Rachel Walsh responds to an article by Georgina Elliott in which she describes the comfort she felt sitting alone in the cinema after losing her brother
The cinema was a world within the world to live someone else’s life, experience their triumphs and adventures, and escape the sharpness of my own painful reality.
Nathan Fielder’s secretive Elizabeth Holmes documentary has become a sold-out smash hit and might make Oscars history
Spoilers ahead
If there is one moment that sums up You Can See Everything, the new A24 documentary on Elizabeth Holmes that until this weekend was shrouded in spoiler-averse secrecy, it is, perhaps surprisingly, the one everyone already knows: co-director Nathan Fielder, the droll comedian known for deadpanning subjects into submission, sitting eye to eye with Holmes, the unblinking fabulist of Theranos infamy. In tight zoom, saturation turned up – Fielder’s arched brows and Holmes’s oceanic blue eyes as stark as two magnetic poles – he asks her: “Are you being real right now?”
That question hangs over much of the colossal three-hour movie, particularly a claustrophobic first half that has made headlines since the film’s existence was announced in September. That first half – essentially, the only part of the movie anyone respecting spoiler guidelines and/or the theatrical experience could talk about – takes place entirely in 2023, when Fielder and his co-director Lance Oppenheim, along with a small crew, embedded with Holmes, her husband, Billy Evans, and their two small children in the run-up to her prison sentence for fraud. We watch as Fielder, over a few surreal weeks in a beachfront rental, attempts to puncture Holmes’s indomitable facade of faultlessness. It’s not exactly comedic, this chess game between three norms-ignoring people, but it can be quite funny: TV’s grand illusionist, an absurdist auteur who will go as far as actually obtaining a 737 pilot’s license for the bit, stymied by a world-class fabricator, with her poorly dissembling husband on the side. This section resembles, in feel, the pull of internet wormhole: the closer you zoom in on a subject, without outside context, the more sense devolves. Was Holmes “being real”, for instance, when she told Fielder, with seemingly complete sincerity, that she has never told a lie in her life? Or when she continued to insist, despite plain reality, that Theranos devices could perform 1,000 diagnostic tests?
She got to torment Don Draper in Mad Men and has just won an Emmy for DTF St Louis. But nothing prepared the star for all the gore as she switched to horror with the Friday the 13th prequel
‘The first time I had the tooth in my hand,” says Linda Cardellini, “I thought, ‘Oh my God, this is what I’m doing.’” The star of Freaks and Geeks, ER, Dead to Me, Mad Men and DTF St Louis (for which she recently won an Emmy) is talking about her pivot towards full-blown horror. In Crystal Lake, the prequel to the Friday the 13th movies, Cardellini plays Pamela Voorhees, the original slasher of the 1980 film. The tooth, by the way, is human and gets embedded in Pam’s knuckle – until she yanks it out with a gruesome, revolting slurping sound.
Casual filmgoers may associate Friday the 13th with Jason, the hockey-mask-wearing serial killer. But aficionados will know that Pam, Jason’s mother, is the villain of the first movie. “He didn’t even have the mask until the third movie,” says Cardellini, who has clearly done her homework. “Pam is the original killer, in vengeance of his death.” (There is some massaging of previous storylines in Crystal Lake, such as moving Jason’s drowning from the 1950s to the early 70s, but since the franchise is flexible enough to have sent Jason into space at one point, a bit of timeline tweaking feels fair game.)
Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim’s headspinning documentary about Elizabeth Holmes is an unprecedented critical success – even with a three-hour runtime
Name: The best reviewed film in history.
Age: Not even out yet, except in the US and Canada.
A local cinema becomes a refuge after Javier Milei’s election ushers in an era of far-right conservatism in Argentina
Cinema halls – or dream palaces, as they’re affectionately called – offer a retreat into the realm of make-believe, and everyday drudgery is left at the door. Though set within a single-screen theatre in the Argentinian city of Córdoba, Ramiro Sonzini and Ezequiel Salinas’s hypnotic film invokes a more porous relationship between the screen and its audience. Here, the messiness of life beguilingly sneaks into this domain of fantasies, blurring the borders between public and private spaces.
While the luminous black-and-white cinematography lends a dreamy fuzziness to the images, the narrative concerns are grounded in thorny economic realities. A film projectionist at his local cinema called Pelu (Octavio Bertone) is reassigned to the post of a night watchman due to budget cuts at the city hall. The cinema soon becomes his literal refuge: he moves out of his cramped rented flat and secretly takes up occupation at his workplace. He then welcomes a horde of other outsiders, including his unemployed roommate, an ageing drifter and a sex worker who livestreams her erotic shows from the cinema. Every night, they watch classic films from the old masters – Jean Renoir, Yasujiro Ozu and Robert Bresson to name a few – until the early hours.
He gave Jimi Hendrix his gear, freaked out Frank Sinatra, inspired Norman Mailer – and tried to topple the American war machine. As a documentary about his band the Fugs comes out, the 87-year-old gives a rare interview
“Charles Manson once wrote me a letter saying, ‘If I was as powerful as you claim then you wouldn’t be here,’” Ed Sanders tells me over a video call, savouring the menace in that sentence.
Sanders is an American maverick; a musician, poet, activist, journalist and author whose greatest hit remains his bestselling 1971 book The Family, in which he chronicled the lives, crimes and trials of Manson and his followers. Sanders was well placed to report on crazed hippies, having played a pivotal role in launching the US counterculture – though he very much espoused peace, love and consciousness-raising, rather than Manson’s apocalyptic worldview.
