Phil de Semlyen

In the days when Max was known as HBO Max, the streaming service was known as the place to go to rewatch The Sopranos, Sex and the City and The Wire and stream recent blockbusters. After the merger that formed Warner Bros. Discovery in 2022, much has changed. Yes, it’s still the platform to use if you want to spend time with Tony, Carrie or Stringer, but the selection of awesome movies has blown up, thanks to licensing deals with the likes of Turner Classic Movies, Criterion Collection and Studio Ghibli. Need help navigating its considerable catalogue? Here are the 25 newer and older movies on Max you absolutely need to stream ASAP. Recommended: 💻 The best movies on Netflix right now🍏 The best movies on Apple TV+🇭 The best movies on Hulu 🗓 The best movies of 2025 so far 

September update: a quietish month for the genre ahead of October’s gnarly line-up does have one headline horror in The Conjuring: Last Rites, which wraps up an $800 million franchise is solidly spooky fashion. Unlike many of its monsters, vampires and virus-y Alphas, the horror genre is alive and well. It is, you might even say, well-endowed. Because anyone who loves that shivery sensation of being spooked witless in a cinema is being a lot better served than anyone searching for big laughs. The biggest stories in horror this year – Robert Eggers’ Nosferatu, Ryan Coogler’s Sinners, Zach Cregger’s Weapons – have packed in audiences and birthed a million memes along the way, but don’t sleep on the following flicks either.RECOMMENDED: 🎃 The 100 best horror films ever made😱 The scariest movies based on a true story 🔥 The best horror films of 2024

What separates a psychological thriller from a regular old thriller? As the phrase implies, it mostly has to do with the mind. In the best examples, special attention is paid to the mental disposition of its characters, and the thrills themselves are derived from how those motivations influence the movement of the plot. That might make it sound highfalutin, but the greatest psychological thrillers play on elemental fears, traumas and delusions to send goosebumps racing up the viewer’s arms. As one particularly disturbed young man once said, we all go a little mad sometimes – and that’s what makes the genre so relatable… and frightening.  Taking all that into consideration, we probed the most shadowy corners of cinema to put together this list of the best psychological thrillers ever made. Some are tense and twisty, others are more meditative, but nearly all of them will leave you feeling dizzy, discombobulated and probably in need of some fresh air afterward. Recommended: 😬 The 100 best thriller movies of all-time🍆 The 35 steamiest erotic thrillers💣 The 101 best action movies of all-time🔥 The 100 best movies of all-time

Crime movies often provide the vicarious thrill of watching people live outside the law – robbing banks, running from cops, getting into shootouts and either narrowly escaping or going out in a blaze of glory. Movies about serial killers, however, are another beast entirely. They force us to peer into the darkest, coldest, most frightening corners of the human psyche. And the scariest thing is, there’s probably a lot more of them out there in the real world than ultra-cool bank robbers. But serial killers are most often made, not born – and the best movies about them interrogate the conditions that create them as much as they try to shock us by their existence. In considering the best serial-killer movies ever made, we prioritised those that go beyond mere exploitation or transgressive voyeurism. Some might be categorised as horror, others as noirs or procedurals. All of them will leave you shaken, in one way or another. 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

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

Let's be real, you'll probably spend most of those lazy days between Christmas and New Year watching Yuletide classics, eating chocs, and forgetting how your legs work. But there's a lot to be said for starting your Crimbo movie viewing long before the pressies get doled out. In November and December, venues across the city start putting on special xmas screenings of festive favourites, and they're the perfect excuse to get into the spirit of the season, whether you're a grumpy Grinch or a troublingly perky Elf.  These Christmas specials are full of added incentives to peel you off your sofa, too, including special snacks, live orchestras and sing-a-longs. So it's high time you put a cinema trip on your festive to-do list. Here are the best Christmas movie events the capital has to offer in 2025. RECOMMENDED:🎄 Read our full guide to Christmas in London.🍿 The 50 greatest Christmas movies.

Horror films aren’t just for Halloween, but they certainly make spooky season that bit more terrifyingly fun. Whether you’re a hide-behind-the-cushion kind of watcher or someone who revels in every jumpscare and nightmare-inducing villain, joining a Halloween film screening with fellow horror enthusiasts is guaranteed way to get your heart racing and your blood curdling this All Hallow’s Eve. If you’re firmly against any blood, guts and gore, you can still get involved – not all Halloween screenings are focused on bone-chilling bumps in the night. There are also plenty of more lighthearted picks to choose from, like the camp-but-festive Hocus Pocus or The Rocky Horror Picture Show, that will get you in the mood without scaring you to within an inch of your life. Recommended:🎃 Our guide to Halloween in London😱 The 100 best horror movies of all time👹 The 66 greatest movie monsters of all time

