Phil de Semlyen

LA has Quentin Tarantino’s New Beverly, New York has its share of classic picturehouses, Paris has a world of old-fashioned repertory cinemas to explore, and Amsterdam boasts the most beautiful cinema in the world. But none of them can hold a flickering projector to London’s vast array of multiplexes, arthouses, luxe cinemas and cult spots. There’s more than a 100 cinemas of all shapes and sizes, and the chances are, if you live in or outside the city, one of them is a short bus or Tube ride away. With the openings of the new Curzon Hoxton, Ealing Picturehouse, West London’s ActOne and The Chiswick Cinema, and fancy new cinemas in Battersea Power Station and Selfridges, the city’s movie-going options have continued to swell, even post-pandemic. But not all cinemas are created equal: some are worth travelling that little bit further for – whether for the incredible value they offer, the tech set-up, crazy-comfy seats, the cult programming, or the gastronomic treats on offer. To sort the elite from the just-merely-really-good, we’ve canvassed Londoners for their pick of favourites and tallied their votes, with a few of our own picks, to rank the best movie houses inside the M25. From PeckhamPlex to The Phoenix, they’re an inestimable bunch, representing London’s past and with any luck, it’s future too. RECOMMENDED: the latest movie reviews, news and interviews

Space may be the final frontier, but filmmakers have been dreaming of it ever since the medium was invented. Indeed, even after humans made it there, cinema’s obsession with the universe beyond our small rock hasn’t abated.  It’s not hard to understand why. Its infinite vastness is essentially a blank canvas on which to ponder all sorts of big ideas, whether it’s mankind’s place in the void, the human desire for exploration or the simple fear of the ultimate unknown. That’s why the ‘space movie’ deserves to be considered its own genre. Yes, many science-fiction movies are set in space. But not all movies about space are necessarily science fiction. Here are our picks for the 30 best movies that travel to infinity… and in many cases, beyond.   Recommended: 👽 The 100 best science fiction movies of all-time😬 The 100 best thriller films of all-time💣 The 101 best action movies ever made🦄 The 50 best fantasy movies of all-time 

We’ve all heard the phrase ‘TV’s golden age’ enough times over the past couple of decades to get wary of the hyperbole, but this year does seem to be shaping up to be a kind of mini golden age for the TV follow-up. Severance, Andor and The Last of Us all look like building on incredibly satisfying first runs with equally masterful second runs (even more masterful, in Severance’s case). The third season of The White Lotus has proved that, whether you love it or find it a touch too languorous, there’s no escaping Mike White’s transgressive privilege-in-paradise satire. Likewise for season 7 of Charlie Brooker’s dystopian-flavoured sci-fi Black Mirror. Watercooler viewing is everywhere at the moment,  and that’s not going to change anytime soon. Netflix has announced the finale of Squid Game this summer, along with the end of Stranger Things, a second run of Tim Burton’s Wednesday, and about a zillion other things. Here’s everything you need to see... so far.  RECOMMENDED: 🎥 The best movies of 2025 (so far)🔥 The 100 best movies ever made📺 The 100 greatest ever TV shows you need to binge

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

The horror movie kicked off with Robert Eggers’ vampire smash hit Nosferatu and the fanged fraternity returned in a big way with Ryan Coogler’s Sinners, a Southern gothic with Michael B Jordan that sunk its teeth into the box office in a big way in April. And that’s just the start for a horror resurgence: 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. 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

No specific battle in the history of warfare has occupied filmmakers’ imagination like D-Day. On June 6, 1944, Allied Forces stormed the beaches of Normandy on the French coast, launching the invasion of Western Europe. Hollywood has since spent the equivalent GDP of many small countries attempting to restage the battle on camera, to either commemorate a major historical event, celebrate individual acts of heroism or reflect the horrors of warfare at its most broadly chaotic. Here are the six films that, in one way or another, pay greatest tribute to the moment. Recommended: 🪖 The 50 best World War II movies🎖 The 50 best war movies of all-time🌍 The 21 best World War I movies of all-time🇻🇳 The 20 best Vietnam War movies

28 Years Later, M3GAN 2.0 and Brad Pitt motor racing movie F1 are this month’s big hitters, and How to Train Your Dragon is following hot on Lilo & Stitch’s heels as an animation-to-live action remake that should bring in the crowds. Cos everyone loves dragons, right? Families are spoiled for choice in June, with Elio the first original Pixar movies since Elemental a couple of years ago. Here’s what you can catch on the big (and small) screen. 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

