Back to the drawing board: "A Grand Day Out" and "The Wrong Trousers"

To celebrate a half-century of Aardman Animations - and better prepare us for this September's third Shaun the Sheep film - we're getting a full retrospective over the remainder of the summer. Revisited almost four decades on from its making, what's most striking about 1989's A Grand Day Out is how closely its form and content align; how clearly it was the work of a mildly eccentric figure, alone at his drawing table in a basement, assembling what would eventually prove his grandest design. For the plasticine Wallace, building a rocket to retrieve cheese from the moon, read the flesh-and-blood Nick Park, then a boyish NFTS student plotting to both update and revolutionise filmed animation via the reapplication of artisanal craft methods. The result now seems more than ever a time capsule, using jerky stopmotion - the same processes viewers of a certain age will recognise as having given life to Morph, Bagpuss and Windy Miller - to fashion choice sight gags: Gromit being used to prop up a workbench, the mice donning sunglasses as one to witness blast-off, the leads finding different ways to counter the boredom of the long Bank Holiday excursion into space, not something Méliès had allowed himself to consider at the start of the century. These characters would get sleeker and more defined, as human performers tend to upon first contact with stardom, and the vehicles they'd travel in got bigger and zippier. Yet the elements moulded into this clay from the very outset included a great charm and wit, an abundant, irresistible cheeriness (best illustrated here by the benign fate of the machine that pursues our heroes across the surface of the Moon), and an overarching comic philosophy that would define the best of Aardman's subsequent work: treat even stratospheric events as though they were the basis of a wet weekend in Filey.

1993's The Wrong Trousers - the breakout success, the Oscar winner, the quantum leap forward - bears about as much relation to its appealingly clunky predecessor as, say, Terminator II: Judgment Day did to James Cameron's directorial debut Piranha II: The Spawning. We're back on the homefront this time, depicted as no less chaotic and hazardous than the wider universe, especially after we factor in a pair of robotic "Techno Trousers" ("Ex-NASA," Wallace coos, "Fantastic for walkies") and the dire financial straits that lead to our heroes taking in a dodgy lodger we instantly distrust. (Partly because, even by Aardman's standards, his eyes are too close together.) That's right, it's Shallow Grave - Danny Boyle's 18-rated breakthrough of the following year - only with a sociopathic penguin in the place of Keith Allen. Both films, made on shoestring budgets by creatives in the first years of their career, were acutely attuned to the interpersonal jeopardies lurking within the flatshare scenario: no-one has any money (why else would the capable, practically minded Gromit still be living with a clueless bachelor like Wallace?), some folks (Wallace) aren't exactly pulling their weight, others (Gromit) feel left out of key decision-making (perhaps an inevitability when you literally don't have a voice), and there's always the possibility someone sleeping under the same roof wants to do away with you (Feathers McGraw).

All of which is to acknowledge how these well-kneaded blobs of plasticine seem to take on recognisably human contours and characteristics; Park and co. built an entire empire out of modelling clay without ever losing sight of what makes us tick (or ticks us off) on a daily basis. The Wrong Trousers remains very funny in this: clock the sleepy Wallace pulling his PJs over those techno-trousers, or Gromit's rightly cherished eyebrow raise as he realises the berryblast of jam conventionally intercepted by a flying piece of toast is instead bound for his face at a considerable rate of knots. (Genius has a way of stopping time, or making its own time.) Yet the lighting of these models and maquettes alone - particularly during the storm sequence, and Gromit's backstreet pursuit of Feathers - elevates this half-hour to the standing of art, and that's before a superb closing setpiece carried as much by sound (the rattle of the toy train, the click of the tracks, the satisfying clunk of penguin in milkbottle) as by anything we see whizzing before our eyes. Later W&G features would prove slicker and smoother yet: they would be Aardman's Avatars, more ambitious, sometimes dazzling, generally well-liked. But I don't think they ever topped The Wrong Trousers: here, unlike Wallace, Park got the dimensions and speed, the set-up and execution just right.

A Grand Day Out and The Wrong Trousers return to selected cinemas from Friday.

For what it's worth...

UK box office Top Ten (for the weekend of June 26-28, 2026):

1 (1) Toy Story 5 (PG) **

2 (new) Supergirl (12A)

3 (2) Disclosure Day (12A) **

4 (new) Jackass: Best and Last (18)

5 (3) Obsession (18) *

6 (4) Scary Movie (15)

7 (new) Bleach: Thousand-Year Blood War - The Calamity (15)

8 (5) Backrooms (15)

9 (new) Les Liaisons Dangereuses - NT Live 2026 (15)

10 (7) Michael (12A)

(source: BFI)

My top five:

1. The Invite

2. Nirvanna The Band The Show The Movie

3. The Furious

4. Taxi Driver

5. Swimming Pool

DVD/Blu-Ray/Download top ten: 

1 (1) Michael (12)

2 (2) Project Hail Mary (12) ***

3 (4) Avatar: Fire and Ash (12) ***

4 (24) Ready or Not 2: Here I Come (15)

5 (6) The Magic Faraway Tree (U)

6 (5) Mortal Kombat II (15)

7 (17) Superman (12)

8 (9) The Super Mario Galaxy Movie (PG)

9 (10) Wicked: For Good (PG)

10 (3) EPiC: Elvis Presley in Concert (12) ****

(source: officialcharts.com)

My top five: 
1. Hoppers

2. Blue Moon

3. EPiC: Elvis Presley in Concert

4. The Mastermind

5. The Good Boy

Top five films on terrestrial TV this week:

