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Tchaikovsky’s ballet ‘Swan Lake’ opens with soft-lapping melodies, before building to several great crashing crescendos. And so it is with Ready or Not pair Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett’s raucously entertaining, ballet-themed gorefest. Abigail is a vampire film that pirouettes over your funny bone while sinking its teeth into your neck… over and over again. Six testy individuals stake-out a 12-year-old girl as she’s driven home from ballet practice. They drug and kidnap little Abigail (still in her tutu) and zip her into a bag during a set-piece that’ too slick to be tense. Then it’s off to the creepy isolated mansion where the rest of the film unfolds.  ‘No real names, no back stories, no grab ass,’ says Giancarlo Esposito, their de facto leader, as he welcomes the crew and hands each of them a fake name. But our watchful heroine ‘Joey’ (Melissa Barrera) is able to read the back stories on her co-conspirators: these are cocky bent cop ‘Frank’ (Dan Stevens), stern military man ‘Rickles’ (William Catlett), corrupt meathead ‘Peter’ (Kevin Durand), hacker princess ‘Sammy’ (Kathryn Newton), and walking shambles Dean, played by the late Angus Cloud (the film is dedicated to his memory). All they need to do is guard Abigail (Matilda the Musical’s Alisha Weir) for 24 hours until her father pays a ransom and they get $7 million richer. Sounds simple, right? It’s a gory horror that creates a genre we never knew we needed From there, the pace picks up and bloody-but-mysterio

Reliability was probably the last thing Guy Ritchie had in mind for his filmmaking future when he unleashed his Tarantino-riffing breakthrough Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels on the world. Yet 26 years on, his cheerfully amusing new wartime spy yarn is exactly that: a sturdy piece of entertainment that he and super-producer Jerry Bruckheimer have made with the ethos that sometimes it’s better to entertain than to shock.  If that early insolence has mellowed, the old Ritchie blueprint endures in The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare: charismatic lads having a laugh, blowing stuff up and nonchalantly dismissing calamities as ‘a spot of bother’.  The film’s wayward hero is real-life World War II spy Gus March-Phillips (Henry Cavill), who’s hired by Freddie Fox’s naval officer Ian Fleming (yes, that one). Fleming’s in his pre-James Bond phase here, working for an intelligence chief named – care to guess? – ‘M’ (Cary Elwes), on the orders of Winston Churchill (Rory Kinnear). Gus and his maverick mates (Alan Ritchson, Henry Golding, Alex Pettyfer) are assigned to an apparently impossible task: destroy a German U-boat that’s sitting ominously off a Spanish island. To help, they have fellow spy Marjorie (Baby Driver’s Eiza González) and club owner Richard (Dune’s Babs Olusanmokun), who runs the local port like his own personal Casablanca. The story is based on real wartime exploits (it’s adapted from a book by Damien Lewis subtitled ‘Churchill’s Mavericks: Plotting Hitler’s Defea

The number of films originating from Mongolia makes every​ single one feel special, as much for their glimpses of life in the East Asian republic as any story they might tell. A large subset is concerned with the nation’s most famous export, Genghis Khan. If Only I Could Hibernate follows teenager Ulzii (Battsooj Uurtsaikh), his widowed, alcholic mother (Ganchimeg Sandagdorj) and his three younger siblings as they scratch out a living in their yurt, incongruously located in the industrialised and rapidly modernising capital, Ulaanbaatar. Ulzii has a precocious talent for physics, nurtured by his kindly teacher (Batzorig Sukhbaatar). It’s a gift that might lead to a full scholarship to a good school – and a ticket out of poverty. But his reality is harsher than the Mongolian winter, where temperatures dip as low as minus 30. Instead of studying, his time is taken up with odd jobs, selling his shoes to pay for coal, collecting cardboard to feed the fire and reluctantly calling on the kindness of neighbours to help the family through. Ulzii’s pride – he is horrified when he discovers his sister selling homemade bracelets at the market – is matched only by a determination to pull his family out of poverty without following his friends into a life of crime. Bleak yet hopeful, this an astonishingly assured debut It only takes one filmmaker to put a country on the movie map, and first-timer Zoljargal Purevdash has real talent. Her 2020 short Stairs became a festival favourite, and i

