Cinema Day Adventures: The Death of Robin Hood, Insidious, and Finally Catching Up with Anora

UK Cinema Day rolled around at an awkward moment this time. For anyone outside the UK, it's a recurring promotion across chains like Vue, Odeon, and Picturehouse — discounted tickets for a day or a weekend, meant to get people back into theatres. Great in theory. The problem this time was that there wasn't much worth using it on. I'd already seen Spider-Man: Brand New Day and The Odyssey, and neither was pulling me back for a second look. Nothing on the current release slate had that "you need to see this" pull. Still, cheap tickets are cheap tickets, and I didn't want to let the weekend go to waste, so I went looking for the most interesting option available, flaws and all.

The Death of Robin Hood

That ended up being The Death of Robin Hood, which might be one of the more genuinely interesting new releases out right now — undercut almost entirely by a marketing campaign that seems to have given up before it started. I hadn't seen it advertised anywhere. What got me into the seat was simpler: it's shot on 35mm, it stars Hugh Jackman, and the premise sounded like it was doing something different with a story everyone already thinks they know.

And it is different. This isn't the swashbuckling, folk-hero version of Robin Hood. We meet him near the end of his life — long grey hair, worn down, clearly having been through more than any of the old stories account for. The film isn't interested in reinforcing the legend; it's interested in picking at it. Is Robin Hood a hero, or is he an outlaw the stories have been generous to? Is any of what's said about him even true? That tension — hero or terrorist, myth or self-justification — sits underneath the entire film, and it's a genuinely compelling angle to take on material this over-familiar.

The opening thirty minutes are excellent. Not "good for what it is" excellent — properly, surprisingly excellent. It's grounded and violent in a way that makes medieval England feel like an actual place rather than a backdrop: mud, dirt, brutal close-quarters fighting, none of the choreographed cleanliness this genre usually leans on. It's also worth noting that this opening stretch carries essentially all of the film's action. Everything else that follows is comparatively still.

That's where things start to slip. After the setup, Robin Hood ends up isolated on an island — a priory, from memory — surrounded by nuns and orphaned children, and the film shifts into a long, quiet, meditative stretch. It becomes a story about regret: the things he's done, the person he's been, the cycle of violence and revenge he can't seem to step outside of. There's a clear tonal echo here of season two of Vinland Saga, when the story trades the high-adrenaline violence of season one for an extended, reflective stretch on a farm. The difference is that Vinland Saga had an entire season's worth of earned backstory to justify that shift in register. The Death of Robin Hood doesn't have that runway, and the patience the film asks of you in that back half never really gets repaid. You keep waiting for the "calm before the storm" to resolve into something — a final battle, a confrontation, some kind of payoff — and it just doesn't arrive. The film ends, rather than concludes.

To be clear, this isn't a complaint about a lack of action for its own sake. It's more that the opening thirty minutes set an expectation of pacing that the rest of the film quietly abandons. It's a shame, because there's a genuinely distinctive take on this character buried in here, and it's rare to see anything new done with Robin Hood as a piece of cultural lore at all. Worth watching for that opening stretch and for the angle it takes — just go in knowing the back half is a different, slower film.

Insidious (2026)

The newest Insidious entry didn't do much for me, though I'll admit the screening conditions didn't help — a crowd that wouldn't stop talking through and right before the jump scares, which is about the worst possible way to experience a horror film that leans on timing. Even accounting for that, it's a fairly standard genre entry. There's a nice idea tucked inside it — multiple generations of women inheriting a connection to the spirit world, passing that role down the family line — and that thread is probably the most interesting thing the film does. But outside of that, it settles into fairly conventional horror-movie shape.

It's not a bad film. It's a perfectly reasonable date-night or watch-with-friends option if you've got nothing else planned on a Friday. I wouldn't go out of your way for it, but if you're seeing it anyway, it's the kind of thing that's better experienced in a cinema than on a streaming service at home — the format does some of the work the script doesn't.

Anora

And then there's Anora, which I'm aware I'm arriving at extremely late. It's been sitting on my list since it made the rounds through the last awards season, and it only recently landed on Netflix UK, which is what finally got me to watch it. I wasn't prepared for how good it is.

It's the story of a stripper and escort working in New York — actually filmed in New York, not on a studio stand-in for it, which shows in the texture of the whole thing — who quickly forms a relationship with the son of a Russian billionaire. Things escalate fast: they marry almost impulsively, and the film is genuinely at its best once his family catches wind of the rumor and sends people to find out if it's true. That's when Anora shifts gears from a gritty New York character piece into something closer to farce, and the comedy in that back half is some of the best I've seen in a film in a long time — not "dark comedy" exactly, just extremely well-constructed, character-driven comedic chaos. There's a touch of Uncut Gems in the frantic, cascading energy of it, but with its own distinct New York grit underneath.

It ends on a note that's jarring and quietly devastating, recontextualising everything that came before it in a single, understated final scene. It's stayed with me since watching it — the kind of film where you go looking for a podcast episode afterward just to sit with someone else's reaction to it. Anora is easily one of the better films I've seen in a long stretch, and it's pushed the director's earlier work — Tangerine, The Florida Project — onto my list.

On the radar

Coming up: Resident Evil, hopefully in IMAX. Tickets for the London Film Festival's public slots go live next week, and top of the list is Look Back, Kiyotaka Oshiyama's adaptation of Tatsuki Fujimoto's manga, which has been getting real attention out of Venice. Also hoping for Godzilla Minus Zero and Prime Time, though I'm not holding my breath on those.