Human traffic: "Sirāt"

So here, finally, is Sirāt, 2025's most heralded item of experiential cinema: cheered at Cannes, propelled around the secondary festival circuit on quite the wave of hype, and thereafter ushered up the awards-season red carpet as an example of what a more adventurous cinema can do. On some level, the new film forms a continuation of its Galician director Oliver Laxe's investigations into states of being. 2019's Fire Will Come set us down in the middle of countryside set ablaze, leading me to conclude my review by wondering whether Laxe was the Red Adair racing to the movies' aid or perhaps its sensation-chasing Keith Flint, armed with a camera and a large box of matches. Sirāt, which takes its name from the bridge said to connect heaven and hell, describes what it is to find yourself in the Moroccan desert for whatever reason; for any kind of enjoyment, take bottled water. This time around, Laxe sets us down among sweaty ravers - played, as we deduce from some of the haircuts and movements, by actual scenesters. They're here to party, as demonstrated by an opening setpiece that shows the group assembling and tesselating vast bass bins along a desert plain and thereafter unleashing a thumping wall of sound. (All of a sudden, my throwaway Prodigy reference in the earlier review doesn't seem so arbitrary: take bottled water and ear protection.) But there's also someone else in the mix: a portly, greying middle-aged man, played by the unmistakable figure of arthouse talisman Sergi López, who's pursuing a very different agenda. He's ventured this way, young son in tow, to search for a daughter who went missing from this scene some time before. This line of dramatic inquiry would be compelling enough in itself - here's a gatecrasher, someone where they wouldn't ordinarily be - but there's also something else going on, over the heads of the ravers and over the film's immediate horizons. All of a sudden, military vehicles show up to halt this apparently illegal gathering; as some part of this circus breaks off to roll ever deeper into the desert, the radio talks of explosions in the city, of refugees and war. Is it possible we've just been watching the last party on Earth?

That's quite some question for a film to pose, and at its best, Sirāt proves as rattling as everybody's said. (To put it in ravers' terms: it's ultimately a bad trip, but its highs are pretty high.) It's not merely what emerges from those bass bins, the sternest test of your local cinema's sound system since the last Michael Bay film; it's those devil-may-care partygoers, endlessly pursuing the next thrill. One sequence here, in which this party traverses the mountains via several miles of perilously bad road, triggered an ultra-specific stress response in me: memories of being on a nightbus caught up in chest-high flashflooding during a Spanish holiday in the 1990s. Then there are the bad vibes that follow, the growing sense everything's going to hell, via mountain pass, celestial bridge or other means entirely. (Does anyone remember when going to the movies was fun, rather than a test of nerve?) Laxe, in fairness, is keeping one eye out for companionship - a friend for the end of the world - in this case the unlikely companionship the genial family man, huffing and puffing his way up and over these hillsides, finds among angular shapethrowers with tattoos and piercings. In such stretches, Sirāt shapes up as among our more oblique migration movies: it recognises that, in times of upheaval, different worlds become fellow travellers, pooling money, intelligence and resources to ensure their survival. Yet even here, we're led to wonder whether the missing daughter fled because she found the normalcy the father represents too stifling, and whether any good can possibly come from a reunion. 

