Phil de Semlyen

Summer may still feel – and actually be – a way off yet, but it’s never too early for outdoor cinema. Especially if you have warm clothes and access to a personal heater. The year’s first cab off the rank – Peckham and Stratford staple, Rooftop Film Club – is offering exactly that with its new ‘Fireside Loveseats’, with wood heaters to keep the early spring chill at bay as Londoners settle in for big blockbusters and a few old favourites. Expect more line-up announcements in the month or two ahead – and the likes of Wicked, Gladiator II, Dune: Part Two, Inside Out 2 and other 2025 hits to be big as the summer season kicks off in earnest. Watch this space for all the latest news and ticket info. Recommended: 📽️ The best cinemas in London💰 London’s best cheap cinemas

London is absolutely world-class when it comes to museums. Obviously, we’re pretty biased, but with more than 170 of them dotted about the capital – a huge chunk of which are free to visit – we think it’s fair to say that there’s nowhere else in the world that does museums better.  Want to explore the history of TfL? We’ve got a museum for that. Rather learn about advertising? We’ve got a museum for that too. History? Check. Science? Check. 1940s cinema memorabilia, grotesque eighteenth-century surgical instruments, or perhaps a wall of 4,000 mouse skeletons? Check, check and check! Being the cultured metropolitans that we are, Time Out’s editors love nothing more than a wholesome afternoon spent gawping at Churchill’s baby rattle or some ancient Egyptian percussion instruments. In my case, the opportunity to live on the doorstep of some of the planet’s most iconic cultural institutions was a big reason why I moved here at the first chance I got, and I’ve racked up countless hours traipsing around display cases and deciphering needlessly verbose wall texts in the eleven years since. From iconic collections, brilliant curation and cutting-edge tech right down to nice loos, adequate signage and a decent place to grab a cuppa; my colleagues and I know exactly what we want from a museum, and we’ve put in a whole lot of time deliberating which of the city’s institutions are worth your time. So here’s our take on the 25 best ones to check out around London, ranging from world-famou

There’s a lot of talk about the state of London nightlife right now. Naysayers lament the fact that venues are closing at an alarming rate, blame Gen Zs for not going out and claim that it’s impossible to get a drink in central after 1am (it’s really not). With all that negativity and uncertainty, it’s tempting to just stick to what you know – or worse, stay in – rather than get out there and experience what this vast city has to offer after dark.  There are new nights popping up all the time. Heart of Soul, Jungyals and Gays, Club Stamina and Joyride are all relatively new (and totally brilliant) additions to London’s club scene. There’s also the nights that have remained classics for good reason – Rowans, the Palm Tree fridays, K-Hole – as well as more wholesome late-evening activities like life drawing, spoken word nights and supper clubs.  There’s nights out for everyone in this city. Nights for foodies, film buffs, audiophiles. Nights for marathon ravers, old-school movers and for when you need a proper good singalong. Even nights out for when you just want a nice sit down.  We curated this list by asking Time Out staff members for their favourite nights out in the city – and trust us, we know our stuff. Our list features nights in central London, east London, west London, north London and in south London. They all take place frequently, or semi-frequently, throughout the year and each offers something unique. So what are you waiting for? Start planning your next night o

Robert Eggers’ Oscar-nominated and box-office smashing Nosferatu aside, it’s been a slowish start to the horror movie year. But it’s about to get real, because spring is delivering a forklift’s worth of terrors into our multiplexes. April alone boasts Ryan Coogler’s Sinners, a Deep South vampire fable with two Michael B Jordan performances, and Lights Out director David F Sandberg’s nocturnal nightmare Until Dawn. And for anyone who prefers their macabre goings-on to come with Paul Rudd, Jenna Ortega and plenty of quirky laughs, there’s A24’s horror-comedy Death of a Unicorn to come. And that’s just the start: 28 Years Later, M3GAN 2.0, The Conjuring: Last Rites, SAW XI, The Black Phone 2.0 and a new Insidious movie are all adding new shocks to smash-hit franchises. Talk To Me pair Danny and Michael Philippou return with Bring Her Back and the Jordan Peele-produced Him hits in September. Oh, and Final Destination Bloodlines just delivered the second most watched horror trailer of all time. This list will be updated as the frights arrive, so keep checking back to see what’s worth shelling out for.RECOMMENDED: 🎃 The 100 best horror films ever made😱 The scariest movies based on a true story 🔥 The best horror films of 2024

War, what is it good for? Absolutely nothing – except movies. Military conflict has formed the background of many great films, including some of the best of all time. It’s not a surprise. Few events are such natural conduits for drama, suspense, horror, heroism and examination of the human condition. It’s the basis for exploring a slew of existential questions: why do we fight? Why do people enlist? What happens afterward? Is war ever justified? Is it ever worth it in the end?  Even if there’s rarely ever any clear answer, the best war movies attempt to examine combat from all sides. For this list, we’ve compiled films that span the historical and fictional gamut, from both World Wars to Vietnam to Iraq to imaginary interplanetary conflict. If you’ve experienced combat, many of these movies will resonate somewhere deep within you. And if you haven’t, perhaps it will give you some small measure of understanding for what those who’ve fought have seen, experienced and felt. Written by David Fear, Keith Uhlich, Joshua Rothkopf, Andy Kryza, Phil de Semlyen and Matthew Singer Recommended: 🎖️ The best World War I movies💥 The 50 best World War II movies🔥 The 100 best movies of all-time💣 The 101 best action movies ever made

