How do you follow up an Oscar winner like Parasite? If you’re the South Korean auteur, you make a sci-fi satire where Robert Pattinson dies over and over again. The director discusses the inspirational Loach and Mike Leigh and why it’s hard being a ‘middle-aged film-maker’

We are in the run-up to the release of Bong Joon Ho’s latest, Mickey 17, and Warner Bros has got the Oscar-winning Korean director stashed away in what appears to be some kind of basement storage room, with grey-painted brickwork and exposed wiring. In fact, this room could pass for one of the “gritty and kind of nasty� cargo-container-packed cabins of his film’s spaceship setting.

Not that anyone is complaining. Bong, who speaks good English but prefers to conduct interviews via his longtime interpreter Sharon Choi, appears cheerful throughout our conversation, taking occasional sips from a takeaway coffee cup, while dressed in his usual arthouse auteur uniform of a slate-grey blazer over a black T-shirt. He is, for example, completely sanguine about the fact that this follow-up to 2019’s Parasite is only now reaching our screens, 12 months after its slated release date. Mickey 17 wasn’t the only production delayed by 2023’s Screen Actors Guild strikes, he points out, and besides: “My films are quite complicated in terms of distributing and marketing. It’s hard to pinpoint exactly how to package and when to release, because it’s a mix of so many different genres.�

Armitage was also responsible for the 1972 blaxploitation remake of Get Carter, made during his time working for Roger Corman

George Armitage, director of 90s indie hits Grosse Pointe Blank and Miami Blues, as well as Hit Man, the 70s blaxploitation remake of Get Carter, has died aged 82. Variety reported he died on 15 February in Playa del Rey in California.

Armitage started out in TV, working on the celebrated TV soap opera Peyton Place, then broke into features via Roger Corman’s micro-budget studio New World in the late 1960s. He subsequently specialised in crime films: Grosse Pointe Blank, which starred John Cusack and Minnie Driver, was his biggest commercial hit, and his final directorial credit was the Elmore Leonard adaptation The Big Bounce in 2004.

At a snowy Berlinale, against a backdrop of political divisions, this year’s standouts include Lucile Hadžihalilović’s The Ice Tower, Richard Linklater’s Broadway biopic of Lorenz Hart, and intensely sexual romance starring Jessica Chastain

Berlin can be a touch inhospitable in February; this year was no exception, with visitors to the film festival enduring heavy snow, treacherous pavements and a two-day, city-wide transport strike. But the Berlinale itself is contending with a frosty climate. Traditionally a hub for film-makers of forthright, oppositional persuasions, it must now attempt to flourish in the face of Europe’s swing to the right, with Germany’s elections imminent and the troubling rise of the extremist AfD party.

Every new festival head faces the challenge of reinventing the event they have inherited, and in the Berlinale’s 75th year, the bar was set especially high given the scrutiny the festival has received. Last year’s closing night brought controversy, with some German politicians taking exception to award acceptance speeches by the Palestinian and Israeli directors of the (now Oscar-nominated) protest documentary No Other Land, about Israel’s village demolitions on the West Bank. So new festival director, the American Tricia Tuttle – formerly head of the BFI London film festival – faces the challenge of giving the Berlinale a boost, while managing political expectations from different fronts.

Megafans fear tech company’s deal could mean an end to the films’ unique characteristics

The announcement that Amazon paid more than $1bn for creative control of the James Bond franchise has sent shock waves across the film world and fans fear it could mean the end of Bond as they know and love it.

David Lowbridge-Ellis, the founder of Licence to Queer, a community of queer Bond fans, expressed concerns that the move could mean an end to the unique characteristics that make Bond appeal to different audiences.

Beguiling French actor who appeared in films such as Belle de Jour and El Cid, but whose true love was the stage

Screen and stage were not equal suitors for the affections of the French actor Geneviève Page, who once described working in cinema as a case of coitus interruptus. “You start a scene, you rehearse it, you’re ready. Then they do the sound and lighting. There comes a moment when you’ve got to charge in. And then: ‘Cut!’ It annoyed me each time,� Page told France Culture in 2009. “Whereas when you arrive in your theatre dressing room in the evening, you know it’ll start soon and you’ll see it through right to the end.�

Page, who has died aged 97, built a heavyweight theatre portfolio over more than five decades; she played roles such as Hermione in Euripides’s Andromache, Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler and the Fassbinder heroine Petra von Kant. But her film career had a stuttering rhythm, with the French industry never truly finding a place for her. Her melodramatic ardour and throaty timbre were not a natural fit in demure starlet roles; with her long neck and upwardly canted nose, her beauty had a certain haughtiness.

Once a prestige genre with lavish spectacle and global stars, it’s since grown pretty dusty and drear. But Nolan’s Odyssey may yet revive its bronzed vigour

Back in the 1950s and 60s in the twilight of Hollywood’s golden era, the sword-and-sandals movie stood as tall as the Colossus of Rhodes. It was a time when burly men in togas and gleaming bronze breastplates fought existential battles with fate. When Ben-Hur had its chariot race, Spartacus roused cries of defiance and the odd moment of splendid anachronism, and Cleopatra had Elizabeth Taylor burning through costume changes like a pharaoh with an Amex card.

And then, it all collapsed. By the 1970s, audiences weren’t interested in ancient glories any more; they wanted Vietnam war movies, paranoid political thrillers and antiheroes who didn’t spend half their films glistening in olive oil. By the time Star Wars arrived in the late 70s and early 80s, the genre had been survived only through low-rent Italian productions, where togas were optional but bad dubbing was essential, and the occasional made-for-TV slog where the biggest battles were against budget constraints.

Emotions hide beneath the surface and horrors lurk behind unseen doors in Walter Salles’s Oscar-nominated tale of the Brazilian disappeared

The subtlety and dignity of Fernanda Torres’s Oscar-nominated performance in Walter Salles’s new film have been rightly praised. This is a kind of mother-courage true story: the case of Eunice Paiva, a Brazilian woman who had to keep her family together and shield her five children from despair when her activist husband Rubens was brutally “disappeared� in 1971 by the military dictatorship. They refused even to admit he had been arrested, or later officially admit his death, in a state-sanctioned act of cruelty which was only finally acknowledged in the mid-90s after decades of campaigning, when the government issued a formal death certificate.

