Lou Thomas

El regreso de Bong Joon-ho después de Parásitos es espectacular (así como lo oyes), aunque, francamente, algo desigual. Con Mickey 17 nos enseña una película de ciencia ficción que ofrece dos brillantes interpretaciones de Robert Pattinson al precio de una. Te contamos de qué va y por qué tanta emoción.  No te puedes perder: Memorias de un caracol, una joya artesanal sobre enfrentar la muerte.  ¿De qué trata?  Es el 2054 cuando Mickey (Pattinson) se despierta gravemente herido y atrapado en una grieta congelada en el lejano planeta Niflheim. Como su apellido numérico sugiere, ya ha sido “reimpreso” —el término que usa la película y la novela de Edward Ashton sobre el proceso de clonación— 16 veces. Una nave espacial llega y su poco confiable amigo, Timo (Steven Yeun), aparece pero no es de mucha ayuda,  pues deja a Mickey a merced de los “creepers” (criaturas alienígenas similares a babosas que aparentemente buscan devorarlo).  Esta apertura divertida, misteriosa y poco convencional marca el tono del resto de la película, que resulta atractiva pero un poco más larga de lo necesario. Posteriormente nos enteramos de que Mickey y Timo escaparon de la Tierra en un viaje de cuatro años hacia Niflheim. Esto lo lograron luego de haber tomado imprudentemente dinero prestado de un empresario con la costumbre de utilizar una motosierra contra sus deudores. Debido a esto Mickey se ofrece como voluntario para convertirse en un “prescindible”: un astronauta dispuesto a morir, con la memor

It’s been a banner year for horror movies. In fact, it seems like all the buzziest films to come out so far aim to terrify. What’s truly great about the current horror bumper crop is that none of the standouts really resemble one another.  Cannes hit The Substance icked its way into the awards conversation on the back of Demi Moore’s staggeringly strong lead turn, Osgood Perkins’ hit Longlegs mixed ’90s serial killer procedurals with the Satanic panic of the previous decade, while I Saw the TV Glow was David Lynch directing Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Late Night with the Devil made found-footage fun again, while In a Violent Nature invented a new subgenre that people called ‘ambient slasher’. And that’s to name just a few. Below, you’ll find our best and scariest movies of 2024. 🎃 The 100 best horror films ever made 😱 The scariest movies based on a true story 🔥 The best horror films of 2025 (so far)

It’s 1870 in Friendship, Wisconsin when Sheriff Jacob Hansen (Johnny Flynn) discovers a feverish, ranting woman in a field adjacent to the dead body of a soldier he’s just removed from an out-of-town homestead. This bizarre, mysterious and macabre blend sets the uncommon tone for A Prayer for the Dying. When she and the unknown corpse reach local physician, ‘Doc’ (John C Reilly), concern turns to panic when he diagnoses diphtheria. Aside from wife Marta (Kristine Kujath Thorp) and new baby at home, Jacob has a head awash with dark secrets from the Civil War, which ended five years previously. This backdrop of trauma, encroaching disease and wildfires nearing town make for a challenging tenure, which escalates when the dead bodies pile up in town and nearby woods where cult leader Chase and his all-female followers reside. Quarantine is the only solution, for what good it will do. All of which makes for a tense, tough western low on the usual gunfights and saloon brawls but high on apocalyptic foreboding and suspense. The pacing is assured and the action plentiful, whether this encompasses the inspection of a cadaver or last-gasp train escape.  It’s a western low on gunfights but high on apocalyptic foreboding  There’s also bizarre humour – the arrival of a long-awaited circus is weirdly hilarious – and, in Jacob’s gruesome dreams and the vividly infernal conclusion in particular, startling imagery. Though it packs more action, Kelly Reichardt’s Meek’s Cutoff and her peerless

