Film

You’d be right to want to exact cold, hard revenge on aperson who tortured you and planted nightmare imagery of death and suffering in your mind for life. Yet would you go so far as to murder them for the greater good, as penance not only for your trauma, but for the many others who

Starring actress Aoi Miyazaki and pop star Mika Nakashima, Kentaro Otani’s 2005 film adaption of Ai Yazawa’s manga​‘Nana’ endures because it captured something rare and radical within Japanese pop culture: female friendship that is messy, intimate and life-changing.Shoujo manga (‘girl comics’) took my peers and Iby storm in our formative years. Usually, these were sugary

It’s never easy to deliver asequel to asuccessful whodunnit, much less athreequel. At this point, the amateur sleuths have begun to identify recurring patterns and misdirects, the characters have become archetypal, and the audience is waiting for the surprise twist on top of the twist. Writer/​director Rian Johnson shows akeen awareness of potential fatigue, and

When Robert De Niro radically transformed his body to play the boxer Jake LaMotta inRaging Bull, it meant he was serious about his craft, and reshaped our understanding of authenticity in acting. What does it mean that Sydney Sweeney transformed hers, gaining an easily googleable quantity of pounds of muscle mass, to play the boxer

Although based on the 2020 novel ​‘Box Hill’ by Adam Mars-Jones, Harry Lighton’s Pillion is mostly unrecognisable from its source material, retaining only afew crucial details. Gone is the 1970s Surrey setting, along with the first-person narration and reckoning with queer identity at the height of the AIDS crisis. Kept are the names – Colin

Zodiac Killer Project review – all filler, all killer David Jenkins Film essayist Charlie Shackleton takes dead-aim at the true crime industrial complex in this cheeky documentary about a dream project that wasn’t to be. 4 Anticipation. Shackleton has the insight and self-lacerating panache of a British John Wilson. 4 Enjoyment. A formally playful look

In 2025, the writer/​director Richard Linklater debuted two new features about revolutionary artists at vital junctures of their respective careers. Nouvelle Vague (which comes to these shores in early 2026) captures the irrepressible creative zeal of Jean-Luc Godard and his ragtag crew while making Breathless on the streets of Paris. Blue Moon, meanwhile, captures agiant

It is that Finnish word ​“that cannot be translated” again, and yet whichistranslated, also again, in opening text, as ​“a white-knuckled form of courage and unimaginable determination”, which ​“manifests itself when all hope is lost.”Wikipedia suggests ​‘guts’. Three years ago, writer/​director Jalmari Helander introduced us, inSisu, to Finnish war veteran and legend Aatami Korpi (Jorma

In the beginning there was nothing and then there was light. Or in the instance ofThe Carpenter’s Son, in the beginning there was the dogmatic Joseph, played by Nicolas Cage, awestruck by the light of God while his wife, Mary (FKA Twigs), wailed in agony delivering none other than son of God. At this point

Like her short La Bouche De Jean-Pierre (1996) and her features Innocence (2004), Evolution (2015) and Earwig (2021), Lucile Hadžihalilović’s latest, The Ice Tower, offers an unnerving, surreal take on ayoung person’s coming of age. It begins with afemale voiceover narrating part of Hans Christian Andersen’s ​‘The Snow Queen’, accompanied by afragmented kaleidoscope of snow-globe

The vainglory of peacocking despots is captured with sardonic wit and homespun creativity in this clever re-staging of acrackpot coup attempted by the Italian poet, aviator and fascism early-adopter, Gabriele d’Annunzio. Croatian filmmaker Igor Bezinović establishes early on that this is apocket of military history that not many people know of, including the residents of

The accusation of ​“all style, no substance” gets thrown around often, sometimes appropriately, but what about afilm that hasneither style nor substance, no matter how much it tries to sell that it has both?Wicked: For Good is that picture, one that probably wouldn’t exist if not for the hubris of everyone involved in its creation.

Although you’d be forgiven for not realising it due to his evergreen boyish charm, 2025 marks 40years of Ethan Hawke’s screen acting career. Never one to rest on his laurels, Hawke is hitting the milestone with three major projects landing concurrently in autumn of 2025: as the leading man in Sterlin Harjo’s star-studded FX showThe

The invisible loyalties between Vinz, Hubert and Saïd suggest that they are childhood friends, splintering in young adulthood because of tensions in the neighbourhood – where the riot following the assault of their friend has laid waste to Hubert’s boxing gym – and in their disparate ways of relating to it. Vinz is ahothead, flailing

When we meet petty thief David (Marc Bessant), his decision to rob acatatonic drug dealer at arave has landed him trapped inside amangled, upturned car in an isolated woodland with abag full of drugs and rapidly dwindling options. From the outset, it’s aphysically demanding role thatBessant throws himself into with gruelling believability, spending much of

When looking over the output of Osgood Perkins, it’s clear that this is afilmmaker of many ideas, possibly more than he can fully execute to their highest potential. In the space of just over ayear, Perkins has established himself as one of the most prominent names in contemporary horror, delivering one of 2024’s most divisive

Despite only running between 2004 and 2007, To Catch aPredator had an indelible impact on popular culture. Fronted by the journalist Chris Hansen, the 44-minute episodes became must-see TV, as law enforcement set up sting operations around the US to lure sex offenders into the open using actual minors as decoys. The series was also

I grew up an incredibly anxious child, horribly shy and unable to make many friends beyond my small, established group. I’ve always watched movies but wasn’t overly invested from ayoung age. Also, Iused to vehemently express my distaste for football. This all changed when my father bought us both season tickets for Brighton &Hove Albion

“I’m not afraid to die.” The refrain of Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds’ ​‘The Mercy Seat’ seems hardcoded into the DNA of Julia Ducournau’s third feature, which sees the Palme d’Or winner move away from the shock and awe body horror of Raw and Titane into something somehow sadder and stranger. That’s how 13-year-old

Gluttons for emotional punishment would do well to seek out Dylan Southern’sThe Thing with Feathers, an ickily-stylised screen adaptation of Max Porter’s hit 2019 novel ​‘Grief is aThing with Feathers’. It’s telling that they’ve removed the marketing turn-off term ​“grief” from the title, but the fact is, you’d need to have amedia literacy score of