This tonally uncertain revival mixes folk horror and little-England satire as an island lad seeks help for his sick mum on the undead-infested mainland

Here they are again, Danny Boyle and Alex Garland’s zombies – though unlike the usual stumbling slow-movers, of course, these things can sprint like Tom Cruise on steroids. Back in 2002, screenwriter Garland and director Boyle had a monster hit with their post-apocalyptic horror thriller 28 Days Later, about a “rage� virus that leaks from a lab and, turning people into aggressive zombies, causes a complete law-and-order breakdown in 28 days; Boyle famously made smart use of then-new lightweight digital tech which let him bring off miracles of unlicensed guerrilla shooting at dawn in the deserted London streets.

That was fierce, muscular film-making, though I have never been a fan of zombies whose massed presence (then as now) requires silly, gurning, ketchup-strewn extras who can’t be clearly looked at for any length of time without laughing. (For my money it was only Edgar Wright’s zombie horror comedy Shaun of the Dead, which came out two years afterwards, which fully explored the real, intimate horror of zombie-ism: the gap between being bitten and transforming.) In 2007, a lacklustre sequel, 28 Weeks Later, brought the franchise stumbling to a halt.

Known as Sam the Wheels, he filmed aspects of community life in south London, including Brixton riots of 1981

Clovis Salmon, regarded as the first black documentary film-maker in the UK, has died at the age of 98.

His family said he died at King’s College hospital in Camberwell on Wednesday morning.

The hotly anticipated music drama stars The Bear’s Jeremy Allen White as the rocker with Jeremy Strong and Stephen Graham also starring

The trailer for Bruce Springsteen biopic Deliver Me from Nowhere has offered the first real look at Jeremy Allen White in the lead role.

The award-winning star of The Bear plays the musician as he puts together his sixth album Nebraska in the early 1980s. The film, from the Crazy Heart director Scott Cooper, is based on Warren Zanes’ 2023 book.

Media mogul faces allegations of creating ‘coercive, sexually exploitative dynamic’ in lawsuit seeking $260m in damages

Tyler Perry has been accused of sexual harassment, workplace gender violence and sexual assault in a lawsuit from an actor who said the media mogul used his influence and power to create a “coercive, sexually exploitative dynamic�.

In the suit filed in Los Angeles last week and first reported on Tuesday, Derek Dixon, who worked on Tyler Perry’s shows Ruthless and The Oval, said Perry promised career advancement but subjected him to “escalating sexual harassment, assault and battery�. Dixon alleges he was subjected to harassment and abuse by Perry while he “held direct control over his employment, compensation, and creative opportunities� and that he faced retaliation when he did not respond favorably to his advances.

The Mission: Impossible actor and country singing multi-hyphenate will be honoured alongside actor Debbie Allen and production designer Wynn Thomas

Tom Cruise and Dolly Parton will be among this year’s recipients of honorary Oscars.

The pair join choreographer, actor and director Debbie Allen and production designer Wynn Thomas, all scheduled to receive special Oscars at this year’s governors awards in November.

In this powerful documentary, six former inmates revisit their old cells to reflect on the childhood trauma and domestic abuse that led them to prison

You can be told the statistics: 30% of women in prison spent time in care as children, and 70% have been the victim of domestic abuse. But what this powerful documentary from Sophie Compton and Daisy-May Hudson (the latter of whom is the director of just-released film Lollipop) does is to demonstrate the cruelty and injustice of a system that incarcerates the vulnerable.

Shot in 2021, it follows six women returning to HMP Holloway in London before demolition began a year later. In the first scenes, they walk back into the prison, some into their old cells. The building is abandoned, ivy creeps up through the floorboards, but it’s still Holloway: “Fuck, I remember this smell,� says one. During a week-long workshop the women – brave and unfailingly articulate – share their stories. All of them experienced trauma in childhood, most masked it with drugs or alcohol, or unhealthy relationships. Of the six, two are now charity CEOs: Aliyah Ali and Mandy Ogunmokun, who both work to support disadvantaged women. The poet Lady Unchained is also in the group.

Spielbergian twists and an aggressive, deal-oriented alien are among the familiar beats of the Inside Out animator’s latest, about a lonely boy who finds friendship in space

There are some sweet retro-Spielbergian thrills in Pixar’s amiable new family animation, whose release was delayed a year due to the strikes; it also has some touches of Douglas Adams as well as John Lasseter’s Toy Stories. There are co-director credits for Pixar stalwarts Adrian Molina (who was the co-director and co-screenwriter of Coco) and feature first-timer Madeline Sharafian, and Pixar will be hoping for a handsome return here to match the success of its recent box office champ Inside Out 2.

