Phil de Semlyen

All war is hell, but Vietnam was a specific kind of nightmare for America. Fought for spurious reasons and ending with little to show for all the bloodshed, it left a generation scarred and began the United States’ long decline as the world’s hero. Coinciding with an era in Hollywood where filmmakers were already growing more cynical and suspicious toward the government at large, the movies about the conflict naturally feature much less rah-rah patriotism than those set during World War II. In fact, many of them are basically horror films. How many, though, are historically accurate? With 2025 marking the fiftieth anniversary of the fall of Saigon, and thus the end of the war, we asked military historian Professor Geoffrey Wawro, author of acclaimed account The Vietnam War, to rank the most well-known Vietnam War movies, not necessarily by quality, but by just how reflective they are of the reality of the war. Here’s how they stacked up. Recommended:  📽️ The 50 best war movies ever made🪖 The 50 best World War II movies🎖️ World War I films ranked by historical accuracy

Call it a hot take if you want, but there is no greater feat in cinema than creating a timeless comedy. That’s because no film genre ages worse. Drama, horror and romance movies all tap into innate human desires and anxieties that anyone from any generation can understand. But comedy is all about context. What’s funny in 1925 might not make a lick of sense to 2025 audiences. Humour is also deeply individualistic: one person’s ROTFLMAO is another’s shrug emoji. That makes coming up with the best comedy films of all-time especially challenging. There’s a lot that goes into identifying truly great comedy, but the main one has to do with durability. Is this film still funny now, and will it still be years from now? In sorting the GOATs from the groaners, we enlisted the help of comedians like Diane Morgan and Russell Howard, actors such as John Boyega and Jodie Whittaker and a small army of Time Out writers. And the films we came up with represent the 100 most hilarious – and most lasting – laughers ever made. We can’t be sure they’ll all make you laugh. But if they don’t… well, that sounds like a ‘you’ problem. Recommended: 🔥 The 100 best movies of all-time🤣 The best comedies of 2024🥰 The greatest romantic comedies of all time

September 2025 update: Our additions this month include an out-of-nowhere indie gem and a long-awaited spinoff to one of the most popular sitcoms of all-time. Splitsville, starring relative unknowns Michael Angelo Covino and Kyle Marvin, along with Dakota Johnson and Adria Arjona, might be the year’s best romcom. And then there’s The Paper, Peacock’s successor to The Office, set at a struggling newspaper in Toledo, Ohio.  It took a few months, but 2025 has turned into a pretty great year for onscreen comedy – relative to recent years, anyway. How can anyone look askance at Tim Robinson starring in his first movie? Or Seth Rogen doing a high-anxiety Hollywood satire? Or low-key, leftfield gems like Splitsville and One of Them Days? Or how about the fact that we got a remake of The Naked Gun, and it turned out to be awesome? Like we said: it’s been a good year for laughs. And there’s more coming, with both the Spinal Tap sequel and Aziz Ansari’s directorial debut, Good Fortune, still on the horizon – plus anything else we probably won’t see coming. Here are the movies and shows that have busted our guts the hardest so far.  RECOMMENDED: 🎥 The best movies of 2025 (so far)🔥 The best TV and streaming shows of 2025📺 The 100 greatest ever TV shows you need to binge

September 2025 update: This month’s addition is perhaps the most surprising: Splitsville, an indie screwball farce about two couples stumbling into open marriages, which somehow manages to be one of 2025’s best romantic comedies while also containing the year’s best fight scene.  At this point in 2025, it’s possible to look at the year in movies and draw a few conclusions. Superhero movies aren’t ‘out’ but they’re no longer guaranteed juggernauts. Kiddie flicks do big business. Gen Z is starting to generate its own IP. Audiences love horror. China doesn’t need the rest of the world to blow up the international box office. And, lo and behold, there is still a place at the multiplex for original stories. Overall, after much hangwringing post-pandemic, the film industry looks to be in decent health. Of course, many of those takeaways could still get blown up – after all, there are still four months left on the calendar, and awards season is just getting underway. But if you look at the year so far, one thing that can be said for sure is there are plenty of reasons to feel hopeful about cinema as an artform, whether it’s the blockbuster success of genre-smashing auteur vehicles like Sinners and Weapons, daring formal experiments such as Nickel Boys, Flow and Better Man and heartening returns to form for masters like Steven Soderbergh and Danny Boyle. While there’s much more to come, there’s much to celebrate already. Here are the movies we’ve loved the most so far.   RECOMMENDED

Museums are one of the things that London does best. This city boasts grand institutions housing ancient treasures, modern monoliths packed with intriguing exhibits, and tiny rooms containing deeply niche collections – and lots of them are totally free to anyone who wants to come in and take a gander. And with more than 170 London museums to choose from, there's bound to be one to pique your interest, whatever you're in to.  Want to explore the history of TfL? We’ve got a museum for that. Rather learn about advertising? We’ve got a museum for that too. History? Check. Science? Check. 1940s cinema memorabilia, grotesque eighteenth-century surgical instruments, or perhaps a wall of 4,000 mouse skeletons? Check, check and check! Being the cultured metropolitans that we are, Time Out’s editors love nothing more than a wholesome afternoon spent gawping at Churchill’s baby rattle or some ancient Egyptian percussion instruments. In my case, the opportunity to live on the doorstep of some of the planet’s most iconic cultural institutions was a big reason why I moved here at the first chance I got, and I’ve racked up countless hours traipsing around display cases and deciphering needlessly verbose wall texts in the eleven years since. From iconic collections, brilliant curation and cutting-edge tech right down to nice loos, adequate signage and a decent place to grab a cuppa; my colleagues and I know exactly what we want from a museum, and we’ve put in a whole lot of time deliberating

