I feel like we should be paying a lot of money for the privilege to hear Christopher Nolan give a masterclass about shooting The Odyssey on IMAX.

And, yet, here we are. For free, we get the legendary director breaking down each painstaking process of how the large-format film gets taken away after shooting, worked on, and edited for the final 'first generation' cut to play in IMAX theatres.

As you can see below, courtesy of guywithamoviecamera on TikTok, Nolan takes viewers through a step-by-step guide to what happens with each canister of film, starting with it being shipped to Los Angeles. Considering how The Odyssey went globetrotting with filming in Morocco and the Mediterranean, that accounts for a serious amount of air miles.

All told, it adds up to a fascinating look behind the scenes at something that Nolan and other directors – Ryan Coogler among them – have done their best to make palatable for a mainstream audience in recent years. If you don't know your diopters from your dailies, there's still a lot here to impress.

Not least of all are tidbits you wouldn't pick up anywhere else: the drying process (shown here in all its glory) and how rolls of film are literally glued together by hand to get the color correction down perfectly after being tweaked within the editing suite.

The Odyssey is the first film shot entirely in IMAX, and now has an appropriate popcorn bucket to match.

The historic first has led to selling platforms crashing, with some tickets being resold for up to $1000.

It's a little wonder, then, that Odysseus actor Matt Damon has lamented how The Odyssey might end up being the end of an era in Hollywood filmmaking.

"It was a really weird movie for me personally in the sense that I had almost a nostalgic feeling the entire time I was making it, because it felt like the movies when I started working. And I know that that’s going away," Damon told GQ. "I knew that this was the last chance I was going to have to do something like this."

The Odyssey, also starring Robert Pattinson, Tom Holland, and Anne Hathaway, opens in cinemas on July 17.

For more, check out our list of best Christopher Nolan movies.

We shouldn't have expected anything different, really. The Odyssey's first popcorn bucket has skipped the Ancient Greek motif entirely, ending up influenced by Christopher Nolan instead of Homer.

As you can see below, The Odyssey official popcorn bucket is in the shape of an IMAX camera. No Trojan Horses or helmets here as snack vessels, thank you very much.

Fittingly, The Odyssey is going all-in on IMAX, becoming the first film entirely shot in the format.

Since then, fan fervor surrounding watching Nolan's historical epic on the biggest screen possible has only intensified.

Fans have already crashed multiple ticket sites and apps on the hunt for 70mm IMAX tickets, with some even being resold – naughty, naughty – for up to $1000.

It's a little wonder, then, that Odysseus actor Matt Damon thinks this could be the end of an era in Hollywood.

"It was a really weird movie for me personally in the sense that I had almost a nostalgic feeling the entire time I was making it, because it felt like the movies when I started working. And I know that that's going away," Damond told GQ. "I knew that this was the last chance I was going to have to do something like this."

He added, "I don't think people are going to be given the resources to shoot movies that way for much longer."

The Odyssey, starring Damon, Tom Holland, Anne Hathaway, and Robert Pattinson, is a big-screen retelling of Homer's Odyssey, an epic poem that charts Odysseus' arduous journey back home after the Trojan War. It opens in cinemas on July 17.

For more, check out the upcoming movie release dates on the way, then dive into our list of best Nolan movies.

Get ready for battle: The Odyssey's "largest screen" IMAX tickets go on sale today.

As per the movie's official Twitter account, the rush for tickets begins on June 4 at 9:00 AM Pacific/noon Eastern/5:00 PM BST in the UK.

Those looking to get a prime seat in The Odyssey 15/70mm screenings – what could be a religious experience for Christopher Nolan diehards – or 35mm screenings in certain venues will have to be quick and, presumably, have a handful of devices ready to go on the hour. This won't hang around for long.

Helpfully, there has been a round-up of 70mm locations in the US, which you can see below. Godspeed.

Originally, IMAX tickets for The Odyssey in certain locations were on sale as far back as last July. Predictably, a scourge of scalpers and re-sellers took hold of the hype, listing seats on eBay for up to $150.

A handful of theaters have listed The Odyssey as receiving an R-rating. Nolan's previous R-rated movies are 2023's Oppenheimer and his early works Following, Memento, and Insomnia.

Even at the best of times, a Nolan movie feels like an event. But star Matt Damon has gone one further in his assessment of his time filming the historical epic, suggesting it could very much be the end of an era in Hollywood.

"It was a really weird movie for me personally in the sense that I had almost a nostalgic feeling the entire time I was making it, because it felt like the movies when I started working. And I know that that’s going away," Damon told GQ. "I knew that this was the last chance I was going to have to do something like this."

For more, check out the upcoming movie release dates heading your way very soon.

Sorry, Tilly Norwood, no Oscar for you! The Academy has changed its rules for the upcoming 99th ceremony and beyond, banning AI-generated actors and screenplays from being eligible to win any gold.

The news comes straight from the official Oscars rules page, which was updated as of May 1 to reflect a series of new changes. One of the items in the Special Rules for Acting Awards category states that "only roles credited in the film's legal billing and demonstrably performed by humans with their consent will be considered eligible." Under Special Rules for Writing Awards, it now says that, "In order to be eligible in either Writing category, an explicit screenwriting credit must be present in the film’s legal billing and the screenplay must be human-authored."

Page 4 of the rulebook does include that some uses of AI are acceptable regarding "digital tools used in the making of the film," as the tools "neither help nor harm the chances of achieving a nomination." Moreover, the Academy will "take into account the degree to which a human was at the heart of the creative authorship," and reserves the right to request more information about the nature of the use of Generative AI and human authorship.

You might recall that Gladiator 2 allegedly (and unconsensually) used the likeness of various extras to generate an entire stadium of people... rather than just fill it with real people. You also might recall last year's introduction to Tilly Norwood, an entirely AI-generated actor created by Xicoia, the world's "first artificial intelligence talent studio," who made the headlines after reports claimed that several big-name talent agencies were interested in representing it... her. Whatever. While we've definitely seen controversy around AI-generated novels being released by Big 5 publishers, we've yet to see a big brouhaha about an AI-generated screenplay... but I'm sure it's coming.

For more, check out our list of the most exciting upcoming movies in 2026 and beyond.

Now that Millie Bobby Brown is free of her decade of service to Netflix smash-hit Stranger Things, she's apparently moving on from one upcoming starring role on the streamer, leading to the film being outright canceled.

As reported by Deadline, Brown has exited her starring role as gymnast Kerri Strug in Olympic sports drama Perfect over creative difference. In response to her departure, Netflix has scrapped the film entirely just ahead of its planned start date this summer. Perfect was to be directed by Gia Coppola, granddaughter of acclaimed Godfather director Francis Ford Coppola.

Perfect would have focused on Strug's Olympic career, during which she became a cultural icon in the United States, winning a gold medal after landing a difficult vault despite suffering a serious ankle injury earlier in her routine. The moment was captured in a famous photograph that became an iconic representation of what many consider true athletic spirit.

Strug's reputation as an Olympic hero still looms large in US history. As someone who watched it in real time, it truly became a defining moment of American sports history almost immediately. Wheaties boxes, Saturday Night Live sketches, news recaps, late night talk show monologues - we got more than our fill of the still remembered highlight of the 1996 Olympic Games in my own hometown of Atlanta, especially, where the games took place.

Despite exiting Perfect, Brown has several Netflix movies on the horizon, including the already completed Enola Holmes 3, which brings her back as Sherlock Holmes' younger sister who is also a detective in her own right. It'll release sometime this year. She's also got deals in place for two more films, Just Picture It, and Nineteen Steps.

For more check out the best Netflix movies you can watch right now.

Alfred Molina became a movie icon as Spider-Man's arch-enemy Doctor Octopus, and he must have really liked having extra limbs because he's now turning into a literal octopus in Netflix's new drama Remarkably Bright Creatures.

In Remarkably Bright Creatures, Molina voices Marcellus, a sentient octopus who resides in an aquarium where he watches human life unfold, surreptitiously influencing their behavior. You can hear Molina's Marcellus voice throughout Netflix's new trailer for the movie, seen below:

Here's the official logline for Remarkably Bright Creatures: "Based on the bestselling phenomenon by Shelby Van Pelt comes the story of Tova, a widow who forms an unlikely friendship with the curmudgeonly Marcellus - a giant pacific octopus that lives at the aquarium where she works. Unbeknownst to Tova, Marcellus is on a mission to solve a mystery that will heal the widow’s heart and lead her to a life-changing discovery."

Tova is played by legendary actor Sally Field, who forms a maternal bond with Lewis Pullman, her new protege in her job as the custodian of an aquarium where Marcellus the octopus lives. Colm Meaney rounds out the main cast.

Octopi and some other cephalopods are indeed surprisingly intelligent, with the scope of their awareness and problem solving skills still being studied by science.

Human understanding of the extent of octopus intelligence has become highly publicized in recent years thanks to the acclaimed documentary My Octopus Teacher, which focuses on filmmaker and activist Craig Foster's ongoing interactions with a particular wild cephalopod.

Remarkably Bright Creatures premieres on Netflix on May 8. For more, check out the best movies to watch on Netflix right now.

While Peaky Blinders: The Immortal Man brings the story of Tommy Shelby to a close, one character, Arthur Shelby, is pretty much absent from the narrative.

He appears in a flashback, though not played by original actor Paul Anderson, who in 2024 pleaded guilty to four charges of drug possession. In the flashback, we see (spoiler alert!) Tommy strangling Arthur to death.

"What I'll say is that the story determines the cast, and the story was set. I knew that Tommy needed to have done something that he couldn't forgive himself for," Knight revealed to The Hollywood Reporter. "Therefore, that's why the plot went in that particular direction. But in terms of Paul, all I'll say is that he's a fantastic actor."

It's not just Arthur who meets his maker in The Immortal Man either, but Tommy, too, who is killed by his son – Barry Keoghan's Duke. "I was having trouble with that one, because Tommy Shelby said in the series the only person who can kill Tommy Shelby is Tommy Shelby," Knight previously revealed of Tommy's fate. "But I didn't want that to happen. And then it just suddenly became quite clear." You can read more about how Tommy goes out in our Peaky Blinders: The Immortal Man ending explained.

A '50s set Peaky Blinders spin-off is currently filming, so we don't have to bid goodbye to Peaky Blinders for good, however.

The Immortal Man is streaming on Netflix now. You can fill out your watchlist with our guide to the best Netflix movies.

Peaky Blinders creator Steven Knight brings the story of Tommy Shelby to a poetic conclusion in new film The Immortal Man – but he had some difficulty figuring out the right way to end.

The following will contain spoilers for the Peaky Blinders movie, so turn back now if you're not up to date.

In the film, Shelby takes two bullets to the stomach, and asks his son, Barry Keoghan's Duke, to finish him and take his place as leader of the Peaky Blinders. You can read more about the moment in our Peaky Blinders: The Immortal Man ending explained.

"No, I was trying to work that out," Knight told Variety, when he asked if he always knew how Shelby would die. "I was having trouble with that one, because Tommy Shelby said in the series the only person who can kill Tommy Shelby is Tommy Shelby. But I didn't want that to happen. And then it just suddenly became quite clear."

Knight added that moment of clarity was "probably about a minute before I wrote it," and added of why it had to be Duke who pulled the trigger: "That's got to be the way it happens. Because it's about succession and legacy, and Tommy Shelby has always had a very curious relationship with life and death. He's always on that tightrope – in the words of Keats, he’s half in love with easeful death – since the First World War.

"And it's not just that he's probably mortally wounded," he continued. "It's the conclusion of what his journey is: that he's going to go and join his family and join Grace, and do that. And the fact that he asked [Duke] to use the bullet with the name on makes it part of the tradition of the succession to power for his son."

"For me, for sure," Cillian Murphy recently told us of whether the film is the end of his journey as Tommy Shelby. "I think Steven [Knight, creator] and the universe of Peaky Blinders can continue, you know, and I'm sure it will. But it's been a quarter of my life playing this character, and that's an awfully long time by anyone's standards. But a deeply satisfying one. I felt we managed to achieve something with the TV show and that each season became richer and deeper, and we never plateaued, which I think is a trick to pull off. And therefore, above all, I wanted it to be a present to the fans, like a return on their investment."

But, a '50s set spin-off is on the way and is currently filming – so the story of the Peaky Blinders isn't over yet.

The Immortal Man is streaming on Netflix now. You can fill out your watchlist with our guide to the best Netflix movies.

V for Vendetta might be one of the best comic book adaptations of all time, but according to director James McTeigue nothing will convince original creator Alan Moore to give it his sign of approval.

In an interview with The Hollywood Reporter, McTeigue addressed Moore's criticism of his 2005 film, saying: "Well, we had a discussion with Alan Moore in pre-production. He was very forthright about how he thought Hollywood stinks and that we’d make a terrible adaptation of his graphic novel. I’m a little bit like, 'Then you need to get with your reps and stop the selling of your material to Hollywood if you hate it so much.'

"I think he hides a little bit behind, 'Well, I made it for Warrior and the imprint that made the comic. Then they sold out to DC, and I had no control over it.' So he needs to Taylor Swift it up and get back the rights to his material. But, look, I can’t blame him. There were a couple of terrible adaptations that had been done previously, so I think he was feeling a little burnt. I still think he doesn’t like V because it’s not a page-by-page turn of his graphic novel."

Adapted from Moore's graphic novel created alongside David Lloyd and Tony Weare, V for Vendetta is set in a dystopian London after a devastating world war, as a fascist government has taken control of the city. A vigilante known as V (played by Hugo Weaving in the film) uses terrorist tactics to fight the oppressors, as he discovers a new ally in a young woman named Evey (played by Natalie Portman) who he saves from the secret police.

Exploring themes ranging from freedom to authoritarianism, the story feels as relevant today as when it was first created. "We just keep falling into the same political cycles, and that’s what makes the film timeless in a way. People can just look around and see that the parallels in the film are always present in different forms," McTeigue told THR.

For more, check our guides on the best upcoming movies in cinemas in 2026, as well as the best TV shows to keep an eye out for.

Twisters star Daisy Edgar-Jones has been cast in the upcoming adaptation of bestselling novel Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, which follows the lives of two game devs founding their own studio.

Edgar-Jones will play Sadie Green, the lead female role, according to Variety. No other casting has been confirmed just yet. The movie hails from Paramount, which picked up the novel's rights before it had been published.

The novel, penned by Gabrielle Zevin, is a bestseller ranked by the New York Times as the 76th best book of the 21st century, and it has sold over four million copies worldwide.

It revolves around Sadie Green and Sam Masur, two friends who meet in childhood and who go on to found their own game studio. Across decades, the book chronicles the twists and turns of their lives, including the pressures of the game industry as the studio, named Unfair Games, finds success with its first game.

