Phil de Semlyen

Escolher os melhores filmes de terror de todos os tempos é assustador, a todos os níveis. Sobretudo tendo em conta a atenção que o género tem recebido em anos recentes, à custa de obras como Foge ou Hereditário. Parece que, depois de anos nas margens, o cinema de terror está a passar por um momento de adulação crítica. Ainda assim, quando chegou a altura de escolher os filmes mais assustadores de sempre, além dos críticos da Time Out, consultámos aqueles que nunca tiveram medo do terror. Desde o mestre Stephen King a um autor como Guillermo del Toro, passando por amantes do género como Simon Pegg ou o músico Alice Cooper. O resultado é uma lista variada e que inclui, inevitavelmente, algumas escolhas polémicas. Será Alien, o Oitavo Passageiro, o clássico de ficção científica de Ridley Scott, um filme de terror? Faz sentido colocar O Silêncio dos Inocentes, de Jonathan Demme, na mesma lista que As Noites de Halloween ou O Exorcista? Os críticos e especialistas consultados acharam que sim. Eis os 100 melhores filmes de terror de sempre. Recomendado: As escolhas dos peritos

However you feel about the label ‘The Great War’, World War I’s filmography is indisputably outstanding. Like our memory of that complex, heavily memorialised conflict, it’s enduring too. Sam Mendes’s 1917 and Netflix’s recent re-adaption of Erich Maria Remarque’s classic anti-war novel All Quiet on the Western Front suggest that it’s far from played out too. But World War I films have been masterful since back in the silent era – witness the battle sequences in Lewis Milestone’s All Quiet on the Western Front, the scale of King Vidor’s The Big Parade and the realism of GW Pabst’s Westfront 1918. As military historian and host of the Old Front Line podcast Paul Reed explains, they’re often good on the history and detail, too. We asked him to dig into the most realistic depictions of the war on the big screen. 💥 The 50 best World War II movies🔥 The 100 best movies of all-time

For the first half of 2024, the main talking point around the movies was that no one was going to see them. Why weren’t audiences flocking to see Ryan Gosling drive stunt cars and flirt with Emily Blunt? Why did Furiosa flop when the last Mad Max film was such a hit? It was especially perplexing given that last year, the worldwide box office had seemed to finally rebound from the post-pandemic doldrums. Studio fortunes are improving, however, on the backs of some major kids movies and the monster success of Inside Out 2 and Deadpool & Wolverine. So how about we all stop wringing our hands, and begin appreciating what’s been a pretty great year for movies so far, both in the mainstream and at the arthouse? You’ll notice some of these movies came out in the US at the back end of 2023, but we’re basing this list on UK release dates to include the best worldwide releases from between January and December. And there is plenty more coming, so keep this one bookmarked. RECOMMENDED: 📺 The best TV shows of 2024 (so far) you need to stream🔥 The best horror movies and shows of 2024🎥 The 100 greatest movies ever made

Many of the greatest British actors have reputations that kind of precede them. While making 1976’s Marathon Man, the great American method actor Dustin Hoffman told his equally great co-star, legendary British thesp Laurence Olivier, that he had stayed awake for 72 straight hours to prepare for a scene in which his character had been up for three solid days. ‘My dear boy,’ Olivier is said to have repied, ‘why don't you try acting?’  However, in spite of what this possibly apocryphal anecdote would have you believe, there is no one British ‘style’ of acting. To prove the point, here are our picks for the greatest British acting talent of all-time: they’re a dazzling varied company of sleek leading ladies and men, naturalistic character actors, and one or two delightfully hammy scene-stealers. And they’re all unforgettable in their own way. RECOMMENDED: 🇬🇧 The 100 best British films😂 The 100 best comedy movies💥 The 101 best action movies

There’s no better excuse than Christmas to plop yourself on the sofa, put on a Yuletide classic and not move for hours. But, if you can bear to pull yourself off the couch (and, trust us, you should), you can experience all the joy of festive film-watching but elevated at one of London’s many Crimbo movie screenings. Cinema snacks are infinitely better than ones you have to make yourself at home and who else will you laugh, groan and cry along with if you’re all on your own in the house? If you need more reason to head out to the flicks, London’s going to give it to you. You want special? It’s got it, from cinema sing-alongs to Christmas movies like ‘The Holiday’ and ‘Love Actually’ accompanied by live orchestras. Here are the best Christmas movie events the capital has to offer in 2024. RECOMMENDED: 🎄 Read our full guide to Christmas in London.🍿 The 50 greatest Christmas movies.

With, seemingly, about 116 different streaming platforms churning out new small-screen shows, you’d expect a few of them to land. Even so, 2024 has been a feast of excellent TV. We’ve had Shōgun, Baby Reindeer, a return for the ever-brilliant Slow Horses, a new series of Industry, a show that’s gathering fans like a coked-up trader acquiring stock options, another run of outlandishly funny Aussie sitcom Colin From Accounts and the nicest surprise of them all: an adaptation of Jilly Cooper’s Rivals so fun, it’ll make you want to don shoulder pads and make out with the nearer polo player.  Not everything has been worthy of eight or so hours of your time, with Armando Iannucci’s so-so superhero satire The Franchise and powder-puff Game of Thrones spinoff House of the Dragon arriving with high hopes that they failed to live up to. Still, whether you subscribe to Netflix, Prime Video or Apple TV+, or just keep it strictly terrestrial, there’s plenty of bangers out there to catch up on between now and the end of the year. Here are our suggestions for where to start.RECOMMENDED: 🎥 The best movies of 2024 (so far)🔥 The best TV and streaming shows of 2023📺 The 100 greatest ever TV shows you need to binge

