Sophie Monks Kaufman

Updated for 2026: Whatever you think of Netflix’s theatrical strategy, it continues to produce some of television’s most formally daring works, including Adolescence, a hard-to-watch but impossible to ignore limited series about an unimaginable crime. On the other end of the spectrum, there’s HBO’s hilariously profane The Righteous Gemstones, which stuck the landing in 2025 with its final season. In addition, we have moved Andor into the top 20 after its astounding second and final season.  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.  A lot has changed. Television is now the dominant medium in basically all of entertainment. 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, from The Wire to Succession to Adolescence, 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 touc

From winter blockbusters to festival sleepers, these are the movies our critics think define 2025. Expect prestige dramas, horror gems, wild indies and some surprise streaming hits – all watched and ranked by Time Out’s film team. What even was last year in movies? A rollercoaster is the most obvious cliche, full of exhilarating successes, puzzling disappointments and news stories that’ve left us wondering if there’s even going to be much of a movie industry left in the next few years. Artistically, it was a top-heavy 12 months, producing one surefire Best of the Decade candidate, with a few others not far behind, then a vast middle-class of films that max out at ‘very good’. As always, though, if you’re willing to do the work, you’ll find dozens of small and medium-sized gems to fill you with hope for the future of moviemaking as an artform, no matter what happens to the business itself. Here are the movies that made us gasp, swoon and shout the loudest in 2025. Quick Picks: 2025’s best films by genre: 😂 Best comedy: The Naked Gun 😱 Best horror movie: Weapons 🥋 Best action movie: One Battle After Another🎭 Best drama: Nickel Boys🪆 Best family film: Flow

Unlike many of its monsters, vampires and virus-y Alphas, the horror genre is alive and well. It is, you might even say, well-endowed. Because anyone who loves that shivery sensation of being spooked witless in a cinema is being a lot better served than anyone searching for big laughs. The biggest stories in horror this year – Robert Eggers’ Nosferatu, Ryan Coogler’s Sinners, Zach Cregger’s Weapons – have packed in audiences and birthed a million memes along the way, but don’t sleep on the following flicks either.Best horrors of 2025 at a glance: 📍 28 Years Later – Netflix (US); also on Prime Video/Apple TV+📍 Nosferatu - US: streaming on Prime Video; US & UK: rent/buy on PVOD📍 Sinners – US: streaming on Max; UK: rent/buy on PVOD📍 Weapons – Rent/buy now on Prime Video/Apple TV (PVOD); still in some cinemas📍 Final Destination: Bloodlines – Max (US); US & UK: rent/buy on PVOD

It’s 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.  Cannes hit The Substance icked its way into the awards conversation on the back of Demi Moore’s staggeringly strong lead turn, Osgood Perkins’ hit Longlegs mixed ’90s serial killer procedurals with the Satanic panic of the previous decade, while I Saw the TV Glow was David Lynch directing Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Late Night with the Devil made found-footage fun again, while In a Violent Nature invented a new subgenre that people called ‘ambient slasher’. And that’s to name just a few. Below, you’ll find our best and scariest movies of 2024. 🎃 The 100 best horror films ever made 😱 The scariest movies based on a true story 🔥 The best horror films of 2025 (so far)

Norwegian native Renate Reinsve made a decision to give up acting, disillusioned by a slew of one-dimensional roles. The very next day, one of the most acclaimed directors working in the country, Joachim Trier, called to say he wanted her to be the leading lady in his next film. That now double Oscar-nominated anti-romcom, The Worst Person in the World, won Reinsve a Best Actress gong at Cannes for her gorgeously open performance as a woman navigating an ongoing existential crisis with joy. And she’s still pinching herself.  Everyone from Dakota Johnson to Jamie Lee Curtis has raved about this film. Any theories as to why it’s connecting with people so strongly?‘It’s trying to say something about how people connect to each other in the time we live in. People feel taken seriously because the film leaves space for the audience to fill in the blanks. It breathes, so it doesn’t push any emotion or tell you what to feel and think. It doesn’t give answers, but it asks a lot of good questions.’ Has there been a piece of feedback that stopped you in your tracks? ‘Paul Thomas Anderson described some acting that I did in one part of the movie as “the best acting in the world” at a Q&A. Then he said, “Do you think you weren’t nominated for an Oscar because people didn’t see the movie or because they’re stupid?” I was sitting there with tears in my eyes and the veins in my forehead pumping out. He is my favourite director, so that was huge. I can retire now.’ Photograph: MUBI There’s