1. Godland (Saturday, BBC Two, 1.30am)

2. Glory [above] (Sunday, Channel 4, 1.20am)

3. Blade Runner (Sunday, BBC Two, 10pm)

4. Marcel the Shell with Shoes On (Saturday, BBC Two, 8.40am)

5. Thunderball (Sunday, ITV1, 6.55am)

Appetites: "The Invite"

Olivia Wilde's new comedy The Invite extends a long tradition of what we might call dinner-party cinema, where the key ingredients are these: a sprinkling of actors, honed to sharp but hopefully still representative points; a single, well-furnished location; a sense of a tumultuous, finally rather testing or trying evening; barbed or otherwise polished dialogue, ideally trialled in a stage setting. Mix them as you would a pre-dinner cocktail, and you end up with the kind of would-be sophisticated entertainment guests can chew over at real-world soirées: think 1967's lodestone Guess Who's Coming to Dinner, Woody Allen's gossipy Husbands and Wives, the French smash Le dîner de cons, Polanski's insufferable Carnage. Adapted by Will McCormack and Rashida Jones from a Spanish play-turned-film (known locally as Sentimental and internationally as The Couple Upstairs) which has already been reworked in multiple languages, Wilde's film operates primarily as a study in radically different energies. Representing exhausted middle age: Seth Rogen (Fozzie Bear playing Oscar the Grouch, sore of back, sorer still of spirit) and Wilde herself (status-anxious, overly committed to the fate of a soufflé) as frazzled parents who see a late supper with their upstairs neighbours as a rare chance to reposition themselves as vibrant social butterflies. Gliding into this married couple's recently refurbished space: sexologist Penélope Cruz and her firefighter beau Edward Norton, who may just be everything their hosts dream of being, namely cosmopolitan (they speak Spanish!), childless, audibly passionate in their lovemaking (Wilde has warned Rogen not to complain), cool as cucumbers, and stylishly attractive in their upward mobility. The guests arrive bearing cheesecake that melts in the mouth and a proposal, indecent or otherwise, which will determine just how close our leads want to get to what these outsiders have. An alternative title floats into view: Guess Who's Coming After Dinner.

By all trustworthy reports, Wilde's previous film as director, 2022's much-hyped Don't Worry Darling, had its virtues and selling points, but its narrative chicanery got out of hand. The controlled chaos of her new project, by contrast, provides welcome reassurance that today's filmmakers haven't entirely abandoned the playbook their predecessors passed down. Wilde has found an excellent script, cast the hell out of it (perfectly, indeed), and then endeavoured not to mess up what was set on the page. Here's an overdue return for a cinema that finds ordinary people, with all their hang-ups and insecurities, fascinating; between them, McCormack, Jones and Wilde set up a tasty tag-team encounter between a couple who possibly care too much what other people think and another who have longstanding reasons for not giving a hoot. As a director, Wilde busies herself tracking shifts in energy. This night starts off cranky and awkward, as Rogen and Wilde row and the former eyes Norton from a suspicious distance; it starts to feel more convivial, as the couples split into mutually reinforcing groups of two (Rogen/Cruz, Wilde/Norton); secrets and confidences are shared, bombshells dropped; and then it all starts to get a little too much for some of the participants. Wilde wards off any residual staginess in the text by giving the couples' interactions a borderline manic antsiness, that demonstrated by folks who've been let off the leash for a night: the filmmaking has its own playful, curious, sometimes outright fruity energy, heightened only further by a mischievous Devonté Hynes score, determined to fill any gaps that it can. But Wilde also organises all this conversation intelligently: once the initial small talk is set aside, this foursome get deeper and deeper into it - until at least a couple of them realise they may have got in too deep.

A smart screenplay is one thing, but The Invite also has actors capable of improvising over the top of it for added value; once everyone's taken their seats, we're getting a symphony of people rubbing one another up the wrong way (and finding that they secretly enjoy the sensation). That Rogen has been getting the most glowing notices may partly be down to his status as the underdog in this heavyweight cast, the actor with the most to prove (despite a largely agreeable two-decade career). But his Joe is also the character who has the most to respond to: set on edge by Norton's glibness, irritated by Wilde's urge to suck up to these outsiders, at once startled, aroused and terrified by Cruz's forwardness, he's the one person in this room whom you sense would rather back out and go solo with some weed. (Which may well be the right call, all told.) Yet Wilde, turning cartwheels while hyperventilating, is almost as funny in passing, and though Norton possibly sounds too New Agey to fully convince as a fireman, he also gets a line I don't think I was expecting to hear in a mainstream film in 2026 ("Nobody in America can afford anything these days"). Towards the end, the material's roots begin to show: after all its interpersonal carnage, The Invite offers the conventional closure of a middlebrow stageplay, paying lip service to the idea that what the Rogen-Wilde pairing really needs isn't carnal knowledge but in-person couples' counselling. We're sat down too long; the laughter rate and pulse dips. Yet what comes before it really is stimulating and cheering: a fun night at the movies, a revival of the old-school farce with skill, craft and a progressive, feminist, sex-positive viewpoint (more European than American, finally), and a most effective corrective to a prevailing movie trend. The Invite is what The Drama might have been, if our comedies were still being made by grown-ups with real lives and not sniggering trolls: for once, a talking-point movie actually merits some positive talking about.

The Invite is now showing in cinemas nationwide.