Like a man granted possession of his own Time Stone, Alex Garland seems to have glimpsed all of humanity’s possible timelines, and discovered that they’re all bad. Whether it’s eco-catastrophe (Annihilation, Sunshine), the menacing side of A.I. (Ex Machina, Never Let Me Go), Big Tech doing Big Tech things (Devs), or good old-fashioned zombies (28 Days Later), the Londoner is not envisaging a future of levity and joy for us all. The often gripping but ultimately frustrating Civil War sees the Brit casting a penetrating outsider’s glance at the current political divisions in America and drawing similarly bleak conclusions. Nine filmmakers out of ten would open it by clueing in their audience with a few scene-setting title cards: the US President (Nick Offerman), now serving a Constitution-busting third term, has abolished the FBI, California and Texas have seceded and their forces are sweeping across America towards Washington. That kind of thing.  Garland is not that filmmaker. He plunges straight in, leaving you to pick up the situation as you go. It’s deliberately disorientating. What you do know is that Kirsten Dunst’s hard-bitten photojournalist, Lee, and Wagner Moura’s reporter, Joel, are aiming to get from New York to DC before the city falls to score an interview with the President. A dangerous car journey shared with Stephen McKinley Henderson’s veteran newshound and cub snapper (Priscilla’s Cailee Spaeny) is the only way to do it.  Alex Garland is not envisaging a fut

Let’s be honest, not many of us had ‘Rome-set nunsploitation’ on our movie bingo cards for the piping hot genres of 2024. But hot on the habit of Sydney Sweeney’s hit Immaculate, The First Omen, a prequel to Richard Donner’s 1976 the-Antichrist-is-a-kid classic, sends another American nun on the run through effective scaremongering scenarios in another religious retreat in Italy. It’s 1971 in the Eternal City. Servant’s Nell Tiger Free is Margaret Daino, a young sister-in-waiting, who is sent to work at an orphanage at the behest of kindly Cardinal Lawrence (Bill Nighy, redefining avuncular). In a patient opening, Margaret learns the orphanage ropes, meeting the severe Abbess (Sonia Braga, channelling Billie Whitelaw’s Mrs Baylock from the first film), going dancing with her worldly-wise roomie (Maria Caballero) and forming a bond with Carlita Skianna (Nicole Sorace), a problem kid at the orphanage who has been put in the ‘bad room’ for biting a sister and does a creepy AF line in charcoal drawings.  Director and co-screenwriter Arkasha Stevenson opens the film in the Democratic Republic of Tired Horror Clichés, kicking off with a tolling bell in a misty graveyard. Happily, this isn’t a portent of things to come. Stevenson does a sterling job of running through the scary movie playbook, creating a hinterland between the real and the imagined.  It’s horror hokum told with unswerving commitment She gives us perfect jump scares, wince-worthy Cronenbergian terrors (be warned if y

Stark social drama meets boy’s own adventure in this strikingly photographed African-set, Oscar-nominated adventure.  It’s a combination that should be very easy to get very wrong. In fact, it’s hard to think of too many filmmakers who have even tried it – at least since Vittorio De Sica’s Miracle in Milan (1951) mashed up neorealist grind and flying kids on broomsticks. But with Io Capitano, De Sica’s fellow Italian Matteo Garrone frames the sorrows and struggles of two African kids as they slog across the continent with steel and sensitivity. It’s wildly exciting in places, horrifying in others, without ever feeling exploitative of a real-world crisis that is claiming the lives of boys just like them. The title literally translates as ‘Me, the captain' – a reference to a moment of heroism on a fateful boat journey that awaits the film’s protagonist, Senegalese teenager Seydou (Seydou Sarr). There are faint echoes of Captain Phillips’ ‘I’m the captain now!’, uttered by Barkhad Abdi’s Somali pirate – although here all the pirates are on land.Seydou is what the western media would call ‘an economic migrant’. With his cousin Moussa (Moustapha Fall), he sets off from Dakar on an African odyssey that points hopefully for Italy, with dreams of a better life and money to send home, but only the vaguest notion of how he’ll achieve it. What he’s leaving behind – a horrified mum, loving siblings and a home – is a source of melancholy that lurks in the fabric of the film.  Newcomer Sey

Boy, whatever happened to that nice kid from Skins and Lion? The new Dev Patel is taking no prisoners in this slice of Mumbai mayhem, announcing himself as a filmmaker with possibly the most ferocious mainstream action movie since The Raid, and as an action star by sticking a knife into a goon’s neck. With his teeth. The John Wick movies are an obvious touchpoint for the kind of revenge mission flick the Londoner is going for – it even namechecks the Keanu Reeves movies at one point – but he applies his own lens of grimy realism to the formula and adds some real political edge. Monkey Man is a gory hero’s journey embroidered with mythical folk traditions and laced with a stark commentary on India’s corrupt cops and seedy super-rich.  It opens with an explainer: Lord Hanuman, the Hindu monkey god, is a courageous deity who is robbed of his powers, only to come back stronger than ever. That’s the arc the film charts, only with Patel’s unnamed ‘Kid’ in the role. He’s introduced wearing a monkey mask – an anonymous intro that’s an instant display of confidence, especially in a film with so few familiar faces – and being battered for measly amounts of cash in rigged back alley fights. Sharlto Copley’s sleazy impresario promises a bonus if his human punchbag spills blood. The kid is a long way from the finished killing machine he needs to be to execute his mysterious revenge mission, but he’s got smarts from the get-go, pulling off an intricate con to inveigle his way into a low-le