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

When it comes to sex, the movies are currently going through a bit of a dry spell. Sure, recent movies like Challengers and Babygirl had some hot-and-horny moments, but it feels like it’s been a long while since we’ve seen a truly steamy, taboo-shattering roll in the hay – or hot tub, or midsize sedan, or literal bay of hale – in a major studio film. Is it because of society’s general rightward shift recently? Or did filmmakers start listening to those misguided social media debates about the merits of the sex scene? In any case, it’s far past time the movies got back to getting it on. Yes, in some cases, sex scenes can seem pointless. In the best examples of cinematic boffing, though, sex tells stories. It develops characters. Sometimes it’s a punchline, sometimes it’s terrifying. Sometimes, yes, it’s simply meant to arouse – but titillation has value, too. So pour yourself some wine and slip into something a little more comfortable: here are the 101 best sex scenes of all-time. Written by Dave Calhoun, Joshua Rothkopf, Cath Clarke, David Ehrlich, Phil de Semlyen, Daniel Walber, Trevor Johnston, Andy Kryza, Daniel Walber and Matthew Singer Recommended: 🕯️ The steamiest erotic thrillers ever made🔥 The 100 best movies of all-time❤ The 100 best romantic films of all-time😬 The 50 most controversial movies ever made💪 The 100 best feminist films of all-time

Like college kids and middle-aged divorcees flocking to the nearest beach or rooftop pool to reveal their revenge bods, summer is the time for Hollywood to show off. The movie industry is going into its most important time of year with some positive momentum, thanks to A Minecraft Movie, Sinners and Thunderbolts* , and the likely successes of Mission: Impossible – Final Reckoning and Disney’s live-action Lilo & Stitch. And there’s reason to believe the money train will continue rolling, with James Gunn’s Superman rebooting the DC universe, Fantastic Four: First Steps looking to keep the Marvel revival moving and Jurassic World Rebirth bringing the dinosaur franchise back from extinction, with Scarlett Johannson, Mahershala Ali and Jonathan Bailey in tow. Of course, nothing in this cinema landscape is guaranteed. Which films will actually hit big and which will have studio execs and industry watchers wringing their hands? We break it all down below with the 21 movies we’re most excited about in summer 2025.RECOMMENDED: 🎥 The best movies of 2025 (so far)🔥 The best TV and streaming shows of 2025

Cinema is full of monsters, none more horrifying than the serial killer. Sure, they might just be deeply damaged human beings, but in the real world there are a lot more of those than skyscraper-sized reptiles or interplanetary demons. Even while watching a work of fiction, there is no quarter from the idea that somebody, somewhere, may want to kill you – and for no other reason than some unknown psychological force compels them to do so.  Why would anyone want to watch a movie about a serial killer? Unlike the general horror canon, films focused on murderers contain less ‘fun scares’ and instead hold a cracked mirror up to society itself – at least, that’s what the good ones do. In putting together this list of the best serial-killer films, we’ve paid particular attention to those that rely less on transgressive shocks and more on observing the conditions that allow serial killers to exist. These movies descend into the darkest parts of humanity, and in doing so reveal some things about ourselves we might not want to admit.  Recommended: 🩸 The 15 scariest horror movies based on true stories💣 The 100 best thrillers of all time😱 The 100 best horror movies of all time🕵️ The 40 best murder-mystery movies

It was a comeback year for the movies, but if we’re totally honest, it wasn’t a great year for comedy movies. Sure, the biggest film of the year was an off-the-wall feminist satire of the world’s most famous doll franchise. Beyond Barbie, though, true LOLs were hard to come by at the cinema – and it wasn’t much better on the small screen. But just because something is hard to find doesn’t mean it’s not worth seeking out. On the contrary: in a down year for comedy, it just made us appreciate the stuff that did make us laugh that much more. That stuff included a dancing murder doll, a coked-up bear, a giant phallic monster – and of course, Ken. Hey, come to think of it, maybe comedy in 2023 wasn’t so bad after all. Recommended: 🔥 The best movies of 2025😂 The best comedy movies and TV shows of 2025 (so far)📺 The best TV shows of 2025 you need to stream

The title of Kelly Reichardt’s (Certain Women) bone-dry art heist comedy, set in the ‘70s of Vietnam War protests and waterbed sales, is strictly tongue-in-cheek. Not only is he not a mastermind, Josh O’Connor’s unemployed Massachusetts carpenter James Blaine ‘JB’ Mooney would make Fargo’s Jerry Lundegaard look like the last word in criminal competence.  Mooney plans to steal four abstract – and fairly low value – portraits by modernist painter Arthur Dove from his local gallery. We see him scoping out the place, observing the snoozy guards and using his wife (Alana Haim) and sons (Sterling and Jasper Thompson) as cover as he figures out all the angles and nails down a watertight scheme to lift the art. And the actual plan? To grab the paintings, stick them in a bag and leg it. It’s executed with the help of a gormless local contact and a hot-headed last-minute ringer who brings a gun and starts pointing it at screaming kids. To add to the tragicomic vibe, their getaway vehicle gets stuck in traffic on the way out.  Based loosely on a real-life 1973 heist of Massachusetts’s Worcester Art Museum, it’s the kind of material from which the Coens would spin a blackly comic tale of betrayal, murder and cosmic justice. But Reichardt’s interest lies in a more existential kind of unravelling. As the cops circle, more serious criminals start sniffing around, and Mooney’s circuit court judge father (Bill Camp) and exasperated mum (Hope Davis) read about the story in the papers, O’Connor

