Human traffic: "Sirāt"

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

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

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

Sirāt opens in selected cinemas today. 

The real green menace: "Cold Storage"

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

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

Cold Storage is now showing in cinemas nationwide.

Evanescence: "The Moment"

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

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

The Moment is now playing in cinemas nationwide.

Lock up: "Wasteman"

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

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

Wasteman is now playing in selected cinemas.

Fantasy island: "Send Help"

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

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

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

Send Help is now playing in selected cinemas.

For what it's worth...

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

1 (new) "Wuthering Heights" (15)

2 (new) GOAT (PG)

3 (new) Crime 101 (15)

4 (1) Send Help (15) ***

5 (3) The Housemaid (15)

6 (5) Zootropolis 2 (PG)

7 (4) Hamnet (12A) **

8 (new) Stitch Head (U) **

9 (new) Whistle (15) ***

10 (8) Avatar: Fire and Ash (12A) ***

(source: BFI)

My top five:

1. If I Had Legs I'd Kick You

2. A Knight's Tale [above]

3. Cold Storage

4. Wasteman

5. Little Amélie

DVD/Blu-Ray/Download top ten: 

1 (new) The Housemaid (15)

2 (1) Zootropolis 2 (PG)

3 (2) Predator: Badlands (12) **

4 (3) Sinners (15) ****

5 (new) Anaconda (12)

6 (new) Hamnet (12) **

7 (6) Dracula (15)

8 (7) Wicked: For Good (PG)

9 (5) 28 Years Later (15) ****

10 (35) Bugonia (15) **

(source: officialcharts.com)

My top five: 
1. Sisu: Road to Revenge

2. Good Boy

3. The Ugly Stepsister

4. Keeper

5. Anemone

Top five films on terrestrial TV this week:

1. Malcolm X (Tuesday, BBC Two, 11pm)

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

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

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

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

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

Peaky Blinders – The Real Story **

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

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

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

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

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

On demand: "The Ugly Stepsister"

Emilie Blichfeldt's The Ugly Stepsister - which earned a leftfield yet deserved Oscar nomination last month for Best Make-Up and Hairstyling - has the air of a Whose Line Is It Anyway? audience suggestion: it's the Nordic film industries revisiting the Cinderella legend after the manner of Nicolas Winding Refn, which means lurid period imagery, an electronic score and a desire to revel in the artistic freedoms provided by an 18 certificate. More grisly than Disney, vastly more perverse than Wicked, it charges full-pelt into Angela Carter territory on horseback, confident in the knowledge that there are many more young women who self-identify as ugly than there are those who see themselves as flaxen-haired princesses. Blichfeldt reframes this story through the twin prisms of class and gender. Our heroine Elvira (Lea Myren) is a gawky brunette with zits and braces whose social-climbing mother Rebekka (Ane Dahl Torp) has married into the aristocracy for a financial protection that disappears overnight after her aging husband expires at the dinner table. Now Rebekka needs a new arrangement, having three girls to raise singlehandedly: the aforementioned Elvira, her sensible, tomboyish sister Alma (Flo Fagerli) and inherited stepdaughter Agnes (Thea Sofie Loch Naess), the movie's Cinderella equivalent, who comes to battle with Elvira for the attentions, hand and dowry of the inevitably syphilitic local Prince (Isac Calmroth). As this sometime bedtime story is rerouted towards a new, unhappy ending, Blichfeldt is revealed as a costume-drama fiend who's studied everything from Picnic at Hanging Rock to TV's The Great and - more significantly - grasped what might still be done within this enduringly popular genre to overturn the status quo. She's also, one notes, a Lars von Trier acolyte ready to pile provocation atop provocation, seeking to make us wince and squirm; the caveat is that even her film's more outlandish gestures retain some correspondence with regrettable reality.