Are film-makers wary of alienating increasingly sensitive audiences by offing a pooch? Or is humanity now just too soft to deal with the trauma of a Turner & Hooch?
There was a time, not so long ago, when watching a film was a clearcut experience. There would be a good guy and a bad guy, and you would know who the bad guy was because they would shoot a dog in the face.
It happened more times than you might expect. Mad Max 2, dog gets shot. Revenge, dog gets shot. Turner & Hooch, dog gets shot. Red, dog gets shot. Man with the Gun, dog gets shot. Badlands, dog gets shot. Dog Soldiers, you’ll never guess.
In the dazzling archival documentary Once Upon a Time in Harlem, a 1972 cocktail party brings together various creative luminaries as they discuss and debate
More than a flowering of the arts at the dawn of the 20th century, the Harlem Renaissance marked the breakthrough moment when Black Americans asserted their creative control, defining a culture that had been purpose-built to exclude them. The imprints were all over the Jazz Age – on bookshelves and radio, in flapper dresses and cloche hats, in Hubert Julian’s daring flights and the fractious debates between Marcus Garvey and WEB Du Bois.
Like the David committee of the Italian Renaissance or the American Revolution’s Continental Congress, the Harlem Renaissance is one of those moments that makes you wonder: what was it really like? The Dark Tower salons? Those Cotton Club nights? The rent parties with all those New Negroes – a heady brew of southern émigrés, Caribbean vanguards and New York lifers – holding forth and hootin’ and hollerin’, high on the fact that they had found one another? Could they appreciate the significance of the moment as they were making it? “I remember being in Brooklyn in the 1990s and seeing various artists around,” says film-maker Liani Greaves, reflecting on her early career working with Tupac on Above the Rim and the director Hype Williams on Biggie music videos. “Brooklyn Moon Cafe was the spot. Sometimes we forget that it is The Now. We’re constantly looking to the next thing, looking outside.”
A mortal twentysomething is caught in a love triangle with two hunky vampire carnival workers in a film with good looks but not much to chew on
‘Does this whole Edward Cullen act actually work?” A distinct Twilight feeling is in the air in this initially enlivening vampire flick, with willowy twentysomething mortal Gemma (Nell Verlaque) caught in the middle of a pointy-toothed tug of war between tender Italian hunk Sebastian (Alvise Rigo) and her bad boy ex Eric (Kieron Moore). When she strolls with her friends into a hot vampire carnival, the ab count nearly outdoes the haemoglobin one. But this good-looking whirligig winds up disappointingly disjointed.
Gemma is still regrouping after her father’s suicide, an unspecified amount of time earlier. So her mum is relieved when she takes a night off from grieving by checking out the local fair with pals Ryan (Corrado Martini) and Olivia (Pauline Chávez). Absent for many years, creepy Eric has apparently joined the circus, featuring as the ostentatiously self-harming Man Who Feels No Pain. But when Sebastian invites Gemma into the carnival’s orgiastic inner sanctum, she learns they are a coven of bloodsuckers who, under leader Toussaint (Jason Isaac), have a strict no-killing code of conduct. Or, in the case of potential initiates like Gemma, obtaining consent. “No means no,” says immortal softboi Sebastian.
After Joss Whedon’s arrival, back in the news with comments from Ben Affleck, the franchise lost a sense of earnest passion that could have sustained a weary DCEU
Nine years after superhero epic Justice League arrived in cinemas, there ought to be very little left to say about how it all went wrong. Zack Snyder shot the film, Joss Whedon substantially rewrote and reshot it, and audiences eventually got to see both men’s versions. Any debate over their relative merits long ago disappeared. Whedon is pretty much cancelled; Snyder has reinvented himself as the writer-director of extremely average ersatz Star Wars movies for Netflix, and an entirely new DC universe is under way that has very little to do with either of them.
To a greater or lesser extent, the world has moved on. But Ben Affleck’s latest comments raise an uncomfortable question about whether Snyder’s departure was ever presented honestly. Speaking to Josh Horowitz on the Happy Sad Confused podcast, Affleck, who played Batman, described the Justice League reshoots as the lowest point of his career, but reserved his strongest criticism for the circumstances of Snyder’s departure. The director stepped away in May 2017, two months after his daughter Autumn killed herself, aged 20, with the public explanation that he needed to be with his family. Affleck, however, alleged that studio Warner Bros had used the tragedy to justify replacing him. “The way in which that was, I thought, used as an excuse was one of the shittiest things I’ve ever seen,” Affleck said. “It was so gross.”
The latest in our series of writers detailing their most easily rewatched comfort films is an appreciation of a smart, funny and tender ode to fan culture
“By Grabthar’s hammer, by the sons of Worvan … you shall be avenged.”
If you have seen Galaxy Quest, those words may bring you close to tears. They mark the moment when Alan Rickman’s character – a Shakespearean luvvie turned sci-fi sidekick – realises that the ludicrous catchphrase he has reluctantly uttered thousands of times does matter after all.
