Phil de Semlyen

Apart from the confetti-cannon finale, this isn’t the hackneyed stereoscopic where things burst through the screen, but an immersive front row and on-stage spot at Billie Eilish’s 2025 world tour.

The Devil Wears Prada 2 is one of those nice surprises, a so-called legacy sequel made with love and executed with flair. Think Top Gun: Maverick with better hats.

The photography is spectacular. Petit and his crew have abseiled, crawled and waded through the darkness to chart the earth’s shadowy recesses.

A woolly family caper with a nostalgic flavour, The Sheep Detectives conjures flattering comparisons with Babe.

Finding positive manifestations for mass groups of men marching through cities in identical clothing is no mean feat, but you’ll walk away from Ultras with a new understanding of a misunderstood phenomenon.

Generic, sure, but gripping enough, Apex has located a corner of God’s own country where the devil reigns.

No one expected this long-delayed piece of Michael Jackson pop-aganda to lay bare the man behind the myths and myriad controversies in forensic style. And yet… this soft-ball character study of the King of Pop only doubles down on the former, while completely ignoring the latter, hitting all the usual dreary biopic beats along the way.

Newcomer Abraham Wapler as video artist Seb and Zinedine Soualem’s high-school teacher Abdel are standouts in the likeable ensemble, but the Adèle timeline, a sepia-tinged coming-of-age tale with a backdrop of characters to put Madame Tussauds to shame, is the film’s heartbeat. It’s a great excuse to revisit this gilded age in French history.

An early twist means that the bloodletting develops a repetitive feel, and there are unfortunate parallels with the recent Ready or Not 2, but the wincing and guilty laughs never quite dry up. Cult status may await.

The Magic Faraway Tree isn’t on Wonka’s level, let alone Paddington 2’s – two other Farnaby joint – and the aesthetic is occasionally a bit CBBC, despite the bucolic settings and intricate sets. But with the cracking cast, thoughtful message and the odd rollicking adventure, it’s a fun family movie that’ll finally give you permission to switch off the wifi.

Sorrentino explores these heavyweight themes with his usual wit and high style – as well as a standout soundtrack of haunting classic cues and Eurodance bangers. Surreal, comedic touches also prick the pomposity of La Grazia’s cloistered world.

A slow cinema treat, Two Prosecutors rewards patience, with endless waiting rooms and antechambers both a limbo state and a last-chance saloon for Kornyev. It’s a haunting, mesmerising, pessimistic piece of work.

Director Bienvenu, who also voices helpful robot Mikki in the French version, has crafted a family film that’s offbeat and full of heart.

Weaponising the cinema’s Dolby Atmos into a delivery mechanism for frights is a clever ploy that Undertone never maximises.

Newton is a fun addition as the bubbly Faith, but the game Weaving is MVP again: a sharp finger in the eye of the one percent. This is a broader sequel, though, that only has more of the same for her to do. It’ll pass an evening but it won’t blow your mind.

The symbolism is lightly worn here in a gently observational film that’s underpinned with humanism and compassion.

With Gosling and Hüller to the fore, Lord and Miller have delivered a cosmic adventure with hope in its heart and a twinkle in its eye.

It’s often enthralling – especially with Murphy at its heart – though rarely explosive.

Smart storytelling and snappy editing elevate the jokes and enrich the emotions.

And that’s the major problem here. When the first Scream hit, it had a ball deconstructing ’80s and ’90s horror movie tropes. Six movies and three decades on, it’s become the very thing it was built to deconstruct, trapped in its own lore and fumbling about for its old smarts. The genre has moved on. Scream needs to get with the times.

If, like Alan Partridge, you believe that Wings were ‘the band The Beatles could have been’, Morgan Neville’s propulsively upbeat music doc is a total treat.

The class satire, the strongest suit of its Ealing ancestor, is blunter than a burglar’s cosh. The murders should be the juice in this devilish cocktail, especially with Zach Woods, Topher Grace and Ed Harris as the marks. But the deaths are throwaway affairs.