Johnson's travels: "Nirvanna The Band The Show The Movie"

The Canadian writer-director-actor-conceptualist Matt Johnson has used the goodwill occasioned by his leftfield tech tale BlackBerry to revive an old pet project. First launched in 2007 as a webseries and later promoted to cable television, Nirvanna The Band The Show was a shuffling postmodern sitcom that tracked two would-be creatives - trilby-sporting schemer Matt (Johnson, playing a flailing version of himself) and tagalong musician pal Jay (Jay McCarrol) - as they pottered around the streets of their native Toronto trying to catch a break, tailed by much the same diegetic camera crew as could be spotted in such millennial mock-docs as The Office and Parks & Rec. This new big-screen variation on a theme actually opens with unused footage of Matt and Jay as they were in 2008, hatching a plan for their band Nirvanna (the spelling or misspelling goes unexplained, but somehow feels pertinent) to headline local nitespot the Rivoli. Cut to: Matt and Jay in the same place in 2025, older and broader in the beam, but no closer to achieving their youthful goal. Still, Matt has a plan. Plans, even, as Matt has always had. All of which is to say you wouldn't have to be au fait with Nirvanna The Band The Series to grasp where Nirvanna The Band The Show The Movie is coming from. A mix of incredibly complex planning, apparent improvisation and genuine ingenuity, Johnson's film - an answer to the question "what if Jackass had been made by Canadian brainiacs rather than all-American jocks?" - will go on to encompass a death-defying skydive from a prominent Toronto landmark, a time machine fashioned from a rusty old RV, as well as the sight of Matt and Jay, shuffling now towards middle age and its attendant crises, encountering and interacting with their own younger selves. Some of this entails traditional forms of movie trickery, but much of it has been done for real; throughout NTBTSTM, the shooting permits typically issued by municipal authorities to filmmakers never quite seem big enough to cover the full scope of Matt Johnson's imagination. Which may explain why so much of the film looks to have been shot undercover, or otherwise on the fly.

The wider the film roams, the higher it climbs, the richer this decidedly sui generis item becomes: these 100 minutes are at once an expansion or remix of the original show, a lap of honour allowing the real Matt and Jay to realise at least one of their earlier dreams, a remake of Back To The Future with heroes who couldn't be any less like the aspirational Marty McFly, a magic trick of sorts (Curt Lobb and Robert Upchurch's super-sharp cutting helps, but you'll also spend at least half the running time wondering how certain shots and effects were realised) and, in its own shambling, shrugging, insistently minor-key way, a demonstration of the cinema's infinite possibilities. NTBTSTM unfolds within a universe of wipeclean boards, where anything and everything could still happen; it involves the chicanery common to summer event movies - giving a sense that our protagonists are adrift in a world that is much bigger than it initially appears - but has none (or fewer) of the overheads and expenses. Somehow both artisanal and spectacular, the film keeps changing shape in surprising, confounding, funny ways. (One early sign Matt's thinking out of the box: the time travel movie he cites onscreen is that mad Ashton Kutcher thing The Butterfly Effect.) Best of all, Johnson makes this questing back-and-forth immense, infectious fun: watching NTBTSTM, you can physically feel the joy of someone making a film on their own terms, revisiting the buoying popular art of their youth, creating and tricking out a world of their own, and doing all of the above while hanging out and goofing off with old friends. (As in The Dirties and BlackBerry, the whole movie hinges on a bromance between two men who have nothing if they don't have each other: the middle stretch is The Butterfly Effect by way of Power Ballad.) The resulting experiment - the closest any film this summer has come to recapturing the puckish, playful, anything-goes spirit of the blockbusters of our childhood - confirms this filmmaker as a prodigious ideas man, perhaps a 21st century Preston Sturges, constitutionally unable to tell a story in the routine manner. In a healthier film ecosystem, our studio chiefs would be dangling the biggest cheques in the Western world before Matt Johnson's busy head - but maybe he's happy with playing the Rivoli.

Nirvanna The Band The Series The Movie is now showing in selected cinemas.

For what it's worth...

UK box office Top Ten (for the weekend of June 19-21, 2026):

1 (new) Toy Story 5 (PG) **

2 (1) Disclosure Day (12A) **

3 (2) Obsession (18) *

4 (3) Scary Movie (15)

5 (4) Backrooms (15)

6 (5) Masters of the Universe (12A)

7 (6) Michael (12A)

8 (7) Star Wars: The Mandalorian and Grogu (12A)

9 (new) Cocktail 2 (12A)

10 (9) The Devil Wears Prada 2 (12A)

(source: BFI)

My top five:

1. The Furious

2. Cactus Pears

3. Portrait of a Lady on Fire

4. A Better Tomorrow

5. Swimming Pool

DVD/Blu-Ray/Download top ten: 

1 (1) Michael (12)

2 (2) Project Hail Mary (12) ***

3 (re) EPiC: Elvis Presley in Concert (12) ****

4 (5) Avatar: Fire and Ash (12) ***

5 (4) Mortal Kombat 2 (15)

6 (new) The Magic Faraway Tree (U)

7 (18) The Good Boy (15) ***

8 (3) Scream 7 (18)

9 (6) The Super Mario Galaxy Movie (PG)

10 (27) Wicked: For Good (PG)

(source: officialcharts.com)

My top five: 
1. Hoppers

2. Blue Moon

3. EPiC: Elvis Presley in Concert

4. The Mastermind

5. The Good Boy

Top five films on terrestrial TV this week:

1. Close Encounters of the Third Kind (Saturday, BBC Two, 4pm)

2. Licorice Pizza (Friday, BBC Two, 12 midnight)

3. Diego Maradona [above] (Saturday, Channel 4, 12 midnight)

4. Shiva Baby (Thursday, Channel 4, 2.25am)

5. Thunderball (Sunday, ITV1, 3.10pm)

"The Furious" (Guardian 25/06/26)

The Furious ****

Dir: Kenji Taniyaki. With: Miao Xie, Joe Taslim, Enyou Yang, Brian Le. 113 mins. Cert: 18

It keeps happening: every few years, usually during a run of especially lethargic American spectacles, the needle of screen violence gets recalibrated by a muscular wonder from the East. Thundering along in the bloody footsteps of the Raid films and the Hindi punch-‘em-up Kill, this martial-arts showcase from Japanese-born, Hong Kong-based director Kenji Taniyaki opens in generic dadsploitation territory: “somewhere in Southeast Asia”, as a caption has it, mute Chinese handyman Wang Wei (Miao Xie) tears off after the traffickers who’ve nabbed his daughter (Enyou Yang). Having Hulk-smashed its way out of the Taken box, though, The Furious starts to crank up. Boy, does it crank up: the closing half-hour achieves a pummelling intensity unlikely to be matched by any other 2026 release.