In the days when Max was known as HBO Max, the streaming service was known as the place to go to rewatch The Sopranos, Sex and the City and The Wire and stream recent blockbusters. After the merger that formed Warner Bros. Discovery in 2022, much has changed. Yes, it’s still the platform to use if you want to spend time with Tony, Carrie or Stringer, but the selection of awesome movies has blown up, thanks to licensing deals with the likes of Turner Classic Movies, Criterion Collection and Studio Ghibli. Need help navigating its considerable catalogue? Here are the 25 newer and older movies on Max you absolutely need to stream ASAP. Recommended: 💻 The best movies on Netflix right now🍏 The best movies on Apple TV+🇭 The best movies on Hulu 🗓 The best movies of 2025 so far 

September update: a quietish month for the genre ahead of October’s gnarly line-up does have one headline horror in The Conjuring: Last Rites, which wraps up an $800 million franchise is solidly spooky fashion. 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.RECOMMENDED: 🎃 The 100 best horror films ever made😱 The scariest movies based on a true story 🔥 The best horror films of 2024

What separates a psychological thriller from a regular old thriller? As the phrase implies, it mostly has to do with the mind. In the best examples, special attention is paid to the mental disposition of its characters, and the thrills themselves are derived from how those motivations influence the movement of the plot. That might make it sound highfalutin, but the greatest psychological thrillers play on elemental fears, traumas and delusions to send goosebumps racing up the viewer’s arms. As one particularly disturbed young man once said, we all go a little mad sometimes – and that’s what makes the genre so relatable… and frightening.  Taking all that into consideration, we probed the most shadowy corners of cinema to put together this list of the best psychological thrillers ever made. Some are tense and twisty, others are more meditative, but nearly all of them will leave you feeling dizzy, discombobulated and probably in need of some fresh air afterward. Recommended: 😬 The 100 best thriller movies of all-time🍆 The 35 steamiest erotic thrillers💣 The 101 best action movies of all-time🔥 The 100 best movies of all-time

Crime movies often provide the vicarious thrill of watching people live outside the law – robbing banks, running from cops, getting into shootouts and either narrowly escaping or going out in a blaze of glory. Movies about serial killers, however, are another beast entirely. They force us to peer into the darkest, coldest, most frightening corners of the human psyche. And the scariest thing is, there’s probably a lot more of them out there in the real world than ultra-cool bank robbers. But serial killers are most often made, not born – and the best movies about them interrogate the conditions that create them as much as they try to shock us by their existence. In considering the best serial-killer movies ever made, we prioritised those that go beyond mere exploitation or transgressive voyeurism. Some might be categorised as horror, others as noirs or procedurals. All of them will leave you shaken, in one way or another. Recommended: 🩸 The 15 scariest horror movies based on true stories💣 The 100 best thrillers of all time😱 The 100 best horror movies of all time🕵️ The 40 best murder-mystery movies

Let's be real, you'll probably spend most of those lazy days between Christmas and New Year watching Yuletide classics, eating chocs, and forgetting how your legs work. But there's a lot to be said for starting your Crimbo movie viewing long before the pressies get doled out. In November and December, venues across the city start putting on special xmas screenings of festive favourites, and they're the perfect excuse to get into the spirit of the season, whether you're a grumpy Grinch or a troublingly perky Elf.  These Christmas specials are full of added incentives to peel you off your sofa, too, including special snacks, live orchestras and sing-a-longs. So it's high time you put a cinema trip on your festive to-do list. Here are the best Christmas movie events the capital has to offer in 2025. RECOMMENDED:🎄 Read our full guide to Christmas in London.🍿 The 50 greatest Christmas movies.

Horror films aren’t just for Halloween, but they certainly make spooky season that bit more terrifyingly fun. Whether you’re a hide-behind-the-cushion kind of watcher or someone who revels in every jumpscare and nightmare-inducing villain, joining a Halloween film screening with fellow horror enthusiasts is guaranteed way to get your heart racing and your blood curdling this All Hallow’s Eve. If you’re firmly against any blood, guts and gore, you can still get involved – not all Halloween screenings are focused on bone-chilling bumps in the night. There are also plenty of more lighthearted picks to choose from, like the camp-but-festive Hocus Pocus or The Rocky Horror Picture Show, that will get you in the mood without scaring you to within an inch of your life. Recommended:🎃 Our guide to Halloween in London😱 The 100 best horror movies of all time👹 The 66 greatest movie monsters of all time

For any serious cinephile, all roads lead to France. For many, French movies are the final frontier of film fandom: painfully stylish and achingly cool, with philosophical underpinnings and experimental structures that more mainstream audiences can find impenetrable. And certainly, some of that stereotyping is based in truth – pioneering New Wavers like Jean-Luc Godard and Agnès Varda prided themselves on their intellect. But once you start exploring French cinema, it’s not difficult to see why it’s had such a powerful influence on global moviemaking – and that it’s not nearly as highfalutin’ and alienating as it can sometimes seem. We understand that leaping in can be intimidating, though. So we’ve ranked the 100 best French movies ever made, less to craft a definitive canon but to give both newbies and hardcore Francophiles a jumping-off point. Sure, there are famous crowd-pleasers like Amélie and Criterion-canonised classics, but also more obscure gems to challenge even deep-diving Nouvelle Vague obsessives. No matter your experience level, you’re sure to discover something surprising.  Written by Tom Huddleston, Geoff Andrew, Dave Calhoun, Cath Clarke, Trevor Johnston, Joshua Rothkopf, Keith Uhlich and Matthew Singer  Recommended: 🔥 The 100 best movies of all-time🌏 The best foreign films of all-time🇬🇧 The 100 best British movies🛏 The 101 best sex scenes in movies of all-time

