Sophie Monks Kaufman

Outside of a few box-office smashes, 2024 was a relatively quiet year for movies, full of fascinating breakouts and leftfield successes, but few major events. But 2025 is shaping up a bit differently. While it’s still hard to spot another #Barbenheimer on the horizon, or even a Deadpool and Wolverine, the calendar is loaded with the return of monolithic franchises like Avatar, Mission: Impossible and Jurassic World and a few monolithic auteurs, including Paul Thomas Anderson, Bong Joon-ho, Lynne Ramsay, Spike Lee and Steven Soderbergh. Shoot, we might even get a Terrence Malick movie this year. Of course, the most exciting thing going into every year are the films you never see coming. Will we get another The Substance or Nickel Boys? Who knows? But that’s why we keep watching – and you can follow along with our ever-growing list of the best movies of the year below. RECOMMENDED: 📺 The best TV and streaming shows of 2025 (so far)🔥 The must-see films for 2025 you can't miss🎥 The 101 greatest films ever made

The horror movie kicked off with Robert Eggers’ vampire smash hit Nosferatu and the fanged fraternity are back in a big way in April with Ryan Coogler’s Sinners, a Southern gothic with Michael B Jordan. David F Sandberg’s (Lights Out) nocturnal nightmare Until Dawn, meanwhile, will boast as-yet unrevealed terrors as a group of friends attempt to survive a night in the woods. Don’t rule out the odd vamp in there, too. And that’s just the start for a horror resurgence: 28 Years Later, M3GAN 2.0, The Conjuring: Last Rites, SAW XI, The Black Phone 2.0 and a new Insidious movie are all adding new shocks to smash-hit franchises. Talk To Me pair Danny and Michael Philippou return with Bring Her Back and the Jordan Peele-produced Him hits in September. Oh, and Final Destination Bloodlines has delivered the second most watched horror trailer of all time. This list will be updated as the frights arrive, so keep checking back to see what’s worth shelling out for.RECOMMENDED: 🎃 The 100 best horror films ever made😱 The scariest movies based on a true story 🔥 The best horror films of 2024

Television has been around for 70 years, but only in the last two decades has it earned true respect as an artistic medium. Up to that point, elitists referred to TV as ‘the idiot box’ or ‘the boob tube,’ and if you worked in it, you were either a hack or an upstart hoping to make the leap into the more dignified world of movies. Was its poor reputation deserved? Sure, there were blips of brilliance between The Ed Sullivan Show and The Sopranos, but by and large, the garbage outweighed the gold. Maybe it’s unfair, but the fact that it was all being beamed directly into our living rooms made the dreck more noticeable.  That’s all changed. Television has nudged film out from the center of popular culture, to the point that some of cinema’s truest believers – Martin Scorsese, David Fincher, Steven Soderbergh – are making movies specifically for the small screen. The shift may have started with HBO and The Sopranos, but the advent of streaming has made it so that hundreds of new shows are now continually flipping the script every few years, if not months. But that doesn’t mean everything before 1999 is pure dross. While this list is dominated by 21st century programs, there are hundreds of shows that deserve credit for pushing TV forward into its current golden age, and 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. Even then, it proved to b

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

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

It’s strange that something as messy as human intimacy is so frequently sanitised on screen, to the point that when a film marinates in the muck of a very particular love language, this rancidity is a breath of fresh air. Luna Carmoon’s debut feature about the daughter of a hoarder comes home bearing prizes, after premiering at the Venice Film Festival, announcing a young British talent capable of blending realism with surrealism to create a vivid personal language that defies simple interpretations. The first of two timelines belongs to Hayley Squires’ (I, Daniel Blake) compelling whirlwind Cynthia who pushes the phrase ‘one man’s trash is another man’s treasure’ to its teetering endpoint. She’s a caring-yet-manic mother who drills young Maria (Lily-Beau Leach) to bring home debris in her lunchbox. The duo’s prime bonding activity is dumpster diving. Maria panics that their love will run out without the fuel of new additions to their ‘catalogue of love’.   Carmoon creates a clashing sensibility by infusing their trash jungle with wonder, as fairy lights twinkle and the sound design drums up the conspiratorial cosiness of a folie à deux. There is something of a The Florida Project-upon-south-London to the depiction of a flawed single mother with the energy to make her child deliriously happy.  But this does not last. Cut to 18-year-old Maria (Saura Lightfoot Leon) living with a kind, conventional foster mother (Samantha Spiro) in a house that in the absence of remarkable feat

There’s a gravitas to Canadian filmmaker Clement Virgo’s handsome yet patchy drama about racially-charged desperation in the Toronto suburb of Scarborough. Told episodically through the eyes of adult Michael (Lamar Johnson), whose flashbacks slowly reveal why protective older brother, Francis (Aaron Pierre), is no longer around, Brother is adapted from David Chariandy’s 2017 prize-winning novel about the sons of Caribbean immigrants and their all-elusive better life.  The film chops between three different timelines, showing Michael and Francis as young kids grappling with an absent father and news reports of bloodshed close to the apartment block where they live with a barely present, overworked mother, Ruth (Marsha Stephanie Blake). The meat of the story unfolds across the brothers’ precarious teen years, as their contrasting personalities are formed – Michael, timid; Francis, confrontational – under the twin shadows of encroaching gang violence and humiliating police surveillance (sirens are heard so regularly that they might as well be part of the sound design). In the final timeline, a decade later, Michael and a catatonic Ruth navigate loss.  Although he retains the sweep of the novel, Virgo struggles to replicate its observational texture and the tension is undone by an atmospheric vagueness, full of pregnant pauses that only stretch out the run-time. The influence of Barry Jenkins’ Moonlight is felt in a gliding camera that strives to find low-lit beauty in muted spac

