New Films 19th June 2021 by Mike Davies

With cinemas now open this column will review films both screening theatrically and/or on various streaming platforms.

NEW

In The Heights (12A)

Directed by Jon M Chu, this big screen adaptation of Lin-Manuel Miranda’s 2008 Latino Broadway hip-hop style musical arrived trailing exuberant reviews only to tank at the box office. Despite the commitment of the cast and some truly impressive mass crowd choreography, with a fairly specific target demographic it’s not hard to see why. The title refers to Washington Heights, a Latino New York neighbourhood, and the film opens in an extended musical number with its narrator, Usnavi (Anthony Ramos) regaling a group of young kids with the intertwined stories of several characters, himself included as the owner of corner shop along with his cousin Sonny (Gregory Diaz) and who, as the area undergoes gentrification and businesses like that of Daniela (Daphne Rubin-Vega) are being priced out, wants to save enough to return to the Dominican Republic and reopen his father’s old beach bar. He has crush on Vanessa (Melissa Barrera), who works in a nail salon but dreams of moving downtown and starting her own dress shop, while straight-A student Nina (Leslie Grace), has returned from Stanford where she’s finding college life tougher – and more racist – than she anticipated and intends to drop out, which will, inevitably, cause conflict with her father (Jimmy Smits) who has sunk a fortune into her education and sees her as the hope for the family, while being back home affords a chance to reignite her relationship with her former lover, Usnavi’s buddy Benny (Corey Hawkins), a taxi dispatcher who wants to start his own business.

Their stories from the crux of the narrative, but the screen is also teeming with a plethora of locals ranging from salon girls, wise Hispanic grannies (Olga Merediz reprising her stage role), assorted young relatives and young men strutting their machismo while the sprawling plot throws in rumoured lottery ticket wins, date night disasters, the problems faced by undocumented immigrants, a heatwave and a power blackout. Frankly, it’s more than one film can handle, constantly shifting its focus and tone as the various strands gradually come together.

It’s undeniably vibrant and the pacing is exhausting as the camera darts all over the place as characters burst into song or dance routines in the middle of the street (including a nod to Busby Berkeley’s synchronised swimmers), while still finding moments for intimate emotional scenes, such as Nina’s family dinner where her secret plans are revealed. Chu even throws in some animation for good measure as a bunch of guys engage in verbal battle while bolds of cloth unfurl across building as symbolic of Vanessa’s ambitions. There’s even a striking sunset scene where a couple dance up the side of a building, a sort of terpsichorean Tenet.

Miranda puts in a cameo turn as a drinks street vendor while there’s a brief sighting of Christopher Jackson from his recent historical hip hop musical Hamilton while the music spins from salsa to rap to encapsulate the variety of ethnic backgrounds that comprise this community that remains ever optimistic despite the realities of life around them. But, while each is interesting, the fragmented storylines weaken the overall cohesion and, the songs not especially memorable, it all feels just too busy to get involved in while its determination to be upbeat means any dramas soon fizzle out.

You can’t fault the energy, but it simply doesn’t connect in the way The Greatest Showman did while its faint air of West Side Story only serves to make your even more eager to see Spielberg’s upcoming remake. (Cineworld 5 Ways, NEC, Solihull; Empire Great Park; Everyman; Odeon Birmingham, Broadway Plaza Luxe. West Brom; Reel; Vue)

In The Earth (15)

Returning to his own material after a stint as director for hire on the remake of Rebecca (although he did manage to include a trademark idiosyncratic hallucinatory sequence there too), writer-director Ben Wheatley delivers an unsettling folk horror that, shot during lockdown and with some early pandemic imagery, feels like an experimental English rustic Blair Witch variation with a nod to The Wicker Man and echoes of Midsommar.

With the world transformed by a deadly virus, Dr Martin Lowery (Joel Fry), a researcher specialising in crop efficiency, arrives at a research centre somewhere in a park reserve in England. His purpose is to try and track down fellow researcher, Dr Olivia Wendle (Hayley Squires), who has been out of contact since setting up her experiments in the forest and so he sets off accompanied by forest scout Alma (Ellora Torchia). Things soon go wrong as they’re attacked at night and their shoes stolen, leading to Martin badly gashing his foot on a trap we saw set in the prologue, and the pair of them being befriended by Zach (Reece Shearsmith), who has set up his own refuge in the forest and stitches up the wound. However, his kindness proves deceptive and before long they’re both drugged and posed for ritualised photography related to the forest spirit Parnag Fegg mythology introduced back at the centre as he seeks to commune with some male eco-creature or other that lives ‘in the earth’, with a subsequent grisly toe-amputation sequence, an escape and finally, making contact with Dr Wendell (the technocrat to Zach’s shaman), at which point it all gets even weirder.

A filmic equivalent of ingesting magic mushrooms (indeed, at one point the fungi give off a wall of fog that gives Alma psychedelic visions), it deliberately resists any cohesive narrative or agenda other than for Wendell to ramble on about nature taking back the planet from the virus of humanity and teaching us to share and respect the environment while knowingly introducing elements of black farce. The visual and sound effects (along with Clint Mansell’s score) impart a decidedly trippy and disorienting experience while the performances walk a fine balance between sober and arch and, while it at times feels like Wheatley is treading old weirded-out ground while ladelling out large spoonfuls of exposition that muddy rather than clarify matters, it does at least stimulate rather than stupify the brain cells. (Cineworld 5 Ways, NEC, Solihull; Empire Great Park; Odeon Birmingham, Broadway Plaza Luxe; Vue)

In The Heights (12A)

The Hitman’s Wife’s Bodyguard (15)

The sequel to 2017’s The Hitman’s Bodyguard, a mediocre action comedy that managed to catch a box office wave, this reunites its stars, Ryan Reynolds as neurotic bodyguard Michael Bryce and Samuel L. Jackson as his frenemy unkillable hitman Darius Kincaid. The former now stripped of his licence after a client as killed, he’s undergoing therapy, the result of which sees him electing to take a sabbatical from guns and killings and to chill out on the beach, recording phone message to his future self.

It’s while doing so that he’s yanked brutally back into the mayhem when he’s rudely awakened in the middle of a shoot-out by Kincaid’s foul-mouthed sociopath con artist wife Sonia (Selma Hayek who, for much of the time, has an accent too thick as to be unintelligible)), who tells him her husband wants his help to rescue him from kidnappers. Which is just the set up for the main narrative, an often incoherent plot that involves Antonio Banderas as Greek billionaire Aristotle Papadopolous, who intends to destroy Europe for crippling his beloved homeland with sanctions. Suffice to say, the film essentially comprises a series of jokes about Hayek’s breasts, an infertility issue, Reynolds and Jackson swapping snarky comments, a couple of underwhelming twists (one of which involves Morgan Freeman as a key figure from Bryce’s past) and a whistle stop tour around assorted European locations. Frank Grillo grits his teeth and takes the money as an American Interpol agent who’s reluctantly recruited the madcap trio to pose as criminals and stop Papadopolous, his running gag being how he wants to be relocated to Boston, while blood and expletives splatter the screen and everyone shouts a lot as a substitute for wit (there’s probably three good lines) and actual dramatic action in an apparent attempt to beat audiences into submission. There’s also painfully unfunny references to Kurt Russell/Goldie Hawn’s Overboard as a “minor classic’.

Aside from one scene in a night club (where Richard E Grant gets to embarrass himself in a baffling pisspoor cameo, the film’s title is a complete misnomer, as contrived as everything around it as a calculated attempt to rake in as much money as possible before word of mouth puts a bullet between its eyes. (Cineworld 5 Ways, NEC, Solihull; Empire Great Park; Everyman; Odeon Birmingham, Broadway Plaza Luxe, West Brom; Reel; Vue)

Monster Hunter (15)

A video-game adaptation directed by Paul W.S. Anderson and starring his wife Milla Jovovich, whatever the ending may suggest if she’s looking for a new franchise after Resident Evil, she’d best widen her search. She plays United Nations joint security task force ranger Captain Artemis (she has a ring with Forever on it but that’s the extent of her backstory) who, following a prologue in another dimension involving a bad CGI galleon on a sea of sand captained by Ron L Perlman being attacked by horned monsters, is out with her crew looking for a missing squad when, they’re overwhelmed by some black cloud and find themselves in another world. Here, discovering the charred remains of the missing squad, they are, inevitably, quickly whittled down by an array of seemingly unkillable creatures, leaving Artemis the sole survivor.

Following several redundant and senseless fight scenes with him, she teams up with Thai martial arts star Tony Jaa as Hunter, a warrior from this other world who sports a massive crossbow and a fuck you sword. And conveniently speaks no English (he learns to say chocolate though) as, along with Perlman, they find themselves battling a horde of assorted giant monsters out of a Godzilla rip-off as they seek to destroy the tower that has opened up a bridge between the worlds.

Knowingly ridiculous (it has a fierce human size cat warrior in a bandana) with Jovovich again proving she’s at her best when she’d not given dialogue, it throws a bucketful of effects at the screen to keep the carnage in overdrive, often to the point of incoherence, but of you felt Godzilla vs Kong was too intellectual, this might be for you. (Cineworld 5 Ways, NEC, Solihull; Empire Great Park; Odeon Broadway Plaza Luxe, West Brom; Reel; Vue)

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Ammonite (15)

As any amateur palaeontologist knows, ammonites are whorl-shaped marine mollusc fossils which, when cleaned up and the accumulated grime of centuries removed, reveal their true aesthetic beauty and the depth within the. No prizes then for guessing that they serve as a not too subtle metaphor for this 19th-Century tale of personal and sexual awakening as a young woman trapped in a sterile marriage comes back to life and stirs the fire within an older, dour woman when she’s dumped in Lyme Regis to recover her health after the loss of a child.

Essentially, The Dig but with a heavy dose of lesbian sex, it’s loosely based on the life of noted working class fossil collector Mary Anning (Kate Winslet) and her relationship with Charlotte Murchison (Saoirse Ronan), although it should be noted from the start that there’s no historical evidence for any sexual shenanigans between them, although taking dramatic liberties to swiftly remove Charlotte’s dull aspiring palaeontologist husband( James McArdle), from the scene does provide an excuse for the much publicised and steamily explicit naked bedroom scene between the two actresses.

It is, however, some time in coming as director Francis Lee (whose previous film, God’s Own Country, was also a queer love story, between two men) slowly builds things from Mary’s initial reluctance, agreeing to teach the mouse-like Charlotte the fundamental fossil hunting skills the urging of her mother (Gemma Jones who comes with a sad backstory of her own embodied in the china dog figurines she polishes every night) to earn a few bob to supplement her fossil sales and then taking her in and giving up her bedroom at the recommendation of the doctor (Alec Secareanu) when she falls ill. The friendship gradually blossoms (as the hitherto stone-faced, brittle and joyless Anning, as grey as the winter skies, gradually softens under the initially petulant Charlotte’s influence) and then a passionate secret romance flares, set against the backdrop of the era’s suffocating restraint, And, of course, the patriarchal elitist boys’ club climate that would not afford Mary the same standing as her male colleagues. Indeed, the film opens the skull of an ichthyosaur being put on view in the British Museum, credited to the man who donated it, not the woman who discovered it.

The cinematography makes the most of the stunning landscape with its coast line and rugged cliffs as well as the contrastive, candlelit scenes with Mary’s cramped small house (more visual metaphors then) while, be it in the verbal exchanges or the unspoken looks, Winslet and Ronan give possibly their finest performances, ably supported by Fiona Shaw as Elizabeth Philpot who makes herbal salves and with whom it is clear Mary had an earlier affair that ended badly and who causes her discomfort when she clearly takes a shine to the more sophisticated Charlotte.

The later scenes set after Charlotte has to return to London are equally potent in what they say about the two women (who were actually firm real life friends) and, dramatic liberties notwithstanding, like the fossil, the more layers are uncovered, the greater the exposed film becomes. (Amazon Prime, CHILI, Google Play, iTunes Rakuten TV, Sky Store, TalkTalk TV, Virgin Movies)

Antebellum (15)

The film opens on a Louisiana cotton plantation that’s been commandeered by Confederate forces ,and is overseen by Capt. Jasper (Jack Huston) whose sadistic brutal nature is swiftly established by executing a female slave who attempts to flee, her body taken the crematorium. Into this set up comes Eden (Janelle Monáe) who, when she refuses to give her name is branded by her Confederate General owner (Eric Lange) , who keeps her as his sex slave, a function all the women are expected to provide to the soldiers. Despite the danger (“speaking without permission can be punished by beatings), she defiantly devises strategies by which she can meet and communicate with fellow slaves such as Eli (Tongayi Chirisa), and new arrival (Kiersey Clemons), named Julia by the general’s haughty daughter (Jenna Malone)

So far so 12 Years A Slave, but then suddenly a ringing phone wakes her and she’s no longer Eden but Veronica Henley, a hugely successful PhD sociologist and author with a husband and button cute young daughter, who delivers speeches about empowerment. So, is her plantation life a race memory from her ancestors, a nightmare metaphor about the continuing oppression of Black Americans (the film titles quote Faulkner’s “The past is never dead. It’s not even past”). Indeed, Elizabeth from the plantation is also the wealthy Elizabeth here, and clearly not to be trusted and, while in Louisiana for her book tour, following a night with her relationship guru bestie Dawn (Gabourey Sidibe), she gets into what she assumes to be her uber. My who’s that in the back, is that Jasper! And so, we’re suddenly back in the plantation for a bloody final confrontation.

