My Top 20 Films of 2025

20. Bogancloch

The hermit as artist, the life as the art.

Where to watch: Prime Video, BFI Player, YouTube (to rent)

19. The Seed of the Sacred Fig

Directed remotely, and you can feel the encroaching threat in every last one of its urgent and immediate frames.

Where to watch: on DVD, Prime Video, Curzon Home Cinema, YouTube (to rent)

18. 28 Years Later

The centrepiece of my ever-upcoming Brexit At The Movies season.

Where to watch: on DVD, NOW (to stream from Jan 1), Prime Video, YouTube (to rent)

17. Sorry, Baby

Screenwriting as tightrope-walking, while juggling. But eventually you find your feet.

Where to watch: on MUBI (to stream), Prime Video, Curzon Home Cinema, BFI Player (to rent) 

16. The Librarians

From the frontlines of the culture war; sometimes this stuff has to be documented and seen to be truly believed.

Where to watch: on BBC iPlayer (to stream), Prime Video, YouTube (to rent)

15. It's Not Me/C'est pas moi

Après Godard, Godard. (Though it's not him.)

Where to watch: on MUBI (to stream), Prime Video (to rent)

14. Kantara A Legend: Chapter One

Mythmaking, and then some.

Where to watch: Prime Video (to stream)

13. Thudarum

A tantalising premise, thunderously executed: why bother putting Liam Neeson in The Naked Gun, when you could put him in Dude, Where's My Car?

Where to watch: Currently unavailable for UK home viewing (which seems regrettable)

12. Lokah Chapter One: Chandra

The year's best comic-book movie. Pop art that genuinely pops.

Where to watch: Currently unavailable for UK home viewing

11. Luther: Never Too Much

If we are to make movies about musicians, make them as involving, curious and complicated as this. (The soundtrack plays itself.)

Where to watch: NOW (to stream), Prime Video, YouTube (to rent)

10. Black Bag

Slow Horses for neatfreaks.

Where to watch: on DVD, NOW (to stream), Prime Video, YouTube (to rent)

9. It Was Just An Accident

Take it from a creative who knows: this is why you take the fuckers out while you can.

Where to watch: in selected cinemas

8. Roofman

In another, brighter universe, a hit as big as A Minecraft Movie.

Where to watch: in selected cinemas, on DVD (from Jan 19), Prime Video, YouTube (to rent)

7. Sinners

Enjoyable as a horror movie, a musical and as textured period drama; truly fascinating as a reflection on what it means for a Black creative to be working within white-owned American structures. No-one can say they didn't get their money's worth.

Where to watch: on DVD, NOW (to stream), Prime Video, YouTube (to rent)

6. Misericordia

Deviation as creative strategy. And as pleasure principle.

Where to watch: on DVD, Prime Video, BFI Player, YouTube (to rent)

5. Holloway

An emptied-out space, stirringly filled by women with so much going on inside.

Where to watch: Currently unavailable for UK home viewing

4. Homebound

For going so sensitively, and movingly, after such hard truths. The second half is where the movies begin to try and process the various tragedies of the Covid era.

Where to watch: Netflix

3. Hard Truths

Everybody's unhappy nowadays. (Again: file under Brexit At The Movies.)

Where to watch: on DVD, Netflix (to stream), Prime Video, Curzon Home Cinema, YouTube (to rent)

2. One Battle After Another

And the Book says: we may be through with the past, but the past isn't through with us.

Where to watch: in selected cinemas, on DVD (from January 26), Prime Video, YouTube (to rent)

1. Blue Moon [above]

How the art gets made, why it depends on the artist, and what it does to the artist. An entire demimonde, poured into a semi-forgotten man's shotglass.

Where to watch: in selected cinemas, Prime Video (to rent)

For what it's worth...

UK box office Top Ten (for the weekend of December 19-21, 2025):

1 (new) Avatar: Fire and Ash (12A) ***

2 (1) Zootropolis 2 (PG)

3 (2) Wicked: For Good (PG)

4 (4) Dhurandhar (18) **

5 (3) Five Nights at Freddy's 2 (15)

6 (10) Home Alone (PG)

7 (5) Fackham Hall (15)

8 (12) The Polar Express (U)

9 (re) It's a Wonderful Life (U) *****

10 (new) Bha. Bha. Ba. (15)

(source: BFI)

My top five:

1. Sunset Blvd.

2. Blue Moon

3. It Was Just An Accident

4. Cover-Up

5. Pillion

  

DVD/Blu-Ray/Download top ten: 

1 (5) Downton Abbey: The Grand Finale (PG)

2 (2) The Polar Express (U)

3 (1) The Grinch (U)

4 (3) Elf (PG) **

5 (10) Superman (12)

6 (4) Wicked: Part 1 (PG) **

7 (12) Arthur Christmas (U) **

8 (18) The Long Walk (15) ***

9 (9) Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy (15) **

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

(source: officialcharts.com)

My top five: 
1. I Swear

2. Memoir of a Snail

3. The Long Walk

4. The Shrouds

5. The Ballad of Wallis Island

Top five films on terrestrial TV this week:

1. Casablanca (Sunday, BBC Two, 1.45pm)

2. Back To The Future (Monday, BBC One, 2.40pm)

3. The Fugitive [above] (Friday, five, 2.20pm)

4. The Wicker Man (Sunday, BBC Two, 1.20am)

5. E.T.: The Extra Terrestrial (Tuesday, ITV1, 2.40pm)

"The SpongeBob Movie: Search for SquarePants" (Guardian 25/12/25)

The SpongeBob Movie: Search for SquarePants ***

Dir: Derek Drymon. Animation with the voices of: Tom Kenny, Clancy Brown, Rodger Bumpass, Bill Fagerbakke. 96 mins. Cert: PG

Even after metabolising the most lysergic pharmaceuticals, could the students who snickered their way through those first SpongeBob adventures have foreseen the franchise persisting 25 years on? Such longevity is partly down to extra-commercial considerations: this series’ capacity for tickling accompanying adults – possibly even those now fully-grown students – as well as the very young. Though it can’t claim anything quite as unexpected as the Hasselhoff cameo in 2004’s first The SpongeBob SquarePants Movie – not so much a high bar as an unforgettably wonky one – feature four thinks nothing of making Clancy Brown talk like a pirate while handing royalty cheques to Barbra Streisand and Yello. Anything can still happen in Bikini Bottom.