Prepare the Brokeback Mountain comparisons now, because Paul Mescal and Josh O’Connor’s tender romance has all the ingredients of Ang Lee’s Oscar-winning queer love story. Like that Annie Proulx adaptation, it’s based on a short story (by Ben Shattuck, who adapts here) and is set in the woods and hills of rural America (Maine, rather than Wyoming). It’s full of the stifled emotions of two men who fall in love but can’t quite express it.  The only thing missing – and it’s a biggie – is the deep passion that coursed beneath the surface of that Oscar winning western. South African director Oliver Hermanus finds plenty of deep feeling and sincerity here but his beautiful-looking, measured period piece gets stifled by its own languors – especially in a first half that needs a slug or two of moonshine to inject some life into it. As he’s proved twice already, with gorgeous Ikiru remake Living and striking queer bootcamp drama Moffie, Hermanus is guided by a powerful sense of empathy and compassion. Here, he follows the story of Lionel (Mescal) and David (O’Connor), two music students who meet at Boston Conservatory in 1917 and bond over their shared love of folk music. Lionel, a gentle country boy blessed with an ability to see music – synesthesia – is the shy outsider; David is an east coaster with easy confidence and a boyish sense of mischief. They fall into bed, but their love remains unspoken and undefined. Soon, David is in uniform and off to the Great War trenches of France,

Chris Evans as a slutty evangelist. The Substance’s Margaret Qualley as a sleuth on the case of a missing woman. Aubrey Plaza as her cop lover. A stack of sex toys. A fork fight. Ethan Coen’s scurrilous new crime caper, the second part of his ‘lesbian B-movie trilogy’ co-written with partner Tricia Cooke, should be a lot of fun. Instead, it’s a sporadically funny nothingburger which, while not as bad as the lamentable Drive-Away Dolls, stills makes you wonder whether his brother Joel was the genius behind the operation all along. The clever opening credits, mapping out its Californian small-town setting to The Animals’ We Gotta Get Out of This Place, promise a level of inventiveness that just never materialises. Instead, there’s a gumshoe plot purportedly inspired by languid ’70s Chandler adaptations Farewell, My Lovely and The Long Goodbye. But where Coen’s own The Big Lebowski and Paul Thomas Anderson’s Inherent Vice took those same raw materials – a vague mystery, sexy dames and a criminal enterprise capable of violent nastiness – and forged enjoyably self-referential stoner noirs from them, Honey Don’t! is just a meandering yarn without a purpose.  You get the languor but not much else. Interminable Vice, maybe.  Honey Don’t! premiered at the Cannes Film Festival.

Iranian cinema is your go-to for knotty, complex morality tales. Small missteps are made, a series of seemingly inconsequential events leads to one big, defining one – and the fallout leaves characters trying to navigate the awful repercussions often made worse by the country’s suffocating social and religious codes. A gun goes missing in Mohammad Rasoulof’s The Seed of the Sacred Fig; a handbag is stolen in Asghar Farhadi’s A Hero. Torment and tragedies ensue.In Saeed Roustayi’s Woman and Child, a carefully crafted and endlessly gripping drama that follows a Tehran family’s slow disintegration, it’s the supposedly joyous occasion of a marriage proposal that set the wheels of fate in motion. Hard-working nurse Mahnaz (Parinaz Izadyar, magnetic) is a 40-year-old widow with two kids: teenage tearaway Aliyar (Sinan Mohebi) and all-round poppet Neda (Arshida Dorostkar). She’s dating ambulance driver Hamid (A Separation’s Payman Maadi), an older man whose flirtations suddenly turn serious. He pops the question, but there’s an immediate string attached: will she pretend she’s childless when his strict rural parents come to visit them at her house?  For anyone unfamiliar with the strictures and mores of Iranian society, the answer would be ‘hell no’. But as Roustayi shows in a movie that’s sympathetic to its female protagonist almost to a fault, it’s nothing like that simple. As a single mum, Hamid might be her best bet – even if he immediately scans as something of a rogue and she’

A sun-soaked dream – okay, nightmare – of a midnight movie, this Australian survival horror asks the question: what if Steve Irwin was basically the devil? The answer would probably look a lot like Jai Courtney’s shark dive owner Tucker, a brawny bogan who takes backpackers and tourists onto his rusty old boat to enthusiastically introduce them to the bull sharks, makos and great whites that swim off the Gold Coast. First in a cage, then sedated and trapped into a harness, lowered into the water while the sweaty psychopath records it all on his VHS camera. Obviously, he gives them a Vegemite sandwich and some shark facts first. He’s not a total monster. The movie’s two heroes are American hippie-chick surfer Zephyr (Hassie Harrison) and hunky local softboi Moses (Josh Heuston). They get some cursory character details (her: estranged from parents, likes eating buns; him: sensitive rich kid, drives a Volvo; both: love Creedence Clearwater Revival), and there’s a budding romance between them that’s rendered in the cheesiest possible notes. But the two actors make them likeable enough for you to hope they don’t end up chomped on by a peckish mako. Zephyr gets abducted during a late-night surf and wakes up chained to a bed aboard Tucker’s boat. From there, we’re off on a gnarly fun ride in the dank cabins and on bloodstained decks, as the sharks, captured in some gorgeous real-life footage, circle below. This is no Sharknado CG fest – it looks and feels real. And the boat itself i