I’m Still Here is a drama which intelligently seeks to intuit the courageously maintained calm that Eunice imposes on herself and the children when the thuggish secret police arrive. Torres is effectively the still centre of a heartfelt but also somehow numbed and sometimes even strangely placid story. The film shows Eunice’s instinctive sense that overt outrage would be interpreted as leftist defiance and guilt. But it also shows her in some sense going into denial, rejecting the horror which is too much to process – even more horrifying as she herself is briefly taken into custody along with one of her children and tortured. She appears to be wordlessly telling everyone: just stay level, try to fabricate some normality at home, and soon it will all be over, and Rubens will return.

Valuable documentary on the vigilant genius whose highly coloured 70s and 80s images revealed the white working class as never before

The beguiling work of English photographer Martin Parr is the subject of this brief, but thoroughly enjoyable study which sets out to introduce his extraordinary work, particularly the fierce brilliance of his colour images in the 70s and 80s celebrating the white working class on holiday.

Parr is an inspired combination of seaside-postcard artist Donald McGill and Alan Bennett, with a bit of American street photographer Vivian Maier, and a sliver of Diane Arbus, although the grotesques in which Arbus specialised are not what Parr has in mind. Everyone here is at pains to emphasise that Parr is never cruel or mocking, and, yes, it’s quite true. But as a real artist, Parr naturally has what Graham Greene called the splinter of ice in his heart. He knows what makes a brilliant image and the person involved is unlikely to find it flattering. (David Walliams is interviewed here, perhaps because of his TV comedy Little Britain, but Little Britain isn’t precisely the same thing either.)

Writer-director Osgood Perkins follows up horror hit Longlegs with a tiresome, juvenile adaptation of a Stephen King short story about an evil toy monkey

“Everybody dies and that’s fucked up� is the tagline and emo ethos of snarky Stephen King adaptation The Monkey, a film about the inescapable inevitability yet goofy silliness of death. The writer-director Osgood Perkins, who scored a hit with last year’s Longlegs, knows more about it than most. His father, the actor Anthony Perkins, died of Aids when Osgood was 18 and then his mother, the actor and model Berry Berenson, died in the September 11 attacks as a passenger on Flight 11. Perkins has found a way to work through something so unimaginably awful with a career as a horror film-maker, and his latest, focused on twins cursed by generational trauma is his most obviously personal film yet.

To his credit, Perkins has chosen not to wallow in the grim dirge associated with trauma and the horror genre. The original script for The Monkey had apparently delivered its central conceit – a toy monkey that brings death to those around it – with a straight face, something he found to be discordant, insisting a lighter, comedy-over-horror makeover. But the humour here is far too smug and nihilistic, similar to the grating can-you-believe-we’re-doing-this swagger of the Deadpool series, so happy with itself that it doesn’t really care if anyone else is smiling too. The film has a juvenile middle-finger-up attitude that confuses broad fuck-the-world misanthropy for actual edginess, annoying enough for a scene but close to insufferable for an entire movie. It’s also a tone that doesn’t really work for a King adaptation and when a flash of his earnestness does shine through, it’s uncomfortably out of place, providing more of a jolt than any of the ineffective death scenes which rely on brash and empty Looney Tunes violence. If the aim is numbing us to the shock of a violent death then perhaps the film succeeds but surely we shouldn’t be quite so bored by it too.

Goalkeeper Peter Schmeichel reflects on his Champions League triumph, on-pitch aggression, double-agent dad and son Kasper in a fan-friendly documentary

This is a pretty respectable entry in the current corporate-landfill era of sports documentaries. It’s the customary slavishly admiring portrait of its subject, the Danish goalkeeper who anchored Manchester United to a string of league titles and Denmark to the European Championships, but you are left with a sense that, somehow, Peter Schmeichel is a big enough character to justify it. Inevitably, the film also acts as yet another outpost of the “Football, bloody hell!� documentary industrial complex, with one more airing of the footage of United’s Champions League final triumph.

Admittedly, there’s now an extra dimension to Clive Tyldesley’s strangulated shrieks as United scored their winner: this was Schmeichel’s last game for the side, having unexpectedly announced his exit from the team earlier in the season. It’s a piquant moment when he raises the cup as his last act. And while he’s talked about it before, it’s still a little sad to hear him say: “Of course it was a massive mistake leaving Manchester United.� Schmeichel talks about how changing his mind might have been interpreted as a sign of weakness by manager Alex Ferguson, and perhaps he might be right, but you can feel the jolt when he shows up to play against United for Manchester City, and gets the cold shoulder from former compadre Gary Neville.

A mysterious mechanical object offers life-giving vitality – but with macabre consequences – in the Mexican maestro’s steampunkish body-horror comedy

Guillermo del Toro’s feature debut from 1992 is a work regarded by many as an early masterpiece, featuring the director’s key repertory players Federico Luppi and Ron Perlman. Yet for all its wit and strangeness, this film underscores my feeling I am not fully part of the Del Toro true believer fanbase. I find myself restive at the elaborate, intricate but sometimes slightly inert visual contrivances, though I have always enjoyed his films, perhaps especially his remake of Nightmare Alley.

Cronos is a macabre body-horror comedy, perhaps more intriguing than frightening, with a hint of steampunkiness; it looks almost like a feature-length pilot for some cult TV show that never got made. There is a faintly perfunctory prologue sequence about an “alchemist� in the 16th century who invented the Cronos, a device with the complex mechanism of a watch, but which has a kind of immortal insect-creature within it whose body evidently extrudes magical liquid that can be implanted into the body of the owner via tiny metal stingers which emerge from the Cronos’s sides.

Peter Weir’s 1975 parable of imperial anxiety and sexual hysteria, rereleased for its 50th anniversary, is a classic of Australian new wave cinema

• ‘Clambering about in Victorian boots was brutal’: how we made Picnic at Hanging Rock

Peter Weir’s eerie and lugubrious mystery chiller from 1975, adapted by screenwriter Cliff Green from the novel by Joan Lindsay, is now rereleased for its 50th anniversary. It’s a supernatural parable of imperial anxiety and sexual hysteria: the bizarre and unclassifiable story of three demure and porcelain-white schoolgirls and one teacher who on Valentine’s Day 1900 – with the 19th century over and the Victorian age less than a year to run – simply vanish in the burning sun while on a picnic excursion to the forbiddingly vast monolith Hanging Rock in southern Australia. No one here uses the Indigenous name Ngannelong and the only Indigenous character is a tracker.