Director Joko Anwar uses horror for social commentary as he skewers corruption and hypocrisy with likable silliness and raucous energy
Given the 2020s horror boom, Indonesia’s prolific Joko Anwar – who has worked more often in that genre than any other – should be better known. Using horror for social commentary, as Anwar has done often in the past, this prison-slasher-satire features the kind of scabrous broadsides against injustice you see in Bong Joon-ho’s films, and Park Chan-wook’s recent No Other Choice. But in skewering the corruption and hypocrisy of the director’s native country, it has its own likable silliness and raucous energy. As the inmates keep saying: this is Indonesia, not Norway!
Fitted up for the murder of his boss, who is found gutted and spreadeagled on a ceiling fan, timid investigative journalist Dimas (Endy Arfian) winds up in the slammer. But murder, immediately followed by the flamboyant flaying of the victim, dogs him wherever he goes: the prison hitman assigned to dispose of him is in turn found in the washroom rendered into flesh origami. Charismatic prison refusenik Anggoro (Abimana Aryasatya) takes Dimas under his wing; as the victims stack up, an apparently clairvoyant member of his clique called Six (Yoga Pratama) admits that all of them manifested a red aura, signifying anger, prior to dying.
Yi-Shan Lo returns to Nepal to follow the route of her best friend’s ill-fated hike in a harrowing but cathartic documentary
A work of deep personal reckoning, Yi-Shan Lo’s debut documentary feature opens with closeups of the film-maker’s own footsteps as she trudges through a snowbound landscape. Her jagged movement mirrors the rugged trajectory of the film itself, which grapples with a harrowing tragedy. In 2017, Lo was about to join her best friends Chun and Yueh on their hiking trip across Nepal when she came down with a sudden illness; she decided to stay behind while the other two carried on. Disaster struck: the pair went missing during a heavy snowstorm and were not found for more than 40 days. Yueh survived, but Chun died from lack of food coupled with hypothermia.
Struggling to make sense of these events, Lo painstakingly retraces the days leading up to and during her friends’ disappearance. She pores over old text messages, Chun’s diaries and footage captured by the Nepali rescue team. These materials shed some light on the ordeal, as well as the pair’s backgrounds. Diving into her personal archive, Lo recalls her burgeoning friendship with Chun at their Catholic girls’ school, where the latter defiantly resisted the institution’s rigid dress codes. Considering Chun’s efforts to express his non-conforming identity and his use of male pronouns, it is even more devastating that he was repeatedly misgendered in death by various news reports.
Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim’s buzzy film was shown on only 855 screens in the biggest documentary opening in North America since Fahrenheit 9/11 in 2004
Nathan Fielder’s nearly three-hour Elizabeth Holmes documentary, You Can See Everything, has opened to an extraordinary $15m domestic box office, the biggest opening weekend for a documentary in North America in more than 20 years.
You Can See Everything, directed by Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim, made $15m (A$21.5m, £11.2m) from only 855 screens, and had more than 2,000 sold-out screenings at the weekend, according to the production company A24. It is the biggest opening for a film playing on fewer than 1,000 screens since Borat opened to $26.5m in 2006.
Staines’s finest nailed the zeitgeist of the late 90s and early 00s, and now he’s back – but how does he fit into 2026? He discusses the backlash against his return, his worst ever interviewee and how he’s going to prevent world war two
“Can you tell people that you’re from Hustler?” Ali G asks me. “Or The Source. Or Guns & Ammo. Speaking to a Guardian journalist ain’t a good look for me in the hood.”
At Ali’s request, we are meeting in an independent chicken shop in Staines because – due to some sort of mix-up – he thought the one interview he had agreed to for his new film was Chicken Shop Date, which was “90% likely to lead to boning”. He follows this with an entirely unprintable reminiscence about the first time he and “me Julie” had sex in the disabled toilets of Egham KFC.
A daring, rich and funny study of the ordeal of having to invent and reinvent your own teenage sense of self amid confounding changes
Carol Morley’s self-portrait of the artist as a young woman is rich, tender and terribly funny and sad: a study in the chaos of being young and a triptych of childhood, girlhood and youth, with some daring touches of Terence Davies. It is about the ordeal of having to invent and reinvent your own teenage sense of self, even as the things you thought permanent suddenly collapse – including the background stability of your poor old mum and dad. And it’s also about the untold, unacknowledged story of sadness that lay behind the angry blaze of punk and new wave. Watching this I thought of something I’d assumed lost for ever: my own feelings, aged 17, on hearing Buzzcocks’ Sixteen: “… I wish I was 16 again / Then things would be such fun / All the things I’d do would be the same / But they’re much more fun / Than when you’re 21.” Could it be, I thought, that I’m already sad about not being 16?
7 Miles Out is based on Morley’s autobiographical novel of the same title, the once-upon-a-time-in-Stockport story of Ann, played with charm and zing by Lucy Halliday, and as a sweetly innocent young girl by Amelie Hughes. Young Ann pretends to be making a radio programme with her cassette recorder the way so many did in the 1970s, and hero-worships her would-be rock journalist elder brother Scott (Kasper Hilton-Hille) – based on Morley’s brother Paul – who is already plugged into the burgeoning post-punk and new wave scene.
Actor experienced a ‘medical emergency’ on flight during which she allegedly injured crew members, statement says
Actor Selma Blair did not mean to hurt anyone during the recent flight which led to her arrest on allegations that she assaulted a pair of cabin crew members, a police officer and a nurse, her representatives said on Friday in a statement that characterized the episode as a medical emergency.
