Tom Huddleston

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

British cinema is as diverse and ever-shifting as the country itself. In 2024, it encompasses everything from David Lean’s historical epics to Ken Loach’s socialist missives, and Steve McQueen’s muscular biographical dramas to Joanna Hogg’s intimate mood pieces. Danny Boyle’s pitch-black comedy ‘Trainspotting’ is a quintessential British film – but so too, in another way, is the Richard Curtis-penned romcom ‘Four Weddings and a Funeral’. And more recent dazzling recent such as Charlotte Wells' aching coming-of-age tale ‘Aftersun’ and Molly Branning Walker's prickly, ambiguous ‘How to Have Sex’ are pushing the medium into bold, bracing new territory. In compiling this list of the best British movies of all-time, we surveyed a diverse array of actors, directors, writers, producers, critics and industry heavyweights, including Wes Anderson, Mike Leigh, Ken Loach, Sam Mendes, David Morrissey, Sally Hawkins, Thandiwe Newton and the late Terence Davies. Unsurprisingly, it’s a richly varied and fascinating collection of must-see movies. Written by Dave Calhoun, Tom Huddleston, David Jenkins, Derek Adams, Geoff Andrew, Adam Lee Davies, Paul Fairclough, Wally Hammond, Alim Kheraj, Matthew Singer & Phil de Semlyen Recommended: 💂 50 great British actors🔥 The 100 best movies of all-time🎥 The 100 best movies of the 20th century so far🇬🇧 The 100 best London songs 

Hollywood actors love to make a fuss about how ‘real’ their backgrounds were: my parents split up! My boyfriend was a drug addict! I was raised a Scientologist! But Lupita Nyong’o is the real deal: the daughter of a prominent Kenyan opposition leader, she grew up in Nairobi never knowing if her dad would come home or be confined to prison without trial. After graduating from film school in the US, she returned to Africa to work as a production assistant on the likes of ‘The Constant Gardener’, whose star Ralph Fiennes urged her to get into acting. Flash forward nine years and she’s picking up the Best Supporting Actress Oscar for her first serious role in ‘12 Years a Slave’ and gearing up to play CGI character Maz Kanata in ‘Star Wars: The Force Awakens’. Talk about a meteoric rise. As a vocal supporter of the #OscarsSoWhite campaign – and as one of the few black women to actually win an Oscar – Nyong’o is central to the debate about diversity in cinema that’s been raging in recent years. In that context, her new film ‘Queen of Katwe’ feels timely: it may have been produced by Walt Disney Pictures, but don’t go expecting fairy princesses and talking frogs, or indeed any white stars to keep Middle American audiences happy. The film is based on the true story of Phiona Mutesi, a girl from the slums of Kampala, Uganda, who found her calling as a chess prodigy. It was shot entirely on location, and strikes a perfect balance between twinkly charm and real-world roughness. 'Queen o

A wise, violent man once asked: ‘Do you like scary movies?’ The better question, though, is who doesn’t like scary movies? Is there any feeling more exhilarating than a jolt of fright, especially if it’s in the form of entertainment? Sure, we all have our limits: not everyone is up for watching a demonic clown saw a woman in half. (Although the box office returns suggest a surprising number of people are.) But even the most squeamish scaredy cats enjoy a light bump in the night every now and then, especially when October rolls around. Horror is the midst of a major renaissance moment, commercially and critically. In 2024, some of the biggest, buzziest movies of the year – I Saw the TV Glow, Longlegs, The Substance and the aforementioned box-office shocker Terrifier 3 – belong to the genre. But horror has a long history, dating back to the earliest days of cinema. Looking to have your nerves rattled? These 100 classics are guaranteed to have you hiding behind your couch by the time the credits roll. Written by Tom Huddleston, Cath Clarke, Dave Calhoun, Nigel Floyd, Phil de Semlyen, David Ehrlich, Joshua Rothkopf, Nigel Floyd, Andy Kryza, Alim Kheraj and Matthew Singer Recommended: 🔪 The best new horror movies of 2024 (so far)🔥 The 100 best movies of all time👹 Cinema’s creepiest anthology horror movies🩸 The 15 scariest horror movies based on true stories

Damn it feels good to be a gangster. Or at least, that’s what the movies tell us. In reality, it seems like a bum gig. Always looking over your shoulder, unsure of who you can trust. Do you even have time to enjoy all that ill-gotten money you’re making? On screen, though, the gangster life has a certain glamour, even if it depicts many of those same drawbacks. Living outside the law? Having money, power, respect? Sounds pretty fun, at least to experience vicariously for two hours at a time. And so, here is our tribute to cinema’s gangsters, in all their many forms, from hard-boiled mobsters to yakuza enforcers to street-level bosses ruling over city blocks. Gangster movies are themselves diverse: some are loud and violent, others smooth and calm. Some are horrific, others romantic or funny or just plain weird. So let’s crack open the bank vault and look around – because in these films, crime does pay. Recommended: 😬 The 100 best thriller movies of all-time💣 The 101 best action movies ever made🔪 The 31 best serial killer movies🕵️ 40 murder mysteries to test your sleuthing skills to the max

