The Iron Claw is a biographical sport film based on the true story of professional wrestler Kevin Von Erich and the Von Erich family. It was written and directed by Sean Durkin and produced by A24. The film stars Zac Efron, Jeremy Allen White, Harris Dickinson, Maura Tierney, Holt McCallany and Lily James.

The film is centred around the Von Erich family, a dynasty of wrestlers from the 1960s onwards that had enormous success, and popularized the iron claw professional wrestling hold. However, they not only had to battle inside the ring, but fight the "Von Erich curse" outside of it, which resulted in just one of the six brothers outliving their father.

This hotly-anticipated comedy caper follows Jamie (Margaret Qualley), an uninhibited free spirit bemoaning yet another breakup with a girlfriend, and her demure friend Marian (Geraldine Viswanathan) who desperately needs to loosen up.

In search of a fresh start, the two embark on an impromptu road trip to Tallahassee, but things quickly go awry when they cross paths with a group of inept criminals along the way.

Directed by Ethan Coen (Fargo, The Big Lebowski) and co-written by Coen Brothers’ frequent collaborator Tricia Cooke, the film also features a stacked supporting cast including Beanie Feldstein, Colman Domingo and Pedro Pascal.

When a young woman in Victorian England committed suicide, little did she know how much life lay in store for her. Re-animated by her de facto guardian, the scientist Dr Goodwin Baxter, Bella Baxter’s mind soon becomes increasingly alive to the opportunities the world offers. She eventually embarks on a global adventure and, unshackled by the mores of the era, sets her sights on sating all her carnal and spiritual desires. Lanthimos continues his creative collaboration with Emma Stone, who is revelatory as Bella – a performance that will help define her place as one of the most thrilling and daring actors of her generation. Lanthimos’ direction is as impeccable as ever and the screenplay, by Tony McNamara, is a pitch-perfect adaptation of Alasdair Gray’s 1992 novel.

You can count on Yorgos Lanthimos, the Greek film-maker behind such strange creations as The Killing of a Scared Deer, The Lobster and The Favourite, to deliver on oddities. Poor Things is indeed fabulously weird.

Lanthimos has concocted a hypnotic and singular world for Bella Baxter (Emma Stone), the Frankenstein-esque creation by mad scientist Dr Baxter (Willem Defoe, plus garish prosthetic facial scars) in Victorian-era London. Part monochrome, part oversaturated picture book, Poor Things is a visual treat throughout, like a colored engraving come to life. As in The Favourite, Lanthimos makes ample use of a fish-eye lens, barrels into the base functions of the human body and revels in delectable torsions of dialogue. But the real reason to watch is Stone, in a career-best performance.

BAFTA AND OSCAR NOMINATIONS

BAFTA: 10 nominations including Best Film, Best Actress, Best British Film, Original Score, Editing, Make Up, Special Visual Effects, Costume, Adapted Screenplay, Production Design, Cinematography

OSCARS: 11 nominations including Best Film, Actress, Supporting Actor, Director, Original Score, Cinematography, Adapted Screenplay, Production Design, Costume, Make Up, Editing

Reclusive author Elly Conway (Bryce Dallas Howard) writes best-selling espionage novels about a secret agent named Argylle (Henry Cavill) who's on a mission to unravel a global spy syndicate. However, Elly, is drawn into the real world of espionage when the plots of her books start to mirror the covert actions of a real-life spy organization, and Aiden (Sam Rockwell), shows up to save her from being kidnapped or killed. Elly (Dallas Howard) and her beloved cat Alfie are plunged into a covert world where nothing, and no one, is what it seems, and the line between fiction and reality begins to blur.

Directed and produced by Matthew Vaughn, Argyle features an ensemble cast that also includes Bryan Cranston, Catherine O'Hara, Dua Lipa, Ariana DeBose, John Cena, Rob Delaney, and Samuel L. Jackson.

John Singer Sargent is known as the greatest portrait artist of his era. What made his ‘swagger’ portraits remarkable was his power over his sitters, what they wore and how they were presented to the audience. Through interviews with curators, contemporary fashionistas and style influencers, Exhibition on Screen’s film will examine how Sargent’s unique practice has influenced modern art, culture and fashion.

