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7 Miles Out review – Carol Morley’s funny-poignant self-portrait of teenage kicks in Stockport

17 October 2026 at 13:35

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.

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© Photograph: Cannon and Morley Productions

© Photograph: Cannon and Morley Productions

© Photograph: Cannon and Morley Productions

Selma Blair ‘did not intend to harm anyone’ during airplane incident, representatives say

17 October 2026 at 09:52

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.

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© Photograph: Ryan Murphy/AP

© Photograph: Ryan Murphy/AP

© Photograph: Ryan Murphy/AP

‘Sometimes it’s not perfect, but it works’: film-maker Charles Burnett on his chronicling of Black working-class life

17 October 2026 at 09:00

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.

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© Photograph: Charles Burnett Archive

© Photograph: Charles Burnett Archive

© Photograph: Charles Burnett Archive

‘You can’t make this stuff up’: why we remain fascinated by Elizabeth Holmes

17 October 2026 at 05:00

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.”

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© Photograph: Courtesy of A24

© Photograph: Courtesy of A24

© Photograph: Courtesy of A24

The hill I will die on: Cinemas have been getting away with lies. Films should begin on time | Jeffrey Ingold

17 October 2026 at 05:00

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

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© Composite: Guardian Design/Getty Images

© Composite: Guardian Design/Getty Images

© Composite: Guardian Design/Getty Images

The Digger disaster: what an epic movie flop means for Tom Cruise and Hollywood

17 October 2026 at 04:12

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).

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© Composite: Alex Mellon/Alex Mellon for the Guardian : Getty Images

© Composite: Alex Mellon/Alex Mellon for the Guardian : Getty Images

© Composite: Alex Mellon/Alex Mellon for the Guardian : Getty Images

From Time to Fontaines DC: the week in rave reviews

17 October 2026 at 01:00

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

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© Composite: Ewen Spencer

© Composite: Ewen Spencer

© Composite: Ewen Spencer

The Influencer Project to Melanie C: your complete entertainment guide to the week ahead

17 October 2026 at 01:00

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.

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© Composite: -

© Composite: -

© Composite: -

Masterplan review – Stanley Tucci is wasted in Amazon’s smooth-brained heist caper

16 October 2026 at 15:24

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 cooking shows 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.”

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© Photograph: Courtesy of Amazon MGM Studios

© Photograph: Courtesy of Amazon MGM Studios

© Photograph: Courtesy of Amazon MGM Studios

The Guardian view on Winnie-the-Pooh: now we are 100 | Editorial

16 October 2026 at 12:52

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.

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© Photograph: Royal Mail/PA

© Photograph: Royal Mail/PA

© Photograph: Royal Mail/PA

Look Back review – Kore-eda’s ode to friendship, manga and artistic success

16 October 2026 at 12:50

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.

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© Photograph: Courtesy: London Film Festival

© Photograph: Courtesy: London Film Festival

© Photograph: Courtesy: London Film Festival

‘Tough to watch, impossible to ignore’: reviewers on NAZA documentary

16 October 2026 at 11:42

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.

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© Photograph: NAZA/The Guardian

© Photograph: NAZA/The Guardian

© Photograph: NAZA/The Guardian

I’ve debated with Israel’s most fervent defenders – NAZA debunks their talking points | Mehdi Hasan

16 October 2026 at 08:00

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.

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© Photograph: NAZA/The Guardian

© Photograph: NAZA/The Guardian

© Photograph: NAZA/The Guardian

An open book: how to make a great film adaptation, from The Shining to Trainspotting

16 October 2026 at 08:00

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.

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© Illustration: Guardian Design/guardian design; Maximum Film/Alamy; Allstar Picture Library/Alamy Stock Photo; Channel 5

© Illustration: Guardian Design/guardian design; Maximum Film/Alamy; Allstar Picture Library/Alamy Stock Photo; Channel 5

© Illustration: Guardian Design/guardian design; Maximum Film/Alamy; Allstar Picture Library/Alamy Stock Photo; Channel 5

How to dress a tech oligarch: The Social Reckoning’s costume designer on Zuckerberg’s style evolution

16 October 2026 at 08:00

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.