There are further developments: cribbing from John Woo’s buddy movies, Taniyaki has his hero run into an undercover journo (Danny Dyer lookalike Joe Taslim) with his own reasons for chasing the traffickers. Yet this route-one plot chiefly bears out the advantages of creatives following straight narrative lines while turning the dial to eleven. The complexities are reserved for the frame itself: here, jawdroppingly limber, seemingly boneless performers pull off bruising manoeuvres on concrete floors, Taniyaki’s well-placed cameras capturing unexpected delicacies and flourishes amid otherwise crunching dustups. It’s that deathless critical cliché for movie action – balletic – only someone’s brought a crossbow and a ballpeen hammer to the dance, and they’re intent on using them.

The Saturday night crowd won’t care, but Taniyaki doesn’t yet have the architectural sense that elevated the Raids, projects born of dojo and drawing board alike. And some may prefer their action more culturally specific: the film screens here in a base-covering polyglot version, part-subtitled, part-dubbed. The precision of its setpieces, though, is inarguable: wherever editor Chris Tonick cuts, he crafts soaring rhymes between bodies in motion. Climaxing with a royal rumble for the ages, Taniyaki’s film is never quite as bludgeoning as it might have been, tempering its ferocity with athletic and technical skill, matching that intensity with invention and delivering as much exhilaration as evisceration. One note of warning: you may require a long lie down afterwards. 

The Furious opens in selected cinemas from today.

On DVD: "The Mastermind"

To the freewheeling mobility of the American independent cinema, Kelly Reichardt has introduced complication and obstruction in a series of droll anti-thrillers that also functioned as lucid, probing character studies. (The Kelly Reichardt Obstructions would be a fine title for any monograph.) In her 1994 debut River of Grass, the lovers on the run didn't - and couldn't - get very far; her 2010 Western Meek's Cutoff stranded its characters in the middle of nowhere; 2013's Night Moves centred on system-smashing anarchists who, in succumbing to their own paranoia, couldn't follow through on their own best intentions. Things ain't easy in a Kelly Reichardt film - another monograph title there, perhaps - and her characters have a tendency to make life doubly difficult for themselves. The Mastermind - its title as ironic as you like - bears down on another of this director's drifters, a non-complimentary term in this instance, as the film's anti-hero is someone who really should have gained some sort of direction by the point we find him: thirtysomething deadbeat JB Mooney (Josh O'Connor), who's forsaken steady employment and responsible parenting in order to plot a heist on a provincial art museum. By complete coincidence, Reichardt's previous film, 2022's Showing Up, concerned the trials and tribulations of a working artist; here, by contrast, is someone aiming to get rich quick without putting in the hours, a career criminal for the age of A.I.. In the non-Reichardt version of this story, Mooney pulls it together in tense setpieces and redeems himself in the process, possibly even reuniting with his estranged family. In the Reichardt version, however, he messes up again: he just about gets the heist done - in the clumsiest, most half-assed way imaginable - but then falls to pieces, leaving JB Mooney with and as a big nothing.

So there's already a major caveat here: you will need to know what this filmmaker is getting at (and has long been getting at) in order to even partly vibe with it. (Were you to stick it on expecting another Thomas Crown Affair, you would likely be wholly underwhelmed: save your money for Michael B. Jordan's upcoming remake.) The perverse fun of The Mastermind instead lies in watching Josh O'Connor potter around aimlessly. This proves a markedly different pleasure from watching O'Connor in the recent Wake Up Dead Man, where his character was altogether more focused and purposeful under his cassock: that guy had the Lord in his heart. God only knows what JB Mooney's deal is. (I'm not sure even he knows beyond a certain point, though Reichardt floats the intriguing possibility that this lawbreaking may be Mooney's delayed adolescent rebellion against his father, a senior judge.) Time and again, this camera emphasises the physical aspect of the protagonist's pottering. A long stretch either side of the midpoint reframes Mooney as akin to a small woodland creature - a weasel, possibly - squirrelling his ill-gotten gains away for the winter while kicking soil over his own mess. It's a funny if somewhat deflating and anticlimactic gag that absolutely no good comes from all this huffing and puffing: like the lovers in River of Grass, Mooney doesn't get very far, either. (Not least as there are wilier predators on this trail.) Is there too much pottering, not enough plot? Almost certainly. And I couldn't quite shake the thought that Reichardt has paced similar mean streets before, albeit with the less saleable Larry Fessenden in the lead role. But The Mastermind is finally very indie in the old, oppositional sense of the word: what Reichardt means to say is that there is another way of looking at and telling these stories, and that the kinds of men our crime fictions lionise aren't always as aspirational as they appear.

The Mastermind is available on DVD through MUBI from Monday, and available to stream via MUBI.

