Phil de Semlyen

For over a decade, it often seemed like the only movies being made were Marvel movies. Beginning in 2008 with the introduction of Robert Downey Jr’s Iron Man, new offshoots, franchises and ensemble pictures arrived with the sun, each raking in more cash than the last – a testament to both the comic monolith’s meticulous world-building and, of course, its marketing budget. Things have changed recently, however. Ever since peaking with Avengers: Endgame, the MCU has been on a downward trajectory, commercially and creatively – and it’s not just the Martin Scorseses of the world saying so. In truth, though, even in its glory days, not all Marvel movies were created equal. For every box-office-dominating event picture, the studio would churn out a few inessential space-fillers. So while we wait to see if upcoming entries Deadpool & Wolverine, Captain America: Brave New World and Thunderbolts manage to pull the franchise out of its doldrums, we decided to see what’s worked best and what has fallen flat by ranking all 33 official MCU flicks released so far. As the list demonstrates, the glory days are still where the gold/vibranium lies. Recommended: 🦸🏿 The 50 best comic book movies of all time💣 The 101 best action movies ever made🕵️ 40 murder mysteries to test your sleuthing skills to the max

Last year we bid farewell to Succession, Barry and Top Boy, fell hard for Beef, Colin From Accounts and Blue Lights. The next 12 months should help us move on – the potential impact of 2023’s writers’ strike notwithstanding – as early hits like World War II epic Masters of the Air and Mr and Mrs Smith, Prime Video’s intoxicating mix of witty marital drama and zippy espionage caper, are already proving. Ahead are hotly-anticipated new runs of Bridgerton and Squid Game on Netflix, a third season of Industry, a sci-fi prequel in Dune: Prophecy, HBO’s barbed political satire The Regime, Park Chan-wook spy thriller The Sympathizer, and The Franchise, the latest from telly genius Armando Iannucci – among many other potentially binge-worthy offerings. But there’s only so many hours in the day and you can’t spend all of them on the sofa. Here’s our guide to the shows most worthy of your time.RECOMMENDED: 🔥 The best TV and streaming shows of 2023🎥 The best movies of 2024 (so far)📺 The 100 greatest ever TV shows you need to binge

Every time you think you’re finally ready to cancel your Netflix subscription, they pull you back in – and it’s usually not an exclusive Adam Sandler or Lindsay Lohan movie that does it (although maybe sometimes). Most of the time, it’s because of a must-binge new series. Original episodic programming has been the streamer’s calling card ever since it stopped being the DVD rent-to-mail service and went entirely online. It changed the game with House of Cards in 2013 and has continually elevated it since, with the likes of Stranger Things and Russian Doll and the world-dominating Squid Game. Sure, there have been some creatively fallow periods, but then it always seems to bounce back with sometime leftfield, like Beef or One Day. Since it’s continually adding hours of essential content to its catalogue, there’s more high-quality content than you possibly have time for. That’s we’ve put together a list of the 41 Netflix originals series you absolutely have to see before finally deleting your account – and of course, once you think you’ve exhausted all your options, something else will get added just as you’re about to press ‘cancel’.  And before you get all upset about the absence of Black Mirror or Cobra Kai, we’ve left out shows that originated elsewhere before the platform picked them up. We’re also sticking to scripted series – sorry Tiger King and the countless other true-crime docs. That’s a list for another time. Recommended: 🎥 The 35 best movies on Netflix right now🔎 

It’s still early days, but 2024 is already shaping up to be a gala year at the multiplex. Last year was a cracker – thanks to Oppenheimer, Barbie, Past Lives et al – but the next 12 months promise plenty, with Denis Villeneuve delivering a long-awaited Dune sequel, George Miller back at the bullet farm with Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga, a resurrection of the Alien franchise, and a tonne of other big-screen fare to get excited about. So far, we’ve been spoiled rotten, with the achingly lovelorn All of Us Strangers, Yorgos Lanthimos’s riotous Poor Things, and Dev Patel’s eye-wateringly violent debut Monkey Man just a few of the good reasons to get to the cinema. So, the criterion for entry: some of these movies came out in the US at the back end of 2023 – Oscars qualification required it – but we’re basing this list on UK release dates to include the best worldwide releases from between January and December. We’ll be updating it with worthy new releases as we go, 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

Has movie music ever been better? With legends like John Williams and Howard Shore still at work, Hans Zimmer at the peaks of his powers, and the likes of Jonny Greenwood, AR Rahman, Mica Levi, and Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross knocking it out of the park, the modern film score is a Dolby Atmos-enhancing feast of modernist compositions, lush orchestral classicism and atmospheric soundscapes.What better time, then, to celebrate this art form within an art form – with a few iconic soundtracks thrown in – and pay tribute to the musicians who’ve given our favourite movies (and, to be fair, some stinkers) earworm-laden accompaniment? Of course, narrowing it all down to a mere 100 is tough. We’ve prioritised music written for the screen, but worthy contenders still missed out, including Dimitri Tiomkin’s era-defining score for It’s a Wonderful Life and Elton John’s hummable tunes for The Lion King.To help do the narrowing down, we’ve recruited iconic movie composers, directors and broadcasters like Philip Glass, Carter Burwell, Max Richter, Anne Dudley, AR Rahman, Emilie Levienaise-Farrouch, Edgar Wright and Mark Kermode to pick their favourites. Happy listening!Recommended: 🔥 The 100 best movies of all time.🪩 The 50 best uses of songs in movies.💃 The greatest musical movies ever made.