What makes a filmmaker cool? In the heyday of the studio system it might have been about creative autonomy, an office on the lot and the studio barman knowing how to mix your Martini. In the heady, revolutionary days of the ’60s and ’70s, a devil-may-care attitude, radical new stories to tell, and ideally a beard of some description might have marked you out as the hipster’s auteur of choice. Times have changed, though. The moviemaking world has fewer boundaries, more entry points and finally, slowly but surely, more hunger to share stories by women and people of colour.  There’s a long way to go but we wanted to celebrate a time of gradual change by singling out the filmmakers who are genuinely moving the dial. The ones swinging for the fences in their choice of material and the way they’re bringing it to the screen. They’re not all new names – you’ll find some old stalwarts on here – but they all have in common a restless urge to do something different, exciting, bold. They come from across the planet and reflect all genres, and every kind of movie and moviemaking style. To take it a step further, we’ve asked a few of them – Rian Johnson, Barry Jenkins and Lynne Ramsay, among others – to share what makes them tick as movie lovers: the scenes that make them laugh hardest, the cinemas they stan for, the cities that inspire them, and the movies that have left them cowering in the back row. Even the posters that they had up on their bedroom walls growing up. Turns out that a lo

⭑⭑⭑⭑✩ Hacer una película de autor basada en un ícono tan profunda y emocionalmente consagrado en la imaginación del público como la princesa Diana requiere ingenio. Afortunadamente, el director chileno, Pablo Larraín, tiene esa cualidad con creces. Utiliza los hechos conocidos sobre la Princesa del Pueblo de cabello emplumado y voz entrecortada, y algunos imaginarios, para hacer girar una visión de la vida singular, barroca y con matices psicológicos dentro de una jaula dorada, habilitada por una actuación virtuosa de Kristen Stewart. "Son sólo tres días", murmura mientras conduce para pasar la víspera de Navidad, el día de Navidad y el día de San Esteban en Sandringham con los suegros. Se infiere rápidamente que la aventura de Charles con Camilla está en marcha, al igual que la bulimia de Diana y su condición de perseguida con obsesión por los paparazzi. Estos problemas psicológicos la marcan como un lastre en un entorno donde lo importante es no armar nunca un escándalo. Al igual que hizo en el retrato de 2016 de una Primera Dama igualmente icónica, Jackie, Larraín no escatima en gastos para hacer que la propiedad real tenga un esplendor ornamentado que raya en el gótico. Un retrato de Enrique VIII en el comedor sirve como recordatorio de quién, y qué, se considera digno de adoración en este mundo. Stewart es extraordinaria al conjurar una forma enrarecida de energía neurótica. Es una mujer moderna y complaciente con la gente, madre y esposa despreciada, y para colmo, ha c

Portrait of a Lady on Fire catapulted French director Céline Sciamma into a new dimension of recognition. She has been making gorgeous emotional character studies with queer themes since her 2007 debut feature Water Lilies. Yet the power of the 18th century lesbian romance caused awards to rain down, including the Best Screenplay and the Queer Palm at the 2019 Cannes Film Festival.  Petite Maman is a disarmingly modest next step. It is a domestic miniature driven by captivating performances from 9-year-old twins Josephine and Gabrielle Sanz. Nelly (Josephine Sanz) is trying to understand mother Marion’s unhappiness after the death of her own mother. In the woods surrounding Marion’s childhood home, she meets a young girl who looks exactly like her (Gabrielle Sanz). As they play together, delicate emotions seep out. We spoke to Sciamma about the ethics of working with child actors, how Portrait of a Lady on Fire changed her life and her work on Jacques Audiard’s forthcoming romantic drama Paris, 13th District. What was the inspiration for this tender and beautiful domestic story?‘This image popped up into my mind about five years ago of two little girls building a tree hut in the woods. I was like: “One is the mother and one is the daughter,” and this image felt both peaceful and troubling. I wrote it very, very fast because I had a lot of desire for it.’ Photograph: © Lilies Films How did you get such mature and self possessed performances out of the nine-year-old twins, Jo

