In memoriam: Jeremy Thomas (Telegraph 14/09/26)

Jeremy Thomas, who has died aged 77, was an independent British film producer whose cosmopolitan tastes, keen instincts and vast industry nous enabled prominent world cinema directors to make some of the most demanding features of their entire careers. He won a Best Picture Oscar for Bernardo Bertolucci’s China-shot The Last Emperor (1987), a project that proved as much logistical feat as artistic vision; he also steadied David Cronenberg during the controversies around Crash (1996) and backed Jonathan Glazer’s debut feature Sexy Beast (2000).

From the off, he relished a challenge. His Recorded Picture Company ventured into production with Mad Dog Morgan (1976), a latter-day Western shot in the Outback with the hard-drinking Dennis Hopper in the lead. “A lot of the people who worked on the film were complete amateurs,” Thomas later recalled. “We ended up getting a $500,000 contract for a film that cost $400,000. It was a fantastic deal but then we didn’t get the money so it was poetic. But it was very good learning.”

Thomas subsequently fell in with equally questing filmmakers. He enjoyed early festival success with the Pole Jerzy Skolimowski’s The Shout (1978), which won the Cannes Grand Prix, while developing a rewarding creative partnership with Nic Roeg, for whom he produced Bad Timing (1980), Eureka (1983) and Insignificance (1985): “I had a ten-year lesson from him about everything,” Thomas reflected, insisting Roeg stood among the greatest directors he’d worked with.

Other candidates presented. While promoting The Shout, Thomas had been introduced to the Japanese director Nagisa Ōshima, whose In the Realm of the Senses (1976) had been a global sensation. Neither could speak the other’s language, but they bonded over cinema, and the result was Thomas’s first commercial hit, the POW camp drama Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence (1983), shot on the Polynesian island of Rarotonga, with musicians Ryuichi Sakamoto and David Bowie in the leads.

After these cultish successes, The Last Emperor proved colossal: arguably the 20th century’s last true movie epic, it required 19,000 extras, a $25m budget and continual, complex behind-the-scenes negotiation. Exploiting a brief window in East-West relations, Bertolucci’s magnum opus became the first Western production shot in China since 1949, and the first feature shot inside the Forbidden City. The leeway was such that Queen Elizabeth II, then on a state visit to Beijing, was denied entry to the Forbidden City while Bertolucci was shooting the coronation sequence. 

Critics were understandably bowled over by the film’s scale – Roger Ebert deemed Bertolucci’s location work “astonishing” – as were awards voters: at the Oscars, the film won all nine categories in which it had been nominated. For Thomas, it was both a high watermark and, he confessed, “a difficult film to emulate”; his subsequent Bertolucci projects – the Tangiers-shot Paul Bowles adaptation The Sheltering Sky (1990) and the spiritual drama Little Buddha (1993) – struggled to emerge from their predecessor’s shadow.

Yet Thomas’s talent portfolio kept expanding. To the sensual Bertolucci, he added the cerebral David Cronenberg, resulting first in the bugged-out, free-associating William Burroughs adaptation Naked Lunch (1991), then Crash, the Canuck’s polarising take on JG Ballard’s tale of jaded fetishists who engineer traffic collisions in a bid to feel something. This, too, was a challenge: Thomas described the source as “one of those books you have to look away from as you are reading it.”

Drolly detached though it was, Cronenberg’s film proved no less provocative, having to swerve aggravated press campaigns and localised censorship restriction to emerge as a minor hit. Yet Crash exemplified Thomas’s policy of backing directors to the hilt: “All the choices I still defend as being from taste, not market driven… When you look at a painting by an artist you normally recognise their style of painting. When you make film you should be somewhat able to recognise the filmmaker as well.”

Jeremy Jack Thomas was born in Ealing on July 26, 1949, one of two children for director Ralph Thomas and wife Joy. He claimed to have been “born with a silver reel in my mouth”: Ralph’s Doctor in the House (1954) launched a series that provided the British film industry with its post-War backbone, while his uncle Gerald directed all thirty Carry On movies. The young Jeremy spent his holidays in studios or out on location; from the age of ten, he was set on making films.

