Phil de Semlyen

Three-fourths of the way through 2024, and it’s safe to say this has been a banner year for horror movies. In fact, it seems like all the buzziest films to come out so far aim to terrify. What’s truly great about the current horror bumper crop is that none of the standouts really resemble one another.  Osgood Perkins’ leftfield hit Longlegs mixes ’90s serial killer procedurals with the Satanic panic of the previous decade, while I Saw the TV Glow is like David Lynch directing Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Late Night with the Devil makes found-footage fun again, while In a Violent Nature invented a new subgenre that people are calling ‘ambient slasher’ – just to name a few. Below, you’ll find our ongoing picks for the scariest movies of 2024 – a list that’s sure to keep growing, especially with heavy-hitters like The Substance on the horizon. 🎃 The 100 best horror films ever made 😱 The scariest movies based on a true story 💀 The best films of 2024 (so far)

For the first half of 2024, the main talking point around the movies was that no one was going to see them. Why weren’t audiences flocking to see Ryan Gosling drive stunt cars and flirt with Emily Blunt? Why did Furiosa flop when the last Mad Max film was such a hit? It was especially perplexing given that last year, the worldwide box office had seemed to finally rebound from the post-pandemic doldrums. Studio fortunes are improving, however, on the backs of some major kids movies and the monster success of Inside Out 2 and Deadpool & Wolverine. So how about we all stop wringing our hands, and begin appreciating what’s been a pretty great year for movies so far, both in the mainstream and at the arthouse? You’ll notice some of these movies came out in the US at the back end of 2023, but we’re basing this list on UK release dates to include the best worldwide releases from between January and December. And there is plenty more coming, so keep this one bookmarked. RECOMMENDED: 📺 The best TV shows of 2024 (so far) you need to stream🎥 The 100 greatest movies ever made🔥 The best movies of 2023

In classic movie-release terms, September is when awards season starts in earnest, and so it is in the streaming era. With summer fading into the rearview, streaming platforms are bringing out the big guns. That includes another Nicole Kidman-led murder mystery, an action-comedy reuniting George Clooney and Brad Pitt, and Colin Ferrell ‘glamming down’ to the most extreme degree as waddling Batman nemesis the Penguin. Meanwhile, new TV seasons are premiering, while other shows are ending and some just beginning. It’s a lot to take in, which is why we’ve assembled this list of the must-watch new movies and series hitting all the major streamers this month. Close the blinds, cancel your plans, and get to watching. Summer’s done – no one will blame you.   Recommended: 🦚 The best movies to watch on Peacock right now🅽 The 35 best movies on Netflix right now📺 The 25 best movies on HBO and Max right now

If you were lucky enough to grow up pre-Y2K, you would have likely known little about Korea beyond the conflict in the back pages of your school history book. But that all changed when, in the aftermath of the 1997 Asian financial crisis, the country doubled down on funding exportable pop culture in an attempt to rebrand the country on the world stage. The gambit, part designed to attract big business and tourism, was a wild success – and now we have K-Pop, K-dramas and kimchi pouring out of our ears. One of the biggest proponents of the ‘hallyu’ wave, though, has always been filmmaking – with Hollywood-style action blockbuster Shiri; brutal revenge thriller Oldboy; and Academy Awards triumph Parasite among the most resounding victories of a national cinema revitalised from the brink of anonymity. We simply can’t get enough of it today. And for good reason: South Korea is a goldmine of original ideas and storytelling talents who show no signs of taking their feet off the gas as the industry thrives. So why not huff on the metaphorical fumes? Our list of the best Korean movies of all time billows below.Recommended:🇫🇷 The 100 best French movies of all-time🇯🇵 The 50 best Japanese movies of all-time🇭🇰 The 100 best Hong Kong movies of all-time🇮🇹 The best Italian movies of all time: from Bicycle Thieves to The Great Beauty

At this point, Angelina Jolie has ascended to a level of celebrity where she’s more ‘famous for being famous’ than she is famous for being an actor. In part, that’s because she’s dedicated the last few decades to humanitarian work, while being sparing in her movie roles. When she does turn up in something these days, it’s often not the best showcase of her talents. Make no mistake, though: she’s one of Hollywood’s highest-paid stars for a reason, and that’s because her mere presence can elevate just about anything: from an Oscar-baiting drama, to a schlocky action flick, to the MCU. Here are the 13 roles that prove she’s earned every cent. Recommended: 🔥 The 100 best movies of all-time💣 The 101 best action movies of all-time🦸 All the Marvel movies ranked from worst to best

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 enjoys every second of jumpscares and gore, joining a Halloween film screening of fellow horror enthusiasts is an unbeatable way to celebrate All Hallow’s Eve. Don’t worry, though – 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’ and ‘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 66 greatest movie monsters of all time

Tuvo a Anthony Perkins (que conocerás por ser protagonista en Psicosis 1960) como padre, e hizo una aparición como el joven Norman Bates en Psicosis 2 (1983) antes de cumplir los nueve años. ¿Sería exagerado decir que el director Oz Perkins nació para hacer cine de terror? Pues su elección de carrera lo ha llevado a crear una de las experiencias en el cine más emocionantes del año hasta ahora. Sí, hablamos de Longlegs, la cual tiene a Nicolas Cage tanto de productor como de el inquietante asesino serial que da nombre a la película. Y logra ser una obra de brillantez escalofriante que electrificará a los fanáticos del género durante años.  Te puede interesar: Los cines de mejor calidad en la CDMX.  Para empezar, Cage tiene un papel estelar, pero Maika Monroe, de It Follows, es la figura clave de la película. Ella hace de Lee Harker, quien es una agente del FBI en la era Clinton en Estados Unidos, quien parece tener instintos telepáticos, pocas habilidades sociales y una madre fanática religiosa.  En la historia nos movemos en algún lugar de los suburbios invernales del noreste estadounidense, donde un asesino serial deja un rastro de familias masacradas e iconografía oculta a su paso, a pesar de nunca haber entrado a sus casas. El sexto sentido de Harker puede ser lo que finalmente resuelva un caso que ha dejado perplejos a sus colegas más experimentados.  Al igual que Clarice Starling en El silencio de los inocentes, la agente del FBI de Monroe es una joven que lucha por ser

