Colman stars as a depressed and bullied fisherwoman in medieval England. Fortunately, Peter Dinklage’s basketmaker delivers the answer to her dreams – an Alexander Skarsgård made of wicker

The spirit of mystery author Shirley Jackson is interestingly revived in this peculiar folk-horror romance, adapted from a 2006 story called The Wicker Husband by British writer Ursula Wills. It’s almost funny but not exactly, and almost disturbing but not exactly, occupying a strange and intriguing Venn-diagram overlap between macabre horror and sentimentality. Yet devotees of bucolic British screen-scariness will note that it is, after all, about a wicker man.

The scene is a fabular medieval-effect village that could be in central Europe or England, where there are bizarre patriarchal rituals, like the placing of metal collars on new brides. A depressed middle-aged fisherwoman (fiercely and naturalistically played by Olivia Colman) lives alone in a remote cottage and regularly brings her unappetising tench and gudgeon to market, where she is mocked and bullied by the nasty, closed-minded locals, including Richard E Grant as a lazy and incompetent doctor. Chief among her tormentors is the spiteful tailor’s wife, an elegant, sharp-faced woman played by Elizabeth Debicki.

Belittled for his speech and looks, and so short of cash he had to sell his dog, Stallone managed to write and star in one of the greatest boxing movies ever. How does Anthony Ippolito feel about playing his hero?

Fifty years ago this December, cinema’s greatest underdog story hit the screen, a tale about a Philadelphia ham-and-egger who takes the world heavyweight boxing champ all the way to the final bell, losing the fight on a judge’s decision but winning the hearts of a nation. That film, of course, was Rocky. Its creation, famously, was no less remarkable an underdog story – one about an out-of-work character actor with the curious name of Sylvester Stallone who wrote his own boxing movie then managed to convince a studio not only to finance it, but also to cast him in the title role. He then went one further than the character he was playing by earning the top prize: a best picture Oscar.

If you thought, half a century on, Rocky’s punching power – its unerring ability to make heroes out of zeroes – has faded, think again. This, after all, is a movie franchise whose stirring qualities are enough to make thousands of people hurtle up all 72 of the Philadelphia Museum of Art’s steps every year in homage to its plucky pugilist.

The film-maker enjoyed a long and varied film and TV career, from horror movies and true-crime thrillers to Cannibal and Breaking Bad

Peter Medak, the British-Hungarian director of The Changeling, The Krays and Let Him Have It, has died aged 88. Medak’s family announced he died peacefully in Los Angeles on Tuesday.

Medak enjoyed a long and varied career across film and TV, which included spirit-of-the-times classics A Day in the Death of Joe Egg and The Ruling Class (both from 1972), cult horror The Changeling with George C Scott, and The Krays and Let Him Have It, period true crime films made in the early 1990s. He also directed numerous episodes of high-profile TV drama, including the 80s revival of The Twilight Zone, Homicide: Life on the Street, and Hannibal.

Oliver Reed and Vanessa Redgrave put in the performances of their lives in this film originally banned for obscenity that highlights the violence of power

‘I could never be Satan’s boy. I haven’t the humility.” The speaker is Father Urbain Grandier, the 17th-century French priest accused of witchcraft, stylishly played by Oliver Reed, in Ken Russell’s scabrous 1971 classic; it is now restored and rereleased in its complete form after years of censorship. It comes from an era when movies, playing in high-street cinemas, still had the power to shock, to position that shock in the polite cultural mainstream and to compel serious discussion about whether that shock – or, conversely, a ban – was justified.

The Devils is based on a true story of politically directed mass hysteria, adapted by Russell from two literary works: Aldous Huxley’s The Devils of Loudun and John Whiting’s stage play The Devils. Of course it is obscene; obscenity is the glowing sulphurous paint which Russell is applying to the canvas. It is about obscenity – but the obscenity does not reside in the sexualised images of the crucified Christ or naked nuns disporting themselves; it is the violence of authority that is shown to be obscene. The idea of martyrs or heretics being burned at the stake has long been an accepted fact recounted in U-certificate history lessons, and a punishment which survived well into the European enlightenment. Russell shows you what it might actually look like and that is to involve a confrontational assault on good taste.

