Lovely documentary records the battle to protect a stretch of the polluted river and the beautiful bathing site it is defending

‘I’m just giving my poo a kiss before I go,� says Lindsey Cole, as she launches in the water to swim the Bristol channel wearing a mermaid tail. Cole is an environmental activist, and the poo is a giant inflatable with a cheery smiley face. It bobs along behind her as she swims to raise awareness of raw sewage polluting local rivers. Six hours in, and Cole is fed up: “It’s so boring!� she wails. And yet campaigning never looked so fun and friendly as it does in this joyous documentary about Bristol’s clean water campaigners.

Not far from the city centre, at a dreamily lush section of the Avon, a formidable female-led group of wild swimmers is fighting for official bathing status for a section of the river at Conham Park. They collect samples of the river water and share sewage data with others swimmers (so no one has to wait for their stomachs to alert them to E coli). If Conham Park has designated bathing status, the Environment Agency would have to test the water and – crucially – investigate the source of any pollution. There’s a depressing meeting with a man from Wessex Water who explains that neither the water company nor the agency has “an aspiration� to make the river clean enough to swim in.

Are the guitars right? Is Joan Baez sidelined? Who is this Sylvie Russo? And why is it an American shouting ‘Judas’? A Dylan tribute singer, two biographers, a superfan and more weigh in

Richard Williams, biographer

Film-maker known for provocative works Les Valseuses and Tenue de Soirée died at home in Paris on Monday

Bertrand Blier, the French film director with a long history of provocative offerings including Les Valseuses (Going Places), Tenue de Soirée (Evening Dress) and Trop Belle Pour Toi (Too Beautiful for You), has died aged 85. His son, Leonard, told AFP that the film-maker “died peacefully at home Monday night in Paris, surrounded by his wife and children�.

Blier achieved his greatest successes in the 70s and 80s with a series of outrage-baiting films, many featuring Gérard Depardieu, which concentrated on exposing wounded male machismo. In 2011 he told the Guardian: “I’ve always enjoyed shocking the bourgeois. I know I make buddy movies, but what intrigues me again and again is how male friendships are relatively unproblematic, and yet when men approach what they passionately desire, then their problems begin.�

An early screening of the new Mission: Impossible film allegedly pushed an attendee close to a medical emergency, as movie-goers are increasingly promised visceral reactions

Every new Mission: Impossible film comes with a task that is, well, quite difficult. This is a film franchise propelled by its set pieces, and the expectation is that each new instalment must better the last. Which would be fine, were it not for the fact that previous instalments have asked Tom Cruise to climb up the outside of the world’s tallest building or strap himself to the exterior of a plane as it takes off.

But don’t worry, because Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning is just months away, and Christopher McQuarrie is already promising a lot. Namely he is saying that the film will push you to the point of a medical emergency.

Harald Hutter sets his documentary in his parents shabby-chic home, a metaphor for his ageing academic father’s loosening threads of reality

Horst is an ageing academic who has lived a full life, enriched by learning, teaching and love; now his son, film-maker Harald Hutter, has decided to create an intimate and often abstract experimental documentary portrait of his father on 16mm film. Taking place over two days, what the film captures, without overtly talking about it too much, is his father’s experience of dementia, and the gradual dismantling of the intellectual faculties that have been so important to him throughout his life. In a sense the film is about the process of erosion: dementia is not a fixed state condition, but a gradual slippage, and not even a linear slippage at that. Horst has better days and some memories that remain clear, even as other important facets of his life trickle away from him like sand in an hourglass.

Horst’s house is the main location for the film and functions as a visual metaphor for his condition. He shares it with his wife, and it has lapsed into a state of genteel disrepair, half of a shabby-chic dichotomy where the shabby is gradually encroaching, bit by bit, on the chic. There are whole walls full of beautiful books, the fruits of an academic life, but there are also strips of wallpaper peeling off the wall. Hutter includes plenty of shots of nice tasteful furniture cluttered with badly organised paperwork, an evocation of a life that still has much of the outward shape and structure it always did, but whose internal organisational principles have begun to go awry.

Full of cliche-riddled dialogue and bizarre flashbacks, this basic effort is only saved by a tacked-on lecture from Jaws star Dreyfuss

This pulpy yet weirdly woo-woo nautical thriller sets good-guy treasure hunters on a collision course with drug smugglers (bad guys) and great white sharks (morally neutral but still voracious). It’s like the plot was dreamed up by a hack who overheard his six-year-old pitting Lego figurines against one another. You start to expect that any minute Batman or Unikitty will join the fray which – frankly – would be an improvement. What we get instead is tired, cliche-riddled dialogue and bizarre flashbacks in which lead good guy Cassie (Scout Taylor-Compton) remembers how her oceanographer grandpa (Richard Dreyfuss!) encouraged her to face her fears in the water after she witnessed a great white kill her father when she was a kid.

Now an adult and an expert diver, Cass has returned to the same coastline where daddy got munched, this time with her husband, Gregg (Callum McGowan) who is looking for a shipwreck. Gregg’s old friend Benz (Stuart Townsend) is the captain of the ship they have hired, along with a first mate and some disposable supporting characters who end up as shark bait when feeding time begins. That happens because the ship is overtaken by a bunch of ex-Navy Seals (led by a charisma-free Jon Seda) who press gang Cass, Gregg and the others to dive for some sunken drug parcels.

In a superb performance, Brody plays a Hungarian architect and Holocaust survivor who comes to the US and begins a distinguished career under the patronage of a wealthy man

Brady Corbet’s amazing and engrossing epic The Brutalist is about the design of postwar America and what was mixed into its foundations at the building stage. It asks us to decide if and how the brutalism of the title applies to something other than architecture, and wonders about the future ruin of what we all imagine at the drawing board of youth: an American Ozymandias. It is about antisemitism and the capitalist adventure, about the unassimilated immigrant experience and about American can-do naivety versus the tragic, painful depths of European culture and expertise.

This is a film with thrilling directness and storytelling force, a movie that fills its widescreen and three-and-a half-hour running time with absolute certainty and ease, as well as glorious amplitude, clarity and even simplicity – and yet also with something darkly mysterious and uncanny to be divined in its handsome shape.

A Chinese student arrives in New Zealand and continues her father’s experimental research in Sasha Rainbow’s cosmetic chiller

Fans of The Substance will probably appreciate this low-budget Kiwi body horror, intent as it is on tearing holes in the human meat carapace in order to question modern beauty standards. Grafted is actually more superficial than Coralie Fargeat’s film in terms of what it says about appearance – but that is somehow fitting and ably concealed by director Sasha Rainbow with a heavy grouting of punky attitude.

