Ahead of James Cameron’s latest Avatar sequel hitting the big screen, we look at how studios aim for ‘theatricality’ to get streaming film fans from sofa to cinema

If anyone still knows how to fill a movie theatre, it’s James Cameron. Having broken the all-time worldwide box office record in 1997 with Titanic and again 12 years later with Avatar, his work is the acme of big-screen spectacle.

His latest offering, Avatar: Fire and Ash, arrives in radically different circumstances. With several years now between us and the pandemic, it is clear that theatrical box office is likely not coming back to what it was: US total box office for 2025 currently stands at $7.6bn (down from $11.3bn in 2019); the worldwide haul is expected to be around $34.1bn, a 13% drop from pre-Covid times. All the more onus on Cameron’s hypertrophic Smurfs to bring in the box office cavalry at year’s end. And hopefully supply some further indications about the magic elixir needed to break the Netflix’n’chill stranglehold and get boots back in cinemas.

Collateral comedy spins out from underneath the repression and violence charted in this sobering documentary that follows three indefatigable women

There are many symptoms of totalitarian sickness gripping Alexander Lukashenko’s Belarus. You risk being arrested for wearing red and white together, the colours of the outlawed flag of the country’s opposition movement. Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four has been banned, which seems rather on the nose. But these are just some of the more farcical elements, the collateral comedy spinning from the deep repression, violence and psychological wounds charted in this sobering film that follows a trio of Belarusian activists, starting from the pandemic through to the invasion of Ukraine.

Director Juliane Tutein fashions a melancholic mood-piece which chronicles ineffectualness in the face of impregnable state machinery, and the meaning of resistance under such circumstances. Nina, who is 74, is a kind of Belarusian Batman; an indefatigable symbol of protest who is immune to repression because of her fame. Human rights activist Darya runs her organisation in exile in Vilnius after student activism landed her in hot water. Tanya has stuck it out near Minsk while her husband and son have fled to Kyiv, but her human-rights NGO and film festival are in the authorities’ crosshairs.