In memoriam: Samantha Eggar (Telegraph 21/10/25)

Samantha Eggar, who has died aged 86, was an adventurous British actress who won a Golden Globe and Cannes Best Actress prize for her performance as a kidnap victim in the movie adaptation of John Fowles’ The Collector (1965); she later committed to cult fare, memorably licking her own newborn clean as a troubled mother in David Cronenberg’s unsettling The Brood (1979).

Pert and redheaded, Eggar could have enjoyed a more conventional career of romantic heroines and secondary sweethearts: one of her breakthrough roles was as the model-turned-actress Delia Mallory, pursued by Dirk Bogarde’s Simon Sparrow in the big Rank hit Doctor in Distress (1963). Instead, she sought out darker material, becoming a begrimed face as the uncertain Seventies went on.

She beat Sarah Miles and Natalie Wood to the role of Miranda Grey, the art student kidnapped by Terence Stamp in The Collector, only to irk veteran director William Wyler. Wyler briefly fired her; Fowles reported “the favourite sport on the Columbia lot is making fun of [Eggar] behind her back”. Eggar, who lost 14 pounds during the shoot, was left wondering whether the stress was a tactic on Wyler’s part: “I guess I was supposed to feel trapped, and I did.”

An Oscar nomination followed the film’s Golden Globes success, though Eggar lost out to Julie Christie’s more flattering work in Darling (1965). Still, she embraced the mainstream: lighting up Cary Grant’s final film Walk, Don’t Run (1966), singing and dancing as Emma Fairfax in Doctor Dolittle (1967) and romancing Richard Harris in The Molly Maguires (1970).

A US relocation yielded high-profile TV work, including CBS’s short-lived King and I spinoff Anna and the King (1972) and a remake of Double Indemnity (1973). There were reported flings with Henry Kissinger and Ed Ruscha, a role as Watson’s wife Mary in the Sherlock Holmes riff The Seven-Per-Cent Solution (1976) and guest slots on Starsky & Hutch, Columbo (both 1977) and Hawaii Five-O (in 1978).

On film, however, she was increasingly drawn towards grislier projects. She confessed to Cronenberg that The Brood, a chilling metastasis of the director’s then-recent divorce, was “the strangest and most repulsive film I’ve ever made” but she told one interviewer that she enjoyed cultivating foetuses on her body: “Those are actually condoms. We had a lot of laughing among all the monstrosity of it.”

More gore followed with the grungy Death Wish knock-off The Exterminator (1980), the Mexican severed-hand opus Demonoid (1981) and the Canadian slasher Curtains (1983) before Eggar refocused on real-life motherhood: “You wonder, are you guilty being away from your kids? Are you guilty because you’ve been told the woman’s place is in the home? Are you guilty because you’ve put ego in front of family? Have you, really? Or is that guilt being projected upon you?”

She was born Victoria Louise Samantha Marie Elizabeth Therese Eggar in Hampstead on March 5, 1938 to Army brigadier Ralph Eggar and his Dutch-Portuguese wife Muriel Palache-Bouma. Educated at St. Mary’s Providence Convent in Woking, she studied fashion at Thanet School of Art; against her parents’ wishes, she began acting in her late teens, eventually enrolling at the Webber Douglas Academy of Dramatic Art alongside future co-star Stamp.

She debuted on TV in the BBC’s Rob Roy (1961), but stage work as Titania in a Tony Richardson-directed A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Olivia in Twelfth Night saw Eggar scouted by producer Betty Box to appear in The Wild and the Willing (1962) alongside fellow debutants John Hurt and Ian McShane. She then played the title character’s mistress in Dr. Crippen (1963), opposite Donald Pleasance.

Eggar later returned to TV as a steady income stream; she shook off The Brood with a 1980 episode of The Love Boat in which her character married the Captain. She appeared in the unaired Falcon Crest pilot in 1981 before rejecting a regular role, instead guesting on Murder, She Wrote and Magnum, P.I. (both 1984) and on Star Trek: The Next Generation (in 1990) as Jean-Luc Picard’s sister-in-law.