Chinese student Wei (Joyena Sun) arrives in New Zealand as an overseas student low on self-confidence, partly because of her facial birthmark. Her father, who also had one, died conducting experimental grafting research; his brilliant daughter – wanting to make him proud and herself beautiful – resolves to pick up where he left off. After she settles in at the house of her cousin Angela (Jess Hong), she gets her opportunity when she is cherrypicked by sleazy lecturer Paul (Jared Turner) to help out in his lab.

Seemingly inspired by the Rotherham child rape scandal, Nathan Shepka’s film has both a streak of sentimentality and an appetite for violence

Here is a vigilante thriller co-directed, written by and starring prolific low-budget Scottish film-maker Nathan Shepka, which has a kind of grim integrity despite the uneven acting and numerous rough edges. Seemingly inspired by the Rotherham grooming gang scandal, but transposing the story to Glasgow, Shepka plays laconic nightclub bouncer Alex, who is asked to do a Jack Carter and rescue a teenage girl from sex-trafficking hell.

Not that this takes place in a world where anyone does anything out of innate goodness. The job, and the accompanying 20 grand, are sent his way by a retired lawyer (ex-Doctor Who Sylvester McCoy) who is trying to cover up the fact that the girl’s mother is a heroin addict sleeping with a major politician. But Alex isn’t fundamentally a wrong’un; he visits his deaf father languishing in a care home, and shows worrying outbreaks of tenderness to sex worker Gemma (Grace Cordell) on her regular visits to his caravan.

When a demobbed British marine goes after his daughter’s killers, his old comrades pile in to beef up the relentless gunfights

This is a boorish, blokey film, the cinematic equivalent of a man sitting on the tube with his legs spread wide apart. It’s a violent British revenge thriller starring ex-Marine (and Jeff Bridges lookalike) Tip Cullen as a veteran getting payback for the death of his teenage daughter from drugs. Everyone involved has clearly worked extremely hard with what looks like a very low budget, but the cracks do show; it’s impossible to take a gangland crime boss seriously when he’s wearing such a nasty cheap suit. To be fair, most of the funding looks like it’s been chucked at SUVs and imitation assault rifles for the relentless gunfights.

As it happens, veteran marine Andy (Cullen) carries out his first kills using bits and bobs borrowed from work; he’s the manager of a hardware shop so he picks off the bad guys in a seedy drug den with a staple gun and hammer, hunting down his daughter’s dealer boyfriend Cassius (Daniel Davids).

This tale of nice ordinary folk doing bad things is a cartoonishly grisly comedy with a hint of Fargo, though without the off-kilter humour

The family that eats together stays together, they say. But the proverb will have to be tweaked for director Caden Douglas’s cartoonishly grisly comedy, in which a family’s regular Sunday dinner ends with the neighbour’s dog running around the back garden with a severed human arm clamped between its teeth. You could describe Mother Father Sister Brother Frank as Fargo-esque, in the sense that it’s a tale of nice ordinary folks doing bad stuff while snow falls serenely around them – though in truth it is less flavoursome and the humour is more obvious, not so deliciously off-kilter.

It is lunchtime at the Jennings’ house, where mom Joy (Mindy Cohn) is a picture of homely friendliness. Her husband Jerry (Enrico Colantoni) seems a little grumpy while their grown up kids Jolene (Melanie Leishman) and Jim (Iain Stewart) bicker like teenagers, but that seems like fairly standard family dysfunction. Then in walks uncle Frank, a truly loathsome piece of work, sexist and nastily homophobic to Jim, who’s gay.

Nam Arum’s debut documentary weaves intimate home videos and family stories into an interrogation of the aftermath of Chun Doo-hwan’s dictatorship

The personal and the political collide in Nam Arum’s astonishingly assured debut, an astute chronicle of South Korean politics through the lens of family memories. Weaving intimate home videos with poignant archival footage, the film-maker makes tangible the invisible link between the private and the public spheres.

As a family portrait, Nam’s documentary refreshingly moves on from the usual emphasis on generational differences, focusing instead on how youthful idealism metamorphoses over the years. As part of the pro-democracy 386 generation who came of age during Chun Doo-hwan’s military dictatorship, Nam’s parents were politically active as students. Their paths following their marriage, however, took contrasting turns. Once an optimistic investigative journalist, her father chose to become a civil servant instead, and with each change of government he was arbitrarily shuffled between departments. Nam’s mother, on the other hand, devotes her time to women’s rights groups.

James Mangold’s biopic follows the rise of the era-defining star with Chalamet brilliantly embodying his shapeshifting allure

Not Judas – Jesus. Timothée Chalamet’s hilarious and seductive portrayal of Bob Dylan makes him the smirking, scowling and unwilling leader of his generation, whose refusal to submit to the crucifixion of folk-acoustic purity is his own crucifixion. Chalamet gives us a semi-serious ordeal of someone who is part Steinbeck hero, part boyband star, part sacrificial deity. On being derisively asked if he is God, Chalamet’s Dylan replies: “How many more times? Yes.� Chalamet shows us the mysterious burden of celebrity and zeitgeist-ownership endured by a singer-songwriter who transcends John the Baptist (in the form of fatherly and sad-eyed folk mentor Pete Seeger – wonderfully played by Edward Norton) and finally has to wake up his dozing Apostles in Garden of Gethsemane with electric guitars played, in his legendary words, “fuckin’ loud�.

James Mangold’s biopic, co-scripted by him and Jay Cocks, is based on Elijah Wald’s 2015 book Dylan Goes Electric! Newport, Seeger, Dylan and the Night That Split the Sixties; it’s the story of Dylan’s musical and personal adventures in the first half of the decade as he electrified the world of folk in every sense. He was carried onwards and upwards by the folk movement appreciative of his poetic talent, but dissatisfied with what he saw as folk’s regressive, museum-oriented placidity (and Dylan is shown here not engaging explicitly with its socialist traditions); he is yearning for the new modern energy of rock’n’roll as the musical form which he has to master if it is not to surpass him.

Maura Delpero’s beautifully-made drama explores the complex dynamics of a sprawling family near the wartime border with Germany

Maura Delpero’s new film was a richly deserving winner of the Grand Jury prize at the Venice film festival this year and will now be a jewel of the selection at Toronto and anywhere else on the festival circuit. It is a richly compassionate, emotional and detailed drama of family secrets in the wartime Italian countryside, in the manner of Ermanno Olmi or the Taviani brothers. It is wonderfully acted with unaffected naturalism by its cast of professionals and newcomers and plays an extravagant, almost shameless pizzicato on the audience’s heartstrings.

The setting is the remote Alpine village of Vermiglio in 1944. Cesare is the village schoolteacher whose wife Adele (Roberta Rovelli) is continually pregnant: he is a white-haired, bespectacled man of fierce standards who also runs an adult literacy class and whose prestige in the community equals and exceeds that of the priest. Cesare is played by Tommaso Ragno, looking in Hollywood terms like a cross between Christopher Plummer and Sam Elliott, with innumerable sons and daughters, of whom Dino (Patrick Gardner) is the sulky ne’er-do-well whose mediocrity and drinking pains him.

