From the return of Squid Game to the best Christmas specials and free movie premieres: The 20 hottest shows and films to watch this weekend, chosen by our TV experts
Looking for something new to watch this weekend? The Mail's TV experts have sifted through hundreds of programmes to bring you the 20 of the best shows and films to stream on demand right now…
Squid Game (Series 2)
The Korean sci-fi thriller series returns with new deadly challenges
Year: 2024
Certificate: 15
The first series of this dark Korean satire on reality TV game shows saw Netflix viewers swept up in the battles of contestant Seong Gi-hun, aka Player 456 (Lee Jung-jae), as he faced-off with the murderous games staged for a mysterious audience as well as his almost equally deadly fellow contestants.
Smart, sardonic and stylish (the gameshow's square, circle and triangle masks swiftly became iconic), the teasing ending suggested that maybe there was more to come from the story. And so there is.
Series two sees 456 return to the arena determined to save as many lives as possible, while trying to uncover the secrets of the shadowy figures who created the game. It's as blunt and bloody as ever with familiar challenges returning alongside new spins on the Squid Game format that throw 456's plans into dangerous disarray. (Seven episodes)
From Roger Moore With Love
Documentary about British icon Roger Moore's rise to global fame
Year: 2024
Certificate: 12
This is no boring by-the-numbers profile of debonair Bond star Roger Moore. There is the usual home movie footage, but we also see his son Geoffrey rooting around for personal memorabilia and pointing out his father's ashes, plus superfan Steve Coogan on narrating duties.
Based on Moore's diaries and interviews, the story comes alive thanks to these personal touches, as well as recollections of the great man from the likes of Pierce Brosnan, Christopher Walken and Joan Collins (who went 'weak at the knees' the first time they met). It's an endearing approach that is almost as charming as the man himself. (78 minutes)
Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl
A festive adventure with the inventor and his canine friend
Year: 2024
Certificate: u
They kept us waiting nearly 20 years for another feature film starring the inimitable inventor Wallace and his clever dog Gromit, but all is forgiven thanks to this movie featuring a robotic gnome gone rogue. Inspired partly by horror films, it sees Wallace create a gnome that does the gardening. But dastardly penguin Feathers McGraw, incarcerated in a zoo since being caught in a diamond theft, has plans to get revenge on Wallace by taking virtual control of the gnome.
Peter Sallis, who provided the voice of Wallace for so many years, died in 2017 and the part of the cheese-loving inventor is now played by Ben Whitehead. (79 minutes)
Gavin & Stacey: The Finale
What's occurin'? It's the last episode of the comedy hit!
Year: 2024
Certificate: 12
Talk about a cliffhanger - we were left waiting for five years to find out what happened next after Nessa went down on one knee during the Christmas special of 2019. If you're one of the few who haven't watched it yet we won't spoil this festive special for you, suffice to say that it provides a lovely last time to hang out with James Corden, Mathew Horne, Joanna Page and Ruth Jones - and their rowdy friends and family.
It was certainly popular with audiences on Christmas Day, with 12.3 million tuning in to see how it all ended. (94 minutes)
Doctor Who: Joy To The World
Hugely ambitious festive special with Bridgerton's Nicola Coughlan, written by Steven Moffat
Year: 2024
Doctor Who at Christmas is always a must-see but the ambition of the 2024 episode is dizzying. It takes us from the Orient Express in 1962 to Manchester in 1940, from Mt Everest Base Camp to the time of the dinosaurs. We also meet temporary new companion Joy, played by Bridgerton and Derry Girls star Nicola Coughlan, and the episode features an endearing role for Joel Fry (W1A) as Trev, an employee at all-purpose holiday destination the Time Hotel - a setting for a story that's so marvellous and so flexible it's hard to believe that Doctor Who hasn't done it before.
The cleverness of the concept is a tip-off to who wrote it - Steven Moffat, the Doctor Who veteran who ran the show during the Matt Smith and Peter Capaldi era and whose last episode as showrunner was 2017's Twice Upon A Time. It's a great standalone story that feels both like classic Who and something fresh at the same time, and you can really see all that Disney money on screen. (60 minutes)
Outnumbered Christmas Special (2024)
Eight years after their last festive special, the Brockmans reunite
Year: 2024
After a brief glimpse of the beloved Brockman family earlier this year on Children In Need, teacher Pete, his wife Sue and their children Jake, Ben and Karen are back for a full-length stand-alone episode. The children (played by Daniel Roche, Ramona Marquez and Tyger Drew-Honey), now all in their 20s, return home to spend the holidays chez Brockman, which is now a rather smaller place than the one they grew up in after Pete and Sue (Hugh Dennis and Claire Skinner) made the decision to downsize. They are determined to enjoy a traditional Christmas but space is tight - especially as one of the offspring has a child...