Elio may well indeed do the business. It has charm, likability and that potent ingredient: childhood loneliness and vulnerability. Its opening act is set aboard a military base where an ambitious young officer has postponed or even abandoned her dream of being astronaut to look after her orphaned nephew. But once the film leaves planet Earth and its recognisably real, lump-in-the-throat emotional world and inhabits the goofy multi-voiced arena of space aliens, it loses, for me, a little (though not all) of its charge. There is occasionally something a little formulaic, a bit programmatic and … well … which two letters of the alphabet sum it up?

Based on the true story of the brutal murder of a teenage shepherd, Lotfi Achour’s sombre film honestly attempts to encompass the unbearable grief suffered by the family

A low cloud of misery and horror settles on this sombre movie from Tunisian writer-director Lotfi Achour, inspired by a brutal event in his country from 2015. A teenage shepherd called Mabrouk Soltani was murdered and beheaded on Mount Mghila in central Tunisia by members of Jund al-Khilafah (“soldiers of the caliphate�), the Tunisian branch of Islamic State, which habitually hides out in that remote, rugged region. They videoed their grotesque homicide, claiming the boy was an army spy, and ordered his terrified 14-year-old cousin, who was with him, to carry the severed head back to his village as a brutal “message� – and this boy obeyed, in a stricken state of trauma that can only be guessed at. This horrifying event was to assume the status of national scandal in Tunisia two years later when the victim’s elder brother was also murdered by IS in the same place and on the same pretext. (Four jihadis were convicted in 2019 and another 45 in absentia.)

Achour’s film centres on the first event while anticipating the second. Achraf (Ali Helali) goes up the mountain with his older cousin Nizar (Yassine Samouni), who brings his goats because it is the only place with water for the herd to drink – and because it is beautiful. The nightmarish attack ensues and the village goes into deep shock. The head is kept in a refrigerator and, despite the obvious danger of another attack, Nizar’s brother grimly resolves to lead a party of volunteers, including Achraf, back up into the mountain to recover the rest of the body so Nizar can be given a proper burial. All the while the heartless and prurient press gather at his home.

Michael Haneke’s masterpiece: a compelling politico-psychological essay about the denial and guilt mixed into the foundations of western prosperity

A stiletto-stab of fear is what Michael Haneke's icily brilliant new film delivers - not scary-movie pseudo-fear, but real fear: intimately horrible, scalp-prickling fear. It is a stalker-nightmare with a shiver of the uncanny and a double-meaning in the title: hidden cameras and hidden guilt. A famous Parisian TV presenter receives menacing, mysterious "surveillance videos" at his home, showing scenes from his private life. How on earth has the stalker filmed these? There is no dramatic musical score, none of the traditional shocks or excitements, just an IV-drip-drip-drip of disquiet leading finally to a convulsion of horror.

Hidden is partly a parable for France's repressed memory of la nuit noire, the night of October 17 1961, when hundreds of Algerian demonstrators in Paris were beaten and killed by the police. As such, it is a cousin to events just 11 years later, dramatised by Steven Spielberg in Munich but utterly without Spielberg's need to find resolution and common ground. Hidden is incomparably darker and harder. It is about the prosperous west's fear and hatred of the Muslim world and those angry pauperised masses once under our colonial control, and over whose heads a new imperium is being negotiated in the Middle East and beyond. Haneke is often described as the "conscience" of European cinema: but he is more a Cassandra, announcing a coming catastrophe and fervently imagining its provocation, acting out the cataclysm's tinder-spark. Haneke's vision is as cold and unforgiving as the surface of Pluto.

Producer-director Frank Mannion follows his cordial guide to champagne with a cheerful celebration of beloved tipples of Irish origin

The always likable figure of Irish producer and film-maker Frank Mannion has, in the past, given us a cordial guide to champagne, a slightly more chaotic essay on Britishness, and its counterpart on Irishness. Now, in his cheerfully celebratory and slightly corporate-promo way, he has made a film about Irish viticulture and drink in general, which means not simply wineries, breweries and distilleries actually in Ireland, but also abroad: this is about drinks producers with an Irish background, such as Hennessy brandy, which has an obvious Irish ancestry.

It’s what this film calls “an Irish drink in a French terroir� – or, in fact, a terroir anywhere in the world, meaning places in Europe, the US and occasionally Australia and New Zealand. The film even jauntily insists that Ireland invented whiskey before Scotland. Prince Albert II of Monaco is interviewed about his love of Irish viticulture and the importance of his mother, Grace Kelly, one of the Kellys of County Mayo. The chief interviewee, however, is the amiable Oz Clarke, himself of Irish heritage, who beamingly descants on how great Irish wine is.