The lengthy statement also dismissed prior media coverage of Blair’s arrest after a Delta Air Lines flight from Los Angeles to New York as unsympathetic and inaccurate, singling out reporting from several outlets alleging that she tried to open the door of the airplane that she and her fellow passengers were on.
A restored version of his 1983 film My Brother’s Wedding, set in South Central LA, brings Burnett’s vision to a new audience
Charles Burnett had a dilemma. He had agreed to attend the wedding of a co-worker, but the wedding was scheduled for the same day and time as a funeral for a childhood friend.
Initially, the film-maker – a landmark chronicler of Black working-class lives – decided he’d go to the funeral. But when he tried to break the news to the co-worker, she was so dejected that he couldn’t go through with it. He tried asking the bride to change the wedding – which was “ridiculous to think of trying to do”, he says decades later – but that didn’t work either. He decided he’d go to both events.
The entrepreneur turned fraudster is the subject of an Oscar-tipped new documentary that takes an unusual look at her strange legacy
David Agus’s first encounter with Elizabeth Holmes at a health conference came as a shock. The Holmes he met in the green room was personable and pleasant. The Holmes he interviewed on stage was altogether different.
“The accent changed: this deep voice, very serious,” Agus, a medical oncologist, recalls by phone from Los Angeles. “It was as if I had met a person and then interviewed a separate person. That transition from the green room to the stage – I had never experienced something like that before.”
If cinemas must run 20 minutes of adverts before a feature, they could at least be honest about it. Or, I have a better solution …
Do you remember the last time you were lied to? I certainly do. I was tricked by the North Finchley Vue, which sold me and my boyfriend tickets to a 7.15pm showing of The Odyssey. Guess what was playing at 7.15pm? A car advert. Ten minutes later, it was a trailer for the horror film Werwulf. Then there was an advert for Vue – as if I wasn’t already there. The film was half an hour late to its own showing when it finally started at 7.45pm.
I am sick and tired of cinemas getting away with such treachery. I don’t want to follow in the footsteps of my friend, who knows that the ads at her local run for 22 minutes so slinks in at just the right time. I shouldn’t have to do mental maths because I am being lied to by cinemas. We are all the victims of their predatory time-wasting system.
Jeffrey Ingold is a freelance journalist covering LGBTQ+ issues, music and culture
Unprecedented folly of misjudgment, bad timing and spectacular hubris is predicted to lose $245m. How did this happen?
The fanfare at Digger’s world premiere in London four weeks ago was literal. As the Prince and Princess of Wales took to the stage, their arrival was heralded by the band of the Irish guards’ fanfare team – bugles gleaming, epaulets shining, bearskin bonnets rippling under the lights.
Given the occasion, the band were not overdressed. Joining William (velvet tux) and Kate (chiffon gown, the late Diana’s earrings) to introduce the film was cinema’s longest-reigning monarch, Tom Cruise (Armani), along with a retinue including director Alejandro González Iñárritu and co-stars Sandra Hüller, Riz Ahmed, John Goodman, Jesse Plemons and Michael Stuhlbarg. Loyal courtiers filled the front rows: Salma Hayek, Hannah Waddingham and no fewer than three Beckhams (David, Cruz and Romeo).
David Tennant wows in the third series of Jimmy McGovern’s harrowing prison drama, and the Dublin band are back with a beguiling fifth album. Here’s the pick of the week’s culture, taken from the Guardian’s best-rated reviews
A social media star comes a cropper in timely horror, and the Spice Girls ledge takes her disco- and indie-tinged bops out on a short tour
The Influencer Project Out now
When your career involves constantly posting footage of everything you do to social media, it makes things a cakewalk for stalkers. And lo, the influencer-in-peril horror subgenre was born. British social media star Chiara King plays herself in this chilling iteration, set in Copenhagen.
A ‘family’ of criminals attempt to steal the Mona Lisa from the Louvre in pulpy and forgettable thriller
In the last half-decade Stanley Tucci has been a source of near-inexhaustible on- screen delight, whether making friends with nonnas in his delightful cookingshows or smartly judged supporting turns in Conclave and The Devil Wears Prada 2. He is an actor well placed for a star vehicle of his own, and this one, Masterplan, sounds good on paper: an art heist fronted by the actor at his most debonair, flanked by a grandson of a French New Wave legend (Victor Belmondo, related to Breathless star Jean-Paul) and a buzzy breakout of The White Lotus (Simona Tabasco, winning in season two of Mike White’s comedy).
There’s a good bit of pulpy fun to have here, with double, triple and quadruple crossing, silly spy gadgetry which has been updated to include retina scan cloning and something called “VR intrusion”. As British criminal mastermind Roger, Tucci is game to send up aristo archetypes, even if his character often veers into parody. “I’m English,” his character says at one point. “‘Not bad’ is what I say when I orgasm.”
He may have been eclipsed by the more progressive Paddington of late, but AA Milne’s creation is not just a Silly Old Bear
“Pooh, promise you won’t forget about me, ever. Not even when I’m a hundred,” Christopher Robin implores his bear in the final chapter of AA Milne’s The House at Pooh Corner. This week Winnie-the-Pooh himself turned 100, and he certainly hasn’t been forgotten. Birthday celebrations have included a week of special programmes, introduced by the queen, on Radio 4; a collection of Royal Mail stamps; and a Google doodle.
Not bad for “a bear of very little brain” who appeared in four slim books. Winnie-the-Pooh, illustrated by EH Shepard, was published on 14 October 1926 and had sold 150,000 copies in the US by the end of the year.