Without giving away any spoilers, dad Pete has a heath scare, which shocks his family, but don't worry, they're not ones to dwell in a chaotic festive special that finds moments for every familiar character - including Sue's hilariously needy friend, Jane. And, even if it doesn't surpass the high watermark of the Brockmans' 2012 Christmas episode it's still good, solid, familiar fun. (43 minutes)
An Accidental Studio
The story of a plucky British success story that had Beatle-power behind it
Year: 2019
Certificate: 15
Life Of Brian, Monty Python's perfectly irreverent take on the life of Jesus, almost didn't happen. As the project limped towards failure, former Beatle George Harrison threw his own money into the pot and almost singlehandedly rescued the British film-making industry.
The company that sprung up from George's involvement with Brian became known as HandMade Films and, with its focus on quirky quality and originally offbeat stories, it brought us the standout British films of the late 1970s and 1980s - from Brian to Withnail And I, Mona Lisa to Time Bandits.
Packed with hilarious clips and anecdotes, this film has an all-star cast adding their twopenn'orth on how it all came together and how the HandMade films themselves were made, including Pythons Terry Jones, Michael Palin, Eric Idle and director Terry Gilliam, as well as archive interviews with the late Harrison and Mona Lisa star Bob Hoskins, plus Dick Clement and Ian La Frenais, Richard E Grant, Helen Mirren and many more.
Not just for Python fans, or Beatles fans, this is for anyone who loves cinema, and British cinema in particular. (94 minutes)
Jurassic World Dominion
The 1993 movie's three original stars all return for this spectacular 2022 finale
Year: 2022
Certificate: 12
The title isn't joking when it says Jurassic World. When the action picks up in this third film in the rebooted franchise, humans and dinosaurs are trying and failing to share the planet now that the great lizards have escaped from the park. Can harmony be found?
Chris Pratt and Bryce Dallas Howard are back for more close shaves with the impressive CGI creatures, but the real selling point here is the return of a different trio of big beasts, as Laura Dern, Jeff Goldblum and Sam Neill all appear in the same film together for the first time since the original movie way back in 1993. The reunion isn't a disappointment, and everyone gets a chance to shine before the final credits roll in this supersized action extravaganza. (146 minutes)
Roald Dahl's Matilda The Musical
Joyful musical starring Emma Thompson as sinister Miss Trunchbull
Year: 2022
Certificate: pg
There's a touch of Netflix's Wednesday to Tim Minchin's musical take on Roald Dahl's tale, which is quite different from the great Matilda film from 1996. Its ace in the hole is Alisha Weir as telekinetic schoolgirl Matilda, who more than holds her own in scenes with Emma Thompson's Miss Trunchbull. A brute of a woman who marches around like Mussolini, Miss Trunchbull is queen of a school that looks like one big torture chamber.
As for the songs, No Time To Die's Lashana Lynch has the best solo as Miss Honey, but some of the ensemble numbers that fill the school's dark halls with movement and light are real earworms too. (116 minutes)
Downton Abbey: A New Era
The Crawleys are off to the south of France in their second big screen outing
Year: 2022
Certificate: pg
It's Downton Abbey, but not quite as you know it.
When a film crew set up shop in the stately home, the Crawley family and their servants head off to the South of France, to temporarily move into a villa unexpectedly inherited by the dowager Countess (Maggie Smith).
The setting may be sunny and new, though, but the opportunities for drama are as reassuringly regular as ever, with legal, romantic and familial problems besetting both the upstairs and downstairs cast of characters.
Hugh Bonneville, Jim Carter, Michelle Dockery, Elizabeth McGovern, Imelda Staunton and Penelope Wilton are all among the familiar faces making a return in the iconic TV show's second spin-off movie. (124 minutes)
Bullet Train
Non-stop action romp starring Brad Pitt
Year: 2022
Certificate: 15
What happens when some of the world's deadliest crooks all find themselves on board the same Japanese bullet train at the same time? The answer is merry carnage in a top-drawer extravaganza that boasts epic fights, a belting soundtrack and more surprise cameos than you can shake a pistol at.
Brad Pitt plays the courier facing a raft of killers including Brian Tyree Henry (Oscar-nominated for Causeway) and Michael Shannon as the train rockets through the Japanese suburbs. Imagine a live-action version of a manga cartoon directed by Quentin Tarantino and you're pretty close. (126 minutes)
A Quiet Place: Day One
Oscar winner Lupita Nyong'o stars in a chilling prequel to the horror series
Year: 2024
Certificate: 18
The first two instalments in the A Quiet Place franchise showed how humanity was struggling to survive in a post-apocalyptic near-future world roamed by murderous alien monsters that can be attracted by the slightest sound.
