Kambole Campbell

July 2025 update: Brad Pitt racing drama F1: The Movie, a gold-plated slab of Jerry Bruckheimer blockbuster entertainment, and 28 Years Later, a very different kind of action movie, overseen with customary skill and heft by Danny Boyle, are the summer’s newest additions to our best-of-2025 pantheon. Halfway through 2025, Hollywood must be breathing a sigh of relief. At this point last year, the studios were scratching their heads at several major unexpected flops, and many analysts were left to wonder if the post-pandemic bounce-back of 2023 was simply an outlier. Now, with films like A Minecraft Movie, Sinners, Final Destination: Bloodlines and Lilo & Stitch outperforming expectations, it might be safe to say that the movies are finally, really, truly… back? Maybe we shouldn’t get ahead of ourselves. But there are reasons for cinephiles to celebrate beyond the industry’s financial health, whether it’s the blockbuster success of the aforementioned Sinners, Ryan Coogler’s ambitious and wholly original horror epic, or several smaller-scale achievements, from the formal invention of Nickel Boys to the animated underdog (undercat?) story of Flow to a pair of home runs from Steven Soderbergh. And there’s plenty more to come. Here are the films that have had us cheering loudest in 2025 so far.  RECOMMENDED: 📺 The best TV and streaming shows of 2025 (so far)🔥 The best horror movies of 2025🎥 The 101 greatest films ever made

There’s more to Japanese movies than Kurosawa, Ozu and Miyazaki. That’s not to downplay their contributions to the country’s cinematic history – or cinema in general. All three are potential GOATs. It’s just that there’s much, much more where that exalted triumvirate came from.  Like the trailblazing silent works of Kenji Mizoguchi. Or the off-kilter pop-art crime thrillers of Seijun Suzuki. Or the bizarrely horrifying visions of Takashi Miike. On this list of the greatest Japanese movies of all time, you’ll find them all, alongside, of course, Kurosawa’s epics, Miyazaki’s soulful animations and Ozu’s powerful domestic dramas – oh, and Godzilla too. You’ll trace Japan’s unique filmmaking history, moving from the silent era to its post-war golden age to the 1960s New Wave to the anime explosion of the ’80s, all the way up to the current renaissance spearheaded by Hirokazu Kore-eda, Ryusuke Hamaguchi and Mamoru Hosoda. It’s a lot to take in. But with expert commentary from Junko Yamazaki – assistant professor of Japanese Media Studies at Princeton, whose focuses include post-war Japanese film music and the jidaigeki (period drama) genre – this cinephile’s bible is as authoritative as it is exhaustive. Consider it your travel guide to one of the world’s most creative movie cultures. RECOMMENDED: 🇰🇷 The greatest Korean films of all time🇫🇷 The 100 best French movies ever made🇯🇵 The best anime movies of all time, ranked🌏 The 50 best foreign films of all-time

Television has been around for 70 years, but only in the last two decades has it earned true respect as an artistic medium. Up to that point, elitists referred to TV as ‘the idiot box’ or ‘the boob tube,’ and if you worked in it, you were either a hack or an upstart hoping to make the leap into the more dignified world of movies. Was its poor reputation deserved? Sure, there were blips of brilliance between The Ed Sullivan Show and The Sopranos, but by and large, the garbage outweighed the gold. Maybe it’s unfair, but the fact that it was all being beamed directly into our living rooms made the dreck more noticeable.  That’s all changed. Television has nudged film out from the center of popular culture, to the point that some of cinema’s truest believers – Martin Scorsese, David Fincher, Steven Soderbergh – are making movies specifically for the small screen. The shift may have started with HBO and The Sopranos, but the advent of streaming has made it so that hundreds of new shows are now continually flipping the script every few years, if not months. But that doesn’t mean everything before 1999 is pure dross. While this list is dominated by 21st century programs, there are hundreds of shows that deserve credit for pushing TV forward into its current golden age, and chiseling them down to a neat top 100 is difficult. So we elected to leave off talk shows, variety shows and sketch comedy, focusing on scripted, episodic dramas, comedies and miniseries. Even then, it proved to b

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.

