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.

Film’s executive producer talks about first time he watched film detailing Israel’s mass killing of civilians in Gaza

The director Jonathan Glazer said he was “shocked into silence” the first time he watched NAZA, an award-winning documentary about Israel’s systems of mass killing in the war on Gaza.

Glazer appeared on a panel at NAZA’s UK premiere in London on Thursday night alongside key figures behind the documentary, including its Israeli co-directors, Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor.

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.

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.”

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.”

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.

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.

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.

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.)

Exclusive: ITV investigation shows leader stood by mayoral candidate who said Labour MP should ‘go home to the Caribbean’

Nigel Farage was told by a senior Reform official that he was “protecting” a high-profile mayoral candidate accused of making racist comments about David Lammy, an undercover investigation has revealed.

The latest footage from an undercover investigation by ITV also shows Sarah Pochin, one of two female MPs for Reform, complaining that other party officials “are so fucking chauvinistic” and that “they just exclude you if you are a woman”.

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.

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.”

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.”

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?).

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.

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.

The revelation comes after the four-hour film’s Venice premiere drew a string of criticisms and insults from the founder of SpaceXAI

Alex Gibney, director of the new four-hour documentary about Elon Musk, said that Universal, owners of the film’s international distribution rights “wavered” over releasing the film outside North America.

Gibney was speaking to the New York Times as the film opened in the US (where it is being released by the independent distributor Bleecker Street), and appeared to confirm a story in the Hollywood Reporter that Universal, which had acquired the international rights to the film in 2023, had got cold feet. Asked by the New York Times, “Did Universal Pictures waver in setting up its international release plans?” Gibney replied: “Yes.”

When influencer/singer/content creator Chiara King visits Copenhagen all the trips to trendy shops and fancy restaurants soon take a turn for the worse

British influencer/singer/content creator Chiara King stars as influencer/singer/content creator Chiara King, or some kind of parafictional version of herself, in this quease-inducing thriller exercise. The ick gets generated not necessarily by the eventual gore that erupts in the last reel, but by the tacky weirdness of the way the film apes the mannerisms of social media reels and streaming nonsense to both satirise the ugly side of the business but also exploit and profit off it at the same time. On one level, it’s an eerily clever exercise in bad faith, like a poor Michael Haneke film (think Funny Games) for gen-Z kicks; on another, maybe it’s just a crappy ripoff of online tropes that have been way overexposed already. Or both.

Anyway, here’s what happens: influencer Chiara gets invited to visit Copenhagen by a tourist organisation, a deal set up by her avaricious manager Alice (Jazmine Summer). Of course, this means practically every moment of her time awake in the city will be filmed, both by Chiara herself on her trusty smartphone, or a camera crew led by director Mike (played by Mike Nybroe, who is also director of The Influencer Project, ha ha); Mike is supported by sound man Daniel (Daniel Parmo) and cameraman Victor (Luca Storm). The early sections turn in all the influence-slop you would expect, with shopping trips to trendy merch vendors such as Baum und Pferdgarten, and meals at fancy local restaurants, and then a livestreamed visit to a “haunted house,” which is the big thing on Instagram and TikTok these days.

Paul Greengrass’s Peasants’ Revolt epic, The Uprising, is just the latest in a long line of movies depicting an unsuccessful attempt at remaking the nation

The British are perverse. We fetishise our failures, even if they are essentially tangential to a national narrative that should be about imperial conquest, slavery and being unremittingly unpleasant to foreigners. We tell and retell, for instance, the story of Captain Scott even though he died in Antarctica in 1912 after losing the race to reach the south pole first to the unacceptably Norwegian Roald Amundsen. Similarly, Christopher Nolan’s 2017 film Dunkirk typified the British tendency to snatch national glory from the jaws of defeat. And then there was the tragicomic disaster of the Charge of the Light Brigade during the 1853-56 Crimean war in which our boys raced to putatively glorious if stupid deaths. It’s as if, for us British, pointless sacrifice and embracing failure are what heroism means. And our cinema has colluded with this perversity.