With her children reaching adulthood, she returned to film, voicing Hera in Disney’s Hercules (1997). She took roles in the superhero flick The Phantom (1996) and sci-fi The Astronaut’s Wife (1999) before playing a scheming mother setting her adopted twins against one another on ABC’s long-running soap All My Children (in 2000). 

She made her final onscreen appearance in Fox’s medical drama Mental in 2009, though in 2012 she voiced a mystic whale for the adult animation Metalocalypse, her final credit. Interviewed in 2014, she insisted “I have no regrets. Never had a regret about anything… Mind you, my agent wanted to kill me at times.”

Her 1964 marriage to actor Tom Stern ended in divorce seven years later; she is survived by the couple’s children, producer Nicolas Stern and actress Jenna Stern.

Samantha Eggar, born March 5, 1938, died October 15, 2025.

On demand: "The Perfect Neighbor"

In 2023, an Oscar-nominated short by the experimentally-minded Bill Morrison wrestled an ultra-contemporary form of found footage into a whole new filmmaking syntax. Composed of surveillance-camera coverage of the build-up to and aftermath of a police shooting in a public space, Incident looked to CCTV for its longshots and officers' bodycam to provide its medium shots and close-ups. That short now seems like a trial run or test balloon for Geeta Gandbhir's The Perfect Neighbor, a full-length documentary now streaming on Netflix: here are the circumstances of another unnecessary death, this time in a domestic environment, which allows Gandbhir to add doorbell cameras to her list of visual sources. What we're watching over these 98 minutes is an everyday neighborhood feud, played out in Marion County, Florida as the world re-emerged from lockdown, which had tragic repercussions; what we take from it is an idea of America as an increasingly contested and hotheaded space. On one side of a spacious yet otherwise nondescript suburban street lived Ajike Owens, a Black thirtysomething whose four children enjoyed playing in that street, as is their right. On the other side, there lived one Susan Lorincz (white, fiftysomething, faintly troubled-seeming), whom the Owens kids came to nickname The Karen. The feud began in the autumn of 2022, as a simple boundary matter: Lorincz felt the Owens kids, and their various dogs, balls and toys, were infringing onto her grass, and felt obliged to repeatedly inform the authorities of these infringements; arguments and sign-tossing ensued, as the police cautioned all concerned to keep their cool, hold their tongue and mind their Ps and Qs. Matters escalated over the course of the following spring and summer, with cease-and-desist orders issued and reports of a snatched iPad. They ended decisively on the night of June 2, 2023, when Susan Lorincz fired a shotgun through the locked front door of her home, killing Ajike Owens.

The framing ensures we sense from an early stage that these are merely the bare bones of this case: what was caught on tape whenever the tape was given cause to run. We never see inside either home; we hear reports that Lorincz used the N-word, and later her muddled justification for using it, but we never personally hear her say it. (We may still have cause to wonder what news channel Susan Lorincz was watching.) Gandbhir and her editor, the marvellously named Viridiana Lieberman, enhance their soundtrack with later verbal statements from those who knew one or both parties, and the bodycam footage catches choice authenticating details in passing: the kids getting distracted from an officer's queries by the sudden discovery of dog poop ("there's so much!") or poo-pooing Lorincz's claims they had eyes on her pick-up truck ("I'm eleven!"). For the most part, however, The Perfect Neighbor really is just footage released into the public domain after a standard-issue FOI request. This makes the film a markedly different proposition from the bulk of Netflix's true-crime catalogue. Though starkly confrontational, getting us up close to the faces of angry grown-ups and upset children, it remains from first frame to last unadorned, bereft of any dressing up; Gandbhir, indeed, resists providing even such basic context clues as onscreen text, meaning it's sometimes not immediately clear what's happened, and what precisely the local PD have been called out to investigate. We're left in no doubt whatsoever, though, that these were an unseemly series of events, which never should have been allowed to go as far as they did, and only went in the direction they finally did because one of the parties had access to a firearm. Yet again, we see how the thoughts and prayers of America's NRA-bankrolled politicians are ultimately meaningless, at ground level, when presented with the deadly reality of a loaded gun.

