Tag: Academy Awards 2026

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Features Live Action Movies

Bugonia

Director – Yorgos Lanthimos – 2025 – US, Ireland, South Korea – Cert. 15 – 118m

****

A man with a grievance against a corporation kidnaps its CEO, believing her to be an alien with hostile designs on the human race – out in UK cinemas on Friday, October 31st

As Teddy (Jesse Plemons from Civil War, Alex Garland, 2024; Kinds of Kindness, Yorgos Lanthimos, 2024; Killers of the Flower Moon, Martin Scorsese, 2023) explains it, they live among us. While he and his autistic bother Don (Aidan Delbis) eke out their very ordinary lives with Teddy working in a warehouse for big pharma company Auxolith, the company CEO Michelle (Lanthimos regular Emma Stone) has her life on a platter: expensive home outside which she works out on the landing every morning, expensive SUV to get her to corporate HQ and back, and an army of corporate minions around her to ensure her every order is carried out. Even so, she still has difficulty speaking complicated lines for a corporate video. But that’s nothing compared to the ordeal Teddy has planned for her.

Teddy and decidedly unsure about the whole thing sidekick Don ambush her when he car arrives home from work and, after a struggle, for Michelle is used to getting her own way and is not a woman to be trifled with, overcome her after injecting her with a sedative.… Read the rest

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Features Live Action Movies

One Battle After Another

Director – Paul Thomas Anderson – 2025 – US – Cert. 12A – 161m

*****

Over a decade after they disappeared into a safe town with new identities, a father and now-teenage daughter are tracked down by their army officer nemesis… – one of the most extraordinary Warner Bros. action movies you’ve ever seen is out in UK cinemas on Friday, September 26th

Radical, black revolutionary Perfidia Beverley Hills (Teyana Taylor) is on the verge of leading the forces of underground far-left organisation the French 75 in an attack on a Californian immigration centre to free those imprisoned when a bedraggled man pulling a trailer, looking to all intents and purposes like a refugee, turns up. Pat Calhoun (Leonardo DiCaprio) tells Perfidia he has all the explosives she could possibly need, and sets about using them with her blessing, putting on an impressive show of pyrotechnics to prove his credentials. Inside the centre, Perfidia locates its commanding officer Col. Steven J. Lockjaw (Sean Penn) to sexually humiliate him at gunpoint. Surprisingly, this personal violation only serves to turn the white soldier on.

With Pat and the pregnant Perfidia now a couple, she carries on her high octane, physically demanding revolutionary activities, belly fully swollen, as if there were no child.… Read the rest

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Features Live Action Movies

Weapons

Director – Zach Cregger – 2025 – US – Cert. 18 – 128m

****

One night, all but one of the children in one class in the town school disappear into the dark, leaving the townsfolk baffled as to what happened to them… – Fortean-sounding mystery is out in UK cinemas on Friday, August 8th

One night at 2.17am, the 17 other kids in Alex’s class got up out of their beds, went downstairs, opened their front doors, and ran out into the night. As a child relates the incident, we observe it in flashback. The kids run with arms half outstretched at an angle, as if playing at being aeroplanes in the school playground. If you’ve seen the film’s poster, this strange angle of the arms is also apparent. As it also is in the film’s trailer, which starts with this flashback. But what is in the mind of these kids? Where are they going? To what purpose?

For that matter, why the title Weapons? I don’t think it’s a spoiler to say that you’ll know the answer once you’ve seen the film.

Thus begins one of the most intriguing cinematic mysteries of recent years. To unpack his prologue, writer-director Cregger opts for an astute, six-part, character-based structure.… Read the rest

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Features Live Action Movies

Jurassic World Rebirth

Director – Gareth Edwards – 2025 – US – Cert. – 134m

***

A group of mercenary hunters and a traumatised family find themselves on an equatorial island populated by mutant dinosaurs – out in UK cinemas on Wednesday, July 2nd

The difficult seventh movie, made on a shorter production schedule than its predecessors – according to the production notes – and probably made too quickly for its own good. First there were three Jurassic Park movies, then there were three Jurassic World movies, and now there’s a seventh Jurassic. What to call it? Jurassic Beyond? Jurassic Outside? Jurassic Environment? Jurassic Habitat? Jurassic Equator? Jurassic Island? Jurassic Laboratory? Jurassic Lab? Jurassic Experiment? Jurassic Mutation? (Those took me a mere five minutes.) No: unable to think of a word to replace Park or World, this one is saddled with the marketing-led Jurassic World Rebirth. Which no doubt will do the job, but when Michael Crichton coined Jurassic Park for his novel’s title and Spielberg ran with it, no-one outside of palaeontologists and dinosaur-geeks (I number myself among the latter) knew what ‘Jurassic’ was. It didn’t matter: it was Spielberg and dinosaurs, that sold it, and the film more than lived up to the lure and the promise.… Read the rest

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Animation Features Live Action Movies

Elio

Directors – Adrian Molina, Madeline Sharafian, Domee Shi – 2025 – US – Cert. PG – 99m

****

An alien-obsessed orphan, whose aunt tracks space debris for NASA, makes contact with aliens – latest Disney / Pixar romp is out in UK cinemas on Friday, June 20th

Young lad Elio Solis (voice: Yonas Kibreab) has never got over the death of his parents, and lives with his aunt Olga (voice: Zoe Soldana) with whom he doesn’t really get on, even though she puts him before the advancement of her career at NASA, where she has forgone aspiring to astronaut training and works tracking space debris. One day, she is having a meal in the large work canteen with him when he vanishes, sneaking in to an exhibit about the cosmos to hear a Carl Sagan monologue about the possibility of extra-terrestrial life.

Following this incident, Elio decides that all his problems would be solved if only aliens would abduct him, and goes out of his way to make this happen, drawing a big “Abduct me” message / diagram on the beach and lying in the middle of it so he can be clearly seen from the sky, not to mention sending ham radio messages to the stars with his woefully inadequate radio transmitter.… Read the rest