Comedy is often described as ‘tragedy plus time’. But what if the formula works in reverse, too? That’s one conclusion you can draw from this vain attempt to recapture the helium high of This Is Spinal Tap, one the funniest and cleverest comedy movies ever made. Forty years on, the laughs are in tragically short supply as Nigel Tufnell, Derek Smalls and Dave St Hubbins reunite for one last gig in another mockumentary that’s taken director Marty Di Bergi (okay, Rob Reiner) four decades to make and still feels half-baked.  There are jokes – well, joke-adjacent remarks – about death, drummers and lots of chat about cheese. We find Tufnell (Christopher Guest) in rock retirement, estranged from his band mates and running a small cheese and guitar shop in Berwick-on-Tweed. Bassist Smalls (Harry Shearer), meanwhile, has a glue museum in south London and writes terrible rock operas with names like ‘Hell Toupee’. Lead singer St Hubbins (Michael McKean) is lending his talents to Californian mariachi outfits and writing hold music for customer service phone lines (‘This one won a Holdie,’ he points out proudly). So far, s’okay. The band’s cricket-bat-wielding manager Ian Faith is no more (actor Tony Hendra died in 2021), leaving the band’s contract with his enthusiastic daughter (Kerry Godliman). She sets to work reuniting the bickering old rockers for a reunion gig in New Orleans, with Chris Addison’s slimy svengali figure standing by to take advantage. From there, the bum notes come t

Cheesier than a wheel of Stilton and about as edgy, Downton Abbey bows out with a cosy but loveable final instalment that will leave few dry eyes among long-time fans of Julian Fellowes’ British TV thoroughbred.  It’s a third big-screen instalment that’s one long ending: to the characters, to the house, to the certainties of Edwardian England. No movie has had this many goodbyes since The Return of the King.  It’s mostly soirées and teas and trips to the theatre, though there is a vague gesture at a plot. A handsome American (Alessandro Nivola) with Wall Street airs arrives in Blighty to stir things up; a prospective visit from Noël Coward gets everyone in a flap; and a prize or two needs giving out at the county fair – a task newcomer Simon Russell Beale’s harrumphing country type isn’t making any easier. The headline news is that Lady Mary (Michelle Dockery) is now divorced from her feckless husband, which gets her rudely booted out of polite society. Things have changed in 1930s England, but they’re still basically nightmarish if you don’t have a moustache.  Money is in short supply at the grand old pile, too, thanks to dopey Uncle Harold’s (Paul Giamatti) bad investments and the post-Depression squeeze, and there’s no Violet Crawley to provide snarky reassurances (the formidable old dame gazes down from a portrait, like Vigo the Carpathian). Maggie Smith’s presence always brought a sharp note to Fellowes’ melodious rhythms and it’s missing here. No movie has had this many

Spare a thought for whoever has to give this wildly obscenity-strewn biopic a rating. Not since Ken Loach’s cheery whisky heist caper The Angel’s Share got hit with a 15 certificate for dropping one too many ‘aggressive “c*nts”’ has there been such a disparity between intent and delivery in a screenplay. Here, writer-director Kirk Jones presides over a Tourette’s Syndrome (TS) story with a potty mouth but not a mean-spirited bone in its body. It’s a ‘PG’ yarn with an ‘18’ gob.Unlike, say, Rain Man, which sidelined and misrepresented the neurodiversity at its centre, the ’90s-set I Swear ushers you right into the tormented headspace of young Scotsman John Davidson as he copes with a neurological condition that leaves him with uncontrollable tics and sees him ostracised from an uncomprehending society, and even his own family. Played as a bubbly 13-year-old in ’90s Galashiels by newcomer Scott Ellis Watson and a more circumspect twentysomething by The Rings of Power’s Robert Aramayo – both delivering terrific, likeable performances – I Swear charts the onset of Davidson’s condition to an adulthood in a kind of self-imposed isolation. But it opens with him collecting an MBE from the Queen for his pioneering educational work on TS, an upbeat framing device to hold onto as the story flashes back to a life with some heartbreaking lows. It’s a ‘PG’ yarn with an ‘18’ gob Whether getting expelled from school for dropping a c-bomb on his headmaster, being shunned by his family, having

