David Hughes

With Hollywood still regaining its footing after a 2020s it’d probably describe as a personal low, the field has been open for streaming shows to monopolise the cultural conversation. And this year it’s been well-established thoroughbreads that have been dominating our social feeds (Succession, Curb Your Enthusiasm, The Bear, Industry, Bridgerton, Slow Horses), as well as some unexpected bolters (Baby Reindeer, Rivals, Fallout)/. And with a second run of Squid Game about to end the year with a big pile of bodies, the pressure to cram in eight or ten episodes’ worth of must-see TV is not relenting anytime soon. Our advice? Shake off the pressure to ‘see everything’ – it’s impossible, short of ripping a hole in the fabric of time – and find the shows that really hit your sweet spot. To help with this, we’ve taken a backwards glance over the best and most all-round enjoyable new binges, curating our definitive list 2024 favourites. And as any fan of ace Aussie comedy Colin From Accounts will tell you: it’s not always about the number of Emmys on the shelf, as the sheer joy on screen that makes something worth your precious time. That said, definitely do watch Succession too. RECOMMENDED: 🎥 The best movies of 2024 (so far)🔥 The best TV and streaming shows of 2023📺 The 100 greatest ever TV shows you need to binge

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

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

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 2024 (so far)🔥 The 100 greatest movies of all-time🎬 The most bingeable series on Netflix

Almost since movies began, the camera has loved the City of Lights. No wonder: Paris is as picturesque a city that exists, a kind of urban dreamland where iconic landmarks are situated around every corner and romance practically radiates from the pavement. And as much as the movies have obsessed over the French capital, Paris has been obsessed with the movies. After all, it’s where the first-ever commercial film screening took place, at the Grand Café in 1895. From the earliest Lumière brothers productions to Mission: Impossible, the city has formed the backdrop for some of the most striking films ever made. Here are 54 of the absolute best. Recommended: 🇫🇷 The 100 best French movies of all-time, ranked💂‍♀️ The 32 best London movies🗽 The 101 best New York movies

Oh, we are so back. It took a few years, but 2023 felt like the year that Hollywood finally found its footing post-pandemic – which is ironic, considering Hollywood also shut down for large parts of the year. Before all the strikes hit, though, there were indications that the movie industry was coming back to life. There was the #Barbenheimer phenomenon, of course, which helped power the domestic box office to its strongest overall numbers since 2019. But in terms of pure moviemaking, the year was particularly strong. Martin Scorsese dropped another masterpiece, while Across the Spider-Verse made comic-book movies fresh again (at least until Madam Web, anyway). Past Lives made audiences swoon, while small-time charmers like Theater Camp, Scrapper and Rye Lane reasserted the vitality of indie filmmaking. And don’t forget the one about the dancing killer doll! Overall, it was a great year for movies – even the Oscars were enjoyable. But what movies were the greatest? Here are our picks. RECOMMENDED: 🫶 The best movies of 2024 (so far)📺 The best TV and streaming shows of 2023🎥 The 100 greatest movies ever made

A top seat at one of the West End’s flagship cinemas can now set you back an eye-watering, wallet-lightening £40. And that's before you've even picked up some popcorn. But don’t despair – while tix to the flix can be overwhelming costly, especially if you’re seeing the latest 3D blockbuster, there are plenty of ways to catch the latest movies without having to take out a loan. All it takes is a little bit of planning, some imagination and you’ll open yourself up to heaps of movie magic. So, without further ado, here are some handy hacks to help you see movies for less. Recommended: The latest films in cinemas now 1. Go early in the week Swerve the weekend rush and head to the cinema in the first half of the week. With the exception of bank holidays, Monday seats at Crouch End’s charming ArtHouse, the lovely Lexi Cinema, Stoke Newington’s ace Rio and Shoreditch’s Rich Mix cost £7, and just £6 at the Barbican. And local fave the Walthamstow Empire has £4.25 seats on Tuesdays. Oh, and sign up to MASSIVE Cinema who regularly offer £3 tickets on Mondays with a MASSIVE Pass. 2. Sign up for a sneak preview Studios love to get an early reaction to their upcoming releases with special preview screenings. If you fancy seeing things first and for free – annoying your friends in the process – sign up with ShowFilmFirst or agencies like Stretch and elevenfiftyfive. Tickets are free, though you may be asked to share your opinion after the movie. Yep, everyone’s a critic.  Peckhamplex. Pict