After you’ve absorbed every classic Disney and Pixar film, where does a nascent animation fan go next? In most cases, it’s the world of anime. And it truly is a world unto itself, bursting with mind-blowing imagery, unique storytelling and meticulous universe-building. And it’s not just for children, either: Japan’s best animated films are as smart and sophisticated as any live-action drama, telling stories that are often fantastical and thrilling but also deeply emotional and, often, extraordinarily human. It’s such a dense universe that for the uninitiated, it can be a bit intimidating to dive in. We’re here to help, with a list of 27 incredible movies to start with, ranging from Studio Ghibli’s heartrending classics to action-packed mangas come to life to semi-hidden gems stretching the boundaries of what anime can be. Fire up Crunchyroll and prepare to get obsessed. Recommended: ✍️ The 100 best animated films of all-time🇯🇵 The best Japanese movies ever made🤖 The 10 best Pixar movies🌏 The 50 best foreign films of all-time

Thanks in part to the malleability of the animated form, anime seems to have a shapeshifting approach to horror – many of its most famous works have borrowed from other genres, mixing and matching at will. Not only that, but human bodies and human imaginations are just as flexible – nightmares and waking visions can become just as tangible as horrors of the flesh. This list covers titles across films, series and OVAs (‘original video animation’ – direct-to-video, basically). Of course, there’s a lot more horror anime out there. That includes both straight-up horror and anime that’s more horror-tinged, as anime has a tendency to be flexible with genre, like with horror-themed battle shonen series such as Jujutsu Kaisen or the more recent, grindhouse-inspired Chainsaw Man. But this is mostly geared to encompass a broad range of key filmmakers and moments from the 80s anime boom through to the present day, as well as the more accessible titles (in terms of what’s available on home release and streaming). Recommended: 🇯🇵 The best anime movies of all-time👹 Cinema’s creepiest anthology horror movies🩸 The 15 scariest horror movies based on true stories

タイムアウト東京 > 映画 > 人生で観ておくべき、日本映画50選日本映画には大きな魅力と素晴らしい監督の存在がある。特に黒澤明は、この地球上で最も偉大な映画監督といえるが、日本が生んだ名監督は彼だけではない。小津安二郎や宮崎駿、溝口健二、市川崑ら、映画「東京物語」「七人の侍」「となりのトトロ」など、圧倒的な名作を生み出し映画界に貢献してきた。 サイレント時代から戦後の映画黄金期をへて、パンキッシュで挑発的な1960年代のニューウェーブ、アニメーション作品の爆発的なヒットを生み出した。そして、多くの作品はアメリカやヨーロッパで大きな影響力を持つようになった。タランティーノやスコセッシは、大の日本映画好きで伝達者であり、ゴジラはハリウッドの大作映画としてとどろき続けている。 しかし、あまりに多くの作品があるため、何から観ればいいのか頭を抱えてしまうかもしれない。ここでは、タイムアウトワールドワイドが選んだ「日本映画ベスト50」を紹介しよう。 関連情報『日本で最もセクシーな映画俳優』『日本人アーティストのドキュメンタリー6選』

‘This work of fiction is not an accurate historical portrayal. Like we care. Now shut up and enjoy the show.’ With these title cards the anime series ‘Samurai Champloo’ announced itself to me with amusing aggression three years ago. It saved me during a lonely period stuck at home, and I’m still comforted by it now. It follows a vagrant, a rōnin and a young girl as they travel across Edo-era Japan to find ‘the samurai who smells of sunflowers’. Their adventure is weird, wild and moving. The man behind it, Shinichirō Watanabe, already gave us the jazz-tastic sci-fi ‘Cowboy Bebop’ (check it out at Funimation). Also blessed with seriously Spotify-able theme music, ‘Samurai Champloo’ marries hip hop and Japanese history – all with a thoughtfulness that I love and deep themes that include repressed feelings, intergenerational change and frayed familial bonds. It immediately ticked all my boxes. Its epic odyssey is a balm at a time when the living room walls seem to be closing in Shinichirō’s love of splicing genres seeps into every detail, from Mugen’s breakdancing-like fighting style to scene transitions that use record scratches. ‘Champloo’ offers an electric combination of chanbara (sword-fighting) and a frankly incredible soundtrack. But it’s not just the style that keeps me coming back. Its epic odyssey story is a balm at a time when the living room walls occasionally seem to be closing in. The show’s in-your-face style also makes a lot of room for gentle contemplation about