In his genius 1985 documentary Sherman’s March, director Ross McElwee follows in the footsteps of a Civil War general’s infamous advance through the Confederacy. Haunted by a recent break-up, the doleful young filmmaker ends up far more preoccupied with finding a girlfriend. The film’s Ken Burns-meets-The Inbetweeners awkwardness and charm gave him a Sundance hit and made it a cult classic (if not especially helpful in understanding the Civil War). Forty years on, the stunning Remake lays bare McElwee’s own battles, the least of which is a mooted Hollywood remake of his breakthrough doc. A tear-stained, deeply personal and utterly singular documentary, it tells the story of the young son he lost to a Fentanyl overdose, captured via home video footage taken across three decades. ‘It’s been seven years since you died,’ he says in the voiceover, ‘and I still miss you every day’. Throat meet lump.  After Sherman’s March McElwee did find his person – wife Marilyn. They have two kids: bubbly, bright-witted son Adrian and a sunbeam of a daughter in Mariah, who the couple adopts in Paraguay. Those experiences become McElwee’s 2008 documentary In Paraguay. But every experience they share gets captured. He rarely stops filming.  Inevitably, this becomes grating for Marilyn and Mariah, who start to feel like characters in a movie he never calls ‘cut’ on. There’s divorce and then a lonely relocation. Adrian, though, has caught the bug. He grows up wanting to follow in his dad’s footsteps

In February 1977, a disgruntled Indianapolis man walked into a city centre tower for a meeting with a mysterious box under his arm. He then took a mortgage company executive who he felt had cheated him out of a real estate investment hostage, jerryrigging a shotgun to his head with wire and demanding an apology and millions of dollars in compensation. One false move from the cops and the man was toast.   This absolutely terrible plan and all the absurdities that ensued over 63 hours and under the full flare of first local, then national news coverage, are captured with terrific gusto in Gus Van Sant’s tragicomic thriller. It’s another perceptive state-of-the-nation movie from the veteran indie auteur to add to To Die For (1995), Elephant (2003) and Milk (2008), sharing their preoccupation with guns as a manifestation of American ambition and dysfunction. Beyond the guilty laughs, authentically beige ’70s period detail and news reportage aesthetic, there’s an offbeat anti-capitalist folk tale here that will strike a chord in the current moment.   It’s scary clown Bill Skarsgård doesn’t leave all the clownishness behind as the jittery, volatile Tony Kiritsis. He’s an aspiring entrepreneur whose efforts to develop a shopping mall were left in ruins when loans company boss ML Hall (Al Pacino) called in his investment. But the plan almost falls at the first hurdle because Hall, he learns, is in Florida. Without missing a beat, he takes his son Richard (Dacre Montgomery) hostage in

The 1960s had Dr Strangelove and Fail Safe, the ’70s had Twilight’s Last Gleaming, the ’80s had WarGames, and the ’90s had Crimson Tide. If you’ve recovered from those Cold War classics, Kathryn Bigelow’s unbelievably stressful nuclear disaster movie is sending you straight back to the basement.  The screenplay by TV news veteran Noah Oppenheim, who also co-wrote Netflix’s White House cyberattack thriller Zero Day and must surely have a bunker in his garden by this point, gives three overlapping perspectives on an unfolding nightmare. Each start at the exact same point: a regular morning in the White House Situation Room and US Strategic Command is disrupted by a spec on the radar. A single nuke has been launched over the Pacific. Is it another North Korean test? A rogue submarine commander? Nothing to worry about or the first shot of armageddon? A faint worry becomes palpable fear for Admiral Mark Miller (Jason Clarke), Captain Olivia Walker (Rebecca Ferguson) and the team in the Situation Room when the nuke goes ‘suborbital’, its trajectory putting it on course to hit the Midwest in 17 minutes time. At Alaska’s missile defence base, Major Daniel Gonzalez (Anthony Ramos) goes from wrestling with homesickness to trying to prevent ten million fatalities in a trice. But, as someone points out, America’s $60 billion defence missiles are like trying to ‘hit a bullet with a bullet’.  Over the world’s most high-powered Zoom call, the President (Idris Elba) and his advisors wrestle

One of Hollywood’s biggest stars in a true-life sports movie with big-time awards hopes. It’s going to be a Rocky-like story of comeback glory wrenched from the jaws of defeat, right? Except that’s not at all what Dwayne Johnson and director Benny Safdie have got cooking with this tender but tumultuous addiction and relationship drama set in the gladiatorial world of mixed martial arts (MMA). Because beyond the regular crunch of fist on bone, The Smashing Machine is an unexpectedly gentle, soulful character study that has Johnson undercutting his crowd-pleasing ‘The Rock’ persona with vulnerability and boyish uncertainty. The early Oscar buzz is certainly warranted: opposite an equally affecting, glammed-up Emily Blunt, it’s far more than just a popcorn-guy-goes-prestige novelty turn. This is his The Wrestler moment. Covering his shaved dome with a crop of black hair and with subtle facial prosthetics lending him an off-kilter look, an extra beefed-up Johnson plays real-life fighter Mark Kerr over three physically and emotionally bruising years in the late ’90s. We meet striding into the ring, basically a wardrobe on legs, and crushing opponents in short order. A journalist asks him what it would feel like to lose and he’s genuinely stumped. He can’t conceive of defeat partly because he doesn’t want to, a bubble of control he expects girlfriend Dawn Staples (Blunt) to help him maintain.   Except that the world of MMA is evolving at speed, with new rules that limit Kerr’s fire