Men with guns: "A Better Tomorrow"

The Arrow label continue their admirable project to dust down and recirculate the first, landmark movies of the Hong Kong action specialist John Woo, for so long locked up in rights limbo. We've already had the heaviest hitters: 1989's The Killer, 1990's Bullet in the Head, 1992's Hard Boiled. Now we get Woo's local breakthrough: a none-more-1986 honour-among-thieves variation, all cigarette smoke, sharp suits and sunglasses, which on first release beguiled young audiences in Woo's homeland and spawned a franchise. What may have seemed especially fresh forty years ago was the lighter tone A Better Tomorrow initially strikes: jaunty strings accompany early scenes illustrating the downtime of chuckling dudes with criminal connections. (Tarantino had to have been taking notes.) The main event, though, is the intersection of - perhaps better: collision between - a handful of these men: a charismatic currency forger and occasional hired gun (Chow Yun Fat, already a movie star), an aspirant young cop (Leslie Cheung), and the latter's brother (Ti Lung), a sometime mobster - and confrere of Chow's - attempting to go straight upon his release from prison. These new faces were handed new ideas to play with: this is one of those genre pics that increasingly seems like a riff on the concept of brotherhood, an experiment to see which family matters most to these guys, and whether the blood we see being spilled at regular intervals in ambushes and shootouts is really any thicker than water.

As exemplified by a few scenes introducing the cop's klutzy cellist girlfriend (Emily Chu), that opening stretch now seems tonally awkward; there's a lot of forced jollification up until the moment the plot proper kicks off with a betrayal and a home invasion. (Rumours have long persisted that certain scenes here were filmed by producer Tsui Hark.) And I suspect even those viewers whose entry points into the Woo canon were The Killer, Hard Boiled or Face/Off might be taken aback by how melodramatic the bulk of the film is. Playing out in hospital wards and domestic kitchens, this is on some essential level a male-oriented soap opera, one that sporadically erupts into spectacular carnage. (Like the later Infernal Affairs thrillers, with their side-swapping antagonists, this set-up invites serialisation.) One could claim this volatile sincerity as proof of this filmmaker's commitment to character; unlike Tarantino, Woo genuinely cares - and wants us to care - about who lives and who dies. Crucially, and despite Woo's love for filming bullet casings pinging around in super-slow motion, the action proceeds at a still-thrilling clip, compressing the events and complications of a three-hour epic of the Leone/Peckinpah stripe into a mere 96 minutes. Some of the plot's finer detail is itself compressed in this process: any future DVD release would benefit from a map illustrating how the main and supporting players relate, although even here, Woo seems to be fostering a useful ambiguity as to who the true hero(es) of the piece will ultimately be. His eye for the stirring gesture is already in place: witness Chow keeping a toothpick in one corner of his mouth and a snout in the other, or later improvising with a mechanic's trolley amid a shootout in a multistorey carpark. The awkwardness would be ironed out over the next decade, replaced by the assurance of a master - Woo's getting there by the time of the dockside finale here - but A Better Tomorrow retains the air of a dynamic apprentice work.

A Better Tomorrow opens in selected cinemas from tomorrow.

In memoriam: Brian Johnson (Telegraph 23/06/26)

Brian Johnson, who has died aged 86, was an Oscar-winning visual effects maestro and modelling specialist who contributed significantly to the look of modern science fiction. Emerging from the multitudes of craftsmen hired for Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: a Space Odyssey (1968), he worked weekly wonders on TV’s Space: 1999 (1975-77); subsequent designs helped elevate such genre touchstones as Alien (1979), its sequel Aliens (1986) and The Empire Strikes Back (1980).

In his mid-twenties, Johnson spent three years modelling for the lunar and moonbase sequences in 2001. Although he warmed to the film, he found production frustrating, later confessing “you could spend weeks talking about a problem before doing anything about it”. When the film won the Visual Effects Oscar, it was awarded to Kubrick, as was customary, rather than individual technicians.

Johnson did, however, develop techniques that proved crucial to Space: 1999, for which he designed the fondly remembered Eagle transporter. Here, his team faced challenges tied to the demands of serialised television: “If you look at earlier science fiction series, they had very few special effects. Star Trek, for instance, often just had a standard planet, and a standard shot of the Enterprise, and that’s it. We’ve had to create a new spacecraft every episode, and a new planet nearly every episode.”

Unknowingly, his influence was spreading. The young George Lucas felt obliged to redesign the Millennium Falcon, the spaceship central to Star Wars (1977), after seeing Space: 1999 while visiting the UK. Lucas and producer Gary Kurtz showed up one day at Bray Studios seeking assistance, only for Johnson to turn the pair down (“I didn’t know who they were”), being busy with the show’s second series.

For Alien, shot at Bray, Johnson and Nick Allder provided model miniatures, notably the spaceship Nostromo; Johnson also offered practical suggestions for the film’s unforgettable “chestburster” sequence, which fitted John Hurt with an artificial torso, loaded with cow’s blood and intestines, through which an alien puppet could be thrust. Johnson won a Best Visual Effects Oscar for his work, shared with Allder, H.R. Giger, Carlo Rambaldi and Dennis Ayling.

He finally entered the Star Wars universe – winning a special achievement Oscar – with The Empire Strikes Back, for which Johnson relocated first to Lucas’s Industrial Light and Magic studio in California, then to snowy Norway to oversee the Hoth battle (and see off an on-set infestation of spiders). A sequence in which the robot R2D2 sinks into the Dagobah swamps was, however, realised closer to home: in Lucas’s own, half-finished swimming pool.

Already an industry go-to, Johnson proved a lifesaver for James Cameron during Aliens, helping to complete the project after the dissatisfied director fired a rival effects crew mid-shoot. Johnson shared the film’s Best Visual Effects BAFTA with Robert Skotak, John Richardson and Stan Winston; though he was omitted from the list of Oscar nominees, Cameron gifted Johnson a Tiffany crystal with a personal inscription as a show of gratitude.

