Loving the alien: "Elio"

Should we be sad that the films of Pixar are no longer cutting through as once they did, or is that exactly the kind of sentimental attachment our new tech-bro overlords rely on? The studio has at least had a good, profitable thirty-year run, from the first Toy Story back in 1995 to last year's Inside Out 2. It's just a little bittersweet that they should now be ceding the multiplex space to live-action remakes of animated favourites: the processor chips that generated three decades' worth of original entertainment have been surpassed in their pull and power by something more algorithmic. Elio, presently doing steady business after a perilously slow launch in a marketplace dominated by the Lilo & Stitch and How to Train Your Dragon redos, could reportedly have been more original yet. Initially conceived and pitched as a coming-out story of sorts, it was toned down even before last November's election result over concerns about the America the film would be releasing into. (The pivot led to the departure of original director Adrian Molina, and some scattered "directed by" credits in the release cut: Madeline Sharafian and Domee Shi upfront, Molina tucked away in the closing scroll.) Something of that initial premise persists, intriguingly enough, but the version we get hinges on a sullen pre-teen outcast (voiced by Yonas Kibreab), being raised by an aunt after the death of his parents, who experiences a close encounter of the third kind. (Hey, if our animated features are having their data scraped by live-action producers, why not the other way around?) A space nut, young Elio spends his days and nights alone on a beach adjacent to his aunt's asteroid-tracking military base, hoping that aliens will abduct him; the S.O.Ses he scrawls in the sand read like deviance from a tight-lipped militaristic norm that denies or doesn't know how to handle any feelings. Packed off to summer camp in the hope it'll straighten him out, Elio is subsequently rescued from bullies by extraterrestrial means. The film, in other words, can itself claim to have been straightened out, yet its narrative arc - solitary refusenik negotiates their place in the world, finding solidarity and relief among a community other than the one they've been born into, becoming more comfortable in their own skin - is unalterably queer: swap the tractor beams and constellations for a nightclub's mirrorball, and we could almost be rewatching the BBC's recent adaptation of Paris Lees' memoir What It Feels Like for a Girl.

Compared to the bulk of the digimations following in Buzz Lightyear's moonbooted footsteps, Elio is at the very least well made, more WALL-E than Planet 51, and identifiably Pixarian in its fealty to a multilayered, well-tempered screenplay. The wide-eyed wonder inspired by the details of NASA's Voyager probe (seized upon here as a means of connecting Elio to his new hosts) is one launchpad; if the pastel spacescapes strike the eye as slightly rote, paling in comparison with the vivid phosphorescence of Disney's semi-forgotten post-Covid flop Strange Planet, the character design is always sharp (the aliens include giant bugs who talk out of their butts and strap themselves into flesh-piercing armour to persuade as warriors) and there are fun asides, like the list of items Elio packs for his intergalactic mission ("nice, peaceful spoooons!"). A clever subplot involving an Elio clone ("what's my motivation?") sent back to Earth while our hero is on his space adventure is plainly Pixar attempting to reassure those accompanying adults in the audience who'd go spare if any of their own charges went missing, but it also results in a story strand that yields several laughs, a properly emotional reunion on a beach at dusk, and an image that wouldn't entirely look out of place in a David Cronenberg movie (the clone melting away with a thumbs-up and a friendly wink once he's been deemed surplus to requirements). We can probably say that Pixar's Golden Age - roughly 1995 to 2015, an era when the company treated digimation as sport, routinely besting their rivals in a run of must-see films that pushed the artform forwards - is behind us. Yet this new, mellower era has freed these animators to pursue other textures and tones, to throw off their hard corporate exoskeleton and embrace their inner softies (as with those alien bugs), feeding any behind-the-scenes insecurities back into their plots. (They were surely there in the Inside Out films' button-pushing, as it is in Elio's mini-identity crisis.) Even in this compromised state, Elio makes for a pleasing summer getaway, but in a moment when the NASA budget has been slashed by a Government suspicious of the alien and marginal, it also presents as a poignant pop-cultural wormhole connecting our world to an alternative reality: a glimpse of a better, kinder galaxy where higher powers look out for the troubled, using technology only for good.

Elio is now playing in cinemas nationwide.

On DVD: "Quatermass 2"

Hammer's reissue program continues with a sequel that changes the rules of its game somewhat. In 1955's The Quatermass Xperiment, the eponymous scientist (Brian Donlevy) was an at best ambiguous figure, a pushy American on Brit soil running headlong into Jack Warner's jovial Inspector Lomax in his frantic mission to retrieve his crashlanded technology and the data it had recorded. Perhaps mindful of the audience for these films in the US - where the sequel was released as Enemy from Space - 1957's Quatermass 2 reframes its protagonist as rather closer to a crusading hero, first trying to pin down the source and consequences of the meteorites raining down on his neck of the woods, which leave the locals - and poor old Bryan Forbes, as one of Quatermass's underlings - with nasty contact burns; then investigating what's really going on at a top-secret, heavily fortified Government facility that claims to be producing synthetic foodstuffs. Reinvesting the original's profits resulted in a notably bigger picture, though there have been losses: the transatlantic back-and-forth between Quatermass and Lomax, for one. (With Warner newly locked into his career-defining role as TV's Dixon of Dock Green, the character of Lomax is reduced to a helpful cameo, played by lookalike John Longden; there's at least one familiar face, however, in a pre-Carry On Sid James, cast as the sottish journo enlisted to bring Quatermass's findings to wider attention.) Yet returning director Val Guest's eye for an evocative sci-fi location has, if anything, only improved. The sequel gets a lot of atmospheric mileage out of a few days' shooting around the recently redesigned new town of Hemel Hempstead; a Shell refinery in Essex stands in for the Government slop factory, and yields at least one still-horrifying image, seemingly inspired by the photos of Hiroshima victims. In a further sign of how rapidly Hammer was becoming part of the national fabric, there's even a brief panorama of Parliament Square as it was in the late 1950s, though Nigel Kneale's script remains suspicious about those in positions of power and sceptical indeed about the capacity of the general public to act in their own best interests. It gets into wobblier B-movie territory upon unleashing a monster that's part Godzilla-like kaiju, part The Blob, and it ends inconclusively with a shameless plea for further sequels ("what worries me is how final this can be"), but for the most part Q2 holds up as thoughtful, involving homegrown SF - and much of what's on its mind is more pertinent to 2025 than most of this year's big summer sequels.