Summer is here – honestly, it is – and with it the return of London’s thriving and fun outdoor cinema scene. After a brief lockdown flirtation with drive-in cinema, during which we all discovered that windscreen wipers are the sworn enemy of movie-watching, this year has an old-school feel to it: cosy blankets; tasty snacks; cocktails, if that’s your thing; headphones; and scenic spots around the city at which an array of big screens will be popping up and entertaining us with crowd-pleasing movies.  Because outdoor screenings aren’t usually the time to dig into arthouse curios and improving documentaries. Rewatching is often the order of the day, and this year it’s all about enshrining ‘Barbie’ into the outdoor cinema canon, alongside the likes of ‘La La Land’, ‘Notting Hill’ and other surefire favourites on London-wide screens. Here’s all the moonlit options for the next few months. Recommended: 📽️ The best cinemas in London💰 London’s best cheap cinemas

What makes a great cinema? For some, it’s cheap tickets and a friendly vibe, while others are happy to pay extra for a sense of indulgence that comes with posh snacks, sofa seating and tiny tables to plonk a cocktail on. There are purists who will always make the case for 35mm projectors and surround-sound powerful enough to shake their insides loose. Film buffs might get an extra buzz from knowing their local picture palace once screened Chaplin movies back when the Little Tramp was the biggest thing at the box office.Whatever you love in a cinema, there are loads across England, Ireland, Wales and Scotland to provide it. And despite a tough year-and-a-bit, they’re still out there providing that unique big-screen experience. What better time, then, to celebrate them in all their variety? We sent our local experts out across the British Isles to find 50 of the very best kinos – and share what makes them special.  Written by Chris Waywell, Isabelle Aron, Huw Oliver, Katie McCabe, Phil de Semlyen, Alim Kheraj, Rosie Hewitson, Joe Mackertich & Chiara WilkinsonRECOMMENDED:  The 50 most beautiful cinemas in the world

Let the normies do their October horror marathons: for true fright fans, every season is spooky season, and anytime is the right time for a horror movie. Netflix has enough scary movies to fill your entire calendar. Unfortunately, there’s a difference between ‘horror’ and actually being horrifying, and not all of the streamer’s offerings are guaranteed to scare your pants off. If you don’t want to waste a night yawning when you should be screaming, we’ve pulled together this list of the best horror movies on Netflix in the UK. It’s a chilling mix of old reliables and modern classics, bloody blockbusters and indie shock-a-thons. All of them are sure to give you nightmares — which is probably exactly what you want. Recommended: 🎃 The best Halloween movies and TV shows on Netflix UK😱 The 100 best horror movies of all-time🔪 The 31 best serial killer movies👹 The 50 best monster movies ever made🧟 The best zombie movies of all-time

Both the starting gun for awards season and the most glamorous film festival on the calendar – sorry, Cannes – the Venice International Film Festival takes over the city’s pencil-thin Lido this week for ten days of red carpets, premieres, and hopefully a few future classics. It wears its glitz with effortless elan, as A-listers like Angelina Jolie, George Clooney and Daniel Craig, glide in and out of the festival via vintage speed boats just as they’ve done since the days of Sophia Loren and Marcello Mastroianni.  Unless you’re lucky enough to be Venetian, scoring a ticket to the movies themselves is not an easy business. But there’s plenty of good reasons to keep an eye out for the films that are making their bow at the Biennale – with a Joker sequel, Craig’s Queer and (very separate) appearances from Jolie and Brad Pitt.  When does the Venice Film Festival start? It all gets underway on Wednesday, August 28, with Tim Burton’s Beetlejuice Beetlejuice as the festival opener, closing ten days later on Saturday, September 7.

The summer was all feast or famine at the box office, with huge hits like Deadpool & Wolverine, Inside Out 2, It All Ends Here and Despicable Me 4 and not too much else. Happily, September has a few more bases covered. There’s some big Hollywood fare in Beetlejuice Beetlejuice and the Burn After Reading reunion that is Brad Pitt and George Clooney’s Wolfs, as well as some intimate human dramas and a clutch of hair-raising horrors. Best of all? It’s a serious showcase for actresses at the top of their games, with Demi Moore, Kate Winslet, Carrie Coon, Saoirse Ronan and Alicia Vikander all in action. Here’s what to look out for. RECOMMENDED: 📽️ The best movies of 2024 (so far)📺 The best TV shows of 2024 you need to stream🏵️ The 100 greatest movies of all time