CGI-allergic Christopher Nolan may have been unable to detonate an atomic bomb for his upcoming biopic of Robert Oppenheimer – at least, as far as we know. But even though he blew up a real Boeing 747 for Tenet and a hospital in The Dark Knight, those set-pieces wouldn’t even make our ranking of the movies’ all-time biggest explosions. We break down with a little help from the demolition men behind them. RECOMMENDED:The 18 greatest stunts in cinema (as picked by the greatest stunt people)The 101 best action films ever made

In the two decades since he was let go as director of Studio Ghibli’s Howl’s Moving Castle – a department all the tougher to take given his fondness Hayao Miyazaki’s films – Mamoru Hosoda has emerged as the natural successor to his childhood hero, earning an Oscar nomination for 2018’s Mirai and an unprecedented 14-minute standing ovation when his latest, Belle, debuted in Cannes. It’s a breathtaking film, combining traditional cel and computer animation to tell the story of Suzu, an ordinary 17-year-old student whose online avatar becomes a global singing sensation in an online world called ‘U’. It isn’t the first time Hosoda has embraced the digital world in his work; his first film was 1999’s Digimon, a kind of digital Pokémon story. Miyazaki’s influence was evident in more recent films, including The Girl Who Leapt Through Time (2006) and 2012’s Wolf Children, but by the time the beguiling Mirai received its Oscar nomination in 2018, Hosoda had stepped out of his hero’s shadow and was drawing worldwide recognition as an animator and an artist.  What was more satisfying, the Oscar nomination for Mirai or the 14-minute standing ovation for Belle at Cannes? ‘I was concerned for people’s hands! Fourteen minutes is a long time to be clapping. Obviously, I was really happy about that because it shows what the audience think of the film, and maybe the prize-winning films at the festival only got a four-minute ovation. But then again, who doesn’t want to be nominated for an Oscar

Anyone with even a passing interest in British politics will know that it has always been a strange beast – especially recently. But even on a stage so routinely peopled by windbags, chancers and the kind of English eccentrics who willingly defer to ‘nanny’ in all key decisions, the electoral presence of a figure dressed in Darth Vader-like garb is going to cut a swathe on the hustings. So it was on election night 2019 when Lord Buckethead, the villain in a low-budget sci-fi from, stood against Prime Minister Boris Johnson in the west London constituency of Uxbridge. And beneath the mask? Well… me. Photograph: Earl Owensby StudiosGremloids’ official poster How did a film journalist come to run for office as Lord Buckethead? The story starts with a poundshop Star Wars spoof called Gremloids (aka ‘Hyperspace’), directed by American filmmaker Todd Durham and released in 1984. I came across it eight years later while writing press releases for cult VHS distributor VIPCO. In a typically madcap PR stunt, VIPCO boss Mike Lee dressed up as the film’s villain, Lord Buckethead, painted the film’s title on his helmet, and ran against the then-Prime Minister John Major in the general election as candidate for the hastily-formed ‘Gremloids Party’. (Nothing in the electoral guidelines says you can’t use your candidacy as a marketing tool. In fact, the government pays for everyone in your constituency to receive a leaflet about your candidacy, and for £500 a pretty cheap way to advertise

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

If any film defines London at the end of the 1960s, it has to be ‘Performance’. Shot 50 years ago, it was reluctantly released two years later by a studio furious at what its maverick filmmakers had delivered. Warner Bros. wanted ‘A Hard Day’s Night’ with Mick Jagger; what they got was a twisted, hallucinogenic, drug- and sex-fuelled fantasy with a cut-up narrative in which a gangster on the run (James Fox) and a jaded rock star (Jagger) spiral into a surreal mix of free love, fluid identity, madness and violence. Co-directors Donald Cammell and the great Nicolas Roeg, who died last month, wanted to make a film about the heady times they were living in. ‘Into that mix went the political, social and psychological mood sweeping across the world,’ explains producer Sandy Lieberson, ‘and in particular for us in London.’ Fifty years on, the Notting Hill slum where it was filmed now has mansions worth millions, but ‘Performance’ retains its power to shock. Its clothes, music and attitudes are a pure distillation of the spirit of ’68 – the year of the Paris riots, Vietnam War protests, and the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy. Seismic changes were also brought about by LSD, the Pill and the (partial) decriminalisation of homosexuality – but thanks to its experimental shooting, sound and editing styles it still feels revolutionary, and as hard to pin down as ever. That hasn’t stopped author Jay Glennie and producer Lieberson – who, before Kubrick came abo

