For what it's worth...

UK box office Top Ten (for the weekend of March 6-8, 2026):

1 (new) Hoppers (U) ****

2 (1) Scream 7 (18)

3 (2) "Wuthering Heights" (15)

4 (new) The Bride! (15)

5 (new) Mother's Pride (12A) **

6 (4) GOAT (PG)

7 (3) EPiC: Elvis Presley in Concert (12A) ****

8 (5) Crime 101 (15)

9 (new) Giselle - ROH London 2026 (PG)

10 (new) Othello (12A)

(source: BFI)

My top five:

1. Hoppers

2. Hard Boiled

3. Crimson Gold

4. EPiC: Elvis Presley in Concert

5. The Straight Story [above]

DVD/Blu-Ray/Download top ten: 

1 (new) 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple (18) ****

2 (2) Wicked: For Good (PG)

3 (3) Zootropolis 2 (PG) ***

4 (re) The Running Man (15) **

5 (6) Sinners (15) ****

6 (22) Anaconda (12)

7 (1) Predator: Badlands (12) **

8 (5) The Housemaid (15)

9 (re) Now You See Me Now You Don't (12)

10 (9) Scream VI (18)

(source: officialcharts.com)

My top five: 
1. Sisu: Road to Revenge

2. Good Boy

3. Zootropolis 2

4. The Ugly Stepsister

5. Keeper

Top five films on terrestrial TV this week:

1. The Martian (Sunday, BBC Two, 10pm)

2. The King's Speech (Thursday, BBC Two, 11pm)

3. Far from the Madding Crowd (Monday, BBC One, 12.05am)

4. Alan Partridge: Alpha Papa (Saturday, BBC One, 11.45pm)

5. How the West Was Won (Sunday, BBC Two, 2.30pm)

Brits v. spears: "Zulu Dawn"

Here's another leftfield Seventies reissue. 1979's Zulu Dawn was the belated, semi-forgotten prequel to 1964's Zulu, released to mark the centenary of the central Battle of Isandlwana, and released into a moment where the tattered remains of the British film industry was falling back on old ideas and properties. Cy Endfield, the hardy American director of the original film, turned over the screenplay he'd written at the start of the decade for the versatile Douglas Hickox - Endfield's former AD, fresh (if that's the right word) from Entertaining Mr. Sloane, Theatre of Blood and Brannigan - to direct. Hickox called in a battalion of the industry's usual suspects (Peter O'Toole, John Mills, Denholm Elliott, Peter Vaughan), plus a Hollywood presence to secure overseas sales and funding (Burt Lancaster, whose unconvincing Scots accent suggests the producers may have been eyeing Connery) and cannon-fodder new faces (a pre-fame Bob Hoskins as a sergeant-in-arms whose look is going to appeal to a very specific gay demographic; Phil Daniels as a mournful bugle boy; Paul Copley as a cadet who gets the script's best line: "Killed by a stray bullet made in Birmingham!"). The story had much the same story structure as had set the cash registers ringing a decade-and-a-half before. Zulu Dawn is thirty minutes of barrack-room and parade-ground chatter followed by a full ninety minutes of Sealed Knot recreation on a ruddy big plain to the accompaniment of a terrific, old-school Elmer Bernstein score played by an exceptionally well-marshalled Royal Philharmonic Orchestra. Trust me, your dad is going to wet himself - although you might like to gently break it to him that there isn't a happy ending, one reason Hickox's film flopped first time around.

As one might expect from a follow-up boasting American investment and the presence of the liberal figurehead Lancaster, Zulu Dawn proves both more expansive and more complicated than its flagwaving predecessor: this British Army presents as far less of a unified front, with dissent in the ranks as well as racism of various stripes. Hickox uses his ensemble to present what we must now call a spectrum of opinions and attitudes, ranging from unsmiling martinet O'Toole to the vastly more liberal Simon Ward, formerly Dickie Attenborough's Young Winston. (Bishop Freddie Jones, meanwhile, can only pray for peace.) Being a 1970s British film, I think we still have to declare it more pre-woke than it is postcolonial: Hickox can't resist cutting back to the topless local girls dancing under the opening credits, and Anna Calder-Marshall (Tom Burke's mum, recent winner of a Berlin festival acting gong for Lance Hammer's Queen at Sea) is stuck playing an Army wife with the unfortunate name of Fanny ("Same old Fanny!"). But Endfield and Hickox do at least seem to have absorbed some of this decade's political lessons. This Empire's priority is shown to be protecting its own commercial and industrial concerns, Mills's functionary positions this combat as (yikes) "the final solution to the Zulu problem", and Zulu king Cetshwayo (Simon Sabela) gets to say his piece before it all kicks off, somewhat more aggressively in 1979 than it had in 1964 (albeit still within the confines of a PG certificate). You have to wait for them, but the initial scenes of the Zulus rising up against their oppressors even made me wonder whether the producers had had half an eye on the blaxploitation audience. It's destined to remain in the shadow of its much-memed predecessor: Hickox's battle choreography - diffuse, circular and finally very samey - makes Endfield's seem like Miklós Jancsó. But it's made for lazy matinee viewing, allowing the viewer to powernap in the gaps between attack and counterattack, and in this newly restored version, it surely looks better than it ever has: properly widescreen (in the days when that term meant something to our cinematographers) with rich film-stock colour picking out every uniform, tea party outfit and, indeed, war wound.