Three-fourths of the way through 2024, and it’s safe to say this has been a banner year for horror movies. In fact, it seems like all the buzziest films to come out so far aim to terrify. What’s truly great about the current horror bumper crop is that none of the standouts really resemble one another.  Cannes hit The Substance has finally landed, Osgood Perkins’ hit Longlegs mixes ’90s serial killer procedurals with the Satanic panic of the previous decade, while I Saw the TV Glow is like David Lynch directing Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Late Night with the Devil makes found-footage fun again, while In a Violent Nature invented a new subgenre that people are calling ‘ambient slasher’ – just to name a few. Below, you’ll find our ongoing picks for the scariest movies of 2024. 🎃 The 100 best horror films ever made 😱 The scariest movies based on a true story 🔥 The best films of 2024 (so far)

Monsters abound in movies, but none frighten quite like the serial killer. After all, zombies, vampires and interdimensional demons are figments of our imaginations, or representations of deep human fears made flesh. But serial killers are real. Senseless, random murders happen all the time, and the culprit isn’t a supernatural force or thing from another planet. Quite literally, it can be the person living right next door. And so, the question is: why do audiences flock to serial killer movies? Why spend the hours of your life you reserve for entertainment immersed in the darkest corners of the human psyche? Maybe it helps assure our own humanity. Maybe it’s simply to stare into the moral abyss. Or maybe it’s because the best serial killer movies try to tell us something about what creates a serial killer. In putting together this list, we’ve paid attention to movies that probe the conditions which, for a certain vulnerable person, can strip all value from a human life. Some might be considered horror movies, others as noirs or procedurals. All of them will leave you shaken. Recommended:🩸 The 15 scariest horror movies based on true stories💣 The 100 best thrillers of all time😱 The 100 best horror movies of all time🕵️ The 40 best murder-mystery movies

Horror films aren’t just for Halloween, but they certainly make spooky season that bit more terrifyingly fun. Whether you’re a hide-behind-the-cushion kind of watcher or someone who enjoys every second of jumpscares and gore, joining a Halloween film screening of fellow horror enthusiasts is an unbeatable way to celebrate All Hallow’s Eve. Don’t worry, though – not all Halloween screenings are focused on bone-chilling bumps in the night. There are also plenty of more lighthearted picks to choose from, like the camp-but-festive ‘Hocus Pocus’ and ‘The Rocky Horror Picture Show’, that will get you in the mood without scaring you to within an inch of your life. Recommended:🎃 Our guide to Halloween in London😱 The 100 best horror movies of all time👹 The 66 greatest movie monsters of all time

London is absolutely world-class when it comes to museums. Obviously, we’re biased, but with more than 170 of them dotted about the capital – a huge chunk of which are free to visit – we think it’s fair to say that there’s nowhere else in the world that does museums better.  Want to explore the history of TfL? We’ve got a museum for that. Rather learn about advertising? We’ve got a museum for that too. History? Check. Science? Check. 1940s cinema memorabilia, grotesque eighteenth-century surgical instruments, or perhaps a wall of 4,000 mouse skeletons? Check, check, check! Being the cultured metropolitans that we are, Time Out’s editors love nothing more than a wholesome afternoon spent gawping at Churchill’s baby rattle or some ancient Egyptian percussion instruments. In my case, the opportunity to live on the doorstep of some of the planet’s most iconic cultural institutions was a big reason why I moved here at the first chance I got, and I’ve racked up countless hours traipsing around display cases and deciphering needlessly verbose wall texts in the eleven years since. From iconic collections, brilliant curation and cutting-edge tech right down to nice loos, adequate signage and a decent place to grab a cuppa; my colleagues and I know exactly what we want from a museum, and we’ve put in a whole lot of time deliberating which of the city’s institutions are worth your time. So here’s our take on the 25 best ones to check out around London, ranging from world-famous cultural

Damn, 2024 is coming through with some absolute bangers. We had Brat summer with hit-after-hit from Charli xcx, but we also saw Sabrina Carpenter sing silly little outros to her sleeper hit Nonsense, Taylor Swift quite simply refusing to leave the charts (by any means necessary) and Chappell Roan catapult into fame faster than you can say ‘Pink Pony Club’. This year really was for the pop girlies. But what are the songs that defined the year? Well, aside from the above, we’ve seen chart-topping country boy crooners, instantly iconic rap takedowns and joyously twee indie – all making 2024 a pretty stellar year for new music. I was tasked with building our ranking of the best songs of 2024 (so far) and compiled this list by asking our amazing international team of writers and editors to contribute their year-defining tracks. Expect to find a global list of tunes, from personal favourites to chart-toppers that simply can’t be ignored. We’ll be updating this list with more music throughout the rest of the year.