Edgar-Jones is probably best known for starring opposite Paul Mescal in Normal People, the 2020 adaptation of Sally Rooney's bestselling novel of the same name. She also recently appeared with Glen Powell in Twisters, the 2024 sequel to the '96 original Twister.

CODA director Siân Heder will helm the Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow adaptation, with a script she wrote from previous drafts by Mark Bomback and author Zevin.

The film doesn't yet have a release date. While you wait, check out our guide to all the most exciting upcoming movies of this year and beyond to fill out your watchlist, or our roundup of the biggest movie release dates.

Sirāt is up for two Academy Awards at the Oscars 2026: Best International Film and Best Sound. In the latter, it could be an underdog winner: the Spanish movie takes a score by French experimental musician Kangding Ray to make a love letter to the rave scene that quickly descends into a hellish cautionary tale. But against what, exactly, is up to us, according to its director.

The movie follows Luis, played by Pan's Labyrinth star Sergi López, who's joined by his young son Esteban and their small dog Pipa as he searches for his missing daughter Mar at a rave in the Moroccan desert. When the party is broken up by the local army, who demand the evacuation of all European visitors in the face of political upheaval, Luis decides to tag along with a group of nomadic ravers who are about to set off through the Sahara to another party, closer to Mauritania, in case Mar is there instead.

The film's striking opening scene is full of contrast that feels precarious and uneasy: ancient rocks in a landscape that's millions of years old vibrate with electronic music that's barely 50 years old. As the camera pans down to the ravers, it's easy to get carried away in the hedonism. Bodies sway and move almost as one mass, completely lost in the music, separate but in unspoken community with one another.

Laxe filmed this scene at a real rave, so the dancers on screen were real attendees rather than extras (and the group who Luis tags along with are all played by non-actors scouted at clubs and festivals, too). These people shouldn't be out here, but it's hard not to see the allure of the party.

Hell and Paradise

In Islam, As-Sirāt is the bridge that passes over to the fires of Hell to take a person to Paradise. It's said to be thinner than a strand of hair and as sharp as the sharpest knife. In this film, though, you'd be forgiven for thinking this was inverted. If the rave is paradise (and for Luis' new friends, at least, it is), then our group of protagonists may well be going to hell in a handbasket – or a camper van. The deeper into the desert they go, they find themselves thoroughly out of their depth (think Mad Max crossed with Gus van Sant's Gerry and soundtracked by a techno score and you're maybe halfway there).

The desert is an unpredictable beast, then, especially as a filming location, but Laxe insisted that making a film "has to be difficult" in a post-screening Q&A that I attended. Sirāt was inspired by his time living in Morocco, where, he says, people were surrounded by death. "You die watching this film, right?" he asked the audience. And sure, there's certainly enough tension to make you feel like that. We're never made to feel at peace in the desert, and neither are the film's characters – despite their best efforts.

There are some jarring colonial overtones in the film that Laxe remains consistently and purposefully vague about when asked: local people are trying to get away as our band of thrill-seeking Europeans barter with them for gas to go further into the desert and, in a film set in the Western Sahara, the overwhelming majority of faces we see are white.

Cautionary tales

Why, exactly, evacuations are taking place is never elaborated on, either – the group flicks through radio channels as they drive, getting snippets of information here and there, but ultimately always switching it off before they get the full story. World War 3 may be breaking out, but that's none of their business.

When an audience member asked Laxe if North African people taking a backseat in this film was intentional or if he'd thought about the implications of this, he refused to elaborate.

But, to me, Sirāt reads as an indictment rather than a careless piece of filmmaking, and a cautionary tale of sorts: the ancient landscape always fights back, pushing our protagonists to their limits as they journey through a place they ultimately belong. At the present moment, this works as both an environmentalist warning and a message about Western exceptionalism in the face of political or social upheaval: none of this will help you in the long run.

In the film's final shot, in particular, as the weary travelers' journey comes to an anticlimactic end, it couldn't be clearer – our privileges can only keep us safe for so long, but we're all going to end up in the same place in the end.

Sirāt is out now in UK cinemas. For more on what to watch, check out the rest of our Big Screen Spotlight series.

The new crime thriller movie How to Make a Killing, which stars Glen Powell and Margaret Qualley, has debuted to a disappointing Rotten Tomatoes score.

The film sees Powell play Becket Redfellow, whose mother was disowned by her rich family before he was born. But, he intends to pick off his relatives to inherit a fortune anyway. Qualley plays Becket's friend Julia Steinway.

How to Make a Killing currently sits at 58% on Rotten Tomatoes, indicating mixed reviews from critics.

"This should be tighter, meaner, leaner, cutting. How to make a killing? Let's worry about the smaller stuff first," is the verdict of Kate Erbland in a C-rated IndieWire review.

"An experience akin to watching someone try to light a match when the entire box is wet," is the pretty damning thoughts of The Guardian's Benjamin Lee in a 2-star review.

"A disappointingly flat almost-remake that has neither the biting farce nor the chilling darkness to match its black comedy ambitions," says The Associated Press's Jake Coyle in another 2-star review.

However, not everyone is unimpressed. "How to Make a Killing boasts an opening so strong that it buys enough audience goodwill to coast through nearly its entire running time. That’s priceless in a screwball murder movie in which everyone’s soul is for sale," says Amy Nicholson's review for the Los Angeles Times.

"In the age of Dexter and Succession and Beef, How to Make a Killing just plays as a patchy amusement. Yet I was held by it; the film’s acrid riffs on the hidden depravity of the new greed culture keep it aloft," says Variety's Owen Gleiberman.

"The dark comedy has a lot of fun with the 'kills' and Becket's charm (or maybe that's just Powell's natural charisma) lends itself to a run ride of a film. And one that really showcases just how fun Glen Powell can be in a role," says The Mary Sue's Rachel Leishman in a 4.5-star review.

How to Make a Killing releases on February 20 in the US and March 13 in the UK. In the meantime, fill out your watchlist with our guide to all the most exciting upcoming movies of the year, or all of the year's movie release dates.

Chances are, you've already made your mind up about Emerald Fennell's Wuthering Heights. The film, an adaptation of the beloved Emily Brontë Gothic classic, has spurred a frenzy of discourse: accusations of flagrantly disregarding the source material, of twisting a layered and complex story into a derivative steamy romance, or of ignoring the novel's complicated themes, have abounded.

This maelstrom also translated into the film's reception: it currently sits at 66% on Rotten Tomatoes, a career low for Fennell, the provocative director of Promising Young Woman and Saltburn.

As an English Literature graduate who has read Wuthering Heights no less than seven times, I was wary of this adaptation, but decided to keep an open mind. I'm a firm believer that adaptations should be transformative, and I was prepared to meet Fennell's film on its own terms. What I saw when I finally sat down in the theater was Wuthering Heights as a half-remembered dream – and that's why it works.

Be with me always

Like many adaptations, Fennell's version of Wuthering Heights reshapes the story to focus solely on Catherine and Heathcliff. Margot Robbie plays Catherine (or Cathy) Earnshaw, the spirited, cruel daughter of Martin Clunes' Mr. Earnshaw, and Jacob Elordi is Heathcliff, a young boy Mr. Earnshaw finds on the streets and brings home to his windswept, dark, and foreboding home of Wuthering Heights.

The pair grow up together and, by the time they're teenagers, they've become so tightly woven they're inextricable; Cathy famously declares "whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same" when describing her love for Heathcliff. However, in both the novel and the film, Heathcliff and Cathy cannot be together – for many reasons, including class – and instead Catherine marries her wealthy neighbor Edgar Linton. Heathcliff, after overhearing Catherine say it would "degrade" her to marry him, vanishes, leaving Cathy to her new life. Of course, Heathcliff only heard half the story, missing Cathy's passionate declaration of love.

The novel tracks the main characters across their entire lives, including the introduction of their children, and through them, many of the novel's central themes are brought to fruition. Not in Fennell's version, however.

"This book is so dense. It's so complicated. It's so epic. It takes place over generations, and I think either you make a miniseries, or even a series of 10 episodes, where you give everything the attention that it would need to be completely faithful to the book, or you do what I've done here, and make your own response to the book, and the things that it made you feel, and the things that you wish happen and didn't happen," Fennell told Screen Rant of the decision.

"Before I reread it again with a view of adapting it, I wrote down everything I remembered from the book from the times I'd read it before and from the first time I read it," she added. "And some of it was real, and some of it was my own imaginings and memory."

Take any form

Indeed, Fennell's adaptation is more like a hazy, half-recalled version of the story: the general shape and feeling of the first half of the novel is there, but the details are off. The second generation is entirely absent, along with Catherine's older brother Hindley, who is a source of Heathcliff's abuse in the novel. Instead, Mr. Earnshaw is the drunken, abusive older man in the house. Similarly, the wealthy Linton siblings are not siblings here but guardian and ward, and they are introduced as moving into their home as adults, rather than meeting young Cathy and Heathcliff as children.

The film leans fully into this dreamy surreality after Catherine marries Edgar Linton. In a montage movingly soundtracked by Charli xcx's 'Chains of Love,' a song about a tortured romance, Cathy wears stunning gowns, sparkling jewellery, and silvery eye makeup, and she picnics on a giant strawberry in a beautiful garden and plays curious parlor games with her new family. Life with the Lintons is lovely but strange, and the only time Catherine finds her equilibrium is when she is outside on the Yorkshire moors, her eyes closed and her cheek pressed against the grass; even in this dreamscape, Fennell understands that Catherine Earnshaw is a wild thing who could never truly be at home in the Lintons' dollhouse.

Similarly, Fennell's Wuthering Heights indulges in a heady dose of wish fulfilment when Heathcliff returns. As in the novel, he has mysteriously made a fortune he refuses to divulge the origins of – and while in Brontë's book he and Catherine still cannot be together, Fennell lets the pair finally collide in a secret, self-destructive affair. This is the film's biggest departure from the source material, and it's an interesting exercise in what if?

This change also solidifies that Catherine and Heathcliff's tormented bond is the messy beating heart of the film, much as it is in the book: while their time together is depicted across only the first half of the novel, its ramifications echo through the second half and the generation that follows them.

It's also through this twist to the tale that Fennell's decision to remove the second generation from the film makes tragic sense. In the novel, the new generation brings an end to the cycle of generational trauma that moves through the book; in Fennell's film, Catherine and Heathcliff only have this one life and one chance to make things right. Still, their obsessive love, so intense it teeters on the brink of hatred, and the shockwaves of hurt it inflicts on the other characters, are all felt here as they are in the novel.

Drive me mad

Fennell has never claimed Wuthering Heights would be a faithful adaptation, which is even reflected in the stylistic choice to put the title in quotation marks. This is her version, straight from her own mind, shown in the lavish, anachronistic costumes and sets.

Of course, there are still valid criticisms to be made. Fennell does engage with the novel's themes of class, trauma, and revenge, but not all that deeply. The film also does not grapple with race or address accusations of whitewashing (Heathcliff's ethnicity is ambiguous in the novel and is still a matter of scholarly debate, though his repeated racial othering suggests he isn't white).

But Fennell has done exactly what she set out to do: bring her own version of the novel to the screen. She has distilled the essence of Catherine and Heathcliff's relationship as she sees it and used it to conjure up this dream version of the story that can either enchant or repulse, depending on your perspective.

In one of the novel's most enduring quotes, Heathcliff desperately begs Cathy to "be with me always – take any form – drive me mad!" This is Wuthering Heights in Fennell's form, and it's certainly driving people mad. Whether that's a good thing or not is up to you.

Wuthering Heights is in theaters now. For more on what to watch, check out the rest of our Big Screen Spotlight series.

While many Super Bowl trailers were rumored in advance, this caught us by surprise: a first full look Brad Pitt's return as Cliff Booth in David Fincher's The Adventures of Cliff Booth.

The TV spot, which you can see below, doesn't disappoint. It features a returning Booth, post Once Upon a Time... in Hollywood, as a studio fixer.

A fixer, of course, needs problems. And The Adventures of Cliff Booth trailer certainly throws them the one-time stunt double's way. There are shady suits, skeezy cinemas, and (in a time-honored Tarantino tradition) plenty of f-bombs. Given a global audience of 100 million-plus, it makes sense that these were censored.

Through it all, Booth's signature charm remains. Whether that smile is wiped off his face as he deals with Hollywood heavy-hitters remains to be seen, however.

Despite Tarantino not taking the reins for Cliff Booth's return, he has nothing but praise for David Fincher.

Speaking last year on the Church of Tarantino podcast, the Pulp Fiction director said,. "I think me and David Fincher are the two best directors. So the idea that David Fincher actually wants to adapt my work, to me, shows a level of seriousness towards my work that I think needs to be taken into account."

Tarantino, meanwhile, is still mulling over his 10th and final movie. Alongside that, he has recently been ruminating on a handful of ideas sparked by Kill Bill's Fortnite animated short, Yuki's Revenge.

"I could see some world between [Unreal Engine] and Japanese anime that I could find some happy medium. Or, you know, between the things that I couldn’t physically do, like, say, the Vega Brothers movie, or something like that," Tarantino said during a Q&A at the premiere of Yuki's Revenge in LA (via Pop Culture News).

For more, check out the movie release dates coming your way soon, plus our picks for the best Tarantino movies.

It’s been four years since he stepped into the shoes of the king of rock and roll in Elvis and earned an Oscar nomination for his troubles. Now, Austin Butler is set to don cycling shorts and take on the life story of Lance Armstrong in a brand new biopic. The untitled project will be handled by Conclave and All Quiet on the Western Front director Edward Berger, with a script penned by King Richard’s Zach Baylin.

Deadline reports that Butler is in final talks to take on the role of Armstrong, whose incredible cycling career ended after an investigation confirmed that the seven-time Tour de France winner had been taking performance-enhancing drugs. The fallout saw Armstrong stripped of his titles and receive a lifetime ban from all sanctioned bicycling events.

The rights to Armstrong’s life story have been acquired by former Netflix film chief Scott Stuber, who is producing the movie, sparking a bidding war among studios to secure the project. The venture comes at an interesting time, given that the biopic was already in motion before Stuber recently signed a first-look deal with United Artists. As a result, the Amazon-owned studio can certainly submit a bid, but it may not be the one that ultimately secures it.

This is another massive project added to a to-do list of equally interesting movies Butler is linked to. Besides the Armstrong biopic, he’s also up to remake American Psycho and might appear in Heat 2, which will be directed by Michael Mann. Speaking of Mann, Butler will also be teaming up with Michael B. Jordan for a new big-screen version of Miami Vice, which will be directed by Top Gun: Maverick’s Joseph Kosinski.

For every other big upcoming movie heading our way in 2026, check out our list here.

Everyone's favorite film critic Hideo Kojima has nothing but praise for Chloé Zhao's new drama Hamnet. He was so blown away by it, in fact, he reckons the Eternals director "must be a witch" to be able to craft such a spell-binding, heartwrenching film.

