Christina Newland

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 and The Last of Us all look like building on incredibly satisfying first runs with equally masterful second runs (even more masterful, in Severance’s case). 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. Watercooler viewing is everywhere at the moment,  and that’s not going to change anytime soon. Netflix has announced the finale of Squid Game this summer, along with the end of Stranger Things, a second run of Tim Burton’s Wednesday and about a zillion other things, while HBO is offering up a second season for Nathan Fielder’s genius/awkward comedy docuseries The Rehearsal. Here’s everything you need to see... so far.  RECOMMENDED: 🎥 The best movies of 2025 (so far)🔥 The best TV and streaming shows to watch in 2025📺 The 100 greatest ever TV shows you need to binge

There’s a reason Martin Scorsese has dedicated part of his life to championing Italian movies – and it’s not just to keep his nonna happy. It’s the national cinema that gave us Fellini, Visconti, Rossellini, Pasolini, and De Sica – where one minute you can corpse to the slapstick silliness of Commedia all'Italiana capers and the next, have your heart smashed into tiny pieces by a human drama about an old man and his dog. Where dodgy politics spawns angry thrillers and seismic historical events are tackled in sweeping epics. And where Clint Eastwood chewed on a cheroot while dispatching bad guys, and Argento and Bava gave us the lurid shocks of giallo. It’s flamboyant, glamorous, jaded, shocking and sexy – sometimes all at once.  And it’s not just sexy people standing in fountains, either. Rome’s famous old Cinecittà Studios powers on, the Venice Biennale is the world’s coolest film festival (sorry, Cannes), and modern-day moviemakers like Alice Rohrwacher, Matteo Garrone, Paolo Sorrentino and Gianfranco Rosi keep offering up fresh slices of la dolce vita (or its darker sides). With the BFI celebrating the work of the Taviani brothers in February and neorealism in May-June, a ‘Cinema Made in Italy’ season running at London’s Ciné Lumière in March, Rohrwacher’s La Chimera and Garrone’s Oscar-nominated Io Capitano coming to cinemas soon, not to mention a cinema re-release of Rome, Open City in May. There’s plenty of Italian films to sample out there. Allow us to add 50 more to t

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