Cat power: "Puss in Boots: The Last Wish"

Consider this the Spider-Man effect, and an illustration of how our franchises might usefully learn from one another. The generally beloved Shrek series begat 2011's Puss in Boots, a spin-off that made an awful lot of money despite seeming sketchy indeed at 75 minutes; the lack of any immediate follow-up only heightened any suspicion that this lineage had finally run out of puff. (Compare that burnout to the number of Minions movies squeezed out of Despicable Me in the meantime.) Over a decade on, however, Puss finally gets a part deux with The Last Wish, a surprisingly successful revival that owes its existence to two distinct forces: one, the creative and commercial triumph of Sony's 2018 spin-off Into the Spider-Verse, which may have persuaded the suits that franchises benefit when creatives are afforded a freer hand; and two, a post-lockdown need for high-profile content with which to re-establish the DreamWorks brand. The studio's animation division has thus been granted cartoon blanche to do more or less what it likes with its second-string characters, in whatever style they prefer; while the resulting film doesn't go what you'd call full Spider-Verse, it has the advantage of doodling over a script bursting with ten years' worth of ideas, many of those good and fun. Foremost among them: that - much like the franchise itself, one supposes - preening swashbuckler Puss (again voiced by Antonio Banderas) is in the last-chance saloon, having exhausted eight of his allotted nine lives. Pursued by a wolf who claims to be a bounty hunter but may even be Death himself, and then driven from the cat shelter he'd hoped might serve as his retirement home, Puss becomes involved in a madcap chase to catch a fallen star (dare one say a fellow fallen star), competing for ground with tyrannical pie magnate Jack Horner (John Mulaney), former flame Kitty Softpaws (Salma Hayek Pinault), a Cockney Goldilocks (Florence Pugh) and her illustrious Three Bears (Olivia Colman, Ray Winstone and Samson Kayo: the voice casting alone is enough to make you chuckle). One way of approaching The Last Wish: as the It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World of Shrek spin-offs.

Clearly, we're still in sidebar territory, yet if the cultural urgency of the Shrek movies now feels a long way distant, we're heading back in something like the right direction. Abundant effort has been expended on The Last Wish, and I wonder if this was one of those projects that got lucky with lockdown, allowing the writers and animators time to polish their plot and images to an appreciable sheen. Visually, the film travels some distance beyond any of its predecessors. In their central Dark Forest, directors Joel Crawford and Januel Mercado plant this series' own idea of a multiverse, namely multiple paths that unfurl before us in multiple styles, depending on who's in charge of the map; sometimes the screen resembles a 1970s prog album cover, sometimes Mario Kart's Rainbow Road, sometimes an expressionist Sergio Leone landscape. (Contrast this with the Shreks, which had a shed, a blocky castle, and some trees.) As befits the last-life set-up, there's more jeopardy and risk, too. Pity Horner's baker minions, degloved by hungry orchids and speared by stray unicorn horns; the Three Bears find their signature bowls of porridge weaponised against them. Parents be forewarned: it's been rated PG with good reason. (The furry Reaper, voiced by the Brazilian actor Wagner Moura, is a genuinely eerie creation, often recognisable as no more than red eyes in the dark.) Yet even this is a consequence of creatives making conscious choices, rather than simply deferring to the whims of the marketplace or their own processor chips. A sure sign of the new movie's success: Eddie Murphy, who until recently wouldn't have struck you as a man unduly concerned with the fate of the Shrek franchise, has been heard wondering why his Donkey hasn't yet secured his own spin-off. He may have to wait, given that The Last Wish also introduces optimistic canine crossdresser Perrito (What We Do in the Shadows' Harvey Guillén, doing just enough in the booth to stop you and the Disney lawyers thinking of Ellen DeGeneres as Dory), a cockroach with the voice and mannerisms of Jimmy Stewart, and Ray Winstone singing "Who Ate All the Pies?". Banderas, sensing this might be as good a retirement plan as any, sounds like he's enjoying himself immensely. You might likewise.

Puss in Boots: The Last Wish is now playing in cinemas nationwide.