"I watched Hamnet at a screening," he recently took to social media to reveal. "In just 126 minutes, it encapsulates all the sorrow, pain, loss, fear, love and joy, healing and hope found in life across all times and cultures. That beautiful final scene has the power to rewrite the history of cinema. It lays bare the miracle of movies. To be able to create something like this, Chloé Zhao must be a witch, or perhaps an angel."

Based on Maggie O'Farrell's historical fiction book of the same name, Hamnet charts the relationship between William Shakespeare (Paul Mescal) and Agnes (Jessie Buckley, who's up for Best Actress at this year's Academy Awards) – and the sudden death of their 11-year-old son, Hamnet. Inspired by Shakespeare's works and the real-life tragedy, it posits that Hamnet's passing inspired the Bard to write Hamlet.

In his review, Kojima drew particular attention to a touching moment in the movie's third act, which sees a grief-stricken, lonely Agnes travel from Stratford-upon-Avon to London to finally see what her husband has been working on in the weeks since Hamnet succumbed to the plague. As Hamlet (Noah Jupe) dies on stage, Agnes extends her hand in silence to soothe the actor, before several other audience members do the same.

Nominated in eight categories at the Oscars 2026, Hamnet is also up for Best Casting, Best Director, Best Picture.

For more, check out our picks of the most exciting upcoming movies heading our way.

Love Elizabethan-era stories about vengeful Danish princes? Then you're in luck, because 2026 is rife with adaptations of Shakespeare's Hamlet. Hot on the heels of awards weepie Hamnet – the 'untold' story of the creation of Hamlet – and just ahead of Mamoru Hosoda's anime Scarlet – a gender-flipped riff on Hamlet set in the afterlife – comes, well, Hamlet. But despite that more down-the-middle title, the Riz Ahmed-starring movie is just as distinct as its cinematic brethren, possessing the urgency and intimacy of a David Fincher thriller.

Directed by Aneil Karia (Surge) and written by Michale Leslie, it's a Hamlet adaptation that takes some surprisingly big swings. Primary among those is the decision to shoot it with a "kind of visceral first-person energy", according to Karia. "We made one big decision in the development process, which was: 'What if we experience everything with Hamlet? What if you encounter every problem in real time?" And it brought this singularity and interesting ambiguity to it."

Fresh blood

Set in contemporary London, and captured with an over-the-shoulder immediacy, it's a film that never leaves the headspace of its spiralling central figure as his world crumbles around him following the death of his father and the news that his mother, Gertrude (Sheeba Chaddha), is to marry his uncle, Claudius (Art Malik). For Ahmed, playing Hamlet was a long-held ambition.

"I'd been trying to make this for a long time because I became obsessed with [Hamlet] when I was a teenager," Ahmed tells GamesRadar+. "I had an English teacher who gave me this play at a time when I was really interested in rap music as well, and I found this was exactly how I felt, expressed in the most amazing lyricism ever. And it's interesting because I often felt, like a lot of people, that I was on the outside of Shakespeare, and it didn't really belong to people like me. But the more I looked at it, the more I realized that it had a lot of resonances with our own kind of cultural experience."

To that end, Hamlet and his family are no longer Scandinavian royalty, but British South Asian property magnates. As Malik bluntly puts it: "Was I surprised [about] it being set within an Asian community? No. It's about time."

"You know, it's a play about honor and family and who you can and can't marry," Ahmed adds. "And so, I was like, 'I would love to reframe this story so that more people feel like this belongs to them and that they can see themselves in it' because it's just such an amazing and beautiful piece of writing. I want it to belong to everyone."

Death becomes her

Also featuring Timothy Spall as Polonius and Joe Alwyn as Laertes (Alwyn's Big Willy year continuing in earnest following his supporting turn in Hamnet), another major beneficiary of the film's streamlining adaptive changes is The Rings of Power star Morfydd Clark, whose Ophelia is a combination of Hamlet's doomed lover and his friend, Horatio.

"I loved that they did that with the Horatio lines," Clark tells GamesRadar+. "It really modernized it, because it meant she was much more aware of what was going on. It made it more tragic for me in a way, because she's aware and still can't get herself out of this horrible whirlwind that's happening around her." Shot between seasons 2 and 3 of The Rings of Power, where Clark plays a young Galadriel, the star was also struck by how "urgent and exciting" the movie is. "It feels so frantic. I had to take a huge deep breath at the end of it because you are just so immersed."

Noting that she came to Hamlet, like most Millennials, through Disney ("I grew up with Hamlet because of The Lion King"), Clark has a theory about the sudden influx of stories inspired by the Shakespeare classic. "All of Shakespeare is always there," she says. "It was a story that was part of my upbringing, and I didn't know it at the time, but it is timeless. Unfortunately, this tragedy is timeless."

Having lived with Hamlet for decades, it's something Ahmed has given significant thought to as well: why Hamlet, and why now?

"The world needs it right now," Ahmed says. "Hamlet is a story about someone who is grieving the illusion of a fair world, who realizes that the world is a messed-up place that he's powerless in the face of it, and actually he's complicit in it. And that I think is how a lot of people are feeling in this moment. That question, which is, 'Am I losing my mind or has the world gone crazy?' You know, that's what Hamlet is about. And I think that's what we're living through at this moment."

Hamlet releases in UK cinemas on February 6 and in US theaters on April 10. For more on what to watch, check out the rest of our Big Screen Spotlight series.

The first reactions are in for Emerald Fennell's new adaptation of Wuthering Heights after the movie's premiere in LA last night (January 28) – and they're overwhelmingly positive, praising the movie's visuals, craftsmanship, and the chemistry between its two leads.

Fennell's follow-up to 2023's controversial Saltburn is "inspired" by Emily Brontë's 19th-century novel and stars Jacob Elordi and Margot Robbie as doomed lovers Heathcliff and Cathy. The cast also includes Hong Chau (The Whale), Alison Oliver (Saltburn), Ewen Mitchell (House of the Dragon), and Owen Cooper (Adolescence).

"Emerald Fennell’s Wuthering Heights is a scorching hot and twisted tale," writes Variety's Jazz Tangcay. "Margot Robbie and Jacob Elordi’s chemistry and sexual tension is a whole other level of HOT! Only Emerald could take a classic, turn it on its head, make you fall completely in lust, and then utterly destroy your soul. An exquisite spectacle of craftsmanship that left me salivating over the costumes, cinematography and production design. Obsessively in love with it."

"Wuthering Heights is utter perfection," says interviewer Maude Garrett. "It's not only visually impeccable with vibrancy and breathtaking shots, but this movie is the epitome of YEARNING. It will make you feel absolutely EVERYTHING during and afterwards. I loved everything about this film."

"Fall in love again and again with Emerald Fennell's imagining of Wuthering Heights," Collider's Meredith Loftus tweets. "From its gorgeous set design & costumes, striking cinematography, & bombastic music by Charli XCX, the film leans into the passion + obsession of Catherine & Heathcliff's torrid love story."

Wuthering Heights arrives in theaters on February 13. In the meantime, check out our guide to the rest of this year's biggest upcoming movies.

Scarlett Johansson, Kristen Bell, and Breaking Bad creator Vince Gilligan are among 700 Hollywood creatives who have put their signature on a new anti-AI campaign.

"America’s creative community is the envy of the world," the statement reads. "But rather than respect and protect this valuable asset, some of the biggest tech companies, many backed by private equity and other funders, are using American creators’ work to build AI platforms without authorization or regard for copyright law. Artists, writers, and creators of all kinds are banding together with a simple message: Stealing our work is not innovation. It's not progress. It's theft – plain and simple."

​The campaign, titled Stealing Isn't Innovation, has been backed by the likes of Cyndi Lauper, Olivia Munn, R.E.M, Paul Feig, Sean Astin, Cate Blanchett, The Roots, and so many more. The project comes from the Human Artistry Campaign, a global collective of over 180 groups that support the use of "responsible, ethical AI." Many actors have fallen victim to deepfakes, which are the most realistic they have ever been thanks to AI, while others have straight out had their work stolen. In 2024, OpenAI used Johansson's voice from Spike Jonze's Her, a romantic drama about a computer companion, for a GPT-40 chatbot.

The statement continues: "A better way exists – through licensing deals and partnerships, some AI companies have taken the responsible, ethical route to obtaining the content and materials they wish to use. It is possible to have it all. We can have advanced, rapidly developing AI and ensure creators' rights are respected."

We also can't forget about Tilly Noorwood, the entirely AI-generated actor who made headlines last year after it was reported that agencies were interested in representing her. It's worth noting that Tilly is the product of feeding thousands of female actors into AI, making her the product of stolen content. With the way things are going, however, she might actually win an Oscar someday.

For more, check out our list of the most exciting upcoming movies in 2026 and beyond.

Tom Cruise is one of the top leading men in Hollywood, with a reputation for bringing a level of intensity and daring to his performances. Despite the boundaries Cruise has already pushed in his craft, he's apparently breaking new ground in director Alejandro G. Iñárritu's Digger, with Warner Bros. co-chair Pam Abdy describing his performance as "nothing you've ever seen."

"Tom is extraordinary," Abdy tells The Wrap. "Nothing you’ve ever seen. That’s what's so brilliant. This is the fourth time I've worked with him. He never repeats himself, and he's constantly taking you into his mind and his vision and surprising you. And this movie does exactly that."

Digger is described as a black comedy. Along with Cruise, the film stars Jesse Plemons, Sandra Hüller, Riz Ahmed, Sophie Wilde, Emma D'Arcy, Robert John Burke, Burn Gorman, Michael Stuhlbarg, and John Goodman.

"The most powerful man in the world embarks on a frantic mission to prove he is humanity's savior before the disaster he's unleashed destroys everything," reads the IMDb logline.

Cruise is best known in recent years for his recently wrapped Mission: Impossible franchise, which solidified him as a force to be reckoned with thanks to his increasingly dangerous and extreme stunts.

Though Cruise has occasionally courted controversy, he's undeniably charismatic onscreen, with a decades long career that has split the difference between stunt-driven action and keen romantic roles. Meanwhile, director Iñárritu has also racked up his share of accolades, including five Academy Awards along with numerous other honors.

Digger is scheduled to premiere in theaters on October 2. While we wait, check out our picks for the best Mission: Impossible movies, ranked.

Some of the biggest highlights of his career were when Alan Rickman was causing problems for the hero of the story, but according to Emma Thompson, he wasn’t particularly a fan of playing the villain. In an interview with GQ, Thompson recalled sharing the screen with her late friend, who played Colonel Brandon in the 1995 film Sense and Sensibility, and how thrilled he was to be the big bad for a change.

"Alan Rickman, God rest him, he was so happy to be playing someone heroic and nice,” she explained. "Because he was so fed up with people wanting him to be the Sheriff of Nottingham.”

Easily grouped in with some of the most beloved performances in his career after Die Hard’s Hans Gruber and Severus Snape in the Harry Potter films, Rickman was on full scene-stealing mode in Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves back in 1991. Calling off Christmas and threatening to cut Kevin Costner’s heart out with a spoon, it was enough to earn him a BAFTA nomination for the performance.

Thankfully, though, just as viewers relished seeing Rickman metaphorically twirl his mustache on occasion as the villain of the piece, some of his best works also featured him as the hero with a heart. Besides his turn in Sense and Sensibility as Colonel Brandon, there were also the likes of the noble boyfriend from beyond the grave in Truly, Madly, Deeply, Metatron from Kevin Smith’s Dogma, or by Grabthar’s hammer, Alexander Dane, aka Dr. Lazarus in Galaxy Quest.

Ultimately, audiences might’ve flocked to see him play the villain of the piece, but whether he was a good or bad guy, there’s no doubt we were always guaranteed a great performance when it came to Alan Rickman. To see some for yourself, check out our list of his most memorable performances here.

Paul Mescal is considering taking a break and "rationing" his career over the next couple of years – once he's finished promoting his new Oscar-favorite movie Hamnet, of course.

"Once I've finished promoting [Hamnet], I hope nobody gets to see me until 2028 when I'm doing the Beatles," he told The Guardian. "People will get a break from me and I'll get a break from them."

Mescal plays William Shakespeare in Eternals director Chloé Zhao's new movie, which follows the death of Shakespeare's young son and the events that inspired his tragedy Hamlet. Jessie Buckley plays his wife, Agnes.

"I’m five or six years into this now, and I feel very lucky. But I'm also learning that I don't think I can go on doing it as much," Mescal added. "It means learning that films like [new period romance, co-starring Josh O'Connor] The History of Sound take more out of the well. You can't keep going back and expect to consistently deliver something you're proud of. What that rationing looks like, I don't know. I miss being on stage, so I might have a time when I'm only doing theatre for a couple of years."

In Sam Mendes' upcoming Beatles quartet of movies, Mescal is set to play Paul McCartney. All four movies will be released on the same date in 2028, with each one focusing on a different member of the band. Harris Dickinson, Joseph Quinn, and Barry Keoghan will play John Lennon, George Harrison, and Ringo Starr, with the cast also including Saoirse Ronan as McCartney's first wife and Wings bandmate Linda and James Norton as the band's manager Brian Epstein.

Hamnet is out now in US theaters and arrives in UK cinemas on January 9. For more on what to watch, check out our guide to the other best upcoming movies on the way in 2026.

Happy new year, and happy new watching from Big Screen Spotlight! While 2026 may be bringing us major new superhero flicks like Avengers: Doomsday and Supergirl, and a new Christopher Nolan epic with The Odyssey, it isn't just blockbusters that should be on your watchlist this year.

We're always looking to bring you new recommendations and put different titles on your radar, which is why we've compiled a list of the best independent, international, and potentially overlooked films coming our way over the next few months. You'll find highly anticipated dramas, comedies, and thrillers from directors like Park Chan-wook and starring big names from Robert Pattinson to Josh O'Connor.

For more on what to watch this year, check out our guide to 2026's other biggest movie release dates and our wider look at the year's upcoming movies.

No Other Choice

Release date: January 23, 2026

The latest from Oldboy director Park Chan-wook is a satirical black comedy with its fair share of laughs and wince-worthy violence. Based on the '90s novel The Ax by Donald Westlake, Squid Game's Lee Byung-hun stars as Man-su, a successful employee of a paper company who abruptly loses his job. With his comfortable lifestyle at risk, Man-su turns to extreme measures to eliminate his competition in his search for new employment. It's been a hit with critics and made the Oscar shortlist as Korea's entry for Best International Film.

The Testament of Ann Lee

Release date: February 20, 2026

Amanda Seyfried swaps Mamma Mia for a very different kind of musical in The Testament of Ann Lee. She plays the titular character, who was the founder of the Shaker religious movement in the US in the 18th Century. The Shakers were categorized by their dedication to communal living, equality, and the pursuit of "ecstatic devotion" in their worship through shouting and dancing. Directed by Mona Fastvold, who co-wrote The Brutalist (and that movie's director, Fastvold's partner Brady Corbet, co-wrote The Testament of Ann Lee), the cast also includes Thunderbolts star Lewis Pullman and Captain America: Brave New World's Tim Blake Nelson.