They disappear while exploring its rugged forms and inlets, which weirdly resemble the faces of Easter Island statues. Like the Marabar Caves in Forster’s A Passage to India, Hanging Rock is the centre of some unknowable enigma, almost audibly humming or throbbing with insects, a phenomenon that resists being subdued by the outsider’s rational law.

This watchable but oblique drama owes a debt to Belgian director Chantal Akerman’s provocative monotony as it tracks its two young protagonists’ daily rituals

Chantal Akerman’s 1975 feature Jeanne Dielman, 23, Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles is the ultimate arthouse exercise in provocative monotony, and was anointed by the 2022 Sight and Sound critics’ poll as the best film of all time. Now it’s hard not to see its influence everywhere, especially in films with a distinctly feminist, queer or queer-adjacent vibe, such as this one from Austrian directors Milena Czernovsky and Lilith Kraxner. Although it doesn’t conclude with any extreme Akermanian violence, Bluish closely observes the rituals of daily life for its two twentysomething protagonists, favouring long takes and deep-breath editing rhythms to explore the quotidian.

Although we never learn the pronouns Errol (Leonie Bramberger) prefers, their name suggests a non-binary disposition and when it comes to romance they seem to mostly prefer other Afab (“assigned female at birth�) people, like a cute young thing seemingly met through a dating app.

Three school friends discover their adult selves in this fast and flashy adventure debut from director Li Yang

“When you grow up, your heart dies,� is a famous line of dialogue from The Breakfast Club. In this barmy coming-of-age sci-fi a trio of teenagers find out that adulthood really does suck after sneezing themselves 20 years into the future. The movie is a directed by young Chinese film-maker Li Yang on a maximalist scale; it’s noisy and flashy, like a John Hughes movie made for TikTok – every scene sped up or slowed down, stylised with a comic-book animation or pinging with gamer special effects.

The year is 1999 on a planet that looks a lot like Earth (although days are only 12 hours long, so time really does move fast). Three 18-year-old school friends acquire the power to travel forward 20 years in time after falling into a lake polluted by toxic chemicals. High-school heartthrob Chengyong (Yang Song) is appalled to discover as an adult he has become a nasty thug involved in an organ trafficking racket. Zha (Ruoyun Zhang) grows up to be an investigative journalist hopelessly and miserably in love with a colleague who’s so badass she puts on ear plugs to fight: “I hate the sound of men screaming.� Only overweight bullied Pao Pao (Chenhao Li) is pleased with the future. His 38-year-old self is gym-sculpted and living with the most popular girl from high school – which is not without complications.

Given a boost by Jordan Peele, this hyped ‘lost’ movie from Eugenio Mira about freaky goings-on at a hotel finally gets a proper release

This amusingly overwrought mystery-horror-thriller is both a new release and a reissue all at once. Originally made in 2004, and shown at a few genre-specific film festivals, it never secured distribution. Still, it found a way to get seen on alternative platforms like YouTube and homemade DVDs. Frustrated with the lack of appreciation for his work, director Eugenio Mira started sending copies of the film to directors he admired like Quentin Tarantino and Guillermo del Toro among others, exactly the right kind of guys who like to champion neglected cult classics. Meanwhile, lead actor Corey Feldman (once a child star in the likes of Stand By Me and The Goonies back in the 1980s) was conducting his own under-the-radar campaign on the film’s behalf. After it ended up getting shown via a scratchy master print at a screening hosted by director Jordan Peele (Get Out, Nope) and praised to the heavens, funds suddenly became available for a 4K restoration and a limited worldwide release. Now we can all see what the fuss is about.

Was it worth the wait? Yes and no. The Birthday takes its sweet time getting going as we meet Feldman’s nebbishy protagonist Norman Forrester in a hotel room, all gussied up in a prom-king tuxedo while he bickers with his bossy girlfriend Alison (Erica Prior). (The whole movie, by the way, takes place in this old-fashioned hotel, the action unfurling in real time, an adherence to Aristotelian notions of classical unity that used to be quite popular in indie and arthouse films but you don’t see so often any more). Nervous about meeting Alison’s posh family for the first time at a birthday party being held in the function room downstairs, pizza-parlour employee Norman must navigate between various awkward social interactions – not just with his partner’s family but at another do on another floor being thrown by a friend from high school (Dale Douma) attended by some beefy pharmaceutical bros. Meanwhile, there’s definitely something weird going on with the hotel employees with their deadpan expressions, toiling away in the background.

A single mother is terrorised by an evil entity sapping her lifeforce and threatening her child in this decent horror with a genre fan’s dream cast

This one starts very strong. Mindy Vogel (Krsy Fox), a single mother, is summoned to her basement by the ringing of a bell. A barely glimpsed monster with a lugubrious but threatening voice demands that she feed him. They engage in a dialogue from which we infer this is something of a long-term dynamic, with the grim beast nibbling from her arm on a regular basis. She tells him she’ll need to go to the hospital if this carries on much longer; the abusive relationship parallels are not accidental. This monster is dangerous, but he’s also a parasite, standing in contrast to the horror genre’s typical one-munch-and-you’re-done type beast.

Unfortunately, from this point on the drama sags. Fox’s performance is top-notch, but there are a number of plot points that don’t really stack up. That might not matter in a loopier story-world, but Little Bites is a horror movie where everything is fairly grounded, other than the actual creature. Chief among the dud notes is the unlikely idea that Child Protective Services would so aggressively hunt down a single mother on the flimsy grounds given here (seemingly amounting to the fact that Mindy’s child is staying with her grandmother).

Recordings of fighters’ wiretapped phone calls are juxtaposed with images of wartime destruction in Oksana Karpovych’s compelling war documentary

Vietnam saw the advent of the visible war, documented by TV cameras; but the Russia-Ukraine war perhaps represents the moment we also get a fully audible one. With two relatively affluent belligerents involved, mobile phone coverage is ubiquitous on both the civilian and soldier sides. Juxtaposing intercepted calls back home from frontline Russian troops with shots of the devastation they have wreaked in Ukraine, this film is a bleak and searing wiretap into Putin’s warping effect on his people and the psychology of power.

“A Russian is not a Russian if they don’t steal something,� jokes one woman when she hears her brave boy has looted some makeup for her. Set against the shots of ransacked living rooms, wrecked petrol stations and dimly lit bomb shelters, such casual banter hammers home a chilling normalisation of imperialism and aggression – which comes with varying justifications. There is the standard dehumanisation: that the “khokhols� (a derogatory Russian term for Ukrainians) deserve it. Many parrot Putin’s line that the special military operation is fighting fascists. Or, in some troops’ amazement at Ukrainian ice-cream and abundant livestock, we glimpse an economic envy that lets such lies slip down more easily.