Preceded by a festive short for Paramount’s other weathered babysitters, the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, the new film soon settles into a familiarly goofy groove, its script a PG-rated treatise on the pros and cons of growth. This SpongeBob (once more voiced by Tom Kenny) is now 36 clams high, a source of particular excitement as this will allow him to ride the rollercoaster of his dreams. (One early, trippy laugh: our overexcitable hero’s imagined loop-the-loops.) As in the best contemporary American animation, though, the corkscrew plotting is the real rollercoaster: SB’s quest to obtain the fabled Swashbuckler Certificate that will prove him a “big guy” brings him into conflict with the Flying Dutchman, voiced by the suddenly ubiquitous Mark Hamill.

The Dutchman’s ship bumps up the scale, but mostly it’s the usual bricolage of digimation and hand-turned elements, forever foregrounding pleasing, properly cartoonish effects. SpongeBob wedges himself into an AC unit and somehow emerges squarer still; there’s a cameo from a pair of chattering joke-shop false teeth; and in a punishment guaranteed to resonate with the six-year-old crowd, our hero is subjected to endless washing-up. Whether its spitballing silliness will linger when the lights come up is debatable, but it’s a solid SpongeBob movie and by far the funniest Pirates of the Caribbean movie, encompassing a hearty Davy Jones joke and a saltily suggestive catchphrase for SpongeBob’s pal Patrick: “The best guys are big guys”. Those students will be snickering anew.

The SpongeBob Movie: Search for SquarePants opens today in cinemas nationwide.

Tangled up in blue: "Avatar: Fire and Ash"

Both culturally and financially, there seems far less at stake with Avatar: Fire and Ash than there was with its predecessor, 2022's The Way of Water, where everyone was looking for post-lockdown numeric proof that The Movies™ were back. This is perhaps as it should be: 2025 has spawned several other major tentpole hits, and after somewhere between seven and nine hours of this series, cinemagoers will now presumably have decided whether or not they're in it for the long haul. Today's studio executives have apparently made peace with the fact their creative endeavours are less likely to bust the proverbial blocks than they are to draw an audience of ultra-devoted obsessives: as underlined by the surprisingly soft numbers for the recent Wicked: For Good, presently being outperformed week in week out by Disney's Zootropolis 2, the popular cinema is well into its era of widespread popular indifference. I've long since made a peace of my own with James Cameron's Avatar films as flotation-tank cinema par excellence: every few years, it seems, we'll be encouraged to don our 3D goggles, sit back to observe everything within our immediate field of vision turning blue, and then spend between two and four hours switching off from an outside world that grows ever more stressy and tiring. It is all a bit woo-woo, yes, but arguably no more cuckoo than that outside world, where the woo-woos are increasingly coming from sirens and alarms. One question the new film raises, however, has less to do with the woo-woo element than what we might call the wow factor: is the spectacular novelty of the Avatar franchise finally beginning to wash off through industrialised repetition?

As the contemporary cinema's pre-eminent deep sea diver, Cameron at least is still fully immersed: you fear he may never come back up for air again. Where 2009's opener served as recon, allowing for all manner of enchantment and eye-opening discovery, The Way of Water began to put down roots, carrying us all further away from the human world and towards the otherworldly. (To the extent that it's now something of a surprise in this third movie when Giovanni Ribisi and Joel David Moore, faces less cerulean than California-tan, rematerialise before us: oh, you go, they're still here, bobbing for paycheques.) Most of Fire and Ash centres on the Sully clan, a family mired in grief after the events of the second film and beginning to divide against themselves. This is tricky thematic territory for a franchise that has always sat closer to lucid dream than theme-park spectacle, being floatily untethered, often vivid once you're in the midst of it and oddly forgettable thereafter. (Fire and Ash actually opens with a dream of fraternal reconnection - possibly inspired by the between-film passing of Cameron's producer and longtime brother-in-arms Jon Landau - and concludes with a new Miley Cyrus song, "Dream As One".) The thing about dreams is that, upon waking, we tend to remember the big picture (whether planetful of blue people! or I was in bed with Sydney Sweeney!) and selected highlights (be that there were massive whales there! or we were interrupted by a talking bear!), but not the mundane narrative smallprint of how everybody wound up here. With the undecideds having made their minds up, the franchise approaches its next inflection point: from here on out, for maximum enjoyment, you will need to know which avatars have perished, if not necessarily which of the Sully kids - this franchise's Muppet Babies - is which. So more questions bubble up into view: how much do you care about the world of Avatar beyond its abundant spectacle? And, crucially: do you care enough to sit through, in this instance, a further three hours and fifteen minutes of it?