Two obsessive artists team up to achieve their dreams, but then their aspirations diverge
Hirokazu Kore-eda’s sad and beautiful film is about friendship, about the ecstasy and burden of success and about what it means to have an artistic vocation, especially when that vocation is pursued collaboratively, with your best friend. It is adapted by Kore-eda from the standalone, or “one-shot”, online manga story of the same title by Tatsuki Fujimoto, which has in fact already had an anime movie adaptation.
Fujino, played by Furi Nanase as a 13-year-old and later by Natsuki Deguchi, is a dedicated would-be manga artist who dreams of being published and adapted for the movies. It is her personal and artistic destiny to come into contact, in her early teens, with fellow manga obsessive Kyomoto, who is played first by Rokka Okada and then as an adult by Aju Makita. Theirs is a kind of platonic but passionate love story.
Film interviewing military insiders about mass killing of civilians in Gaza wins widespread praise around the world
Critics around the world have hailed the award-winning documentary NAZA as a “brilliant and harrowing” film that is “impossible to ignore”.
NAZA, which is produced by the Guardian and details Israel’s mass killing of civilians in Gaza, was released in UK cinemas this week and will be shown in more than 50 countries. As well as its global cinema releases, NAZA will be available free on the Guardian’s website from late November.
The film’s testimonies from Israeli soldiers and intelligence officers expose years of baseless propaganda. Don’t take my word – take theirs
I watched the extraordinary new Guardian-produced documentary from Oscar-winning Israeli film-makers Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor the other night, and I have struggled to stop thinking about it ever since. The film’s title comes from a Hebrew military term for collateral damage, and it consists of eye-opening interviews with two dozen Israeli soldiers and intelligence officers sitting in darkness, often on the rooftops of Tel Aviv, their voices “digitally altered to disguise their identities”.
At one point, Abraham asks one of the soldiers a remarkably blunt question.
Not every great novel makes a great movie, and sometimes the opposite is true. But regardless of the source text, or how beloved characters are treated, there is more than one way to write a successful adaptation
It is always fun to join in a craze, like a Victorian going mad for penny farthings. Which is probably why, against my better judgment, I went to see Christopher Nolan’s blockbuster The Odyssey this summer, buying my ticket into the popular conversation along with everyone else. This year’s other divisive adaptation, Emerald Fennell’s Wuthering Heights, had the world and his wife arguing about it before they had even watched the film. No doubt the makers of the recent Sense and Sensibility movie were also hoping for lots of people to go and see it to discover whether they hated it.
After all, very few of us leave the cinema saying: “That’s exactly how I pictured it in my head.” Or even less likely: “That was better than the book.” We’re more likely to shake our fists at how they ruined the ending, dumbed it down, unforgivably cast somebody with the wrong hair, or betrayed a beloved character, as with last year’s Thursday Murder Club debacle.
Susan Lyall worked with actor Jeremy Strong to research the Meta CEO’s favorite Nikes and luxury sweaters
The first Aaron Sorkin Facebook movie, 2010’s The Social Network, helped cement the early aughts image of Mark Zuckerberg rebelling against corporate norms in rumpled hoodies and T-shirts.
The follow-up, The Social Reckoning, is carbon-dated from 2019 to 2021. This is “post-hoodie”, as the movie’s costume designer, Susan Lyall, describes it, “post-thumbing his nose” to formality. It is also peak robot. Zuckerberg’s reserved wardrobe of suits or interchangeable long-sleeved shirts echo his chilling composure throughout, even as fury simmers under the surface.
As violent spirits are unleashed in Sky’s Possession, observers see confident creatives reclaiming the island’s narratives in a form of ‘cultural reparation’
A woman opens a 300‑year‑old box, unleashing a violent spirit – it is the spirit of colonialism and oppression roaring back to life. It is a pivotal scene in Sky’s supernatural series Possession and symbolises a wider shift in Jamaica’s film industry, where directors are increasingly using the landscape to tell Jamaican stories – including those that confront enslavement, trauma and historical memory.
The series is about a biracial British lawyer who travels to Jamaica to investigate a multimillion-pound inheritance dispute, only to uncover a dark, vengeful spirit tied to the plantation’s brutal colonial past.
Oscar-winning filmmakers Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor discuss their new documentary, NAZA, which exposes the AI systems that the Israeli military uses to rain down strikes on Gaza, causing the mass killing of civilians. Based on the testimony of 24 military insiders, the documentary caused uproar in Israel, with the government threatening to strip the filmmakers of their citizenship. The Guardian's Annie Kelly talks to the directors about how the film was made, and the price they paid for speaking out
The lore of Once Upon a Time in Shaolin, once bought by Martin Shkreli, is explored in a rambling film produced by RZA
For every reason except one, Once Upon a Time in Shaolin, the seventh album by the Wu-Tang Clan, should’ve been a commercial hit. The 31-track double album, recorded in secret between 2007 and 2013, reunited all of the remaining members of the hallowed Staten Island rap crew and featured eye-catching collaborators from the standard (Redman, offshoot group Wu-Tang Killa Bees) to the unexpected (Cher, Game of Thrones actor Carice van Houten). The sound, at least according to those involved, harkened back to the glory days of the group’s beginnings in the 90s.