Upon leaving school, he took a job in film processing before being promoted to the cutting rooms. His first assistant editor gig was a brush with the old Hollywood: the trippy folk horror Tam Lin (1970), directed by Roddy McDowall and starring Ava Gardner. Subsequently, he worked on Ken Loach’s Family Life (1971), the landmark Jamaican reggae film The Harder They Come (1972) and the Great Depression collage Brother, Can You Spare a Dime? (1975); the latter’s Australian director Philippe Mora then enlisted Thomas to produce Mad Dog Morgan.

As the millennium loomed, Thomas bolstered his internationalist credentials. Upon founding the sales agent Hanway Films in 1998, one of his first projects was the Bhutanese sleeper hit The Cup (1999), written and directed by Khyentse Norbu, about two young monks attempting to source a television on which to watch the World Cup final; it was, said Thomas, “a very happy story for everybody involved”.

Back at home, Thomas took a chance on the emergent ad maven Jonathan Glazer; the result, the electrifying Sexy Beast, proved the standout title of the British gangster cycle, as visually striking as it was profane. The producer rejoined Bertolucci for the Paris ‘68 drama The Dreamers (2003); he ventured into the American heartlands with Terry Gilliam’s Tideland (2005) – which passed off British Columbia as a flyblown Texas – and Richard Linklater’s Fast Food Nation (2006).

Increasingly, Thomas’s credits alternated established names with fresh talent. He reteamed with Cronenberg for A Dangerous Method (2011) and with Skolimowski for Essential Killing (2010) and the Oscar-nominated EO (2022). Yet he also backed emergent visionaries, ranging from the agitated Japanese genre specialist Takeshi Miike (13 Assassins, 2010; First Love, 2019) to the elegant Italian fabulist Matteo Garrone (Tale of Tales, 2015; Pinocchio, 2019).

He worked until the end: his Werner Herzog drama Bucking Fastard (2026) premiered in Venice a week before his death, while his latest Miike production, Bad Lieutenant: Tokyo (2026), premiered in Toronto this week. He even tried directing himself: All the Little Animals (1998), adapted by his wife Eski from a Walker Hamilton novel, concerned a troubled young man (Christian Bale) who finds solace in nature. Thomas claimed it was his only production to go over budget: “I was arguing with myself, so I always won either way.”

He received BAFTA’s Michael Balcon award in 1991, served as Chairman of the BFI between 1992 and 1997, and was made a Fellow of the BFI in 1998; in 2006, he received the European Film Award for Outstanding Achievement in World Cinema; and he received a CBE in 2009 for services to film. He also inspired the affectionate tribute The Storms of Jeremy Thomas (2021), in which director Mark Cousins joined the producer as he made his annual road trip to Cannes in his Alfa Romeo.

In 2017, Thomas told Cineaste: “I never merely make a film because I think it’s going to hit the market. I’m making it because I like the people and the subject involved and I think it’s going to hit the market, but it’s not made for the market — it’s made for a passion. I join somebody’s passion or they join my passion. And it’s worked: I’ve managed to have a long run, a longer run than many... I still wake up every day thinking about the movies.”

He married twice; his first marriage to Claudia Frohlich ended in divorce, his second was to Eski (née Vivien Coughman), who died in 2023. He is survived by Jack and Joshua, his two sons by Eski, and by Jessica, his daughter by Frohlich.

Jeremy Thomas, born July 26, 1949, died September 11, 2026.

Oh brother: "Don't Look Back in Anger"