First time directors Gerard Bush and Christopher Renz are clearly trying to follow in the footsteps of Jordan Peele’s brilliant horror Get Out, but the twist here is a direct crib from M Night Shyamalan’s The Village with an added timeline misdirection, but with even less plausibility regarding how it was all carried off. (Sky)

Army of the Dead (18)

Drawing on a formula that ranges from The Magnificent Seven to The Dirty Dozen to The Expendables with a group of mercenaries gradually being whittled down as they seek to carry out their mission, as written and directed by Zack Snyder this two hour plus video-gamer horror action romp throws the undead into the ultra-violent post-apocalyptic mix when, after a zombie outbreak (caused when newlyweds, distracted by a blow job, pile into an army convoy from Area 51, letting their cargo escape). the shambling hordes are contained within Las Vegas, walled off by a circle of shipping containers in a herculean effort headed up by Scott Ward (Dave Bautista). Now, some time later, he’s working in a burger joint when he’s approached by shady Vegas hotel owner Tanaka (Hiroyuki Sanada) who wants him to break into the city and retrieve 200 million dollars from the casino basement high security vault, amusingly named Gotterdamerung.

To which end, he recruits his old crew mechanic Cruz (Ana de la Reguera) and chainsaw wielding Vanderohe (Omari Hardwick), boosting the team with the addition of wisecracking cigar-smoking helicopter pilot Peters (Tig Notaro), YouTube zombie-killer star Guzman (Raúl Castillo) and German safecracker Dieter (Matthias Schweighöfer). Plus, their employer’s right-hand man (Garret Dillahunt) informs them he’ll be coming along to oversee (so you can bet he has a hidden agenda) while Scott’s refugee camp volunteer daughter Kate (Ella Purnell), estranged after dad had to kill her mother to prevent her turning into a zombie, insists on tagging along to rescue a friend who has disappeared from the camp, leaving her two kids behind. Plus, there’s Coyote (Nora Arnezeder), a hard ass French people smuggler who knows her way around the infested Vegas. There’s just one small problem. The President intends to nuke Vegas on July 4th, complete with fireworks, so the clock is ticking. And then the date’s brought forward.

Once the crew enter the city the film shakes up a cocktail of Escape From New York, Planet of the Apes and Aliens stirred with the heist elements of Ocean’s Eleven, as they navigate their way through the streets, avoiding piled up bodies that can reawaken with the rain, tunnels populated by comatose zombies who you really don’t want to touch, not to mention, in an inspired touch, a zombie tiger that was part of Siegfried & Roy’s act. That, and as Coyote reveals, a new evolved breed of thinking Alpha zombies (though they still only say gaaahhhh) headed up by a bejewelled queen (Athena Perample) and her warrior consort (Richard Cetrone) with his impressive abs and zombie horse. To ensure safe passage, Coyote explains they need to offer a sacrifice, which explains why she’s brought along the camp security guard bully who’s duly dragged off to their citadel to be transformed into another member of the zombie army – a fate likely to be facing Kate’s abducted friend.

This might seem like a bit of a tangled plot, but basically once the splatterfest begins that’s really all that matters as double crosses and unexpected demises pile up, culminating in a last act climax as Scott and the remaining survivors head into the citadel to find Kate who’s taken off to rescue her friend (whose fate seems to have been overlooked by the script in the final moments). This is terrific braindead fun with big guns and geysers of blood that also has a knowing sense of humour (Liberace and Elvis impersonators, a soundtrack including Viva Las Vegas and The Cranberries hit Zombie) as well as finding time for some character depth that makes you care about who lives and dies. Although the body count would seem to effectively knock any ongoing franchise on the head, the coda hints at a Mexico City sequel. Bring it on. (Netflix)

The Broken Hearts Gallery (12)

It may be a sort of Sundance-lite predictable girly romcom, but, the feature debut by writer-director Natalie Krinsky, this is nevertheless a hugely enjoyable, at times disarmingly poignant little gem, sprinkled with some delightful banter and founded on a hugely endearing and likeable turn from Australian-Asian Bad Education star Geraldine Viswanathan.

She plays Lucy, a quirky 26-year-old New York art gallery assistant whose love life has been marked by a series of break-ups, from each of which she has kept a memento to remind her of her ex, anything from old shoelaces and a pink rubber piggy bank plastic toy to even a used condom. There’s also a Monopoly thimble, although the significance behind this is kept back until much later in a particularly moving moment.

The narrative gets under way following her latest disaster which saw her being dumped by wealthy upscale two timing gallery worker Max (Utkarsh Ambudkar), and, as a direct consequence, being fired from her job at the prestigious gallery run by celebrity art dealer Eva Woolf (Bernadette Peters). All of this she drunkenly relates to Nick (Dacre Montgomery), into whose car she’s climbed thinking he’s her Uber driver.

It’s followed by a second meet cute as he intercedes as bustles her out of a café as she’s about to cause a scene with Max and his reunited ex, and, naturally, thrown together by fate, their relationship grows from thereonin. Nick, it transpires, is transforming and old Brooklyn YMCA into a boutique hotel. “a place that feels like the spots I fell in love with when I first moved to New York” He’s not got much money to do this, a friend offering his services for free, as does Lucy, who, in turn, will be able to open her own ‘gallery’ in the lobby where, inspired by her own mementoes of lost relationships (kicking off with Max’s tie), people will donate their own bittersweet nostalgic keepsakes by way of closure.

Punctuated by a series of to-camera confessions from assorted donors (who all make a contribution for the gallery’s uptake), the novelty of the idea soon goes viral, making Lucy something of a celebrity herself, prompting Max’s rekindled interest. Meanwhile, she and Nick have a close platonic friendship that, as in all movies of this kind, is waiting for the moment they realise it’s something more, but the path to that epiphany is still a rocky one when Nick fails to secure a needed loan and Lucy meets Chloe, the woman after whom the hotel (Nick’s broken heart memento) is named.

In all of this, the film features several scenes involving Lucy’s Sex In The City-styled childhood best friends and roommates, lesbian Nadine (Phillipa Soo), and Amanda (Molly Gordon), a law student who lives with her hipster boyfriend (Nathan Dales) who never says a word until the film’s almost over, the chemistry and snarky repartee between the three girls sprinkled with Nora Ephron and Woody Allen stardust.

A film about letting go, of following your dreams and looking to the future rather than being weighed down by the past, yes it’s a frothy trifle, but that’s really something you need on the menu right now. (Amazon Prime)

Coming 2 America (12)

Thirty-two years after the hugely successful John Landis original and it’s almost exclusively Black cast and almost two decades on from the career catastrophic The Adventures of Pluto Nash, an on form Eddie Murphy resurrects his character of Prince Akeem (along with the other three roles he played under heavy makeup), now back in the kingdom of Zamunda and happily married to Lisa (Shari Headley) and with three feisty daughters, Meeka (KiKi Layne), Omma, real-life daughter Bella Murphy) and Tinashe (Akiley Love).

What he doesn’t have is a son and heir, since by law women cannot inherit the throne. However, prior to his death, Akeem’s father, King Joffer (James Earl Jones) reveals that he does, in fact, have a son, the bastard offspring resulting from a drugged sexual encounter engineered by Akeeem’s aide Semmi (Arsenio Hall also playing Witch Doctor Baba and two others) during that visit to Queens. And so, the pair duly return to America where they discover Lavelle (Jermaine Fowler), a street smart hustler living with his brash mother Mary (Leslie Jones as Lavelle) and his uncle Reem (Tracy Morgan), transporting mother and son back to Africa to groom Lavelle for his new role (including having to snip the whiskers off a lion). It’s a situation General Izzi (a wildly hamming Wesley Snipes), the warmongering leader of Nextdoria and brother of the woman (Vanessa Bell Calloway) Akeem declined to marry in the last movie and is still barking like a dog, is keen to exploit by marrying him off to his daughter Meeka (Kiki Layne). Much to the dismay of his wife and daughters, Akeem agrees. Lavelle, however, has fallen for royal groomer Mirembe (Nomzamo Mbatha), throwing up further complications and culminating in yet another trip back to Queens where Akeem’s reminded about following your heart..

With several other returning characters from the original along with a plethora of cameos playing themselves (among them Morgan Freeman, Salt N Pepa, John Legend and Gladys Knight) and assorted song and dance sequences, despite feeling the need for some unnecessary vulgarity, directed by Craig Brewer (who coaxed a towering performance from Murphy in Dolemite Is My Name), it may have largely dispensed with the originals theme of Black identity and dismantling stereotypes, this is funnier more often than not. Just not as often as it might have been. (Amazon Prime)

Concrete Cowboy (15)

Following yet another run in with the police and his Detroit school, rebellious 15-year-old Cole (Caleb McLaughlin) is sent by his exasperated mother (Liz Priestley) to spend the summer with his estranged ex-con father, Harp (Idris Elba) in of North Philadelphia. Needless to say neither is especially happy about it and Cole’s surprised to find his father shares his run-down apartment with a horse. Harp in fact heads up the Fletcher Street Stables, an inner city black community subculture dating back over 100 years which cares for rescue horses, breaking the wild ones and teaching youngsters to ride. At which point, Cole assigned to cleaning out the shit from the stables, you really are looking the tough love father-son gift horse in the metaphorical mouth.

Taken under the wing of his father’s Stetson-wearing neighbour, Nessi (Lorraine Toussaint), and with a romantic interest provided by fellow stables worker Esha (Ivannah Mercedes), despite his father’s orders, Cole continues to hang out with Smush (Jharrel Jerome,), a childhood cousin who’s now’s part of the local drug-dealing network. You don’t need blinkers to see where that’s heading. And then there’s the threat to the neighbourhood by property develops who wants to raze the stables to the ground.

Based around the young adult novel Ghetto Cowboy , co-writer and first time director Ricky Straub rarely strays from the cliché paddock with themes of trust and redemption encompassed in things like Cole being the only one a wild horse called Boo will let near him, while the dialogue frequently ploughs into the cornfield. That said, however, the central performances are strong and it delivers its inspirational black community message with a genuine passion and vibrancy that reflects the reality on which it’s founded (as the end credits reveal, several of the cast are real Fletcher Street cowboys basically playing themselves), so that while the narrative scenery may be shaky at times, the foundations are solid. (Netflix)

The Conjuring: The Devil Made Me Do It (15)

The seventh in the franchise, if you include the spin-offs, this brings the focus back to real life exorcists and Christian paranormal investigators Ed (Patrick Wilson) and Lorraine (Vera Farmiga) Warren), based on events from 1981 when they carried out an exorcism on bespectacled 8-year-old David (Julian Hilliard), who talks in a guttural voice and contorts his limbs. Ed’s remark that he “can’t remember one quite like this” provides the springboard for what follows as we plunge into a tale of possession when Arne (Ruairi O’Connor), the boyfriend of David’s sister Debbie (Sarah Catherine Hook), dares the demon to take his body instead (Ed sees but then has a demon-provoked heart attack before he can warn anyone, leaving him on medication), leading to mayhem and murder as the Warrens support him at the ensuing trial in Brookfield, Connecticut, where he declares that, quite literally, the devil made him do it.

A rather more sober and less horror effects driven outing this time around, with the explanation for events more about human malevolence than demonic forces (a satanic cult, that prompts the Warrens to enlist a specialist former priest), this, more of a paranormal procedural than a horror movie, doesn’t have the impact of its predecessors but the spell still has enough power to warrant a look. (Cineworld 5 Ways, NEC, Solihull; Empire Great Park; Odeon Birmingham, Broadway Plaza Luxe; Reel; Vue)

County Lines (15)

Inspired by stories he heard while working in an East London pupil referral unit and based on his 2017 short, New Zealand-born, London-based writer-director Henry Blake makes his feature debut with this powerful examination of the impact and damage involved in the use of teenagers and young children as drug mules, trafficking across county boundaries.