The Drama

Release date: April 3, 2026

Before they venture to Arrakis in Dune 3, Robert Pattinson and Zendaya star in The Drama, a mysterious new rom-com. They play bookstore employee Emma and museum director Charlie, a couple whose relationship is shaken when one of them discovers some unsettling truths about their partner just days before their wedding. Intriguing…

The film is directed by Kristoffer Borgli, who previously helmed Dream Scenario, starring Nicolas Cage, and Ari Aster is on board as a producer, so it's safe to assume that things aren't quite as they seem.

Bad Apples

Release date: April 10, 2026

After turns in Steve McQueen's war drama Blitz and moving recovery drama The Outrun in 2024, we were missing Saoirse Ronan on our screens in 2025. This year, though, she makes a comeback in Bad Apples, a new comedy thriller. She stars as Maria, an elementary school teacher who finds herself going to extreme measures to stop her class being disrupted by one unruly kid. Interview with the Vampire's Jacob Anderson also stars.

Rebuilding

Release date: April 17, 2026

After starring as a boxer-turned-priest in Knives Out 3 last year and before he hits the big screen in Steven Spielberg's next major flick, Josh O'Connor will take center stage in Rebuilding. The film follows Dusty, a cowboy whose ranch is destroyed by wildfires, as he finds himself living in a federal emergency camp alongside his estranged ex-wife and young daughter. Amy Madigan, who terrified us as Aunt Gladys in 2025's Weapons, The White Lotus' Meghan Fahy, and True Detective's Kali Reis also star.

Rose of Nevada

Release date: April 24, 2026

Director Mark Jenkins is back with his first film since 2022's quietly discomfiting folk horror Enys Men. This time around, he's taking on sci-fi and time travel with Rose of Nevada, which follows a boat that returns to a village 30 years after it vanished. Callum Turner and George MacKay play two men who decide to join its crew in search of better fortunes, but end up travelling back in time after being mistaken for members of the original crew.

For more on what to watch, check out the rest of our Big Screen Spotlight series.

Sentimental Value is a film about a family, but it's also a film about a house. In The Worst Person in the World director Joachim Trier's latest, the dysfunctional Borg family and their Oslo home are inextricable from each other – it's been in the family for generations, through the Second World War, death, and suffering, and it takes on the quality of a haunted house. There are ghosts in these walls.

The film follows stage actor Nora (Renate Reinsve) and historian Agnes (Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas), sisters who are estranged from their father, acclaimed movie director Gustav Borg (Stellan Skarsgård). He left Norway to focus on his career decades earlier after divorcing their mother, but unexpectedly turns up at their mother's wake with two things on his mind: he wants the house back, and he wants to offer Nora a job.

Gustav is working on a film inspired by his own family history, which will be filmed in the family home where he grew up, and culminate in his mother's suicide. He wrote the part based on his mother for Nora, but she refuses to work with him – or even read the script – on account of their difficult relationship. Gustav goes on to offer the part to Hollywood actor Rachel Kemp (Elle Fanning) instead, and her involvement helps secure funding from Netflix to make the film.

Mutual (mis)understandings

Despite seeing great success earlier in his professional life, Gustav hasn't made a movie in 15 years. His career isn't exactly booming, but neither is Rachel's – her last film bombed, and she's on the verge of quitting acting. They bond one night after being introduced at an afterparty at a French film festival and, on the surface, they make an unlikely pair. However, their friendship isn't so dissimilar from the one between their real-life counterparts, and Fanning tells GamesRadar+ that her and Skarsgård's shared experiences as child actors gave them a "mutual understanding."

As for their characters, "Gustav sees something in [Rachel] that ignites this light in her again," Fanning says. "She's felt a bit lost, and so having him see her, and feel like he really sees her, and then to ultimately give her this opportunity, it's a beautiful thing. And I think he's much more open to Rachel than he is with his own daughters."

Indeed, Gustav's personal relationships are at odds with his filmmaking, Skarsgård thinks. "He is capable of feelings, and he's capable of expressing feelings," he tells us. "He's excellent at it in his art, but he's clumsy in his personal life, and it's funny to see him trying. It's comic, and it's tragic at the same time. It's very funny, but you also feel that he really wants to do it, but he can't, and that's the key to him."

One particularly humorous scene that exemplifies this is during Agnes' son Erik's birthday party, when Gustav gives his nine-year-old grandson a copy of Michael Haneke's psychosexual drama The Piano Teacher on DVD. Baffled by the gesture, Agnes tells him, "We don't even have a DVD player." It's a clever and bittersweet moment that shows Gustav isn't just out of touch with his own family, but with the film industry more broadly.

"In spite of being the same age as me, he's of an older generation, and he's a 20th-century man," Skarsgård explains, before referencing a scene in which Gustav and Rachel are being interviewed at a press junket. "It's like the interview discussion when he gets the question, 'Will the film be shown in the cinemas?' 'Of course, where else would it be shown?' He doesn't quite get that Netflix might not show it."

Art imitates life

Discussing a press junket during a press junket isn't the only way art imitates life in Sentimental Value: Fanning isn't just playing an American actor in a Norwegian production, she was an American actor on the set of a Norwegian film. "There were aspects and scenes that I could understand very, very well, and were happening in real time around me. So you can't help but acknowledge and take that in," she says.

"It was fun to calibrate her just right and toe that line of her, because I think she could have easily slipped into a cliche, vapid Hollywood star. But Joachim is not interested in characters that are one-dimensional, and so I loved getting to flesh her out in the many layers of her."

It's not hard to imagine a version of this film in which Rachel is an unsympathetic character, but Fanning's performance and Trier's script make us feel for her wholeheartedly. Not only has she found herself on the outside of her industry during a fallow point in her career, but her supposed comeback role has put her on the outside of a family rift she can't ever fully understand.

If the Borg's home is a haunted house, Rachel is an unwitting visitor who doesn't quite grasp the price of admission. Still, she's integral to the eventual dismantling of its ghostly walls, whether she's fully aware of it or not, as Gustav's film tries to make sense of his painful past. Trier "had to audition many houses," Fanning says, to find the right one to play one of the film's most vital roles. "For me, it felt like a very special space."

Sentimental Value is out now in UK cinemas. For more on what to watch, check out the rest of our Big Screen Spotlight series.

Earlier this year, Timothée Chalamet ruffled some feathers by announcing in front of a room full of his peers at the SAG Awards, that he was in "pursuit of greatness". For some, it was a moment of refreshing honesty: don't we all want to do something worthwhile with our time on Earth? Especially if we have the talent to back it up. These words could have come straight from the mouth of Marty Mauser, the cocksure ping pong champ that Chalamet brings to the screen with electrifying magnetism in Marty Supreme.

In fact, if you've been anywhere near social media in the last couple of months, you've probably already had a taste of Mauser's brash confidence thanks to Chalamet's unconventional publicity campaign for the film. Typically flanked by several people with "hardcore orange" spheres on their heads, and wearing Mauser-esque glasses, Chalamet has been talking up his "really top-of-the-line performances" over the last 7-8 years, declaring Marty Surpeme specifically "top-level shit."

There's a fascinating blurring of the lines between character and performer going on here because, like Chalamet, Marty Supreme has the ability to back up his self-aggrandizing statements. American ping pong's(!) blazing young star, Mauser ruffles institutional feathers by charging expensive rooms to the league, while putting on an unmissable show that draws in the crowds. That is, until he loses to a Japanese underdog with a new type of paddle – a shame that he hopes to rectify with a rematch.

Back in the game

That brief precis probably makes Marty Surpreme sound like more of a sports movie than it actually is. Set in 1950s New York, ping pong bookends the movie, but the mid-section is something else entirely. Much closer to a frantic 70s-era drama, and very much in keeping with the Safdie Brothers' agonisingly tense oeuvre (though Josh directs solo here, while Benny went off to make The Smashing Machine), it's a film about a resourceful schemer who's been dealt a bad hand skirting the law to claw back what he thinks he's owed.

One of Mauser's strangest money spinners involves a failed attempt to extort a dangerous gangster (played by Bad Lieutenant director Abel Ferrara) over the return of his dog, barely 24 hours after Mauser almost crushes both of them when he, and the bathtub he's sitting in, fall through the ceiling of a decrepit motel. From the moment Mauser arrives back on US soil after a humiliating world tour where he performs pleasant ping pong tricks for family audiences, everything goes wrong – a spiral of disasters that take Mauser further and further away from his dreams.

In the middle of it all, Mauser manages to become involved with a faded Hollywood star, Kay Stone (Gwyneth Paltrow, sporting a spot-on British accent). Stuck in a dead-end marriage to a pen magnate (played with reptilian menace by Kevin O'Leary), Stone is won over by Mauser's unassailable confidence as an escape from her husband, even if Mauser's bulletproof self-regard frequently tips over into arrogance. Outside of the MCU and Ryan Murphy projects, Paltrow hasn't appeared on screen since 2015's risible Mortdecai, but in just a handful of scenes, she reminds you why she was one of the 90s most in-demand stars.

Rule the world

Similarly beguiling is Odessa A'zion as Rachel. The Until Dawn star is a constant as Marty's chaotic love interest, who's looking for a way out of her loveless marriage to Ira (Emory Cohen). They're a perfect match – Rachel is as much of a schemer as Marty, and even more determined to find a way out of her hopeless situation. In a way, the film is a stealth love story, albeit one that opens with a microscopic view of Marty's sperm swimming to victory, soundtracked rousingly by Tears For Fears' 'Everybody Wants to Rule the World.'

But this is the Timmy show, and after nearly going all the way with his transformative performance as Bob Dylan in A Complete Unknown, there's a very real chance that Chalamet will be holding a golden baldie aloft come mid-March. Chalamet learned to play ping pong to an impressively convincing standard as Mauser, and even though it's far from the focus of the film, when Chalamet has a paddle in his hand, Marty Supreme taps into the pulse-quickening thrills of a Rocky or a Rudy.

There's something undeniably invigorating about Marty Supreme. While there's a familiarity to its atmosphere and worldview – more so than The Smashing Machine, it's a continuation of the Safdie project, including esoteric casting choices, spiralling madness and lots of scenes featuring sweaty lowlifes shouting at each other about money – watching Chalamet dominate the screen is akin to watching a young Pacino. Chalamet is no longer in pursuit of greatness, he's already there.

Marty Supreme releases in theaters on December 25. For more on what to watch, check out the rest of our Big Screen Spotlight series.

From teenage rapper (‘Lil Timmy Tim’) to Hollywood icon, Timothée Chalamet has always aimed high, so it seems perfectly apt that the Dune star would tackle the role of an ambitious ping-pong prodigy with lofty aspirations of global domination. We’re talking about the upcoming A24 movie Marty Supreme, of course. And we’re chatting with the acclaimed actor about dreaming big ahead of the film’s global release.

“I feel like I was a huge dreamer in my mid-teens to late teens – maybe to a degree that I didn’t really feel the people around me doing,” Chalamet tells GamesRadar+ during an exclusive interview in Los Angeles.

“In my late teens to early 20s to mid 20s, I feel that’s the time in life where you chase something. And then I feel like people settle down, or whatever. I'm not [talking about] traditional family values, I'm saying it metaphorically, but I feel like it's given me an opportunity to triple down – not double down but triple down – on the initial promise of the life I sought out.”

The smile broadens across his face: “It's like, ‘Alright, do you want to take the foot off the accelerator pedal a little bit? Do you want to go in neutral or whatever the metaphor is? And I'm hitting the f*cking gas pedal, for better or worse.”

The 29-year-old is friendly, enthusiastic, and thoughtful as he chats away beside the rooftop pool of the plush Maybourne Hotel in Beverly Hills. “I feel like in my mid-20s, I had a good growing experience as far as thinking there’s some candy at the top of the mountain or some indicator of achievement,” he continues, speaking about his acting aspirations.

“It’s a relentless attitude to have in your early 20s, so it doesn't mean you're megalomaniacal or delusional – but there are bellwethers. As I’ve grown, no matter how cheesy this sounds, [I’m grateful for] the gift of every day, the gift to be alive, and the gift to work at a high level.”

With a critically-acclaimed mix of blockbuster movies and indie hits under his belt – including Call Me By Your Name, A Complete Unknown and the Dune franchise – why did Chalamet sign up for an unconventional underdog sports movie? The answer is simple. “The appeal of this was to work with Josh Safdie,” he explains.

“Okay, this is through the lens of a table tennis movie, but really, it's about someone who’s got enormous dreams, but he’s living life as the underdog whose only resources, whose only support system – whose only foundation – is himself. Certainly, a lot of people in their late teens and early 20s can relate to that. I certainly can.”

The actor candidly opens up about his vulnerabilities as he continues: “In my early 20s, when I was pursuing an acting career, you go, ‘Man, I know the person believing the most in me right now is me.’ That is a weird hall to hear your thoughts echo in. It’s a lonely [place]. If you have a fast-paced mind like myself, it leaves a lot of room for self-doubt at times.”

After Marty Supreme finished filming, Chalamet leapt back into blockbuster territory with Dune 3 – and was thankful that the two characters were “vastly” different. “Had the roles been similar, it might have been more complicated. I’d have thought, ‘Oh, man… How do I not let these roles bleed into each other?’”

In the background, a bright orange Marty Supreme blimp hovers above the Los Angeles skyline, but that doesn’t take Chalamet away from his thoughts: “They are such different roles and the tones of the film couldn’t be more different. A high-wire, Safdie brother, New York, 1950s period piece about a borderline delusional, ambitious character in contrast to a Denis Villeneuve sci-fi epic space opera.”

Audiences have a bit of a wait until the December 2026 release of the third Dune film, but Marty Supreme is just around the corner. With awards buzz circling Chalamet for his role as the uber-ambitious Marty Mauser, there’s clearly a lot more to come in this story. Bring it on.

Marty Supreme releases in US theaters on December 25, and UK cinemas on December 26. Dune: Part Three is scheduled for release in December 2026. For more, check out our list of the 25 best movies of 2025, or look ahead to the upcoming movies heading your way in 2026.

Russell Crowe is beloved for his role as Maximus Decimus Meridius in 2000's Oscar-winning epic Gladiator. But the man himself apparently has no love for 2024's Gladiator II which introduced Paul Mescal as Maximus' illegitimate son with Connie Nielsen's Lucilla, AKA the true heir to the throne of Ceasar, telling Australian outlet Triple J that it's an "unfortunate example" of when sequels get it wrong.

"I think the recent sequel that, you know, we don't have to name out loud, is a really unfortunate example of even the people in that engine room not actually understanding what made the first one special," Crowe says, later making it clear that he's referring to Gladiator II. "It wasn't the pomp. It wasn't the circumstance. It wasn't the action. It was the moral core."