But for years, almost no one heard it. The group only issued a single copy of Once Upon a Time in Shaolin – on CD, ensconced within layers of filigreed silver – with the stipulation, in legalese, that it could not be used for any commercial purposes for 88 years. The decree, either a stunt or a bold artistic statement on streaming’s devaluation of music, depending on your generosity and perhaps your net worth, succeeded in drumming up plenty of hype. And if you were anywhere around the blogosphere or cable news in 2015, you may recall that the beneficiary of that hype – the purchaser and thus single intended listener of this $2m musical treasure – was one Martin Shkreli, the “pharma bro” widely despised for gleefully hiking the costs of prescription drugs for profit.
Tom Hiddleston, Willem Dafoe and Genden Phuntsok scale Everest in the ultimate adventure biopic, plus Martin Scorsese mafia masterpiece
To Edmund Hillary (Tom Hiddleston) and British expedition leader Col John Hunt (Willem Dafoe), it was ‘Mount Everest’, named to honour a 19th-century British Raj official. But Tenzing Norgay (Genden Phuntsok), the Tibetan-Indian mountaineer who joined them on that historic 1953 trek to the summit, called the peak by its Sherpa name Chomolungma, meaning “holy mother”. To Tenzing, the mountain is not so much somewhere to conquer but someone to connect with. As director Jennifer Peedom’s film tells his story, it scales the heights of the adventure biopic, discovering new angles from which to view old themes of ambition, colonialism and class.
Out now, Apple TV
The documentary detailing Israel’s mass killing of civilians in Gaza is the latest film to give a voice to those who carry out atrocities – confronting viewers with some of the most difficult questions of all
Are we still talking about the banality of evil? When that overworked phrase was first used by philosopher Hannah Arendt, it described the blank persona of Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann. Now, in NAZA, anonymisedmembers of Israeli intelligence discuss their remote execution of the assault on Gaza. The comparison to Hitler’s Germany, while understandably controversial, is made by a subject themselves. If they are banal, it is a modern, oddly familiar kind. These are articulate, middle-class millennials. They say they are leftwing and non-racist. Put differently, they could be Guardian readers.
And yes, one remarks, they have been conducting a genocide.
Cristian Mungiu’s Cannes winner echoes the news story of a Romanian couple whose children were taken by the Norwegian government. As it heads to London film festival, two writers explain how the film exposes real hypocrisies
When Cristian Mungiu’s Fjord was shown in Romania as a one-day preview this June, the reception was extraordinary. Across 53 towns and 96 cinemas, the film reportedly pulled in over 40,000 viewers in a single night, a number arthouse cinema rarely sees in Romania. But the response here had little to do with cinema. It felt instead like a reopening of a familiar fault line about the clash of values within the EU itself.
It’s been 25 years since the release of this film skewering an industry that famously takes itself very seriously. It might have been comedy gold but it was also, in its own way, prophetic
Critics were divided, the US release date couldn’t have been worse (a few days after 9/11) and the sequel was a flop. Yet few films have predicted fashion’s own present like 2001’s Zoolander. The memeable absurdist comedy about the “three-times male model of the year” was a cinematic Cassandra: correctly predicting themes, styles and sensibilities of the industry that still ring true today.
London film festival Anna Biller’s intricate tribute to the British 1960s genre plays melodrama for laughs and pulls it off wonderfully in a medieval tale based on a Japanese ghost story
There’s over-the-top … and there’s this playfully bizarre new film from US indie film-maker and genre connoisseur Anna Biller, whose previous film The Love Witch first alerted me to her ecstatic love of style, surface and the A-pleasures of the B-movie. The Face of Horror is a deadpan homage to the garish Technicolor horror pictures of Britain’s Hammer Films in the Peter Cushing 1960s, with an extraordinary visual emphasis on red velvet, whose Freudian significance can only be guessed at. Perhaps it’s not accurate to call it pastiche – in any event, the advent of AI has arguably undermined the value of skilled pastiche in movies and literature. It is more an attempt simply to make another film in the same vein as Hammer, to continue in the same rackety tradition of melodrama, eroticism and black comedy – and to create a film that can be laughed at as well as laughed with, just as they were at the time.
The setting is a cod-medieval England, a land of courtly nobles, smudgy-faced peasants and ladies wearing floor-length gowns with rope-style belts – although Biller has taken as her starting point the classic Japanese ghost story Yotsuya Kaidan, which is also an inspiration to, among others, Takashi Miike and Hideo Nakata. Edward (Jonah Hauer-King) is a handsome, unscrupulous knight, suspected of robbing his former master, seen here in the opening scene riding through a sun-dappled forest with his similarly shifty squire Richard (Leo Suter). Edward wishes to marry the blond, beauteous Eleanor (Kristine Froseth), who appears in a separate scene demurely preparing a preposterously lavish meal with her equally blond sister Beatrice (Ellie Bamber) in one of the vast, oppressive wood-panelled halls that Hammer horror was known for.
There are brief, simple pleasures in the inevitable new big screen take on the classic game but like the recent Mortal Kombat movies, it’s a largely incoherent mess
We just had Resident Evil, Zach Cregger’s giddy, nasty, devilishly fun spin on Capcom’s popular zombie franchise. It gave us renewed hope (after Sonic the Hedgehog, The Last of Us and Fallout) that video game adaptations could be good, actually.
But now here comes Street Fighter, a garish and incoherent mess that amuses in fits and starts but barely improves on the Mortal Kombat movies before it, crushing those hopes in its atomic suplex.