A buff, bloodthirsty mouse-man terrorises Mexican teens in the latest horror schlock made from newly expired copyright

It seems “public domain horror movies� are now a proper thing: a cinematic subgenre of gory, uber-schlocky fearmongering that revolves around a well-known intellectual property, usually from the realm of children’s entertainment, whose copyright has expired. That means the makers are free to turn a beloved character into a murderous man-beast psychopath, with the Winnie-the-Pooh derived Blood and Honey franchise a prime example.

Meanwhile, the moment black-and-white cartoon Steamboat Willie, the 1928 debut of Mickey Mouse, entered the public domain, almost half a dozen Mickey-themed slasher pics were born, like spores released from a fruiting body. In a very low-bar environment, I Heart Willie is perhaps a tick better than previous public domain horrors, or maybe we have reached the film critic’s equivalent of Stockholm syndrome, with our defences worn down by shoddy production values, originality deficits and lame performances.

In this moving and funny documentary, Swedish TV presenters Filip Hammar and Fredrik Wikingsson try to rekindle Filip’s father’s zest for life on a road trip to France

‘Do you want to rot away in an old armchair?� asks Filip Hammar, a Swedish TV presenter, talking to his dad. In this charming, often hilarious documentary, Hammar takes 80-year-old Lars on a road trip to the south of France; the idea is to rekindle Lars’s spark, shake a bit of life back into him. Since retiring as a French teacher, Lars has been sitting around at home, steadily more depressed and frail. Hammar wants to show his dad that life is worth living. But as you’d expect from a documentary this heart-warming, Hammar has a lesson or two to learn himself.

For the trip, Hammar has bought a knackered old Renault 4, the same car the family had when he was a kid. Their destination is the apartment they rented every summer holiday (judging from the old photos, this was pre-factor 50 sunscreen; everyone was a livid shade of lobster). Father and son are joined by Hammar’s best mate Fredrik Wikingsson, another TV presenter. The two are a fixture on Swedish telly; like Ant and Dec they come as a pair, Filip och Fredrik. Their easy, lived-in banter jollies everything along.

Foo has to rescue his family from some very, very bad guys in this formulaic and fun-lacking man-on-a-mission thriller

Our hero just wants a quiet life, but when terrorists committing a bank robbery take his wife and child hostage, Michael has no choice but to go up against the lot of them – battling both the bad guys and the incompetent good guys who can’t handle the situation. Sounds a lot like Die Hard, right? Yippee ki-yay, knock-off merchants. Jon Foo plays a down-to-earth ex-special forces soldier whose day watching cartoons on the sofa is ruined when the villainous Cooper (Clayton Norcross) marches his goons into a downtown bank and rounds everyone up, including Michael’s incredibly annoying wife and child. (In fact they are so irritating that you may find yourself wondering uncharitably if Michael shouldn’t just let the baddies get on with their day in peace.) Cue a man on a mission movie with a couple of twists but very few actual surprises up its sleeve.

The acting and script is, to put it kindly, uneven. The problem with ripping off Die Hard is that it’s not that easy: the underlying formula may be simple, but if you cut all of the action scenes out of Die Hard, you would still have an entertaining film. If you cut out all the action scenes from Last Resort, you would have an unholy mess. Moreover, the dialogue feels Trumpian, in the sense that it feels as if they are making it up as they go along. (Here’s a verbatim quote from the shouty lead villain: “Your daddy murders people! He kills them in cold blood! He cuts their feet! He cuts their hands! He tortures them! Oh no, he’s not so nice. He’s bad! He’s very, very bad! He’s bad!�)

Drag is a tool of self-expression and of protest in this kaleidoscopic portrait of the city’s vibrant underground art

The queer defiance of Fil Ieropoulos’s kaleidoscopic documentary manifests not only through its subject, but also through its form. Centring on a group of drag performers and gender-nonconforming artists in Athens, this shape-shifting film celebrates a vibrant underground scene that thrives in a homophobic system, rife with state-sanctioned discrimination and violence. Introduced through an episodic structure, figures from the community light up the screen with their artistry and activism as they carve out a safe haven of their own.

In each of the vignettes, we get a glimpse of both the joy and the peril of navigating the city as a queer person. Decked out in extravagant costumes and makeup inspired by Leigh Bowery, Kangela Tromokratisch struts in towering high heels, while her drag performances, with their vaudevillian feel, parody heteronormative ideals of motherhood and marriage. Equally irreverent is Aurora Paola Morado, who weaves her Albanian heritage into her act as she takes aim at xenophobia in Greek society. For them and other artists featured in the film, drag is both a form of self-expression and a tool of protest.

Sympathetic docu-biography centres on the conceptual artist deemed ‘too shocking for punk’ who inadvertently spawned the industrial music genre

Genesis P-Orridge was the performance artist, shaman and lead singer of Throbbing Gristle who was born as Neil Megson in Manchester in 1950, but from the 90s lived in the US. P-Orridge challenged gender identity but it is clear from the interviewees that there were no wrong answers when it came to pronouns: “he�, “she� and “they� are all used. This is a sympathetic and amiable official docu-biography in which the subject comes across as a mix of Aleister Crowley, Charles Manson and Screaming Lord Sutch. The “P-Orridge� surname makes me suspect that Spike Milligan might have been an indirect influence, although there’s also a bit of Klaus Kinski in there as well.