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© Photograph: Everett Collection Inc/Alamy

© Photograph: Everett Collection Inc/Alamy

© Photograph: Everett Collection Inc/Alamy

‘Opening the lid of a horrible secret’: Jamaicans confront enslavement with taboo-busting stories on screen

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.

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© Photograph: Des Willie

© Photograph: Des Willie

© Photograph: Des Willie

NAZA: the film Israel does not want you to see - video

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

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© Photograph: The Guardian

© Photograph: The Guardian

© Photograph: The Guardian

The Disciple: A Wu-Tang Fable review – Netflix doc on ‘secret album’ is strictly for super fans

16 October 2026 at 05:00

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.

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© Photograph: Courtesy of Netflix

© Photograph: Courtesy of Netflix

© Photograph: Courtesy of Netflix

Tenzing to Goodfellas: the seven best films to watch on TV this week

16 October 2026 at 04:00

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

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© Photograph: Apple

© Photograph: Apple

© Photograph: Apple

Calling the shots: what NAZA says about perpetrator cinema

16 October 2026 at 03:00

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, anonymised members 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.

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© Photograph: The Guardian

© Photograph: The Guardian

© Photograph: The Guardian

Dogmatic Nordic liberals v eastern family values: culture-clash drama Fjord touches nerves in Norway and Romania

16 October 2026 at 02:00

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.

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© Photograph: ©Tudor Panduru

© Photograph: ©Tudor Panduru

© Photograph: ©Tudor Panduru

Victoria Beckham, ‘duck face’ and onesies: nine things Zoolander predicted about fashion

16 October 2026 at 02:00

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

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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.

***

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© Photograph: Paramount/Sportsphoto/Allstar

© Photograph: Paramount/Sportsphoto/Allstar

© Photograph: Paramount/Sportsphoto/Allstar

The Face of Horror review – a future cult classic delights with playful spin on Hammer horror

16 October 2026 at 01:30

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.

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© Photograph: Courtesy: London Film Festival

© Photograph: Courtesy: London Film Festival

© Photograph: Courtesy: London Film Festival

Street Fighter review – nostalgia only goes so far in junky fighting game movie

15 October 2026 at 12:00

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.

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© Photograph: Mark Rogers/PARAMOUNT PICTURES, CAPCOM AND LEGENDARY

© Photograph: Mark Rogers/PARAMOUNT PICTURES, CAPCOM AND LEGENDARY

© Photograph: Mark Rogers/PARAMOUNT PICTURES, CAPCOM AND LEGENDARY

Klara and the Sun review – Taika Waititi’s manic pixie dream robot sci-fi is a sentimental mess

15 October 2026 at 16:15

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.)

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© Photograph: Album/Alamy

© Photograph: Album/Alamy

© Photograph: Album/Alamy

Cult venue Prince Charles cinema ‘saved’ after lease renewal signed

15 October 2026 at 11:20

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”.

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© Photograph: Sophia Evans/The Observer

© Photograph: Sophia Evans/The Observer

© Photograph: Sophia Evans/The Observer

‘Stranger than stranger-than-fiction’: how Lance Oppenheim made the year’s two buzziest films

15 October 2026 at 10:55

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.

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© Photograph: Alessandra Tarantino/AP

© Photograph: Alessandra Tarantino/AP

© Photograph: Alessandra Tarantino/AP

‘Don’t do this!’ Why Paul McCartney cares about looking shorter than John Lennon in Sam Mendes’ Beatles films

15 October 2026 at 09:30

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.

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© Photograph: John Russo/REX/Shutterstock

© Photograph: John Russo/REX/Shutterstock

© Photograph: John Russo/REX/Shutterstock

Your full attention: Jesse Eisenberg’s 10 best film performances – ranked!

15 October 2026 at 07:00

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.

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© Photograph: Linda Nylind/The Guardian

© Photograph: Linda Nylind/The Guardian

© Photograph: Linda Nylind/The Guardian

Rebellion review – story of Bradford 12 revisits Britain’s ugly racist past

15 October 2026 at 06:08

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.