For any serious cinephile, all roads lead to France. For many, French movies are the final frontier of film fandom: painfully stylish and achingly cool, with philosophical underpinnings and experimental structures that more mainstream audiences can find impenetrable. And certainly, some of that stereotyping is based in truth – pioneering New Wavers like Jean-Luc Godard and Agnès Varda prided themselves on their intellect. But once you start exploring French cinema, it’s not difficult to see why it’s had such a powerful influence on global moviemaking – and that it’s not nearly as highfalutin’ and alienating as it can sometimes seem. We understand that leaping in can be intimidating, though. So we’ve ranked the 100 best French movies ever made, less to craft a definitive canon but to give both newbies and hardcore Francophiles a jumping-off point. Sure, there are famous crowd-pleasers like Amélie and Criterion-canonised classics, but also more obscure gems to challenge even deep-diving Nouvelle Vague obsessives. No matter your experience level, you’re sure to discover something surprising.  Written by Tom Huddleston, Geoff Andrew, Dave Calhoun, Cath Clarke, Trevor Johnston, Joshua Rothkopf, Keith Uhlich and Matthew Singer  Recommended: 🔥 The 100 best movies of all-time🌏 The best foreign films of all-time🇬🇧 The 100 best British movies🛏 The 101 best sex scenes in movies of all-time

At the intersection of crime drama, action flick and psychological thriller lies the heist movie. In truth, though, the subgenre predates the many umbrellas it exists under: movies had barely been invented when Edwin S Porter dropped The Great Train Robbery, depicting a group of bandits holding up an American locomotive in the Old West.  Well over a century later, filmmakers from Quentin Tarantino to Stanley Kubrick to Kathryn Bigelow had taken the same basic premise and used it to create some of the most memorable moments in cinema, whether it’s Rififi’s silent hit on a Parisian jeweller or the breathless shootout in Michael Mann’s Heat. It’s no wonder the concept has proven so enduring: somewhere deep down, everyone romanticises the concept of living outside the law, and even if we find the perpetrators despicable, there’s a visceral rush to watching criminality in action. Yes, it’s a genre with many tropes – the phrases ‘one last job’ and ‘ragtag group of low lives’ pop up frequently – but the best heist movies manage to find brilliant new ways to put those familiar rhythms to use. Here are 60 of the greatest examples. Recommended: 😬 The best thriller films of all-time🔪 The 12 best thrillers on Netflix🔥 The 100 best movies of all-time🌋 The 35 steamiest erotic thrillers ever made

Remember the last time you went somewhere – anywhere – exciting? After a year parked on the sofa, movies have become our passports to strange, exotic places. With that sense of escapism in mind, we’ve mapped out 100 places around the world that offer something for every film fan, cinephile and pop-culture nerd. It ticks off everything from legendary film locations, to studio tours, to movie museums, to delis where you should always have what Meg Ryan is having. There are three lots of iconic staircases, a prison or two, a couple of boats, and at least one crashed train. And if none of that tickles your DVD collection, look out for the high school where Ferris skivved off and the Breakfast Club did detention. Oh, and you can check into the cinema hotel where you dial ‘007’ for room service. Happy trails.From Cape Town to Amsterdam: these are the 50 most beautiful cinemas in the world.

Whatever you think of Netflix, there’s no denying the streamer has changed the game when it comes to original programming. Starting with House of Cards way back in 2013, the platform broke down the door for on-demand series to become their own form of prestige TV. Of course, that innovation came back to bite them, as they now have to compete with everyone from Hulu to Disney+ to – checks notes – FreeVee. But just when it seems like Netflix has been left in the dust of the revolution it started, it drops something like Baby Reindeer or Adolescence, and ends up right back at the centre of the entertainment conversation. Even factoring in its fallow periods, Netflix has already created so many must-watch shows that most of us won’t ever get to half of it. So we’ve put together a list of the Netflix original series you absolutely must make time for. And before you get all upset about the absence of Black Mirror and Cobra Kai, we’ve left out shows that originated elsewhere before the platform picked them up. We’re also sticking to scripted series - though you can check out our favourite Netflix true crime docs here. Recommended: 🎥 The 35 best movies on Netflix right now🔥 The 25 best movies on HBO and Max right now👽 The best sci-fi shows streaming on Netflix

Family movies are having a ginormous year. The top five box office hits have all been kid-friendly capers of different stripes, from the blocky mayhem of Minecraft to the alien mayhem of Lilo & Stitch and fantasy adventure of How To Train Your Dragon. And the biggest of all of them you may not have even heard of – unless you’ve been in China. Because the holidays are long and children’s attention spans are short, we’ve assembled a definitive list of 2025’s family-friendly fare worth its salt (okay, sugar) – and ranked it by how likely it is to keep all of the family entertained, not just little Billy. Sorry, Billy.    

Spare a thought for whoever has to give this wildly obscenity-strewn biopic a rating. Not since Ken Loach’s cheery whisky heist caper The Angel’s Share got hit with a 15 certificate for dropping one too many ‘aggressive “c*nts”’ has there been such a disparity between intent and delivery in a screenplay. Here, writer-director Kirk Jones presides over a Tourette’s Syndrome (TS) story with a potty mouth but not a mean-spirited bone in its body. It’s a ‘PG’ yarn with an ‘18’ gob.Unlike, say, Rain Man, which sidelined and misrepresented the neurodiversity at its centre, the ’90s-set I Swear ushers you right into the tormented headspace of young Scotsman John Davidson as he copes with a neurological condition that leaves him with uncontrollable tics and sees him ostracised from an uncomprehending society, and even his own family. Played as a bubbly 13-year-old in ’90s Galashiels by newcomer Scott Ellis Watson and a more circumspect twentysomething by The Rings of Power’s Robert Aramayo – both delivering terrific, likeable performances – I Swear charts the onset of Davidson’s condition to an adulthood in a kind of self-imposed isolation. But it opens with him collecting an MBE from the Queen for his pioneering educational work on TS, an upbeat framing device to hold onto as the story flashes back to a life with some heartbreaking lows. It’s a ‘PG’ yarn with an ‘18’ gob Whether getting expelled from school for dropping a c-bomb on his headmaster, being shunned by his family, having