Genesis P-Orridge, known to friends and family as Gen, started as a radical conceptual artist, rule-breaker, consciousness-expander and tabloid-baiter who with Throbbing Gristle influentially coined the term “industrial music�, a term later to be borrowed without acknowledgment by many. They were, in the words of Janet Street-Porter, shown here in archive footage, “too shocking for punk�. P-Orridge formed a new band, Psychic TV, in the 1980s, and then also formed a group of likeminded occultist provocateurs called Thee Temple ov Psychick Youth. (The film tactfully passes over how very annoying that spelling is.)

What begins as a portrait of Argentinian art collective Mondongo snowballs into Mariano Llinás’s infuriatingly brilliant farrago of colour, conflict and existential crisis

About as inside-baseball for visual arts as you can get, Mariano Llinás’s three-part portrait of Argentinian art collective Mondongo is knackering, infuriating and, infuriatingly, often brilliant – especially in its more sincere second instalment. The film nominally tries to document Mondongo’s 2021 Baptistery of Colours project, in which the artists catalogued the chromatic spectrum with plasticine blocks inside a dodecahedron chapel. But it quickly snowballs into Llinás’s own scattershot inquiry into colour and portraiture, a tone poem that ceaselessly interrogates its own tones, a crisis of faith about representation, and – as he falls out with artists Juliana Laffitte and Manuel Mendanha – a droll depiction of a director’s nervous breakdown.

As Laffitte lets fly at him at one point, Llinás can never resist the urge to interrupt with his latest brainwave. By quoting one critic referencing his previous 13-hour portmanteau from 2018, the director pre-empts any criticism of the almost five-hour work in front of us: “You get the feeling he doesn’t know what to do next, and the solution he’s found is to autodestruct.� But this impish postmodernism quickly darkens in the Triptych’s first part, titled El Equilibrista (The Tightrope Walker); soundtracking Mondongo’s colour classification to bursts of music from Psycho and Vertigo, he seems disturbed by their quest to break down art into its constituent elements. This strand alternates with another in which an art historian attempts to document Mondongo’s process; both are constantly intercut with excerpts of Llinás’s documentary script, him revealing the canvas on which he is daubing his own strokes.

Informed by her own experiences, Daisy-May Hudson’s portrait of a woman trying to regain custody of her kids is surprisingly even-handed

Daisy-May Hudson is the British film-maker who in 2015 made a fiercely personal documentary about homelessness: her own. Half Way told the story of how she, her mum and her 13-year-old sister lost their home and then found themselves in the bureaucratic nightmare of hostels and halfway houses, and her camera showed the audience every excruciating moment. Now Hudson has developed these ideas as a fiction feature in the tradition of Ken Loach’s Ladybird Ladybird and Cathy Come Home. It’s an impassioned, humane and urgently performed drama, a vivid look at what it’s like to be reduced to screaming anguish by the system – as well as what it’s like to work for the system, and to be the brick wall getting screamed at.

Posy Sterling plays Molly, a single mother who emerges from prison expecting to be immediately reunited with her two young children. To her astonishment, she finds that her own mother (TerriAnn Cousins), in whose care she had placed her kids while she was inside, has handed them over to social services, claiming to be too stressed for this task while she was looking after her dying partner. Now Molly is homeless, initially living in a tent, unable on that basis to be awarded custody of her children, and only able to get a single person’s flat, so disqualified from getting them all over again.

A mother and her drug-abusing daughter are entangled in a far-fetched crime plot involving scary dealers and hastily disposed bodies

Brad Ingelsby, creator of TV’s Mare of Easttown, has written an enticing-looking suspense thriller which Michael Pearce directs and Ridley Scott co-produces. And with the acting A-team of Julianne Moore and Sydney Sweeney in the leads, and rock-solid support from Fiona Shaw and Domhnall Gleeson, things look promising. But Sweeney is absent from the drama for too long for the central relationship to be satisfyingly dramatised. And after an intriguing opening, the convoluted narrative doesn’t merely jump the shark but lies down and lets the shark jump over it before the pair of them charleston their way across the rolling Pennsylvanian farmland where the film is supposed to be set.

Moore plays Kate, a lonely and unhappy grieving woman who trains horses and gives riding lessons on the farm she now precariously owns. She is divorced from a testy and judgemental lawyer called Richard (Kyle MacLachlan), and the woman she subsequently married has died. She gets some companionship from her no-nonsense neighbour and pal Jessie (Shaw). But the one light in her life is her beautiful, smart but fatally spoiled daughter Claire (Sweeney), who is a screwup and drug abuser for whom Kate has lavished all her money on pointless rehab programmes.