You will already have your own answers, I suspect; these films are so sui generis that a therapist may be of greater guidance to you at this stage than any critic. (Fire and Ash is the first movie I've seen that feels obliged to insert a suicide hotline number between its closing cast and crew credits, lest the process of navigating back to reality proves especially problematic.) As a handful of splenetic first responses in their own way bear out, what Cameron appears to have taken from his Titanic experience is that the staggering mechanics of these event films will ultimately matter less, in the popular imagination, than how they make you feel. For my part, I'm not going in up to my chest for these sequels, and I'm certainly not willing to get my hair wet, but I'm happy enough to roll up my trouserlegs and have an occasional paddle. (One way of framing this franchise: as an awayday, the world's most expensive seaside special.) As with all those Star Wars spinoffs currently cluttering up the Disney+ menu, the Avatar series seems likely to proceed via some combination of spectacle and soap opera. Fire and Ash introduces a sexy new lady avatar, represented by a pixellated Oona Chaplin wearing fetish gear and a St. George's cross across her torso; she's both Cameron's idea of an Alexis Carrington-style maneater and what would happen in the unlikely event somebody put Christina Aguilera in charge of the English Defence League. No Na'vi (or Na'vi-adjacent species) has ever had anything interesting or memorable to say for themselves, an ongoing problem; in Fire and Ash, it's those morosely whistling whales who get all the best lines. But arm this new character with a flamethrower that signals an elemental seachange for the series, and ask her to threaten to burn this brave new world down, and suddenly you've got yourself a picture: an insurrection against democracy, civility and - eventually - the entire human race. Fire and Ash is Cameron's January 6th, only bigger, smarter and vastly better organised.

That latter, I think, is why I keep coming back to these films, and why I cannot bring myself to dismiss them or otherwise write them off as many esteemed colleagues have. If the studios are going to default to making bum-numbing 12A-rated fantasies, far better they be engineered by a precision-seeking control freak like Cameron. The high priests of the cinematic artform can (and will) rail against Fire and Ash all they like, but this filmmaker has amply achieved one of the goals 21st century studio cinema has set for itself: building a coherent universe for audiences to explore and escape into. Seven hours in, and he's finally filling in the characters and their attitudes. (Better late than never, one might say.) While the new film never doggypaddles too far from the shallow end when discussing empathy and race relations - yes, there's more of that business of plugging your dreadlocks into your fellow avatars, or some central Tree of Life; I spent a good twenty minutes wondering whether the Sullys keep a drawer filled with discarded ponytails that might fit different sockets - even this material has been more organically integrated than the comparable editorial in One Battle After Another and The Running Man. (Cameron makes you feel it rather than think about it, or allowing you to quibble with it.) Like I say, I circle back this way not to convert or recruit you to this cause: I'm hardly an Avatar diehard, let alone a zealot. But the three Avatar films so far may be as close as any earthling has come to realistically achieving the Muskian dream of relocating us from a stricken planet onto a higher plane of consciousness; there's more vision visible in these frames than any of our politicians is currently proposing. That's why these sequels will find their people and do okay, even as some viewers find themselves rediscovering a yen for dry land and everything non-turquoise. We will all exit this particular flotation tank in a far wrinklier state than first we entered it, no-one more so than Jim Cameron himself, moving heaven and earth to make this franchise happen. Yet if 2025 taught me anything, it's that we need to apportion our remaining hours on this earth wisely, and not necessarily likewise.

Avatar: Fire and Ash is now showing in cinemas nationwide.

For what it's worth...

UK box office Top Ten (for the weekend of December 12-14, 2025):

1 (1) Zootropolis 2 (PG)

2 (3) Wicked: For Good (PG)

3 (2) Five Nights at Freddy's 2 (15)

4 (7) Dhurandhar (18) **

5 (new) Fackham Hall (15)

6 (new) The Nutcracker - ROH London 2025 (PG)

7 (6) Now You See Me: Now You Don't (12A)

8 (new) Silent Night, Deadly Night (18)

9 (5) Eternity (15) ***

10 (re) Home Alone (PG)

(source: BFI)

My top five:

1. Sholay: The Final Cut

2. Blue Moon

3. It Was Just An Accident

4. Pillion

5. The Shining

  

DVD/Blu-Ray/Download top ten: 

1 (1) The Grinch (U)

2 (3) The Polar Express (U)

3 (5) Elf (PG) **

4 (2) Wicked: Part 1 (PG) **

5 (4) Downton Abbey: The Grand Finale (PG)

6 (6) Jurassic World: Rebirth (12) **

7 (9) F1 The Movie (12) ***

8 (8) Dracula (15)

9 (10) Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy (15) **

10 (16) Superman (12)

(source: officialcharts.com)

My top five: 
1. Memoir of a Snail

2. The Long Walk

3. The Shrouds

4. The Ballad of Wallis Island

5. F1: The Movie

Top five films on terrestrial TV this week:

1. Die Hard (Saturday, Channel 4, 9.10pm)

2. Babe (Christmas Eve, Channel 4, 10.10am)

3. It's a Wonderful Life [above] (Sunday, ITV1, 12.45pm and Christmas Eve, ITV1, 3.50am)

4. E.T.: The Extra Terrestrial (Christmas Eve, ITV1, 1.35pm)

5. Blue Velvet (Boxing Day, BBC Two, 12.55am)

There's no-one quite like Grandma: "Goodbye June"

For her directorial debut, Kate Winslet has called in favours from thespian pals and a script by her own 21-year-old son (Joe Anders, via Sam Mendes) which might have been better off pinned to a fridge. The filmmaker Winslet has taken her cues from isn't Jane Campion or Jim Cameron - precisely zero boundaries are being challenged here - but the Nancy Meyers who did The Holiday: we're getting something both familiar and familial. (And the mumsiest directorial debut in recent cinema history: you suspect that, before calling action, Winslet personally went round tidying up her cast's faces with a saliva-wettened tissue.) It's post-Brexit Nancy Meyers at that: cheaper, shabbier, stressy, passive-aggressive rather than aspirational. Much of Goodbye June unfolds around the corridors and waiting rooms of an NHS hospital in Cheltenham. After the titular grandmother (Helen Mirren) collapses one Christmas, the rest of her family - harrumphing husband Timothy Spall, the pair's adult children (Winslet, Andrea Riseborough, Johnny Flynn, Toni Collette) and their own kids - congregate at the matriach's bedside awaiting further news; while doctors move in and out, and June's health goes up and down, her offspring begin to thrash out their issues. It's very much that kind of movie: the siblings bicker and snipe, Mirren rouses herself to interrupt with an occasional homily or other groan, and on the far side of 110 minutes, after an impromptu oncology-ward nativity, everyone ends up in a more peaceful and settled place. We know exactly what we're getting for Christmas.

