For what it's worth...

UK box office Top Ten (for the weekend of October 24-26, 2025):

1 (new) Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere (12A)

2 (new) Regretting You (12A)

3 (new) Chainsaw Man - The Movie: Reze Arc (15) **

4 (1) Gabby's Dollhouse: The Movie (U)

5 (2) Black Phone 2 (18)

6 (3) I Swear (15) ****

7 (5) One Battle After Another (15) ****

8 (new) Pets on a Train (PG)

9 (4) Tron: Ares (12A)

10 (6) Roofman (15) ****

(source: BFI)

My top five:

1. Back to the Future

2. One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest

3. Hedda

4. Roofman

5. The Descent [above]

  

DVD/Blu-Ray/Download top ten: 

1 (3) Jurassic World: Rebirth (12) **

2 (re) The Fantastic Four: First Steps (12) **

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

4 (1) Mission: Impossible - The Final Reckoning (12) **

5 (6) Wicked: Part 1 (PG) **

6 (8) Practical Magic (12)

7 (7) How to Train Your Dragon (PG)

8 (4) The Conjuring: Last Rites (15) **

9 (11) The Bad Guys 2 (PG) **

10 (10) 28 Years Later (15) ****

(source: officialcharts.com)

My top five: 
1. Battleship Potemkin

2. The Curse of Frankenstein

3. Misericordia

4. Sinners

5. Bring Her Back

Top five films on terrestrial TV this week:

1. The Remains of the Day (Sunday, BBC Two, 10.45pm)

2. Trainspotting (Saturday, Channel 4, 11.20pm)

3. One Fine Morning (Saturday, BBC Two, 12.50am)

4. Letter to Brezhnev (Monday, BBC Two, 11.05pm)

5. Whisky Galore! (Sunday, BBC Two, 12.40am)

A house of dynamite: "Hedda"

Where Guillermo del Toro gives us Frankenstein as we know it, with Hedda the writer-director Nia DaCosta offers Ibsen's Hedda Gabler as you likely won't have seen it before: all under the one roof, and in some movie intensification of real time. Now we're in 1950s England, watching a society soiree we know will go awry, because a prologue has already shown our poised heroine (Tessa Thompson) submitting to police interrogation. On the night in question, the stakes are perilously high, as this Hedda's straitlaced husband George (Tom Bateman) is keen to point out: among the invitees are a High Court judge (Nicholas Pinnock), who has one eye on his bombshell hostess, and Professor Greenwood (Finbar Lynch), chancellor of a university at which Hedda hopes to find gainful employment. (It's as much job interview as dinner party, because wining and dining is how this stratum of society works.) But there will be unexpected arrivals, too: a justifiably nervy young thing (Imogen Poots, at her most Poots-ish), who turns up bearing a) the only copy of her academic manuscript and b) a warning that Hedda's old flame, a professional provocateuse by the name of Eileen Lovborg, is in town and on the warpath. When the old flame is revealed as being embodied by the ever-lofty Nina Hoss, here leading with her embonpoint, we are confirmed in our suspicions there will be serious trouble, if not mortal danger, ahead. Among the Gablers' antique furnishings is a heirloom revolver straight out of Chekhov, brandished in jest in the first reel and thereafter passed hither and thither; even without it, this country house could scarcely seem more like a tinderbox.

Both of this week's streamer-backed productions are united in demonstrating a desire to work within lavish period settings: even after the summer's so-called Grand Finale, the Downton effect continues to hold sway over the West's creative industries. Yet where del Toro goes for the classical approach - straight-ahead, often prettifying - DaCosta strives constantly to rough her source material up, to find new angles on the action, to generally agitate. One immediate advantage to being an outsider within the country-house genre: she's not so easily seduced by the usual period accoutrements. The formal dinnerwear and flowing gowns are soon thrown off, revealing more basic instincts, and throughout Hedda, DaCosta proves intensely alert to the ugliness her characters have been trying to dress up: the jockeying for positions of power (or to hold onto power), the varyingly normalised and casual prejudice ("she's duskier than I expected"), the horrible compromises these people have made, and will make, to grasp the big brass ring. DaCosta's studio-compromised Candyman redo - another old tale given a fresh lick of paint, before being unduly kicked to the kerb - revealed the emergence of an artist's eye: it was always strikingly composed, even if the storytelling wobbled here and there. Here, working with the experienced DoP Sean Bobbitt, the filmmaker adorns her frames with exactly that shade of yellow where gilded warmth meets the onset of jaundice, and greens that give off bare nausea, as though the mussels served up for an entrée had gone bad on everybody. It's an example of a filmmaker moving into an inherently conservative genre with the aim to unsettle - rhythms, stomachs, assumptions - tucked into her waistband like a loaded gun.