It’s a suitably arresting set-up for Jafar Panahi’s politically charged and darkly hilarious abduction movie – especially when it becomes clear what’s going on: impulsive mechanic Vahid (Vahid Mobasseri) believes he’s caught the brutal interrogator who once tortured him for three months and left him scarred – a man given the epithets ‘Peg Leg’ and ‘the Gimp’ by his victims. The guy in cuffs has a prosthetic leg, just like the Gimp, who lost his fighting in Syria. It scans. But like so much else in this blackly brilliant film, a question mark hangs over this Blood Simple-style scenario. Is this man, played by Ebrahim Azizi, really the author of his suffering or is he just a family man called Eghbal, as he claims? All the Gimp’s victims were blindfolded, so how can anyone be sure?  Panahi is a formidably courageous filmmaker who has spent time in jail at the hands of his country’s repressive regime. Here, he brings deep feeling to a movie that often plays closer to a straight comedy than a fiercer indictment of the state or a Munich-like morality tale about justice and vengeance.  You can definitely sense the directorial wish-fulfilment in the carnivalesque that follows as Vahid drags the drugged Eghbal around Tehran in his beat-up transit van, gathering a small band of fellow victims to help him identify the man and decide what to do with him. Joining this increasingly hapless quest are wedding snapper Shiva (Mariam Afshari), a soon-to-be newlywed couple (Hadis Pakbaten and Ma

After blowing us away with her cannibalism coming-of-age debut Raw and the car-fucking whirlwind that was Titane, a follow-up that even swept up the Palme d’Or in its wake, French auteur Julia Ducournau overthinks it with a bloviating, 1980s-set family drama that’s tinged with sci-fi elements but fails to strike for the heart.  Ducournau’s films already have a rep for causing extreme reactions – Raw’s premiere famously had audience members fainting – and sure enough, someone was stretchered out of the Cannes screening of Alpha.  It’s harder to know what caused the health scare this time. Sure, the needle-phobic will find the opening shot, of 13-year-old free spirit Alpha (Mélissa Boros) getting a bloody ‘A’ carved into her arm while baked at a school friend’s party, a lot to stomach – and needles are never far from the frame in a film that imagines an Aids-like virus rife among the sexually active and drug users.  In a twist that owes something to Greek mythology and something to Cronenberg, sufferers gradually turn to marble, breathing frost and crumbling to dust like alabaster statues in an ancient land. No wonder, then, doctor mum (Extraction’s Golshifteh Farahani) is worried sick that her daughter has contracted the virus from a dirty tattooist’s needle.  Sadly, Ducournau’s latest hand grenade is a dud That striking visual detail aside, Alpha represents a disappointing gear-change for Ducournau that casts a compassionate eye on the loving, angry chaos of family dynamics

Imagine George Clooney being coerced into playing Donald Trump in a straight-faced hagiography – perhaps directed by one of White House’s new Special Ambassadors – and you’ve got the predicament faced by the Egyptian movie star at the heart of Swedish-Egyptian director Tarik Saleh’s new thriller. George Fahmy (Fares Fares), the so-called ‘Pharaoh of the Screen’, is a much-loved fiftysomething actor carving out a comfortable, westernised living on Cairo’s soundstages and in its members’ bars, parroting Samuel Beckett quotes to the much younger girlfriend (Lyna Khoudri) who looks to him for a career leg-up. But under the repressive rule of real-life president Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, that feckless lifestyle leaves him wide open to blackmail. It’s made clear that if he wants to continue having a career and keep his student son out of jail, he’ll have to don el-Sisi’s old military uniform for a propaganda film called The Will of the People. He’s already a cliché, they want to make him a tool too. ‘Nothing is for free,’ he’s told. Including his freedom.  Fares, star of the two previous films in Saleh’s ‘Cairo trilogy’, The Nile Hilton Incident (2017) and The Cairo Conspiracy (2023), is a hoot as an egotistical dilettante whose dreams of an easy life in a difficult country are scuppered in brutal fashion.  It’s an Armando Iannucci-esque send-up of something deadly serious Saleh uses the first half to poke fun at both the regime and the actor, before hairpinning into a final stretch w