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© Photograph: ©migrant media/ishaq kazi

© Photograph: ©migrant media/ishaq kazi

© Photograph: ©migrant media/ishaq kazi

Whalefall review – slimy survival thriller traps us in a whale and struggles to make it digestible

15 October 2026 at 05:00

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.

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© Photograph: 20th Century Studios/PA

© Photograph: 20th Century Studios/PA

© Photograph: 20th Century Studios/PA

Faust review – FW Murnau’s silent masterpiece is a devilishly dazzling vision

15 October 2026 at 04:00

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.)

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© Photograph: Courtesy of Mubi

© Photograph: Courtesy of Mubi

© Photograph: Courtesy of Mubi

By Design review – Juliette Lewis turns into a chair in hypnotic Lynchian drama

15 October 2026 at 02:00

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.

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© Photograph: Courtesy of Bulldog Film Distribution

© Photograph: Courtesy of Bulldog Film Distribution

© Photograph: Courtesy of Bulldog Film Distribution

‘To succeed meant to leave’: inside the jolting film about Brummie estate kids knocked flying by demolition

15 October 2026 at 00:00

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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© Photograph: Chris Harris

© Photograph: Chris Harris

© Photograph: Chris Harris

Jessie Buckley suggests film industry gives too much weight to Oscar campaigns

The actor, who won the Academy Award for best actress this year, was speaking at the BFI and Chanel film-maker awards

Jessie Buckley has questioned whether the film industry places too much emphasis on Oscar campaigns at the expense of nurturing emerging talent, suggesting there may be greater potential in supporting film-makers at grassroots level.

Speaking at the BFI and Chanel film-maker awards in London, the actor was responding to comments by John Malkovich, who said Oscar campaigns were now the only way to get audiences into cinemas.

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© Photograph: Scott A Garfitt/Invision/AP

© Photograph: Scott A Garfitt/Invision/AP

© Photograph: Scott A Garfitt/Invision/AP

How we lost our appetite for eat-the-rich satire

14 October 2026 at 09:34

Tom Cruise’s latest film could lose $250m (£190m) – could one reason be that audiences are tired of Hollywood telling them what they already know about the super-rich?

It seems as if nobody can decide who should shoulder most of the blame for the recent box office flop of Digger.

Was it the ousted Warner Bros film executives Mike De Luca and Pam Abdy, whose love of big-budget auteur cinema usually came with a hefty price tag? Or was it the marketing team, who were responsible for hiding the movie’s biggest swing from all trailers, ensuring many viewers would be left alienated from its early meta-reveal onwards?

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© Photograph: Keizo Mori/UPI/Shutterstock

© Photograph: Keizo Mori/UPI/Shutterstock

© Photograph: Keizo Mori/UPI/Shutterstock

Winter of the Crow review – Lesley Manville magnificently on edge in intriguing cold war thriller

14 October 2026 at 08:00

Manville’s academic psychologist finds herself trapped in a tower block wasteland in 1980s Warsaw. Bizarre and surreal details add to the sinister vibe

Part cold war thriller, part Kafkaesque reverie, this movie takes us back to the sinister drear of Poland in 1981, when General Jaruzelski has just introduced martial law in reaction to the dangerous new mood of freedom occasioned by the Solidarity trade unions. The director is Kasia Adamik, daughter of The Green Border’s Agnieszka Holland; the film is adapted from a story by Olga Tokarczuk, called Professor Andrews Goes to Warsaw.

Lesley Manville plays Professor Andrews, an academic clinical psychologist (like Tokarczuk) from Britain with testy, peremptory mannerisms; her indulgence is a fondness for taking Polaroid photos. She has attained a certain level of celebrity for a book on dreams, despite claiming that she never dreams herself. Andrews has been invited to give a lecture in Warsaw, during which she begins to outline views on mental illness not unlike those of Laing or Foucault; but her speech is chaotically disrupted by students shouting that Poland itself is an oppressive asylum.