Nobody cares about the plot. That’s the arguably depressing but also self-aware lesson the King Kong/Godzilla franchise seems to have learned. After a number of entries that half-tried to create humans you cared about or allegories for whatever, 2021’s Godzilla Vs. Kong was primarily just a showcase for big things hitting each other and was far more entertaining than any of its predecessors. Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire has a greater number of big things and a smaller number of humans. Its brainless brawn is again pretty entertaining, until the credits roll and you can instantly forget the whole thing. Its set-up is that Kong is now living in the Hollow Earth, a parallel world full of giant monsters. He is lonely, continually hunting for others like him. When he eventually finds kin it’s no great family reunion. They’re led by an evil ape, who looks kind of like an orangutan going through an awkward teenage growth phase and is plotting to make his way to the world above. Thwarting this requires Kong to team up with Godzilla, who is gallumphing around the world looking for fights, and a few humans who fill in the bits between the CGI. That’s about as complex as it gets. There’s no human antagonist. There’s no significant development in the existing characters (Rebecca Hall as a scientist, Kaylee Hottle as her adopted daughter, and Brian Tyree Henry as the requisite comedy screamer). There’s a pleasing addition to the cast in Dan Stevens’ kaiju-handling veteran, introduced v

‘The Father. The Son. The Sydney Sweeney.’ Whoever came up with the unofficial tagline for this nunsploitation horror may have consigned themselves to a spell in purgatory, but they’ve definitely nailed the full-blooded commitment the fast-rising Euphoria star brings to her first ‘final girl’ role. The Suspiria-with-sacrements premise has Sweeney’s devout young American, Cecilia, invited to take the veil at an old monastery outside of Rome. Unbeknownst to her, but thanks to a harrowing prelude that calls back to an iconic European horror movie (you’ll know the one), very much beknownst to us, the picturebook convent hosts the kind of vicious bloodletting of which the Borgias would be proud.  A really charismatic actor can supercharge even the most stolid genre fare, and that’s what Sweeney pulls off as the innocent but fast-learning Cecilia. Her arc from chaste and trusting to blood-caked and severely pissed-off turbocharges this workmanlike horror.Cecilia’s lack of Italian puts her at an immediate disadvantage, distancing her from her fellow nuns, some of whom, like Benedetta Porcaroli’s spiky Sister Gwen, are already rattling the bars of their liturgical jail. Something is off here – and it gets off-er when Cecilia, a virgin, discovers she’s pregnant. An immaculate conception, as the cardinal and mother superior hope, or something more sinister? The seriously charismatic Sweeney turbocharges this workmanlike horror  What follows is a liturgy of classic horror moves: mysteri

Most disaster movies announce themselves with vast tsunamis, spewing volcanoes or cow-flinging twisters. In Senegalese writer-director Ramata-Toulaye Sy’s tough but tender debut, balance with the natural world falls out of kilter in smaller increments – and with it, a love affair and a whole community.  Set in a tight-knit village in rural Senegal that’s baking dangerously in the 50 degree heat, Banel & Adama follows two star-crossed lovers. The fierce-spirited Banel (Khady Mane) and the mellower Adama (Mamadou Diallo) have been brought together by the death of her first husband. Their arranged marriage, fast-tracked by Adama’s status as chief-in-waiting and the community’s need for him to produce an heir, might have produced a loveless union. Instead, the pair are inseparable, spending their spare time excavating an old sand-covered abode as a new home for themselves beyond the village. Their plan, coupled with Adama’s refusal of the chiefdom, hit like an earthquake in their traditional community. It’s a powerful love story with a bruised heart  From sombre Islamic prayers to café-touba-fuelled socialising, Banel & Adama is stitched beautifully together from the fabric of rural Senegalese traditions. But just as Banel’s bright, more modern-feeling clothes offer dazzling bursts of colour in cinematographer Amine Berrada’s washed-out palette, the couple’s quest for emancipation is too confronting for their fellow villagers. The village elders – and fuelled by jealousy, some of