No one who’s fallen for the timeless and charmingly antic worlds of Sylvain Chomet will be disappointed by this poignant eulogy to one of France’s great, if now decidedly uncool 20th century artists. Here, the French animator swaps the escapist fantasias of The Triplets of Belleville (2003) and The Illusionist (2010) for a biopic that, while more conventional, still holds wonders of its own in its depiction of an extraordinary career and 60-odd eventful years of French history. The life in question belongs to inventor, teacher, playwright, novelist and filmmaker Marcel Pagnol (voiced by Laurent Lafitte). Best know outside the Republic as the author of Jean de Florette and Manon de Sources, but a fixture on school syllabuses in his homeland, he’s introduced receiving a smattering of applause in a sparsely attended Parisian theatre in 1956. Well-meaning friends note that soaring petrol prices caused by the Suez crisis are keeping people at home. Pagnol, though, knows his star is waned. ‘The young will sweep us under the carpet,’ he later laments at a soirée at his home, a grand Parisian pile taking on the air of a mausoleum. An artist confronted by his own obsolescence, Pagnol is reluctantly forced into one final act of creation: a memoir that’s to be serialised by Elle magazine. Flashbacks to the eventful chapters he jots down make up the meat of the film. It’s a framing device you’ve seen a hundred times before, but Chomet freshens it up by introducing the younger Pagnol as

A bold new voice is born with this story of a dad and his two sons set over a single day in Nigeria as it teeters on the edge of a coup. Nigerian-British filmmaker Akinola Davies Jr taps into universal feelings – of wide-eyed childhood discovery, parental responsibility and a feeling of a world spinning out of control – and backdrops it with an immersive sense of controlled chaos.  Written by the director and his older brother Wade and fuelled with their childhood memories, the result is touching, contemplative and unsettling – a film with the gentle impressionist gaze of Moonlight, the hard-scrabble edge of Bicycle Thieves, and a fourth-wall-breaking daring all of its own. My Father’s Shadow is also coming-of-age story – an unusual one for focusing as much on its struggling but well-intentioned dad, Folarin (Gangs of London’s Sope Dirisu), striving to be a better man, as his two boys, 11-year-old Remi (Chibuike Marvellous Egbo) and eight-year-old Akin (Godwin Egbo).  It’s 1993 and Nigeria has gone to the polls to elect a new president. Folarin hopes it will be social democrat MKO Abiola, but as he travels with his sons into Lagos, word spreads of a spate of killings by a military regime looking to cling to power. The country is divided. Petrol is scarce. Tension throbs from the frame. ‘Nigeria needs discipline,’ mutters a passenger on their bus ride into the city, advocating for the jackbooted junta to come.  Davies Jr’s bold debut speaks with a murmur and beats like a drum

If being locked in the Criterion Closet for a couple of hours sounds like heaven, Richard Linklater has made the perfect film for you. It’s a playful, black-and-white making-of story for Jean-Luc Godard’s New Wave classic Breathless – ‘À Bout de Souffle’ to the cinephile crowd – that captures a revolutionary moment in cinema history with reverence and a touch of cheek. You’ll probably know movies that backdrop the story: Godard’s 1960 crime drama Breathless is the key text, of course, but Truffaut’s Cannes premiere of The 400 Blows is also recreated with a wink to contemporary Cannes-goers, and Linklater offers access-all-areas visits to the sets of Robert Bresson’s Pickpocket and Jean-Pierre Melville’s classic noir Bob le Flambeur too. But chronology is king here. When he’s introduced, coolly intellectual behind his ever-present shades, Godard (played with distracted charisma by Parisian photographer Guillaume Marbeck) has yet to put someone else’s money where his sizeable mouth is. The French New Wave has begun and his fellow critics at film mag Cahiers du Cinéma, including Jacques Rivette, Claude Chabrol, and his best pal François Truffaut, have begun to establish themselves as filmmakers. Godard is in danger of being left behind, a kind of chic troll snarking from the sidelines. But as Godard famously said, all you need to make a film is a gun and a girl. His opportunity comes via the sponsorship of his soon-to-be long-suffering producer Georges de Beauregard (Bruno Dreyf

As Marvel has been learning, it’s hard to keep a franchise fresh and relevant. Mission: Impossible, though, may be the first to be too relevant. The idea of all-powerful artificial intelligence attempting to nuke the planet back to the Stone Age was a bit of escapist fun in the days of Terminator 2. Now? It feels like something Sam Altman might casually raise in an OpenAI brainstorming session.   If the stakes in Final Reckoning – the eight M:I movie and a full stop of sorts for the series – are triggering (and in fairness, the pilot episode of the ’60s TV series did involve a couple of rogue nuclear warheads, so World War III has been on its mind before), the execution is regularly breathtaking. Writer-director Christopher McQuarrie’s storytelling ambition is off the scales here – a bug as well as a feature. Not content with springboarding off the events in Dead Reckoning, The Final Reckoning stitches in call backs to the original Brian De Palma movie and even JJ Abrams’ unloved Mission: Impossible III.  This makes for an opening 30 minutes that are treacly when they need to be spry and nimble. It’s exposition served five ways, with flashbacks and flashes forward (Mission: Impossible’s ‘here’s what you’re about to see…’ opening credits makes it all start to feel like Tenet), and an entire scene where Cruise is plugged into a kind of hypobaric exposition chamber.  So, a quick reminder: The Entity, a malevolent AI, now controls the entire internet from a sunken Russian submari