So it goes. Blur reunite, successfully, and document the occasion with not one but three separate documentaries. Oasis do likewise, no less successfully, and go as far as to hire the directors of Blur's first and best comeback movie (Will Lovelace and Dylan Southern, late of 2010's No Distance Left To Run) to put them up on the big screen. Is nothing the Gallaghers do original? Don't Look Back in Anger opens with a "previously on Oasis" potted history: the supersonic - nay, stratospheric - launch and success, the tabloid feeding frenzy, the wibbling rivalry, the thousand-yard glares and stares, the bust-ups, "The Hindu Times", the semi-inevitable split (announced on stage in Paris by a heroic fonctionnaire who advises the jeering fans to log onto oasis.com to find out more), the far less potent solo projects (yielding literally one good song over sixteen years), the years of stubbornness, the will-they-won't-they, the rising plumes of nostalgia stoked by such docs as 2016's Supersonic and 2019's Liam Gallagher: As It Was and the scenes after every recent England football victory. It was, after all, the songs that persisted. Scrappy, patchwork beerhall and terrace anthems, really no more lyrically meaningful than, say, Andrew WK's "Party Hard", their very porousness proved a virtue, and indeed Oasis's saving grace: these circuits were only fully completed once The People™ started to sing or howl along with them, their integral retroness allowing everybody to reconnect with some half-forgotten, perhaps even non-existent heyday. She's electric. He's electric. Together, we are only more electric. At some point in the long and drawn-out reunion process, that's what Noel and Liam - two individuals famously not given to reflection - began to realise themselves. And gradually, unexpectedly, Lovelace and Southern's film itself becomes electric, too.

It takes a while, granted, and there are stretches where the emotional current flows brighter and more freely than it does elsewhere. At its strongest - and as with No Distance Left to Run before it - DLBIA functions as an event-cinema study in modern British masculinity, swapping in bluff Manc lads for effete Essex art-schoolers. When Liam finally shows up at the rehearsal rooms, it's as a parka-contained cloud of displaced grievances, refusing to address his brother directly, getting in a huff with some innocent drum baffles, tearing the plastic cap off one of those woke water bottles they have nowadays. We knew things were bad; Lovelace and Southern show us how bad things could be when one brother or another had a right cob on. For a while here, it's touch-and-go, strictly business: this first day of rehearsals as the Oasis of old ends with Liam swaggering out of the room before his bandmates can even bring "Champagne Supernova" to an end, Noel offering an older brother's sage nod that seems to say "let him go". The techies look on nervily. How can this possibly work over the course of one gig, let alone a whole world tour? It's the songs, of course. It was always the songs. On the soundtrack, one unidentified Gallagher - probably Liam, but as with most siblings, their voices tend to merge - insists he's sworn off the drink because the songs demand that level of respect. (We don't hear "The Hindu Times".) Suddenly, Noel and Liam are recast as an estranged couple having to put their interpersonal differences aside for the benefit of their offspring, in this case their musical legacy. And as the tour plays out, that wibbling rivalry is transformed into a sibling synergy that falls somewhere between magical and miraculous: now they're on the same stage and the same page - and it doesn't seem quite so absurd when the directors cut in a Manchester priest's sermon about Jesus telling Peter to forgive his brother. They may not be Biblical, but one can draw lessons from these events.

Inevitably, some of the old familiar hubris remains in place. We hear Liam opining that Oasis's splitting was responsible for the world going to hell in a handcart, as Lovelace and Southern lay on a montage encompassing Brexit, Trump, Johnson, Musk and Covid. (I don't think Oasis splitting was responsible for any of that. Though the older, wiser Noel is heard maintaining Oasis is "not some right-wing thing", I do suspect some of the group's fans might be.) And the film isn't blind to the hyperbole and hoopla that accompanied these gigs: one attendee, a middle-aged man in (not inaptly) a Beatles tee, insists the comeback is on a par with the resurrection of Christ. What's interesting about DLBIA - what makes this by far the strongest Oasis film yet - is that there are stretches where we can't be sure Lovelace and Southern are the biggest Oasis fans, and their ambivalence allows them to take a step back and a good look around; they're not entirely swept up and swept along by proceedings, until the point where they (and we) are. In the meantime, they couldn't help but spot what these gigs meant to the fans, captured in an elevated form of concert-movie portraiture, crying, praying, hugging and - yes - singing. What's more surprising is what these concerts clearly meant to the band: hitherto never the most emotionally expressive individual - unless that emotion was "peeved" - Noel is caught fiddling anxiously around backstage before the first Cardiff gig ("we've got a chance here to fix the narrative"); he appears, by his own admission, in something of a trance as the gig itself plays out; he looks visibly relieved at how well it all went afterwards; and is finally observed with tears in his eyes as he sets about the title song with a new, middle-aged mellowness. There is, after all, so much to look back on, for better and worse.