In just a few years, Apple TV+ has amassed a decent selection of original movies, but where it’s really excelled is television. Since launching in late 2019, the streaming service has produced several shows and miniseries that could be deemed phenomenons, including Ted Lasso, Severance and Slow Horses. Narrowing down what it does best can be difficult, though: in just those aforementioned highlights, you’ll find a heartwarming comedy, a sci-fi mystery and a spy thriller. In truth, the platform is simply loaded with highly bingeable content spread across several genres and formats. And with buzzy series like The Studio, Lucky and Murderbot on the way, the slate is just getting more crowded. So what’s the most deserving of your precious time? Here are 20 of our current favourites. Recommended: 🍏 The 25 best movies to watch on Apple TV+🗓 The best TV and streaming shows of 2025 (so far)📺 The 101 best TV shows of all-time

Outside of a few box-office smashes, 2024 was a relatively quiet year for movies, full of fascinating breakouts and leftfield successes, but few major events. But 2025 is shaping up a bit differently. While it’s still hard to spot another #Barbenheimer on the horizon, or even a Deadpool and Wolverine, the calendar is loaded with the return of monolithic franchises like Avatar, Mission: Impossible and Jurassic World and a few monolithic auteurs, including Paul Thomas Anderson, Bong Joon-ho, Lynne Ramsay, Spike Lee and Steven Soderbergh. Shoot, we might even get a Terrence Malick movie this year. Of course, the most exciting thing going into every year are the films you never see coming. Will we get another The Substance or Nickel Boys? Who knows? But that’s why we keep watching – and you can follow along with our ever-growing list of the best movies of the year below. RECOMMENDED: 📺 The best TV and streaming shows of 2025 (so far)🔥 The must-see films for 2025 you can't miss🎥 The 101 greatest films ever made

Spring is here with a surge of hope and positivity and – checks notes – brooding men on personal missions of revenge. Your local picture house (and Netflix) will be serving up a few of those this month, with The Accountant 2, The Amateur and Havoc all man-on-a-mission extravaganzas in which it will be very bad indeed to be Random Suited Henchman #3. But it’s not just growling dues with guns: One To One: John & Yoko is a doc to catch, Alex Garland’s Warfare is assembling one the most exciting young casts of the year and sending it into combat, and Sinners and Until Dawn should be two must-sees for horror lovers.RECOMMENDED:📽️ The best films of 2025 (so far)📺 The best TV shows of 2025 you need to stream🏵️ The 100 greatest movies of all time

Ball is life, they say, which is what makes basketball such a popular conduit for movie drama. Because it’s never just about the game on the court – although the game itself is as fast and furious as any action scene – but the stories that surround it, from players desperate to transcend the situation they were born into to coaches in search of redemption to teams pulling together to pull off the ultimate upset. Or, y’know, a legendary athlete joining with famous cartoon characters to defeat some evil monsters. Sure, sports like baseball and boxing are more entrenched in the American mythos, and thus have inspired more classic Hollywood movies. But b-ball has its share of awesome films, too, whether they take place at the pro, college or street level, on the hardwood or the asphalt, in packed arenas or outer space. Here are 18 of the GOATs. Recommended: 🏆The 50 best sports movies of all-time, ranked🥊 The 10 best boxing movies of all-time⚾ The best baseball movies of all-time🥇 The best Olympic movies

The streaming year is off to flier. For anyone who’s spent the dark winter months hibernating at home in their downtime, Netflix, BBC, HBO, Apple TV and all those other giants of small-screen entertainment have really delivered on the assignment. To help us hunker down with shows to dispel the winter blues or, in the case of Netflix’s bleak and brutal American Primeval, make them slightly worse – albeit in thunderously widescreen style. And there’s plenty more ahead. Apple TV has The Studio, Seth Rogen’s eagerly-awaited, cameo-packed Hollywood satire, Netflix has announced the finale of Squid Game this summer, along with the end of Stranger Things, more Black Mirror, a second run of Tim Burton’s Wednesday and about a zillion other things, while Disney+ delivers another series of Andor, arguably the standout show of 2022. Here’s everything you need to see... so far. You’re gonna need a comfier couch.RECOMMENDED: 🎥 The 50 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

Comedy gets no respect, no respect at all. Sure, everyone loves to laugh, and just about every film buff has a comedy movie they hold close to their heart. But for some reason, when it comes to awards and canonisation, comedies still get short shrift in the history of cinema. That’s probably because, more than any other genre, comedy is dependent on context. What’s funny in 1924 might land with a thud in 2024. And that’s to say nothing of varying tastes in humour.  There is no more difficult movie for a filmmaker to pull off than a comedy. No film genre ages worse: humour is largely dependent on context, and what’s funny in 2025 might be completely lost on audiences five years later, let alone a century. And as any stand-up comedian will tell you, the stuff that makes people laugh varies greatly – from country to country, city to city, generation to generation.  And so, those that have kept us cracking up for decades are truly special. Comedies might rarely win Academy Awards, but the best comedy movies stick with us longer – and get rewatched more frequently – than just about any other type of film. To put together this list, we asked comedians like Diane Morgan and Russell Howard, actors such as John Boyega and Jodie Whittaker and a cadre of Time Out writers about the movies that make them chuckle the hardest for longest. In doing so, we believe we’ve found the 100 finest, most durable and most broadly appreciable laughers in history. No matter your sense of humour – goofy,