The Brutalist is a major work of art that asks something from its audience but gives back in spades. Weighing in at a meaty 210 minutes, complete with an old-school opening overture and a 15-minute intermission, it’s like a trip to the pictures circa 1962. It’s even been compared with The Godfather, a parallel that would crush a lesser film like a tin can. Brady Corbet’s epic can handle the hyperbole. With his long-time co-writer Mona Fastvold, the actor-turned-filmmaker has forged a monumental parable about the false promises of the American dream, as well as the act of creation and its uneasy relationship with money, all underpinned by a rich and complex love story. It’s presented in period-evoking 70mm VistaVision, each grainy frame filled with note-perfect performances and big ideas about assimilation, trauma, and architectural form and meaning.After charting the aftermath of the Great War in The Childhood of a Leader (2015), a brooding origin story for a fictional dictator, Corbet repeats the trick with the post-World War II era. Hungarian-Jewish modernist architect László Toth (Adrien Brody, as good as he’s been since The Pianist), his wife Erzsébet (Felicity Jones) and their all-but-mute niece Zsófia (Raffey Cassidy) could easily be victims of that same dictator. They’ve survived the concentration camps but only László has escaped from Europe. He stumbles from the hold of his cargo ship in a stunning opening shot that eventually fills the screen with the Statue of Lib

It takes a film of real chutzpah to needle-drop George Michael’s ‘Father Figure’ into a dom/sub seduction scene and not only get away with possibly the most glaringly on-the-nose musical cue in the history of cinema, but have it hold the moment perfectly.Halina Reijn’s Babygirl is that movie: a deliciously barbed, but wise and ultimately hopeful investigation of female sexual desire, marriage and modern power dynamics that takes a hundred touchpoints, from ’80s erotic thrillers to the indie candour of Sex, Lies and Videotape and Secretary, and does something completely new with them. Nicole Kidman and Harrison Dickinson are magnificent as the age-(and-HR)-inappropriate duo who disappear into a supercharged office relationship that turns out to be a paradise, maze and prison – all at once.  Kidman is Romy, the respected and successful CEO of a company that manufactures robots for Amazon-like warehouses. With her iPhone glued to her palm, she’s jokingly accused of being like one of her own automatons, but her human complexities are there from the first scene. She has seemingly satisfying sex with her doting husband (Antonio Banderas), only to slip away straight afterwards to masturbate to BDSM porn. At work, twentysomething intern Samuel (Dickinson) has an eerie sense of Romy’s unfulfilled needs. He asks for her to be his mentor and she reluctantly agrees, amused by his front. That amusement turns to arousal when he speaks to her in a way no one else would dare. Soon, they’re h

A brooding, muscular FBI procedural that occasionally explodes into Point Break-y action, Aussie director Justin Kurzel’s (Snowtown) true-life thriller delves, pungently and topically, into the inner workings of white nationalism in America before deciding that squealing tyres and shootouts are a lot more fun. It’s a shame because The Order is spearheaded by a bang-on-form Jude Law, bringing a rumpled, lived-in quality to his dogged federal agent – like Eli Wallach doing John McClane. He’s pill-popping bureau veteran Terry Husk – a character description as much as surname here – sent for the good of his health to an Idaho backwater in 1983. ‘The only crime around here is catching trout without a licence,’ the local sheriff tells him. Which is true, if you ignore the fast-growing and heavily armed neo-Nazi cult just outside of town, which he has.Happily, Tye Sheridan’s diligent local cop, Jamie Bowen, has been keeping an eye on a white supremacist group – The Order – that contains an old high-school friend. It’s that kind of community: you grow up to be a Nazi or a cop. There’s not much in the middle.   Nicholas Hoult, who never takes the safe option, imbues the group’s real-life leader, Bob Mathews, with a charismatic kind of malice. He’s a family man, as well as a hardcore racist, with a pregnant mistress (Odessa Young) squirrelled away from his unquestioning wife (Saltburn’s Alison Oliver). Most of all, though, he’s a criminal whose self-professed revolutionaries fund their

Move over Yorgos Lanthimos. Compatriot Alexandros Avranas also has a bleak few things to say about the infinite downside of the human experience in this frosty drama set within the maze of Swedish bureaucracy in 2018. The Greek weird wave man delivered a tar-black portrait of family life in 2013’s Miss Violence, and his latest is an equally poor advert for parenthood. Here, he muscles in on Roy Andersson’s offbeat terrain to deliver a chilly allegory that follows an asylum-seeking Russian family as it navigates unsmiling Swedish bureaucracy.  Dissident teacher Sergei (Grigory Dobrygin, A Most Wanted Man) has fled Russia after a brutal attack from the security services, taking his wife Natalia (Chulpan Khamatova, the girlfriend in Good Bye, Lenin!) and their two young daughters, Alina (Naomi Lamp) and Katja (Miroslava Pashutina), to the relative sanctuary of Sweden. But it’s fair to say that Avranas is not one of life’s optimists, and his depiction of what the family has to deal with would give Kafka a headache. Subjected to interrogation, their claims to asylum picked apart. For reasons never made clear, Sergei’s professional status counts against them here; perhaps he just does not match the preconception of what a political refugee should look like, despite the vivid scar he flaunts in a desperate attempt to be believed.  This depiction of bureaucracy would Kafka a headache But, confusingly, Quiet Life ceases to be about the trauma of the parents – at least, not that trau

For evil to triumph sometimes all it takes is for good men to get massively bogged down in emails with faceless bureaucrats.That’s one read on Errol Morris’s scathing critique on the Trump administration’s profoundly cruel policy of forced separation for the mostly Salvadoran, Guatemalan and Honduran families that crossed the border without visas in the late 2010s. It’s a story of dehumanisation, children in cages, and the blurting, vote-craving policy-making of government by id – and it’s shattering to experience.  The good man here – and he is a genuine hero – is whistleblower Jonathan White. A senior member of the Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR), he fought back against Donald Trump’s undeclared war on illegal migrants. White is the articulate moral core around which Morris builds a quietly furious documentary that traces the enactment of a law that no one remotely thought through.  The plan, as formulated by Trump’s brains trust, was to deter wannabe migrants by turning the ORR, Homeland Security and ICE (US Immigration and Customs Enforcement) into child-catchers. They took babies, toddlers and older kids from their parents and placed them in detention centres. Only, no one was keeping track of who was who – the toddlers could only say ‘momma’, the then-acting head of Homeland Security points out – and there was never any evidence of a deterrent effect. Thousands of young children were kept from their parents for months, causing untold trauma. Some are still to be re

