What films are out in UK cinemas this week? Reviews from Eddington to The Thursday Murder Club
Your weekly round-up of all the films currently showing in UK cinemas.
It's another busy week in UK cinemas: we've got an acclaimed entry from this year's Sundance Film Festival, a divisive epic from the always provocative Ari Aster and a cinema release for one of Netflix's most hotly anticipated titles of the year, to name just three of the new films out today.
That latter film is, of course, The Thursday Murder Club – a star-studded adaptation of Richard Osman's bestselling crime novel which features Dame Helen Mirren, Sir Ben Kingsley, Pierce Brosnan and Celia Imrie as four sleuthing veterans in a cosy retirement village. It's getting a very brief theatrical outing before being added to the streamer next week, so act quick if you want to see it big.
Aster's latest Eddington opened at this year's Cannes Film Festival and looks to have split opinion just as much as his previous film, Beau Is Afraid, while Sorry, Baby – the debut feature from writer/director Eva Victor – attracted more universally positive notices when it played at Sundance.
Meanwhile, another film which did well on the festival circuit – Mike Flanagan's Stephen King adaptation The Life of Chuck – has also now been released almost a year after its Toronto premiere.
Our reviews for all those titles are below, and you can also find our lowdown on the pick of the other major films to have been released in UK cinemas in recent weeks – from superhero behemoths Superman and The Fantastic Four: First Steps to raucous comedy reboot The Naked Gun and acclaimed horror pic Weapons.
Read on for your weekly round-up of all the films currently showing in UK cinemas.
What films are released in UK cinemas this week? 22nd - 28th August
Eddington
A moustachioed Joaquin Phoenix is the unhinged sheriff at the heart of Ari Aster’s sprawling but dynamic Covid-era neo-western. Set in May 2020, in the titular New Mexico town, Phoenix’s maverick lawman Joe Cross clashes with the mayor (Pedro Pascal) after refusing to wear a mask in shops just as the pandemic is growing.
This sets in motion a deadly chain of events, as Black Lives Matter protests also gather on the streets in the wake of the murder of George Floyd. Featuring Emma Stone as Cross’s ailing wife, Austin Butler as an unnerving online guru and British actor Micheal Ward as the deputy sheriff, the film is overflowing with ideas.
Aster takes his time to build the tension, but when shots are fired you won't know what's hit you. Phoenix, following his turn in Aster’s balmy 2023 psychodrama Beau Is Afraid, once again shows he’s an actor willing to take some wild risks. – James Mottram
The Thursday Murder Club
Early in this broad adaptation of Richard Osman’s mystery best-seller, pensioner sleuth Joyce (Celia Imrie) remarks to her cohort Elizabeth (Helen Mirren) that it feels like she’s in 'one of those Sunday night dramas about two bright-eyed, feisty old lady detectives'. The line essentially pre-empts any criticism of this cute whodunnit about a band of retirees who meet each week to solve cold cases but now have a fresh murder on their hands in their plush complex.
Directed cleanly by veteran Chris Columbus, the film benefits from its stellar cast, which just lifts it above the likes of Miss Marple and Midsomer Murders. The retirement village setting is vast, with green and pleasant landscapes ready for a US market, while the Brit stalwarts in the support cast (including David Tennant and Jonathan Pryce) offer what are ultimately variations on work they've done on the smaller screen.
Thankfully, touches of pathos bring some shade to the otherwise safe and cosy drama, while Imrie and Mirren, along with fellow crime-solvers Pierce Brosnan and Ben Kingsley, remain comradely company throughout. – David Brown
- Read our full The Thursday Murder Club review
- Read our interview with director Chris Columbus
- Read our interview with Helen Mirren
- Read our interview with Pierce Brosnan
Sorry, Baby
This melancholic and darkly amusing debut feature from American writer/director/actor Eva Victor is set in a Massachusetts university town, where twentysomething English Literature academic Agnes (Victor) is struggling to process having been sexually assaulted by her thesis supervisor years before.