In a West End theatre, a young actor hears a disembodied voice coaching his singing. It’s the start of an icky ghost-on-human romance

This ghost story set in a West End theatre is creakier than the old wooden floorboards on stage. It’s a gender reversal of Phantom of the Opera with a female phantom: wildly talented composer Eve (Amanda Jiang), who died tragically in a theatre fire. Or did she? That’s the question for earnest young actor Christian (Charlie Goddard) cast as the lead in a revival of Eve’s hit musical, City of Masks. It’s being staged in the very theatre where she died. Then Christian starts hearing a ghostly disembodied voice coaching his singing.

Part of the problem with the film is a clash of acting styles. Jiang seems to have stepped out of a David Lynch film to play Eve; sensual and mysterious. Meanwhile, actor Deano Bugatti Mitchison channels Al Pacino in Scarface levels of intensity to play the revival’s director, coked-up theatre impresario Victor – surely the only director in the West End to keep a loaded gun in his desk drawer

The latest in our ongoing series of writers explaining their most rewatched comfort films is a journey back to the 90s for Tom Hanks’ heartfelt 60s-set music comedy

“How did we get here?” That’s the question Steve Zahn’s character in That Thing You Do! asks his bandmate with bemusement right before they perform on live television.

It’s a moment I have thought of many times over the past 30 years. Sometimes, it’s been a moment I’ve aspired to, and sometimes it’s a moment I’ve felt myself. When the band hears their song on the radio for the first time, it’s one of the most ebullient moments I’ve ever seen on film. There is a euphoria that is recognizable for anyone who has ever felt the joy of a creative accomplishment – and isn’t that all of us, in one way or another? That’s what makes That Thing You Do! my feelgood movie.

The Friends alum makes up half of a messy and pretentious comedy drama that boasts some visual panache but is dragged down by a confused tone

You could be forgiven, upon watching the first scene of Junk, for believing that this debut feature will boldly, perhaps ill-advisedly, dare to satirize the industry it’s purporting to join. At a swanky restaurant in LA, four people aglow with self-importance embark on the time-honored ritual of discussing the screenplays they’re working on – specifically, the screenplay Martin (David Schwimmer), is “working on”. It’s classic industry navel-gazing, underscored by a tight focus on Martin’s clammy face as he sputters poorly through a confidence game.

Schwimmer, of course, is still best known for playing a perpetually and comedically exasperated sitcom character; it’s hard to square that extremely familiar voice with Martin’s dark bluster on how “drug-addled gen Zers” have “no respect for the communal aspect of the cinema”, an off-putting rant that is also a tad intriguing – who is more pretentious here, the sweaty character or the picture starkly sending him up?

The Australian author of Love and Virtue says her nationality didn’t give her pause when she wrote the script, but Ang Lee’s ‘perfect’ 1995 film did

The summer Diana Reid spent writing her film adaptation of Sense and Sensibility, she found herself having some oddly formal conversations down at the pub. The Australian author used only about 25 lines from Jane Austen’s first published novel for her screenplay, inventing most of the dialogue herself. To be able to mimic that very distinctive voice, Reid had to dive headfirst into studying Austen’s rhythm and sentence structure.

“I got so immersed in the language it infected my own speech. I would be describing someone I just met, and I’d be like, ‘Oh, he was most amiable!’” Reid says, laughing. “It was a kind of insanity.”

A local cinema becomes a refuge after Javier Milei’s election ushers in an era of far-right conservatism in Argentina

Cinema halls – or dream palaces, as they’re affectionately called – offer a retreat into the realm of make-believe, and everyday drudgery is left at the door. Though set within a single-screen theatre in the Argentinian city of Córdoba, Ramiro Sonzini and Ezequiel Salinas’s hypnotic film invokes a more porous relationship between the screen and its audience. Here, the messiness of life beguilingly sneaks into this domain of fantasies, blurring the borders between public and private spaces.

While the luminous black-and-white cinematography lends a dreamy fuzziness to the images, the narrative concerns are grounded in thorny economic realities. A film projectionist at his local cinema called Pelu (Octavio Bertone) is reassigned to the post of a night watchman due to budget cuts at the city hall. The cinema soon becomes his literal refuge: he moves out of his cramped rented flat and secretly takes up occupation at his workplace. He then welcomes a horde of other outsiders, including his unemployed roommate, an ageing drifter and a sex worker who livestreams her erotic shows from the cinema. Every night, they watch classic films from the old masters – Jean Renoir, Yasujiro Ozu and Robert Bresson to name a few – until the early hours.