In his genius 1985 documentary Sherman’s March, director Ross McElwee follows in the footsteps of a Civil War general’s infamous advance through the Confederacy. Haunted by a recent break-up, the doleful young filmmaker ends up far more preoccupied with finding a girlfriend. The film’s Ken Burns-meets-The Inbetweeners awkwardness and charm gave him a Sundance hit and made it a cult classic (if not especially helpful in understanding the Civil War). Forty years on, the stunning Remake lays bare McElwee’s own battles, the least of which is a mooted Hollywood remake of his breakthrough doc. A tear-stained, deeply personal and utterly singular documentary, it tells the story of the young son he lost to a Fentanyl overdose, captured via home video footage taken across three decades. ‘It’s been seven years since you died,’ he says in the voiceover, ‘and I still miss you every day’. Throat meet lump.  After Sherman’s March McElwee did find his person – wife Marilyn. They have two kids: bubbly, bright-witted son Adrian and a sunbeam of a daughter in Mariah, who the couple adopts in Paraguay. Those experiences become McElwee’s 2008 documentary In Paraguay. But every experience they share gets captured. He rarely stops filming.  Inevitably, this becomes grating for Marilyn and Mariah, who start to feel like characters in a movie he never calls ‘cut’ on. There’s divorce and then a lonely relocation. Adrian, though, has caught the bug. He grows up wanting to follow in his dad’s footsteps

In February 1977, a disgruntled Indianapolis man walked into a city centre tower for a meeting with a mysterious box under his arm. He then took a mortgage company executive who he felt had cheated him out of a real estate investment hostage, jerryrigging a shotgun to his head with wire and demanding an apology and millions of dollars in compensation. One false move from the cops and the man was toast.   This absolutely terrible plan and all the absurdities that ensued over 63 hours and under the full flare of first local, then national news coverage, are captured with terrific gusto in Gus Van Sant’s tragicomic thriller. It’s another perceptive state-of-the-nation movie from the veteran indie auteur to add to To Die For (1995), Elephant (2003) and Milk (2008), sharing their preoccupation with guns as a manifestation of American ambition and dysfunction. Beyond the guilty laughs, authentically beige ’70s period detail and news reportage aesthetic, there’s an offbeat anti-capitalist folk tale here that will strike a chord in the current moment.   It’s scary clown Bill Skarsgård doesn’t leave all the clownishness behind as the jittery, volatile Tony Kiritsis. He’s an aspiring entrepreneur whose efforts to develop a shopping mall were left in ruins when loans company boss ML Hall (Al Pacino) called in his investment. But the plan almost falls at the first hurdle because Hall, he learns, is in Florida. Without missing a beat, he takes his son Richard (Dacre Montgomery) hostage in

The 1960s had Dr Strangelove and Fail Safe, the ’70s had Twilight’s Last Gleaming, the ’80s had WarGames, and the ’90s had Crimson Tide. If you’ve recovered from those Cold War classics, Kathryn Bigelow’s unbelievably stressful nuclear disaster movie is sending you straight back to the basement.  The screenplay by TV news veteran Noah Oppenheim, who also co-wrote Netflix’s White House cyberattack thriller Zero Day and must surely have a bunker in his garden by this point, gives three overlapping perspectives on an unfolding nightmare. Each start at the exact same point: a regular morning in the White House Situation Room and US Strategic Command is disrupted by a spec on the radar. A single nuke has been launched over the Pacific. Is it another North Korean test? A rogue submarine commander? Nothing to worry about or the first shot of armageddon? A faint worry becomes palpable fear for Admiral Mark Miller (Jason Clarke), Captain Olivia Walker (Rebecca Ferguson) and the team in the Situation Room when the nuke goes ‘suborbital’, its trajectory putting it on course to hit the Midwest in 17 minutes time. At Alaska’s missile defence base, Major Daniel Gonzalez (Anthony Ramos) goes from wrestling with homesickness to trying to prevent ten million fatalities in a trice. But, as someone points out, America’s $60 billion defence missiles are like trying to ‘hit a bullet with a bullet’.  Over the world’s most high-powered Zoom call, the President (Idris Elba) and his advisors wrestle