When eight-year-old Josephine (Mason Reeves) witnesses a rape in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park early one Sunday morning, the horrifying event – depicted fully on screen at a slight distance – has understandable repercussions. In writer-director Beth de Araujo’s devasting second film, the man who committed the vile act is almost immediately apprehended, partly thanks to Josephine’s quick-thinking and fast-running father Damien (Channing Tatum). The impact on victim Sandra and Josephine, however, is only beginning and, excluding short moments which bookend the story, the focus is on the latter. Josephine, played by Reeves with a commitment and poise rarely seen in such a young actor in their first role, is justifiably troubled. She imagines the rapist lurking in her bedroom, all around her home and in the streets. With the encouragement of her dad she toughens up with self-defence classes and wins an arm-wrestle with a boy in her class, only to strangle him with a carrier bag after he pushes her ungraciously following his defeat. Josephine’s mother Claire (Gemma Chan) and Damien struggle to keep a lid on their daughter’s outbursts and sadness but show love, patience and care in a horrible situation which all three probably realise will traumatise her for life.  As Josephine and her parents try to live with what she has witnessed and its consequences on her mental wellbeing and behaviour, the machinations of the American legal system grind frustratingly away in the backgroun

A fast, cold open at the US-Mexico border where a gang of revolutionaries named the French 75 prepare to free hundreds of detained immigrants set the burning wheels in motion. It’s the early noughts and righteous firebrand Perfidia Beverly Hills (an indelible Teyana Taylor) doesn’t so much step into the fray as bulldoze her way through it, assisted by her vehement but bumbling lover Pat (Leonardo DiCaprio, having tremendous fun). Before they leave the detainment camp, Perfidia forces Colonel Steven Lockjaw (Sean Penn, award-worthy) into noticeable arousal at gunpoint and all the elements of writer-director Paul Thomas Anderson’s tenth film are in play. From start to finish, One Battle After Another is a mighty 162 minutes of danger, comedy, excitement, love, sex and confusion. The first hour flies by as our rebel pairing shoot guns, rob banks and blow up power lines. Perfidia gives birth to daughter Willa but can’t commit to motherhood and the revolution, leaving Pat holding the baby in both senses. After a bank robbery goes awry and Perfidia gets caught, the gang scatter before Pat changes his name to Bob Ferguson and hides out in an insurrection-sympathetic town called Baktan Cross. Some 15 years later, Lockjaw is offered an opportunity to join a secret mason-ish racist order called The Christmas Adventurers if he can find Bob and his daughter (now played with great poise by Chase Infiniti in her debut film role). This is a mighty 162 minutes of danger, comedy, excitement,

Back in 2022, The Night of the 12th examined an all-male detective team’s attempts to solve the murder of a young woman in a small town and exposed sad truths about how women are perceived and treated.  As its title suggests, his new film finds director Dominik Moll delving back into another true life case. This time, the French filmmaker digs into an internal affairs investigation of officers suspected of shooting and badly wounding a young man with rubber bullets at a 2018 Yellow Vest (‘gilets jaunes’) demonstration in Paris. Dogged police officer Stephanie Bertrand (a superb Léa Drucker) methodically leads investigators through each aspect of the case, detailing life-changing head injuries that put teenager Guillaume in hospital, assessing the impact on his mother Joëlle and finding out who fired the weapon via tricky interrogations of suspects. She also interviews Guillaume’s friend Remi, present at the incident, who has been rapidly charged, tried and jailed for three months for his part in the demonstrations.  In a crucial moment, Stephanie takes her team to the road off the Champs-Élysées where the shooting happened, identifying a spot where a witness had a clear view of the event. There’s a riveting extended sequence where witness Alicia (a hotel maid played by Saint Omer’s Guslagie Malanda) is tracked down at work, briefly interviewed, and then followed by Stephanie. It also opens up another can of worms entirely: would Stephanie’s team have been as tenacious if the