Beyond that, however, the film remains a little more open to interpretation than perhaps it should have been. The Morrison short made starkly visible clear and preventable failures on the part of the beat cops working what was to become a crime scene, but I don't think Gandbhir's film does, unless I missed something. The officers called out this way are polite and professional, even-handed, continually de-escalating and more often than not friendly, although you sense even their patience wearing thin after the increasingly erratic Lorincz rams a gate with her truck; as one officer sighs to another, "there comes a point where you just have to accept you live with a bunch of kids". If Gandbhir intends to raise questions, those questions pertain to Florida's judiciary, whose Stand Your Ground rule (permitting gunowners to shoot in self-defence) may in theory have afforded Susan Lorincz an easier ride - yet, as this footage shows, she was still arrested, interrogated, prosecuted, convicted and eventually imprisoned for 25 years. So the film floats into an odd space: there may well be none more documentary all year - it's all raw feed, with the exception of some TV news coverage massaged into the closing moments - and yet what this footage ultimately communicates, beyond the given that this was a tragic death, feels ever so slightly abstract. The cool, hands-off approach means there's never much sense of a case being made; Gandbhir is as the prosecution lawyer who walks into the courtroom, deposits a stack of files on the jury benches, and then absents herself. Much of The Perfect Neighbor is fascinating at a human interest level - there's a reason it currently sits at #1 on the streamer's charts - and again as a formal exercise; there's also no denying that these cameras picked up those agitated molecules of fear and frustration, anger and suspicion that have been gathering in the air these past ten years. It's just that the film shows them back to us in the most dispassionate format imaginable.

The Perfect Neighbor is now streaming on Netflix.

Too fast, too furious: "The Bad Guys 2"

It's some feat that The Bad Guys 2 has remained on the UK Top Ten for three months, and even after a) the film became available for home viewing and b) the kids went back to school. Granted, the last theatrical screenings standing would have been weekend matinees - but clearly something about it has clicked with the mass audience, and the summer's dearth of options for younger cinemagoers can only have helped its cause. Perhaps folks have been drawn back by the sequel's gleaming toplayer of artistry, which has been expanded to embrace yet more anthropomorphised animals spitting pulpy dialogue (newcomers to the voicecast here include Danielle Brooks, Maria Bakalova, Natasha Lyonne and the Riyadh Comedy Festival's Omid Djalili) and now covers areas of this bizarro-world L.A. that the first movie overlooked: the storm drains and back alleys, the hills and the oilfields. Superficially, at least, this latest DreamWorks animation is operating at some level far above those dubbed half-term screenfillers rendered in what looks like toddlers' crayon. Once again, though, more seasoned onlookers can surely only notice how basic the underlying plot mechanisms are, assembled as they have been merely to flip the initial premise on its head.

First time round, the bad guys were forced to go good. Now these good guys, introduced seeking clerical work at the banks they once held up, have to reconnect with their inner badasses after being framed for crimes they didn't commit. Again, this yields the motion of a street-corner cup-and-ball game, designed to misdirect the eye while anywhere between £10 and £40, depending on local ticket prices and the size of your family, gets extracted from your back pocket. (I mean, c'mon, the Sam Rockwell-voiced Wolf even says "it's not about the action, it's about the distraction"; a vague Trumpiness is evident long before the villain-in-chief reveals their plan to suck up all the gold in the universe.) Bigger, faster setpieces ensue: a high-speed escape from Egypt in the prologue, a lucha libre bout ("who's ready for some violence?") scored to pounding Cardi B, a zero-gravity final reel that does for this franchise what Fast Nine did for its own. (To infinity and beyond, this time to make a quick buck.) There's a set-up for a third instalment, but this franchise remains neither especially good nor bad; it's just there, offering nothing really to cling to save a small handful of rapidly dissipating titters. It's amazing The Bad Guys 2 has stuck around in cinemas this long, given how fundamentally flimsy and frenetic it is: maybe folks are just going back to see what flew between their ears at the speed of light first time around.