Leigh Whannell’s unfocused follow-up to The Invisible Man is a howling disappointment, misjudged and dull

Horror virtuoso Leigh Whannell, screenwriter of the original Saw and writer-director of The Invisible Man, gets into an awful mess with this fundamentally muddled and unsatisfying attempt at reviving the Wolf Man from Universal Studios’ monster stable as part of a possible integrated franchise series – the first since Benicio Del Toro found the cheek whiskers and lupine dodgy teeth sprouting at the first touch of moonlight back in 2010. There’s an excellent opening prologue sequence and a very smart final shot – but everything between is silly, misjudged and dull with dud storytelling, middling prosthetics and wide-eyed “I’m scared� reaction acting that will have you checking the time on your phone.

Christopher Abbott plays Blake, a failed writer and successful dad and househusband, living in New York with adorable daughter Ginger (Matilda Firth) and workaholic journalist-breadwinner Charlotte (Julia Garner). Blake is haunted by childhood memories of being brought up in remote Oregon by his angry and emotionally cold single father (Sam Jaeger). (The film sports half-heartedly with wolfmanness being a metaphor for toxic masculinity and abusive fatherhood.) A flashback reveals how the pair were hunting in the woods one day and menaced by a creature that Blake’s dad gruffly assures his son was a bear. When grownup Blake inherits his dad’s creepy old Andrew Wyeth farmstead, he suggests to Charlotte that they all go on a family trip out there together as a bonding experience. Hugely bad idea.

Noémie Merlant, Naomi Watts and Will Sharpe languish in a luxurious hotel in Audrey Diwan’s self-conscious remake of the classic French softcore drama

If anyone could have rebooted and revitalised the much-mocked 70s softcore-sexy franchise Emmanuelle, you would think it would be that formidably smart film-maker Audrey Diwan, winner of the Venice Golden Lion for her drama Happening. In the porn-chic era of 1974, Emmanuelle was an odyssey of saucy self-awakening which featured Sylvia Kristel seated on the iconic rattan chair, and was directed by Just Jaeckin, the man with the most outrageous name in adult entertainment. In theory, this meisterwerk is ripe for reinvention as a spectacle of unapologetic sensuality in our new world of the sex-positive and kitsch-positive.

But even with Noémie Merlant as her lead and no less a film-maker than Rebecca Zlotowski working with Diwan on the screenplay, this Emmanuelle 2.0 comes across as inert and self-conscious, confusing torpor with languor, and endowing the non-sex scenes and also the sex scenes with blankness rather than tension or anticipation or pleasure.

Combined star power only takes this overfamiliar caper so far, let down by an unfunny script and a lack of originality

The last time we saw Cameron Diaz on screen, it was way back in 2014. The star, who had been such a magnetic force in Being John Malkovich, My Best Friend’s Wedding and There’s Something About Mary, had checked out with a trio of pale production line films that represented what we’d grimly come to expect at that stage of her career. Diaz had once easily moved between dark and light as well as large and small, had smoothed out any of her more interesting edges to become one of the industry’s highest-paid yet most boringly unchallenged stars. That year saw her lost in the juvenile comedies The Other Woman and Sex Tape before being horrendously miscast in a dud remake of Annie and not long after, she chose to retire, perhaps feeling as glum over the quality of her films as those of us stuck watching them.

News of her re-emergence, after a decade of focusing on family and an organic wine brand, came at an opportune time, as the industry still struggles to find newer and younger yet equally luminous movie stars to take over from those that came before. Many from that era have found success on Netflix, from Adam Sandler and Jennifer Lopez to Jessica Alba, and so it seemed like the smoothest way for Diaz to re-engage with her fans, partnering with her Annie co-star Jamie Foxx for a broadly appealing action comedy. It’s an easy way back in, a low-effort comeback vehicle quite literally called Back in Action, but the film is only a half-victory at best. While it might prove that Diaz still possesses that same particular magic, it also shows that she should be far more discerning with how she chooses to share it.

Directed by legendary writer Brian Clemens this macabre vampire yarn is marked by the Edgar Allan Poe template but has a charm and humour all of its own

The sword fighting vampire genre never really took off, but it wasn’t for the want of trying by this very enjoyable Hammer horror from 1974, a macabre swashbuckler written and directed by British genre legend Brian Clemens; his sole feature directing credit in fact. Clemens was a prolific writer who did so much to get TV audiences addicted to The Avengers, The Persuaders and The Professionals and it surely must have occurred to him that this trio of vampire-hunting leads could well have been spun off into a recurring TV series, perhaps under the aegis of Lew Grade.

German star and international co-production veteran Horst Janson plays Captain Kronos (dubbed by British actor Julian Holloway), a blond ex-army officer in a hilarious panto military outfit, roaming what appears to be a nameless Ruritanian-Transylvanian central European landscape (with a dash of Puritan England); he is dedicated to hunting vampires with his friend, the poignantly hunchbacked Professor Grost, played by John Cater. Kronos rescues a sultry young woman from the stocks, to which she had been sentenced for “dancing on the Sabbath�; this is Carla, played by horror icon Caroline Munro, and they fall in love.

Contenders for prestigious Golden and Silver Bear unveiled with 75th edition of festival due to open on 13 February

Richard Linklater’s long-awaited Broadway biopic Blue Moon starring Ethan Hawke and Margaret Qualley, a Mexican love story with Jessica Chastain as a socialite who falls for a émigré ballet dancer, and a British family drama set in Spain featuring Emma Mackey and Fiona Shaw will premiere in competition at next month’s Berlin film festival.

The 75th edition of the Berlinale, Europe’s first major cinema showcase of the year, will open on 13 February with the world premiere of The Light by Tom Tykwer (Run Lola Run) about the intertwined fates of a Syrian refugee and a middle-class German family.

Two leading contenders for Oscars this year have revealed use of artificial intelligence in the editing suite – will it affect their chances?

The use of artificial intelligence could become a ferocious battleground during movie awards season, as at least two major contenders were revealed to have used voice-cloning to enhance actors’ performances.

In an interview with moving-image tech publication Red Shark News, The Brutalist editor Dávid Jancsó said that, in an effort to create Hungarian dialogue so perfect “that not even locals will spot any difference�, Jancsó fed lead actors Adrien Brody and Felicity Jones’s voices into AI software, as well as his own.

The ongoing devastation has impacted this year’s awards season, raising questions over the Oscars and Grammys

The California wildfires have to date killed at least 25 people, destroyed or damaged more than 12,000 structures and put about 300,000 people on evacuation orders. It has also had a major impact on business, most notably that of Hollywood.

Rumours have circulated online that the Oscars, set to take place on 2 March, could be postponed, but the Hollywood Reporter called these “baseless� with no changes to the date planned. “We will get through this together and bring a sense of healing to our global film community,� organisers said.