The murder mystery has come back from the dead. Up until a few years ago, the old-school whodunnit had fallen desperately out of fashion, despite being a tentpole cinematic genre stretching back to the earliest talkies. Then came Rian Johnson’s Knives Out and it became clear that audiences were clamouring for the return of pop-culture products that test their own sleuthing skills. Now, the genre is undergoing a full-scale renaissance, from Hulu’s Only Murders in the Building to remakes of Murder on the Orient Express and Death on the Nile to, of course, Knives Out’s discourse-sparking 2022 sequel, Glass Onion – with another on the way. It’s a very welcome return, particularly when you consider how accustomed we’ve all become in the last few years to half-watching movies from our couch while scrolling through our phones. It’s the ideal antidote to distracted viewing. After all, what other brand of film engages your mind and pulls you through the screen like a murder mystery? With a renaissance now in full swing, we felt it was time to round up some of the genre’s classics, along with its hidden gems. Here are 40 of the best. Contributors: Phil de Semlyen, Matthew Singer, Annette Richardson, Ashanti Omkar Recommended:🕵️ The 100 best thriller films of all time🔪 The best true crime documentaries on Netflix in the US🔥 The 100 greatest films ever made

From Serpico to LA Confidential to Training Day, stories of straight-arrow cops navigating corruption on the force are a Hollywood staple. Will that cheeky free donut lead the principled officer spiralling into a life of backhanders and dodgy deals, or can they hold onto their morals and bring the big apples on the force to book? Ultimately, the good guy wins out – and it is invariably a guy. Sandhya Suri’s terrific slowburn drama is the non-Hollywoodised version of that story, depicting life as a woman in India’s rural police as a far murkier and less predictable affair. The British-Indian director diagnoses a problem far too deep-seated for one well-meaning, inexperienced young constable to solve, leading you into a maze of compromised ethics, police brutality, caste violence and misogyny, and refusing to point to the exit. That constable is Santosh, an emotionally bruised young woman played with tentative gumption by Shahana Goswami. When her husband of two years is killed policing a riot, she takes up the option of a so-called ‘compassionate appointment’, a real scheme in India that enables women to take up their deceased husband’s old jobs.  Suri’s sharp-edged screenplay doesn’t find much admirable in Santosh’s new police colleagues, a lazy, bribable bunch of layabouts. One bullying female officer takes particular delight in humiliating trysting couples, enforcing a strict moral code noticeably absent back at the station. The cops laugh over a meme comparing China and In

To the list of the world’s most dazzlingly imaginative animators – America’s Pixar and Laika, Japan’s Studio Ghibli, England’s Aardman, Ireland’s Cartoon Saloon – you can officially add a 30-year-old Latvian with a laptop. Flow’s Gints Zilbalodis is now a Latvian with a laptop and an Oscar, and boy, is it deserved. His DIY animation, made partly with freely-available open-source software, takes the promises of his eye-catching 2020 debut Away and fulfils it in spellbinding style. A survival epic full of mysteries and magic, it’s an animated epic worthy of Ghibli. Set in the aftermath of an inexorable, unexplained flood, it follows a small band of animals floating on a small sail boat towards an uncertain future. Its small posse of furry and feathered adventurers include a slinky, inquisitive cat; a ring-tailed lemur; an aloof secretary bird; and the hipster’s mammal of the moment, a capybara. It’s been ages since anything articulated the spirituality of the natural world as breathtakingly as this Their voyage is not Disney’s mushy The Incredible Journey redux and there’s no Life of Pi metaphor behind these characters – they behave like animals in a way that speaks to many hours’ studying at the local zoo (in one cheat, the capybara sounds were provided by a baby camel). But Flow still finds behaviourisms that are touchingly relatable. Teamwork, friendship, ingenuity and common interest are themes that run below the surface like one of the mythical whales that occasionally br

With this quick-witted and sexually supercharged espionage caper, Steven Soderbergh and his screenwriter David Koepp (Jurassic Park) have just remade Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy for the Industry generation.  Cerebral rather than action-packed, it’s like a classic le Carré (or, with its Harry Palmer allusions, Len Deighton) thriller, brought bang up to date with stylish direction, outrageously thirsty acting, and some bone-dry wit. There’s also a Ukraine invasion subplot to keep things uncomfortably topical.Michael Fassbender and Cate Blanchett are married couple George and Kathryn Woodhouse – a pair of British spies who bring far too much work home with them. He has the calm, measured air (and glasses) of his namesake George Smiley, and a fastidiousness that’s perfect for his job but could be deeply annoying on date night. She’s cool with it – she’s cool, generally. The so-called ‘black bag’, a metaphorical mechanism employed by spooks to keep some semblance of work/life balance, helps keep the intel and intimacy apart. At least, it should. But a slick opening Steadicam sequence through a Mayfair nightclub sees George learning that there’s a traitor in his team’s midst – and Kathryn’s name is firmly on the shortlist. It’s Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy for the Industry generation Soderbergh gathers all the suspects – agency shrink Zoe (Naomie Harris), tech whiz Clarissa (Marisa Abela), cocky field agent James (Regé-Jean Page) and morally compromised veteran Freddie (Tom Burke) – for

There’s something so bloody-minded about this workmanlike Marvel entry, you can only applaud it. Rather than bowing to grumbles that the modern-day MCU demands too much prior knowledge from its audience, Captain America: Brave New World absolutely insists you have a firm grasp on The Incredible Hulk. Yes, the 2008 one that saw Edward Norton leave the franchise before it even got started.  If, like me, The Incredible Hulk has yet to make your Letterboxd list, some head scratching awaits. Who’s the guy Tim Blake Nelson is playing? Why is Thaddeus Ross, now the President and played by Harrison Ford in place of the late William Hurt, agonising on his relationship with a daughter we never see? Why are we all here? And before you turn your paper over on entry number 35 in the MCU, you’ll also need to swot up on Eternals and its small-screen cousin, The Falcon and the Winter Soldier. The former will explain the mass of strategically and narratively vital space rock sitting in the Pacific Ocean; the latter sets up Anthony Mackie’s new Captain America, Sam Wilson, and Joaquin Torres (Danny Ramirez), his chirpy sidekick now promoted to Falcon duties. Mackie makes an equally charismatic but much more mortal Captain America to Chris Evans’s Steve Rogers. His sense of inadequacy at replacing his serum-enhanced predecessor provides the movie’s best moment – a vulnerability that should be mirrored by Ross’s heartache over his estranged daughter, were she not marooned in a movie from 17 year

Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy Review ‘Fourquels’ are usually where film franchises start to flirt with rock bottom. From Matrix Resurrections to Die Hard 4.0 to Batman & Robin and – shudder – Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, they love to coast along on past glories and creaky story beats. One of them even gave us the phrase ‘nuking the fridge’, the perfect shorthand for a movie series blowing itself into orbit.    It’s a joy to report, then, that Mad About the Boy is comfortably the best Bridget Jones outing since Bridget Jones’s Diary. In fact, there’s barely a Silk Cut filter between this and that delightfully goofy first screen incarnation of Helen Fielding’s great singleton.  And there is absolutely no nuking Bridget Jones’ fancy new Smeg fridge. For Renée Zellweger’s still klutzy but now wiser Bridge, living in cosy Hampstead, the singleton Borough era is a distant memory. Ciggies and Chardonnay have been dispensed with (okay, ciggies have been dispensed with), replaced with a big dose of lingering grief for lawyer Mark Darcy (Colin Firth). Her partner, and dad to her kids, was killed four years previously on a humanitarian mission to Sudan.  Via the attentive direction of Michael Morris (To Leslie) and a fab Zellweger turn, the push-and-pull of Bridget’s new reality – two young children needing their mum, a bunch of old pals, led by the still mouthy Shazzer (Sally Phillips), encouraging her to ‘get back out there’ – is laid out in an immaculate ope

If you have claws and an insatiable craving for human flesh, can you still be a great dad? That’s the theme underpinning Leigh Whannell’s latest go at dragging a Universal Monster into the cold light of the 2020s, a more hard-bitten and demanding age than the one Lon Chaney’s Wolf Man prowled – and a lot harder to scare. Obviously, the answer is ‘no’ – werewolves fall down in so many key parenting categories – but the Aussie horror auteur behind Saw and 2020’s terrific The Invisible Man deserves some credit for bringing a new prism to the furry critter first made famous by Chaney in 1941.  Christopher Abbott, often excellent in supporting roles, steps up in a lead role once earmarked for Ryan Gosling. He’s Blake, a country kid who’s grown up to appreciate his big-city life with workaholic journalist wife Charlotte (Ozark’s Julia Garner) and moppet of a daughter, Ginger (Matilda Firth). A writer who’s ‘between jobs’ and worried about his marriage, Blake pours himself into parenting, inadvertently mirroring the overprotective tendencies of his own dad – set up in flashback, along with the movie’s wolfman mythology, via a great prelude sequence. There are one or two genuinely disgusting moments of body horror here Whannell and co-writer Corbett Tuck’s screenplay helpfully twice-underlines the impending twist – ‘Sometimes as a daddy, you get so scared of your kids getting scars that you become the thing that scars them,’ Blake tells Ginger – before the trio head for his old famil

Thought William Tell was just a guy who shot apples off his son’s head? This old-fashioned Euro epic will set you straight. Here, the legendary medieval crossbowman gets placed in an action-packed historical context, showing that skewering Granny Smiths was just one of the daring feats he pulled off in the cantons of 14th century Switzerland. Played by The Square’s Claes Bang, a charismatic actor with a hint of devilry, Tell is a somewhat solemn family man, nursing old traumas dating back to his time on the Crusades. He’d rather be left in peace to hunt in picturesque Alpine valleys with his son (Tobias Jowett), while his Middle-eastern wife (Extraction’s Golshifteh Farahani) tends the hearth. But enter eye-patched Hapsburg tyrant Albert – Sir Ben Kingsley in one of those three-day’s-work-and-a-fat-paycheck roles – with dastardly plans for his corner of the mountains. An army of henchmen, led by Connor Swindells’ tax-collecting tyrant, Albrecht Gessler, is soon provoking the peace-loving Swiss to fury with their violent pillaging. In case you hadn’t guessed, Will Tell is basically Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves at altitude, though not as fun as that sounds. The crossbowman’s band of not-so-merry men (and women) includes Rafe Spall and Emily Beecham’s aristocrats, but it’s not until that famous apple scene – staged in the second half here – that Tell’s wavering gives away to full resistance.  The acting is a bubbling fondue of clashing styles Writer-director Nick Hamm (Killing

The Japan Foundation Touring Film Programme is back in London next month, and it’s your chance to experience the country’s finest filmmaking without having to board a flight. The UK’s largest celebration of Japanese cinema, it will be taking up residence at the ICA – where you can catch the entire programme – and, for a more limited run, at Hammersmith’s Riverside Studios. The overarching theme this year is ‘Justice, Justification and Judgement’, with hard-hitting dramas like Yûya Ishii’s provocative The Moon and Bunji Sotoyama’s Tea Friends, based on a real-life prostitution ring bust, on the slate. For younger Japanophiles, there’s ​the charming manga-based anime Ghost Cat Anzu. Tanoshimu!