Quatermass 2 is now available in a limited edition 4K Collector's Boxset through Hammer Films, and is available to stream via Prime Video.

For what it's worth...

UK box office Top Ten (for the weekend of July 4-6, 2025):

1 (new) Jurassic World: Rebirth (12A)

2 (1) F1 (12A) ***

3 (3) How to Train Your Dragon (PG)

4 (2) 28 Years Later (15) ****

5 (4) Elio (PG) ***

6 (5) Lilo & Stitch (U)

7 (6) M3GAN 2.0 (15) **

8 (7) Mission: Impossible - The Final Reckoning (12A) **

9 (8) Sardaar Ji 3 (12A)

10 (12) The Ballad of Wallis Island (12A) ***

(source: BFI)

My top five:

1. Hearts of Darkness: a Filmmaker's Apocalypse

2. Nine Queens [above]

3. The Girl Who Leapt Through Time

4. Clueless

5. F1

  

DVD/Blu-Ray/Download top ten: 

1 (1) A Minecraft Movie (PG)

2 (new) Thunderbolts* (12)

3 (13) Wicked: Part One (PG) **

4 (6) Jurassic World: Dominion (12)

5 (4) Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy (15) **

6 (re) Disney's Snow White (PG)

7 (2) Final Destination: Bloodlines (15) **

8 (re) Flow (U) ***

9 (3) 28 Days Later... (15) ****

10 (new) James Bond: Sean Connery 6-Film Collection (12) ****

(source: officialcharts.com)

My top five: 
1. Black Bag

2. The Seed of the Sacred Fig

3. Quatermass 2

4. Flow

5. I'm Still Here

Top five films on terrestrial TV this week:

1. Deliverance (Friday, BBC Two, 11pm)

2. Manhunter (Tuesday, BBC Two, 11pm)

3. Passport to Pimlico (Sunday, BBC Two, 1.50pm)

4. Little Women (Saturday, Channel 4, 3pm)

5. Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (Sunday, BBC Two, 3.10pm)

In memoriam: Ken Colley (Telegraph 09/07/25)

Ken Colley, who has died aged 87, was a familiar British character player launched into the fan-convention stratosphere via his role as Admiral Piett, commander of Darth Vader’s Executor craft in the Star Wars sequels The Empire Strikes Back (1980) and Return of the Jedi (1983); ever-versatile, he counts among the few performers to have appeared on screen as both Jesus Christ and Adolf Hitler.

Such extremes were however light years removed from the daily bread-and-butter of Colley the jobbing actor. After an uncredited screen debut as a corpse in the BBC’s A for Andromeda (1961), he settled into steady TV employment, appearing on The Avengers in 1963 and as a steelworker in one 1964 episode of Coronation Street; he played two roles on Emergency-Ward 10 (1957-67) and three on Z Cars (1962-78).

Colley made his film debut as a porter in the Children’s Film Foundation title Seventy Deadly Pills (1964), followed by supporting roles in more prominent titles: squaddies in How I Won the War (1967) and Oh! What a Lovely War (1969), underworld fixer Tony Farrell in Performance (1970). By then, his sad-eyed, lugubrious mien was being noticed by creatives drawn to the cultish and marginal.

Colley became a favourite of Ken Russell, who cast him as Hitler in his scandal-inducing TV film Dance of the Seven Veils (1970). (It was the second time Colley had played the dictator, after “These Men Are Dangerous”, a 1969 episode of the BBC’s Thirty-Minute Theatre.) He was Tchaikovsky’s younger brother in The Music Lovers and Legrand in The Devils (both 1971); later he appeared as Krenek in Mahler (1974) and Chopin in Lisztomania (1975).

He also bonded with the Pythons, playing “1st Fanatic” in Terry Gilliam’s Jabberwocky and Michael Palin’s bungling bank robber accomplice in “The Testing of Eric Olthwaite”, the second episode of Ripping Yarns (both 1977). With reported first choice George Lazenby unavailable, Colley was recruited to play Jesus in Monty Python’s Life of Brian (1979): “There was as much fun between takes as on takes,” the actor recalled. 

The significance of his role as Lord Vader’s pilot snuck up on him: “I was out shopping in Notting Hill Gate with my wife Mary, and we walked past an old-fashioned Odeon… The queues were four-deep around the block and I said ‘Look, my Star Wars film is on. We ought to go and see it.’ There were two seats left on the front row and when the film began, with those words disappearing into infinity, you could have heard a human hair drop. I looked around at the people in the audience and I said to Mary ‘this is wonderful!’”