What the film centres, then, is a tentative alliance, riven with tensions at every turn: Laxe has basically found his way to filming those areas in Glastonbury where folks prepared to spend £1000 a night to house their family in a yurt while attending wellness sessions intersect with/rub up against those anarcho-syndicalist stalwarts who've shown up for the Corbyn speech and the Runrig reunion. Still, the film tails off badly; I'm amazed quite how seriously some have taken Sirāt, given the abject silliness of its closing section. At a crucial point - roughly once these drifters reach salt flats improbably studded with landmines - Laxe's film becomes less spiritual than logistical, veering into genre territory without understanding the terrain. It gets booming in a different way here - bombastic, really - and Laxe's po-faced direction finally strands his performers at the border of absurd and ridiculous: you half-expect Graham Chapman to wander on in the guise of corporal or copper, telling everyone to wrap things up and go home. The film's achievement lies in using its enervated characters - zonked figures in a landscape, looking off into the middle distance - to square the arthouse and the club, to find the unlikely centreground connecting, say, Antonioni with Tony De Vit. It's a fairly niche achievement, granted - some measure down on the countercultural landmarks of the 1960s and 1970s - but then the movies are fairly niche at the moment, so here we all are: there's a reason Sirāt hasn't leapt from the Best Foreign Language Film shortlist and onto the season's Best Picture lists as The Secret Agent has - and as It Was Just An Accident, a far more assured journey into the heart of authoritarianism and the desert of human despair, really should have.

Sirāt opens in selected cinemas today. 

The real green menace: "Cold Storage"

Here's an unexpected comeback. Twenty years ago, a youthful British TV director, Jonny Campbell, made an abortive leap from the small to the big screen with the largely nondescript Ant & Dec vehicle Alien Autopsy. (I say largely nondescript because the supporting cast featured a bemused Harry Dean Stanton and a pre-tax, pre-surgery, pre-Riyadh Jimmy Carr, together at last; it's streaming on Prime, if you really must.) Maybe Campbell - who's spent the intervening decades compiling increasingly ambitious and impressive telly credits (Ashes to Ashes, Doctor Who, Westworld, Am I Being Unreasonable?) - felt he owed it to himself to give it another go, or maybe he's one of those single-issue filmmakers: either way, his spry, splattery B-movie Cold Storage, adapted by David Koepp from his own novel, hinges on a parasitic alien fungus that fell to Earth with Skylab in 1979 and has taken the form of an extra-malevolent pesto, finishing off everyone it garnishes. A prologue offers an unlikely Ordinary Love reunion, with a hazmat-suited Liam Neeson and Lesley Manville poking nervily around an Outback town whose residents have succumbed to these deadly green globules; the samples they take away are quarantined in a Kansas military facility that, as the years pass, gets haphazardly decommissioned and thereafter converted into the kind of self-storage facility that now provides the backdrop to countless locker-raiding reality shows on Bravo and Quest. We rejoin the action on one very eventful night shift, as the quarantine period conclusively expires and the facility's bored staffers - chatty slacker Joe Keery and conscientious single mom Georgina Campbell - go exploring with grisly yet funny consequences.

It's all a bit unlikely, in truth: corner-cutting awards-season counterprogramming shot many miles away from where it's notionally set (the end credits suggest nobody ventured further than continental Europe), with a ragbag cast drawn from the available and willing. But it's a production founded on long-lost multiplex virtues; viewers of a certain vintage could be forgiven for believing they were sat watching it at the Showcase circa 1995. (Just after Koepp's breakthrough with the Jurassic Park script, in other words.) The MVP here is production designer Elena Albanese, an MCU survivor who hands Campbell a non-virtual set that keeps revealing new levels and depths from the moment Keery decides to take a sledgehammer to the foyer wall. Koepp, though, runs her a close second. As evidenced by the initially gruff back-and-forths between Neeson's aging hero and his rookie Homeland Security pointwoman (Ellora Torchia) or Keery and Campbell's more genial badinage, this script is simply much better written than these things tend to be - and certainly far better written than Sam Raimi's Send Help, the movie's current box-office rival. Collectively, Campbell and Koepp have packed a lot into these 99 minutes, not least a witty brevity; the VFM quotient here is quite something. The storage facility also attracts, in no particular order, a larcenous biker gang, a suicidal Vanessa Redgrave (yes, that Vanessa Redgrave), a crazed deer and a CG cockroach (thereby establishing this cursed building's altogether batty ecosystem) and, come the finale, an old-school nuclear device with big red numbers ticking down on its side. That the whole proves a vast improvement on Alien Autopsy is almost a given; the surprise is that Cold Storage is more enjoyable than anything else currently stalking your local Odeon.