It focuses on Tyler (an outstanding turn by newcomer Conrad Kahn), a disaffected east London 14-year-old who, angry, frustrated and resentful, lives with his younger sister and single mother, Toni (Ashley Madekwe), essentially the man of the house while she works nights as a hotel cleaner and brings home far from suitable pick-ups. Disengaged and bullied at school, where he’s in the pupil referral unit, he falls under the influence of Simon (Harris Dickinson), a local ‘entrepreneur’ who initially intervenes when Tyler’s being bullied in the local chicken chippie, seeking him out, impressed by his relatively flashy lifestyle and, through being meals and nice trainers, eventually being chillingly groomed to smuggle drugs, concealed in his rectum (a product placement Vaseline could have done without), to clients down at the coast.

The film opens with a close-up on a blank, often distracted Tyler as the voice of a female social worker informs him that, in that line of work, he’s what businesses refer to as an acceptable loss, the scene replayed later in the film, only this time with his social worker in the frame. In-between, Blake charts how exposure to the often brutal world of suppliers and users, an abused young female addict in particular, both shocks and hardens Tyler, his experiences then mirrored in his own life as he adopts a machismo attitude to the extent that, at one point, he rounds on and physically attacks his mother, who is increasingly desperate at and unable to cope with her son’s refusal to cooperate with the support the school tries to offer and, having lost her job, is trying to get work to make ends meet.

Visually stark and with effective use of harsh music to compound the punishing environment, it is disturbing, unsettling, often harrowing but never exploitative and always compelling viewing that pointedly, while offering Tyler physical and emotional rescue, refuses to compromise with a pat, moralistic and upbeat ending. (BFI Player, Curzon Home Cinema)

Cowboys (15)

At times recalling Hunt For The Wilderpeople, writer-director Anna Kerrigan’s western-tinged drama debut is a low key but incredibly engaging affair, one that also shows what an underrated actor Steve Zahn, too often consigned to undemanding comedy, truly is.

Here, he’s Troy, a veteran who (as we see in flashbacks) has suffered from PTSD and now has to take pills to counter his bipolar episodes. He’s happily married to Sally (Jillian Bell), but the relationship comes under tress when their 11-year-old daughter, Josephine (Sasha Knight), confesses to him that she feels she’s a boy trapped in a girl’s body and henceforth wants to be called Joe. Troy is understanding and tries to talk Sally into supporting her, but she will have none of it, insisting it’s just a phase. An incident with his brother-in-law when his young nephew calls Joe a dyke winds up with Troy doing time and, subsequently he and Sally separate with she having custody.

One morning, however, Joe’s bedroom is empty. Troy has taken his son, now with short hair and wearing cowboy style clothes in emulation of the father he adores and the stories he told him, and, ‘borrowing’ a horse from a friend he made in rehab, they’ve set off through the Montana wilds to cross into Canada where everyone’s ‘super nice’. Back home, Sally naturally calls in the police, here in the form of shrewd local cop Faith (Ann Dowd) who suspects there’s more to things than meet the eye, to track the pair down as they make their way cross country, encountering various obstacles along the way, not least when Troy loses his pills and his manic condition reasserts itself.

Never sensationalised, exploited or judgemental, Kerrigan infuses her story and film with recognisable human emotions and pathos that hit home all the more effectively thanks to the understated performances of the central cast, Knight, a transgender actor, especially persuasive, as it builds to an inevitable tense climax. (Amazon Prime, CHILI, Google Play, iTunes Rakuten TV, Sky Store, TalkTalk TV, Virgin Movies)

Cruella (12A)

Having given Sleeping Beauty’s Maleficent a sympathetic origin story makeover, Disney now apply the same spin to 101 Dalmatians villain Cruella de Vil with a terrific cocktail of The Devil Wears Prada and The Joker mingled with a touch of Oliver Twist. Set in 70s London, it opens with a spot on refined English accent voiceover from Emma Stone, who takes on the title role announcing her death, and proceeds to a flashback prologue in which, en route to London to start a new life after being expelled from school following a series of incidents for which she was wrongly blamed, a stopover is made at Hellman Hall, a sprawling mansion where, sneaking in to watch a fashion show, Estella (Tipper Seifert-Cleveland), a non-conformist young girl with half black and half white hair, witnesses her mother (Emily Beecham) pushed to her death from the clifftop by the three Dalmatians belonging the Hall’s owner. Losing her mother’s heirloom necklace in the process, Estella, who’s caused havoc at the show, runs away with her dog Buddy, winding up in London where she’s taken in by a couple of young thieves, Jasper (Ziggy Gardner) and Horace (Joseph McDonald), and, with the help of Buddy and Horace’s one-eyed dog Wink, becomes part of the gang, pulling off a series of pickpocketing and robberies.

Cut then to the 70s as Jasper (Joel Fry) and Horace (Paul Walter Hauser) wangle Estella, whose dyed her hair red, a birthday present job at prestigious fashion emporium Liberty’s where’s she hoping to launch her career as a fashion designer, only to find herself a skivvy cleaning the toilets and bullied by her snobby boss. However, drunkenly redesigning a window display catches the attention of imperious, narcissistic famed fashion icon The Baroness (Emma Thompson, gloriously devouring the scenery) who hires her as part of her team.

Suffice to say, it’s not long before Emma realises it was The Baroness’s dogs who pushed her mother to her death and for which she’s always blamed herself, and with the help of Jasper and Horace, sets out to get revenge and stage a heist to retrieve the necklace, creating her alter-ago as Cruella, a punky fashion designer upstart who, making a dazzling first entrance on the scene, proceeds to upstage The Baroness and grab the headlines, causing sales to plummet. However, there’s further revelations ahead, the first being the discovery that it was The Baroness who actually responsible for her mother’s death, ratcheting up her thirst for vengeance, with her single-minded pursuit and new control-freak attitude causing a rift between herself and her partners in crime. But that’s not the biggest twist.

Directed by I, Tonya’s Craig Gillespie and with The Favourite co-writer Tony McNamara one of the screenwriters, two other tales of female rivalry, it affords a sympathetic view of how Cruella became the sociopath in the Dalmatians movies, and Stone seizes the part’s strutting performance and sharp lines with magnetising relish while the screen filled with a series of eye-popping costume designs and extravagant edgy fashion displays designed to torment and humiliate The Baroness as it builds to the final showdown. With a support cast that includes Mark Strong as The Baroness’s valet with a secret, John McRea as a flamboyant vintage fashion shop owner who becomes part of the grand revenge plan and Kirby Howell-Baptiste as Anita Darling, one of Estella’s early schoolfriends now working as a newspaper fashion photographer, and an inspired soundtrack that ranges from The Doors, Nina Simone, Ken Dodd, The Clash and, naturally, The Stones’ Sympathy For The Devil (the film also explaining the origin of the name de Vil).

It’s hugely entertaining fun that, like Maleficent, carves out its own identity while nodding to its source material (don’t miss the mid-credits sequence involving The Baroness’s former lawyer, Roger, now a songwriter, and his wife Anita and a gift of two spotty pups), leaving you eagerly anticipating to see where her story goes from here. (Cineworld 5 Ways, NEC, Solihull; Empire Great Park; Odeon Birmingham, Broadway Plaza Luxe, West Brom; Reel; Vue)

Demon Slayer: Mugen Train (15)

The most successful anime and highest-grossing Japanese film of all time, as a feature length bridge between the second season of the TV series franchise, you really do need to be a fan to have any real idea of who anyone is and what’s going on. Plus, while the backdrops have a relatively realistic look, the character animation is styled comic book stuff with pointed features and moments where the characters’ expressions are frozen like drawings. That said, its near two hour running time never flags and, once the action starts, it never lets up, delivering explosions of colour and combat until the final, muted and bittersweet frames.

The basic plot has orphan Tanjiro, his demonic sister Nezuko (who he carried in trunk), and fellow demon slayers, bare-chested warthog-headed Inosuke and the girl-mad, at times cowardly, Zenitsu, who board the Mugen Train to help elite super-powered slayer and former Hashira (no, me neither) Flame Pillar Kyōjurō Rengoku investigate a series of onboard disappearances. Before it gets to the traintop showdown between them and the demon responsible, Kizuki, a shape shifter who has a detachable hand with its own face, there’s a series of surprisingly emotionally involving sequences as, trapped in a dream spell, Tanjiro, Zenitsu and Rengoku (a minor figure in the franchise who is given a tragic backstory), find themselves reliving their past, their fears, hopes, regrets and grief, especially so in the case of Tanjiro who, in a fantasy version of his life, is happily reunited with his family and must confront his feelings of guilt and shame over their eventual murder.

Released in subtitled and dubbed versions, essential viewing for devotees of the show, the curious ticket holders might also find themselves caught up in the ride. (Vue)

The Dig (12)

A polite and genteel very English period drama directed by Australia’s Simon Stone, this is based around real life events and the Sutton Hoo discovery in 1939, with war looming, of an 89-foot Anglo Saxon burial ship and is treasure buried beneath a mound in a Sussex field.

It was the most significant Anglo Saxon find until the discovery of the Staffordshire Hoard seventy years later. The land belonged to the relatively young and recently widowed Edith Pretty (Carey Mulligan) who, with an interest in archaeology and an intuition about the mounds in the back garden, engaged taciturn, self-taught pipe-smoking working-class ‘excavator’ archaeologist Basil Brown (Ralph Fiennes with a broad accent, unlike the refined speaking voice of the other main characters), a freelancer for the Ipswich Museum, to dig away and see what he found.

On discovering the remains of the ship, the big boys descended in the form of pompous British Museum archaeologist Charles Phillips (Ken Stott) and his team to take charge and send Brown packing. Petty refused to let him go and (later publically ensured he receive full credit) Phillips agreed he could remain, but not work on the excavation as the treasures are unearthed revealing the Anglo Saxons to have been a far more sophisticated lot than assumed, with art and currency.

Other than some social class snobbery on the part of the London mob and Pretty’s quiet refusal to be browbeaten just because she’s a woman, even when she’s diagnosed some terminal illness, which she naturally keeps to herself, there’s not a lot more for the film to explore in this particular scenario, although it does spend some time on Edith’s young son, Robert (Archie Barnes), who sees Brown (who lives in and only returns to his stoical supportive wife at weekends) as a sort of surrogate dad,

Consequently, mid-way in, the narrative focus expands to take in a romantic subplot involving Margaret ‘Peggy’ Piggott (Lily James), the wife of fellow archaeologist Stuart (Ben Chaplin) who both form part of the British Museum team, the latter, at least here, invited because she doesn’t weight much, so won’t break the relics. Her husband being somewhat indifferent to her sexually, preferring the company of the lads, Peggy (who was the aunt of the source novel’s author John Preston) finds herself attracted to Pretty’s (fictional) handsome cousin Rory (Johnny Flynn) who assigned to photograph the dig (this somewhat negating the film’s low key feminist threads, given the find was documented by two female photographers), only for him to be called up when war’s declared.

Beautifully shot against a rolling verdant rural landscape with a couple of very striking sequences, it’s tasteful to a fault, the ending musing on the legacy of the past and what we in turn will leave behind us, it may not have as much depth or earthiness as the dig itself, but of its kind it is a kind of treasure. (Netflix)

Elyse (15)

The film opens as a woman (Lisa Pepper) walks slowly down the stairs of her luxury home and wanders out of the front door, going to a book shop where she looks at a copy of The Wizard of Oz and then a park where she greets her son whose playing on a swing with his nanny (Julieta Ortiz). The woman seems to have no idea what time it is. She returns home later that night where her husband (Aaron Tucker), mother (Fran Tucker) and the nanny’ daughter, Carmen (Tara Arroyave), an employee in her husband’s law firm, are sat round the table and has a blazing row when her snide mom asks where she’s been. All this is shot in metaphorical black and white, with just an occasional touch of red, with a muted jazz saxophone score. Everyone walks as if they have a rod up their backside and tend to speak in much the same way. The woman, Elyse, is clearly suffering from mood swings and is advised to see a therapist (Anthony Hopkins). Mid way she goes into shock and the film (like The Wizard Of Oz) abruptly switches to colour, she now consigned to hospital in a catatonic state from which she slowly, very slowly, recovers under treatment from the shrink and a caring French nurse (Anthony Apel). At some point, she screams as the film finally reveals what has caused her trauma.