Born Kenneth Colley in Manchester on December 7, 1937, he began acting while working as a gopher in rep theatre (“They threw you on stage in small parts so they didn't have to pay an actor”). Debuting in Leicester in 1961, he later appeared alongside John Hurt and Rodney Bewes in the Garrick’s recut of David Helliwell’s Little Malcolm and His Struggle Against the Eunuchs in 1966, and opposite Albert Finney in the Royal Court premiere of David Storey’s Cromwell in 1973.

His Star Wars adventures unlocked more prominent parts, often in international miniseries or TV movies: the naval hero of ITV’s BAFTA-winning I Remember Nelson (1982), for which he strapped his right arm behind his back; Eichmann in the Emmy-winning Wallenberg: A Hero’s Story (1985); Ben Gunn (opposite Brian Blessed’s Long John Silver) in Return to Treasure Island (1986).

Russell remained loyal, casting Colley as Mr. Brunt in The Rainbow (1989), Alfred Dreyfus in Prisoner of Honor (1991) and the composer John Ireland in The Secret Life of Arnold Bax (1992). Colley now had overseas admirers – he was the titular hitman in droll Finnish auteur Aki Kaurismäki’s I Hired A Contract Killer (1990) – though typically he saw the decade out with episodes of Peak Practice (in 1997) and The Bill (between 1995-99).

After revoicing Admiral Piett for the Lego Star Wars animation The Empire Strikes Out (2012), he played Estragon in the Cockpit Theatre’s 2014 revival of Waiting for Godot and Mob boss Vicente Changretta in 2016’s third series of Peaky Blinders. He briefly turned to directing, shooting the Ouija-board horror Greetings (2007) in his own Hythe home; his final role was in the Kent-shot indie thriller Dan Hawk Psychic Detective (2024).

There was, he insisted, no formula for success: “You only realise what you’ve got when it’s put together. Some of the best scripts you’ve ever read come out like dreck and you can’t understand why, while some scripts you had no respect for become wonderful movies… You cannot predict what will be a hit, otherwise we’d all be millionaires.”

He is survived by his wife Mary Dunne, who he married in 1962.

Ken Colley, born December 7, 1937, died June 30, 2025.

Battlegrounds: "Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker's Apocalypse"

The death of Eleanor Coppola and the release of her husband Francis Ford Coppola's Megalopolis last year have collectively triggered a reissue for 1991's Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker's Apocalypse. Originally assembled by Fax Bahr and George Hickenlooper for US cable network Showtime yet subsequently shown in cinemas to critical acclaim, this was the making-of documentary that notarised the legend of an earlier Coppola opus - 1979's famously troubled Conrad adaptation Apocalypse Now - while also perhaps contextualising the safe path the director would tread over the following decade. (The unhappy Godfather threequel would be followed by John Grisham adaptations and PG-rated Robin Williams vehicles.) The bulk of the doc was drawn from footage Eleanor shot during Apocalypse's attenuated eight-month shoot in the Philippines, initially to provide the foundation of a United Artists press kit. Yet Bahr and Hickenlooper open with footage of Coppola at the movie's Cannes premiere, insisting the film wasn't about Vietnam, it was Vietnam; over the doc's brisk 95 minutes, the inherent madness of this project seems to redouble with every passing frame. Much of it has long been a matter of public record. The shoot had barely begun when Francis elected to replace leading man Harvey Keitel with Martin Sheen, only for a spiritually unmoored Sheen to suffer his own on-camera breakdown; Eleanor films the 14-year-old Laurence Fishburne, cast as young gunner Mr. Clean after lying about his age, speaking about an associate who claimed he found his time in Vietnam "fun and groovy"; a passing typhoon lays waste to the sets and schedule. Coppola found himself obliged to pump in more and more of his own money and rewrite John Milius's script as he went, and while Bahr and Hickenlooper work in a parallel with Orson Welles, who'd attempted his own Heart of Darkness adaptation in the late 1930s, the figure the director most closely resembles may actually be Gromit in the climactic setpiece of The Wrong Trousers, having to put down track as he goes along so as to prevent some terrible derailment. This Coppola presents as heroic in many ways, committed to his task, refusing to abandon his post and continually fighting for his film's forward progress; yet Eleanor's access-all-areas documentation keeps alighting upon images that could have equally served as evidence in a strong case for prosecution, sectioning or simply more draconian health-and-safety legislation.