Adam McKay says the Jennifer Lawrence and Leonardo DiCaprio-starring satire resonates with a widespread feeling of being deceived by government and media

Adam McKay, writer-director of climate-crisis satire Don’t Look Up, says that the film’s popularity with viewers shows the popular will to tackle climate change, despite the critical brickbats the film attracted and political inertia around the issue.

McKay was speaking to the NME during the wildfire emergency that is currently affecting Los Angeles, which has included many high-profile victims from the Hollywood community. Saying that while Netflix, the film’s distributors, would not release definitive audience figures, he estimated that “somewhere between 400 million and half a billion� people saw it, and that “viewers all really connected with the idea of being gaslit�.

The great American film-maker died this week, leaving behind a body of work unmatched in its seductive strangeness and transcendent mystery. We put it in order

It is one of life’s eternal mysteries that for the last two decades of his life, no one was willing to fund another feature by America’s greatest film-maker of the time. Almost as much of a mystery was his final completed feature: the evil twin of his previous film, Mulholland Drive. As Laura Dern’s hexed actor segues into the character she is playing, this digitally shot rampage down Hollywood’s boulevard of broken dreams dials up the narrative fragmentation of his late period. It runs the gamut from inspired camcorder surrealism to making-it-up-as-you-go-along incoherence (which is what it was: Lynch shot without a finished screenplay).

Micro-budget thriller put the brothers on the map, laying the groundwork for a career filled with similarly dark stories of crimes gone wrong

The loathsome proprietor of a Texas bar slumps in his office chair after hours, seemingly dead from a gunshot wound to the chest. Another man tries to clean up the mess in an effort to cover up a crime that he mistakenly assumes someone close to him has committed. Only the blood isn’t wiped away so easily: it seeps into the hardwood. It streams from the victim’s nose and drips from his forefinger. An old shirt used an improvised mop soaks in much of a puddle, but leaves drippings like house paint on the way to the bathroom sink. Morally speaking, the whole ordeal represents a stain on the man’s conscience. But don’t overlook the plain fact that crime is a messy hassle.

That’s the defining sequence in Joel and Ethan Coen’s brilliant first feature, Blood Simple, and it may be the defining sequence of a career filled with amateurs who commit crimes of passion or conceive harebrained plots, but wildly underestimate how hard it is. Again and again in Coen brothers crime thrillers, we learn that human beings don’t die so easily and that impulsive acts of violence or ill-considered schemes lead to tragicomic ends. Think of the car salesman who has his own wife kidnapped in Fargo, the vain personal trainers who try to sell secrets to the Russians in Burn After Reading, or the welder who tries to slip away with drug money in No Country for Old Men. They either overestimate their resourcefulness or underestimate the potential variables. Whatever the case, they pay for their hubris.

Before the Academy Award nominations are announced on Sunday, Observer critics name their standout movies, performances, directors and more

Nickel Boys

All We Imagine As Light

Anora

Conclave

Nosferatu

RaMell Ross – Nickel Boys

Payal Kapadia – All We Imagine As Light

Sean Baker – Anora

Edward Berger – Conclave

Coralie Fargeat – The Substance

To mark his birthday this week, we celebrate his versatility from bumbling Mr Bean to his punctilious headteacher in The Secret Policeman’s Ball

Atkinson is the bumbling Father Gerald, who praises “the Holy Goat�, invites the happy couple to be “Johned in matrimony� and asks the groom to take his bride to be his “awful wedded wife�. Cutaways to the congregation’s reactions – Hugh Grant snickering, Simon Callow stifling a guffaw – do little to convince us that Richard Curtis’s script is top-tier stuff. At least Atkinson brings some typically subtle modulations, such as the vicar’s premature flickers of smugness when he wrongly believes his worst malapropisms to be behind him.

As Oscar voting kicks off and other bodies continue to reward a similar rotation of actors, there are others who deserve inclusion

Demi Moore might get nominated for her first Oscar, four decades into her career, for a gonzo 140-minute body-horror satire that features literally gallons of fake blood. Even if she doesn’t make it to Oscar’s final five, the fact that The Substance has become a major awards player comes as a delightful surprise.

That is to say, awards season isn’t always a stultifying march through predictable traditionalism. But it’s also difficult to avoid the routines that set in once it becomes clear that, say, Kieran Culkin is going to win best supporting actor for A Real Pain. And look, he deserves it. (Well, apart from the question of whether the just-barely-second lead in what often plays like a two-hander is really a “supporting� role.) But surely he didn’t give the only worthwhile performance in his category for the entirety of 2024?

New films from Paul Thomas Anderson and Kelly Reichardt with stars including George Clooney, Michaela Coel and Cate Blanchett will premiere this year

Jim Jarmusch prefers to work at an unhurried pace, but perhaps it’s no coincidence that his longest inter-picture hiatus has followed the most tepidly reviewed release of his career. Soon, it will have been six years since his low-key zombie comedy The Dead Don’t Die was met with a resounding shrug at Cannes, and it would seem that the coolest cucumber in American independent cinema will respond by paring down to basics. No more fun and games with genre, just a “very subtle�, “very quiet�, “funny�, and “sad� family affair gathering Cate Blanchett, Charlotte Rampling, Adam Driver, Tom Waits and a pink-haired Vicky Krieps around the dinner table. But if it’s going to be anything like his last film dealing with parents and children – the hangdog, allegorical Broken Flowers – then we can still expect the rhyming repetitions, eclectic grab bag of allusions, and other eccentricities typical of the Jarmuschian style. Marrying open-heart emotionality with his wry brand of well-read erudition, he’s putting the “home� in “homage�. Charles Bramesco

From the mullets in Love Lies Bleeding and the bonkers body horror of The Substance to the tender humanism of Crossing, there was something for all tastes in 2024. Our readers share their highlights

Dune II is an amazing cinematic experience that built on the success of the first film and was rewarded accordingly at the box office. The only time, other than Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings trilogy, when a director has matched the look and feel of a novel and brought a living and breathing world to the screen exactly as I had imagined it. Bring on part three!
James Mustoe, 40, Cornwall

Her film breakthrough in 1960’s The Entertainer was a harbinger of the calmness and strength she brought as a distinguished character actor – and as her lovable self in Nothing Like a Dame

• Joan Plowright dies aged 95
• Michael Billington: Plowright was a dynamic force
• Joan Plowright: a life in pictures

One of Joan Plowright’s greatest screen performances came towards the very end of her career: a gloriously subtle, lovable appearance on Roger Michell’s documentary Nothing Likea Dame from 2018, with four great dames of the British acting profession – Plowright, Eileen Atkins, Judi Dench and Maggie Smith – assembling like Marvel superheroes at the country home that Plowright shared with her late husband Laurence Olivier to drink tea and swap uproarious anecdotes and sharp observations about the acting profession and the sexism they and their younger colleagues continue to face.