The concert footage, which starts to dominate from around the halfway mark, will obviously depend on personal tolerance for, say, Liam's gravel-gargling vocal on "Roll With It"; there's still only so much Lovelace and Southern can finesse. And in the second half, you can feel these directors - possibly egged on by writer-producer Steven Knight, who takes a bizarre "created by" credit - giving in and giving the fans what they may ultimately want, even if that's something those fans will likely have already experienced. The extended fan portraits - here a Korean oyster diver who hums "Acquiesce" to herself underwater, there a Brazilian who named her dog after Bonehead - prove far less compelling than whatever was going on in those rehearsal rooms and backstage on this tour; I'll give the directors credit for going international with these segments - it's not all tubby middle-aged men in bucket hats - but they leave DLBIA as a concert film with a terrific opening act, a rousing finale, and some bland filler in between. Still, the plain truth is these shows did fix the pop-cultural narrative, while simultaneously repairing something fundamental to the brothers' relationship. What that middle stretch quietly flags is that nobody in their right mind would pay this much to see Noel performing "Wonderwall" solo (you'd be better off catching Mike Flowers for nowt at the local village fete), but put him on guitar and stick Liam upfront, and you've got something. With newfound humility and self-awareness, they realised they needed one another, too - or at the very least to see one another anew through the eyes of their adoring (and forgiving) crowds. Maybe it's inevitable that the foremost Beatles copyists of our time should have arrived at their own Get Back - but this Get Back wonders what it's like when a band gets back together, and then take whatever message they're carrying to the masses once more. The dates have just been announced for Oasis Live '27, with tickets retailing in the vicinity of £150-200. They will almost certainly sell out within minutes. So it goes.

Don't Look Back in Anger is now playing in cinemas nationwide.

Eye of God: "Leviticus"

The ongoing horror renaissance here brings off something genuinely radical: installing an unabashedly queer chiller at the heart of the multiplex. (Last month's Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma felt intrinsically arthouse, and not much of a horror movie in the end; and although certain corners of the Internet might long for it, I still think you have to do a fair bit of critical heavy lifting to draw 1987's A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors out of its much-discussed closet.) Australian writer-director Adrian Chiarella's Leviticus puts at its centre two gay teenagers attempting to hide their love from their elders in a small industrial town. It's a small Australian industrial town, to be more specific, pulling us back into the rough-and-ready territory of 2022's Talk to Me. As we first join them, young Ryan (Stacy Clausen) and Naim (Joe Bird) are watching a Biblical serpent devour a frog in the fields surrounding their tumbledown home; later, they'll break into one of the area's many abandoned factories to lob stones at one another. They're at the displacement stage of young love, where desire tends to manifest as horseplay and roughhousing - although a full-mouthed kiss, one pinning the other down on the factory floor, would appear to signal this displacement is no more. But this is also, to further specify, a small, predominantly Christian town, which both explains that looming title - Naim's mother Arlene (Mia Wasikowska) is a big deal in the local revivalist church - and why these boys feel they have to keep their affections secret. Some people out this way would consider such affections unnatural. But they're nothing like as unnatural as what follows: a Judas-like betrayal, a spell in conversion therapy overseen by a steely-eyed Nicholas Hope (from 1993's Bad Boy Bubby) and the emergence of a new threat that turns these boys against one another, once more leaving them feeling watched, judged, hounded.