The girls' dual pursuit of the Prince encompasses facial reconstruction surgery undertaken by a cokehead sawbones who advertises his services with the slogan "Beauty is Pain"; crash diets; gropey, leery men; the fairytale equivalent of a training montage, as Elvira is coached through the rituals of ladyhood by one Miss Kronenberg (wink wink); and, amid a clutch of unsparing close-ups of vulnerable body parts, some business with eyes and needles and blades and toes you may well prefer to look away from. In the central role, Myren proves as resilient as the shapeshifting young leads of Julia Ducorneau's recent causes célèbres: she's obliged to leave her vanity in her trailer along with her phone, but nothing phases her, she heals and transforms quickly and effectively - albeit under considerable narrative duress - and she understands exactly what this story is targeting. She lands some form of reward in being remodelled as Sydney Sweeney heading into the Prince's ball, but then her hair begins to come out in clumps (swings and roundabouts), and she winds up having a vast tapeworm extracted from her in a grand grossout finale that recalls a conjuror's showstopping trick: ta-da! Her character is from first to last a victim of the beauty regime, but the actress becomes an active conspirator in Blichfeldt's efforts to undermine the patriarchy (and those sisters who still seek to uphold its strictures). If the latter's methods lean, sometimes slide towards the sensational, it is at least the kind of sensationalism that makes for grabby, poppy cinema, and sensationalism in the service of something greater than mere titillation, which wasn't precisely the case with last year's awards-season talking point The Substance (and I also gather isn't quite the case with Emerald Fennell's current charttopping hatewatch "Wuthering Heights"). Were it not for that prohibitive certificate and occasional flashes of explicit sex (how Scandinavian of her), you could well imagine teachers rolling in those big tellies that aren't currently booked out to show Adolescence to teenage boys so as to screen Blichfeldt's film to thoughtful fifth-form girls. Don't live your life like this, those educators might say beforehand by way of supportive context; the rewards cannot be worth all this suffering.

The Ugly Stepsister is currently available to rent via Prime Video, and will be released on Blu-ray through Second Sight on Monday 23rd.

Falling down: "If I Had Legs I'd Kick You"

Our various Academies, in their wisdom, have overlooked or disregarded Jennifer Lawrence's turn in Lynne Ramsay's Die My Love: too much - too messy, perhaps - in a film that didn't find the groundswell of popular support some critics hoped it would. It's left to Mary Bronstein's If I Had Legs I'd Kick You, then, to represent the outer limits of female performance and endurance as the 2025-26 awards season enters its home straight: here is a familiar face being put through the ringer and otherwise pushed to her very limits in a dark indie comedy-drama from the folks who previously brought you the Safdies' Good Time and Uncut Gems. The face belongs to Rose Byrne, taking a stride or seven beyond her preliminary work on Apple TV's Physical in the role of Linda, a people-pleasing working mother trying to hold it together while running the gauntlet of modern life: a near-permanently absent husband, a daughter with an eating disorder and anxiety besides, domestic plumbing issues that result in her once-perfect Montauk home being flooded even before Bronstein has flashed her Evan Dando-sounding title on screen in horror-movie crimson. Certainly, there are horrific elements in play here: we're watching a potentially fatal existential crisis collide with something more literal. For Bronstein, modern life is a matter of treading water, while hoping the sky isn't also going to cave in on you; her film crystallises a moment where all our pre-existing structures and sureties have been undermined and nobody really seems to know what day it is, in large part because the majority of us have been forced to scrabble around like blue-arsed flies to keep ever more feral wolves from the door. The daughter's anxiety is understandable, to say the least.

In a typically Safdiean manoeuvre, Bronstein isn't trading in plot so much as pile-up, a process made literal in her antsy driving scenes (every time Linda gets behind a wheel, you fear someone's going to get hurt) and the fractious answerphone messages that accumulate as our newly displaced heroine is tugged this way and that. The droll fun here - if fun's the word - is that everybody Linda bumps into appears to be undergoing their own idea of their own worst day. Over the phone, Linda's husband is repeatedly short with her; he sounds like George Costanza - and the movie gains a dimension if you approach it as a treatise on what it might be like to find yourself married to George Costanza - but turns out to be Christian Slater. The doctor treating the daughter - played by Bronstein herself, the thinking person's Gal Gadot - is prone to nagging and fingerpointing; a jobsworth motel clerk (Ivy Wolk) won't serve Linda the alcohol that might at least take an edge or two off; her shrink (Conan O'Brien) veers between distractible and outright evasive. It's very funny when we discover, in one of the rare moments when the protagonist can return to her day job, that Linda is herself a therapist, obliged to spend her days listening to patients who fall on a spectrum between needy and sincerely troubled and who generally only confirm her in her harassed outlook. At best, she brings empathy to her task: she knows exactly what her clients are going through, partly because she too is processing some of it mid-session. But you can equally forgive her for seeming distracted or brusque or sharp, as she often is; it's the errors of personal and professional judgement that concern Bronstein, and therefore us. In cataloguing those errors, though, Bronstein succeeds in showcasing a performance that really does feel like an entire, complex universe. Until the closing moments, we don't see the daughter and husband, so fixated is the filmmaker's gaze on the agonised contours of Byrne's face; in some ways, it's a directorial compliment (she sees Linda in all her agitated and spiralling glory), but this camera also seems another of the pressures bearing down on this woman. 