The actor, who is in Italy for a film about the Maserati car moguls, had an official audience with the pope alongside the film’s producer

Al Pacino has become the first major celebrity to have an official audience with the newly elected pope. The actor, 85, met the pontiff at the Vatican on Monday. He is currently in Italy shooting a film about car moguls the Maserati brothers.

After the pair’s introduction, the film’s producer, Andrea Iervolino, wrote: “We are honoured to announce that this morning His Holiness Pope Leo XIV received in a private audience at the Holy See a delegation from the film Maserati: The Brothers, including Oscar winner actor Al Pacino and the film’s producer Andrea Iervolino.

The actor-writer-director, who will turn 99 this month, is set to return for an in-development follow-up to his 1987 spoof comedy

Mel Brooks is set to reprise his role as Yogurt in an already-confirmed sequel to Spaceballs.

Brooks, who turns 99 later this month, co-wrote, directed and starred in the 1987 original which spoofed the Star Wars franchise among other films.

The actor claims she was made to work 15-hour days without proper support and suffered a severe knee injury as a result of a scene where she was thrown into a wall

Kate Beckinsale is suing the producers of Canary Black, the 2024 action thriller in which she starred, over claims she suffered “severe and debilitating injuries� as a result of “unsafe conditions�.

In news first reported by Puck, Beckinsale’s legal complaint was filed anonymously in June 2024, but has now been refiled under her full name Kathrin Beckinsale.

Judge finds Lively’s accusations of sexual harassment were legally protected and therefore immune from suit

A judge on Monday dismissed Justin Baldoni’s $400m defamation claim against Blake Lively and Ryan Reynolds, after finding that Lively’s accusations of sexual harassment against Baldoni were legally protected and therefore immune from suit.

The entire lawsuit from Baldoni, the actor and director, which included claims of extortion, was dismissed by Lewis Liman, a US district judge of New York. But the ruling allows Baldoni to amend and refile some allegations regarding interference with contracts.

From coming-out fables and dancefloor make-outs to unsimulated sex and a madcap maternal quest, here is a feast of movies about LBGTQ+ lives

One detractor called it “a Shawshank Redemption for progressive millennials�. But the force of Céline Sciamma’s lesbian love story about an artist and her unwitting sitter on a remote island in 18th-century Brittany is undeniable. As is the integrity of its central dynamic, stripped of power imbalances, hierarchies – and men.

From a dark and death-haunted classic by Mike Leigh to Tom Cruise’s final highwire stunt and Timothée Chalamet’s brilliant embodiment of Dylan we rewind six months of sensational cinema – in order of their UK release date

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Adaptation of Colson Whitehead novel is an intensely moving story of two friends trapped in a racist reform school, told with piercing beauty by RaMell Ross.

From her Academy Award-winning performance in Prizzi’s Honor to the deliciously morbid Morticia Addams, we count down the Hollywood great’s top 10 turns

Wielding a Belarusian accent like a weapon, Huston joins the Wickiverse as The Director, head of the Ruska Roma syndicate, who is forced to help Wick when every assassin in Manhattan is trying to kill him. She can also be seen bullying a dancer, a taste of things to come since The Director will be back very soon, in Ballerina, the new Wick spin-off starring Ana de Armas (out on 6 June).

As The Final Reckoning hits cinemas, Guardian writers pick their favourites of the action-packed series

Mission: Impossible’s slick and sensuous surface bears no trace of the drama behind the scenes making it. During production, the screenwriters of Jurassic Park (David Koepp) and Chinatown (Robert Towne) sent in duelling script pages for director Brian De Palma and producer Tom Cruise to wrestle over. The magnificent outcome is an intense tango between the modern blockbuster and a classic film noir, circling each other warily, and beautifully, like no Mission: Impossible that would follow. De Palma’s original is a sexy wrong-man thriller, a Hitchcockian affair that comes disguised as an action-heavy corporate product (or maybe the mask is worn the other way around?). In it, Cruise’s coiled IMF agent, framed for the murder of his entire team and surrounded by slippery allies, is constantly trying to play it cool through the plot’s knotty parlor games, all while feeling the noose tightening around him. If Cruise’s career up to this point was all about often leaving his relaxed boyish middle-American charm on the surface, Mission: Impossible pushed him to try on layers – not just the latex ones – while also pulling off those incredible high-wire stunts, which would only escalate but never improve on the hair-raising tension the first time out. Radheyan Simonpillai

As Spike Lee’s neo-noir crime thriller Highest 2 Lowest debuts at Cannes film festival, we index the most ravishing Hollywood redos of all time

Jeff (Kiefer Sutherland) obsesses over the fate of his missing girlfriend in George Sluizer’s American remake of his own 1988 Franco-Dutch psychochiller. Is it as devastating as the original? Absolutely not! But Jeff Bridges has never been creepier, and at least the dumb Hollywood ending won’t give you nightmares.