Feeling like some arty experimental play from the 70s New York fringe, addressing theme of grief and mental illness, it’s directed and co-written by Hopkins’ wife, Stella, in a flat, mannered and unfocused style that makes it almost impossible to engage with any of the characters or, at times, to fathom the dynamics between them, or just how much is playing out in Elyse’s mind rather than in reality. Pepper, who looks not unlike Jennifer Aniston, is to be commended for giving such a convincingly and uncomfortable blank performance, but Hopkins, who spends most of his appearances sitting in a chair, is simply phoning in his familiar banter and everyone else is just terrible. Clearly a supportive and generous husband, Hopkins also wrote the music and produced. Perhaps just buying his wife a new coat might have been a better option. (Amazon Prime, CHILI, Google Play, iTunes, Sky Store)

The Father (12A)

Co-writer Florian Zeller makes his directorial debut with an adaptation of his own stage play (Christopher Hampton gets a credit for the English adaptation), starring Anthony Hopkins, who, at 83, became the oldest actor to win Best Actor at both the BAFTAs and Oscars for his monumental performance of an irascible elderly man, named Anthony, as it transpires, struggling with dementia.

It opens with him in his London flat where, visited by his daughter, Anne (Olivia Colman), who reprimands him for driving away his latest carer, he accusing her of his stealing his watch (a telling metaphor about chronological confusion), and insisting he doesn’t need looking after, before she informs him that she won’t be able to look after him anymore as, divorced, she’s met a new man and is moving to Paris, the veiled suggestion being he should go into a care home.

But then everything is upended as the scene shifts and Anthony walks into his living room to find a man called Paul (Mark Gates) who, he says, his Anne’s husband and that this is their flat. Anne returns from shopping, except now she’s Olivia Williams not Colman. And so it proceeds, keeping to unsure of what exactly is reality and what are Anthony’s dementia delusions. Who is Laura (Imogen Poots), the new carer Anne has arranged who he tells he used to be a tap dancer (he was an engineer) and says she reminds him of his youngest daughter, Lucy, apparently an artist off travelling the world who we never see but who, from Anne’s facial expressions, we can assume has died. Then there’s Rufus Sewell who is Anne’s actual, not-divorced husband, Paul, resentful (or so it’s played) that his father-in-law is living with them with no sign of ever leaving, while Williams resurfaces as Catherine, a nurse.

While Colman especially deserves plaudits, conjuring echoes of King Lear, following on the heels of two recent films unworthy of his talents, Hopkins magnetises the screen, astounding in the way he modulates and nuances his character’s emotions, slipping in and out of lucidity, at times charming, at others confrontational and petulant, trying to make his daughter think he’s in more control than he is, but equally frightened of what will happen if he’s left on his own. The film’s visual design also keeps the viewer disoriented as to where events are actually playing out along with who is and isn’t part of Anthony’s fractured reality in the same way that he continues to lose his bearings.

Not without dark humour, it’s a mesmerising portrait of dementia that avoids the clichés and melodramatics but deliver a searing and at times terrifying insight as to what it is like to live with the illness, both for the sufferer and those close to them. Uncomfortable viewing but utterly compelling. (Cineworld 5 Ways, NEC, Solihull; Empire Great Park; Everyman; Odeon Birmingham, Broadway Plaza Luxe, West Brom; Reel; Vue)

Flora & Ulysses (PG)

Narrating her own story, ten-year-old Flora (an ultra-cute Matilda Lawler) is a comic book fan (mostly Marvel, it seems) who lives with her award-winning (a Jack and Rose statue a la Titanic) romantic novelist mother Phyllis (Alyson Hannigan) who has hit a creative block since separating from husband George (Ben Schwartz), a comic book artist who fell into a slump when he couldn’t get his characters, such as Incandesto (who Flora fantasises along with his sidekicks), published and now works a store shelf-stocker. Trying to get her mojo back, Phyllis has bought an old-fashioned typewriter hoping it will help write the new novel, the deadline for which is looming. It will prove important in a very different way.

Flora (who actually looks like a young Hannigan) is first seen looking to sell her comics stash, disillusioned that superheroes never turn up in the real world when you need them, becoming a self-described cynic with the motto “Do not hope. Observe.” Her favourite book is Terrible Things Can Happen to You. However, her life changes when she rescues a squirrel that’s been sucked up by a neighbour’s remote outdoor vacuum, giving it mouth-to-mouth to bring it back to life. Naming him Ulysses, she takes the rodent home where he proves to be a rather special squirrel, typing out a poem note (“holy unanticipated occurrences!” declares Flora) and proving precisely the bush-tailed superhero she needs in her life.

Naturally, there needs to be a nemesis which, rather inevitably, proves to be the town’s squirrel-obsessed animal control officer (Danny Pudi) who enters the picture after Ulysses causes chaos at a diner, leading to panic cries of rabies. Pursuing a storyline in which he plays a crucial role in bringing Flora’s parents back together, rekindling their personal and professional spark, it also introduces a support cast of eccentrics such as George’s wise and kindly neighbour Dr. Meacham (Anna Deavere Smith) and Flora new friend, a British boy called William (Benjamin Evan Ainsworth) who’s been dumped there for the summer after being diagnosed with hysterical blindness following an incident he’s rather not discuss and who provides much of the comedy seeing via echolocation by making little chirps and usefully having “a knack for absorbing short falls.” Plus a psychotic rangy cat.

Partly about opening yourself up to the magic that surrounds you, it’s a delightful good hearted affair, both amusing and touching, with plenty of action sequences such as Ulysses’s rescues and the scene where Flora and her father break into the animal pound to stop him being euthanised, to keep it rolling along. Brilliant CGI brings a very realistic Ulysses to life and infuses him with real character, which further adds to the chemistry with Lawler, the silliness guarantees to keep the kids happy while director Lena Khan throws in plenty for the grown-ups too, ranging from a soundtrack that classics by Cat Stevens and Tom Jones to such film nods as ET and even a sly reference to Apocalypse Now. An utter joy. (Disney +)

The Glorias (15)

Recently a central figure in the TV series Mrs America which focused on her role in the feminist movement’s struggle for equal rights, adapting the autobiographical My Life on the Road, writer-director Julie Taymor offers a wider look at the life of Gloria Steinem and her journey to becoming a women’s lib icon. As such, it ranges from her itinerant childhood (her father an impecunious travelling antique-salesman, the family lived in a trailer), through her travels in India during the late 50s, her years as a lauded journalist that kickstarted with an undercover expose of the Bunny Girl world for Show magazine and culminated in the launching of Ms Magazine (the term finding its way into official recognition as a form of address) and her work crusading for abortion rights (the film recreates her visit to a London doctor – Tom Nowicki – in 1957 when she fell pregnant) and female equality.

As such, she’s played by four different actresses. Nine-year-old Ryan Kiera Armstrong is the youngster growing up in 1940s Ohio with her irrepressible father Leo (Timothy Hutton) and depressed mother Ruth (Enid Graham), who gave up her own career as a writer – under a male pen name – when she married, moving from one town to another, while, after their divorce, Lulu Wilson is the teenage incarnation living in Toledo as her mother’s mental health falls apart while dad takes off to California. In her twenties, travelling India and making a name for herself as a New York journalist, Alicia Vikander steps in (and introduces the signature aviator glasses) while the older Steinem of the feminist era is played by Julianne Moore, looking uncannily like the real thing as witnessed when Steinem herself finally steps up to reprise her triumphant address to the assembled crowds in Washington.

But rather than hewing to a strictly linear path of Steinem’s greatest hits, Taymor moves back and forth between the Glorias, one scene giving way to another years later/earlier, while also bringing all four together in a black and white sequence as they share conversations while travelling on a Greyhound bus. Fleshing out the cast of characters is a roll call of other women’s movement luminaries who were in her orbit, among them Janelle Monae as Dorothy Pitman Hughes who teaches her how to speak in public, Lorraine Toussaint as the outrageous shoot-from-the-hip Flo Kennedy, Kimberly Guerrero ‘s Wilma Mankiller and an exuberant Bette Midler as Bella Abzug.

Taymor laces all of this with a series of fantasy and psychedelic sequences, including a riff on The Wizard Of Oz when Steinem’s interviewed with a male TV presenter asking why she never married while also frequently shifting between colour and monochrome, or even (as with the yellow road markings) mixing both. And yet, underpinned by the core old school biopic narrative, the film never feels confused or adrift and, even at over two hours it keeps you glued to the screen and the story of this self-styled crazy woman. (Sky)

Godzilla vs Kong (12A)

A thundering welcome back to the cinemas that looks to offer spectacular popcorn entertainment without challenging the brain cells (other than trying to make sense of some of the plot strands), set not long after the events in Godzilla: King of the Monsters, this reunites the titular two titans who last faced off in 1963 Japanese film King Kong vs. Godzilla.

As the film opens, to keep him save from his scaly arch enemy, everyone’s favourite oversized gorilla is being kept in a large dome on Skull Island, designed to resemble his natural habitat and being monitored by Monarch in the shape of Doctor Ilene Andrews (Rebecca Hall) whose adopted deaf mute daughter Jia (Kaylee Hottle) has struck up a bond with the giant ape and, spoiler alert, can who can communicate with him through sign language. Not stupid, Kong has sussed this isn’t his actual home, making his point by throwing a tree through the electronic net covering his habitat.

Meanwhile, having been off the radar for some years, Godzilla, formerly seen as the planet’s protector, suddenly reappears, attacking the Florida base of the high tech global corporate Apex Cybernetics for, it would seem, no apparent reason. As Dr. Mark Russell (Kyle Chandler’) succinctly puts it by way of stating the obvious, “Godzilla is out there and he’s hurting people and we don’t know why!” His daughter Madison (Millie Bobby Brown) is, however, convinced Apex are up to no good and, with the reluctant help of her nerdy techie teen friend Josh (Julian Dennison) recruits conspiracy podcast theorist Bernie (Brian Tyree Henry), a former Apex engineer, to sneak in and find out what’s going on.

Drawing the storylines together, Apex CEO Walter Simmons (Demian Bichir) persuades scientist Dr. Nathan Lind (Alexander Skarsgard), controversial for his hollow Earth theory that giant creatures are living within the planet’s core, to head up a mission to solve the energy crisis and journey into this world in one of his new specially designed vehicles. To which end, Lind persuades Andrews to go along with a plan to transport a sedated Kong by sea back to his natural home, away from Godzilla. Needless to say, Godzilla attacks the fleet leading to the first clash between the two juggernauts, with Kong not coming off best.

At this point, the narrative jumps back and forth between Lind, Andrews and Jia journeying into the world within with Kong, Simmons’s daughter accompanying them in another craft with clearly an agenda of her and her father’s own, while, back at Apex, Madison and co are snooping round and discovering just what Simmons is up to, winding up in Hong Kong where another slug fest between the monsters takes place and a third techno titan enters the equation in a battle for supremacy.

Lurching from one big exposition scene to the next, punctuated by mass destruction battles, the human cast take it and the arch dialogue seriously so that audiences don’t have to, but, once in gear, director Adam Wingard drives it all along at a furious pace, investing Kong with a hitherto little seen humanity and personality and playfully peppering the soundtrack with numbers like The Air That I Breathe. A massive adrenaline rush after those months cooped up, indulge at will. (Odeon Broadway Plaza Luxe; Vue)

I Care A Lot (15)

Rosamund Pike electrifies the screen in this return to thriller form by J Blakeson, the British writer-director of The Disappearance of Alice Creed. Pike plays Marla Grayson, a latter day Gordon Gekko with a severe bob cut and a vaping habit who, by greasing the right palms, from doctors (Alicia Witt) to administrators (Damian Young), has carved a lucrative scam for herself and her business partner cum girlfriend Fran (Eiza Gonzalez) by having vulnerable senior citizens declared incapable and, with the help of an admiring judge, placed into care with herself and her firm appointed as legal guardian. At which point they proceed to plunder their estate and savings under the guide of necessary expenses and administration fees.

Just how smoothly she works her Kafkaesque schemes things is shown in the first courtroom scene where she gets the son of one of her ‘clients’ barred from visitation rights after he caused a scene at the care home. Looking for their next mark, the pair target Jennifer Peterson (Dianne Wiest), a wealthy senior showing early mild signs of dementia and with no apparent family to take responsibility. A ‘cherry’. The next thing Peterson knows is that, without warning or any court appearance, she’s being bundled out of her home by social services and the police and taken off to be placed under the charge of one of Marla’s creepy care home administrator accomplices, stripped of her cell phone, and pumped with tranquilisers. Marla, meanwhile, puts the house up for sale and discovers a fortune in diamonds in a safety deposit box.