In the lead, Thompson is far from the regally assured Hedda theatregoers might have in their heads - Brit ears will only hear a performer reaching for the accent - but that uncertainty, too, meshes with the authorial intention: it's as if DaCosta is extending the dissonance of Hildur Guðnadóttir's score into the performances, looking for off notes from her wildly disparate cast rather than the harmonies most ensemble directors seek, and honing in, as Ibsen did, on those points where the power imbalances the text set in play become unignorable. This is a film where Nina Hoss comes to stare down Imogen Poots, which instinctively seems a terribly unfair fight - but then Poots, ragged and tearful, holds her own in this company, even Hoss's Eileen proves more vulnerable than she first appears, and Thompson gives us a Hedda who's scrabbled her way to somewhere near the top only to realise the effort has left her exposed and an even bigger target besides. The radical rethink extends to an open ending that allows all of these internal tensions to spill over into the present - DaCosta's own assertion that we still haven't got a grip on any of this. (Observing that manuscript being torn from a woman's hands and scattered to the wind, she may well have been thinking of the interference her last project suffered.) Full disclosure: I was a bit sceptical when I heard Danny Boyle had handed the next instalment of his ...Later franchise to DaCosta, especially given the previous film's very British denouement. But Hedda confirms this filmmaker as not just adaptable and adventurous, but more attuned than most to the decadence and decay of collapsing societies. A boon for horror franchises, this Hallowe'en: she's also got teeth and claws.

Hedda is now streaming via Prime Video.

Creature comforts: "Frankenstein"

There's a degree to which you already know what you're getting from a Guillermo del Toro retelling of Frankenstein. Robustly storyboarded visual sense, coupled to expansive, expensive production design. A full-blooded commitment to the original's horror elements. Some sort of emotional undertow. After the recent experiments carried out on the Shelley text by Danny Boyle (on stage) and Bernard Rose (on the indie fringes), this is very much Frankenstein trad: a handsome period piece that opens with an Arctic prelude, proceeds to some variation of the usual fucking around in the lab, and concludes with a comprehensively bloody bout of finding out. Del Toro's script tweaks the basics to provide a closer fit with a moment of extreme technological arrogance, introducing a syphilitic German financier (Christoph Waltz) who stands for the myriad ways capital can compromise the processes of creation and discovery. (Some will be reminded of certain tech-bro overlords, keenly buying up and ripping the lid off Pandora's box; cinephiles of this filmmaker's run-ins with Harvey Weinstein during the making of 1997's Mimic.) Mostly, though, the new film is Frankenstein as you've always had it in your head, albeit newly enlarged via palladian windows, practical prosthetic effects and everything else streamer money can buy.

The positive is that makes this the first of Netflix's awards-season contenders - after the unpersuasive Steve and the underwhelming A House of Dynamite - to deliver more or less what we were expecting when the project was announced. The flipside is that this Frankenstein lacks any real element of surprise, anything we weren't expecting. (It's somewhat algorithmic in its choices: if you've enjoyed del Toro's other Netflix productions, chances are you'll enjoy this too.) Frankenstein '25 has both the look and air and the flaws and virtues of a long-time pet project. By all reports, del Toro was thinking of filming this story in the wake of his international breakthrough Cronos some three decades ago, and he's visibly spent the years since tinkering with and adding to it, if the movie's GdT-designed weaponry, coffins and scientific hardware (generators in Netflix red) are reliable indicators. The results prove greatly more considered than Ken Branagh's pell-mell Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, configured for mindless multiplex consumption around the time of Cronos; as a production, this Frankenstein has been layered up like the latex uglifying Jacob Elordi's Creature. At fully two and a half hours, it's one of the more complete Frankensteins of our times - and makes the Boyle/Rose deviations seem like so much revisionism. Yet each successive script pass and departmental confab has only served to put extra skeins of comforting artifice between the film and the elemental Shelley was writing about; there's finally more texture than there is terror or thrills.