The latest gem from Australian stop-motion maestro Adam Elliot (Harvie Krumpet) comes with the same funny, macabre, bittersweet edge that runs throughout his films. With 2010’s Mary & Max, he turned a real-life friendship into a dark comedy framed in striking black-and-white animation. Like that film, Memoir of a Snail smudges the line between reality and fiction in deeply moving ways by drawing on its own director’s life. Grace Pudel is a snail-collecting youngster in 1970s Melbourne. Voiced by Succession’s Sarah Snook, she tells her story delicately but matter-of-factly. The tales of friends, like the adventurous and eccentric Pinky (Jacki Weaver) and the other less charitable folks who try to exploit her, are told with equal gentleness.  Time carries her from one misfortune or cruelty to the next. It starts with the death of her stop-motion animator father, leading her and her brother Gideon (Kodi Smit-McPhee) being sent to separate foster homes, where the latter being subjected to abuse at the hands of devout Christians. The film’s eccentric framing device has Grace telling all of this to her pet snails, whom she’s in the process of freeing, telling all while they slowly creep away. It could easily be a relentlessly miserable affair. But Elliot finds dark comedy in the awful circumstances of Grace’s life, whether that’s the visual gags of a bus with the apt number plate ‘YRUSAD’ carting off her brother to a separate home, or a social worker’s badge photo showing them puff

Based on ‘War Horse’ author Michael Morpurgo’s novel, Kensuke’s Kingdom feels like a throwback – for better and worse. While some of its classical animation is pleasant, the story of a young boy bonding with a former Japanese soldier can feel schmaltzy and obvious.  Directed by Neil Boyle and Kirk Hendry from a script by Frank Cottrell-Boyce, the story starts with a family who have gone sailing around the world after the parents (voiced by Cillian Murphy and Sally Hawkins) have lost their jobs. Michael, the youngest, has little patience for the chores the trip requires; his sister Becky seems to be getting all of his parents attention and her continual responsibility puts her younger brother to shame. Feeling spurned, he smuggles the family dog Stella aboard.  The pair get swept overboard in a violent storm, and wash up on a seemingly deserted island where they meet Kensuke (Ken Watanabe). Kensuke lives in harmony with the island, having built himself a lavish treehouse. He feeds the local animals and protects them from poachers. After some initial hostility, Michael and Kensuke grow close, particularly when the latter opens up in one of the film’s standout sequences: his memories of home are depicted in an ink wash art style (and some pink watercolour for the blossoms), as though Kensuke’s paintings in his treehouse have started moving.  This animation feels like a throwback – for better and worse Watanabe’s voice performance as Kensuke is just as delicate. It’s kept unsubt

There’s a real horror to extreme cases of sleepwalking – one that’s not unlike possession. The loss of bodily autonomy, the unwitting threat to one’s loved ones, the lack of awareness that these things are even happening. In Sleep, director Jason Yu turns that idea into a home-invasion thriller where the trespasser is whatever is forcing Hyun-su (Parasite’s late, great Lee Sun-kyun) to do strange things while he’s unconscious. Soon, his cosy domestic space is alive with danger.  It starts small: Hyun-su is sitting upright in bed and murmuring ‘someone’s inside’, leading his wife Soo-jin (Jung Yu-mi) to think that there’s a stranger in their home, a feeling affirmed by the strange noises coming from the landing. But the stranger is actually Hyun-su himself, who has begun to wander the apartment in his sleep. The noise comes from a slipper left behind on his midnight excursion to jam a door open. And these episodes only more menacing from there: in one of the film’s most disturbing images, Hyun-su uncontrollably claws at his own face.  The home of Sleep’s newlywed couple is transformed by their desperate attempts to safeguard it from these nightly episodes. Yu, an assistant director on Bong Joon-ho’s Okja, shows a similar taste in dark comedy as the Korean master – personal anxieties externalised in instances that can turn from horrific to funny in their absurdity. One such early moment is a simple edit: one of Hyun-su’s spooky night-time walks culminates in him urinating on a

