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Features Live Action Movies

They Will Kill You

Director – Kirill Sokolov – 2025 – US – Cert. 15 – 94m

****

A young woman, searching from her missing sister, takes a job as a cleaner in a mysterious, wealthy, New York apartment block – horror action movie is out in UK cinemas on Friday, March 27th

This has been sold as a horror / paranoia conspiracy thriller about a New York apartment building in the mould of Rosemary’s Baby (Roman Polanski, 1968). Yet while its opening set up has echoes of that film, it turns out to be something altogether very different.

Asia Reaves (Zazie Beetz from The Bad Guys, Pierre Perifel, 2022; Joker, Todd Phillips, 2019; Deadpool 2, David Leitch, 2018), her younger sister Maria (Myha’la from Dead Man’s Wire, Gus van Sant, 2025; Bodies Bodies Bodies, Halina Reijn, 2022) in tow, flees their abusive father. He tracks them down in a grocery store, outside which she later shoots and hospitalises him before going on the run alone.

Ten years later, she applies for a housekeeper’s job at the Virgil, a nine-storey New York apartment building. The door is answered by Irish building superintendent Lily (Patricia Arquette from Boyhood, Richard Linklater, 2014; Lost Highway, David Lynch, 1997; True Romance, Tony Scott, 1993) who introduces her to a few of the tenants in the lobby including Sharon (Heather Graham from Austin Powers 2; The Spy Who Shagged Me, Jay Roach, 1999; Boogie Nights, Paul Thomas Anderson, 1997) and Kevin (Tom Felton – Draco Malfoy from the Harry Potter films, 2001-2011) before showing her to her room.… Read the rest

Categories
Animation Features Live Action Movies

Wonka

Director – Paul King – 2023 – US – Cert. PG – 112m

Movie ****

Hugh Grant as an Oompa Loompa when he eventually appears*****

How the youthful Willy Wonka became the world’s most celebrated maker of chocolate – musical based on one of Roald Dahl’s best-known characters is out in UK cinemas on Friday, December 8th

Willy Wonka is familiar to generations of children through both the book in which he first appeared, Roald Dahl’s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (1964) and its two film adaptations Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory (Mel Stuart, 1971) and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Tim Burton, 2005). Rather than remake the novel a third time, Warner Bros. have taken the bold step of creating a Willy Wonka origin story. Who was Wonka before he became the innovative and eccentric chocolate factory owner that book and movie audiences know and love? It’s a great idea for a film.

Paul King, who previously breathed cinematic life into another well-known figure from British children’s literature in his two Paddington movies (2017 and 2014), has, together with Paddington 2 co-screenwriter Simon Farnaby, come up with an original story which feels like a Dahl adaptation – although it isn’t.… Read the rest