One day I set myself the project of watching all of his movies, and finished about three months later. There was one film I really hated – and I wish he’d do more romcoms

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When I was growing up, I always told my parents, “Don’t expect me to become a doctor.� But in high school I really liked the TV show House and I really liked solving problems. So I never knew what else I wanted to become except for a doctor. I’ve been a practising GP for years now.

This means that, for a lot of my life, I’ve been science-focused. And I wasn’t always a film watcher. I only really started watching movies seriously when I was living in the Gold Coast and studying for my fellowship exams during Covid.

As the wrestler turned action hero turns 53, we count down his best movies – from Baywatch to Jumanji to that time he played the Tooth Fairy

Dwayne Johnson is about to violently switch gears. His next films include a Benny Safdie drama about an MMA fighter battling addiction and a true-crime drama produced by Martin Scorsese. The reason for this abrupt handbrake turn towards grownup film-making seems to be Red One; a duff Christmas action film. During its production, tales of Johnson’s backstage behaviour leaked out: the star was said to frequently be late, and would habitually hand his assistant bottles of urine rather than walk to the toilet. It was the biggest knock to The Rock since his career began. But onwards and upwards.

Sharp edges of bitter history keep jutting through Wes Anderson’s whimsical intrigues that turn international tragedy into light comedy

The Phoenician Scheme, Wes Anderson’s makebelieve treatment of the war-ravaged near east, reimagines the region as a sunlit Levantine fantasia of cypress trees, fez hats, camel-riders and kitsch hotels, all photographed with the lustre of an Ottolenghi cookbook. Meanwhile, livestreamed daily to our news feeds, the warlords of the Holy Land exhibit for us an equally spectacular dystopia of cities pummelled into sawdust, of skies scarred with scorching white phosphorus and gun-toting paragliders.

How could these images be of the same place? What does it mean that they have been produced at the same time, and that we are consuming them alongside each other?

The Sorrow and the Pity punched a hole through France’s self-excusing myths and saw something nastier, shabbier, more political and more human

• Marcel Ophuls dies aged 97

The last great voice of wartime European cinema has gone with the death of documentary film-maker Marcel Ophuls, son of director Max Ophuls; he was born in Germany, fled to France with the rise of Hitler, fled again to the US with the Nazi invasion and then returned to France after the war. He therefore had an almost ideal background for a nuanced, detached perspective on the impossibly (and enduringly) painful subject of French collaboration with the Nazis during the second world war.

This was the basis of his four-and-a-half hour masterpiece The Sorrow and the Pity from 1969, commissioned by French TV (which refused to screen it); however, it gained an Oscar nomination and its international reputation grew from there. The film was in two parts, The Collapse, about the invasion, and The Choice, about the factional splits on the subject of resistance. It was an unflinchingly tactless and powerful look at what amounted to France’s traumatised recovered memories.

Panahi has endured years of harassment from the Iranian authorities but has created a tremendous body of work; his Palme d’Or is richly deserved

• Iranian director Jafar Panahi wins Palme d’Or at Cannes for It Was Just an Accident

In the end, the Cannes Palme d’Or went to the most courageous film director in the world. It was a very satisfying grownup decision, favouring a remarkable and utterly individual film-maker: the director and democracy campaigner Jafar Panahi, an artist who unlike any other director in the Cannes competition really has suffered, taken real risks for cinema and spoken truth to power – and endured arrest and imprisonment for his pains.

He has created a rich canon of work which has told the world about Iranian society and the Iranian mind with a subtlety and depth that we are never going to get from the TV news.

In a Cannes film festival where the greatest movies were about dictatorships and political cruelty, our chief critic shares his picks for the prix

Cannes this year had a lot to live up to after last year’s award-winners, headline-grabbers and social media meltdowners Anora, The Substance and Emilia Pérez. It makes reading the signs now that bit more difficult: the bizarre event on the Croisette boulevard this year was a palm tree falling over. If it happened in a film, the metaphor would be unbearable.

Whether 2025’s Cannes movies are going to spark a new burst of overwhelming excitement remains to be seen, though this year’s vintage feels good – often excellent, although even the biggest names can get it wrong: former Palme d’Or winner Julia Ducournau presented an incoherent drama called Alpha.

The artist and author’s hit book had so much in common with her own life that even her friends forgot it wasn’t real. How did this revolutionary portrayal of midlife desire come to inspire a generation of women?