There’s a lot to grab your attention here, but strong performances struggle to save Ariane Labed’s adaptation of Daisy Johnson’s novel Sisters

Award-winning French actor Ariane Labed directs her first feature film, a self-aware and self-conscious work she has adapted from the novel Sisters by Booker-shortlisted author Daisy Johnson. Johnson’s own debts to Shirley Jackson and Stephen King are acknowledged in the film with a quote from The Haunting of Hill House, “No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality�, and a visual quote from The Shining. It’s made in a style clearly influenced by the Greek new wave in which Labed made her name in films such as Attenberg and Alps.

There’s an awful lot to grab the attention here: a story of an intense sisterly bond in a private shared world, a lot of set-pieces, big performances, dysfunctional violence and a hallucination involving lemurs. And yet I felt it didn’t really come together; this is an international coproduction in which something is lost in translation. The action takes place in Oxford and Yorkshire in the book; in the film it apparently starts somewhere in the UK as there is a preponderance of English accents (certainly among the main characters) although one scene is evidently set in the National College of Art and Design in Dublin. Then the action moves to rural Ireland with Irish accents.

007 stars offer mixed reactions to deal with the British-American heirs to the film producer Albert ‘Cubby’ Broccoli

• Business live – latest updates

Amazon has paid more than $1bn for “creative control� of the James Bond franchise, the Guardian understands, in a deal that has met with a mixed response from stars of the films.

Amazon MGM Studios said on Thursday that it had struck a deal with Barbara Broccoli and Michael G Wilson, the British-American heirs to the film producer Albert “Cubby� Broccoli and longtime stewards of the Bond films.

Deal is struck with heirs to film producer Albert ‘Cubby’ Broccoli, long-serving stewards of franchise

James Bond has fallen into the hands of a billionaire’s business empire after Amazon revealed that it has acquired “creative control� of the spy franchise from the Broccoli dynasty.

Amazon MGM Studios said on Thursday it had struck a deal with Barbara Broccoli and Michael G Wilson, the British-American heirs to the film producer Albert “Cubby� Broccoli and longtime stewards of the Bond films.

‘I’ve got nothing to hide’ says Spacey, after the Australian actor said he is attempting to be more candid about his former co-star’s alleged behaviour

Kevin Spacey has responded to Guy Pearce’s allegation that the actor “targeted him� during the filming of LA Confidential, telling Pearce to “grow up� and “you are not a victim�.

On Monday, Pearce expanded further on his alleged experiences with Spacey, having previously called him “a handsy guy� in 2018. Spacey, who has been dogged by accusations of sexual misconduct, has conceded he made some “clumsy� approaches to men in the past, but never anything illegal.

The actor starred in the innuendo-laced comedy films as well as TV sitcoms including Porridge and The Likely Lads

Julian Holloway, who starred in eight Carry On films and was a regular in TV shows such as The Sweeney and Doctor Who, has died. He was 80.

In a statement to the Guardian, agents for the actor confirmed that Holloway died after a brief illness in a Bournemouth hospital on 16 February.

What to know about the actors nominated for the Academy Awards’ biggest acting prize, along with the Guardian’s reviews and interviews

• Full list of nominations
• Want more? Our guide to the best picture race

Ahead of the 2 March Oscars ceremony, the Guardian film looks at how the big contenders are shaping up in the race for glory. We sort through the nominees for the best actor Oscar, assessing each one’s chances and how you can watch or stream each film.

The revered but divisive American director, who died in 1984, would have turned 100 this week. We rate his greatest movies, from Straw Dogs to The Wild Bunch

After making his name as a director of westerns, Sam Peckinpah was given his first shot at making a major studio film – an epic about a tyrannical cavalry officer (Charlton Heston) leading an expedition into Mexico. The production set a template for later Peckinpah films – heavy drinking, personality clashes, battles with the suits, and a final cut not matching the director’s vision. Major Dundee was a victim of its chaotic ambition and it’s easy to see why it flopped on release: even in the 2005 restored version, it is hopelessly unfocused, taking in Dundee’s Moby-Dick-like mission to track down an Apache chief, the dynamics of the US civil war, encounters with the French army and an unconvincing romantic interlude. But it’s interestingly flawed, a sort of dry run for The Wild Bunch, and Richard Harris is entertaining as Benjamin Tyreen, the Irishman who leads the Confederate prisoners in Dundee’s ragtag army.

From uplifting declarations of undying love to shared plates of spaghetti and tearful resignations of what might have been, these are the movie scenes that have touched our readers’ hearts

Last week, Guardian writers shared their favourite romantic moments in cinema – here are some more chosen by readers from around the world.

What to know about the 10 films nominated for the Academy Award’s biggest prize, along with the reviews, interviews and the big prizes earned so far

• Full list of Oscar nominations

The Golden Globes and Baftas are done and dusted, the Critics Choices packed up for another year. But the big one, the Academy Awards, is yet to come, and with it the ultimate prizes the film industry can bestow on its peers.

Ahead of the 2 March Oscars ceremony, Guardian film looks at how are the big contenders shaping up in the race for glory. We sort through the nominees for the best picture Oscar, assessing each one’s chances and how you can watch or stream each film.

‘A potential US distributor,’ recalls director Peter Weir, ‘supposedly threw his coffee cup at the screen at the end of the film, saying, “So whodunnit?� He felt he’d wasted a couple of hours’

One morning in early 1973, the TV personality Patricia Lovell knocked on my door. She was thinking of buying the rights for a novel by Joan Lindsay, Picnic at Hanging Rock, a story about the mysterious disappearance of three schoolgirls at an ancient rock formation and she was looking for an up-and-coming director. I had been gripped by the book and was very keen to make it.