As with Netflix UK's other late 2025 offering Steve, however, might we have preferred something less conspicuously threadbare, blessed with greater coherence, festive comfort and connective (rather than paper) tissue? It shouldn't matter that these players never really resemble a family - that they are, visibly, a handful of the director's favourites corralled together for a few weeks' shooting. (Even so, we've ended up in a world where Kate Winslet and Andrea Riseborough are apparently sisters despite totally diverse accents, and where Riseborough has somehow ended up married to Stephen Merchant, so the casting wasn't high on anybody's priorities.) It does matter, I'm afraid, that Goodbye June is sedentary verging on the outright flat. Winslet divides her actors up into manageable groups of twos and threes, forgetting to do anything much with the movie around them; it often feels as if she's filmed the shooting schedule rather than the script. We, meanwhile, are left sitting around waiting for Mirren's June to make good on the morbid promise of the title. (Merry Christmas everyone! Don't forget to book yourself in for that flu jab.) There are bright spots: the odd scene where the acting saves the day; Spall is enjoying himself, singing and getting a nice ham roll for his troubles; and Winslet is good with kids. (Arguably the grandchildren, afforded a freeish rein, are more fun to watch than the grown-ups, stuck in varyingly stock characterisations and behaving much as people in this type of film typically behave: I've lost track of how many times I've now seen Toni Collette playing the New Age sister, burning sage and banging a tambour in a way nobody in the real world ever has.) Still: favours were called in, Netflix pounced, and now there's a gap in the heart of the Yuletide terrestrial TV schedules that ITV are going to have to plug with two hours of Stephen Mulhern pulling crackers or something.

Goodbye June is now playing in selected cinemas, and streams on Netflix from Christmas Eve.

Tinker tailor soldier bhai: "Dhurandhar"

Happy, healthy film industries tend to reward loyal cinemagoers with a treat at the end of the year, a Muppet Christmas Carol or Paddington, say, maybe even a Wicked or an Avatar, if that's your bag. For Christmas 2025, the Indian cinema has deposited Aditya Dhar's Dhurandhar, handing audiences a film that falls somewhere between hot potato and Molotov cocktail while leaving critics facing a potential hospital pass. The first in a planned diptych, the new film extends the ideological project of its writer-director's sizeable 2019 hit Uri: The Surgical Strike in viewing India as under near-permanent attack from without, and in insisting, with fervour and at some length, that the barbarians are massing at the country's northwestern gates. After the keening summer of love proposed by this industry's runaway July hit Saiyaara, Dhar now plunges us into a potentially nuclear winter of discontent. As with 2023's Animal, a comparably incendiary Hindi hit that seemed to hail from a similar corner of social media (or had merely attended the same political rallies), my initial aim was to keep Dhurandhar at arm's length; in its homeland, those colleagues who haven't bowed down before the film's supposed might have received death threats (for the boys), rape threats (for the women) and a lighter, funnier strain of nitpicking that amounts to something like "you critics, always setting films in context, rather than enjoying them for what they are", which sounds somewhat like asking us to applaud Triumph of the Will for its crowd scenes and sound recording. Never mind the politics, feel the bloodlust. Still, the film has proven unignorably popular: it's currently third on the Indian box-office of 2025 list - behind the trippy Kannada vision Kantara: Chapter 1 and the bellowy Hindi historical Chhaava - and climbing the UK charts, presumably down to word-of-mouth. This stuff now sells bigtime - or, more accurately, the mechanisms have been set in place for it to be launched at a wider audience.

What, then, is being sold here exactly? Dhurandhar is the paranoid North imitating those rowdy, multi-part South Indian actioners that have been so in vogue since the turn of the decade; narratively, it's a spy thriller mirroring this century's altogether fraught diplomatic relations between two neighbouring, historically well-matched adversaries. In a 1999-set coda, a hijack of an Indian plane by Pakistani terrorists is ended semi-peaceably, but only after the latter faction have smirked "you Hindus are cowards"; a suicide-bomber attack on the Indian Parliament two years later proves more effective, however, leaving one security guard with her face blown wide open. A plan is thereafter hatched by India's top brass to smuggle their top spy into Pakistan to infiltrate - and then sabotage - such terror plots. The spy is played by Ranveer Singh, under flowing hair and beard; introduced being shuttled across the border to a thumping club track, he's barely sunk his first smoothie at the juicebar that provides his cover story before he's sexually assaulted by a local streetgang and threatened with rape. (At least we know where the more rabid fanboys are sourcing their ideas.) One of the few modern Indian stars who's also a bonafide actor, capable of subsuming his own personality within the contours of distinct characters, Singh should by rights be the film's biggest asset, and certainly his watchful stillness is useful early on: at the very least, it provides a stark contrast to all the heedless tumult occasioned as he descends into Karachi's underworld. Much like those star turns in the likes of Pushpa and KGF, though, this is ultimately more pose than role. In Dhurandhar's closing moments, by which point we realise we've learned next to nothing about our protagonist, we discover Singh will be assuming a whole new identity for March's second instalment, shaven-headed and beardless. The character has no identifiable centre, and as a result the movie has no centre. Our hero is initially a tourist, being shifted around a den of iniquity that's apparently been fostering terrorism, gang law, political corruption, fake gun factories and non-Hindus. (Thank heavens none of this is going on inside India, eh readers?) Only belatedly is he repositioned as the strongman India needs... and now he's going to be someone else, just because.