The cinephiles in Bahr and Hickenlooper exercise their own judgement, and Hearts of Darkness includes enough of what Coppola did get filmed for the pair to make their own case for Apocalypse Now. No madness, no craziness, no shoulder-dislocating big swings, and you don't get the Ride of the Valkyries sequence, you don't get Robert Duvall as Kilgore, and you don't get whatever the hell Brando and Dennis Hopper were doing in the movie's final reel. George Lucas, who was briefly attached to direct Milius's script at an early stage, notes the insanity of the initial plan to film in Vietnam while the war was ongoing, but no madness, and you get more George Lucas films than you do John Milius films; you end up with a war movie like Revenge of the Sith, shot against green screens on entirely sterile sets, detached from gravity and reality alike. I'd forgotten how much fun the documentary is: this shoot yielded great, one-of-a-kind war stories (retold here by born storytellers), and it's amusing to see how sober Coppola, Sheen and Duvall appear in contemporary interviews shot long after the dust had settled and their ears had stopped ringing. The now-adult Fishburne, presumably doorstopped at the moment between School Daze and Boyz N The Hood, reflects that he was cast to represent all those draftees who didn't know what they were getting into; Sam Bottoms, the film's surf-dude gunner, reveals he matched his on-set drug consumption to the mood of individual scenes. The Hollywood these chastened and battle-scarred warriors came home to was one of childproofed franchises and PG-13 ratings; the old grindhouses and drive-ins were being pulled down and replaced with gleaming multiplexes. Everything now had to make commercial sense. Yet Hearts of Darkness sent viewers back to its source, even if just to goggle at it, and revisiting the plantation sequence in Bahr and Hickenlooper's company seemed to remind Coppola to finish what he started. No Hearts of Darkness, no Apocalypse Now Redux, nor Apocalypse Now: The Final Cut - and you could argue those rejigs were central to Coppola restarting on Megalopolis. By all accounts, Mike Figgis has been tasked with overseeing the making-of that grand folly: heaven knows what will come out of that.

Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker's Apocalypse is now showing in selected cinemas; a new Blu-Ray edition will be available through StudioCanal from July 28.

Child's play: "Sitaare Zameen Par"

Aamir Khan's recent choices are as prominent an illustration as any of the Hindi mainstream's increasing dependency on pre-tested material. 2017's musical Secret Superstar was constructed from familiar storybeats, but elevated by the strength and sincerity of its performances; yet 2022's Laal Singh Chaddha emerged as hamstrung by its fealty to its source material, Robert Zemeckis's ever-contentious Forrest Gump. Now Khan gives us Sitaare Zameen Par, a "spiritual" (i.e. more or less completely unconnected) sequel to his 2007 success Taare Zameen Par. The new film starts from a far less illustrious blueprint, being a remake of 2018's Campeones, the Spanish comedy-drama that's already been remade by Hollywood as 2023's Farrelly-directed Woody Harrelson vehicle Champions. Khan's Gulshan, an assistant coach for a Delhi basketball team, walks into shot playing the asshole, turning up late and unshaven for a key game and parking where he shouldn't, even before he thumps a superior and drunk-drives into a police patrol car. Community service and an attitude adjustment beckon: at his hearing, Gulshan is assigned to manage a squad of young ballers with special educational needs, the "superstars on earth" of the title. You will sense what's going to happen long before these plot points line up in exactly the order you'd expect; if R.S. Prasanna's film makes for a smoother, slicker, better-drilled adaptation than the staccato Laal Singh Chaddha, it's doubtless because this story has literally been told twice before, and spiritually revisited many more times besides.

On the plus side, SZP confirms its producer-star's nose for non-toxic material, for characterisations that are appreciably human rather than the superhuman figures namesake Salman Khan has been struggling to convince as, and for projects offering the prospect of chuckles. Chuckles there are here, on the subject of terminology (while shrugging off their own labels, the lads decide upon "businesswoman" as a synonym for sex worker), and at the sight of the pint-sized Khan being dwarfed by the absolute hulks among his charges. The star, passing into middle age with a lived-in, Jude Law-ish handsomeness, remains game for a laugh; a recent divorcee, he even works in some metatextual business involving Gulshan's gradual renegotiation of his relationship with ex-wife Sunita (Genelia Deshmukh, sparkier than a lot of recent Hindi heroines). The movie is aggressively unobjectionable: it's become the box-office hit it was always intended to be, and which Khan perhaps needed after a rocky Covid era. Yet it's only been ten years since P.K., a major Khan hit that took creative and satirical risks, where SZP goes genially through the motions. Unwilling to train his neurodivergent performers to dunk like Shaquille, Prasanna is never particularly interested in basketball as a sport, which means any in-game drama has had to be conveyed by cutaways to the sidelines. You could also duck out of the cinema for a meal during the entire central stretch, which doesn't trade in scenes so much as gentle lessons on the theme of "everybody has their own normal", put across in the same tone as an elementary teacher and in the same colours used to sell multivitamins to pre-teens. (The Shankar-Ehsaan-Loy songs play like nursery rhymes and lullabies.) In those stretches that aren't blandly entertaining, you spy the predicament of a megastar in an industry that's been set on a war footing even before India went to war. (Gulshan's community service comes to seem like a form of conscientious objection.) Rather than bang a nationalist drum, Khan has retreated to a gym that resembles a crèche to coach a sport that suggests war without the casualties. It's the very definition of a safe space, for star and audience alike, but there's not much more to the film than that - and set against the memory of Khan's epic and stirring Lagaan, a sports movie from a bolder, more confident era of Hindi filmmaking, it can't help but seem like kids' stuff.

Sitaare Zameen Par is now playing in selected cinemas.

My Top 100 Films of the Century So Far

Amid what's so far been a so-so moviegoing summer (and year), it's been educative to look back on the artistic highpoints of the past quarter-century; they do still sometimes make 'em like they used to, and - even better - sporadically make 'em like they've never been made before. Figures in brackets indicate their position on a similar list I compiled back in 2017 (which included films made in 2000, where this doesn't).