The trend of women being denied credit for their scientific discoveries is nothing new. Films such as Life Story (1987), The Imitation Game (2014) and Hidden Figures (2016) have belatedly acknowledged the contribution of women to scientific breakthroughs, but it seems particularly cruel that the ground-breaking work of Jean Purdy in the creation of in vitro fertilisation (IVF) went unrecognised for half a century. But who better to set the record straight than prolific screenwriter Jack Thorne and his co-writer wife Rachel Mason? Their son is one of the so-called ‘test tube babies’ born since the first, Louise Joy Brown, made medical history in 1978. And what better time than now, with right wing evangelicals and their political proxies coming for IVF with the same vigour with which they attack women’s right to choose? The scientific procedural tends to start with a ‘can we do this?’, often followed – as in Oppenheimer and TV’s Masters of Sex – with opposing forces saying ‘no, you can’t’. But while genre conventions and an unavoidably chronological narrative might hobble a lesser writer, when Thorne tackles a subject – a celebrity sex scandal (National Treasure), care homes during Covid (Help), a fight to save a severely disabled child (Best Interests) – deeply satisfying drama invariably results.  Unless you live in a deep red state, it may be hard to imagine the tabloid and ecclesiastical opprobrium massed against embryologist Purdy (Thomasin McKenzie), scientist Robert Edw

You wait ages for a Yorkshire-set folk-horror dripping with grief and dread, and then two come along at once. First, there was The Moor, a melancholy, subtly supernatural tale of grief and dread set in motion by the death of a young boy; Starve Acre, however... well, same but it’s the ’70s and has bigger stars. Arriving seven years after his gripping, thrillingly assured debut Apostasy, Daniel Kokotajlo’s second film is a valiant yet flawed adaptation of Andrew Michael Hurley’s creepy 2019 novel about a grieving couple, Richard and Juliette, whose asthmatic, behaviourally troubled little boy has died suddenly, leaving them adrift in their remote home among the Yorkshire Dales. As they struggle to come to terms with the senseless tragedy, the couple – played here by Matt Smith and Morfydd Clark – begin to experience strange phenomena, which notebooks found in the house suggest may be linked to Richard’s childhood and his father’s belief in centuries-old folklore. Wisely, if reductively, Kokotajlo’s screenplay rearranges the novel chronologically, but otherwise his fidelity to the source is impressive; the ‘tea-coloured Austin’ car described in the novel is precisely the correct shade of brown. For obvious reasons, the period setting is more noticeable in the film, but the immensely talented Smith and Clark bring the characters to life in a way that Hurley never quite managed. Smith’s face, seemingly hewn from one of the Yorkshire moors’ many standing stones, is a stark contras

The brilliant 2010 documentary No Distance Left to Run charted the history of the Britpop hitmakers blur and the journey to their huge reunion gig at Hyde Park, after a falling-out a decade before. But despite the band members’ separate lives and other interests, from Damon Albarn’s Gorillaz and operas to Alex James’s cheese, middle age had mellowed the fractious foursome. A new studio album followed in 2015.  Then, in 2023, blur celebrated their rekindled brotherhood – at this point, they feel more like brothers than their former Britpop rivals, the Gallaghers, with two sell-out performances at Wembley Stadium (a venue they’d never played before) and a critically-acclaimed album, The Ballad of Darren. Director Toby L (Liam Gallagher: Knebworth 22) was there to document everything: from Albarn gently weeping as he hears The Ballad of Darren’s first playback, to Albarn and Coxon’s return to Colchester’s Stanway comprehensive, where the singer recalls being regularly bullied. Why? “’Cause they thought I was a cunt,” he grins puckishly. Far from a slick, record-label-sanctioned promotional film, blur: To the End is a fly-on-the-wall look at a band coming to terms with themselves and their shared history and destiny. It swerves formal interviews in favour of moments of friendship, joy, melancholia and reflection that transcend the ‘for the fans’ framework of a typical album/tour film and becomes something more meaningful. It’s still downbeat – this is blur, after all – but in a f