A restored version of his 1983 film My Brother’s Wedding, set in South Central LA, brings Burnett’s vision to a new audience

Charles Burnett had a dilemma. He had agreed to attend the wedding of a co-worker, but the wedding was scheduled for the same day and time as a funeral for a childhood friend.

Initially, the film-maker – a landmark chronicler of Black working-class lives – decided he’d go to the funeral. But when he tried to break the news to the co-worker, she was so dejected that he couldn’t go through with it. He tried asking the bride to change the wedding – which was “ridiculous to think of trying to do”, he says decades later – but that didn’t work either. He decided he’d go to both events.

Two obsessive artists team up to achieve their dreams, but then their aspirations diverge

Hirokazu Kore-eda’s sad and beautiful film is about friendship, about the ecstasy and burden of success and about what it means to have an artistic vocation, especially when that vocation is pursued collaboratively, with your best friend. It is adapted by Kore-eda from the standalone, or “one-shot”, online manga story of the same title by Tatsuki Fujimoto, which has in fact already had an anime movie adaptation.

Fujino, played by Furi Nanase as a 13-year-old and later by Natsuki Deguchi, is a dedicated would-be manga artist who dreams of being published and adapted for the movies. It is her personal and artistic destiny to come into contact, in her early teens, with fellow manga obsessive Kyomoto, who is played first by Rokka Okada and then as an adult by Aju Makita. Theirs is a kind of platonic but passionate love story.

The 1926 film of Goethe’s tragic tale of a man who sells his soul to the devil remains a spectacular feat of German expressionism

The centenary of FW Murnau’s silent fantasy-melodrama from 1926 is the occasion to ponder this mysterious film, taken from Goethe’s 19th-century depiction of the alchemist and natural philosopher who sells his soul to the devil but, in a very high-minded climax of German romanticism, is redeemed by love. (Not love of God precisely, but love of a good woman; the word “Liebe” finally appears at the centre of Murnau’s radiating vision of concentric circles conjured by the heavens, which annul his debt to the Evil One.) It is therefore very different from Christopher Marlowe’s scarier and more unforgiving account of Doctor Faustus.

Murnau’s Faust is (obviously) concerned with and animated by evil, and there are echoes of his Nosferatu, made four years previously. In this film, Faust, having struck his bargain on a provisional 24-hour basis with Mephisto, finds that he is scared of a crucifix, like a vampire. It is also very much a film of Weimar Germany with its mad energy and streaks of garish satire and black comedy; the book-burning scene in which Faust immolates all his necromancy volumes, along with the Bible, is one which resonated with later events. (Perhaps it indirectly inspired Klaus Mann’s novel Mephisto, later to be filmed by István Szabó.)

A musician becomes obsessed with the haunted seat, but the potentially hilarious premise sleepwalks its way to an unsatisfying conclusion

The indie indulgences of US film-maker Amanda Kramer – which often contain big names making small appearances – are such a puzzle; sometimes they work, sometimes they don’t. I enjoyed her weird reverie about an imaginary 80s TV special, called Give Me Pity!, but not so much the 1950s-camp daydream Please Baby Please, with Andrea Riseborough. Now she gives us a film with a toweringly strange and potentially hilarious premise, on which the result does not in any way deliver. Yet there are moments of interest in the dreamy Lynchian drift that causes Kramer’s films to float away from the audience.

By Design is an all but unbearable absurdist drama. The actors deliver halting dialogue as if in a hypnotic trance, paralysed by the film’s heavy conceit: Juliette Lewis plays a depressed single woman who turns into a chair. The scene seems set for some entertaining hijinks with visual effects, in which Lewis and the chair merge. But no – not really. What in fact happens is that Lewis’s own body is supposedly robbed of its animating identity or spirit, which migrates into the chair while she becomes catatonic, a body flopped down on the bed. The chair itself doesn’t look or behave in any way differently.