1 (1) Mulholland Dr. (David Lynch, 2001) [above]

2 (2) Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives (Apichatpong Weerasethakul, 2010)

3 (16) Once Upon a Time in Anatolia (Nuri Bilge Ceylan, 2011)

4 (7) In the City of Sylvia (José Luis Guerín, 2007)

5 (71) Mad Max: Fury Road (George Miller, 2015)

6 (3) The Corporation (Mark Achbar and Jennifer Abbott, 2003)

7 (new) Decision to Leave (Park Chan-wook, 2022)

8 (5) Father of My Children (Mia Hansen-Løve, 2009)

9 (4) Zodiac (David Fincher, 2007)

10 (10) There Will Be Blood (Paul Thomas Anderson, 2007)

11 (6) The Class (Laurent Cantet, 2008)

12 (new) Memoria (Apichatpong Weerasethakul, 2021)

13 (23) Toni Erdmann (Maren Ade, 2016)

14 (new) Saint Omer (Alice Diop, 2022)

15 (8) Take Shelter (Jeff Nichols, 2011)

16 (9) The Social Network (David Fincher, 2010)

17 (25) Memories of Murder (Bong Joon Ho, 2003)

18 (new) Roma (Alfonso Cuarón, 2018)

19 (new) Our Body (Claire Simon, 2023)

20 (new) No Bears (Jafar Panahi, 2022)

21 (new) Parasite (Bong Joon Ho, 2019)

22 (new) Godland (Hlynur Pálmason, 2022)

23 (new) Killers of the Flower Moon (Martin Scorsese, 2023)

24 (33) Our Little Sister (Hirokazu Kore-eda, 2015)

25 (21) The Last of the Unjust (Claude Lanzmann, 2013)

26 (new) For Sama (Waad Al-Kateab and Edward Watts, 2019)

27 (27) London: The Modern Babylon (Julien Temple, 2012)

28 (new) The Irishman (Martin Scorsese, 2019)

29 (new) Blitz (Steve McQueen, 2024)

30 (new) Heal the Living (Katell Quillévéré, 2016)

31 (new) The Worst Person in the World (Joachim Trier, 2021)

32 (new) Bloody Nose, Empty Pockets (Bill and Turner Ross, 2020)

33 (49) A Town Called Panic (Stéphane Aubier and Vincent Patar, 2009)

34 (new) Summer of Soul (or, When the Revolution Could Not Be Televised) (Questlove and Hal Tuchin, 2021)

35 (36) We Steal Secrets: The Story of Wikileaks (Alex Gibney, 2013)

36 (new) Kokomo City (D. Smith, 2023)

37 (new) Profit Motive and the Whispering Wind (John Gianvito, 2007)

38 (12) Être et avoir (Nicolas Philibert, 2002)

39 (34) Brokeback Mountain (Ang Lee, 2005)

40 (40) Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room (Alex Gibney, 2005)

41 (32) Crimson Gold (Jafar Panahi, 2003)

42 (63) It's Such a Beautiful Day (Don Hertzfeldt, 2012)

43 (15) Pan's Labyrinth (Guillermo del Toro, 2006)

44 (new) Annette (Leos Carax, 2021)

45 (new) The World to Come (Mona Fastvold, 2020)

46 (new) The Zone of Interest (Jonathan Glazer, 2023)

47 (19) The Magdalene Sisters (Peter Mullan, 2002)

48 (new) The Lost City of Z (James Gray, 2016)

49 (17) Before the Devil Knows You're Dead (Sidney Lumet, 2007)

50 (new) Leave No Trace (Debra Granik, 2018)

51 (18) NO (Pablo Larraín, 2012)

52 (37) The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada (Tommy Lee Jones, 2005)

53 (new) R.I.P./ee.ma.yau (Lijo Jose Pellissery, 2018)

54 (83) Far From Heaven (Todd Haynes, 2002)

55 (new) Ponniyin Selvan: Parts 1 & 2 (Mani Ratnam, 2022-23)

56 (new) The Death of Stalin (Armando Iannucci, 2017)

57 (13) The Piano Teacher (Michael Haneke, 2001)

58 (20) Talk to Her (Pedro Almodovar, 2002)

59 (31) 24 Hour Party People (Michael Winterbottom, 2002)

60 (new) And Your Mother Too/Y tu mamá también (Alfonso Cuaron, 2001)

61 (new) Possessor (Brandon Cronenberg, 2020)

62 (41) Lady Chatterley (Pascale Ferran, 2006)

63 (new) Driveways (Andrew Ahn, 2019)

64 (new) A Hidden Life (Terrence Malick, 2019)

65 (70) Train to Busan (Yeon Sang-ho, 2016)

66 (30) WALL-E (Andrew Stanton, 2008)

67 (89) Amélie (Jean-Pierre Jeunet, 2001)

68 (28) Before Midnight (Richard Linklater, 2013)

69 (new) The Son's Room (Nanni Moretti, 2001)

70 (48) Bridge of Spies (Steven Spielberg, 2015)

71 (new) Labyrinth of Cinema (Nobuhiko Obayashi, 2019)

72 (new) First Reformed (Paul Schrader, 2017)

73 (new) 25th Hour (Spike Lee, 2002)

74 (new) Eden (Mia Hansen-Løve, 2014)

75 (new) Hale County This Morning, This Evening (RaMell Ross, 2018)

76 (new) The Florida Project (Sean Baker, 2017)

77 (new) Manchester by the Sea (Kenneth Lonergan, 2016)

78 (58) The Tree of Life (Terrence Malick, 2011)

79 (new) John McEnroe: In the Realm of Perfection (Julien Faraut, 2018)

80 (61) The Court/Bamako (Abderrahmane Sissako, 2006)