John Hughes set the formula for many films and TV shows in his wake with his uneven 1985 high school-set comedy

It is the burden of all art wielding sufficiently vast influence that its revelatory power will be dampened by the many imitators following in its wake; if the 1971 proto-slasher A Bay of Blood now seems to be packed with cabin-in-the-woods cliches, that’s only because it coined so many of them. In the case of John Hughes’ ur-teen-flick The Breakfast Club, still bratty four decades after its zeitgeist-capturing theatrical run, its headlining truth that teenagers possess depth beyond their broad archetypes has since been re-realized ad nauseam by generations of on-screen adolescents. (Smaller, ancillary truths, such as the binding potential of cannabis to bridge inter-clique divides, are where the film really shines.) Of recent vintage, high school crowd-pleasers Booksmart and Bottoms both learned the hard way that the pretty, popular girls descended from Molly Ringwald’s princess in pink Claire face private challenges belied by their put-together exterior. Arguably, grasping that other people exist just as much as you do is the defining milestone of the puberty years, but it still behooves a present-day viewer of Hughes’ film to remind themselves that he first broke ground on what has come to seem matter-of-fact.

Hughes’ unvarnished take on youth culture, replete with joints and F-bombs, arrived in 1985 to fill a vacuum of movies about young people in which they could see lifelike facsimiles of themselves. To one side, they had the risible attempts from much-mocked after-school specials to address Big Issues, and to the other, the cartoonish raunch of Porky’s and its hairy-palmed ilk. Following through logically on the anti-nostalgic purview of Hughes’ tenure at National Lampoon, where he punctured Rockwell’s wholesome Americana to find a waking hell in the ritual of family vacation, The Breakfast Club dared to admit that everything sucks. (In this stance, it announces itself as one of the earliest gen X touchstones.) And while that sentiment’s accuracy hasn’t been diminished by time – teens have no money, they live with their parents, their sense of self is a whirling cyclone of chaos – its articulation has.

From thwarted love in Casablanca to awkward listening in Before Sunrise and bicycle jinks in Butch Cassidy, our writers pick their most passionate scenes for Valentine’s Day

Who among us didn’t fall for Captain Von Trapp from the moment he sang Edelweiss? Maria, on the verge of flunking out of nun school, didn’t stand a chance. The PG sexual tension then becomes unbearable during a ländler; the captain can’t take his eyes off Maria, forcing her to blush so hard that she legs it back to the abbey. But after the reverend mother talks sense into her (choose the captain, not God, duh!) the pair reunite and finally confess their love in a gazebo, before singing in the moonlight: “Here you are standing there loving me, whether or not you should�. Not even the revelation that the actors were told off for laughing so much during filming can dim the romance – it only adds to the adolescent thrill of it all. And the one tiny, goose-pimply moment that tops it off is Von Trapp whispering: “Oh, my love.� Hollie Richardson

The Berlinale opens today to an industry thriving on EU funds. But where is the money going – and are audiences benefiting too?

European film is booming. Really. In spite of the disruption caused by the pandemic to production and release schedules, film productions on the continent have increased by more than 50% over the past decade. Some of these new films will premiere at the Berlin film festival, which opens today, or Cannes and Venice later in the year. Those who don’t manage to get a slot at the “big three� can still hope for red-carpet treatment: the submission platform FilmFreeway records more than 600 new European film festivals for this year alone.

There is a less shiny flipside to the golden decade of European film, however. Since 2011, the growth in film productions has not been matched by a similar growth in audiences, meaning fewer moviegoers per film. In economics, increasing choices through product differentiation – offering more options to cater to diverse tastes – usually boosts demand. But for European cinema, the increase in production has not translated into more ticket sales. The French director Jacques Audiard’s Emilia Pérez feels like a symptomatic film in this regard, irrespective of the recent controversy around its star’s social media comments. It was a jury-prize winner at Cannes, hyped as an arthouse-to-mainstream crossover hit with a triumphant night at the European film awards – and has mostly left cinemagoers cold.

Moritz Pfeifer is a film critic and research fellow at Leipzig University’s Institute of Economic Policy

Thanks to his books, travel shows and TikToks, it’s impossible to see the actor as anything other than a classy sophisticate. So go on, Cardinal Bellini, fix us a cocktail

Conclave, quite rightly, is nominated for a number of Oscars this year. This, I suspect, is down to how successfully it managed to construct a perfectly Oscar-friendly cladding – religion! costumes! meticulous reconstructions of the Vatican! – and wrap it around the silliest story imaginable. We’ll save discussions of the twist for another time, but even without that it’s a story about a bunch of ostensibly serious men acting like gossipy schoolgirls. It’s honestly hilarious.

Part of its appeal is in how well it has been cast. Ralph Fiennes gets to play his two best modes – furrowed doubt and Leonard Rossiter – at the same time. John Lithgow gets to be at once avuncular and menacing. Isabella Rossellini gets to tell lots of people that they’ve been very naughty boys. But arguably the best casting, and one weirdly shut out of nominations, is that of Stanley Tucci. And this is because, in Conclave, Stanley Tucci plays Stanley Tucci.

Brady Corbet’s Oscar-tipped film is clearly based on real-life modernist master Marcel Breuer but brazenly misrepresents him and his revered modernism

• This article contains spoilers for The Brutalist

It has graced tea towels and cushions, mugs and socks, and spawned numerous Instagram accounts and coffee table books galore. Now brutalism, the once-maligned postwar architectural style of chiselled concrete forms, has finally reached Hollywood, in the form of an epic three-and-a-half-hour film that looks set to sweep the Oscars. You would think that architecture fans would be thrilled to have their subject in the limelight for a change. But they are raging.

There is nothing more irritating to enthusiasts than when the mainstream tries to portray their niche world and gets it wrong. And The Brutalist gets an awful lot wrong. Just as Gladiator II recently vexed classicists with its inaccurate portrayal of the emperors and its anachronistic scenes of people reading the newspaper and drinking at cafes (neither of which, apparently, existed at the time), so too has director Brady Corbet riled the architecture world by playing fast and loose with his interpretation of brutalism, the Bauhaus, postwar immigration and the basic process of architecture itself.

A fourth film about Helen Fielding’s creation will be released on Valentines’s day, and this time it’s gen Z that has fallen in love with her

Bridget Jones is back. The fabled diary (probably a Surface Pro now) has snapped back open. The cigarettes are doubtless replaced by a Vaporesso vape.

The new film, Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy, again starring Renée Zellweger, is being released into cine­mas on Valentine’s day, which feels appropriate. One of the most emotionally charged days of the year for the return of one of Britain’s more emotionally charged exports.