The then 89-year-old Plowright, despite her failing health and eyesight, exchanges affectionate badinage with the others: “My agent in America said to me, when he knew I couldn’t do very much because of the eyesight going: ‘Well, if you do want to come over again, we’ll look around for a nice little cameo that Judi Dench hasn’t got her paws on.’� (Dench replies tartly: “How rude!�)

The president-elect’s latest trio of mischievous appointments show his genius for trolling the celebrity-woke community

Donald Trump has permitted himself the delicious pleasure of trolling Hollywood’s celebrity-woke community who once dreamed of preventing his second term with their collective prestige. He has found a new wellspring of liberal tears in which to bathe. But whatever our feelings about his proposed “Hollywood ambassadors�, Mel Gibson, Jon Voight and Sylvester Stallone – ambassadors to Hollywood from Maga? to Maga from Hollywood? – it’s possible to wonder if the ambassadors themselves have a right to be a bit miffed.

Hollywood ambassador? Gibson has directed a number of feature films, (Stallone and Voight also have directing credits); these are vast organisational challenges, requiring energy, vision, skill and political finesse. And that zero-experience lunkhead Pete Hegseth gets to be defence secretary? Despite only knowing how to do sycophantic interviews with the once-and-future C-in-C on Fox News? What an insult to Gibson, Voight and Stallone who surely deserve cabinet posts. Arnold Schwarzenegger is perhaps constitutionally out of the running to be a Hollywood ambassador despite his own political experience, maybe because of his Austrian birth or his bold questioning of rightwing views.

From disturbing debut Eraserhead to his masterpiece Mulholland Drive, Lynch’s dark tales combined radical experiment with everyday Americana

• David Lynch, Twin Peaks and Mulholland Drive director, dies aged 78
• Cigarettes were David Lynch’s magic wand – and his undoing

No director ever interpreted the American Dream with more artless innocence than David Lynch. It could be the title of any of his films. Lynch saw that if the US dreamed of safety and prosperity and the suburban drive and the picket fence, it also dreamed of the opposite: of escape, danger, adventure, sex and death. And the two collided and opened up chasms and sinkholes in the lost highway to happiness.

Lynch was a film-maker who found portals to alternative existences and truffled in them like they were erogenous zones, moist orifices of existential possibility. He was the great American surrealist, but his vision was so distinctive that he became something other than that: a great fabulist, a great anti-narrative dissenter, his storylines splitting and swirling in non sequiturs and Escher loops. Lynch was unique, in that he took a tradition of experimentalism in movies such as Maya Deren and Alexander Hammid’s Meshes of the Afternoon and brought it into the commercial mainstream, mixing it with pulp noir, soap opera, camp comedy, erotic thriller and supernatural horror.

The wonderfully watchable pope-voting movie has 12 righteous nominations – but films about defiant outsiders have clearly captured voters’ imaginations
• Read the full list of nominations
• Conclave blessed while Kidman shut out

These Bafta nominations have given us the traditional buffet of snubs for industry observers to frown at. Nothing at all for Luca Guadagnino’s tremendous drama Queer – its exuberant leading turn from Daniel Craig passed over. Nothing for the very moving Irish film Small Things Like These and so no Bafta nod for Cillian Murphy’s outstanding (arguably career-best) performance there. The appetite for Yorgos Lanthimos films starring Emma Stone seems to be maxed out. Nothing for their film Kinds of Kindness.

But one much-feared possible exclusion thankfully did not materialise: Marianne Jean-Baptiste has a best actress nomination for her superb performance in Mike Leigh’s blistering study of depression, Hard Truths, though no director nomination for Leigh himself.

Child actors Caitlin Hale and Angelo Massagli met on the set of the 2003 film, fell in love and have now become husband and wife. This year only goes downhill from here

The world is a dark and dismal place at the moment. Every day we’re greeted by fresh horrors from every quarter. Political cravenness. Environmental collapse. Sign after sign that we as a species have permanently blown the only chance we were ever given, and now we’re on a downward spiral to the end. Never before have we so needed something – anything – to lift our spirits and remind us that, despite it all, there might still be some good in the world.

So thank God for the two kids from School of Rock who just got married.

Despite bold scenes for mainstream American cinema, the sexy dom/sub age-gap film can’t quite figure out what it’s saying about desire

Arguably the most transgressive scene in Babygirl, A24’s erotic drama from the Dutch writer and director Halina Reijn that has Nicole Kidman on the awards circuit, is the first one. The film opens with an orgasm – for both Romy Mathis (Kidman) and her husband, Jacob (Antonio Banderas), together, in the marital bed. But as Jacob slumbers in post-coital bliss, Romy scampers down the hall – the shot of Kidman’s bare, apple-cheeked behind recalls her first scene in Stanley Kubrick’s 1999 film Eyes Wide Shut, one of several erotic 90s touchstones Reijn seeks to invoke and invert through the female gaze. In another room, we witness a private ritual. Her hands desperately flutter across a laptop keyboard; she prostrates herself on the ground, and makes herself come – for real this time – to porn.

It’s a bold opening salvo for a film, a statement of sorts: this film, arriving amid Hollywood’s long slide toward sexlessness, is not about sex so much as female desire. In less than two minutes, we glimpse a tangle of lust, shame, inner chaos, deception, actualization – what Romy sounds like when she’s faking it and when she’s not. For her, as for many women, desire is a maze, bent by societal pressures and warped by internalized incuriosity, non-linear, combustible and not fully comprehensible.

Brady Corbet’s meaty drama looks likely to become this year’s Oppenheimer but the acting categories were full of the unexpected

• Full list of Golden Globes 2025 winners

In the end, these Globes surprised us, uncontroversially rewarding obvious quality in some categories but passing over other huge achievements like Payal Kapadia’s All We Imagine As Light or Timothée Chalamet’s performance as Bob Dylan. (And entirely ignoring RaMell Ross’s masterly Nickel Boys still hurts.)

The megamusical Wicked, which had been winning hearts and minds and various levels of grudging and ungrudging acceptance (including from your correspondent) did not walk off with the award for best musical or comedy as we all expected, instead sent away with the Globe for “cinematic achievement�, the rather strange award instituted to acknowledge box office whoppers (including those in the now dowdy superhero genre) which otherwise get critical noses turned up at them, and for which the box office numbers themselves are surely the only meaningful arbiter.

It wouldn’t be a press tour without the Gladiator II director saying something contentious, and now he’s managed to upset big cheeses on the Mediterranean island

For a while, it looked as if Ridley Scott was going to get through the Gladiator II press cycle without saying anything remotely contentious. That was a worry since, as we know, saying contentious things is the entire point of a Ridley Scott press cycle. The gold standard, of course, was Napoleon; a film about a historical French figure that he promoted by slagging off French people (they “don’t even like themselves�) and historians (“Excuse me, mate, were you there? No? Well, shut the fuck up then�). However, the most he managed for Gladiator II was a half-hearted potshot at Russell Crowe’s “bitching�. Slim pickings indeed.