The director of Hunt for the Wilderpeople and Jojo Rabbit turns Kazuo Ishiguro’s AI fable into a twee, tiresome tale of love and grief
Taika Waititi detonates an explosion of postmodern quirkiness and ironic dorkiness in this unbearably mannered, unspeakably acted film. It’s a slice of sentimental whimsy-futurism and non-satire, adapted by Waititi from the Kazuo Ishiguro novel, which winds up saying nothing substantial or meaningful (or funny) about artificial intelligence, love or grief. Klara and the Sun is soft-centred sci-fi-lite, simultaneously demanding we laugh at its (unfunny) humour and wipe away a tear at its pass-agg poignancy. With earlier films like Hunt for the Wilderpeople and Thor: Ragnarok, Waititi showed he can do comedy. But this, sadly, is closer to his notorious fey-Hitler fantasy Jojo Rabbit – misjudged and self-admiring.
In the world to come in an uncanny valley of the almost-real, families can buy “artificial friend” or AF robots for their kids. In terms of tech plausibility overall, incidentally, their status isn’t entirely clear: AF salesperson (Natasha Lyonne) says that the recent third world war has wiped out the internet. (This post-WW3 world looks in pretty good shape apart from that.) And these AF humanoids incidentally have a kind of purple blood called PEC-9 running through them which one character incidentally tells us is “highly flammable”. (Uh-oh. Quite the design fault.)
The much-loved central London institution, which has been threatened with closure since January 2025, secures 25-year lease without break clause with current landlords
The celebrated Prince Charles repertory cinema in London’s Leicester Square has announced that the threat of closure has been staved off by signing a new 25-year lease with its landlords.
In a post on social media titled “You Saved the PCC”, the cinema said that “after 21 months of uncertainty, we’re delighted to have secured the future of the cinema” and that they had “signed a new 25-year lease with no break clause, ensuring our projectors will keep rolling for years to come”.
Primetime and You Can See Everything are both clammy, audacious awards contenders that challenge our sense of reality. Ahead of the release of his drama starring Robert Pattinson as a TV vigilante, the 30-year-old director talks crime, punishment and South Park
To direct one movie that is on everyone’s lips in awards season is remarkable. To make two begins to look like sorcery. That is the position in which the 30-year-old Florida-born film-maker Lance Oppenheim now finds himself. Next month brings the release of You Can See Everything, the three-hour documentary which he co-directed with faux-naif deadpan prankster Nathan Fielder, in which they spend a month living with the disgraced health-tech mogul Elizabeth Holmes before she begins her 11-year prison sentence for fraud and conspiracy. The film, described by Oppenheim as “head-spinning” and so shrouded in secrecy that Variety magazine’s list of Oscar predictions identifies one of its cast members only as “[Redacted]”, is expected to become the first documentary nominated for best picture.
When I meet Oppenheim in a London hotel, it is to discuss his other hot ticket, Primetime, for which Robert Pattinson is the one attracting Oscar buzz. The Batman actor gives a high-wire performance as Chris Hansen, the sensationalist US television vigilante renowned for ambushing paedophiles on To Catch a Predator, which was a disreputable and highly addictive segment of the current affairs show Dateline NBC between 2004 and 2007. Hansen later parlayed the idea, and his crusading shtick, into a succession of spin-offs. Some, including Hansen Vs Predators, had the same sleazy catnip quality. Others, such as a sting to collar bicycle thieves, did not.
You’re Paul McCartney. So how come you’re still getting het up at a fictional version of you being marginally smaller than a fictional version of John Lennon?
There has been a lot of discourse and conjecture surrounding Sam Mendes’s forthcoming Beatles biopics. Some of this is logical (will people really turn out to see four near-identical films on the same day?), some creative (what animal did they have to shave to make John Lennon’s Abbey Road beard?). At every turn the film has been examined and factchecked and cross-referenced against testimonies from the band’s actual hairdresser.
But until now the remaining Beatles have managed to keep fairly quiet about the whole thing. Last year Ringo Starr mentioned that he’d sat down with Mendes to rework a scene he wasn’t happy with, and Paul McCartney has praised the guitar playing of Paul Mescal, but it appeared that no real red lines had been crossed. Until now.
As his new movie The Debut closes the London film festival, we count down the best of the actor’s shy, sly and sometimes hairy outings
A doppelganger role can be a trap for an actor: either the two roles are not sufficiently distinct, or they are too hammily different, and either way the result can look like a film school graduation project. But Jesse Eisenberg gives a stylish split-personality turn in Richard Ayoade’s adaptation of the Dostoevsky novella. He plays Simon, a nerdily shy and self-effacing computer programmer in a grim futureworld, ignored by his employers and by co-worker Hannah (Mia Wasikowska), with whom he is hopelessly in love. But then his carbon copy, James, arrives, also of course played by Eisenberg. James is a confident alpha-achiever who impresses his bosses and entrances Hannah – to Simon’s gibbering despair.
Ken Fero and Tariq Mehmood’s documentary recalls the fight against racism in 1980s Britain – even if its account of solidarity has a notable omission
This fierce film from socialist film-makers Ken Fero and Tariq Mehmood gives us the story and the context of the Bradford 12. Twelve south Asian members of the United Black Youth League in 1981 were arrested on a charge of conspiracy to cause explosions for possessing dozens of molotov cocktails – milk bottles filled with petrol, with a rag through the lid – allegedly for throwing at the police. To the intense irritation of the British authorities, a mixed-race jury acquitted them, accepting their argument that it was in self-defence (and that the items themselves were closer to fireworks than bombs), because black and Asian communities were routinely and systematically attacked by skinheads and racists whose activities were shrugged at by the powers that be.