Last year, a genre usually filled with shambling zombies and sentient mounds of carnivorous goo birthed leftfield successes like M3GAN and Skinamarink, low-budget horror hits that elbowed their way to viral status, even amid the giddy fluorescence of Barbie and prestige awardsiness of Oppenheimer.  By contrast, this year’s slate of scares probably won’t catch too many people sleeping. 2024 is loaded with genre prequels, sequels and spin-offs, from MaXXXine, the third instalment of Ti West’s cult-fave franchise, to the alien-invasion terror of A Quiet Place: Day One, to the extremely-long-awaited Beetlejuice 2. But given that horror is historically a genre of small expectations and big surprises, there’s bound to be something that pops up to frighten the bejeepers out of us when we least expect it. Here’s the best of what’s freaked us out so far.  🎃 The 100 best horror films ever made 😱 The scariest movies based on a true story 💀 The best horror movies of 2023

Many cineastes turn their noses up at the action genre, but let’s be real: if you don’t like action movies, do you really like cinema? Because if the main point of film is to make you feel something, well, what produces more visceral feeling than a good action flick?  The best action movies choreograph violence with almost balletic grace, and can karate kick your heart harder than any romantic drama. This list of the greatest action films ever made is proof that the genre is more versatile than it appears. We polled over 50 experts in the field, from Die Hard director John McTiernan to Machete himself, Danny Trejo, along with Time Out’s writers, and the results show just how awesome and unique the best action movies can be when done correctly. Written by Eddy Frankel, Eddy Frankel, Yu An Su, Joshua Rothkopf, Trevor Johnston, Ashley Clark, Grady Hendrix, Tom Huddleston, Keith Uhlich, Dave Calhoun, Phil de Semlyen, Dave Calhoun and Matthew Singer Recommended: 🔥 The 100 best movies of all-time😬 The 100 best thrillers of all-time🪖 The 18 greatest stunts in cinema (as picked by the greatest stunt people)🥋 The 25 best martial arts movies of all-time

There are a million podcasts out there, and 2024’s releases are showing no signs of slowing down. There’s already been a load of bangers since the beginning of the year, and here at Time Out, we’re determined to listen to them all. After all, how else are you going to know which one to choose? We’ve rounded up our favourites, from political podcasts that look behind the news to comedy podcasts with your favourite funny people, and plenty of those all-important investigative whodunnits to keep you up at night. If you’re looking to dig deeper into one genre, we’d recommend trying our specialist lists on for size (you’ll find them below). But for a full list of good, addictive podcasts of every genre, read on.  RECOMMENDED:🎧 The best podcasts on Spotify😂 The best comedy podcasts 🗞️ The best news podcasts💤 The best sleep podcasts🎶 The best music podcasts

Get out your police tape because the murder-mystery is back! Or maybe the genre just faked its own death? However you want to put it, the old-fashioned whodunnit had fallen far out of fashion until recently, despite a history that stretches back to the silent era. But the surprise success of 2019’s Knives Out revealed a major hunger for more throwback mysteries. Suddenly the genre is everywhere:  from TV shows like Hulu’s Only Murders in the Building and Peacock’s Poker Face, to big-screen remakes of Murder on the Orient Express and Death on the Nile, to Glass Onion, Knives Out’s much-discussed sequel. We may not have known how much we missed them, but it’s a very welcome return. Especially considering how comfortable we’ve all become in the last few years to half-watching movies from our couch while scrolling through our phones. A mystery is the ideal antidote to distracted viewing. What engages an audience more than trying to solve a murder? So let’s round up some suspects. Here are the 40 best murder mystery movies ever. Contributors: Phil de Semlyen, Matthew Singer, Annette Richardson, Ashanti Omkar Recommended:🕵️ The 100 best thriller films of all time🔪 The best true crime documentaries on Netflix in the US🔥 The 100 greatest films ever made

When people think of 1990s movies, the first images that come to mind are usually John Travolta and Uma Thurman twisting the night away, or Keanu Reeves contorting his body to dodge a slew of slow-moving bullets. But please, save a little mental space for Michael Douglas’s ass. It was the golden age of the erotic thriller, and back then it seemed like you couldn’t go to the multiplex without having the option of watching a woman have sex with a man – usually Douglas, sometimes Tom Berenger or a random Baldwin – and then try to ruin and/or end their life.  Yes, erotic thrillers were often ‘problematic’ and almost always self-consciously campy, but damn, they could be fun – and fun, sexy movies are precisely what’s missing from cinemas today. But there are signs of a potential comeback: Love Lies Bleeding, a queer neo-noir from British director Rose Glass, is one of 2024’s buzziest movies, and Luca Guadagnino’s Challengers promises at least sexual intrigue, if not lurid violence. Even if a revival never comes to fruition, the ’80s and ’90s alone provide us with a rich back catalogue of steamy violence to revisit. Here are 36 of cinema’s best erotic thrillers to get your blood boiling. Recommended: 🍆 The 101 best sex scenes in movies😬 The 100 best thriller movies of all-time😍 The 100 best romantic films of all-time 🕵️ 40 murder mystery movies to test your sleuthing skills to the max🔥 The 100 best movies of all-time

Television used to be considered one of the lowest forms of entertainment. It was derided as ‘the idiot box’ and ‘the boob tube’. Edward R Murrow referred to it as ‘the opiate of the masses’, and the phrase ‘I don’t even own a TV’ was considered a major bragging right. And for a long time, it was hard to say that television’s poor reputation was undeserved.  A lot has changed. Television is now the dominant medium in basically all of entertainment, to the degree that the only thing separating movies and TV is the screen you’re watching on. Now, if you don’t own a television – or a laptop or a tablet or a phone – you’re basically left out of the cultural conversation completely. The shift in perception is widely credited to the arrival of The Sopranos, which completely reinvented the notion of what a TV show could do. But that doesn’t mean everything that came before is primordial slurry. While this list of the greatest TV shows ever is dominated by 21st century programs, there are many shows that deserve credit for laying the groundwork for this current golden age. Chiseling them down to a neat top 100 is difficult, so we elected to leave off talk shows, variety shows and sketch comedy, focusing on scripted, episodic dramas, comedies and miniseries.  So don’t touch that dial – these are the greatest TV shows of all-time. Recommended: 📺 The best TV and streaming shows of 2023 (so far)🔥The 100 greatest movies of all-time🎬The most bingeable series on Netflix