The week before the shoot began on Emerald Fennell’s filmmaking debut, Promising Young Woman, its London-born writer-director received a home-movie clip from her mum of herself aged seven. ‘She was asking me what I’d like to do when I grow up. I said, ‘‘‘I want to be an actress and write stories about murder!’’’ ‘Stories about murder’ is a fair summation of Killing Eve, the Emmy-winning assassin drama, whose second season Fennell wrote, while her stature as an actress has grown with credits on Call The Midwife, Albert Nobbs and Vita & Virginia. She is best known as Camilla Parker-Bowles on The Crown, a role she imbues with perky entitlement. For all these creative strings to her bow – not forgetting children’s book author – the new one of ‘director’ means the most. ‘It’s the pinnacle for me,’ she says. How painful, then, to have theatrical release held in suspended animation. Pre-pandemic, Promising Young Woman was to be out in UK cinemas for April 2020. This was pushed back to December, and now, finally, April 2021. ‘The thing I am very sad about is that, even though some people will be able to see it in theatres, the likelihood is most won’t,’ says Fennell, ‘and it’s a film I made specifically to be watched communally.’ My mum asked me what I wanted to do when I grew up. I said, ‘I want to be an actress and write stories about murder!’ The communal elements come from reservoirs of emotion running beneath the surface of this rape-revenge film, as it builds to a finale of ove

⭑⭑⭑⭑✩ Proxima es el nombre de una estrella brillante que está a 4.2 años luz de la Tierra. También, es el nombre de la Estación Espacial Internacional que transportará a la francesa Sarah (Eva Green), el estadounidense Mike (Matt Dillon) y el ruso Anton (Aleksey Fateev), en una misión a Marte que durará un año. Será la primera vez que Sarah estará en el espacio. Su expareja aprovecha la gravedad y toma la custodia de su hija de ocho años, Stella (Zélie Boulant), y su mascota, una gata llamada Laika, mudándose a Alemania. Los diálogos son una mezcla de francés, inglés, alemán y ruso en un ámbito políglota, una característica de las películas de la directora Alice Winocour. Ella crea un vínculo entre las naciones, entre los planetas y entre las normas domésticas. Los espectadores se quedarán esperando los espectáculos de ciencia ficción similares a la secuencia de luces de color en 2001: Odisea en el espacio (Stanley Kubrick) o el vacío infinito de Gravity (Alfonso Cuarón). Prometo volver sucede en la Tierra y hace una crónica de las intensas preparaciones fiscales requeridas a los astronautas antes del despegue. El rodaje fue en los centros de formación reales: el Centro Europeo de Astronautas (EAC) de Colonia, Star City, Moscú y el Cosmódromo de Baikonur en Kazajstán. Cada día trae un régimen riguroso, mientras vemos a Sarah cuando está corriendo en una caminadora, haciendo tareas con tiempo limitado submarinas y girando por un brazo electrónico y gigante. Para el montaje con

It’s hard to make time for wholesome pleasures when the city exerts a relentless pressure to be productive, but you have to! Everything is riding on your capacity to feel alive. When you’re overwhelmed by work, social life can mean saying ‘yes’ to the pub, or a party, or whatever-it-is lubricated by booze. Over-drinking doesn’t always spell drama; it does cause tiredness. So how can we tap into London’s more energising riches? My goal here was to track down pursuits that could slot into a routine without too much fuss or expense. Whittled down from a long list, these all left an afterglow of pure joy and made me feel that maybe, just maybe, life is good?