But there is an exception to this national veneration of failure. Britain has been reluctant to embrace its revolutionary defeats. There is, for instance, no film dealing with the Chartist movement’s 19th-century struggle for universal suffrage. Even more strikingly yet, it is only now, in 2026, that a film has been made about the calamitous 1381 Peasants’ Revolt, even though it is a pivotal event in British history. Paul Greengrass’s The Uprising, starring Andrew Garfield as a – let’s just get this over with – revolting peasant, joins a mere handful of other movies, including Kevin Brownlow and Andrew Mollo’s 1975 Winstanley, Bill Douglas’s 1986 Comrades and Mike Leigh’s 2018 Peterloo, that dare depict how radical collective action was crushed by a ruthless state.

Jay-Z in 8, the rap mogul’s HBO docuseries, covers his life and career in effort to mend his image – with no pushback. Why is he so fixated on the court of public opinion?

During the finale of Jay-Z’s Jay-Z in 8, the recent eight-part HBO documentary series on his life and career, the billionaire rap mogul talked with record producer Rick Rubin about the song Family Feud from his 4:44 album. He clarified one of its lyrics, “Al Sharpton in the mirror takin’ selfies / How is him or Pill Cosby ‘posed to help me?”, in which he chided Sharpton, the civil rights leader, and Cosby, the disgraced actor-comedian, for constantly criticizing rap music. He called Sharpton an “extortionist” who goes “from place to place” demanding: “You want our support … give us the money.” Listening to him chastise Sharpton, I pondered how he doesn’t see himself as a similar figure.

Starting in 2019, Jay-Z partnered with the NFL in 2019 as entertainment director, deciding the Super Bowl half-time performers and working with the league on other community endeavors. Colin Kaepernick, the former NFL quarterback, has recently alleged that the deal came after NFL owners decided they needed a “Black face” to help them quell outrage from Black people after Kaepernick was blackballed by the league for kneeling during the national anthems as a form of protest against police brutality. Jay-Z was lambasted for undercutting Kaepernick’s cause for personal gain, marring his reputation with many fans who came to view him as the same counterinsurgent figure he criticized in the documentary.

Debut feature from Ben Sottak provides outlandish Halloween-based scares, with Milly Shapiro superb as the naive yet resilient home-defender, Pumpkin

Home Alone meets Mad Max in this atmospheric seasonal chiller, named for Halloween and not a cheery greeting. A disease has wiped out most of humanity, leaving 16-year-old Pumpkin (Milly Shapiro) stranded alone in her rural family home in the middle of nowhere for the best part of four years. This classic American clapboard house has always been the perfect quaint yet unsettling place to celebrate Halloween, and she determines to uphold the family tradition and do just that, sending a radio broadcast to anyone listening to invite them to celebrate spooky season with her. Unfortunately, the message is picked up by some less than wholesome types, led by Thalia (Shannyn Sossamon), thus setting the stage for the proverbial to hit the fan.

It’s the first major screen role for Shapiro since her memorable debut as the little sister in Ari Aster’s Hereditary, and she is in almost every scene here, making for quite the showcase. It’s good casting: Pumpkin is an intriguing presence – at once young and old, presumably because she’s been fending for herself during such a key stage of her development. She’s not had any adult guidance since the age of 12 – arresting her development in some ways, while having to survive, be totally independent and grieve her entire family alone has simultaneously made her unusually tough in others.

The latest in our series of writers explaining their go-to comfort films is a tribute to Darren Aronofsky’s dark and unusually satisfying ballet nightmare

In early 2011, sometime after the film was released on home video, I sat down with mum to watch what she had heard was a “new ballet movie” by Darren Aronofsky. I was 12 years old, spending school nights training to be a professional dancer. Without any warmup, knowing very little of the ballet and pointe work that earned Natalie Portman her best actress Oscar, we pressed play on Black Swan.

Well before Brendan Fraser’s time on the couch and the many houseguests of Mother!, Aronofsky increased the wattage with a companion piece to follow his heavy-hitter, The Wrestler. Watching Nina Sayers’ (Portman) intense physical trials and her stilted sexual awakening, with my mum beside me, I was understandably disturbed. At this point in my adolescence, I thought Jumanji was a scary movie. Like the film’s injured bird, I was being introduced to a darkness I didn’t understand. And somehow I couldn’t get enough. Why did it feel so good?