What if you could talk to the dead? In ‘Dungeons & Dragons’, there’s a spell for that. In horror movie Baghead, a basement-dwelling witch offers two minutes with the deceased. Countless mediums, clairvoyants and Ouija boards provide such a service to the gullible. But what if AI could make chatting with the dead as simple as downloading an app? Brace yourselves – because it already can. Jason Rohrer’s Project December is among several Silicon Valley startups that allow people to interact with their dead loved ones, via an AI Q&A platform that uses minimal data about the deceased person to create a digital simulacrum. A grieving woman called Christi talks to her boyfriend, Cameroun, who died young. ‘The damn AI texts like him,’ she says. ‘The vernacular, the shortened words. How would they know that?’ Rohrer suggests it’s no more harmful than rewatching old videos of the dead, or calling their voicemail to hear their voice – but things go south when Cameroun’s AI avatar tells Christi that, on the other side, he meets ‘mostly addicts’. ‘In heaven???’ she asks incredulously, ‘No. I’m in hell.’ It’s a ghoulish business, and there are horrifying implications for the living: can such a mechanism be part of the healing process of grieving? If grief is a vital part of moving on from loss, how can people properly move on if they never have to let go?  Project December is just one example of ‘death capitalism’. The ‘digital afterlife’ phenomenon is already big business, and will grow e

Yorkshire, 1996: 11-year-old Claire convinces her little friend Danny to distract a shopkeeper while she pockets some sweets. When she returns to collect him, however, Danny has been snatched – the victim of a serial child abductor. Although the man is later arrested, his young victims are never found, presumably buried somewhere on the Yorkshire moors. Twenty-five years later, having served his sentence, the perpetrator is about to be released, prompting Danny’s desperate father, Bill (David Edward-Robertson), to convince Claire (Sophia La Porta) to help him search the moors once again, hoping to find evidence of the crimes, and perhaps – finally – Danny’s body. They both know it’s a fool’s errand; a retired detective (one of the late Bernard Hill’s final roles) illustrates the vastness of the unforgiving, treacherous moorland in an effective scene employing overlapping Ordnance Survey maps. There’s more to this than meets the eye, however. Claire discovers that Bill is employing divination to try to pinpoint Danny’s location, which sets her sceptic-o-meter bleeping. Yet the further they explore, the more Claire feels the supernatural power of the foggy, boggy marshland, with its impassive standing stones and 5000-year-old rune carvings. Before long, Claire’s scepticism – and the audience’s – are challenged. You may feel the fog closing in around you in the cinema Most horror films weigh in at around 90 minutes, but first-timers Paul Thomas (screenwriter) and Chris Cronin (d

The number of films originating from Mongolia makes every​ single one feel special, as much for their glimpses of life in the East Asian republic as any story they might tell. A large subset is concerned with the nation’s most famous export, Genghis Khan. If Only I Could Hibernate follows teenager Ulzii (Battsooj Uurtsaikh), his widowed, alcholic mother (Ganchimeg Sandagdorj) and his three younger siblings as they scratch out a living in their yurt, incongruously located in the industrialised and rapidly modernising capital, Ulaanbaatar. Ulzii has a precocious talent for physics, nurtured by his kindly teacher (Batzorig Sukhbaatar). It’s a gift that might lead to a full scholarship to a good school – and a ticket out of poverty. But his reality is harsher than the Mongolian winter, where temperatures dip as low as minus 30. Instead of studying, his time is taken up with odd jobs, selling his shoes to pay for coal, collecting cardboard to feed the fire and reluctantly calling on the kindness of neighbours to help the family through. Ulzii’s pride – he is horrified when he discovers his sister selling homemade bracelets at the market – is matched only by a determination to pull his family out of poverty without following his friends into a life of crime. Bleak yet hopeful, this an astonishingly assured debut It only takes one filmmaker to put a country on the movie map, and first-timer Zoljargal Purevdash has real talent. Her 2020 short Stairs became a festival favourite, and i