A nod to Easy Rider towards the end of Jeff Nichols’ The Bikeriders feels like an apt reflection on the end of an era. As Dennis Hopper’s film marked a move from classic Hollywood to New Hollywood, the clean-cut outlaws at the centre of The Bikeriders represent a similar shift. Romantic, idealistic ruffnecks getting the boot in favour of a harsher, uglier version of Americana. The Bikeriders is based on a book of photographs by Danny Lyon (played in the movie by Challengers’ Mike Faist). It explores the stories beyond those snaps, focusing on the wild panoply of characters drawn by this fringe lifestyle. Cleverly, the visual grammar reflects its source text, with portraiture-like cutaways to members of the Vandals, a real-life Chicago motorcycle club. They’re misfits unified by a love of bike riding and their own pariah status.  Caught between those two generations is young biker Benny (Elvis’s Austin Butler). Jodie Comer is the film’s main voice as the sparky Kathy, Benny’s wife. She quickly falls in love with him and slowly learns to deal with his stubborn stoicism. It’s a journalistic but romantic snapshot of a moment in time lost forever But Benny isn’t quite one of the old guard. He’s as hot-headed as the new guys who arrive to turn the scene on its head. Their machismo is wryly reflected through the eyes of Kathy, who is simultaneously compelled by the gang’s surrogate family dynamic and repulsed by its unruliness. Benny only thinks about riding, an internalised state

Anyone familiar with the Von Erich wrestling family won’t need reminding that The Iron Claw is not your average underdog sports story – a Rocky-with-lariats flick. The marketing may promise a sun-kissed wrestling romp set in the American South, but the reality is much more tragic – and more heartfelt. Much of that is thanks to a beefed-up Zac Efron, captivating as Kevin Von Erich, the great hope of the Texan wrestling clan led by hard-driving dad Fritz (Mindhunter’s Holt McCallany). We meet them in 1979 and follow the brothers’ rise to fame in the sport.   Jeremy Allen White and Harris Dickinson are magnetic, too, as Kevin’s loyal brothers Kerry and David, showing the insecurity beneath the bravado. The trio fuels The Iron Claw with fresh-faced humanity to go with all the Spandex-clad theatrics and piledrivers (choreographed expertly by wrestling veteran Chavo Guerrero Jr). That boyish vulnerability turns a minor-key drama into an out-and-out weepie. Director Sean Durkin (The Nest) is interested in how wrestling blurs the line between theatre and reality. He shoots the ring like a theatre stage in austere black and white, smash-cutting from ‘kayfabe’ (the staged ‘reality’ of wrestling) to the real world, while capturing Fritz’s toxic pride as it slowly destroys his family from the sidelines.   There’s fresh-faced humanity to go with the Spandex-clad theatrics The physical reality of wrestling is effectively depicted, too. Unlike the improvised sound effects of real-life wres

Loving Vincent writer-directors DK Welchman and Hugh Welchman expand the scope of their oil-painted rotoscoping with their second hand-painted animation, an adaptation of Polish author Władysław Reymont’s early 20th century novel of rural life. There’s a temptation to obsess over the film’s wild logistics – live-action footage was captured on set and then painted over in a more realist style than their 2017 van Gogh animation – but they never fully capitalise on the opportunities unique to this format. The effect is of gazing into a book as though it were a living painting is novel – for a time at least. But once that effect wears off, The Peasants can feel flat.  Observing a village and its traditions over four seasons, The Peasants is full of fascinating anthropological details. Communal traditions, like harvest celebrations and weddings, backdrop the film’s conflicts. This rural world is captured through the eyes of Jagna, a 19-year-old unwillingly sold off by her parents for marriage to Maciej (the main character in the novel), a much older, wealthy farmer who is in the midst of a land dispute.  It’s an animation that feels like a live-action film in disguise It’s fertile ground for storytelling but the animation doesn’t nurture it – beneath the paint, the framing and camerawork is lethargic and rote. The method flattens scenes in a manner that feels limiting, mostly adhering to rigid realism and the visual language of live-action filmmaking. Style doesn’t necessarily ha