Byrne's myriad acting nominations this season, then, are on one level a reflection of the degree of difficulty involved here. This is a role to keep an actor awake at night: for just shy of two hours, If I Had Legs is all about Linda, and a sensitive performer might well worry whether she was being heroic enough, or at all. (One semi-legit criticism - which the film obliquely addresses over the course of Linda's haphazard relationship with a motel handyman, played very capably by A$AP Rocky - would be that these are first-world, white-lady problems.) An attractive performer, meanwhile, might also fret about how zonked Bronstein wants to make her look in those mercilessly tight close-ups. Yet Byrne doesn't just withstand such scrutiny, she responds with a (characteristically Antipodean?) resilience and fortitude; she remains extremely relatable, even - especially, perhaps - as Linda takes to screaming into a pillow. Bronstein acted in her husband Ronald's Frownland, one of this century's most radically uncompromising indie propositions, in that it didn't want to be liked (or, really, sat through) at all. Some trace of that film persists into this one via the black hole in Linda's ceiling, which becomes increasingly fraught with meaning, some of it structural, some of it depressive, some of it maternal. If I Had Legs is, however, a product of a more emollient imagination, and a more commercially minded studio in A24: it knows the value of a star who might better sell us on all this stress, and of the mordant humour that helps to lighten the load. O'Brien's normie presence is expertly deployed as someone who has got it together but wants you to know it, and I feel I should also praise the hamster whose fate speaks - maybe squeaks - to bruising lived experience on the Bronsteins' part. It's a tough old world out there, and Linda's is not a crisis that could be eased much by any emotional support animal - but it's some feat for an indie film released this far into the 21st century to remind you of Jill Clayburgh's heyday and those old Cassavetes-Gena Rowlands collaborations.

If I Had Legs I'd Kick You opens in selected cinemas from Friday.

"O' Romeo" (Guardian 16/02/26)

O’ Romeo **

Dir: Vishal Bhardwaj. With: Shahid Kapoor, Triptii Dimri, Avinash Tiwary, Nana Patekar. 178 mins. Cert: 18

It must be Misbegotten Adaptations Week. This Hindi gangland epic’s credentials are impeccable: director Vishal Bhardwaj previously wowed with textured, inventive variations on Macbeth (Maqbool, 2003), Othello (Omkara, 2006) and Hamlet (Haider, 2014). Rather than a straightforward modernisation of Romeo and Juliet, his latest instead revisits a grisly true-crime story ripped from Hussein Zaidi’s Mafia Queens of Mumbai, the compendium that also inspired Sanjay Leela Bhansali’s 2022 hit Gangubai Kathiawadi. The results align Bhardwaj’s cinema with the newly lurid turn mainstream Bollywood has taken via recent smashes Animal and Dhurandhar, but it’s jarring to witness, as if Kenneth Branagh had followed his turn-of-the-Nineties Shakespeare successes by making Natural Born Killers.

For Venice (or Baz Luhrmann’s Venice Beach), Bhardwaj swaps in the Mumbai underworld of the 1990s, ushering on the movies’ first Romeo to be a moral degenerate. Shahid Kapoor’s Hussein Ustara – nicknamed Romeo – is a heavily tattooed bellower employed as a hitman for a local godfather; his Juliet (Animal’s Triptii Dimri) an aggrieved widow clutching a sizeable hitlist. These two are star-crossed: he rescues her amid her bungled assassination attempt on the lawyer smearing her late husband, earning them both powerful foes. Yet they’re chiefly blood-splattered and otherwise begrimed: the fish tank through which Leo glimpsed Claire Danes here abuts the bed to which this Romeo takes two escorts while his Juliet listens in. Happy Valentine’s week, everybody.