It rivals The Substance as 2024’s most arresting horror film – and it was a killer year for the genre – but you’d hesitate to call Robert Eggers’ deeply sinister, slow-burning new take on the vampire classic ‘fresh’ exactly. Plague, rats, death and moral degradation abound in a tale made with a coolness manifest by none of its out-of-their-depth characters.  The American auteur, crushing it in every film he makes, returns to his horror roots with an even darker vision. The Witch, his debut, a parable of evil penetrating a Puritan family unit in Colonial America, gave us the demonic and meme-able Black Phillip. Nosferatu gives us just blackness, shadows to get lost in (props to cinematographer Jarin Blaschke’s noir lighting) and an undercurrent of lurking villainy that’s articulated in the film’s lulling early stretches by the jittery strings of Robin Carolan’s impressive score.  As with FW Murnau’s 1922 silent adaptation of Henrik Galeen’s Dracula riff, a film spilling over with post-Great War dread, and Werner Herzog’s AIDS-era remake Nosferatu the Vampyre, the plot is set in motion by a humble real-estate deal. Wisborg realtor Herr Knock (Simon McBurney) sends his ambitious young agent Thomas Hutter (Nicholas Hoult) to the Carpathian castle of one Count Orlok, to complete his purchase of a new abode in their seafront town.  Wrong move. The man he meets has none of the doomed romanticism of Klaus Kinski’s vampire, a mole-toothed softboi who was prone to lamentations about ho

The most enjoyable Disney Animation movie since The Lion King (1994) – sorry, Frozen heads – 2016’s Moana dazzled with its kaleidoscopic Oceania seascapes, catchy tunes, and a coming-of-age adventure that tacked smartly around empowerment clichés. Now, eight years later and retooled from a planned Disney+ spinoff series, the sea-quel is here with… well, exactly the same. There’s nothing too much wrong with Moana 2, which ticks all those same boxes for adventure and empowerment. It’s another loving celebration of Polynesian culture, replete with mad-looking sea creatures, hummable songs, and a charming goofy streak. But the lightning that jags from its spectacular climactic tempest doesn’t end up in the bottle this time.  Hawaiian actress Auli'i Cravalho returns as the voice of Moana, now a seasoned wayfarer held in the highest esteem on her Pacific island. She even has her own fanclub – the Moana-be’s – and a direct line to her demigod frenemy from the first movie, Maui (voiced again by Dwayne Johnson). Her dream, pursued on solo journeys across the waves, is to make contact with other Pacific Islanders. It’s Star Trek with starfish.  It’s Star Trek with starfish But that’s not the adventure that Moana 2 takes us on. Instead, returning screenwriter Jared Bush and co-writer Dana Ledoux Miller serve up another deus ex machina – this time a malevolent deity called Nalo – to unleash seismic disorder on the ocean. Moana must embark on another perilous journey to restore the balan

Baboins sauvages. Requins tueurs. Délire à l'opium. La suite de Ridley Scott, musclée, assoiffée de sang et parfois résolument décalée, n’est pas le Gladiator que vous connaissez – ni celui que vous enseignait votre prof d’histoire. Mais malgré ses défauts, c’est une aventure colossale qui ne ménage aucun effort pour vous épater par son ampleur et son spectacle. Là où Gladiator (2000) mêlait habilement scènes de bataille et intrigues politiques subtiles, cette suite fonctionne mieux lorsqu'elle se concentre sur des moments d’action pure, comme lorsqu'une baliste est tendue et envoie une boule de feu en direction de votre tête. L’action dégage une extravagance brutale, une volonté de mettre en lumière la violence comme symptôme de l'effondrement social, avec une dose supplémentaire de membres tranchés et de plaies ouvertes. Seize ans se sont écoulés depuis les événements de ce premier film désormais culte, et notre nouveau héros, Lucius Verus de Paul Mescal, est passé du statut de neveu de Commodus en péril à la fin de Gladiator à celui de père de famille amoureux vivant un exil heureux dans une ville côtière d'Afrique du Nord. La première bataille navale met fin à tout cela. Une flotte de trirèmes romaines sous le commandement du général Marcus Acacius, incarné par Pedro Pascal, s'abat sur la citadelle de Lucius et de sa femme au bord de la mer. Ce qui s'ensuit déchaîne l'enfer à une échelle similaire à celle de la mêlée d'ouverture de Russell Crowe en Germanie dans le premie

Is there a better or more versatile British actor at work than Ralph Fiennes? He can dial things right down in quieter dramas (The Dig), brings a spry verve to comedic roles (The Grand Budapest Hotel), and goes magnificently big when the assignment requires (A Bigger Splash, In Bruges). He’s always precisely as good as the material allows him to be. Sometimes better. Peter Straughan’s eloquent adaptation of Robert Harris’s 2016 Papal thriller allows him to be very good indeed. He’s Cardinal Lawrence, a Vatican functionary charged with overseeing the election of a new Pope when the ailing Pontiff, a much-loved and liberal-minded Holy Father, heads for the Pearly Gates. Rounds of voting – and scheming – await before a new pope is chosen and white smoke comes out of the Vatican chimney. And Fiennes is immaculate. His cardinal carries himself with the burdened obeisance of a man who knows that when he finally gets to heaven, he’ll probably be put in charge of the filing. A fellow cardinal dismisses him as ‘less a shepherd than a manager’. The actor’s reaction is perfect: the half-wince of a man who knows, deep down, that he’s probably right.  Directed with real élan by Edward Berger – going two-for-two on literary adaptions after his take on All Quiet on the Western Front – Conclave is a film for the ’they don’t make ’em like they used to’ brigade. Like a ’70s conspiracy thriller, its schemes and twists play out sotto voce: senior clergymen exchange scuttlebutt between vapes (the