81 (60) Om Shanti Om (Farah Khan, 2007)

82 (39) Punch-Drunk Love (Paul Thomas Anderson, 2002)

83 (55) Spirited Away (Hayao Miyazaki, 2001)

84 (new) Goodbye, Dragon Inn (Tsai Ming-liang, 2003)

85 (new) I Am Not Your Negro (Raoul Peck, 2016)

86 (new) A Thousand and One (A.V. Rockwell, 2023)

87 (84) Lootera (Vikramaditya Motwane, 2013)

88 (new) Foxcatcher (Bennett Miller, 2014)

89 (new) Gangubai Kathiawadi (Sanjay Leela Bhansali, 2022)

90 (new) Mr. Turner (Mike Leigh, 2014)

91 (86) Inside Llewyn Davis (Joel and Ethan Coen, 2013)

92 (68) Under the Skin (Jonathan Glazer, 2013)

93 (new) Lost in Translation (Sofia Coppola, 2003)

94 (new) Moneyball (Bennett Miller, 2011)

95 (new) Rocky aur Rani Kii Prem Kahaani (Karan Johar, 2023)

96 (new) Of Time and the City (Terence Davies, 2008)

97 (new) The Image Book (Jean-Luc Godard, 2018)

98 (new) Joyland (Saim Sadiq, 2022)

99 (new) 120BPM (Robin Campillo, 2017)

100 (new) Gagarine (Fanny Liatard and Jérémy Trouilh, 2020)

On demand: "Derek"

2008's Derek found a survivor of the British art cinema (Isaac Julien) paying impressionistic tribute to a fallen comrade (Derek Jarman, our posher Pasolini, the patron saint of Old Compton Street) in the New Documentary Style of the early 21st century. The subject is represented in his own words and images, seen and heard in an extended interview with Bernard Rose reflecting on his childhood, his influences (Hockney, Warhol, Anger), the work, the surrounding scene and the world(s) he created for himself and others, recreated anew here with full access to the Jarman archive and the arresting and often startling imagery of the films and videos themselves. In retrospect, it seems wild that this career should have opened with the bold one-two of 1976's Sebastiane and 1978's Jubilee, which - whatever their pros and cons as independently financed provocations - were singular works, heading in directions few British filmmakers have gone in since; you could say much the same of Jarman's last film and testament, 1993's Blue, which I'm just about old enough to remember launched on Channel 4, Radio 3 and in cinemas simultaneously. Who's thinking that big nowadays?

Representing Jarman's mature period - the run of better-dressed dramas he made with public funding from 1986's Caravaggio onwards - Tilda Swinton is observed ghosting through a newly remodelled and sterile London, a cathedral to capital, and penning a letter on the soundtrack with the aim of cluing her former employer in on developments in the years since his passing: chiefly the gentrification of Britain and the streamlining of its creative industries, pointed towards far sunnier, cosier images and the potential profits they represent. (But to what artistic end?) These occasional cutaways might have presented as a slight continuity issue, suggesting as they do another film entirely, one setting Jarman in fond context. Yet they also serve as a reminder of how Jarman's polyphonic films often incorporated disparate voices, working in different tones and textures to the point of seeming torn or ragged. (Julien underlines the point by closing with Elisabeth Welch singing "Stormy Weather" from 1980's The Tempest.) More energy is apparent than there would be in any polished, official portrait: between them, Julien and Jarman - even their names sort of rhyme - cover a lot of ground in these eighty minutes. Sex, politics, pop music; religion, AIDS, death. Shimmering and shifting like the waves lapping at the shores of Jarman's Dungeness home, Derek leaves you keen to revisit Jarman's in every sense original films - and may yet inspire another young filmmaker or two to follow his lead.

Derek is available on DVD through the BFI, and currently streaming on YouTube.

On TV: "A House Named Shahana"

We're introduced to Shahrin (Aanon Siddiqua), the heroine of the Bangladeshi-UK co-production A House Named Shahana, in two distinct yet equally pivotal moments: in 1995, when she takes delivery of her divorce papers, and in 1987, as a young bride being married off - over the phone, indeed - to an English hotelier. Those parallel timelines ensure Leesa Gazi's film keeps surprising us, as Shahrin keeps surprising herself with her own fortitude and drive. We watch her leave those divorce papers behind on an auto-rickshaw, only for it to prove no big deal. She's revealed to be working as a doctor - which allows Gazi and Siddiqua, co-writers here, to brush up against other case studies involving women at the mercy of the men in their lives. And just when we seem to be settling alongside Shahrin in her new, liberated life, we are returned to the Britain of the late 1980s - a fairly grim time to have been Bangladeshi in the UK, even with an outwardly welcoming husband, keen to ensure his household runs like clockwork - to get a sense of what our lived through back there, and crucially what she survived. I say crucially, because Gazi and Siddiqua, drawing on the stories of actual young brides launched into overseas exile, don't approach this failed first marriage as the abusive dead loss a more overtly polemical film might dramatise, rather a learning experience, something formative and survivable, to be looked at philosophically. Your arranged marriage fails. But so what? Life goes on.