But now that awards season is cranking up again, Scott gets a second bite at the cherry. And so last month, during a discussion with Christopher Nolan, he decided to throw Malta into a minor political crisis. The country’s film commissioner Johann Grech shared a clip of the chat on social media, in which Scott made this tourist-friendly pronouncement: “Malta is a treasure trove of architecture. The architecture goes from medieval right through to Renaissance and when it’s good it’s spectacular.�

Women around me in the cinema groaned at what Amy Adams’ character had to put up with in the film – and it was nothing to do with dogs

Nightbitch is not the best film of the year. But if it becomes a cult classic, that will primarily be down to its perfect portrayal of one specific dynamic: weaponised incompetence.

In Marielle Heller’s adaptation of Rachel Yoder’s bestselling novel, Scoot McNairy embodies the “useless� husband, weaponising his incompetence to varying degrees of absurdity. Amy Adams plays the protagonist, “Mother�, who grows increasingly frustrated and angry at her husband’s idiocy, eventually transforming into a dog, complete with eight nipples.

Sebastian Stan gets a best actor nomination for playing younger Trump in The Apprentice and a there’s a musical about a gender-reassigned Mexican gangster. Trump won’t be happy

• Golden Globes 2025: Emilia Pérez scores 10 nominations as Kate Winslet, Selena Gomez and Sebastian Stan each take two

• Full list of 2025 nominations

The Golden Globes nomination list once again raises the curtain for awards season in this new, uncertain era for the movies: post-strike, post-pandemic, but very much pre-AI. Of course, the Globes cover TV as well, and may well in years to come find themselves in a new era of relevance as so many, rightly or wrongly, claim the distinction between the two is blurring. It is certainly supposed to be a new era of respectability for the Globes, which (it hopes) has put to bed accusations of non-diversity and kickbacks. It’s hoping also that this year’s presenter Nikki Glaser will do better than last year’s icily received turn from Jo Koy.

It’s a great Globes list for streamer Netflix, hip distributor A24 and indeed the Cannes film festival, whose films are well represented. But awards lists will always annoy someone and this year that someone is going to be President-elect Trump, who will no doubt be infuriated at the best actor (drama) nomination for Sebastian Stan, who plays young Trump in the early-years biopic The Apprentice. Trump hates it, although I thought the movie went pretty easy on him. Jeremy Strong picks up a best supporting actor nomination for playing Trump’s toxic mentor Roy Cohn.

Despite Minnelli’s memoir not being finished and a queue of ‘Academy award, Emmy, Tony and Grammy winners excited to talk’, the star of the upcoming biopic is already obvious

As the repeatedly stalled Madonna biopic has shown, it’s difficult to make a film about a real-life icon, especially when the icon in question has a say in who will play them. And so it might prove to be with Liza Minnelli. Earlier this year, Minnelli announced that she is writing what is sure to be a blockbuster memoir. The book promises to pull no punches which – when you factor in her parents, her addiction issues and her complicated love life – is a hell of a lot of punches not to pull.

The book isn’t due to come out until 2026. Despite this, the television rights have already been optioned and, even though it’s so far in the distance, Minnelli has already got several ideas about casting. In an email to People magazine, she wrote: “First, we need a great script and an actress who loves to move,� adding, “Honey, first, I’m a dancer … like the great line in Chorus Line: God, I’m a dancer … a dancer dances … even with replaced hips and scoliosis!�

As BBFC’s Wicked warning leaves usual suspects green with anger, is a polite notice on a website really worth frothing about?

Wicked has faced more than its fair share of controversies since it was first announced; from the uproar over recasting the play’s leads, to fan-made posters going viral for the wrong reasons, to the debate over people singing along to it in cinemas and ruining it for everyone.

As such, Wicked does not wish to cause any more upset, which is why it has gone out of its way to cut any new controversy off at the pass. Exhibit A: the BBFC has slapped a warning on the film, alerting viewers that it features scenes of discrimination against those with green skin.

Brooke Shields, sexualised child star at just 11, is no stranger to tabloid controversy. Now 59, perhaps now she can tell us how she ended up so… normal?

Brooke Shields was at a party, drifting off. The host, a small man with bare feet, was giving her a tour of his wine cellar and she was losing interest, if she’s being honest – which she is now as a matter of principle, after a lifetime of smiling politely and pretending everything’s fine. Her mind was wandering. They say wine gets better with age, she was thinking, “but isn’t there a moment when it turns to jam? And I said to him, ‘I’m 58 and I’m wondering if…’ I didn’t even get the rest of the sentence out before he said, ‘Oh, I wish you hadn’t told me that.’�

That’s curious, she replied. “I asked him, ‘Did my age make him older?’ I was interested in the psychology of it, that kneejerk reaction.� It was partly, she thinks, her fame – people imprint on a child star, and when they grow up they take it personally. “It felt so indicative of what we do to women, too. And we do the same thing to ourselves – we get caught up, chasing something that’s gone.� It wasn’t the first time somebody had taken offence at the fact she was no longer 15 and she knew it would not be the last, but it was this conversation that inspired her new book about fame, women and the complexity of ageing. She’s called it, Brooke Shields Is Not Allowed To Get Old.

The actor and musician answers your questions on his time as a roadie, being intimidated by rich people and falling off a horse for Steven Seagal

Is your music less important, more important, or about as important as your film work? BenderRodriguez
Here’s the thing: I grew up in music. I saw the Beatles when I was eight. By the time I was nine, I had a band. Started with a little cheap guitar and then got a drum kit, which my father hated. I was playing pretty big concerts by the time I was 16 and then went on tour. I became a roadie from 18 to about 22. I went to LA to play music, accidentally got into acting. I’m still not sure how it happened. I always say that my success as an actor was out of ignorance, because I didn’t know how to be anything other than natural, and I think they liked that.

I loved both of them. It’s all one vision, all out of the same brain. I couldn’t choose one over the other. I’d like to do both, as long as they’ll let me.

Twenty-two years after The Pianist, the actor is again Oscar frontrunner for a post-Holocaust epic. He talks about renovating a castle, unfulfilled yearnings and making his parents happy

Adrien Brody puts down his phone. “I’m heartbroken,� he says. The latest of many friends in Los Angeles has just lost their home to the city wildfires. The actor, 51, hasn’t had a place in LA for some years, he says. Still. “It’s horrible. Unfathomable.� The mood is sombre, but he is also at work. He sits in the corner of a London hotel room, legs crossed in a chic black coat. A publicist hovers in the en-suite bathroom.