The mule: "EO"

2022 ended with the British film industry converting Akira Kurosawa's Ikiru into Living. 2023 begins with the Polish veteran Jerzy Skolimowski either remaking or riffing on Robert Bresson's Au Hasard Balthazar. Both projects are far from the fist-in-mouth disasters they might have been, yet neither entirely shakes the idea that the cinema is struggling to conceive of a viable forward path for itself; even those directors who aren't retreating into outright reminiscence appear stuck with their head over their shoulders, backtracking along tried-and-tested arthouse routes. (When Nicolas Winding Refn announces his update of The Seventh Seal next year, we can officially call cinema's time of death.) As early as its opening title card, EO is turning circles, setting its eponymous hero - a donkey; his name is apparently the Polish equivalent of ee-aw - down in the dispiriting confines of a touring circus's big top. And this is the highlife: thereafter, he trots downhill in poor Balthazar's hoofprints. Liberated from the circus, EO is employed as a corporate mascot (where he at least gets a necklace of carrots for his troubles), taken in by a working farm (only to be overlooked in favour of the poncy show ponies, suggesting some equine class system; his eventual escape involves a nice sight gag), resurfaces in a muddy, impoverished backwater, incurs the wrath of football fans, gets an unlikely twirl around the dancefloor, goes through the donkey version of rehab, and is finally - brutally - dispatched to the knackers' yard. It's the circle of life, in a way - and a hell of a role for the six donkeys credited with playing EO. Take a bow Tako, Ola, Marietta, Ettore, Rocco and Mela; next to them, Cate Blanchett's Lydia Tár begins to seem a trifle underexercised.

Whether or not you buy into EO as fiction will depend upon your readiness to project emotion onto a creature who, by his or her very nature, cannot act in a way, say, even Gerard Butler can act. (Favourable responses to the film are as the "aww"s occasioned in petting zoos.) As allegory for Man's Suffering, EO can't work because, as wasn't the case with its inspiration, its construction and execution keep getting in your face and in the way - Skolimowski's plainly enjoying himself too much, in short. (Bresson never thought of blaring death metal over the ride into oblivion, for better or worse.) Only auteurist noblesse oblige can account for the film's madly pinballing tone: why it resembles a kids' film until the scene where somebody gets their throat slashed, and then sends on Isabelle Huppert for an utterly baffling cameo. For a while, though, the film proves diverting enough as one of the Polish cinema's documentary-adjacent texts: non-fiction, accompanying a donkey or six as they have a jolly day out in artfully shot and lit locations. In this reading, EO would be as the cow in Andrea Arnold's Cow, given greater freedom to roam - from inner city to Poland's rural outreaches - before arriving at much the same destination. EO is never less than visually dynamic: one minute, Skolimowski's ziplining his camera over a river, the next he's falling in synch with a churning wind turbine. That makes it move, yes, but nothing here comes close to the austerely involving and affecting Bresson film. EO makes quite a good advert for donkeys - steadfast, docile, a handy way of getting from A to B, and Skolimowski pays his weary four-legged trooper-in-chief the compliment of shooting him like a 7 Series BMW. But does a dotty footnote like this deserve an Oscar nod ahead of Decision to Leave? One again concludes the Academy is an ass.

EO opens in selected cinemas from Friday.

From the archive: "Puss in Boots"

The Toy Story series has kept its universe intact over the course of its sequels, so maybe we have the Shrek films to thank for the current state of play in the digimation game. After 2009's very ordinary Shrek Forever After, the producers retired their hulking green star and instead pushed on with Puss in Boots, an origin story for one of the franchise's more popular supporting players; that it played as successfully as it did on release in 2011 explains why we now have movies about Madagascar's penguins and Despicable Me's minions. (With the market growing increasingly competitive and desperate for new angles, every last pixelated clump began jostling for its own spin-off.) Where the Shreks were old-school 2D propositions, bedtime stories rewritten with a newly knowing tone, Puss (again voiced by Antonio Banderas) is very much a 21st century conception: a posturing superhero whose derring-do, leaps and swashbuckling are meant to be viewed in 3D. Around him, however, the film gets more than a little hesitant and defensive. Puss is given not one but two sidekicks - a crafty love interest (Salma Hayek) and a treacherous Humpty Dumpty (Zach Galifianakis) - which speaks to a certain writers' room uncertainty as to whether their lead can actually carry a movie on his own. The story, meanwhile, is the kind of quest narrative that these diversions got bogged down in from the mid-Noughties onwards, no matter that it takes in magic beans, the Golden Goose and a sprouting, curling beanstalk that practically begs for the third dimension. Like the majority of DreamWorks' sequels and spinoffs, it's at least proficient about delivering more of what audiences enjoyed elsewhere: briskly paced, pleasingly sunny of hue, unobjectionable in its outlook, there's nothing here to leave you feeling ripped-off, exactly. Still, it seems telling that it barely runs to 75 minutes, and that there have been no further sequels since: what you're watching are the last drops of inspiration being squeezed from the tube.