One of Hollywood’s biggest stars in a true-life sports movie with big-time awards hopes. It’s going to be a Rocky-like story of comeback glory wrenched from the jaws of defeat, right? Except that’s not at all what Dwayne Johnson and director Benny Safdie have got cooking with this tender but tumultuous addiction and relationship drama set in the gladiatorial world of mixed martial arts (MMA). Because beyond the regular crunch of fist on bone, The Smashing Machine is an unexpectedly gentle, soulful character study that has Johnson undercutting his crowd-pleasing ‘The Rock’ persona with vulnerability and boyish uncertainty. The early Oscar buzz is certainly warranted: opposite an equally affecting, glammed-up Emily Blunt, it’s far more than just a popcorn-guy-goes-prestige novelty turn. This is his The Wrestler moment. Covering his shaved dome with a crop of black hair and with subtle facial prosthetics lending him an off-kilter look, an extra beefed-up Johnson plays real-life fighter Mark Kerr over three physically and emotionally bruising years in the late ’90s. We meet striding into the ring, basically a wardrobe on legs, and crushing opponents in short order. A journalist asks him what it would feel like to lose and he’s genuinely stumped. He can’t conceive of defeat partly because he doesn’t want to, a bubble of control he expects girlfriend Dawn Staples (Blunt) to help him maintain.   Except that the world of MMA is evolving at speed, with new rules that limit Kerr’s fire

There’s surely a more incisive, enlightening version of Olivier Assayas’ (Personal Shopper) enjoyable but strictly meat-and-two-veg recap of modern Russian political history waiting to be made. The performances are solid, with an excellent Jude Law all inscrutable psychopathy as a younger Vladimir Putin and Alicia Vikander the perfect embodiment of an amoral post-Soviet arrivista, and the chilly world-building works well enough, but there’s a missing ingredient – actual Russians.   It’s unsurprising that a French director and screenwriter adapting a book by a Swiss-Italian author with a cast of Americans, Brits and Swedes, filming in Latvia, struggles to burrow deep into the psyche of one of the world’s most secretive political cultures. The Wizard of the Kremlin never shakes the sense of being a best-guess at the cold realities of modern Russia. And there’s an ersatz quality to Assayas’s drama that’s not aided by a hackneyed framing device that has Jeffrey Wright’s US journalist summoned to a snowy dacha for a history lesson from mystery ex-Kremlin fixer Vadim Baranov (Paul Dano). He’s based on Vladislav Surkov, the so-called ‘new Rasputin’ who ruthlessly expedited the dictator’s rise to power during the helter-skelter, oligarchic post-Yeltsin days of the 1990s. You’ll feel for the American Fiction star as he’s left nodding solemnly while Dano blasts through reams of exposition. Baranov tees up flashbacks to rowdy student parties, his early career in Moscow’s avant-garde the

Jim Jarmusch, that beat poet of mellow angst, is back on familiar turf with this triptych of stories about grown-up children and the parents they don’t really want to visit. After 2019’s limp zombie comedy The Dead Don’t Die, devotees will be happy to hear that the Ohioan’s stocks-in-trade – wry insights into the human condition, laconic vibes, a growly Tom Waits – come augmented with deeper heart here. It’s divided into three roughly equal length chapters: ‘Father’, ‘Mother’, ‘Sister Brother’. In the first, Adam Driver’s divorcee Jeff and his equally buttoned-up sister Emily (Mayim Bialik) take his Range Rover in the New Jersey sticks for a long-overdue visit to see their dad (Waits). Amusingly, their stiff in-car conversation is crosscut with the old man not tidying his lakeside home in anticipation of their visit, but messing it up. He ramps up the dodderiness when the pair arrive, a sly manipulation, it turns out, designed to keep his fretful son’s cash handouts coming.  The theme of gentle deception also informs a second chapter with a faint Mike Leigh quality in which two wildly contrasting sisters, Cate Blanchett’s nervy Timothea and Vicky Krieps’s half-tamed wildchild Lilith, head to their mother’s (Charlotte Rampling) immaculate Dublin home for tea. A lot of effort has been made, cakes bought and flowers arranged, but there’s something stopping any of them enjoying the get-together. The distance between the trio is the width of a tablecloth, and an ocean. Lilith lies

A shot of Earth from space seems an unexpected opening perspective for a film that zeroes in on a few square miles of the scrubby, starkly beautiful Tucumán Province in northern Argentina to tell a story of murder and courtroom drama. But Argentinian auteur Lucrecia Martel’s (Zama) finds striking universality in her first documentary, a compelling true-crime tale of indigenous dispossession and cultural erasure that could be set in a hundred different countries. Multiples more gripping than its bland English title might suggest, Landmarks is a story 15 or so years in the telling. The case at its heart (summarised in this 2009 Amnesty report) involves the alleged murder of indigenous leader Javier Chocobar by three men, two of whom were armed ex-police officers. The trio, we learn in lively court proceedings to which Martel’s cameras have total access, were trying to finagle a mining concern on ancestral land that belonged to the Chuschagasta people. When Chocobar and 20 or so others confront them on a recce, there’s a bad-tempered exchange, a scuffle and finally gunshots. At the end of it Chocobar lies dying, shot in the stomach.  It’s not Rashomon. Despite the confident testimony of the ex-cops, and even their walk-through recreation of the events in the valley that day, it’s pretty clear that Chocobar didn’t shoot himself. There’s even dramatic home video footage that culminates in the camera rolling down a hillside when shots ring out. But the question of whether justice w