I should say at this point that Dhar is no fool: from a technical perspective, he's a far more proficient filmmaker than almost all of those contemporaries who've carried the flag into this particular theatre of war. (Set it next to the lumpen and retrograde Chhaava, and Dhurandhar may well appear a modern classic.) If our protagonist drifts in and out of focus, the story Dhar's telling here is detailed and not wholly uninvolving, and he knows the value of a propulsive setpiece to keep an audience onside: if he'd never subscribed to the Joe Rogan podcast (or local equivalent), he'd probably enjoy a celebrated career as a maker of enjoyably punchy and pulpy B-movies. He's also, though, canny indeed about the buttons he's pushing here. If you truly believe that Pakistan is a latter-day hell on earth, and that those living on the other side of the border deserve everything coming to them, then Dhurandhar will dutifully confirm every last one of your pre-existing biases. The rest of us, however, are left floating around in this editorially imposed quagmire for no less than 214 (count 'em) minutes, trying to figure out what our business is being here: are we meant to be tickled or terrified when an especially dead-eyed Sanjay Dutt shows up in hero whites to shoot a succession of young men through the face at close range? This isn't the only place where Dhurandhar begins to betray certain wearying characteristics of Right-leaning art. Taking three-and-a-half hours to tell half of its story, it makes the Wicked movies seem fleet of foot; Dhar's aiming for baroque - the story behind the headlines, a bigger-budget version of those darkly conspiratorial YouTube clips your uncle posts to the family What'sApp group - but this first instalment instead lands on long-winded and musty, full of grim-faced men muttering in darkened rooms, few of whom can match Singh's charisma and presence. Even when Dhar stops the movie dead in the second half to flash up typed transcripts of conversations between terrorists and hostages during the 26/11 attack on Mumbai - as if we'd all been gathered for a security briefing or a PowerPoint presentation - it's still talk: this is a movie that loves the sound of its own voice, and can't bring itself to mix up its messaging.

Dhar surely knows this, which is why he takes such pains to interrupt the lecture with material that feels more intrinsically cinematic. Those setpieces are worth talking about, and it's to the film's betterment that our knight-like hero takes possession of a shining steed - a Royal Enfield 350 motorbike - at the midpoint, even if he mainly uses it to transport his boss's princessy, phone-clutching teenage daughter. (As played by Sara Arjun, she's the closest the film has to a fully rounded female character, and she's basically the Pakistani equivalent of Bae from Call Me Bae.) Unlike Trump's residual fondness for the Village People - clung to as a dementia patient does a favourite song that reminds them of their youth - Dhar prefers cutting-edge dance beats; he succeeds in giving his nationalism a whole new, youth-friendly soundtrack, distinct from the usual battle cries and the drums of war. (Those attending one terrorist training camp can even be seen dancing; it's like the rave sequence in Sirāt.) And when all else fails to raise the pulse, there is always - and I do mean always - bloody, bludgeoning violence: skulls being bashed in with a market trader's weights, or removed from the neck area altogether; unfortunates being dragged through the streets at high speed and propelled into iron spikes; some Gibsonian torture (replete with especially grisly Foley work) as a gentle opener to the post-intermission carnage. This, too, is a way to liven matters up - at least one young man at my public screening could be heard whooping at such kills - but it's also just another button to be pushed, and Dhar hammers it so often over these 200-plus minutes that any effect soon wears off. 

The weirdest form of trolling the critical naysayers have been facing is that stock RW riposte "triggered much?", and it's weird because the trolls are the ones being triggered by Dhurandhar: they've been roused by the violence to rally to the film's defence. The dissenters, it seems to me, have merely spotted the trigger mechanisms Dhar springloads beneath his drama like IEDs, and been numbed into understandable dispassion by their overuse; if we react to these gruesome deaths, it's not to cover our eyes or clutch at our pearls, rather to sigh and think what a brutal end that is for a character we haven't been given the slightest reason to care about over these three-and-a-half hours. But then Dhar's not trading in empathy, and he's not telling a story in the conventional sense; instead, he's been appointed to reinforce, through sounds and images, the pre-existing stories that have been planted in some people's heads by bad agents. This director is no fool, but he needs his target audience to be for Dhurandhar to take effect as it has: he needs them to exist in the state of unthinking, thoroughly uncritical ignorance that allows xenophobic hatred to take root and flourish. (You either swallow this stuff absolutely, or not at all.) There's no arguing with the fact Dhurandhar is more effective in what it's doing than 99% of the Hindi flagwavers that have come down the pipe of late - but what a funny-warped idea of entertainment this is, trebly so at this time of year. At the risk of getting all Judeo-Christian on Dhurandhar's ass, which strikes me as just about the last thing Dhar or his supporters would want: so much for peace on Earth and goodwill to all men.

Dhurandhar is now playing in selected cinemas.