(December 2014)

Puss in Boots is now streaming on Netflix, and available on DVD through DreamWorks Animation; a sequel, Puss in Boots: The Last Wish, opens in cinemas nationwide Friday, and will be reviewed here in the days ahead.

The spy who came in from the cold: "Pathaan"

Over dinner just before Christmas, my esteemed friend and colleague Asim Burney - no-nonsense ringmaster of the Khandaan podcast - hit upon a definition of what we want to see when the lights go down that will do us as well as anything to be found in the pages of Bresson's Notes on the Cinematograph. What we ultimately long to witness on our nights off in the dark, Asim argued, can be boiled down to just five words: hot people doing cool shit. As suggested by Pathaan's spectacular opening-weekend returns - a sign Bollywood might just be bouncing back after an uncommonly rotten 2022 - no-one has better understood that than writer-director Siddharth Anand, who signed off on one of the Hindi cinema's last pre-Covid megahits (2019's War). The new film is Anand picking up where he left off before the germs blew in, with more money, bigger stars yet, and the organising idea of the Yash Raj Films Spy Universe, a throughline that connects Pathaan not just to War but to Salman Khan's Tiger movies. Yet crucially, for any latecomers to the YRFSU, this is also a movie in which Shah Rukh Khan can be seen surfing a helicopter's blades, a movie in which Khan and Abraham beat seven bells out of one another on the roof of an articulated lorry speeding through downtown Dubai - Abraham simultaneously holding onto a helicopter's guyline as if the chopper were a kite - and a movie where Deepika Padukone wears a swimsuit so hard it causes a cork to pop explosively out of an adjacent champagne bottle. ("The world has not seen my true colours," trills the song playing over this formative moment for an entire generation of teenagers. With only a half-inch less material, we'd see a whole lot more than those.) No need to overthink things. Hot people; cool shit. Life's complicated enough, in the main.

It's been complicated for Shah Rukh, certainly, who's spent the past few years having to square the vast affection felt for him in his homeland with a run of movies that, while often inventive in re-examining his star persona, hardly set the box-office alight; as if these professional setbacks weren't enough to have to process, there were external political developments within a country making life difficult for anyone with a surname like his. So Pathaan has been positioned - profitably - as a comeback as much for Khan as it has been for Bollywood, and having set out that equation, we might further calculate that Khan is Bollywood, his versatility essential to the kind of masala movie where a star has to fire a gun, sing a song, and cover a lot of ground in between. The spy role he assumes here affords him narrative licence to shuffle between personas: his Pathaan is introduced as a bloodied, lank-haired political prisoner (his opening growl "zinda hai" - still alive - both a reference to earlier films in this universe and a barely coded message to the actor's detractors); he loses his shirt to play action hero in the pursuit of Abraham's renegade Jim; and then, faced with Padukone's double agent Rubina, turns into an awestruck swain. If there's any real difference between Pathaan and a Western formulation like James Bond, it lies in the star's altogether boyish, non-predatory sexuality. Pathaan appears understandably intimidated by the coltish goddess towering over him; after Rubina proposes the pair spend the night together in a Moscow hotel suite, he uses the time to fill her in on his adventures in Afghanistan, which might seem something of a missed opportunity. Politically, Pathaan struck me as no more or less than pragmatic: its hero's final line is a patriotic "jai Hind". But it's elevated by the lightness of touch Khan brings to the clunkiest stretches of event-movie exposition, and his Cary Grant-ish ability to strike up chemistry with even those scene partners who wouldn't look so dashing in a saffron bikini. (Stick around after closing song-of-the-moment "Jhoome Jo Pathaan" for a droll coda in which Khan and a fellow aging warrior compare wounds and speculate who, among the next generation of leads, could do what they do better. You know a film has done its job when such self-reflexivity doesn't come over as total hubris.)