Beetlejuice Beetlejuice is Tim Burton’s best live-action film since 2003’s Big Fish and his most satisfying slice of goth hokum since Sleepy Hollow (1999) – which is not saying all that much, considering the competition includes Big Eyes and Dumbo. His return to Winter River is a wild ride on a rollercoaster that never feels entirely bolted to the ground, and is all the more hair-raising for it. Sensibly, Burton leans into the things that made the 1988 original so memorable. Keaton’s zebra-suited underworld dweller, Betelgeuse, gets much more screen time here (he got a mere 17 minutes in the first film), presiding over an afterlife call centre like a mouldering David Brent, while still holding a candle to Winona Ryder’s grown-up goth girl Lydia Deetz.  He’s a blast, matched by the dependably brilliant Catherine O’Hara as Lydia’s mum Delia, now an abstract artist known as ‘The Human Canvas’ but just as egotistical and doolally as in the first outing. She’s mourning the death of husband Charles (Burton niftily solving the problem of actor Jeffrey Jones’s disgrace with the help of a hungry shark and some stop-motion animation) and is planning ‘a multimedia visual manifesto of our loss’ at the family’s old Winter River house. Cue a surprise marriage proposal from Lydia’s toxic softboi boyfriend (Justin Theroux) and the chaotic return of Betelgeuse. There’s two levels of nostalgia at work. Jenny Ortega’s presence as Lydia’s resentful daughter and the script by Wednesday screenwrit

This analogue noir set in central China evokes satisfying memories of Bong Joon-ho’s great Korean crime thriller Memories of Murder. It’s Jiangdong province, 1995. An elderly lady has been found brutally murdered on the banks of a small town’s slow-moving river. Detective Ma (Yilong Zhu) and his willing but gormless sidekick are soon sifting through possible suspects: a local man with learning difficulties, a hairdresser who seems weirdly keen to hand himself in, or maybe some other malevolent figure. A cassette tape leads them to a young woman and her illicit partner. Maybe they hold the answer?Played by the leather-jacketed Zhu, 36 years old but carrying himself like a world-weary fortysomething, Ma is a jaded sleuth in the best noirish mode: all tired eyes and the faint sense that he’s three or four murder cases past his best.That applies to the police force as a whole, led by a ping-pong-obsessed chief who cranks up the pressure on Ma while rattling on vaguely about ‘collective honour’. Director Wei Shujun brings a subtly satirical lens to all this small-time hubris: the older lady is ‘Granny Four’; the river bank lurker is dubbed ‘Madman’ – lazy nicknames that betray a slapdash methodology. It evokes Bong Joon-ho’s great crime thriller Memories of Murder Near-constant rain backdrops a serial-killer procedural that also evokes David Fincher’s Seven. The killer is two steps ahead, even as Ma spirals into a madness of his own. Early in the piece, his small team is exiled t

Directing an Alien movie in 2024, after six movies and 44 years, must feel like wandering into a kitchen the day after Pancake Day looking for flour and eggs. Every possible ingredient has surely been used, every angle exhausted. Major props, then, to Fede Álvarez for cooking up something fresh in this furiously exciting, gnarly seventh entry. He’s even found the eggs, too. Unlike his franchise predecessors – Ridley Scott, James Cameron, David Fincher, Jean-Pierre Jeunet (side note: did the Amélie man really direct an Alien movie?) – Álvarez is a straight-up horror filmmaker and he’s a perfect pick for the job, pulling off satisfying jumps, ingenious zero gravity sequences, and camera moves that come at the dead-meats-vs-monsters action from entirely new directions.  Smartly, the Don’t Breathe and Evil Dead (2013) director and his co-writer Rodo Sayagues strip things back to basics. Like Scott’s 1979 haunted-spaceship movie, it’s a bunch of blue collar types trapped in an orbiting vessel with the universe’s perfect – and most malevolent – organism.  Romulus is set a few years after the events in Alien and a few before those in Aliens. Combining the claustrophobic tension-building of the former and the gung-ho spirit of the latter, it tracks six young colonists as they plunder an abandoned space station for the cryosleep chambers that will let them escape their dying mining settlement for a brighter future. Except, well, it hosts a few ultra-violent stowaways of its own.  Lik

Fittingly for a story of fresh beginnings, Colleen Hoover’s 2016 memoir of domestic abuse and unresolved childhood trauma got a huge second lease of life when TikTok’s community of bookworms, #BookTok, seized on it five years later. By 2022, it was outselling the Bible.  This smart and sensitive movie version will more than satisfy the millions who’ve picked it up and found a bible of sorts for abuse survivors. It Ends With Us begins like a soapy Nicholas Sparks adaptation about teen love with homeless boys and grown-up flings with hunky ones, but rug pulls all that in a second half that lays into toxic men and the insidiousness of abusive relationships. Blake Lively steps into Hoover’s shoes to play wannabe flower shop owner Lily Bloom, a young woman starting over in Boston in the wake of her unloved dad’s death. He used to beat her mum (a porcelain Amy Morton) and bully her. ‘It’s one of the most beautiful things I’ve never written,’ she snarks of the eulogy she’s asked to deliver.  This adaptation will more than satisfy the book’s millions of readers Enter hunky neurosurgeon Ryle Kincaid (played by director Justin Baldoni) to bring solace in a sexy rooftop meet cute. With that dream-guy job, sly smile and deltoids like small mountain ranges, he’s straight out of Grey’s Anatomy central casting, but the film is self-aware enough to turn its romantic tropes (and its daft character names) on their heads. Ryle is a self-confessed commitment phobe who comes waving his own red f