Dubbed ‘“Withnail and I” with girls’ by Caitlin Moran, Emma Jane Unsworth’s novel ‘Animals’ was published in 2014. Now she has adapted it for a film directed by Sophie Hyde (‘52 Tuesdays’) featuring Alia Shawkat as debonair rebel Tyler and Holliday Grainger as sidetracked writer Laura. Powered by MDMA (smashed-up cola Chupa Chups), cocaine (icing sugar) and gallons of white wine (apple juice), their combined energy captures the euphoria of wild nights out in Dublin, the repetitive nature of a lifestyle of coming up and coming down, and the private desires that can drive even the closest friends apart. This is a two-hander friend romance carried by your shared energy. As actors, do you know when you’re nailing that rapport? Holliday Grainger: ‘You hope to. You can feel it if it feels fake, but I put a lot of my trust in Sophie, to be honest. It is difficult to bring that night-time energy when it’s 6am on a film set.’Alia Shawkat: ‘You have to be present in each moment, then hope it all comes together. But it’s as much a surprise to us as anybody.’ ‘I think that by being vulnerable you're able to be braver than by analysing something.’ ‘Animals’ is about two friends trying to be free in different ways. Is it possible to be free as a woman while craving a traditional relationship? HG: ‘Freedom is a state of mind and it’s up to you to make sure that you keep that, and that the people around you know you need it. Of course, there are responsibilities that come with having a famil

First aired on MTV in 2000, Jackass has become far more than the sum of its exposed, flayed and electrocuted parts. A trolley load of stuntmen, risking death to the delight of their dumb friends, hit notes of primal glee and homoerotic camaraderie, in among the gross-out moments (poo cocktail, anyone?). In this final film, there are extra ingredients. Chiefly, the acknowledgement of ageing and a strangely profound group acceptance that soon Johnny Knoxville will have to stop presenting himself for concussions from furious bulls. Now all in their fifties, with original cast members Knoxville, Steve-O, Jason ‘Wee Man’ Acuña, Chris Pontius et al, supplemented by new recruits picked up over various movie sequels, Jackass: Best and Last has a melancholic awareness of its own mortality. Really.  New stunts are spliced with favourite skits from previous films, as well as unaired segments that were too edgy for broadcast at the time. Their bodies have been through so much trauma by this point, not least the tragic death in a car crash of OG cast member Ryan Dunn, and references to prostate exams are woven in among the abundant penis trials. Within this existential framing, footage from the early noughties, when the Tennessean Knoxville was the Southern belle of the balls and they all resembled scrappy skate kids, feels poignant as hell.  ‘Warning: do not attempt this. It’s extra stupid and could kill you’ is the onscreen advice accompanying a stunt of mythological significance to fan

Japanese humanist Hirokazu Koreeda is known for packing a sentimental wallop into shrewdly-observed melodramas about families and children. So, it’s curious that he returns to the sci-fi genre 28 years on from After Life (1998) – one of his most wistful and probing films to date – with a concept this loaded, yet he focuses on everything but its core emotions. Likewise, anyone looking for his sweeping manifesto on generative AI best keep those expectations in their box. Instead, we are treated to a shallow chronicle of the continuing adventures of Otone (Haruka Ayase) and Kensuke Komoto (Japanese comedian Daigo) and their adopted humanoid child Kakeru (Rimu Kuwaki). This adorable seven-year-old comes with an off button and a charging chair. Kakeru is a robot doppelganger for their flesh-and-blood child who died two years previously in circumstances not broached until the midpoint.  Koreeda doesn’t waste time wrestling with a ‘should they/shouldn’t they adopt a humanoid’ line of questioning. We are in a near-future world that seems to have put ethical arguments around AI in the past and where big companies send adverts via insect holograms. One propaganda butterfly from tech company REBirth is all it takes for Otone to feel the rush of temptation. Kensuke is sceptical enough to keep his distance, but doesn’t feel strongly enough to fight with his wife over her impulse purchase of luxury goods. The story ambles on from here in a sunny, anecdotal fashion with lots of things happe