The novel had no hero, no dialogue and little action. So how was I See Buildings Fall Like Lightning turned into such a funny, rousing and acclaimed film? Director Clio Barnard reveals all

As a kid in 90s Birmingham, Keiran Goddard would gather with his friends to watch the tower blocks coming down. That’s what passed for entertainment back then. Controlled explosions, collapsing buildings. The demolition of the city’s postwar council estates marked the end of one story and the start of another. It was a dust-blown display of regeneration and progress. The housing that replaced it would be an improvement. The people of east Birmingham would move on to better lives.

Goddard, specifically, moved on to study English at Oxford University. He now lives in London and writes books for a living. Physically, he has left his home town far behind. Emotionally and spiritually, not so much. “So I feel quite splintered,” he says. “I’m not sure anyone ever really leaves the world they grew up in.”

Manville’s academic psychologist finds herself trapped in a tower block wasteland in 1980s Warsaw. Bizarre and surreal details add to the sinister vibe

Part cold war thriller, part Kafkaesque reverie, this movie takes us back to the sinister drear of Poland in 1981, when General Jaruzelski has just introduced martial law in reaction to the dangerous new mood of freedom occasioned by the Solidarity trade unions. The director is Kasia Adamik, daughter of The Green Border’s Agnieszka Holland; the film is adapted from a story by Olga Tokarczuk, called Professor Andrews Goes to Warsaw.

Lesley Manville plays Professor Andrews, an academic clinical psychologist (like Tokarczuk) from Britain with testy, peremptory mannerisms; her indulgence is a fondness for taking Polaroid photos. She has attained a certain level of celebrity for a book on dreams, despite claiming that she never dreams herself. Andrews has been invited to give a lecture in Warsaw, during which she begins to outline views on mental illness not unlike those of Laing or Foucault; but her speech is chaotically disrupted by students shouting that Poland itself is an oppressive asylum.

Bárbara Mori stars in tepid tale of a high-society wife who opens a restaurant in her home after her husband leaves her

What you expect from a film about a fancy high-end restaurant is a certain amount of heat: the roiling intensity of staff pushed to their absolute limits in the pursuit of gastronomic perfection. But this 1960s-set Peruvian drama instead maintains a gentle simmer, sedate and elegant. Perhaps it’s too elegant given the circumstances of its chef-proprietor, a high-society trophy wife with no catering experience who makes a high-stakes gamble on opening a successful restaurant.

Bárbara Mori is Norma, a glacial beauty who cultivates a kind of Jackie Onassis chic: huge sunglasses, massive blow-dry, makeup thickly applied like armour. One night, Norma’s husband humiliatingly leaves her for a beauty queen. You’d be sympathetic if Norma wasn’t so foul to the staff, lashing out at housekeeper Rosa (Hermelinda Luján) and chauffeur Oscar (Cesar Ballumbrosio). It’s Oscar (who is a bit in love with Norma) who suggests she opens a restaurant in the house to pay the mortgage. Norma’s father was the French ambassador to Peru, and she has picked up his passion for gastronomy. Although the script is a bit inconsistent on this, since Oscar also says he’s never seen her so much as light the oven.

Aaron Sorkin’s attempt to return to the success of The Social Network is a strangely dated and incomplete look at a world that needs a sharper eye

In retrospect, David Fincher’s 2010 film The Social Network was a landmark for a quiet, even counterintuitive reason. Before the film was released, some questioned whether Aaron Sorkin, a writer not exactly known for his mastery of, nevermind obsession with, the technical sphere, was the right man to tell the origin story of Facebook. And while Sorkin may well have converted Mark Zuckerberg into terms he could better understand – namely, a motormouthed wiseass who deep down wants to impress a smart, serious-minded girl – he and Fincher also made one of the first internet-centric movies to treat online life as a natural extension of IRL dynamics, rather than the otherworldly tech portal seen in so many 90s internet movies.