Next to Umberto D., Chinese director Guan Hu may just have made the enduring masterpiece of man-and-dog movies – Citizen Canine, if you will – in this soul-filling homecoming odyssey set on the windswept fringes of the Gobi Desert.  Taiwanese heartthrob Eddie Peng, once the Hugh Grant of Chinese romcoms, plays against type as a brooding, shaven-headed ex-rock star and stunt biker called Lang. An intense man of few words, he’s a gnomic presence as he returns to his remote hometown after a stint in prison for manslaughter – equally hero-worshipped and hated. A local snake-rearing gangster called Butcher Hu holds him responsible for his nephew’s death and is still thirsting for payback. (Chinese film geeks will get a kick out of seeing Still Life auteur Jia Zhangke as the grim-faced crime boss.) The town that the writer-director sketches out in dusty increments hangs under a cloud of its own: this is the lead-up to the 2008 Beijing Olympics and China is taking a giant broom to its economic left-behinds. The populace is being relocated, and the local packs of stray dogs need to be rounded up. Short of options, Lang soon signs up to join the hastily assembled dog catching squads. This seismic moment in the country’s recent history provides a symbolically apt backdrop to Peng’s return home. He’s trying to work through his baggage as everyone else is packing theirs. This could be the Citizen Canine of dog movies The dog of the title – a sinewy, reputedly rabid greyhound mix – offer

He’s not quite Dr Seuss, but American author Crockett Johnson’s picture books about a four-year-old with a magical crayon have been awakening young imaginations since 1955. In this big-screen treatment, a goofy Zachary Levi embodies the wax-pastel-wielding nipper in grown-up form, as he opens a magical portal and gets spat out in the real world for a fish-out-of-water adventure with his moose sidekick Moose (Get Out’s Lil Rel Howery, not that moosey). As colourful as a Christmas jumper and nearly as naff, the cheery adaption doesn’t justify the 70-year wait. Harold and The Purple Crayon isn’t bereft of charm – there’s a kooky spirit and plenty of fun for younger viewers as Harold’s crayon magics up helicopters, planes and fantastical beasts to bring joy back to a grieving boy called Mel (Benjamin Bottani). But as a family adventure it cries out for the kind of maverick charisma that, say, a prime Robin Williams might have provided, and Carlos Saldanha’s (Rio) direction is stiff when zip is needed. Jemaine Clement hits the right notes as a failing fantasy author who craves the crayon’s power to turn his world into a giant crucible of fire and brimstone, but the rest is as blunt as a broken pencil.  In cinemas worldwide Aug 2.

Can a movie leave you with a comedown? If it’s as raucous and unruly as Kneecap, a nonstop blizzard of beats, bumps of white powder and punky defiance of the British and Belfast’s sectarian past, the answer’s a firm ‘yes’. Not just inspired by real life, but played, brilliantly, by its own three real-life Irish hip-hoppers, this Gaelic rap origin story is a bit like 8 Mile stumbling, half-cut and high, down the Falls Road, or if Trainspotting spoke Gaelic.The story follows three unfulfilled Belfasters with a few things to say – about the Brits, the slow death of their mother tongue and the joys of Class-As – on their journey to becoming the globally-renowned rap trio of the title in the late 2010s. There’s clubs-and-drugs-loving layabouts Naoise (aka ‘Móglaí Bap’) and Liam (‘Mo Chara’), Celtic-loving boyhood pals who piss off the police for larks, and their beat-crafting producer JJ (‘DJ Próvaí’). He’s an older, stuck-in-a-rut school teacher with the musical chops to make alchemy from all their pent-up energy and scribbled-down lyrics. The tunes, from anti-Brit anthem ‘H.O.O.D’ to ‘Parful’, a club banger about the unifying power of getting extremely high with Protestants, offer out-of-it musical interludes as the gang try to juggle career progress with industrial quantities of ketamine. Think 8 Mile stumbling, half-cut and high, down the Falls Road Michael Fassbender lends star power as Móglaí’s dad, a one-time IRA inmate of the city’s notorious Maze prison who has faked his

We’re in the grip of a new wave of Kidmania. Fresh from the rapturous reception afforded Babygirl at the Venice Film Festival, Nicole Kidman is back on our screens in new six-part murder-thriller series The Perfect Couple. Adapted from a 2018 bestseller by Elin Hilderbrand – aka ‘the queen of beach reads’ (cc New York magazine) – it stars the Aussie actress, Dakota Fanning, Liev Schreiber, Eve Hewson, Billy Howle, Meghann Fahy and Midsommar’s Jack Reynor in a glossy Netflix binge. Resistance is probably futile: sooner or later you will be joining everyone else among the grand piles of the Nantucket shoreline to find out exactly what kind of shady business these good-looking people are up too. Clue: it involves murder most horrid. Those olde-worlde clapboard, shingle-style houses and their luxe interiors are among the drawcards for a series that’s been hailed as one of the guilty pleasures of the year. But not all of them were filmed exactly where you might think. Here’s where director Susanne Bier (Bird Box) and her cameras headed to capture the show’s moneyed milieu.  Photograph: Courtesy of Netflix What happens in ‘The Perfect Couple’ Kidman plays super-rich and successful romance novelist Greer Garrison Winbury, long and supposedly happily married to Tag (Liev Schreiber) and living on an exclusive Massachusetts island. One of their sons, Benji (On Chesil Beach’s Billy Howle), is about to marry Eve Hewson’s less privileged Amelia Sacks. Greer is very unhappy about a rich