You can’t talk about the best songs of all time without talking about the Beatles. In fact, they’ll likely come up again and again and again. We know them for screaming girls, shaggy hair and psychedelia, but we mostly know them for making bangers. Lots of them.  So, choosing the best from the fab four is no easy feat. But not all Beatles tunes are created equal, and it’s worth cutting out the duds to experience them at their very best. We’ve polled the biggest Beatlemaniacs on our team to bring you this ultimate list, from the gruffer Hamburg days to their Ravi Shankar era. If your favourite isn’t on there, fight us. Here are our top Beatles songs ever recorded.  RECOMMENDED:❤️ The best love songs🎸 The best rock songs🎶 The best cover songs🎤 The best karaoke songs

The geeks have inherited the Earth – and the film industry. Once thought of as the realm of shut-ins and those folks you see roleplaying in the park, fantasy movies are now huge business. All snark aside, though, that’s probably a good thing. If one of the main points of cinema is to take you somewhere else, there are few genres as transportive as fantasy. And with the real world as rough as it is today, all of us could use an escape to lands of elves, dragons, superheroes and David Bowie in a revealing leotard. But the movies on this list are limited to swords-and-orcs epics and  comic-book blockbusters. Sure, there are quite a bit of those on here. By our definition, though, fantasy encompasses many other forms of imaginative whimsy, whether it’s the surreal vision of Luis Buñuel or the cartoon chaos of Who Framed Roger Rabbit. So: wanna get away? These 50 films will take you where you want to go. Recommended: 🦸🏿 50 amazing comic-book movies🛸 The 100 best sci-fi movies of all time👹 The 50 best monster movies ever made👾 The 50 best ’80s movies, ranked

Were the ’90s the best decade for movies ever? It’s in the running. So much happened. It’s when the indies went big and blockbusters got even bigger. Global cinema reached wider audiences than ever before, while filmmakers in America and Britain took harder swings, exploring topics that previously felt taboo. It was a truly thrilling time to be alive and going to the movies. You really should’ve been there! If you weren’t, never fear. Time Out’s writers have put their Gen X and elder millennial heads together to determine the greatest movies of the 1990s. Sure, you’ll see Tarantino, The Matrix and dozens of John Malkovichs. But there are plenty of surprises, too. So break out the Starter jacket and chug that bottle of Josta in the very back of the cooler – these are the 50 best ’90s movies. Written by Cath Clarke, Gail Tolley, Chris Waywell, Dave Calhoun, Tom Huddleston, Kate Lloyd, James Manning & Matthew Singer Recommended: 🔥 The 100 best movies of all-time🤣 The 100 best comedies of all-time🌏 The 50 best foreign films of all-time🎸 The 50 best ‘90s songs 

What is war good for? Absolutely nothing, of course. That said, war has produced some pretty good movies, and none more than World War II. It has fascinated filmmakers more than any other conflict, which is understandable, given the atrocities it involved and its impact on human history. So many movies have been made about it that it stands apart from other war movies as a genre unto itself.  It’s rather daunting, then, to choose the best World War II movies ever made. But we know someone who has thoughts on the subject: director Quentin Tarantino, a man who knows quite a bit about making a great WW2 film himself. He and a grizzled squad of Time Out writers helped craft this definitive list of the greatest movies centred around that global battle, and it includes screen-filling epics, intimate dramas, devastating documentaries, and even a comedy or two.  Written by Tom Huddleston, Adam Lee Davies, Paul Fairclough, Anna Smith, David Jenkins, Dan Jolin, Phil de Semlyen, Alim Kheraj & Matthew Singer Recommended: ⚔️ The 50 best war movies of all-time🎖️ The best World War I movies, ranked by historical accuracy🇺🇸 The 20 best Memorial Day movies

Everyone loves a good action movie, even if some won’t admit it. Film school snobs may pretend to turn up their noses, but no matter how cultured you’d like to think you are, there’s a part of your lizard brain that loves explosions and shootouts and badass one-liners – and it needs to be satisfied.  But action flicks needn’t be dumb, loud or graphic to succeed. Some find beauty in orchestrated violence. Others might crane-kick you right in the heart. Some even have – gasp! – character development. And so, to help put together this definitive list of the greatest action movies ever made, we reached out to some of the people who understand the action genre better than anyone, from Die Hard director John McTiernan to Machete himself, Danny Trejo. Pull the pin, light the fuse and batten down the hatches – these are the most pulse-pounding, edge-of-your-seat thrill rides ever put to film.  Written by Eddy Frankel, Eddy Frankel, Yu An Su, Joshua Rothkopf, Trevor Johnston, Ashley Clark, Grady Hendrix, Tom Huddleston, Keith Uhlich, Dave Calhoun, Phil de Semlyen, Dave Calhoun and Matthew Singer Recommended: 🔥 The 100 best movies of all-time🪖 The 18 greatest stunts in cinema (as picked by the greatest stunt people)🥋 The 25 best martial arts movies of all-time

It’s coming. The days are getting shorter, the air is getting chillier. Pumpkin spice is wafting through the air, and the rattling sound of 20-foot-tall Home Depot skeletons emerging from their hibernation is getting louder. That’s right: it’s almost spooky season. And that means a month-long horror movie binge is right around the corner, too.  Of course, depending on when you might be reading this, the weather could still be hot, humid and not all that terror-appropriate yet. But really, it’s never too early to start planning your Halloween viewing. And luckily, Netflix already has a ton of frightful content ready to be streamed. In addition to classic and original horror movies, the platform also has several shows and miniseries sure to send shivers down your spine. Whether you’re looking for something lightly spooky or full-on nightmare inducing, these 20 treats should do the trick. Recommended: 😱 The 24 best horror movies streaming on Netflix UK😨 The 100 best horror movies of all-time👹 The 50 best monster movies ever made🔪 The best serial killer movies of all-time

