David Sexton

Eli Roth’s Ice Cream Man follows a demonic ice-cream vendor whose products turn suburban children into murderous zombies, leading to graphic attacks on parents, teachers, police and firefighters. The review finds the film energetically committed to splatter but questions Roth’s explanation that its premise reflects parental fears, since the children are the perpetrators rather than victims. It concludes that the film’s premise and gore are less intellectually compelling than other independent horror releases such as Backrooms and Obsession.

Imran Perretta’s debut film Ish follows two 12-year-old friends, Ish and Maram, through a formative summer in Luton. Their friendship fractures after Maram is subjected to a stop-and-search operation, while both boys become increasingly shaped by family grief, racial suspicion, political awareness and divergent adolescent paths. The review praises the film’s stark monochrome cinematography, locally cast performers, original score and ability to unite personal coming-of-age drama with a critique of how brown boys are treated in Britain. It also identifies a tension in the film’s perspective: by focusing almost exclusively on Muslim and South Asian communities and scarcely showing the wider population or police, Ish’s critique of social exclusion may itself reinforce the separation it seeks to challenge.

Christopher Nolan’s adaptation of Homer’s Odyssey is presented as a technically impressive but excessively Hollywood production. The review acknowledges its enormous scale, real locations, practical effects, Imax cinematography and physical set pieces, while criticizing its star-driven casting, American accents, northern fantasy imagery and simplified treatment of Homeric characters and episodes. Nolan’s Odysseus is earnest and remorseful rather than sly, the gods are largely demystified, and several darker elements of the original epic are omitted, leaving the film more recognizably Nolan than Homer.

Jodie Foster’s first French-language leading role anchors Rebecca Zlotowski’s A Private Life, in which she plays Lilian Steiner, a difficult Paris-based psychoanalyst investigating the apparent suicide of a former patient. The film moves among therapy satire, family drama, murder mystery, remarriage comedy and surreal wartime fantasy without fully resolving any of them, and its ending is anticlimactic. Foster’s command of French, emotional intelligence and unvarnished performance make the film worthwhile, supported by a strong cast and polished filmmaking.

Savage House follows the impoverished, socially ambitious Savages as they prepare for a visit from the Duke and Duchess of Devonshire, only for their scheme to collapse amid servants’ revolt, disease, violence and squalor. The film’s elaborate period design, strong cast and Richard E Grant and Claire Foy’s performances are praised, but Peter Glanz is criticized for imposing a repulsive contemporary sensibility on the aristocratic genre. The review argues that the film satirizes desperate social climbers rather than the aristocracy itself, leaving it neither enchanting nor genuinely funny.

The Backrooms evolved from a creepy image shared on 4chan into a substantial online mythology, largely through Kane Parsons’s YouTube shorts. His digitally created, VHS-styled films attracted hundreds of millions of views and led Hollywood to develop a feature adaptation. The film follows Clark, a failed architect who discovers an endless maze beneath his furniture store, and therapist Mary Kline, who pursues him after his disappearance. It remains faithful to Parsons’s unsettling visual world and effectively realises its liminal spaces, though its body-horror turn and Async-focused third act are less successful. Parsons sees the phenomenon as an expression of exhaustion with anonymous, industrialised environments that lack the humanity of home.