It’s refreshing to see a grown-up big-screen thriller this well crafted – and one that cares for its grounded characters and their predicaments. If it comes off the road once or twice, it’s still well worth the ride.

Rather than a bruising marital wipeout drama, Is This Thing On? is a film about how new purpose and a new tribe can help you re-evaluate what was there all along (the title, of course, refers to the marriage as well as the mic). It might make you think about relationships differently; it probably won’t make you want to take up stand-up.

Kangaroo has a love for the people, landscape and wildlife that leaves a warm glow. It’s not doing anything wildly different or unexpected, but it’ll put a smile on your face.

Happily, Send Help is both a return to the world of horror and a major return to form for the Evil Dead man, who’s been waylaid with bland franchise fare in recent years.

Finally, someone has returned to The Damned United’s cunning formula for a good football movie: don’t show any football.

Empathetic, funny and myth-busting – there are 300,000 children and adults living with TS in the UK alone whose condition will be better understood for this film – it gives you permission to laugh at the situation while feeling only compassion for the man.

This is simultaneously the nastiest and most soulful of the franchise to date – and the most probing.

For brain-free Friday night viewing, you could do much worse than spend 90 blood-soaked minutes with not-so-gentle Ben.

Sure, it’s a somewhat honeyed portrait that lacks voices to put the other side across. But as the flimsiness of the case against Assange is laid bare, so too is a system that tried to suffocate, torture and crush him to protect its interests.

When the foot comes off the gas, the cracks become apparent.

Marty Supreme is a stunning achievement, a breathless yet precisely controlled joyride full of vivid characters, hairpin turns and did-that-just-happen moments – and a modernist fairy tale about big ambitions colliding with grubby street-level realities and capitalism’s seedy imperatives. This is a film that’s built to last.

There have been better animated sequels and more epic ones, but has there ever been a fluffier follow-up than this bouncy, buoyant caper starring at least half the nature world?

Ultimately, though, there’s not enough story to fuel a three-hour musical stretched across nearly five hours. What once was brisk and bright becomes a bit of a slog. Fans will be obsessified; everyone else, ossified.

It’s weird, in the year 2025, that it seems timely to point out that the Nazis were bad. But Nuremberg, an old-fashioned and satisfyingly complex morality tale in the guise of a courtroom drama and spy thriller, does that job in impressive style.

It’s a movie that got up on the wrong side of the bed and compensated with four quadruple espressos.

For a study of human connection at its most honest and affecting, with two remarkable lead performances, Dragonfly is a powerfully striking experience.

Measured rather than playing to the gallery, The Choral is Brassed Off in a minor key – an elegant, Yorkshire-set exploration of music as a spiritual morale-boost in the darkest times. With Ralph Fiennes gravely essaying the controversial choirmaster at its heart, it does a lovely job of swerving the obvious notes but misplaces its stirring crescendo.

Like Nomadland, another film that maps out rocky terrain with impressionistic grace, Hamnet is a deep-felt ode to loss and resilience. Zhao doesn’t just tell you about the healing power of art, she shows you. Prepare your tear ducts accordingly.

Needless to say, Souleymane’s Story is not an easy watch. It’s a tough, unsparing and often heartbreaking look at life for the migrants who make the online world tick, and a jolt for those of us who use it unthinkingly.

As with the previous Knives Outs, the satire is applied in broad but enjoyable brushstrokes.

Cinematographer Pal Ulvik Rokseth’s handheld camera work, some really slick editing and canny use of real news footage, combined with impressive CGI, give it all a pulse-raisingly immersive quality, like a plunge into the underworld.

Cheesier than a wheel of Stilton and about as edgy, Downton Abbey bows out with a cosy but loveable final instalment that will leave few dry eyes among long-time fans of Julian Fellowes’ British TV thoroughbred.

Remake is emotionally shattering.

Martel’s forensic doc shatters any sense that, for her fellow Argentinians, the colonial burden has been lifted. It’s an intimate pinhole camera capturing an IMAX-sized story.

The performances are solid, with an excellent Jude Law all inscrutable psychopathy as a younger Vladimir Putin and Alicia Vikander the perfect embodiment of an amoral post-Soviet arrivista, and the chilly world-building works well enough, but there’s a missing ingredient – actual Russians.