Cold Storage is now showing in cinemas nationwide.

Evanescence: "The Moment"

Movies and pop music snuggle up once again. First there was Barbie summer, then there was Brat, in which Letterboxd's most illustrious contributor Charli XCX proposed a Muppet Babies variant of the messy-women's lib pop culture pushed into vogue (and, doubtless, Vogue) as this century gathered pace. Now Brat's creative prime mover offers an A24-backed mockumentary, The Moment, composed along postmodern, Kneecap-like lines as simultaneously artistic self-mythologising and an insider's guide to What Charli Did Next. As Aidan Zamiri's film has it, this mostly involves the singer retreating behind Dylanesque dark glasses (don't look back) and reacting with varying levels of Brat (and Grump) to the idea of doing anything - perhaps unsurprisingly, given the options being set before her by a label desperate to capitalise on all things Brat. In order of the priority The Moment affords them, these include an Amazon-sponsored concert film overseen by a "visionary" director (Alexander Skarsgård) who proceeds to make a total nuisance of himself, and copious branding opportunities, most disastrously a Brat credit card targeted at Charli's queer fanbase that serves much the same narrative purpose as Krusty Burger's LGBTQBLT ("How can a ploy this cynical and shameless fail?") did in The Simpsons. Last and least on the list of priorities, to the extent no-one in the movie even thinks to talk about it: new music. (One surprise awaiting fans is how little Charli there is on the soundtrack; perhaps she was clean out of inspiration post-"Wuthering Heights".) If the Charli we see on screen is keen to resist positioning - going so far as to whisk herself away to an Ibizan health spa when it all gets too much - the Charli making the film is doing nothing but. The Moment exists principally to raise the possibility that whatever she does next may be Brat, but may not be anything like as hot, happening or indeed successful. Zamiri's film may have already borne this out by opening at a lowly number nine at the UK box office, albeit in a competitive week for new releases.

For fullest enjoyment, you may need to be more invested in Brat as a concept than this viewer, who still thinks of Roger Kitter whenever he hears that particular B-word, and to find the machinations of the music industry (or of the music industry as presented in The Moment) inherently fascinating. As it is, I spent most of the film's 103 minutes wondering whether Charli might have been better off playing a character with autobiographical traits, as Gaga surely did in A Star is Born, rather than merely playing herself (or "herself"). That might have proved both a riskier and more rewarding strategy; in this version, the singer is all too visibly playing the kind of diva-in-waiting that Madonna - an even savvier performer in matters of public image - was being in 1991's In Bed with Madonna, her pre-rehearsed tantrums carefully controlled, her mid-strop breathwork impeccable. Zamiri's film is above all else a document of a moment where the bulk of our popstars have been stage-schooled. Dotted around Charli, we get celebrity hangers-on (Rachel Sennott, Kylie Jenner, Julia Fox), interspersed with actors who've fared better in mockumentaries with far funnier, more purposeful scripts (Jamie Demetriou, Alex Macqueen). At least Skarsgård, whose moment this may ultimately be, is enjoying himself, albeit in the stock role of the clueless male creative; the one distinction is that you won't have seen that role filled by someone quite this handsome. What's semi-interesting about The Moment is its foundational sourness about the music business: exhausting and malformed when not plain opportunistic, geared predominantly towards snuffing out original or personal expression, this is not an industry anyone would choose to get into or stay within for long. (One way of explaining the film to those over the age of fifty: it's Charli XCX's Slade in Flame. Or even Charli's "Radio Musicola".) The movie business, for once, has stepped up in this respect, enabling this particular performer to do what she wants to do and say what she wants to say. Still, the moment Zamiri chronicles here for Charli has passed; so too, by the time you read this, will The Moment.

The Moment is now playing in cinemas nationwide.