Italian social realism heightened by myth and magic is a subgenre that has become Alice Rohrwacher’s stock in trade. For the first time, her leading man is English as Josh O’Connor switches Prince Charles’s finery in The Crown for a dirty cream suit to play Arthur, the wandering soul at the heart of her most emotionally wrought film to date. La Chimera, true to its title, is a hybrid beast that merges the earthly with the ethereal, illuminating the criminalised archaeological digs of the working class ‘tombaroli’ in 1980s Umbria while immersing us in the mental state of a man on the brink. Arthur has a unique form of a genius. Armed with a divining rod he can identify the precise spots where Etruscan artefacts lie buried. These are excavated, in one case involving a tomb that leaves Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom in the dust. They are then sold onto a shady art dealer whose respectable front means that Arthur and his band of merry tombalari are the ones shouldering all of the risks.  In fact, we meet Arthur on the other side of jail time, as he takes the train to Tuscany. Cinematographer Hélène Louvart uses beautiful bleached colours and a vignetted frame to create the nostalgia of a postcard from a lost time. We are introduced in flashback to Beniamina, an old flame whose fate is a mystery but whose memory still burns brightly for Arthur.  O’Connor is sublime, alternately charming and aggressive, and indifferent to reactions to his volatile behaviour. Local girls flirt

Why is there always trouble in paradise? In Spanish director Albert Serra’s fictional present-day Polynesian idyll, a threat sneaks up between waves of dreamlike images.  French high commissioner to Tahiti, De Roller (The Piano Teacher’s Benoît Magimel), moves through political and social spaces with the aesthetic of an off-duty rock star in his tinted glasses, hawaiian shirts and cream suit. He’s a big fish in a small pond, at least until rumours about a resumption of nuclear testing begin to spread. It’s quickly obvious that, in contrast with the French military, he’s actually a small fish. Subtle observations about different shades of colonial power infuse what is – above all else – a strikingly gorgeous film. De Roller is taken out to sea for an extraordinary business meeting in a place where 50-foot waves climb the widescreen frame. Plot is forgotten. Character is forgotten. The roaring, white-tipped azure ocean is all that matters. This scene is a serene outlier, as political intrigue sneaks in via het-up conversations with stressed locals. Magimel gives De Roller a poise that slowly comes undone once he sees that he is further from the seat of power than he’d previously imagined. It’s a strikingly gorgeous film, full of long and naturalistic takes His closest confidante is transgender hospitality worker Shannah (Pahoa Mahagafanau, a megawatt discovery with no prior credits). Mahagafanau is consistently captivating, exuding a grace that is all the more palpable amid the

Why is the grass around the English country house where Harper (Jessie Buckley) comes to stay after the death of her ex-husband (Paapa Essiedu) a hallucinogenic shade of chartreuse? No reason, except for aesthetic shock value. Overly-produced, emotionally empty images dominate a film that makes broad gestures towards the subject of toxic masculinity, while failing to land a single point in meaningful detail.  Buckley is an all-in performer and her grounding presence enables Men’s promise to linger for the first act. She humours her temporary landlord, Geoffrey (Rory Kinnear), an affable country posho whose odd comments are framed as somehow loaded. In the time-honoured fashion of folk horrors like The Wicker Man, exploring the local countryside reveals Strange Goings On – not least a satyr-like nude in the corner of a field. Harper notices him, but does not notice that every single man and boy in the village has the same face. That face belongs to Rory Kinnear, pulling off enough roles to rival Alec Guinness in Kind Hearts and Coronets, Peter Sellers in Dr. Strangelove, or, if you want to get really granular, Dick Van Dyke in the ‘Inheritance Death’ episode of Diagnosis Murder. This casting choice, though entertaining, scans like a cheap gimmick. As a bloody spectacle, it’s absurdly kitsch rather than exhilarating Garland builds expectations by creating a suggestive atmosphere that, as the horror and home-invasion elements kick in, leads to an anticlimax. Harper’s traumatic b

Making an arthouse film based on an icon as deeply and emotionally enshrined in the public imagination as Princess Diana takes ingenuity. Fortunately, Chilean director, Pablo Larraín, has that quality in spades. He uses the known facts about the feathered-haired, breathy-voiced People’s Princess – and a few imagined ones – to spin a singular, baroque and psychologically-nuanced vision of life inside a gilded cage, enabled by a virtuoso performance by Kristen Stewart. ‘It’s just three days,’ she murmurs as she drives up to spend Christmas Eve, Christmas Day and Boxing Day in Sandringham with the in-laws. It is quickly inferred that Charles’s affair with Camilla is well underway, as is Diana’s bulimia and her hunted status as a paparazzi obsession. These psychological troubles mark her as a liability in an environment where the important thing is to never make a fuss.Just as he did in 2016’s portrait of an equally iconic First Lady, Jackie, Larraín spares no expense to render the royal estate in an ornate splendour that verges on the gothic. A portrait of Henry VIII in the dining room serves as a reminder of who – and what – is deemed worthy of worship in this world.  Stewart is extraordinary at conjuring up a rarefied form of neurotic energy. She is a modern woman and a people-pleaser, a mother and a spurned wife, and to top it off she’s begun to hallucinate Anne Boleyn. A member of the palace staff (a gaunt Timothy Spall) is deputised to coldly monitor her every move, interfe

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