Comedy has a shorter shelf life than just about any other movie genre. A classic drama will still make hearts swell and eyes water decades down the line, and a truly terrifying horror movie can still scare the bejesus out of viewers no matter how standards for scares change. But humour is highly subjective and dependent on context: what’s funny in 1924 might land with a thud in 2024.  That’s why, when considering the greatest comedy movies of all-time, one of the most important questions is not necessarily how big the laughs are, but how long they can keep audiences laughing. With the help of comedians like Diane Morgan and Russell Howard, actors such as John Boyega and Jodie Whittaker and a small army of Time Out writers, we believe we’ve found the 100 finest, most durable and most broadly appreciable comedies in history. As we said, hilarity is in the gut of the beholder – some like it, silly, others sophisticated or dark or surreal – but if you don’t find something funny on this list, you may want to check your pulse. Recommended: 🔥 The 100 best movies of all-time🥰 The greatest romantic comedies of all time🤯 33 great disaster movies😬 The best thriller films of all-time🌏 The best foreign films of all-time

Like a man granted possession of his own Time Stone, Alex Garland seems to have glimpsed all of humanity’s possible timelines, and discovered that they’re all bad. Whether it’s eco-catastrophe (Annihilation, Sunshine), the menacing side of A.I. (Ex Machina, Never Let Me Go), Big Tech doing Big Tech things (Devs), or good old-fashioned zombies (28 Days Later), the Londoner is not envisaging a future of levity and joy for us all. The often gripping but ultimately frustrating Civil War sees the Brit casting a penetrating outsider’s glance at the current political divisions in America and drawing similarly bleak conclusions. Nine filmmakers out of ten would open it by clueing in their audience with a few scene-setting title cards: the US President (Nick Offerman), now serving a Constitution-busting third term, has abolished the FBI, California and Texas have seceded and their forces are sweeping across America towards Washington. That kind of thing.  Garland is not that filmmaker. He plunges straight in, leaving you to pick up the situation as you go. It’s deliberately disorientating. What you do know is that Kirsten Dunst’s hard-bitten photojournalist, Lee, and Wagner Moura’s reporter, Joel, are aiming to get from New York to DC before the city falls to score an interview with the President. A dangerous car journey shared with Stephen McKinley Henderson’s veteran newshound and cub snapper (Priscilla’s Cailee Spaeny) is the only way to do it.  Alex Garland is not envisaging a fut

Origin-itis, the most irritating habits of biopics, is one of the problems that blights Sam Taylor-Johnson’s genuine effort to honour Amy Winehouse’s (Marisa Abela) life and music. From that trademark beehive to the lyrics to ‘Stronger’, everything in Back to Black gets its own origin story – usually spelled out and double underlined in case you missed it. Not all of these vignettes are duds – Amy’s meet-cute with Blake Fielder-Civil (Jack O’Connell, excellent) over pints and pool in a Camden boozer is genuinely terrific – but they don’t make a script that already feels soft-soaped to get the Winehouse’s estate’s approval, feel any less pedestrian. Abela does solidly with the impossible task of capturing this unique woman’s voice and spirit, but how to tackle Winehouse’s tragic, booze-and-drugs-fuelled death without it feel exploitative? For screenwriter Matt Greenhalgh, who did such an affecting job reprising Joy Division singer Ian Curtis’s life and death in Control (2007), the answer is to swerve it altogether via a weirdly abrupt ending. When the film was announced, Twitter threw a collective fit. Turns out Twitter isn’t always wrong. In UK cinemas Fri Apr 12. In US theaters May 17.

Stark social drama meets boy’s own adventure in this strikingly photographed African-set, Oscar-nominated adventure.  It’s a combination that should be very easy to get very wrong. In fact, it’s hard to think of too many filmmakers who have even tried it – at least since Vittorio De Sica’s Miracle in Milan (1951) mashed up neorealist grind and flying kids on broomsticks. But with Io Capitano, De Sica’s fellow Italian Matteo Garrone frames the sorrows and struggles of two African kids as they slog across the continent with steel and sensitivity. It’s wildly exciting in places, horrifying in others, without ever feeling exploitative of a real-world crisis that is claiming the lives of boys just like them. The title literally translates as ‘Me, the captain' – a reference to a moment of heroism on a fateful boat journey that awaits the film’s protagonist, Senegalese teenager Seydou (Seydou Sarr). There are faint echoes of Captain Phillips’ ‘I’m the captain now!’, uttered by Barkhad Abdi’s Somali pirate – although here all the pirates are on land.Seydou is what the western media would call ‘an economic migrant’. With his cousin Moussa (Moustapha Fall), he sets off from Dakar on an African odyssey that points hopefully for Italy, with dreams of a better life and money to send home, but only the vaguest notion of how he’ll achieve it. What he’s leaving behind – a horrified mum, loving siblings and a home – is a source of melancholy that lurks in the fabric of the film.  Newcomer Sey

Boy, whatever happened to that nice kid from Skins and Lion? The new Dev Patel is taking no prisoners in this slice of Mumbai mayhem, announcing himself as a filmmaker with possibly the most ferocious mainstream action movie since The Raid, and as an action star by sticking a knife into a goon’s neck. With his teeth. The John Wick movies are an obvious touchpoint for the kind of revenge mission flick the Londoner is going for – it even namechecks the Keanu Reeves movies at one point – but he applies his own lens of grimy realism to the formula and adds some real political edge. Monkey Man is a gory hero’s journey embroidered with mythical folk traditions and laced with a stark commentary on India’s corrupt cops and seedy super-rich.  It opens with an explainer: Lord Hanuman, the Hindu monkey god, is a courageous deity who is robbed of his powers, only to come back stronger than ever. That’s the arc the film charts, only with Patel’s unnamed ‘Kid’ in the role. He’s introduced wearing a monkey mask – an anonymous intro that’s an instant display of confidence, especially in a film with so few familiar faces – and being battered for measly amounts of cash in rigged back alley fights. Sharlto Copley’s sleazy impresario promises a bonus if his human punchbag spills blood. The kid is a long way from the finished killing machine he needs to be to execute his mysterious revenge mission, but he’s got smarts from the get-go, pulling off an intricate con to inveigle his way into a low-le