When Miranda July’s All Fours was published in May last year, it triggered what felt like both a spontaneous resistance movement and the sort of mania last experienced when the final Twilight book dropped, except this time for women in midlife rather than teenage girls. Two friends separately brought it to my house, like contraband dropped out of a biplane. Book groups hastily convened, strategically timed for when the men were out of the picture.

The story opens with a 45-year-old woman about to take a road trip, a break from her husband and child and general domestic noise. She’s intending to drive from LA to New York, but is derailed in the first half hour by a young guy, Davey, in a car hire place, to whom she is passionately attracted. The next several weeks pass in a lust so intense, so overpowering, so lusciously drawn, it’s like a cross between ayahuasca and encephalitis. The narrator is subsumed by her obsession, and disappears her normal life. The road trip is a bust from the start, but the effort of breaking the spell and going home looks, for a long time, like way too much for the narrator, and when she finally does, to borrow from Leonard Cohen (perhaps describing a similar situation), she’s somebody’s mother but nobody’s wife.

Ahead of her new film – in which she fights, dives and wrangles horses – the Oscar-winning actor discusses sunburn, age-gaps and hanging from helicopters

Julianne Moore has played some right mothers in her time. There was Amber Waves in Boogie Nights, whose pornography career and cocaine addiction costs her access to her child. Or Maude, the outre artist – “My work has been commended as being strongly vaginal� – whose determination to conceive drives much of the plot in The Big Lebowski. Moore was the infernal, domineering mother – the Piper Laurie role – in the 2013 remake of Carrie, and a lesbian cheating on her partner with the sperm donor who fathered their children in The Kids Are All Right. In May December, the most recent of the five pictures she has made with her artistic soulmate, the director Todd Haynes, she became pregnant by a 13-year-old boy, then married and raised a family with him after her release from prison. Shocking, perhaps, but then she had already played a socialite with incestuous designs on her own son (Eddie Redmayne) in Savage Grace. Imagine that lot as a Mother’s Day box set.

Her latest screen mum is in the jangling new thriller Echo Valley. She has a lot of heavy lifting to do as Kate, a morally compromised rancher whose farm is falling apart, along with her life. Some of that lifting is emotional: Kate left her husband for a woman (“I’m the one who ‘ran off with the lesbo ranch hand’,� she sighs) who then died. To add to her woes, Kate’s daughter (Sydney Sweeney), who has addiction problems, calls on her for help after accidentally throwing away $10,000 worth of drugs belonging to a dealer (Domhnall Gleeson).

The actor and musician takes your questions on devastating box office results, his love of Oliver Hardy, and his new vaudeville crooner alter ego

Your roles fluctuate wildly between the serious and silly. Does one necessitate the other? vammyp
I’ve always thought it’s all the same. You just try to be as honest as you can, and if you’re being honest in absurd circumstances then you’re in a comedy. It’s not like I try to be funny or serious – just honest. If you’re watching someone play a bad guy and there’s nothing about the performance that makes you feel for the person or understand them in a deeper way, that’s a fail to me. Because the truth of life is that at a funeral someone always cracks a joke. There’s something so rich about being able to laugh at a funeral. That is what life is to me: all those grey areas, these contradictory things.

I’m impressed and baffled by this left turn with Mister Romantic [Reilly’s vaudevillian crooner alter ego]. How did you come up with the character? Why did you pick out the songs that you did? steve__bayley

Co-directors Alex Garland and former US Navy Seal Ray Mendoza recreate a 2006 battle with almost unbearable intensity – and a dazzling ensemble cast

It’s up there with the first 23 bruising minutes of Steven Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan or Elem Klimov’s harrowing and relentless Come and See. This is film-making that doesn’t just show you the horrors of war; it forces you to taste the dust and the choking panic, smell the fear and the cordite and the tinny metallic tang of spilled blood. Warfare, by Alex Garland and Ray Mendoza, is the most forceful and unflinching depiction of combat since Edward Berger’s 2023 Oscar-winning All Quiet on the Western Front. It’s also one of the boldest and most formally daring.

There are certain conventions at play in most war movies. Among them is the unwritten rule that however blisteringly hellish the depiction of combat, there’s a mitigating audience sop in the form of a flag-waving message about the nobility of the cause. Or, at the very least, some attempt at sentimental string-pulling to knit an emotional attachment to the characters. But Warfare, a forensic, close to real-time re-enactment of a 2006 battle fought during the Iraq war, rejects all that. Co-written and co-directed by Garland and former US Navy Seal Mendoza, the film’s radically stripped-back approach gives us next to no background on the characters, a platoon of Seals, or the operation, a surveillance mission in the Iraqi city of Ramadi. Nor does it take a stance on any moral questions about the Iraq war. Instead, it focuses on evoking, with almost unbearably visceral intensity, the experiences of a group of highly trained professionals who have been hired to do a job. And they are having a really bad day at work.