Split into a series of achronological and archly titled chapters, Sorry, Baby chooses not to depict the violence in question, concentrating instead on how the traumatic incident has impacted on Agnes’s everyday life and sense of self. Still living several years later in the same cluttered cottage, she receives empathetic support from former fellow graduate student Lydie (Naomi Ackie), who’s now married in New York, and from a sweet-natured neighbour (Lucas Hedges).
While Victor reveals the inadequacy of the institutional responses to Agnes’s ordeal, there’s also an amusing wryness in the film's tone, exemplified in Victor's often deadpan line readings. Despite the crisp running time, there’s a leisurely feel to this carefully framed film, which offers a resolution that fittingly combines tenderness and humour. – Tom Dawson
The Life of Chuck
In the spirit of The Shawshank Redemption – if not quite the class – writer/director Mike Flanagan’s non-horror Stephen King adaptation is a reflective, crowd-pleasing drama with cosmic undercurrents. The three-act plot tells a life story in reverse, beginning at the world’s demise – where a teacher (Chiwetel Ejiofor) keeps seeing posters thanking a man named Chuck Krantz for 39 great years.
Act two introduces Chuck as an accountant and exuberant dancer (Tom Hiddleston), before the final section explores young Chuck’s formative triumphs and traumas. Following Gerald’s Game and Doctor Sleep, Flanagan’s third King movie shares the writer’s generous feel for character and dialogue. The director’s way with actors matches the material well, with Hiddleston, Karen Gillan, Mark Hamill, Benjamin Pajak and Matthew Lillard providing winning turns.
Meanwhile, an affirmative meditation on life-changing choices takes gradual shape between the diffuse character strands. Even if The Life of Chuck can get schmaltzy, there are plenty of poignant, well-crafted pleasures to be had from its richly imagined and heartfelt fable of life’s joys and mysteries.
Oslo Stories Trilogy: Sex
One part of a triptych that also includes Love and Dreams, this Norwegian drama is an astute treatise on the centrality of sex to modern-day living and the trouble people have in dealing with that fact. After two unnamed chimney sweeps (Thorbjorn Harr and Jan Gunnar Roise) exchange confidences, the elder man is compelled to fathom the significance of a dream in which he is desired by someone resembling David Bowie, while the latter must cope with the fallout of telling his wife of 20 years (Siri Forberg) that he's had a one-off moment with a male client.
Writer/director Dag Johan Haugerud is less concerned with narrative mechanics than he is with psychology: male hang-ups, the ways in which the sweeps navigate their emotions, and how their self-discoveries impact upon their loved ones.
Examining everything from gender identity and marital fidelity to the extent to which couples are obliged to share, this is certainly dialogue-heavy. But the conversations are drolly thought-provoking and the leads nicely vulnerable, while Cecilie Semec's summery cinematography is as spontaneously infectious as Peder Capjon Kjellsby's jazz-inflected score. – David Parkinson
Best of the rest still showing in UK cinemas
Materialists
Modern dating comes under the microscope in this sexy, smartly written New York story from Past Lives writer/director Celine Song. Dakota Johnson plays Lucy, a singleton who makes a lucrative living matchmaking professionals for an upmarket agency. But then her own romantic life is thrown into chaos. At the wedding reception of her latest success story, she meets the groom's brother, wealthy financier Harry (Pedro Pascal), but also runs into her ex-boyfriend John (Chris Evans), a waiter and struggling actor.
What’s a girl to do? Examining the way so many too easily choose potential partners by algorithm – by status and looks rather than personality – this nails the sometimes callous nature of contemporary couplings. Pascal and Evans are expertly cast, both playing fundamentally decent men and providing subtle twists on their public personas. But it’s Johnson who leads the line, the Fifty Shades of Grey star finally grabbing an adult role that befits her skills. The result is a highly satisfying romantic tale that stimulates the brain and the heart. – James Mottram
Nobody 2
Bob Odenkirk returns as family guy Hutch Mansell, whose unassuming exterior belies his skillset as a retired government assassin. In this pacey action sequel, Hutch has relocated with wife Becca (Connie Nielsen) and his children after tangling with Russian mobsters in the first film, but is co-opted by an old handler to execute more barely survivable assignments.