The music star was also an electrifying screen presence, from The Girl on a Motorcycle to Marie Antoinette

• Marianne Faithfull, singular icon of British pop, dies aged 78
• Marianne Faithfull was a towering artist, not just the muse she was painted as

On the screen and also in life, Marianne Faithfull experienced something similar to her contemporary Anita Pallenberg – the condescension of being treated like an icon or a muse. Maybe her very real success in music ruled her out of a serious acting career in the eyes of some, but Faithfull for a while occupied the epicentre of the late-60s pop culture zeitgeist, for an intense flashbulb moment she found herself in the overlapping worlds of music, movies and the explodingly important world of celebrity itself.

The famous photograph of her in 1967 on a couch between Alain Delon and Mick Jagger absolutely captures her magnetism: Delon is entranced by her, Jagger (her boyfriend) is jealous, looking grumpily down: she and Delon were starring together in The Girl on a Motorcycle by the British cinematographer and director Jack Cardiff in which she was the super-sexy rock chick in a leather body suit whose zipper Delon would lasciviously pull down with his teeth.

We would like to hear people’s memories of the Prince Charles Cinema in central London and the films they’ve seen there over the years

The Prince Charles Cinema, the central London film venue much loved for its screenings of hard-to-find films, has launched a petition saying its property developer landlord wants to alter the lease, leaving it able to shut down the business.

The cinema has run since 1969 and among its global fans are the directors Paul Thomas Anderson, Quentin Tarantino and John Waters.

The 81-year-old actor has revealed that he has no streaming services, has never sent an email, and doesn’t even know what time it is. Perhaps he has found true freedom

Perhaps the buzziest show on TV is Severance, a twisty-turny workplace drama that is available to anyone with a subscription to Apple TV+. Of course, there are ways to watch Severance without an Apple subscription. The primary one is: be Christopher Walken, because then they will send you DVDs of it.

Talking to the Wall Street Journal, Walken explained: “I don’t have technology. I only have a satellite dish on my house. So I have seen Severance on DVDs that they’re good enough to send me.� The reason Walken receives DVDs is because he is actually in Severance, which dramatically raises the bar for people who would also like to watch it on DVD.

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.

The British actor Gugu Mbatha-Raw has worked with Reece Witherspoon and Oprah Winfrey, been awarded an MBE and told stories that have challenged perceptions around race. So what, asks Rhik Samadder, keeps her so grounded?

Early on in Gugu Mbatha-Raw’s career, an older, white actor advised she change her name to something easier to pronounce. She declined – a strong choice for a young actor. “I don’t think it’s that strong,� rebuts Mbatha-Raw. She likes her name. Besides, “it means ‘Our Pride’ in Zulu. To change that would be the antithesis of its meaning.�

Mbatha-Raw is known for choosing roles that combine art and social advocacy. She’s won awards, been honoured with an MBE, appointed a Goodwill Ambassador for the United Nations Refugee Agency. People still mispronounce her name, though. The most extreme example she recalls was in Norway, when a host announced her from a piece of paper. “Gucci… Matthew… Ray? I was like, ‘I guess that’s me!’�

The star of Baywatch and The Last Showgirl answers questions from Observer readers and famous fans including Stella McCartney, Liam Neeson, Ruby Wax and Naomi Klein

Pamela Anderson, makeup-free and beautiful in a floral Westwood suit, is making a fuss of my dog. My dog likes her. I’m not a particular believer in the idea that animals are great character judges but, in this case, me and the dog are aligned. I like Anderson too. She combines openness with a kind of vulnerability, and you warm to her immediately.

Settled on a sofa in a small dressing room off a photography studio, she asks for a coffee and promptly spills it everywhere. “I strive for imperfection,� she jokes. “I strive for it, and I just hit it every time.� Cortado mopped, she takes a breath, before talking excitedly of a new phase in her eventful life. “A door opened, and I walked through,� she says. “It’s hard to believe.�

He has a prolific career and extensive portfolio, with his images of British life especially iconic. At 72, he tells Miranda Sawyer, he’s still thinking about what to shoot next

About 20 years ago, I was on a judging panel for a photography competition, and one of the other judges was Martin Parr. He was charming and affable, almost teddy bear-ish. He was also utterly ruthless. When it came to deciding which photographs were worthy of a prize, he went through the selection swiftly – no, no, yes, no – without hesitation or doubt. His eye was impeccable.

Has he always known what makes a good photograph? “Oh yes,� says Parr. “Right from the beginning. Total conviction. I knew I would be a photographer from the age of 13, 14, and I knew what was good even then. I was obsessive about photography. All artists are obsessive, I think.�

We are in his agent’s office, a small upstairs flat on a market street in east London. Parr owns the building, and this room used to be packed with his work as well as Parr-type things: his collections of Saddam Hussein watches, Soviet-space-dog ephemera, Spice Girls merch. He was obsessed with gathering all sorts of daft stuff, but he’s stopped now to concentrate solely on his work. Though as he says, “photography is a form of collecting.�

His obsession now is the Martin Parr Foundation, headquartered in Bristol, which he established in 2017 and which is where all of his photos have been moved to (along with the watches, space dogs and Spiceys). The foundation is a collection of documentary photography of the British Isles, his own and other people’s. Alongside maintaining Parr’s huge archive, it buys work by lesser-known photographers, gives bursaries to those who are just starting out, has a library and gallery, curates shows, and is Parr’s legacy, what he’s most proud of. He’s 72, is in cancer recovery and is conscious of his age. “Hopefully it will be of some benefit,� he says. “I’m not going to say I’m saving the world. I never expect photography to change anything.� Perhaps not, but the Foundation is clearly a good thing: the website is great and the current show, featuring Siân Davey’s photos of family life, is excellent.

“Have you been to visit it?� he asks. I haven’t. He looks a bit miffed. He’s quick to pick up on things he thinks I’ve missed about what he does. When we go for a coffee after the interview, he says, almost triumphantly, “You just missed me taking a photo with my phone, of that wall!�

In my defence, there is so much of Parr’s work to see that you could spend your whole life looking at his photographs. He’s been working since the 1980s, has had well over 80 exhibitions all over the world, has published more than 145 photography books. He is madly prolific, with an archive that’s endlessly recategorisable. “If you want me to do a book on dogs, no problem,� he says. “I can come up with 100 pictures straight away. Or cigarettes. I’ve just done a book called No Smoking, using my archive, edited by my gallery here in London.�

Is he constantly thinking about work?