It’s not exactly a ‘meet-cute’. Sylvia (Jessica Chastain) is a social worker and recovering alcoholic, 13 years sober. Taking a rare break from juggling work, over-protectively raising her teenage daughter and AA meetings to attend a high-school reunion, she is understandably creeped out when a man (Peter Sarsgaard) not only follows her home, but camps outside her New York apartment, all night, in the pouring rain. His name is Saul. As his friend Isaac (Josh Charles) explains, he’s suffering from a form of dementia that means he can remember the distant past, but has trouble making new memories. Sylvia, who remembers the past all too well, stuns Saul with a terrible accusation: that he and his friends, five years her senior, raped her at school when she was aged just 12. But is she right? Or is her memory playing tricks on her, of a different but no less destructive kind? And if Saul is innocent, as seems to be the case, can these two broken people find solace in each other’s company? With his previous films, most recently Sundown (2021), Mexican writer-director Michel Franco displayed a talent for deceptively low-key, incisively observed stories about everyday people, mostly functioning dysfunctionals, whose lives are upended by sudden, unexpected events. It’s a testament to his skill as a storyteller that Memory survives a calamitously mishandled plot point to slowly reveal itself to be his best work since 2012’s After Lucia, the first of three of his films to win awards in

What do cinema audiences want from a horror film? If recent box office is anything to go by, they want to be frightened without cheap ‘jump scare’ tactics. A tantalising and ideally fresh premise, optionally couched in a set of rules it doesn’t break. Psychological terror over the gory excesses of noughties ‘torture porn’. Atmospheric visuals, eerie soundscapes and a cast that takes the premise, however fantastical, absolutely seriously. Above all, they want to not have their intelligence insulted by having the on-screen avatars for their catharsis do, you know, dumb shit. If all that’s true, Baghead may just bag itself a franchise. Screenwriters Christina Pamies and Bryce McGuire (Night Swim) do a commendable job of expanding Alberto Corredor’s award-winning 2017 short, which asked the question ‘What would you give to have two more minutes with a dead loved one?’ For in the basement of a derelict German pub, inherited by cash-strapped twentysomething Iris (The Witcher’s Freya Allan) on the death of her estranged father (Peter Mullan), dwells a bag-headed creature with the power to transform into a dead loved one for a two-minute chat. But like the demonic spirits in Talk to Me, blow the time limit and there’ll be hell to pay.  Against the advice of bestie Katie (Bridgerton’s Ruby Barker) – and dodging the question of whether or not a tortured supernatural creature should be exploited for cash – Iris grants a grieving widower an audience with the creature. Of course, it all g

Hitler is dead. Germany has surrendered. But while the war in Europe may be over, for Heinrich Zwygart (Michael Neuenschwander), the Swiss ambassador to Berlin since 1937, peacetime presents a new set of challenges. Switzerland’s famously declared neutrality will not, he knows, hold up to post-war scrutiny; his countrymen made fortunes backing the Nazi war effort, and turned away refugees with Jewish in their passports. ‘Do you know what they say in Berlin?’ he asks, as he contemplates his compromised past and uncertain future. ‘Six days a week, the Swiss work for Hitler, and on the seventh, they pray for Allied victory.’ Either way, he notes wryly, Switzerland was determined to end the war on the winning side. Zwygart is particularly haunted by the real-life fate of Maurice Bavaud, the Swiss student who was executed for attempting to kill Hitler in 1938, and on whose behalf the ambassador, acting on orders from his government, refused to use his diplomatic powers to intervene. Zwygart burned the evidence of this shameful episode before leaving Berlin, but his future son-in-law (Yann Philipona) is digging into the story, and other examples of Swiss collaboration with the Nazis, drawing Zwygart’s family into the mess. Meanwhile, his elderly father, a former soldier, has swallowed the party line that it was the Swiss Army’s deterrent value, not bank loans and arms deals, that kept Switzerland safe. Inspired by Thomas Hürlimann’s 1991 play ‘Der Gesandte’ (‘The Envoy’), itself dr

Best known for a film about a sentient, homicidal tyre (Rubber) and a talking fringed jacket (Deerskin), French writer-director Quentin Dupieux has been busy ploughing a filmographical furrow as idiosyncratic and instantly recognisable as that of, say, Wes Anderson. Tune into his uniquely surreal frequency – wackadoodle ideas delivered with utterly deadpan sincerity – and there is much to enjoy. Those who fail to may find it insufferable. His latest is a kind of horror anthology, which directly references Tales from the Crypt, comprising three tales (although one of them is so short, it’s really more like two tales). The first is about two couples who rent a vacation home, where one of the women (Anaïs Demoustier) finds a 1930s ‘thinking helmet’, enabling a rare sense of peace that leads to a reappraisal of her marriage and her friends – with horrific consequences. Is it a pointed parable about the effects of disengaging from our hectic lives just long enough to re-evaluate them? Or just classic Dupieux daftness? Another is about a young man unfazed by the malfunctioning machine which has ground him to bits. Is it a satirical take on young people’s indifference to the crushing gears of oppression they face? Or simply, you know, Dupieux being Dupieux? Most bizarre of all is the framing device, for which adjectives like ‘zany’, ‘eccentric’ and ‘whimsical’ fall far short. Essentially, the stories are told at a lakeside team-building retreat for ‘Tobacco Force’. Five costumed sup