Demanding a break, he takes the trio and his geriatric dad (Christopher Lloyd) to his favourite childhood holiday spot – a small-town amusement/water park – to relive happy memories. Naturally, for Hutch, he soon falls foul of corrupt lawmen and the minions of a vicious local crime queen (Sharon Stone, scenery-gnashing with gusto), forcing the Mansell clan (including a katana-wielding RZA) to get involved in the holiday havoc.
Indonesian film-maker Timo Tjahjanto (Headshot) here makes his Hollywood debut and delivers the familiar Nobody ingredients of bone-crunching brawls, grisly comeuppance, droll deadpan humour and a bloodily explosive climax. Just a pity a bit more flesh wasn’t added to the characters this time around. – Jeremy Aspinall
Together
In this curious hybrid of body horror and relationship drama, Alison Brie and Dave Franco star as a couple who move to the country to re-energise their faltering romance, but fall prey to an unknown, malevolent entity. After drinking water from a remote pool in the woods, they awake to find themselves stuck together at the legs by a bizarre gooey substance.
It's just the first of increasingly grotesque instances in which the pair are, literally, forced to stay together. While the film has an element of absurd humour, its graphic effects aren't for the squeamish, as debut director Michael Shanks settles into his task as a kind of marriage counsellor with a David Cronenberg fixation.
The added mystery thriller motifs arguably add to a pot that risks becoming too full to stir, but the end result is a tricky fable that motors along nicely. Events benefit from the casting of real-life spouses Brie and Franco, whose rhythms and chemistry go a long way to selling an outlandish premise and its gleefully dispatched shocks. – Terry Staunton
Oslo Stories Trilogy: Love
Such is his willingness to exploit contrivance that Norwegian writer/director Dag Johan Haugerud fashions a new form of relatable realism in the second part of a trilogy that also contains Sex and Dreams. Marianne (Andrea Braein Hovig) and Tor (Tayo Cittadella Jacobsen) work together as a doctor and nurse in a hospital urology department.
She lacks a bedside manner, while he is more empathetic. Yet, when they bump into each other on a ferry boat, Tor admits to using these crossings to cruise for casual sex, while she still places her trust in conventional forms of dating. Ironically, as Marianne decides to experiment, Tor finds himself being drawn to Bjorn (Lars Jacob Holm), an older psychologist who needs a friend after a devastating diagnosis.
Employing hefty reams of chat, Haugerud wittily and poignantly explores the shifting sands of relationships in an enlightened, post-happily ever after era, while also deftly using Cecilie Semec's balmy views of a Nordic August to celebrate the pleasures and complexities of modern urban living. – David Parkinson
Weapons
Writer/director Zach Cregger follows his 2022 hit Barbarian with this unnerving and thunderously entertaining horror epic. It follows events in the aftermath of a deeply troubling incident in a suburban US town: one night, without explanation, all but one student in the third-grade class of a new teacher (Julia Garner) vanished from their homes. Divulging further plot details would severely dampen the viewing experience.
The non-linear structure employed by Cregger – we follow events from six unique perspectives – allows the film to explore the complex ways people's psyches are affected by broken communities, traumatic events and surrounding public storms. Each chapter gradually teases more information about the bizarre events engulfing the town, resulting in a propulsive, perfectly paced thriller that leaves things tantalisingly mysterious until a reveal that will appeal to fans of 2024's Longlegs.