Movies had barely been invented when the first on-screen heist took place. In 1903’s The Great Train Robbery, a gang of bandits in the Old West hold up a locomotive. That’s pretty much the whole thing. And yet, from that simple premise came an entire subgenre.  A century-plus later, directors as diverse as Quentin Tarantino, Stanley Kubrick, Kathryn Bigelow and Steve McQueen have produced memorable heist films, proving how durable and malleable the formula can be – and that the vicarious thrills of watching criminals in action is simply irresistible. It’s a genre built upon many familiar tropes – most heist movies boil down to ‘ragtag group of outlaws come together to pull off a big score’ – but the best examples find ways to stretch the basic framework in unexpected directions. Here are 60 of the greatest.  Recommended: 😬 The best thriller films of all-time🔪 The 12 best thrillers on Netflix🔥 The 100 best movies of all-time🌋 The 35 steamiest erotic thrillers ever made

Savage baboons. Killer sharks. Opium hits. Panto villains. Ridley Scott’s brawny, bloodthirsty, and occasionally wildly camp sequel is not your dad’s Gladiator movie – or your history teacher’s. But for all its flaws, it’s a colossally entertaining ride that never stints on its efforts to wow you with its scale and spectacle.    Where Gladiator (2000) deftly intercut its battle scenes with subtly plotted political manoeuvrings, this one works best when it’s just winding up one of its ballistas and launching a fireball at your head. There’s a brutal extravagance to the action, a dedication to the film’s theme of violence as a portent of social collapse that manifests in an extra slather of chopped limbs and slashing wounds.  We’re 16 years on from the events of that now-canonical first film, and our new hero, Paul Mescal’s Lucius Verus, has grown from Commodus’s imperilled nephew at the end of Gladiator to a loved-up family man living in happy exile in a coastal city in north Africa. The opening sea battle puts paid to all that. A fleet of Roman triremes under the command of Pedro Pascal’s upstanding general, Marcus Acacius, descend on Lucius and his wife’s seaside citadel. What follows unleashes hell on a similar scale to Russell Crowe’s opening scrap in Germania in the first film, by way of Kingdom of Heaven’s vast Siege of Jerusalem sequence. Scott has lost none of his feel for combat on this scale.  Most of the movie is set in a ravishingly-replicated Rome, rendered in dus

‘I’m humble now, but it tells you the story of how I became humble.’ With that magnificent faux modesty, Pharrell Williams provides the synopsis for a hero’s journey that’s rendered entirely in Lego animation. On paper, it sounds completely bonkers – The Lego Movie, only a biopic – but it somehow works a treat. Packed with the super-producer’s pop bangers, punctuating its music biz self-importance with consistent silliness, and laden with A-list cameos, including Lego Snoop Dogg, Lego Missy Elliott and most of the noughties hip hop scene (also Lego), it’s a real joyride. Hopefully it’ll inspire a few more docs to deviate from the boring old biopic formula. Pharrell invited 20 Feet From Stardom director Morgan Neville to shoot a standard documentary, complete with a meaty central interview with the man himself, and then bin it and remake the whole thing in Danish bricks. It works for two reasons: the primary colours and charmingly daffy animation technique fits its endearing subject to a tee. His genius, it charts, began with his synesthesia – an ability to see music in colours – and the Lego animation illustrates it better than a regular doc ever could. And it turns out that it’s way more fun hearing A-listers intoning about their musical genius when they’re Lego-fied. A Snoop Dogg cameo has a little Lego figure appearing with a canister of ‘PG spray’ to replicate the moment when Pharrell and his Neptunes/N.E.R.D. co-producer Chad Hugo had a woozy meeting with the weed-smoki

What would Terminator 2’s Judgment Day look like in Aardman’s world? Vengeance Most Fowl, the Bristol animators’ first Wallace and Gromit caper since 2008 short A Matter of Loaf and Death, is the typically charming, inventive and ridiculously English answer to that hypothetical. Much more upbeat, basically, and with more turnips. Instead of killer cyborgs, this tale of revenge and larceny unleashes an army of evil robot gnomes (voiced by Reece Shearsmith) under the control of still-sinister penguin Feathers McGraw. Wallace has levelled up on his inventions, flooding his house with mechanical gadgets, and enabling Nick Park and co-director Merlin Crossingham to deliver their own version of a cautionary tale on the perils of AI – albeit one that’s about as hard-edged as a tea cosy. ‘See how embracing technology makes our lives better!’ Wallace tells his long-suffering pooch, like Lancashire’s answer to a tech bro, before unleashing his new gnome helper, Norbot, on an unsuspecting town. But from behind bars, Feathers is plotting revenge against the duo who foiled his diamond heist in 1993’s The Wrong Trousers. He’s had 31 years to master computer hacking, and is soon taking control of Norbot and wrecking havoc.  It’s Aardman’s ridiculously English answer to Terminator 2 If Vengeance Most Fowl’s core dynamic – the guileless Wallace’s obliviousness to his dependence on his brainy beagle sidekick, and the pooch’s own stifled sense of frustration and hurt – hasn’t changed a jot dow