It’s at this point that what initially appeared to be a caustic satire on rampant and ruthless capitalism, the treatment of the elderly and the flaws in America’s legally appointed guardianship system suddenly pulls a genre flip into a deadly cat and mouse thriller. Peterson, you see, does have family. A son she sees once a year on a prearranged date. He’s Roman Lunyov (Peter Dinklage), a ruthless businessman who just happens to be a former Russian mafia kingpin. And he doesn’t take kindly to having his mother locked away. As Peterson coldly informs her “”I’m the worst mistake you’ll ever make”.

Marla’s initially unaware of any of this of course, only that a snappily dressed lawyer (Chris Messina) turns up offering $150,000 for Peterson’s release and making hardly veiled threats when she, looking to hold out for a bigger payoff, turns him down.

Things very quickly turn murderously nasty in what develops into a battle of wits and power between Marla and Roman, Peterson as her leverage, as she looks to negotiate a better deal than he’s offering, and he decides to simply eradicate the annoyances.

While it’s hard not be impressed by Marla’s smarts and resilience, while both apparently care for their respective lover and mother, neither of the film’s despicable protagonists are intended to grab your sympathies, each lacking in the most basic humanity in their ferocious determination to succeed and become obscenely wealthy. Balancing a tightrope between compellingly nasty thriller and jet black satire, Blakeson rattles the action and tension along with barely a pause for breath as the stakes continue to rise before an unexpected resolution that returns to the predatory toxicity of the American Dream and a last minute comeuppance for at least one of those concerned.

Weist, Dinklage and Gonzalez are all terrific, but none can hold a candle to Pike who, making her Gone Girl performance seem like soft-pedalling tears into the screenplay like a wolf, toying with the dialogue before ripping it to shreds yet never once losing her chilly calm composure. In the opening voiceover, remarking how there are two types of people: predators and prey, lions and lambs, she declares “My name is Marla Grayson and I am no lamb. I am a fucking lioness.” Watch her roar. (Amazon Prime)

Judas and the Black Messiah (15)

In December 1969, aged 21, Fred Hampton, chairman of the Illinois chapter of the Black Panther Party in Chicago and deputy chairman of the national BPP, was shot dead in his bed by the FBI when they broke into his apartment. They had been given the layout by his trusted security chief William O’Neal, who had also drugged Hampton, and who was, in fact, an undercover informant.

Director Shaka King charts the lead up to the assassination from O’Neal (Lakeith Stanfield) being busted by the Feds for impersonating an FBI agent in order to steal cars and subsequently being forced to work as an informant by Bureau agent Roy Mitchell (Jesse Plemons) as part of as campaign to crush the movement regarded by racist FBI head J. Edgar Hoover (Martin Sheen under heavy prosthetics) who regarded them as threat to America on part with Communism and was concerned about the rise of a potential Black Messiah.

As the film unfolds, we follow Hampton’s (Daniel Kaluuya) gradual rise to prominence with his fiery rhetoric, forging alliances with other powerful groups, including local street gangs, revolutionaries the Young Lords and unlikely as it seems, Southern White organisation the Young Patriots, coming together as The Rainbow Coalition. Having failed to crush them either by imprisoning Fred on a trumped up charge or by setting fire to their headquarters after a siege, it was decided to eliminate Hampton. In tandem, it charts the blossoming of a relationship between Hampton and Black Panther volunteer Deborah Johnson (Dominique Fishback) who became his fiancée and was pregnant with his son at the time of the killing.

Alongside, it also unfolds O’Neal’s rise through the ranks to become Hampton’s right-hand man, his meetings with Mitchell (he’s visibly thrilled at being taken to an upmarket restaurant) and conflicts of conscience over his two roles, finally climaxing in the bloody predawn raid involving a tactical unit of the Cook County State’s Attorney’s Office, the Chicago Police Department and the FBI, during which Panther Mark Clark was also killed and several others seriously wounded.

Driven by dynamite performances by the fiery charismatic Kaluuya and a more nuanced Stanfield (who remains sympathetic despite his Judas role), both nominated for Best Supporting Actor, potently supported by Fishback and Plemons (there’s chilling scene where he’s thrown and discomfited by Hoover asking what he’ll do when his daughter’s called on by a black boyfriend), it’s a powerful and appropriately angry drama that affords no easy answers and ends with both a recreation of the only television interview the much older O’Neal ever gave and footage from the real thing where he’s questioned about his actions. A closing postscript notes he committed suicide that same night. Gripping stuff. (Amazon Prime, BT TV, CHILI, Google Play, Rakuten TV, Sky Store)

Let Him Go (15)

Kevin Costner specialises in playing father figures, be it in the wider frame of Hidden Figures, as an escaped con bonding with the boy he kidnaps in A Perfect World, the mentor to a troubled teen in The Guardian or fighting a custody battle in Black and White. So, set in the mid-60s, he fits snugly into the character of George Blackledge, an ageing retired lawman turned rancher living on their Montana farm with former horse-breaker wife Margaret (Diane Lane, Martha to his Jonathan Kent in the Superman films), son James (Ryan Bruce), his wife, Lorna (Kayli Carter), and their infant son, Jimmy. Tragedy strikes, however, when James is thrown from his horse and killed.

Given the film’s title you might well expect a tale of coming to terms with grief and finding closure; however, James death is almost immediately followed by a shot of Lorna remarrying nice guy Donnie Weboys (Will Brittain). Except, as Margaret discovers when she sees them in town, he’s anything but, striking both Lorna and the now three-year-old Jimmy for dropping his ice-cream. Concerned, she says nothing but, turning up at their apartment and finding they’ve abruptly left town, it doesn’t take much to persuade the more taciturn George (who points out they’re on dodgy legal ground) to join her on a road trip in their ancient Chevy station wagon to track them down and reclaim their grandson, firing her with a sense of aggressive purpose she’s lacked since her son’s death.

The journey takes them to North Dakota where, having encountered a kindly young loner (Booboo Stewart), they discover the Weboys are a notoriously no-good dynasty based on a ranch in the middle of nowhere and headed up by chain-smoking scumbag matriarch Blanche (a Lesley Manville who gives a memorably dinner table stand-off where there’s more scenery chewed than pork chops) who has no intention of letting son Donnie fly the nest a second time or of the Blackledges taking Jimmy back with them. And, even when they persuade Lorna to do a runner in the middle of the night, things very bloodily do not go as planned, leading up to the dramatic rescue mission finale about the cost of heroism where Costner gets to put family first.

Given a neo-Western sheen, it’s fairly predictable and lacking in nuance, and Lorna frankly doesn’t seem to get much say in things, although Blanche and Margaret locking horns (Lane is far more the lead than Costner) certainly ticks strong-willed women box, but taking a slow burn and suspenseful path to its eventual shoot-em up climax. (Amazon Prime, CHILI, Google Play, iTunes Rakuten TV, Sky Store, TalkTalk TV, Virgin Movies)

Little Fish (15)

Written before the advent of Covid, Chad Hartigan’s mutedly sad film is set against a different pandemic, neuro-inflammatory affliction, which, akin to Alzheimer’s, robs people young and old of their ability to remember (a pilot forgets how to fly, a marathon runner forgets to stop). At the start we’re introduced to photographer Jude (Starred Up’s Jack O’Connell) and Emma (Olivia Cooke from Sound of Metal), recently married after his rough charm seduced her away from a boyfriend, she didn’t love at a Halloween party, she writing down memories of their relationship, including a stray dog they adopted (she a vet, having to euthanize pets owners no longer remember) called Blue.

It keeps returning to those first weeks together (including a lovely moment in a pet shop aquarium where he proposes) as it becomes clear that, while she seems immune, Jude is starting to show symptoms, made scarier by flashbacks to a similar relationship between two of their friends, songwriter Ben (Raul Castillo), the first of their circle to catch is heartbreaking as Ben, the songwriter who is the first of the group to catch NIA, desperately tried to record all his songs before he forgets how to play them and, eventually, no longer recognises his wife.

There’s few scenes of the world outsider the couple’s relationship, although images of hostile crowds gathering where medical trials are purportedly being carried out (Emma gets Jude into a programme, but the vaccine side-effects might be worse than the illness) deftly capture the apocalyptic tone with its accompanying conspiracy theories. Mostly, though, it’s a meditation on the importance and fragility of memory and an intimate perspective of someone trying to hold on to the person they love in the face of seemingly impossible odds, giving a whole new meaning to the phrase “I know you better than you know yourself” as it winds to an achingly poignant final image. (Amazon Prime, CHILI, Google Play, iTunes Rakuten TV, Sky Store, TalkTalk TV, Virgin Movies)

Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom (15)

Following on from Fences, directed by George C Wolfe, driven by a score from Branford Marsalis with a sharp screenplay from Ruben Santiago-Hudson, this is the second adaptation from The Pittsburgh Cycle, a collection of ten plays by the late August Wilson chronicling the African-American community in the 20th century. Written in 1984, set in 1927, it was inspired by legendary blues singer Ma Rainey, dubbed the Mother of the Blues, played here in powerhouse form by Viola Davis, who won a Supporting Actress Oscar for the previous film. However, the dramatic focus and, inevitably, the film’s most compelling attraction, is that it co-stars the late Chadwick Boseman (with whom Davis appeared in Get On Up) delivering a volcanic, highly physical live wire performance in his final Golden Globe winning role as her band’s fictional trumpet player, Levee, an ambitious, cocky figure determined to make a name for himself but also troubled by a traumatic past.

First seen on his way to the recording studio, his attention’s caught by a pair of flash, yellow leather shoes which he buys and proudly shows off to his colleagues, and which will prove the catalyst to the film’s sudden, tragic ending. The youngest and a new addition to the ranks, he’s at the Chicago recording studio owned by Sturdyvant (Jonny Coyne), along with bassist Slow Drag (Michael Potts), veteran piano player, Toledo (Glynn Turman) and highly religious trombonist Cutler (Colman Domingo) the band’s de facto leader, to rehearse in the basement ready to lay down material for Ma’s next records, among them her signature tune Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, He, however, has his own ideas for the arrangement they should play, a swing intro designed to hook an audience looking for livelier, more danceable music. His swagger is buoyed by the fact Sturdyvant, seeing crossover potential, has agreed and also expressed interest in his own compositions with a view to recording, a step towards Levee forming his own band and becoming a star in his own right.

However, as Cutler points out, this is Ma’s music and Ma’s band and what she says goes. It’s clear from her first appearance, sporting gold teeth and overdone makeup, arriving in a swanky car driven by her nephew Sylvester (Dusan Brown) along with her latest flirty young pick-up, Dussie Mae (Taylour Paige), and immediately involved in an altercation with another driver, that she’s a blowsy, imperious diva used to getting her own way. Under no illusions as to her status in a white America, she also knows that the sales of her records give her the power to call the shots, something she makes very clear by her late arrival and the demands she makes during the session, declaring “they gonna treat me the way I want to be treated no matter how much it hurt ‘em”, much to the exasperation of her long suffering white manager Irvin (Jeremy Shamos).

Inevitably, then, she immediately slaps down Levee’s proposals, insisting that Sylvester will do the song’s spoken introduction (despite the fact he stutters) and they’ll play it the way it’s always been played. It’s not the only time during the session that Levee’s hopes will be taken away from him.

Much of the drama takes place in the rehearsal room where, in a mix of playful banter and more serious concerns, the conversation variously takes in fashion sense, the history of black oppression, Toledo’s views on the futility of trying to change things (“The coloured man, he’s the leftovers”, he declares after his African Stew monologue), Levee’s seemingly sycophant attitude to white folk, and, tellingly, the story of black man who sold his soul to the Devil and became untouchable. It’s here that, driven by the friction between Levee and Cutler that Boseman’s most electrifying, blisteringly intense scenes take place, first in recounting the childhood trauma of seeing his mother violated by a gang of white ‘crackers’ (who only stopped after scarring his chest with a blade) and what he learnt from his father’s revenge and, subsequently a physical knife-bearing confrontation with Cutler and a subsequent ferocious calling out of God for abandoning him (given added resonance since Boseman was by now dying of cancer) and never intervening to save his mother.

The knife, naturally, has, along with the shoes, a further part to play as the anger within Levee boils over in the wake of Rainey’s veto of his arrangement (his revenge is to have sex on the piano with Dussie Mae) and Sturdyvant’s rejection of his songs (and recording sessions) as of no commercial worth, the final intercut scenes, of course, underling white exploitation of black music as we see them being recorded by an all white line-up. The film will be celebrated and remembered as Boseman’s final and finest hour, but it’s also much more than that. (Netflix)

Made In Italy (12A)

There is of course an uncomfortable real life frisson about pairing Liam Neeson with his son Micheál Richardson as a father and son whose lives were upturned when, the wife and mother was killed in a tragic accident. There again this probably need any emotional support it can muster as it unfolds a well-worn tale of lives being healed under the Tuscan sun (which, of course, was an earlier film of exactly that title).