Mike Leigh, Andrea Arnold, Asif Kapadia are a few of the hometown heroes bringing their new films to this year’s BFI London Film Festival.  The full line-up for this year’s London Film Festival (LFF) line-up has just been announced and it boasts a mighty 255 films – feature length and shorts – plus plenty of free events and immersive works via the LFF Expanded strand.On the programme is Leigh’s new London drama Hard Truths, Arnold’s Cannes-acclaimed Bird and Kapadia’s dystopian docudrama 2073. LFF audiences will get an early look at Daniel Craig’s much-praised performance in Queer, Luca Guadagnino’s William Burroughs adaptation set in Latin America. Pedro Almodóvar’s first English-language drama, the American-set The Room Next Door, is also making its UK bow at the festival, alongside Sean Baker’s Palme d’Or winner Anora, Maria, a Maria Callas biopic starring Angelina Jolie, and RaMell Ross’s Colson Whitehead adaptation The Nickel Boys. Brooklyn director John Crowley is bringing his new romantic drama We Live in Time to the fest, starring Andrew Garfield, Florence Pugh and that cheery carousel horse.   Time Out’s own special presentation this year is A Real Pain. Written, directed by and starring Jesse Eisenberg, it’s a bittersweet road trip movie about the legacy of the Holocaust through the prism of two bickering Polish-American cousins (Eisenberg and Succession’s Kieran Culkin).  Represented on the programme are 112 films and other works made by female and non-binary creat

Storming straight onto the list of the year’s best new streaming shows comes the fourth season of Slow Horses. With Gary Oldman back as slovenly but brilliant cold warrior Jackson Lamb, leading Jack Lowden, Saskia Reeves and their small band of exiled spooks at Slough House, it’s another six episodes of pure viewing pleasure for one of Apple TV+’s best shows. Hugo Weaving’s mysterious spook Frank Harkness is a killer addition.Slow Horses’ realisation of Mick Herron’s series of spy novels, ‘Slough House’, is one of its super-strengths: a grey, slightly out-of-time London that mirrors the characters’ fringe status in UK intelligence. ‘It always feels like it's seven or eight years behind the present date,’ says the show’s veteran supervising location manager, Ian Pollington. ‘Lamb is a relic of the cold war and we want to make it feel down and dirty around the edges.’ He talks us through the new – and old – locations that give season 4 its extra bang. What London locations were used in Slow Horses series 4? Photograph: Apple TV+Roddy at season 4’s fictional chicken shop The explosion (ep 1) – Leather Lane Market, EC1 The series opens with Slough House’s obnoxious hacker genius Roddy Ho (Christopher Chung) emerging from a chicken shop and witnessing a massive explosion. ‘We took over a shop on Leather Lane on the fringes of the City,’ says the location manager of the redressed chicken shop. ‘It’s tricky to take over a business for the time we'd need it, because we have to rebr

This year’s BFI London Film Festival is opening with a bang – probably a lot of them.  The world premiere of Steve McQueen’s new World War II drama ‘Blitz’ is the festival’s opening gala on October 9.  Starring Saoirse Ronan, the film is named after the Nazi bombing campaign against London in 1940 and 1941.It follows nine-year-old evacuee George (Elliott Heffernan) as he tries to make it back to London and his mum Rita (Ronan) and grandpa Gerald (Paul Weller) in the East End.Co-starring are Kathy Burke, Harris Dickinson, Stephen Graham, Leigh Gill, Mica Ricketts, CJ Beckford, Alex Jennings, Joshua McGuire, Hayley Squires, Erin Kellyman, Sally Messham, and music-actor Benjamin Clementine. ‘“Blitz” is a movie about Londoners,’ says McQueen. ‘It honours the spirit of what and how Londoners endured during the Blitz, but also explores the true representation of people in London, while at its core is the story of a working-class family desperate to be reunited during times of war.’  Photograph: Courtesy of Apple McQueen is calling on some pretty elite talent behind the camera too, with production designer Adam Stockhausen (‘12 Years a Slave’), costume designer Jacqueline Durran, and composer Hans Zimmer adding five Oscars’ worth of skill to the production. ‘It's an astounding production that will leave audiences in awe of the director, his cast, and creative collaborators,’ says festival director Kristy Matheson. ‘The depth of character and texture of the city are all peerless an

Barry Keoghan’s new thriller, Bring Them Down, will be one of films competing for the prestigious best film award at October’s BFI London Film Festival.  The 11 newly-announced Official Competition entries take in everything from a Palestinian drama to a Zambian #MeToo manifesto, to a coming-of-age film made using stop-motion animation. Bring Them Down sees Keoghan playing the son of a farmer who becomes embroiled in a violent turf war in the west of Ireland. Also on the line-up is The Extraordinary Miss Flower. Co-directed by Iain Forsyth and Jane Pollard, the London artist-filmmakers behind 2014 Nick Cave doc 20,000 Days on Earth, and scored by Icelandic singer-songwriter Emilíana Torrini, it’s billed as ‘love letter to the enduring power of creativity and friendship’. The 11 films in Official Competition are:  April (Dea Kulumbegashvili)    Bring Them Down (Christopher Andrews) The Extraordinary Miss Flower (Iain Forsyth & Jane Pollard) Four Mothers (Darren Thornton) Living in Two Worlds (Mipo O)       Memoir of a Snail (Adam Elliot) On Becoming a Guinea Fowl (Rungano Nyoni) Thank You For Banking With Us (Laila Abbas) The Wolves Always Come At Night (Gabrielle Brady) Under the Volcano (Damian Kocur) Vermiglio (Maura Delpero)  Photograph: BFI London Film FestivalThe Extraordinary Miss Flower All the award winners will be announced in a special ceremony at the Royal Festival Hall on Sunday, October 20. Previous competition winners include A Prophet, Corsage and last year’s