In the past few decades, queer cinema has made major strides – not just in reaching mainstream audiences, but in redefining what ‘queer cinema’ actually looks like. In the past, if gay lives and issues were ever allowed to be addressed on screen at all, the viewpoint was often limited to that of white, cisgender men. But the LGBTQ+ experience is not a monolith, and recent years have seen the scope of queer film expand to include the voices of the trans community and people of colour.  Obviously, there are still many barriers left to breach, but the progress of the last half-century or so deserves to be celebrated. To that end, we enlisted some LGBTQ+ cultural pioneers, as well as Time Out writers to assist in assembling a list of the greatest gay films ever made.  Written by Cath Clarke, Dave Calhoun, Tom Huddleston, Alim Kheraj, Guy Lodge, Ben Walters and Matthew Singer. RECOMMENDED: 🔥 The 100 best movies of all-time🎥 The 65 best documentaries of all-time😍 The 100 best romantic films of all-time🤣 The 100 best comedies of all-time

It all began on a beach in Hawaii. As Star Wars exploded into cinemas in May 1977, George Lucas was far, far away: fearing negative press he’d escaped to Mauna Kea, inviting his friend Steven Spielberg along for moral support. Idly musing over their next projects, Spielberg announced that he’d always wanted to direct a James Bond movie. But Lucas had something better up his sleeve: inspired by the adventure serials that had thrilled him as a kid, he had for some years been developing the character of Indiana Smith, an archeologist-adventurer on the trail of an ancient Biblical treasure. Spielberg was hooked – just as long as Lucas agreed to change the guy’s last name.  Tom Selleck was actually offered the role only to drop out due to his commitment on Magnum, P.I.. But they landed on precisely the right guy: it’s now impossible to imagine anyone other than Harrison Ford in the role, his wry, world-weary and effortlessly charming performance the anchor that holds all the mayhem together. It’s impossible to imagine anyone but Harrison Ford in the role And what mayhem: probably the first Hollywood action movie to truly merit that description, Raiders of the Lost Ark starts full-pelt as Indy raids a South American temple only to find himself on the receiving end of arrows, snakes and that iconic rolling boulder. But it’s the central chase sequence that really ups the stakes, as Indy pursues the Ark on horseback through the Egyptian desert, pummelled and pounded by rocks, trucks

This review was updated on September 21, 2024 A horror film in the most punishingly literal sense, Tobe Hooper’s DIY shocker has lost none of its single-minded power in the 50-odd years since it was unleashed upon an unsuspecting public. Co-written, produced and directed by Hooper on a budget somewhere in the region of $100,000, the film utilised mostly untrained actors and a semi-professional crew, all working on a punishing seven-days-a-week schedule in blistering heat.  Envisioned by Hooper as a response to all the horrors that were being piped into American homes at the time, from footage of the war in Vietnam to graphic traffic accidents on the local news, the script was inspired in part by the acts of backwoods murderer and grave robber Ed Gein who, like the film’s childlike monster Leatherface (Gunnar Hansen) made trinkets and even furniture out of human bones and skin. Entirely spuriously, Hooper’s movie even opens with a claim that the ‘film you are about to see is true’.  It’s essentially an extremely nasty Scooby-Doo episode The basic plot has been ripped off and riffed on so many times that it’s easy to lose sight of the fact that it’s essentially an extremely nasty Scooby-Doo episode: a gaggle of hippies, led by original ‘final girl’ Marilyn Burns, journey in their beat-up camper van to find their dead grandfather’s now-abandoned homestead, only to stumble across a family of cannibalistic lunatics who proceed to hack them to pieces one at a time.  Though relativ

This review was updated on September 21, 2024 ‘They don't know why, they just remember. Remember that they want to be in here.’ If George Romero’s groundbreaking, self-produced debut Night of the Living Dead had worn its satirical elements relatively lightly – a Black hero, a dash of generation-gap angst, some timely, Vietnam-era newsreel-style shakeycam – by the time of this long-delayed sequel, Romero had evidently decided that subtlety was overrated. He was right, too: the tale of a group of survivors from a zombie apocalypse who hole up in a suburban shopping mall only to discover that the undead are instinctively drawn to the place, this is sledgehammer satire and all the better for it; a hilariously blunt sideswipe at unthinking consumerism. Which isn’t to imply for a moment that Dawn of the Dead is not a clever film. While it may be stuffed with cheap thrills – from buckets of inventive gore to a giddy, fist-pumping truck-based action sequence – the script itself is as sharp as a pin, plunging us head-first into the crisis and refusing to let up, while at the same time finding ample room for character development and audience identification (the fact that the terrific cast pretty much vanished without trace in the years afterwards is criminal).  A tough film to finance and a controversially violent one on release A tough film to finance and a controversially violent one on release – hence the multiplicity of different cuts – Dawn of the Dead would inspire a whole wav