Zulu Dawn is now playing in selected cinemas.

On demand: "Zootropolis 2"

So now we know why Zootropolis 2 spent four months inside the UK's Top Ten films, even climbing the charts after the film landed on VoD: these are the busiest frames of anything released in 2025. From a commercial standpoint, it makes for exceptional value for money, returning directors Jared Bush and Byron Howard offering fans plentiful reasons to take a second or maybe even third look at what was going on in the sidestreets and backalleys of the titular city in the run-up to the Zootennial; some viewers doubtless wanted to spend extra time in the company of old crimefighting friends Judy Hopps (the happy bunny voiced by Ginnifer Goodwin) and Nick Wilde (the wise-ass fox voiced by Jason Bateman). Creatively, however, that busyness becomes a double-edged sword: the artistry gets altogether clotted, the result of animators feeling they have to catch up with every character who became a fan favourite during 2016's first film while sending our odd-couple leads on a new quest. Overworked and up against the clock to capitalise on the goodwill engendered by the first film, those animators have been forced to grab their inspiration where they can. If you find yourself wondering why a scene in which a heavily guarded artefact is swiped during a glitzy function sparks an odd sense of déjà vu, or why a gag about animal Captchas seems so familiar, it's because you'll have seen both as recently as 2022's The Bad Guys and its 2025 sequel, DreamWorks' own anthropomorphised critters franchise. Maybe the relentless motion of so much multiplex animation reflects the way competing teams of creatives are now scrabbling around to be first to an old idea, trampling on or tripping over one another's tails as they go.

In any case, this is visibly one of those sequels that resolved to be bigger rather than necessarily better. The relative tightness of the first movie's plotting, the Disney idea of a Prince of the City-style precinct procedural, has here been replaced by a sprawling, galumphing road movie. Zootropolis, we now learn, has been historically segregated, and Hopps and Wilde are obliged to pass from zone to zone after being exiled from home turf. The approach expands this world scene by scene, doubtless readying the ground for further sequels and future TV spinoffs, but you also sense the creative team wandering alongside their characters, going in search of anything like a compelling hook or plot. What they eventually arrive at, after all the hypercaffeinated huffing and puffing, is the kind of backstory - a squabble over ownership and naming rights, essentially who owns the IP to the city of Zootropolis - which would slow down any spinoff TV series something rotten. I recognise that I am writing these words after a week in which I pronounced an animation about a talking beaver to be a noteworthy reflection of our times, but I think you'd have to strain to spot any significant social comment within these frames: that strikes me as something hurriedly scribbled on the writers' room wipeboard and never followed up in any substantive way, and which may finally have been doodled over in brighter colours by the character and background artists. (The variety of names listed in the movie's closing credits tells a vastly more credible and stirring story about inclusion and community.) Those artists are the ones who might just claw you back to finish a first watch, even if you have no intention of returning for round two (or the now-inevitable Zootropolis 3). What Zootropolis 2 has in its favour is a richness of character work (one of many new additions to this menagerie: David Strathairn, who's been showing up in some unlikely places this year, as a moggy Mob boss) and flickers of the original's strong gagwriting (a passing Ratatouille gag - Disney cannibalising itself, for once - is genius). Elsewhere, I fear, the focus is being lost, the charm being squeezed, perhaps permanently, out of shot.

Zootropolis 2 is now showing in selected cinemas, streaming via Disney+, available to rent via Prime Video and YouTube, and on DVD and Blu-ray through Elevation Sales.