“More or less, yes. I’m either thinking about things I haven’t shot, or things I’ve done. What’s got to be done. What can I do next? Where can I go?�

Fares is a refreshingly unpredictable voice, starting as a film director before moving into games; now, he says, working on a movie would be ‘a vacation’

There aren’t many video game developers as outspoken as Hazelight’s Josef Fares. Infamous for his expletive-laden viral rants at livestreamed awards shows, Fares is a refreshingly firy and unpredictable voice in an all too corporate industry. As he puts it, “It doesn’t matter where I work or what I do, I will always say what I want. People say to me that that’s refreshing – but isn’t it weird that you cannot say what you think in interviews? Do we live in a fucking communist country? Obviously, you have got to respect certain boundaries, but to not even be able to express what you think personally about stuff? People are too afraid!�

Yet while gamers know him as a grinning chaos merchant and passionate ambassador of co-op gameplay, in Fares’ adopted homeland of Sweden, he is best known as an award-winning film director. His goofy 2000 comedy Jalla! Jalla! was a domestic box office success, while his 2005 drama Zozo was a more introspective work about his childhood experience of fleeing the Lebanese civil war.

She caused a sensation in 1966 when she joined the New York Phil and its 103 male musicians. Now the double bassist is the star of The Only Girl in the Orchestra, a documentary nominated for an Academy Award

One of the most fascinating, inspirational and talented creatives nominated for an Oscar this year will not be at the ceremony on 2 March. “Oh, I’m not going. No, no, no. I’ll be 90 in June, my dear,� says Orin O’Brien, double bassist and the star of nominated short documentary The Only Girl in the Orchestra. “That’s no excuse,� I tell her. Over Zoom, she looks and sounds more than capable of flying the plane there herself. “No. You couldn’t get me on a plane these days. People are so badly behaved. I’m staying here in my nice apartment in New York. I will cook dinner for my friends in the orchestra. Some students will come over.�

O’Brien has never sought the bright lights. Her chosen instrument, the double bass, means she sits at the back of the orchestra, providing harmonies and structure. One scene shows her telling her students: “You don’t want to stick out. You’re a support for what else is going on. You’re the floor under everybody that would collapse if it wasn’t secure.�

As the film that caused havoc at its Paris premiere resurfaces, the great French actor looks back on an extraordinary career, from the furore of Meetings With Anna to the meltdown of Apocalypse Now

‘People stood up and started to yell,� says Aurore Clément, remembering the day Les Rendez-vous d’Anna premiered at the Paris film festival and caused havoc. This glacial, disquieting film, which appeared in English as Meetings With Anna, follows the titular director on an odyssey around Europe that climaxes with her singing an Edith Piaf song to her lover. And that, apparently, was the final straw. “They wanted to attack me,� says Clément, who played Anna. “The journalist sitting next to me put his trenchcoat over me and got me out of there.�

The film was the third feature from Chantal Akerman, who loosely based Anna on herself. It was undoubtedly a challenging, elusive film – a series of haunted confessions heard by this film-maker protagonist from lovers, family and wayfarers while on her travels promoting an unknown work. Anna’s existential solitude, her refusal to remake herself for her lovers, was quietly radical. “People weren’t ready to accept it at the time, its feminism,� says Clément of the film, which was released in 1978. “Society was still very closed, women didn’t have much say.�

The Brazilian director on his Oscar-nominated new film, I’m Still Here, the importance of remembering shared history, and Brazil’s double pandemic

Walter Salles, 68, is Brazil’s most internationally celebrated film-maker. He came to global prominence in 1998 with the poignant road movie Central Station, which won the Golden Bear at the Berlin film festival and received two Oscar nominations, and has since released English-language films including Dark Water and On the Road and had an arthouse hit with the Che Guevara biopic The Motorcycle Diaries. For his first feature film in 12 years, I’m Still Here, he returned to Brazil to tell the true story of Eunice Paiva, an activist and mother coping with the forced disappearance of her husband during the country’s military dictatorship. Last month, its star, Fernanda Torres, won the Golden Globe for best actress and the film is up for three Oscars, including one for best picture – a first for Brazilian cinema.

You actually knew the Paiva family while growing up in Rio. How did that acquaintance help when making I’m Still Here?
I was 13 years old, and Nalu, the middle of the five kids of the Paiva family, was exactly my age, and we had a mutual friend. This is how I got to be invited into a family that differed drastically from mine. Politics were freely discussed in that environment, as well as an alternative project for Brazil, and this in a moment where we had already been for five years under military dictatorship. The way people intermingled in that free space was something very unique: I felt invited to be part of a community. In doing the film, I tried to extend that invitation, to let the spectator be part of that community that I had the luck to know in my adolescence, so that you wouldn’t see these characters from a distance.

Renée Zellweger’s Bridget faces new challenges in parenting and love, but it’s the familiar faces around her who deliver heart and humour in this unexpectedly poignant fourth outing

There is something rather affecting about growing up and growing older alongside a fictional character. Particularly when, unlike the aspiration Barbies of Sex and the City, that character is permitted to show the inevitable wear-and-tear of being a middle-aged mum of two. Checking in with familiar faces – Jesse and Céline from Richard Linklater’s Before movies, for example; or in this case, Bridget Jones and her disreputable band of booze buddies – feels somehow more cherishable when those faces reflect the same rough patches and tough times we all endure.

It has been nearly a quarter of a century since Renée Zellweger first stumbled on to our screens as the gauche, accident-prone klutz Bridget Jones. And, in common with the core friendships that define us, our relationship with the character has evolved and deepened. The 2001 Bridget of Bridget Jones’s Diary was an insecure hot mess fuelled by vat-sized glasses of house white (or “party petrol� as Sally Phillips’s Shazza pithily describes it). Today’s Bridget achieved her happy-ever-after fairytale ending. She married Mark Darcy (Colin Firth), had two adorable kids and moved barely a yoga mat’s distance from Hampstead Heath, only to have it all snatched away. Mark, we learn, was killed while on a humanitarian mission in Sudan.

Ridley Scott’s Paul Mescal-starring sequel, now streaming, joins cinema’s legion of Roman empire love-ins, from Ben-Hur to Conan the Barbarian

If men, according to the internet, simply cannot stop thinking about the Roman empire, then Hollywood remains a largely male-brained enterprise. Storytelling trends come and go, but the Roman epic has been a recurring fixture of blockbuster cinema for more than a century. Twenty-five years ago, Ridley Scott’s beefy, lavishly appointed action film Gladiator marked a resurgence in the genre after some time off, winning a best picture Oscar and spawning a new wave of sweeping, grunting imitators.