If you’re looking for this year’s answer to Barbenheimer, head straight for High Street Kensington. Here, the contents of Tim Burton’s drawers, attics and crypts – because he definitely has a crypt – have been arranged into a mind-altering residence at The Design Museum – just downstairs from the venue’s other blockbuster exhibition. Yes, Barbie upstairs, the Corpse Bride down below. Burton’s goth-ucopia has decamped to London just in time for Halloween, after a 10-city world tour. With advance ticket sales breaking records – 32,000 and counting –  the Californian’s adopted hometown is clearly already sold on the chance to eyeball 50 years of ceaselessly imaginative output up close.And eyeballs are everywhere here. They adorn monsters sketched, modelled and doodled by Burton over a career that stretches back to a restless, ambitious youth in the Burbank ’burbs. The opening section charts those ‘Anywhere, USA’ years, where the preternaturally gifted Burton was experimenting with stop-motion animation and pitching kids’ books to Disney. Pages from that book – The Giant Zlig – are on display, alongside a polite but encouraging rejection letter praising the young Burton’s imagination but pointing out its similarity to Dr Seuss’s.   The chance to peer at Edward Scissorhands’ actual scissorhands will be a rush for any movie lover Before transporting visitors into the heart of Burton’s Hollywood era, there’s a room dedicated to formative influences: Ray Harryhausen, Hammer films, G

A film made with cold courage by the victim of a sexual assault, this gripping Japanese documentary plays like a ’70s conspiracy thriller. Eavesdropping devices are ripped out of apartment walls, secret recordings made, the abuse of strangers is fended off, and the full might of a patriarchal state faced down. You can imagine a young Jane Fonda or Faye Dunaway playing its young heroine, journalist-filmmaker Shiori Ito, as she pursues the man who raped her with every means at her disposal.  Depressingly, it’s set much more recently. In 2015, as a young female journalist, Shiori was raped by veteran Washington bureau chief of the Tokyo Broadcasting System, Noriyuki Yamaguchi, in a hotel. The man’s connections ran all the way to Japan’s then-Prime Minister, Shinzo Abe, for whom he’d served as biographer. Even as the traumatised reporter went to the police, the wagons were circling. Yamaguchi’s arrest was mysteriously called off at the last minute and criminal charges were never brought against him. Refusing to leave it at that, Shiori published an account of her experiences, going public with her accusation against Yamaguchi with a book called ‘Black Box’ in 2017. A potent metaphor for the secrecy at the heart of Japan’s antiquated and sexist system, the title also hints at its plane-crash impact on the lives of victims like Shiori. Shiori is a fragile but unbowed figure standing in the middle of a typhoon She also picked up a camera, filming her battle to bring the man to just

A month-long feast of contemporary Czech cinema, the Made in Prague Festival is back for another month of high-calibre dramas, comedies, docs and family films. This year is the 35th anniversary of the Velvet Revolution that exchanged Communist autocracy for democracy and led to the presidency of Václav Havel, and the poet-revolutionary is the subject of Petr Jančárek’s documentary, Havel Speaking, Can You Hear Me?, at the ICA on November 14. Look out, too, for Cold War drama Brothers, the country’s 2023 Oscars pick, and spiky family drama Waltzing Matilda, starring The Bourne Supremacy’s Karel Roden. With venues also including Regent Street Cinema, The Garden Cinema, The Gate and the Czech Centre itself, and a welcoming vibe, it’s one of London’s best boutique film fests.

One again, it’s all about gathering together and amplifying diverse, female and LGBTQ+ voices at this boutique west London indie fest – on-screen and in front of it. The Little Venice Film Festival (LVFF) kicks off with a screening of Lucy Cohen’s Cornish coming-of-age drama Edge of Summer at Maida Vale tube station on Tuesday, October 22, before taking in an array of other cool and unexpected London locations over seven days of features and shorts in west and central London. Look out for a day of female-directed screenings at the BBC’s Maida Vale Studios, the UK premiere of new Peter Dinklage Western The Thicket and screenings at Little Venice’s waterside Canal Café Theatre. Tickets are on an RSVP basis, so jump on the link and get RVSP-ing.

The term ‘the Blitz spirit’ gets bandied about a lot in the UK. It’s become a handy, often jokey shorthand for Brits’ doughtiness in the face of everything from terrorist attacks to a sudden shortage of crisps. Eighty years on, we still wear that ‘keep calm and carry on’ badge with pride. Should we, though? Steve McQueen’s (Occupied City) anthemic film is in fiery conversation with those untouchable legends of Britain’s early war years. It suggests that German bombs rained down on a London (and other British cities) that wasn’t exactly the united, anti-Nazi bastion of stiff upper lips and solidarity of lore. Instead, Blitz shows a place rife with social and racial division, where prejudice is just another kind of shrapnel for Black Londoners to dodge. For that reason, and a few others, it’s not a comfortable watch. And it’s definitely not The Railway Children redux, despite some superficial similarities in its story of a young train-bound city dweller absconding and striking out for his East End home.That boy is steely nine-year-old George (newcomer Elliott Heffernan), the biracial son of Saoirse Ronan’s munitions worker Rita. His dad’s roots and fate are revealed much later in the story. Paul Weller, gently low-key in his belated screen debut, is grandpa Gerald, a piano-tinkling presence in their Stepney terraced house. This is definitely not The Railway Children redux Luftwaffe bombers, shadowy silhouettes in the night sky, are the film’s deus ex machina. But Blitz never sh

It’s impossible to watch this period misfire and not wonder what the curmudgeonly, conniving newspaper theatre critic at its heart would say about it. Played by a scowling Ian McKellen as an unholy cross between Kenneth Tynan and Magneto, he’d no doubt give it fairly short shrift. Creakier than a derelict stage and often just as wooden, Leap Year director Anand Tucker’s snapshot of the viperous side of Edwardian society nods to a dozen things – snobbery, ambition, English fascism, homophobia and the power of the media among them – and gets under the skin of none of them. On the upside, it does have a wonderfully vinegary McKellen giving full value to screenwriter Patrick Marber’s juicy putdowns and catty asides as Jimmy Erskine, a self-important newspaper critic at a time when critics had something to be self-important about. Marber’s adaptation of Anthony Quinn’s 2015 novel Curtain Call serves Mark Strong, Lesley Manville and Ben Barnes less well in thin roles as figures in Erskine’s orbit, while Gemma Arterton does what she can with the guileless but ambitious actress unwittingly drawn into his foul schemes. No standing O for this one. In UK cinemas Sep 13.