Johnson’s work increasingly combined practical and digital effects, as he explained in Once Upon a Galaxy, a tie-in Empire Strikes Back paperback: “We are actually able to program a computer to ‘dirty down’ an electronic image. We start with a clean model and then program the computer to make it look well-worn and used… a spacecraft with scuffmarks and oil-streaks.” The goal was “convincing an audience to believe that what they’re seeing is real.”

He was born Brian Johncock in Surrey on June 29, 1939; he changed his surname in the 1960s. Childhood ambitions of becoming a pilot were dashed by a lack of maths qualifications (“I left school with one O Level, which was art, and I just scraped through on that”), but he found employment at the Cement and Concrete Research Association at Wexham Springs, where he mixed test concrete for bridges on the planned M1. 

After six wearying months, he walked into his local pub, the Dog and Pot in Stoke Poges, and fell into conversation with his neighbour, the Canadian effects artist Les Bowie: “Les said to me ‘Would you like a job sweeping the floor in a film studio?’ and I said yes […] I went to Anglo-Scottish Pictures in Addlestone, in an old church, on my Lambretta, which was all I could afford, and started doing camera work, loading magazines, sweeping the floor, that stuff.”

This apprenticeship was interrupted by a spell of national service in the RAF, where Johnson was assigned to instrument landing systems, but upon his release, he was welcomed into Bowie’s own effects studio, where he made uncredited contributions to such British sci-fi landmarks as X the Unknown (1956), Quatermass 2 (1957) and The Day the Earth Caught Fire (1961); he also provided matte paintings for the WW2 drama Dunkirk (1958).

In 1961, Johnson joined AP Films under Derek Meddings, building models for Supercar (1960-62), Fireball XL5 (1962-63) and Stingray (1964-65); Meddings assigned Johnson his own effects unit on Thunderbirds (1965-66). With Bowie, Johnson worked on Hammer’s Taste the Blood of Dracula and When Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth (both 1970), his first onscreen credits.

Johnson specialised in fantasy and horror, visualising the plane/skyscraper inferno in The Medusa Touch (1978), the mechanical dragon Vermithrax Pejorative in Dragonslayer (1981) and the flying canine Falkor in The NeverEnding Story (1984). His final effects credit was on the bawdy sci-fi romp Space Truckers (1996), though he later directed 58 episodes of the CITV cartoon Dream Street (1999-02).

After retiring, Johnson toured the convention circuit; last September, he appeared at the London: 1999 convention, which showcased a full-scale Eagle replica. He retained the optimism he’d displayed upon discussing The Empire Strikes Back in 1979: “Everything is possible. It’s usually a question of money… Top effects cost top money. Ingenuity can produce excellent effects for less.”

He is survived by Lucy-Kate Johnson, his daughter by an earlier marriage to Delia Tindall, a secretary on 2001.

Brian Johnson, born June 29, 1939, died May 25, 2026.

Fruits of passion: "Cactus Pears"

Anand (Bhushaan Manoj), the tousle-haired, muddle-headed thirtysomething who serves as the protagonist of the new Marathi film Cactus Pears, represents a very different idea of masculinity from that the Indian cinema has typically promoted in the Dhurandhar era. For one, he's vulnerable from the off. We first join him in a hospital waiting area, as he learns his ailing father has finally succumbed to complications of the kidney. Anand's complications, as soon become apparent, are those of the heart and the tongue. Over ten days of mourning in his father's leafy village, we cannot help but spot how this Mumbai-based IT wonk is at the mercy of protocol, rules and regulations, some societal, some entirely self-imposed. Relatives insist his unmarried status leaves him ineligible to perform key burial rituals; his father's passing means he must either marry within six months or wait three years, for reasons that can only be explained as local custom. All the conditions are in place for some sort of movie romance, perhaps even an unlikely romcom, but the film's mood initially seems too sombre to countenance much in the way of happiness. Instead, Anand sneaks away from the main event to spend more time in the company of Balya (Suraaj Suman), a gentle family friend - and contemporary of Anand's - who works as a farmhand. Balya is more assured than Anand: he knows who he is and what he wants, and is prepared to speak up for these in a way the more guarded Anand can't. He is, one could say, exactly the kind of stout and hardy fellow who might pull our guy out of his funk. But what about those blasted rules? And what on earth would the neighbours say?

Writer-director Rohan Kanawade sets about telling this story with some of All We Imagine As Light's hushed, attentive naturalism, although we're a long way from that film's enchanting urban sparkle. Instead, Kanawade proposes a rural alternative. Cactus Pears is a slower and quieter endeavour, as befits a setting where the characters can often be seen taking mid-afternoon naps in the shade of a tree. We, too, are afforded ample time to feel the breeze blowing over the hills and to hear the birds singing in those tree branches. But we're also attuned to those tensions creeping into these frames: between the individual and the family (and, indeed, between the individual and wider society), and - more specifically - between two men trying to speak their truths, but not so loud as for anybody else to notice. Nature, again, provides some solace and shelter: Ang Lee's Brokeback Mountain has to have been some influence. But Kanawade, in an impressive feature debut, proves more worldly than dreamy. He knows the farm life can be a tough one, and he presents us with a genuinely complex character in Anand: a shy, sensitive, secretive, rather scared soul who's put up walls, kept his head down, lost his way and now sorely needs some form of shepherding. The title refers to a sweet fruit Balya brings in from the fields for Anand, having removed its thorns for easier consumption, but it's just possible Anand himself is the real prickly pear here: someone determined to keep the world at arm's length, who hardly appears an obvious recipient of life's happier endings. The film around these two men is simple, unflashy, somewhat unfashionable within the context of today's Indian cinema. Yet its anchoring bedrock of restraint preserves what's essential here: real-seeming people, with aching, bruised and yearning hearts.