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© Photograph: Danny James/Courtesy of Signature Entertainment

© Photograph: Danny James/Courtesy of Signature Entertainment

© Photograph: Danny James/Courtesy of Signature Entertainment

Mistura review – ice queen brings Peruvian culinary drama to a gentle simmer

14 October 2026 at 06:00

Bárbara Mori stars in tepid tale of a high-society wife who opens a restaurant in her home after her husband leaves her

What you expect from a film about a fancy high-end restaurant is a certain amount of heat: the roiling intensity of staff pushed to their absolute limits in the pursuit of gastronomic perfection. But this 1960s-set Peruvian drama instead maintains a gentle simmer, sedate and elegant. Perhaps it’s too elegant given the circumstances of its chef-proprietor, a high-society trophy wife with no catering experience who makes a high-stakes gamble on opening a successful restaurant.

Bárbara Mori is Norma, a glacial beauty who cultivates a kind of Jackie Onassis chic: huge sunglasses, massive blow-dry, makeup thickly applied like armour. One night, Norma’s husband humiliatingly leaves her for a beauty queen. You’d be sympathetic if Norma wasn’t so foul to the staff, lashing out at housekeeper Rosa (Hermelinda Luján) and chauffeur Oscar (Cesar Ballumbrosio). It’s Oscar (who is a bit in love with Norma) who suggests she opens a restaurant in the house to pay the mortgage. Norma’s father was the French ambassador to Peru, and she has picked up his passion for gastronomy. Although the script is a bit inconsistent on this, since Oscar also says he’s never seen her so much as light the oven.

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© Photograph: Courtesy of Seine Pictures

© Photograph: Courtesy of Seine Pictures

© Photograph: Courtesy of Seine Pictures

Wuthering Heights: The House of the Damned review – Brontë horror do-over is part Dracula, part Jeeves and Wooster

14 October 2026 at 04:00

Emily Brontë’s classic is reimagined with extra stranglings, slashings and pitchfork impalings but plays it straight

Where pornography once trod, horror has now become the genre that infiltrates and apes all others. With a host of out-of-copyright cartoon characters recently grave-robbed for not-so-fresh IP, now classic literature is apparently fair game for a gruesome glow-up, in this case, Emily Brontë’s regular GCSE-botherer. But Becca Hirani’s laboured reworking makes the book’s gothic subtext crashingly, jugular-spurtingly textual.

As in the novel, wide-eyed Mr Lockwood (Ross Townsend-Green) pays a courtesy call to his brooding landlord Heathcliff (Sky Cheema) at Wuthering Heights. But this time, his sojourn is more like Jonathan Harker’s at Dracula’s castle; everywhere he turns, the shrouded phantom of Heathcliff’s beloved Catherine Earnshaw (Elle O’Hara) is lurking, and she leaves an extra dollop of gore on the windowsill in her famous nocturnal apparition. The tetchy host doesn’t do much to put Lockwood at ease – even before he’s trapped in the house by a bubo-inflicting malady. Between the hallucinations, the surly servants, and the weird absence of Heathcliff’s rumoured son Linton, he begins freaking out that it’s a different kind of moors story he’s stumbled into.

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© Photograph: Courtesy of EMRJ Entertainment

© Photograph: Courtesy of EMRJ Entertainment

© Photograph: Courtesy of EMRJ Entertainment

Kiri and Lou Go Raaa! review – delightful origin story for CBeebies’ prehistoric pals

14 October 2026 at 02:00

The pair’s first feature-length adventure stars Jemaine Clement and Olivia Tennet, has a dreamy soundtrack and beautiful stop-motion visuals – fantastic family fun

Kiri is a lively yellow dinosaur, Lou is an amiable purple palorchecie (a fictional beast, vaguely resembling a palorchestes, which in turn vaguely resembles a giant tapir) – and if you’ve been watching their CBeebies show, which hails from New Zealand and consists of 5-minute episodes, you’ll know they’re the best of friends despite their ingrained temperamental differences. But how did they become friends in the first place? For the uninitiated, Kiri and Lou Go Raaa! functions as an introduction to the characters and their world, while for fans it’s a delightful origin story.