Opening night: "Blue Moon"

Blue Moon is Richard Linklater the theatre kid, adding another to the strand in this ever more impressive filmography that gave us 1996's SubUrbia, 2001's Tape and 2008's Me and Orson Welles (and arguably even 2003's School of Rock). But it's also still recognisably Richard Linklater the romantic, if we recognise Blue Moon as its own kind of break-up movie. Before Rodgers and Hammerstein, as all good theatre kids know, there was Rodgers and Hart, the composer-lyricist pairing who gave us "My Funny Valentine", "The Lady is a Tramp" and the title track among other standards. Golden boy Richard Rodgers was a man on the up, becoming the toast of mid-20th century Broadway; by contrast, Lorenz Hart - a diminutive, prematurely balding alcoholic - was, after his early success, a man on the skids. Linklater's biopic of the latter, written by Robert Kaplow, actually opens with its 48-year-old subject (played by Ethan Hawke, stooped beneath a greasy combover) collapsing and all but perishing of pneumonia by the bins in a New York back alley, his body left out in the rain like last week's trash. Cue a scene change: we flash back seven months to witness Hart, held upright by the piss and vinegar in his blood, ducking out of the premiere of Rodgers' new smash Oklahoma! to hold court in a bar across the way, where he sits, drinks, snipes and has to watch the raves and garlands coming in for his former collaborator. This Hart is cultured, witty, gossipy and garrulous - translation: you can't shut the guy up - but he can also be hard work, a narcissistic nightmare. (Any resemblance to other showbusiness figures, etc. etc.) We understand why the movie's Rodgers (an upright Andrew Scott) may have thought it best to move beyond Hart's glibly adolescent provocations; we just feel sorry for the barman (Bobby Cannavale) who has to listen to his embittered tirades, and for the 20-year-old co-ed the middle-aged lyricist has misguidedly set his heart on. (As played by Margaret Qualley, she's called Elizabeth, but may as well go by the name Hail Mary.) With all his erstwhile triumphs turning to apparent failure, Hart is yesterday's man, a fact apparent even before his early toast to the way it was: "To the great and glorious past, when it all mattered so much."

As we watch Hart tying up his earthly business - or resigning himself to his fate - another Linklater hoves into view: the adaptable independent contractor. The director has sympathy for Hart, who's a great character at the very least, someone one might well construct a diverting movie around. But Linklater has also long metabolised the life lessons that a figure such as Hart represents: the need to move on and evolve, to let the past go, to live in the present with an eye to the future; to resist succumbing to both the masochism that is the writer's fate and the bitterness and jealousy the creative industries inevitably foster. (Flexibility is, was and shall forever remain the key.) His latest project is so steeped in theatreland you could easily imagine it being reworked for the stage, but it's good theatre: atmospheric, crafty, textured, literate, characterful, as suffused in lived experience as any barman's rag, 100 minutes that give you the world. Kaplow has apparently proceeded from an intriguing prompt: what if you made theatre itself the basis of a play like The Iceman Cometh? Well, for starters, it provides an abundant opportunity for your actors. Hawke, for one, has never in his four-decade screen career been more front-and-centre, nor asked to be more relentless. The casual talk required of him in Linklater's Before films is here replaced by something more forced, loaded and desperate: the last words of a sometime leading light reduced to the status of a supporting player, only just more notable than the so-called "extras" the bar now surrounds him with. This Hart is himself giving a performance, pretending to go entirely unaffected by the sight of his former partner arm-in-arm with another man. If you're struggling to conceive of Blue Moon as another of Linklater's relationship movies, listen to Rodgers telling Hart "I want to be one of those composers who writes with other lyricists", and clock the front the latter immediately has to put on. What Linklater has spotted, in his many years on the job, is that showbiz folks are uniquely well-engineered to switch on and off, to put on a show as required - but that doesn't mean they don't hurt like the rest of us.

For much of Blue Moon, Hart is so busy trying to make himself a memorable character that he forgets he's also a human being - but Hawke never does, instead finding the vulnerabilities beneath the lyricist's flinty and brittle surface: the regrets, the looming fear of old age and irrelevancy, of becoming an afterthought in a far more illustrious story. (There may be nothing more indie in all 2025 cinema than the sympathy Hawke and Linklater demonstrate for this footnote - but then the guy wrote "Blue Moon", you know?) Still, it's not all Hart. Although conceived along smaller, tighter lines than Dazed and Confused and School of Rock, this is also another of Linklater's ensemble pieces, attentive indeed to those who draw different notes and responses - from bawdy camaraderie to mortal offence - out of the main character; collectively, they come to suggest the demimonde and wider world that have left Lorenz Hart behind. Scott's solid-pro Rodgers senses the way the wind is blowing as WW2 drags on, and spends much of this particular night trying not to lose it at the wretch clinging to his coattails; there's also a nicely self-effacing turn from Patrick Kennedy as E.B. White, more comfortable in midlife than Hart, and more open to the world, too. (A fun in-joke about a certain mouse is one of Kaplow's riffs on the ways creatives borrow from one another, how they can take a stray thought or idea and make it their own.) For me, what finally elevated Blue Moon into the front rank of American filmmaking in 2025 is that Linklater is the first director to properly explain Margaret Qualley to me, rather than merely forcing her into my eyes and down my throat as if she were AI. (If I were Sydney Sweeney's people, I'd be DMing Linklater 24/7.) Linklater dresses Qualley up in gorgeous Consolata Boyle finery, then steps back, lets her breathe and think for herself, and regards her, fondly, as three-dimensional flesh-and-blood, an actress playing a young woman with ambitions of her own to which a less generous artist like Lorenz Hart has sadly blinded himself. There are always the consolations of art: Kaplow's screenplay, easily the year's richest, admits as much by wrapping up with a satisfying nod in the direction of Casablanca. (No harm whatsoever in borrowing from the best.) But things change, the world turns, and time really does go by.

Blue Moon is now showing in selected cinemas.