Crowe takes particular issue with the idea that Maximus would have fathered a child with Lucilla, saying he fought hard to avoid plotlines like that in the first film.

"The thing is, there was a daily fight to keep that moral core of the character. The amount of times they suggested sex scenes and stuff like that for Maximus, it's like, you're taking away his power," he explains. "What are you talking about? You're saying at the same time he had this relationship with his wife, he was fucking this other girl? What are you talking about? It's crazy."

I have to admit, I'm inclined to agree with Crowe that the plotline of Gladiator II does feel particularly contrived, and it fails to live up to the gravitas of the original film. It certainly hasn't earned the same mythic stature as its predecessor.

For more, check out our picks for the best movies based on historical events, and stay up to date on the most exciting upcoming movies.

Hideo Kojima has once again taken to Twitter with a movie review, and this time he's sharing his thoughts on Stephen King adaptation The Long Walk.

The movie stars Cooper Hoffman and David Jonsson as teenage boys who enter a deadly competition called the Long Walk, which involves being the last man standing to win a cash prize and a wish. The Hunger Games' Francis Lawrence directs.

"I watched The Long Walk on the plane. It was great. I was imagining something like The Running Man, another King adaptation – a 'reality show' esque sci-fi story of the 1980s era of TV broadcast dominance (a critique on media) – but it was completely different," Kojima wrote. The Running Man was also released this year, starring Glen Powell as Ben Richards, a man who enters a game show where he is hunted down on live TV.

"It's about young lonely people, burdened with trauma and worries, who just keep walking through life (the long walk)," Kojima continued. "The perspective and background of the organizers or the spectators aren't shown; the film maintains a strict distance from the roadside. The camera simply stays close to the boys and walks by their side until the very end.

"The direction is very different from The Hunger Games. Director Francis Lawrence is clever. Within the absurdity of this game, the youths help each other, understand one another, reflect on their past, and come to realize the 'path' that stretches toward tomorrow. Dropping out isn't just the end of one person – it's passing the baton and entrusting their 'will' to the winners. It's a meta, philosophical film about friendship and growth and also a declaration of war against the adults."

Kojima concluded his thoughts by drawing a comparison to another King adaptation and praising the lead actors: "In a way, it's close to Stand by Me. David Jonsson, a big favorite of mine, gave an amazing performance too. Cooper Hoffman was also great. And of course, Mark Hamill, too. I’ll watch it again in theaters. Highly recommend."

Kojima regularly shares his thoughts on film and TV on Twitter, with this year's reviews including Predator: Badlands and Marvel's The Fantastic Four: First Steps. He's also got a big screen role of his own this year, too, with a voice cameo in the Japanese version of Zootopia 2.

You can fill out your own watchlist with our guide to all the most exciting upcoming movies on the way in this year and beyond.

Wuthering Heights director Emerald Fennell has a particular vision for her adaptation of the beloved novel, according to star Margot Robbie.

"It's a literary classic, visually stunning and emotionally resonant," Robbie told Vogue. "In one of our first conversations about this film, I asked Emerald what her dream outcome was. She said, 'I want this to be this generation's Titanic. I went to the cinema to watch Romeo & Juliet eight times and I was on the ground crying when I wasn't allowed to go back for a ninth. I want it to be that.'"

Romeo & Juliet is Baz Lurhmann's '96 classic. Titanic, of course, is James Cameron's epic romance/disaster movie, which shares a lot in common with the story of Romeo and Juliet, and follows star-crossed lovers Jack and Rose aboard the doomed ocean liner.

Robbie plays Cathy in the film, starring opposite Jacob Elordi's Heathcliff. Shazad Latif is Edgar Linton, while Alison Oliver is Isabella Linton, Charlotte Mellington is Young Cathy, and Owen Cooper is Young Heathcliff. Charli xcx provides an original soundtrack.

Wuthering Heights is adapted from Emily Brontë's Gothic novel of the same name, which is a classic of English literature and revolves around the tortured, forbidden connection between Cathy and Heathcliff, whose entanglement echoes through the generations.

"A bold and original imagining of one of the greatest love stories of all time, Emerald Fennell's Wuthering Heights stars Margot Robbie as Cathy and Jacob Elordi as Heathcliff, whose forbidden passion for one another turns from romantic to intoxicating in an epic tale of lust, love and madness," reads the film's logline.

Wuthering Heights arrives in theaters on February 14, 2026. In the meantime, fill out your watchlist with our guide to all the upcoming movies left of 2025 and beyond.

If we had a penny for every time Elizabeth Olsen played a widow trying to navigate her grief in a fantastical setting in the last five years… Well, we'd have two pennies. After playing a grieving Scarlet Witch in WandaVision on Disney Plus (and again in Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness), Olsen is tackling love and loss again in new rom-com Eternity.

She plays Joan, a woman faced with an impossible choice in the afterlife, but Olsen tells GamesRadar+ that she didn't "consciously think of" any similarities between the two characters when we sit down with her and Teller in London to discuss the movie. "I also don't even mean to pick projects that are about grief, and I did all of them for different reasons," she says.

"With His Three Daughters, it was my friend Azezal Jacobs who directed it," she continues, referring to her 2024 Netflix drama about three estranged sisters reuniting to care for their dying father. "He was kind of trying to prepare himself for his parents' passing, because they were getting quite old, and it was almost like an emotional preparation for him, and I loved getting to work on that with him, with Natasha [Lyonne] and Carrie [Coon]. With this, it felt more about a continued life as opposed to just grief."

That's because in the world of Eternity, life doesn't stop when you die. Instead, you have one week to choose where you want to spend the afterlife – and there are no takebacks or do-overs once you decide. Olsen's character Joan has a big decision to make, then, when she realizes it's not just Larry (Miles Teller), her husband of 60 years, waiting for her beyond the grave: Luke (Callum Turner), her first love who died in the Korean war in the very early days of their marriage, wants to spend his afterlife with her too. It poses an impossible dilemma for Joan, as well as bringing back long-buried feelings of grief for the life she could have had with Luke.

"There's such an emphasis on, 'Where do you want to go, which eternity do you want to choose?' And at the end, really, it's about, 'But who do you want to spend it with?'" Teller adds. "And I think that's beautiful."

Eternity is out now in US theaters and arrives in UK cinemas on December 5. In the meantime, check out our guide to the other upcoming movies on the way in 2025 and beyond.

Two years after making his directorial debut with 2023's Creed III, Michael B. Jordan, who also stars as Adonis Creed in the Rocky spin-off series, is promising that a fourth film is still in the works, alongside an expansion into a whole "Creed-verse."

"Eventually, definitely. It's a franchise that's been really kind to me in a big way. I love MGM and Irwin Winkler and everything they've got going on. I think there's a bit more story to be mined through that," Jordan tells Variety, though he has a few caveats.

"Do I want to be in the ring boxing for the next 15 years? Not so much," he explains. "But I think there are clever ways and interesting characters we've established that we might want to see where that goes, along with some introductions to new ones I have in mind. I still might be able to get a couple of really good swings at the franchise a bit more."

There's at least one Creed spin-off in the works as well, an Amazon streaming series focusing on Adonis Creed's daughter Amara, who was shown to have boxing ambitions of her own in Creed 3.

"We're spinning off doing Adonis's daughter, Amara's story, the television show that's picked up at Amazon. So you'll be seeing different parts of the Creed-verse, I like to call it," says Jordan. "These little IPs are going to keep the universe alive without it being completely reliant on just me to push it through the finish line every time as a boxer. I'll be adjacent."

Creed IV is still a twinkle in Michael B. Jordan's eye, but I'm waiting anxiously for more entries in the film series. The Rocky franchise is my favorite movie series of all time, and I consider the Creed films to be some of the best entries in the canon. Whenever Creed IV happens, I'll be first in line for tickets.

While we wait, check out our picks for the best sports movies of all time.

The older I get, the more I just want to shut my brain off and watch movies where bad things happen to teenagers who wander into a house they aren't supposed to enter, or movies where the cast is led entirely by CGI animals who are smarter than the real-life humans they encounter. I rarely want to feel anything besides good ol' fashioned amusement… but I was almost delighted to be sobbing during and at the end of Julia Jackman's dazzling 100 Nights of Hero, which flips the tragic queer love story trope on its head and gives us all something new to believe in.

The story, based on the graphic novel of the same name, follows a woman named Cherry (Maika Monroe), who is facing persecution if she cannot produce an heir to the throne with her husband, Jerome (Amir El-Masry). Jerome, neglectful and also unable to consummate his marriage (due to being attracted to men), decides to leave her alone for 100 nights with a fellow royal named Manfred (Nicholas Galitzine), in the hope that Manfred will seduce and impregnate Cherry on his behalf. However, this plan isn't as easy as Manfred thinks, as Cherry's loyal maid, Hero (Emma Corrin), is in love with her – and blocks him at every chance by reciting parts of an ongoing, fantastical tale of three sisters who wanted more than just marriage.

That ye old 'make me an heir or else' trope that often pops up in historical fantasy has never really done it for me, even when it's under the guise of humor (and especially not when it's in a bleak, nightmare fantasy world like Game of Thrones). I shut my brain off at pointed hats and cool architecture, and it's possible that I've just become curmudgeonly as I've gotten older. However, 100 Nights of Hero is so much more than that, and it wastes no time in making itself known. Right from the jump, it's visually stunning, borrowing imagery and color straight from the graphic novel and adding those glimmery finishing touches (like the way the light catches on Cherry's cheekbone, or the beautiful medieval guitar that Charli xcx plays in the garden).

The film has all those little things I liked in fantasy stories when I was a little girl, like a quill scratching against parchment, stained glass windows that depict epic stories, shirtless muscular men dripping with blood in an attempt to show off their utmost heroism, beautiful women in dazzling cloaks and long hair that flows dreamily in the wind. But most importantly, it's quite literally a hero's tale, if the title wasn't a dead giveaway, and our Hero is a woman who dares to love in the face of a kingdom that wholly disagrees.

Queer stories are often tragic, and they either end with a devastating breakup (looking at you, 2006 teen drama series South of Nowhere, and 2013 erotic romantic drama Blue is the Warmest Color) or death (i.e. Lost and Delirious or A Single Man). I won't spoil anything, as I want you to head to the theater on December 5, but this one is different. There's magic here, and I'm not talking about the witches and spells and moons mentioned throughout the film. Cherry and Hero have a quiet magic between them that made me clutch my heart at nearly every turn – even in the most simple of moments. It helps that there is a chemistry between Monroe and Corrin that vibrates on a frequency I have not seen in a film in quite some time.

My favorite quote of the entire film (which has some of the most delightful and also poignant dialogue, mind you) might be simple, but it's the most earnest. Towards the end, Chery declares: "I was supposed to get married, have children, do needlepoint, I guess, and then die." May we all aspire to be more, to want more, and to push beyond the limitations that our families and society have put in place for us. May we all try to be a little bit more heroic in our day-to-day lives. Although I do kind of really want to learn needlepoint.

100 Nights of Hero hits theaters on December 5. For more on what to watch, check out the rest of our Big Screen Spotlight series.

Pillion probably isn't the movie you're expecting. If you've read the source material (Box Hill, a modest, devastating novella by Adam Mars-Jones), you'll already have a preconceived idea of what the film's central relationship looks like. If you haven't, you may have seen reviews or social media first reactions dubbing Pillion a rom-com or "feel-good" film (which might raise an eyebrow if you're familiar with Mars-Jones' work). It's not quite either of those things, though, and it's all the better for it.

The film follows Colin (Harry Melling), a lonely, reserved parking attendant who still lives with his parents in the suburbs. After a chance encounter with biker gang leader Ray (Alexander Skarsgård) in a pub on Christmas Eve, Colin finds himself entangled in an intense dominant/submissive relationship that begins with oral sex in an alleyway on Christmas Day. Outsiders are baffled at what devastatingly handsome Ray could see in clumsy Colin, and Colin is, too, initially. "You sort of bring his qualities into relief," another member of the gang tells him.

Don't get me wrong, I love a rom-com, but putting Pillion into this category feels a little reductive to me: what romance and comedy there is here isn't anywhere near as straightforward as the genre usually requires. Colin and Ray don't have a conventional relationship: Ray promptly moves Colin into his house, where he cooks, cleans, and sleeps on Ray's bedroom floor. Ray gets Colin to shave his head and wear a padlocked chain around his neck, and the pair never, ever kiss. Colin thrives in this environment to begin with, but gradually starts to yearn for more from Ray, even if he doesn't know how to ask for it. At times, Ray is crushingly aware of Colin's inexperience, and it's uncomfortable to watch.

There are comedic moments throughout Pillion too, thanks to the hapless charm Melling brings to Colin, but they have a bittersweet aftertaste because of the uneven nature of the relationship, and first-time writer-director Harry Lighton makes sure that any humor is never at Colin's expense and, despite it all, we understand fully why Colin wants to stick around. It's a confident control of tone from a debut filmmaker.

Different contexts

Although it was published in 2020, Mars-Jones' novella was written in 1999, in the shadow of the AIDS crisis and the UK's Section 28, which banned the "promotion" of homosexuality, and a lesser-known case, Operation Spanner. This was an early '90s police crackdown on gay BDSM practices, which led to the legal precedent in the UK that you can't consent to actual bodily harm. Unlike the movie's 21st-century setting, the book sees Colin looking back from the late '90s at his relationship with Ray 20 years earlier.

"You end up, whether you know it or not, as an ambassador for your sexuality… And at this point, I thought, 'OK, let's go the other way," Mars-Jones said in an interview around the time of the book's release. With Box Hill, which has the subtitle 'A Story of Low Self-Esteem,' he said he wanted to write "the ugliest story that could still be described as a love story." Although the bones of the story are the same, there are some scenes of explicit sexual assault, and Colin doesn't take to his new role quite like the duck to water that Melling's version of the character is.

By shaking off this heavy historical context, there's a little less of this "ugliness" and Pillion is able to inject more light and humor into its script. Colin is a little older in the film than he is in the book, a little more sure of himself. His parents are more supportive, too: unlike in the novella, they know that he's gay (his mother even sets him up on dates) and they know about his relationship with Ray – although they don't quite know all the ins and outs of their dynamic.

A well-oiled machine

Watching Pillion, the audience isn't ever made to feel like they're gawping outsiders looking at the BDSM community from a safe distance. The other members of Ray's biker gang are played by people involved in the real-life Gay Bikers Motorcycle Club (who took to the Cannes red carpet in full leather earlier this year), and Lighton takes pains to depict this subculture with care and respect. Nothing is sensationalized, even in the film's riskier, more explicit moments.

Because Pillion doesn't shy away from sex; far from it. Melling and Skarsgård both give fearless performances, a term that's often thrown around but certainly applies here. Both actors embrace the vulnerability needed to make these characters feel real and lived in, echoing the vulnerability that's necessary to create a well-oiled BDSM relationship. That being said, the film doesn't gloss over the stickier parts of their relationship, either, and Ray's abuse of power is never romanticized.