The kind of thirsty even a bucket of Gatorade can’t help with, this wildly enjoyable tennis movie works on the sensible basis that if you take three smokeshow actors, stick them in shorts, bathe them in sweat and pheromones and have them run rings around each other in a fashion even Jules and Jim might blanch at, you might be onto something.  It helps, of course, to have Luca Guadagino calling the shots. The Italian auteur delivers the equivalent of two terrific movies in one here. The first, a sports movie that will satisfy tennis fans in a way that, say, Wimbledon didn’t, examines the pressures of life as an elite athlete. The second, the one that draws you in deepest, is a satisfyingly murky relationship drama where viciousness and homoerotism bubble away beneath a stylish surface. Challengers opens with a seemingly common-or-garden tournament final in 2019 – a small-town challenger event where journeyman pros battle it out for $7000 prize money and a shot at US Open qualification.  On opposite sides of the net are Josh O’Connor’s Patrick Zweig and Mike Faist’s Art Donaldson. Watching on is Zendaya’s Tashi Duncan, a former wunderkind forced to retire by a knee injury. Then Justin Kuritzkes’s cleverly constructed screenplay introduces two timelines in flashback: the week leading up to the match and 13 years previously with the youthful trio all tennis hopefuls at college. And every time it heads back to the court, the match has taken on new significance. It’s a tennis love

‘The Father. The Son. The Sydney Sweeney.’ Whoever came up with the unofficial tagline for this nunsploitation horror may have consigned themselves to a spell in purgatory, but they’ve definitely nailed the full-blooded commitment the fast-rising Euphoria star brings to her first ‘final girl’ role. The Suspiria-with-sacrements premise has Sweeney’s devout young American, Cecilia, invited to take the veil at an old monastery outside of Rome. Unbeknownst to her, but thanks to a harrowing prelude that calls back to an iconic European horror movie (you’ll know the one), very much beknownst to us, the picturebook convent hosts the kind of vicious bloodletting of which the Borgias would be proud.  A really charismatic actor can supercharge even the most stolid genre fare, and that’s what Sweeney pulls off as the innocent but fast-learning Cecilia. Her arc from chaste and trusting to blood-caked and severely pissed-off turbocharges this workmanlike horror.Cecilia’s lack of Italian puts her at an immediate disadvantage, distancing her from her fellow nuns, some of whom, like Benedetta Porcaroli’s spiky Sister Gwen, are already rattling the bars of their liturgical jail. Something is off here – and it gets off-er when Cecilia, a virgin, discovers she’s pregnant. An immaculate conception, as the cardinal and mother superior hope, or something more sinister? The seriously charismatic Sweeney turbocharges this workmanlike horror  What follows is a liturgy of classic horror moves: mysteri

Most disaster movies announce themselves with vast tsunamis, spewing volcanoes or cow-flinging twisters. In Senegalese writer-director Ramata-Toulaye Sy’s tough but tender debut, balance with the natural world falls out of kilter in smaller increments – and with it, a love affair and a whole community.  Set in a tight-knit village in rural Senegal that’s baking dangerously in the 50 degree heat, Banel & Adama follows two star-crossed lovers. The fierce-spirited Banel (Khady Mane) and the mellower Adama (Mamadou Diallo) have been brought together by the death of her first husband. Their arranged marriage, fast-tracked by Adama’s status as chief-in-waiting and the community’s need for him to produce an heir, might have produced a loveless union. Instead, the pair are inseparable, spending their spare time excavating an old sand-covered abode as a new home for themselves beyond the village. Their plan, coupled with Adama’s refusal of the chiefdom, hit like an earthquake in their traditional community. It’s a powerful love story with a bruised heart  From sombre Islamic prayers to café-touba-fuelled socialising, Banel & Adama is stitched beautifully together from the fabric of rural Senegalese traditions. But just as Banel’s bright, more modern-feeling clothes offer dazzling bursts of colour in cinematographer Amine Berrada’s washed-out palette, the couple’s quest for emancipation is too confronting for their fellow villagers. The village elders – and fuelled by jealousy, some of

If we’re living in a new golden age of horror, then David Dastmalchian is its Christopher Lee. With his sallow countenance, laconic elegance, and general air of a man who sleeps in a crypt, the actor brings a note of eeriness to everything he does. So often an eye-catching side act in blockbusters like The Suicide Squad, Oppenheimer and Dune, he gets the perfect vehicle in this sinister, wickedly clever found-footage horror that purports to have been a real broadcast in 1977 America. Instead of a creaking coffin, it’s a creaking late-night chat show that’s trapping Dastmalchian’s host, Jack Delroy. Once a relatively successful Johnny Carson wannabe, he’s suffering from plummeting ratings and a lack of fresh ideas. The recent death of his young wife adds a layer of existential despair that he hides behind a forced smile and some lame patter with his band leader. Halloween night, though, may be his salvation. As his fancy-dress-clad audience watches on, he introduces a parapsychologist (Laura Gordon) and a young Satanic cult survivor suffering – supposedly – from demonic possession. No one’s had a demon on a chat show before – not even prime Carson – so this could be the break he’s been looking for.  A sceptic of the paranormal (Ian Bliss, supremely pompous) is invited on ‘for balance’.  This wonderfully creepy horror is like Alan Partridge by way of The Exorcist The studio itself makes a really effective setting for this one-location horror – a deceptively beige environment w