Directed by John Krasinski and starring his wife Emily Blunt, they were fantastic high-concept horror-thrillers, but they left somewhat vague the question of just how the world first reacted to the arrival of the creatures. This prequel sets out to answer that.
Lupita Nyong'o (an Oscar winner for 12 Years A Slave) stars as Sam, a cancer patient seeking treatment at a hospital in Manhattan when strange meteor-like objects begin dropping from the sky. The account of the early days of the invasion that follows is properly chilling as humanity's survivors slowly work out the silent rules for surviving the new alien menaces. (99 minutes)
Kung Fu Panda 4
Jack Black and Dustin Hoffman return for the third animated comedy sequel
Year: 2024
Certificate: pg
By the time many franchises, especially animated ones, have hit their fourth instalment, the well is running dry. Not so with Kung Fu Panda. This full-throttle mix of the faintly grounded and the utterly ridiculous started in 2008, when Jack Black charmed audiences as the panda Po, a hapless, dumpling-addicted creature who is somehow destined to become the formidable Dragon Warrior.
Fast forward 16 years and Po is told by his mentor Master Shifu, a wise red panda voiced by double Academy Award-winner Dustin Hoffman, that he must find a successor to his warrior role and graduate to spiritual leader. That's the extent of the plot, but then you don't need much to propel movies like this and, at just over an hour-and-a-half, this gag-packed ride doesn't outstay its welcome.
New additions to the cast include Awkwafina as a smart-talking fox and Viola Davis, the holder of Emmy, Grammy, Oscar and Tony awards - the famed EGOT award combination held by so few - as a villainous, shape-shifting sorceress who stands in Po's way. Expect light, colourful fun and you won't go far wrong. (94 minutes)
The Road Trip (2024 series)
Sunny romcom about exes travelling to a wedding together
Year: 2024
Love stories can be tangled affairs and such is the case for Addie and Dylan (Everything I Know About Love's Emma Appleton and Will's Laurie Davidson) in this TV romcom, a six-parter based on the book by Beth O'Leary whose first novel, The Flatshare, was adapted for Paramount+ in 2022.
The Road Trip is less comic than that, but it does have a lovely sunshine feel, set as it is on a road trip to a wedding in Spain. At the start of the journey, Addie and Dylan are exes with unresolved business that neither wants to resolve so, when they're forced to share the trip, it creates a lot of friction. Warm-toned flashbacks to how they met flesh out the story and help us understand why, in the present, they're staring so balefully at each other.
Appleton and Davidson are both good-looking actors and the mystery of what happened between their characters is an interesting one, but they don't have much comedy to perform here - that's largely left to Dylan's hilariously entitled friend Marcus (Industry's David Jonsson) and quirky third wheel Rodney, played by Angus Imrie - son of Celia. (Six episodes)
The Serial Killer's Wife
Annabel Scholey stars in a thriller about a spouse whose idyllic life is shattered
Year: 2023
Certificate: 18
Beth (The Split's Annabel Scholey) and Tom (Poldark's Jack Farthing) seem to have the perfect life. Enormous house, happy family, plus he seems to earn untold amounts of money as a doctor - and has the time left over to maintain an impressive six-pack. However, things take a nasty turn when the police show up at Tom's birthday party and accuse him of murder in front of all their friends. Beth is outraged, but is there something she doesn't know about her husband? And could this murder be connected to others?
Based on the book by Alice Hunter, this four-part thriller flirts with racy bedroom practices as it unfolds the stories of its main characters, the third of which is Tom's supportive best friend, Adam (A Street Cat Named Bob's Luke Treadaway). It's a moreish, solid story that takes a couple of satisfying turns and is filled with glossy, good-looking actors, and should give you plenty to talk about while watching. There are a couple of enjoyably ridiculous moments too, which is all part of the fun with such things. (Four episodes)
A Ghost Story For Christmas
Settle in for a spooky Christmas tradition
Year: 2022
Certificate: 15
Mark Gatiss, one of the original members of The League Of Gentleman and co-creator of TV's Sherlock, is responsible for reviving a TV tradition that began with a 1968 adaptation of MR James's Whistle And I'll Come To You and continued through the 1970s, with memorable instalments including The Signalman, by Charles Dickens, and James's A Warning To The Curious.
In 2023, Gatiss broke from tradition slightly by releasing Lot No. 249, a creepy tale written by Sherlock author Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, starring Kit Harington and Freddie Fox. Stay put for the final scene, it's a cracker.