Bold imagemaking and considered design persists through the murk, and the performances are strong. Kapoor and Dimri commit to this plot’s peculiar demands, while Nana Patekar is appreciably sly as our anti-hero’s wearied handler. Yet where Gangubai showcased Bhansali’s heightened tonal sensitivity, these gruelling three hours veer between crude and emotionally inert: a tale of obsession and abjection, with its dead-eyed lovers dragging one another towards the gutter and the grave. It’s the kind of distinctive misfire only an artist could make, typically when they’re so hung up on a story they swallow its poisons whole. Still, mildly heartbreaking to see such a thoughtful cineaste tossing his library card to play the leering tough guy: that title invites reading with a rueful shake of the head.

O' Romeo is now showing in selected cinemas.

On demand: "Soundtrack to a Coup d'État"

The film essayist Johan Grimonprez last broached British cinemas all the way back in 2010 with Double Take, where the films of Alfred Hitchcock and the events of the Cold War criss-crossed in supremely entertaining and illuminating fashion. With Soundtrack to a Coup d'État, Grimonprez offers two histories for the price of one, on subjects which once more intertwine. The first is a history of what Billy Joel in "We Didn't Start The Fire" summarised as "Belgians in the Congo", that mid-20th century colonial misadventure that climaxed with the murder of the democratically elected Patrice Lumumba by forces keeping a beady eye on the country's vast rubber, copper and uranium deposits. The second film - lest the first appear a touch dry - concerns American jazz at the turn of the 1960s: Dizzy Gillespie, Louis Armstrong, Nina Simone et al. The connection between the two - and it's not such an arbitrary one - is that, in the very same moment, jazz had begun to be weaponised by the powers-that-be in a bid to baffle and outwit Soviet leader Nikita Kruschchev (who wasn't a fan); key performers such as Armstrong were sent around the globe, missionary-like, so as to persuade other nations that Eisenhower's America had its house in order. (Even if its ongoing problems with race positioned the majority of its Black population as akin to house slaves.) As you'd maybe expect from an Oscar-nominated doc, Soundtrack proves clear-eyed and serious in its editorial line, yet Grimonprez folds in all that jazz to produce something more cinematic besides: it's Cold War: The Musical! With footnotes! Only the Congolese climate prevents me from adding: On ice!

Rather than proving secondary to this picture, the soundtrack serves as an organising principle. Grimonprez reframes history itself as jazz: sometimes harmonious, often improvised and bordering on unfathomable, occasionally murderously dissonant. But he also gives us film as jazz, too. If the thinking is broadly anti-colonial, so too the montage recognises no borders: this kind of archive footage rubs up against that kind of archive footage, sometimes to underline a point, sometimes to counterpoint, sometimes just to be mischievous. (Witness Eisenhower meeting Kruschchev while Louie sings "I'm confessing that I love you".) Elsewhere, macro and micro mesh. History carries us from the UN in New York to the households of Brazzaville, allowing Grimonprez and editor Rik Chaubet to stitch together a link between pipe-smoking CIA chief Allen Dulles, René Magritte and Colonel Mobutu, head of the armed forces massing against Lumumba. Elsewhere, they create odd little echoes and funny ripples within this history: Khrushchev's tendency to thump tables with his fists in moments of high drama comes to rhyme with Art Blakey's drumming. What becomes impressive is Grimonprez's own command of tempo: whenever the political toing-and-froing is getting too baroque or intense, he can cut away to a marvellous Duke Ellington or Miriam Makeba clip, allowing us to catch our collective breath. 

That back-and-forth movement brings us closer to the shifting allegiances - and mounting turbulence - of this historical moment, when Africa and Asia stood up on the floor of the UN in a push for a more powerful voting bloc. Lumumba and his right-hand woman/comrade-in-arms, the remarkable Andrée Blouin, were unifiers: at the UN, they became a cause others could rally around, while at home, they sought to centralise and consolidate Black power while repelling those liplickers lining up to exploit their homeland. Yet they would be undermined, both from within and without, by those who were prepared to permit Congolese independence - but only so much independence. Events get ugly in the closing stretch, as the historical record insists they must, but it's the most complete account of this crisis I've yet encountered, meticulous in its onscreen sourcing, and lent a further dimension by the material Grimonprez works in: fleeting cameos from Robin Day, Eva Gabor, Fidel Castro and sometime Eurotrash fave Eddy Wally as the singing face of colonial distraction; an ominous drumfill here, a honking, siren-like sax solo there, the wails of a blues singer lamenting yet another historical wrong. Some achievement, all told: you can't fail to come away better informed, but you also emerge wildly stirred and stimulated.