At only one hour long, the runtime is toddler-friendly – and to be honest, there are plenty of films marketed at adults that could learn a lesson from writer-director Harry Sinclair’s economical storytelling. (Sinclair is also the writer of the TV series, alongside Buffy the Vampire Slayer writing alum Rebecca Kirshner.) With the voice acting talents of Olivia Tennet (Freda in Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers) and Jemaine Clement (Flight of the Conchords), plus dreamy songs from Don McGlashan (Blam Blam Blam, The Front Lawn), Kiri and Lou Go Raaa! would arguably work superbly as an audiobook or radio show – except the visuals are a treat too.

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© Photograph: Stretchy

© Photograph: Stretchy

© Photograph: Stretchy

Frank and Percy review – bromance becomes romance for dog walkers Ian McKellen and Roger Allam

13 October 2026 at 16:05

London film festival
McKellen and Allam reprise their roles for the film version of Ben Weatherill’s play in a star-filled bittersweet comedy about finding love later in life

There is a tender sweetness to this silver-years romance of new experiences and new ideas – and also some sugary sentimentality, an autumnal woodwind score telling us how to feel, and a bit of sitcom-cartoony characterisation in the all-star gallery of supporting turns. Sometimes that works and sometimes it doesn’t. But the movie’s easy-going good nature wins out – and there’s a terrific contribution from Joanna Lumley, playing Belinda, an elegant woman poignantly suffering from early onset dementia. Screenwriter Martin Sherman adapts the two-hander stage-play by Ben Weatherill in which Roger Allam and Ian McKellen originally starred. They return here for the expanded movie version and Sean Mathias once again directs.

Allam plays Frank, a retired history teacher whose wife died of cancer a few short years ago (Belinda is his sister-in-law) and who now likes to walk his dog Toffee on Hampstead Heath. McKellen is Percy, an academic sociologist and climate scientist who can be found there too, with his dog Bruno. Percy is rather acrimoniously separated from his now ex-partner, a waspish and querulously self-pitying figure gamely played by Stephen Fry.

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© Photograph: Jack Merriman/John Gore Studios/BK Studios

© Photograph: Jack Merriman/John Gore Studios/BK Studios

© Photograph: Jack Merriman/John Gore Studios/BK Studios

Netflix unveils first trailer for Greta Gerwig’s Narnia: The Magician’s Nephew

13 October 2026 at 15:10

The fantasy epic based on CS Lewis’s classic stars Daniel Craig, Carey Mulligan and Meryl Streep

The first look at Greta Gerwig’s vision for Narnia has been revealed.

Today, Netflix is giving a first look at her vision for CS Lewis’s magical world in the trailer for The Magician’s Nephew, the first chronological book in the beloved series.

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© Photograph: Courtesy of Netflix

© Photograph: Courtesy of Netflix

© Photograph: Courtesy of Netflix

‘A tipping point of ickiness’: Welsh star Tom Rhys Harries on playing eyelid-snipping DC supervillain Clayface

13 October 2026 at 10:58

He cut his teeth playing rock stars and pretty posh boys. Speaking from his LA home, the actor talks about landing his first blockbuster lead in the grisly DC horror. Will it be too shocking for comic book fans?

Exactly 13 years ago this month, Tom Rhys Harries was hanging by his ankles from a meat hook every night. Playing a teenage rock’n’roll idol abducted by gangsters in a revival of Jez Butterworth’s Mojo, Harries was fresh out of drama school and the only unknown in a cast led by Ben Whishaw and Rupert Grint. The Guardian’s Michael Billington likened him to “an embryonic Elvis”.

Now the 36-year-old Cardiff-born actor has the title role in Clayface, a violent DC Comics supervillain blockbuster set in Batman’s stomping ground, Gotham City. This puts him in the company of fellow Brits in the comic-book universe, such as Tom Holland (Spider-Man), Robert Pattinson (Batman) and David Jonsson, recently announced as the new Black Panther. “I felt ready to do this,” says Harries. “Had I been younger, I’d have been suffocated by the insecurity of wanting to do a good job but not having that quiet trust in getting there.”