Using archive material of destroyed houses, terrorised children and dead bodies, Kamal Aljafari adds humanity to the reels by overlaying poems by Palestinian authors

In Arabic, “fidai” means someone willing to sacrifice themselves for the greater good. Borrowing this word, which is at times used in a military context, for his collage film, Palestinian film-maker Kamal Aljafari stages a potent uprising of images against the tide of propaganda and historical erasure. Much of the film draws on archive materials once housed in the Palestine Research Centre in Beirut. In 1982, during the Lebanese civil war, Israeli forces raided the centre and seized the archive. Most of these documents on Palestinian history – books, newspapers, audiovisual artefacts – are believed to still be in the hands of the Israeli army.

Obtained through clandestine means, the footage that resurfaces in Aljafari’s film bears the physical traces of political suppression. The images are scratched, grainy and pixelated, yet through the power of montage they evoke startling visual parallels that point to the relentless violence endured by Palestinians through the decades. Black-and-white film taken during the British mandate show soldiers patrolling the streets and inflicting violence upon the Indigenous population; similar acts then committed by Israeli forces. In place of a chronological order, the editing builds a sense of continuity through recurring images. Time and time again, we see torn-down houses, terrorised children and the bodies of Palestinians murdered by occupation forces.

We got our first look at Prime Video's new sci-fi series Blade Runner 2099 in July at San Diego Comic-Con. With the show's premiere roughly six weeks away, the streamer unveiled the full trailer this weekend at New York Comic-Con. Co-stars Michelle Yeoh and Hunter Schafer (Euphoria) joined showrunner Silka Luisa (Shining Girls) onstage for the big reveal.

As Luisa described the show during the NYCC panel Saturday night:

We are 50 years after [Blade Runner] 2049 and, bad news, the worst has happened. The replicant uprising that has been bubbling up in the films has taken place and the humans have lost. So the creations have surpassed their creators. And the series, the big question it asks is, ‘What happens when our time as a species ends?’ 2099 is taking place at a junction point when one species is ending and a new one is rising. The first film, something I loved about it, was that it was looking at mortality on a micro level. Roy Batty and the other replicants were fighting for more life. This show asks that same question but on a macro level. Mankind—what happens when we realize our time is running out? And are we going to accept that loss? Can we hold on to our humanity during it?

Yeoh stars as Olwen, the dying Replicant, while Schafer plays Cora. The cast also includes Hugo Hamlet as Buster Friendly, as well as Dmitri Abold, Lewis Gribben, Katelyn Rose Downey, Daniel Rigby, Johnny Harris, Amy Lennox, Sheila Atim, Matthew Needham, Tom Burke, and Maurizio Lombardi—all in as-yet-undisclosed roles.

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The makers of Coraline return with their distinctive animation style in a magical tale of a secret world of strange beasts, talking animals and evil governesses

Here is an engaging family movie from the Portland-based Laika studio that created Coraline. It is a fantasy adventure in Laika’s distinctively crafted stop-motion animation, written by Chris Butler from the bestseller of the same title by Carson Ellis and Colin Meloy, the latter being a band member of The Decemberists, one of whose tour posters we duly glimpse in this film. The director is Laika’s lead animator Travis Knight. It’s a forthright, exuberant, good-natured and old-fashioned children’s tale which CS Lewis and JRR Tolkien might have recognised, a story about the mysterious glory of going on a quest and the terrible fear and wish-fulfilment euphoria of being called upon to confront secret forces that the grownups know nothing about.

The setting is modern-day Portland, Oregon, a groovy city whose hipster-ish stores (there’s a coffee shop actually called Dripster) and Woke 1.0 signage are affectionately mocked. But most of all, the film is aware of a huge forest park next to the city, a place here mythologised as the impassable wilderness or “wildwood” where strange creatures, fairytale nobility and wisecracking talking animals reputedly dwell, of which the city-dwelling humans are entirely ignorant. Prue (voiced by Peyton Elizabeth Lee) is a 12-year-old girl whose parents (voiced by Jake Johnson and Maya Erskine) are a couple of amiable hippies who believe in natural forces and benign magic. They have another child, Prue’s baby brother Mac, who Prue has to look after one day, pushing him in his stroller around the city and having to endure a certain classmate of hers tagging along. This is nerdy Curtis (Jacob Tremblay) who has a crush on her.

Sam Rockwell voices the gumshoe who becomes embroiled with Scarlett Johansson’s femme fatale in this big-hearted and beautifully designed fantasy spectacular

Brad Bird, the Spielberg of animation, applies his masterly authorial touch to a terrific family film that retrieves the genre from the doldrums of dull, AI-formulaic stories and visuals. This animation is smart, witty, humane: a fantasy spectacular with old-fashioned entertainment values and some amazing cityscape design showcasing a beguiling and sweet romance.