The opening stretch of Walter Salles’ steely but moving family drama set in 1970s Rio de Janeiro throws you for a loop. Framed in sun-bleached Super 8, kids play on Copacabana Beach, ice creams are eaten, and fresh-from-the-waves teenagers come and go from the elegant home of the Paiva family nearby. Only the odd helicopter overhead disturbs this dreamy vision of middle-class Brazilian life.  But just as you’re settling in for Salles’ sensuous answer to a Paolo Sorrentino film, the veteran Brazilian filmmaker delivers a proper needle-scratch: those choppers are part of the country’s 1970 military junta, a dictatorship hell-bent on tracking down dissidents, including this real-life family’s patriarch Rubens (Selton Mello), a former left-wing politician. Beach football is soon a distant memory as dad is taken away to give a ‘deposition’ while leather-jacketed goons loiter awkwardly in his wife, Eunice’s front room.Played wonderfully by Fernanda Torres, Eunice is onscreen almost throughout. She’s at the centre of a family drama and political thriller that really blossoms as a survival story – about a dogged woman determined to do her best for herself and her family under brutal circumstances. Personal and political liberation come together in stirring ways In that regard, its closest kin is Costa-Gavras’s classic Missing, another film that tackles a fascist coup in ’70s South America through the eyes of fretful family members. And like it, I’m Still Here takes you right into the

The Brutalist is a major work of art that asks something from its audience but gives back in spades. Weighing in at a meaty 210 minutes, complete with an old-school opening overture and a 15-minute intermission, it’s like a trip to the pictures circa 1962. It’s even been compared with The Godfather, a parallel that would crush a lesser film like a tin can. Brady Corbet’s epic can handle the hyperbole. With his long-time co-writer Mona Fastvold, the actor-turned-filmmaker has forged a monumental parable about the false promises of the American dream, as well as the act of creation and its uneasy relationship with money, all underpinned by a rich and complex love story. It’s presented in period-evoking 70mm VistaVision, each grainy frame filled with note-perfect performances and big ideas about assimilation, trauma, and architectural form and meaning.After charting the aftermath of the Great War in The Childhood of a Leader (2015), a brooding origin story for a fictional dictator, Corbet repeats the trick with the post-World War II era. Hungarian-Jewish modernist architect László Toth (Adrien Brody, as good as he’s been since The Pianist), his wife Erzsébet (Felicity Jones) and their all-but-mute niece Zsófia (Raffey Cassidy) could easily be victims of that same dictator. They’ve survived the concentration camps but only László has escaped from Europe. He stumbles from the hold of his cargo ship in a stunning opening shot that eventually fills the screen with the Statue of Lib

It takes a film of real chutzpah to needle-drop George Michael’s ‘Father Figure’ into a dom/sub seduction scene and not only get away with possibly the most glaringly on-the-nose musical cue in the history of cinema, but have it hold the moment perfectly.Halina Reijn’s Babygirl is that movie: a deliciously barbed, but wise and ultimately hopeful investigation of female sexual desire, marriage and modern power dynamics that takes a hundred touchpoints, from ’80s erotic thrillers to the indie candour of Sex, Lies and Videotape and Secretary, and does something completely new with them. Nicole Kidman and Harrison Dickinson are magnificent as the age-(and-HR)-inappropriate duo who disappear into a supercharged office relationship that turns out to be a paradise, maze and prison – all at once.  Kidman is Romy, the respected and successful CEO of a company that manufactures robots for Amazon-like warehouses. With her iPhone glued to her palm, she’s jokingly accused of being like one of her own automatons, but her human complexities are there from the first scene. She has seemingly satisfying sex with her doting husband (Antonio Banderas), only to slip away straight afterwards to masturbate to BDSM porn. At work, twentysomething intern Samuel (Dickinson) has an eerie sense of Romy’s unfulfilled needs. He asks for her to be his mentor and she reluctantly agrees, amused by his front. That amusement turns to arousal when he speaks to her in a way no one else would dare. Soon, they’re h

Ridley Scott’s long-in-the-making Gladiator sequel is finally here, and the world’s buffest film critics have assembled to wrestle it to the ground like a charging rhino in Rome’s Colosseum. And the early verdicts are largely positive. The UK’s New Statesman calls it a ‘triumph’. Across the pond, Entertainment Weekly notes: ‘With Gladiator II, Ridley Scott reminds us why, at 86, he's still one of the most invigorating filmmakers around.’ ‘A thunderous sword-and-sandals epic with the devil in its eye,’ writes Time Out. The Guardian praises Paul Mescal’s ‘charismatic and likeable’ performance, noting that ‘there is something awe-inspiring in seeing Mescal’s triumphal march into the A-list’. The Playlist agrees, writing that ’Mescal’s affinity for conveying tumultuous emotions, plus his chiselled physique here, serves Scott’s tale well’.  There’s praise, too, for Denzel Washington as the scheming slave owner Macrinus. ‘A stellar Washington rather eclipses the rest of the cast,’ writes Robbie Collin in The Telegraph. ‘Washington deliciously steals every scene in this rousing heir to the Oscar-winning classic,’ agrees The Daily Beast. Photograph: Paramount Pictures‘Denzel Washington deliciously steals every scene’ in Gladiator II Not everyone is as fulsome, with complaints about the movie’s narrative similarities with 2000’s Gladiator. ‘We have a different gladiator and two evil emperors, but a lot of Gladiator II is familiar to the point of redundance,’ writes The Wrap. ‘There’

