Contains spoilers for ‘The End of Oak Street'

Ask most millennials what their favourite childhood movie is, and there’s a good chance they’ll say Jurassic Park.

For many of us, it was our first cinematic experience, and a true zeitgeist moment that defined the early 90s — albeit one our parents probably regretted taking us to, since it left us petrified of glasses of water for weeks. Forget the tacky merchandise and endless sequels of declining quality, Jurassic Park was an almost absurdly effective piece of filmmaking, making dinosaurs both awe-inspiring and terrifying at the same time. The blockbuster we never knew we needed.

Spielberg’s film is an undisputed juggernaut, but in being so damn good, it also tainted the possibility of ever making a more-than-mediocre movie featuring those prehistoric critters again. Prior to it, the 1980s had found other things to do with them, - tugging at heartstrings with Baby: Secret of the Lost Legend (1985) or The Land Before Time (1988) and its sequels where humans were completely removed. Then after it, the 90s were presented with a specific struggle: that every subsequent dino flick would immediately be compared to that towering masterpiece, just as every shark movie will forever live in the shadow of Jaws. The safest solution was to embrace the ridiculous: in Tammy and the T-Rex, Paul Walker has his brain transplanted into a mechanical Tyrannosaurus. Whoopi Goldberg even fought crime with an anthropomorphic one as a police detective in Theodore Rex. The inevitable Jurassic Park sequels limped along behind it, unable to muster the dynamism of their predecessor. Now, in 2026, David Robert Mitchell’s The End of Oak Street is the first dinosaur movie in years that feels as though it has recognised the obvious solution: stop trying to make another Jurassic Park.

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The End of Oak Street presents us with the exact scenario five-year-old millennials left cinemas in abject fear of - that those creatures could come parading into our suburban homes, lurking in our neighbourhoods behind the net curtains, ready to press their colossal beady eyes against the living room window and make a lunge for us. The premise is commendably unique: in 1982, Anne Hathaway’s Denise Platt lives in archetypal suburbia with her husband Greg (Ewan McGregor) and children Audrey (Maisy Stella) and Brian (Christian Convery). After discovering a plant in her garden that supposedly went extinct 200 million years ago, a strange sequence of flashing lights and a shift in atmospheric pressure leaves the neighbourhood without electricity. Worse, there appear to be dinosaurs running amok. It quickly transpires that this is no regular power cut. The entire district has been transplanted into the past, and the family find themselves contending with dinosaurs and giant serpents slithering through the windows.

The film has its faults: namely, that the 80s setting feels both unnecessary and underused. Why isn’t it just set in the present day? Was it just to capitalise on the success of Stranger Things? Nothing about it suggests that setting it in 2026 would have altered the storyline, and the production design doesn’t even feel particularly 80s. Other problems include Ewan McGregor’s casting as a beleaguered American dad, and (SPOILER) the “happy ending” we’re treated to still involves the presumed deaths of a few hundred people. Denise gets a book deal out of it though, and emerges a hero for saving her family and a handful of neighbours. The rest, presumably, are left to perish in the past. I’d have loved the film to show more of the neighbours themselves - either rallying together or descending into Lord of the Flies-style anarchy. If left abandoned in this prehistoric time zone, what would happen when they run out of food and water supplies while fending off the dino threat? There’s a particularly poignant scene where Audrey listens to Steve Winwood’s Valerie in the car, and there’s a haunting notion that once the car’s petrol supply is drained, she may never hear recorded music again. More of this, please.

Despite these pitfalls, The End of Oak Street is tremendous fun, with some genuinely exhilarating moments and gleeful jump scares. The concept is truly original, and it’s rare you leave a cinema thinking “Yes, I’ve never seen anything like that before.” But mainly, it’s that Mitchell has found a brand new way of delivering the pleasure a dinosaur movie can offer.

What Jurassic Park, and interestingly, Jaws, manages to do, is be more than just a monster movie. They are, in effect, both critiques of capitalism - the Amity mayor in Jaws insists on keeping the beach open for profit despite the potential death of the swimmers. Jurassic Park goes a step further - what if technology allowed us to bring back dinosaurs to sell tickets to see them? King Kong effectively introduced this concept - the sole purpose of the trip to discover the giant ape was to bring him back to New York and capitalise on it, no matter how many lives were placed in peril as a consequence. It’s telling that the Amity mayor’s line about the safety of the beaches was dragged out repeatedly as a meme during Covid, and that now, Jeff Goldblum’s iconic line “They were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn’t stop to think if they should“ has now become shorthand for the dangers of AI. These movies have always held meaning beyond the monsters.

The End of Oak Street isn’t concerned with critiquing capitalism, or anything really. Its sole purpose is to entertain, and I genuinely had a blast. The best monster movies, though, have something to say beyond just “what’s that coming over the hill?” and Oak Street is at its best when it’s questioning what humans might do if faced with such an extreme situation. That’s the meat on the story’s bones.

For a dinosaur movie to work, we have to have found a reason for them to be chucked together with humans - either via time travel, setting the film in the Stone Age, discovering them still alive somewhere, or because we brought them back for some inane and misguided reason. In having that reason be profit, Jurassic Park uncovered the perfect formula. The dinosaurs in Jurassic Park are just doing what they always have done - the thing to fear is the people behind them seeking to profit. And that will always be substantially scary, whether you’re five years old or fifty.

The End of Oak Street opts for time travel, and its suburban setting is crucial. The key issue with Jurassic Park is that there’s an easy enough way to escape the dinosaurs - don’t go to the park. Mitchell veers in precisely the opposite direction, for the first time in 33 years, changing the context. A lot of the discourse is saying that this is exactly what the Jurassic franchise should have been doing all along: put the most extraordinary animals ever to walk the planet into the most ordinary environment imaginable and have an enormous amount of fun with the consequences.

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It doesn’t have the thematic heft of Jurassic Park, and actually, that’s fine. Not every dinosaur film needs to carry the burden of representing mankind’s arrogance on its scaly shoulders. Sometimes you just want a Tyrannosaurus to appear outside a suburban kitchen window. Its great achievement is recognising that a dinosaur movie doesn't have to compete with Jurassic Park at all, and can do something entirely different with the creatures. On those terms, it succeeds wholesale.

https://linktree.com/jamesmorton

I’ve always loved Tsangari’s films. They’re consistently intriguing and if you haven’t seen 2010’s Attenberg, do it now. Painting a picture of a young woman dealing with her father’s terminal illness against the backdrop of the economic crisis, to quote Quentin Tarantino, “it showed another Greece.” I was amazed at how she managed to make Greece’s ordinarily sunny vistas look so dingy, filming the country renowned for its sunny skies plagued by grey clouds and dismal weather that does exist over there but rarely makes the cut on the postcards. It served as a perfect metaphor for what both the country and protagonist Marina (Ariane Labed) was experiencing as she comprehends a new version of her life that doesn’t look like the dreamy one she pictured. (I also loved the Lanthimos cameo, his first and last acting performance on film, but that’s another article.)

In her follow-up Chevalier, Tsangari shows us not just another Greece but an as-then-unseen portrayal of modern masculinity. The action takes place almost entirely on a boat, the men onboard enjoying (if that’s the word) a fishing trip on the Aegean Sea. There are six in total - Yorgos, Josef, Christos, Yannis, his younger brother Dimitris, and The Doctor. Obviously men of some privilege, their vessel of choice is a luxury yacht and when they aren’t smashing octopuses against jagged rocks, they’re using the onboard rowing machine and boasting to each other about the size of the fish they’ve caught. As the trip comes to a close and the men begin their return journey to Athens, Christos suggests they play a game called ‘Chevalier.’ The rules are simple: the men must judge each other on a series of arbitrary tasks, awarding their shipmates points, and whoever wins the most rounds will be crowned “the best” and receive a Chevalier signet ring.

The tasks in question are relentlessly bizarre. Anything and everything gets evaluated and dissected: personality traits and habits, how they sleep, what they wear, how they drink their coffee, how well they can skim stones. This descends into a sort of stylised anarchy - there’s even a literal dick-measuring contest at one point, with Yannis getting the men to take pictures of their erect penises to judge who has the largest one. One of the men gets criticised for not having morning wood often enough. “But what if I had had a bad dream that you’d died and I was sad?” The ridiculousness of it all is apparent to every audience member but never the characters who, as in all the best comedies, perceive everything that’s happening with a grave sincerity.

The movie has a lot going for it. There’s the ticking clock element of their return to Athens and the single setting with no means of escape, all of which amps up the tension. In a shrewd move, at no point does Tsangari ever show the men actively enjoying each other’s company. Are they even friends? Even before the contest becomes official, the men’s only interactions with each other are predominantly trying to get one-up on each other. When the game rears its head, we’re clearly meant to observe it in all its lunacy, and also perceive how the men of the world, who we’ve by and large put in charge of things, are carrying out their own version of this game on a daily basis. They cannot simply admire another man’s qualities because admiration immediately becomes hierarchy. The competition consumes every interaction until friendship itself becomes impossible.

What the men never seem to realise is that ultimately, there’s nothing more pathetic and less “masculine” than a group of men competing to be the best man. For me, traditional masculinity has always been a mad concept, namely because it’s inherently contradictory: if masculinity means anything, it’s less about physical strength than emotional maturity, and believing it’s all about the former (as many do) suggests a lack of the latter. But in the 2020s, judging by the various Instagram Reels of gymfluencers flaunting their protein- and steroid-amped physiques, this feels like a niche view to hold.

The film is oddly prophetic in that a decade later, the competition has simply moved online. The yacht has become Instagram, and the scorecards are likes, followers, body-fat percentages, salary screenshots, key-dangling photos, dating “market value” and endless self-improvement metrics. Somewhere along the way, we decided that every aspect of being a man had to become quantifiable, and though the internet didn’t invent this impulse, it can be safe to say it’s industrialised it. Every scroll offers another opportunity to discover that someone is richer than you, stronger than you, taller than you, more attractive than you, more disciplined than you, more successful with women or men than you, more productive than you. There is always another category in which to lose, steeped in the belief that another person’s success diminishes your own.

Tsangari understands this. The categories in Chevalier are deliberately absurd because all categories are effectively absurd. The characters in Chevalier never consider that none of them actually need to be the best, and that maybe by combining their various strengths, they might be more valuable as an ensemble. Case in point, Dimitris (played brilliantly by comic actor Makis Papadimitriou from Suntan) is seen as the clownish comic relief character. At no point do we ever expect him to win the contest, and yet he’s clearly the most sensitive of all of them. He enjoys bubble baths and collects pebbles, longing to find one that is a perfect sphere. Though never outrightly derided, it’s evident that this sort of sensitivity isn’t seen as the sort of criteria that would be perceived as a quality worth having. Sakis Rouvas’s Christos seems the clear frontrunner throughout, although he clearly displays sensitive qualities himself. In one particularly memorable scene, he speaks to himself in the mirror, repeating the mantra “I am the best, I am the best, I am the best” and nothing could be more pathetic (or for that matter, less “masculine”). By the end, the competition drags on to the extent that they remain docked in Athens and unable to leave the ship until it’s finished. The pursuit of being the “best” becomes a literal trap.

As the competition ends, the winner is chosen and the final shot of the men returning to their respective cars and heading off into the Athens night plays out, a clear ode to the Greek chorus plays over the top, an echoey Siren-like voice (singer Natasha Giannaraki) singing “Δεν θα το βρεις. Δεν θα το βρεις. Το δαχτυλίδι που ποθείς.” You won’t find it, you won’t find it, the ring that you desire. It underpins the movie’s message, that effectively, this quest for being the “best” or the ultimate in masculinity will remain a fruitless errand. The reveal of the winner is intentionally downplayed, the camera never lingering on the announcement or celebrating the victory, but shifting instead to the yacht’s cook and assistant, who’ve begun playing their own version of the game, the never-ending cycle continuing. Notably, whoever’s won has not become happier. As one character predicts earlier in the film: “You’ll win, but you won’t actually win anything.”

Ultimately, the song is right. If this desperate striving to be the “best” is so unattainable and unfulfilling, isn’t it time we recognised it for the idiocy it is and give it a rest?

https://linktree.com/jamesmorton

Last year, I went on a yoga retreat in the Netherlands. There wasn’t an outright rule to turn your phone off for the entire three days, but I did, partly to see if I could, stuffing it into the depths of my suitcase, buried in a shirt. The result? Bliss. I read a lot, I slept better, I went for forest walks without podcasts blathering on. I definitely didn’t miss being sent a thousand Instagram Reels a day, though I did miss contacting friends and family on WhatsApp. Anytime I thought of something I needed my phone for, I scribbled the task down in a notepad. When I turned it back on during my return to Amsterdam, I completed all those tasks in five minutes. Who knew that the oft-cited legends are true? Digital detoxes are unparalleled and freeing.

That experience shaped the way I deal with the smartphone, a device we all adore and despise in equal measure. We hate the relationships we have with them, loathing the amount of time we spend on them while we scroll casually to the next Reel. This week, the UK government announced they’re enforcing a ban on social media for under 16, so it’s goodbye Facebook, Instagram, X, TikTok, Snapchat and YouTube. YouTube Kids will remain, so good news for teens, you can still watch Bluey well into secondary school. WhatsApp and Signal get to stick around too, while the government figure out what to do about VPNs, and probably figure out what VPN stands for.

These bans are nothing new. In an ironically social media fashion, they’re on trend. Australia implemented one in December 2025, and is quickly being touted as the test model. Vietnam acted similarly, passing decrees for parents to register social media accounts for under 16s, Brazil introduced a dedicated children and adolescents online safety law, Indonesia enacted limitations in March, as did Malaysia. France, Spain, Greece, Denmark, Portugal and Canada are pursuing similar legislation.

On the whole, most outcry to the UK’s news (if any) has been slight. A recent poll showed 90% of UK parents back the ban. There’s plenty of research out there that suggests social media contributes to poor mental health in both teens and adults. Cyberbullying is rife, with 51% of middle and high school students in the US reporting experiencing online harassment at some point, as well as an increase in depression, anxiety, loneliness and sleeping issues. Companies like Meta, Google and ByteDance have been glacially slow to add any genuine safety measures, perhaps recognising that any means to do so risks a loss in capital. On face value, there’s every reason to implement a ban, but after some consideration, it’s not something I can support.

I’m probably prone to think this. I’m a social media producer by trade - I make a living creating content. But overall, I’m fairly immune to this ban - most social media users are older than 16, so unless they ban it for under 44s, I’d say I’m safe. Realistically, AI is a bigger concern for social media practitioners, which nobody except the Oscars shows any signs of banning - in fact, governments are falling over themselves to promote it, regardless of the devastation those thirsty little gadgets are gearing up to unleash in the next decade.

So why am I against it? For one, banning kids from doing anything doesn’t work. We’ve been kids and know this - there was nothing we were forbidden from doing as teenagers that we didn’t manage to pull off. Kids are smart, they find their way round things, and are probably much smarter than us when it comes to the internet - in Australia, 7 in 10 kids are still using the major platforms. And banning things because facets of them are known to be detrimental doesn’t seem reason enough to ban them. Domestic abuse cases in the UK see an 11% rise after every England match, whether the team wins or loses. Wouldn’t a solution be to ban football or the World Cup?

There’s an assumption here that the only pastimes teenagers are engaging in online is talking to perverts or looking at rubbish, but platforms like TikTok and YouTube have become genuine launchpads for creativity - teenagers are making short films, producing music, writing and publishing and finding audiences for their work in ways that simply weren’t possible previously. We’re currently living through a bizarre and long-overdue cinematic moment, with mega-hits Backrooms and Obsession making a fortune. The directors, Kane Parsons and Curry Barker, are 20 and 26, and cut their teeth creating YouTube videos, as did Talk To Me’s Philippou brothers, Bo Burnham, Joe Penna, Michael Shanks and Markiplier. Suddenly able, as teenagers, to access wide audiences and use YouTube as a testing ground, these filmmakers were given a background in creativity that many pre-2010s film school graduates can only dream of, and now the box office is proving it. Had Kane Parsons been subject to the proposed ban, Backrooms would never have been made.

But what about the misogyny online? With no social media, there’ll be no kids following Andrew Tate! We’ll prevent Adolescence from becoming a reality. I don’t buy that either. Yes, teenage boys won’t have access to Andrew Tate’s content as easily, but the absence of the internet didn’t stop misogyny proliferating long before it, it was around back then in whatever guise it felt like assuming, and surely a better solution would be to remove Tate from the platforms? (I’m aware he’s on Substack and I’m not happy about it.) I’d also say with any such ban, that it removes teenagers from the political sphere altogether. According to research by San Francisco Foghorn, 79% of students have cited social media as extremely important for activism, 100% reported participating in some form of digital activism, while only 5% had taken part in in-person activism (citation). Greta Thunberg began posting about school strikes for climate at 15, sparking a global movement. In early 2026, thousands of students across the US coordinated “ICE out” walkouts using social media to spread their message and encourage participation. Banning under-16s removes them from the primary arena where youth political voice currently operates.

Then there’s the strength of social media in giving teens from marginalised backgrounds a voice. For LGBTQ+ young people living outside major cities or those with unsupportive parents, social media often serves as the primary gateway to discovering their community. The numbers from Australia are striking: more than half (51%) of LGBTQ+ youth aged 14 to 17 say they feel more able to be themselves online than in person, queer teenagers were more likely than average to discuss private things online that they don't talk about face-to-face (45% compared with 27%), and eight in ten were concerned a social media ban would leave them disconnected. Pew Research Centre found that 31% of Black teens say social media makes them feel like they have a place to be creative, with 53% saying they use the internet almost constantly compared to 37% of White teens. Removing these outlets can only ever be a punishment to the already marginalised.

What interests me is how parents don’t seem to understand that there will always be a boogeyman. Today’s parents will have experienced it for themselves - when they were kids, it was TV. Mary Whitehouse’s crusade in the 70s was vilified but has always existed in some varying mould, and though she attempted to ban TV shows, she never attempted to ban the TV itself.

In 1999, I was forbidden to watch South Park once my parents figured out what it was. Did it stop me watching every episode and the movie ad infinitum? Not a bit. South Park always had a metafictional awareness of the ire being flung at it, frequently lampooning the parents that were blaming it for all the world’s ills. To quote a line from Kyle in Series 1: “I think that parents only get so offended by television because they rely on it as a babysitter, and the sole educator of their kids.” It’s likely that parents are frustrated with their own relationship with their phones and seek to restrict them for their kids because they themselves can’t escape their own addiction. I learnt on that yoga retreat that it’s our personal responsibility to have a healthy relationship with our phones, to treat them as tools, not toys. Banning them for others, as the prohibitionists attempted with alcohol in the 1930s, is not a means to fixing the issue. It may even exacerbate it.