There are frights aplenty, with Cregger tapping into nightmarish, fairy tale-esque imagery, but also evidence of the director's comedic roots. The deft way in which he juggles those tones makes Weapons a refreshing triumph. – Patrick Cremona
Freakier Friday
Jamie Lee Curtis and Lindsay Lohan reprise their roles from the 2003 body-swap comedy Freaky Friday for this fun fairground ride of a sequel. Now a single mother to Harper (Julia Butters), Anna (Lohan) is about to marry English ex-pat Eric (Manny Jacinto). However, there's family friction in the fact that Harper doesn't get along with Eric's daughter Lily (Sophia Hammons).
After a visit to a fortune teller, bodies are swapped again, as Anna and Harper trade, as do Lily and Curtis’s Tess. With the men – including Anna’s ex, Jake (Chad Michael Murray) – blithely unaware, chaos ensues. Directed by Nisha Ganatra (The High Note), the film is ambitious in delivering a four-way body swap. While this does amp up the lunacy of the original, it is also the film's slight downfall.
The performances aren’t distinct enough (with the exception of the ever-reliable Curtis), and the payoff from all the identity confusion isn’t as strong as it could be. Yet there are some very funny lines (generation-gap gags about Coldplay and Facebook), a bouncy soundtrack featuring the Spice Girls and Britney Spears, and a colourful, carefree vibe that ensures the film is still fun. – James Mottram
The Naked Gun
The return of the spoof franchise sees Liam Neeson take on the mantle from Leslie Nielsen, playing the son of Frank Drebin. As far as the plot goes, narrative threads aren’t especially important when director Akiva Schaffer and his co-screenwriters busy themselves front-loading the hilarity and giving the parody movie genre a much-needed shot in the arm.
References to what went before are par for the course legacy sequels life this, and in a franchise that was fond of sight gags and one-line asides from the start it’s no surprise to find a generous helping of nods to days of yore. But this reboot also has the clout and cavalcade of laughs to announce itself as its own beast.
Neeson confidently treads a fine line between vigilante and vaudevillian, while Pamela Anderson shows she’s admirably skilled at knowing when to serve as the perfect foil and when to land a gag herself. The Naked Gun is a near 90-minute hoot that bodes well for more to come, a gun that feels like it still has several bullets to fire. – Terry Staunton
The Fantastic Four: First Steps
Marvel’s original superhero team finally enters the MCU with this enjoyable, colourful escapade. Set on the alternate Earth-828, the film begins four years after the Fantastic Four formed, when astronauts Reed Richards (Pedro Pascal), Sue Storm (Vanessa Kirby), her brother Johnny (Joseph Quinn) and Ben Grimm (Ebon Moss-Bachrach) returned from space with special abilities.
Now they face their biggest threat to date: the cosmic, planet-devouring Galactus (voiced with menace by Ralph Ineson). Sue's pregnancy adds a very human dimension to the impending global catastrophe, as the imposing Galactus sets his sights on Earth-828.
Wisely, the film ignores the three earlier Fantastic Four movies, none of which served well the 1960s comic book creation by Jack Kirby and Stan Lee. The result is a fine blend of action, humour and high-stakes danger from director Matt Shakman (WandaVision). Beautifully designed with a retro-futuristic aesthetic, and acted with charisma by the four leads, First Steps does not stumble. – James Mottram
- Read our full review of The Fantastic Four: First Steps
- Read our interview with Director Matt Shakman
Bring Her Back
Sally Hawkins gives a superbly demented performance playing against type in this bleak Australian horror. Written and directed by Danny and Michael Philippou, who previously turned heads with their feature debut Talk to Me, it follows siblings Andy (Billy Barratt) and Piper (Sora Wong) after they are placed in the care of new foster mother Laura (Hawkins).
Early alarm bells – including the unusual behaviour exhibited by another, non-verbal foster child – suggest something a little fishy, and it soon emerges that Laura has turned to sinister sources in a desperate bid to hold back the grief of losing her biological daughter.
While much of the terror stems from the bizarre occult practises glimpsed in bootleg video tapes and a handful of shocking bursts of visceral violence, there's just as much fear to be found in its more grounded, psychologically-troubling moments – as Laura seeks to gain control over Andy with a series of cruel tricks.