Lock up: "Wasteman"

Wasteman is the New British Realism mob that gave the world Adolescence shifting their attention from schooling to the prison system. David Jonsson's Taylor is a manslaughter inmate who's been trying to get through his sentence in a narcotics-induced haze; the fug around his head lifts momentarily after he's informed he'll be released on parole - as part of Government plans to relieve overcrowding - if he can stay out of trouble for just a few more weeks. The trouble is he finds this out at precisely the point his own cell becomes overcrowded: his new cellmate Dee (Tom Blyth) is a ne'er-do-well with a neck tattoo who walks on bellowing "The Good Life" in a bloodspattered sweatshirt, turns the pair's notionally shared space into a hectic combination of tuckshop and import-export business, and promptly vows to initiate a turf war with rival dope pushers in a bid to take over the facility entire. In some ways, Dee's not unlike the movie he's in, one of those modestly budgeted Britpics that looks like an expansion of pre-existing TV: muscling past Jimmy McGovern's recent BBC hit Life - and towards the realms of HBO's Oz - with its 18 certificate, Wasteman also retains an air of especially brutal sitcom in describing what proves, for both of these young lags, a most unfortunate (and untimely) flatshare. (It's Porridge with a pool ball in a sock.) Weirdly, it'd even make an unlikely but lively double-bill with last year's crossover hit Pillion, in that it's about two men wrestling - sometimes literally - for position and power. (For motorcycling leathers, swap in drably institutional duds.)

Above all, however, this is that rare kind of Britpic that appears to work for everyone. For those of us looking on, the premise is familiar but inherently dramatic, often tense. Writers Hunter Andrews and Eoin Doran and director Cal McMau get to nudge their way into the industry conversation - and, indeed, last night's BAFTAs - by showing they've absorbed the many recent newspaper exposes of prison life (drug-drop drones! Prohibited cellphone use!); the plot here is by definition self-contained - 90 minutes, much of that time spent on lockdown with bunkbound protagonists - but McMau opens the drama up via mobile-phone footage of what's going on beyond the boys' cell. (Mostly gangland posturing, as it happens, with the occasional grace note: the weariness of a seasoned guard as he's called in from his break by an alarm, the eerie quiet of a riot's aftermath.) The distributors can slap an eyecatching title on all this and sell it to that strain of agitated youth who are permanently cruising cinemas for a bruising. And the actors get to attempt something swaggering and street-tough in close-up, a chance actors generally leap at, given some of the names they were called during their time at theatre school. Casting supremo Kharmel Cochrane calls in all those day players who've been chased away from other auditions for looking like they might steal off with the producer's car, and the leads are (perhaps perversely) a good match. Blyth, who broke through in last year's Plainclothes, captures the mannerisms of a small and not terribly intelligent individual trying to be big and clever: he has to trade in swag because he has nothing else to offer, but he's charismatic company until he turns. And Jonsson, continuing his early-career quest to play every type of role under the sun (Rye Lane, Alien: Nemesis, The Long Walk), gives us a new type of inmate: a nerd, essentially - a scientist incarcerated for getting his sums wrong - who now has to use his brain to keep himself alive. He has a great face for fatigue and suffering, both of which are much in demand here: I hope he can pick up a few cheerier roles along the way, but he could well become this generation's John Hurt.

Wasteman is now playing in selected cinemas.

Fantasy island: "Send Help"