It's a character study, then, but it's also a very endearing portrait of an independent spirit. Shahrin isn't for a single moment of screentime a downtrodden victim, but a pillar of strength; what she ultimately learns from her spell in mute, under-the-burqa servitude is the power of her own voice. (She demonstrates such spirit in the 1995 sequences that her parents, under whose roof she's returned, believe she's been possessed by a djinn who's rendered her untameable.) She asks a tailor to sew pockets in her clothes, like men have in theirs; she works up a buoying relationship with her folks' obedient domestic Julekha (Kamrunnahar Munni, a real find), to whom Shahrin serves as an inspiration, as someone who's left domesticity behind, lived a life and then succeeded in rebuilding that life from scratch. It's a terrific breakout performance from the London-based musician Siddiqua, all the more impressive for being her feature debut. She convinces not just as a pathfinder and postergirl but as a flesh-and-blood divorcee, someone whom actual wives, weighing up whether or not it's worth the disruption and any stigma to go their own way, might well remember in their own moments of self-determination. Gazi maintains a close, intimate domestic focus, shuttling us back-and-forth between households, and thereby allowing us to spot subtle changes in the family unit and attitudes within. Yet she inhabits this space so confidently that even what may at first appear missteps come to lead us somewhere rewarding. Shahrin is such an independent woman I wasn't sure the film needed the quasi-romantic subplot linking her to a genial family friend (Iresh Zaker), but it allows Gazi, through these two excellent actors, to raise the possibility of love again - or organic connection, something a Bangladeshi woman might choose for herself, and that only enhances who she already is. A quietly wise and lovely film.

A House Named Shahana screens on Channel 4 this Thursday at 1.55am, and will then be available on Channel 4's on-demand service.

For what it's worth...

UK box office Top Ten (for the weekend of June 27-29, 2025):

1 (new) F1 (12A) ***

2 (1) 28 Years Later (15) ****

3 (2) How to Train Your Dragon (PG)

4 (3) Elio (PG)

5 (4) Lilo & Stitch (U)

6 (new) M3GAN 2.0 (15) **

7 (5) Mission: Impossible - The Final Reckoning (12A) **

8 (new) Sardaar Ji 3 (12A)

9 (6) The Long, Wet and Now Apparently Wrong Walk (12A)

10 (7) Sitaare Zameen Par (12A) **

(source: BFI)

My top five:

1. Hearts of Darkness: a Filmmaker's Apocalypse

2. Ran

3. The Girl Who Leapt Through Time

4. Clueless

5. 28 Years Later

  

DVD/Blu-Ray/Download top ten: 

1 (2) A Minecraft Movie (PG)

2 (1) Final Destination: Bloodlines (15) **

3 (3) 28 Days Later... (15) ****

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

5 (5) How to Train Your Dragon 2 (PG) ***

6 (40) Jurassic World: Dominion (12)

7 (9) How to Train Your Dragon: The Hidden World (PG) ****

8 (new) Lethal Weapon (15) [above] ****

9 (6) Sinners (15) ****

10 (7) The Amateur (12)

(source: officialcharts.com)

My top five: 
1. Black Bag

2. The Seed of the Sacred Fig

3. Flow

4. I'm Still Here

5. Four Mothers

Top five films on terrestrial TV this week:

1. The Wicker Man (Tuesday, BBC Two, 11.50pm)

2. Don't Look Now (Wednesday, BBC Two, 12midnight)

3. King Richard (Saturday, BBC One, 10.20pm)

4. A House Named Shahana (Thursday, Channel 4, 1.55am)

5. The Day After Tomorrow (Saturday, Channel 4, 7.40pm)

Enshittification: "M3GAN 2.0"

The first M3GAN - written by Akela Cooper and James Wan, directed by Gerard Johnstone - was released in January 2023 as Blumhouse's official alternative to the season's po-faced awards bait. The tale of a sociopathically sassy emotional support android, it didn't strictly have to be any good to stand out, but it achieved one of the 21st century studio movie's aims in becoming memeable, resulting in a global box-office take of $180m. Sequel M3GAN 2.0, written and directed by Johnstone, is opening at the height of movie summer - between the new Jerry Bruckheimer and the latest Jurassic Park reboot - which possibly explains the decision to expand a small, snarkily satirical sci-fi proposition into something approximating a midrange action pic adjacent to the Terminator, X-Men and Mission: Impossible franchises. Now there is a second item of killer kit on the loose: a robot known as Amelia (Ivanna Sakhno), who threatens not just one household, but the entire world order, and prompts the authorities to revive the first film's antagonist as a first line of defence. Johnstone clearly sees this as an opportunity to initiate a popcorn-counter debate about tech that goes beyond kids and screens to consider the looming presence of AI in our homes and pockets and whether it's still possible to forge an ethical career in tech, given the money and lunatics now flooding that field. All valid points for a broadsheet editorial, but as a movie, M3GAN 2.0 proves disappointingly dry: for an hour or so, there's barely one laugh to be had with it. Partly that's because Johnstone gives himself a lot more to set up: while humanoid heroine Gemma (Allison Williams) comes to realise she has to reboot the killer doll that terrorised her family, we're introduced to a weirdo tech guru (Jemaine Clement) with a neural link and bolt-on abs. The elevated budget, too, provides a lot more tech to show off, but it's a narrative issue when these gleaming machines seem to exert greater control over the plot than the tagalong humans. M3GAN 2.0 is busy, but it's never as funny as its predecessor: you begin to wonder whether everybody involved has misunderstood what made the original such a hit - and misjudged whether the franchise really needed expanding in this way.