One of London’s most popular cinemas has big plans to safeguard its future. Genesis Cinema, Mile End’s chic but bargain-priced five-screen picturehouse, is planning to add student accommodation to its site – and potentially add a second cinema to its portfolio. Genesis has been in talks with Queen Mary University to add between 2-300 student units to its site and plans have now been submitted to make the plan a reality. The current building on Mile End Road will be torn down and rebuilt, with a temporary new premises sought while construction is ongoing. ‘This is a five-year plan, so it's early days,’ says Genesis owner Tyrone Walker-Hebborn, ‘but we’re looking for other sites to either operate temporarily or make into another Genesis. So when we open this one up again, we'll have two cinemas – we’ll be a mini chain. That's the dream.’ Photograph: Genesis CinemaOne of the basement screens in the new Genesis While optimistic for the future, Walker-Hebborn points to a fall in box-office takings and a less steady slate of new releases, post-pandemic, as drivers behind the decision.  ‘We've always been approached by people wanting to buy it and turn it into residential, which has never been my thing,’ he says. ‘But we've always been thinking about what we can do to realise a bit of cash to keep us going, and a developer proposed a scheme where we could take the building down, dig down and put a cinema back in place underground and on the ground floor, and then put student accom

You may know what MobLand is – a starry new crime show with Guy Ritchie behind the camera and Tom Hardy, Helen Mirren and Pierce Brosnan in front of it – but do you know where it is?  Set in London and the Cotswolds, the world-building behind Paramount+’s gangster thriller is equal parts The Long Good Friday and Country Life. It’s turf that will be familiar to fans of Guy Ritchie’s work from Netflix series The Gentleman to OG cockney caper Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels. But there’s something different going on here, says the show’s supervising location manager Steve Mortimore. The tone is more Top Boy than Lock, Stock, with Ritchie parking his guns-and-geezers signature style; the show’s East End underworld is new terrain.‘We didn't want to copy any of The Gentleman locations,’ says Mortimore. ‘We wanted it to be completely fresh.’ The locations guru – a veteran of films from Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy to Ridley Scott’s Napoleon – takes us on a tour of MobLand’s crime black spots.  Photograph: Paramount+Tom Hardy plays gangland fixer Harry Da Souza What is MobLand about? Created by Top Boy’s Ronan Bennett, with some script input from Jez ‘Jerusalem’ Butterworth, MobLand was originally conceived as a spinoff of Showtime series Ray Donovan in which Liev Schreiber played an LA gangland fixer. This time it’s Tom Hardy’s Harry Da Souza who is the fixer. He works for London-based Irish crime family the Harrigan and it’s his job to facilitate the deals of urbane patriarch Con

Gene Hackman’s last screen role was in 2004’s Welcome to Mooseport, so we’ve had time to adjust to his absence from our screens but still, boy, does news of his passing still hurt. Arguably the finest American screen actor of the past half century, the Californian won two Oscars but might have won about a dozen more. With a roguish charm that could switch to wolfish and predatory for his villainous turns – has there been a better superhero nemesis than his Trump-y Lex Luthor in the Richard Donner Superman films? – and charisma that flooded the screen, he was an electrifying presence even in his lesser films. From Royal Tenenbaums to The Firm, his stock-in-trade was making you side with the scoundrel, but, honestly, there wasn’t much he couldn’t do. His on-screen greatness was such, it took two other movie stars to introduce his lifetime achievement award. Here’s five scenes that show off his powers. 1. ‘I’m Captain of this boat, now shut the f*ck up!’ – Crimson Tide (1995) Hackman was the ultimate rule-bender in many of his greatest roles, from The French Connection to Mississippi Burning. But in Tony Scott’s nuclear thriller, a sweat-caked chamber piece disguised as a blockbuster, he trades power moves with Denzel Washington’s morally courageous 2IC as a submarine commander whose desire to go by the book may or may not mask a degree of psychopathy. Like a pot boiling over, he hits a tipping point in this pivotal scene where amused intellectual jousting

The Scouse Sopranos? The Merseyside Macbeth? Whatever descriptor you apply to it, BBC’s This City Is Ours has all the ingredients of a gripping, gritty crime drama: warring dynasties, bitter betrayal, sudden violence and power struggles that teeter on the edge of all-out civil war. Sean Bean plays Ronnie Phelan, an ageing Liverpool crime lord pondering retirement. But will his successor be his ambitious right-hand-man Michael Kavanagh (James Nelson-Joyce) or his own scheming son Jamie (Jack McMullan)? With its real-life Liverpool locations – and the odd Spanish interlude to soak up the Costa del Sol sun and tee up another shipment of narcotics – Stephen Butchard’s series is almost suffocatingly atmospheric, evoking a criminal underworld where only the truly ruthless survive. And the music plays a big part in that, with This City Is Ours dusting off some classic LPs from crooners like Matt Monro, Bobby Darin and Frida Boccara to lend a Scorsesian touch to all the blood-letting.   The music helped create Ronnie’s character – a man with a sentimental attachment to the past ‘Being set in Liverpool, it’s no surprise music plays such a large part in This City Is Ours,’ says lead director Saul Dibb.  ‘Stephen Butchard’s first scripts already had a lot of specific music written into them – from Ronnie’s love of the crooners Matt Monroe and Perry Como to… Frankie Valli and Bobby Darin. They helped create Ronnie’s character – a man with a sentimental attachment to the past – as well a