Wild wild life: "Hoppers"

Hoppers is both Pixar's maddest and sanest animation in some while - and I'm tempted to add the company's strongest since their turn-of-the-millennium golden age. The madness lies in its story. Director Daniel Chong and co-writer Jesse Andrews present us with the saga of how the consciousness of one Mabel (voiced by Piper Curda), a young woman with anger management issues, finds its way into being uploaded into a laser-printed beaver whose natural habitat is being concreted over by the authorities so as to build a bridge for the easing of commuter traffic. It is, as they say, a lot to swallow. But after overseeing a run of varyingly futzing propositions - most recently last year's sweet but compromised Elio - the fabled Pixar story department is noticeably on its A-game from an early stage here: not just making this narrative work, but making it appear to work effortlessly, without clunking gear changes or awkward tonal shifts. As in the hall-of-fame Pixars, a complex concept becomes mere sport or child's play before our very eyes; the transmigration of souls is here rendered so simple even the six-year-old sitting behind me could comprehend it. 

Much has already been made of the trailer-ready line "this is just like Avatar", one of those winking throwaway references a studio gets to make when its parent company has swallowed the referent's studio whole. Yet that same scene demonstrates the simplification process going further, into hyperdrive almost, via a three-word mantra ("this into this") repeated with increasing levels of comic delirium until everybody in Screen One is on the same page. (No child left behind.) Having made things elementary, the movie can then start to make jokes, to relax more fully into its environment. Hoppers has great linguistic gags (as the species-hopping Ratatouille also did). Though Mabel-as-beaver speaks American English, she's not quite on the natural world's frequency to begin with; her urgent need to force change hits a furry brick wall in the form of Ralph, the beaver equivalent of a beach bum, who just wants to spend his afternoons sat on his behind chewing sticks. The film also has my favourite sight gag in anything for a long while - the kind of flourish that remains the exclusive domain of cartoons. When these creatures are inhabited by human souls, their faces take on anthropomorphised, recognisably Pixarian features; yet when the upload link drops or cuts out, they return to being currant-eyed scrabblers, background characters essentially, like the turtle Mabel liberates from a schoolroom tank in the opening sequence. (Even the faces help to explain the plot, who's in where; it's this into this, converted into visual form.) The marvel is that all this chicanery and sophistry never entirely overwrites the movie's emotional core: the calming effects of the natural world, an element this animated film itself has to slow down to appreciate, and the promise Mabel made to her grandma, the only relative who fully understands her, to look after and protect said world. Having set all this up inside its exceptionally efficient first half-hour, Hoppers is free to crank the madness dial up once more. The second-act complication is that the heedless Mabel-as-beaver unwittingly initiates an uprising among the animal kingdom - a pixellated January 6th - causing fish, fowl, insect and invertebrate alike to try and wipe out (or as they call it, "squish") the human race. Had the events of the third act been recounted in any other public place, its tellers would surely be sectionable under the Mental Health Act.

The film's sanity, however, resides in its subtext. Faced with the incomparable stupidity and venality of Man, Hoppers proposes a retreat into nature; it's Walden with processor chips, and it may prove as generational a green moment for kids in 2026 as Disney's Bambi was back in 1942. Pixar aren't the first animators to set up their easels (or routers) in the woods, yet Hoppers improves on DreamWorks' too-pristine, look-don't-touch The Wild Robot: where that film gazed adoringly at the natural landscape, this one plugs us directly into it, obliging us to observe both the wonder and the threat at close quarters (as, indeed, Avatar did in its turn). Mabel's new identity allows her to channel her rage more effectively, and to go undercover while continuing a previously two-legged feud with image-obsessed Mayor Jerry (Jon Hamm, because of course Jon Hamm), characterised not unreasonably as another white guy in a suit, representing both wanton construction and destruction. It's Jerry who unlocks Hoppers' most pertinent March 2026 imagery: that of humans dynamiting everything in sight. Against him, though, Chong and Andrews can set Mabel's efforts to build more strategically: first a replacement dam, then a coalition, then a movement, then a better world. (Weirdly, Hoppers starts to feel like a dramatisation of that Rebecca Solnit profile that was circulating over the weekend: it's plugged into all kinds of sockets.) If the film remains altogether loopy, it's loopy in a way that speaks coherently, stirringly, even movingly to what is a fundamentally loopy moment in human development: what this script is wrestling with, deep down, is the question of where to put our anger so that it will be most effective. For Pixar, apparently, the answer has been to push their creativity beyond the usual multiplex centreground and towards a new extreme: by the end of Hoppers, the company's pixel-pushers are proposing solutions not just to forest fires but to the rise of populism itself. We can but wonder what miracles these folks might achieve in the Middle East; for now, however, they've gifted us a film that transcends story to become the kind of rigorously satisfying parable James Cameron wishes he was still telling.