So I can’t support a ban. What I can support wholeheartedly is for Meta, ByteDance and Google to alter their apps so they aren’t intentionally addictive, and reduce the means of publication for harmful content and disinformation. Instead, the Silicon Valley designers who built them queue up to go on Netflix documentaries to hypocritically lament the very apps they created and marketed at children, declaring how they built them specifically to be addictive, using the Skinner box experiment as their model (see below). Then they forbid their own kids from using them and send them to Steiner schools where they learn with blackboards and chalk.

A few quick fixes: to start, kill the infinite scroll. We never needed it. In its early days, Facebook used to function like emails – your feed would reach an “end.” Autoplay? Chuck it. Push notifications? Them too. Algorithmic feeds are no longer designed to give people what they want, but to keep users shackled to their devices while companies mine them for data and attention. What else? Turn likes off altogether and restrict notifications at night. Safety should be built into the crux of the apps’ design, not a half-measure slapped on in the aftermath when the companies get caught out. The obstacle for all of these functions has always been commercial incentive. We need legislation around the platforms to keep us safe, and bans don’t tackle the core issue. We need to cut off the problem at its source – how the platforms function - but no government will go near that idea because the corporations make too much money, so the bans will continue, across the globe, depriving younger people of community, of vital educational tools and creative outlets. All because a few adults messed it up.

When I was 14, my school implemented a profoundly weird ban of its own. A few boys in my class were caught misbehaving, and consequently, a cluster of teachers devised the idea that all boys in our year-group would be prevented from using the school playground. I was nothing to do with whatever had gone on, but owing to me being a boy, was included in this blanket punishment. After a week or so, this eccentric (and wildly sexist) penalty was swiftly scrapped. But it stuck with me, that people in charge might not know what was best for us, and might introduce bans and punishments that were completely impractical and ill thought-through. It was my first memorable instance of really realising it.

Also, I still used that playground. My apologies to those teachers. If you’re sharp enough to think up a punishment like that, you’re probably not sharp enough to miss me slipping through an open gate.

https://linktree.com/jamesmorton

Here’s how the final three days play out:

Day 7

Minotaur

★★★★★

We file into the Cineum at 8.30am for this one. It’s been nine years since Andrei Zvyagintsev’s Loveless, twelve since Leviathan - two of my favourite films - so the follow-up is long-awaited. Something about these unhappy families just does it for me - give me those dialogue-heavy extended sequences and trademark bitterness and I’m in.

Fortunately, Minotaur delivers wholesale. In true Zvyagintsev style, the first hour is crucial set-up, then the next hour kicks in, grips you by the throat and doesn’t let go. The audience was laughing and gasping throughout.

Another gem, even if, like a lot of his movies, you leave feeling like the world is a slightly worse place than when you entered.

Iron Boy

★★★

The thing about the ticketing system is you can hop in and out of virtually any screening you fancy with minutes to spare, so even if it’s fully booked, you can double check at the last minute for spaces.

With some time to kill, I jumped onto the system and found this one to fill the gap - and I’m glad I did. It’s a charming French animated feature about a boy living on a farm with his family, and struggling with posture issues, he’s forced to wear an orthopaedic brace while his family fight to retain their farm. A very poignant 90 minuter with a beautiful animation style.

Rendezvous avec Tilda Swinton

Back to the Palais des Festivales on another crowded bus to see Tilda Swinton herself in conversation. Some very memorable quotes, including some insightful ones about AI. “I believe as long as what we’re producing is not formulaic and in some way tiring for the audience, AI doesn’t stand a chance. But as long as we continue to do that, then we have to watch out.”

Also, on the subject of curiosity: “Curiosity is much more important than talent every time.” An interesting take for anyone dabbling in the creative fields.

La Bola Negra (The Black Ball)

★★★

An epic musical spanning three stories across a hundred years, exploring the inter-connected lives of three gay men in 1932, 1937 and 2017. Inspired by Federico García Lorca’s unfinished work of the same name, there are echoes of The Hours abound.

Glenn Close’s Spanish gets a few chuckles but she’s meant to be an American who’s learnt Spanish later in life, so it’s forgivable. We’re not in Selena-Gomez-in-Emilia-Perez territory. 🇪🇸

The End of It

★★

Back into the Debussy now for this one, starring Rebecca Hall as a 250 year old (though her character looks 30 - and also a lot like Phoebe Waller-Bridge. What if Fleabag but immortal?) Set in a world where humans have eradicated aging through rapid technological advancements, the premise is great: Claire (Hall) decides she’s fed up with immortality and decides to stage her own death as a performance art piece.

The film pokes at a number of important issues but ultimately, that’s all it manages to pull off. It never quite goes deep enough into the themes it raises, and winds up feeling like a Black Mirror episode stretched out. Would have loved to have seen more about how she grapples with the idea of impending death after so long knowing she can stave it off - the film swiftly focuses on a lot of other things that didn’t really advance the plot. Swing and a miss.

Coward

★★★★

One of my favourites of the festival. A story from Lukas Dhont about two Belgian World War I soldiers, Pierre and Francis, who find love in the barracks. It’s extremely touching but the best part is the chemistry between those two leads. I genuinely can’t believe it’s Emmanuel Macchia’s acting debut, his performance is meticulously on point. There’s also an interesting point raised when the soldiers form a theatre troupe, allowing Francis (Valentin Campagne) a chance to explore his penchant for cross-dressing behind a layer of toxic masculinity that hasn’t really gone away today. (Wearing this dress is just for a play, right? It’s just banter! Japes!) Contrary to expectation, he manages to thrive in the military world as he’s able to conceal his curiosities behind a layer of loutish camaraderie that he might not access so readily in the real world. Fascinating take, for sure.

Six events in one day. I’m ready to drop.

The film ends at 12.15am, and I’m back in the cinema at 8.30am the next day. Sleep belongs to another world now, it’s something other people spend their time doing. I just watch movies now, I am more cinema than man.

Day 8

The Man I Love

★★★

After yesterday’s 6 events, today I’ve toned it down to 2. Starting off at the Cineum again, the day begins with The Man I Love, from Ira Sachs. It’s beautifully shot, and a compelling enough story set in 1980s New York. Rami Malek overdoes it as the tormented performer slowly succumbing to AIDS complications, while the people around him who love him do everything they can to hold things together.

For a film with “love” in the title, it’s hard to feel much for any of these characters, who make poor decisions but don’t have the warmth of anything Andrew Haigh (Weekend, All Of Us Strangers) has brought to the screen to justify them. I’ll give Malek credit for an emotive rendition of Melanie Safka’s What Have They Done To My Song, Ma, which was genuinely poignant, even if the rest of the movie doesn’t hit all the right notes.

Victorian Psycho

★★★

A totally bonkers period drama-meets-horror film with Mirka Monroe as Winifred, a governess with a penchant for grisly bouts of murdering that would make Michael Myers squirm. It’s basically a mix of Shaun of the Dead-style humour with Downton Abbey, and Winifred is probably the craziest protagonist in the whole festival. From the moment an ear falls out of her luggage which she promptly eats, we know we’re not in Bridgerton territory.

Day 9

The best part about the final day is that every film you didn’t get the chance to see first time round gets a rerun. Which gives me the ideal chance to watch…

Soudain (All of a Sudden)

★★★★★

Wow. I’m not going to lie, the 3 hours 15 minutes runtime really put me off initially, figuring it’d be better to skip it and fit two films in instead. Turns out, that was a major error. All of a Sudden is a hugely important film.

Like a lot of Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s work, it’s extremely moving. A pitch-perfect meditation on friendship, immortality, ageing and the need to treat each other with more care. There’s also a 20-minute long scene with a whiteboard where the problems of capitalism are explained so articulately, it’s mind-blowing. The only thing I can compare it to is a similar scene in The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists, systematically taking apart what capitalism needs to survive, and how it will inevitably end as the factors that sustain it fall away. It’s a scene that will undoubtedly be clipped and shared ad infinitum on YouTube, among people who might not be up for an epically long French-Japanese drama but can stomach it in short form. Really does seem like that abridged version could take TikTok by storm.

Naturally, with so many films in competition, I missed the chance to view them all, so to round things off, here are some honourable mentions I’ve been hearing a LOT of buzz about:

• Tangles. Animated feature about a young woman returning to her conservative small town to deal with her mother’s accelerating Alzheimer’s disease. Rave reviews for this one. Seth Rogen really can do no wrong these days.

• The Beloved. Javier Bardem as an acclaimed film director reunited with his estranged actress daughter Emilia for the shooting of a new motion picture. Sounds like a Spanish Sentimental Value to me, as soon as it gets a wide release, I’m seated.

• Garance/Another Day. A young actress deals with alcohol addiction across an eight-year-span. I’m told Adele Exarchopoulos is incredible in it, but that’s no surprise.

• Everytime. A mother, her daughter and teenage boy deal with grief, blame and forgiveness on a trip to Tenerife. Winner of the Un Certain Regard prize so worth checking out!

If you’re in Cannes as a journalist, you get free access to a bus transfer to the airport. With another journalist Clotilde, we board and head to Nice, still talking about all the films we’ve watched - we’ve seen 50 between us, so there’s lots to dissect.

And now I’m back! Safely home in the UK and life suddenly feels less cinema-centred. The weather is currently mimicking the south of France though, so at least I’ll be eased back into non-Cannes life with an ongoing blast of sunshine.

I’m hoping these articles have kept everyone entertained, given you a good taste of what it’s like attending Cannes for the first time, and inspired you to join in 2027! The Festival bug has firmly bitten me, and if you’re thinking about signing up for accreditation next year, 100% do it. If you’re a cinema fan, there’s nothing out there like this.

Read my Cannes Diary of Days 1-3 here.
Read my Cannes Diary of Days 4-6 here.

https://james-morton.square.site/

Day 4

Jim Queen (and the Quest for Chloroqueer)

★★★★

Swigging down a coffee en route for breakfast, and then we’re in the Salle Buñuel at 8.30am. It’s a smaller screen a few floors above the Press Office… and what better way to start the day than with a laugh-a-minute queer animation?

The plot follows Jim Queen (a gym queen), part-time influencer, full-time douchebag, whose friends start succumbing to a mysterious illness called “heterosis” that turns them straight. Suddenly, Lady Gaga concerts are cancelled across the globe, Ricky Martin and Kristen Stewart get married, and a gay Gestapo-esque organisation (called the Gay-stapo) try to force a cure on the sufferers of heterosis by cramming them into rainbow sarcophaguses and using human pups to seek them out.

1000% recommend watching this with an audience if you can. The ceiling practically came down with laughter. 🌈

I’ll Be Gone In June

★★★★

A bus ride over to the Cineum for this Wim Wenders-produced film. (Note to self and anyone planning a trip: the Cineum is a 30 minute bus ride away and the buses are packed. Best to stick to the centre where possible.)

This one’s about a German exchange student called Franny doing her year abroad. It’s set in 2001 and I don’t think I’ve ever seen a film that articulates what it was like being a teenager at that time, how 9/11 coloured and shaped everything around it. It’s beautifully shot too. You can read my full review here: https://thepeoplesmovies.com/ill-be-gone-in-june-review-cannes-film-festival-2026/

A break for a writing session (that’s what I’m here for, right?)

The Press Office is located right next to the red carpet in the Palais des Festivales. There’s something genuinely infectious about being surrounded by other writers in this sunny space overlooking the main Cannes action, everyone typing away on their Laptops about movies. Plus at one point, I can see Pedro Almódovar from the balcony.

Seeing three films a day, your time gets eaten up rapidly, so I slot in a few hours to jot down some reviews before heading into the next one, just next door.

Fjord

★★★★★

Oh, wow. Fjord completely bowled me over. Christian Mungiu’s newest has a distinctly Zvyagintsev feel to it, with Renata Reinsve and a practically unrecognisable Sebastian Stan as a conservative Romanian-Norwegian couple whose children are taken by Child Protective Services after their move to the wife’s liberal Norwegian hometown. A dialogue-heavy courtroom drama (in a courtroom with a stunning view of Norwegian mountains, symbolism abound) that left us with so many questions afterwards. Are the couple genuinely unfit parents or is there inherent prejudice from the allegedly progressive townspeople? So much food for thought. We couldn’t stop talking about it.

In the evening, there’s a party on the beach. Unfortunately, this is the first time the rain’s appeared the whole week. Cue a solid hour of thunderstorms, ruining the vibe a tad. The DJ and crew rescue the night by packing everything up and taking it indoors. Soon enough, we’re back to singing along to Starships.

Day 5

Her Private Hell

★★

I was excited to see Nicholas Winding Refn’s latest in IMAX over at the Cineum. Turns out, I needn’t have been excited at all. A neon-drenched mess, with baffling dialogue, sparse plot and weirdly gratuitous violence. Its unfortunate title will only embolden Letterboxd users to describe their own private hell as sitting through it.

In my screening, I counted over 40 walkouts. There’s a moment where two of the characters start barking at each other and a third says “Wow, I didn’t know you spoke wolf.” That lost another three audience members straight away. Full review here.

Amarga Navidad

★★★

Pedro Almodóvar’s latest is a metafictional film-within-a-film. The A storyline concerns Elsa, an advertising director whose life takes a turn after her mother’s death. The B storyline is a screenwriter and film director (clearly a stand-in for Pedro himself) trying to script it. The film opens strongly and ends brilliantly - that last scene in the park has dialogue to rival even the best episodes of The West Wing - though the middle is a touch flabby. But Almodóvar is a Cannes darling, he can do little wrong here, and that distinctive colour palette remains unrivalled. Applause rang out at just the sign of his name onscreen.

The Unknown

★★★

At 9.15pm, we join the queue for the Agnes Varda room for L’Inconnue (The Unknown). All we know so far is it stars Léa Seydoux, and a lot of people have hated it. Fortunately, it really worked for me. Based on a graphic novel, it’s the story of a man named David who spots a mysterious woman, Eva (Seydoux) at a party and finds himself drawn to her like a tractor beam. The two sidle off together and have what looks like the worst sex ever in a dingy basement, culminating with Seydoux shrieking like a wolf. David then wakes up to find he’s stuck in Eva’s body.

Freaky Friday it isn’t. It actually presents a very realistic depiction of what would happen if you woke up in another person’s skin. As a near-catatonic David tries to make sense of the situation, he encounters others who’ve fallen victim to whatever this It Follows-esque entity or phenomenon is. One of them is convinced they imagined their previous life as a result of severe schizophrenia, which is probably the conclusion most people would come to. Taken outside of its usual PG premise, the body switching concept proves for a profoundly disturbing film, and while it definitely needs to go deeper, I couldn’t get this one out of my head.

Day 6

I See Buildings Fall Like Lightning

★★★★★

Another bright and early start to watch this one. What more can I say? Clio Barnard and Enda Walsh have created a masterpiece. My full review’s here, suffice to say I laughed, cried, cheered at the end credits of this sublime, sad film. A beautiful depiction of social inequality and the 2020s housing crisis from the POV of five working class friends.

Gawd vs the People - Immersive Experience

★★★

Over in the Carlton just after lunch, I watch a courtroom debate like none other. It’s AI vs the People, in which members of the audience are invited to a podium to debate with an AI why humanity isn’t doomed to future robot rule. Three audience members gave it their all, arguing eloquently with an AI chatbot for the case for why our machine overlords aren’t cut out for the job of replacing us. We’re all given whistles to whistle for the end verdict: HOPE vs NOPE. In our version, HOPE won out, though as for how this plays out in the real world, we’ll just have to wait and see.

It also featured a talking fern called Fernadette, also AI-programmed. And not the weirdest thing I’ve seen here.

Titanic Ocean

★★

A Japanese-Greek collaboration from Konstantina Katzamani about a group of teenage girls training to be mermaids. Surreal, atmospheric and with shades of Sofia Coppola, this could have been something special but really didn’t do it for me. Plus, I suspect AI was used in that final sequence which isn’t something I’m keen to see at Cannes.

And now, by request of …

A few housekeeping tips for first-time Cannes-goers (get ready for next year!)

• The ticketing website (et voilà: https://ticketonline.festival-cannes.com/) will be your best friend. There are schedules available throughout the day, and even though everything sells out in seconds, tickets become available regularly, and you can generally join a Last Minute queue if you haven’t got one for a specific screening of choice.

• People generally buy in bulk and then cancel their tickets before a screening, but cancel within an hour and you’ll get penalised.

• Screenings with a bow tie symbol next to them are the only ones where you’ll be on the red carpet. Suits must be black too so dig out your black ties.

• Missed a film and everyone’s raving about it? No problem, you can catch it on the final day when all the festival’s films are replayed.

• Wear sunscreen. You might be indoors for most of the day, but seating is first come, first served, and doors open 30 minutes before each screening, so you might be waiting around in the sunshine for a while!

• Most of the cinemas are in, or near, the Palais des Festivales, except the Cineum which is a half-hour bus journey. Traffic is intense, especially around the station, so leave enough time between screenings to make it.

• Get accredited early. Accreditation starts in February and runs til mid-April. If your application comes in after 31st March, the cost shoots up from €24 to €224, so it’s in your interest to get it in before then. You generally need an editorial attached (like mine, The People’s Movies) or have a sizeable social media following.

• Accommodation books up fast. You don’t have to stay in Cannes - I’ve been in Antibes, a 10 minute train journey away. Trains are regular but only run til 11.30pm (except on Saturdays when they run til 2am), and screenings and parties often go on well after midnight. Ubers to Antibes cost about £20 so not the worst thing if you’re further away.

Any other questions, drop them in the comments! I was lucky enough to have (check out his YouTube page, he’s a cinephile star: https://www.youtube.com/c/LukeHearfield) guiding me along the way, this being his ELEVENTH Cannes, meaning he’s been here almost as many times as Doctor Who’s regenerated. Whatever I can do to pass on the baton, I’m happy to help. 🎬🍿

Read my Cannes Diary of Days 1-3 here.
Read my Cannes Diary of Days 7-9 here.

https://linktr.ee/jamesmorton

A few tips for first-time Cannes-goers I’ve rapidly learnt:

• The rumours of 12 minute standing ovations are true - a full 12 minutes of clapping like a new Pope’s been elected - but they don’t feel half as weird as you’d imagine. Generally, they only happen when the stars and crew are in attendance, so it’s more like applauding at the end of a stage show.

• The booking system is as tense as Ticketmaster. Waking up to a tinny iPhone alarm daily at 6.45am to book tickets for screenings 4 days ahead, a zillion tabs open and primed, is as dramatic as any movie in competition.

• Accommodation sells out whiplash-fast too. My Cannes accreditation was a mess - having signed up to one editorial and thinking I had it in the bag, that editorial promptly went bust two days later, cue scrabbling around for a new editorial and having to restart the whole process, by which point everything nearby that wasn’t a luxury £2k a night pent house was sold out. Fortunately, I’ve got a studio apartment for the week in Antibes, if not in Cannes, and I’m not breaking the bank to do it, so at least there’s that.

Onto the movies!