Leviticus is one of those rare horror films that feels broadly original even as it encompasses elements you may well have encountered elsewhere. Conversion therapy, for one, was central to the recent Oz-shot, US-set streaming title Diabolic; we also get an unexpected revival for that classic expositionary scene in which our harried heroes have to track down a mental patient with close personal knowledge of how their demons operate. Yet Chiarella's assured storytelling takes these staples in its stride, and he's eloquent indeed in his shotmaking. That dreamy prologue, for starters, establishes a wordless contrast between the wide open skies and spaces Ryan and Naim are framed against and the cold, dark houses of God the boys' elders retreat inside; thereafter, an altogether oppressive atmosphere takes hold. Accusatory glances are fired from the pulpit and the pews; the youngsters are penned in by pylons and wires, unable to communicate as they would prefer; and Jed Kurzel's score, scattering unresolved notes and tensions, keeps threatening to fuse with the opening moments of Dire Straits' "Money for Nothing". Quite some threat, then, even if the real demons here are shame and self-loathing, threats from within. As a result, Leviticus maybe doesn't have the blunt-force impact of other recent Aussie breakouts, but it's quietly impressive all the same, both as horror and as a film. Chiarella proceeds with a scuffed-up sincerity that manifests wherever you look: in his gripping and unnerving narrative developments, forever rooted in painful human experience; in his largely analogue effects work, specialising in trauma registered on bodies and faces; and in the Gregory Crewdson-like eye DoP Tyson Perkins displays for distressed and dishevelled locations. This shouldn't be the ultimate horror litmus test, but you sense Leviticus would work almost as well without its central supernatural conceit - as a latter-day parable on the evils men are perfectly capable of doing unto themselves.

Leviticus is now showing in selected cinemas.

For what it's worth...

UK box office Top Ten (for the weekend of September 4-6, 2026):

1 (1) Spider-Man: Brand New Day (12A) ***

2 (2) The Odyssey (15) ***

3 (3) Insidious: Out of the Further (15)

4 (10) Toy Story 5 (PG) **

5 (6) The End of Oak Street (12A) ***

6 (11) Minions & Monsters (U)

7 (new) The Death of Robin Hood (15)

8 (5) The Dog Stars (15)

9 (4) Coyote vs. ACME (PG) ***

10 (8) Paw Patrol: The Dino Movie (U)

(source: BFI)

My top five:

1. Raiders of the Lost Ark

2. La Femme Infidèle/The Unfaithful Wife

3. Don't Look Back in Anger

4. Leviticus

5. Shaun the Sheep: Farmageddon

DVD/Blu-Ray/Download top ten: 

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

2 (2) Obsession (18) *

3 (3) Minions & Monsters (U)

4 (4) Michael (12)

5 (5) jackass: best and last (18)

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

7 (re) 28 Days Later... (15) ****

8 (18) Supergirl (12)

9 (8) Star Wars: The Mandalorian and Grogu (12)

10 (15) Tuner (15) ***

(source: officialcharts.com)

My top five: 
1. Power Ballad

2. Rose of Nevada

3. The Stranger

4. Tuner

5. Passenger

Top five films on terrestrial TV this week:

1. Saint Omer (Saturday, BBC Two, 1.50am)

2. Lawrence of Arabia [above] (Saturday, BBC Two, 1.30pm)

3. The Innocents (Thursday, Channel 4, 2am)

4. Back to the Future Part II (Sunday, BBC One, 2.50pm)

5. Moonage Daydream (Friday, Channel 4, 1.20am)

Indy revival: "Raiders of the Lost Ark"

This back-to-front, Benjamin Button-ass movie summer began with substandard Spielberg; it closes with a reminder of the young master operating somewhere close to his peak. In those rare moments of downtime in 1981's Raiders of the Lost Ark, you may start wondering which of this filmmaker's early works still affords you the most pleasure, the biggest thrill: if forced at gunpoint, I'd probably take the cosmic wonder of Close Encounters and the crisp perfection of E.T. over a film that was always intended as homage - although Raiders endures as a homage that, in qualitative terms, far outstripped its tatty and yellowing inspirations. It was a team effort, the product of a Movie Brats brains trust: script by Lawrence Kasdan from a story by George Lucas and Philip Kaufman, turned over to Spielberg to bring to life with a team of studio-raised craft veterans and emergent leading man Harrison Ford as a new kind of hero. Academic in term time, adventurer off the clock, the Indiana Jones introduced here was the kind of unflustered multidisciplinary gadabout his bookish and bespectacled West Coast creators dreamt of some day being, a man who looked good whether in tweedy jacket or wielding a whip. (One early, especially sharp Spielberg touch: the cutaway to the goo-goo-eyed young women in our hero's lecture theatre, paying notably more attention to Dr. Jones's jawline than they are to his words.)