The Bad Guys 2 is now playing in cinemas nationwide, and available to rent via Prime Video and YouTube.

Everybody's all-American: "Roofman"

Roofman constitutes a change of pace for writer-director Derek Cianfrance, hitherto a purveyor of varyingly agonised relationship dramas (2010's Blue Valentine, 2012's The Place Beyond the Pines, 2016's The Light Between Oceans). For all the acclaim those modern melodramas attracted, there may well be less money in them than in a goofy, all-American true-crime story such as this, especially when said crime story is repurposed as a full-on charm offensive. The story, which dates from 2004, concerns one Jeffrey Manchester, a cashstrapped Army vet introduced literally on a roof: that of the latest McDonald's he's burrowed into in order to liberate its abundant petty cash. A brisk flashback brings us up to speed on how this latter-day outlaw got here, before Cianfrance cracks on with recreating what happened next - in short order, Jeff's arrest at his own daughter's sixth birthday party, a prison break, and a large-scale manhunt, during which Manchester holed up for several months in the eaves of his nearest Toys 'R' Us. If this clown needed excuses making for him, the film has them in spades. First and foremost, he's played by Channing Tatum, the current cinema's #1 lovable oik; early on, we see Jeff offer his coat to one of the McDonald's employees he's about to shut inside the branch's meat fridge. But it's really the movie's two branded reference points - the burger joint and the spacious palace of childhood dreams - which best allow us to get a handle on the protagonist. Cianfrance frames Jeff Manchester as a bigger than average kid, a well-meaning but scrabbling dad, trapped within a system that doesn't pay him enough to afford the things he wants for him and his loved ones. The underlying assumption is that you and I may well know someone like this.

In his earlier films, Cianfrance could be observed straining for depth and weight, for seriousness and significance. Roofman bears out the advantages of a director pairing the same sensibility with something lighter in tone: they feel obliged to ground their material, to bulk it out and prevent it from flying away like a stray novelty balloon. So it is here: in the opening half-hour, we get a suggestive sketch of a straitened blue-collar community, an inventive, more than plausible breakout, and a sequence in which Jeff overrides the store's motion sensors and security cameras and starts to get the lay of his new, somewhat unreal kingdom. The story is goofy - a Dog Day Afternoon on rollerskates - but the storytelling is rarely other than considered. So you sit back and relax, freed up to enjoy the montage in which Jeff realises that, after hours, he essentially has every commercially available toy in the continental United States at his disposal; and the sequence in which he improvises rudimentary laundry arrangements; and the passage which sees Jeff go from passive intruder-observer to actively intervening in Toys 'R' Us store and personnel policy; and then the character's realisation that even this most colourful and well-stocked of capitalist utopias - even with all the M&Ms a man might eat to stay awake through the wee small hours - is, in fact, its own form of prison. Imagine having all the toys in the western world at your disposal, and being unable to give them to your daughter without risking recapture. It's a superficially goofy story, then, but it has hidden pockets of depth - like the nooks into which Jeff has to repeatedly curl himself - and resonances all the way down.

One potential issue is that we, too, might have found ourselves holed up and restless, but Cianfrance keeps looking beyond his core story to find inviting, warming bubbles of everyday American life. Some of these (a singles dinner at a Red Lobster, perhaps) are almost certainly invention, part of the film's overall project of romanticisation, but - whatever - Roofman remains good company for a couple of hours, even when it's just the leading man poking around on his lonesome. Equal parts goofus and gallant, Tatum plays Jeff as someone who's both determined and practical enough to live off-grid for half a year, but who also has to try and keep his story straight whenever he's confronted by the outside world. You could argue the role isn't that great a stretch - Tatum has rehearsed similar lunks in Magic Mike, Logan Lucky and less alliterative, non-Soderbergh projects besides - but somehow the actor proves even more integral to Roofman's peculiar charms: he finds real pathos in the sight of a grown man curling up under Spider-Man bedsheets, and the contours of his face readjust in the film's second half. Sloughing off an initial, appealing toplayer of puppy fat as starvation kicks in, Tatum re-emerges as closer to the hardened career criminal De Niro played in Heat, some indicator of the choice Jeff will eventually have to make. (He gets taut as the movie does.) This is a performance to banish any remaining doubts one may have about this actor's status as a fully-fledged leading man: one marker of Tatum's achievement is that it's only on the way out that you realise that, like everybody else on screen, you too have been charmed by a character who's basically a con artist.