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© Photograph: Austin Hargrave

© Photograph: Austin Hargrave

© Photograph: Austin Hargrave

The Girl in the River review – forensic psychologist police procedural thriller plays like noir parody

13 October 2026 at 08:00

Ralph Macchio and Tiffany Haddish feature in a ropey and implausible manhunt thriller as cops search for the missing twin of a murdered teenager

This small-town police thriller sets its stall out intriguingly, with a murder that seems actively begging to be solved. The perp chose to dump his victim – the 14-year-old daughter of a local political bigwig – into a part of the Mississippi River where she was likely to resurface, and from a highly visible bridge. When veteran detective Alan Kramer (Devon Sawa) and rookie forensic psychologist Amelia Pembrock (Maggie Grace) show up to investigate, they are immediately alerted to a gun in the bushes just yards away. As a colleague observes: “This isn’t a clean-up. It’s a message.”

But Brando Benetton’s debut film sadly fails to capitalise on the misdirection at play in this open-goal crime scene. Instead of using it to pry open community secrets, he gives us a ropey and implausible manhunt. As Kramer and Pembrock race to locate the girl’s twin, who is presumably still in the killer’s clutches, they zero in on local butcher Boris (Darron Dunbar). He has a sex-pest rap sheet and lives with his mother – which apparently ticks all the boxes for a profiling genius such as Pembrock. Kramer pulls her up for being unbothered by the lack of actual prosecutable evidence. But carping is about the only investigative contribution this seasoned criminologist makes here (and what’s a criminologist – a crime sociologist – doing out in the field anyway?).

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© Photograph: David Wiggins

© Photograph: David Wiggins

© Photograph: David Wiggins

Cheesy? Yes. Cringe? Absolutely. That’s why High School Musical is still our secret passion | Rachel Chang

13 October 2026 at 07:00

I watched the filming of the first jazz-hands epic. Two decades on, its sparkle hasn’t faded – and now it’s back on the London stage

Whenever I watch basketball, I come away disappointed that the players’ shoe squeaks didn’t jumpstart a choreographed dance number, just like in High School Musical. Whether it was a lunch break turning into a confession of closeted passions or a pep rally evolving into a flashmob, the 2006 Disney Channel movie proved that teen drama can always be solved through song.

Quality entertainment? Meh. The corniest of lines? Oh, for sure. But the cheesiness was the point. Its 98 minutes became a deliciously enduring slice of pop culture not despite the cringe, but because the film embraced it so wholeheartedly.

Rachel Chang is a journalist and author specialising in travel and pop culture. Her book Unforgettable Walks: 52 Places to Stroll Around the World is published next year

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© Photograph: Fred Hayes/Disney/Allstar

© Photograph: Fred Hayes/Disney/Allstar

© Photograph: Fred Hayes/Disney/Allstar

Devil in the detail: 100 years on, FW Murnau’s Faust scrapbook reveals the secrets of his silent masterpiece

13 October 2026 at 06:25

A rediscovered collection of drawings and on-set photos finally reveals the intricate on-set mysteries of one of early cinema’s most gifted pioneers

FW Murnau was one of the greatest of all silent film-makers, with a rare genius for making beautiful images on screen. His peers liked to say he “had a camera instead of a head”. The director of such stunning films as vampire tale Nosferatu (1922) and marital romance Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans (1927) died at the age of 42 in 1931, meaning that his career barely scraped into the talkie era. Still, Murnau’s tremendous run of silent pictures included some beautiful, often disturbing classics, in which he sent his camera roaming through changing vistas of shadows and light, and plumbed the depths of the human soul. Nowhere more so than in his tour-de-force Faust, released 100 years ago this month, based on Goethe’s play about a deal with the devil. And the making of Faust is depicted in a stunning new book, which is both a document of, and in a sense an artefact from, the production of this classic film.

Murnau was also one of the most mysterious of directors: secretive about his methods, with an intense devotion to his work. Early collaborator Edgar G Ulmer called him “a great purist who worked under a sort of hypnosis”. Murnau banned producers from his sets, and executives from watching his rushes. Bar a few exceptions, he did not allow on-set photography to reveal the secrets of his camerawork and special effects. This mystique created room for speculation as to whether Murnau, or his talented crew, were responsible for the success of his films. The Faust Bible: The Making of FW Murnau’s Masterpiece publishes unseen images from the shoot of one of his best films, and gives a rare insight into the collaborative way it was made.