It amounts to a consistently chilling and occasionally gnarly look at the extremes of parental grief, and Hawkins has rarely been better. – Patrick Cremona
Friendship
Nose-bleedingly funny and frequently discomfiting, often at the same time, Friendship is a fine showcase for the singular talents of comic actor Tim Robinson. Best known for his Netflix sketch show I Think You Should Leave with Tim Robinson, the US comedian excels at playing weird and pitiful characters whose behaviour escalates in wild and unexpected ways.
Here, he gets to flesh out such a schmuck over the course of 100 minutes playing Craig, a middle-aged man with few interests and even fewer friends. When he starts hanging out with his effortlessly suave neighbour, Austin (Paul Rudd), Craig falls hard and a bromance develops.
After their subsequent break-up he falls harder still, obsessing over Austin in his own efforts to reinvent himself. Writer/director Andrew DeYoung crafts a borderline surreal tragicomedy hinging on male loneliness, attachment and fantasy. As with the best of Robinson’s work, the silliness and shouting betrays a vulnerability that only amplifies the laughs. – Sean McGeady
Superman
With writer/director James Gunn (Guardians of the Galaxy) and producer Peter Safran head honchos of a revamped DC Universe, a new Superman takes his bow in the relatable shape of David Corenswet, who is more genial Boy Scout than Henry Cavill’s brooding take on the last son of Krypton. Gunn cuts to the chase immediately – no origin story here – as we encounter our hero three years into his role as Earth’s protector.
He's up against billionaire Lex Luthor (a menacing Nicholas Hoult), who is consumed by his seething hatred of the alien so beloved by the people of Metropolis, while he's also in the early months of a relationship with Daily Planet reporter Lois Lane (Rachel Brosnahan). Gunn knows his DC Comics lore and introduces a colourful bunch of metahumans not seen in earlier DC blockbusters, but with so many figures to introduce and so much action and drama to deliver, some characters are underused and underwritten.
Nevertheless, subtle nods to the original Superman epic from 1978, not least the regular refrains from John Williams’s iconic and still rousing score, certainly swell the CGI-heavy fantasy action – and the chemistry between Corenswet and Brosnahan bodes well going forward. – Jeremy Aspinall
Jurassic World Rebirth
A hush-hush mission goes disastrously wrong in this hugely enjoyable seventh entry in the dinosaur franchise. Rebooting the series with a new story and new characters, the film sees operative Zora Bennett (Scarlett Johansson) leading a mission to the tropical Ile Saint-Hubert to collect blood samples from three dinosaurs for medical research. Among her team are dino expert Dr Henry Loomis (Wicked's Jonathan Bailey) and boat captain Duncan Kincaid (Mahershala Ali), while shady pharmaceutical rep Martin Krebs (Rupert Friend) is also aboard because his company is bankrolling the excursion.
However, things go awry when they intercept a stranded family. The script by David Koepp (who adapted Michael Crichton's novels for Steven Spielberg's Jurassic Park and 1997 sequel The Lost World) doesn't stray far from the formula - it is, after all, another island-set dinosaur thriller.
However, incoming director Gareth Edwards (Godzilla) nails the action set-pieces, including a stunning T rex moment. As new dinosaurs mix with old faves (Spitters! Spinos!), this feels like a loving tribute to the spirit of Jurassic Park. Johansson is thunderously good, while blasts of John Williams's theme tune can't help but bring a lump to the throat. - James Mottram
- Read our full Jurassic World Rebirth review
- Read our exclusive interview with director Gareth Edwards
F1
A former Formula 1 driver returns to the race track for one last shot at glory in this visceral but corny pedal-to-the-metal blockbuster. Brad Pitt plays Sonny Hayes, a one-time F1 prodigy who lost it all. Now, thanks to ex-teammate Ruben (Javier Bardem), who recruits him out of desperation for his Apx GP team, he’s back out on the track. Paired with hot-headed rookie Joshua Pearce (Damson Idris), the maverick Sonny tries every trick in the book to help Apx gain a foothold in the season.