When his wife died, Robert (Neeson) packed his son off to boarding school (for reasons he explains later), returned to England, developed an artistic block and immersed himself in drink and one night stands. Now they’re estranged and Jack (Richardson) run a London art gallery (which his dad’s never visited) owned by his wife’s family, although he’s taken aback to learn that she’s planning to sell it. They’re going through a divorce and if he wants to keep it then he has to raise the money to buy them out. So, without mentioning the fine print, he duly seeks to persuade his father to sell their old Tuscan family home, which has stood empty for some 20 years. Surprisingly, he agrees, so off they pop to Italy where, overrun with the dust of time, the place is revealed to a prime case of a Fixer Upper, not least for the red and harsh Jackson Pollack-like mural Robert daubed on the wall to vent his grief. A challenge even for practised estate agent to the rich and pretentious, Kate (Lindsay Duncan, who also appeared in that other Tuscan idyll).

Still, albeit Robert less enthusiastically so, the two set about doing the place up and getting rid of the resident weasel, to which end Jack has the help of local single mother divorcee restaurant owner Natalia (Valeria Bilello), signalling of course the inevitable romantic interest. And then what is it that Robert has got padlocked in the nearby shed.

Written and directed by James D’Arcy, it’s cute, sunny and sentimental with attractive Tuscan views to distract you from the threadbare and predictable narrative as renovating the house plays as a glaring metaphor for repairing the father-son relationship and finding new starts. There’s a natural chemistry between Neeson and Richardson and, it makes a change not to see the former killing anyone, but that and the landscape are probably the biggest sells. (Amazon Prime)

Mank (15)

During the Golden Age of Hollywood in the 30s and 40s, screenwriter Herman J Mankiewicz churned out many a motion picture, often without getting any screen credit. Then, in 1941, Orson Welles (Tom Burke), who, for his film debut, had been given carte blanche by RKO studios to make whatever he wanted, with whoever he wanted and with absolute control. So, he enlisted Mankiewicz (Gary Oldman) to write what would turn out to be Citizen Kane.

The only problem was that Mankiewicz, a garrulous ex-journalist, was a notorious drunk who had rubbed many a Hollywood executive the wrong way, getting fired on several occasions, and, on top of which, in the psychodrama version directed by David Fincher from his late father’s screenplay, he’s just broken his leg in a car accident. So, as told in vintage black and white (complete with the ‘burns’ in the corner that were used to indicate a reel change), he’s shipped out to a ranch house in the Mojave desert, ministered to by a German housekeeper, monitored by John Houseman (Sam Troughton) and dictating his script to English secretary Rita Alexander (Lily Collins), all of whom are charged with keeping him away from the booze. Welles, it would seem, has generously provided him a case of whiskey as a reward at the end of the day’s work, except it’s actually Seconal, to knock him out. It may not be what actually happened, but it makes for a compelling narrative.

Told in a series of flashbacks, each introduced with screenplay notes, it shifts back and forth between the writing of the script and the cynical, dishevelled Mankiewicz’s self-sabotaging drunken antics as, the court jester, he acerbically wisecracks his way around tinsel town, and, especially Metro Goldwyn Mayer studios, headed up by the manipulative Louis B. Mayer (Arliss Howard). Mayer tolerates his behaviour until it threatens the studio’s relationship with newspaper magnate Randolph William Hearst (Charles Dance) who, of course, served as the template for the film’s publishing giant Charles Foster Kane.

An affectionate (poison pen) love letter to old Hollywood, it balances the playful and mischievous (a bunch of writers improvising a Frankenstein plot to David O. Selznick) with the much darker side, notably Mank’s fury at learning, between them, the ultra-conservative Meyer and Hearst had, in California’s 1934 gubernatorial election, authorised fake newsreel footage to discredit socialist candidate Upton Sinclair, its fictional director Shelly Metcalf unable to live with what he did. All of which, of course, fed into the screenplay.

It’s a stellar cast with luminous performances from Amanda Seyfield as Marion Davies, a Hollywood comedienne star and the trophy girlfriend of the much older Hearst, who wanted to transform her into as dramatic actress, and with whom Mankiewicz has a platonic romance, alongside Tuppence Middleton as Mank’s long-suffering wife ‘Poor’ Sara, and Tom Pelphrey as his more successful brother Joe. However, it’s Oldman who magnetises the screen with his energy as the dissolute, at times bitter, at others compassionate, erratic genius, falling foul of Welles when, going against their contract, he declares, that he wants a credit, something that sees him almost bumped off the project. The film won one Oscar, Best Screenplay, shared between Mankiewicz and Welles, neither of whom was there to accept, the final moments of Fincher’s film playing out the interview where Mank delivered a brilliant last word on the matter. (Netflix)

The Map of Tiny Perfect Things (12)

A sort of teenage Groundhog Day (to which it makes frequent reference), adapted by Lev Grossman from his 2016 short story, Kyle Allen stars as Mark, a 17-year-old aspiring art student, who shares his home with a younger sister (Cleo Fraser), a workaholic mother he rarely sees and a father (Josh Hamilton) who, apparently, quit work to work on a Civil War the answers to dad’s crossword puzzle. He can also cycle through town preventing mishaps before they occur. That’s because he’s living the same day over and over, resetting like rewinding videocassette, but only he knows it. The advantage is that he can work on different ways to attract the attention of girl (Anna Mikami) to whom he gave directions before she asked when he next meets her at the local pool and stop a ball from hitting her. Until, that is, another girl disrupts the pattern by catching it. Fascinated, he starts to follow her.

This is Margaret (Kathryn Newton), she dreams of working for NASA, has a thing about the fourth dimension and is stuck in the same “temporal anomaly”. Although, initially, she’s not interested, he persists and eventually they start to hang out and decide to ‘collect’ all the small moments, the ‘perfect things’ that happen to people over the course of the day each time it resets: an old lady dancing for joy at winning cards, an eagle swooping on a lake to catch a fish, bikers stopping traffic for a turtle to cross the road, working on the belief that once he’s mapped them all the anomaly will cease and normal time resume. However, for some reason, Margaret refuses to divulge any personal information, is unwilling to progress the friendship into romance and always has to leave at 6pm to take phone call from a hunky doctor named Jared.

There’s a particularly poignant explanation that Mark eventually stumbles on and which explains why she’s in no hurry to close the loop, the film gradually showing him learning not to be blinkered to what’s happening to people other than himself, such as the real reason’s dad’s not at work and, as such, the film carries a certain message as well.

It doesn’t all work, scenes with Mark’s videogamer best friend Henry (Jermaine Harris) feel surplus and his constructing a moon trip experience for Margaret in the school gym is just a little too cheesily cute, but, thanks to the chemistry between the two leads, the emotional punch of the third act and the sheer charm, it’s a loop you’ll be happy to put on repeat. (Amazon Prime)

The Mauritanian (15)

On Nov 20, 2001, recently returned from an electrical engineering scholarship in Germany, Mohamedou Ould Salahi left a wedding reception in his native Mauritania in north-west Africa to accompany the local police for questioning by them and the FBI regarding the planned millennium attack plots earlier that year. He did not return home until Oct 17, 2016. Alleged to have been the chief recruiter for 9/11 ( he had been part of Al Qaeda in the fight against the Russians in Afghanistan, alongside America, but had severed ties), for fourteen of these years he was held in at the US facility at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba, all evidence against him entirely circumstantial (a cousin once called him from Osama Bin Laden’s phone) and without any charge ever being made against him.

In 2005, Nancy Hollander, a defence attorney specialising in human rights, and her associate Teri Duncan travelled from their New Mexico offices to Gitmo to meet with Salahi with a view to representing him, thus beginning a long legal pro bono battle to bring a case of habeas corpus, forever obstructed by the US government in obtaining access to vital documents, that did not come before the US court until 2010.

Now, based on Salahi’s best-selling memoir, Guantanamo Diary, compiled from his letters written from Gitmo to Hollander, director Kevin McDonald brings that story to the screen in a compelling serious-minded procedural drama that adroitly casts Jodie Foster as Hollander alongside Tahar Rahim as Salahi with Shailene Woodley as Teri Duncan and Benedict Cumberbatch as plays the devoutly religious Lt Col Stuart Couch who was given the job of prosecuting “the al Qaeda Forrest Gump” and (a friend having been killed in 9/11) was initially gung ho for the death penalty until he discovered exactly what the US government had been keeping quiet about the treatment of detainees and then refused to continue, declaring that while someone had to pay, it should not just be anyone.

It’s a straightforward telling of events, Hollander and Duncan navigating a minefield of military red tape, redacted documents, and government hostility, travelling back and forth to question the incredibly resilient Salahi who never loses his capacity to smile, as layer by layer the deceptions are peeled away to reveal the truth behind his confessions about his involvement as, in a harrowing flashback montage the horrific 70 uninterrupted days of torture, authorised by Donald Rumsfeld, he underwent at American hands are finally shown. Other flashbacks, to happier times with his family and his childhood also punctuate the drama, further compounding the travesty of justice he suffered, Hollander’s victory as much about defending the process of law and justice as defending a wrongly accused man. Even so, after the prosecution case was thrown out, Salahi remained at Guantánamo for a further six years on the orders of the Obama government. A film that stirs indignation about the way the US government trampled justice, human right, moral principles and the most basic humanity underfoot in a quest for vengeance, it’s perhaps brilliantly summed up in a throwaway shot at Gitmo where it was deemed acceptable to brutalise the detainees but a sing warns there’s a hefty fine for harming an iguana. (Amazon Prime)

Minari (12A)

A loosely autobiographical drama about Korean immigrants in the rural US inspired by writer-director Lee Isaac Chung’s childhood, it stars Steven Yuen as Jacob who, as the film starts, moves his wife Monica (Yeri Han) and their two young kids, Anne (Noel Cho) and David (the scene-stealingly cute and wise Alan S. Kim), her young brother with a weak heart, from California to live in a secondhand mobile home, propped up on cinder blocks in the middle of nowhere Arkansas, using the money saved from years working sexing chickens in the city.

The family’s not best impressed, but while they work in the local chicken hatchery, Jacob’s determined to turn the accompanying land into a farm, growing Korean vegetables to sell for his fellow ex-pats yearning for a taste of home. The soil, he tells his wife, is perfect. Unfortunately, the water supply isn’t. But with the help of eccentric Pentecostal field hand Paul (Will Patton), things initially seem to be starting to look up. Until Jacob’s dream starts hoovering up all their savings. And then, to keep his wife sweet, he agrees for her mother (BAFTA and Oscar Best Actress winner Youn Yuh Jung) to join them, the kids, who have become Americanised, not overly thrilled by the strange foods their mischievous Grandma brings with her. David, who has to share a room, reckons she smells Korean and takes exception to her embarrassing him about his bedwetting issues (he gets his revenge in wickedly funny way). She does, however, bring with her the water celery seeds of the title that she sows in the nearby creek, a versatile crop that (serving as the film’s metaphor) can grow anywhere.

As Jacob’s American Dream falls apart around him and the promised land increasingly becomes less so, so does it impact on family life and the marriage, the film never overplaying the way the fault lines develop and keeping a strong focus on the interaction of the characters making its emotional impact honestly earned. (Amazon Prime, Apple TV, Google Play, Vudu, YouTube)

The Mitchells v The Machines (PG)

Produced by Phil Lord and Christopher Miller who directed The Lego Movie and 22 Jump Street and produced Into The Spider-Verse and the other Lego movies with writer-director team Mike Rianda and Jeff Rowe making their feature debut (with characters based on their own family members), this is hugely entertaining fun animation with a solid message about embracing your inner weirdo and a cautionary tale about letting technology control you rather than the other way around.

When Mark Bowman, head of an Apple-like tech company, introduces his latest invention, an upgrade white humanoid robot servant version of his AI smartphone assistant, he’s not prepared for the Siri-like PAL (voiced by Olivia Colman) to take revenge for being consigned to history by taking control of the robots (who resemble Star Wars’ battle droids) and, Terminator-style, setting out to rid the planet of all humans. She’s not, however, reckoned on the Mitchells.

An oddball family headed up by technophobe Rick (Danny McBride), who wishes everyone would leave their cellphones for at least a few minutes and actually talk to each other round the dinner table, and super-positive wife Linda (Maya Rudolph), they have two kids, young dinosaur-obsessed Aaron (Rianda) who randomly calls people in the phone book to talk about them, and teenage Katie (Abbi Jacobson), an aspiring filmmaker who, on the back of her home videos featuring their cross-eyed pug Monchi, has landed a place at film school in California. However, her relationship with her dad is prickly since he just doesn’t get her and, for reasons explained later, tends to speak of potential failure rather than potential success.