This review was updated on September 21, 2024 Blending humour and sadness is among the trickiest balancing acts in cinema, but for a brief moment in 1987, writer-director Bruce Robinson made it look easy. Drawing on his own experiences as a struggling actor in the late 1960s – and taking inspiration from real-life figures including the great Italian director Franco Zeffirelli, whose alleged pursuit of the young Robinson fed into the character of the predatory Uncle Monty – Robinson first envisioned the material as a novel, before being persuaded to transform it into a screenplay.  Produced by Handmade Films – whose chief financier, George Harrison, personally signed off on the project, and even allowed his song ‘While My Guitar Gently Weeps’ to be used in the film – Withnail and I was shot on location in London and the Lake District (Monty’s cottage still stands, though sadly the Mother Black Cap pub was demolished in 2011), with a largely unknown cast and an inexperienced director.  Nevertheless, it was a classic from the first: reviews at the time recognised the quality of its direction and performances – playing the louche, devious, ultimately tragic Withnail made Richard E Grant an overnight star – while huge chunks of the script instantly entered the cultural lexicon, particularly those lines uttered by Ralph Brown’s antenna-haired, permanently wasted Danny the Dealer: you could barely move for Camberwell Carrots in the early ’90s.  The louche, devious, ultimately tragi

This review was updated on September 21, 2024 Selected by Time Out as its best movie ever Stanley Kubrick’s gargantuan interplanetary pilgrimage tracks humanity’s progress from the prehistoric plains of Africa, where proto-human apes discover a consciousness-expanding alien monolith that grants them the wit to use tools, to the start of the 21st century, and a human voyage to the moons of Jupiter where the evolutionary promise of the monolith will finally be realised.  Working with British sci-fi author Arthur C Clarke – whose short story ‘The Sentinel’ provided some of the initial concepts – Kubrick’s intention was to make what he described as ‘the proverbial good science fiction movie’: a film entirely free of scaly monsters, scantily clad princesses and laser-packing heroes, where the focus was on real-world speculative science rather than space opera. Graceful, inquisitive, groundbreaking and endlessly rewatchable  Needless to say, he succeeded. Released over a year before the first manned moon mission, 2001 mirrors the Apollo project in its sense of absolute, painstaking precision: like the lunar missions, this is a film where every single element works perfectly, where every person involved – from the designers to the special effects technicians to the actors to Mission Commander Kubrick himself – has given their total focus to the project. Accusations of emotional coldness are hard to refute, but any remoteness is offset not just by the musical choices – from Richard

This review was updated on September 21, 2024 The slasher movie had been bubbling under for a while by the time John Carpenter co-wrote, directed and scored Halloween. Mario Bava’s Bay of Blood (1971) had birthed the whole series-of-inventive-kills plotline; The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974) had added both the memorable (and marketable) masked killer aspect and given us our first ‘final girl’; while Black Christmas (1974) had brought not just the seasonal fun, but the teen-girls-in-peril angle. Halloween wasn’t even Carpenter’s idea: two independent producers, Irwin Yablans and Moustapha Akkad, actually approached him, asking if he’d deliver them a low-budget horror flick about a killer who stalks babysitters.  But Halloween was still Carpenter’s baby, and the entire slasher subgenre that followed - one that, in the 2020s, shows no signs of flagging – would, for better or worse, never have existed without it. Penned by Carpenter and his then partner, producer Debra Hill, the script was written in ten days, and it shows: there’s nothing remotely superfluous here, just forward momentum and driving plot. It’s left largely to the cast to lend the film personality, which they do in spades: Jamie Lee Curtis’s casting was almost accidental (Carpenter wanted someone else) but the film might not have worked at all without her grounding, relatable presence (the fact that her mum was Janet Leigh from Psycho is just a great added Easter egg); meanwhile, Donald Pleasence adds a touch of

This review was updated on September 21, 2024 Voted the greatest horror movie ever by Time Out’s expert panel of filmmakers, horror icons and enthusiasts, William Friedkin’s full-throttle adaptation of William Peter Blatty’s novel works because it fuses the extreme and the everyday, taking a potentially absurd tale of demonic possession and placing it in an ordinary suburban home, incorporating some of the most extreme imagery ever devised but shooting it like straight drama.  It’s also a deeply unusual movie, opening with a lengthy, near-wordless prologue in Iraq which seems to exist purely to invoke a sense of otherworldly dread, before switching abruptly into what could almost be a domestic comedy-drama about a movie-star Mum (Ellen Burstyn) and her cute, comically outspoken 12-year-old daughter, Regan (Linda Blair).  It’s perhaps the most upsetting single image in a Hollywood film The horrors start fairly subtle – a shaking bed, a spot of memorably foul language – before increasing spectacularly in intensity; the crucifix masturbation that arrives roughly halfway through remains perhaps the most upsetting and transgressive single image in a Hollywood film. It’s notable, however, that in a movie crammed with outrageous supernatural horrors – revolving heads, levitation, buckets of pea-soup vomit – the scenes that hit hardest are those in hospital, as the confused and helpless Regan is subjected to a series of invasive procedures, all under the gaze of Friedkin’s implacable

This review was updated on September 21, 2024 The film that changed everything. First-time director Orson Welles, 28, may not have invented all of the groundbreaking techniques he employed in Citizen Kane – from deep-focus photography to the incorporation of newsreel footage via densely overlapping dialogue and the film’s labyrinthine flashback-within-flashback structure – but he was the first to bring all these ideas together in a single work. The result is still dizzying, still enthralling, and still devastating in its emotional impact. Renowned for his work in the New York theatre and on radio, where he scandalised America with his all-Black stage production of ‘Macbeth’ and his terrifyingly realistic broadcast based on ‘The War of the Worlds’, Welles was wooed to Hollywood with a controversial contract promising him total creative control – unheard of in the days of the studio system – and the chance not only to direct, but to write and star in his own movies.  As witty, tragic, unlikely, unique and fascinating as ever Penned by Welles in partnership with screenwriter Herman J Mankiewicz – a complex relationship explored in David Fincher’s 2020 biopic Mank – Citizen Kane is at heart a satire on wealth and power in America, inspired at least in part by the life of billionaire media mogul William Randolph Hearst, whom Mankiewicz knew and loathed. Played by Welles himself in various degrees of ageing makeup, Charles Foster Kane starts out as a crusading newsman delivering t