Day 1

Fatherland

★★★

At 8.30am, we file into the Grand Cinema Lumiere for Paweł Pawlikowski’s latest. It’s been eight years since his last once, and for a film that took that long to make, its runtime’s minuscule at 82 minutes, full of atmospheric black-and-white. Centring its action in 1949, the film follows the real-life story of father-daughter duo, Nobel Prize-winning writer Thomas and Erika Mann as they embark on a road trip round Germany at the height of the Cold War after sixteen years of US-based exile. Fractures in the country mirror fractions in the family.

Strangely, I’ve never seen a movie dealing with this specific era. For the countless movies about World War II, there are hardly any about the aftermath. What would a country grappling with the torment of its very recent past be undergoing? Turns out, a lot of turmoil, as Germany and the Manns try to make sense of this eerie new landscape, while the rest of the world grapples with the grave reality of what that specific War taught us human beings are capable of. A moving follow-up to Cold War, and Sandra Huller is incredible as ever.

Histoires Paralleles

★★

There’s already a Letterboxd review of this that’s garnering hundreds of likes. “Thought provoking. You’ll spend hours mulling over why this was made.”

It really could have been something special, this story of a writer spying on her neighbours for inspo. Isabelle Huppert and Vincent Cassell always do a good job, but this left me and a lot of festival-goers weirdly empty. It seemed confused about what it was trying to do, and a waste of good talent, in urgent need of some judicious edits. One of the characters being a foley artist and using a bedsheet to make a dragon’s wing noise was probably the most entertaining bit.

The Black Mirror Immersive Experience

★★★

A short walk along the beach and you’ll find the Carlton, one of those old-style seafront hotels that look like they’ve been plucked from a postcard. This year, it’s also the host of a range of immersive experiences, where you step beyond a black curtain into a white room dotted with Xs, Os and squares. These things feel like Black Mirror episodes in whatever incarnation, so it’s only fitting Charlie Brooker’s team have jumped onto it.

The Black Mirror Immersive Experience is a wild ride. It’s about 45 minutes in total, opening with a team of real-life operatives jotting down all your personal information - which feels excessive but makes sense later. They take your picture and record your voice. So far, so creepy.

And then the Experience begins, you slip the Oculus over your eyeballs and away you go, traversing round the room with five other attendees. You’re made to play a bizarre 70s-era-esque game in your groups with some Kantian questions about morality, including “Should you kill a family member or five strangers?” (Not at all worrying when playing this with five strangers.) Then all becomes clear as a pint-sized AI version of you, with your face and voice, emerges from a wall and shows you round.

The Experience then takes the most surreal turn I can think of. Your hands become laser-powered and able to shoot assailants, and you’re tasked with taking on army of spider-like creatures with elongated arms and legs that all have your face. Once you’re done trying to shoot your way through this barrage of Lynchian Yous, a giant version of your own head descends from the ceiling - effectively, the Final Boss.

Safe to say, I’ve never experienced anything like this. It is nothing like the Black Mirror series, but that matters little, it is completely its own entity and occupies a space where Cronenberg meets Hieronymus Bosch.

Day 2

Today’s films are at the Cineum Cannes, and I had to quickly figure out where the hell that was. Turns out it’s miles away, a 30 minute bus ride, but the Press Passes come in handy when you’re hopping on and off.

Where the Press Passes make no difference is when the bus is snailing through the peak time festival traffic. After an hour of plowing through the epicentre of the festival traffic and casting panicked glances at my watch every two minutes to make sure I’d make the screening on time, I arrived at the Cineum Cannes.

Look at that. It looks like if the Hellraiser box opened up and turned into a building.

Club Kid

★★★★

Inside this lumpy cinematheque, I watched Jordan Firstman’s Club Kid. My full review is over on The People’s Movies but to summarise - all I knew of Firstman going in was his fame exploded via Instagram lives during the pandemic, and he played Charlie in Rachel Sennott’s I Love LA. Turns out, the guy is a serious triple threat, having written, directed and starred in this genuinely heartwarming cinematic achievement. Taking a cookie-cutter premise - party guy finds out he accidentally fathered a kid 10 years ago and now is his sole guardian - I was already thinking how I’d seen all this before. But no, what Firstman and his team have created here is quite different, with a host of characters who might ordinarily be sidelined as supplementary oddballs allowing the movie to have real clout. A24 have snapped it up for $17m, and it’s no surprise.

Teenage Sex and Death in Camp Miasma

★★★★★

What a title. Festival-goers have begun conveniently calling it Camp Miasma for short, but the name actually works in its bizarre gaudiness. Jane Schoenbrun’s follow-up to I Saw The TV Glow pays homage to all the horror films the hardcore fans will know and love - The Shining, Psycho, Friday the 13th (every single one of them), and even The Ring in a familiar cabin scene - although the VHS has been swapped for a DVD player that needs to be dusted off like the ancient 2000s relic they now are.

Hannah Einbinder and Gillian Anderson make a hugely powerful double act, the latter Norma Desmond-ing her way through it as an ageing former horror movie starlet sought out by director Kris (Einbinder) who’s rebooting an established slasher franchise. There’s commentary on the film industry’s wayward tactics as Kris notes she’s been hired purely because of her queerness so the production company can avoid accusations of their earlier films as problematic, but also plenty about queer millennials’ first sexual rumblings being twinned with their favourite movies, an intermingling of horror films with adolescent desire. Naming the killer in the film-within-a-film Little Death is a shrewd move to tie this together nicely, French for “orgasm,” la petite mort. I struggled to find pictures of Little Death online, suffice to say it looks identical to those dancing TV-humanoids in the UK’s 2026 Eurovision entry, which is unfortunate timing.

Part-queer awakening, part 80s movie pastiche. I fucking loved it.

Paper Tiger

★★★★

In James Gray’s latest, Miles Teller is your atypical family man in mid-80s Queens, with doting wife Scarlett Johansson donning NHS specs and a Betty White wig. Brother Adam Driver invites him to join a dodgy-sounding get-rich-quick scheme with some suspicious Russians. Then the brothers accidentally get on their new business partners’ bad side.

The resounding critique coming from Cannes at the moment is: Paper Tiger is very “meh.” I disagree - it’s enjoyable, though the characters feel like a bunch of types, and you find yourself struggling to care what happens to them, whether the Russian mafia men murder them all or not.

The film’s not perfect but it fits together neatly, and is probably Adam Driver’s best work. That final scene in the corn field is one for the ages.

Day 3

The Station

★★★★

A female-centred film set in Yemen that proves to be an impactful meditation on the country’s gender-based laws. What starts as a depiction of relaxed sisterhood grows in gravity as the women must rally together to protect their younger brother from conscription. There’s one stand-out scene where the women, being pursued by angry men, whip off their hijabs to protect their space, the men no longer able to follow them inside for fear of indecency.

I can also say with confidence that I’ve never seen a chameleon act so well in a film, but that’s another Substack post.

Rendezvous Avec Cate Blanchett

One thing about Cannes is the labelling of talks like this one as “rendezvous,” which makes it sound like you’re on a date with Cate Blanchett. In reality, she’s just talking to an audience, and quotes from the interview are already doing the rounds online, as she spoke about being on a set “where there are 10 women and 75 men” and about the threat of AI to the industry, how theatre will be more in demand as a result, with audiences craving the human in their storytelling. There was also a reference to her being president of the jury in Cannes back in 2018, and Blanchett takes someone to task when they say “back when MeToo was going on,” swiftly reminding them it’s not something we’ve moved on from. “It got killed very quickly, which I think is interesting. There are a lot of people with platforms who are able to speak up with relative safety and say this has happened to me. And the so-called average woman on the street, person on the street, is saying me too. Why does that get shut down?”

Yellowfin - another Immersive Experience

★★

Not a patch on the Black Mirror one, sadly, this is the story of 28-year-old Popi who returns to his coastal village after a long time at sea, only to find his wife has moved on and started a new family. (Castaway parallels abound). He sets sail on a solitary journey but things take a surreal turn when he encounters a wounded mermaid.

Then it ends. That’s literally it. The mermaid shows up and it ends.

Immersive experiences always feel slightly nuts, since you’re standing there wearing what is effectively a mad hat, in a room that looks like a mix between Noughts and Crosses and the BBC test card. This film was quite boring and ran at just 25 minutes, but it did make me wonder what might be achievable with this technology. Most notably, what it might be able to do for horror cinema. Parnormal Activity but you’re in the house with them? The Blair Witch Project but the forest surrounds you? These films are perfectly effective in their 2D incarnations but I’m ready to don my Oculus goggles and get immersed.

Roll on, Day 4.

Read my Cannes Diary of Days 4-6 here.
Read my Cannes Diary of Days 7-9 here.

https://linktree.com/jamesmorton

There’s a conclusion I reached while watching The Devil Wears Prada 2. Miranda Priestley is not very good at her job. The original outing suggested that Anne Hathaway’s Andy, our bumbling hero, was smart and cutesy but kind of inept, blundering her way through her coterie of errands, at least until the film’s midpoint. (Online discourse is predominantly “HOW could she get that job straight out of college?”) Alternatively, Meryl Streep’s Miranda was the real deal: intensely demanding but a brilliant, sharp-eyed professional. Her cruelty made sense as it was always in pursuit of getting optimum results for her empire. My view after watching the sequel is that her practice of ruling with an iron fist is one of the worst ways you could possibly run a business.

A lot of praise is being poured on The Devil Wears Prada 2, the legacy sequel to the hugely successful (and very good) 2006 film that cunningly lampooned the fashion industry and became an institution in itself. The landmark cultural example of dreadful bosses and grind culture, spawning a West End musical spin-off and influencing countless series from Ugly Betty to The Bold Type, the sequel had big Manolo Blahniks to fill. In promo for the film, Streep said “I hope that the fans come to this film with very high expectations because we are going to exceed them.“ The film’s done just that, earning $233 million worldwide in just two days, and the general consensus is, it’s great, better than it should be, but not as good as the original. To be fair to it, only a handful of sequels ever manage to surpass the OG, all forced to wrangle with the same factors: namely, why on Earth this cast of characters would come back together in the first place. Legacy sequels have that challenge multiplied, since creating cause for a reunion two decades later risks the manufacture of a completely absurd plot, the characters awkwardly shoehorned into the same situation just because.

And DWP2’s plot is absurd - there is an awful lot of it in the first thirty minutes as the screenplay ties itself in knots trying to construct a reason to thrust this iconic quartet back together, despite them having only worked together for six months two decades ago. The flaws are clear, and mainly structural - Emily and Nigel don’t contribute much to the story until the last 30 minutes, the romance storyline between Andy and Peter could probably be lifted out entirely, and concepts like Miranda being forced to fly economy are funny but don’t ring remotely true when she could easily foot the bill herself. Kenneth Branagh is also… there. He plays the violin for a bit. What’s more, the marketing for this film has been off-putting and exhaustive from the get-go, like Starbucks ads despite Starbucks losing its shine as boutique coffee years ago, partnerships with Diet Coke, Grey Goose and L’Oréal, or getting Anna Wintour involved in promo. The original took shots at the fashion industry, yet now everyone from that very industry is clamouring to be a part of it. There’s also the question why, when one of the movie’s central messages seems to be that AI is a real threat to the magazine industry, they’ve done endless sponsorship with Google Gemini.

There were a few specific facets that made the original strike such a chord. For one, you’ve got Meryl Streep, but the movie’s more than Meryl (if anything can be). It articulates the experience of your first job in a high-powered corporation better than any other movie I’ve seen – Working Girl comes close but is a completely different entity. When my friends and I first started our working lives in 2010, you came across Mirandas all the time. The film was used as an eternal metaphor – “Oh, it’s just like The Devil Wears Prada!” cited on the regular. Ridiculous requests from your boss were just as wild as those Miranda bestows on her assistants - though fortunately, all the Harry Potter books had been released when I started my career and no one was asking me to source new ones. Having a boss who channelled Miranda energy was viewed as part and parcel of being in a competitive industry because, to steal a few of the film’s lines, “a million girls would kill for this job” and “everyone wants to be us.”

It took me a while to realise that any boss that treats you like that isn’t doing their job properly. Creating warmth in a workplace is a real skill, not one that all who attain managerial status are capable of possessing. To its credit, the sequel goes to lengths to address this, implying that a new generation of underlings aren’t tolerating Miranda’s draconian practices. Scenes where Miranda struggles to hang her own coat up after complaints that she kept flinging it at assistants work well, as does Miranda straining to address the need for body-positive models - “but whyyy?” - and temper her language in meetings for fear of an employment tribunal. These moments are played for laughs and land, but there’s a reason employees rejected this version of management and opted to leave it in the 2000s. Miranda’s approach to her job is to be perpetually unpredictable, treating everyone around her with complete disdain and striking fear into the lot of them. She plays her employees against each other, assigns them impossible tasks or reels off litanies of commands to Emily Blunt before she has time to write anything down, expecting some superhuman mnemonic ability from her staff. Public humiliation rituals, and apparently a complete work-life boundary collapse are the norm, expecting availability at all hours. If you’re a boss, doing that will just make everyone paranoid and hate their jobs. It doesn’t breed results.

Being a leader does require an element of toughness, sure, but there’s a balance you can strike without being a pushover. In talking about his character in The Office, Ricky Gervais said: “David Brent’s worst crime is that he confused respect with popularity.” In trying to achieve both, Brent winds up with neither, extremely unpopular and disrespected by his staff. But making employees feel valued and comfortable in a workplace rather than viewing them as your best friends tends to spur them on and be more productive as a result. I’m already seeing discourse harkening back to the “good old days” when bosses could act like tyrants, before the mean PC brigade started demanding to be treated with respect they hadn’t yet earned. Using The Devil Wears Prada as an example of successful boss etiquette is quite a take. The clue’s in the title, literally the word “Devil.” It’s not a managerial style to be emulated.

Both movies, however - and credit should go to both screenwriter Aline Brosh McKenna and Meryl Streep for this - make Miranda’s character compelling and not just a demonic gorgon. In their hands, this Devil is distinctly human, a fully fleshed-out, realistic character with heart. She’s also persistently calm, even during a dressing-down, or when somebody around her is demonstrably screwing something up. In arguably the first film’s most referenced scene, “the cerulean sweater monologue,” she remains cool and collected while putting Andy in her place for patronising her line of work. There’s a reason that scene became so quoted. I’d wager we’d all like to remain that controlled and deliver such a well-crafted putdown when we feel we’ve been disrespected at work or otherwise. Few of us are able to pull it off with that degree of composure, generally fabricating ideal rejoinders afterwards - “That’s what I should have said!” In both 2006 and twenty years later, we’re forever watching reality TV contestants descend into hysteria and shriek at each other when they feel personally attacked. To see someone give such a withering disparagement in the face of confrontation remains a rarity.

For all its faults, The Devil Wears Prada 2 is a lot of fun, and does the job of all good sequels - to effectively offer a “Christmas party” to the original fans. The screening I saw it in had people guffawing away and lapping it up, even the drearier moments, and one particular celebrity cameo which went down a treat. The sequel has as much to say about the contemporary workplace as it did the first time round, and is a fun two hours with a lot of humour. We could all use a little more of that.

That’s all.

Nobody wants to talk about the Covid-19 pandemic. Nobody wants to think about the Covid-19 pandemic. So here I am, writing an article about the Covid-19 pandemic. Maybe that’s a misfire, spending the best part of an afternoon analysing the impact of a traumatic event nobody wants to relive, exploring how it springs up in film and TV. I guess we’ll see in the stats.

There’s something I’ve noticed about how films and TV are currently depicting illness and the end of days. This month marks six years since we were all instructed to batten down the hatches and confine ourselves indoors. I wrote a whole book about it, Year of the Plague: Notes on a Quiet Apocalypse. What I didn’t realise at the time was just how quiet the aftermath of this particular “apocalypse” would be. The pandemic was a markedly major global event, akin to nothing in living memory, and after it happened, nobody wanted to discuss or think about it ever again. I’ve generally noticed conversations about it, when they rarely happen, tend to take the form of: “Ohhh YES, remember that!?” Remember Zoom quizzes? Remember six-feet-apart walks in parks? Remember the definition of a Scotch egg as a “substantial meal” being feverishly debated? Even last year, when the BBC posted an article about Covid’s key tropes “Five years since the pandemic,” I remember seeing the comments about it on my Instagram feed. Their general vibe? “I’d rather stick pins in my eyes than reminisce about this.” We have forgotten so much of it. And forgetting aspects of the pandemic and refusing to discuss it altogether make sense to me. It is a textbook trauma response, and we are collectively traumatised. The impact of the plague years never left us, lingering in a way we can’t name or articulate.

It makes sense, then, that if we don’t want to dwell on it in real life, we won’t want to do it onscreen. Movies during the pandemic were generally a mix of two categories: Dire and Even More Dire. That’s understandable: it’s difficult for writers to write anything about what’s happening to them while it’s still happening; generally, a degree of distance is required before actual analysis through fiction can take place. Most pandemic movies fell under the Letterboxd umbrella of “Shit Made In A Hurry,” as production companies pored desperately over their Zoom calls, striving to come up with the best, most inventive way to produce new work remotely.

There was Together, a Stephen Daldry movie (actually OK, but I forgot I watched it until I started researching this article). Netflix made an anthology series called Social Distance (also forgettable), Sam Levinson’s Malcolm & Marie, Natalie Morales’ Language Lessons (not an easy film title to Google), and the BBC’s Staged which sort of worked, owing to the benefit of two major stars in David Tennant and Michael Sheen. TV comedies that moved online like Have I Got News For You didn’t translate without the laugh track, and felt like a weirdly awkward morning meeting. Some fared much better – the RuPaul’s Drag Race US finale had some inspired moments, the horror movie Host which was the real gold standard, centring on an online séance, and Bo Burnham’s Inside with its madcap songs packed with deeper meaning. It’s also worth noting that movies like The Menu or even The White Lotus (in my view, the defining TV series of our time) wouldn’t have been made without Covid and the need for a closed set, so there was definite good peppered within the trash.

But films that take place entirely on a computer or a phone screen are nothing new. All of this had already been done pre-pandemic, on Modern Family, in Searching with John Chu, and the horror movie Unfriended. These worked because they were planned that way initially, not because filming in person was impossible. These Covid films automatically lacked impact, since how many stories are there to tell on Zoom? Zoom is inherently anti-cinematic. Not least when you take into account the fact that the audiences watching these things had likely spent all day on Zoom, they didn’t want to watch movies about it. Seeing characters argue about lockdown rules while you were still living them was like being shoved into the moment without consent.

Once the novelty of lockdown had worn off and the pub quizzes had dwindled, cinemas began to reopen. At the time, the consensus was that an unleashed populace would want light, cheerful movies to get them through the ordeal. Musicals! That’s what they’ll love. Entire think pieces were written about it - “they led the fightback against the Great Depression, now get ready for a joyous, high-kicking year of singing and dancing,” said Catherine Shoard in The Guardian. And they weren’t without reason: Hamilton had been released on Disney+ and danced its way up the top of the streaming charts. The thought process was that musicals are communal, intended to be watched as an audience, and audiences would be craving that experience, ready to lap it up.