Imagination has been applied to the setpieces, which are all anybody seems likely to remember by the time the inevitable sequel comes around. A motorcycle chase across a frozen lake to retrieve scattered smallpox vials reveals that Deepika has also remembered to pack her Wilf O'Reilly outfit; and Khan and Abraham eventually set about one another in a collapsing wooden shack bolted altogether optimistically to the side of a mountain. Still, even with two megahits under his belt, I don't think we can claim Anand as any great innovator. War allowed him to crank the homoeroticism up to 11, but as there, Pathaan keeps defaulting to a familiar commercial shape. The male leads compete for the Arnold Schwarzenegger Trophy, seeing who can grow the most stomach muscles on their stomach muscles, while Padukone - whose packing for this project demands a separate, possibly Congressional inquiry - forever seems to be wearing more layers of clothing indoors than she does outside, and the rumbling between India and Pakistan over Kashmir carries on regardless. As with the MCU and DCU, I suspect the Spy Universe may limit what creatives can ultimately do with their characters, beyond having them set up the next cycle of running around. (Franchises like these are a way for insecure industries - possibly even insecure countries - to reassure and restabilise themselves: no deaths, only the promise of box-office glory.) Yet Anand knows the least he can do with hokum like this is get the basics right, and thereby treat his audience with a level of respect. He not only ensures this dovetailing plot marries up, but finds strengthening rhymes and parallels within it; he keeps the action spatially coherent, thus often thrilling; and he makes time for all his stars - yes, even the late arrivals - to shine as only they can. Many theories have been aired these past few days as to why Pathaan posted the biggest one-day take of any Hindi film, and why it's come closer than any title to unseating Avatar 2 at the head of multiple domestic markets. There is some truth to most of them. But it's also possible audiences wanted to see hero and villain go after one another on next-generation handgliders, and the scene in which Deepika gets her hands on a really big gun. Very hot people. Very cool shit. What more does anyone need on a Friday or Saturday night?

Pathaan is now playing in selected cinemas.

On demand: "Balloon"

Balloon, co-written and directed by the marvellously named comedian-turned-filmmaker Michael Bully Herbig, finds the German film industry once again reckoning with the country's not so distant past, and more urgently than the film's kooky-airy premise would suggest. Its first dramatic coup is to pitch us headlong into what feel like pivotal, if not indeed climactic events: a defection attempt planned by a family of four from Pößneck, East Germany in 1979, using as their unlikely escape vehicle a homemade hot air balloon. There's very little exposition, save to determine that anyone seen looking even remotely shifty by, near or over the border was typically shot on sight; Herbig touches on the GDR's widespread monitoring and surveillance program (already amply covered in The Lives of Others), but is keener to flag up the issue that a giant balloon illuminated from within might be no more than a moving target in the night sky, and its passengers sitting ducks in a basket. The journey time from Pößneck to safety in the FRG was only just shy of an hour, and for a while, you might wonder whether the film is going to play these events out in fraught real time. Here, though, Balloon stages its another coup: having what feels like a one-shot, make-or-break getaway attempt fail spectacularly, thus allowing official suspicion to redouble as our dishevelled heroes regather themselves and their belongings and rally for a second pass. To paraphrase an English song of a far older vintage, there are some ups, some downs, and - in between those - some understandably nervy flying around.

The downtime allows Herbig to feel out the attitudes of an era. The Army official poking through the (abandoned) wreckage of that first balloon is a grizzled functionary of the State (Deutschfilm veteran Thomas Kretschmann), but also a pragmatist who reckons the so-called "riff-raff" ought to be allowed to leave without undue penalty if they so desire. A neighbour who has the look of a conformist stooge wants his TV tuned to a Western signal so he can watch Charlie's Angels. We hear a joke East Germans were telling one another about Erich Honeker, albeit not in public. Yet the abiding atmosphere is tense, coiled rather than cosy; there's none of that latent cuddliness that ensured Goodbye, Lenin! crossed international borders, because the stakes appear vertiginous from the off. (An opening title card suggests some 400-plus prospective defectors were shot on sight under the GDR's border policy.) At every turn - on a shopping trip, and again during a few days away in East Berlin - the family threaten to give themselves away; there's no easy way out of this place, and the net is rapidly closing in. Though the expected period signifiers are all in place (wide collars, Bakelite phones, longwave radio sets), there's nothing unduly flashy about the filmmaking. Instead, Herbig proceeds smartly and efficiently from a strong script, not bullying exactly, but ruthless in the way he splits up teenage lovers and leaves even kindergartners liable as potential informants. (Those were the days.) Pro tip: don't read up on how the second attempt turned out, and the final half-hour will play as excruciatingly tense. Either way, Balloon is finally what any escape from the East Germany of the late 1970s had to be: expertly strategised and marshalled.

Balloon is currently streaming on the BBC iPlayer.