If record sleeves are the poor man’s art collection, as Noel Gallagher is fond of saying, the work of Hipgnosis is like MoMA, the Guggenheim and the Tate Modern rolled into one.  The two-man art collective – Aubrey ‘Po’ Powell and the late Storm Thorgerson – was behind many of the most famous album covers of the 1970s, from Pink Floyd’s prismatic ‘The Dark Side of the Moon’ – arguably the single most iconic album cover of all time – to Led Zeppelin’s naked-moppets-on-the-Giant’s-Causeway ‘Houses of the Holy’, plus classic images for other British pop and rock legend like AC/DC, Black Sabbath, 10cc, Peter Gabriel and Wings. There’s a great deal of overlap with Roddy Bogawa’s 2011 documentary Taken by Storm: The Art of Storm Thorgerson and Hipgnosis, made while Thorgerson was still alive, and – as the title suggests – heroing his contribution to the partnership. (Humility was not Thorgerson’s strong point; his friendship with Pink Floyd’s Roger Waters ended because Thorgerson claimed credit for Waters’ pig-flying-over-Battersea-Power-Station idea.) Yet it’s hard to imagine the Hipgnosis story being told by a more qualified admirer than photographer-turned-filmmaker Anton Corbijn (Control), whose monochromatic photography was key to establishing the image of 1980s music acts such as U2, The Smiths and Depeche Mode. Underpinned by a new interview with Powell, Corbijn traces Hipgnosis back to their first collaboration, the psychedelic sleeve for Pink Floyd’s second album, 1968’s ‘

If someone transcribed a conversation you had with your plumber about a leak in one of your pipes, and Tina Satter made a film based on that conversation, chances are the results would be so gripping you’d have to check your seat for a damp patch when you left the cinema.   Satter is the award-winning playwright and theatre director who staged a play called ‘Is This a Room?’ in 2020. It was a word-for-word recreation of the June 2017 interrogation of US whistleblower Reality Winner, who received the longest prison sentence ever imposed for leaking government secrets – about potential Russian interference in the 2016 election – to the media. With no formal film training, Satter has crafted a claustrophobic thriller packed with such nail-biting tension there should be an emergency manicurist waiting outside each cinema. Sydney Sweeney, Emmy-nominated for The White Lotus and Euphoria, is riveting as the eponymous 25-year-old NSA translator, who returns from a yoga session to find FBI agents waiting at her home. Two interrogators (Josh Hamilton and Marchánt Davis) question Winner in an empty spare room (hence the stage play’s title), determined to expose her as the government operative who found something on the NSA’s secure intranet and mailed it to independent media outlet The Intercept. Did she do it? And if so, why? It’s so nail-biting, there should be an emergency manicurist waiting outside every cinema Knowing the outcome does little to dissipate the relentlessly ratcheted

If you’re still reeling from last year’s Michael J Fox documentary Still, buckle up. Super/Man: The Christopher Reeve Story takes another icon of 1970s and 1980s cinema struck down by tragedy, documenting the unknown actor’s catapult to stardom as the lead in 1978’s Superman, and the showjumping champion left unable to move from the shoulders down after being thrown from a horse in 1995.  Ian Bonhôte and Peter Ettedgui, who previously made a 2018 film about fashion designer Alexander McQueen, use recordings from Reeve’s audiobook memoir Still Me (1999) and interviews with family and friends, including Susan Sarandon, Glenn Close, Jeff Daniels and Whoopi Goldberg, to chart the death-defying story of Reeve’s rise to stardom and post-accident journey, battling for survival and fighting for funding for spinal injuries and other disabilities. The film is clear-eyed about Reeve’s struggles with family life – his eldest son recalls that his mother was virtually a single parent, because his father was away so much – and touches on some controversial aspects of his activism on behalf of the disabled community, including a controversial charity ad in which CGI was used to make the quadriplegic actor get out of his chair and walk.  Photograph: Herb Ritts/Warner Bros. 1. Reeve’s father was not proud of his son Reeve’s father, Franklin, was a hard taskmaster. The only time he celebrated his son’s success was when the actor told his father he had been cast as Superman. Franklin ordered c