See, 2026 isn't all bad news: we got a new Sam Raimi film - his first standalone since 2009's Drag Me To Hell - and it even briefly topped the box office while the rest of us were glued to the Winter Olympics. Send Help proceeds from a script by two men (Damian Shannon and Mark Swift, past crimes: Freddy vs. Jason, the 2009 reboot of Friday the 13th, the Baywatch movie) which suggests a post-#MeToo rewrite of Nicolas Roeg's Castaway: it describes the circumstances whereby an entitled corporate asshat (Dylan O'Brien) ends up stranded on a desert island in the Gulf of Thailand with one of his lowlier employees, a workaholic numbers whizz (Rachel McAdams) possessed of the comic-book name Linda Liddle and the limpest bangs ever dangled on screen. This being Raimi, they've not been put there for sunkissed romance, rather a knockdown drag-out battle of the sexes, fought to the death. It does, however, involve a makeover. In this new environment - a sandy leveller - the previously meek, downtrodden and generally overlooked Linda can reap the benefits of the many lonely nights in she's spent bingeing Survivor with her pet parakeet; she is, inevitably, better suited to this scenario than her feckless, whiny, incapacitated alpha dog of a boss. One of Send Help's more obvious flaws is that it wildly overrates what reality TV teaches us on a nightly or weekly basis, but then - as a 20th Century Fox production - it too emerges from the entertainment-industrial complex.

Mostly, we're watching a creative heading back to basics after surviving the indifferent multiverse chicanery of 2022's Doctor Strange sequel: this is two characters, one location, a self-contained narrative worked through with a smaller budget than you get - with hand-tying caveats - on an MCU movie. (You can even imagine it being done in less exotic climes with a smaller budget still.) That story is simple enough for a director to feel as if he can impose himself upon it: here extreme close-ups that exaggerate first Linda's dorkiness, then her boss's helplessness, there buckets of blood, projectile vomiting and maggot-eyed zombie nightmares, towards the end a neat match cut that at least suggests Raimi is having a measure of fun making movies again. I will concede it all still feels fairly superficial, one of those 15-rated items that spiritually feels more 12A (adolescent, perhaps) than it does 18 (or adult). Raimi can open his box of tricks and apply lipstick to this wiggly pig of a script, but he can't really dress it up with themes, ideas or anything else much. However hot and steamy the weather, whatever desperation or isolation these characters are feeling, sex - to name one possibility - doesn't enter the picture: Linda briefly cops an apparently appreciative eyeful of the O'Brien derriere, bringing on a thunderous storm, and the next minute she's threatening to chop off this dude's goolies. (The transitions between these scenes don't make a lot of sense, but they may unintentionally reflect Hollywood's muddled thinking in the matter of male-female relations, with newly empowered women running up against male creatives' longer-standing castration complexes.)

For much of its 113 minutes, Send Help seems happy enough to remain at or around the level of a live-action cartoon, which is why the conspicuously shoddy CGI (a crashing plane, a charging boar) didn't bother me unduly: if it's some considerable way down on the practical VFX Raimi engineered on his breakthrough Evil Dead films forty years ago - and reads as the groggiest of visual hangovers from the director's time in the Marvelverse - it's broadly of a piece with everything else around it. These antagonists aren't a real, flesh-and-blood couple; they're either abstract ideas of man and woman, almost certainly the result of writers spending too much time on social media, or mere characters in a movie. (Call them "Man" and "Woman": Raimi should have rented out Emerald Fennell's quotation marks for the opening weekend.) She's the kind of sleeves-rolled-up adventuress your agent advises you to play after your big Oscar shot playing a homemaking sweetheart comes to naught (Linda's hair bounces back to life on the island, which is almost as much a relief for us as it must have been for McAdams); he's the kind of asshole you sign up to play in a film by a name director that will get you into the multiplexes; and as Send Help approaches the ninety-minute mark, both run into a plot development that makes you think "ah, this must be the third act now" rather than "gosh, this is exactly how all this would play out in the real world". A throwaway sketch rather than a fully committed picture, from a filmmaker himself found swimming back to the mainland from choppy waters: semi-enjoyable, but minor Raimi, and finally all a bit too cynical for this viewer's liking.

Send Help is now playing in selected cinemas.

For what it's worth...

