Christina Newland

August update: horror fans are spoiled for choice this month with Weapons, Zach Cregger’s indefinable and relentlessly brilliant missing kids mystery, and Alison Brie/David Franco relationship horror Together making singledom look like a really good idea. 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.RECOMMENDED: 🎃 The 100 best horror films ever made😱 The scariest movies based on a true story 🔥 The best horror films of 2024

July 2025 update: The third and final season of Squid Game – the Korean version, at least – is a highly-placed new addition to our best of the year list, with season 4 of FX’s chef drama The Bear, and the third run of Paramount+’s Star Trek spinoff, Strange New Worlds, also slotting into Time Out’s top 20.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. Stranger Things is coming to an end, there’s a second run of Tim Burton’s Wednesday, and about a zillion other things still come. Here’s everything you need to see... so far.  RECOMMENDED: 🎥 The best movies of 2025 (so far)🔥 The 100 best movies ever made📺 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

‘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