The central quest in Paddington in Peru involves a treasure map to a stash of Inca gold. Fittingly, the film is already fulfilling a similar role for the UK’s cinemas. The little bear’s latest adventure, his third in the franchise, has opened with a whopping £9.65 million at the UK and Irish box office since opening on Friday.  That makes it the biggest British and Irish film opening of 2024 – and the largest opening weekend haul since No Time To Die back in 2021. Only Deadpool & Wolverine (£17.2m) and Inside Out 2 (£11.3m) have outstripped its opening this year.  Paddington in Peru may not have received quite the same levels of critical acclaim as Paddington 2 – although it’s still sitting on a very healthy 92 percent on Rotten Tomatoes – but that it’s opened even more strongly than its predecessor. (Paddington 2’s opening weekend take was £8.2 million back in 2017.) And for added context, the little adopted Londoner has take a marmalade-coated hammer to the opening weekends of some other monster family films, including Wonka (opening weekend £8.9m), Mary Poppins Returns (£8.2m), and even the latest in the relentless Despicable Me franchise (£8.8m). Photograph: StudioCanalAntonio Banderas in Paddington in Peru It’s great news for anyone hoping to see a Paddington 4 one day, and even better news for cinema lovers, with UK and Irish multiplexes and picture houses desperate for a blockbuster November. And with Gladiator II and Wicked are still to come, the picture could get e

Squid Game is throwing a massive free party in London this December. Netflix is taking over London superclub Drumsheds on December 18 and throwing a free rave to mark the arrival of season 2 of the smash-hit Korean dystopian thriller. The event promises ‘live DJs, Korean food and plenty of Squid Game fun’. (NB: food and drinks won’t be free.) The old Tottenham Ikea, now the biggest nightclub in London, will make a suitably industrial setting for the massive free party: its vast main dance floor will be throwing shapes to a line-up of DJs. Not so much ‘Red Light, Green Light’, as big fish, little fish, cardboard box.The line-up of DJs, and exact timings for the night, will be unveiled soon. You just need to be 18 or over – and remember to take ID. To join the waiting list for tickets, head for the official site. You can secure a maximum of two tickets per booking. Photograph: Netflix For the unfamiliar, Squid Game season 1 followed gambling addict Seong Gi-hun (Lee Jung-jae) into a mysterious contest to win nearly $40 million. The catch? Death awaited the losers in a series of lethal games. Season 2, which launches on Boxing Day, will see Gi-hun returning to the arena in an attempt to expose the lethal, exploitative competition.  Photograph: Drumsheds x False Idols Squid Game season 2 launches on Netflix on December 26. Check out the teaser trailer below. The 50 best things to do in London. The best Netflix original series to binge.

After two adventures in his adopted hometown of London, Paddington is heading, new passport in paw, for his native corner of South America in Paddington in Peru. The threequel takes a leaf out of Werner Herzog’s book by sending the loveable spectacled bear and the whole Brown family on a hair-raising caper through Amazonian jungles and Inca ruins. Making the film, however, did not involve any madness in the jungle or the hauling of steamboats up hillsides a la Fitzcarraldo and Aguirre: the Wrath of God. Instead, as Paddington producer Rosie Alison explains, the movie used a combination of real South American locations and filming spots much closer to Windsor Gardens in a moviemaking gambit as clever as Mrs Bird and as innovative as one of Jonathan Brown’s bedroom inventions. ‘When people see the film they'll feel like they've been on an amazing holiday,’ says the producer. Read on to peak at the movie’s road (and river) map. Paddington in Peru filming locations Photograph: StudioCanalMaras, Peru 1. Maras, Peru: Paddington’s hometown After initial plans to take the whole cast out to Peru, Rosie Alison, director Dougal Wilson and the production team settled on a new approach. ‘We developed what we called his “postage stamp” technique,’ says Alison, ‘where we'd film the Browns within a little bit of forest in Hertfordshire and then put that within a bigger landscape that really exists in South America.’ The Peruvian town was a key backdrop for Paddington’s arrival in his homel