Gia Coppola’s drama starring Pamela Anderson peers behind the glamour of ‘the fun capital of the world’, but sin city has long seduced film-makers from Scorsese and Soderbergh to Sean Baker and Baz Luhrmann

(There’s a reason why film-makers are routinely drawn to the glaring, garish lights of Las Vegas: in its spangliest strips, it feels more movie set than city, the kind of place it’s hard to imagine people living everyday lives 24/7. Gia Coppola’s The Last Showgirl – streaming on Mubi from 18 April – is quite rare in its focus on one such person: Shelly, a dancer in a long-running revue on the Vegas strip, now pushing 60 and at a crossroads when said revue announces its imminent closure. Short and light on plot, it’s a character study built on a poignant night-and-day contrast, as Shelly literally performs a glitzy Vegas dream that all looks a bit shabby by daylight in her modest bungalow in the desert suburbs. Pamela Anderson affectingly brings her own career baggage to the role of someone who takes her art more seriously than anyone takes her, in a film intent on stripping the city of some varnish.

It certainly gives Vegas showgirls a better name than, well, Showgirls, Paul Verhoeven’s tacky (and, despite the critical mauling it received in 1995, vastly entertaining) tale of a young dancer intent on working her way up a slippery pole – with all manner of exploitative svengalis and sharp-clawed rivals standing between her and her showgirl dream. If she saw Coppola’s film, she might not be so keen.

A cast of indie darlings and the critics’ seal of approval hasn’t saved this supervillain spin-off – but that asterisk is a sign of monumental instalments to come

There’s no such thing as a sure thing in Hollywood. Just ask Marvel Studios – once the box office equivalent of a cashpoint duct-taped to a golden goose, now resembling a busted slot machine in Skegness. Reports this week suggest that Thunderbolts*, the studio’s latest attempt to turn supervillain also-rans into marquee gold, has officially faceplanted at the box office despite strong reviews, a cast stacked with rising stars and indie darlings, and enough emotional baggage to ground a Sundance drama.

In theory, Jake Schreier’s rowdy ensemble piece had it all: Florence Pugh, David Harbour, Wyatt Russell’s jawline, a marketing campaign whispering “this isn’t your dad’s Marvel film�, and the sort of melancholic indie sheen that usually comes free with a Bon Iver soundtrack. Critics even liked it. And yet audiences, perhaps stung by a mercurial ride for the once pristine superhero studio simply couldn’t be bothered to find out what all the fuss was about. With a production and marketing tab pushing $275m (£203m), Thunderbolts* needed to soar like Iron Man. Instead, Variety suggests its $371m (£273m) global take after six weeks in multiplexes is likely to leave it some way short of the $425m (£313m) the film needs to break even by the time it slips quietly on to Disney+.

Ryan Coogler’s ambitious box office hit combines genres to come up with something wholly original and fascinatingly complex

• This article contains spoilers for Sinners

Ryan Coogler’s Sinners just notched the biggest opening weekend for an original movie since the start of the pandemic, which means the Michael B Jordan-starring, period-set vampire movie will be seen and talked about for weeks (and more) to come. Here are some absolutely spoiler-packed discussion points (seriously, multiple endings are spoiled!) for the film’s variety of layers, genres and readings.

Howard, Orlando Bloom and Nick Mohammed star in an entertaining odd-trio crime caper with turns by Sean Bean and Paddy Considine

Producer and screenwriter Colin Trevorrow has co-created this amiable, high-concept action comedy about three hapless improv actors dragooned into going into deep cover to bust a drug ring. It’s entertaining, though I think some of the cast understand comedy better and more instinctively than others. It’s set in London (though Trevorrow might originally have imagined it set in LA or New York) and the credit is shared with his longtime writing partner Derek Connolly, and also with Ben Ashenden and Alexander Owen, the funny British double act known as the Pin, who also amusingly appear as two squabbling coppers with a Mitchell and Webb energy. The director is the talented Tom Kingsley, who has a substantial TV career and with Will Sharpe got a Bafta nomination in 2012 for the dark comedy Black Pond.

Bryce Dallas Howard plays Kat, an American actor whose career is tanking and who now runs an improv workshop in London. Orlando Bloom is Marlon (as in Brando), a smoulderingly hunky method performer and wannabe star reduced to doing TV commercials, and Nick Mohammed is Hugh, a sweet, shy beta-male IT guy who gets bullied in the office and turns to Kat’s improv classes as a way of boosting his self-esteem. The lives of all three are turned upside down when hard-faced Met cop Detective Billings, played by Sean Bean, offers these cash-strapped losers £200 each to infiltrate a criminal organisation run by a narcotics kingpin played by Paddy Considine, on the grounds that career officers are too easily recognisable.