‘People seem a little aggressive around here,’ notes Jake Gyllenhaal’s taciturn but twinkly-eyed bouncer, Elwood Dalton, of the good people in Florida’s Glass Key. Once a UFC champion, now haunted by guilt and spiritually at odds with his own violent skillset, Dalton is also a master of understatement. The punters at the sunny Florida establishment he’s been hired to manage can’t make it through so much as a quiet beer without smashing each other’s faces in. Even more than the Patrick Swayze cult classic on which Doug Liman’s fun and ferocious update loyally riffs, this Road House is a snarling beast of a thing, full of snapped limbs and faces like hamburger patties. The fight scenes, choreographed by Logan stunt man Garrett Warren, are spectacularly violent. I could swear someone yelped at one point in my screening. It could well have been me. This roadhouse is a thatched, open-plan joint in which a conveyor belt of house bands play behind chicken wire (presumably no one books this place more than once). It makes the Mos Eisley cantina look like a soft play centre. There’s a hospital 20 minutes down the road, Dalton helpfully informs a group of troublemaking biker meatheads, before pulverising them and driving them there.  The cartoonish Conor McGregor is the bad kind of stunt casting The first half is full of similarly knowing touches. Then Conor McGregor strides into the movie, serving both as Dalton’s brawny nemesis and testosterone-fuelled comic relief, and subtlety bec

Do you work to live or live to work? If you’ve got a half-decent job, it might just be the latter. For young millennial Angela, a hard-pressed PA at a Bucharest film production company in Radu Jude’s self-described tale of ‘Cinema and Economics in Two Parts’, it’s barely even the former. She’s a pissed-off but hard-working member of the gig economy, grinding through a 16-hour shift. The ‘Ode to Joy’ on her ringtone feels strictly ironic. Played by Ilinca Manolache with gum-chewing insouciance and a total absence of bullshit, Angela schlepps around the city in her car, blasting out Romanian turbo-folk and hip hop on the radio, flicking V signs at abusive motorists, and generally trying to keep her eyes open as she films victims of industrial accidents sharing their testimonies. The end result will be a corporate video encouraging workers to wear their safety gear – a message that, by implication, makes these broken-down ex-employees culpable in their own misfortune.The hypocrisy in this doesn’t quite lead to a political awakening in Angela as she travels from assignment to assignment. Instead, Jude shows how the demands of this working life turns the smallest gesture of personal autonomy into an act of defiance. Even a quick after-hours shag with an older man puts her behind the clock and scrambling for excuses. Angela’s creative outlet is a TikTok character called Bobita (Manolache’s own lockdown creation), a wildly offensive Andrew Tate-like caricature, complete with bald he

If Aardman hired David Cronenberg to reboot ’80s Plasticine scamp Morph, it might look a bit like this creepy collision of body horror and stop-motion craft. It’s a wildly inventive spurt of bug-eyed British gore that pulls the innards out of the creative process. Quite literally, at some points. Game of Thrones’ Aisling Franciosi was a torrent of female rage in rape revenge thriller The Nightingale. Here, the anguish is channelled inwardly as her stop-motion filmmaker Ella Blake grasps for the inspiration to finish her puppet film, gradually losing her moorings in the process. It doesn’t help Ella’s state of mind that her twisted fairy tale is set in a tangled wood where a trembling puppet is stalked by a grotesque figure called the Ashman. Or that she lives under the shadow of her disapproving mother (Stella Gonet), a legendary animator incapacitated by a stroke and content to sit at her shoulder pointing out what she’s doing wrong. Boyfriend Tom (Tom York) is handsy rather than helpful.  ‘Great artists always put themselves into their work,’ whispers her neighbour, played with impish glee by nine-year-old Caoilinn Springall. She’s a cheery poppet who slowly morphs into a malicious muse, with the unnamed girl soon dishing out the darkest notes imaginable – at least one involving a Stanley knife. It’s a wildly inventive spurt of bug-eyed British gore  The psychological scares stem from the medium itself by debut director Robert Morgan and are underlined by composer Lola de

This clever entry to the things-get-freaky-in-the-woods horror canon – fellow entries: The Blair Witch Project, Dog Soldiers, The Witch, The Ritual – turns the clock back to the misty, starvation-stalked days of early man, where a band of hunter-gatherers find themselves hunted, and in one case, gathered, by something deeply malevolent.  Actually, it’s an early woman who gives the film its spine. Extraordinary’s Safia Oakley-Green plays Beyah, a fierce ‘stray’ reluctantly adopted by a small group of nomads traversing this unpromising country to find sanctuary. She gets a few crumbs of solidarity and welcome from Kit Young’s earnest wannabe-warrior that are noticeably absent from Chuku Modu’s brooding alpha and the rest of the group. Out of Darkness wisely dedicates its early scenes to establishing that tense dynamic. These Paleolithic travellers need each other… but how much? The small fault lines quickly become chasms when the nastiness breaks out. As an outsider, Beyah is the most vulnerable once they step into a forest that seems to hold some kind of demonic presence.  Why not risk death by demon when the exposure will get you anyway? Debut director Andrew Cumming makes full use of landscape and time period. Horror often has a problem with characters’ annoyingly faulty decision-making; here, their hierarchy of needs, with food and shelter to the fore, makes self-endangering choices more than believable. Why not risk death by demon when the exposure and hunger will get you

Staggeringly good telly by any standards, Netflix’s ‘Baby Reindeer’ is a drama with a highly relatable sense of place. Its themes – of toxic obsession, mental illness, half-buried trauma, and, eventually, healing – play out against a recognisable backdrop of spaces that we’ve all experienced ourselves. Pubs. Bars. Clubs. Night buses. Long, gloomy walks home. The nightmarishness of the events depicted in the show is accentuated by Edinburgh and London locations too preoccupied with their own shit to take stock of one lonely man’s implosion.The series’ creator-star Richard Gadd transplants his own one-man show from stage to screen with a level of honesty best described as ‘agonising’, determined to make ‘Baby Reindeer’ a deeply personal but also universal viewing experience that transcends tired bunny-boiling stalker clichés. Those locations play a key role in that. Here’s where to find them. Warning: contains mild ‘Baby Reindeer’ spoilers. Photograph: Netflix The Hoppy – Meadowbank, Edinburgh  ‘Baby Reindeer’s time-jumping structure is one of its great strengths: stand-up comedian Donny (a near-autobiographical version of Gadd) relives his trauma and experiences at the hands of stalker Martha (played by Jessica Gunning). The younger Donny’s fateful experiences at the Edinburgh Festival aren’t tackled until episode 3. We see him walking, wide-eyed, down the Royal Mile and through the Grassmarket, before unveiling his hit-and-miss comedy show, at a pub closer to the edge of th