Now, Gladiator II is among them. Scott’s surprisingly belated follow-up substitutes Paul Mescal’s brooding glower for Russell Crowe’s brawny roar, but otherwise follows the template of its predecessor in a way that renders it as much remake as sequel. Playing the son (thanks to some blatant narrative revisionism) of Crowe’s Roman general turned gladiator Maximus, Mescal’s Lucius follows the same trajectory through capture, imprisonment and revenge via some grisly theatrics in the Colosseum. The film is missing the hungry intensity of Crowe’s star presence, while its aesthetic is muddier than the blood-and-gold spectacle of the original, but it’s enjoyable just the same. Piling on the gore and the absurdity (sharks in a Roman arena? Why not?), Scott directs it like a sword-and-sandal B-movie with an A-movie budget.

The US film-maker, who died last month, took surrealism mainstream with Blue Velvet, Twin Peaks and more. He was also a champion of meditation and excelled at delivering a well-timed gag

In January 1997, I went to Paris to interview the great American surrealist film-maker David Lynch, who died at the end of last month aged 78. Lynch was in an upbeat mood because the European reviews for his new feature, Lost Highway, had been glowing – even in Spain, where the film had been screened to critics with the reels in the wrong order. “I heard about that!� he laughed. “It gives you an indication of how the human mind can work with pieces even when they’re out of order. How it seeks to make sense of something, and makes it work somehow. It’s a beautiful thing.� And then he laughed some more.

Over the years, I had the privilege of interviewing Lynch many times, talking about his movies, music, paintings and his passion for transcendental meditation. As he told me when I spoke to him on stage for the Guardian in 2007 after a screening of his latest (and, as it turned out, last) feature, Inland Empire: “It allows any human being to dive within and transcend and experience the unbounded, infinite ocean of pure vibrant consciousness – bliss, intelligence, creativity, love, power, energy, all there within.�

With one of the film industry’s most lucrative franchises signed over to Amazon MGM, 007 could be facing down the barrel of spin-offs, quasi-crowdsourcing and a cinematic universe to rival Marvel

The ink could hardly have dried on the contract between Amazon MGM and Eon Productions, the legendary Bond film company run by Barbara Broccoli and Michael G Wilson, before Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos put up a social media post that went to the heart of the conundrum faced by one of the film industry’s most lucrative franchises: “Who’d you pick as the next Bond?�

The reality underlying Broccoli and Wilson’s decision to cede control to Amazon, the company that has since 2021 been responsible for co-producing Bond films after its purchase of MGM, is that since it became apparent that Daniel Craig wanted to leave the role, the franchise has been struck by a kind of creative paralysis. We are used to increasingly long gaps between their release, but with no new lead actor in sight, Bond 26 has still not even reached the starting gate. Eon kept the quest for a new Bond behind completely closed doors, like a sort of state secret, but Bezos’s first act has been to throw the gates open, with an Elon Musk-esque act of quasi-crowdsourcing. It may be just a PR-grabbing gesture, but it demonstrates that Amazon is planning to do things differently from now on.

The animation studio’s softball series is occasionally tender and wise, with moments that are rich and funny – even if the characters don’t get enough airtime

Everyone you meet is fighting a battle you know nothing about. It’s a cliche because it’s true, and it could be the motto for Pixar’s best creations – its animations have revealed the hidden feelings of toys, monsters, even cars. That idea powers Win or Lose, the studio’s latest TV series – and in the moments where it commits to its ethos fully, it delivers a powerful appeal for empathy with a knowing smile.

We watch the Pickles, a middle-school kids’ softball team led by blustering dad-coach Dan (Will Forte), as they play a crucial match. They win! Thus they have the chance to play in the state championship seven days later, which is as scary as it is exciting. That is the foundation every instalment is built on. Like a sporting version of multiple-perspective arthouse classic Rashomon, we keep replaying the same week’s events – but through the eyes of a new person each time.

A stunt double who plays roof-bouncing ninjas before the lead steps in for the closeup is stuck in a family/mob triangle in Vivian Qu’s occasionally silly thriller

Vivian Qu is the Chinese film-maker who has directed three features and also produced the noir drama Black Coal, Thin Ice which in 2014 won Berlin’s Golden Bear. Now she brings this crime melodrama to Berlin, an engaging if tonally uncertain high-wire adventure that satirises China’s hopeless addiction to gangster capitalism. It is also acidly unsentimental about the bread-and-circuses escapism of the country’s booming film and TV industry with all its period-costume wuxia nostalgia. It’s an appealing film, though it contains some strangely broad comedy and is also, in a couple of violent moments, a bit naive about exactly how easy it is for a young woman physically to fight off a big strong guy.

Above all, Qu gives us a rather amazing set-piece scene on the set of a wire-fu action movie, a scene that feels real in a way that the rest of the film really doesn’t, for all that it is watchable. Fang Di (Wen Qi) is a tough woman employed as a stunt double on a movie set, playing the black clad, sword-wielding ninja bouncing over terracotta rooftops and whizzing through the air in long shot. For the closeup, the preening star in the same outfit steps in while Fang Di staggers over to get a coffee at the craft table. The work is exhausting and dangerous and Fang Di is doing it to pay off her family debts to mob matriarch Madame Wang.

Adapting Daisy Johnson’s psychological thriller Sisters, French actor Ariane Labed’s directorial debut feels emotionally distant yet strangely familiar…

Ariane Labed, the French-Greek actor most famous for roles in The Souvenir and Assassin’s Creed, has made her directorial debut and chosen the 2020 novel Sisters, by British author Daisy Johnson, as her inspiration. It’s a tale of too-close teenage sisters – the domineering September (Pascale Kann) and the submissive July (Mia Tharia) – who experience playground bullying and a disturbing sexual awakening, in parallel to their mother’s (Rakhee Thakrar) own demonstrations of sexual liberation. Carrie by way of Dogtooth, then? The fact that Labed is married to Yorgos Lanthimos, the Oscar-nominated director of Poor Things and, before that, Dogtooth, makes the comparison difficult to avoid.

Whatever the specific influences, though, this is modern gothic, with natural lighting, neatly composed wide shots and the near total absence of a musical score. These directorial choices also act to keep the sisters at an emotional distance, as if the camera were another classmate wary – or weary? – of their kooky unpredictability. Would that the plot twist was equally unpredictable.

In UK and Irish cinemas