There’s surely a more incisive, enlightening version of Olivier Assayas’ (Personal Shopper) enjoyable but strictly meat-and-two-veg recap of modern Russian political history waiting to be made. The performances are solid, with an excellent Jude Law all inscrutable psychopathy as a younger Vladimir Putin and Alicia Vikander the perfect embodiment of an amoral post-Soviet arrivista, and the chilly world-building works well enough, but there’s a missing ingredient – actual Russians.   It’s unsurprising that a French director and screenwriter adapting a book by a Swiss-Italian author with a cast of Americans, Brits and Swedes, filming in Latvia, struggles to burrow deep into the psyche of one of the world’s most secretive political cultures. The Wizard of the Kremlin never shakes the sense of being a best-guess at the cold realities of modern Russia. And there’s an ersatz quality to Assayas’s drama that’s not aided by a hackneyed framing device that has Jeffrey Wright’s US journalist summoned to a snowy dacha for a history lesson from mystery ex-Kremlin fixer Vadim Baranov (Paul Dano). He’s based on Vladislav Surkov, the so-called ‘new Rasputin’ who ruthlessly expedited the dictator’s rise to power during the helter-skelter, oligarchic post-Yeltsin days of the 1990s. You’ll feel for the American Fiction star as he’s left nodding solemnly while Dano blasts through reams of exposition. Baranov tees up flashbacks to rowdy student parties, his early career in Moscow’s avant-garde the

Jim Jarmusch, that beat poet of mellow angst, is back on familiar turf with this triptych of stories about grown-up children and the parents they don’t really want to visit. After 2019’s limp zombie comedy The Dead Don’t Die, devotees will be happy to hear that the Ohioan’s stocks-in-trade – wry insights into the human condition, laconic vibes, a growly Tom Waits – come augmented with deeper heart here. It’s divided into three roughly equal length chapters: ‘Father’, ‘Mother’, ‘Sister Brother’. In the first, Adam Driver’s divorcee Jeff and his equally buttoned-up sister Emily (Mayim Bialik) take his Range Rover in the New Jersey sticks for a long-overdue visit to see their dad (Waits). Amusingly, their stiff in-car conversation is crosscut with the old man not tidying his lakeside home in anticipation of their visit, but messing it up. He ramps up the dodderiness when the pair arrive, a sly manipulation, it turns out, designed to keep his fretful son’s cash handouts coming.  The theme of gentle deception also informs a second chapter with a faint Mike Leigh quality in which two wildly contrasting sisters, Cate Blanchett’s nervy Timothea and Vicky Krieps’s half-tamed wildchild Lilith, head to their mother’s (Charlotte Rampling) immaculate Dublin home for tea. A lot of effort has been made, cakes bought and flowers arranged, but there’s something stopping any of them enjoying the get-together. The distance between the trio is the width of a tablecloth, and an ocean. Lilith lies

A shot of Earth from space seems an unexpected opening perspective for a film that zeroes in on a few square miles of the scrubby, starkly beautiful Tucumán Province in northern Argentina to tell a story of murder and courtroom drama. But Argentinian auteur Lucrecia Martel’s (Zama) finds striking universality in her first documentary, a compelling true-crime tale of indigenous dispossession and cultural erasure that could be set in a hundred different countries. Multiples more gripping than its bland English title might suggest, Landmarks is a story 15 or so years in the telling. The case at its heart (summarised in this 2009 Amnesty report) involves the alleged murder of indigenous leader Javier Chocobar by three men, two of whom were armed ex-police officers. The trio, we learn in lively court proceedings to which Martel’s cameras have total access, were trying to finagle a mining concern on ancestral land that belonged to the Chuschagasta people. When Chocobar and 20 or so others confront them on a recce, there’s a bad-tempered exchange, a scuffle and finally gunshots. At the end of it Chocobar lies dying, shot in the stomach.  It’s not Rashomon. Despite the confident testimony of the ex-cops, and even their walk-through recreation of the events in the valley that day, it’s pretty clear that Chocobar didn’t shoot himself. There’s even dramatic home video footage that culminates in the camera rolling down a hillside when shots ring out. But the question of whether justice w

Some murder-mysteries – Seven, for instance – immerse you in grisly menace. Others – Memories of Murder –  weave a web of intricate plotting and surprising feints. The Thursday Murder Club, by comparison, just wants to plump up a cushion, pour you a nice cup of tea and spin you a cosy yarn with an unusually high body count. And, honestly, you’d be a silly sausage not to enjoy it on those terms. For a movie in which people die violently every 30 or so minutes, the stakes are stupendously low, the vibe steadfastly upbeat. In fact, there’s more fuss at Downton Abbey when a fork goes missing than when Tony Curran (Geoff Bell), a flash building developer at posh retirement village Coopers Chase, gets bumped off. The dastardly deed is all the crime-solving pensioners at the heart of Richard Osman’s best selling murder-mystery novels need to set about ID’ing the culprit, in between mouthfuls of Celia Imre’s surprisingly moist sponge cakes.  Alongside Imre’s newcomer Joyce, an ex-nurse whose handy forensic knowledge sees her fast-tracked into the group, our amateur sleuths are Helen Mirren’s Elizabeth Best, a guileful ringleader with a coy espionage back story. Land-grabbing Ray Winstone’s rightful turf, a grinning Pierce Brosnan is West Ham-supporting ex-union boss Ron, and Ben Kingsley is gentle psychiatrist Ibrahim. The gang, who congregate in the orangery each Thursday to puzzle over a long-ago cold case, prove equally adept at elbowing their way into the new investigation. But w