The story of the 1983 Brink’s-Mat robbery, when a group of unsuspecting robbers stumbled upon £26 million of gold in a Heathrow warehouse, The Gold is back for a second season covering the ‘what happened’ next part of the extraordinary true-life tale.  Season 1 covers the aftermath of the crime during the 1980s, as the gang try to figure out how to turn several tonnes of bullion into untraceable lucre. Season 2 spans the late ’80s and into the early ’90s and it’s got a crate load of period–specific bangers to help set the mood.  The soundtrack spilled out of the writing process, showrunner Neil Forsyth tells Time Out. ‘I'm always putting together a song list to get into the period of the show as I’m writing, and sometimes it's good for characterisation. When we get in the edit, it's a group conversation with the director. Music adds so much, we put a huge amount of thought into it – and [Simon Goff’s] score as well.’ The first season boasted New Order, The Smiths and The Fall, and the new six-episode run has a Manchester feel too.  Here’s the season 2 soundtrack in full: Disorder – Joy Division Loaded – Primal Scream Ride On Time – Blackbox She Bangs The Drums – The Stone Roses Somewhere In My Heart – Aztec Camera Pure – The Lightning Seeds Ceremony (Substance 1987 version) – New Order There She Goes – The La’s Zombie – The Cranberries Mr Bojangles – Jerry Jeff Walker Roads – PortisheadInsomnia – Faithless The Masterplan – Oasis So are Bernard Sumner, Peter Hook and their

One of the best things on telly in 2023, smash-hit BBC heist drama The Gold told the gripping and barely believable true-story of the notorious Brink’s-Mat robbery. In 1983, a group of robbers ripped off a Heathrow warehouse expecting a decent but unspectacular haul, and ended up making off with £26 million in gold bullion.  While the first season charted the blindsided criminals upscaling their operation in a hurry to fence the gold as a special police unit tracked them down, series 2 picks up at the end of the ’80s with half the gold still missing and the police back on the trail. This time, international locations from the Caribbean to the Canary Islands will be splashing some golden light on this compelling story of ill-gotten gold. Showrunner/writer Neil Forsyth talks us through the key locations used to tell the continuing story of the Brink’s-Mat gold.  Photograph: BBC/Tannadice PicturesStephen Campbell Moore as Tony Lundy, Emun Elliott as Tony Brightwell and Charlotte Spencer as Nicki Jennings What is the plot of The Gold series 2? Season 1 villains Dominic Cooper and Sean Harris step aside as the spotlight falls on a new band of wrong’uns, all scrambling around to turn their ill-gotten treasure into untraceable currency. Chief among them is Tom Cullen as John Palmer, an aspirational Brummie who has evolved from season 1’s gold smelter to a slick property magnate sunning it up on the Canary Isle of Tenerife. One of the lesser-spotted Brink’s-Mat gang, Charlie Miller

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 Harrigans, and it’s his job to facilitate the deals of urbane patriarch

In news to thrill moviegoers north (and south) of the border, Scotland’s famous Edinburgh Filmhouse cinema is set to reopen this summer. After a three-year campaign, the independent cinema on Edinburgh’s Lothian Road will finally throw open its doors and fire up its projectors on June 27, 2025. Once both Scotland’s leading indie cinema and the home of the Edinburgh International Film Festival (the world’s longest-running film festival), the Filmhouse went into administration in October 2022. But a successful crowdfunded campaign backed by the likes of Jack Lowden, Brian Cox and Emma Thompson, and support from Screen Scotland, the UK government and other bodies mean that the cinema is back with a £2 million-plus refit, fresh energy and new management.  The new-look Filmhouse will have an extra screen – a bijou, 24-seat fourth screen has been added – and a total capacity of 350 seats. The owners are promising not just a cutting-edge cinema experience, but a vibrant social hub too. Screens 1, 2 and 3 will reopen on June 27, with the fourth screen opening later in July as the second phase of the development work comes to an end.   Photograph: Alastair McCrumNew Filmhouse cinema seats in Screen 1 The Filmhouse Bar and foyer space have both been reworked and modernised, with comfier cinema seats installed in the screens. The Filmhouse team are keen for returning moviegoers to know that ‘the world-famous nachos are staying put too’.   ‘The love for Filmhouse never went away, it

The blockbuster of 2025 so far, Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning is bookended by two scenes in the heart of London. The movie opens with Tom Cruise’s Ethan Hunt and his team, including tech wiz Benji (Simon Pegg) and computer specialist Luther (Ving Rhames), emerging from Trafalgar Square tube station and into a throng of police and protestors all on the edge of a riot with armoured trucks standing by. Evil A.I. The Entity has taken control and martial law has been imposed on society. The second scene we won’t spoil, except to say that it has the IMF crew back in the same bustling corner of Trafalgar Square and exiting the same Zone 1 station.   Photograph: Paramount PicturesTrafalgar Square tube station in ‘Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning’ Amid this dystopian set-up, eagle-eyed viewers will have spotted one major anomaly in the two scenes: Trafalgar Square tube station, of course, does not exist. ‘Charing Cross Station has an entrance in Trafalgar Square but to get Tom and all those extras in – and to get The National Gallery in the background – this new tube station was born,’ explains the film’s supervising location manager Niall O’Shea.  ‘All the Mission: Impossible movies are love letters to the cities they’re in – Fallout is Paris, Dead Reckoning is Rome and Paris – so Trafalgar Square picked itself. It's where a big protest would happen.’ Photograph: Paramount PicturesTrafalgar Square under martial law in ‘Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckon

MI5’s finest – well, -ish – are back.  An Apple TV+ show that only gets better and better, Slow Horses is returning for a fifth run this autumn. September 24 is the date to earmark for the return of Gary Oldman’s schlebby spymaster Jackson Lamb and his band of misfit heroes at Slough House.  The first two episodes will launch on that day, with the final four to follow once a week every Wednesday until October 22.  Season five is adapted from Mick Herron’s 2018 Slough House novel London Rules and sees Ted Lasso star Nick Mohammed join the ensemble as an ambitious mayoral candidate. Photograph: Apple TV+in ‘Slow Horses’ season 5 ‘In season five, everyone is suspicious when resident tech nerd Roddy Ho has a glamorous new girlfriend, but when a series of increasingly bizarre events occur across the city, it falls to the Slow Horses to work out how everything is connected,’ runs the official synopsis. ‘After all, Lamb knows that in the world of espionage, the London Rules – cover your back – always apply.’ Photograph: Apple TV+Roddy Ho and his mysterious new girlfriend Clocking back in for another shift under the critical eye of Jackson Lamb are Jack Lowden’s once fast-tracked agent River Cartwright, Saskia Reeves as long-suffering Slough House stalwart Catherine Standish, Rosalind Eleazar as recovering coke addict Louisa Guy, and Christopher Chung as obnoxious hacker/IT whiz Roddy Ho.   Photograph: Apple TV+Kristin Scott Thomas and James Callis in ‘Slow Horses’ season 5 Kr

It’s the 35th anniversary of David Lynch and Mark Frost’s landmark TV brain-bender Twin Peaks and MUBI is celebrating in style.   For one day only, the streamer will be turning Stoke Newington’s New River Café into a pop-up version of Twin Peaks, Washington State’s famous Double R Diner – Agent Dale Cooper’s morning stop-off of choice. Expect cherry pie, damn fine coffee, and maybe even a glimpse of the Log Lady passing by.  The diner will be drop-in only and open from 11am-7pm on June 18. Alongside the coffee and pie, you’ll be able to win limited edition Twin Peaks goodies throughout the day. The pop-up diner is the handiwork of the Mam Sham crew and creative agency Hot Sauce Presents. You’ll find it at New River Café, 271 Stoke Newington Church Street.Twin Peaks (1990) and 2017’s Twin Peaks: The Return are streaming on MUBI from June 13. And the film company is also teaming up with Whitechapel’s Genesis Cinema for a two-day Lynchian celebration called A Gathering of the Angels: A Tribute and Celebration of the world of David Lynch from September 27-28. More than 400 of David Lynch’s personal items to be auctioned. Where to start with David Lynch – 5 key films that showcase his brilliance. Get the latest and greatest from the Big Smoke – from news and reviews to events and trends. Just follow our Time Out London WhatsApp channel. Stay in the loop: sign up for our free Time Out London newsletter for the best of the city, straight to your inbox.

SXSW London isn’t just the debut South by Southwest festival in London but the first in all of Europe. This week the event – for which Time Out is an official media partner – is taking over dozens of iconic Shoreditch venues for a week-long feast of talks, panels, music concerts and film screenings.  Between June 2 and June 7 SXSW London will host literally hundreds of events: a total of 420 talks and panels, 250 film screenings and over 500 gigs. The lineup for the Texan festival’s first London event is stacked with big names: included are talks by the likes of actor Idris Elba, comedian Katherine Ryan and footballer Cesc Fàbregas, and gigs from names such as Tems, Mabel and Erykah Badu (the latter performing under her alias DJ Lo Down Loretta Brown). Heading to SXSW London but still undecided on who or what to see? Here’s Time Out’s list of the top things to look forward to at SXSW London, featuring the insights of our global film editor Phil de Semlyen and music expert Georgia Evans. 🎤 How to get tickets to SXSW London. Music Chosen by Georgia Evans. Uncle Junior  These kids are far cooler than most of us were at 17 (did we all dress like we were desperate to be in Skins?), bursting onto the London underground music scene in a frenzy of harsh noise, hardcore and experimental rock. Erratic performances at The George and Shacklewell Arms have earned Uncle Junior cult status, despite only dropping two singles so far. The first, 'I Love You, Kenneth Copeland', is a fantastic