Hoppers is now showing in cinemas nationwide.

USA for Africa: "Soul to Soul"

Here's a good example of a leftfield yet complementary reissue: a 1971 concert film less frequently spoken about than its contemporaries Woodstock, The Last Waltz and Soul Power, not out of any dip in quality or absence of comparable star names, more likely that the rights expired and it dropped out of general circulation. Soul to Soul retains its intriguing origin story. In March 1971, while Paul McCartney was mulling the contradiction of being supremely famous yet suddenly unemployed and Elvis was scooping up divorcees from the front rows of his Vegas residency gigs, a small band of African American musicians set out from New York to Ghana for a day-long concert to mark the country's first decade of independence, an event through which some of the travellers hoped to reconnect with their roots. The title came from a song by the second-billed act Ike and Tina Turner. The director was the workmanlike documentary pro Denis Sanders, passing the midpoint of a career that spanned paranoid Hoover-era shorts on the dangers of marijuana (1951's Subject: Narcotics) and early user guides for home computers (Computers: The Friendly Invasion and Computers Are People, Too!, both 1982); more pertinently to this project, he'd just wrapped on Elvis: That's the Way It Is, outtakes of which have now found their way into Baz Luhrmann's EPiC. A crack team of cameramen - including DoP Erik Daarstad and Les Blank - were sent out to preserve on celluloid the colours, moods and textures of this cultural mission: the curtains in the plane carrying these readily smoking troubadours to their destination (Tina is spotted getting some much-needed shuteye), the visible culture shock that awaited everybody on landing. The music here would be only one element; equally relevant are the people, the history, the customs, the fashions and the attitudes. When headliner Wilson Pickett launches into "In the Midnight Hour", he does so before a sea of delighted kids, but also one beaming policeman, evidently enjoying his most relaxed posting in years; by the time of "Land of 1000 Dances", the locals are kicking off their sandals onstage in order to better bust a thousand moves.

The era being captured is pre-entourage and pre-footage approval: these musicians can be seen mucking in, in a spirit of adventure, learning and open-mindedness. It's a two-way street. Before the concert, the locals put on their own performance for the visiting dignitaries (Tina joins in; Ike looks on, unsmiling) while Sanders and crew prove as interested in Ghana as a place as they are in its latest visitors. This version restores an audio interview with Mavis Staples in which the singer describes the eerie experience of touring a storage facility once used to house slaves at the height of the slave trade, while the exteriors describe a land found in the middle of a makeover. (A billboard advertises the so-called "007 Shirt", promising to combine "comfort with elegance".) Increasingly, though, the focus is on the concert itself, presented without obvious hiccups as proof Ghana could both attract and successfully stage such an event. (Zaire, site of the future Rumble in the Jungle and its attendant Soul Power concerts, had to have been watching on enviously.) Santana's rhythm section, for one, had clearly absorbed what could be heard going on around town, to the extent the film's Wikipedia page cites their performance as a formative influence on today's Afrobeats: here, that two-way street becomes an active back-and-forth, a cultural dialogue that apparently shaped an entire genre. Les McCann and Eddie Harris - representing the jazz contingent - take the politics up a notch via "The Price You Gotta Pay To Be Free". Then insouciant Ike (letting the guitar do all his talking) and Tina (in diaphanous outfit) give "River Deep, Mountain High" another runout, this time to a vastly more receptive audience than the US record-buying public. One possible cavil: there's an awful lot of drumming for a 96-minute movie. (Of course, if you love percussion, you'll be quids in.) Yet even before Pickett's last-reel efforts to convert the stage into a level playing field, what strikes the 2026 viewer is the unity on show. Time and again, Sanders returns us to the sight of performers and crowd simultaneously lost (or otherwise caught up) in the music; both are a source of curiosity and fascination for this camera. That apt title reflects how, unlike Woodstock or (heaven help us) Altamont, this modest gathering really was soul to soul: American superstars and Ghanaian spectators connecting, with no steeper hierarchy than a well-lit raised platform, amid a vastly more idealistic climate. Contemporary musical megastars can have their three-hour concert movies - shot on quick-and-easy digital, with tie-in Slurpee cups and elevated ticket prices - but I worry they're not going to tell future generations much about our world, beyond that we lost our heads for celebrities.

