Wendy Ide’s pick of other films: 2000 Meters to Andriivka, Late Shift, The Naked Gun and more

2000 Meters to Andriivka

(108 mins, 15) Directed by Mstyslav Chernov

At the beginning of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the film-maker Mstyslav Chernov was one of a team of journalists trapped in the besieged city of Mariupol. As mortars shredded the streets, Chernov and his colleagues kept their cameras rolling. The result was the harrowing, Oscar-winning documentary 20 Days in Mariupol.

Three and a half years later, the fighting continues, and Chernov returns with another frontline account of the conflict, this time captured during the Ukrainian counteroffensive of 2023. The propulsive reportage of the first film gives way to an anguished existential howl. It’s equally powerful, but perhaps even bleaker.

In this film, Chernov is one of a small team of journalists embedded with a brigade of Ukrainian troops, shadowing the soldiers as they fight, inch by bloody, grenade-blasted inch, along a narrow, 2,000-metre-long corridor of woodland. At the end of what the troops generously describe as forest (in reality, it’s a meagre, denuded strip offering minimal cover beneath a few cowering trees) is the Ukrainian village of Andriivka. Or what’s left of the village, following after a Russian occupation that has left the infrastructure ruined and the buildings uninhabitable.

The mission is to reclaim it as Ukrainian territory; the cost is unimaginably high. Dispassionate God’s-eye drone shots of the final hundred metres show a stretch of ground littered with bodies, both Russian and Ukrainian. Many of the soldiers we get to know – a fresh-faced engineering student, a chain-smoking grandfather – will, we learn from Chernov’s sober voiceover, die a few months hence. And the territory, inevitably, will be lost again. Is there an end in sight? The question hangs in the air along with the artillery smoke.

Late Shift

(91 mins, 12A) Directed by Petra Volpe; starring Leonie Benesch, Sonja Riesen, Alireza Bayram 

Anyone who saw her scalding performance in The Teachers’ Lounge will already know that Leonie Benesch is a rare talent. She’s intensely present in her performances, committing so much mental and physical energy to each role that just watching her is exhausting.

That skill has rarely been put to better use than in Late Shift, in which Benesch plays Floria, a dedicated hospital nurse struggling through the late shift on a chronically understaffed ward. The film is set in Switzerland, but it could be anywhere where nursing staff are undervalued and overstretched.

Director Petra Volpe favours an urgent, kinetic camera that trails behind Floria as her sunny smile fades and the demands of the job pull her in 10 directions at once. The score, a pulsing note played on nervy strings, evokes the panicky bleep of the patient monitors. There’s an inevitability to the plotting – Volpe telegraphs an imminent snapping point; we’re just left to speculate what form it will take – but the fact that we can predict Floria’s breakdown doesn’t make the spectacle any less potent.

The Naked Gun

(85 mins, 15) Directed by Akiva Schaffer; starring Liam Neeson, Pamela Anderson, Paul Walter Hauser

Here’s something I didn’t have on my 2025 bingo card: the remake of the famously silly cop movie The Naked Gun turns out to be an absolute blast. Liam Neeson steps into the role of Lt Frank Drebin (formerly played by the late Leslie Nielsen) and understands that the key to nailing a movie as outlandishly absurd as this is to play it as straight as possible.

Pamela Anderson is a goofy delight as femme fatale Beth Davenport, a vampy writer of “fictional true crime” novels, who believes that her brother was murdered and isn’t about to let the cops botch the investigation. Her jazz improvisation scene alone is reason enough to watch the movie. Directing and co-writing, Akiva Schaffer (Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping) delivers an exhaustingly high gags-per-minute rate. So what if some of the jokes would have been corny even back in the late 80s when the series was first released? The sheer volume of comic nonsense wears down any resistance.

The Legend of Ochi

(95 mins, 12A) Directed by Isaiah Saxon; starring Helena Zengel, Willem Dafoe, Emily Watson

The Legend of Ochi, a lushly imagined fantasy adventure featuring a cast of real children and hyperrealistic puppet monsters, is the kind of throwback family movie that is made all too infrequently these days. An ET-style child-creature bond is filtered through a mittel-European lens of Carpathian mountain folklore.

Shy village girl Yuri (the German child actor Helena Zengel, mesmerising in System Crasher, is slightly out of her depth in an underdeveloped role) confronts abandonment issues and her monster-hunter father (Willem Dafoe, cosplaying as a kind of Viking warrior in a pick-up) to save a baby mountain creature called an ochi.

It almost works. The immersive and verdant visual landscape sweeps us up, while the tactile special effects – the puppetry is remarkable – feel entirely believable. But the storytelling is disjointed, the dialogue muddy, and the film’s ending seems woolly and fumbled.

Savages

(87 mins, U) Directed by Claude Barras; starring Nicolas Buysse, Karim Barras, Babette De Coster, Martin Verset 

Claude Barras, the Swiss stop-motion animation wizard who in 2016 brought us the heartbreakingly lovely tale of a lonely orphan, My Life as a Courgette, returns with another film in which kids with huge heads and haunted eyes face off against an uncaring world.

Savages, set in the jungles of Borneo, follows Kéria (Babette De Coster), a young girl who lives in a village on the edge of the forest with her widowed father and finds her life changed when she adopts an orphaned baby orangutan.

Dealing with Indigenous rights, deforestation and bereavement, Savages might not have the immediacy of My Life as a Courgette, but it’s a heartfelt charmer of a movie and a refreshing alternative to factory-tooled Hollywood products for family audiences.

Photographs by Paramount Pictures/A24