Director Bong Joon Ho’s post-Parasite return is a spectacular if uneven sci-fi romp offering two stellar Robert Pattinson performances for the price of one. It’s 2054 when the eponymous Mickey (Pattinson) wakes up badly injured, stuck in a frozen crevice on far-off Planet Niflheim. As the eponymous numerical surname hints he’s already been ‘reprinted’ – the term the film and Edward Ashton’s source novel use for cloning – 16 times. A spaceship docks and untrustworthy pal Timo (Steven Yeun) appears – but leaves Mickey at the whims of the creepers, gross slug-like alien creatures ostensibly preparing to eat him.  A funny, mysterious and unusual opening, the sequence is characteristic of the remaining compelling but slightly overlong running time. We learn in flashback that Mickey and Timo escaped from earth on a four-year journey to Niflheim having unwisely borrowed money from a dubious businessman with a habit of chainsawing his debtors. Mickey volunteers to become an expendable: an astronaut willing to die, memories intact and be reprinted forever more, with the lengthy journey passing sweetly for Mickey as he meets and falls in love with Nasha (an uber-cool Naomi Ackie).  On Niflheim, the colony run by failed senator Kenneth Marshall (a bizarre, gurning turn from Mark Ruffalo that’s even more oily than his character in Poor Things) and his similarly OTT wife Ylfa (Toni Collette) unspools into disarray after an extra Mickey is erroneously reprinted and the creepers mobilise ou

Maxine Minx wants to be famous. It’s 1985 and this 32-year-old porn star with a secret past is looking to go legit in Hollywood. Her first step is bagging the lead role in ‘The Puritan II’, a slasher sequel with big feminist ideas helmed by tough British director Elizabeth Bender. Once Maxine aces the audition that opens this entertaining horror, surely the only way is up. That is, until her porno pals start getting murdered. Is it the night stalker that keeps appearing on panicked nightly TV news reports or someone closer to home? With MaXXXine, writer-director Ti West concludes his Mia Goth horror trilogy (following X and Pearl) with a thrilling slasher that’s both fond neon tribute to the genre’s ’80s gory heyday and a brisk, smart look at the role of women and power in Hollywood. His star Goth again steals the show as the eponymous wannabe on the rise who survived the Texas film-shoot massacre in X, while others excel in chunky support roles. Elizabeth Debecki in particular is excellent as Bender, hard but nurturing, no one’s fool as she navigates the misogyny of the 1980s film biz. Giancarlo Esposito is her male equivalent as Maxine’s steadfast agent. MaXXXine pays fond neon tribute to the slasher genre’s ’80s heyday As the local body count increases in lurid, bloodthirsty fashion, LAPD detectives Williams (Michelle Monaghan) and Torres (Bobby Cannavale) pressure Maxine but get nowhere. She’s not one to spill her guts even while others are having theirs filleted. Besides

A fictional G7 summit at a German chateau to prepare a statement addressing an unspecified global threat may sound like a dry old time, but Rumours is an off-beat comic delight. There’s all the oddball charm, noirish atmosphere and visual flourishes you’d expect from experimental Canadian filmmaker Guy Maddin, who co-directs with Evan and Galen Johnson again after their found-footage collaboration The Green Fog. This G7 line-up is stacked: Cate Blanchett is German Chancellor Hilda Ortmann; Charles Dance plays American President Edison Wolcott (with an English accent, for some reason); and Denis Ménochet is French premier Sylvain Broulez. As you’d expect with that cast, it’s consistently smart and well-acted.  After posing for press photos with 2000-year-old human remains in the chateau’s neighbouring forest, the seven world leaders sit at a bandstand, eating and drinking in comfort. A conversation between troubled Canadian Prime Minister Maxime Laplace (veteran Maddin collaborator Roy Dupuis) and British PM Cardosa Dewindt (Knock at the Cabin’s Nikki Amuka-Bird) suggests the pair had a one-night stand previously, though it’s Maxime and Hilda who have their own secret tryst this time. There’s endless talk about broad topics from climate change to finance, but they never quite manage to get into any details, merely bloviating about nothing instead. Each character is deliberately and hilariously self-regarding, while facial expressions and line readings are often accompanied by