A fistful of dholas: "Sholay: The Final Cut"

The totemic Hindi hit Sholay is back on screens this week to mark the film's 50th anniversary, presented in a richly textured restoration going under the billing The Final Cut. What we're getting is the full roadshow kit-and-caboodle: all 204 minutes of it, just as director Ramesh Sippy originally wanted audiences to experience before the opening weekend's box-office numbers proved unexpectedly soft. The new suffix gives Sippy's film an air of the Apocalypse Now, the classic that took a while to arrive at a definitive version and find its popular feet. In fact, this was Sippy and screenwriters Javed Akhtar and Salim Khan looking towards the globetrotting Westerns of the late Sixties and early Seventies for inspiration, and coming up with a Once Upon a Time in the East. The movie opens with a train pulling into a remote station; some three hours later, it concludes with a train pulling out of a station. In between, there are men with guns on horseback, shawls worn like ponchos; R.D. Burman's Morricone-aping score, which prefers whistles to devotional chants and found sounds to traditional instruments; our heroes - Dharmendra's Veeru and Amitabh Bachchan's Jai, roguish types of the kind Dean Martin and Bob Mitchum used to play in Westerns - are dispatched by a local sheriff, Sanjeev Kumar's Inspector Thakur, to bring in the fearsome bandit Gabbar Singh (Amjad Khan) dead or alive. These were simpler times for Bollywood, for India and for (at least some of) the wider world: should you seek an antidote for the toxic ugliness being provoked by current India First sensation Dhurandhar, lurking coiled and defensive in the screen next door, all one need do is revisit Sholay's ever-hearty opening number "Yeh Dosti", being two best buds in a stolen motorbike-and-sidecar, armed only with a harmonica that recalls Manfred Mann ("5-4-3-2-1" in particular) as much as it does Charles Bronson. Here - in glorious 70mm and retouched Technicolor, not to mention stereophonic sound - is cinema that thrills to the possibilities of the big country and the open road.

This was also a time when a Bollywood film could roam in every which direction, which may present as a challenge to the contemporary cinemagoer. Even 21st century viewers immersed in the house style of the masala movie have been known to raise an eyebrow at the sudden handbrake turns Sippy applies in matters of genre and tone. Sholay's opening reels veer from western to musical to broad pantomimic comedy, as Veeru and Jai find themselves behind bars and at the mercy of an incompetent warden (Asrani) modelled after Chaplin's Hitler in The Great Dictator; late on - approaching the three-hour mark, and a point where you might start to think it'd be a good idea for the lads to saddle up if they're ever going to capture this Gabbar Singh fellow before midnight - we are invited to spend a good ten minutes chuckling at Dharmendra's drunk acting as a lovelorn Veeru threatens to throw himself off a water tower. Veeru and Jai famously make critical decisions on the flip of a coin; early on in Sholay, at least, it sometimes seems as if Javed-Salim (as the screenwriters are credited) were doing likewise. History has led us to regard Sholay as the beginning of something (Bachchan's career, notably), yet it's as much of a magpie-movie as any other genre piece of the time, filching from films its cultured makers admired: when Inspector Thakur sends on a pair of high-kicking assailants to test Veeru and Jai's combat skills, it's as though we've suddenly strayed into one of those newfangled Bruce Lee pictures that had started gaining traction by 1975. Certain elements don't quite blend at first. In their jeanjackets, Dharmendra and Bachchan are the image of 1970s antiheroes. (The latter spends his non-action scenes looking for the best place to lie down and get forty winks; real moviestars know when and how to conserve their energy.) Yet Hema Malini's love interest is conceived and styled like the heroine of a Fifties Bollywood extravaganza; she seems to exist in another time and place to, say, item girl Helen, who wiggles through a post-intermission song dressed like one of Pan's People. 

I retain reservations about Sholay's pick-and-mix first half, to these eyes very much the work of creatives feeling their way tentatively into this world. In the thumping second half, however, these disparate elements come together and absolutely body you. The bits of Sholay you remember are exceptionally vivid. A game of Russian roulette that prompts several minutes of manic laughter before the murderous punchline. Bachchan brushing dust off his shoulder in the laconic Eastwood style. Stuntmen tumbling from rocky outcrops in perfect Greg Louganis curls. The bandits' midfilm assault on the Thakur family home, being refried, still-potent Leone: the victims frozen in their death throes, a gust of wind blowing the shrouds off the corpses. Jaya Bhaduri, the future Mrs. Bachchan, framed from below against a cloudless blue sky like one of the supplicants in Black Narcissus, having been handed only one eccentric note to play: someone who's really into Holi. (How eccentric: the Western equivalent would be a character who eats nothing but Easter eggs.) Yet that screenwriters' quirk may actually be key to why Sholay endures so as entertainment. At its very best, Sippy's film is nothing if not all-in, demonstrating a total commitment to its particular cause. It's Malini dancing barefoot over broken glass in the noonday sun in an attempt to keep her man alive; it's the same full-throttle derangement you see in later, devil-may-care spaghetti westerns, only sustained for the running time of Dances with Wolves. What Sholay has spent the past half-century proving is that we spectators will forgive a lot if the images set before us attain the desired intensity; even as the film wobbles, meanders and confounds as narrative, it's all movie. No surprise to learn that its biggest contemporary fans should include V. Vijayendra Prasad, screenwriter of choice for his son SS Rajamouli: the embers of Sholay burn on in RRR, both in the bond between twin heroes who operate as left hand and right hand - an image that assumes even greater meaning once you've witnessed what Gabbar Singh does to Inspector Thakur - and in the relentless delivery of cool stuff that looks amazing on a big screen. Sholay remains a landmark film, if not a perfect film. But you could say the same thing about Gone with the Wind or even The Searchers.

Sholay: The Final Cut is now showing in selected cinemas.

For what it's worth...