If laughter is the best medicine, this gut-twisting tale of vanishing kids from American comedian-turned-horror auteur Zach Cregger comes with its own built-in cure.  Put simply, if Weapons wasn’t the best horror movie of the year – pipping even the mighty Sinners – it would probably be the best comedy. The last 30 minutes alone is hands down the most satisfying final reel I’ve winced through – and corpsed at – in absolutely ages, a whirlwind of laughs and scares that ties up the movie’s knotty narrative in a singular fashion. Of course, Weapons is a less-you-know-the-better experience. Suffice to say, at 2.17am on an otherwise unremarkable night in the fictional US town of Maybrook, 17 classmates spontaneously get out of bed, leave their parents’ homes and run into the darkness, arms outspread like sycamore seedlings blown by some unseen tempest (in suitably macabre fashion, the pose was inspired by photojournalist Nick Ut’s legendary Vietnam War snap Napalm Girl).  When teacher Justine Gandy (Julia Garner) turns up to class the next morning, there’s only one pupil to greet her: a taciturn boy called Alex (Cary Christopher). Is his silence down to shock or is there something else going on?  Who – or what – is the Pied Piper behind this bizarro event is the mystery that Weapons works its way towards in unhurried but enthralling fashion. Cregger’s camera sweeps, wraith-like, through a town whose shock is turning to anger and recrimination, with the besieged Gandy in the crossh

Tickets for this year’s BFI London Film Festival are on sale to the public now, and as always they’ll be going like the hottest of cakes. There’s plenty of big hitters on the line-up, from The Boss biopic Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere to Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein, Yorgos Lanthimos’s sci-fi Bugonia, the latest films from Park Chan-wook (No Other Choice) and Lynne Ramsay (Die My Love), and Jafar Panahi’s magnificent Palme d’Or winner It Was Just an Accident. But we’ve delved a bit deeper into the programme to recommend a few that might not be on your radar yet. From ghostly Cornish sc-fi films to hard-hitting docudramas to sweat-inducing thrillers, here’s ten films to check out when the festival gets underway on October 8. Photograph: Cannes Film Festival Sentimental Value Joachim Trier reunites with his The Worst Person in the World star Renate Reinsve for a family drama that was treated to a 19-minute standing ovation in Cannes. While LFF-goers will not be expected to clap for that long, the early word is that this is one – which also stars Stellan Skarsgård and Elle Fanning – is another ovation-worthy effort from the Norwegian maestro. 8.45pm, Sun Oct 12 – Royal Festival Hall2pm, Tue Oct 14 – BFI Southbank5.50pm, Sun Oct 19 – Curzon Mayfair Photograph: Venice International Film Festival The Testament of Ann Lee The Brutalist’s creators reunite for another epic immigrant tale – this time, a musical with Anna Fastvold directing and Brady Corbet co-writing. T

If you’ve seen his plays Cyprus Avenue and Ulster American, you’ll know David Ireland is a dramatist who likes to put unexpected spins on the darker corners of human behaviour.  And the Northern Irish playwright is doing just that with his much-anticipated new ITV Coldwater. He even coaxed back The Walking Dead’s Andrew Lincoln for his first British TV role in nearly 15 years, pairing him with Trainspotting’s Ewen Bremner in a Straw Dogs-y scenario that tackles the dark side of rural life and masculinity itself over six hard-hitting, fast-spiralling episodes.  Coldwater ‘started with a question I was asking myself: where do I want to live – the countryside or the city?,’ says Ireland. ‘Such an innocent beginning, but from it came this dark, funny, twisted thriller. I hope viewers will find it intoxicating.’ Photograph: Mark Mainz/Sister Pictures What is Coldwater about? The six-part thriller follows John (Lincoln), a middle-aged man trying to shake off a disturbing incident in London. He and his wife Fiona (Indira Varma) have moved to a rural Highlands village called Coldwater, where John is quickly befriended by oddball neighbour Tommy (Bremner) and his wife. On the surface, everything seems set up for John and his wife to start afresh with their two children, and rekindle a marriage that has turned stale. Tommy has a pastor for a wife, Rebecca (Eve Myles), and the kind of boisterously hospitable nature that can help newbies to settle in a new community But Fiona has immed

A starry new adaptation of Mary Shelley’s classic directed by horror legend Guillermo del Toro is worth celebrating – and Netflix and the BFI London Film Festival are doing exactly that with a new London exhibition tied into the release of Frankenstein. The free exhibition, ‘Frankenstein: Crafting a Tale Eternal’, will be coming to London’s The Old Selfridges Hotel on October 17. Visitors can expect a deep dive into the glorious gothic world-building of the Mexican moviemaker and his team. On display will be props, artwork, costumes and Tiffany & Co. jewellery featured in the film and ‘rare books curated by the firm Peter Harrington to honour Mary Shelley’s legacy’. ‘This film concludes a journey for me that started at age seven, when I saw James Whale’s Frankenstein films for the first time. Gothic horror became my church, and Boris Karloff my Messiah,’ says del Toro. ‘It is an honour to be able to invite people to take a closer look at how my incredible crafts team and I have brought Mary Shelley’s world to life on screen.’ The exhibition runs from 10am-6pm daily from October 17 to November 9. Free tickets are available from the Selfridges website now.  Photograph: Netflix Already well-received at the Venice Film Festival, del Toro’s movie stars Oscar Isaac as Victor Frankenstein and Saltburn’s Jacob Elordi as his monster.  Frankenstein is getting a gala screening at the BFI London Film Festival on October 13, and members of the public can pick up tickets from the offici

