Captain America: Brave New World to Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy - 10 of the best films to watch this February
2025-01-31
Category: entertainment

From Captain America: Brave New World to Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy, these are the films to stream and watch at the cinema this month.
Becoming Led Zeppelin
There are plenty of films about The Beatles, but Becoming Led Zeppelin is the first ever authorised documentary about the band that took over their mantle as one of the world's biggest and most influential rock groups. An intimate account of the foursome's pre-Zep careers and their early years together, the film is constructed from jovial interviews with the three surviving members, singer Robert Plant, guitarist Jimmy Page and bassist John Paul Jones, while a 1971 interview with John Bonham provides the late drummer's perspective. "It's the personal confidences that stand out" in this "fascinating" film, says Jonathan Romney in Uncut. "A rich vein of anecdotes is found in Page and Jones's busy history as session players, with Jones particularly emerging as an affable raconteur with a juicy portfolio of anecdotes." James Bond trivia alert: as jobbing musicians, both Page and Jones were in Abbey Road Studios when Shirley Bassey recorded the theme song for Goldfinger.
Released on 5 February in the UK and Ireland, and on 7 February in the US, Canada, Australian, Spain and Sweden
Armand
Armand is a provocative and weirdly comic Norwegian drama written and directed by Halfdan Ullmann Tøndel, the grandson of two Scandinavian film legends, Ingmar Bergman and Liv Ullmann. Renate Reinsve, the star of The Worst Person in the World, plays a famous actress who is summoned to her six-year-old son's school after he has been accused of sexually assaulting a classmate. Ushered into a room with the school's senior teachers and the alleged victim's parents, she is subjected to "one of the most harrowing PT meetings ever witnessed", says Jo-Ann Titmarsh in HeyUGuys. And as secret connections and shady agendas emerge, "there is plenty of violence lurking beneath the surface of this middle-class tale". The winner of the prize for best first feature film at last year's Cannes Film Festival, Armand is "troubling, entertaining and at times confounding".
Released on 7 February in the US, on 21 February in Spain, and on 28 February in Turkey
I'm Still Here
I'm Still Here is already one of the stand-out successes of this year's awards season, having been nominated for the best picture, best international feature, and best actress Oscars. A Brazilian political thriller directed by Walter Salles (Central Station, The Motorcycle Diaries), it tells the true story of Rubens and Eunice Paiva and their children. In 1971, they are living happily by the beach in Rio de Janeiro, but Rubens (Selton Mello), a former congressman, has been campaigning against the military dictatorship. When he is removed from his house by a team of policemen, it is up to his wife (the Oscar-nominated Fernanda Torres) to ask where he has been taken – and to keep asking, even when all hope seems lost. A longstanding family friend of the Paivas, Salles has made a "deeply poignant" drama, says Jessica Kiang in Variety, and his "deeply invested film-making is remarkable in its grace and naturalism".
Released on 14 February in the US, and on 21 February in the UK, Ireland and Spain
The Day the Earth Blew Up: A Looney Tunes Movie
The classic Looney Tunes characters have featured in some of the greatest animated short films ever made, but they haven't been in any feature-length cartoons: instead, they've popped up in such animated/ live-action hybrids as Space Jam and Who Framed Roger Rabbit. But now, at last, Daffy Duck and Porky Pig star in their own 91-minute animation, a full nine decades after the characters made their debuts. The idea is that Daffy and Porky (both voiced by Eric Bauza) get a job in a bubblegum factory where they uncover an alien plot to take over the world. "It's not consistently hilarious but it is consistently imaginative, sometimes even breathtaking," says William Bibbiani in The Wrap. "The animation style evokes favourable comparisons to Max Fleischer and Don Bluth, with jaw-dropping backgrounds and fluid, energetic, expressive movement. It's the prettiest animated movie Warner Bros has released since The Iron Giant."
Released on 12 February in France, Belgium and Luxembourg, and on 28 February in the US and India
The Monkey
Inspired by a Stephen King short story, The Monkey stars Theo James as a pair of twin brothers with a cursed wind-up toy monkey: ever since they were children, the toy has somehow caused people to die in extravagantly gory ways. The film is written and directed by Osgood Perkins, who made last year's creepy horror hit, Longlegs, but he promises that his follow-up is completely different. While Longlegs was infused with a gloomy atmosphere of dread and despair, The Monkey revels in the silliness of its premise. "It's deliberately comedic," Perkins said in The Hollywood Reporter. "It's feeling more like an old John Landis movie or a Joe Dante movie or a Robert Zemeckis movie. I saw an opportunity to make a wry, absurdist comedy about death... For me, the movie is a smile from top to bottom."