Staggeringly good telly by any standards, Netflix’s ‘Baby Reindeer’ is a drama with a highly relatable sense of place. Its themes – of toxic obsession, mental illness, half-buried trauma, and, eventually, healing – play out against a recognisable backdrop of spaces that we’ve all experienced ourselves. Pubs. Bars. Clubs. Night buses. Long, gloomy walks home. The nightmarishness of the events depicted in the show is accentuated by Edinburgh and London locations too preoccupied with their own shit to take stock of one lonely man’s implosion.The series’ creator-star Richard Gadd transplants his own one-man show from stage to screen with a level of honesty best described as ‘agonising’, determined to make ‘Baby Reindeer’ a deeply personal but also universal viewing experience that transcends tired bunny-boiling stalker clichés. Those locations play a key role in that. Here’s where to find them. Warning: contains mild ‘Baby Reindeer’ spoilers. Photograph: Netflix The Hoppy – Meadowbank, Edinburgh  ‘Baby Reindeer’s time-jumping structure is one of its great strengths: stand-up comedian Donny (a near-autobiographical version of Gadd) relives his trauma and experiences at the hands of stalker Martha (played by Jessica Gunning). The younger Donny’s fateful experiences at the Edinburgh Festival aren’t tackled until episode 3. We see him walking, wide-eyed, down the Royal Mile and through the Grassmarket, before unveiling his hit-and-miss comedy show, at a pub closer to the edge of th

Waitrose is selling Wamb chops this Christmas.  Matthew Macfadyen, Tom Wambsgan in HBO smash Succession, has lent his Emmy-winning charisma to the posh supermarket’s new bumper Christmas ad campaign. The 90-second ad, called ‘Sweet Suspicion, A Waitrose Mystery’, centres around a family of food lovers preparing for Christmas day ‘only to discover that the show-stopping No. 1 Waitrose Red Velvet Bauble Dessert has gone missing’.  Egads! Who could be behind this, the ultimate in middle-class problems? Macfadyen will be discovering the culprit in the second instalment and hopefully chewing their earlobes like barnacle meat. ‘I wonder if my extensive repertoire of past detective roles led to me to this very moment – starring in this wonderful Waitrose whodunnit,’ says Macfadyen. ‘I think… we have created a story that will have the public speculating over who the pud thief really is!’ Co-starring with him are a clutch of other familiar faces from the telly, including Afterlife’s Joe Wilkinson, Sex Education’s Rahkee Thakrar and Fleabag’s Sian Clifford. The ad is the handiwork of Lucy Forbes, director of Ben Whishaw medical drama This Is Going to Hurt, and ad agency Saatchi & Saatchi.  A second, 60-second spot will reveal the culprit at some stage over the next few weeks. The idea is to get amateur sleuths across the nation sharing their theories on social media, with a ‘physical evidence board’ at King’s Cross Station and Waitrose staff wearing ‘suspect’ t-shirts in stores

Horror, fittingly, is the unkillable genre. Just when you think it’s peaked – the exploitation-heavy ’70s, the slasher ’80s, the post-ironic ’90s – it gets a new leash of life and lurches back at you, claw hammer in hand. Like the transmogrifying alien in The Thing, there’s something in its bloodstream that keeps its scares relevant, keeps them reflecting our fears back at us in ways that are too damn frightening to resist. Halloween, however, requires a very specific kind of horror film: it’s a time when spooks and scares, ghosts and ghouls take precedence over subtext and smarts. With that, and the genre’s recent purple patch in mind, here’s a few films from the last year or two that will scare you witless this week and enhance that gothic vibe. (If you’ve got younger viewers in the house, give this more family-friendly list a go instead.) Our pick of the top Halloween movies for 2024 Photograph: A24 1. Heretic Hands up: who had Hugh Grant down as this year’s answer to the Jigsaw Killer? The erstwhile romcom softboi shows new, darker shades in a fiendishly clever horror-thriller with big ideas and even bigger shocks. It’s not Grant’s first villainous turn – hello, Daniel Cleaver and that cannibal in Cloud Atlas – but when his seemingly hospitable would-be convert lulls a pair of guileless Mormon missionaries into a hellish labyrinthine, it’s a ride you really don’t want to miss. In theaters now Photograph: Signature Entertainment 2. Terrifier 3 Who knew there was such

You’ve carved a pumpkin – looks great, top work – you’ve stocked up on candy and decked out the front porch like it’s the set of a Tim Burton movie. But there may be one variable still lingering over your Halloween: what to watch with the little ones? What’s needed is something that offers kids a frisson of spookiness and some gentle scares, but nothing that’s going to freak them out and require you to spend three hours sitting by their bedside reassuring them that Pazuzu isn’t real. Oh, and something that’s genuinely fun for grown-ups too. Here’s our pick of ten Halloween faves that hit that ghoulish sweet spot. (Oh, and grown-ups should head for this more R-rated list.) The top Halloween movies for kids Photograph: Disney 1. Coco (Disney+) Give your Halloween a celebratory vibe with an effervescent Pixar animation that sends its young musical hero into the afterlife for a race-against-the-clock adventure featuring skeletons as far as the eyeball can see. No culture does death with as much vibrancy and joy as Mexico, and this riff on the Day of the Dead celebrations is a suitably kaleidoscopic treatment of the great beyond. The actual Día de Muerto falls on Saturday, November 2, so what better time to cue it up? Photograph: Disney+Frankenweenie 2. Frankenweenie (Disney+) Nothing’s worse than the loss of a beloved family pet. Enter Tim Burton’s stop motion animation to raise the spooky possibility of reincarnating the little guy with the help of a massive electrical cha