Trying to make up for his comments and behaviour, Rick arranges to take the whole family on a road trip to Katie’s college in their battered orange station wagon and, stopping off at a rundown dinosaur attraction en route, they find themselves at the centre of the worldwide robot attack, rounding up humans and sending them off to their Silicon Valley HQ in flaying green boxes. And so it is the Mitchells end up as the last humans not in captivity and, with the aid of two robots (Fred Armisen, Beck Bennett) whose programming has been send into a spin by being unable to decide if Monchie is a dog, a pig or a loaf of bread, they set out to save the world.

It’s a silly and as anarchic as it sounds and all concerned revel in the opportunity to go wild, both in the use of the animation, which at times includes real YouTube clips as well as cartoon drawings of the family and their escapades, and in a non-stop barrage of gags, none of which miss the target, along with any number of energetic action sequences, including a show down with the world’s biggest Furby in a shopping mall and Linda letting loose her inner Mulan against PAL’s killer robots.

Never losing sight of its central theme of family bonds, father-daughter in particular, it rattles along with unflagging energy and a support cast that includes John Legend and Chrissy Teigen as the Mitchells’ supercool neighbours, this is an absolute joy. (Netflix)

Mortal Kombat (15)

Another unsubtle action outing to let off all the pent up tensions, this is the latest attempt to translate the classic video game into a big screen franchise, one that, in the hand of first-time feature director Simon McQuoid, fares rather better than the misbegotten Paul W Anderson 1995 version starring Christopher Lambert and its equally poor sequel Annihilation. It’s also about a hundred times more violent and bloody as it juggles the silliness with the po-faced seriousness.

Set in a universe divided into several realms, such as Earthrealm and Outworld, in which chosen warriors compete in a tournament called Mortal Kombat with the fate if Earth as the stakes, it opens in 17th-century Japan where famed warrior Scorpion (Hiroyuki Sanada) is killed by his arch-rival Sub-Zero (Joe Taslim), after first turning his wife and young son to ice. However, hidden before the attack, his baby daughter is rescued by glowing eyed Thunder god Lord Raiden (Tadanobu Asano). Cut, then, to the present day and Cole an orphaned and wholly successful cage fighter with a wife and young daughter who’s understandably taken aback to learn he’s of Scorpion’s bloodline (which may explain those visions he keeps getting) and, sporting the iconic birthmark, has been chosen to be Earth’s champion in the upcoming tournament. This throws him together with obnoxious Australian mercenary Kano (Josh Lawson), Special Forces femme fatale (but as yet mark-free) Sonya Blade (Jessica McNamee) and, although he’s part dismembered by Sub-Zero in the early scenes, her colleague Jax (Mehcad Brooks) , who are taken off to Lord Raiden’s desert temple to train under fireball throwing Liu Kang (Ludi Lin) and Kung Lao (Max Huang), who wears a flying buzzsaw for a hat , who seek to unleash their hidden powers before they are pitted against four-armed goliath Goro, blood-thirsty Mileena (Sisi Stringer) with her Joker-like slash of a mouth, the robotically enhanced Kabal and, of course, Sub-Zero, who serve evil Outworld sorcerer Shang Tsung (Chin Han), in the crucial tenth tournament with the fate of Earth up for grabs.

While it may be confusing for non-devotees to keep up and fathom out the what and why, it’s at least never subtle, what with any number of gratuitously gory deaths, including someone sliced in half by a buzzsaw and knives tearing into flesh, the narrative largely consisting of an endless stream of fight sequences punctuated by bickering between the champions and assorted cod philosophising for those with slightly longer attention spans.

Ultimately a violent 100 minute set-up for the sequel (a poster introducing the next game character), it’s junk food moviemaking, it satisfies a need while you consume it, but you’ll have forgotten the taste before the credits end. (Vue)

Moxie (12)

Directed by and featuring Amy Poehler, this is an engaging high school dramedy with a fairly light touch that pivots around a theme of female empowerment in the face of institutionalised sexism and male chauvinism. BFF with Claudia (Lauren Tsai), equally introverted Oregon junior year student Vivian (Hadley Robinson) has her radical streak awakened with the arrival of African-American new girl Lucy (Alycia Pascual-Peña) who, after arguing they should be reading more contemporary relevant books than The Great Gatsby, is immediately targeted for bullying by the obnoxious boorish Mitchell (Patrick Schwarzenegger) whose behaviour is tolerated by the don’t rock the boat school principal (Marcia Gay Harden) as he’s the star of the school’s showcase football team, even though the underfunded girls’ team are far better players.

Following a show piece game during which everyone’s texted an anonymous list ranking students in derogatory terms of things like Best Ass, Best Rack, Most Bangable, Designated Drunk and Future MILF in which Lucy’s particularly subjected to vitriol, motivated by the outspoken Lucy’s defiant attitude and inspired by her own mom’s (Poehler) teenage riot grrrl rebel past (emblemised by dancing around to Bikini Kill’s Rebel Girl), Vivian puts together a photocopied zine she titles Moxie (a favourite word of the principal’s) attacking Mitchell and the school’s misogynistic climate anonymously distributing it around campus.

It’s an immediate hit with the other girls who’ve spent their school life as basically extras in a film starring the boys, inspiring many to equally take stand against the sexism (such as one being sent home for wearing tank top that highlighted her bosom) and, Vivian prompted to produce a second issue (presumably she has unlimited funding to pay for all this) and Moxie quickly becomes a movement.

Interlaced with this is a friendship crisis with Claudia, who feels sidelined by Lucy and whose strict mother keeps her from joining in the protests, and a budding romance with impeccably woke pro-feminist classmate Seth (Nico Hiraga), the only one who becomes aware she’s the one behind the zine. There’s also a minor subplot involving her discovering mom’s own new romance with that nice guy they met in the supermarket (Clark Gregg) that prompts a diner table tantrum in the wake of Vivian’s questioning her own self and values and that feminist revolution requires more than good intentions.

In variously tackling diversity, bully, sexism, the patriarchy and, in the final stretch, rape, while there’s some funny, snappy dialogue and Ike Barinholtz is amusing as the amiable, quietly supportive English class teacher, it perhaps inevitably lacks the wider humour of similar films such as Booksmart, Mean Girls (in which Poehler also played a cool mom) and Election. But nor is it overly earnest in putting across its message, leaving the narrative with poignancy and sweetness in equal measure while dutifully checking the dance scene, clothes shopping and other genre staple boxes.

Backed by a solid ensemble cast of characters from a variety of gender, ethnic and socioeconomic backgrounds that allows individual personalities to shine through, Robinson and Pascual-Peña deliver knockout performances while Poehler ensures the energy and emotional thrust never flag, resulting in an inspirational and entertaining film that speaks not only to its intended teenage girls youth audience but all women who live under the pressure of a culture of toxic masculinity. (Netflix)

News Of The World (12)

Set in 1870, five years after the Civil War, Tom Hanks makes his Western debut, reuniting with director Paul Greengrass for a film that evokes True Grit and The Searchers minus the racism, Hanks plays Capt. Jefferson Kyle Kidd, a former Confederate infantryman who, before the war, ran a newspaper printing company and now, that swept away and, traumatised by what he’s seen and done, has left his wife behind to travel, unarmed save for a rifle that shoots only birdshot, from one Texas town to another, eking out a living –perhaps finding atonement – by giving lively readings from newspapers to bring his audience, still hurting from the war, stories of events from far and wide as they’re called on to be part of the recovery effort.

En route to his next stop, he comes across a wrecked wagon and a trail of blood leading to a tree from where a lynched Black man hangs, tagged with a note that reads “Texas Says No! This is White Man’s Country.” A movement gets his attention and he chases down what proves to be a 10-year-old girl who, it transpires, was being transported, against her will, to her aunt and uncle’s hill country farm hundreds of miles away near San Antonio having been abducted and raised by Kiowa Indians after her settler family were killed six years ago, now orphaned a second time with her Kiowa parents killed by soldiers as part of the reservations being cleared to pave the way for the Pacific Railroad. The girl’s named Johanna (Helena Zengel), but, while German, now only speaks Kiowa. Instructed by passing soldiers to take her to the Indian Agency representative at Red River, he’s informed he can either take her home himself or wait for the Agent to return.

Having no experience in caring for a child, initially seeking to offload her to a shopkeeper couple (Ray McKinnon, Mare Winningham), the feral girl proves too much of a handful and, learning more of her background via kindly Dallas innkeeper Mrs. Gannett (Elizabeth Marvel) speaks some Kiowa, he resolves to ensure she’s safely reunited with her relatives.

Ad so begins a long incident packed journey as the unlikely companions grow to understand more about each other and the differences in the cultures in which they were raised (she learns about forks, he learns about connection to the natural world), forging a bond and reciprocal trust. Their trip’s variously punctuated by run ins with, first a predatory former Confederate soldier (Michael Angelo Covino) and his sidekicks who offer to buy her off Kydd and won’t take no for an answer, leading to a tense shootout in the bluffs (Kydd armed with only a gifted revolver). That’s followed by an encounter with a lawless settlement of renegades presided over by the cruel racist despot Farley (Thomas Francis Murphy), who insists Kydd read from his own self-aggrandising (fake) newsletter and takes umbrage when, instead, he cannily delivers an inspirational account of striking miners rising up against their exploitative taskmasters.

And, of course, eventually, after a stopover to the site of her family’s murder, they inevitably cross paths with the Kiowa, though this plays out far differently and far more hauntingly sad than you might have expected, before finally arriving at the farm, where he leaves her to return and make things right with his wife.

Naturally, given the way things have been set up and the relationship that’s developed, the film has one final predictable chapter that, while sentimental, speaks eloquently of family, love and healing. Essentially a two-hander, playing a man of moral decency is no stretch for Hanks, but his soulful, quietly understated performance never feels rote while Zengel, who only gets to speak a few words of English, is superlative, conveying depths of emotion with her eyes and facial gestures. There’s a brief but memorable turn too from Fred Hechinger as a slow-witted member of Farley’s crew whose eyes and good heart are opened by Kydd’s readings and Johanna’s plight. Needless to say, the landscape is stunning.

Arriving at a time that calls for national divisions to be repaired and the value of the news media has been brought into question, its message of making connections, putting the past behind and moving forward to find peace needed now more than ever. (Netflix)

Nobody (15)

With a screenplay by John Wick co-writer Derek Kolstad and directed by Ilya Naishuller, his first since Hardcore Henry, this is high octane, bloodily violent hyper-stylized action crowdpleaser more concerned with the thrills than narrative cohesion about another one-man army out for revenge.

Here he’s Hutch Mansell (Bob Odenkirk) who, in the opening montage, is presented as a suburban drone living a repetitive life of going to work as an auditor for his wife’s (Connie Nielsen) company, missing the refuse collector and other equally drab routines. Then, one night, two robbers break into his home and, while he has a chance to take out the one with the gun when his teenage son (Gage Monroe) wrestles the other, he backs off and lets them go with their handful of spoils, resulting in him being mocked by everyone, son included, for being such a pussy. However, discovering they’ve taken his young daughter’s kitty cat bracelet, having seen a tattoo on the female burglar’s wrist, he sets out to track them down, armed with an outdated FBI badge and gun belonging to his dad (Christopher Lloyd).

This, in turn, leads to a brutal encounter on a bus with a bunch of drunk thugs, one of whom turns out to be the brother of Yulian Kuznetsov (Aleksei Serebryakov) a Russian mobster nightclub manager and singer who’s babysitting a pile of loot for the Russian mafia (Michael Ironside included) who sends his goons to Hutch’s house for revenge. Bad move, since, we’ve no learnt he’s not some ordinary Deathwish vigilante, but a highly trained former secret forces killing machine who now gets to release all his pent-up frustrations, aided and abetted by dad and a no nonsense sharpshooter adoptive brother Harry (RZA) for a full-on shoot ‘em up climax complete with death by landmine.

With a soundtrack that ranges from Nat King Cole to Pat Benatar, a cameo by Colin Salmon and taken at a breathless pass, it’s braindead popcorn fodder laced with an assortment of ingenious scenes, such as a novel use of a fire extinguisher to escape being trapped in a speeding car, but every bit as much guilty fun as it sounds. (Cineworld 5 Ways, NEC, Solihull; Empire Great Park; Everyman; Odeon Birmingham, Broadway Plaza Luxe, West Brom; Reel; Vue)

Nomadland (12A)

The triumphant winner of Best Film, Director and Actress at the Oscars, adapted from Jessica Bruder’s non-fiction Nomadland: Surviving America in the Twenty-First Century, this ever bit a slow burn, spare, quasi-documentary style work as Chloé Zhao’s previous film The Rider. Echoing the title, it kind of drifts and meanders without a clear destination in sight, but it’s the journey not the arriving that makes it so extraordinary.