Downton is back for one last hurrah this month. Downton Abbey: The Grand Finale gathers all your old favourites – Lord Grantham, Lady Crawley, Carson, Mrs Patmore, Uncle Harold – for a whopping great slice of cinematic comfort food that will satisfy long-time fans and may even win over any newbies who have wandered in by mistake. The story takes in scandals and love affairs, epic changes and old traditions – classic Downton ingredients given a seasoning of nostalgia and a fond farewell as screenwriter Julian Fellowes bids farewell to his beloved characters. But The Grand Finale also says goodbye to some very familiar British landmarks, too, while introducing some new ones. As ever, it’s an access-all-areas pass to some of the country’s grandest country houses, but the new movie introduces some unexpected new locations as it recreates Edwardian England in flux. Here’s where it all came together.  Photograph: Focus FeaturesHighclere Castle in ‘Downton Abbey: The Grand Finale’ Downton Abbey was filmed at Highclere Castle Of course, it’s not Downton Abbey without a trip to Highclere Castle. The grand Berkshire pile has been standing in as the Crawley’s ancestral seat since episode 1 way back in 2010. ‘Julian [Fellowes] had loosely based the drama on Highclere Castle so we thought we ought to see that first,’ says production designer Donal Woods of the location. ‘After Highclere, we saw another 40 houses in Yorkshire and the south of England. Then in November 2009, we all sat do

From North by Northwest to Mission: Impossible, trains have made frequent and memorable appearances in movies. But when was the last time you spotted a cinema screen on a train? Well, thanks to a group of volunteers and a new celebration of the UK’s railways, one train carriage is being turned back into a cinema. The restored 25-seat cinema carriage dates back to the 1970s. It was first unveiled by Princess Margaret in 1975 as part of a travelling exhibition train celebrating 150 years of the modern railway.  It was used to screen British Rail staff training films until 1988, before being sent to a Bristol depot in 1991 for use as a meeting space. Friends of its manager at the time, Alan Willmott, have spent six years restoring it to its original form, repanelling, rewiring and repainting it, and adding a speaker system, as well as vintage seats salvaged from a Deptford cinema.  The work was done at the Swindon & Cricklade Railway, with the help of Willmott’s family friend and BFI curator Steve Foxon. ‘Alan was the closest person I had to a grandfather,’ says Foxon. ‘When he died, he left all the cinema coach’s paperwork to me. Sitting in the carriage absolutely warms my heart and takes me back to my childhood. It’s exactly what Alan would have wanted.’ ‘The coach could’ve been returned to passenger use, but so much history would’ve been lost,’ says Martin Rouse, who led the volunteer renovators. ‘What we have now is almost unique, nowhere else offers this facility, and it’s

A tumultuous year for one of London’s best loved cultural venues has taken another twist with news that a new hostel will be opening above the Prince Charles Cinema. The upper storeys of the building, Charles House at 7 Leicester Place, will be turned into a 230-bedroom hostel, reports MyLondon. The cinema itself will be unaffected by the development.  Commissioned by landlords Criterion Capital, the hostel will take up the four storeys above the venue, bringing ‘high quality and reasonably priced’ accommodation to the area. Each bed would be separated by ‘individual privacy capsules’, with unisex washing and few windows.  ‘In principle, it’s positive news,’ says PCC owner Ben Freedman. ‘It shows a commitment on behalf of the owner of the building to do something other than knock it down. The hostel looks as though it’s aimed at the same target demographics that come to the cinema. We’re happy that it’s moving forward and hopeful that this resolution will free up some headspace for the landlord to talk to us about our new lease.’ Construction work will only take place between 8am-12pm to keep disruption to a minimum, and the cinema’s famous marquee will be untouched by the development. ‘It’s all internal [development work], with an entrance on the side of the cinema where there was a previous entrance to the offices,’ says Freedman.  In January, Criterion Capital made moves to insert a six-month break clause in the cinema’s lease and increase rent ‘far above market rate’, jeo

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

This year’s BFI London Film Festival line-up has been announced in full – and the fest will be a happy homecoming for one of the city’s greatest actors. Daniel Day-Lewis’s new film, Anemone, is one of the films on the LFF’s newly announced 2025 programme. Directed by his son Ronan, it’s the Londoner’s first screen appearance since Phantom Thread in 2017. He’ll also be appearing for a sure-to-be roadblocked screen talk at the festival. Other standouts on this year’s line-up include Park Chan-wook’s capitalist satire No Other Choice and Chloé Zhao’s Hamnet. An adaptation of Maggie O’Farrell’s 2020 novel, it’s drawn instant Oscar buzz since its Telluride debut last week. Really giving it the big one, the reliably brilliant Richard Linklater has two films at the fest: wistful songwriting drama Blue Moon and his snappy love letter to ’60s cine–radical Jean-Luc Godard, New Wave. Time Out will be presenting a BFI IMAX screening of Oliver Laxe’s extraordinary Sirât, a desert odyssey that’s equal parts Sorcerer and Mad Max: Fury Road. It’s guaranteed to melt minds on the biggest screen in Britain.  Look out, too, for, Harry Lighton’s BDSM romance Pillion, Jim Jarmusch’s latest Father Mother Sister Brother, The Brutalist screenwriter Mona Fastvold’s directorial debut The Testament of Ann Lee, and Bait director Mark Jenkin’s Rose of Nevada.  Bringing a musical flavour to the line-up are Jane Pollard and Iain Forsyth’s drama about Marianne Faithfull, Broken English, and Bruce Springsteen