Brody is here to spread word about The Brutalist, the epic drama in which his star performance is likely to secure the best actor Oscar. It would be his second. He remains the youngest man to ever win the prize, having done so in 2003 for Roman Polanski’s The Pianist. An awards campaign is now under way, a process not much less fraught than a run for political office.

The revered cinematographer was making an apocalyptic musical with Tilda Swinton deep in a salt mine when he realised he had to flee. Can he now save his son?

It was March 2022 and Joshua Oppenheimer was waiting at Copenhagen airport for the young man who would be staying with him for a few weeks. Oppenheimer, who directed two devastating Oscar-nominated documentaries about the 1965 Indonesian genocide, The Act of Killing and The Look of Silence, had been working closely with Russian cinematographer Mikhail Krichman. He was now preparing to make The End, an audacious musical about the last family on earth hiding in their bunker following a climate-related apocalypse in which they were complicit. And Mikhail’s 22-year-old son, Vlad, was travelling to Copenhagen to participate in a workshop addressing the challenges implicit in The End, which was to be shot partly in German and Italian salt mines.

Oppenheimer had never met Vlad before, though he knew of his joie de vivre and infectious good humour. But the young man who emerged at arrivals that day, having stepped off a flight from Moscow, cut a very different figure. “He looked terrible,� the director recalls. “He was pale. He was stuttering. He was traumatised. It was frankly heartbreaking. I asked him, ‘What’s the matter?’ He said, ‘I can’t go back.’�

The actor soared to fame in the 90s and 00s in Kill Bill, Charlie’s Angels and Ally McBeal – navigating a notorious time for women on set. Now, she returns to Hollywood in Steven Soderbergh’s Presence – and says she’s still not afraid of standing up for herself

Boredom is not a feeling with which Lucy Liu is familiar. “Sometimes I wouldn’t mind it,� she says with a smile. “But it feels nonstop. I never get bored because I don’t have time.� If there wasn’t so much to do, she says: “I’m sure I could learn a language, you know, learn how to ride a unicycle. I mean, come on, the list is endless. So it never feels, like ‘What’s left?’ It’s ‘Where do we start?’� Liu is not someone who likes to look backwards. “I think my best work is ahead of me,� says the actor who has done blockbusters (2000’s Charlie’s Angels and its sequel), two Quentin Tarantino movies (Kill Bill Vols 1 & 2), performed on Broadway, shared top billing on a hit TV show (Sherlock Holmes update Elementary, playing a female Watson), all after receiving her big break on another, era-defining series (Ally McBeal).

Liu’s latest film is Presence, one of Steven Soderbergh’s more experimental works. Although nominally a horror, it’s weirder than that, being shot from the perspective of a ghost who watches a new family move into a house. “He’s truly an artist, because he’s willing to experiment and not really afraid to fail,� says Liu of the director. She has been a fan of Soderbergh’s since his 1989 breakthrough Sex, Lies, and Videotape. “I feel like it [Presence] is coming from a very clear place of curiosity, which I enjoy, because that is artistic freedom, isn’t it? You’re not doing it for ‘the Man’. It’s something you are curious about so then you just try it. It’s almost childlike.� The film has little dialogue, and little backstory. Liu’s character is the mother of two teenagers, and there is clearly tension within the family, not least because she seems to favour her son over her daughter. Sometimes there are scenes, in the ghost’s watchful presence, where nothing appears to happen, which feels a little destabilising to a modern audience used to fast cuts and spoon-fed exposition. “We’re so used to being told what to look at, what to do or feel,� says Liu.

The US novelist and co-writer of The Wire on why his new book isn’t about cops and robbers, his 80s drug addiction and the authors who have inspired him

Richard Price, 75, is a screenwriter and author whose books include the 600-page drug-war epic Clockers (1992), which was filmed by Spike Lee and inspired the HBO crime drama The Wire, co-written by Price. Michael Chabon has called him “one of the best writers of dialogue in the history of American literature�. Born and raised in the Bronx, he lives in Harlem – the setting for his new novel, Lazarus Man, in which four strangers cross paths amid the collapse of a tenement block.

The book’s acknowledgments mention its “incredibly long gestation�...
I signed the contract to write this 17 years ago; if it was a baby, it’d now be applying to college. I’d just written Lush Life, a sort of panorama of the Lower East Side of Manhattan, and I wanted to try to do the same for Harlem, but I’d only just moved there. New York City is 1,000 cities – move five blocks, you’re in a different one – so I had to live there a while to pick up the nuance. Plus, I was in a new relationship and it took about two years to calm down: it’s not just get up, write, sleep, get up, write, sleep, you know. And I needed dough – you can’t live on royalties from a novel – so I was doing TV serials. Also, honestly, I was intimidated: I’m a white writer in a time where people are very sensitive to who gets to write the stories of who. When I wrote Clockers, there wasn’t that policing of language; the whole world became hyperconscious, probably in a good way.

The writer-director of A Real Pain and co-stars Kieran Culkin, Jennifer Grey and Will Sharpe talk about being overcome by generational trauma while making Oscar season’s funniest film

Jesse Eisenberg and Kieran Culkin are in complete agreement. People being more open about everyday anguish is a good thing. Absolutely. One hundred per cent.

Not them, though. They will continue to button up. “I know my pain is unexceptional,� says Eisenberg, words clattering out of him like a runaway train, “so I don’t feel the need to burden everybody with it. I have OCD and general anxiety disorder and bad things happen to me, but I’ll never talk about them because I don’t want that kind of attention.�

James Mangold’s handsome portrait of the enigmatic singer’s stratospheric early career boasts a barnstorming lead performance yet often slips into heavy-handedness

It’s a remarkable performance. Star of the moment Timothée Chalamet inhabits the loose-limbed, live-wire physicality of the young Bob Dylan and makes an impressively good fist of capturing the frayed hessian of his distinctive voice. Acoustic guitars are plucked and harmonicas honked with the effortless fluency of someone who learned to play almost before they could walk. Chalamet’s Dylan sucks so fervently on his cigarettes it’s as though he’s breathing in the genius of the musical heroes who came before him. But while he radiates insouciant charisma and channels the once-in-a-lifetime talent, he reveals next to nothing about Dylan as a person. This is not necessarily a failure in Chalamet’s acting. It’s a deliberate choice – the film is called A Complete Unknown, after all, and it’s a manifesto as much as a title. But it does mean that this is more a movie about Dylan the phenomenon than Dylan the man; a picture that peers at the folk legend through the distorting lens of fame and fan worship.