Some murder-mysteries – Seven, for instance – immerse you in grisly menace. Others – Memories of Murder –  weave a web of intricate plotting and surprising feints. The Thursday Murder Club, by comparison, just wants to plump up a cushion, pour you a nice cup of tea and spin you a cosy yarn with an unusually high body count. And, honestly, you’d be a silly sausage not to enjoy it on those terms. For a movie in which people die violently every 30 or so minutes, the stakes are stupendously low, the vibe steadfastly upbeat. In fact, there’s more fuss at Downton Abbey when a fork goes missing than when Tony Curran (Geoff Bell), a flash building developer at posh retirement village Coopers Chase, gets bumped off. The dastardly deed is all the crime-solving pensioners at the heart of Richard Osman’s best selling murder-mystery novels need to set about ID’ing the culprit, in between mouthfuls of Celia Imre’s surprisingly moist sponge cakes.  Alongside Imre’s newcomer Joyce, an ex-nurse whose handy forensic knowledge sees her fast-tracked into the group, our amateur sleuths are Helen Mirren’s Elizabeth Best, a guileful ringleader with a coy espionage back story. Land-grabbing Ray Winstone’s rightful turf, a grinning Pierce Brosnan is West Ham-supporting ex-union boss Ron, and Ben Kingsley is gentle psychiatrist Ibrahim. The gang, who congregate in the orangery each Thursday to puzzle over a long-ago cold case, prove equally adept at elbowing their way into the new investigation. But w

If laughter is the best medicine, this gut-twisting tale of vanishing kids from American comedian-turned-horror auteur Zach Cregger comes with its own built-in cure.  Put simply, if Weapons wasn’t the best horror movie of the year – pipping even the mighty Sinners – it would probably be the best comedy. The last 30 minutes alone is hands down the most satisfying final reel I’ve winced through – and corpsed at – in absolutely ages, a whirlwind of laughs and scares that ties up the movie’s knotty narrative in a singular fashion. Of course, Weapons is a less-you-know-the-better experience. Suffice to say, at 2.17am on an otherwise unremarkable night in the fictional US town of Maybrook, 17 classmates spontaneously get out of bed, leave their parents’ homes and run into the darkness, arms outspread like sycamore seedlings blown by some unseen tempest (in suitably macabre fashion, the pose was inspired by photojournalist Nick Ut’s legendary Vietnam War snap Napalm Girl).  When teacher Justine Gandy (Julia Garner) turns up to class the next morning, there’s only one pupil to greet her: a taciturn boy called Alex (Cary Christopher). Is his silence down to shock or is there something else going on?  Who – or what – is the Pied Piper behind this bizarro event is the mystery that Weapons works its way towards in unhurried but enthralling fashion. Cregger’s camera sweeps, wraith-like, through a town whose shock is turning to anger and recrimination, with the besieged Gandy in the crossh

Even those cinemagoers who have grumbled about the preponderance of superhero origin stories – and I’m guilty there – might feel a touch of remorse watching writer-director James Gunn’s puckish and political (but wildly overstuffed) blockbuster skip merrily past all the basics of DC’s most righteous figure. The Guardians of the Galaxy man, probably mindful of the many Super-movies that have come before his, races through Kal-El’s origins in a handful of captions over the opening frames: an Antarctic vista into which a battered and vulnerable Superman (David Corenswet) is hurled after his first defeat in battle over the skies of Metropolis. In those few sentences, establishing the existence of metahumans on Earth and the arrival of Superman from the planet Krypton 30 years prior, this DC reboot skips jauntily past the entire plot of Richard Donner’s 1978 classic.  So, there’s no orientation, none of the scene-setting Smallville stuff with Jonathan and Martha Kent (though they do get a touching later scene). We’re not getting those early flirtations with girlfriend Lois Lane (the impressive Rachel Brosnahan) either, or even Clark Kent learning how to use The Daily Planet’s nifty-looking CMS. In fact, we’re not getting much of Clark Kent at all.It’s the most in medias res-iest bit of storytelling imaginable, a gambit that feels more and more misguided as the movie slips deeper into generic superhero terrain in a packed but muddled second half. A giant chasm is carving its way to

While most directors fret over final cuts and spiralling budgets, it’s more likely to be exploding mortar shells and buzzing drones that keep Ukrainian filmmaker-reporter Mstyslav Chernov awake at night.  Fresh from winning a Best Documentary Oscar for 20 Days in Mariupol, a fly-on-the-shattered-wall depiction of the brutal 2022 siege by Putin’s invading army, the insanely brave journalist-filmmaker has picked up his camera and found somewhere even more dangerous to go.  That place? A pencil-thin strip of blasted forest just outside the destroyed village of Andriivka in eastern Ukraine. The fields on both sides are sewn with landmines, making the task of capturing the village a forest crawl of hidden Russian bunkers, random shellfire and sudden death. It’s a trench-by-trench battle as brutal as Okinawa or the Somme, and Chernov and his Associate Press colleague Alex Babenko are right there with the Ukrainian assault brigade assigned to the task.  Its vérité view of combat is intense and confronting. What makes it so impactful is the first-person nature of the footage – suddenly, the tools of modern warfare have become filmmaking tools too. Footage from soldiers’ bodycams and aerial photography from reconnaissance drones puts you right in the shoes of the men – sometimes even as they fall, wounded. The result is disorientating, distressing and often surreal. It’d feel like Call of Duty if it wasn’t so grimly real. Alex Garland’s Warfare suffers by comparison Of course, there’

