thriller, Ash is a former addict who runs a business as a ‘fixer’, helping corporate whistleblowers and malcontents to quietly take their hush money from angry companies. He conducts this work mainly through ‘relay’ telephone service – intended for use by the deaf and hard of hearing – an old-fashioned item which leaves no record of its communications.   He runs into trouble when a client, Sarah (a tenacious Lily James), seems to be at risk of being snuffed out. She’s a passionate whistleblower flagging unethical practices at her bioengineering company. The unlikely duo, forced together by desperate circumstances, race against time and the arrogant capitalist goons on their tails. Those goons are led by Sam Worthington’s Dawson and Willa Fitzgerald’s Rosetti, both amusingly obnoxious and even occasionally disguised in silly gear at airports, offering both realistic and faintly humorous foils for our protagonists. The leads have an unusual rapport, with Ahmed – an icily quiet, methodical customer – particularly good.  Relay is an old-school thriller with a drum-tight script and real style Directed by Mackenzie, the man behind prison flick Starred Up and neo-western Hell or High Water, this is another genre exercise of sorts – a consciously retro, twisty bit o

‘Babe’ is a term of endearment that can have a lot of uses. For real-life married couple Dave Franco and Alison Brie, who star as long-term, not-yet-married couple Tim and Millie in their new horror film, it can be wielded with passive-aggression, gooey pleading, or clingy apology; the pair use ‘babe’ so much it’s basically meaningless.  Tim and Millie are on the verge of a move from city to country as Millie takes on a new teaching job; we find them at a difficult crossroads, with a moratorium on sex and a growing distance between them. Tim is rudderless, ageing out of his dreams of success as a musician while Millie is pragmatic and high-achieving; to make matters worse, Tim is also recovering from a traumatic incident, haunted by the memories of discovering his father’s badly decomposed corpse. The pair put a cheerful facade over their uncertainties, but their move only seems to increase tension – especially when, on a hiking trip in the nearby woods, they stumble into a seemingly manmade cave and find themselves infected by a strange medical condition. They cannot, seemingly, be physically apart. The metaphor is not subtle, but it is deployed with delicious and surprising twists nonetheless: when Millie gets in the car, Tim’s catatonic body throws itself violently against the wall as if to mimic her movement. When Tim closes himself behind his office door late at night, Millie drags herself from bed, zombifies, and headbutts it. A kiss makes their lips stick painfully tog

Kristen Stewart reveals a deft directorial hand and a distinct, languid, echoing style in her vividly made, emotionally visceral exploration of the life and times of American novelist Lidia Yuknavitch.  Filmed on 16mm, split into five literary-style chapters across Lidia’s life and matching the prose of the memoir it’s adapted from, The Chronology of Water is a story of trauma, resilience, the dispelling of female shame, and gynephilic fascination. Yuknavitch is a woman who, by anyone’s definition, has had more than her fair share of suffering. In her 2011 memoir, she recounts an upbringing in ’80s Florida by a complicit mother and a sexually abusive father who continually raped both her and her older sister. She grows up to be a near-champion swimmer, but her past won’t leave her alone.  Lidia – played by Imogen Poots as a straw-haired whirlwind who barrels into adult life with a vengeful desperation for freedom and a self-destructive desire for sensation – is a force of nature.  She develops substance abuse problems, flunks out of college, gets pregnant, suffers a devastating stillbirth; she flits between relationships with men and women, using sex and drugs to fill the void. And, most importantly, she writes her heart out, growing a career in the literary world both because – and in spite of – the whirling trauma of her memories.  Eventually, she finds some hard-won stability, through her writing most of all. All of these experiences are rendered by Stewart in patchwork-qu

Jason Statham, you deserve better. After a series of films and franchises which feature cheeky, tough guy fun from the Stath – everything from his breakout in Guy Ritchie’s hard man classic Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels through to the enjoyable and baroquely vulgar Crank series – it’s fair to expect that the now-57-year-old action star might be given roles which at least nod to his stature onscreen.  In A Working Man, though, there’s a little bit too much nodding and too little of anything else. Even snappy one-liners. Yes, there are nods to John Wick, to Taken, to ghosts of Stathams past; the story is entirely cobbled together with action flick clichés. Statham plays Levon Cade, an elite ex-Marine keeping his head down in a construction job, and a single dad fighting his father-in-law for custody of his daughter after the death of his wife. He first displays his ability to kick ass in a minor skirmish with his workers; but when his bosses’ daughter Jenny (Arianna Rivas, given predictably little to do) is kidnapped from a bar by what turns out to be Russian sex traffickers, his black-ops military training kicks into gear. Jason Flemyng, Statham’s former Lock, Stock co-star, plays Wolo the Russian crime lord – an unusual choice, to say the least.  Jason Statham, you deserve better David Ayer, a terse action-oriented filmmaker who last collaborated with Statham on surprise hit The Beekeeper, is capable of making very fine films. (His World War II drama Fury is rollickin