One of the best comedies in absolutely ages, Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy is kicking off a brand new movie club – just in time to make your mum feel very spoiled indeed.   Time Out is teaming up with Leicester Square’s ultra-chic W London to launch the dreamiest afternoons’ viewing imaginable. It’s called W London Film Club and tickets have just gone on sale. The club is a genuinely VIP experience. A £24 ticket gets you a seat in W London’s 38-seat boutique cinema, plus a handcrafted cocktail and popcorn. Upgrade to a £44 ticket, and you get a two-course meal and a glass of prosecco in the W Lounge before or after the screening. Photograph: W LondonW London’s state-of-the-art cinema On the line-up so far, alongside the latest Bridget Jones – v v good! – are Pamela Anderson’s stellar comeback drama The Last Showgirl (April 6) and Twiggy (April 13), Sadie Frost’s acclaimed documentary about the Swinging ’60s icon. Then comes a stellar run of this year’s Academy Award winners. Animated masterpiece Flow (Best Animation) is followed by A Real Pain (Best Supporting Actor for Kieran Culkin) and Brazilian drama I’m Still Here (Best International Feature). We can vouch strong for Steven Soderbergh’s spy thriller Black Bag, too. If you’ve missed them until now, here’s your chance to catch up in the most luxe surrounds. Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy – 3pm, Sunday March 30 The Last Showgirl – 3pm, Sunday April 6 Twiggy – 3pm, Sunday April 13 Flow – 3pm, Sunday April 27 A Real P

New BBC crime thriller This City Is Ours may have been dubbed the ‘Scouse Sopranos’ but ‘the Mersey Macbeth’ might be closer to the mark.  Sean Bean is Ronnie Phelan, a Liverpool crime patriarch who’s thinking about passing the mantle on to a younger heir. But will it be ambitious young pretender Michael Kavanagh (James Nelson-Joyce) or his own ruthless but underestimated son Jamie (Jack McMullan)? The sudden collapse of a major drug deal threatens to send the whole organisation into free fall, with violent consequences for all concerned.  Photograph: BBC/Left Bank Pictures/James Stack What is This City Is Ours about? ‘There’s nothing good about our men. Get out while you can.’ As that line, spoken by one of This City Is Ours’ female characters hints, the men in The Last Kingdom screenwriter Stephen Butchard’s new crime drama aren’t a band of angels. Then again, neither, necessarily, are the women.The show makes it a trifecta of attention-grabbing BBC series for Sean, after Jimmy McGovern’s exceptional prison drama Time (2021), and Marriage (2022), an unvarnished look at married life. It’s a visceral, gripping dynastic tale But it’s not Bean’s show. That honour belongs to his Time co-star James Nelson-Joyce, who you might also have spotted in Andrea Arnold’s social-realist fantasia Bird last year.  In This City is Ours he plays Michael Kavanagh, an ambitious, and when required, vicious operator whose priorities are divide by his desire to settle down with the love of his l

Às vezes, surge uma série na Netflix que nos prende completamente e nos obriga a parar de fazer scroll e a prestar atenção. Adolescência é uma dessas séries – um drama criminal intenso, cativante e profundamente empático, que reflecte a preocupação crescente com o aumento da criminalidade juvenil com facas no Reino Unido. Para reforçar ainda mais o seu peso dramático, a série vem da mesma equipa que criou o thriller Boiling Point (2021) e a série que dele derivou da BBC. Entre os nomes envolvidos estão os co-argumentistas Jack Thorne (Help) e Stephen Graham, que também protagoniza, além do realizador Philip Barantini. A equipa tem uma abordagem hiper-realista de filmagem contínua da história de um adolescente acusado do homicídio de um colega de turma. Photograph: NetflixOwen Cooper as Jamie Miller and Stephen Graham as dad Eddie     Afinal, Adolescência é sobre o quê? A série acompanha o impacto devastador da detenção de Jamie Miller (Owen Cooper), um rapaz de 13 anos acusado do homicídio de uma adolescente da sua escola. Contada em tempo real ao longo de quatro episódios – e filmada em quatro planos-sequência contínuos – a narrativa foca-se não só em Jamie, mas também no seu pai, Eddie (Graham), no detective encarregado do caso (Ashley Walters) e na psicóloga clínica designada para avaliar Jamie (Erin Doherty, The Crown). "Podíamos ter feito um drama sobre gangues e crimes com facas, ou sobre um miúdo cuja mãe é alcoólica ou cujo pai é um agressor violento", diz Graham.

Gangs of London is back for a third season in a flurry of blood, thunder and unbelievably OTT action sequences. The Sky series is set in a ‘Gotham-like’, alternative London that you’ll be glad not to live in but that’s plenty of wince-worthy fun to visit on the small screen. And there’s no Batman here to keep the peace. Instead, season 3 reunites us with a cast of criminals and shady figure in a fictional London where even the mayor is on coke. The new eight-episode run also introduces ruthless new figures to a London gangland that isn’t exactly short of them. Photograph: Sky UKSean Wallace (Joe Cole) in police custody What happens in Gangs of London season 3? When a batch of fentanyl-spiked cocaine leads to dozens of fatalities in a city nightclub and even claims the life of one mobster’s daughter, the finger of blame is pointed at the newly imprisoned Sean Wallace (Joe Cole). London Mayor Simone Thearle (The Fall of the House of Usher’s T'Nia Mille) has a radical solution to the city’s drug problem – take them all herself to legalise them – while ex-cop turned fully-fledged gangster Elliot Finch (Ṣọpẹ́ Dìrísù) is the closest GoL has to a hero – which is to say, not every close.  Game of Thrones’ Michelle Fairley returns as Sean’s mum and Wallace family matriarch Marian, the widow of Colm Meaney’s psychotic gangster Finn who got his well-deserved comeuppance in season 1. Lucian Msamati, recently seen as Conclave’s Cardinal Adeyemi, is back as the Wallace’s right-hand man