Three feature films deep and it’s safe to say that Jane Schoenbrun has created a brand new subgenre of cinema. It is cine-literate and self-referential without the ironic detachment associated with meta storytelling. Their films are vividly emotional – and so innovative in finding playful forms to express these emotions – that they deepen the meaning of having a relationship with cinema.  Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma is both a continuation of the preoccupations of their first two features and a leap into more vulnerable territory, accompanied by a dazzling step up in the sophistication of the world-within-a-world building. Schoenbrun has form in creating additional media to sit within their films as a source of nurture for protagonists wrestling with secret shames and desires.  Lonely teen Casey in We’re All Going the World’s Fair (2021) communes with a spooky viral internet game; lonely teen Owen in I Saw the TV Glow (2024) lives vicariously through a TV show called ‘The Pink Opaque’. Here, grown-up intellectual queer filmmaker Kris (Hacks’ Hannah Einbinder) is obsessed with an ’80s slasher franchise that she is now remaking for a modern audience. Schoenbrun shot 20 minutes of the fictional ‘Camp Miasma’ and some actors on the cast list, Eva Victor, for example, exist solely within this film-within-a-film. Kris (whose past credits include ‘Psycho from the perspective of the shower curtain’), believes she was hired to launder the franchise’s transphobic origins, but s

It’s rare that formidable French actress Juliette Binoche is fighting to match her two co-stars. But, so it is in American writer-director Lance Hammer’s (Ballast) London-set, moral maze of a dementia drama. Anna Calder-Marshall is Leslie, a woman with advanced dementia, and Tom Courtenay is Martin, her doting husband. Both embody their roles with subatomic nuance to drum up not just their present relationship, but a history that, like the rings on a mighty tree stump, has brought them to this moment.  In one of the year’s boldest openings, Hammer drops us in at the deep end. Amanda (Binoche) and her teenage daughter Sara (Florence Hunt) pop into this elderly couple’s sanctuary to find Martin having sex with Leslie. Amanda calls the police, believing that her mother lacks the capacity to give consent to her stepfather. Given the chance to avoid this outcome in exchange for a promise that he won’t do this again, Martin gently seethes: ‘You’ve no right to ask us this.’ This scene launches dilemmas that will unspool for the rest of the runtime. It’s a credit to Hammer that he seeks to explore rather than to answer them. Is Martin abusing Leslie or does she initiate their intimacy as a remaining source of marital comfort? Is that a moot point when she is almost non-verbal and her illness has erased her sexual inhibitions? As these questions are introduced, so are the mechanisms of humane state care. The police arrive, instigating an upsetting medical check-up, a visit from a soci

The Greek prince of feel-bad satires, Yorgos Lanthimos, has grown a troupe of wildly talented craftspeople and performers, drawn by the chance to play in his imaginatively designed dollhouses. His female Frankenstein riff, Poor Things, marked an ascension in his appeal to popular audiences, while cementing his relationship with Emma Stone, as both muse and producer.  Bugonia, an English language remake of 2003 Korean film Save the Green Planet!, is his first film since the early Greek ones to be set in something approximating recognisable modern times. Here, in an armpit of smalltown America, Stone and Jesse Plemons go head to head, delivering bravura performances that put a shine on what, at its core, is a high-concept exploitation movie.  Teddy (Plemons) is a greasy-haired, beekeeping, tinfoil-hat wearing obsessive who recruits his sweet-natured cousin Don (Aidan Delbis) into a plan to kidnap the CEO of a big pharma biotech company. Because he believes, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that sleek girlboss Michelle Fuller (Stone) is an alien from the planet Andromeda.  Lanthimos is at the peak of his powers when it comes to production-design led set pieces. Teddy and Don’s comically overlong and deeply flawed kidnapping plays out on the grounds of Michelle’s McMansion. The farce of it all is highlighted with shots from various vantage points, as Stone repeatedly demonstrates greater athleticism than her abductors.  Once Michelle has been caught and transferred from the sterile lu

It is no great compliment to say that Hot Milk makes a successful case for Emma Mackey’s physical charms. One of the break-out stars of Netflix’s Sex Education, she has moody features and an instinctive gravitas that has elevated her in everything from Emily Brontë drama Emily to Barbie. This film fails to tap into those inner depths. That frustration is compounded by the credentials of longtime screenwriter/first-time feature director, Rebecca Lenkiewicz. With uncompromising arthouse writing credits such as Ida and Disobedience to her name, she also holds the status of first woman to have a play staged in the NT Olivier. Despite all of this, she makes an error common to literary adaptations by prioritising loyalty to the source material over a cinematic reimagining of the same – this is Deborah Levy’s fragmentary, fever dream of a novel (shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize in 2016).  This dream unfolds over a summer in the Spanish coastal city of Almeria. Here, aided by a lesbian tryst with a manic pixie dream girl (Phantom Thread’s Vicky Krieps, arriving on horseback) 25-year-old Sofia (Mackey) has an animal awakening as she unshackles from her controlling, wheelchair-bound mother, Rose (a gutsy Fiona Shaw) Rose has a nerve problem that may or may not be real. Sofia has paused her PhD in anthropology to accompany her in pursuit of a cure. This is the latest in two decades worth of fruitless treatments – and it may be the last. Rose has sold her cottage in England to afford