With their second feature I Saw the TV Glow, writer-director Jane Schoenbrun delivers a memorable, strange and satisfying teen horror-mystery. Owing much to Buffy the Vampire Slayer and plenty, if slightly less, to the wilder, weirder imagery of Twin Peaks, it’s a rare film that wears its influences on its sleeve while still feeling totally fresh. We meet 12-year-old, mixed-race Owen (played at this point by Ian Foreman) in the late ’90s, where he struggles to make friends and has a pretty miserable home life, despite the support of his mum Brenda (Danielle Deadwyler). One evening after school in a dark cafeteria Owen meets Maddy (Atypical’s Brigette Lundy-Paine), who’s reading an episode guide to her favourite TV series, ‘The Pink Opaque’. A tentative friendship develops as Maddy introduces Owen to this Buffy-style show when he stays over one Saturday night, having told Brenda he was staying elsewhere. Two years later, Owen (now played by Justice Smith) is as much an addict of the show as Maddy. The film casts a really interesting gaze at the nature of fandom, observing that a shared love of pop culture can bring people together, but also pull them into bizarre, toxic spaces. It owes a lot to Buffy and plenty to the wilder, weirder imagery of Twin Peaks Images and scenes from the show real and imagined by Owen flit in and out of the film in an intoxicating fashion – one night shot of an ice-cream van is a thing of noirish beauty, but the vendor of the icy treats is a monstro

The Creator explores a future where A.I. detonates a nuclear explosion in Los Angeles killing a million people – a bit like in Sarah Connor’s Terminator 2 nightmare. A decade later, in 2065, undercover soldier Joshua Taylor (John David Washington) lives with pregnant wife Maya (Gemma Chan) in an unnamed country in ‘New Asia’ and a raid ends with her being killed by NOMAD – America’s satellite weapon that tours the globe, raining down death from high in the earth’s atmosphere. Chaos and mass destruction rarely thrills so often or looks so good. Five years later, Colonel Jean Howell (Allison Janney) offers Taylor – now a broken ex-soldier earning a living in a scrapyard – a return to Asia to help defeat the AI-loving East, who apparently have a weapon that could destroy NOMAD. It’s a somewhat hackneyed enticement plot device seen in many war and crime films but Janney sells it well. All facial scars and harsh chat, her gung-ho character is a treat. Last time Janney was quite so tough on screen she got an Oscar for her role in I, Tonya. When Howell leads a crew way behind enemy lines, Taylor discovers the weapon is actually a child (Madeleine Yuna Voyles). Director Gareth Edwards created the story and co-wrote the screenplay with Chris Weitz. His last two features – Godzilla and Rogue One: A Star Wars Story, the latter also co-written with Weitz – married booming, boisterous thrills within a pre-existing franchise world. The Creator is his best film to date, delivering on the pr

Following punchy German crime features Gravity and Stereo, director Maximilian Erlenwein’s first English-language film is a terse, minimal two-hander that should do at least as much to keep swimmers out of the ocean this summer as The Meg 2, albeit for completely different reasons.  Drew (Sophie Lowe) and May (Louisa Krause) are sisters driving to a quiet, unnamed coast for their annual scuba dive. May left her family years earlier for reasons that are never fully explained, but there is the suggestion of parental mistreatment – it appears a previous trip to the sea involved her father pushing her underwater. Of more interest are the mechanics of the dive itself, as May ends up caught under a heavy rock 100 feet underwater. Erlenwein excels in setting up a gripping race against time: under May’s calm instruction, panicking Drew has 25 minutes to get to the surface, nab spare oxygen tanks, call for help, grab a car jack and return to May before she runs out of air.  Lowe’s terrified, anxious trip to the surface and agonised attempts to alert others are followed with precision, clarity and pace by cinematographer Frank Griebe’s roving camerawork. Erlenwein – with an assist from co-writer Joachim Heden – keeps things controlled and believable. The section where a frantic Lowe tries desperately to open their rented motor's uncooperative boot is perhaps the film’s most exciting moment. Despite the drastically different setting, the film that The Dive most readily recalls is Fall,

