Florence pugh

Traditionally, the Super Bowl advertising spots are not only the most prestigious and expensive of the year, but also serve to showcase the movies that will be the biggest and most thrilling blockbusters of the coming summer. Since the advent of social media and streaming, there is no longer the same giddy thrill at watching a few seconds’ footage, which is usually taken from a more expansive and detailed trailer, but it’s still a clear calling card for studios to suggest which of their forthcoming films they’re most excited by, and which have been quietly set aside. (Awful though I think it looks, however, James Gunn’s Superman, which lacked a new spot, did at least have a short clip with the hoped-for breakout star Krypto the Superdog.

In my pre-Oscar predictions, I wrote “we are now in that brief period where Christopher Nolan, the most significant director of the past two decades, is not an Oscar winner, and by the time people read this on Monday 11 March, that will no longer be the case.” And so it has proved. Oppenheimer won seven awards, including Best Film, Best Director, Best Actor and Best Supporting Actor. The only accolade that it might reasonably have expected to take that it was disappointed in was Sound, but The Zone of Interest deservedly nabbed that one.

At a moment when words like “jihad” and “genocide” fall perpetually from the lips of pundits, professional activists, and policy makers, Denis Villeneuve’s Dune: Part Two seems a rather subversive spice to sprinkle into our combustible culture. While both parts of Dune comprise a complex film that defies simplistic one-to-one allegory, at times Villeneuve’s richly imagined epic places a finger on the familiar, the historical, just as it points its others toward a fiction set amongst the stars.  In the second half of this adaptation of Frank Herbert’s 1965 novel, Paul and his mother, Jessica, have escaped the initial assault on House Atreides to shelter with Fremen insurgents, but Harkonnen death squads pursue them.

Cockburn loves a little drama, but it’s proving difficult to work out who the real villain is amid the continued theatrics of the Don’t Worry Darling cast. The film concerns a 1950s housewife living with her husband in a utopian experimental community. Don’t Worry Darling (Cockburn feels compelled to ask why there is no comma) was directed by Olivia Wilde, and started filming what seems like decades ago One thing is certain: the crew saved their best performances for the movie's premiere at the Venice Film Festival instead of the actual thing. The film has been branded a disappointment by critics, who claim that Harry Styles, Wilde's boyfriend who plays a lead role, is "charisma-free.