How we used to live: "The Fabelmans"

By his own admission, Steven Spielberg has long unpacked elements of biography into his movies: the chaotic but broadly genial West Coast childhood (E.T., Close Encounters), the Jewish lineage (Schindler's List, Munich), the abiding love of popular culture (Ready Player One, West Side Story). Advance word on The Fabelmans has been that it marks a final unburdening - the most personal film yet by the most commercially successful filmmaker of all time. This claim turns out to have the ring of truth about it, but it's ironic that Spielberg should have undertaken his most personal work at a point where his commercial track record has, for the first time in a fifty-year career, started to look a shade wobbly. Parsing the past decade's receipts, more than one industry observer has been led to wonder whether Spielberg has lost touch with the audience who, once upon a time, helped crown him box-office king. The version of The Fabelmans now playing in UK cinemas is preceded by a short introduction from Spielberg himself, thanking us for leaving our homes and coming to see his little movie - an extraordinary state of affairs, given that this is the man behind Jaws, E.T. and Jurassic Park. (By contrast, James Cameron, the filmmaker who seems most likely to inherit Spielberg's crown, didn't appear to care if you liked Avatar 2, just that you bought a ticket for it.) The history books will eventually show that, among its many other legacies, the novel coronavirus humbled the cinema, obliging even Steven Spielberg to put himself before a camera and sing for his supper anew. But this prologue isn't just about advocating for the primacy of the theatrical experience; it's advocating for a particular type of cinema, one that allows space for creatives whose fortunes are bound up with the American studio system to broach quieter, more personal, more human stories, that isn't just spectacle, brand consolidation or an extension of pre-existing IP. There's another irony here: Spielberg only gets to do this - to insert himself in your scheduled multiplex programming - because he made more money through spectacle than anybody else, and in so doing became a brand himself.

The Fabelmans, then, finds both Hollywood and its foremost representative wrestling with themselves, in ways that prove largely absorbing and occasionally fascinating. Part of its project is to evoke a certain way of life: as its title and 151-minute running time imply, it's far more of a sprawling family saga than, say, James Gray's similar but essentially anecdotal Armageddon Time. What it evokes, though, is the stifling conservatism of the post-War years. Heading into his first movie - 1952's boxy The Greatest Show on Earth, with its all-star cast and enlivening train crash - boy scout-in-waiting Sammy Fabelman (Mateo Zoryan) is given two definitions of how the cinema casts its spell. Engineer dad Burt (Paul Dano, with his now perfectly round face) is all scientific rationalism, citing lights and lenses and frames per second. The kid's mother Mitzi (Michelle Williams), an aspirant concert pianist to whom Sammy is already painfully close, instead compares the medium's effects to the way we dream. From the off, Spielberg and his regular writing collaborator Tony Kushner (the Angels in America playwright who wrote Munich, Lincoln and West Side Story) clock that everyone on screen is playing the deeply gendered roles society expected of them in 1952. (If we take Sammy as the half-pint, the Fabelmans even have 2.4 children.) Having discovered the movies, with their plots, tropes and formulas, Sammy is about to get a lesson in human relations, understood here as far trickier to get a read on. Mum, it transpires, is straying from the family home with her upright husband's more spontaneous best friend Bennie (Seth Rogen, weaponising that Fozzie Bear laugh); Sammy accidentally catches evidence of this betrayal on camera, graduating from filming model trainwrecks in his parents' basement to documenting the derailment of a once-happy marriage. Everyone's running on such straight and narrow lines you spot how easily things could go awry. Our next, sliding stop: Unhappiness Parkway.

There's a jolting admission at the heart of The Fabelmans, and it's this: that Spielberg first shot (at least a version of) this story six decades ago, but can only now bring himself to share it. That confessional quality is the new film's strength. Whenever The Fabelmans threatens to become too cosy or middle-of-the-road, it digs just a little deeper, and invariably pulls out something that goes against the genteel grain. Yes, we get reassuring reminders of Spielberg the virtuosic imagemaker, the Spielberg we've known all our lives: when Mitzi snatches up her brood to chase a tornado - moving in sympathy with a fellow hurricane - her station wagon is brought to a careening halt by an out-of-nowhere snake of supermarket trollies, loosed into the wild. (And we realise the real world has the potential for wrecks, pile-ups, smash-ups.) Mostly, though, Spielberg can here be observed undertaking the hard work of revisiting past, ugly behaviour, roughly as painful as that Gray depicted in Armageddon Time - an acknowledgement that the people closest to him in his formative years didn't always conduct themselves perfectly, and that - furthermore - neither did his teenage self. There's still fondness and joy in the mix: watch how the gentrified Fabelmans are thrown into renewed disarray with the arrival of the old-country Uncle Boris (Judd Hirsch, lending his wonderfully abrasive rasp to the juiciest of awards-season cameos), a sequence in which you feel the teenage Spielberg's fascination with this distant-bordering-on-extraterrestrial relative meshing with the adult Spielberg's fascination with Hirsch as a screen presence. But it's cut with vividly remembered shock and pain. Shortly after discovering the affair, Sammy tells Mitzi he wishes she weren't his mother and turns an unclothed back to her; we feel her clumsily misdirected slap - square between Sammy's shoulder blades - as surely as Spielberg himself must have done at the time. Few moments in recent American film have struck me as more therapeutic in their methods: show me exactly where and exactly how much it hurts.