Soul to Soul is now touring selected cinemas nationwide.

For what it's worth...

UK box office Top Ten (for the weekend of February 27-March 1, 2026):

1 (new) Scream 7 (18)

2 (1) "Wuthering Heights" (15)

3 (new) EPiC: Elvis Presley in Concert (12A) ****

4 (2) GOAT (PG)

5 (3) Crime 101 (15)

6 (5) The Secret Agent (15) *****

7 (4) Zootropolis 2 (PG) ***

8 (new) The Audience - NT Live 2026 (12A)

9 (new) Pegasus 3 (PG)

10 (new) The Testament of Ann Lee (15)

(source: BFI)

My top five:

1. Hoppers

2. Hard Boiled [above]

3. Crimson Gold

4. EPiC: Elvis Presley in Concert

5. Soul to Soul

DVD/Blu-Ray/Download top ten: 

1 (8) Predator: Badlands (12) **

2 (12) Wicked: For Good (PG)

3 (2) Zootropolis 2 (PG) ***

4 (24) I Swear (15) ****

5 (1) The Housemaid (15)

6 (5) Sinners (15) ****

7 (19) One Battle After Another (15) ****

8 (new) The SpongeBob Movie: Search for SquarePants (PG) ***

9 (26) Scream VI (18)

10 (11) Jurassic World: Rebirth (12) **

(source: officialcharts.com)

My top five: 
1. Sisu: Road to Revenge

2. Good Boy

3. Zootropolis 2

4. The Ugly Stepsister

5. Keeper

Top five films on terrestrial TV this week:

1. The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (Sunday, BBC Two, 12 noon)

2. The Last Black Man in San Francisco (Monday, BBC Two, 12 midnight)

3. Sound of Metal (Saturday, BBC Two, 12 midnight)

4. No Other Land (Monday, Channel 4, 2.15am)

5. Blade Runner 2049 (Saturday, BBC One, 11pm)

"Mother's Pride" (Guardian 05/03/26)

Mother’s Pride **

Dir: Nick Moorcroft. With: Jonno Davies, Martin Clunes, James Buckley, Mark Addy. 93 mins. Cert: 12A

The Fisherman’s Friends team have found a modestly profitable post-Brexit niche: tales of culturally endangered Anglo-Saxon endeavours, nudged towards gentle uplift via a few songs and laughs, dollops of sentiment and some rabble-rousing populism. First it was half-forgotten sea shanties; now it’s the dwindling pub trade, represented here by rival West Country premises. On one streetcorner, spit-and-sawdust local The Drover’s Inn, overseen by salt-of-the-earth (read: emotionally repressed) widower Martin Clunes, slowly being strangled by his grasping brewery’s supply chain. On the other, that same brewery’s poncy gastropub, owned and somewhat implausibly operated by posho Luke Treadaway, introduced sipping from one of those teeny cappuccino cups issued as standard to all metropolitan elites.

The scene may have shifted indoors – gone, alas, is the Cornish scenery – but the formula remains much the same: clunky exposition, upper-case Issues, variably groansome dad gags. Tension emerges between Clunes and prodigal son Jonno Davies, until the latter proposes a radical idea to save the business: homebrewing. Davies has an awkward reunion with old-flame Gabriella Wilde, who’s now shacked up with Treadaway, doubtless eating swan for breakfast. But the resolutions really are arbitrary: it takes barely ten minutes for the villager who sabotages the microbrewery to crowdfund its replacement, a rapid U-turn even for Starmer’s Britain. Co-writer/director Nick Moorcroft must be praying audience sympathy for rickety, no-frills structures like the Drover’s will extend to the film itself.

The cast nurdle matters along to the climactic Real Ale Awards, scene of recent cinema’s least surprising surprise result. Clunes at least troubles to cobble a character together out of whatever was set before him, while Mark Addy – as the town drunk – commits gamely to an asthmatic running gag involving disco-infused Morris dancing. Josie Lawrence and Miles Jupp, briefly glimpsed, could have improvised a funnier film between them. Would-be cheeky nods to TikTok and dogging are delivered in the manner of a backbench MP, and there surely has to be a stronger case for preserving our pubs than “last refuge for middle-aged depressives”. Ken Loach and Paul Laverty almost made it with 2023’s The Old Oak, but Moorcroft’s mild variant is weak beer, to say the least.

Mother's Pride opens in cinemas nationwide today.