When London’s legendary Prince Charles Cinema advertised a screening of Peter Luisi’s ‘The Last Screenwriter’, billed as ‘the first feature length film entirely written by AI’, the backlash was immediate – and fierce.  After 200 online complaints and outrage from film critics on social media, the programmers announced it was cancelling the privately booked, publicly accessible screening, scheduled for the evening of June 23. ‘The feedback we received highlighted the strong concern held by many of our audience on the use of AI in place of a writer which speaks to a wider issue within the industry,’ a cinema spokesperson said. The announcement acknowledged the film’s experimental nature and its ambition to ‘engage in the discussion about AI and its negative impact on the arts’, but the screening was shelved. Films being pilloried sight-unseen is hardly a new phenomenon: the BBFC famously received hundreds of complaints prior to the release of Martin Scorsese’s ‘The Last Temptation of Christ’, but not a single one afterwards. Pushback against the encroachment of AI into filmmaking, however, tends to be about the protection of artists’ livelihoods, rather than morality. Marvel endured a backlash for its deployment of AI in the title sequence of Nick Fury-led Disney+ series ‘Secret Invasion’, as did this year’s Late Night with the Devil’, a horror film that included AI-generated art. The use of AI in screenwriting was a key plank of last year’s Hollywood writers’ strike, although

There are plenty of films that act as polemics for the vegan-curious – and if you’ve watched one, you’re probably already on the path. None, however, have hit upon the ingenious format of UK filmmaker Thomas Pickering’s new doc I Could Never Go Vegan. One by one, the film addresses the excuses even the most environmentally-conscious and animal-loving omnivores make for resisting the lure of the plant-based lifestyle.  Backed by exec-producer and committed vegan Alicia Silverstone, this persuasive doc busts meat-eating myths and challenges the arguments against a plant-based lifestyle. Here’s five things we learned from the film. 1. You need to eat more fibre – a lot more In fact, vegans have a higher intake of nutrients like vitamins and fibre than omnivores and carnivores. Given that only one in ten people in the UK get enough fibre – something only found in plant-based food – a plant diet is optimal for bowel health, as the doc puts it, ‘just having a good poo’. Photograph: DARTMOUTH FILMS 2. You don’t need meat to get built Although people often claim that plant-based diets don’t give humans enough protein, some of the largest mammals on Earth – elephants, rhinos, great apes, etc. – are veggies. We actually don’t need that much protein – about one gram per kilogram of bodyweight per day – and every single plant food contains protein. 3. You – personally – can save a 100 animals this year You don’t have to care about animals to go vegan, but if you do, you’ll be saving th

Twenty years ago today, David Fincher’s ‘Fight Club’ landed on an unsuspecting America like a Sugar Ray uppercut. Since then, its status as a modern masterpiece is all but unchallenged. But, asks film writer David Hughes, is its assault on society’s smug complacency still as potent as it once was? ‘The first rule of Fight Club is you do not talk about Fight Club’ Well, we don’t care much for rules. With David Fincher’s maverick masterpiece turning 20 today, we’re here to talk about ‘Fight Club’. It was released at the tail end of 1999, arguably the best year for film – at least, since 1939 – with ‘The Matrix’, ‘The Sixth Sense’, ‘The Blair Witch Project’, ‘American Beauty’, ‘Being John Malkovich’ and ‘Magnolia’ among the game-changers. ‘This is your life, and it’s ending one minute at a time’ ‘Fight Club’ was one of the last films of the twentieth century, but felt like the first film of the twenty-first – a radical, subversive, controversial life lesson in which Tyler Durden (Brad Pitt) and his pal (Ed Norton) start a bare-knuckle boxing club in a bid to reclaim their manhood from a milquetoast life of Ikea furniture, lattes and self-improvement. Their idea catches on, and before you can say ‘I am Jack’s complete lack of surprise’, fight clubs start springing up all over America, spearheading a kind of revolution designed to shake the masses from their designer-label delirium (or ‘buying shit you don’t need to impress people you don’t like’, as Jim Uhls’s screenplay succinct