Timur Bekmambetov

A cursor hesitates before a click in LifeHack (2026), and a heist has found a way to show somebody thinking. The film stays on its characters’ screens, turning chat windows, video calls and browser tabs into the places where the action happens. Timur Bekmambetov is one of its producers, and his backing of the screenlife format is the most interesting part of his work. He is worth following for his willingness to support an unfamiliar way of telling a familiar story, though the results can wear us out.

Night Watch (2004) and Day Watch (2006) brought him to prominence as a director of fantasy, before his Hollywood debut with Wanted (2008). James McAvoy keeps Wesley Gibson recognisably human as the office worker enters an assassin’s life. Bekmambetov makes the action inventive and intermittently exhilarating, but he also insists too often that being able to hurt people amounts to improving yourself. We can enjoy the extravagant gunplay without accepting the film’s tiresome enthusiasm for it as a solution to unhappiness.

The turn towards producing brought Unfriended (2015) and Searching (2018), both part of his effort to make stories unfold through screens. He also produced Hardcore Henry (2015), with Ilya Naishuller directing action from a first-person viewpoint. These are useful choices for a producer to make: they give directors a specific problem to solve rather than merely another familiar plot to illustrate. Ronan Corrigan’s first feature, LifeHack, fits that habit of backing emerging directors.

Corrigan gets a quick, funny hour out of four friends attempting to steal cryptocurrency without leaving their bedrooms. We grew impatient when the windows piled up and the pace stopped being a pleasure. At 97 minutes, the film keeps finding more windows to open after it has run short of things to do with them. Try LifeHack for Corrigan’s ingenuity, with patience for the clutter that follows.