Does the film endeavor to make Colin and Ray's relationship more palatable for a straight audience? I don't think so. In the film's final act, it has a chance to write off Colin's sexual proclivities as misguided or wrong, a blip in the wider story of his life, but instead it doubles down on the idea of sexual freedom as personal freedom. By the end of the movie, Colin knows exactly what he wants – and he's happier, more self-assured, and a better person for it.

Pillion arrives in UK cinemas on November 28 and US theaters on February 6. For more on what to watch, check out the rest of our Big Screen Spotlight series.

New drama Alpha is a change of tack for French filmmaker Julia Ducournau, who took Cannes by storm with her 2021 auto(mobile)-erotic body horror Titane and made waves with her debut feature Raw, about a teenage cannibal, in 2016.

It's much lighter on the body horror than Titane, which confronts the viewer with a graphic brain surgery scene right off the bat, but stays firmly rooted in the messy, upsetting, tender family dynamics that underpin her previous movie's otherwise outlandish, controversial plot points (car sex, anyone?). That being said, Alpha does open with an unflinching close-up of its titular 13-year-old protagonist (Mélissa Boros), blackout drunk and getting a tattoo at a house party using an unsanitary needle. The camera painstakingly follows the needle's movements in her skin, but that's the last time a squeamish viewer may have to avert their eyes.

When Alpha arrives home, she's in big trouble, but not for the reason you might think. Her single mother (Golshifteh Farahani), who's a doctor, is seized by panic when she spots the bloodied marks on Alpha's arm because a mysterious bloodborne virus is in the midst of pushing the French healthcare system to breaking point. Although it's not immediately obvious if a person has the virus, once contracted, their skin slowly begins to turn into a marble-like stone. As Alpha, who seemingly doesn't realize her tattoo could have gotten her sick, anxiously awaits the results of the blood test that will tell her if she's negative or positive, her life is further turned upside down by the arrival of her estranged uncle, Amin (Tahar Rahim). A heroin addict, Amin has had the virus since Alpha was a small child.

Fear spreads faster than disease

Just as she did with Raw's Garance Marillier and Titane's Agathe Rousselle, Ducournau nurtures a standout performance from her lead actor, newcomer Boros, who skilfully embodies the contradictions of a confused, complicated teenage girl: Alpha may smoke cigarettes and fool around with boys, but she's still just a kid who solemnly meows when her mother asks her to "do the cat" to get her to round her back for a medical examination.

Other than Alpha, the other patients we meet in the film are drug addicts and gay men: at first glance, the unnamed disease feels like an extremely thinly veiled allegory for AIDS that frustratingly refuses to name its subject matter, but as the film unravels it becomes clear that there's much more to it than initially meets the eye.

"If I had done a movie directly about AIDS, I would obviously have treated the symptoms differently; I would have named the disease, and I probably would have done a way more historically accurate film than what this is," Ducournau said in an interview with The Skinny. "The main disease that spreads in the film is fear."

Ostracized at school by her fearful classmates, who don't understand how the virus is spread, ignorance and mistrust are rife throughout the film. More so than fear, though, Alpha is a movie about families and the harm we do to the ones we love, whether we mean to or not. To say it's about "trauma" feels overly simplistic – it's a descriptor thrown around a lot these days about everything from "elevated" horror films to Marvel TV shows about AI on Disney Plus.

Family drama

Family is a knotty thing in Alpha. For one thing, they can't understand each other, in more ways than one. There's a generational and cultural roadblock between Alpha's mother and uncle and her grandmother, which is revealed through the film's flashback timeline that explores events from eight years prior: she won't, or can't, accept her son's addiction, and would rather ignore it than give him the help he needs. In the present-day timeline, Alpha feels like an island. Kept apart from her uncle at her mother's wishes, she doesn't recognize him when he first arrives in their home and assumes he's an intruder, which leads to her feeling angry that her mother kept her in the dark and upset that the equilibrium of their two-person household has been shaken when she's at her most vulnerable. Later on, she's isolated at an Eid celebration with her extended family as she doesn't speak Berber and her grandmother can't speak French. When her mother, who acts as her interpreter, leaves the room, she panics, isolated in a room of her own flesh and blood.

The film's non-linear structure slowly peels back the layers on the damage that addiction and disease – and the family's response to these things – has wrought on Alpha, her mother, and Amin. Some of the movie's reviews have criticized its dual timeline approach as confusing and unnecessary, flitting back and forth between Alpha's current predicament and her mother's strained relationship with her brother as he tries and fails to get clean when Alpha was much younger. But trauma and memory go hand-in-hand, and Alpha's structure is key to understanding its protagonist, her family, and just what her potential diagnosis means for those around her.

AIDS allegory or not, the packed-out hospital wards and sick, marbled bodies feel secondary to Alpha – both the girl and the movie itself. They play a similar role to cars and metal in Titane: the movie wouldn't be the same without them, but they matter much less than the complicated, broken people around them.

Alpha is out now in theaters. For more on what to watch, check out the rest of our Big Screen Spotlight series.

The trailer for Saltburn director Emerald Fennell's upcoming adaptation of Emily Brontë's beloved gothic romance novel Wuthering Heights has arrived with all the visual flair and tragic romance one would expect.

Check it out:

Wuthering Heights stars Jacob Elordi as Heathcliff and Margot Robbie's Cathy, a pair of starcrossed lovers who are driven to the brink by their forbidden romance. Hong Chau, Shazad Latif, Alison Oliver, Martin Clunes, and Ewan Mitchell round out the main cast.

Here's how Warner Bros. describes the film:

"A bold and original imagining of one of the greatest love stories of all time, Emerald Fennell's Wuthering Heights stars Margot Robbie as Cathy and Jacob Elordi as Heathcliff, whose forbidden passion for one another turns from romantic to intoxicating in an epic tale of lust, love and madness."

Wuthering Heights has been adapted to the screen numerous times in both film and television, starting as far back as 1920. Further adaptations were released in 1939, 1953, 1962, 1964, 1970, 1978, 1982, 1985, 1992, 2009, and 2011. The novel also inspired several adaptations that changed the setting and circumstances of the story while maintaining the core elements of the plot.

Along with the multiple other film adaptations, Wuthering Heights also lives on in the public consciousness thanks to auteur songwriter Kate Bush's immortal song which takes its name and themes from the novel. Wuthering Heights was Bush's first single, released in 1977. The singer was directly inspired to write the song after watching the 1967 adaptation of the novel.

Director Emerald Fennel is best known for her recent cult hit Saltburn, another story of intrigue, desire, and madness set among a modern family of aristocrats whose bonds are challenged by a manipulative stranger. With that pedigree, it's easy to see why Fennell next turned her attention to Wuthering Heights, which seems like an appropriate companion piece to her previous film.

Wuthering Heights hits theaters on February 14, 2026. For more, check out our list of the most exciting upcoming movies in 2025 and beyond, or, skip right to the good stuff with our list of movie release dates.

Dwayne Johnson says he had "an out-of-body experience" listening to Christopher Nolan praise his performance in The Smashing Machine.

In early October, the legendary director sat down with filmmaker Benny Safdie to discuss the latter's new sports-drama at a Directors Guild of America screening in Los Angeles. During the event, Nolan described the movie as "incredible", before claiming it's unlikely he'll see "a better performance" than Johnson's portrayal of real-life MMA fighter Mark Kerr in 2025.

Johnson, it turns out, was in the audience – and was left floored by the Oppenheimer helmer's kind words. "It was the most inspiring thing anyone has ever said about me," the actor told Variety recently. "Once it started to sink in, I was having an out-of-body experience. I was sitting next to my wife [singer Lauren Hashian] and I grabbed her hand so hard, and she squeezed my hand back."

Despite urges from Hashian for him to "actually speak, like a human being," when he inevitably caught up with Nolan backstage, Johnson said he couldn't muster much more than a hug. "I just gave him the biggest kiss on the cheek," he explained. "All I could say was 'Thank you.' He said, 'I meant what I said. You were heartbreaking, and the best performance of the year.' Then, I gave him another hug."

Also starring Emily Blunt, The Smashing Machine follows Kerr's journey from amateur wrestler to UFC champ. As much about his life outside of the ring, it explores Kerr's struggles with painkiller addiction, as well as his tumultuous relationship with his partner, Dawn.

Despite its respectable 70% Rotten Tomatoes score, the film underwhelmed at the box office, pulling in $20.4 million at the global box office.

For more, check out our picks of the most exciting upcoming movies heading our way.

What makes a life worthy of examination on the big screen? It's a question I've found myself mulling over since watching Train Dreams, the new movie from Sing Sing duo Clint Bentley and Greg Kwedar.

Because Train Dreams' central figure, Robert Grainer, is no one special. As portrayed by Joel Edgerton (Warrior, The Great Gatsby), Grainer is a logger whose peripatetic worklife has him felling trees across the Pacific Northwest as part of the railroad's cross-country expansion in the early 20th Century. One day, Grainer meets Gladys (Felicity Jones, Rogue One), and they start a family. The Grainers have a perfectly pleasant life together, until one day they don't, and Robert is left to live out the rest of his days in contemplative solitude, only occasionally crossing paths with similarly sorrowful individuals, like Kerry Condon's forest worker Claire.

There is a Major Event in Train Dreams but, perhaps tellingly, it happens off-camera, as Grainer arrives home via train from his latest months-long stint in the wilderness. A different film would have Grainer running headfirst into danger to save his nearest and dearest, but Train Dreams is a film, in part, about how change is often beyond our control, and that life continues on regardless.

"I remember reading the script and thinking, 'Oh, Clint is going to do something really special with Train Dreams,'" says Jones, speaking to GamesRadar+ during the London Film Festival in October 2025. Noting that much of the film was shot on location in the shadow of towering pine trees in Washington State, with natural light illuminating a custom-built cabin that the Grainers call home, it's a film that has a Malickian relationship with the natural world. "I live in a very urban area, so I think I was slightly fantasizing about that – what would it be like to be in that environment, exploring the positive and the negative impacts of the life removed? It can be, at times, very isolating."

For Condon (F1: The Movie, The Banshees of Inisherin), the opportunity to explore her own relationship with the natural world through Claire proved irresistible. "I am big into nature," Condon says. "I love movies where nature is this big character, and they talk about having a respect for nature. I think those are important things for people to remember. Then the script was so beautiful to read… I knew he was going to pull it off in a beautiful way."

Out of the ordinary

What Train Dreams identifies is that the ordinary life of a turn-of-the-century logger is just as extraordinary as a typical screen hero at the center of seismic change. There's nothing special about Grainer, but that's what makes him special. He is a man who finds himself left behind by the march of progress and haunted by his past for much of the movie. It is a melancholy depiction of what a person does when they have nothing left to live for. But Grainer never gives up on life, and the uplifting final act of Grainer's story is a soaring sendoff, and one of the most moving sequences you'll see on screen this year.

An underutilized leading man, Edgerton does special work here. There is an emptiness and longing that the star conveys almost entirely through physicality, as Grainer is a man of few words at the best of times. Jones' Gladys represents something different for the film – the bright sun at its centre – but Grainer and Condon's Claire have a great deal in common. In fact, despite limited screen time, it's easy to imagine the camera wandering off and following Claire for a stretch and locating an equally rich story.

"There were a lot of similarities between me and Claire," says Condon, who rescues horses on a farm outside Seattle when she isn't acting in movies. "Her tomboyishness is quite similar to me. But her backstory is talked about in the voice-over, so that helped me understand where she was at and how to get to here."

Off the beaten track

A rare film with evocative, additive voice-over (the drawl of character actor Will Patton will be familiar if you've watched a western in the last 30 years), Train Dreams has a lyrical, meditative quality that won't be to everyone's taste. It would be somewhat generous to describe it as 'slow-paced', in fact. But succumb to its rhythms and Train Dreams is, well, a dream.

How the film will fare on streaming when it hits Netflix in a few weeks is another question – something tells me the second screen ecosystem won't be kind to a movie where a man frequently spends multiple minutes at a time staring out at the tree line in quiet reflection. But everyone involved knows they're a part of something exceptional.

"The reason that cinema is having such a great moment is that audiences are really enjoying distinctive viewpoints and quite a singular viewpoint, in some ways," says Jones, who most recently starred in another arthouse hit, The Brutalist. "This sounds really naff, but it's a palette, and you're one of the paints that they're using to put an idea into the world."

Robert Grainer may be no one special, but Train Dreams is quite the opposite.

Train Dreams is out now in theaters and streams on Netflix from November 21. For more, check out the rest of our Big Screen Spotlight series or our list of the best Netflix movies to watch right now.

A new movie is on the way based on the life of Norwegian World of Warcraft gamer Mats Steenis, better known as Ibelin, with some major stars attached.

Vendôme Pictures and Pathé have partnered up to make the feature film, titled Ibelin, which will tell the real story behind Steen, a young man battling with Duchenne muscular dystrophy who spent most of his days playing video games, and made a name for himself amongst the World of Warcraft fanbase as his alter ego, Ibelin Redmoore.

The movie has some major star power behind it, as the studios have cast The Long Walk's Charlie Plummer, Adolescence's Stephen Graham, Hereditary's Toni Collette, The Last of Us' Isabela Merced, My Old Ass' Maisy Stella, and The Silence of the Lambs' Sir Anthony Hopkins.

The Imitation Game helmer Morten Tyldum is on board to direct, with Ilaria Bernardini and Hossein Amini penning the script from Steen's blog.

As well as the official cast list, the studios shared the film's synopsis, which reads, "In the vast digital realm, Ibelin was admired by thousands for his humor, kindness, and courage. Behind the screen, Mats was just the same, except for one thing: he lived with a degenerative muscular disease that slowly took away his body, but never his spirit. At home, his loving, funny, slightly chaotic family feared he was withdrawing from the world."

"But Mats proved them wrong; he wasn’t escaping life. He was redefining it. Ibelin is a celebration of life, tender, funny, and profoundly moving; a heartfelt family story intertwined with an epic adventure that explores the power of friendship and the invisible threads that connect us all."

This is not the first time that Steen's life story has been brought to the screen. In 2024, a Norwegian documentary titled The Remarkable Life of Ibelin, directed by Benjamin Ree. The documentary includes home movies from throughout Steen's life, chats from Steen's World of Warcraft guild, and excerpts from Steen's blog, Musings of Life. The film premiered at the Sundance Film Festival 2024, where it won two awards.

For more, check out the best video game movies you should be watching, and keep up with upcoming movies heading your way.

There's a sequel to The Social Network in the works, called The Social Reckoning, but Mark Zuckerberg won't be portrayed by Jesse Eisenberg. The actor declined to return for The Social Network 2, and he's now explained a little about why, and apparently it has nothing to do with the quality of the picture.