Released on 21 February in cinemas internationally
Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy
It's been 24 years since the first Bridget Jones film, and over eight years since the last one, but Renée Zellweger is back again in the fourth comedy to be based on Helen Fielding's bestselling novels. This time Bridget is a single mother dealing with the death of her husband, Mark Darcy (Colin Firth – who is due to appear in flashbacks). Leo Woodall (One Day) plays her much-younger love interest, Chiwetel Ejiofor is an eligible teacher at her children's school, and Hugh Grant has a cameo as her dastardly former boss, Daniel Cleaver. But will audiences still warm to the bumbling Bridget? Zellweger believes so. "I think maybe folks recognise themselves in her and relate to her struggles and feelings of self-doubt," she said in British Vogue. "Bridget is authentically herself and doesn't always get it right, but whatever her imperfections, she remains joyful and optimistic, carries on and triumphs in her own way. She seems to make her quirky individuality and shortcomings charming, lovable and acceptable – and, in turn, she makes us feel lovable and acceptable, too."
Released on 12, 13 and 14 February in cinemas internationally, and on 13 February on Peacock in the US
Love Hurts
As a boy in the 1980s, Ke Huy Quan had major roles in two blockbusters, Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom and The Goonies, but acting work dried up soon afterwards. Decades on, he made a stunning comeback in the multiverse-spanning Everything Everywhere All at Once, and even won an Oscar for best supporting actor. Now he has his first ever leading role. Love Hurts is an action comedy in which Quan plays a geeky estate agent with a secret past as a gangland enforcer. The film's mix of gentle humour and nifty martial artistry seems ideal for him, but he wasn't sure whether to take the role until he consulted an old friend. "I was at an event with Steven Spielberg and he was asking me, ‘Ke, how are you doing?'" Quan told Empire magazine. "I said, 'Steven, I'm not doing so well.' Because of all the love and support that I had gotten during that whole award season, I was so worried that whatever I was going to do next, I would disappoint. I told him about this project and kind of pitched it to him. He said, 'Ke, it's great. Do it.'"
Released on 7 February in cinemas internationally
Captain America: Brave New World
Now that Chris Evans is no longer playing Steve Rogers in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, the question is whether audiences will pay to see someone else wielding the character's patented red, white and blue shield. More specifically, will audiences pay to see Anthony Mackie's Sam Wilson, who was Captain America's sidekick in earlier Marvel films, and has now been promoted to the title role? Judging by the trailers and the posters, studio executives seem to be hoping that another character will be the film's big draw. Filling in for the late William Hurt, Harrison Ford co-stars as Thaddeus Ross, a former US Army general – and arch-enemy of the Hulk – who has just been elected as US president. He hopes to count on the new Captain America's support, but their negotiations are interrupted when Ross is transformed into a bright red version of The Hulk. "What we liked was this notion of a man who is trying to do the best he can but can't quite outrun the demons of his past," the film's producer, Nate Moore, told Entertainment Weekly. "Turning a guy who hunted Hulks into a Hulk himself makes him more than an antagonist; it makes him a tragic character."
Released on 14 February in cinemas internationally
The Gorge
A genre-mashing horror-romance-action film, The Gorge is directed by Scott Derrickson (Doctor Strange, The Black Phone), and it stars Anya Taylor-Joy and Miles Teller. The concept, as dreamt up by screenwriter Zach Dean, is that two elite snipers are paid to spend a year in separate concrete observation towers on either side of a remote, misty valley. They have no high-tech means of communicating with each other, but they chat and flirt via flashcards and binoculars. The only obstacle in the way of this burgeoning relationship is that the valley is, apparently, "the door to hell", and their job is to stop monsters climbing out of it. The Gorge is a Valentine's Day release, and Teller thinks that it's the perfect film for the occasion, whether or not you're in the mood for love. "Well, I just think it's good alternative programming, as well, to your typical love story," he told Screen Rant. "They meet each other for the first time, and you're going to watch 'em fall in love. But they have to go through some really entertaining, engaging, high-octane, hellacious shit to end up with each other, so that's cool."
Released on 14 February on Apple TV+
Bring Them Down
Christopher Andrews' debut film as writer-director could be the darkest and most brutal thriller about sheep-farming ever made. At its heart are two dysfunctional families with adjacent fields in the rural west of Ireland. Colm Meaney and Christopher Abbott play a taciturn father and son who are scraping a living on one farm; Barry Keoghan plays the feckless son of a rival couple (Nora-Jane Noone, Paul Ready) just down the road. When one family suspects the other of stealing two rams, the ensuing feud is as believable as anything in a down-to-earth kitchen sink drama, but with the twists and tension of a gangster film. And it could put you off eating lamb forever. "Although hardly the first film to address toxic masculinity and the scourge of violence in small-town communities, this grimly compelling drama possesses a scruffy integrity," says Tim Grierson at Screen Daily. "In Andrews' vision, rural Ireland is as harsh as the Old West."
Released on 7 February in the US, UK & Ireland
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