Beyond the regular crunch of fist on bone, The Smashing Machine is an unexpectedly gentle, soulful character study that has Johnson undercutting his crowd-pleasing ‘The Rock’ persona with vulnerability and boyish uncertainty.

Those first 40-odd minutes are unbearably tense. Ferguson is a standout in a strong ensemble cast

Not top tier Jarmusch, but still a funny, soulful anthology worth seeking out.

As with The Shape of Water, del Toro makes no secret of where his sympathy lies and who the real monsters are, but there are surprises here. Not least of which is how moved you might feel in the end.

Grab your nan, put the kettle on and enjoy some exceedingly fine thesps hamming it up royally.

There’ll be moans from horrorheads that it’s not scary throughout, but in deepening his exploration of family life in the ‘burbs, Cregger sharpens his twisted scares to a dagger point. And the frights, when they come, really land.

A groundbreaking view of the horror and pity of war, I can’t remember a cinematic experience quite like it. It’s devastating and extraordinary.

For a movie that looks this sleek, there’s a lot of scrappiness around the fringes. Paul Walter Hauser is fun as subterranean mastermind Mole Man, but gets barely a toehold on the plot. Half of whatever Natasha Lyonne’s character, a teacher with a thing for The Thing, was due to be doing is surely on the cutting room floor. The Four’s droid helper H.E.R.B.I.E. doesn’t leave a massive impression.

For Gunn, who has injected superhero movies with a winningly irreverence since his R-rated indie Super, ridding the DCEU of its bombast and self-seriousness is a step in right direction. Whether, like his alien hero, he can arrest the march of time and reinvigorate this tired genre is another matter.

Rebirth knows it needs to make its scaly stars frightening and surprising again and manages it in Spielbergian style.

M3GAN 2.0 continues to offer up a goofy brand of cautionary tale, too: against AI, tech dependence, and Silicon Valley types who want to stick a chip in their brains. You can take that seriously as you want to, just don’t be surprised to find yourself watching it again on your cellphone one day.

There’s so much in Grenfell: Uncovered about the state of modern Britain that Sadiq does brilliantly not to get sidetracked.

Splicing in montage footage of marching soldiers, shots from Lawrence Olivier’s Henry V, and even archers in action, and layering in discordant sound design, Boyle reinvents the zombie movie as a bloody pop-art installation.

It’s hard to draw too much old-school romance from this world of sponsorship, celebrity and sports washing, but F1 manages it on the back of Pitt’s earthy charm. Watch it rev into the canon of great sports movies. Motion sickness tablets recommended.

Unfolding at the American filmmaker’s measured tempo, it’s more droll than LOL-funny, though there are some big laughs along the way.

It takes a steady hand to pull off a horror film as outlandish as Dangerous Animals – a movie, lest we forget, that is literally about dangerous animals – but Byrne has pulled off something slick and confident here. It’ll keep horror fans out of the water for years.

In Saeed Roustayi’s Woman and Child, a carefully crafted and endlessly gripping drama that follows a Tehran family’s slow disintegration, it’s the supposedly joyous occasion of a marriage proposal that set the wheels of fate in motion.

South African director Oliver Hermanus finds plenty of deep feeling and sincerity here but his beautiful-looking, measured period piece gets stifled by its own languors – especially in a first half that needs a slug or two of moonshine to inject some life into it.

The director is clearly having a whale of a time taking the piss out of the corruption, cruelty and bribery rife in his country.

For devoted filmlovers, Nouvelle Vague is a must-see – a joyful homage to the art of cinema that’ll have you queuing at your local repertory cinema as soon as the credits roll.

So, sure, the plot is overstuffed, the cross-cutting is frenzied, and Pegg’s goofy asides are the only light relief from the underlying somberness. If you’re looking for flaws, The Final Reckoning definitely has them. But with action sequences this adrenalised, no one is leaving short-changed.

By keeping the camera in the vehicle, hauntingly lit with the blur of passing houses and the glow of the mobile phone, Hallow Road invites you to fill the scene at the other end of the line with a shadowy menace that the final stretch really delivers on.