This year’s BFI London Film Festival is getting a fairy tale ending. Julia Jackman’s 100 Nights of Hero, a fresh twist on Middle Eastern folktales One Thousand and One Nights, will be bringing down the curtain on the London film fest (LFF) at the Royal Festival Hall on Sunday, October 19.Starring Emma Corrin, Nicholas Galitzine, Maika Monroe, Amir El-Masry, Charli XCX, Richard E Grant and Felicity Jones, and written and directed by one-time BFI new talent winner Jackman, the film is an adaptation of Isabel Greenberg’s graphic novel – itself a queer-coded spin on The Arabian Nights. The story follows Cherry (Monroe), whose husband leaves home in the wake of a secret bet to test her fidelity, and her maid Hero (Corrin) as they fend off a seductive visitor, Manfred (Galitzine). Expect folklore, medieval costumes and the first of a run of on-screen turns from Charli as she flexes her acting skills. Photograph: Time OutCharli XCX , Olivia D'Lima and Kerena Jagpal in ‘100 Nights of Hero’ ‘The BFI London Film Festival has championed my work since my very early shorts, so bringing 100 Nights of Hero here is profoundly special,’ says Jackman. ‘To return as the closing night gala is an incredible honour, and we can’t wait to share this film on our home turf with a London audience.’  This year’s LFF opens with Rian Johnson’s Knives Out threequel, Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery on October 8, with so-far announced galas including Brendan Fraser comedy-drama Rental Family and No

The millions of fans of Richard Osman’s bestselling crime capers won’t need telling, but The Thursday Murder Club has landed on Netflix. Adapted from the first book in the series, first published in 2020, it’s an origin story that revolves around a small band of crime-solving retirees who aren’t ready to go out to pasture and the grisly murders they set about investigating. Directed by Chris Columbus, the movie’s quintessentially English backdrop is another bit of immersive world-building from Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone filmmaker and his team, including production designer James Merifield (The Deep Blue Sea, Mary Queen of Scots). Merifield talks Time Out through how the often deadly world of Coopers Chase retirement home and its picturesque surrounds came to be.  Photograph: Giles Keyte/NetflixHelen Mirren, Pierce Brosnan, Ben Kingsley and Celia Imrie in ‘The Thursday Murder Club’ What is The Thursday Murder Club about? A gang of pensioners at a fictional retirement home called Coopers Chase gather every Thursday to work on solving a cold case involving a woman murdered in the 1970s. Elizabeth Best (Helen Mirren), the Thursday Murder Club’s de facto leader, is an ex-MI6 agent with spycraft skills and a pin-sharp mind she conceals beneath a doddery persona when the situation requires it. Ron Ritchie is a still-crusading ex-union boss played with a twinkle by Pierce Brosnan, while Ben Kingsley is former psychiatrist Ibrahim Arif who puts his acumen to use scruti

It’s been a tumultuous 2025 at London’s greatest cult picture house, but the Prince Charles Cinema (PCC) could be ending it on a high – with plans for a second venue in east London just announced.  The off-Leicester Square cinema, a beloved fixture with movie-loving Londoners and famous fans like Quentin Tarantino and Paul Thomas Anderson, is planning a second venue in the space occupied by the now-shuttered Stratford Picturehouse. ‘Stratford has always been a hub,’ the Prince Charles’s head of programming Paul Vickery tells The Guardian. ‘There are plenty of students and loads of new-build properties that have sprung up recently. But it also feels like it’s still trying to find its feet and figure out what it is.’ The PCC was faced with the threat of closure in January when its landlord’s redevelopment plans came to light, but found some protection in being listed as an asset of community value (ACV) in May. But according to Vickery, the plans for a new venue are unconnected with those legal wranglings. ‘Given what’s happened this year, I understand how it could look like we’re trying to shift operations but that’s not what’s happening,’ he says. ‘We were looking for a pre-existing venue that needed a bit of love which we could turn into a new site. Ideally, we’d want to go on to add a third or fourth space.’ The Prince Charles had previously looked at taking over Edinburgh’s historic Filmhouse cinema, which reopened this summer under new management.  And the PCC isn’t the o

Like a nerve-shredding mix of 24, London Has Fallen and your favourite soap, Hostage is a new Netflix political thriller that asks: what would happen if the British prime minister’s husband was captured by? And what would happen if the French President was in town and being blackmailed too?   With British telly stalwart Suranne Jones (Vigil) as the British PM and two-time Academy Award nominee Julie Delpy as her French counterpart, Hostage is a female-led political thriller where the adrenaline flows as freely as the improbable plot twists. Photograph: Netflix What is Hostage about? British PM Abigail Dalton (Jones) is facing a political meltdown at home as a urgent medicine shortage and a migrant crisis threatens to bring down her government. French President Vivienne Toussaint arrives at Downing Street with a proposal to help that comes with some major strings attached. But in French Guiana, Dalton’s husband Dr Alex Anderson (Ashley ‘Bashy’ Thomas), a volunteer with Médecins Sans Frontières, is kidnapped. The terrorists threaten to execute him unless the PM agrees to step down. But, with the ransomers holding dirt on Toussaint too, the conspiracy runs much deeper than anyone can imagine. Penned by Bridge of Spies screenwriter Matt Charman, Hostage quickly throws other family members into this edgy mix, including Dalton’s daughter Sylvie (Isobel Akuwudike), another of the PM’s points of vulnerability, and Toussaint’s stepson Matheo (played by My Oxford Year’s Corey Mylchre