Os fãs de Outer Banks não precisam de ser lembrados de que a nova temporada – ou a primeira parte dela, pelo menos – chegou à Netflix. Devido à sua enorme e apaixonada base de fãs, a série de romance e aventura é já um ponto de paragem obrigatória em qualquer lista das melhores séries de televisão de 2024. Mas depois de uma viagem às Caraíbas e à Amazónia na terceira temporada, os Pogue regressam a casa para a quarta temporada. Mas por quanto tempo? Faça uma viagem pelos locais mais recentes da série. Photograph: Netflix O que acontece na nova temporada? A terceira temporada, repleta de acção, foi como se Lost – Perdidos se encontrasse com Os Salteadores da Arca Perdida, com naufrágios, raptos, tesouros e uma viagem à selva da América do Sul. Houve lágrimas, risos, engate e algumas personagens importantes foram eliminadas (spoiler alert: RIP Ward e Big John). Que mais se pode querer de um pedaço de escapismo para jovens adultos da Netflix? Mas calma! A quarta temporada está aqui e há mais romance, perigo e reviravoltas no enredo. Desta vez, passaram-se 18 meses e os Pogue estão no rasto de outro tipo de tesouro. Kiara (Madison Bailey) e JJ (Rudy Pankow) são agora um casal, e Cleo (Carlacia Grant) e Pope (Jonathan Daviss) também actualizaram o seu estado civil para “apaixonadinhos”, com John B e Sarah (Madelyn Cline) a completar o grupo. A pandilha está de volta às Carolinas e a montar o acampamento na Poguelândia 2.0, um novo refúgio a partir do qual gerem uma empresa de ex

Anna Kendrick’s directorial debut, freshly landed on Netflix, is a serial-killer thriller that tells the barely-believable but entirely true story of Rodney Alcala, Cheryl Bradshaw and a fateful 1978 episode of US TV matchmaking show The Dating Game.  The Pitch Perfect and A Simple Favor star plays Bradshaw, a professional actress who agrees to go on the show, only to encounter a well-grooved system that was built on casual sexism and a near total absence of due diligence processes. The result of that system? The opportunity for a killer who preyed on young women to win a date with a potential target – in the full glare of studio lights and in front of a national TV audience.  Photograph: Leah Gallo/Netflix Is Woman of the Hour a true story?  Extraordinarily, yes. Director-actress Kendrick and screenwriter Ian McDonald dug into the 1978 taping of an episode of The Dating Game in Los Angeles and discovered a true story that played like ​a David Fincher thriller.  ‘[Anna] was just like: “I kind of ​w​anted it to be like Zodiac meets No Country for Old Men,”’ McDonald tells Indiewire. Billed on the show as a ‘successful photographer’, Texan-born Rodney Alcala appeared as one of the three bachelors that Sheryl Bradshaw (Kendrick) was invited to pick from via a series of double entendre-heavy questions and answers. At the time, the photographer, who’d studied fine art at UCLA and worked for a stint at the Los Angeles Times, had already served two terms for molesting two girls un

Aardman’s resident hardman – well, hardpenguin – is back. Feathers McGraw, the larcenous mastermind from 1993 short The Wrong Trousers, is back on evil genius duties in the new Wallace & Gromit movie. And, to borrow from Christopher Walken, the movie’s first trailer shows him in a vendetta kinda mood. Check it out below.  Clearly still stewing over his incarceration all those years ago, and still cunningly disguised as a chicken, Feathers McGraw is framing Wallace for the theft of a series of garden items. This time, Wallace doesn’t just have his trusty and very smart pooch Gromit to help out, but a new ‘smart gnome’ called Norbot. What can go wrong for the cheese-loving inventor? ‘Everything’ would be a fair guess.  The second feature-length Wallace & Gromit movie after 2005’s The Curse of the Were-Rabbit, Vengeance Most Fowl is also the debut of new-voice-of-Wallace, Ben Whitehead, who takes on the role the late Peter Sallis made so iconic.  Also starring in the voice cast are Peter Kay, Lauren Patel, Diane Morgan, Adjoa Andoh, Muzz Khan and Lenny Henry. More details on their characters are promised soon. Aardman OG and Wallace & Gromit creator Nick Park is co-directing this one with Merlin Crossingham, a 28-year Aardman veteran.  Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl lands on BBC One and iPlayer on Christmas in the UK. If you’re further afield, you can catch it on Netflix on January 3. Read our review of Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit. The 54 great

Outer Banks fans will not need reminding that the new season – or the first part of it, at least – has landed on Netflix. For its huge and passionate fanbase, the romance-and-adventure series is already a shoo-in on any list of the best TV shows of 2024. But after a trip to the Caribbean and the Amazon in season 3, the Pogues are heading home for number 4. But for how long? Take a trip behind the show’s newest locations. Photograph: Netflix What happens in the new season? The action-packed third season played out like Lost meets Raiders of the Lost Ark, with shipwrecks, kidnaps, treasures and a trip to the jungles of South America. Tears were shed, laughs were had, attractive people made out, and some major characters were dispatched (RIP Ward and Big John). What more could you want from a season of Netflix’s most popular slice of young adult escapism?  But wait! Season four is here and there’s more romance, peril and plots twists ahead. This time, it’s 18 months on and the Pogues are on the trail of another kind of treasure. Kiara (Madison Bailey) and JJ (Rudy Pankow) are now an item, and Cleo (Carlacia Grant) and Pope (Jonathan Daviss) are also updating their relationship status to ‘loved up’, with John B and Sarah (Madelyn Cline) rounding out the posse. The gang are back to the Carolinas and setting up camp at Poguelandia 2.0, a new haven from which they run a charter tour company and bait shop. But more perils and adventures await them when the mysterious Wes Genrette (