Cactus Pears is now showing in selected cinemas.

For what it's worth...

UK box office Top Ten (for the weekend of June 12-14, 2026):

1 (new) Disclosure Day (12A) **

2 (5) Obsession (18) *

3 (1) Scary Movie (15)

4 (4) Backrooms (15)

5 (3) Masters of the Universe (12A)

6 (7) Michael (12A)

7 (6) Star Wars: The Mandalorian and Grogu (12A)

8 (re) BTS World Tour 'Arirang' in Busan: Live Viewing (12A)

9 (9) The Devil Wears Prada 2 (12A)

10 (8) The Sheep Detectives (PG)

(source: BFI)

My top five:

1. Boogie Nights

2. Cactus Pears

3. Portrait of a Lady on Fire

4. Power Ballad

5. Swimming Pool [above]

DVD/Blu-Ray/Download top ten: 

1 (new) Michael (12)

2 (1) Project Hail Mary (12) ***

3 (22) Scream 7 (18)

4 (new) Mortal Kombat 2 (15)

5 (2) Avatar: Fire and Ash (12) ***

6 (3) The Super Mario Galaxy Movie (PG)

7 (10) Hoppers (U) ****

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

9 (24) Sinners (15) ****

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

(source: officialcharts.com)

My top five: 
1. Hoppers

2. Blue Moon

3. EPiC: Elvis Presley in Concert

4. The Good Boy

5. Avatar: Fire and Ash

Top five films on terrestrial TV this week:

1. My Darling Clementine (Saturday, BBC Two, 10am)

2. Psycho (Friday, BBC Two, 11pm)

3. The Producers (Monday, BBC Two, 11pm)

4. From Russia with Love (Sunday, ITV1, 6am)

5. Goldfinger (Sunday, ITV1, 4.20pm)

Overload: "Toy Story 5"

These late-in-the-day Toy Story sequels and spinoffs may have spoilt the neatness of the original trilogy, but they've been far from shy about addressing social and systemic change. If you were feeling academic, you could compile a more than workable thesis out of the ways the franchise's toybox favourites have been deployed - and rearranged, and redeployed - to illustrate shifts in progressive Hollywood thinking over the past thirty years, away from those trad masculine fantasies of cowboys, spacemen and soldiers (the prime movers in the 1995 original) and towards cowgirls and ragdolls. Show us where the industry hurt you. Toy Story 5 effectively completes this transition. Now Woody and Buzz (voiced, once again, by Tom Hanks and Tim Allen) play second fiddle to Jessie (Joan Cusack), sent away from the other toys to work through her formative abandonment trauma; and with Andy and Sid long out of the picture, proprietory ownership of the toys has fallen to young Bonnie (Scarlett Spears), an awkward, friendless tot so desperate for connection to her peers that her angsty parents invest in a digital device, the frog-shaped Lilypad (Greta Lee), which starts to hog all our girl's leisure time and relegates the old gang to the cold of the family garage. The new film is at its most illuminating in examining the impact of such tech on its humanoid characters' lives: coming just a week or so after Spielberg's phone-smashing Disclosure Day, it suggests the studio suits have been properly rattled by the online barbarians amassing at the gates, in the same way their Fifties predecessors were by television. Show me how the Internet is eating into your market share.

This is also, alas, the source of one of the core frustrations with Toy Story 5. Where previously this series has offered the universal pleasures of good stories with engaging characters, dazzling setpieces and funny jokes, this instalment sometimes feels like an elaborate PowerPoint presentation being given by producers to similarly concerned parents (perhaps with support from Keir Starmer's government): the messaging precludes any lasting merriment. It is, at any rate, another cluttered late sequel, having to stretch and strain to find something for earlier fan favourites to do, following a small army of Buzz Lightyears (presumably survivors of 2022's spinoff Lightyear) through a vaguely determined B-plot, while shuttling on new characters, generally American toys ("Combat Carl", some sort of pottytraining device voiced by Conan O'Brien) who will mean no more to overseas audiences than those nightly cutaways to American sports stars watching on from corporate sponsors' boxes at the World Cup. Previously, this series gave us one story at a time, told well; now, however, we've arrived at the (monkey) barrel-scraping stage, which means three or four half-ideas - some cut from earlier scripts, others retrieved from bottom drawers - worked through half as well. The writing has dulled: the jokes aren't as funny, smug callbacks predominate, and the stories being told by the grown-up creatives in charge - here, Pixar veteran Andrew Stanton (Finding Nemo, WALL-E) and newcomer Kenna Harris - prove barely more coherent than those the kids tell within the film itself.

Every now and again, something clicks as it used to, the muscle memory kicks in. As Woody and Buzz duke it out in Bonnie's bedroom over which of them Jessie deputised first, Hanks and Allen fall back into their winning comic rhythms; but they're sidelined for much of the film and total bystanders in the most potent scene, as Bonnie turns down a reunion with Jessie and her horse Bullseye out of shame. Visually, the new film is still impressive - but it would be even more impressive if we hadn't already seen so much of these characters and this world. A sequence on a hilltop involving Jessie, a tree, Bullseye and another, actual horse sits among the loveliest this franchise has ever given us - but then it's back to pell-mell, half-arsed plotting, faux hand-drawn fantasias, a hundred thousand pixels a second. Here is a digimation that knows from creative experience how hard it can be to step away from the CPU and the laptop: the tech has clearly made this plenitude of imagery possible, but it's also made it far less special, much less of an event. Five films down the pipeline, we're left with a mechanical reproduction of former glories. So this, then, is summer 2026: a Star War that resembled two episodes of telly, Spielberg not quite meeting the moment, and Toy Story: The College Years. Something really is shifting before our eyes: you can bet a lot of fingers are presently being crossed that Christopher Nolan, at least, has got it together - or that one of those YouTubers they have nowadays will hop off their Lilypad long enough to pluck a compelling new idea out of the ether.