As such, there’s a curious kinship between this handsome if formulaic period piece by music movie veteran James Mangold (he also directed the Johnny Cash portrait Walk the Line) and Michael Gracey’s recent Robbie Williams-as-monkey biopic, Better Man. Gracey’s film and A Complete Unknown both explore the impact of sudden and stratospheric celebrity on very young artists. Like Williams, Dylan is shown as a fully formed talent but a half-grown man. But while Williams mainlines fame like a drug and then bares his damaged soul to all, Dylan builds barricades against the encroaching tide of celebrity and protects himself with layers of assumed identities – an idea previously explored by Todd Haynes’s formally daring but frequently infuriating 2007 Dylan film I’m Not There. The sunglasses, the Triumph motorbike, the studied disinterest, the sneer – it’s all, A Complete Unknown suggests, part of the wall that Dylan constructs to protect the vulnerable part of himself, if indeed it exists.

Hallucinatory hippo drama Pepe, now on Mubi, joins the rabbits of Watership Down, a tragic donkey and elusive snow leopards in a classy menagerie

If you liked Moo Deng, Thailand’s baby pygmy hippo who went viral last year, there’s still no guarantee that you’ll like Pepe – but how much hippopotamus-oriented media does one typically get in a year? A deeply strange, dreamy voyage into the consciousness of an adult hippo held captive in Pablo Escobar’s infamous private menagerie in Colombia, this fragmented fable from Dominican director Nelson Carlos De Los Santos Arias won the Silver Bear for best director at Berlin last year is now streaming exclusively on Mubi. Though it might give the eponymous beast a philosophical, impressively multilingual narrative voice, this isn’t a cuddly, anthropomorphised creature feature: the handsome pachyderm begins and ends the film an elusive mystery.

Pepe is an eccentric addition to a niche subgenre: grownup films centred on animals rather than humans. Outside nature documentaries, animal protagonists tend to be the preserve of animation and children’s fantasies: see the recently Golden Globe-honoured animal-apocalypse adventure Flow, hitting UK cinemas in March, while almost everyone has some Disney cartoon critter or other that caught their young imagination, be it Dumbo or The Lion King or the intrepid rodents of The Rescuers. (Or even the confusingly humanoid woodland creatures of Disney’s Robin Hood.) Somehow, adults are supposed to grow out of identifying with animals, and yet Pepe channels a more visceral form of that empathy.

The multiverse has made room for a lot of unlikely reinventions, but murmurs that the late actor’s iconic character may be reworked with a new star could prove controversial

Marvel’s multiverse has become a narrative Swiss army knife capable of slicing through the thorniest of creative dilemmas and papering over the widest of cracks. That said, few dilemmas are as sensitive as how to move forward with a superhero as iconic as Black Panther. Chadwick Boseman’s portrayal of T’Challa wasn’t just a performance – it was a cultural touchstone, woven so tightly into the fabric of modern blockbuster cinema that imagining anyone else in the role feels like attempting to rewrite history. Four years after Boseman’s untimely death from colon cancer, Marvel faces the delicate task of continuing a legacy that seems impossible to replicate.

If rumblings out of Hollywood this week have foundation, however, the studio is beginning to countenance just that, a new T’Challa from an alternate reality who presumably finds his way into the mainstream Marvel universe via one of the umpteen ways we’ve seen superheroes such as Doctor Strange, various Spider-Men and Scarlet Witch crossing the boundaries between one reality and another. Jeff Sneider of the InSneider newsletter reports that the studio is finally “firmly open� to bringing back the king of Wakanda, despite previous attempts to recast the role having getting rebuffed by actors who didn’t want to jeopardise their careers by “stepping into Boseman’s gigantic shoes�.

This might come as something of a surprise to Letitia Wright (T’Challa’s sister Shuri), who took up the mantle of the royal Avenger in the reasonably well-received 2022 sequel Black Panther: Wakanda Forever – though of course, she was not playing T’Challa himself. Wright has previously hinted a third film is in the works, though Marvel has not yet announced it is entering production. “We need a little bit of a break, we need to regroup and [director] Ryan [Coogler] needs to get back into the lab,� she told Variety in January 2023. “So it’s going to take a little while, but we’re really excited for you guys to see that.�

From his killer two-note Jaws riff to the sheer uplift of Star Wars, Williams captures a movie’s essence with tunes that stick. Now the Hollywood great is celebrated in a Disney+ documentary

Some years ago I interviewed the British director Edgar Wright about his favourite soundtrack albums. I mentioned that, in the age before videos, I had owned and learned by heart the spoken-word-and-song soundtrack for the Magic Roundabout feature film Dougal and the Blue Cat. Wright reminded me that, in the 80s, there had been a tie-in Storybook album for Steven Spielberg’s ET: The Extra-Terrestrial, with Michael Jackson narrating the film and breaking down in tears when ET appears to die. The record also included John Williams’s score, which, as Wright noted, “told the story better than any narrator ever could�.

Now streaming on Disney+ is a new documentary, Music By John Williams, in which the French-American film-maker Laurent Bouzereau (creator of umpteen behind-the-scenes movie docs) interviews the American composer, who has defined the face of modern orchestral movie music. Williams’s recollections, from his earliest days as a hard-practising pianist (he has a background in jazz) to his blockbuster collaborations with film-makers such as Spielberg and George Lucas, are as clear and concise as his earworm theme tunes for Superman (1978), Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981) and Star Wars (1977) – the last of which spawned a double-LP soundtrack that became the biggest selling symphonic album of all time.

Graphic novelists, cartoonists and animators use testimonies of migrants to depict tales of survival and escape across the world in show at Soas University of London

An award-winning graphic novelist who migrated to the UK from Tripoli, a Pulitzer prize finalist from the Philippines and a director who sought refuge in the UK from Iran are among the animators showcased in an exhibition at Soas University of London, which explores migration through animation and comics.

The Stories of Migration exhibition marks 12 years of PositiveNegatives, a non-profit organisation based at Soas that transforms academic research into visual stories. It is showing a series of videos that tell the stories of migrants from countries including Yemen, Iraq and the Philippines.

Garner and Christopher Abbott excel in an intriguing thriller that struggles to sustain its shock factor

The locals call it “hills fever�; the Indigenous community in the isolated Oregon mountain country where Blake (Christopher Abbott) grew up named it “face of the wolf�. The labels vary, but the rumour persists: an infectious disorder that transforms sufferers into unrecognisable monsters with slavering jaws, sprouting thickets of body hair and a taste for human flesh. With that in mind, you may think that returning to the gloomy farmstead he fled as a teen might not be high on Blake’s to-do list. But city life is grinding him down, and he decides that a visit to the country might just shore up his crumbling marriage to Charlotte (Julia Garner) and make some treasured memories with his daughter Ginger (Matilda Firth).

It’s a promising package. Director Leigh Whannell (The Invisible Man) takes genre schlock reassuringly seriously; Abbott and Garner are consistently excellent; the central idea, of the threat that lurks at the heart of the family, is intriguing. But the film soon runs out of bite, with a plot that repeatedly chews over the same thumps, bumps and rattled doors, and the same shadowy menace in underlit basements.

In UK and Irish cinemas