Soundtrack to a Coup d'État is available to rent via Prime Video, YouTube and the BFI Player, and on Blu-ray via Modern Films.

For what it's worth...

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

1 (new) Send Help (15)

2 (new) Stray Kids: The DominATE Experience (12A)

3 (2) The Housemaid (15)

4 (1) Hamnet (12A) **

5 (5) Zootropolis 2 (PG)

6 (3) Shelter (15)

7 (7) Marty Supreme (15) ***

8 (6) Avatar: Fire and Ash (12A) ***

9 (4) Iron Lung (15) **

10 (9) 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple (18) ****

(source: BFI)

My top five:

1. Nouvelle Vague

2. No Other Choice

3. 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple

4. Little Amélie

5. Whistle

 

DVD/Blu-Ray/Download top ten: 

1 (1) Zootropolis 2 (PG)

2 (7) Predator: Badlands (12) **

3 (2) Sinners (15) ****

4 (36) Dogma (15)

5 (4) 28 Years Later (15) ****

6 (8) Dracula (15)

7 (5) Wicked: For Good (PG)

8 (3) One Battle After Another (15) ****

9 (new) Song Sung Blue (12)

10 (23) Now You See Me Now You Don't (12)

(source: officialcharts.com)

My top five: 
1. Sisu: Road to Revenge

2. Good Boy

3. Keeper

4. Anemone

5. F1: The Movie

Top five films on terrestrial TV this week:

1. Bonnie and Clyde (Tuesday, BBC Two, 11pm)

2. Crimes of the Future (Sunday, BBC Two, 11.55pm)

3. Beetlejuice (Sunday, BBC Two, 10.30pm)

4. A Shaun the Sheep Movie: Farmageddon (Saturday, BBC Two, 1pm)

5. The Damned United [above] (Friday, BBC Two, 11pm)

"Whistle" (Guardian 10/02/26)

Whistle ***

Dir: Corin Hardy. With: Dafne Keen, Sophie Nélisse, Percy Hynes White, Nick Frost. 99 mins. Cert: 15

The horror renaissance resumes. On the surface, this teen-courting, genre-savvy Irish-Canadian entry looks like one of those projects ushered towards a greenlight once the Philippou brothers’ cursed-artefact chiller Talk to Me cleared up at the international box office. Rather than suburban Australia, writer Owen Egerton and director Corin Hardy relocate us to an autumnal, Springsteen-ready North American steeltown, where artsy high-schooler Chrys (Dafne Keen) inherits the locker of the star basketballer we’ve just seen flambeed in a prologue. The deadly doodad she finds there is a skull-shaped Aztec whistle with either “summon the dead” or “summon your dead” (there’s some linguistic quibbling) inscribed on the side. Naturally she puts it back, and everybody lives happily ever after.

I kid, of course. For a while, the horror element is less in-your-face than it was in that pummelling Antipodean predecessor, but whistleblowing soon makes literal everyone’s worst fears about dying. That development gives Hardy’s increasingly bloody kill scenes a Final Destination-like piquancy: your heart can only go out to the boy racer who perishes via car crash in his upstairs bedroom. One obvious holdover from the Philippous is the sympathy for insecure, troubled teens who couldn’t seem any less like the usual disposable jocks and prom queens. Egerton observes courtship rituals with tenderness, quietly foregrounding Chrys’s struggles to come out to upright classmate Sophie Nélisse; beneath the looming shadow of death, an attempt to live one’s truest life.