This review was updated on September 21, 2024 In late ’70s America, silliness ruled. Vietnam was over, Nixon was gone, and those who could afford it just wanted to have a good time. Sure, there was widespread poverty, racial strife and a wider world teetering on the brink, but who cared about all that? Silly movies like Smokey and the Bandit and Grease topped the box office; silly records like ‘Disco Duck’, ‘Y.M.C.A.’ and ‘Rasputin’ rocked the charts, and silly comedies like Saturday Night Live and Monty Python’s Flying Circus were being widely quoted on college campuses up and down the country.  But in this age of silliness, no one was sillier or more popular than Steve Martin. Part lowbrow old-fashioned entertainer, part ironic, postmodern anti-comedian, Martin was already a platinum-selling recording artist and an arena-filling performer. The transition to cinema was inevitable; as was the fact that whatever he came out with, it would be spectacularly silly.  The result remains the funniest film of Martin’s career What wasn’t set in stone was whether or not it’d be funny. Martin’s live act may have been hugely popular but it was also in many ways deeply strange, relying on physical humour, repeated catchphrases (‘excuuuuuuse me!’) and moments where the jokes fell entirely flat on purpose. Luckily, he found the perfect collaborator: Carl Reiner, a comedian turned director who was able to take Martin’s stream-of-consciousness comic style and, with the aid of co-writer Carl G

This review was updated on September 21, 2024 Voted the Best Comedy Movie of All Time by a Time Out panel of filmmakers, comedy stars, critics and experts, Rob Reiner’s intimate evocation of ‘the sights, the sounds, the smells of a hard-working rock band on the road’ remains entirely unimprovable, four decades on. Shot for a relative pittance and starring three comedians pretty much no one had heard of, the film would go on to become arguably the most quotable comedy ever made, or at least this side of Monty Python and the Holy Grail. What’s remarkable about that, however, is not that Spinal Tap contains dialogue worthy of being ranked alongside the all-time great comic screenplays, but that almost every word of it was improvised. Shooting largely on location with only a basic idea of what each scene would contain, actor-writers Christopher Guest, Michael McKean and Harry Shearer – plus a supporting cast largely made up of their friends and collaborators – would improvise at great length, shooting as much as 100 hours of footage in total. Indeed, so much of the film was made up on the hoof that Reiner wanted to credit the screenplay to the entire cast, only to be denied by the Writers Guild of America. It would go on to inspire an entire genre Reiner and his three leads would also write all the music for the film, resulting not just in some of the finest comedy lyrics ever written (‘the looser the waistband, the deeper the quicksand / or so I have read’) but some of the crunc

This review was updated on September 21, 2024 The genre parody had existed before Airplane!. In the ’60s and ’70s, movies as diverse as Carry On Screaming!, Monty Python and the Holy Grail and Blazing Saddles had lampooned specific genres, often very successfully. But Airplane! was the first to fully exploit the possibilities of the form, to take the by-then familiar framework of the airborne disaster movie and use it not so much as a source of humour, but simply as a skeleton on which to hang as many jokes as humanly possible. Never before had any movie displayed such a single-minded dedication to scoring laughs, at the expense of absolutely everything else: eschewing the visual splendour of Holy Grail or the political nous of Blazing Saddles, here was a film whose only reason for existing was to deliver jokes, as many of them as possible, to pummel the audience into submission with sheer overwhelming comic firepower.  What’s most extraordinary, looking back, is that the vast majority of them are really good jokes – not always clever, not always tasteful, but for the most part really damn funny. From wordplay – ‘don’t call me Shirley’; ‘I’ve been nervous lots of times’; ‘Me John. Big tree!’ – to visual gags – the magic egg; the automatic pilot; Nun’s Life – to jokes that really oughtn’t to work but do (‘Joey, have you ever been in a Turkish prison?’), gag-for-gag it’s almost certainly the funniest film ever made. Which is an achievement that can’t be undervalued: even writer

This review was updated on September 21, 2024Of all the great cast lists in Hollywood history, pound-for-pound the best of them might very well be Alien. Of an only seven-strong ensemble, three – Sigourney Weaver, John Hurt and Ian Holm – were Oscar nominees, while two more – Harry Dean Stanton and Yaphet Kotto – belong on any cinephile’s list of the all-time great character actors. Between them, they bring not just a depth and seriousness to what could have been a cheap exercise in interplanetary schlock, but a vital sense of relatability and realism: these characters are working stiffs, they’re you and me – so when they start getting taken apart, we really feel it.  Of course, the cast isn’t the only thing about Ridley Scott’s movie that’s essentially perfect. The narrative runs like clockwork, drawing us slowly, almost gently into the world of the film before unleashing a string of extraordinary, stake-raising shocks: the downed ship, the eggs, the facehugger, and of course, that dinner scene, which totally upends the film and seems to take the cast by surprise as much as the viewer. Scott’s direction is gorgeous, from the gliding grace of the early scenes to the up-close handheld ruthlessness of Weaver’s climactic race against time. It’s a workmanlike world invaded by an unstoppable force Then of course there’s the design, not just HR Giger’s predatory, leather-clad penis-with-teeth or those monstrous, fossilised ‘space jockeys’ but the costumes and the computer banks an