It’s fair to call the arrival of Sherwood season two a British telly ‘event’ in the same way a fresh run of Line of Duty once would have been. Such is the quality of James Graham’s Nottingham-set crime drama that the prospect of another six episodes should – and probably will – reunite British viewers with their sofas sharpish.  The first two episodes aired over the Bank Holiday weekend, setting up the drama and themes that will unfold over the next few weeks (the final episodes airs on Monday, September 9). A violent crime committed by drug-dealing outsider Ryan Bottomley (Oliver Huntingdon) will set the community ablaze again and spark a turf war between local crime clans the Sparrows and the Bransons. The newly-appointed Sheriff of Nottingham (Ria Zmitrowicz), meanwhile, is fighting a proposed new power station in the area – ramping up the political stakes. Photograph: Sam Taylor/BBCRia Zmitrowicz as Sheriff of Nottingham, Lisa Waters Where was Sherwood season 2 filmed?  Season two prowls Nottingham’s official corridors of power as well diving into the county’s hard-bitten criminal underworld. Look out for Nottingham City Hall, a key location the series was given full access to. ‘When we were filming we got to film in the actual Sheriff’s office in City Hall and we got to meet the real Sheriff at the time,’ says creator James Graham. Nottinghamshire County Council's headquarters was another municipal building used in season two, as was Nottingham’s 17th century castle.

Elton John: Never Too Late is this year’s American Express Gala at the BFI London Film Festival. The documentary look back at the life and 50-year career of Pinner’s favourite son gets its European premiere at the fest on Thursday, October 10. The singer-songwriter, rock god, Watford FC hero, and subject of 2019’s Rocketman is the focal point of the doc co-directed by RJ Cutler and David Furnish that’s billed as ‘an emotionally charged, intimate and uplifting full-circle journey’. Like the recent Blur doc To the End, Never Too Late is framed around the build-up to a mega-gig – though for Wembley, substitute LA’s Dodger Stadium where Elton prepares to make his final concert appearance in the US. The film will see him share memories of the highs and lows of a kaleidoscopic career, as well as his struggles with substance abuse. Cutler is the director of 2009’s sharply observed portrayal of Anna Wintour, The September Issue, and Furnish, of course, is Elton’s long-time partner. All three will be in attendance at the Royal Festival Hall gala on the 10th.  ‘RJ Cutler and David Furnish bring a great intimacy and exhilaration to the story of one of the world's most accomplished and beloved musicians,’ says festival director Kristy Matheson. ‘We're delighted to give audiences a front row seat to one of the most electrifying creative careers of our age.’ The film is the second big musical doc to play at this year’s fest: Morgan Neville’s LEGO-based film about Pharrell Williams, Piece B

This year’s BFI London Film Festival will be getting the LEGO out for its closing night.  Pharrell Williams’s new film ‘Piece by Piece’, a documentary biopic told entirely in the medium of LEGO animation, will be bringing the curtain down on this year’s LFF at the Royal Festival Hall on October 20. And the singer-rapper-actor will be there to intro it in person.  Directed by Morgan Neville, whose music doc Twenty Feet From Stardom won an Oscar in 2014, ‘Piece by Piece’ will invite festival goers into the musical superstar’s life and journey from growing up in Virginia Beach to dominating the music scene as a pop superstar.  The film boasts a powerhouse voice cast of Pharrell collaborators, including Gwen Stefani, Kendrick Lamar, Timbaland, Justin Timberlake, Busta Rhymes, Jay-Z and Snoop Dogg.   ‘“Piece by Piece” is a film of enormous joy and invention,’ says festival director Kristy Matheson. ‘In telling the story of Pharrell Williams, entirely in LEGO®, acclaimed documentarian Morgan Neville brings a sense of wonder to this story that matches the creativity and verve of his subject. This is a must for fans and will charm the uninitiated alike.’ The festival’s opening gala is Steve McQueen’s World War II drama ‘Blitz’, which will be raising the curtain on 12 days and nights of screenings, events, talks, and assorted other movie-related goings-on across London and the UK. This year’s LFF runs from October 9-20. Tickets go on sale to the general public on September 17. Head t

We’ve had #Barbenheimer, now meet ‘Deadpool & Us’. Hot on the heels of Ryan Gosling’s superhero smash, Deadpool & Wolverine, comes the perfect piece of counterprogramming from his real-life partner (and D&W cameo-er), Blake Lively.  Lively is the star and producer of It Ends With Us, the much-anticipated adaptation of Colleen Hoover’s fictionalised account of her abusive childhood and traumatised adulthood. Out this Friday, it’s a couldn’t-be-more-different cinema-going alternative for anyone who doesn’t fancy two hours of sweary superheroes.  At times, It Ends With Us plays like a textbook romance in the Nora Ephron mold, as a young Lily falls for a tragic boy-next-door figure called Atlas (Alex Neustaedter), and the thirtysomething Lily takes a similar path with dishy neurosurgeon Ryle Kincaid (played by director Justin Baldoni). But the only thing in the story that smells of roses is Lily’s Boston flower shop, where she has Ryle’s quirky sister (Obvious Child’s Jenny Slate) to help. Surprisingly, for a story so embedded in Boston and New England life, It Ends With Us was filmed on the doorstep of Beantown’s rival Metropolis, New York. Here’s how it came together.  Photograph: Sony Pictures Where does the movie It Ends with Us take place? It Ends With Us author Colleen Hoover grew up in Texas, but her 2016 mega-selling memoir is set in Maine and Boston. In both the book and film, Lily Blossom grows up in the fictional Maine town of Plethora, a picturesque community of whi