Brit Hardy has far more fun with his budget than he did on 2018’s mechanical franchise entry The Nun: he runs with a solid Egerton in-joke – naming objects, places and Nick Frost’s doomed teacher Mr. Craven after noted horror directors – and pushes a sequence involving a labyrinthine straw maze, surely beyond the remit of a smalltown harvest festival, towards the pleasingly surreal. If neither he nor Egerton can successfully integrate a loose-end preacher-slash-drug dealer (Percy Hynes White), elsewhere they pull off the deft trick of being familiar without seeming derivative: it’s scenes you remember from films you like, occasionally with a novel twist. Enough for Friday or Saturday night enjoyment, certainly – and regular sleepover rotation beckons.

Whistle opens in cinemas nationwide tomorrow.

Dur dur d'être bébé: "Little Amélie"

A dearth of prominent animations in 2025 has led our various academies to consider one or two leftfield options, to their credit and our benefit. The Cannes-endorsed Francophone charmer Little Amélie - which has been picked up by the Vue chain to show in both dubbed and subtitled options - proves altogether more philosophically inclined than all those imported half-term screenfillers called something like Dogs on a Train. Adapted from the author Amélie Nothomb's somewhat fantastical memoir Métaphysique des Tubes - a 2003 work so highfalutin its translation bore the Faber imprint - this is a very French, distinctly literary project: a young girl's attempt to get her head around human consciousness within the first three years of her existence. The movie opens more or less as Marty Supreme did, which is to say at the moment of conception; thereafter it charts young Amélie's formative years in Japan at the end of the 1960s and her efforts to comprehend how and why the world is as strange and wondrous as it is. If it contains any element of biographical truth - and that has been debated in the French book pages - it's that its heroine is a writer, or at least possessed of the writer's restless, curious mindset, from the off; here, she even gets to narrate her enquiries herself, giving the film an air of a more cerebral Look Who's Talking.

Behind it all is the not unreasonable idea that human life is kind of trippy when you stop to think about it. First you don't know what you are, then you do; you have no idea how to stand or walk or talk, and then you figure it out. (It seems an awful lot of hard work, and maybe it's no surprise some humans decide to stop developing beyond a certain point.) Where a Dogs on a Train might compel you to wonder why it is you bother to go on at all, Little Amélie seeks active engagement with how it is one lives and moves through the world: it's Left Bank Disney, with Sartre as its Baloo. The directors, Liane-Cho Han and Maïlys Vallade, work up a contrast between the classical elegance of their images (big eyes, bright, pleasing picturebook colours, more than a dash of Ghibli in the material details of this household) and the state of existential crisis and flux they seek to depict. Yet they capture a lot in passing: the florid wonders of a girl's first springtime (a particular balm amid the dreariest winter in living memory); an early lesson in the gendering of this universe, why boys get to do (and get away with) that which is forbidden to girls; the death that becomes a part of life the moment we're born into it. In some respects, Han and Vallade go PG-rated gently, restaging WW2 in a rice cooker and framing a last-reel suicide attempt as reverie; you can feel the book being softened here and there for easier, wider consumption. (The young Nothomb later spent time in Coventry, and I'd like to see these directors try something similar with an animated ringroad as a backdrop.) Yet the 77-minute running time is unimprovable: like childhood, Little Amélie flies by, and as with childhood, it imprints cherishable images on the inside walls of your cranium.

Little Amélie opens in cinemas nationwide from Friday.

"Stitch Head" (Guardian 09/02/26)

Stitch Head **

Dir: Steve Hudson. With the voices of: Asa Butterfield, Joel Fry, Rob Brydon, Alison Steadman. 92 mins. Cert: U

Perhaps the most noteworthy aspect of this middling Brit-headed, European-financed, Indian-manufactured digimation is the radical change of career trajectory it represents for its pinballing director Steve Hudson. Hudson broke through with 2006’s Loachian social drama True North, a well-received migrant movie starring Peter Mullan; having subsequently witnessed how the other half lives while helming episodes of primetime TV’s Cranford, he now pivots to pixels with a big-screen adaptation of Guy Bass’s kid-lit books. His latest does feel like a tentative first step into a heavily crowded field, sutured together from ideas and images previously encountered in far more confident and accomplished entertainments.