He’s the last of the rock star film directors, an idiosyncratic genius who brought an avant garde edge to the Hollywood mainstream. His TV show ‘Twin Peaks’ revolutionised the small screen forever, while movies like ‘Blue Velvet’, ‘Wild at Heart’ and ‘Mulholland Drive’ seduced audiences with a blend of dark humour, extreme violence, heartfelt melodrama and dangerous eroticism. Now, a unique event in London is set to celebrate the work of David Lynch with a weekend of celebrity guests, live performance, music, art, cosplay and film screenings. Running from September 14-15 at the London Irish Centre, ‘A Gathering of the Angels’ will invite attendees to enter a world both beautiful and strange. Photograph: Universal PicturesMulholland Drive (2001) Among the special guests attending the festival will be several actors from Lynch’s movies including Dexter Fletcher and Lesley Dunlop, who each made youthful appearances in Lynch’s London-set masterpiece ‘The Elephant Man’. Fletcher has of course gone on to become a highly successful actor-director in his own right with films like ‘Sunshine on Leith’ and ‘Rocketman’ on his CV, while Dunlop would go on to star in ‘Emmerdale’. The pair will answer audience questions following a special screening of the film. Also attending will be Dana Ashbrook, who played teen heartthrob and all-round bad boy Bobby Briggs in ‘Twin Peaks’ and its big-screen spinoff ‘Fire Walk With Me’, before returning as a reformed character in 2017’s ‘Twin Peaks: Th

Located in one of London’s most atmospheric local cinemas, the Lexi Film School in Kensal Rise isn’t some stuffy, snobby, nose-in-the-books cinéaste course. It’s a series of public screenings, with each film introduced by a notable expert in the field. This term runs from March to May, with six films and six speakers including Guardian critic Peter Bradshaw, who will speak about apocalyptic documentary ‘Homo Sapiens’; film journo (and Time Out alumnus) David Jenkins, who will introduce bracing Argentinian drama ‘The Headless Woman’; and excitingly, an appearance from ‘Suffragette’ director Sarah Gavron, who will present an exclusive early screening of her brand new film ‘Rocks’, a scrappy tale of London teenagers that’s been garnering great reviews at film festivals. The programme also includes British new-wave masterpiece ‘A Taste of Honey’, Beyoncé’s favourite experimental drama ‘Daughters of the Dust’ and intimate relationship comedy ‘Losing Ground’. Every £9 ticket comes with introductory notes written by the speaker, plus a month’s free subscription to MUBI. Head to the official site for all the info. Find out where the Lexi features on our poll of Londoners’ favourite cinemas.   

Secret Cinema’s latest interactive experience is a leap into the unknown for its creators as much as their audience. Can an event traditionally tied to a specific, well-loved film – and culminating in a screening – still work when the anchor is a streaming series? Is it really Secret Cinema without the ‘cinema’ part? As always, the creative team has gone to extraordinary lengths to immerse attendees in the world of the show. It’s the Fourth of July and the town of Hawkins, Indiana is hosting the biggest high school reunion party of all time. Mulleted, deely-boppered and dolled up in their shiniest ’80s threads, the students have gathered at the neon-drenched Starcourt Mall to shop, stuff their faces with Scoops Ahoy ice cream and party the night away. But in the darkness on the edge of town, something wicked is lurking… The mall is spectacularly recreated inside and out, with a video bar, a fashion emporium and an old-school arcade where punters can remind themselves how infuriatingly impossible early console machines were (I spent 25 minutes on Donkey Kong and didn’t make it past the first screen). Hits of the era blast from the public address system and those inclined can take part in dance-offs and energetic, Jane Fonda-style fitness workouts in the lobby. But it’s not just about retro rubbernecking: there are stories to follow too, mysteries to uncover and hidden spaces to explore. Actors in character weave through the crowd, pursuing leads of their own and encouraging th

He hasn't made a film since 2008's Bafta-winning Wallace and Gromit short 'A Matter of Loaf and Death'. So the promise of a new film from animator, writer and all-round national treasure Nick Park has us very excited. Set – as the title implies – in prehistoric times, 'Early Man' features Eddie Redmayne as the voice of Dug, a decent caveman whose tribe is under attack by a more advanced army of Bronze Age warriors led by the villainous Nooth (voiced by Tom Hiddleston). There's no sign of Nooth in this just-released teaser trailer, but we do get a good look at Dug and his piggy pal Hognob, who comes off a lot like Gromit with tusks. ‘Early Man’ isn't out until the start of 2018, but we’re officially looking forward to it. And we’re not the only Nick Park fans getting a bit overexcited...   Been working with the great Nick Park and Aardman on their hilarious new film, @earlymanmovie. He is absolutely as brilliant as you might expect. Sometimes he makes me laugh so much I have to leave the sound studio for five minutes and calm down and have another go. A photo posted by Tom Hiddleston (@twhiddleston) on Oct 20, 2016 at 3:45am PDT   The first clip from Nick Park’s ‘Early Man’ and A look at Tom Hiddleston’s role in ‘Early Man’.