Odeon has just announced that two of its London cinemas will be closing.The chain’s Odeon Covent Garden and Surrey Quays cinemas will be putting up the shutters for the final time on August 11 and 18 respectively. ‘Odeon confirms it will be closing its Covent Garden and Surrey Quays cinemas, due to redevelopment plans taking place at both sites by the respective landlords,’ said the cinema chain in a statement.  Originally opened as the Saville theatre, the four-screen Odeon Covent Garden was converted into a cinema in 1970 and became an Odeon in 2000.  As reported by Time Out, the venue is currently subject to contentious plans to create a basement theatre and hotel within the building. The famous exterior frieze would be preserved, with a six-storey extension added to the ’30s building, according to architect SPPARC’s plans.   Photo: SPPARC Odeon Surrey Quays, meanwhile, is a casualty of the Canada Water regeneration project. It will turn Surrey Quays Leisure Park into a Tesco Extra and 384 new homes. The cinema chain says that it plans to relocate staff from the two sites to other cinemas. Odeon currently operates more than a hundred cinemas across the UK. ‘Supporting our local cinema teams is our number one priority,’ said Odeon in the statement. ‘We will be looking to secure jobs for as many of them as possible in one of our other local cinema locations. We would like to apologise to our guests for any inconvenience this will cause.’  With two other London cinemas, Bro

You probably knew that London’s Australia House stood in for Gringotts Wizarding Bank in Harry Potter, and that you can find the Joker stairs in the Bronx. But did you know that you can find Q Branch under Waterloo Station or how to find Joe Goldberg’s You book store in New York? Enter CineMapper, the movie and travel lover’s dream app. The handiwork of British entrepreneur Tim Hughes and web developer Izzy Osman, it’s a visually-detailed, interactive map of film and TV locations that spans the global. Locations are being added all the time – for new films and classics alike – but there’s already a whole host of spots for Londoners, New Yorkers and film lovers around the world to spend hours exploring.'I create content online about films (@whoshughes) and in one TikTok, I covered Star Wars locations you can visit in the UK,' Hughes tells Mail Online.  'This TikTok hit over a million views so I made it a TikTok series, and eventually I made a Google Map to document them. Two years later, Izzy said he could help make it a proper web app.’ ‘We started sharing CineMapper and it went semi viral again!’ CineMapper currently has 2241 locations across 596 films and streaming shows. Locations are being added all the time – for new films and classics alike – but there’s already loads of grammable spots for Londoners, New Yorkers and film lovers around the world to spend hours exploring and sharing. To demo the tool, just scroll and zoom to pinpoint your nearest movie location.

ロンドンの「オーストラリア高等弁務官事務所」が『ハリー・ポッター』のグリンゴッツ魔法銀行だったことや、ニューヨークのブロンクスに『ジョーカー』に登場した「ジョーカーの階段」があることは有名だ。 しかし、『007』の「Q支部」の場所や、『YOU －君がすべて－』でジョー・ゴールドバーグが働くニューヨークの書店がどこにあるか分かるだろうか？ もしその答えを知りたければ、映画と旅行好きのための夢のウェブアプリ「CineMapper」を見るといいだろう。 イギリス人起業家のティム・ヒューズと開発者イジーの手によるこのウェブアプリは、世界中に広がる映画とテレビのロケ地を視覚的に詳しく説明したインタラクティブなマップを提供している。 現在登録されているのは映画やテレビ、ゲームを合わせた596作品に関する2241地点。新作名作を問わず、ロケ地や作品の舞台になった場所は随時追加されているが、すでにロンドンっ子やニューヨーカー、世界中の映画好きが何時間もかけて探検できるほど、十分なボリュームだといえるだろう。 ヒューズはCineMapperを立ち上げた経緯を、Mail Onlineに語っている。 「私はオンラインで映画に関するコンテンツを作っていて、TikTokのある投稿でイギリスで訪れることができる『スター・ウォーズ』のロケ地を取り上げました」 「するとそれがバズり、再生回数が100万回を超えたので、TikTokでシリーズ化し、最終的にはGoogle Mapでアーカイブしました。その2年後に、イジーがウェブアプリにするのを手伝ってくれると言ってくれ、完成したCineMapperを共有し始めたら、また少しヒットしたんです」 このウェブアプリの使い方は簡単。ロケ地を探したいエリアまでマップを動かして、ピンがある場所をズームするだけだ。 例えばニュージャージーエリアを見ると　『ザ・ソプラノズ 哀愁のマフィア』のロケ地が、イギリスでは『ブリジャートン家』や『ハリー・ポッター』に登場するスポットが簡単に見つかる。もちろん、『デッドプール＆ウルヴァリン』に登場するノーフォークの冷たい北海のビーチも登録されている。 このアプリは映画ファンの間で人気を博していて、1週間で21万7000ものピンがクリックされているという。 関連記事 『Step inside your favourite movies with this free set-jetting app（原文）』 『東京、漫画やアニメの舞台として知られる神社10選』 『東京を舞台にした映画10選』 『ギャング映画ベスト30』 『史上最高のロマンチックコメディ映画30選』 『2024年公開の注目映画15選』 東京の最新情報をタイムアウト東京のメールマガジンでチェックしよう。登録はこちら