Filmed at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston and the Tate Britain, London, the exhibition reveals Sargent’s power to express distinctive personalities, power dynamics and gender identities during this fascinating period of cultural reinvention. Alongside 50 paintings by Sargent sit stunning items of clothing and accessories worn by his subjects, drawing the audience into the artist’s studio.

Sargent’s sitters were often wealthy, their clothes costly, but what happens when you turn yourself over to the hands of a great artist? The manufacture of public identity is as controversial and contested today as it was at the turn of the 20th century, but somehow Sargent’s work transcends the social noise and captures an alluring truth with each brush stroke.

Step into the glittering world of fashion, scandal and shameless self-promotion that made John Singer Sargent the painter who defined an era.

Explore the unique creative process of the late 19th century’s favourite portrait artist and the way in which his portraits captured the spirit of a vibrant and rapidly changing age.

Following his BAFTA Best Film winner 1917, Sam Mendes returns with this majestic, personal work, set in a 1980s English coastal town.

Hilary (Olivia Colman) manages a seafront picture palace. Once an opulent multiscreen cinema with a dance hall overlooking the sea, now only one screen remains open, albeit a grand one. In preparation for a regional premiere of Chariots of Fire, Hilary and her colleagues – played by a heavyweight ensemble that includes Toby Jones, Colin Firth, Tom Brooke and Micheal Ward – spruce up the venue. Outside, the town itself is crumbling, with a rising far-right presence and Stephen (Ward) regularly harassed by skinheads. Mendes delivers a stirring ode to the cinema – as a space for collective experience, offering the pleasures and balms of watching films in darkness together.

Alongside regular producer Pippa Harris, Mendes collaborates with an outstanding and mostly British creative team, including legendary cinematographer Roger Deakins, designer Mark Tildesley, editor Lee Smith and casting director Nina Gold. Together, they craft a vivid, tactile sense of 1980s Britain. With Colman and Ward magnificent at the heart of the film, Empire of Light is an elegant exploration of the potential of both community and cinema to help us find light in the darkness

Screening as part of our year-long season - CINEMA ON SCREEN

Director George Clooney‘s The Boys in the Boat is a gorgeous adaptation of the Depression-era story of a group of poor but scrappy young men who find a slice of glory when they become the USA’s choice to compete in the 1936 Berlin Olympics. It is, to use a well worn cliché, a stand-up-and-cheer tale if ever there was one.

But the primary reason to cheer is the kind of unspoken underlying message within, that this is a sport where it is imperative that everyone in the boat rows as one, in unison and together physically and psychologically. This makes The Boys in the Boat not just enormously entertaining, but also important and relevant to our current world that is more divided, more ripped at the seams, than ever in memory. This movie, based on the 2013 bestseller by Daniel James Brown, assures us that the triumph of the soul is working together, not apart. It is a simple sentiment to be sure, but watching Clooney’s beautifully constructed period piece it is pretty much all you can think about.

Cinematographer Martin Ruhe’s cameras swoon over the finished product once the boat is revealed in a long, slow shot ogling every inch of it. The work of Ruhe (a longtime collaborator of Clooney’s) here overall is sumptuous, employing every possible way to make the spectator sport of it all seem genuinely exciting to watch. The 1936 Olympics is expertly re-created. Two-time Oscar winner Alexandre Desplat’s lovely score avoids the usual beats for this genre and is well matched to what we see on screen. Turner and Robinson are both appealing young actors, giving us all the reason we need to hope they will have a life together.

Producers are Clooney and his Smokehouse partner Grant Heslov. It is a gift for lovers of the kind of movies you thought they just didn’t make anymore.

Acclaimed multi-Oscar winning director Alexander Payne travels back to the 1970s for his eighth film, in which three disparate characters find support in the most unlikely of places. Already nominated for numerous awards this season!

Barton men don’t lie. This is just one of the many rules Professor Hunham (Paul Giamatti) takes much too seriously as he hands out poor grades at an elite boarding school in 1971. As he dismisses the politics that come along with educating the children of people in high places, he’s punished by the headmaster who gives him a most undesirable assignment for the winter break: to stay at the school and supervise the students who are unable to go home.

Hunham resolves to have the students suffer with him, forcing them to start studying next semester’s curriculum ahead of time. Among them, 15-year-old Angus (Dominic Sessa), bright but belligerent, makes a ruckus. Teacher and student become foes, antagonizing one another and tiring themselves out, as Mary (Da’Vine Joy Randolph), the school cafeteria manager, observes from the sidelines, herself alone after recently losing her son in the Vietnam War. As the petulant pair succumb to the depressing truth that they’ve got little else but each other this holiday season, Professor Hunham starts to soften up and they begin to see themselves in one another.