Bass’s eponymous hero is rendered here as a boy with Bowie-esque polychromatic eyes, a baseball-like head and the voice of Asa Butterfield; his home is a castle overlooking smalltown Grubbers Nubbin, where a mad professor (Rob Brydon) carries out Frankenstinian experiments. If the lead character design is solid – accompanying adults may wind up knitting replicas of Stitch Head’s onesie – the surrounding menagerie seems a bit too Pixar for comfort: Stitch’s furry cyclops pal Creature (Joel Fry) is so conspicuously a hybrid of Monsters, Inc.’s Mike and Sully you’re amazed legal letters haven’t been exchanged. Once this pair abscond to join a travelling freakshow, Stitch Head ventures a rather melancholy and misshapen showbiz story – that of a boy who, much like the film, sorely wants to be loved.

This viewer emerged feeling a little sorry for it: in cinemas, Stitch Head is being preceded by trailers for Pixar and Sony’s latest whizzbang endeavours, armed with the full box of audiovisual fireworks. By contrast, dead air swirls around Hudson’s minor-celebrity voicecast; his backgrounds are more detailed and persuasive than the script. With its free-floating, slightly macabre imagery, the whole suggests a watered-down Saturday morning kids’ club variant of 1993’s The Secret Adventures of Tom Thumb, undertaken by Bristol’s bolexbrothers in their guise as Aardman’s dark side. It’s one to test on your children rather than treat them to, certainly: sensitive youngsters may run screaming, while their elders may develop that glazed look that indicates they’ve sat through much of this before.

Stitch Head opens in cinemas nationwide from Friday.

On demand: "Maiden"

You could see it as a sign of skewed cinematic priorities that that accursed mariner Donald Crowhurst has inspired three (very different) films - 2006's Deep Water, 2017's Crowhurst and 2018's The Mercy - despite failing to achieve whatever it was he was trying to do. By way of a counterpoint, we might well consider 2018's Maiden, Alex Holmes's documentary tribute to Tracy Edwards MBE, skipper of the first all-female crew to compete in the Whitbread Round the World Yacht Race. Holmes's film takes a conventional form: its backbone is a long and frank interview with Edwards, supplemented by contributions from her crewmates and archive and race footage. Yet this is one of those stories that raises interesting questions and fascinating points (and, in passing, points up exactly where the solitary and morbidly self-sufficient Crowhurst took a wrong turn). It is, on some level, a more spectacular variant of the old yarn about a woman finding her place in the world; this woman has to circumnavigate it. Edwards, who by her own admission had been suspended from school no less than 26 times, entered her twenties as a dropout and a party girl. Pressganged by peers into stewardessing on holiday-resort charter boats, she began to learn the ropes, however, and eventually emerged as someone who might tackle the challenges involved in competitive sailing. Again, she got there the hard way: she completed her first Round the World race as a chef, catering for grizzled old seasalts who at best tolerated her presence, and at worst were openly condescending, often contemptuous. For her second go, in 1989, she was in charge - and, unlike Crowhurst, she wasn't alone.

It was a challenge nevertheless, as Holmes makes abundantly clear. Edwards had to seek out comparably experienced female sailors; their first task was patching up a fairly shonky-looking vessel, quite possibly the last ship in the shop; then she had to overcome both last-minute crewing issues and her own internalised reluctance to lead. That archive flags up Edwards' determination, her entrepreneurship (which included striking a sponsorship deal with King Hussein of Jordan) and her need to overturn the expectations of onlookers. (Intriguingly, her younger self appears militant in rejecting any attempt to dub the crew's efforts as feminist. More internalisation?) It also paints a fairly damning picture of the attitudes displayed by fellow competitors and the media covering this boat's progress. (The Guardian was among the sniggerers, its sailing correspondent Bob Fisher notoriously billing the boat as "the tinful of tarts".) Then there is the footage of the race itself, all the more spectacular for not being the sort of sporting event one sees much of outside of the Olympic cycle. We watch as the boats leave each port, landmasses disappearing in favour of all-enveloping ocean; reference points seem to disappear altogether once the flotilla reaches Antarctica; blurry onboard footage captures the ladies standing at crazy angles, being strafed by huge plumes of spray while trying to tack sails. Gradually, this story gathers in momentum and import: you see it most obviously in the swelling crowds gathering in every harbour to cheer this crew home. And by Maiden's final stretch, we number among those multitudes. They did it, we tell ourselves. Whatever the hardships they encountered, whether this achievement was feminist or not: they actually did it.

Maiden is now available to rent via Prime Video, YouTube and the BFI Player, and on DVD through Dogwoof.