UK box office Top Ten (for the weekend of February 13-15, 2026):

1 (new) "Wuthering Heights" (15)

2 (new) GOAT (PG)

3 (new) Crime 101 (15)

4 (1) Send Help (15) ***

5 (3) The Housemaid (15)

6 (5) Zootropolis 2 (PG)

7 (4) Hamnet (12A) **

8 (new) Stitch Head (U) **

9 (new) Whistle (15) ***

10 (8) Avatar: Fire and Ash (12A) ***

(source: BFI)

My top five:

1. If I Had Legs I'd Kick You

2. A Knight's Tale [above]

3. Cold Storage

4. Wasteman

5. Little Amélie

DVD/Blu-Ray/Download top ten: 

1 (new) The Housemaid (15)

2 (1) Zootropolis 2 (PG)

3 (2) Predator: Badlands (12) **

4 (3) Sinners (15) ****

5 (new) Anaconda (12)

6 (new) Hamnet (12) **

7 (6) Dracula (15)

8 (7) Wicked: For Good (PG)

9 (5) 28 Years Later (15) ****

10 (35) Bugonia (15) **

(source: officialcharts.com)

My top five: 
1. Sisu: Road to Revenge

2. Good Boy

3. The Ugly Stepsister

4. Keeper

5. Anemone

Top five films on terrestrial TV this week:

1. Malcolm X (Tuesday, BBC Two, 11pm)

2. We Dive at Dawn (Saturday, BBC Two, 2.05pm)

3. Point Break (Wednesday, BBC One, 12midnight)

4. The Fabelmans (Saturday, Channel 4, 9.15pm)

5. Spider-Man (Sunday, BBC One, 2.50pm)

"Peaky Blinders - The Real Story" (Guardian 19/02/26)

Peaky Blinders – The Real Story **

Dir: Robin Bextor. Documentary with: Grant Montgomery, Michael Hogan, Carl Chinn and the voice of Andrew Insol. 61 mins. Cert: 15

Given the global reach of the Peaky Blinders, next month’s Netflix-backed movie threatens to be as momentous as final Downton or new Bridgerton, only with razorblades concealed about its person. This week, that anticipation secures a pay-per-view release for this hour-long, meat-and-potatoes primer, fashioned by Sophie Ellis-Bextor’s dad Robin out of much the same combo of talking heads, drone shots and fair-use clips you’d ordinarily encounter on free-to-air Channel Five. Uppermost in the edit is a recognition that Steven Knight’s creation was one of those Peak TV shows that blurred the televisual and cinematic. Heaven’s Gate, The Godfather and Rio Bravo provide contextualising material; critic Michael Hogan positions the show as Knight’s Once Upon a Time in the West Midlands.

The talk is widescreen, at least, even if the delivery format remains resolutely telly. Bextor’s most illuminating enquiries arrive early on, in addressing how Knight expanded upon stories bequeathed by his parents, inspiring first a concerted attempt to recreate Birmingham’s working-class past and thereafter a modern pop-cultural phenomenon. Production designer Grant Montgomery recalls recycling sets in the show’s formative BBC days; Hogan hails the “rebel music” – the anvil-smashing rock and pop – which helped catch ears as well as eyes. It was a popular sensation before it developed into a network-hopping brand, a subculture endorsed and sustained by those Shelbian undercuts visible everywhere from Balsall Heath to Buenos Aires.

That’s the audience, then, though fans might want someone to pull out a cosh amid the doc’s historical nitpicking – and long for greater VFM besides. Just as Knight’s show became emblematic of an unusually confident moment in UK TV, so this patchwork tribute indirectly reflects today’s mend-and-make-do arts coverage. (In previous eras, Knight’s cultural triumph would surely have merited the full Yentob treatment.) Bextor nevertheless covers a fair bit of turf, taking irrepressible Brum historian Carl Chinn’s walking tour and paying a cautionary visit to the West Midlands Police Museum. Perfunctorily packaged though it all is, there’s even a lesson for the industry to heed going forwards: as Knight puts it, “If you’re not telling the stories of 70% of the population, you’re missing 70% of the story.”

Peaky Blinders - The Real Story will be available to rent digitally from Monday 23rd.