The setting is a city of marvels in a world to come, a retro-futurist urban landscape with hints of Metropolis and Blade Runner; there are plenty of regulation moving walkways, flying cars and eerie hologram billboards, yes, but a light touch to put the fun back into what could be just cliche. Here is where an old-school noir thriller is to take place with tough private detectives and bad guys wielding state-of-the-art laser-particle firearms (this explains the title, though I’d hoped that it might also include some reference to 1980s Republican politics). There are careworn cops, cynical club owners and alluring shady ladies with touches of Lana Turner and Veronica Lake. The airborne automobiles also have the bulbous lines of a previous century, and the TV monitors show black-and-white images; plasma flatscreens have evidently been disinvented.

Leonard Peltier was imprisoned for 49 years before his sentence was commuted. A new Netflix documentary exposes the ‘corrupt’ system that allowed it to happen

On 20 January 2025, with 14 minutes remaining in his term as president, Joe Biden commuted the life sentence of Leonard Peltier, after years of pressure to release a figure seen by many as the longest-serving political prisoner in the US. The Indigenous activist, a leader within the American Indian Movement (Aim) and an icon of Native American resistance, served nearly 50 years in prison for allegedly killing two FBI agents during a shootout on the Pine Ridge reservation in South Dakota, in 1975 – killings he has always denied, prosecuted in a railroaded trial widely seen as corrupt.

Outside the Florida prison where Peltier was being held that morning were several of the many activists and lawyers who fought for his release, as well as film-makers David France and Jesse Short Bull. The two directors’ long-gestating documentary on Peltier’s fight for justice was set to premiere just a week later at the Sundance film festival with a very different ending, the octogenarian still awaiting a chance to return home to the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa reservation in North Dakota. That morning, there was “a sinking feeling that it wasn’t going to happen”, France said.

New York film festival: the director has made a fascinating and troubling companion piece to her Netflix documentary 13th, which takes a fiery look at American injustice

It feels at once like the blink of an eye and an eternity since Ava DuVernay’s documentary 13th arrived on Netflix, a month before the election of Donald Trump to his first term as president. The intervening decade has more or less borne out the film’s thesis on the enduring specter of white supremacy in American life: that a clause within the 13th amendment abolishing chattel slavery – that involuntary servitude could be used as punishment for a crime – was immediately and continually exploited to criminalize black people, mass incarceration thus being the modern incarnation of America’s original sin.

The Oscar-nominated film, which saw a surge in viewership during the protests of 2020, has remained both a time capsule of late Obama-era moral clarity and, arguably, the acclaimed director’s best picture. At least, until now – 14th, DuVernay’s sequel, of sorts, soon also to arrive on Netflix, is just as lucid and galvanizing as its predecessor, with an updated, more pressing urgency befitting a democracy in distress.

Jasmine Jobson goes the distance as the British-Somalian boxer battling pain from her past and her family’s disapproval in a heavyweight, tick-the-boxes production

The true-life success story of boxer Ramla Ali is confidently told in this capable picture from screenwriter Ursula Rani Sarma and documentary director Anthony Wonke, in his feature-film debut. Ali is the British-Somali boxer who escaped to the UK from the Somali civil war with her family as a refugee, and in 2021 became the first person to box for Somalia at Olympic Games. The boxing significance of her last name is actually not mentioned in the film – and I never noticed it until it flashed up in a kind of “fight card” intertitle before her first competitive bout.

She is fiercely played by Jasmine Jobson, from TV’s Top Boy; her supportive white Muslim-convert husband Richard – a hugely important figure in enabling Ramla to break away from her disapproving family and do as she wants – is played by Finn Cole, and her abusive trainer Clinton is Gershwyn Eustache Jr. This is a film that takes you through the classic boxing-movie scenes fluently enough: the nervous first appearance in the gym, the overbearing quasi-parental coach, the heartstopping fight debut. It was good to see the traditional closeup of post-fight sore fists in the ice-bucket. All in all, the film works better than Giant, the recent biopic of British-Yemeni boxer Prince Naseem, who is in fact briefly mentioned here.