Season 2 of ‘Blue Lights’ has just landed on the BBC. With it comes another tense, visceral and meticulously crafted slab of Belfast-set police drama as the cops at Blackthorn police station tackle a new loyalist threat. The handiwork of two Northern Irish journalists-turned-showrunners, Adam Patterson and Declan Lawn, both once of BBC investigative news programme ‘Panorama’, it marries characters with depth – fraught, hard-pressed Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI) officers, as well as criminals driven by greed or ideology – and real-world city backdrops that lend authenticity and cultural edge. As Patterson tells Time Out, Belfast is the show’s secret sauce. ‘You do a lot of location shooting in shows like this and it was really important to us to find the real places,’ he says. ‘We’re made a concerted effort to make the city a proper character in the show.’ The first season was set in nationalist West Belfast. The second run moves across the city to loyalist East Belfast. ‘Nobody’s really shown loyalism with this amount of depth before,’ says Patterson. ‘Sometimes it's positive and heartwarming; sometimes it’s dark and dangerous, but that is the world of Northern Ireland.’ Here’s how it came together on screen. Photograph: Adam PattersonBelfast’s Netherleigh House doubled as Blackthorn Station in ‘Blue Lights’ season 2 Blackthorn police station Filmed at: Netherleigh House, Belfast You may not even notice it but ‘Blue Lights’ police station, Blackthorn, has a new

Season 1 of ‘Blue Lights’ was one of the TV highlights of last year. The BBC cop show offered a ridiculously tense inside track on the dangerous work of Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI) cops that was satisfying both as a police procedural and as a gutsy, uncompromising thriller. Co-created by ‘Panorama’ alumni Declan Lawn and Adam Patterson, it delivered both an unvarnished look at Belfast’s cultural and political fault lines and a dive into Northern Ireland’s organised crime scene, with the odd off-the-books MI5 op thrown in. All through the eyes of rookie officers Grace Ellis (Siân Brooke), Annie Conlon (Katherine Devlin) and Tommy Foster (Nathan Braniff) at Belfast’s fictional Blackthorn Station.  The second season is landing on the BBC One this month and Lawn and Patterson are promising more of the same – only ‘bigger, bolder and more dramatic’. Drugs and street crime are on the rise this time out, which means more pressure and more perils for our doughty but hard-pressed band of law enforcers. And somewhere out there there are probably more gun-brandishing gangsters ready to get all their leave cancelled. Here’s what you need to know.  Photograph: Christopher Barr/Two Cities TelevisionKatherine Devlin and Nathan Braniff in ‘Blue Lights’ When is season 2 of Blue Lights released?  It all kicks off – figuratively and probably literally – on Monday April 15. What should we expect from season 2?  Time Out’s verdict on season 1 – ‘a gripping and cliché-free police d

Guy Ritchie’s new movie, The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare, is an action-comedy set in World War II. Like Inglourious Basterds, it’s a men-on-a-mission movie in which a crack unit sets about knocking Nazi heads together and getting as far up Adolf’s nose as possible. Unlike that Quentin Tarantino flick, though, it’s based on real-life events that took place off the coast of West Africa in the dark days of 1941.Starring in Ritchie’s boy’s own caper are Henry Cavill, Henry Golding, Baby Driver’s Eiza González, Fast X’s Alan Ritchson and Cary Elwes. It’s firmly in the spirit of The Great Escape, The Dirty Dozen, The Guns of Navarone and – deep cut – The Sea Wolves. Like that 1980 Roger Moore and David Niven war flick, the story involves hijacking a ship from an unsuspecting enemy. But how does it weigh up as a piece of history? We asked the movie’s military advisor Paul Biddiss, ex-Para and consultant on movies from Napoleon to 1917, to sort the fact from the fiction. Photograph: Dan Smith for LionsgateHenry Cavill plays real-life special forces operative Gus March-Phillipps in ‘The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare’ Is The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare based on a true story? Yes. Well, mostly. For the first time, Guy Ritchie has tackled a true-life story on the big screen (and, nope, we’re not including King Arthur: Legend of the Sword). Based on historian Damien Lewis’s non-fiction book, The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare follows the exploits of a real Allied spec

The 11th Sundance London hits the West End this summer and the line-up to the UK’s key indie fest has just been unveiled. Screening at Picturehouse Central in June are 11 films, a programme of UK shorts, and, of course, the fest’s ever-popular surprise screening. It all gets underway on June 6 with raucous Irish Gaelic hip-hop docudrama, ‘Kneecap’ – Belfast’s answer to ‘Patti Cake$’ or ‘8 Mile’ – and wraps on June 9 with Sean Wang’s Taiwanese-American coming-of-age story ‘Dìdi’.Bold cinematic voices are core to the fest’s philosophy and this year they’re provided by the likes of non-binary filmmaker Jane Schoenbrun (‘I Saw the TV Glow’), Shuchi Talati (‘Girls Will Be Girls’), and Londoner Chiwetel Ejiofor (‘Rob Peace’).Here’s the full festival line-up of fiction features and documentaries: ‘Dìdi’ (Sean Wang) ‘Girls Will Be Girls’ (Shuchi Talati) ‘Handling the Undead’ (Thea Hvistendahl) ‘I Saw the TV Glow’ (Jane Schoenbrun) ‘Kneecap’ (Rich Peppiatt) ‘My Old Ass’ (Megan Park) ‘Rob Peace’ (Chiwetel Ejiofor) ‘Sasquatch Sunset (David and Nathan Zellner) ‘Your Monster’ (Caroline Lindy) ‘Skywalkers: A Love Story’ (Jeff Zimbalist) ‘Never Look Away’ (Lucy Lawless) Sundance London runs June 6-9, and tickets go on sale to the public on April 30. If you want to jump the queue, festival passes are onsale now (£75) and offer priority booking and credits for five tickets. Picturehouse members and Sundance London passholders can book tickets now.Head to the official Sundance London site fo