It is a reminder of a particularly ugly, squalid, bigoted and mediocre era in British public life, when Margaret Thatcher, just before becoming prime minister, tried to siphon off some of the far-right National Front’s political energy by declaring that people felt “swamped” by immigrants, the most earsplittingly loud dog whistle in Tory history. It was also the era when anti-racist protester Blair Peach was killed by the Met’s yet-to-be-disbanded special patrol group, when the still-unsolved New Cross fire in London took the lives of 13 young black people, when the south Asian woman Anwar Ditta was subject to a spitefully obstructive move from the Home Office to prevent her bringing her children into the UK – supposedly because they weren’t really hers, though a DNA test finally proved her right. Perhaps most of all, it was an era when the witness-box testimony of uniformed police officers was increasingly seen as almost valueless in these cases; the film also reminds us how culpably lackadaisical and incompetent the Yorkshire police were in catching the serial killer Peter Sutcliffe.
Austin Abrams gets eaten by a sperm whale in an overlong and flashback-heavy adaptation of Daniel Kraus’s hit novel that only has us on edge in moments
Spare a thought for poor Austin Abrams, who, having just endured the world’s worst, and gloopiest, courier assignment in Resident Evil, has now been trapped inside a sperm whale …
The immensely likable Euphoria alum (has any show in recent memory provided quite as many genuine stars?) brings what he can to Brian Duffield’s rather soggy adaptation of Pulitzer prize-winner Daniel Kraus’s acclaimed novel Whalefall. But there’s not a great deal he can do, despite being in every scene of what’s his second studio lead in a month, other than scream and writhe and look understandably alarmed. It’s a setup that’s grabby enough to have us wonder just how the hell it’s going to play out (what if that one scene in Finding Nemo but a whole movie) but it just doesn’t work as a 106-minute adventure, too overstretched and too silly to have us rooting for his escape and caring how he might orchestrate it.
The 1926 film of Goethe’s tragic tale of a man who sells his soul to the devil remains a spectacular feat of German expressionism
The centenary of FW Murnau’s silent fantasy-melodrama from 1926 is the occasion to ponder this mysterious film, taken from Goethe’s 19th-century depiction of the alchemist and natural philosopher who sells his soul to the devil but, in a very high-minded climax of German romanticism, is redeemed by love. (Not love of God precisely, but love of a good woman; the word “Liebe” finally appears at the centre of Murnau’s radiating vision of concentric circles conjured by the heavens, which annul his debt to the Evil One.) It is therefore very different from Christopher Marlowe’s scarier and more unforgiving account of Doctor Faustus.
Murnau’s Faust is (obviously) concerned with and animated by evil, and there are echoes of his Nosferatu, made four years previously. In this film, Faust, having struck his bargain on a provisional 24-hour basis with Mephisto, finds that he is scared of a crucifix, like a vampire. It is also very much a film of Weimar Germany with its mad energy and streaks of garish satire and black comedy; the book-burning scene in which Faust immolates all his necromancy volumes, along with the Bible, is one which resonated with later events. (Perhaps it indirectly inspired Klaus Mann’s novel Mephisto, later to be filmed by István Szabó.)
A musician becomes obsessed with the haunted seat, but the potentially hilarious premise sleepwalks its way to an unsatisfying conclusion
The indie indulgences of US film-maker Amanda Kramer – which often contain big names making small appearances – are such a puzzle; sometimes they work, sometimes they don’t. I enjoyed her weird reverie about an imaginary 80s TV special, called Give Me Pity!, but not so much the 1950s-camp daydream Please Baby Please, with Andrea Riseborough. Now she gives us a film with a toweringly strange and potentially hilarious premise, on which the result does not in any way deliver. Yet there are moments of interest in the dreamy Lynchian drift that causes Kramer’s films to float away from the audience.
By Design is an all but unbearable absurdist drama. The actors deliver halting dialogue as if in a hypnotic trance, paralysed by the film’s heavy conceit: Juliette Lewis plays a depressed single woman who turns into a chair. The scene seems set for some entertaining hijinks with visual effects, in which Lewis and the chair merge. But no – not really. What in fact happens is that Lewis’s own body is supposedly robbed of its animating identity or spirit, which migrates into the chair while she becomes catatonic, a body flopped down on the bed. The chair itself doesn’t look or behave in any way differently.
The novel had no hero, no dialogue and little action. So how was I See Buildings Fall Like Lightning turned into such a funny, rousing and acclaimed film? Director Clio Barnard reveals all
As a kid in 90s Birmingham, Keiran Goddard would gather with his friends to watch the tower blocks coming down. That’s what passed for entertainment back then. Controlled explosions, collapsing buildings. The demolition of the city’s postwar council estates marked the end of one story and the start of another. It was a dust-blown display of regeneration and progress. The housing that replaced it would be an improvement. The people of east Birmingham would move on to better lives.
Goddard, specifically, moved on to study English at Oxford University. He now lives in London and writes books for a living. Physically, he has left his home town far behind. Emotionally and spiritually, not so much. “So I feel quite splintered,” he says. “I’m not sure anyone ever really leaves the world they grew up in.”
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