We know what you’re thinking: what’s remotely surprising about filming a show set in Edinburgh in Edinburgh? Except, it’s so rarely done as to make Netflix’s new crime thriller Dept. Q a genuine standout. Most shows and films from Trainspotting to Rebus have used Glasgow as a stand in for the capital. The handiwork of The Queen’s Gambit creator Scott Frank (Logan, Out of Sight), Dept Q showcases the Scottish capital in all its Georgian elegance and urban grittiness – as well as taking a tour of the countryside outside the city and further flung corners of the country. ‘We filmed in something like 13 of the city’s 17 council wards,’ says supervising location manager Hugh Gourlay. ‘There’s such a variance in the architecture in Edinburgh: you’ve got the New Town, the medieval parts, the narrow closes, the wide streets, and the high-rise flats of parts of the city that that are not often seen.’The location manager takes us on a tour of Dept Q.’s Edinburgh. Photograph: NetflixMark Bonnar and Matthew Goode in ‘Dept. Q’ What is Dept. Q about?  Adapted from the Nordic noir books of Danish writer Jussi Adler-Olsen and transplanted from Denmark to Edinburgh, Dept. Q does for the police force what Slow Horses does for MI5. It takes its name from a small group of misfit cops under the leadership of cranky, traumatised detective Carl Morck (Downton Abbey’s Matthew Goode) who are assigned to investigate cold cases in the city. One of the dusty dossiers Morck finds on the pile is the dis

Guy Ritchie’s new adventure movie, Fountain of Youth, is a globe-trotting caper in the spirit of National Treasure and that all-time classic, Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. There’s clues, a treasure map, stolen portraits, subsea wrecks and a powerful McGuffin that people will die to keep safe – and that John Krasinski’s artefact hunter will risk it all to pinch.   A Quiet Place’s Krasinski plays Luke Purdue, an adventurer who teams up with his reluctant sister Charlotte (Natalie Portman) on a quest to find the mythical Fountain of Youth. Domhnall Gleeson’s terminally ill tycoon provides financial backing, hopeful that water from the mythical spring will cure him. Queuing up to stop them are ruthless agent Esme (Mexican star Eiza González), a detective played by Succession’s Arian Moayed, and more than is a few twists and turns. Photograph: Apple TV+John Krasinski, Domhnall Gleeson and Natalie Portman in ‘Fountain of Youth’ Fountain of Youth Filmed filming locations The Apple TV+ movie has Apple money behind it, which means big action set pieces and iconic international backdrops for them to play out against. We asked Guy Ritchie’s long-time production designer Martyn John (The Gentleman) to talk us through the film’s globe-spanning filming spots. The scooter chase – Bangkok, Thailand Fountain of Youth opens with Purdue in possession of an item that his adversaries want very badly. Cue a madcap chase through Thailand’s bustling capital city as the treasure hunter tries

Ethan Hunt is back to save the world again – and this time it really needs saving. Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning, the eighth and biggest Mission movie yet, sees Tom Cruise’s agent pushing at the boundaries of gravity and physics once again in an attempt to foil the megalomaniac plans of evil AI The Entity and its human handmaiden Gabriel (Esai Morales). Luckily, Ethan has back-up in the equally mad/daring form of Benji (Simon Pegg), Luther (Ving Rhames), Grace (Hayley Atwell), Paris (Pom Klementieff) and new guy Theo (Greg Tarzan Davis). The action, as our review will testify, is on another scale and the stakes are even higher. Fans of the franchise will not be shortchanged. Behind the scenes, the film’s production story was not a lot less bananas, with the film’s shoot overlapping with that of previous instalment Dead Reckoning, Hollywood strikes and about a bajillion moving parts for director Christopher McQuarrie and his stuntman star Cruise to corral into place. Here’s how – and where – they did it, and how to visit the movie’s incredible locations. Paramount Pictures and SkydanceMisión imposible: Sentencia final Mission Impossible – The Final Reckoning filming locations  Trafalgar Square, London If there’s one thing the Mission: Impossible franchise loves even more than self-destructing messages and fast-burning fuses, it’s the city of London. From Brian De Palma’s opening entry back in 1996, which had a key scene inside Liverpool Street Station, to Mission

One of London’s oldest and most storied cinemas, Curzon Mayfair, is closing for good.The venue, which first opened in the 1930s and has been a long-time venue for big West End film premieres, will cease to run as a Curzon – although there are plans for a new cinema at the site.  As reported by Time Out in February last year, landlord Fantasio (previously 38 Curzon Lease Ltd) has major plans for the historic building on Curzon Street. After a lengthy legal challenge, Curzon has announced its intention to withdraw from litigation, clearing the way for the redevelopment. ‘Sadly, Curzon has concluded that it had no option but to withdraw its legal challenge to the landlord’s plans, given the risk of meeting the landlord’s enormous legal costs should the challenge prove unsuccessful,’ says the cinema group in a statement. ‘We’re disappointed it has taken so long but relieved it’s over and that we can now progress,’ Fantasio CEO Dan Zaum tells The Evening Standard. ‘We are passionate about creating London’s ultimate cinema experience. The Mayfair cinema will always have film at its heart – and will become a vibrant venue serving the wider community, creatively, socially, educationally and beyond.’ The company, which previously refurbished Camden’s KOKO, as well as The Ned and The Wolseley, is promising to spend £15million and restore some of the cinema’s original features and install new audio and visual screen technology. The venue will remain as a two-screen cinema with redevelop