‘What the hell did I do? I killed them all, of course.’ The words that sealed Robert ‘Bob’ Durst’s fate were picked up by a hot mic during a bathroom break. In a surreal twist, the mic belonged to the production crew of HBO’s true-crime series The Jinx. The septuagenarian had inadvertently fessed up to murdering three people on the very documentary show that was investigating those mysterious deaths. Nearly a decade on, much has changed. Durst went to trial, was convicted, served time, and, in 2022, died of natural causes while still in custody. But for filmmaker Andrew Jarecki, the story had a distance still to travel. In The Jinx: The Life and Deaths of Robert Durst, the Capturing the Friedmans director picks up where the first series left off to follow Durst, first on the lam, then through the justice system, then into prison – exploring, in mind-bendingly meta ways, how the HBO series itself became a key element in this dark true-crime tale. Here’s what you need to know. Who was Robert Durst? A eccentric, curmudgeonly 72-year-old when the first season of The Jinx aired in 2015, Robert Durst was the son of New York real estate tycoon Seymour Durst. He became estranged from his family and, Succession-like, control of the main Durst estate fell to his younger brother. Even so, his own vast wealth – the New York Times estimated it at $100 million – supported a life of luxury. And, as it later turned out, crime. In 2015, Durst was arrested and charged for the murder of Susan B

2024年の「カンヌ国際映画祭」の公式出品作が発表された。世界的な映画監督による新作がめじろ押しの期待が高まるラインアップだが、意外なセレクトや新発見が含まれているのも例年通りだ。 カンヌというと、ややマニアックな印象を持っているかもしれない。だが、近年は映画界全体への影響力を強めており、カンヌでプレミア上映された作品が翌春のアカデミー賞に選ばれることも多い。その一例は、今年のアカデミー賞をにぎわせた「関心領域」（監督：ジョナサン・グレイザー）や「落下の解剖学」（監督：ジュスティーヌ・トリエ）だ。前者はホロコーストを独自の視点で描き、後者は山を舞台にした複雑な殺人ミステリーである。 何と言っても、まだ世に出ていない作品の封切りには心をかき立てられるものだ。今回初公開される作品群が、各地の映画館にかかる数カ月後が待ち遠しい。ここでは、中でも注目の10作品を紹介しよう。 Photograph: Cannes International Film Festival 1. 『Kinds of Kindness』 すでに高い評価を得ているギリシャの映画監督、ヨルゴス・ランティモス。彼が名声にあぐらをかくことなく挑んだ新作は、難しい状況に置かれた登場人物たちが紡ぐ3つの物語によるアンソロジーだ。前作「哀れなるものたち」で組んだエマ・ストーン、ウィレム・デフォーと再タッグを組むほか、ジェシー・プレモンス、マーガレット・クアリー、「女王陛下のお気に入り」にも出演したジョー・アルウィンらが出演する。 2. 『The Shrouds』 鬼才デヴィッド・クローネンバーグの作品がカンヌでプレミア上映されるのは2022年以来で、今一つの出来だったSFホラー「クライムズ・オブ・ザ・フューチャー」ぶりだ。そのクローネンバーグが、人体を巡る不安に切り込むような作品を引っ下げて帰ってくるというのだから、期待は高まる。しかも、監督自身が「これまでの作品の中で最も私的な作品の部類」と言っているのだ。 妻を亡くし悲嘆に暮れる主人公を演じるのは、ヴァンサン・カッセル。物語は、彼が地中に埋められたデバイスを通じて、埋葬された死体と交信する能力を手に入れることから展開する。そのほか、ダイアン・クルーガー、ガイ・ピアースらが出演者に名を連ねる。 Photograph: Warner Bros.Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga 3. 『マッドマックス：フュリオサ』 今年のカンヌでは「マッドマックス」シリーズ最新作も上映される。スクリーン越しに吹きつける暴風に圧倒され、エネルギーを使い果たした観客が会場をよろよろと後にする……そんなことが起こるかもしれない。 過去10年間に公開されたアクション映画の中でも傑作と言える「怒りのデス・ロード」の続編を作るなど、並大抵のことではない。だがトレーラーを見る限り、この難問に対する監督ジョージ・ミラーの回答は、「もっと轟音（ごうおん）で、もっとクレイジーに、もっと目にも鮮やかに」ということになるようだ。 カンヌでは、同映画祭がいかにもフランス的な人物描写重視の作品の集積にとどまらないのだということを世界に知らしめるために、ハリウッド超大作が上映されることがままある。マッドマックス以上に、その役目にふさわしい映画はないだろう。 Photograph: Element Pictures 4. 『September Says』 ヨルゴス・ランティモスによる「アルプス」や「ロブスター」にも出演したフランス人女優アリアン・ラベドの監督デビュー作

‘This is a true story.’ So begins Netflix’s latest sensation ‘Baby Reindeer’, a true-crime series unlike any other. Richard Gadd’s dramatisation of his own experiences at the hands of a stalker isn’t your average ‘Fatal Attraction’-alike thriller where the man is a poor innocent and the woman is a crazed harpy looking to put some bunnies on simmer. Adapted his own acclaimed one-man show, which debuted at the Edinburgh Festival in 2019 and moved to London’s Bush Theatre a year later, Gadd struggles with a more complicated version of the truth in his depiction of a struggling stand-up comedian drowning under the relentless attentions of a troubled woman. Alongside its painfully candid treatment of sexual abuse, that sets this seven-episode series apart. Here’s what you need to know about it.  Photograph: Ed Miller/NetflixRichard Gadd as stand-up comedian Donny in ‘Baby Reindeer’ What is the true story behind Baby Reindeer?  Writer-star Gadd plays Donny, a version of his own younger self whose ambitions of stand-up stardom in London quickly give way to disappointing gigs, small crowds and a make-do job pulling pints. It’s in the pub that he encounters Martha, an eccentric but enthusiast fantasist who claims to have Tony Blair on speed dial but doesn’t have the money for a Diet Coke. Donny’s pity leads to an awkward, accidental flirtation of sorts, which eventually leads to a barrage of emails, voicemails, texts and Facebook messages. ‘Martha’s voicemails became the podcast of