Alex Parkinson’s adventure thriller, a remake of his own 2019 documentary about a miracle at sea, pumps a steady stream of adrenaline by conjuring the setting of one of the most dangerous jobs on the planet. Off the coast of Aberdeen, 300 feet below the surface of the North Sea, saturation divers are tasked with maintaining telecommunication pipes. Although it comes with an above-average risk of death, there are rewards for such a cool job. Or so Chris (Peaky Blinders’ Finn Cole) tells his fiancée with a mock-swagger. That Chris’s cockiness is about to be tested is telegraphed as starkly as a red distress flare will later glow in the depths of the ocean. Parkinson rushes through the obligatory life-stakes set-up before hustling Chris aboard the good ship Tharos. Here, Chris reconnects with ‘Sat Daddy’ Duncan (Woody Harrelson), an affable dive veteran under threat of being retired, and meets brusque ace Dave (Shang-Chi’s Simu Liu), a focused pro who will be diver 1 to Chris’s diver 2 once the job is underway.  As the lads bed down in the silver, oxygen-boosting cylinder they call home, a grudging bonhomie starts to bloom. It’s the soothingly familiar kind found in every male bonding movie from Top Gun to Cool Runnings. The dark subaqueous world becomes a stage for a gripping survival drama Those tropes are not an issue for a film whose originality stems from its attention to the procedural detail of a fascinating job. Parkinson’s documentary about this story (the real-life in

How often do you watch something so original, it changes the way you think about image construction itself? Colson Whitehead’s source novel – winner of the 2020 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction – was widely regarded as ‘unfilmable’ due to heartbreaking twists that surely could not be translated to the screen. And yet Ross has done so using techniques that pose questions about the way cinema has represented racially-motivated violence. The place is Florida in the early 1960s. Jim Crow segregation is thriving despite civil rights actions and the rise of a charismatic young preacher named Martin Luther King. Elwood (Ethan Herisse) is a quiet, bright and idealistic student whose path to an all Black college is cut short when he hitches a ride with the wrong man. The open road of his future becomes a dead end as he is yanked from a loving home shared with grandmother Hattie (Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor) and into a segregated reform school for boys.  Director and co-writer RaMell Ross has an uncanny ability to lead viewers into an image that turns out to be a narratively significant trick of the eye. The Nickel Academy where Elwood is taken in the back of a police car is all leafy, spacious grounds, for this is how its gatekeepers want it to be seen.  Miraculously, Nickel Boys goes against the grain of its own devastating trajectory Schoolmaster Spencer (Hamish Linklater – pure evil) explains the route to graduation is to play by the rules. Meanwhile life is lessons, chores and staying out of

You can almost smell the sweat, sex and tequila wafting off the cream suit that Daniel Craig wears as William Lee, a former American GI prowling after-hours Mexico City with a coterie of equally debauched expats. ‘Lee’, as everyone calls him, is living from one conquest to the next. Nothing much changes his autopilot ritual of drink-fuck-sleep-repeat until he becomes obsessed with a younger man named Eugene Allerton (Love, Simon’s Drew Starkey). He takes the young man on a journey through South America in search of the connection that can only come through an ayahuasca ceremony. Adapted from William S Burroughs’ famously horny novel – only published in 1985, over 30 years after it was written – Queer isn’t a story in the traditional sense, more a loosely autobiographical hangout tale. And what is hanging out in this case is usually found tucked away.  Call Me By Your Name and Challengers director Luca Guadagnino has been hailed from some corners of the film industry as the saviour of sex on screen. Queer undeniably has its steamy moments and Craig is phenomenal as a chewed-up charmer who delivers the novel’s loquacious prose with a relish that is part razzmatazz, part ruin. Neither does he shy away from displaying the physical art of seduction, although it’s a shame that Guadagnino is not equally committed, primly cutting to a shot of a window whenever things heat up in bed.  Although he has established a reputation as a teller of sexy queer stories, Guadagnino’s biggest feti

