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This week at the kino: Shaken, delayed, but finally back!

Our movie man has the verdict on Daniel Craig's long-awaited 007 swansong, plus the week's best film events.

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Daniel Craig’s Bond swansong No Time To Die is finally out in cinemas this week. Photo: MGM

There’s only one release anyone’s going to be talking about this week: the return of James Bond in No Time To Die.

The 25th 007 adventure finally lurches its way into cinemas after multiple delays and false-starts due to You-Know-What, and joins Dune and the upcoming The Matrix Resurrections as one of 2021’s most-anticipated and biggest blockbuster releases. Read our full, spoiler-free review for more… Because anyone who spoils this particular Bond adventure will need all the help they can get.

Oh, and as an extra fact (don’t say we don’t spoil you), did you know that Germany is opening the biggest IMAX in the world for the film’s release? According to Deadline, the 21.3 metre-high and 38.16 metre-wide IMAX screen is opening today at the wonderfully named Traumpalast Multiplex in Leonberg, near Stuttgart. So if you feel like a six-hour drive from Berlin to see No Time To Die on the biggest screen known to man (it’s wider than a Boeing 737 airliner), more power to you!

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Taste of Cherry, screening at Arsenal’s Abbas Kiarostami retrospective

If you’re looking to escape the crowds and the Bond fans rushing to the multiplexes, we’ve got five stellar recommendations for you:

FK66 are celebrating their 50th anniversary by treating us to a celebratory retrospective. Starting tonight until October 13th, the kino is screening classics from the past five decades, combining box-office heavy hitters and arthouse gems. It kicks off with Dani Levy’s Du mich auch (You Love Me Too) (1986) and finishes with the Coen Brothers’ The Big Lebowski (1998). We recommend you don’t miss out on seeing the following titles on the big screen once more: David Lynch’s Blue Velvet (02/10 at 22:30), John Carpenter’s Assault on Precinct 13 (08/10 at 22:30) and Curtis Hanson’s LA Confidential (11/10 at 20:00). Check out their full programme here.

There’s the Festival of Animation Berlin (FAB2021), whose 5th edition starts tomorrow (until Oct 3rd). Taking place both on-and-offline, this year’s selection of films is… well, fab. Head to City Kino Wedding, Centre Français de Berlin or the Russian House of Science and Culture, and make sure to check out our festival preview for what to look out for.

Also tomorrow is a killer evening at Babylon, who begin the month of October with a spooky 24-hour Horror-a-Thon. As the name suggests, it’s an all-nighter starting at 18:00 and ending… well, you can make an educated guess. On the menu is an evening of graphic violence, cannibalism and all the haemoglobin a discerning gorehound could wish for: Brian De Palma’s Carrie, Ivan Reitman’s Cannibal Girls, the original 1989 Pet Sematary, the infamous Sleepaway Camp, an ever-welcome reminder that From Dusk Till Dawn remains an absolute blast, and some tent-shaking antics courtesy of the Blair Witch. Don’t miss out.

If that all sounds a bit much, Arsenal are giving you another option for tomorrow evening: a 70mm print screening of James Cameron’s Aliens (01/10 at 20:00). You can’t go wrong with this one.

Finally, and sticking with Arsenal, we recommend you pay them a visit this coming month. Starting October 2, they’re launching a retrospective of Abbas Kiarostami’s work, including his newly restored early films. For those who haven’t yet had the pleasure, Kiarostami (1940-2016) was an Iranian director, poet and photographer who was part of a generation of filmmakers in the Iranian New Wave. Many of his films are essential viewing and have been recognised on an international level, with his Venice Grand Special Jury Prize-winning Bad ma ra khahad bord (The Wind Will Carry Us) and the Cannes Palme d’Or-winner Taste Of Cherry, to name only those two. As Arsenal have beautifully put it: “Beyond their visual qualities, his films are also contemporary documents – they capture everyday life and social change in his homeland, obstinately sounding out the interaction between art and reality.”

The series runs through October 31 and each screening is accompanied by introductions and video messages from the filmmaker’s friends and colleagues from Iran (including Jafar Panahi, Leila Hatami and Asghar Farhadi), as well as live interventions from the likes of David Streiff, the former director of the Locarno Film Festival, Kiarostami’s translator and artistic collaborator Massoumeh Lahidji, and director Mani Haghighi. You can check out the full programme here.

There we have it. Happy screenings all, take it easy on the vodka martinis, and see you next week.