In its second half - with M3GAN (Jenna Davis) fully rebooted - the movie shuffles closer to what one might expect from any M3GAN sequel. Williams deals with the elevated exposition as well as anybody could, and is rewarded for her efforts with a fight sequence of her own; this setpiece kicks loose the sequel's single most promising idea - having Gemma and M3GAN merge personalities, requiring Williams to mimic the robot's speech patterns - and then promptly forgets all about it. A leftfield deployment of Kate Bush's "This Woman's Work" is the one scene that connects to the joshing original, but plays as incongruous in this new, straitlaced context: a bug or glitch. Elsewhere, Johnstone doubles down on the original's limitations: there are too many bland supporting characters played by cutprice performers (one of whom, TV breakout Brian Jordan Alvarez, arrives on the big screen with a blotted copybook, further adding to the sense of an ill-fated production) and it's been shot with an eye to the softest of R ratings - maybe even a PG-13 - which means it keeps having to cut away from the worst of the carnage this set-up anticipates. It's as if the filter Gemma installs to rein in M3GAN's worst excesses of word and deed has equally been fitted to the film itself: the plot may take a note from Terminator 2, retrofitting an erstwhile murderbot with a conscience, but the tone recalls something like the Short Circuit sequel, particularly around the relationship between the first film's now teenage lead (Violet McGraw) and the android who once watched over her. (Again, to a M3GAN movie's detriment, I was reminded of Blumhouse's underseen Upgrade, a properly thumping, often jolting techno-fantasy that was far more vivid in its pulp, and hadn't been childproofed for an assumed audience of excitable TikTokkers.) Were it not for the visibly higher budget, M3GAN 2.0 would seem much like an opportunistic DTV riff on some sizeable studio hit: most of the ideas with which Johnstone fills these two hours have been done to death, right through to a finale that sees our heroes fleeing a lair their tech loon nemesis has equipped with self-destruct software. It is, however, very much reflective of developments in 21st century tech: after a successful first rollout, 2.0 adds a lot more whistles and bells, new toys with new buttons to press, all of which impede it from functioning as effectively as this technology once did.

M3GAN 2.0 is now playing in cinemas nationwide.

From the archive: "The Girl Who Leapt Through Time"

Delicate, becalmed and emotionally satisfying, Japanese director Mamoru Hosoda's animation The Girl Who Leapt Through Time forms a welcome antidote to the noisy, smirking banalities of Jumper. After an incident in a chemistry lab, klutzy schoolgirl Makoto (voiced by Riisa Naka) discovers she can stop and reverse the clock by means of a running jump, thus literally leaping through time. Rather than save the world, Makoto applies herself to accomplishing the kind of things an ordinary girl in her late teens might consider cool: landing top marks in her exams, eking out extra minutes in the karaoke lounge, getting the tea she wants, rather than that she's originally served. Yet the main business of the plot is a chain of events caused by her embarrassed rebuffing of a friend who asked her out, from which our heroine learns that direct intervention in the lives of others, leaping in feet first, has as many negative as positive effects. It's very sweet that that the film should use a superpower to resolve a series of crushes: actions that might very well mean the world to the parties involved, though which turn out to have further-reaching consequences than first imagined. Visually, Hosoda takes his cue from a painting the girl's aunt is restoring, and which proves crucial to the plot ("the longer you look at it, the more relaxed and comforted you get"); even when Makoto is at her most agitated, this dreamiest of cameras will often drift away to observe a cloud formation or a ladybird making its way across a surface. It's a time-travel movie that allows itself, and its audience, precious moments in which to breathe, think and reflect upon the various ways in which time flies.

(May 2009)

A 4K restoration of The Girl Who Leapt Through Time opens in selected cinemas from Sunday.

For what it's worth...

UK box office Top Ten (for the weekend of June 20-22, 2025):

1 (new) 28 Years Later (15) ****

2 (1) How to Train Your Dragon (PG)

3 (new) Elio (PG)

4 (2) Lilo & Stitch (U)

5 (3) Mission: Impossible - The Final Reckoning (12A) **

6 (4) The Long Wet Walk (12A)

7 (new) Sitaare Zameen Par (12A) **

8 (5) Ballerina (15)

9 (6) Karate Kid: Legends (12A)

10 (8) The Ballad of Wallis Island (12A) ***

(source: BFI)

My top five:

1. Clueless

2. 28 Years Later

3. F1

4. Lollipop

5. The Ballad of Wallis Island

  

DVD/Blu-Ray/Download top ten: 

1 (new) Final Destination: Bloodlines (15) **

2 (1) A Minecraft Movie (PG)

3 (8) 28 Days Later... (15) ****

4 (3) Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy (15) **

5 (9) How to Train Your Dragon 2 (PG)

6 (2) Sinners (15) ****

7 (4) The Amateur (12)

8 (35) Nosferatu (15) ***

9 (14) How to Train Your Dragon: The Hidden World (PG) ****

10 (13) How to Train Your Dragon [2010] (PG) ****

(source: officialcharts.com)

My top five: 
1. Black Bag

2. The Seed of the Sacred Fig

3. Flow

4. I'm Still Here

5. Four Mothers

Top five films on terrestrial TV this week:

1. North by Northwest (Sunday, BBC Two, 1.50pm)

2. Bonnie and Clyde (Sunday, BBC Two, 11.40pm)

3. The 39 Steps (Sunday, BBC Two, 12.25pm)

4. Glory (Saturday, Channel 4, 12.30am)

5. The Addams Family [above] (Saturday, ITV1, 6.50am)