In the 45 years since, we've seen more than our fair share of Hollywood throwbacks: strained attempts to recreate some formative corner of a creative's childhood bedroom, many of which never came to life, some of which should have remained in mothballs. Why did this one click so? Obviously it helped to have a generational filmmaking talent who knew exactly where to put the camera to get the best out of any given set-up, but Spielberg had also grasped, from an early point, that event movies are as sharks: they have to keep moving forward, otherwise they wither and perish. Just as Indy reaches for his gun when faced with an opponent waving a big sword around, Spielberg understood the advantages of keeping things simple and cracking on. Raiders is the story of two people - Indy and his on-off lover Marion (Karen Allen, arguably this director's greatest heroine) - who go looking for a thing, hoping to get to the thing before some other people (in this instance, Nazis) get to the thing. True, they will search for it here, there and everywhere; the movie did as much as any other to re-establish audience fondness for those interstitial sequences showing planes flying over hand-drawn maps, themselves a way of hurrying matters along. But the pair's quest would be framed in the quick-read fashion of comic-book panels, throwing up daffy images in their wake: the giant rolling boulder, the sieg-heiling monkey, the bad dates, the spiders and the snakes. One revelation from this latest rewatch: how much sudden, violent death there is here. The PG-rated entertainment of your youth now truly seems to earn its new 12A certificate - while also hinting at how the 1980s blockbuster had internalised the carnage of the previous decade's cinema: it's just these directors weren't fashioning auteurist statements so much as rollercoaster rides. We need not mourn the Nazi brute splattered by his own Messerschmidt, but the sequence is notable as one of the few kills in Raiders where Spielberg operates by suggestion.

The bigger picture is a grand triumph of art and production design. One reason Spielberg is operating at such speed is that, like a child on Christmas Eve, he simply cannot wait to uncover and play with the choice gifts he'd been provided with: the booby-trapped cave systems, the tombs within tombs, the bazaars and archaeological digs, the various knick-knacks and tchotchkes that drive this plot (and drive these characters crazy). Scorsese had to turn to cocaine to get this high; his contemporary was giddy on filmmaking alone, and it's that very giddiness that still sweeps us up. Raiders is visibly pricier than the cheapjack Saturday-morning serials that inspired it: Spielberg was getting better and better at putting his budget up on screen (without any of the fuss of, say, a Coppola or Cimino) and allowing his audience to feel they were getting their money's worth, even after - especially after - they'd bought into a dimestore plot. The action here is better than that of those serials, as are the stunts, as is the romantic element; in the desert scenes, John Williams' score achieves the same expansive effect as Maurice Jarre's score for Lean's Lawrence of Arabia. (The frame seems to get bigger with every note.) The principal charge levelled against Spielberg's early films by leaden-faced critics - that they're no more than juvenilia, a lavish recreation of something half-remembered - probably sticks: the climactic face-melting is obviously very different from the deaths filmed for Schindler's List and Munich, the final flourish of a teenage gorehound who sat pop-eyed before the transformation sequences in mid-century monster movies. But - as we all now know - he would grow up and turn his camera to more adult concerns. Raiders remains The Young Spielberg's Guide to History, a WW2 picture-book: skipping nimbly around the cultural faux pas and pitfalls of the later Temple of Doom, it's managed to reach cinematic middle-age without losing any of its original sprightliness or charm. The best blockbuster of summer 1981 just became the best blockbuster of summer 2026.

Raiders of the Lost Ark returns to cinemas nationwide tomorrow. 