David Lynch’s dizzying detective show ‘Twin Peaks’ features some of the most memorable villains in TV history, from double-denim demon Killer Bob in the original series to Kyle MacLachlan’s gurning greaser Mr C in the recent reboot. For its tenth birthday bonanza, the immersive, weekend-long Twin Peaks UK Festival has invited three of the show’s most notable bad boys over to London to meet their British fans. From the 1990s show, there is Kenneth Welsh, AKA impish master of disguise Windom Earle. Meanwhile, from the reboot they’re bringing George Griffith, who played murderous sidekick ‘that fucker’ Ray Monroe, and John Pirrucello, AKA Deputy Chad Broxford, the dirtiest cop in 'Twin Peaks'. They will be joined by the usual array of special appearances and live acts, from performances by the long-running Double R Club cabaret troupe to a Roadhouse stage crammed with Lynch-inspired bands. Add in movie screenings, a live owl show, doughnuts, limitless coffee and a chance to lose yourself in the immersive ‘Black Lodge Experience’ and this should be as wild, weird and wondrous as the series itself. The Twin Peaks UK Festival runs from Oct 5-6 at Stoke Newington Town Hall. See the official website for more info and tickets.What’s on this Bank Holiday weekend? Check out our guide to the best things to do in London.

How do you spot a great film? Is it widespread critical acclaim? A regular spot in all-time top ten lists? A famous director and a bunch of big stars? Or is it possible that all those things – whisper it now – don’t actually matter? A weekly programme of screenings introduced by a critic, filmmaker or academic, the Lexi Film School aims to expand the definition of ‘classic’ cinema. Sure, they show the odd established masterpiece – the upcoming run includes ‘Rome: Open City’, Robert Rossellini’s neo-realist masterwork shot on scraps of film in the wake of the fall of fascism, alongside the timeless ‘Saturday Night and Sunday Morning’, in which Albert Finney plays a Nottingham factory worker railing against the strictures of ’60s society. And art enthusiasts won’t want to miss ‘Frida’, the controversial, bracingly original biopic of Mexican painter Frida Kahlo. But the season also includes a fistful of titles we’re betting you haven’t even heard of (we hadn’t, and we’ve seen quite a lot of films). There’s ‘Of Love & Law’, a recent documentary about the first openly gay lawyers in Japan and the fight they face to be taken seriously in their profession. There’s ‘Saawariya’, a Bollywood romance with an unexpectedly dark edge. And there’s the fiercely radical ‘Angela Davis: Portrait of a Revolutionary’, a 1972 doc following the woman who came to symbolise the Black Power movement. The Lexi Film School runs from April 29, every Monday at 6pm. Each screening will be preceded by an in

One of our favourite small cinemas celebrates its tenth birthday this month. Here’s everything you need to know about the lovely Lexi in Kensal Rise:1. It shows everything from blockbusters to cult classics While the main programme consists of new-release indies, arthouse titles and the occasional big-ticket blockbuster, the Lexi also finds room for more offbeat fare like their ongoing Film School project (see below). In this anniversary month there’s loads of juicy extras to sink your teeth into, including a screening of ‘The Harder They Come’ complete with a slap-up Jamaican feast. 2. It’s got heaps of celebrity fans This summer, Lexi-goers got the surprise of their lives when Tom Hiddleston showed up unannounced, to discuss his acting debut ‘Unrelated’. And regulars still speak in hushed tones of the time Mark Rylance introduced a screening of ‘Night of the Hunter’ with an impromptu calypso number… 3. It looks – and sounds – amazing From the outside, the Lexi is recognisable for its old-school marquee sign – funded earlier this year with a Kickstarter campaign - and for the graffitied front wall that reads ‘I AM A CINEMA – LOVE ME’. But it’s quality on the inside too, with a plush auditorium and great sound. 4. It’s truly independent In London, most little cinemas are linked in one way or another to the big chains like Picturehouse and Curzon. The Lexi is one of the few genuinely independent venues in the city, free to pick its own film programme.   Lex appeal: inside the

It’s been a London institution for nine years, and in the wake of last year’s dizzying, controversial TV reboot the UK’s only official ‘Twin Peaks’ festival is set to be bigger and weirder than ever. Over the weekend of September 29-30, the London Irish Centre and the adjoining Camden Square Gardens will play host to an extravagantly costumed cavalcade of Lynchian obsessives, not to mention guests from the show, musicians, cabaret artists, DJs and doughnut delivery drivers. This year’s lineup includes appearances from Kimmy Robertson, who plays scatterbrained receptionist Lucy Moran both in the original series and the 2017 reboot, and Rebekah Del Rio, the extraordinary singer who performed a haunting Spanish-language version of Roy Orbison’s ‘Crying’ (‘Llorando’) in Lynch’s ‘Mulholland Drive’. Ms Del Rio will be performing live at the festival, alongside ‘Peaks’-inspired cabaret from the Double R Club, a lineup of live bands and some actual performing owls, which may or may not be what they seem. There’ll also be screenings, an art gallery and interactive events, and for the first time, the festival will include a Virtual Reality experience, which sounds potentially bloody terrifying. Standard tickets for the festival are now on sale, starting from £85 – but grab them fast, the VIP tickets were snapped up in less than two minutes. We’ll see you in the trees… Head to the official site for the skinny, or check in with your local log lady.The biggest and best films to see this s