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© Photograph: © La Cinémathèque française, Paris

© Photograph: © La Cinémathèque française, Paris

© Photograph: © La Cinémathèque française, Paris

Forever Is Now review – political study of former Irish Green leader is like The Thick of It but with morals

13 October 2026 at 06:00

Eamon Ryan is shown to be principled, likable and hard working in a glowing portrait, filmed while serving in the country’s coalition government

This fly-on-the-wall documentary about the former Irish Green party leader and cabinet minister Eamon Ryan reminded me of the political satire The Thick of It – but without the cynical gags and hapless self-serving politicians. Even after you factor in the skewing effect of it being a favourable portrait, showing him in the best possible light, Ryan comes across as one of the good guys: principled, likable and extremely hard working. The film follows his final 18 months serving in Ireland’s coalition government as minister for the environment and transport before stepping down in 2025.

The title is something that Ryan’s 25-year-old son Tommy repeats over and over. “Forever … forever … forever.” Tommy is autistic and requires full-time care. When Ryan resigns from government, one of his reasons is to spend more time with Tommy. We see the pair of them at the allotment picking raspberries and walking the dog. But other than a quick glimpse of his wife, Victoria, the rest of Ryan’s family life is kept firmly behind closed doors.

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© Photograph: Soilsiú Films

© Photograph: Soilsiú Films

© Photograph: Soilsiú Films

The Social Reckoning isn’t as angry or as potent as a Facebook drama should be

13 October 2026 at 05:00

Aaron Sorkin’s attempt to return to the success of The Social Network is a strangely dated and incomplete look at a world that needs a sharper eye

In retrospect, David Fincher’s 2010 film The Social Network was a landmark for a quiet, even counterintuitive reason. Before the film was released, some questioned whether Aaron Sorkin, a writer not exactly known for his mastery of, nevermind obsession with, the technical sphere, was the right man to tell the origin story of Facebook. And while Sorkin may well have converted Mark Zuckerberg into terms he could better understand – namely, a motormouthed wiseass who deep down wants to impress a smart, serious-minded girl – he and Fincher also made one of the first internet-centric movies to treat online life as a natural extension of IRL dynamics, rather than the otherworldly tech portal seen in so many 90s internet movies.

Granted, that’s the whole deal with Facebook: its viral spread of social networking, something so simple and addictive that aunts, grandpas and coworkers everywhere could understand it. Yet understanding its simultaneous extension and distortion of the real world wasn’t a given; four years later, for example, 2014’s Men, Women and Children was widely derided for taking an alarmist approach to the internet as a haven for adults seeking an affair, teenagers nursing porn addictions and fame-hungry strivers of all ages. The Social Network, on the other hand, is remarkably nonjudgmental about the basic mechanics of Facebook, rooting its nascent flaws in the human weaknesses that birthed it. In retrospect, the movie only feels outdated to the extent that it underestimates Zuckerberg’s grasping for power and the potential for grim carelessness that his online kingdom was built on.

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© Photograph: Leah Gallo/Sony Pictures/AP

© Photograph: Leah Gallo/Sony Pictures/AP

© Photograph: Leah Gallo/Sony Pictures/AP

Dream of Birds – documentary

What happens when a forest loses its birdsong? Following clues hidden in the sounds birds make while asleep, Argentinian physicist Gabriel Mindlin uncovers a hidden extinction – not of species, but of memory – and sets out to revive vanished melodies before they disappear forever. Part detective story, part cutting-edge science, Mindlin’s mission leads him to the dusty 1960s archives of Buenos Aires naturalist, confirming that some songs no longer echo in the biosphere. So he deploys “robot tutors” to see whether young birds can learn and spread the old songs once again.

Read more on this topic: Trill seekers: can scientists use AI and tutors to help birds remember lost songs?

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© Photograph: Martín Benchimol

© Photograph: Martín Benchimol

© Photograph: Martín Benchimol

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