Dismiss Spielberg as a sap or sentimentalist if you like, but such scenes only work as drama with a substantial investment in their human elements, a fundamental curiosity about the people positioned front and centre. At some point, the cinema became more than just a train set to this filmmaker: it's why Jurassic Park operates some level above and beyond its largely mechanical sequels and reboots. Yet for the first time, towards the middle of The Fabelmans, Spielberg seems to be working towards a full recognition of how complex human beings, human lives, human emotions can be. (His partnership with Kushner looks to have been key to this process.) I suppose once they've filmed and confronted some small part of the Holocaust, a filmmaker might feel they've made all the statement they need to with regard to the darker side of human nature. But there are shades of grey, lesser indiscretions and misdemeanours, points where even a nice, normal middle-class family takes a turn for the regrettable. The Fabelmans is not without its own flaws: Williams gives a very odd performance, varying her level of spaciness from scene to scene, and all we can do looking on is defer to her director's judgement that this is true to the spirit of his mother. And I have reservations about the film's shape: the high drama of the affair dissipates after the halfway mark, leaving Sammy to endure high-school anti-Semitism, the ministrations of a thirsty Christian girl, the arrival of a monkey in the Fabelmans' household, and a fun cameo from one of Spielberg's peers. All of this may well be true, but the combined effect of the last hour is to throw a consoling arm (and a few John Williams tinkles) around us after the strongest and most affecting material. We know this story turns out all right - that Sammy Fabelman turns into Steven Spielberg - but something of its maker's crowdpleasing muscle memory takes over. We're left with a rare Spielberg movie that allows itself to have flaws, to show weakness - charmingly so, in its closing seconds - but also a very good movie stuck within a very sweet movie, as if Spielberg were still reconciling the two sides of his personality, the instincts that led him to make Schindler's List and Jurassic Park in the same twelve months. Still, for an hour or so, for a few miles of bad road in the middle of memory lane, we get to watch Steven Spielberg - the great pop artist of our age, the Peter Pan of the modern multiplex - growing up before our eyes, on screen as behind the camera. If we can't rally an audience to buy tickets for that, we might as well pack up and stay home for good.

The Fabelmans is now playing in cinemas nationwide.

For what it's worth...

Top ten films at the UK box office (for the weekend of January 20-22, 2023):

1 (1) Avatar: The Way of Water (12A) ***

2 (2) M3gan (15) ***

3 (new) Babylon (18)

4 (4) I Wanna Dance with Somebody (12A)

5 (5) Roald Dahl's Matilda: The Musical (PG)

6 (6) A Man Called Otto (15)

7 (3) Empire of Light (15)

8 (8) Tár (15) **

9 (11) Strange World (PG) ***

10 (10) Black Panther: Wakanda Forever (12A) **

(source: BFI)

My top five:

1. The Fabelmans

2. Enys Men

3. Alcarràs

4. Till

5. Pathaan

DVD/Blu-Ray/Download top ten: 

1 (re) Black Adam (12)

2 (21) Halloween Ends (18)

3 (1) Elvis (12) **

4 (3) The Banshees of Inisherin (15) ****

5 (2) Top Gun: Maverick (12) ****

6 (19) Bullet Train (15)

7 (4) Lyle, Lyle, Crocodile (PG)

8 (5) Jurassic World: Dominion (12)

9 (new) The Menu (15)

10 (14) Downton Abbey: A New Era (PG)

(source: officialcharts.com)

My top five: 
1. Decision to Leave

2. The Banshees of Inisherin

3. Crimes of the Future

4. The Velvet Underground

5. Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy

Top five films on terrestrial TV this week:

1. Portrait of a Lady on Fire (Tuesday, BBC2, 11.45pm)

2. Get Out (Saturday, Channel 4, 11.10pm)

3. Hustlers (Saturday, Channel 4, 9pm)

4. Phantom Thread (Monday, BBC2, 11.15pm)

5. True Grit [above] (Saturday, five, 2.45pm)