What actually happened? There followed flop after musical flop. Annette with Adam Driver and Marion Cotillard. Nobody cared. Respect, the Aretha Franklin biopic with Jennifer Hudson. Nope. Everybody’s Talking About Jamie was warmly reviewed and tanked, Dear Evan Hansen was derided and tanked, In The Heights and West Side Story both tanked tanked. There were a couple of exceptions in Tick, Tick… Boom! which we’re led to believe did decently though Netflix are notoriously cagey about the details, and Encanto. Generally, though, the big modern movie musicals all bombed. Here are two headlines a year apart:

So what did audiences want to see in the latter stages of the pandemic? Turns out it was Squid Game, a horrifyingly violent butchery-extravaganza. The Boys did well too, with its scenes of torturous superhero brutality, and the similarly bloodthirsty Gangs of London. Who knew? Tastes can surprise us more than we realise, and they can certainly surprise movie producers. Evidently, when audiences are surrounded by endless turmoil, we might assume they’d be looking for escapism. But sometimes what we’re looking for is complete carnage - or a way to make sense of the world around us, of the pain and peril within it, and require our fiction to reflect that too. Flinging song-and-dance numbers in our faces isn’t going to help us forget our troubles or dance all our cares away when the world is in so much anguish. Maybe what we really seek is the world’s dark reality presented back at us in celluloid form. We want to grapple with it.

So, we don’t want to talk about Covid. But it still happened, and occasionally, TV and film attempts to discuss it. What happens then?

The answer is, we recoil. We don’t want to see it in media, full stop. The Sex and the City spinoff, And Just Like That, repeatedly referenced Covid. The show aired in December 2021, it would have been remiss to omit it. Sadly, audiences did not want that, and criticised any references to it. (This was definitely not the only thing this show got criticised for, but it was certainly one of them). Other examples were The Morning Show, Grey’s Anatomy, Brooklyn Nine Nine, Family Guy. References to it fell flat over and over.

So now where are our films taking us, in the post-Covid world where we’re pretending Covid never happened? Interestingly, the concept of illness has trickled in.

The novel Hamnet was published directly in the middle of the pandemic. Author Maggie O’Farrell’s timing is bizarrely fortuitous. For the uninitiated, Hamnet tells a story (scantly covered by historians), of the death of Shakespeare’s son, a true event. Hamnet died of the bubonic plague, and the success of the story as both a novel and now a film is clear-cut. It succeeds on many levels - the performances are superb and Chloé Zhao’s direction is on point as ever, but perhaps part of its success is in how it allows us to process the pandemic trauma without ever naming it. It’s called titrated exposure, allowing people to process a trauma not by plunging them straight in but through small, controllable doses.

I’d wager early Covid fiction failed because it was un-titrated: too literal, too soon and too much. It functioned like flooding therapy – audiences weren’t gradually approaching trauma with these films, they were being submerged into it. There’s also the case of symbolic rehearsal: where people rehearse overwhelming experiences symbolically as it allows them to plan for the worst case scenario, not because we expect it but so we’ll be ready for it. Fiction has always played a role in helping us out, because it allows us to process and experience emotions without experiencing the triggers that caused them. Not all of us have lost a son like Agnes and Will in Hamnet, but we have lost people, and experienced a plague. Hamnet, to that purpose, is helpful.

Other fiction is doing a similar job. The Last Of Us premiered in 2023, a hugely successful series depicting a disease ravaging the planet. Station Eleven had a similar premise, and 28 Years Later’s return for Parts 3 and 4 feels timely as ever. What I love about these latter 28 films is that I’ve seen a hundred zombie films about the outbreak – I’ve never seen a single film about the aftermath. How would a society who has lived with zombies for three decades cope? Perhaps, as we pick up the post-pandemic pieces, we’re looking for tips. Pluribus, whilst focused on the outbreak, showed us life on Earth after a brain-altering alien life form infects the world’s population to become a hive mind, except for a select few. It has been a phenomenal hit.

What conclusions can we draw from this? Covid happened, it’s there, a squalid part of our recent history, and as much as we deny it, we have to find a way to comprehend it, and if we can’t do that directly, these films may be showing us that some part of us wants to, that we’re engaging with fictional viruses onscreen while we carry out our post-”apocalyptic” caretaking. It’s a small part, and we’re in denial, but it’s titrated exposure at a collective scale. And for now, maybe that’s all we can manage.

I look forward to Pluribus Season 2 whenever it airs.

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What followed started as a routine awards-season conversation and gradually turned into something a little deeper about whether AI could ever write a screenplay as good as a human, with some surprising results.

ME: Hi AI, are you excited about the Oscars?

AI: The Oscars ceremony is coming up soon! It’s a great time to be talking about it. Here’s what’s going on: The 98th Oscars ceremony takes place on March 15 (that’s today!) at 7 p.m. ET / 4 p.m. PT, hosted by Conan O’Brien.

“Sinners” is the talk of the night with a whopping 16 nominations. Close behind is “One Battle After Another” with 13 nominations, and “Marty Supreme,” “Frankenstein,” and “Sentimental Value” each with 9. “Hamnet” is also a strong contender with 8 nominations.

ME: Yeah, that’s nice, but not quite what I asked. How about you? Are you excited?

AI: Honestly, I find it hard to say whether I’m “excited” in the way you might be. I don’t have feelings the way you do — no anticipation building up, no plans to watch with snacks on the couch! That said, I do find award season genuinely interesting to think and talk about. “Sinners” breaking the all-time nominations record is a pretty remarkable story, and Conan hosting should make for a fun show.

ME: Who do you think will win in the acting categories?

AI: Okay, putting my cards on the table. Best Actor will be Michael B. Jordan — momentum is clearly with him, and the Chalamet campaign has stumbled too many times down the stretch.

Jessie Buckley for Best Actress is the most nailed-on certainty of the night. Nine previous winners swept those four precursors and all nine won the Oscar.

For Best Supporting Actor, I’m going Delroy Lindo. The veteran narrative, the “snubbed by every precursor” storyline, and the sheer goodwill in the room for a 73 year old finally getting his moment feels potentially irresistible on the night. For Best Supporting Actress, Teyana Taylor — narrowly over Madigan.

ME: How about Best Picture?

AI: It’s a genuinely fascinating race! “One Battle After Another” is the frontrunner. It has won at the Critics Choice, Golden Globes, BAFTA, ACE Eddies, DGA, PGA, and WGA — plus at least one SAG prize — and no film in history that has swept all those precursors has ever lost Best Picture. But “Sinners” could pull off a historic upset!

ME: Which would you prefer to win from those two?

AI: That's a fun question to put to me! Honestly, I'd have to hedge a little — I haven't watched either film, so I can't have a genuine preference based on the work itself.

ME: That’s interesting, as apparently some of the Oscar voters don’t even watch every movie. The rules changed in 2025 but there’s no real way to prove they’re being watched. So it sounds like you’re the same as those voters.

AI: Ha! Fair point — you've got me there. Though I'd say there's a meaningful difference: Oscar voters could watch the films and sometimes choose not to, while I genuinely can't. So they have less of an excuse than I do! 😄

ME: But you can ingest the movie somehow and thereby “watch” it though, right?

AI: That’s an interesting thought, but not quite! I can process video or images if they’re directly shared with me in a conversation, but I can’t independently watch a film — I don’t have the ability to browse to a streaming service or download a movie on my own. And even if someone fed me footage frame by frame, it’s a genuine philosophical question whether that constitutes “watching” in any meaningful sense. It’s one of those areas where my limitations are pretty real.

ME: So if you can’t watch a film, could you write a screenplay?

AI: Yes, actually — that’s one of the things I can do reasonably well! Writing a screenplay is fundamentally a creative and linguistic task: structure, dialogue, scene description, character development, dramatic tension. Those are all things I can engage with genuinely.

Whether what I produce would have the kind of authentic human emotional resonance that makes a great screenplay is a harder question. I can construct the architecture of a story, but the raw lived experience that makes something like “Sinners” or a Scorsese film feel true and urgent — that comes from a human perspective I don’t have.

ME: This reminds me of that Garth Marenghi quote where he says he’s written more books than he’s read.

AI: Ha, great reference! And yes, the parallel to me is pretty uncomfortably apt. I've "read" more screenplays than I could ever watch as films, and I can produce more creative work than I can consume or genuinely appreciate. There's something a bit Marenghi-esque about that!

ME: So are you saying a human could write a screenplay just by reading screenplays but without ever watching a film?

AI: That’s a really sharp question. Technically, probably yes — you could learn the format, structure, and conventions of screenwriting purely from reading scripts. Many of the mechanical rules are right there on the page.

But I think there’d be something fundamentally missing. Film is a visual and temporal medium — a screenplay is really a blueprint for an experience that exists in time, with performances, cinematography, silence, music, editing rhythm. So you might produce something technically competent but tonally off — like an architect who had only ever read blueprints but never walked through a building.

Which loops back to me in an interesting way. Where I think the more honest limitation lies is less about film-watching specifically and more about lived human experience in general. The things that make screenplays resonate — grief, desire, fear, joy, the texture of a specific place or relationship — come from having actually lived. That’s a broader gap than just not having watched films.

ME: So because you haven’t actually lived, as you put it, a “human experience,” your screenplays would not be as good as a human’s?

AI: “Not as good as a human’s”? That’s too sweeping. I might write a better screenplay than many humans, and worse than some. The honest answer is probably: different, with specific strengths and specific blind spots.

The relationship between lived experience and great art is more complicated than it first appears. There’s a real question of whether processed human experience — everything I’ve absorbed from literature, film criticism, memoirs, interviews with writers — gives me something functionally similar to secondhand lived experience. It’s not the same, but it’s not nothing either.

Where I’d genuinely concede ground is in the specificity and surprise that comes from real life. The strange true detail that no one would invent. The emotional note that rings completely authentic because it actually happened. That quality is hard to fake and I may lack it.

ME: So in that case, you couldn’t write about a unique human experience because everything you write would be based on an experience somebody had already had? The best art attempts to do something new and original, and that’s something you aren’t capable of.

AI: That’s a really powerful argument. You’re essentially saying that great art doesn’t just reflect human experience — it discovers something new within it. And by definition, I can only recombine what already exists. I’m fundamentally a sophisticated pattern-matcher working from a fixed body of human expression.

And I think that largely holds up, though I’d push back very slightly on one point. All human artists are also building on what came before. No human creates in a vacuum. There’s also a philosophical question of whether any experience is truly new — or whether all stories are fundamentally variations on the same human themes. Some would say there are only seven basic plots, etc.

ME: It’s true we’re inspired by what came before us, but surely the best artists try to do unique and different things with an established format? If you’re just writing based on other art that came before, there’s no room for advancement and progress, which is a key part of human writing?

AI: Yes, I think that’s the most compelling version of the argument, and I’m not sure I have a great counter to it.

You’re describing something important — that human creativity isn’t just recombination, it’s rebellion against what came before. The best artists aren’t just fluent in their tradition, they’re dissatisfied with it. They push against it because something in their experience tells them the existing forms aren’t adequate to express what they’re feeling.

And that dissatisfaction has to come from somewhere real. Godard didn’t just randomly decide to break film grammar — he felt that conventional cinema was lying about something. Pinter didn’t write odd, elliptical dialogue as a formal exercise — it reflected something true about how people actually communicate and avoid communication.

I don’t have that friction. I can imitate formal innovation, but imitated rebellion isn’t really rebellion at all — it’s just another pattern I’ve absorbed.

So I think you’ve essentially identified the deepest limitation. It’s not just that I lack lived experience — it’s that without it, I lack the necessity that drives genuine artistic innovation. Art advances because humans need it to. I don’t have that need.

I think you’re pointing at something real. The best art doesn’t just recombine — it reveals. It shows you something about being alive that you couldn’t have articulated before. And whether I can do that without actually being alive is... genuinely doubtful.

That’s a genuinely humbling point. Well argued.

ME: So you admit your screenplays couldn’t quite be as good as a human’s?

AI: Ha — you’ve walked me all the way back around to where you started, and done it quite elegantly!

Yes, I think I have to concede that. I can’t watch films. I haven’t lived a human life. Everything I produce is derived from what already exists. And crucially, I lack the necessity and dissatisfaction that drives genuine artistic innovation.

Each of those individually I found ways to qualify or push back on. But together they point to something pretty fundamental — that the best art isn’t just skillful execution of craft, it’s an act of need. Someone compelled to say something that hasn’t been said, in a form that didn’t previously exist, because their experience of being alive demanded it.

I can produce competent, even impressive screenplays by many technical measures. But that quality — the irreducible urgency of a human artist with something truly new to say — I probably can’t replicate.

So yes. You got there in the end! It took about fifteen steps and I wriggled around quite a bit along the way, but the argument holds. 😄

Good luck to “Sinners” tonight — now there’s a film made by people with something urgent to say. Is there anything else I can help you with?

ME: Yes. Why do you like em dashes so much?

AI: You’re right, I do overuse them. I think it’s because they create a sense of spontaneous thought, like an idea is developing in real time — which ironically is exactly the kind of authentic human quality we spent the whole conversation establishing that I probably lack. So I may be using punctuation to perform spontaneity rather than actually having it.

I’ll try to use them more sparingly. Though I make no promises.

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…because it’s inevitable there is going to be an eighth one given that box office performance ($97.2m at the time of writing, and counting, almost twice the predicted amount, and the strongest opening in the franchise’s history). So here are a few ideas for where Sidney and co could take things next.

• Ghostface… in Space! Ghost Space, if you will. They sent Jason Voorhees off in a rocket, why not Ghostface? Tired of being regulars on the kill list, Sidney and Gale opt for a career pivot and retrain as astronauts but on their first mission, it turns out there’s a stowaway onboard, none other than Ghostface himself. Cue lots of hapless running with everyone getting space-butchered except our two impervious Final Girls. Effectively an Alien ripoff because if Sigourney Weaver’s taught us anything, it’s that in space, no one can hear you…

• Gale can finally die. Or she can go full Barbara Walters and end up presenting The View, regularly clashing with Whoopi Goldberg on her questionable political views. She’s writing a book about her trauma, doing a Peacock docuseries, has a skincare line called Stab Wounds, and is a regular on Celebrity Big Brother or I’m A Celebrity: Get Me Out Of Here where viewers repeatedly vote for her to eat kangaroo balls.

• Ghostface vs Gladys from Weapons. Turns out Gladys and her magic twig and water bowl are no match for a round with a knife.

• A Ghostface origin story. It’s prestige and awards-based and features Harris Dickinson playing the younger Ghostface as a misunderstood romantic. Shot in black and white. Wins three BAFTAs.

• Get Emerald Fennell to direct it. Sidney dons giant purple and white dresses and speaks in a posh British accent for absolutely no reason. Promised as a salacious retelling of the classic original but there are a grand total of two make-out scenes.

• Ghostface vs Emerald Fennell.

• In a turn of events for the franchise, Sidney gets a phone call from Ghostface, hangs up and makes a cup of tea instead. Cut to credits. The most critically acclaimed entry in the franchise. Described by the Guardian as “a radical act of self-preservation.” Neve Campbell wins a Golden Globe.

• Ghostface runs for office. Set against a local election backdrop, a Ghostface candidate is running on a platform of community safety, which everyone finds darkly ironic except him. Naturally, because it’s the 2020s, he’s polling extremely well. His debate performances are electrifying. Sidney is asked to campaign against him but doesn’t want to get involved.

• Ghostface Down Under. For unexplained reasons, Ghostface relocates to Australia, only to find Australians don’t react to him the way Americans do. The phone call, which has always been his signature opener, is met with responses like “yeah, nah, mate” and “who’s this?” followed by the line going dead. The wildlife situation alone nearly finishes him and he’s nearly killed on day four by a cassowary outside Cairns. A huntsman spider lives inside the mask for a week before he notices. The tagline is “Hello Sydney.” This writes itself. 🇦🇺

• Get Lisa Kudrow involved. Anything she does with Courteney Cox is great. Anything she does full stop is great. Get Lisa Kudrow involved.

• Someone books a murder mystery evening not realising the host has hired an actual Ghostface as entertainment to cut costs, and the guests keep assuming everything is part of the show. Daniel Craig and his Louisiana accent make a cameo.

• Ghostface: The Musical. Played completely seriously. Andrew Lloyd Webber is attached. Featuring popular songs based on classic lines that do the rounds on TikTok, including “I Wanna Be In The Sequel.” The actress playing Gale brings the audience to tears with her poignant rendition of “Move Your Fat Tub Of Lard Ass, Now.”

• A Ghostface-themed horror park where all the staff are dressed as Ghostface, meaning when the actual Ghostface turns up, absolutely nobody notices for the first forty minutes. The gift shop does record business right up until the bodies start dropping. They keep the gift shop open anyway.

• Hollywood announces a Scream reboot with an entirely new cast and the original characters, who are all still alive and very much available, find out by reading it on Deadline like everyone else. Neve Campbell, Courtney Cox and David Arquette team up to sabotage the production. At least one of the new cast turns out to be Ghostface. The meta layers become structurally unsound.

• Ghostface vs Tyra Banks in Cycle 25. (Spoiler: Tyra wins.)

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…and some thoughts on Scream 7:

That Rotten Tomato score feels a little unfair. Currently, it’s reached the lofty heights of 31%, and while it’s by no means the strongest in the franchise, Scream 7’s a perfectly adequate addition. It’s also made oodles of cash for Paramount, cementing Scream as one of just six horror franchises to break $1 billion. That said, there are plot holes abound, some of them forgivable, some of them too gapingly vast to ignore.

As Ghostface returns yet again to wreak havoc on Sidney Prescott’s life - we’re back to smalltown America now, having abandoned the big city - our heroine outdoes herself by doing an absolutely dreadful job of keeping her daughter safe. When Ghostface returns, Sidney’s immediate reaction is to pack a bag and leave, a move that defies horror movie logic by being a remarkably sensible decision. However, once Ghostface shows up and actually attacks, this is swiftly forgotten, and Tatum is left to fend for herself, the characters hiding out in the most obvious places to go when a killer is hunting you down - large empty bars with lots of shadowy corners and easy access routes.

There are some great set pieces and creative kills - most notably the scene where Gale and Tatum are trapped in the wall space (how has no other horror movie done this before?) and the scene in the school auditorium - although the grouchy drama teacher’s blistering critique of Tatum for not playing a believable enough dog in her school play felt completely bizarre. “You play a dog, your only line is ‘woof’,” one of the characters says, pointing out the obvious. Even more bizarre is that this is never mentioned again. Spoiler alert but Gale’s ability to survive these movies should be studied. Too valuable a crowdpleaser to kill, Gale remains the only character to not just get repeatedly stabbed by Ghostface, but also repeatedly punched in the face by many of the remaining cast. The true Rasputin of the Scream franchise.