Sometimes a Netflix binge comes along that stops you in your tracks, that demands you stop scrolling and really lock in.  Adolescence is one of those – a gritty, gripping and deeply empathetic crime drama that will speak to a nation shocked by rising knife crime rates among Britain’s young people. To add to its hefty bona fides, it comes from the team behind 2021 restaurant thriller Boiling Point – and its BBC spinoff series: co-writers Jack Thorne (Help) and Stephen Graham, who also stars, and director Philip Barantini. They bring their hyper-kinetic, all-in-one-take approach to an even more heavyweight story of a teenage boy accused of murdering a classmate. Photograph: NetflixOwen Cooper as Jamie Miller and Stephen Graham as dad Eddie What is Adolescence about?  Adolescence follows the intense fallout when a 13-year-old called Jamie Miller (Owen Cooper) is arrested for the murder of a teenage girl from his school. Told over four episodes in real time and via four continuous shots, it follows the key players in the drama: not just Jamie, but his dad Eddie (Graham), as well as the investigating detective (Ashley Walters) and the clinical psychologist assigned to Jamie’s case (The Crown’s Erin Doherty). ‘We could have made a drama about gangs and knife crime, or about a kid whose mother is an alcoholic or whose father is a violent abuser,’ says Graham. ‘Instead, we wanted you to look at this family and think, “My God. This could be happening to us!” And what’s happening her

Sitting at the top of our best streaming shows of the year so far and with a lofty 98 percent Rotten Tomatoes score, Adolescence is breakthrough telly: gripping, innovative, and with plenty to say about social issues, education, Andrew Tate and incel culture, cyber-bullying, the importance of male role models, and teen violence. If you haven’t seen it yet, tee it up asap. The four-part Netflix drama – co-written by, and starring, Stephen Graham – follows in the aftermath of the brutal stabbing of a teenage schoolgirl in an unnamed town in the north of England. The chief suspect, boyish 13-year-old Jamie Miller (Owen Cooper), is arrested and taken to the local police station. Episode 1 charts the early stages of the police investigation, taking in the booking process, a roughly handled strip search, the appointment of a solicitor (Mark Stanley), and preliminary questioning – as traumatised parents Eddie (Graham) and Manda (Christine Tremarco) stand helplessly by. The second episode sees the investigating duo, DI Luke Bascombe (Top Boy’s Ashley Walters) and DS Misha Frank (Andor’s Faye Marsay), head to the local school to question Jamie and the victim, Katie Leonard’s fellow pupils.  The drama is never less than taut and gripping throughout, with the one-take filmmaking approach generating a harrowing sense of momentum. But how successful is the show as a police procedural? We asked former police constable, Steven Barclay, to explain what it gets right – and wrong.  Photograph

If you like your spy thrillers slinky, sexy and stuffed to the gills with outrageously charismatic people, Black Bag is an absolute must-see. Directed by a bang-on-form Steven Soderbergh with the twisty-turny plotting of an ultra-modern John le Carré potboiler, plenty of wry wit and a keen eye for hot people stabbing each other in the back, it’s Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy for the Industry generation.  One of its secret weapons is its array of seductive but discreet locations – mostly in London, but also in Zurich – as shadows for its spooks to lurk in. There are exclusive nightclubs, tech-laden offices, Michelin-worthy restaurants, and possibly for the first time in spy movie history, a Pret a Manger. Look out, too, for a humble fishing lake to take on major significance. Photograph: Universal PicturesMichael Fassbender, Tom Burke and Pierce Brosnan in ‘Black Bag’ What is Black Bag about? The movie’s set-up has glacier-cool British intelligence agent George Woodhouse (Michael Fassbender) on the hunt for a traitor within his team. A powerful espionage McGuffin called ‘Cerberus’ has gone missing and in the wrong hands it could spell disaster for the nation. To spice things up, the small group of suspects include George’s own wife Kathryn Woodhouse (Cate Blanchett), a fellow agent with whom he is besotted. But will he hesitate to murder her if she turns out to be the mole? Probably not. The film’s location manager Emily Wright shared the intel with Time Out on how its world of

Gentlemen, rev your Aston Martins and start shaking those martinis, because a new James Bond is on the horizon. Menthol smoke has not yet started billowing out of MGM Studios – the traditional indication that the next 007 has been chosen – with Daniel Craig’s likely replacement still a mystery. What does this mean for the future of the iconic British spy series and its upcoming 26th instalment? Information is limited, but here’s what we know so far.  What does Amazon MGM Studios’ takeover mean for the next James Bond? After months of rumour and speculation, James Bond finally got a new boss in February 2025. Not M, but Amazon MGM Studios who sealed a deal with 007’s producers, Eon’s Barbara Broccoli and Michael G Wilson, to take creative control of the franchise.  Broccoli and Wilson will remain co-owners of James Bond but crucially, will step back from controlling the future direction or execution of the franchise. ‘With the conclusion of No Time to Die and Michael retiring from the films, I feel it is time to focus on my other projects,’ Broccoli said in a statement.So what does it all mean for 007? We’re probably a step closer to a release date for Bond 26 and the announcement of a new James Bond to star in it. Maybe a radical change of direction for the whole franchise, too, with immediate speculation that Amazon will look to spin their expensive new IP into the kind of shared universe storytelling that Disney pursued with Lucasfilm and Star Wars after its takeover. Is a