Writer-actors Tim Key and Tom Basden’s three-hander, set on a remote British isle, have delivered a rare blend of unkempt charm, emotional precision and soulful folk music with this feature-length expansion of their own 2007 short, The One and Only Herb McGwyer Plays Wallis Island.

It’s a lurid psychological horror that’ll thrill midnight movie crowds.

As so often the case, this Marvel effort is best when its talented cast is flinging around snarky banter and self-aware asides.

The Friend is a poignantly affecting watch that mostly earns its emotional payoff, delivering gentle laughs along the way.

Malek’s twitchy brand of anti-charm makes him an unusual lead for a film like this, and his outsider energy works better as the tormented killer-to-be than the doting husband. Heller is not always easy to root for, which can make The Amateur a chilly experience.

A survival epic full of mysteries and magic, it’s an animated epic worthy of Ghibli.

With this quick-witted and sexually supercharged espionage caper, Steven Soderbergh and his screenwriter David Koepp (Jurassic Park) have just remade Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy for the Industry generation.

‘Please don’t be boring,’ Nelson’s villain beseeches Wilson in a clutch moment. Who wants to tell him?

As ever, it’s Zellweger that provides the secret sauce.

Emotionally charged, Last Breath offers a forensic study of cold professionalism in the face of unfolding disaster. It’s deepened, too, by a rich cast of supporting characters, including Lemons’s fiancée in Scotland, the surface crew who recall the fateful night and his teary-eyed dive leader and mentor.

As it is, it’s an atmospheric, sporadically disquieting depiction of fatherhood in freefall.

The acting is a bubbling fondue of clashing styles.

This Nosferatu is a worthy modern addition to a classic horror lineage. Get lost in its shadows.

The songwriting verve of Lin-Manuel Miranda is missed, too. Composers Barlow and Bear chip in with some catchy ditties, but there’s nothing to match How Far I’ll Go and You’re Welcome.

Directed with real élan by Edward Berger – going two-for-two on literary adaptions after his take on All Quiet on the Western Front – Conclave is a film for the ’they don’t make ’em like they used to’ brigade.

You’d need an army of flying monkeys to find a Wicked fan with a grumble about this film.

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.

Most of all, it’s a colourful journey lit up with great tunes and a deep love of music – an ingenious, infectious new spin on the music doc.

It’s the two characters with no dialogue at all, Gromit and Feathers, who steal the show – a pair of silent cinema-style adversaries sparring in another joyfully Aardman nostalgic caper.

A film made with cold courage by the victim of a sexual assault, this gripping Japanese documentary plays like a ’70s conspiracy thriller.

McQueen isn’t questioning the courage or endurance of the city and its people through these brutal days. But he is probing our relationship with this over-lionised period of our history, though, and finding it hopelessly romanticised. Maybe it’s time, his flawed but hard-hitting film suggests, to lift the curfew on looking it afresh.

It’s a story of dehumanisation, children in cages, and the blurting, vote-craving policy-making of government by id – and it’s shattering to experience.

I’m Still Here takes you right into the machinery of a repressive regime, showing just enough of its dank jail cells and casual cruelties without overwhelming its deeper story of loss.

The Brutalist is a major work of art that asks something from its audience but gives back in spades.

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.

A brooding, muscular FBI procedural that occasionally explodes into Point Break-y action, Aussie director Justin Kurzel’s (Snowtown) true-life thriller delves, pungently and topically, into the inner workings of white nationalism in America before deciding that squealing tyres and shootouts are a lot more fun.

Still, powered by its own helter-skelter momentum and the wild-eyed Keaton, Beetlejuice Beetlejuice just about holds all its macabre threads together. It’s not Burton at his very best, but like its fiendish antihero, it does the trick.

This analogue noir set in central China evokes satisfying memories of Bong Joon-ho’s great Korean crime thriller Memories of Murder.

Like its xenomorphs, Romulus is best when it’s single-minded, streamlined and ferocious. See it on IMAX and hold on tight.