That everybody else is noteworthy in itself. One of this script's great pleasures is that it keeps wriggling away from the situation at the Toys 'R' Us, and forcing Jeff into quasi-love triangles: first with Kirsten Dunst as the brassy blonde shelfstacker he falls for (again: not the biggest stretch for this performer, but nobody plays these roles better) and Peter Dinklage as her pernickety, suspicious boss; later, with best friend LaKeith Stanfield and his beauty-salon squeeze Juno Temple; even, in passing, with pastor Ben Mendelsohn and wife Uzo Aduba. No man can be an island when you're this charming. (And Cianfrance has realised another way to bulk this scenario out is with good actors, who can transform a few lines here and there into a way of life, a philosophy, maybe even an escape route.) Working with cinematographer Andrij Parekh, Cianfrance gives the film a nice, crisply unfussy autumnal look - it's perfect that Jeff should find himself increasingly exposed as the leaves start to fall from the trees, and you do fear he wouldn't survive an especially chill winter - and engineers one of the year's funniest sight gags (involving two adjacent buildings) through framing alone. There's one image towards the end that seems on-the-nose, unnecessary underlining, and we don't really need the potted biography of Jeff Manchester provided in the end credits, which struck me as letting a bit too much light in on Hollywood magic. The good news, though - and Roofman is, on the whole, very good news - is that there is still magic here, not least in witnessing that earlier strain in Cianfrance's cinema finally conjured out of sight. Roofman remains a goofy story, but it's also supremely well told.

Roofman is now playing in cinemas nationwide.

On demand: "Jurassic World: Rebirth"

From a commercial perspective, rebooting the Jurassic Park franchise over the past decade has proved a sound if not terribly inspired idea. Creatively, however, we surely have to admit the Jurassic World films have been subpar at best, a judgement born out by the grab-bag of approaches individual instalments have pursued, none of which have stuck for longer than two indifferent hours at a time. 2015's Jurassic World, co-written and directed by Colin Trevorrow, went for bluntly self-reflexive fabulism (dinosaur theme park as latter-day corporate entertainment) in a bid to win over those executives who may have had misgivings around the prospect of getting box-office lightning to strike twice in the same place. Trevorrow's most recent entry, 2022's Jurassic World: Dominion, went so far as to get the old Neill-Dern-Goldblum band back together, and left even hardcore loyalists disappointed. With Jurassic World: Rebirth, Gareth Edwards - who worked such wonders on his homemade blockbuster Monsters fifteen years ago, before finding steady employment in WB's Kong/Godzilla universe - attempts a return to Spielbergian first principles. Small things (a discarded Snickers wrapper in the prologue) which trigger bigger, disastrous things; images that tip a very specific hat to a gamechanging event movie; lots more of that old, familiar John Williams theme. Its self-contained, standalone story, care of original JP scribe David Koepp, sees Big Pharma exec Rupert Friend dispatching unlikely adventuress Scarlett Johansson and speccy academic Jonathan Bailey to an equatorial isle to collect dino blood, notionally to assist his company's research into a possible cure for heart disease - though if you believe philanthropy is the shifty Friend's motivation, you may just be the one person who still hasn't seen enough of this type of movie.