Granted, that’s the whole deal with Facebook: its viral spread of social networking, something so simple and addictive that aunts, grandpas and co-workers everywhere could understand it. Yet understanding its simultaneous extension and distortion of the real world wasn’t a given; four years later, for example, 2014’s Men, Women and Children was widely derided for taking an alarmist approach to the internet as a haven for adults seeking an affair, teenagers nursing porn addictions and fame-hungry strivers of all ages. The Social Network, on the other hand, is remarkably nonjudgmental about the basic mechanics of Facebook, rooting its nascent flaws in the human weaknesses that birthed it. In retrospect, the movie only feels outdated to the extent that it underestimates Zuckerberg’s grasping for power and the potential for grim carelessness that his online kingdom was built on.

True story about a former maths teacher who became a puzzle champion in retirement is squeezed into predictable sports-movie formula

It’s not quite up there with Leonardo DiCaprio eating raw bison liver to get into character, but Michelle Yeoh reportedly spent two years learning the Rubik’s Cube to prepare for this Chinese drama in which she plays a real-life former maths teacher who became a champion in retirement. The true story is stretched and squeezed here, fictionalised to fit sports-movie formula; it ends up being so-so entertaining and funny in places, but disappointingly predictable. The biggest surprise is that cubing is so popular it has its own world championship.

Still, Yeoh gives a superb, spiky performance as blunt, foul-tempered Zhao Yanhong; following a stroke, Zhao is living in a nursing home where she is the resident badass, assaulting her robot care companion and making illicit trips to the off-licence. She discovers her natural talent for the Rubik’s Cube when a washed-up ex-champion called Wu Youwei (Haoran Liu) comes to the nursing home to give a tutorial. What follows is a classic sports-film structure, with qualifying heats and Zhao training day and night, lifting weights and pounding the city streets. (Yes, running is de rigueur in a Rubik’s Cube movie; physical strength is Zhao’s weak spot says Wu, who agrees to be her coach.)

Paul Greengrass’s Peasants’ Revolt epic, The Uprising, is just the latest in a long line of movies depicting an unsuccessful attempt at remaking the nation

The British are perverse. We fetishise our failures, even if they are essentially tangential to a national narrative that should be about imperial conquest, slavery and being unremittingly unpleasant to foreigners. We tell and retell, for instance, the story of Captain Scott even though he died in Antarctica in 1912 after losing the race to reach the south pole first to the unacceptably Norwegian Roald Amundsen. Similarly, Christopher Nolan’s 2017 film Dunkirk typified the British tendency to snatch national glory from the jaws of defeat. And then there was the tragicomic disaster of the Charge of the Light Brigade during the 1853-56 Crimean war in which our boys raced to putatively glorious if stupid deaths. It’s as if, for us British, pointless sacrifice and embracing failure are what heroism means. And our cinema has colluded with this perversity.

But there is an exception to this national veneration of failure. Britain has been reluctant to embrace its revolutionary defeats. There is, for instance, no film dealing with the Chartist movement’s 19th-century struggle for universal suffrage. Even more strikingly yet, it is only now, in 2026, that a film has been made about the calamitous 1381 Peasants’ Revolt, even though it is a pivotal event in British history. Paul Greengrass’s The Uprising, starring Andrew Garfield as a – let’s just get this over with – revolting peasant, joins a mere handful of other movies, including Kevin Brownlow and Andrew Mollo’s 1975 Winstanley, Bill Douglas’s 1986 Comrades and Mike Leigh’s 2018 Peterloo, that dare depict how radical collective action was crushed by a ruthless state.

The latest in our series of writers explaining their go-to comfort films is a tribute to Darren Aronofsky’s dark and unusually satisfying ballet nightmare

In early 2011, sometime after the film was released on home video, I sat down with mum to watch what she had heard was a “new ballet movie” by Darren Aronofsky. I was 12 years old, spending school nights training to be a professional dancer. Without any warmup, knowing very little of the ballet and pointe work that earned Natalie Portman her best actress Oscar, we pressed play on Black Swan.

Well before Brendan Fraser’s time on the couch and the many houseguests of Mother!, Aronofsky increased the wattage with a companion piece to follow his heavy-hitter, The Wrestler. Watching Nina Sayers’ (Portman) intense physical trials and her stilted sexual awakening, with my mum beside me, I was understandably disturbed. At this point in my adolescence, I thought Jumanji was a scary movie. Like the film’s injured bird, I was being introduced to a darkness I didn’t understand. And somehow I couldn’t get enough. Why did it feel so good?