Writer-director Celine Song’s beautiful debut film follows a pair of Korean childhood sweethearts who eventually reunite in person after 24 years. It’s a nuanced, careful work that will resonate strongly with everyone who has loved and lost, as well as offering a warning of possible heartbreak ahead for those who haven’t. In Seoul, 12-year-olds Nora and Hae Sung walk home together each day and compete to be top of the class until Nora’s family emigrates to Canada. A dozen years pass before they reconnect online, with Nora now a budding New York playwright and Hae Sung stuck in Korea. From their first Skype call it’s clear that the adult Nora (Greta Lee) and Hae Sung (Decision to Leave’s Teo Yoo) still have a deep affection for each other – feelings expressed with subtlety rather than cheesy, overblown sentiment by the elegant screenplay. Hae Sung promises to visit but Nora can’t wait forever – who can? – and when Nora meets Arthur (John Magaro from Kelly Reichardt’s equally exquisite First Cow) at a writer’s retreat romance blossoms with him instead. It all leads up to a final act another 12 years on when Hae Sung’s belatedly visits the now-married Nora in New York. And it’s absolutely as emotionally devastating as you’d expect. It’s even comparable with Wong Kar-wai’s masterpiece In the Mood for Love Song knows this terrain inside out, as a one-time émigrée Korean who moved to Canada and then to the Big Apple to become a playwright – and it really shows. Given Past Lives’ gr

Having revitalised pandemic-exhausted TV viewers in 2021 with We Are Lady Parts, her award-winning sitcom about an all-female Muslim punk band, writer-director Nida Manzoor sets her sights on the big screen with a lively debut feature.  West London teenage martial arts fanatic Ria (Priya Kansara) dreams of becoming a stuntwoman and makes older sister Lena (Ritu Arya) film her efforts for YouTube in between writing letters to her idol Eunice Huthart, Britain’s best-known real-life stuntwoman. The Pakistani-British siblings are close, with the headstrong Ria full of admiration for art-school dropout Lena. Their partnership is threatened when the pair attend an Eid party and Lena meets a wealthy doctor from a posh family. Soon, Salim wants to marry Lena and move to Singapore and distraught Ria is trying to sabotage their relationship.  Polite Society’s frantic pacing and wild invention is mirrored by Kansara’s livewire performance as Ria. She’ll try anything, and so will the film. There’s much fun to be had leaping from high-school conflict (Ria’s exploits aren’t popular with all her classmates) to sizzling martial arts action scenes, to slapstick espionage, to sci-fi/horror via class-conflict drama, as Salim’s mother Raheela (a deliciously evil Nimra Bucha) condescends to Ria’s poorer family.  She bites off more than she can chew in trying out so many filmmaking styles Not everything works. The basic plot about someone trying to stop a wedding has been old hat since the days o

Bong Joon Ho’s ‘Mickey 17’ – review Robert Pattinson dazzles at the double in Korean filmmaker Bong Joon-ho’s wild trip into deep space Director Bong Joon-ho’s post-Parasite return is a spectacular if uneven sci-fi romp offering two stellar Robert Pattinson performances for the price of one. It’s 2054 when the eponymous Mickey (Pattinson) wakes up badly injured, stuck in a frozen crevice on far-off Planet Niflheim. As the eponymous numerical surname hints he’s already been ‘reprinted’ – the term the film and Edward Ashton’s source novel use for cloning – 16 times. A spaceship docks and untrustworthy pal Timo (Steven Yeun) appears – but leaves Mickey at the whims of the creepers, gross slug-like alien creatures ostensibly preparing to eat him.  A funny, mysterious and unusual opening, the sequence is characteristic of the remaining compelling but slightly overlong running time. We learn in flashback that Mickey and Timo escaped from earth on a four-year journey to Niflheim having unwisely borrowed money from a dubious businessman with a habit of chainsawing his debtors. Mickey volunteers to become an expendable: an astronaut willing to die, memories intact and be reprinted forever more, with the lengthy journey passing sweetly for Mickey as he meets and falls in love with Nasha (an uber-cool Naomi Ackie).  Photograph: Warner Bros.Robert Pattinson(s) in ‘Mickey 17’ On Niflheim, the colony run by failed senator Kenneth Marshall (a bizarre, gurning turn from Mark Ruffalo that’s