What's really being peddled is nostalgia for a blockbuster golden age, when audiences were dazzled week in week out; the Bailey character gestures towards that past in his introduction, taking down his museum's most recent exhibition with a morose "we sold a dozen tickets last week... no-one cares about these animals any more". One reason we were dazzled back in the day, though, was that what we were watching was to some degree new and surprising, or at least expertly crafted. Here, by contrast, Edwards is obliged to engineer a setpiece every twenty minutes, solely to prod us awake, and the bulk of these are striking less for their photorealism than for the glitchy mismatch between foreground and background, between the in-camera work and the largely digitised space around it. Those Nineties event movies more often than not appeared dazzlingly expensive; Rebirth must have spent a fortune on plane fares and appearance fees, yes, but its action looks cheap and rushed. The Williams theme does a lot of elevating heavy lifting, but what's beneath it, stuck forever at ground level, only underwhelms. Koepp outlines three distinct species of dinosaur (sea, land and air), which is a neat structuring device, but only one type of humanoid: bland. (Even with Mahershala Ali on board as a roguish captain, this has to be the dullest cast ever assembled for a summer movie, all going through the motions, all keeping one eye out for the production accountant.) And Spielberg's underdiscussed ruthless streak is beyond Edwards' peppy fanboying: where Jurassic Park strained at the leash of its original PG certificate (to the extent it's since been reclassified as a 12A), Rebirth seems regrettably declawed. A winsome family tag along on this mission for no good reason; with the exception of the occasional chomp, these dinos are cuddly compared to the acid-spitting monsters of their inspiration. The past gets misremembered. Between a full-throttle Jerry Bruckheimer comeback, the diverse terrors of the horror renaissance, several bold South Indian crowdpleasers and the Jaws reissue, 2025 was the liveliest summer season for some while, but you'd never guess it from something this rotely uninspired. Nostalgia isn't what this reboot needs. Extinction might be.

Jurassic World: Rebirth is currently available to rent via Prime Video and YouTube, and releases on DVD via Universal tomorrow.   

For what it's worth...

UK box office Top Ten (for the weekend of October 10-12, 2025):

1 (new) Tron: Ares (12A)

2 (2) One Battle After Another (15) ****

3 (new) I Swear (15) ****

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

5 (4) The Smashing Machine (15) ***

6 (5) The Conjuring: Last Rites (15) **

7 (new) Night of the Zoopocalypse (PG)

8 (new) Good Boy (15) ****

9 (9) The Bad Guys 2 (PG) **

10 (7) The Long Walk (15) ***

(source: BFI)

My top five:

1. One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest [above]

2. Perfect Blue

3. Homebound

4. Roofman

5. I Swear

  

DVD/Blu-Ray/Download top ten: 

1 (new) The Conjuring: Last Rites (15) **

2 (12) Jurassic World: Rebirth (12) **

3 (4) A Minecraft Movie (PG)

4 (1) The Naked Gun (15) ***

5 (8) Wicked: Part 1 (PG) **

6 (2) How to Train Your Dragon (PG)

7 (3) The Fantastic Four: First Steps (PG) **

8 (5) Superman (12)

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

10 (7) 28 Years Later (15) ****

(source: officialcharts.com)

My top five: 
1. Battleship Potemkin

2. The Curse of Frankenstein

3. Misericordia

4. Sinners

5. Elio

Top five films on terrestrial TV this week:

1. Close Encounters of the Third Kind (Saturday, BBC Two, 6.25pm)

2. Manhunter (Monday, BBC Two, 11pm)

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

4. Halloween (Friday, BBC Two, 11pm)

5. A Shaun the Sheep Movie: Farmageddon (Sunday, BBC One, 3.30pm)

It's only the end of the world: "A House of Dynamite"