This year’s BFI London Film Festival line-up has been announced in full – and the fest will be a happy homecoming for one of the city’s greatest actors. Daniel Day-Lewis’s new film, Anemone, is one of the films on the LFF’s newly announced 2025 programme. Directed by his son Ronan, it’s the Londoner’s first screen appearance since Phantom Thread in 2017. He’ll also be appearing for a sure-to-be roadblocked screen talk at the festival. Other standouts on this year’s line-up include Park Chan-wook’s capitalist satire No Other Choice and Chloé Zhao’s Hamnet. An adaptation of Maggie O’Farrell’s 2020 novel, it’s drawn instant Oscar buzz since its Telluride debut last week. Really giving it the big one, the reliably brilliant Richard Linklater has two films at the fest: wistful songwriting drama Blue Moon and his snappy love letter to ’60s cine–radical Jean-Luc Godard, New Wave. Time Out will be presenting a BFI IMAX screening of Oliver Laxe’s extraordinary Sirât, a desert odyssey that’s equal parts Sorcerer and Mad Max: Fury Road. It’s guaranteed to melt minds on the biggest screen in Britain.  Look out, too, for, Harry Lighton’s BDSM romance Pillion, Jim Jarmusch’s latest Father Mother Sister Brother, The Brutalist screenwriter Mona Fastvold’s directorial debut The Testament of Ann Lee, and Bait director Mark Jenkin’s Rose of Nevada.  Bringing a musical flavour to the line-up are Jane Pollard and Iain Forsyth’s drama about Marianne Faithfull, Broken English, and Bruce Springsteen

This year’s BFI London Film Festival is getting a fairy tale ending. Julia Jackman’s 100 Nights of Hero, a fresh twist on Middle Eastern folktales One Thousand and One Nights, will be bringing down the curtain on the London film fest (LFF) at the Royal Festival Hall on Sunday, October 19.Starring Emma Corrin, Nicholas Galitzine, Maika Monroe, Amir El-Masry, Charli XCX, Richard E Grant and Felicity Jones, and written and directed by one-time BFI new talent winner Jackman, the film is an adaptation of Isabel Greenberg’s graphic novel – itself a queer-coded spin on The Arabian Nights. The story follows Cherry (Monroe), whose husband leaves home in the wake of a secret bet to test her fidelity, and her maid Hero (Corrin) as they fend off a seductive visitor, Manfred (Galitzine). Expect folklore, medieval costumes and the first of a run of on-screen turns from Charli as she flexes her acting skills. Photograph: Time OutCharli XCX , Olivia D'Lima and Kerena Jagpal in ‘100 Nights of Hero’ ‘The BFI London Film Festival has championed my work since my very early shorts, so bringing 100 Nights of Hero here is profoundly special,’ says Jackman. ‘To return as the closing night gala is an incredible honour, and we can’t wait to share this film on our home turf with a London audience.’  This year’s LFF opens with Rian Johnson’s Knives Out threequel, Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery on October 8, with so-far announced galas including Brendan Fraser comedy-drama Rental Family and No

The millions of fans of Richard Osman’s bestselling crime capers won’t need telling, but The Thursday Murder Club has landed on Netflix. Adapted from the first book in the series, first published in 2020, it’s an origin story that revolves around a small band of crime-solving retirees who aren’t ready to go out to pasture and the grisly murders they set about investigating. Directed by Chris Columbus, the movie’s quintessentially English backdrop is another bit of immersive world-building from Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone filmmaker and his team, including production designer James Merifield (The Deep Blue Sea, Mary Queen of Scots). Merifield talks Time Out through how the often deadly world of Coopers Chase retirement home and its picturesque surrounds came to be.  Photograph: Giles Keyte/NetflixHelen Mirren, Pierce Brosnan, Ben Kingsley and Celia Imrie in ‘The Thursday Murder Club’ What is The Thursday Murder Club about? A gang of pensioners at a fictional retirement home called Coopers Chase gather every Thursday to work on solving a cold case involving a woman murdered in the 1970s. Elizabeth Best (Helen Mirren), the Thursday Murder Club’s de facto leader, is an ex-MI6 agent with spycraft skills and a pin-sharp mind she conceals beneath a doddery persona when the situation requires it. Ron Ritchie is a still-crusading ex-union boss played with a twinkle by Pierce Brosnan, while Ben Kingsley is former psychiatrist Ibrahim Arif who puts his acumen to use scruti

It’s been a tumultuous 2025 at London’s greatest cult picture house, but the Prince Charles Cinema (PCC) could be ending it on a high – with plans for a second venue in east London just announced.  The off-Leicester Square cinema, a beloved fixture with movie-loving Londoners and famous fans like Quentin Tarantino and Paul Thomas Anderson, is planning a second venue in the space occupied by the now-shuttered Stratford Picturehouse. ‘Stratford has always been a hub,’ the Prince Charles’s head of programming Paul Vickery tells The Guardian. ‘There are plenty of students and loads of new-build properties that have sprung up recently. But it also feels like it’s still trying to find its feet and figure out what it is.’ The PCC was faced with the threat of closure in January when its landlord’s redevelopment plans came to light, but found some protection in being listed as an asset of community value (ACV) in May. But according to Vickery, the plans for a new venue are unconnected with those legal wranglings. ‘Given what’s happened this year, I understand how it could look like we’re trying to shift operations but that’s not what’s happening,’ he says. ‘We were looking for a pre-existing venue that needed a bit of love which we could turn into a new site. Ideally, we’d want to go on to add a third or fourth space.’ The Prince Charles had previously looked at taking over Edinburgh’s historic Filmhouse cinema, which reopened this summer under new management.  And the PCC isn’t the o