The Blackening is a horror-comedy with a meta angle and a distinctly Black perspective, but make no mistake: Get Out this is not. Instead, it lands somewhere between Scary Movie and Scream – like the former, the opening references the latter – dealing in a similar kind of heavily referential humour that edges up to, but never quite crosses over into, full-on parody. The results are mixed.  Expanding on a comic short by co-writers Tracy Oliver and Dewayne Perkins, The Blackening follows a group of old college friends reuniting on Juneteenth for a trip to a secluded cabin – an immediate red flag they all seem wary of. Their suspicions turn out to be warranted: there’s a killer on the loose, who keeps a collection of racist cultural ephemera in the basement.  As the friends bicker and panic, the one liners delivered among the chaos are uplifted by a generally strong cast – Perkins, effectively playing himself, is a particular standout. And in between the many quips, director Tim Story (Fantastic Four, Barbershop) does throw in moments of genuine surprise.   Overall, though, nothing really feels at stake. The Blackening suffers for its inability to build an effectively scary or tense set-piece, nor does it reach particularly far with its thoughts about colourism or social constructions of Blackness, or even the horror tropes it satirises. Not every movie needs to be Jordan Peele, of course, and it’s funny enough half the time. But even as it focuses on comedy, its built-in self-a

In some ways, Blue Beetle, the latest addition to the beleaguered DCEU, is a rarity: a comic-book movie with a Mexican-American hero, a mostly Latinx cast and a distinct retro-’80s vibe. In other, more dominant ways, though, director Ángel Manuel Soto’s adaptation is something we’ve seen many times before. Cobra Kai’s Xolo Maridueña is Jaime Reyes, a working-class kid who, after returning home from college, is gifted a superpowered suit by an alien artefact known as ‘The Scarab’. There’s plenty of warmth – and the occasional good joke – in Soto’s depiction of the Reyes family, along with a refreshing wealth of esoteric references to Latin American culture. Maridueña is charming and bounces off the rest of the cast well, particularly American comedian George Lopez as his uncle Rudy, whose energy keeps the film afloat. But any moments of genuine character interaction are subsumed by rote superhero world-building, plot points seemingly borrowed from other franchises, and trite dialogue. The Power Rangers-flavoured action sequences are genuinely exciting, and the early scenes depicting Jaime’s transformation are about as close as any of these kinds of movies have gotten to body horror. Those inspired moments, however, are ultimately drowned out by too many contemporary superhero clichés. It all just feels too familiar.  In cinemas worldwide Fri Aug 18.

South Korea was one of the world’s largest exporters of adopted children between the ’50s and the early noughties. Many of those two hundred thousand or so children were brought into white American and European families, the fallout of which is still being unpacked. Frédérique, or ‘Freddie’, played by newcomer Park Ji-Min, was one such child: born in Korea but adopted and raised by French parents. In this naturalist drama, director Davy Chou charts Freddie’s attempts to come to terms with her tumultuous feelings towards her background, something that only becomes more complicated the more she finds out about her biological parents. The emotional challenge of reconnecting with a place that you haven’t really been to is felt throughout Return to Seoul. A photo of Freddie’s birth mother – or the person she assumes is her mother – is her only memento of a country with which she has no familiarity. She doesn’t even speak the language and is treated like a foreigner – but also not, because she has an ‘ancestral and ancient Korean face’, as a group of drunk restaurant patrons speculate. Not long after a one-night stand, she begins a whirlwind reunion with her biological father.  Chou charts Freddie’s long, uneasy journey of reconciling her dual heritage with close-up camerawork and patient writing. The French-Cambodian filmmaker gracefully charts her thorny near decade-long journey through broken relationships and a morally murky career. He leaves room for the captivating Park to ex