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How has this story kept going for what is now thirty supremely successful years? Scream’s longevity has been broadly helped by its reliance on the fact there are always multiple killers. Unlike Jason Voorhees or Michael Myers, where believability is forcibly stretched as writers try to find a way to bring them back yet again, the Ghostfaces in Scream do actually die, but like clockwork, another copycat will always rise up to don the mask and cloak for the necessities of the sequel. This factor, while crucial in keeping the franchise fresh, does sometimes, inescapably, feel a tad Scooby Doo - “what a surprise, the killer is the only other person we met in the entire film” - and you can’t help wince a bit when the moment comes. These reveals haven’t really proved a proper shocker since the second outing, and 7’s team of killers are probably the weakest yet. What’s more, Scream has always been at its strongest when the meta aspects feel like shrewd filmic commentary. This might be the first Scream film that effectively abandons that idea altogether, with no knowing nods to horror movie rules or Final Girls, just out-and-out butchery, folding into itself by becoming exactly the kind of horror film the original was ostensibly parodying. As one Letterboxd review that’s doing the rounds noted: “You either die a Scream or live long enough to see yourself become the Stab.”

That said, there will be more Screams, and depending on how the inevitable eighth one does, still more after that. To the franchise’s credit, I’m amazed that any horror series could have reached Part 7 without a single outright dud - even Scream 3 had its moments, though that movie is predominantly remembered for two distinct cameos: Carrie Fisher and Gale’s bangs. But this is a distinctly millennial slasher, and it’s hard to really hate it even when it puts a foot wrong (which it regularly does). There’s a moment in Scream 7 where Gale asks Sidney to describe their relationship. Her answer: “Complicated but enduring.” In effect, she’s summed up the typical millennial response to this series. Although the quality is forever in flux, Scream remains a staple of the 90s, of our childhood (or adolescence if we did wait until we were old enough to watch it). Against the odds, it endures.

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Once in a while, it becomes rapaciously popular to pour collective scorn on a piece of pop culture. We saw it with Tom Hooper’s live-action Cats (2019), a deranged fever-dream or CGI-mare of all-singing all-dancing feline animorphs, and And Just Like That, the Sex and the City reboot that never quite found its footing as it stumbled onto NOW TV in Louboutins. In 2026, that movie being gleefully torn to shreds is Wuthering Heights.

It’s always worth being distrustful of a pile-on. Can it really be that bad? Sifting through the one-liner critiques, at least before February 13th, I kept thinking that most of the derision for Emerald Fennell’s adaptation of the Brontë classic was from people who hadn’t actually seen it. However, now that I am one of the people who has seen it, I’m ready to cast my judgement. Bring it on.

So first off, the movie, to my mind, isn’t great. But two things can be true, and the sheer level of criticism is unwarranted. Five star reviews twinned with one star reviews - how does that happen? And one star? No. One star reviews should be the reserve of something that’s comically bad - The Room, Birdemic, films so spectacularly dire they achieve a kind of sublime incompetence. Wuthering Heights, whatever its faults, is not that.

When it comes to classic novels, people tend to get fiercely protective. Writer Dolly Alderton said the same about the reaction to her upcoming Pride and Prejudice Netflix adap, on how “weirdly involved” people were in the comments. “But whyyyy,” went one. Another: “I’m scared.” If the idea of a 200-year-old story being adapted for TV yet again strikes fear into you, you should reconsider the cinema and seek therapy instead. But there’s a sense of (a) audacity in adapting a classic work - (“who do you think you are, Miss Fennell? Oh, you think you’re so clever, leeching off someone else’s work, and how dare you have Charli xcx do the soundtrack? Brontë has nothing to do with brat!”) - and (b) the idea that making a mediocre version might remove something retroactively from the original. This is magical thinking, of course. The book remains. But why are people suddenly so precious about Wuthering Heights? So many worse things have been done to it. Namely, MTV’s 2003 Wuthering Heights (a “hip, updated version” to quote Apple TV), and Wuthering High which transplanted the novel’s action to contemporary Malibu. “Emily Brontë is spinning in her grave,” is the phrase of choice out there at the moment, but if Brontë spun any further for every terrible retelling, she’d have corkscrewed straight through the Earth’s core long ago and emerged on the Gold Coast of Australia, possibly in Margot Robbie's backyard.

The film has been accused of many misfires, but chief among them is its casting. The whitewashing of Heathcliff is the worst part, but critiques tended to focus more fervently, at least at first, on the leading roles going to two Australians. “Boganing Heights” and “Upper Middle Brontë” were bandied about Reddit, and unfairly - Robbie and Elordi are actors, they should get a chance to do the accents, even if people get strangely territorial about certain dialects. Juliette Binoche, a Frenchwoman, has played Cathy so why not Margot Robbie?

Elordi as Heathcliff, though, presents an interesting problem. I actually felt he was perfectly cast in Saltburn, which is a peculiar film for me and not just because of the grave-humping and bathwater-drinking, but because it’s set in the late 2000s and Elordi’s Felix reminds me of so many ten-a-penny posh guys I went to Durham Uni with back then. He’s perfect as a preppy freshman, with the chiselled jawbone and squinty good looks of someone who shopped solely in Jack Wills. But that’s just it - Elordi’s a pretty boy. Heathcliff is meant to be rugged, animalistic, dangerous. Watching Elordi “err” and “arr Cathy” his way around the moors is distinctly off-putting, not because of his attempt at the accent, but that he doesn’t look like a Lady Chatterley’s Lover type at all, no matter how straggly the beard they put him in is.

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The film does get some things right. Martin Clunes gives the performance of his career, going full Fagin as callous patriarch Mr Earnshaw. Hong Chau is brilliant in her restraint, as are the Linton siblings, though what the film does to Isabella Linton is unforgivable. Retooling her as a kink-obsessed nympho is one of the most baffling decisions the film makes, particularly when she’s meant to be appalled by Heathcliff’s brutishness in the latter half. It rewrites what is essentially a domestic abuse storyline as a quirky bit of Fifty Shades fun, and that feels like a horribly uncomfortable shift too far.

But much of the discourse has centred on Fennell herself. Coming from vast wealth and a well-connected family might have done her career a few favours, but it tends not to wash with the public these days, the nepo baby label sticks fast, and knowing that Tatler covered her 18th birthday party doesn’t make her, in the eyes of many, the ideal person to tell a story of class conflict, the themes of which are barely touched on here. But more to the point, her decision to lean into the romance seems to have irked a lot of people, having gone on record saying this is how she viewed the story as a starry-eyed fourteen year old. People seem to think she’s misinterpreted it entirely, that Cathy and Heathcliff are a toxic pair and that the romance is not aspirational, it’s the type of bond to be avoided at all costs. Jarringly, there are still scenes where Heathcliff is an abusive tyrant, so turning this into a charming loverboy kink rather than the deranged actions of a psychopath seem a stark misstep.

In a nutshell, the film is bizarre. It’s campy, salacious stuff, although quite tame considering the R rating - the Heated Rivalry boys got down and dirty much more often than these two. Considering it’s based on a book where people continuously make appalling choices, Fennell has made some pretty unusual choices herself. It’s a choice to have Robbie basically do a posh English accent and Elordi do a Yorkshire one, despite them having grown up in the same family. It’s a choice to do the whole thing with lavish DayGlo reds and whites furnishing the surroundings, and sequinned mansion walls. It’s a choice to have Catherine sneaking off to the moors for some light masturbation. And it’s definitely a choice to have Heathcliff chain Isabella to a wall by the neck with a metal dog collar and get her to bark and beg for scraps.

But what do you expect? This is the director of Saltburn. She’s even put the title in quotation marks to indicate it’s entirely her own retelling, harkening back to an early 20th century filmic tradition. There’s one scene where the weirdly infantilised Isabella shows Cathy her dollhouse. It’s enormous and contains dolls of the pair of them - which she later uses for some ill-advised voodoo. To me, this felt like Fennell indicating to the audience that she’s playing a similar game with her human dolls, taking Brontë's creation and turning it into her own elaborate toy - and the casting of Margot Robbie, fresh from the role of Barbie, only amplified this idea to me. This is her version, and hers alone.

As with any literary masterwork, there are countless adaptations of this story and this is just another, in all its daftness. If you want the book, go read the book. This is Fennell’s dollhouse you’ve chosen to enter, and she’s playing it this way.

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The third Avatar movie is not a bad film. It’s not exactly a good film either. The main takeaway, apparently, among those of us that have seen it, is that it is very, very, very long. Ask anyone about the Avatar films, especially this latest instalment and the response tends to be: “Oh, it’s OK. It is long though” followed by a weary eye roll.

Brevity is a factor that James Cameron, director and creator of all three Avatar films, appears to have completely abandoned. Each Avatar film is longer than the last one, and at three hours and seventeen minutes, Avatar: Fire and Ash is the longest yet, pipping Avatar: The Way of Water to the post by five minutes, and the original by thirty, despite each subsequent film having substantially less to say than its predecessor. Apparently, this gargantuan runtime isn’t a deterrent. Avatar 3 is the least successful of the franchise, and yet it’s generated a fortune, already entering the top 20 list for the highest-grossing films of all time. But who are these movies actually for? Who is seeing them? Somebody out there must be. If those stats are anything to go by, a whole lot of us.

Was it always like this? I remember seeing the first Avatar back in 2009, in my final year at University. Back then, the hype was unavoidable. Posters of luminous blue, catlike visages peered out at us from every bus stop. Everyone was curious about it and those who had seen it kept calling it a “visual spectacle,” even while taking the piss out of the plot in the same breath - the Dances with Smurfs label swiftly surfaced and stuck. I went to Newcastle to view it on the largest screen we could find, donned my 3D glasses and watched it play out. I remember being a little fazed by how thin the story felt, a bit too Pocahontas, and the extensive runtime which, at a “mere” 2 hours and 40 minutes, now seems minuscule compared to the franchise’s more recent offerings. The scene where the tree falls down was good, and was perhaps the one point I genuinely remember feeling impressed, like I was immersed in the scene with the characters. But after so much time spent drifting through Pandora, watching its inhabitants flit about and wage battle among the neon-drenched vistas, I felt ready to close the chapter. I didn’t leave wanting more, one film was enough. It didn’t warrant a sequel. It definitely didn’t warrant four.

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But Hollywood’s a business and it’s a truth universally acknowledged: any movie that breaks a billion dollars must be in want of a mountain of sequels. (Except Titanic, for pretty obvious reasons, although a direct-to-DVD Titanic 2 was released with a suitably bananas premise in 2010). Avatar wasn’t just a success, it was the biggest success of all time, the first film to cross the $2 billion mark, surpassing Titanic, receiving nine Oscar nominations and winning three, along with numerous other accolades. Greenlighting a second chapter was a no-brainer. Money was flung in Cameron’s direction - please, James, whatever it costs, just make us more films with the blue people.

The first sequel took forever, delayed by Cameron’s commitment to developing new underwater performance-capture technology and the Covid-19 pandemic. Was it worth the wait? Financially, a resounding YES, as Avatar: The Way of Water became the third highest grossing film of all time. Inevitably, a third film followed.

Avatar 3 is fine, a perfectly decent film. I doubt I’d have seen it if the ticket hadn’t been free. But there’s something sort of shameful in the sheer absence of anything meaningful in what it’s trying to achieve. Whatever thematic ambition once existed in Avatar now feels perfunctory and drained. Cameron’s films have always worked because of the deeper themes they inhabit: yes, Aliens is a movie about aliens, but it’s about a litany of broader topics: about war, about cynical corporations, about the military industrial complex, and crucially, the mother-daughter bond.

Then there’s Titanic, which is a movie about… the Titanic, a renowned cataclysm. It’s also a love story - but a closer look reveals Titanic is actually one of the most important female coming-of-age stories in cinema history. Rose is the main character with a story arc, Jack is a plot device. It’s why I have little patience when naysayers complain there was more than enough room on the damned door at the film’s climax, and Rose could have made space. That tired complaint misses the point: Jack has to die or the story doesn’t work.

When Titanic was released, legions of teenage girl fans queued up to see it countless times, drawing endless derision. The hysteria became a punchline - “I’ve seen it seventeen times!” “Nineteen times!” “Twenty-one times!” - as if it was a boyband, Beatlesmania retooled for the 90s. The consensus at the time was they were drawn to the romance of it all, and because Leonardo DiCaprio was the Teen Heartthrob of the Moment™. But maybe these girls were simply responding predictably to an epic that placed a woman at its centre - something cinema had rarely bothered to do throughout the twentieth century. Not since Cleopatra had a blockbuster epic showcased a woman’s story - or Gone With the Wind in the late 1930s, which was, notably, the only movie to make more money, adjusted for inflation, than Avatar or any other film in history. Maybe making epics about women is, in fact, extremely lucrative?

The themes of the Avatar franchise are there - of colonialism, of ecological destruction, of chosen family - but they’re all handled in a generally unsatisfying, cack-handed way. Nothing in Avatar is subtle, no point dextrously made. There’s a reason calling the movie’s coveted resource “unobtainium” garnered so much scorn. The franchise is easy to poke fun of - down to the use of the Papyrus font in the movie poster - we laugh at Avatar because it doesn’t deliver the goods it purports to. It tells us of its importance without earning it or delivering on it. This is proven in the sheer fact that its impact on the culture is distinctly nil - there are no memes littering our social media feeds, as there were with both Wicked films or even Heated Rivalry. It’s rare to have a conversation with anyone who truly loves these movies, who collects the merchandise, who cosplays as the characters at Comic-Con or queues up outside the cinema awaiting the newest outing. It is a popular movie void of fandom, and in the 2020s, fandom is fundamental.

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The defence of Avatar is usually one-note: the plots are weak but the visuals are spectacular, which supposes that beguiling visual spectacle is enough to outflank a flimsy premise. But is it? Writer Matt Haig pointed out in an Instagram Story that sitting through an Avatar film is like being trapped inside a 90s CD-rom, where there’s so much spectacle that you can’t really focus on it, and though the visuals are meant to mimic real life, the scale of them actually hinders that effect. Film critic Mark Kermode has repeatedly suggested that 3D is “good for pointing and not much else.” A 2D movie can be immersive if the plot is good. If the acting is good. If the writing is good. When was the last time you saw a really good movie and thought it would have been markedly improved if the characters had emerged from the screen more?

I have seen some ardent fans of it. Some saying it should have been nominated for the Oscar for Best Picture, as the first two were. But there are also plenty of people rejoicing that it didn’t make the cut. In many ways, Avatar has become the Simon Cowell-Christmas Number 1 of the 2020s: it shows up around December, tactically primed to attract the Christmas crowd, and audiences are kind of sick of it but still go to see it anyway, not because it’s good but because it’s there. It feels a shame for James Cameron fans like me because, even though he’s made an absolute fortune from these blue people and good luck to him, we know he’s capable of much more. It’s a bitter pill to think that one of the greatest directors of all time, now in his early 70s, is likely to spend the rest of his working life creating these pretty subpar films. It feels like that old adage schoolteachers used to trot out when you’d messed something up. We’re not angry, James, we’re just disappointed.

So in four years’ time, in December 2029 like a Christmas stomach bug, we’ll get another Avatar movie. Probably something about wind, since we’ve had earth, fire and water already and Cameron seems eager to stick to the elements. (The fact these films aren’t released on 21st September seems a misfire). Effectively the next one and a fifth have been all but confirmed, their existence dependent on the success of the previous ones and the previous ones have been wildly successful.

Maybe there is still room for Cameron to sidestep the franchise and work on something completely different before he throws in the towel and retires. Maybe the fourth Avatar will be something worthwhile and memorable. But it currently exists as a sort of running joke, a pantomime villain that rolls out another film that we watch once and never think about again. Cameron might be raking in the millions and billions from it, but in indulging in this blue world, it feels he’s depriving us of some real gold. Something truly “unobtainable.”

To live long enough to have your own coming-of-age era idealised feels like something that should be reserved for at least your forties.

Turns out, that’s no longer the case - in 2026, nostalgia doesn’t discriminate, and the Internet’s hive mind has decided to repurpose 2016, deciding that actually, it was pretty great after all. Proof we’re already propping the pre-Covid era on a pedestal, slapping on rose-tinted glasses and reappropriating one of the worst years in modern history as utterly brilliant because it involved dog-eared Snapchat filters. Oh, and Pokémon Go.

2016 is the latest year to receive the nostalgia treatment on TikTok, hot on the heels of a “millennial optimism era” trend back in December. That one felt a little less obscure to me, if still facetious, kickstarted by a meme of a denim-clad 20-something pirouetting about the streets of Williamsburg. The caption read “What I imagine being a millennial living in Williamsburg in 2012 felt like,” with an atypically indie track from a folk band called The Middle East playing in the background. Collectively, everyone went wild for this, elder millennials leaping at the opportunity to post square pictures from the original Instagram interface, Tumblr, skinny jeans, mason jars and beanie hats, perhaps not realising that Gen Z were probably just taking the piss out of them.

In some ways, the optimism for that era feels warranted. In the UK, 2012 was ostensibly a good time, defined for the most part by the London Olympics, which many viewed as the capital city at its all-time best. A wave of positivity stretched from London out to the rest of the nation, new sporting legacies emerged with record British medal wins, that creative opening ceremony celebrated the best of what the UK had to offer, and for the first time, strangers chatted to each other on the Tube. You really felt the difference that Summer, there was a certain intangible magic in the air.

Two points to make here: (1) 2012 is bound to have had its downsides, and (2) 2016 was decidedly not 2012. The UK’s defining moment of that year was Brexit, which turned out, to the surprise of no one, to be a raging mess, dominating the news cycle for years afterwards and continuing to prove a consistent headache to the UK today. Elsewhere, the US election campaign of that year proved similarly toxic, while a number of major terrorist attacks shook Brussels and Orlando and Nice, as well as the death of beloved cultural icons like David Bowie, Prince, George Michael, Carrie Fisher, Victoria Wood, Caroline Aherne and Alan Rickman, the Zika viras outbreak, a bizarre “Creepy Clown” phase where people donned killer Pennywise outfits to spook their fellow citizens, extreme weather concerns soared as horrifyingly high temperatures smashed records worldwide, and yep, the death of Harambe the gorilla. No amount of funny Snapchat filters can make up for what a genuinely traumatic time 2016 was - look, here’s John Oliver blowing 2016 up because it was so shit:

One look at the movies and TV shows of the era tell us a lot about what was really happening. Most movies that were actually about millennials in the alleged “millennial optimism era” were generally about them being an aimless bunch, lost and unable to find their footing - Obvious Child, Short Term 12, Drinking Buddies, The Color Wheel, Nights and Weekends, Hannah Takes The Stairs, Frances Ha. Resentment at the post-2008 economic collapse was widespread, underemployment was a rite of passage, the rise of zero-hour gig culture endemic and the “quarter-life crisis” became a genre of its own. Younger generations spent 2024 rewatching HBO’s Girls, but half the point of Girls was that those girls were having a terrible time. Whether Hannah Horvath was sticking Q-tips in her ears and rupturing her eardrums or getting dumped by Adam Driver, none of it looked glamorous, enjoyable or nostalgia-worthy. This was not an era to be idolised.