Toy Story 5 is now showing in cinemas nationwide.

On demand: "Bugsy"

Written by the subsequently disgraced James Toback and directed by Barry Levinson, 1991's Bugsy opens with scattered snapshots from the life of Thirties mobster Benjamin "Bugsy" Siegel: saying goodbye to his wife and children in New York, performing speech exercises in his car, availing himself of the finest shirts, picking up a chick in a lift and whisking her off to bed, enjoying some quality time with a sunlamp on a train to L.A.. As he's played by producer-star Warren Beatty, it allows Toback and Levinson to establish a parallel between Depression-era mobsters and the more contemporary heavies of showbusiness. Even before Siegel is seen feeding tough-guy lines to movie star pal George Raft (Joe Mantegna), and long before his grand opening (of the hotel-casino complex he builds in Vegas) proves a total flop, it's a case of same racket, different era. This Siegel is a man with a lot on: monitoring the toings and froings of the Mob game, keeping his wife onside, while simultaneously initiating an altogether tumultuous affair with the one woman of this period who dared stand up to him - the actress Virginia Hill, played by Annette Bening, a.k.a. the soon-to-be Mrs. Warren Beatty. So it's a self-portrait of sorts. But here's the curious thing about Bugsy, and the thing that short-circuits any idea we're watching an entirely selective and largely romanticised portrait of a mass murderer: it's not a terribly flattering self-portrait. Watching Beatty-as-Ben strut into an opera singer's Beverly Hills home with a bag of cash in order to seize what he believes should rightfully be his dream house, he appears less a bug than a parasite. Sure, he may be superficially appealing, but we long - as certain of the real Bugsy's associates surely longed - to see this guy squished.

It being a Beatty project, there remains a certain vanity in play: there's barely a scene that doesn't feature Bugsy front and centre, stopping traffic, pitching woo, making a fuss. But the movie also appears well aware its protagonist is a vain chump, and it's often funny in describing his vanity. Above all else, this Bugsy is a big blabbermouth ("do you always talk this much before you do it?," asks one sexual conquest) whose dealings most often manifest as farce: conducting business over the phone with his wife while ushering his latest flame into the boudoir, having his head scrambled when Hill takes up with other men, making haphazard plans to assassinate Mussolini before swanning off to try and conquer Nevada. Beatty is hardly convincing as a tough guy: he can't throw a serious punch, and you suspect the supporting cast could get the better of him by pointing out a pretty girl on set and then blindsiding him with the other hand. But he's certainly qualified to play a character who's bitten off more than he can chew. No-one back in 1991 was better suited to embody ego, hubris, overreach, a fly-by-night engaged in a fruitless quest for permanence, and Levinson makes the inspired decision to surround this goofball gangster - setting out his vision for the casino while still clad in the same chef's hat he donned to ice his daughter's birthday cake - with serious actors whom you feel could at any moment snuff Beatty out like birthday candles (Harvey Keitel, Ben Kingsley, Bening, the latter every bit as memorable as this role demands). This script arms them all with tough, snappy, salty dialogue - it's a Forties movie with Nineties cussing; its critical and commercial success might well have sparked the subsequent neo-noir revival - and something unsaid besides. It does now seem telling that Bugsy's screenwriter was later busted for demonstrating comparably unbalanced, unhealthy appetites: say what you like about Toback - and you probably can nowadays - but he knew whereof these characters spoke.

Bugsy is now streaming via Netflix.

For what it's worth...

UK box office Top Ten (for the weekend of June 5-7, 2026):

1 (new) Scary Movie (15)

2 (new) The Amazing Digital Circus: The Last Act (12A)

3 (new) Masters of the Universe (12A)

4 (1) Backrooms (15)

5 (4) Obsession (18) *

6 (2) Star Wars: The Mandalorian and Grogu (12A)

7 (3) Michael (12A)

8 (6) The Sheep Detectives (PG)

9 (5) The Devil Wears Prada 2 (12A)

10 (7) Tuner (15) ***

(source: BFI)

My top five:

1. Boogie Nights

2. Strictly Ballroom [above]

3. Portrait of a Lady on Fire

4. Power Ballad

5. Swimming Pool

DVD/Blu-Ray/Download top ten: 

1 (2) Project Hail Mary (12) ***

2 (4) Avatar: Fire and Ash (12) ***

3 (1) The Super Mario Galaxy Movie (PG)

4 (6) The Housemaid (15)

5 (new) Avatar: 3 Movie Collection (12) ***

6 (5) "Wuthering Heights" (15)

7 (7) A Minecraft Movie (PG)

8 (10) Wicked: For Good (PG)

9 (15) Mother's Pride (12) **

10 (9) Hoppers (U) ****

(source: officialcharts.com)

My top five: 
1. Hoppers

2. Blue Moon

3. EPiC: Elvis Presley in Concert

4. The Good Boy

5. Avatar: Fire and Ash

Top five films on terrestrial TV this week:

1. Strangers on a Train (Sunday, BBC Two, 12.25pm)

2. From Russia with Love (Sunday, ITV1, 12.30pm)

3. The Magnificent Seven (Saturday, BBC Two, 3.15pm)

4. BlacKkKlansman (Sunday, BBC Two, 12.25am)

5. Letter to Brezhnev (Tuesday, BBC Two, 12.05am)