Like a nerve-shredding mix of 24, London Has Fallen and your favourite soap, Hostage is a new Netflix political thriller that asks: what would happen if the British prime minister’s husband was captured by? And what would happen if the French President was in town and being blackmailed too?   With British telly stalwart Suranne Jones (Vigil) as the British PM and two-time Academy Award nominee Julie Delpy as her French counterpart, Hostage is a female-led political thriller where the adrenaline flows as freely as the improbable plot twists. Photograph: Netflix What is Hostage about? British PM Abigail Dalton (Jones) is facing a political meltdown at home as a urgent medicine shortage and a migrant crisis threatens to bring down her government. French President Vivienne Toussaint arrives at Downing Street with a proposal to help that comes with some major strings attached. But in French Guiana, Dalton’s husband Dr Alex Anderson (Ashley ‘Bashy’ Thomas), a volunteer with Médecins Sans Frontières, is kidnapped. The terrorists threaten to execute him unless the PM agrees to step down. But, with the ransomers holding dirt on Toussaint too, the conspiracy runs much deeper than anyone can imagine. Penned by Bridge of Spies screenwriter Matt Charman, Hostage quickly throws other family members into this edgy mix, including Dalton’s daughter Sylvie (Isobel Akuwudike), another of the PM’s points of vulnerability, and Toussaint’s stepson Matheo (played by My Oxford Year’s Corey Mylchre

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

After 15 years of high drama, seismic historical events, love affairs, births, deaths and a thousand withering looks from Violet Crawley, the epically popular TV-turned-movie series is coming to an end with Downton Abbey: The Grand Finale… and everything must go. To mark the end of the Downton, London’s auction house Bonhams is holding a farewell exhibition and sale of props, costumes and assorted Crawley-bilia. The sale runs online at bonhams.com from August 18 to September 16. The free exhibition will run simultaneously at the auctioneer’s New Bond Street premises.  Catalogue items include everything from Lady Mary’s (Michelle Dockery) wedding dress (estimated price £3-5000) to Lady Rose’s (Lily James) ‘coming out’ ball gown (£800-1200). Bids for a copy of the script from the first ever episode, signed by the cast, will start at £6-800, while a clapperboard from Downton Abbey: A New Era will fetch in excess of £1-1500. Photograph: Bonhams ‘Downton Abbey is an exceptionally well-researched piece of storytelling on aristocratic society in the early 20th  century, and the costumes and props show the impressive attention to detail that brought the world to life on screen and making it so beloved by millions across the globe,’ says Bonhams’ Charlie Thomas.  Downton production house Carnival Films will be donating its auction proceeds to the charity Together for Short Lives. Photograph: Bonhams ‘The world of Downton Abbey is beloved around the globe for its rich, timeless sto

Brendan Fraser’s career renaissance has already taken in a Oscar win for his performance in The Whale and now his new movie is getting a big gala at this year’s BFI London Film Festival. Rental Family, which stars Fraser as a struggling American actor living in modern-day Tokyo, will be the LFF’s American Express gala on Thursday, October 16. Directed by Hikari, the Japanese filmmaker behind Netflix drama 37 Seconds, Rental Family has Fraser’s down-and-out thesp finding work with a Japanese rental family company, playing stand-in roles for strangers. ‘As he immerses himself in his clients’ worlds, he begins to form genuine bonds that blur the lines between performance and reality,’ runs the festival’s synopsis. ‘Confronting the moral complexities of his work, he rediscovers purpose, belonging, and the quiet beauty of human connection.’ ‘While it’s inspired by a real, and sometimes unusual, business in Japan, it’s ultimately about people longing for connection, and discovering the meaning of true friendship in modern Tokyo,’ says Hikari. Photograph: Courtesy of James Lisle/Searchlight PicturesBrendan Fraser in ‘Rental Family’ Co-starring with Fraser are Shōgun’s Takehiro Hira, as well as Mari Yamamoto, Shannon Mahina Gorman and Akira Emoto. The gala takes place at London’s Royal Festival Hall, with simultaneous screenings at cinemas across the UK.  The 69th BFI London Film Festival runs from October 8-19. Tickets will be on sale to the general public from September 16 via th