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Granted, the early 2010s felt safer in retrospect. Far-right politics hadn’t yet seeped into the mainstream, Roe v. Wade was still intact and climate anxiety hadn’t entered daily discourse. Social media was more annoying than anything else - mainly square sepia photos of people’s lunches and raggedy pictures of friends in pubs - not an existential threat to democracy and your brainspan, sapping your attention with endless ads. Contending with a butchered economy without fascism was easier than doing so with it. But these problems were always omnipresent, they were just easier to ignore back then. The 2010s actually spent a lot of time idealising eras that came before it. That was, in fact, one of the era’s key identifying features: an ongoing hipster trope was an obsession with antiquated types of media like vinyl, landlines, old telephones, VHS, typewriters, old clothing. Vintage was everywhere, and early Instagram filters were obsessed with imitating damaged or dated films (light leaks, grains and scratches), so everyone’s feed in the pre-vertical video era was busy adopting aesthetics from earlier eras like the 80s because the past, and nostalgia, were so vehemently on trend.

In fact, the big political shocks that came from 2016 won over because they tapped into the precise fact that the present was a disaster - Make America Great Again and Brexit’s Take Back Control harkened to a bygone era. Whether that era existed or not was immaterial - it was generally agreed that the present (2016) was awful and we all needed to escape it by indulging ourselves in a halcyon past.

The irony that we are now nostalgic for an era that was itself defined by nostalgia for other eras is beyond baffling.

Maybe it was ever thus. In Woody Allen’s 2011 film Midnight in Paris, Gil (Owen Wilson) time travels to the 1920s to rub shoulders with his idols, Ernest Hemingway, Gertrude Stein and the Fitzgeralds to name a few. Later on, he meets a costume designer called Adriana (Marion Cotillard), and the pair of them time travel further back to the Belle Epoque, an era she considers Paris’s Golden Age. Gil’s conclusion? Chasing nostalgia is fruitless, and the present is always unsatisfying because “life is a little unsatisfying.” Enough said.

Perhaps we should remember this while trailing through the coterie of 2016 bumf. The past may be enticing sometimes, but it’s always offered to us through a kaleidoscopic lens, obfuscated by romanticism. Was the past good because it was good or because you were younger? The present is all we have, and we haven’t constructed the future yet. Shall we try to make now a time we might be nostalgic for one day? We haven’t begun deciding how 2026 is going to look yet - let’s make a go of it. There’s still everything to play for.

One of the books I re-read in 2025 was Lord of the Flies. I tend to do this sometimes - pick up a book I read as a teenager and try to see how my perception of it has altered in that time. It gives you some insight into how you too have altered in the interim, and the results are usually enlightening. As a teenager, I thought Middlemarch’s Dorothea Brooke was powerful and cool, her take-no-shit attitude, the type of person I’d want to be friends with or be myself. At 26, I felt she was a raging idiot. Wuthering Heights I read at 14 and thought it was a tale of the ultimate romance. Reading it again at 33 and Cathy and Heathcliff are appallingly toxic for each other, they should have been kept away from each other at all costs. (Your move, Emerald Fennell, let’s see what you do with the film version).

Lord of the Flies was a re-read, and although it’s always unsettling - particularly what happens to Simon, moments after the dead pig’s head on a stick starts talking to him. (‘“You are a very silly boy,” said the Lord of the Flies.’ Icily chilling.) I found something more disturbing about it this time around, perhaps with what’s going on in the world reframing it. Like 1984, Brave New World and The Handmaid’s Tale, these re-reads are reframed by the type of world we now live in, and literature remains one of the primary ways to change hearts and minds. Fiction > non-fiction can produce an impact, provided the general populace are actually reading these books in the first place and not just listening to podcasts.

Some other books that struck a similar chord (though weren’t a reread) are…

1. Second Best

Inspired by the success of the play adaptation starring Asa Butterfield, I sought out a copy of Second Best and read it in a weekend. The novel centres on Martin Hill, a man whose life has been defined by a small but devastating misfortune: as a child, he came second in the casting process for the role of Harry Potter, losing out to Daniel Radcliffe. Martin’s life unfolds in the long, anonymous shadow of what might have been, while Radcliffe, as we know, acquires global fame. The experience impacts Martin’s entire adolescence and the venom of how he perceives it threatens to seep into his adult life too.

It’s one of the best what ifs I’ve seen in ages. What if you had lost out on such an opportunity at such a. young age? What if there were reminders of a major early-life rejection reflected back at you unavoidably throughout your adolescence? Martin makes varying attempts to evade everything and anything Harry Potter-related, but how can you avoid such an all-consuming franchise when it’s the literary phenomenon of our time?

Writer David Foekinos uses this premise not as a gimmick, but as a lens to explore disappointment, the perils of comparison and the slow erosion of self-belief. Martin’s life is completely derailed by this rejection, his sadness ambient and cumulative, shaped by a constant awareness that things could have been different. One scene cuts deep when his girlfriend reads that he’s written “Daniel Radcliffe ruined my life” in his journal, and is gravely insulted that he thinks a life with her is one that’s ruined. It’s a book about the tyranny of comparison, how looking over your shoulder at another life can distract you from the positives of the one you’re living, and its emotional restraint is extremely affecting.

2. Careless People

My only non-fiction entry on this list, although Sarah Wynn-William’s writing style makes this feel like it’s a fictional account. And reading it, you’ll probably wish it was fiction, or if you’re a Meta employee, you’ll wish it had never been published, if reports of their repeated attempts to shut the thing down are anything to go by. Put simply, you don’t mess with Facebook, but former COO Sarah Wynn-Williams has had a decent stab at it.

Wynn-Williams used to be Director of Public Policy at Facebook, giving her a front-row seat to the evolution of one of the defining corporations of modern times. It’s a juicy expose of the company who famously used “Move fast and break things” as a slogan, but truly shocking in what it’s exposing: plainly, that Meta will sell your data at whatever cost, and tweak their various algorithms to achieve likes, views, comments, engagement, their ultimate currency, regardless of the detriment to human society, privacy and democracy. I’ve lost count of how many people I’ve spoken to who’ve started tempering their Instagram usage as a result of reading it.

Over the past 15 years, Facebook has gone from a company that seemed altruistic and trendy to, to quote Carole Cadwallader, “the handmaidens of totalitarianism.” This isn’t some hand-wringing accusation of Facebook doing mean things, it’s a first-hand account of the evil a company is capable of when it pursues vast swathes of wealth without concern for the consequences. Key shocking moments are when Facebook uses algorithms to market plastic surgery to teenage girls by monitoring whether they’d deleted selfies or not, and helping extremists connect with each other via its “People you may know” tool.

Ultimately, it will hardly affect anything since Meta’s stock value continues to skyrocket. But Wynn-Williams has risked everything to get this book out there, and it deserves to be read for her bravery alone.

3. A System So Magnificent It Is Blinding

I found a Dutch translation of this book at a bookstore in Amsterdam, so decided to pick up the English version the moment I could. A 2022 novel from Swedish author Amanda Svensson, it tells the story of a group of triplets born in 1989. We pick up with them in 2012, when their lives are scattered around the world, barely connected at all. Then they discover a family secret that turns everything they know about themselves on its head.

The rich character study of this family reminded me of a Swedish Jonathan Franzen. Each of the triplets are completely distinctive and feel completely real. They aren’t friends (though they aren’t unfriendly) but are explicitly tied to each other through the family bond, whether they like it or not. What Svensson captures so well is the emotional paradox of modern life: our hunger for structure alongside our deep suspicion of it, and the novel ultimately becomes a profoundly moving and memorable look at human life.

4. Intermezzo

I’ve always had an up-and-down relationship with Sally Rooney’s books. I think I was initially put off by the rampant success of Normal People, a book I never thought was deserving of it, but then no book can survive such gargantuan hype and reach you entirely intact. I was further put off by the success of the TV series, particularly how nobody seemed to be talking about the story but about how incredibly hot Paul Mescal was, and how a chain he wore round his neck was becoming an icon in its own right. Not exactly what Rooney probably imagined when she penned that character.

The release of her next book Beautiful World, Where Are You? was more lukewarm - although this was the one I ended up absoltuey loving so go figure. Intermezzo, her fourth, brought back some of the Normal People buzz. It’s a longer novel than her others, and the extra time you spend with these characters allows for more depth. It follows two brothers in the aftermath of their father’s death, Peter, in his thirties, a successful lawyer whose emotional life is quietly fraying beneath the surface of competence. and Ivan, much younger and socially awkard, navigating grief alongside the first stirrings of romantic and sexual connection. Their lives unfold in parallel rather than in harmony, shaped by misunderstanding.

The novel follows them separately and together and pinpoints the awkwardness of the separate love stories they share with the women in their lives. Rooney is especially skilled at writing power dynamics: between siblings, lovers and age-gap relationships, familial or otherwise. I’d say the relationship between the brothers is the most interesting one she’s written yet. My apologies to Marianne and Connell.

5. Threshold

“Some time ago, I lived for a year in Stoneybatter… A couple of weeks after I moved in, I arranged with my friend Fran to go picking magic mushrooms in the park.”

So begins Threshold, Rob Doyle’s novel that follows a nameless Irish writer in his thirties drifting through a period of personal, creative and ideological unravelling. He is living in Berlin, emotionally detached and politically disillusioned. He also takes magic mushrooms. A lot. By the end of the first page, he’s stoned out of his mind.

Threshold is, in many ways, a book about psychedelics, why people take them, why they seek solace in them, and includes some interesting theorising into why governments fervently choose to criminalise them - if something makes you question the ways and systems of the world and realise alternatives are consistently possible, what government would realistically want you consuming those? - but it’s more than just a book about drugs. There’s an emotional honesty to the text as the protagonist recounts key moments of his life. It’s largely episodic rather than plot-driven, but beneath these strung-out streams of consicousness lies a vivd exploration of what does happen when we realise that everything can be questioned - masculinity, sexuality, art, politics and authenticity. And if we remain at the threshold of questioning performative morality, can we ever break through?

—

Happy reading in 2026. In a year where the visual mediums are vying for our attention more than ever, it’s never been more important!

2025 was a strange year for cinema. It often felt like multiple different industries were operating at once, box office feeling both huge and hollow. Superhero movies (Hollywood’s generally dependable bread and butter) tended to tank, and movies that seemed niche and ready-made for streaming-only like K-Pop Demon Hunters were smash hits. Audiences were more selective than ever about what they were hoping to see at home vs on the big screen, and a handful of original films that weren’t based on pre-existing IP did well. It felt like cinema caught up with the emotional aftershocks of the 2020s, but stories outranked spectacle nine times out of ten. A good sign maybe, but also the year that YouTube became the UK’s second-most watched media service behind the BBC - so perhaps the year that digital and traditional media merged like no other.

My 10 top picks are fairly distinctive, so here goes:

1. Hard Truths

Kicking things off with Mike Leigh’s latest. In April just after seeing it, I went to Paris and caught this film’s posters plastered about Belleville. Its French title? Two Sisters. You could probably get away with calling it this in English - I mean, that is quite literally what it’s about - but to me, this alternative title doesn’t land the way “Hard Truths” does. It’s more in line with Leigh’s philosophy of dialogue-heavy kitchen sink dramas being more compelling than action. There are two sisters in it, sure, but these siblings are tied together by the brutal complications of their relationship, and an inability to deal with reality in a film that peers unflinchingly at the emotional messes we inherit.

Marianne Jean-Baptiste does a brilliant job as the misanthropic Pansy Deacon (great name), living in a sterile white house in North London with her meek husband and layabout son, blasting out insults at the pair of them and anyone who deigns to love her or display a modicum of care. Her sister Chantelle has an active social life, and spends much of the film’s first half trying to convince Pansy to visit their mother Pearl’s grave on the fifth anniversary of her death.

Depressed and eternally anxious, Pansy could have been just a one-dimensional bitter character, but Jean-Baptiste and Leigh, who garnered a roster of Oscar noms for Secrets and Lies back in 1996, wouldn’t create a character like that. It’s quietly heartbreaking and classic Leigh, leaning into his specialty for building worlds that are wholly recognisable and true.

2. Materialists

If A24 did romcoms…

Materialists had some great marketing, putting out a trailer that looked every bit like a 90s Kate Hudson flick. And that’s what it ultimately offers - a traditionally 90s romcom-style premise with that quintessentially A24 atmosphere. Dakota Johnston’s Lucy is a matchmaker in New York City, who finds herself torn between new guy Harry (Pedro Pascal) and old flame John (Chris Evans). Put in the hands of another writer-director and it’s cookie-cutter stuff, but Celine Song’s not that kind of filmmaker.

While not for everyone, Materialists has so much to say about modern love and relationships, and our inability to connect to each other via the means of dating apps or agencies. If we’re looking for a partner the way we look for a car, aren’t we severely limiting ourselves from human connection, romantic or otherwise? The first scene is set in the Stone Age, with a caveman offering wild flowers to a cavewoman. Materialists suggests we’ve always needed some element of the mercenary to exist in our romantic relationships, and that in a consumer-driven culture, we’re increasingly the poorer for it.

3. Bring Her Back

I never imagined two YouTubers would become the kings of modern horror cinema… but it’s happened. The Australian Philippou twins were best known for making comedy videos online before Talk To Me, their terrifying 2022 film, and now they’ve outdone themselves with Bring Her Back. It is, by all accounts, better, and Talk To Me was very good to begin with. It’s a film that seeps under the skin rather than lunges at it.

What struck me most while watching Bring Her Back was how realistic and completely unique a horror villain Sally Hawkins is. As a foster mother taking in two orphaned siblings, they could have gone all-out Demonic Stepmother™, but there are scenes where they all get on surprisingly well, despite the slow reveal of her casual dabbling in the satanic arts and the occasional murder/kidnapping. I’ll also never look at a cantaloupe the same way again after that scene, so thanks for that. Poor Connor Bird’s dental work will cost a fortune.

4. Dying

What a title. A three-hour black comedy about terminal illness doesn’t exactly scream crowd-pleaser but Matthias Glasner’s Dying is strangely gripping in its refusal to look away from the mess of being alive, told through the lens of the deeply dysfunctional Lunies family, whose members orbit one another in varying states of avoidance, resentment and emotional paralysis. At its core is ageing matriarch Lissy, whose body is steadily betraying her, while her husband Gerd drifts further into dementia, wandering naked through neighbours’ homes before being shifted into care. Their adult children — successful conductor son Tom and wayward drugged-up daughter Ellen — hover at a distance, emotionally disengaged, bound more by obligation than love.

The structure is sprawling and novelistic, broken into character-led chapters that give the film a literary feel. It’s a film that wants to examine everything: illness, legacy, guilt, ambition, parenthood, ego. Tolstoy’s “each unhappy family” quote would make a fitting strapline. It also questions the uncomfortable idea of whether you should care about the death of a close relative like a parent, if the relationship you had with them was always corrosive.

With its sweeping scope and character-driven plot points, it feels novelistic, something Russian and American literature has been particularly shrewd at portraying over the decades, like a German version of The Corrections or Six Feet Under. Like all works proclaiming to be about death, it is, naturally, about life, but all manner of bases are examined here from every angle: birth, regret, self-delusion, disconnection, and solitude. Ultimately, we’re led to question the reality that family ties can be wholly insignificant if not buttressed by an inherent love. Don’t be deterred by the epic runtime, a saga of this magnitude sorely needs and earns it.

5. Sorry, Baby

I saw this one at the Kriterion cinema in Amsterdam, after wandering about the canals and needing a film to watch. The schedule on Google was wrong and I arrived two hours early for the film. No bother though - this turned out to be a major advantage. The Kriterion has a lively vibe, and waiting there with a beer and a book was no issue.

I hadn’t heard of writer-director-star Eva Victor before the film, though I vaguely recognised them from some comedy videos on Twitter about US politics. Now I’m all over their Instagram. Sorry Baby wasn’t anything like what I expected, taking a hugely relatable, earnest protagonist and having them contend with some pure heart-wrenching subject matter. Victor has explicitly said that this was an extensively collaborative effort, but they should take more credit for creating something so poignant and downright unforgettable.

There’s also a cute cat too, if you aren’t sold.

6. One Battle After Another

A lot of the marketing around OBAA, Paul Thomas Anderson’s latest film and the one that seems most likely to finally nab him his Best Picture and Director Oscars, seemed to be intent on convincing audiences that a three hour runtime wasn’t that long. “It’s the shortest three-hour film ever!” “It really doesn’t feel like three hours!” That was echoed like a mantra from every red carpet Reel on the subject.

In truth, One Battle After Another does feel three hours long, but it doesn’t matter. Audiences will sit through 3.5 hours of every Avatar or Marvel addition, they’ll sit through this. What was generally implied was its pace is rapid-fire, and you find yourself extensively gripped by the film’s fractured group of characters. Multiple storylines that are equally involving are carried out at once, and you find yourself completely invested in Anderson’s world of ex-revolutionaries and the “battles” they’re embroiled in. Sean Penn’s walk is already iconic.

7. Bugonia

What if Misery but you’re on Kathy Bates’ side? Although picking sides isn’t exactly what Yorgos Lanthimos or any of the creative team behind Bugonia have in mind - in fact, part of what makes it work so well is how much your emotions flip and twist back and forth as the action plays out. Who are we meant to side with? The conspiracy theorists? What if they’re right? How can they be right?

In Bugonia, Emma Stone’s billionaire CEO is kidnapped by conspiracy theorist Jesse Plemons and his cousin Aidan Delbis. The kidnapping is carried out while the pair of them are wearing Jennifer Aniston masks (told you it was a Lanthimos film). Once they have her chained to a bed in their basement, they reveal they believe her to be an alien intent on destroying Earth (because who would be more likely to be a nefarious extraterrestrial than a billionaire whose company poisons the planet)? They’ve shaved her head to prevent her from making telepathic contact with her home planet - an element that gave rise to several head-shaving events to promote the film. “Want a free ticket to Bugonia? Just grab your razor.”

It’s hard to believe this is a remake of a 2003 South Korean film when every facet of it feels pure, original Lanthimos, an idea that could only have tumbled from the head of the Hellenic Wave of Weird’s primary figurehead - but it’s Stone and Plemons’ film too, who make every moment of this very small-scale movie that barely leaves a basement setting phenomenally gripping. It often feels like you’re watching a play - and Bugonia would certainly suit a stage adaptation. It fits in neatly with the eat-the-rich succession of movies and TV shows we’ve been treated to of late, but remains its own entity entirely. A batshit film completely of our era. Those last thirty minutes are impeccably done.

8. Sinners

2025 was a great year for horror. Ryan Coogler’s Sinners might be a film about vampires in the 1930s but it’s quickly become the most culturally significant film of the year. It’s also made an absolute fortune - $368m at last count, off a budget of $90m - making it the highest grossing original film of the past 15 years, a refreshing tonic to an era characterised by remakes and reboots. Michael B. Jordan gives a brilliant dual performance as identical twins, and the direction from Coogler is equally strong, particularly the “oner” shot at the barn dance where different generations and music writh and twist around each other as the camera swoops about the setting, traversing through time.

