The lights dim, the projector hums, and suddenly you're not in a multiplex but adrift in memory or chased through twisted woods. That's the pull of the films that landed in UK cinemas and on streaming this week. From a meticulously restored classic to a gleefully gory fairy-tale slasher, the offerings cut across generations and moods without once pausing to chase the latest cultural script.
Nostalgia, Andrei Tarkovsky's 1983 meditation on longing and displacement, returned in a crisp 4K restoration courtesy of Curzon. Watching it again feels like stepping back into a slower, more deliberate era of cinema, where images linger and questions refuse easy answers. The film doesn't lecture; it immerses, letting its Italian countryside and Russian soul speak in the language of memory itself. In an age of quick cuts and louder messages, its patience feels almost radical.
The horror that refuses to behave
At the other end of the spectrum sits Pinocchio Unstrung, a British independent slasher horror written and directed by Rhys Frake-Waterfield. Starring horror veterans Robert Englund and Richard Brake, the film had its world premiere at the Brussels International Fantastic Film Festival back in April before landing in UK theatres distributed by Altitude Film Distribution. Clocking in at one hour twenty minutes and carrying an adults-only classification for its strong gory violence and injury detail, it wastes no time pretending to be anything other than what it is: a bloody, irreverent twist on a childhood tale. Following the same team behind the Winnie-the-Pooh: Blood and Honey films, it proves once more that independent voices can still carve out space for unfiltered genre thrills.
Elsewhere, families could turn to Chickenhare and the Secret of the Groundhog, released through Miracle Communications, while On The Sea arrived via Matchbox and Verve, offering a gentler, more contemplative counterpoint. These titles sit comfortably alongside the heavyweight restoration and the horror upstart, sketching a cinema landscape that still makes room for the adventurous, the reflective and the outright playful.
Netflix adds its own flavour
On the streaming front, Netflix UK served up two sharply contrasting new arrivals. 72 Hours is a 2026 original comedy starring Kevin Hart as a forty-year-old executive who finds himself hilariously out of place after being accidentally added to a group text for a bachelor party full of twenty-somethings. The premise promises the kind of generational friction and physical comedy Hart has long made his own.
Meanwhile The Truthers, a Spanish psychological thriller, follows a woman who returns to her hometown after her mother's death only to begin questioning the events surrounding her father. Its slow-burn tension and domestic unease provide a darker counterweight to the laughs, proving that thoughtful genre work travels well beyond borders.