Where its two predecessors feel like extensions of the Rocky universe, Creed III is the first time this spinoff series has struck out on its own. After Creed II resolved lingering grudges and laid the legacy of Rocky Balboa to rest, this threequel zeroes in on Adonis Creed’s own past – with mixed results. Now directed by its star Michael B Jordan, the series swaps Philly for LA, where the newly-retired Adonis Creed (Jordan) and his wife Bianca (Tessa Thompson) live with their daughter Amara (Mila Davis-Kent). But his triumphant retirement is soon disrupted by the return of Damian ‘Dame’ Anderson (Ant-Man 3’s Jonathan Majors), a surrogate older brother from foster care with boxing dreams of his own. The charismatic Majors is a brooding highlight here, offering an angry challenge to Adonis’s life of relative comfort. But Creed III’s most interesting ideas – around this class divide and Adonis's inability to communicate past pain – feel rushed. And that introspection is short-lived anyway, as problems get solved the ‘old-fashioned way’, sliding the movie back into more formulaic terrain. Even so, the old-fashioned way – mano a mano – is enjoyable enough (look out for the obligatory but still-satisfying training montage). The fights emulate the prowling style of Ryan Coogler’s Creed, while adding new visual flourishes, like extreme close-ups from Creed’s perspective as he finds his opponent’s Achilles’ heel. And Jordan’s well-documented passion for anime is felt both in the film’

‘The sky will crack and fall like glass, and god’s fingers will scorch the earth.’ So recites Leonard (Dave Bautista), a devout believer in the world’s imminent destruction and the leader of a strangely polite but cultish group of home invaders in M Night Shyamalan’s adaptation of Paul G Tremblay’s 2018 novel ‘The Cabin at the End of the World’. Unusually for the filmmaker, it’s structurally straightforward: a claustrophobic chamber piece thriller where a family of three is given a choice between the literal apocalypse or a personal one: the death of a loved one. Shyamalan has often situated such personal crises – of faith, of families coming apart at the seams, of lost love – against potential end times. Knock at the Cabin, while just as emotionally sincere as anything in his filmography, sees its characters wrestle with misanthropy and lost faith in humanity, borne from being victims of hate crimes. Its gay couple Eric (Mindhunter’s Jonathan Groff) and Andrew (Fleabag’s Ben Aldridge) have been all but shunned by one husband’s parents and attacked in public. Why should they give up anything, let alone the thing that’s most precious to them? What they stand to lose is emphasised via moving flashbacks.  Most of the film is admirably quiet and thoughtful, as it turns over this ethical question and climate disaster allegory, limiting any apocalyptic consequences to TV news reports as it heads for a poignant finale that veers away from its source material (it's loosely based on P

There’s been nothing in recent memory quite like Small Axe, an ambitious, deeply empathetic series of films by Steve McQueen. Each of its five dramas about London’s West Indian communities across the decades has returned to interconnected themes of collective resistance, changing familial ties and the hope of making your mark on the world. These familiar, personal issues may as well be the entire universe as far as McQueen is concerned, and Education, the final film in the series and its most personal tale yet, illustrates as much in its first shot: the stars themselves mapped on the face of Kingsley (Kenyah Sandy), a young boy gazing awestruck up at the planetarium presentation, dreaming of being an astronaut. Of course, the rigid and anti-Black structure of British systems belittle such aspirations, and do everything in their power to phase Kingsley out. He’s picked on in class by his own teachers, all unaware or wilfully ignorant of his dyslexia; McQueen and co-writer Alastair Siddons’ script homes in on his struggle with being moved out of sight to a ‘special’ school. In this context, the move is simply a pretence for racial segregation within the British school system. Kingsley is compartmentalised for the school’s sake; left to his own devices the moment he arrives. He isn’t disruptive because of a lack of interest in learning. In fact, he desperately wants to learn. Instead, it’s the lack of accommodation and outright hostility from his teachers that turns him against