A colourful and sure-to-be-contentious replaying of Amy Winehouse’s triumphant and tragic life, ‘Back to Black’ finally lands on UK cinema screens this month. ‘Industry’s Marisa Abela steps into Winehouse’s ballet flats and ‘Starred Up’s Jack O’Connell is her hubby Blake Fielder-Civil. But it’s London, too, that takes a starring role in a musical biopic that showcases the swinging, seedy, boozy side of the city we all know and love. From Amy’s Camden to Soho by night, via a quick trip to the Big Apple, director Sam Taylor-Johnson took her cameras to the real spots once frequented by the ‘Rehab’ singer. As the filmmaker tells us, it all adds a layer of authenticity to the film that will hit home with anyone who remembers those heady mid-noughties days when every step Winehouse took seemed to appear on the front page of the tabloids. ‘As much as possible, I wanted to be authentic to the places that she loved and feel the spirit of her,’ the director tells Time Out. ‘I feel like we’ve honoured the city.’ Photograph: Alamy Flamin’ Eight Tattoo Studio, Camden Kentish Town’s Flamin’ Eight scores highly on Time Out’s ranking of London’s best tattoo parlours – and it scored highly with Amy Winehouse during her Camden days. It was one of her favourite spots for getting inked – as reflected by several scenes in the film, all filmed at the studio itself. Jeffrey’s Place, Camden  Amy Winehouse’s old home turf in Camden, Jeffrey’s Place, forms a key part of the story. It’s where she’s l

The full line-up for this year’s Cannes has been announced and it’s packed full of exciting new offerings from some of the world’s greatest filmmakers. As usual, it looks to have a few surprises and new discoveries in store, too. And for anyone who things that that the festival is just bunch of film industry types drinking rosé and chin-stroking cineastes using the phrase ‘mise en scène’ a lot, Cannes has re-established its preeminence on the movie calendar in recent years to the extent that it’s become a reliable supplier of Oscar winners. Last year’s festival introduced the world to Jonathan Glazer’s singular vision of the Holocaust, The Zone of Interest​, and Justine Triet’s knotty Alpine murder-mystery Anatomy of a Fall. Not to mention recent Palme d’Or winners like Parasite, Triangle of Sadness and Shoplifters.  But it’s fresh new big-screen releases that get us fired up and the line-up is chock full of movies that will be gracing our local cinemas in the months ahead. Here’s ten to keep a close eye on. What’s the French for ‘we’re so back’?  Photograph: Cannes International Film Festival Kinds of Kindness Yes, it’s another Yorgos Lanthimos joint – the Greek auteur does not rest on his laurels – and another team-up with Poor Things’ Emma Stone and Willem Dafoe. This time Jesse Plemons, Margaret Qualley, The Favourite’s Joe Alwyn and Hong Chau (The Whale) join his ensemble for a ‘triptych’ fable following three characters facing some seriously unusual challenges in thei

Like ‘Escape to the Country’ meets ‘Pacific Heights’, new telly thriller ‘The Cuckoo’ has been gathering plenty of positive word of mouth since it debuted on Channel 5. The story of a cash-strapped family whose move to the country curdles into a nightmare when they take in a proper wrong’un as a lodger, it unfolds over four nights and four hour-long episodes. It’s a semi-realtime domestic drama that promise gripping drama, intrigue and a whole lot of bunnies scurrying for safety. Here’s what you need to know. Photograph: Channel 5Lee Ingleby and Claire Goose as Nick and Jessica Hayes What is The Cuckoo about? As you can guess from the title and the on-the-nose tagline (‘Don’t let her in’), Channel 5’s tense new domestic thriller charts what happens when a malign force is let into a family’s domestic space. It’s a theme that’s fuelled Hollywood thrillers since year dot, from ‘The Hand That Rocks the Cradle’ to Hitchcock’s ‘Shadow of a Doubt’, but over four episodes viewed from the family sofa, it promises some seriously uncomfortable, slow burn telly – and deeply moreish with it. You may have taken in your last suspicious lodger.  The lodger in this case is artist Sian, who moves into the Hayes’s – Nick, Jessica and Alice – mid-renovation farmhouse and quickly starts turning things upside down. A bond soon forms between her and the disgruntled Alice, a potential source of poison to drip into an already combustible situation. Alice’s tough situation at her new school isn’t he

Need some tips on telling better jokes? Want a star filmmaker to teach you the basics of filmmaking? Just fancy a bit of a natter with Creed star Tessa Thompson? If the answer to any of those is ‘heck yes’, you’ll want to gather your savings and put a bid in for the latest batch of lot items in the Cinema For Gaza auction.  The auction, which is raising funds to help alleviate the humanitarian crisis in Gaza, has seen a host of movie stars and filmmakers offering their time and memorabilia.The latest to join the action are Colman, who will be providing a no-doubt magnificent video message to the highest bidder, Paul Mescal, ditto a signed Aftersun poster, and Tessa Thompson. The Creed and Thor: Ragnarok star will be sharing a virtual beer – and one of her film costumes – with whoever stumps up the most money for charity.  Here’s a few of the latest items to bid for: Personalised video message from Olivia Colman Aftersun poster signed by Paul Mescal Beer on Zoom with Tessa Thompson, plus Sorry to Bother You costume and The Marvels memorabilia Zoom chat about your favourite Susan Sarandon film with Susan SarandonMalcolm X poster signed by Spike Lee Joke workshop with Nish Kumar over Zoom Dinner in Ghent with Close director Lukas Dhont Filmmaker or actor mentorship with Shane Meadows over Zoom Zoom AMA with Harry Potter star Bonnie Wright  Rugby ball signed by Heartstopper star Kit Connor  A map of The Bear’s Ayo Edebiri’s favourite restaurants and a chat about them on Zoom Zoo