Eisenberg is doing the rounds for Now You See Me 3 at the minute, and during a stop on Today, he was asked about why he’s chosen not to be involved in The Social Reckoning. "Listen, for reasons that have nothing to do with how amazing that movie will be, really, truthfully," he explained. "When you play a character, you feel, at some point, you've grown into something else."

He calls it a "wonderful movie," and believes Aaron Sorkin, who's serving as both writer and director, is making something worthwhile. "All of the reasons that I am not in it are completely unrelated to how brilliant it will be," he finishes.

Succession mainstay Jeremy Strong is taking the baton from Eisenberg, stepping in to portray Zuckerberg this time around. He's joined by Mikey Madison, who's playing Frances Haugen, a former employee of Facebook who became a whistleblower on internal issues within the platform, and Jeremy Allen White, who’s playing Jeff Horwitz, a journalist who reports on her story.

The Social Reckoning picks up years after the first, with Facebook as a behemoth of online discourse that comes under scrutiny from the Securities and Exchanges Commission. Sorkin is expanding his duties this go around by contributing the screenplay and taking the director's chair from David Fincher, who directed The Social Network, but isn't coming back either, for unspecified reasons.

Now You See Me: Now You Don't is in theaters November 14. The Social Reckoning is due out October 9, 2026.

Keep an eye on our upcoming movies list so you don’t miss a trick, and we have a look at every upcoming superhero movie if you’d really rather just escape entirely.

God of War star Christopher Judge has reflected on working with Christopher Nolan on The Dark Knight Rises.

Judge might be best known for bringing Kratos to life in the hit video game series, but he also has a role in The Dark Knight Rises as one of Bane's henchmen.

"I did Dark Knight Rises with Christopher Nolan, who's a true genius, but he doesn’t really talk to you as an actor a lot so it's very disconcerting," Judge joked on stage at MCM London, via a press release. "Actors are fragile, they gotta be told exactly every 3.7 minutes 'you're wonderful babe, you're doing great' and Nolan doesn't do that."

Next up for Nolan is The Odyssey, his adaptation of Homer's epic poem. Matt Damon stars as Odessyeus, with Tom Holland playing his son Telemachus. The rest of the massive cast includes Jon Bernthal, Anne Hathaway, Robert Pattinson, Charlize Theron, Elliot Page, Lupita Nyong'o, Benny Safdie, and more.

"It was an incredible experience," Safdie told us recently of The Odyssey. "If I explained to you the scale of what it was and how it happened, you wouldn't even believe me. It really was remarkable to see this period of time come to life the way that it did. It was amazing."

As for Judge, he recently denied rumors that he'll be playing Kratos in live-action for Prime Video's God of War adaptation. "I am???" the actor wrote on Twitter, complete with three shrugging emojis and a heart, in response to a post saying he was in talks to play Kratos in the show.

The Odyssey arrives July 17, 2026. In the meantime, check out our guide to all the most exciting upcoming movies of this year and beyond to fill out your watchlist.

"I've heard so much about you, Mrs. Tesman," a detective admits to the eponymous character in the very first scene of Nia DaCosta's new sumptuous, feminist period drama. "Hedda is fine," she replies with a smile, though it's more of a statement than a friendly suggestion. Later in the movie, someone from her past refers to Hedda as 'Hedda Gabler', the maiden name she got from her late army-commander father, and she rejects that, too; DaCosta's protagonist isn't interested in being defined by men – and neither is the film itself.

Based on Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen's classic work, Hedda swaps Scandinavia in the 1890s for 1950s England, opening on Tessa Thompson's lead and her new husband George Tesman (Tom Bateman) as they prepare to host a housewarming party. Their mansion was a gift of sorts from academic George to Hedda; an attempt to satiate his seemingly insatiable new wife – but tonight's shindig is as much about him schmoozing his peers and securing a high-profile professorship in order to pay off its colossal mortgage as it is Hedda showcasing her lavish p̶r̶i̶s̶o̶n̶ present.

In the source material, George's shot at the teaching job is threatened by Eilert Lovborg, a former colleague of his and Hedda's ex-lover. In DaCosta's take, Eilert is not Eilert, but Eileen, whose arrival at the get-together majorly shifts focus away from George's insecurities and kicks off a fascinating exploration of female desire and ambition. "It changed everything. It challenges George in a different way; it challenges [Nicholas Pinnock's cynical Judge] Brack. It challenges the men, in the sense they have to take these three women seriously," Nina Hoss, who brings Eileen to life, tells GamesRadar+.

Break a leg (and misogynistic stereotype, while you're are it)

"We do have examples of [the female ego], but probably not enough," says Hoss's co-star Imogen Poots. "We've spent a lot of time ruminating on the male ego. Not to call [Nina's] character a narcissist, but she's sort of 'the female narcissist', or like a female version of all of these male traits. It's not necessarily artist traits or human traits. I think that there's something very, very interesting about all of that. It's still seen as such an ugly word, "ambition", which is a real problem."

For Hoss, who played Gabler on stage in Germany in 2010, shooting Hedda felt like being a part of a theater troupe. All of the actors tended to stay on set and just make sure they were out of frame, rather than going back to their individual trailers between takes. To say Hedda is a menace to Eileen throughout the movie's runtime is an understatement as she encourages the recovering alcoholic to have a drink or hides her sacred manuscript, but the vibes off-camera couldn't have been more different.

"Whenever I work with women, it's always an amazing collaboration," says Hoss. "And that doesn't mean I like one more than the other, you know? We're all human beings with flaws and preferences or whatever, but when you work together as women, there's this collaborative feeling – not pitting against each other or whatnot. What these three women feel they have to do is the sad bit but how they fight their way through and how they try to come into their own is, I hope, interesting to watch."

The invisible women

While the film doesn't dwell on its main trio's queerness much, the era in which DaCosta sets Hedda feels important to its central themes – adding depth and unspoken context to Eileen's need to prove herself as a scholar or Thea's decision to leave her husband. Following the Second World War, the UK saw a significant increase in the amount of arrests and prosecutions under the Criminal Law Amendment Act 1885, which deemed gay relationships between men illegal. By 1954, a total of 1,089 men were in prison for homosexual acts, with the average sentence being 37 years. Female sexuality was such a peripheral subject that no one could even imagine that women could be attracted to other women, too. So often in the film, Hedda operates from the shadows, listening to the fallout of her master meddling through the crack of a door or stealing a smooch in a hidden corner – and there's both a playful quality and sadness to her invisibility and the idea that she's not yet realized.

During the fateful evening in which Hedda takes place, hidden frustrations come to the fore; both internal (Hedda beating herself up over not being bold enough to choose Eileen years ago) and external (Eileen urging the "brilliant" Hedda to stop coloring within society's lines and do something more with her life than marrying well). The former, it turns out, is gunning for the same role George is – but first she plans on publishing a book on womens' sexuality with her new faithful paramour Thea (Poots).

"You can really see Thea and Eileen as different parts of Hedda," DaCosta explains. "I thought that was really interesting, because for a character that is quite opaque and doesn't let people in and doesn't understand herself, I thought having these two other women who are, in some ways, parts of Hedda psyche would illuminate her in a way that was really helpful."

Enduring enigma

Some actors may be daunted by taking on a role that could rival Shakespeare's Hamlet in terms of how many times it's been interpreted, but Thompson was excited by the challenge of bringing something new to the silverware-adorned table. "One of my favorite things about my job is the amount of research that you can do. There are historic performances of Hedda, and I just decided to watch all those and internalize them. At first, I was like, 'Oh, do I watch the Cate Blanchett? Do I see the Fiona Shaw? We just leaned in. Then Nia met Fiona Shaw and told her, 'Tessa Thompson's gonna play her.' Fiona Shaw said, 'Does she want to have coffee?' And I was like, 'Yeah, I want to have coffee. I want to have a Hedda convention'. You know? Then Nia cast the brilliant Nina Hoss, and I loved talking to her about her approach. It was just so refreshing to embrace it all rather than be intimidated by it.

"I decided not to worry too much about how to make my Hedda individual, because I knew she would be. Anytime you funnel things through your lens, it's different and Nia made so many fundamental changes to the source material that we really were making our own offering," the Marvel star explains. "As soon as I really understood that, I worried less about the pressure. No one's ever played this Hedda before; I am the first and only, and I felt so supported by Nia and our incredible cast."

The fondness and admiration is mutual. "I had a completely new experience with this, and found it very liberating. I forgot completely about what I had done [as Hedda]," Hoss recalls. "I knew this production would be so different and was its own beast from the script, but I was just so curious to see what Tessa does with it, you know? To see everyday the choices she made with the material I knew very well. She's such a strong actress, I completely forgot about it all. I always say, 'No one owns Hedda'. You can't explain her. You have to make up your own mind what her motives are and that's very personal, and why I think she will always stay fascinating."

It's quite the wonder how Hedda is still such a mysterious figure, given the amount of times she's been portrayed – by performers as notable as Ingrid Bergman and the late Maggie Smith. In DaCosta's opinion, the reason she's such an enduring, interesting character is because she's like a mirror forcing audiences to think about their own impulses and less admirable qualities. Plus, she points out, there's a dearth of "bad" women on the big screen these days. "It's so gendered, right? No one says they don't like Silence of the Lambs because Anthony Hopkins' Hannibal Lecter isn't likeable", argues Thompson. Somewhere (or some-when), Hedda is rolling her eyes and nodding.

Hedda is in theaters now, and will land on Prime Video on October 29. For more on what to watch, check out the rest of our Big Screen Spotlight series.

Nia DaCosta has "always had a yearning" to a more modernized take on Henrik Ibsen's classic play Hedda Gabler, the stars of the writer-director's new adaptation have shared. So much so, in fact, that it was like watching a dream come true while they were filming it.

From indie thriller Little Woods and superhero blockbuster The Marvels to legacy sequels Candyman and 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple, DaCosta has been behind the camera of all sorts of movies across her seven-year big screen career. With Hedda, she swaps world-building and VFX for a single location, period costumes, and a tight, tension-filled script, as Tessa Thompson's titular master meddler throws the party to end all parties (and potentially some lives, too).

Condensing Ibsen's original works into one evening, DaCosta reimagines the story in 1950s and Hedda's former lover Eilert as Eileen (Nina Hoss), which adds another layer to Hedda's new husband's professional jealousy from the source material.

"She's so intelligent. I mean, she was incredibly eloquent and smart and had obviously thought deeply about this story," Imogen Poots, who plays Eileen's lover Thea in the movie, tells GamesRadar+. "Nia takes her work incredibly seriously, and herself to some degree, but she's also got an amazing sense of humor. She's a very chilled out person and on set, she was very calm. She treated everybody incredibly well, which you would expect and hope for but isn't always the case, and just created an environment that felt really fun, which was necessary for this job.

"She was excited. She was excited to make this film because she's made bigger things but I think that she'd always had a yearning to make this with Tessa, and it's just really cool that that happened, because it's hard to make these smaller things."

"You could tell how much it meant to them, how personal it was, and then it was for us also, you know?" adds Hoss. "Nia is just very inviting and she knew what she wanted to say with this film, then she was so curious to see what we would do with it. In that sense, it really reminded me a lot of the theater work I used to do. We were all in the same room most of the time; no one wanted to leave, so we would hang out on the sofa, even if there was another scene. We just made sure we weren't in the frame. It was so wonderful to be there for each other and to experience this party together, as part of an ensemble."

According to Hoss, the whole "being together" thing was a choice. In Thompson's recollection, though, it was more of a necessity – thanks to the restrictions they had due to shooting in a listed home. Albeit it a welcome one in the end. Turns out, they weren't really allowed to "congregate anywhere", says the Marvel star, so they were often confined to a "little smelly room" where the owners usually kept their dogs. A far cry away from the lavish, champagne-fuelled event depicted onscreen...

"It meant that we spent a tremendous amount of time together," laughs Thompson. "Our whole cast basically comes from the theater, and I think there are just very different traditions in that world. When you're doing a play, you become kind of an ensemble; it's not like that on a film where people can go off into their own areas and then just come out when you shoot.

"We were making something that's very cinematic, it is not a play but it felt a bit like one. When you play a huge character like this, you're really only as strong as the actors that are supporting you and I felt so supported and so helped by this cast. It changed everything."

Hedda is in US cinemas now, and will land in UK theaters on October 24. It will be streaming on Prime Video from October 29. For more, check out our picks of the most exciting upcoming movies heading our way.

Having played Thor's pal Valkyrie in four Marvel movies, musician Bianca Taylor across Ryan Coogler's Creed trilogy, and devious Delos director Charlotte Hale in (almost) every season of sci-fi series Westworld, Tessa Thompson is well-versed in revisiting characters. Whenever she signs up to play a new one, though, she's hellbent on doing something completely different to what she's done before.

That's a trickier task, still, when you're playing someone who's been interpreted by many others before you – on both stage and screen. In her latest collaboration with writer-director Nia DaCosta, who she previously worked with on low-budget crime drama Little Woods and blockbuster sequel The Marvels, Thompson is the most recent actor to tackle Henrik Ibsen's Hedda Gabler.

"I hope not. I really try not to do that in general. I'm always trying to, like, break new ground and figure out new pathways into things," Thompson tells GamesRadar+, when we ask whether she transferred anything she's learnt playing darker characters into the role. "I think that so many of the things that you see in any character exist in all of us, it's a matter of circumstance. I believe that so many of the places that we see Hedda go exist in all of us."

While still fraught with tension (and Machiavellian scheming from its eponymous master meddler), DaCosta's take swaps 1890s Norway for 1950s England – and Hedda's male ex-lover Eilert for Nina Hoss's formidable Eileen. The result? A wilder, sexier, queerer tale that shifts focus away from Hedda's new husband George's insecurities and onto its central trio of women, in its exploration of race, societal status, and the female ego.

"I wasn't actually interested in an icy version of Hedda, I feel like I've seen a lot of them. In fact, some of my favorite Heddas, like Fiona Shaw's, are incredibly warm. If you talk to her, she thinks Hedda is, you know, not the worst person in the world," Thompson laughs. "So I don't know, I wasn't really interested in that. I was interested in a person that is capable of monstrous things – and seeing what those monstrous things cost them."

DaCosta, similarly, didn't want to make Hedda a dour drama. Yes, Hedda might encourage recovering alcoholic Eileen to have a drink or smooch another man in the shadowy corners of her and George's new manor, but there's a mischievous, lost child-like quality to her that the filmmaker felt was crucial to bring to the fore.

"I found the play quite funny. One of her first lines is her making fun of Aunt Julie's purse, or no broken umbrella… or no, her hat. Her hat. She's like, 'There's a bunch of ugly hats over there. Why do the maids keep moving things around?' And Julie's like, 'Oh, that's mine,'" she chuckles. "It's just really funny. She makes fun of George to his face in the play, and he's just like, 'What's going on?' I just loved how fun she is and I think that's part of what makes her so vital as well, is that you actually love watching her. You love spending time with her, even when you're, like, covering your eyes. And because it's a party, you just ratchet some of that up."