Genden Phuntsok brings charm and innocence to his portrayal of Tenzing Norgay, while Tom Hiddleston is suitably frank as Edmund Hillary

Here is a well intentioned, watchable, if sometimes soft-edged film with some NatGeo production values and VFX jeopardy on high mountain peaks. The subject is the triumphant Mount Everest expedition of 1953, in which the ultimate ascent was achieved by Nepalese-Indian mountaineer Tenzing Norgay and New Zealander Edmund Hillary.

Tenzing, a former Sherpa guide whose unparalleled knowledge of the mountain and exemplary climbing skills earned him promotion to full team member, is played here by Tibetan actor Genden Phuntsok, while Hillary is robustly portrayed by Tom Hiddleston. Screenwriter Luke Davies and director Jennifer Peedom have the decent aim of restoring Tenzing’s achievement to the centre of the narrative, a tale which at the time was resoundingly claimed for Hillary and the British empire: a glorious redemption of Scott’s Antarctic ordeal 41 years earlier and a sign of divine approval for the imminent coronation of Queen Elizabeth II.

There’s some effectively unnerving imagery and a cleverly icy dual lead performance but this kept-from-critics shocker is a bit of a jumble

The buzz surrounding the viral, limb-bending trailer of pre-Halloween horror Other Mommy was such that screen grabs became memes, official YouTube channel views ran up to 30m-plus and BuzzFeed used the extremely BuzzFeed headline: “The Lady Sitting Next To Me SCREAMED”: This Trailer Playing Before The Odyssey Is Scaring Moviegoers, And These Hilarious Reactions Have Me Crying.

Sure, Universal releasing it exclusively attached to the second biggest film of the year played a considerable part but the imagery was efficiently direct and frightening, a derivative scared child/creepy demon set-up turned into something that felt hard to deny and increasingly impossible to avoid. But then what had seemed like the surest slam-dunk horror of the season seemed to slither away. The marketing continued (there was a second trailer that didn’t quite break the internet in the same way) but the reviews never appeared, a choice made to hide the film from critics until the day it opened. It’s a strategic decision that implies a disaster, Universal eager to keep pre-ticket sales high (it’s predicted to win the weekend with $20m-plus) and bad reviews at bay. But instead, as is often the case, it’s less of a one-star train wreck and more of a two-star mess, likely to frustrate rather than enrage.

It’s easier to blame brutes and sadists for extreme violence. But as we see in the documentary, modern genocides are fueled by people who are uncomfortably recognizable

Werner Best, a senior SS official and jurist who helped organize the Nazi death squads that murdered hundreds of thousands of Jews, is also known for his statement: “We must destroy the enemy without hating him.” He belonged to a younger generation of Nazi technocrats, who despised the foul-mouthed, beer-bellied, brown-shirted “old fighters” of the Nazi party in the 1920s, and believed in organizing genocide neatly and dispassionately. After the fall of the regime, Best escaped justice for the rest of his long life, dying peacefully in Germany in 1989. His chilling statement came to my mind while I was watching the film NAZA.

I grew up in Tel Aviv and have visited there often in recent years. That is why the interviews with 24 Israeli soldiers and intelligence officers, which make up this documentary, felt strangely familiar. The conversations are conducted at night on rooftops, and the camera scans the cityscape, lingering on apartment windows as their inhabitants watch TV and make dinner. The landscape was intimately recognizable, and I felt a natural affinity with those people living their lives. I also recognized the way the interviewees talked – their speech patterns and choice of words. They reminded me of my son, who served more than a decade ago in the intelligence unit many of them might have belonged to.

John Cena and Jessica Biel collect paychecks in a soulless and synthetic slab of corporate product that hints at what we can expect from the Paramount-Warner merger

After a windy road, this week it finally happened. The day that Hollywood, and many of those who are invested in it, had been dreading, the grimly inevitable disappearance of Warner Bros as it was consumed by what is now known as Paramount. The two once-classic studios will become one – Skydance, the David Ellison-owned company that has infinitely more money than common sense or base-level creativity.

The week has seen many, including the Guardian, speculate about what we may be able to expect, what kind of films the billion-dollar behemoth might now be releasing. Warners after all has created classics such as Casablanca, The Exorcist and 2001: A Space Odyssey while Paramount has been behind The Godfather, Chinatown and Breakfast at Tiffany’s. Just imagine what the combined might of these two prestigious, industry-defining studios could achieve with the promise of 30-plus theatrical releases a year, huge amounts of money and considerable manpower at play.