Del Toro's USP is that this is actually a sins-of-the-fathers story: Oscar Isaac's kohl-eyed Victor, rockstar scientist, is seen to visit on his creation the same cool indifference that Frankenstein Sr. (Charles Dance, wielded much as Tim Burton did Christopher Lee in the actor's final films) showed Victor as a boy. (The icy wastes of the wraparound story are really a masculine state of mind, as distinct from the matrilinear warmth of del Toro's native South America.) What this set-up yields, however, is lingering variations on scenes Frankenstein scholars will have seen many times before; it's the same story, elegantly redressed and reshuffled. The actors are generally fine, but you sometimes catch them struggling to extricate themselves from the overarching design. Though she's central to a late beauty-and-the-beast sequence, Mia Goth's Elizabeth is less memorable than one of the character's jade dresses; the movie's signature scene has Victor's brother William (Felix Kammerer) urge partygoers to toss handfuls of petals in the air to create a more striking effect. (Even the characters become set dressers.) This Victor is meant to be feckless and posturing, a fly-by-night success and personal failure, so the role doesn't much call for Isaac's soulfulness. Elordi - confirmed here as the real deal: an It Boy with legit screen smarts - succeeds in delineating the seven ages of Monster, even if he most potently registers when matters get pulpier: seeing off a pack of wolves with his bare hands, and tearing the jaw off one of his human pursuers. It'd work best as an introductory adaptation - My First Frankenstein? - for young adults: a good story, in the hands of a proven storyteller. My eyeballs were happy enough, which I can't say about every Netflix release this season. I just wish my pulse had been given cause to race a little more.

Frankenstein is now playing in selected cinemas; it streams on Netflix from November 7.

On demand: "The Field"

The reinvigorating short film Sandhya Suri completed for Film London in the decade separating her breakout documentary I for India from her recent festival favourite Santosh, The Field invites viewer speculation on the precise percentages of non-fiction and fiction involved. The title describes both a site of escape and erotic possibility: a tangled cornfield in rural India where a wife and mother (Mia Maelzer) goes to meet her lover. The routines and locations are real: so real, in fact, that our heroine's husband recruits her to lend a hand with the forthcoming harvest, one way of keeping your other half busy (or, indeed, giving her away). But the longings Suri reveals and dramatises are more ambiguous: is the lover real, or is this just a place this woman goes in her head from time to time? If the affair is real, then how much of a future can there be in it? There's no denying Suri's masterful atmospheric sense: we feel the heat, and hear both the insects in the grass and the wind stirring things up. What I wasn't expecting was the movies' most symbolic and suggestive corncob.

The Field is streaming via Channel 4 until Friday. 

"Chainsaw Man - The Movie: Reze Arc" (Guardian 27/10/25)

Chainsaw Man: The Movie – Reze Arc **

Dir: Tatsuya Yoshihara. Featuring the voices of: Kikunosuke Toya, Reina Ueda, Tomori Kusunoki, Ai Fairouz. 100 mins. Cert: 15

Hot on the heels of last month’s Demon Slayer: Infinity Castle – confirmed this past weekend as the highest-grossing anime feature of all time – a big-screen outing for what, in manga terms, is a relative upstart: Tatsuki Fujimoto’s gore-soaked coming-of-age saga, first serialised in 2018. Standard critical guidance applies: what will doubtless be catnip for fans is likely to prove varyingly baffling for newcomers, arriving late to a frenetic game offering few chances for catch-up. The latter camp might, however, cling to the Hallowe’en-adjacent release date as a partial decryption device, for Fujimoto’s teenage hero Denji (voiced by Kikunosuke Toya) has a chainsaw-wielding demon squatting in his soul, suggesting the twin influences of Tobe Hooper and Shinya Tsukamoto.

The fallout from this will be, let’s say, exaggerated, but the underlying emotions remain legible, maybe even relatable. Dopey slacker Denji is here torn between two romantic prospects: notionally nice girl Makima, who appeals to his cultured side, and freckled, jade-eyed waitress Reze, who invites our boy to break into school after hours to skinny-dip. Here’s a gal to elevate your heartrate; pity she’s also hellbent on ripping Denji’s heart out. The artistry is undeniable: director Tatsuya Yoshihara and team sketch ultra-photorealistic urban environments, making it only more striking when Reza pulls a grenade-pin from her neck, exploding her earthly form, or a possessed Denji, bearing chainsaws for arms, launches a counterattack atop his shark familiar. 

Before a final descent into exhausting citytrashing, its gleeful perversity is semi-interesting: what the success of these titles tells us is that there’s an audience whose desires aren’t currently being met by Western pencil-pushers. Man, is it male, though. From Denji’s frilly pink fantasies to the fact Reze becomes more pornographic in form the more demonic she gets, Yoshihara’s not shy about courting those who might have felt uniquely wronged by the opposite sex. “What a waste!,” poor, put-upon Denji sighs. “I just cut off a beautiful woman’s leg.” On the way out, I overheard a cheery Chainsaw Fan explaining such aggressive indelicacies to his female companion. “It’s intentionally jarring,” the young man insisted. “I got that,” his companion replied. “I just don’t think I liked it.”

Chainsaw Man - The Movie: Reze Arc is now showing in cinemas nationwide.