UK box office Top Ten (for the weekend of December 5-7, 2025):

1 (2) Zootropolis 2 (PG)

2 (new) Five Nights at Freddy's 2 (15)

3 (1) Wicked: For Good (PG)

4 (new) André Rieu's 2025 Christmas Concert: Merry Christmas (PG)

5 (new) Eternity (15) ***

6 (3) Now You See Me: Now You Don't (12A)

7 (new) Dhurandhar (18) **

8 (new) Kill Bill: The Whole Bloody Affair (18)

9 (new) It Was Just An Accident (12A) ****

10 (7) Nuremberg (15) ***

(source: BFI)

My top five:

1. Sunset Blvd.

2. Sholay: The Final Cut

3. Blue Moon

4. Christmas, Again

5. It Was Just An Accident

  

DVD/Blu-Ray/Download top ten: 

1 (2) The Grinch (U)

2 (1) Wicked: Part 1 (PG) **

3 (16) The Polar Express (U)

4 (27) Downton Abbey: The Grand Finale (PG)

5 (13) Elf (PG) **

6 (3) Jurassic World: Rebirth (12) **

7 (9) Nobody 2 (15)

8 (new) Dracula (15)

9 (6) F1 The Movie (12) ***

10 (12) Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy (15) **

(source: officialcharts.com)

My top five: 
1. The Long Walk

2. The Shrouds

3. The Ballad of Wallis Island

4. F1: The Movie

5. The Naked Gun

Top five films on terrestrial TV this week:

1. Strangers on a Train (Friday, BBC Two, 3.30pm)

2. Hell or High Water (Monday, BBC Two, 11pm)

3. Miracle on 34th Street [above] (Sunday, Channel 4, 4.45pm)

4. Laura (Tuesday, BBC Two, 3.50pm)

5. Live Free or Die Hard (Wednesday, ITV1, 11.25pm)

Going underground: "It Was Just An Accident"

With his latest film, the Palme d'Or-winning It Was Just An Accident, Jafar Panahi finesses some of what was going on in Mohammed Rasoulof's much-admired Iranian drama The Seed of the Sacred Fig, an Oscar nominee at the start of the year. As there, we find Iranian cinema back on the road, its foremost filmmakers (like Panahi) having been sprung from house arrest; once again, all parties find themselves on a potentially lethal collision course with the regime and its representatives. Yet things have intensified in Panahiland: now the director has started mulling what it is to take a life. Accident takes its title from a line heard in its opening minutes, as a family man driving his heavily pregnant wife and young daughter home hits a stray dog in the dark; this freak occurrence leaves the car in need of repairs. Yet the title multiplies in meaning after one of the mechanics at the garage, Vahid (Vahid Mobasseri), realises this respectable-seeming motorist, who walks with a pronounced limp, may just be the man who tortured him in custody several years before. The squeak of your oppressor's prosthetic limb impacting upon a hard floor is not something you easily forget. The question Panahi poses - both for Vahid and those of us looking on - is what best to do with this information. The question those of us who've followed Panahi's career may start to ponder is how this specific scenario relates to the filmmaker's own situation, as a dissident who's just been sentenced to prison time for continuing to make films in defiance of the authorities. Has Panahi, too, crossed paths with one of those enforcers who've made his life such a challenge in recent times? Is the new film his way of channelling (perhaps neutralising) idle thoughts of bloody vengeance?

It would be something of an understatement, then, to frame Accident as more urgent than the average thriller. One surprise here is how early the two parties collide and how quickly decisive (if non-fatal) action is taken; dramatically, it gives Vahid the rest of the movie to regret what he's done. (And then start to worry that he should have gone further still.) I suspect actual revenge may be something like this: you act with rash certainty and righteous indignation, and are then given cause to rue and repent at leisure. This grabby first-reel activity also affords Panahi greater time to describe what will look to the rest of us like two distinct yet damnably interlinked Irans. There is the surface Iran where life apparently proceeds as normal, a country populated by model citizens, obediently engaged in the everyday business of repairs, bookselling, wedding photography, raising a family. The other is more subterranean: a quasi-underground network of comrades and contacts, those who've been touched and traumatised by the cruelties of the State and thus have crucial intel to share. What we observe over these 100 minutes is the ever-nervy interplay between these two Irans: the one desperately trying to get all the information they need from the other without blowing their cover. (As a groom is overheard saying to his bride at one point: "This is a quagmire, darling. The further you go, the deeper you sink.") These are, too, the two Irans Panahi himself has been forced to navigate between over the past couple of decades, attempting to film and show the realities of his country without leaving himself exposed to further retribution. How do you make movies you want to make in a place that doesn't want you to make movies? The answer: with a great deal of help from your friends.

Another of Accident's surprises is how many people this narrative eventually involves (and touches, and traumatises). The set-up - one man pursuing another - seems to invite stark, minimalist handling, yet Panahi's film gradually opens out into what's effectively an Altmanesque ensemble piece, a portrait of a troubled society. Through some of the good Samaritans and fellow travellers Vahid picks up en route, the writing can strike a more peaceable note, insisting it probably isn't the noblest idea to go around rounding up your political opponents. But the expansion in personnel also underlines just how many people in Iran have been affected by state-sanctioned oppression: there are, in short, more sometime torturers, and consequently more torture victims, walking among these people than we might first think. It was only around the film's midpoint that I realised why long stretches were unfolding in the back of Vahid's transit van: the aim, presumably, was to keep this production off the street and away from prying eyes. Once again in a Panahi film, the form reflects (and critiques) the situation. Accident doesn't quite sustain the electrifying immediacy of an autofiction like 2022's No Bears: this is more obviously a story that's been composed, right down to an absurdist riff about bankcards, though that authorial distance may be the difference between life and death in Iran. (Presumably Panahi could claim it's the characters in this instance who are contemplating doing away with a representative of the State, not the filmmaker himself - though I fear an authority as ideologically absolutist as the Iranian court would see this as splitting hairs.) It's still an event, though: a thriller rooted in pressing here-and-now concerns (liberal complacency; the best response to zealotry), forcing characters and audience alike to make moral choices, and a rare film where the stakes appear as elevated for those behind the camera as they are for those before it. Form can offer only partial protection, only so much sanctuary; for much of its duration, It Was Just An Accident really just is.

It Was Just An Accident is now playing in selected cinemas.