Since entering the Major American Filmmaker phase of her career, Kathryn Bigelow has typically been drawn towards material that feels in some way contemporary. Released in the Internet's infancy, 1995's Strange Days was both a pulsating thriller and a cautionary fable on the dangers of spending too much time in the virtual realm; 2008's The Hurt Locker and 2012's Zero Dark Thirty took baleful looks at America's then-recent misadventures in the Middle East; 2017's Detroit, released in the summer of Charlottesville, entered into fractious conversation with the country's long history of racism. Brought to you in association with Netflix, Bigelow's comeback film A House of Dynamite intends to speak to a moment of increased militarisation, and more generally to a point in time where citizens across the political spectrum have started to wonder who the hell's in charge. The script, penned by former NBC News chief Noah Oppenheim, updates Fail Safe, Sidney Lumet's 1964 thriller about Cold War nuclear tensions, except the earlier film's ensemble is here atomised in a very modern way. Faced with a renewed nuclear threat, the main characters will now be given precisely nineteen minutes to think things through: the time it takes for a missile launched somewhere in the Pacific to reach its destination on the US mainland. The rogue nuke is first spotted by soldier Anthony Ramos, already having a bad day on his Alaskan base; it's phoned through to Rebecca Ferguson and Jason Clarke, manning the White House Situation Room; then passed up along the command chain to Defence Secretary Jared Harris, baseball-nut General Tracy Letts and President Idris Elba. At first, it's unclear whether the red dot on everybody's screens is a test launch, or simply the result of someone's bad maths; then the emergency alerts and shelter-in-place orders are issued, and we learn the missile in question will shortly turn the Windy City into a hole in the ground, as if that place doesn't currently have enough on its plate.

Whatever the outcome, Bigelow doubtless saw this script as another opportunity to immerse audiences in the helter-skelter of the here-and-now. Presented as a real-time procedural drama, House never lacks for ticking digital displays (see the countdown from Defcon-4 to Defcon-1 as it happens!) and spiralling handheld photography (care of Paul Greengrass favourite Barry Ackroyd). Several of the main characters have to patch into the comms feed while in transit; we quickly grasp this administration has been caught on the backfoot. In the prologue in particular, Bigelow appears to be employing a policy of temporal brinkmanship: you wonder where the film can possibly go after these opening twenty minutes, and what will happen once the clock ticks down to zero. The answer, I'm afraid, is this: it has nowhere to go. The missile doesn't fragment, but the film does: we go on to revisit those first twenty minutes - perhaps the final twenty minutes on Earth - in the company of an entirely arbitrary-seeming sample of the above characters. On paper, that's an intriguing structural wrinkle: we're essentially watching lives flashing before our eyes, while again being reminded of how fleeting life is. (Never more so when some ne'er-do-well elects to push the button.) Here, however, the film just proceeds to bog down in much the same jurisdictional and technical detail that dogged Zero Dark Thirty's progress; Oppenheim's going over the same scenario three or four times, edging us ever closer to an unimaginable climax. So unimaginable, it transpires, that the film simply stops dead at a certain point; for different reasons, both the characters and the audience are left wondering 'is that it?'

After the potent yet divisive Detroit, a defining film of the first Trump administration even as it underperformed at the box office, House shapes up as Bigelow's most dourly conventional film - and I can hardly believe I'm writing that after sitting through 2002's K-19: The Widowmaker. Volker Bertelmann's classical score underlines every emotion we're meant to feel; a hackneyed sentimental touch has Ferguson discover a toy dinosaur her sick son has left in her jacket pocket; the shockingly televisual framing (a Netflix imposition?) suggests some algorithmic levelling out of 24, The West Wing and the streamer's recent, Oppenheim-penned dud Zero Day. Is this really the same filmmaker who made Point Break and Strange Days so compelling to look at? Bigelow's newfound belief that actors plus script is enough would be curious even before she read this particular, oddly patchy screenplay, which plays to very few of her established strengths: introduced as the latest of this director's tough working women, the Ferguson character disappears entirely after the opening reel, and so - once again - it's down to frowning men to try and prevent the end of the world. It's not hard to see what's gone so desperately wrong here: this would have been one of the projects rushed into production after Oppenheimer's Oscar sweep (you can hear the elevator pitch: "what if Oppenheimer, but now?"), only to find itself completely overtaken by the recontextualising events of November 5, 2024. What the film that limps out now assumes is that those in positions of power would be trained specialists, and that the biggest threat to Chicago in late 2025 would come from outside the United States. If previous Bigelow films felt like reflections on their moment, House - the first of this director's works to fall somewhere between distraction, afterthought and outright irrelevance - instead spends two listless hours scrabbling around hopelessly behind the curve. The America Bigelow's film describes has already been blown to smithereens.

A House of Dynamite is now playing in selected cinemas, and streams via Netflix from October 24.