Hedda releases in select US cinemas on October 22, before landing in UK theaters on October 24. It will be streaming on Prime Video from October 29. For more, check out our picks of the most exciting upcoming movies heading our way.

The Mastermind may be billed as a heist movie, but that categorization does the movie a disservice. If anything, director Kelly Reichardt's latest is an anti-heist movie, with the heist being almost entirely beside the point: instead, she invites us into a historical moment not so dissimilar from our own to wonder just what the purpose of art is in times of upheaval. A rush of tension in the first 30 minutes or so quickly dissipates, and we're left to chew on the anticlimactic aftermath for the rest of the runtime. You'll either find it frustrating or brilliant.

Josh O'Connor, who's pulling double duty on the film festival circuit at the moment for The Mastermind and new Knives Out movie Wake Up Dead Man, stars as James "JB" Mooney, a man who's swapped a fledgling career in academia for a life as America's most useless househusband. Unlike his art thief character Arthur in last year's La Chimera, JB isn't motivated by love or beauty, though – it's ego and greed, and instead of tragedy we get subtly deadpan comedy in another standout turn from O'Connor.

Set in the early '70s against the backdrop of anti-Vietnam War protests, there's an overwhelming feeling of powerlessness in the air. It's in this climate that JB, listless, bored, and broke (and thoroughly uninterested in his wife and two young sons), decides to steal four paintings by abstract modernist Arthur Dove from his local suburban Massachusetts art gallery.

Not according to plan

JB isn't going to steal the paintings himself, of course: he's the titular "mastermind" behind the scheme (heavy emphasis on the inverted commas). I don't think it's too much of a spoiler to say that nothing really goes to plan for JB, and the rest of the film is concerned with the aftermath of the heist, a slow, ambling unravelling that takes JB across the country but no further away from his problems.

Reichardt has long been interested in people who turn to the wrong side of the law and their reasons for doing it: First Cow saw two men in 19th Century Oregon start a business using stolen milk, Night Moves follows radical environmentalists in the aftermath of a risky protest, and in Certain Women, Laura Dern plays a lawyer whose client, disabled by a workplace injury, takes a security guard hostage at his former company. With The Mastermind's JB, she's delving into perhaps her least sympathetic protagonist yet.

A vaguely mischievous jazz score idles away in the background of the film, always on the verge of something but never quite getting to its climax – a bit like JB and his grand plans. One scene, which has been the subject of a few bemused Tweets and Letterboxd reviews, sees JB painstakingly hide the paintings in a barn loft, taking each one carefully up a precariously balanced ladder. "Not even joking there’s a scene where the guy is climbing a fucking ladder for 10 minutes I can’t stress this enough do not go see this movie unless you are in need of a solid nap," one disgruntled viewer wrote on Twitter. JB goes to great lengths, not just in that moment, but throughout the film, but to what end? It's a quietly confronting scene that's a microcosm of the rest of the movie, one that almost teasingly asks us: what's the point?

This woman's work

Another criticism of the movie I've seen online claims that Alana Haim is "underused" or "wasted" as JB's long-suffering wife Terri, which again strikes me as missing the point. JB isn't particularly interested in her, so she remains on the movie's periphery. We don't even see her face in the movie's extended opening sequence, really, because JB is too focused on the gallery's Dove paintings rather than his family, who he's visited the museum with.

Gabby Hoffman's Maud, the wife of a friend JB visits later in the film, is afforded a similar level of regard: the men in The Mastermind don't have much to say to the women in their lives unless they want something from them, and the women just have to get on with it, for the most part. All of this just goes to paint an even more unflattering image of JB, a character we are not particularly meant to empathize with.

The movie's final shot, which I won't spoil, is particularly farcical. In the moment, it's ironically comical, but I found the closing image stuck in my head even after I left the theater (as the endings of Reichardt's movies are wont to do). Drawing particular attention to the futility of JB's ambitions and his impotency in the face of both his own circumstances and society at large, Reichardt seems to be wondering what the point of doing any of this is as the world falls apart.

The Mastermind doesn't signpost us to any particularly straightforward answers on that front, and it may well be saying that there's no point at all, but that doesn't mean it's not a question worth asking.

The Mastermind is out now in US theaters and arrives in UK cinemas on October 24. For more on what to watch, check out the rest of our Big Screen Spotlight series.

Dwanye 'The Rock' Johnson's new A24 movie The Smashing Machine may not have had a successful theatrical release, but the sports biopic has earned a rave review from none other than Oppenheimer director Christopher Nolan.

"It’s heartbreaking. I think it’s an incredible performance. I don’t think you’ll see a better performance this year," said Nolan of Johnson's portrayal of MMA fighter Mark Kerr, whilst speaking with director Benny Safdie in the most recent episode of The Directors Guild of America's The Director's Cut podcast.

This is big praise coming from the king of epics, especially considering we have seen other actors shine bright this year, such as Leonardo DiCaprio in Paul Thomas Anderson's new and widely celebrated political thriller, One Battle After Another.

The Smashing Machine stars Johnson as two-time UFC Heavyweight Tournament Champion Mark Kerr, who shot to stardom in the MMA world but faced struggles with drug addiction, relationships, and fame whilst at the top. The biopic is written and directed by one half of Uncut Gems' directing duo, Benny Safdie, and also stars Emily Blunt as Kerr's girlfriend, Dawn.

However, despite A24's 2023 wrestling biopic The Iron Claw managing to draw moviegoers to theaters and earn its budget back three times over, The Smashing Machine has so far failed to draw up much buzz in the cinema. The movie has so far earned $13,865,177 worldwide, according to Box Office Mojo, despite debuting to positive critical response and a respectable 71% on Rotten Tomatoes.

The Smashing Machine had an estimated budget of $50 million, meaning that Johnson's best performance may just turn out to be his biggest box office blunder. With its opening weekend ringing in just $5.9 million, the movie has already marked the star's lowest opening ever. However, the movie is not yet available on digital and is still in selected cinemas, meaning Nolan's comments may just drive a second wave of film buffs to the big screen.

The Smashing Maine is out in theaters now. For more on what to watch, check out our guide to the rest of this year's best upcoming movies.

Dwayne Johnson has addressed his new movie The Smashing Machine's disappointing box office debut in a social media post that praises the film and its director, Benny Safdie.

"From deep in my grateful bones, thank you to everyone who has watched 'The Smashing Machine,'" Johnson wrote on Instagram. "In our storytelling world, you can't control box office results – but what I realized you can control is your performance, and your commitment to completely disappear and go elsewhere. And I will always run to that opportunity."

The Smashing Machine made $5.9 million at the domestic box office in its opening weekend after hitting theaters on October 3, a career-worst for Johnson. The movie had a budget of $50 million. By contrast, his last big-screen outing, Disney's Moana 2, debuted to $139.8 million and went on to become the third-highest-grossing movie of 2024.

"It was my honor to transform in this role for my director Benny Safdie. Thank you, brother, for believing in me," Johnson continued. "Truth is this film has changed my life. With deep gratitude, respect and radical empathy, dj."

In the movie, Johnson plays real-life wrestler and MMA fighter Mark Kerr, and he stars alongside Emily Blunt as Kerr's girlfriend Dawn Staples. The Smashing Machine is the solo directorial debut of Safdie, who's best known for helming movies like Uncut Gems with his brother Josh.

"This really was a sort of leap into the unknown, for he and I," Blunt recently told GamesRadar+. "We've been trying to find something to do together again since Jungle Cruise, and I was hoping it could be something that would be very different, but this was the polarized end of what we had done together before."

The Smashing Machine is out now in theaters. For more on what to watch, check out our guide to the rest of this year's best upcoming movies.

Dwayne Johnson's The Smashing Machine was the third highest-grossing movie last weekend, but that's not really good news. The sports drama directed by Benny Safdie collected only $6 million during its release weekend, which now feels quite far from the reported $50 million A24 spent to produce it (via Variety).

These underwhelming box office results come with an unwanted record for The Rock – it's the actor's lowest-grossing film of his entire career.

Despite underperforming with viewers, The Smashing Machine has been a success with critics since premiering at the Venice Film Festival, where Safdie won the Silver Lion for his directing work. The biopic has a 73% approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes from over 200 reviews, most of them praising Johnson's performance and predicting he will get an Oscar nomination next year.

The film sees Johnson transform into MMA fighter Mark Kerr, and explores what happens when the fighter faces loss and the psychological ramifications of such a blow. Emily Blunt plays Kerr's wife, Dawn Staples.

Elsewhere in the box office, Taylor Swift proved once again that she's a force to be reckoned with in any medium. Her "cinematic experience" titled The Official Release Party of a Showgirl, a companion piece for her new album, landed second with $33 million in the US, and $46 million globally. Not quite the record-breaking numbers of The Eras Tour, but still a monumental result for the artist.

The Smashing Machine also battled (and lost) against One Battle After Another, which stayed strong in its second weekend at the box office. It's officially the highest-grossing film of filmmaker Paul Thomas Anderson's career, passing There Will Be Blood.

The Smashing Machine is now out in cinemas. For more, check out our list of the most exciting upcoming movies heading your way for the rest of the year.

Emily Blunt has teased her co-star Dwayne Johnson's role in Martin Scorsese's next, currently untitled movie – and she says it's a "terribly exciting role" for the actor, whose choice of acting projects has taken a turn for the dramatic recently.

"We're developing it right now. It's a really astonishing story," Blunt told Deadline. "It's the last great American mob story, and I can't believe it hasn't been told yet. It's a terribly exciting role for [Johnson] to kind of dig into. So, it's being written, we're working on it. And that's the wonderful part, is building it."

Johnson and Blunt (who are currently co-starring in The Smashing Machine, a biopic of wrestler and MMA fighter Mark Kerr, and previously worked together on 2021's Jungle Cruise) will be joined by frequent Scorsese collaborator Leonardo DiCaprio in the film.

When Johnson's casting was first announced, Deadline described the character as "Robert De Niro's Jimmy the Gent character from Goodfellas, but as a ruthless Hawaiian crime boss, based on a real figure, who battled encroaching rivals for control of organized crime in Hawaii." The movie is reportedly set during a "turbulent time" on the island of paradise when "an aspiring mob boss battled rival crime factions to wrest control of the underworld of the Hawaiian islands."

Journalist Nick Bilton is writing the screenplay for the film, which will be Scorsese's first movie since 2023's Killers of the Flower Moon. Starring DiCaprio, Lily Gladstone, and Robert De Niro, Killers of the Flower Moon is set in Oklahoma in the '20s and follows the brutal murder of the Osage people over local oil supplies.

Scorsese's next movie doesn't have a release date yet. While we wait for more updates, check out our guide to the best upcoming movies still to come in 2025.

Andor showrunner Tony Gilroy is prepping a new film titled Behemoth! which will star Fantastic Four Reed Richards actor Pedro Pascal. It seems the film may be adding another Marvel actor in David Harbour, who is reportedly in talks to join Behemoth! as reported by Deadline.

Harbour plays Red Guardian in the MCU, co-starring in the recent Thunderbolts*/New Avengers movie. He's also well known for his Emmy-nominated performance as Jim Hopper in Stranger Things, which will wrap with a final season premiering on January 1, 2026.

The plot of Behemoth! is still under wraps, though it apparently focuses on a cellist. It's even unclear exactly what genre the film might fall under, with its enigmatic title lending itself to multiple potential interpretations.

As for Behemoth!, writer/director Tony Gilroy has become a fan-favorite filmmaker thanks to his recent role as showrunner of popular Star Wars streaming show Andor.

Andor focuses on the political and social ramifications of the war between the Rebel Alliance and the Galactic Empire that forms the backbone of much of the Star Wars mythos. The show has been nominated for multiple Primetime Emmy awards, and won a Peabody Award for entertainment.

Prior to that, Gilroy was the screenwriter on The Bourne Identity and its first two sequels. He also wrote and directed the George Clooney-starring film Michael Clayton, which earned him Academy Award nominations for both Best Director and Best Original Screenplay.

Behemoth! is set to start filming in Los Angeles this fall, though no release date for the film has been announced yet. While we wait for more info, you can dig into our picks for the best drama movies of all time.

Benny Safdie says his work as director of The Smashing Machine benefitted from his wildly successful second career as an actor, following recent performances in the likes of Oppenheimer and Licorice Pizza.

Safdie is best-known as the co-director of the exceedingly tense drama-thrillers Uncut Gems and Good Time, as well as being the sole director of The Smashing Machine – an unconventional sports biopic which stars Dwayne Johnson as early UFC champ Mark Kerr. But the filmmaker also has a burgeoning career in front of the camera, having appeared in movies for the likes of Christopher Nolan, Paul Thomas Anderson and Claire Denis – work that informed his approach to directing his latest movie.

"There's certain things that happen, then I think, 'Oh, wow, that made me do better,'" Safdie explains, speaking to GamesRadar+ about his experiences acting for legendary filmmakers between directing duties. "There was one time where Chris [Nolan] came up to me and he was like, 'I have to take away one of your lines.' And he was very serious about it. From a director's point of view, I'm like, 'Do what you gotta do! Fine!' Then I realized, 'Oh, wait a second, this is a big deal,' He's approaching it with this level of care."

As well as appearing as the traitorous Edward Teller in Oppenheimer – where he memorably shares the screen with Smashing Machine star Emily Blunt – Safdie also acts in One Battle After Another director Paul Thomas Anderson's 2021 movie Licorice Pizza, where he plays a politician running for the mayor of Los Angeles. The collaboration with Anderson proved equally informative. "Paul would say something to me like, 'I don't know if we could do much better than that.' But I could hear that there was a little something. A competitive nature, playing into our relationship. I'm like, 'Oh, you know what, let's go!'"

These differing experiences in front of the camera fed into Safdie's approach to directing the intense confrontations between Johnson's Kerr and Blunt's Dawn on The Smashing Machine. "I know that being on that side is a very vulnerable place to be," Safdie says. "And you have to make decisions and you don't know if it's going to work, and you want somebody to say you did okay. Having had those feelings I thought 'Okay, how can I lessen that and just make it feel as if there's no pressure?'"

For Blunt, having a director with acting experience made all the difference. "I have to say, the most loving directors I've worked with have been actors," Blunt notes. "Because they understand the vulnerability. You [Benny] and John [Krasinski] are very similar. I felt that with John on the Quiet Place movies, that as soon as they call cut, he's in, he's saying 'Woo!' and it helps you, because it's that awful pause where you're waiting. 'Did I do okay?' And it is vulnerable, and as many years as you've been around the block, I still get scared."

The Smashing Machine opens in theaters on October 3. For more, check out our list of the most exciting upcoming movies heading your way for the rest of the year.