The central relationship in Babes reaches its climax when pregnant yoga teacher, Eden (Ilana Glazer), reveals that she feels betrayed that BFF-since-childhood Dawn (Michelle Buteau) is prioritising time with people she has known a fraction as long – her husband and kids. That this conversation lands as both hilariously funny and poignantly true is the secret of Babes’ powers. It has its craving-induced Cheetos and eats them, thanks to a screenplay attuned to the fact that emotionally needy adult friendships are as absurd as they are full of life-expanding warmth. We are dropped into Eden and Dawn’s friendship as they meet for their annual tradition of a Thanksgiving morning movie. It’s a ritual honoured despite the tortured commute inflicted by Dawn relocating from their shared neighbourhood, Astoria, to the Upper West Side. Glazer, who co-wrote the screenplay with Josh Rabinowitz, remains best known for TV’s raucous joyfest, Broad City, and this – its slightly more grown-up twin is equally sluiced in New York mentality, pivoting around what it means to live in one borough over another, and animated by characters with a capital C. Dawn’s waters break before the trailers end. This doesn’t stop the duo going for a slap-up lunch. From the off, there is a shame-free worship for womanhood: from our bodily functions, to our wild impulses, to the wellspring of love we have for our chosen family. ‘Your vagina looks like it’s yawning,’ Eden tells Dawn, more fascinated by her friend’s

Tchaikovsky’s ballet ‘Swan Lake’ opens with soft-lapping melodies, before building to several great crashing crescendos. And so it is with Ready or Not pair Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett’s raucously entertaining, ballet-themed gorefest. Abigail is a vampire film that pirouettes over your funny bone while sinking its teeth into your neck… over and over again. Six testy individuals stake-out a 12-year-old girl as she’s driven home from ballet practice. They drug and kidnap little Abigail (still in her tutu) and zip her into a bag during a set-piece that’s too slick to be tense. Then it’s off to the creepy isolated mansion where the rest of the film unfolds.  ‘No real names, no back stories, no grab ass,’ says Giancarlo Esposito, their de facto leader, as he welcomes the crew and hands each of them a fake name. But our watchful heroine ‘Joey’ (Melissa Barrera) is able to read the back stories on her co-conspirators: these are cocky bent cop ‘Frank’ (Dan Stevens), stern military man ‘Rickles’ (William Catlett), corrupt meathead ‘Peter’ (Kevin Durand), hacker princess ‘Sammy’ (Kathryn Newton), and walking shambles Dean, played by the late Angus Cloud (the film is dedicated to his memory). All they need to do is guard Abigail (Matilda the Musical’s Alisha Weir) for 24 hours until her father pays a ransom and they get $7 million richer. Sounds simple, right? It’s a gory horror that creates a genre we never knew we needed From there, the pace picks up and bloody-but-mysteri

As the title indicates, Someone’s Daughter, Someone’s Son wears its heart on its sleeve. It’s a passionate documentary that asks whether we see our homeless population as worthy of equal rights – and whether we even see them in the first place. ‘When we think of homeless people, we think of them as “other”, “them”, “not us”. It could never happen to us, could it?,’ says the narrator over a scratchy home video of a little girl’s birthday party in 1989. Moments later we learn that the little girl ran away from home at the age of 14.  What the little girl went through before she became the filmmaker, Lorna Tucker, sets the vulnerable tone of a documentary that draws its soul from the stories of former and current homeless people in the UK. Darren, Emma and Laura in London. Jamie in Edinburgh. Earl in South Shields.  Without pushing an angle too hard, Tucker shows a pattern of young people fleeing domestic violence and families riven with substance abuse. By giving space to her interviewees, she deepens our superficial understanding of the problems and solutions involved. Emma and Laura in London say that they feel safer sleeping on the streets than in a hostel, even though there are a dangerous couple of nocturnal hours between partygoers going home and day workers heading out.  As the title hints, this passionate doc wears its heart on its sleeve A distinction is made between the policy of rushing people into temporary housing to cosmetically reduce homeless numbers, and genui