Des robots ! Des vaisseaux spatiaux ! Des sabres laser ! De l'inceste ! Avant 'Les derniers Jedi', et au cas où vous n'auriez pas dix-huit heures devant vous pour revoir l'ensemble des épisodes précédents, voici notre résumé de la saga 'Star Wars' en moins d'une minute...     Ceci est un Jedi. Une sorte de sorcier (d'où la barbe) qui saurait manier le sabre laser (cool) et s'occuperait parfois de diplomatie intergalactique (moins cool).   Le personnage ci-dessous est un Gungan, nommé Jar Jar Binks. Imaginez un hippocampe qui essaierait de faire du stand-up en imitant Roger Rabbit parlant patois. Autrement dit, un personnage très chiant et pas drôle du tout.   Et voici Anakin Skywalker, un sale gosse odieux qui deviendra la force la plus néfaste de l'univers.   En grandissant, Anakin travaille à devenir Jedi. Il en profite pour fricoter avec Natalie Portman, une reine qui adore se travestir en clown.   Leur meilleur allié est Obi-Wan Kenobi (Ewan McGregor), dont le fameux passé de toxicomane fait de lui le conseiller intergalactique idéal en matière de narcotiques.   Et voici le plus grand des Jedis (qui est aussi le plus petit) : maître Yoda. Tout vert et parfois pixellisé, il se révèle étonnamment retors, un sabre laser à la main.   Malheureusement pour tout le monde, un gros blaireau ridé, le sénateur Palpatine, compte bien être le dernier à rire en dominant l'univers.   Aussi Palpatine persuade-t-il Anakin de trahir ses amis et de passer du côté obscur. Ce qui ne lu

Tickets are on sale for next weekend’s big London book celebration, the annual Stoke Newington Literary Festival. Now in its eighth year, the festival offers everything from straight-up author interviews to quizzes, panel discussions and loads of food and drink events. As ever, the focus is on music and politics – the latter is hardly surprising, given the festival takes place just a few days before the election. Here are five events we can heartily recommend. 1. Friday Night Live – Pre-election Special Comedians and commentators including Guardian columnist Suzanne Moore and ‘The Thick of It’ contributor David Quantick discuss the upcoming vote. Try to keep it light, guys.Stoke Newington Town Hall. Fri Jun 2, 7.30pm. £10. 2. John Berger: Ways of Seeing One of Stoke Newington’s most beloved sons, writer and thinker John Berger passed away in January this year. At this event, leading Berger-ologists Tom Overton and Andrea Luka Zimmerman discuss the great man’s life and legacy.Stoke Newington Library Gallery. Sat Jun 3, 12pm. £5.         3. Owen Jones The effortlessly articulate boy prince of lefty politics returns to the festival to try and persuade us that everything’s going to be fine, and the world’s not going to hell in a handcart. Sure, Owen. Sure.Stoke Newington Town Hall. Sat Jun 3, 6pm. £8. 4. ‘Game of Thrones’ Pub Quiz Test your knowledge of all things Thrones, from bastards to battles, Starks to Lannisters, dragons to Dornishmen. Any apparent similarity between this

Twenty-six years since its initial run, David Lynch’s game-changing murder-soap-thriller-fantasy ‘Twin Peaks’ returned to TV screens this weekend with the first two instalments of an 18-episode run. Screening on Sky Atlantic in the UK, the series kicked off at 2am on Monday, concurrent with the US launch. But they’ll both air again this evening for non-night owls, and are already available to stream. Our resident ‘Twin Peaks’ expert Tom Huddleston offers a few tips on how best to enjoy the new series. 1. Be realistic At 71, David Lynch is no longer the upbeat upstart who made unusual but approachable works such as ‘Blue Velvet’, ‘Wild at Heart’ and the original ‘Twin Peaks’. In old age, he’s cycled back to his roots in the American avant-garde: his last film, 2006’s ‘Inland Empire’, was his most idiosyncratic since his DIY 1977 debut ‘Eraserhead’. Anyone coming to the new ‘Twin Peaks’ expecting aw-shucks comedy and lashings of cherry pie is going to be disappointed. It’s funny, when it wants to be – but this is most definitely not comfort viewing.     2. Be patient The new ‘Twin Peaks’ doesn’t care if you like it; it is entirely itself and nothing else. This approach results in some of the most mind-blistering moments you’ll ever see on TV, indelible images of shock, horror and unearthly loveliness. But it also means that not everything happens when you think it’s going to, at the speed at which modern television usually operates. In simple terms: it can be slow. It’s not b

Londoners, you have a choice – watch ‘Twin Peaks’ or live in it. After 26 years, new episodes of David Lynch’s iconic mystery thriller debuted on Showtime in the US last night (we’ll have a full report on that soon). But there was more exciting news this weekend, as tickets for London’s annual Twin Peaks UK Festival went on sale.        This giddy, immersive two-day celebration of all things ‘Peaks’ may not be exactly cheap, but it’s worth it: not only do you get to enjoy a wide range of festival screenings while stuffing your face with complimentary doughnuts, cherry pie and coffee, you get to meet actual real-life cast members – this year's confirmed guests so far are Sherilyn Fenn, aka cherry-twisting high school vixen Audrey Horne, and Kenneth Welsh, who played season two’s madcap villain Windom Earle. There’s also live Lynchian cabaret from the Double R Club, a costume competition, a quiz and a live music stage offering ‘Peaks’-y sounds throughout the day. All this, plus the chance to mingle and get gradually, happily plastered in the company of fellow nerds. The Twin Peaks UK Festival takes place at Hornsey Town Hall Arts Centre on Oct 7-8. Get your tickets here.  Swot up with our in-depth A-Z for ‘Twin Peaks’ newbies. Check out the first images from the ‘Twin Peaks’ reboot. And did you know that there’s a cookbook celebrating the food of ‘Twin Peaks’?