Giamatti gives a career-high performance as the risible teacher who delights in doling out punishment, while newcomer Sessa makes an immediate name for himself, revealing layers of complexity to his character’s rebellious nature. With The Holdovers, director Alexander Payne (Sideways, Nebraska) makes a delicate point about how a first impression never tells the whole truth and shows that the pains and tragedies that feel specific to us actually make us a lot more alike than unalike.

Alexander Payne will be talking to Neil following the film screening on evening of Tuesday 13th February via a pre-recorded interview. Please book tickets here for the Q&A screening

BAFTA AND OSCAR NOMINATIONS

BAFTA: 7 nominations including Best Film, Best Actor, Supporting Actress, Supporting Actor, Director, Original Screenplay, Casting

OSCARS: 5 nominations including Best Picture, Best Actor, Best Supporting Actress, Best Original Screenplay, and Best Film Editing. 

In this reteaming of the star and director of A Royal Affair, Mads Mikkelsen displays his mettle as a former soldier trying to tame Jutland in 18th-century Denmark.

For all the strengths that make Nikolaj Arcel’s sixth feature such a richly satisfying historical drama, the most compelling may be the least surprising. That’s the old-school screen charisma that Mads Mikkelsen exudes in great abundance as a man whose taciturn nature and rugged fortitude are tested by nearly every conceivable hardship that can be dished out in 18th-century Denmark.

The film reunites Mikkelsen with Arcel, who previously directed him in A Royal Affair. The actor stars as Ludvig Kahlen, the illegitimate son of a maid and a nobleman, who defied his low status to succeed in Denmark’s military. Though many had already tried and failed to realize the hopes of King Frederik V for the wild heath of Jutland to be tamed and cultivated, Kahlen believes he has the necessary mettle to triumph over the inhospitable soil, roving thieves, and many other obstacles. His most formidable enemy proves to be Frederik de Schinkel (Simon Bennebjerg), the landowner who knows that any progress on the heath will cost him his power. For all his stoic self-reliance, Kahlen soon realizes he can’t succeed without allies such as Ann Barbara (Amanda Collin), a worker who comes under his protection, and Edel Helene (Kristine Kujath Thorp), de Schinkel’s cousin and very reluctant betrothed.

Arcel equips it all with a sense of sweep and swagger that evokes a John Ford western. And with Mikkelsen’s robust yet nuanced performance being matched by the whole of the cast, The Promised Land boasts a vitality that’s all too uncommon in such handsomely mounted period fare.

Michael Sheen plays Nye Bevan in a surreal and spectacular journey through the life and legacy of the man who transformed Britain’s welfare state and created the NHS.

Confronted with death, Aneurin ‘Nye’ Bevan’s deepest memories lead him on a mind-bending journey back through his life; from childhood to mining underground, Parliament and fights with Churchill.

Written by Tim Price and directed by Rufus Norris (Small Island), this epic new Welsh fantasia will be broadcast live from the National Theatre.

Prince Siegfried chances upon a flock of swans while out hunting. When one of the swans turns into a beautiful woman, Odette, he is enraptured. But she is under a spell that holds her captive, allowing her to regain her human form only at night.

Von Rothbart, arbiter of Odette's curse, tricks the Prince into declaring his love for the identical Odile and thus breaking his vow to Odette. Doomed to remain a swan forever, Odette has but one way to break the sorcerer's spell.

Out hunting, Prince Siegfried chances upon a flock of swans. One among them transforms into the beautiful human Odette and he is immediately enamoured. But Odette is bound by a spell which keeps her captive as a swan during the day. Can Siegfried free her?

Tchaikovsky’s sensational score combines with the evocative imagination of choreographer Liam Scarlett and designer John Macfarlane to heighten the dramatic pathos of Marius Petipa and Lev Ivanov’s quintessential ballet classic. Opening in Spring and returning in Summer, Swan Lake remains to this day one of the best-loved works in the classical ballet canon.

Cast: TBC

Choreography: Liam Scarlett after Marius Petipa and Lev Ivanov

Music: Pyotr Il’yich Tchaikovsky

Additional Choreography: Frederick Ashton