Every year, the Venice Film Festival delivers a slate full of headline films, fires the starting gun on awards seasons and throws up a bunch of viral moments, some of which will have you wincing in horror. This year threw up some surprises, including a Golden Lion winner, in Jim Jarmusch’s family triptych Father Mother Sister Brother, that absolutely no one saw coming and a Luca Guadagnino #MeToo drama that many festival goers wished they hadn’t seen at all. Kathryn Bigelow scared us witless, The Voice of Hind Rajab and Remake moved us to ugly tears, and Dwayne Johnson launched the beefiest Oscar campaign in cinema history. Here’s what to look out for between now and Christmas.  Photograph: Venice Film Festival The Voice of Hind Rajab This Silver Lion winning docudrama had Venice audiences in floods. It’s an elegy for six-year-old Hind Rajab that centres the distress call she made in January 2024. The Palestine emergency services hear from Hind in Gaza, trapped in a car with the corpses of relatives, begging for an ambulance as IDF tanks (that would riddle her car with 355 bullets) close in. Tunisian director Kaouther Ben Hania brings uncompromising political acumen to a film that offers a chance to collectively mourn for both Hind and Palestine. Photograph: Netflix A House of Dynamite Kathryn Bigelow has made two defining ‘War on Terror’ epics in The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty. She loses none of her touch in switching focus to a hypothetical involving a nuclear at

Cinema has a painful paradox at its heart. This is an artistic medium with a canon that celebrates outsiders, whether fictional misfits or the renegade auteurs behind them. Yet, over a century out of the gate, the neurotypical gaze remains the norm. But thanks in part to the efforts of three collectives, that may be changing. New visionary spaces are being opened up and everyone is welcome. In most other respects, experimental film The Stimming Pool, mixed-reality experience Impulse: Playing with Reality, and curation initiative Stims Collective are very different from each other.  ‘The design of the project was to put cinema in the laboratory rather than autism,’ says artist-filmmaker Steven Eastwood who co-directed The Stimming Pool with a group of autistic artists, the Neurocultures Collective, aka Sam Chown-Ahern, Georgia Bradburn, Benjamin Brown, Robin Elliott-Knowles and Lucy Walker.  The Stimming Pool arrives at the BFI London Film Festival after an award-winning run on the festival circuit. Each artist devised their own contribution: Elliott-Knowles introduces a lost horror animation at a B-movie film club; Chown-Ahern has an eye-tracking test that shifts into being about focus itself; Lucy inhabits a magical border collie; Brown satirises the testing process; and Bradburn conceives of an autistic camera (wielded by Aftersun cinematographer Gregory Oke) that learns how to ‘stim’ – a repetitive movement that soothes anxiety but which many autistic people have been soci

The Monkey review A killer wooden monkey rampages through a Final Destination-style comedy-horror short on surprises ‘It kills who it wants and it doesn’t take requests.’ This is the last thing a kid wants to hear about a cymbal-playing, wind-up wooden monkey left behind by his absent father. Unfortunately, them’s the breaks in The Monkey, adapted from a short story by the head honcho of horror, Stephen King. Osgood Perkins’ follow up to his creepy calling card, Longlegs reveals a playful sense of humour and a reverence for gore-tastic B-movies of yore. Still, this feature feels as thinly stretched as a melting human face. Even double-duty Theo James having the time of his life can only do so much about the diminishing returns of the premise. James plays the adult versions of Hal and Bill, twins that we first meet as preteens (both played by Christian Convery). Their dynamic is more ‘Cain and Abel’ than ‘Fred and George Weasley’, to the point that Hal sometimes fantasises about murdering his bully of a brother. The bright spot in both of their lives – and only point of unity – is mother Lois (a spirited Tatiana Maslany).  Violence becomes less of an abstraction when they discover the titular monkey, a ‘toy’ that emanates pure evil left behind by their pilot father – who has long since flown the coop. Turning the key on the monkey’s side guarantees that someone nearby will die in a freak accident.  Photograph: Black BearTheo James in ‘The Monkey’ There is a fraternal bond, t