The semi-autobiographical story of Lena Dunham and her husband Luis Felber, a British-Peruvian musician, new Netflix series Too Much is a fictionalised version of their relationship in London. How fictionalised, only they will know, but hopefully quite a lot. No one should take that much ketamine at a city zoo. It’s also a proper joy: a story of millennial love, work, sex and life in two big cities peppered with the kind of cultural authenticity that only lived experience can provide, and enough fantasy and big laughs to make it work as pure escapism too. And that’s not to mention the killer soundtrack and a stuffed-to-the-gills supporting cast that boasts Stephen Fry, Andrew Scott (hot priest turns sleazy filmmaker here), Richard E Grant, David Jonsson, Naomi Watts, Emily Ratajkowski, Rita Wilson, Adèle Exarchopoulos and Dunham herself. © "Too Much", Lena Dunham, Netflix What happens in Too Much? The show’s ten episodes follow American creative Jessica (Megan Stalter), fresh from a break-up, as she heads from New York to London in pursuit of a romanticised version of the city that only exists in the movies of Richard Curtis and the books of Jane Austen. Instead of a grand Regency estate, she finds herself in the bricky Hackney kind. Instead of a clean slate, she discovers that the emotions she’s fled from have come along for the ride. And she has no clue what a ‘tosser’ is.  Enter Will Sharpe’s striving musician Felix, a man with a few skeletons of his own, and a wild and

Wednesday season 2 is here – the first half, at any rate – with more deliciously dark and spooky shenanigans in the accursed Vermont town of Jericho. Wednesday Addams (Jenna Ortega) is back at Nevermore Academy for more lessons of the deeply alarming kind. This time, it’s werewolf roomie Enid (Emma Myers) under threat from a mysterious force. There’s dark deeds and even darker magic – and that’s just the official school syllabus.  The task of soundtracking these dark and dismal goings-on fell to music supervisors Jen Malone and Nicole Weisberg – and the pair have gone big with some knowing, surprising and tonally spot-on new musical choices. ‘We took the energy of what we did for Season 1 and opened another door,’ says Weisberg. ‘So now season 2 feels more expansive musically.’ Look out for tracks from pre-emo alt rockers Sixpence None the Richer, goth rock legends  Sisters of Mercy, K-pop girl group Mamamoo, and even classical OGs Mozart, Wagner and Prokofiev. There’s also a classic movie cue from Bernard Herrmann’s Vertigo score and a couple of zombie-themed bangers to make Pugsley Addams’s pet shuffler Slurp feel right at home. Here’s the tracklisting in full for episodes 1-4: Episode 1 My Favourite Things – The Lennon SistersUn Mundo Raro – Chavela VargasTropical Island – Berry Lipman SingersKiss Me – Sixpence None the Richer No Time to Cry – Sisters of MercyUm Oh Ah Yeh – MamamooThe Dance of the Knights – Prokofiev’s Romeo and JulietNevermore Alma Mater – Pitch

To mark the release of Wednesday season 2 this month, a Thames paddle steamer is being transformed into a floating temple of the macabre in the spirit of Nevermore Academy – and everyone is invited aboard.  The Dixie Queen (below) will be hosting a free Wednesday-inspired 90-minute ‘gothic voyage through London's darker past’, promising ‘bleak history, drier commentary, and fellow passengers who also find joy in the morbid, comfort in the eerie, and humour in things better left buried’. The cruises leave from Butler’s Wharf Pier on Wednesday, August 20. There are four sailing times, leaving at 9.30am, 1pm, 4.30pm and 8pm. There’ll be onboard entertainment of the eeriest kind, ice cream (black, natch) and photo opportunities for anyone wanting to bring a touch of Wednesday Addams’ unsmiling aura to their IG feed.  Head to the official site to sign up for up to four seats aboard the good (ie bad) ship Wednesday. All under-18s must be accompanied by an adult.  If you can’t snag tickets now, don’t unleash your inner Hyde. There’ll also be a walk-up queue on the day.  Photograph: Thames Luxury ChartersThe Dixie Queen is being commandeered for Netflix’s Outcastaway Cruise The first four episodes of Wednesday S2 stream on Netflix on August 6, with the final four episodes landing on September 3. The best TV and streaming shows of 2025 (so far). Inside Wednesday season 2’s Ireland filming locations.

Wednesday’s first season is Netflix’s third biggest show of all time, clocking up a 1,237 million hours of viewing in its first 28 days alone.  Season 2 has the challenge of magicking up similar numbers, but it’ll pack plenty of gothic superpowers to help do it. Psychic student Wednesday Addams (Jenna Ortega) is heading back to Nevermore Academy to get to the bottom of more macabre goings-on in a second run that has Tim Burton back to lend his ooky, spooky touch to things.  This time, Wednesday’s bubbly werewolf roommate Enid (Emma Myers) is under threat from a mysterious force that manifests via a murder of murderous crows. It’s The Birds meets The Breakfast Club, where everyone is Ally Sheedy. Photograph: Jonathan Hession/Netflix © 2025Emma Myers as Enid Sinclair and Jenna Ortega as Wednesday Alongside Ortega, all the Wednesday gang returns to join the black-hued fun, including Catherine Zeta-Jones as overprotective mum Morticia Addams, Luis Guzmán as dilettante dad Gomez and Isaac Ordonez as Wednesday’s eccentric younger brother Pugsley, this time busy rearing a zombie called Slurp. Gwendoline Christie, Christina Ricci and Fred Armisen are all back too. Outcasts assemble! Photograph: Helen Sloan/Netflix © 2025Joonas Suotamo as Lurch, Catherine Zeta-Jones as Morticia Addams, Jenna Ortega as Wednesday, Isaac Ordonez aș Pugsley Addams, and Luis Guzmán as Gomez Addams Where was Wednesday Season 2 filmed? The sharp-eyed will spot one major change for season 2. Instead of