In 2024 he presented us with Woman Of Stone, based on E Nesbit's story Man-Size In Marble - a chilling tale of an ancient curse that also happens to be the first ghost story Gatiss that ever read. (30 minutes)
Tiddler
Hannah Waddingham narrates a loving adaptation of Julia Donaldson and Axel Scheffler's tale of a fabulating fish
Year: 2024
Certificate: u
Magic Light Pictures has been adapting the picture books of Julia Donaldson and Axel Scheffler since 2009, and they always make for a lovely Christmas highlight. The films have a wide audience, too, from the younger children currently devouring the books to the older ones who remember them and the parents who have spent so many hours reading them that the words are seared onto their retinas. The joy of these adaptations sits in how they flesh each story out and, with Tiddler, the tale of a fish who spins stories about why he's always late for school, it's by challenging the friendship between our fabulating protagonist and his pal Johnny Dory - who loves Tiddler's tall tales with all his little heart.
The story is further enlivened by a hilarious appearance by a Gruffalo-shaped fish, and by the cinematic treatment of the very real adventure that a dawdling Tiddler is drawn into when he's swept up by a fishing net. A refreshing lesson sits at its conclusion, too, for children who love making up tales, as it's Tiddler's talent for stories that saves him, unlike The Boy Who Cried Wolf in which the tale-spinner dies for his lies.
As for the cast, Ted Lasso's Hannah Waddingham narrates with bright young talents Reuben Kirby and Theo Fraser as Tiddler and Johnny Dory. Rob Brydon, who has been in every Magic Light adaptation so far, lends his smooth tones to multiple characters. The credits feature a tribute to Donaldson's husband Malcolm, who died in September 2024, months before the film was released. (30 minutes)
Bad Tidings
Lee Mack and Chris McCausland star in a Christmas comedy
Year: 2024
Certificate: pg
A neighbourhood war over Christmas lights swiftly escalates in Sky's festive comedy. Lee Mack is the arguably petty, arguably entirely in the right man who asks his neighbour (Strictly winner Chris McCausland) to take down his Christmas lights which are still up and keeping him awake in August. The neighbour promises, but then doesn't - did he forget, or is he deliberately being irritating?
If you've seen Mack in Not Going Out he's on very similar form, here - indeed, you can almost imagine this is a Not Going Out Christmas Special at first, although it is a little lighter on traditional gags. McCausland co-wrote the script, along with Ghosts' Laurence Rickard and Martha Howe-Douglas, and the other strand of their story involves a recently released crime boss (Rebekah Staton). No spoilers but, ultimately, when the two stories intertwine, it becomes something akin to Home Alone - with Mack and McCausland in the Macaulay Culkin role. That's when their comedy chemistry really takes off, too. (80 minutes)
Matthew Bourne's Edward Scissorhands
Magical stage dance production of the haunting gothic film
Year: 2024
Certificate: pg
We're taught from a young age not to run with scissors, so dancing with them sounds like a very bad idea indeed. That aside, Tim Burton's 1990 film about a sharp-fingered outsider had a haunting gothic grace to it that translates well to the stage, and especially with the masterly Matthew Bourne behind the production of this dance show, first performed in the UK in 2005.
The music of the great Danny Elfman - so important to the feel of Burton's film - is in effect here too, scoring a similarly tender story of an outsider trying to adapt to suburbia, although the setting has been shifted from the 1980s to the 1950s.
Elfman's music is arguably even more important to the stage show, which has no speaking or singing, so the performers tell us everything by the way they move to that music. The show makes for a magical experience all year round, but the ice sculptures make it feel particularly well suited to viewing at Christmas. (95 minutes)
Death In Paradise
Cosy Caribbean crime drama, now starring Don Gilet as the island investigator
Year: 2011-
Certificate: 12
It's a running joke that this series is a holiday for those working on it, because they spend their time in the sunny Caribbean filming it. It's not a bad gig if you can get it.
The long-running show has been on our screens since 2011 and features a lead actor taking a holiday - sorry, a job - as a British detective having an extended stay on the Caribbean island of Saint Marie. The location is a big part of the appeal, and the tone is light and breezy. If you like Midsomer Murders or Murder She Wrote, this is just the cosy crime drama for you.
The lead detective has been recast several times over the years, with each actor bringing their own unique set of quirks: Ben Miller's eccentric, heat-hating Richard Poole, disorganised Humphrey Goodman (Kris Marshall), sweet, easy-to-underestimate Jack Mooney (Ardal O'Hanlon), and sensitive Neville Parker (Ralf Little).
The latest actor to join the Robinson Crusoe detectives is former EastEnder Don Gilet who debuts as Melvin Wilson in the 2024 Christmas special. The spin-off Beyond Paradise had its second Christmas special in 2024, too. (13 series)