Anatomy of a murder: "The Unfaithful Wife/La Femme Infidèle"

The flagship film of the BFI's current Claude Chabrol season, 1969's La Femme Infidèle, lures us in: it opens in sundappled soft focus, before allowing the scrutiny of its characters to become harsher by the frame. Insurance broker Charles (Michel Bouquet) lives in apparent bliss on the outskirts of Paris with his wife Hélène (Stéphane Audran), the very model of a lady of leisure, and the couple's bright young son. Darker clouds blow in after Charles discovers Hélène has been spending her leisure time in the arms of another man, yet when he goes to confront her lover, Victor (Maurice Ronet), the conversation is initially very cordial (and decidedly French): the men bond over the body they've shared, and the husband - with a characteristic degree of condescension - blithely dismisses the affair as just another of his wife's so-called "adventures". It's cordial, that is, up until the point Charles feels compelled to take a marble bust to the other man's bonce. Now Chabrol begins to bear down and hone in, hunting something more psychologically revealing: Bouquet's extensive clean-up of the murder scene, undertaken in much the same committed silence as the heist in Rififi, serves to (further) feminise a protagonist already stricken by the nagging doubt he doesn't measure up as a man. Just when you think the film might develop outwards and explore the consequences of this rash act of violence, it instead folds inwards; a later interrogation of the chief suspect takes place over the dinner table, in the family's home and garden. (The sting, when it comes, is that those who slay together usually stay together.) Chabrol relies heavily on a discordant Pierre Jansen/Dominique Zardi score to draw out these characters' mounting mental unrest, but he also picks up on several subtly unsettling signifiers: a lost TV signal, a crucial jigsaw piece going AWOL. Audran's reptilian beauty holds up remarkably well under the duress, while Bouquet's thin-lipped, blandly amenable smile serves to conceal all manner of frustrations and insecurities. Adrian Lyne reheated the premise for the modern multiplex with 2002's Unfaithful, casting Richard Gere and Diane Lane as the husband and wife, but this forensic original remains genuinely fascinating in its froideur.

The Unfaithful Wife/La Femme Infidèle returns to selected cinemas from Friday; the BFI's Chabrol season runs until October 6.

"Knightfall" (Guardian 08/09/26)

Knightfall **

Dir: Ben Fortune. With: Jeanine Nerissa Sothcott, Ian Ogilvy, Nick Moran, Geoffrey Moore. 82 mins. Cert: 15

Proceeding from an old-school titling pun – yes, the heroine goes by the name Ros Knight – the latest from the resourceful microbudget producer Jonathan Sothcott surely has one optimistic eye on filling the void left by the withdrawal of 007 from public life. Here is that gender-flipped Bond some have been seeking: the adventures of a no-nonsense, tough-talking security operative (Jeanine Nerissa Sothcott) tasked with recovering a lethal bioweapon pilfered from a scaled-down Porton Down during the prologue. Everything, in truth, proves a bit reined-in. This austerity actioner spends less on its setpieces than the Broccolis typically have on keeping one Aston Martin refueled; the Sothcotts’ car of choice, emblematically, is the dinkiest of Minis.

So it’s Bond without the attendant glamour, hanging around drizzly marinas and parky-looking country lanes, in dim light that hopefully obscures some of the more obvious budgetary limitations. What money there is here has wisely been spent on human resources, faces who might still look good on the promotional material: a cameoing Michael Paré as a shady Felix Leiter type, Roger Moore’s son Geoffrey as our gal’s understandably worried-looking lover, Nick Moran giving cut-price Colin Firth as a meddling bureaucrat. The pick of the players is a spry, characterful Ian Ogilvy as Ros’s estranged father, helpfully identifying where the real power lies on a chessboard and generally steadying scenes whenever matters seem a bit too threadbare.

Despite the brassy parps of Logan Jones’s score, there’s nothing much to give Eon sleepless nights. Though director Ben Fortune keeps his careworn world-domination plot moving and just this side of coherent, those action scenes don’t build tension so much as deconstruct the very idea of it, setting Sothcott and Ogilvy to plodding around the garden in the dead of night, taking out the gunmen behind the polytunnel; the grand finale involves a Mexican standoff in someone’s front room. What would already have seemed antiquated circa Bourne risks redundancy in the Slow Horses era, where the tattiness is fully costed and integrated. Still, Knightfall holds onto a certain nostalgic charm: a bizarro-world vision of Bond in severely straitened circumstances, armed only with a licence to kill time.

Knightfall will be available to rent via Prime Video from September 11.