A re-run of Top Gun: Maverick – with director Joseph Kosinski, producer Jerry Bruckheimer and writer Ehren Kruger all involved – this boasts the same top-notch, IMAX-ready thrills. Featuring F1 world champions Max Verstappen, Lewis Hamilton (also a producer) and other racers, the stunning footage will blow your mind.
Off the track, though, the hammy story is about as propulsive as a burst tyre. Pitt’s lone-wolf character borders on cliché, as does his relationship with team engineer Kate (Kerry Condon). Fun but dumb. – James Mottram
28 Years Later
More than two decades after 28 Days Later, director Danny Boyle and screenwriter Alex Garland are back in the drivers’ seats to impart deeper wisdom about the longer-term aftermath of a world gone to hell in this zombie sequel.
It follows events on Holy Island off the coast of Northumbria, where a close-knit healthy community goes about the day-to-day rebuilding of a working society, including 30-something couple Jamie and Isla (Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Jodie Comer) and their 12-year-old offspring Spike (relative newcomer Alfie Williams) – who heads to the mainland for a coming-of-age initiation that sets the plot in motion.
Garland’s script suffers a little from disjointed pace, but there’s a more tangible sense of a mythology when Ralph Fiennes shows up in a role that is equal parts bonkers and charismatic. Young star Williams turns in an outstanding, remarkably layered performance, while the violence is suitably, shockingly, deftly choreographed. The result is a well-seasoned, emotionally nutritious soup that feeds its audience a more reflective, human story than before. – Terry Staunton
How to Train Your Dragon
The geeky son of a Viking chief forms a friendship with one the tribe's bitterest enemies, a dragon, in this thrilling live-action remake of the beloved children’s animated fantasy. Hiccup (Mason Thames) is training to be a dragon-slayer to impress his dad (Gerard Butler), but when he accidentally wounds a dragon, instead of killing it, he forms a bond with it that reveals a whole new side to the scaly fire-breathers.
As remakes go, this rates as one of the most loyal in Hollywood history. It’s almost a scene-for-scene copy, with much of the same dialogue and even some sequences shot and edited identically. Director Dean DeBlois also helmed all three animated Dragon features and his love of Cressida Cowell's original books shines though.
Amazingly, the magical charm and sly wit of the earlier film version survive almost unscathed, and the human cast fleshes out the cartoon characters marvellously. The action sequences thrill, the dragons look amazing and the flying scenes are breathtaking. Not quite as consistently brilliant as the 2010 original, but not far off. – Dave Golder
Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning
The closing chapter of the long-running saga follows on directly from Dead Reckoning, with Christopher McQuarrie back in the director's chair for a fourth straight outing. This time around, the AI weapon known as the Entity has gained even greater prominence by accessing the nuclear arsenals of every major power in the world, and is threatening instant Armageddon.
This raising of the stakes gives the film an impressive doomsday tone that sets it apart from the more playful mood of its immediate predecessors; this mission really does feel like the most vital – and, of course, impossible – for Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) and co. However, the movie is also plagued with major structural and pacing issues. The convoluted opening section devotes too much time to longwinded exposition scenes, while attempts to tie up various loose ends are clumsy. The film has also lumbered itself with too many characters, leaving some underused or superfluous.
Yet there is no denying the bonkers brilliance of the film when it comes to action. A nail-biting underwater sequence is the first masterstroke, but the franchise has saved arguably its best set piece for last in the form of an exhilarating sequence that sees Cruise desperately dangling off the wing of a plane. – Patrick Cremona
- Read our full Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning review
- Read our interview with Hayley Atwell
- Read our interview with Simon Pegg
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Authors
Patrick Cremona is the Senior Film Writer at Radio Times, and looks after all the latest film releases both in cinemas and on streaming. He has been with the website since October 2019, and in that time has interviewed a host of big name stars and reviewed a diverse range of movies.