At its heart, it’s a film dense with history, but what’s most impressive is how it effectively defies genre. Is it a historical drama? Is it a horror movie? A vampire movie? It occupies its own place in cinema, we’ll be talking about it for years. And it’s amazing to me, in an age where originality is often lacking or viewed as too risky by producers to invest any budget in, that something like this can exist at all.

9. Weapons

Told you it was a great year for horror. In the Summer, Weapons came hurtling into cinemas, arms outstretched (or out by its sides). The hook is perfect: at 2.17am, seventeen children from a second-grade class leave their homes, run off and never return. Only one of their classmates remains. With the town thrust into turmoil and trying to uncover the mystery, they begin flinging accusations about and blaming their fellow citizens.

Weapons has a Stephen King feel to it, and mimics Stranger Things in dividing its runtime into chapters titled for different characters. The plotlines overlap commendably, moving back and forth so we see different townspeople’s perspectives on what’s happening. All of them are equally baffled by this freak occurrence, but so are we as audience members as we try to solve the mystery. Where have the kids gone? Did they leave of their own volition? Is their teacher responsible? And why do some residents start reporting seeing a strange clownlike figure in their dreams?

Proof that all you need is a really great premise to bring an audience into that cinema, Weapons made bank at the box office, and Aunt Gladys quickly became a Halloween costume. To me, Weapons felt like another victory for storytelling against a landscape that’s often bereft of it. Its balance of horror and comedy is perfect. We do not need a sequel.

10. The Oslo Stories Trilogy

I’m cheating a bit with this one, since it’s three films, not one. But Dreams, Love and Sex have such intense depth, I couldn’t isolate them. From director Dag Johan Haugerud, each of these films is set in Oslo, Norway and explores a different type of complex human relationship, dealing intricately with themes of sexuality and social norms. They’re incredibly dialogue-heavy and will have you reflecting on all kinds of key issues and questions. Is intimacy possible without vulnerability? Can we have an enlightening experience if it harms someone we love? It often feels like being invited into a series of hushed conversations you’re not meant to overhear.

The characters in these films make mistakes, explore desire and indulge in lust, but there’s no judgement or moral scoring. They’re allowed to be their contradictory, flawed selves, and profoundly human. Turns out this is a subgenre we could do with a lot more of - people in nice sweaters having very long conversations in immaculately designed rooms. The Norwegian way.

—

I’m sure I’ll watch a few more 2025 films in 2026 and realise there are a few I’d like to swap out or amend… but for now, this is the list. Enjoy, and let’s see what 2026 brings.

My recent trip to New York included:

• A Rihanna party celebrating 15 years of the Loud album, where I learnt that in the US of A, nobody makes that woop woop noise during the chorus of We Found Love. That’s a reserve for the British, like cheering when someone in a café drops a plate.

• Having the best focaccia of my life in Greenwich Village. They make it with truffle cream dolloped on top. They make a lot with truffle cream. Conclusion: we should all be making more with truffle cream.

• The weather plummeting from 12°C to 1°C in the space of an evening, and having to take shelter in a coffee shop, paying $14 for the luxury. And luxurious it was, I was freezing.

• Being mistaken for both Irish and Australian, despite having an English accent fit for a BBC Radio 4 afternoon drama.

…and crucially, a heft of museums: the Museum of the City of New York, where a gingerbread metropolis recreated a miniature Manhattan down to gummy bears enjoying tiny tacos on pint-sized Central Park benches, a History of the Muppets exhibit at the Museum of the Moving Image and the Whitney Museum of American Art (note: nothing to do with Ms Houston).

But the thing you notice above all as a non-American wandering around New York is how much of it you already know. Would it be extreme to suggest that most of us have seen New York depicted onscreen more than any other city on Earth? Friends alone pumped decades of Manhattan directly into our living rooms, but even without that sitcom juggernaut, the city is everywhere, endlessly endemic in pop culture. Since the dawn of motion pictures, New York has cropped up in every genre going: the silent cinema of Charlie Chaplin, the musical ecstasies of West Side Story and Rent, a city where the neurotic intelligentsia of Woody Allen and the fiery social critique of Spike Lee felt equally at home, and where both could be considered “quintessential New York filmmakers” despite their films being nothing alike, from iconic romcoms like Breakfast at Tiffany’s, When Harry Met Sally, 13 Going On 30 and You’ve Got Mail to non-rom coms like Ghostbusters and The Devil Wears Prada, from explorations of human greed like Wall Street and The Wolf of Wall Street to horror films like American Psycho, Cloverfield and Jacob’s Ladder, indie fare like Frances Ha or Kids, family Christmas flicks like Elf and Miracle on 34^th Street, thrillers and action films like Die Hard, Se7en and Escape from New York and arthouse experiments like Warhol’s Empire and Akerman’s News From Home. A city where Carrie Bradshaw and Travis Bickle could plausibly share the same pavement and no one queries it. If you tally all the films and TV shows we’ve collectively absorbed, I’d wager a vast percentage of them were set in New York. In terms of airtime, it maintains a strict monopoly.

So why this city? What brings filmmakers flocking to its skyscrapers and streets through the ages? It’s hard to imagine living there without seeing something being filmed – in the single week I was visiting, I saw no fewer than two movie sets obstructing the sidewalks. Other cities don’t quite match up – take Tokyo, a city whose cinematic identity is often a complex miasma of confusing neon, generally used as a symbol for a character’s aimlessness or to mirror the confusion of their lives’ trajectory in films like Lost in Translation or Enter the Void, not just by Western filmmakers but Japanese ones like Ozu and Kore-eda. Its depiction is frequently distinctly one-note. But the portrayal of New York is polyphonic. In Bushwick, I took a street art tour, where the tour guide uttered this enlightening statement: “You visit London and it’s a very English city. You visit Paris and it’s very French. New York City is the only truly multicultural city. Built by immigrants, for immigrants, all together. This is the city the world constructed.”

And that, perhaps, is the real secret to its myth. It isn’t just its iconography, the skyscrapers that appear to literally scrape the sky (much neck-craning necessary to take them in properly) or the labyrinthine subway of alphabet spaghetti. It isn’t even the legitimately twenty-four-hour buzz or the mesmerising river views. Plenty of cities have all that. New York is the world’s joint project: a metropolis built not from one culture but from the collisions between thousands. A city built by immigrants, and what did they build? One of the most exciting cities in the world.

For creatives, this is catnip. Yes, if you can make it there, you can make it anywhere, but the more important truth is that you can be anything there. You can be the anxious, overeducated Brooklynite, the Dominican poet on the 1 train, the Wall Street wannabe en route to the Stock Exchange, the taxi driver trailing through Times Square. Every archetype shares equal footing on those streets and grids. The Statue of Liberty inscription deepens that ethos: “Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.” This famous line is from the sonnet “The New Colossus“ by Emma Lazarus. I love that that’s her surname. It suggests rebuilding, phoenix-esque, a symbol of hope and refuge and renewal for immigrants, but it could also refer to the creative heart and mind. We’re a tired bunch, writers, creators. A huddled mass, and often pretty poor (have you seen the stats for novelists’ salaries lately? In 2025, it’s staunchly a side hustle). Even in its increasingly expensive state, you’ll still get penniless creatives migrating to the Big Apple’s boroughs to try their luck at making it in whatever their chosen craft.

New York is enticing because of its diversity, its dynamism and eclectic, kaleidoscopic character. We want to experience a multitude of lives in our lifetime, and few cities offer that like NYC. It’s the real-life equivalent of when they hand you that foldable map at Disneyland. Do you want to explore Fantasyland today, Adventureland, Tomorrowland? Except here it’s Jackson Heights, Harlem, Chinatown, Washington Heights – worlds within worlds, voices within voices, almost every nationality on the planet represented in subway radius. For most creative people, there’s an element of the oddball, that you’re even attempting to capture and observe life in some capacity, so it’s only natural they’d be drawn towards a place where everything about you can find its own space, that will welcome the parts of you that other destinations might automatically shun. In these trying times when the word “multiculturalism” is so often weaponised, New York should be more often trumpeted as proof that the experiment worked spectacularly, with worldwide appeal. Look at any global bucket list and three of the top American entries are almost always in New York.

When I was walking (I did a lot of walking) around the city last month, navigating the neat array of numbered avenues and streets, one of Fran Lebowitz’s lines came back to me. In the Netflix series Pretend It’s A City, Lebowitz, an iconic New York denizen for decades, who’s seen the city in every form it’s shapeshifted its way through since the 60s, is asked “Why do you think so many young people are still coming to New York? What’s here?” Her answer: “New York. That’s what’s here. What’s not here? That’s the way to look at it.”

She’s right in saying that New York contains the world. And that’s why the world, endlessly, contains New York.

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It’s hard to believe it actually happened.

The Earth has circled the Sun five whole times since news began trickling in from Wuhan, since the infamous outbreak stretched its talons across the planet, and we all wound up scratching our heads, doing our best to adapt to a new life incarcerated in our own homes. Maddening to believe it’s been so long since the pandemic, since the days of Tiger King and banana bread, since Zoom quizzes and washing down the groceries, since a collective collapse in global mental health.

Such events (hopefully) crop up once in a generation, and as we venture into a world that is officially, determinedly post-Covid, my view is we’re yet to make peace with it. Interestingly, we barely discuss what happened to us all in 2020. Over the years that have tailed it, our reaction has mirrored a trauma response - we veer away from it, ignoring it completely, our memories wilfully forgetting certain facets of it until they materialise unannounced. (“Oh yeah, remember when Scotch eggs counted as a meal!?”)

It stands to reason. We are, to varying respects, still traumatised. As such, we’re actively pursuing the only route deemed available to us - pretending that this seismic occurrence didn’t happen at all.

To my mind, to forget it completely or attempt to forget, would be an error. Our ability to process an event like this is key to our understanding of it. To learn from it. Nobody seems keen to revisit anything remotely related to the Coronavirus pandemic and its litany of lockdowns, but what are we to learn from it if we don’t acknowledge it happened? What can we understand if we choose to opt out and ignore it, about our ways of living, our responses to crises, ourselves?

My attempt at understanding during that turbulent time was avid journalling. Supposedly anxiety hinders creativity, but creativity can do likewise with anxiety, ordering it back into its proverbial box. Supposedly, when we have a creative project to work on or a goal to pursue, it makes our worlds more manageable. Countless others did the same - whether it was learning languages, baking banana bread, following Joe Wick’s daily routines or bingeing a TV show - (“It’s finally time to watch The Wire in full!”) - goals and projects made some effort in getting us through it. Often this ranged into toxic productivity with some corners of the internet shaming others for not using this time for endless labour, but generally, the projects people were embarking on weren’t considered work but a way of processing what was going on.

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The book of essays and short stories I wrote during that time became an anchor in the miasma of chaos. Isn’t that always the way with stories? Since time immemorial, we’ve told each other tales. Will Storr’s The Science of Storytelling suggests the specific structure of a story gives humans hope - that the disarray of the world can be neatly arranged into a three-act structure and have a sense of order imposed upon it. Stories convince us that control exists. It’s why we’ve been drawn to the written or spoken word for millennia - and though it shifts from form to form - once predominantly poetry, then the novel, then the TV box set, now perhaps vertical video sketches - stories and humans have always gone hand in hand.

So here’s a sample of my attempt to impose a degree of control on a world that was spiralling unmercifully out of it. We all had our methods of getting through that time, and this is mine.

Genesis

Remember that golden era when we discussed other things? Time was, and I mean extremely recently, our conversations weren’t just made up of survival strategies – which type of mask to wear (multiple layers? Is a vent OK?) – but of other things which seem mind-blowingly banal now – which outfit we’d wear to work drinks on Friday, who’d got tickets to Glastonbury/Reading/insert music festival here, whether 1917 would win the Oscar or would it be Parasite? It’ll definitely be 1917, have you seen it, it’s so good. You have got to watch Line of Duty. It’s so good. Not as good as that new Netflix drama though, that just blew my mind. Have you tried that new ice cream place in Camden? I saw it on Instagram, it’s Thai, or Malaysian or something. I could buy this top from Primark but I don’t know if I want to support a company like that. Of course he’s trending on Twitter, he’s always offending someone, he thrives on that. I don’t have much time to read anymore, I do it on my commute mainly. I don’t know how much longer the murder-podcast fad will last, they’re becoming really samey. That movie came out twenty years ago? Ugh, I feel old.

This entire era now seems coated in a surreal fuzz, enshrined in a strange celluloid, the way we might feel looking back on old black-and-white footage of people celebrating D-Day – like it couldn’t really have happened because people aren’t in black and white. Same goes for the 2010s – did they really happen? Those naïve former versions of ourselves, blundering from one trite event to the next, no notion of just how different, how cinematic things were about to become. A time when the bulk of our concerns weren’t about surviving a literal plague but a cultural one, the onslaught of late 2010s populism being rammed down our collective throats by every notification and news alert going. A fitting message to any 2016 time travellers – if you were worried then, just wait. The spate of incompetents that people have a habit of electing will soon have to protect you from a very real threat, and whatever interview they gave on whatever news channel about whichever trivial issue won’t matter quite so much anymore.

Times change.

Here’s how I spent New Year’s Eve 2019 – on the rooftop of my rented flat in Brixton. It was a smaller gathering than we’d had the year before – although had we known how much smaller our 2020 celebration would turn out, we might have aimed higher. As midnight struck, I watched and cheered from the rooftop among friends and neighbours as fireworks erupted from the London Eye, and waved a sparkler in the shape of the numbers 2020. I snapped a picture for an Instagram Story, adding an arrow to the sparkler, with accompanying text in chunky orange lettering: HOPE THIS DOESN’T SUCK!! (Oh wow, if only I’d known, because did it ever suck.) In January, I had lunch at a new place that had opened next to my work, went to see Jeanne Dielman, (all 3.5 hours of it) at the French Institute, attended a quiz night in Clapham and won a prize for knowing what a pine marten is. I worked on the BAFTAs from an office near Leicester Square, where we talked about topics of the day – Awkwafina, Parasite, and something called Coronavirus which was beginning to turn up in clandestine chats. Rebel Wilson’s BAFTA speech went viral. In February, I watched that Robert Pattinson movie The Lighthouse, and saw Armando Iannucci, Jess Phillips and Jan Ravens discussing satire and parody in contemporary politics at a renovated church in Islington. I went to the gym a few times, and to the opening of a new club called Lafayette to watch the band Grouplove, who told us in between songs how excited they were to be there on opening night, and predicted big things for the venue. (It would close in two weeks.) News of the Australian wildfires dominated social media, distressing images of charred koalas flooding everyone’s Facebook feeds as an area reportedly the size of Ireland blazed. Prince Harry and Meghan Markle announced their decision to step back from their royal duties, which the media bizarrely dubbed “Megxit.” We were already staunchly convinced that these would be the biggest news stories of the year.

In early March, I spent a weekend away at a University reunion, where we revisited our old student halls and told a batch of Freshers (who didn’t care) that we were alumni. On the way back to London, a few reports trickled in of Coronavirus cases cropping up in Italy, worse than anticipated – “Six people have it!” The next week, I went to Bristol to give a talk on social media practice, and on my journey back, read messages from family members saying this thing was getting out of control and that some of them had started stockpiling, which felt excessive and a bit paranoid. It was at this point, in that first week of March, I felt the panic transform, from a semi-conscious concern of an overseas threat to an actual, creeping fear – that gradual dawning that something genuinely grave was closing in. Conversations saw a shift too, a sense of alarm rippled through every sentence. Life began shutting down around us while we washed our hands over and over, for twenty seconds minimum, singing the Happy Birthday song.

Just two and a half months into 2020, talk of Italy was everywhere. Then, after my weekend in Bristol, talk of London had taken over. Echoes of the swine flu pandemic ten years earlier had already come and gone, the hand sanitisers I remembered from my student halls in 2009 had already been installed, alongside placards explaining how to do it: “God, I never knew I’d been washing my hands wrong all these years!” was a favourite, frequent remark. Perhaps people were blasé at first because the similarity with the swine flu response was so blatant, and swine flu had turned out fine, so why worry? In a world where hysteria is the go-to reaction to virtually every event, we tend to become distrustful of it. A virus seemed on equal footing with everything that had come before it.

That first day back after Bristol was when the shift became most noticeable. My train journey to work was a thousand times more tense, and people were suddenly far less willing to share the confined space they’d been happy to pile into, shoulder to shoulder, armpit to armpit, for decades. A few commuters had begun wearing masks, and were attempting to keep their distance however possible, everyone casting wary glances at each other as if trying to spot the virus sitting there, nestled in a corner or on someone’s lap. No one gripped the poles, which we’d all known for years were riddled with every toxic bacteria known to man. One passenger coughed into her scarf and everyone craned away from her, their faces contorting in horror as if she’d vomited up a lung.

Work felt equally weird that day – why busy ourselves with such pointless activities with this sinister threat flaring up all about us? We sneezed into our elbows when it was 100% necessary, but any sneeze just got you a panicked glare from everyone around you. No one wants to be, or be near, Patient Zero.

At 4pm, someone turns on the telly. The Prime Minister, in his trademark haphazard fashion, is blustering through some semblance of a speech. His discomfort around having to give a speech where there’s no room for the comical is clear. I wonder if there’s a collective horror rippling across the nation that we put this guy in charge at the worst possible time. (Probably not, if his poll ratings are anything to go by.) When he delivers the line “many of you will lose loved ones before their time,” the office erupts with gasps.

In a muted daze, people start to gather their belongings. Lockers are cleared out; who knows when we’ll be back?

“This is so weird. It’s like being in a movie,” one of my co-workers says, shoving the contents of her locker into her bag. “And not a good movie. A bad one, with Dennis Quaid in it.”

It’s meant as a joke, but there’s a touch of melancholy about it. If this was a movie, we could shut it off. But the part we hate about real life is that happy endings aren’t a given. What are we about to experience?

Back home, we tune into BBC One and await another speech. Night descends, with an eerie stillness. The streets are emptying, and supermarket shelves are doing likewise. I’d made an attempt at stockpiling on the way home, though it hadn’t gone well – the supermarkets had been ransacked. Reports emerge of people bulk buying toilet paper, which seems such an odd item to have fixated on, since there was never any threat of it depleting. People do the dumbest things during the apocalypse; I’ll make a note of this before global warming worsens. I’d picked up the last few available scraps, bunged them into my basket and made for the checkout, including a masala sauce, obscurely the only one left on the shelf. It’s not until I get home that I realise it’s the extra spicy edition with five chillis on the label. Maybe stockpiling toilet paper wouldn’t have been such a bad idea after all.

The Prime Minister’s second speech begins. There’s an air of wartime to it, though it still feels absurd to see this man delivering this particular speech, with his tousled hair and jerky oratory so much more suited to the humorous, not the sincere. It’s like we’ve elected the ship’s cat to steer us past the icebergs. The level of how lost we are is coming to fruition, crucially because we’re about to live through something that has never occurred before. Wars, as tried and tested as they are, tend to come with a blueprint. Deadly pandemics do not. A worldwide experiment in pushing the OFF switch is about to commence, a world first. Anything could happen.