On demand: "Keeper of Promises/The Promise/The Given Word/O Pagador de Promessas"

Should you seek a cinematic example of the difficulties of interpreting the godly Word, look no further than the multiple English-language titles accumulated by 1962's Keeper of Promises, a striking Brazilian Palme d'Or-winner that offers a Biblical parable shot like a Western, a noir, even a musical. It opens with a hunched figure staggering out of the desert and into the heart of the modern city, carrying a vast wooden cross on his back. He's not the Messiah, as it turns out, but Zé (Leonardo Villar), a farmer who's made a promise to St. Barbara to fashion and transport this burden to a cathedral so as to guarantee the life of his ailing pet donkey. Writer-director Anselmo Duarte quickly develops and complicates this metaphor. The cathedral, when our pilgrim finally arrives in the early hours, is closed. Zé alienates his doubting wife Rosa (Glória Menezes), who reckons it'd be fine just to leave the cross outside, by insisting on delivering the item personally; the pair are contrasted with another couple they encounter on the city's shadier backstreets, namely a white-suited pimp who goes by the ironic name of Bonitao (Geraldo del Rey), introduced leering at Rosa from a doorway, and his prize girl Marly (Norma Bengell), who presumably serves as this parable's own Mary Magdalene. Set against the squeaky-clean visions of 21st century faith movies, the whole proves surprisingly earthy: lust comes into play early on, cowshit gets proffered as a cure for a head wound, and it all builds towards a catfight and a colossal punch-up. Songs of Praise this is not.

Most intriguingly of all, the forbidding strictures of organised religion are persistently critiqued. The movie opens and closes with a Candomblé ceremony - the dancing and chanting of Brazil's indigenous Black population - which the cathedral's father (very) superior denounces as pure devilry, shortly before he accuses Zé of blasphemy and tells him to stick his cross where the sun don't shine. In an Ace in the Hole-ish subplot, the pilgrim's plight attracts the attention of a cynical newspaperman whose editor tells him "we don't want good articles, we want profitable articles" (a line that leaps across time, if ever there was) and dubs Zé the new Christ. A simple pilgrimage thus becomes a properly thorny, not exclusively ecumenical matter, and the film describing it bends into fascinating new shapes: Kafka if he were more concerned with the spiritual than the bureaucratic, Buñuel without the self-amused sniggering, an Ealing comedy in a far warmer climate. As Zé is forced to lug the cross up and down the church steps, his progress assisted and checked by not just the priest but his congregation, local businessmen and a passing capoeira squad, we get much the same feel for a situation and a community as we did in an earlier Cannes triumph, 1959's Black Orpheus: for an hour and a half, these steps in front of this church seem absolutely the place to be. Did this spectacle inspire Pasolini and Bresson to fashion their own modern passion plays? (At points, I wondered whether it even factored into Eastwood's High Plains Drifter a decade later.) Funny, involving, visually acute, not to mention as playful as a checkers set, Keeper of Promises obviously puts today's faith-based cinema to shame. Real grace is somewhere in these bustling frames; Duarte challenges the viewer to find it.

Keeper of Promises is now streaming on YouTube.

For what it's worth...

UK box office Top Ten (for the weekend of October 17-19, 2025):

1 (new) Gabby's Dollhouse: The Movie (U)

2 (new) Black Phone 2 (18)

3 (3) I Swear (15) ****

4 (1) Tron: Ares (12A)

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

6 (new) Roofman (15) ****

7 (new) Good Fortune (15)

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

9 (new) After the Hunt (15)

10 (7) Night of the Zoopocalypse (PG)

(source: BFI)

My top five:

1. Perfect Blue

2. Hedda

3. Roofman

4. I Swear

5. Good Boy

  

DVD/Blu-Ray/Download top ten: 

1 (11) Mission: Impossible - The Final Reckoning (12) **

2 (new) Downton Abbey: The Grand Finale (PG)

3 (2) Jurassic World: Rebirth (12) **

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

5 (3) A Minecraft Movie (PG)

6 (5) Wicked: Part 1 (PG) **

7 (6) How to Train Your Dragon (PG)

8 (24) Practical Magic (12)

9 (8) Superman (12)

10 (10) 28 Years Later (15) ****

(source: officialcharts.com)

My top five: 
1. Battleship Potemkin

2. The Curse of Frankenstein

3. Misericordia

4. Sinners

5. Bring Her Back

Top five films on terrestrial TV this week:

1. Edward Scissorhands (Saturday, BBC Two, 6.20pm)

2. Don't Look Now (Friday, BBC Two, 11.40pm)

3. The Others (Monday, BBC Two, 11pm)

4. Scream [above] (Sunday, BBC One, 11.45pm)

5. Widows (Saturday, Channel 4, 11.35pm)