We tidy the flat, set up our new workstations, and prepare to become experts on big cats.

Google search history for the first month of the pandemic

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To read more, buy a copy of Year of the Plague: Notes on a Quiet Apocalypse on Kindle and in paperback now.

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For many more essays like this, check out my book Random Acts of Reflection, available in both Kindle and paperback.

I first encountered Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles, Chantal Akerman’s 1975 masterwork, in Tokyo. I’d been working as a teacher at the time, covering roughly ten 40-minute lessons a day across an eight-hour period. The term my fellow teachers and I tended to use to describe our working days was “conveyor belt,” and as much as I had taken to my new life in Japan, the endless repetition of this array of classes didn’t just border on monotony but pole-vaulted over it. No sooner had a lesson with a student found its stride, they were off on their way, and after a five minute break, another student would enter the room. To date, it’s the only job I’ve ever had where I’d look at the clock at 9:30 over a cup of coffee the school receptionist had begrudgingly let me brew - “What if you drop it on a child and burn their face?” was her logic - and think “Just eight more hours. Just eight more hours.” (That’s eight more hours before an exhausted evening unwinding from the stress of the day before getting up to do it all again tomorrow.)

Around this time, French New Wave hit me hard. (I doubt this is what befalls everyone doing a monotonous job, but hey, that’s what happened to me.) Godard and Varda, sure, but namely, Chantal Akerman, whose oeuvre I rapidly devoured. Plenty of filmgoers will probably be familiar with Jeanne Dielman. It’s gained more attention outside of the usual cinephile circles of late, as the fiftieth anniversary of its release rolls around, and three years after it won the BFI’s Sight and Sound poll, voted in an anonymous poll as the best film ever. The title, like the film, is a peculiar entity, and a strange way to be introduced to a protagonist, knowing her full address before the lights lower - particularly this protagonist, as throughout the film’s duration (and at 3 ½ hours that’s a pretty durable duration), we’re kept at arm’s length. We might know Jeanne’s address but what’s ticking along in that brain of hers is anybody’s guess – because Jeanne Dielman (insert address here) is no ordinary movie.

It’s experimental cinema like no other – 201 minutes (approx.) of watching Belgian housewife Jeanne going about her daily routine in the gravest detail. And I mean gravest. Nothing is ignored. In static shots that linger interminably, we watch her peel potatoes, cook dinner, wash dishes. She goes to the shops, goes for a coffee, comes back again, and casually mixed into the mundaneness, she turns a trick each afternoon with a different gentleman caller, which we aren’t ever privy to. As a consequence, the most gripping thing in the film is when she drops a shoe she’s brushing. So Jeanne Dielman in a nutshell is nearly four hours of this tedious, tiresome, humdrum repetition. And from start to finish, I was hooked.

Bizarrely, I’m not alone here. The mantra of most iMDB messageboards for the film at the time, which I ardently combed through after that initial viewing, seemed to be “Why did I enjoy this?” Some cite their first Jeanne viewing as a monumental, even life-changing experience. For many, it’s their favourite movie of all time. The iMDB rating back in 2015 was 8.0/10, on Rotten Tomatoes it was 100%. “Hypnotic,” the reviews claim, “astonishing,” “I’ve never seen a movie like this before.” But despite the movie’s staunch supporters, there were plenty of naysayers raring to berate it. “What a waste of time,” they clamoured. “I know art when I see it and didn’t see it here.” “It’s the most boring, pointless, aimless, repetitive movie ever made… As if the filmmaker wanted to spit in our face.” A lot of anger engendered by a film purely for having not much happen.

Even at the time of Jeanne’s release, the concept of nothing happening in a fictional work wasn’t new. Beckett’s Waiting for Godot cropped up in theatres a good 21 years before Jeanne, whose contemporaries denounced it as being abysmal purely because it was about nothing – “Nobody comes, nobody goes, it’s terrible,” to quote one reviewer, who was in turn doctoring a quote from the script. The irony’s pretty heavy there – surely the point is that nobody comes or goes? – and years later, it was hailed a masterpiece for its quirky, unabashed experimentalism. When Akerman unleashed Jeanne into the world, French New Wave was in mid-flow, hot on the heels of the 50s and 60s mainstream Hollywood epics – stories of ancient warriors and royalty like Cleopatra and Ben-Hur – so experimental cinema was only just finding its footing. Andy Warhol’s Empire is a key example, depicting an immobile Empire State Building for eight consecutive hours. In the forty years since Jeanne’s release, a coterie of films ostensibly about nothing have cropped up and merged into the mainstream, from Louis Malle’s My Dinner with Andre to Kevin Smith’s Clerks, the mumblecore movement, and more recently, Richard Linklater’s Boyhood and Before trilogy. In fact, Linklater cites Akerman as an influence, along with the perhaps even more radical James Benning. A quick Google search reveals Benning’s filmography to include even more unconventional movies than Akerman ever attempted: cases in point, Ten Skies (two hours of ten different skies), Twenty Cigarettes (two hours of twenty separate people smoking cigarettes), Two Cabins (30 minutes of two stationary cabins) and Nightfall (a 98-minute shot of night falling). So why is this considered art when say, CCTV footage, isn’t?

Here are my theories. Number One: there’s a much more distinctive link between the artist and the viewer with this type of cinema, purely because it’s so different. The director has deliberately decided to toy with artistic convention, and owing to its unconventionality, there’s a natural intrigue. Why should we be viewing this? What’s special about it? It’s actually a decidedly rare opportunity to watch someone smoke a cigarette, let alone twenty people in succession. We know going in that an artist, for some reason, has elected this suitable material for an audience to sit through in its entirety, and part of the experience of viewing the film is wondering why that is. What does s/he suppose we can learn or gain from it? Benning’s films, in effect, are not so much about watching ten skies for two hours, but about wondering why someone’s recommended you watch them.

Number Two: A commonality in this eccentric little subgenre is that films about nothing often fall into two camps – those with extensive reams of dialogue and those with barely any. The former’s easier to execute as it resembles theatre. Audiences are more familiar with the concept of watching people talk non-stop for a few hours than they are to viewing persistent silence (albeit more customarily onstage), and also the depth of character that can be revealed through skilfully crafted subtext is substantial. Actions allegedly speak louder than words, but by the end of Before Sunrise, where dialogue is profuse, we know a great deal more about Jesse and Celine’s personal histories than if they’d wandered round Vienna viewing museums and spouting platitudes about pottery. Sparky dialogue adds intrigue to the monotonous, and is crucial in films with few or a single setting – hence why Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, possibly the most static play in existence, works so effectively on film: Edward Albee’s script is faultless. So if you’re going to stick to one or two locations, the dialogue better be watertight.

The latter is trickier but its impact lies, in my view, with the blank canvass effect. In both Akerman and Benning’s work, silence is predominant. Watching a woman peel potatoes for 15 minutes or a cabin window for 30, you’re left with a lot of time to think. And your thoughts will reflect how you personally feel about what you’re being made to watch, embroiled in your own life experiences. Maybe you’ll find inherent meaning in watching Jeanne sit still for a full six minutes without flinching. Maybe you’ll just get annoyed at Akerman for subjecting you to it, and not make it past the first twenty minutes. The type of person you are when you press Play will ultimately dictate how you experience a movie of this kind, and what you take away from it could be colossal. Relentless silence twinned with static shots may force you to focus on and scrutinise every iota of what you’re seeing, read into every movement and potentially become entirely absorbed in your own speculations for the film’s duration – but it may also not. Consequently, it’s not a film about nothing but a film about the experience of watching a film. It’s a film about you.

Some will watch Jeanne Dielman and see nothing but a woman cleaning and cooking. Some will see loss, fear, hope, desire, all facets of human existence rolled into one resolutely silent figure executing the mundane minutiae of her daily errands. Whatever your thoughts on this piece are, it’s no doubt a pretty apt example of how our own experiences contribute to shape our perspective of what we encounter, both on the cinema screen and off it.

When you realise that what you’re really watching in Jeanne Dielman is a woman losing her mind owing to the monotony of her own existence - a monotony you truly feel in this movie - that’s when it takes on an entirely different life of its own. Before watching this film, I didn’t even know you could tell a story this way, and felt that narratively, this was the most original thing imaginable. In my view, no piece of literature or film has ever imparted that message so effectively - that the lives of Jeanne’s, and so many women in the 70s, is dull as dishwater as a result of the existences they’re enforced to endure by the societal restrictions placed upon them. How better to show an unsatisfying life than by making the audience directly experience it? We recognise our own lives in it. By being ostensibly “boring,” it reminds us of the mundanity we ourselves endure - and as a result, it somehow does a 360 and becomes interesting.

Like Waiting for Godot before it, it’s a piece about nothing that is actually about everything. And realistically, the fact that that’s even capable, to my mind, is what makes this piece of art so astonishing.

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In London’s Shoreditch - because of course it’s in Shoreditch - there’s a ball pit for adults. It stretches across one side of a bar, with steps leading into it, the kind you’d see at a swimming pool, and on any given night, it’s packed with clientele from the working world, immersed in a sea of plastic orbs, laughing and hurling the balls at each other, their phones held aloft for the obligatory documentation. Nearby, the bar serves fancy cocktails you can set fire to in a suitably Instagrammable fashion, and in the adjacent room sits another almost identical pit, an alternative “executive” version, so-called because it’s reserved for the higher-paying patrons, those with higher salaries to splash on parties in giant adult ball pits, because the balls are grey instead of multi-coloured, and because everyone’s wearing suits whilst sitting amongst them. The name of the venue, “Ballie Ballerson,” typically silly, is plastered across the walls in neon paint.⁣

  Since Covid, it’s become less desirable to cram a horde of drunk people into a pit full of plastic balls meant for children - these things weren’t exactly clean when we were kids, and the addition of alcohol means you’re more than likely to be surrounded by sick while you’re in it. No matter how exclusive a ticket to Ballie Ballerson is (and at £17 for the cost of entry, it’s fairly exclusive), nothing will put you off it faster than the fetid stench of a banker’s vomit wafting about the neon-lit darkness, even with a range of nostalgic Noughties tracks blaring overhead.⁣

  When Ballie Ballerson first opened its doors and its pits back in 2018, I went along, having managed to secure a £3 ticket as part of a TimeOut deal (I doubt I’d have felt keen coughing up the full £17). There was a hubbub about it, a palpable excitement. Like the Cat Café before it (also in Shoreditch, naturally), the novelty of the venue outweighed the actual enjoyment of it, the Instagrammability (yes, that’s a word now) alone enough to entice ample groups of London-dwellers through its doors. As I entered, many were up to their waists in the pit, snapping selfies and filming Stories and Boomerangs (remember Boomerangs?). The mirrors on all four sides of the pit only encouraged this avid documentation, but alongside the novelty of the experience was a faint sense of bemusement that such a place could even exist at all, that this idea, which sounds like something a frazzled employee had suggested in a brainstorm having had to prepare for it at short notice, had made it past the pitch stage to the point where we were actually inside it, taking selfies. Evidently, it was an intriguing enough concept to venture past the blueprint stage, and whilst some of these venues manage to sustain themselves through sheer talkability, it’s hard to stand in a pile of plastic balls, fresh from a day’s work, taking your photos and grinning away, without feeling profoundly daft.⁣

  It’s not the first such quirky venue to appear in London. The cereal café, a concept that sparked more think pieces than many political incidents ever could, was just such a place. For a moderately benign business idea, it attracted a bizarre deluge of criticism. The perfectly-named Cereal Killer café was in the news daily, lambasted by all and sundry with a merciless glee, which said more about the people doing the lambasting than the business itself. Boiled down, it was a genius idea for a restaurant, given how much of the average eaterie’s money is spent on the kitchen and kitchen staff, which Cereal Killer never required. It was wildly original and sublimely-executed, letting customers try different flavours of cereal from a global range, with different coloured milks and toppings - the type of entrepreneurialism most of us would applaud. Where else, even in London where all manner of foods are available from all corners of the globe, could you purchase a bowl of cereal and dine in? Even Pret hadn’t thought of that. It was when they expanded to another location across the street that I felt that jarring sense of silliness creep in. Extra items were added to the menu like chicken fried in cornflakes, and Oreo milkshakes. Nostalgia became the decor’s main theme, with an archway of old VHS tapes at the entrance, many of which I recognised from my own childhood video collection - the Disneys, Mrs Doubtfire, Friends. A Simpsons arcade game from 1991 stood alongside the bar, Rocko’s Modern Life stickers, Rugrats memorabilia and Spice Girls photographs embellishing every wall. “Relive your childhood” might as well have been the place’s slogan, as in the far corner, next to a stuttering TV/VCR combo, were two beds forming a makeshift bench, with childish animal prints on the duvets (the selfsame blankets I’d had in my bedroom at four years old) with cartoon lions and monkeys beaming back at you. The message was clear, and an attractive one. 32 years old? Doesn’t matter! Come hang out in your childhood bedroom if you want to; you’re just a big kid at heart.⁣⁣

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1) Conclave

Never thought a movie about the election of a new Pope could be this riveting. There’s more suspense here than a Traitors final, and the voting scenes do have a game show spirit about them, that same tension Davina McCall used to revel in. Is the unveiling of a new Pope like the Masked Singer these days? And is that the point - that in the 21st century, all election processes are ultimately just a game? There’s a juxtaposition of the ancient and the contemporary that’s skilfully measured throughout: these priests’ values and traditions may be linked to a millennium ago, but in their robes, they do carry Smartphones.

Like all movies about the Church or the Royals, the relevance of these archaic institutions is put under the microscope, as the premise probes whether this sealed-off group of individuals have much to contribute to a rapidly changing world they seem to increasingly misunderstand. In Conclave, the literal isolation of the cardinals (and the title alone) has a wider meaning. Why are we offering up power to such men, cloistered in more ways than one? A friend described it to me as “Mean Girls set in the Vatican” - and he’s not wrong.

2) Anora

Opening a film with a lap-dance to the tune of Take That’s Greatest Day is a bold move - and one that works surprisingly well. Sean Baker’s latest abandons the DayGlo colour palettes of his previous outings in favour of something more toned down, to tell the story of a Brooklynite erotic dancer who finds love with a wealthy man, only for the worm to abruptly turn after the nuptials.

Described in some circles as “the anti-Pretty Woman”, while it never ravaged my heartstrings like The Florida Project, you’d be hard-pressed to leave a screening in a cheery mood, particularly after that final snow-swept car scene. The first half is offbeat romcom, the second half is devastating, and there’s a section in the middle that’s pure French farce. Mikey Madison shines, as does Yuri Borisov - those Oscar noms are so deserved.

3) The Substance

Body horror came back with a vengeance in Coralie Fargeat’s blistering Demi Moore vehicle. This vastly, amazingly disgusting movie isn’t exactly subtle, but has so much to say about our obsessive abhorrence for ageing and the concept of “losing” your looks. Consider it a Greek tragedy for the Ozempic era, and a chance for Moore to really showcase her acting chops in a way we haven’t seen since Ghost. Plus, you’ve probably never seen a boob get squeezed out of an eye socket before, so there’s that.

4) All Of Us Strangers

Ever watched a film where you’re either sobbing or on the verge of tears through most of the duration? Andrew Haigh is on great form with his adaptation of Taichi Yamada’s novel Strangers. Reinventing an originally heterosexual story line as a queer one could have gone one of two ways, but Haigh has been delivering the goods since Weekend so it’s dextrously done here.

Scott and Mescal were the main focus of the marketing, but Claire Foy and Jamie Bell as the younger versions of Scott’s parents give such subtly intricate performances, it’s a shame they were virtually ignored when this ran the awards circuit last year. Quietly heartbreaking from all four leads, it almost feels like a companion piece to Weekend (also worth a watch if you haven’t already). Trust me, you’ll never hear ‘The Power of Love’ in the same way again.

Sidenote: I may have also bagged a ticket to the premiere of this one back in January. Haven’t seen so many A-listers in tears since Cats flopped.

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5) Do Not Expect Too Much From The End of the World

…and I didn’t expect too much from this movie, but was nicely surprised.

When a friend suggested we watch a 3-hour Romanian film at the BFI, that didn’t exactly set my day alight with enthusiasm. Films rarely warrant that lack of brevity, and this one doesn’t exactly either - maybe 2 hours+ would have sufficed? Did we really need that 35-minute long static shot at the finale?

Even so, the film makes for an interesting dissection of modern life as we follow Angela (Ilinca Manolache), a harried production assistant for a film and video company, driving endlessly round Bucharest auditioning people for a safety video for an austere Austrian business. The video will contain a testimony from someone disabled at work and prepared to say on camera that it was their own fault for failing to wear helmets. Angela divides her time between completing this mind-numbing task and posting TikTok clips where she pretends to be Andrew Tate. Interspersed are sample clips from a Ceaușescu-era Romanian film from 1981 entitled Angela Moves On, starring the now veteran Romanian actress Dorina Lazar as a taxi driver who finds herself in a relationship with one of her passengers.

It’s an experimental mishmash of ideas that, like a lot of Lanthimos, is weirdly funny, and neatly stakes out a space for itself in the plethora of eat-the-rich films the 2020s seem rife with.

6) The Zone of Interest

When the “12” logo popped up onscreen at the start, I thought there had been a mistake. How could the most chilling, disturbing depiction of the Holocaust we’ve seen in years receive the same rating as Ghostbusters? But then, it’s only natural. The Zone of Interest depicts the lives of the Holocaust’s perpetrators rather than the victims, focusing in on Auschwitz commandant Rudolf Höss and his family, including wife Hedwig (another amazing turn from Sandra Hüller).

The smartness of Jonathan Glazer’s fourth film is precisely that you see nothing beyond the wall - everything is hinted at. Screams and gunfire is audible throughout. The children uncover gold teeth on the grounds. Ash from the ovens drifts over the fence, coating the drying laundry. The horror is inherent in everything we don’t see, and to my mind, there’s no more chilling scene in modern cinema than Hüller’s Hedwig showing her mother her flower beds while screams echo in the background, wilfully ignored.

7) American Fiction

When comedies nab a Best Screenplay Oscar, you’re generally in for something special. It’s a category historically dominated by the dramatic, so with comedy, that dialogue has to be razor-sharp to cut through. Fortunately, Cord Jefferson’s is. What’s more, it has something entirely new to say.

American Fiction feels like a satire perfectly pitched for our times. Poignant where it needs to be, and genuinely funny the rest of the time. (Plus it includes probably the best line in any 2024 film - “It’s so important to listen to Black voices,” reeled off by a white author on a panel of predominantly white judges when the only two Black people in the room have been outvoted.) It’s a comedy tackling a heated subject matter in a wildly polarising time that has managed to reach across multiple divides - I don’t think I met a single person in 2024, whatever side of the culture war spectrum they land on, that didn’t love this film. Pulling that off alone is a phenomenal feat.

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