Frances McDormand is Fern, recently widowed, a former substitute teacher and a victim of the economic downturn in Empire, Nevada, the local gypsum works being forced the close and the town even having its post code discontinued. As such, she’s made houseless, but not homeless, taking to the road with a few possessions, including the china plates her father collected, in her camper van, which she names Vanguard, living an itinerant life along with a nomadic, largely, elderly community of likeminded and similarly affected souls, working zero hours contracts in Amazon warehouses or burgers bars to make money for food and gas, moving on – in Fern’s case to Arizona – when the demand or the weather changes.

In her early sixties, she’s a flinty and determined oddball, never given to self-pity, kindly and compassionate to those she meets in need of comfort or whatever help she can offer, receiving their kindness in return. Most notably among them are David (David Strathairn), a kindly senior citizen with a strained relationship with his son back home and who offers the possibly of something more than friendship, and, Linda May who first brings her into the nomadic community by inviting her to the regular Rubber Tramp Rendezvous meetup and has found escape from despair through life on the road. She, like pretty much everyone else in the film including, the group’s leader, Bob Wells (who has a heartbreaking backstory), all featured as part of Bruder’s book, are playing themselves.

There’s very little by way of a drama (a flat tyre, an accident with a cardboard box), the film essentially a collection of small, naturalistic scenes punctuated here and there by monologues of wisdom (memorably one of ineffable beauty by a character named Swankie), some moving confessionals, a reunion and, for Fern, a slow emerging from the grief that, while she’s physically on the move, has held her in emotional stasis.

The political commentary on contemporary America is never in your face, but you always feel its subtle presence as Zhao crafts an almost dreamlike experience that, capturing a little seen American landscape with visual poetry, never forces or manipulates your response to of feelings for the characters or their broken dreams, who are defined by joy rather than sadness, although it’s fair to say the third act, which has her returning home to ask her sister for a loan and visiting David now back with his family feels more narratively hands on. But even so, this is an exquisite snapshot of an unseen America that will seep into your soul and linger for months. (Disney + Star; Vue)

The Old Guard (15)

Following on from Mad Max and Atomic Blonde, Charlize Theron further underscores her cool action movie persona as Ancient Greece warrior Andromache of Scythia aka Andy, the head of a small group of immortal mercenaries that also comprises Booker (Matthias Schoenaerts), who gained immortality after dying in the Napoleonic Wars and Joe (Marwan Kenzari) and Nicky (Luca Marinelli) who became gay lovers while fighting on opposing sides in the Crusades. Keeping a low profile so as not to attract attention to themselves, they’ve fought on the side of right through the centuries, to which end, brought back together after a year apart, although, disillusioned by humanity’s continued inability to redeem itself, she declares “The world can burn for all I care”, she’s persuaded by former CIA operative Copley (Chiwetel Ejiofor) to rescue 17 schoolchildren abducted in South Sudan.

However, this turns out to be a set up aimed at capturing them and harvesting their DNA engineered by pharmaceuticals CEO Merrick (Harry Melling, unrecognisable from his role as Harry Potter’s Dudley Dursley) who claims he wants to end cognitive decline, but whose actual motives are rather less altruistic.

The corporate villain has become something of a cliché and the film, self-adapted by Greg Ruckahich from his graphic novels and which sees director Gina Prince-Bythewood spreading her wings after romantic dramas, never seems as assured in the basic plot framework as it does in handling the character interplay and the action sequences.

The quartet are soon joined by a fifth member, American Marine Nile Freeman (KiKi Layne) who, much to her confusion and the unease of her fellow soldiers, recovers from a fatal neck-wound in Afghanistan without so much as a scar. A psychic bond between fellow immortals leads to Andy rescuing her from the military base and, after a mano a mano fight aboard a transport plane, recruiting her to the cause, though she remains understandably freaked out about the whole set-up.

Not that, with Merrick’s paramilitary squad on their tail, anyone has a great deal of time to sit around reflecting on the cost of immortality and rapid healing, and never knowing when your time will be up. The character depth is thickened by the revelation that Andy is haunted by guilt over the fate of her first fellow immortal, Quynh (Van Veronica Ngo) following their capture during the witchcraft trials.

As such, the film jumps around from Africa and Southern Asia to rural Paris as the group elude pursuit and seek to track down Copley before, after a betrayal and two abductions for experimentation, it all climaxes in an extended shoot-out at Mannix’s London HQ.

Dressed in black (though flashbacks have her in Amazonian armour) with a bob-cut, Theron strides confidently through the film, delivering action and conflicted character complexity and psychological baggage with equal skill, and she’s well-supported by her four peers, Layne especially strong while Schoenaerts provides soulful melancholia and Kenzari and Marinelli introduce a degree of humour and tenderness.

With one of the group apparently losing their immortality and a six months later end credits scene that sets up further mystery and intrigue, this is clearly envisioned as an ongoing narrative, both as high octane action and exploring what it means to be human; it most certainly deserves a sequel. (Netflix)

One Night in Miami (15)

On February 25, 1964, cocky 22-year-old Cassius Clay defeated Sonny Liston in Miami to become the world heavyweight champion. The race laws being he was unable to celebrate in the white part of town, he drove to the Hampton House Hotel in a black neighbourhood where he planned to party with his friends, singer Sam Cooke, NFL star Jim Brown and Nation of Islam spokesman Malcolm X. The latter, understandably paranoid and troubled, accompanied by his two bodyguards, had booked a room, but, ice cream the only refreshment, partying was the last thing on his mind.

Adapted by Kemp Powers from his acclaimed 2013 play and marking the feature directorial debut of Oscar-winning actress Regina King, the film imagines what might have down in the room that night, the X (British rising star Kingsley Ben-Adir) laying into Cooke (Leslie Odom Jr., who does his own singing), fresh from a humiliating experience of being ignored by the all-white audience for his Copacabana show, for not using his music to speak of social – and specifically black – issues (holding up Dylan’s Blowing In The Wind as a role model), but rather selling out to the white pop market. The night also sees Clay (Eli Goree) announce that he’s becoming a Muslim, but later accuses his mentor of using him to further his own agenda, while Brown (Aldis Hodge), who’s seen earlier experiencing racism when a Georgia grandee (Beau Bridges), a self-declared supporter and admirer, won’t let him past the porch because “we don’t let niggers in the house”, talks about how he’s looking to run a parallel career in the movies.

It turns into an evening of confrontations and discussions about racism, politics and black responsibilities, each man with their own insecurities, all of them on the edge of making a transition in their lives (Clay becoming Muhammed Ali, X quitting the Nation to form his own movement, Brown retiring from football, Cooke famously appearing on Johnny Carson to sing Change Is Gonna Come, the lost footage recreated here) and examining who they actually are.

It’s heavily dialogue driven, but the performances, Ben-Adir the engine, ensure it’s never dry or lacking in dynamic, while X’s suspicions about some white men he things are following him, his call home to his wife in Detroit to reassure her and a scene of them being firebombed all add to the tension and atmosphere, but there is also room for humour, be it Clay’s preening narcissism or one of the bodyguards’ fanboy request for autographs.

Knowingly theatrical, although opened up with a prologue where Clay’s beaten by Henry Cooper and with several scenes beyond the room’s four walls, but never stagey, it raises still highly charged issues and leaves you, as with its four icons, pondering how to address them. (Amazon Prime)

Peter Rabbit 2: The Runaway (PG)

There’s a curious case of having your cake and eating it to this sequel based around the Beatrix Potter characters in that, now married to McGregor (Domhnall Gleeson wildly overacting), Bea (Rose Byrne) is approached by a smooth-talking major publisher, Nigel Basil-Jones (David Oyelowo), who wants to bring her stories to a wider audience, but to do so would mean departing from their simple innocence, such as having them wear t-shirts, going surfing or even into outer space. Bea is seduced by the idea, especially after he gives her a snazzy car, but McGregor feels this is betraying her principles and the characters, which, of course, are based on the animals on and around the farm where they live.

And yet the film itself seeks to do the very same thing for the same reasons, exaggerating it all into a frantic caper movie based, rather obviously, on Oliver Twist (in case you miss it, Rose starts reading Charles Dickens). In his game plan, the publisher wants to give the various characters defined personalities, with Peter (James Corden) being cast as the Bad Seed (with, self-referential joke, an annoying voice), reinforcing his feeling that, despite a tentative peace between him and McGregor, he’s always getting blamed for everything by McGregor, even when he’s not bene up to mischief. So, when everyone troops off to Gloucester (and if you think this means introducing Potter’s The Tailor of Gloucester into the plot, pat yourself on the back), he takes off my himself and runs into Barnabas (Lennie James), an old friend of his father’s who’s stealing fruit from the market and invites him to become part of his gang. So, deciding that if he’s always going to be seen as the villain of the piece, then he might as well be, Peter joins up with Barnabas’s crew, including masterplanner Samuel Whiskers and rough and ready felines Tom Kitten and Mittens (Hayley Attwell).

After showing Peter the ropes in how to get yourself adopted by humans so you can raid their food cupboard, Barnabas announces his big plan is to steal the dried fruit from Gloucester’s weekly market, persuading Peter to rope in all his friends, Flopsy (Margot Robbie) and Mopsy (Elizabeth Debicki), Cottontail (Aimee Horne), Mrs Tiggy-Winkle (Sia), Jemima Puddle-Duck (Byrne), Pigling Bland (Ewen Leslie), Mr. Jeremy Fisher (Gleeson), Tommy Brock (Sam Neill) and even Felix D’eer (Christian Gazel), to help pull it off.

Throwing in assorted amusing moments along the way (Cottontail having his first sugar high on jelly beans – or the hard stuff a Whiskers calls them), McGregor rolling down the hill, the old gag about standing on each other’s shoulders in a raincoat to pass off as one person, D’eer on a parachute) as well as a car chase, it naturally spins a message about family, friendship, being true to yourself and judging others by your preconceptions of them as it heads towards its rather rushed big finish (Bea, Peter and McGregor having to rescue the others from their assorted fates after being sold on by the local pet shop). McGregor even discovers Peter can talk.

While doing an equally good job of integrating the CGI animals alongside the actors, it lacks the charm and sweetness of Paddington and, like the books Basil-Jones wants to publish has very little in common with Potter’s stories, but the slapstick should keep the youngsters happy enough and, it has to be said, it does have a very clever spin on the obligatory lavatory gag. (Cineworld 5 Ways, NEC, Solihull; Empire Great Park; Everyman; Odeon Birmingham, Broadway Plaza Luxe, West Brom; Reel; Vue)

Pixie (15)

Cheerfully sporting its Tarantino and John Michael McDonagh influences, directed by Barnaby Thompson and written by Preston Thompson, this comedy thriller set in Co. Sligo, is great fun. The step-daughter of local drugs baron gangster Dermot O’Brien (Colm Meany), the spunkily ruthless but irresistible Pixie (Olivia Cooke) sets out to avenge her dead mother and score the money she needs to go to San Francisco, setting in motion a plot that involves her new lover Fergus recruiting her ex, Colin (Rory Fleck Byrne), to steal a consignment of MDMA from a syndicate of drug dealing Catholic priests, headed up by her step-father’s old rival, Father McGrath (Alec Baldwin). This leaves the priests dead and, subsequently, the jealous Colin putting a bullet in Fergus’s head, heading off with the bagful of drugs to have words with Pixie and himself ending up in the boot of a car driven by the naïve Harland (newcomer Daryl McCormack) who’s sitting outside her house waiting for his directionless best mate, Frank (Ben Hardy, Roger Taylor in Bohemian Rhapsody) who’s inside supposedly getting shagged. And that’s just the start.

Now they and Pixie find themselves thrown together with Colin’s body in the boot, first trying to offload the drugs to a local dealer’s Dingle-based uncle (Dylan Moran) and then on the run across the county, Pixie’s step-brother, who reckons dad’s lost his grip, looking to bring her down using the family’s pet hitman (Ned Dennehy), before setting up a deal with McGrath that culminates in a rival gangs shoot-out in an abandoned church.

Taking its cue from Westerns, it romps along with a copious supply of blood, violence and knowingly spark dialogue as the various characters seek to outmanoeuvre on another, before you get to the revelation about Pixie’s mother’s death and how it ties everything together. It makes a couple of unnecessary plot detours, such as snogging threeway between Pixie, Frank and in which the latter realise the extent of their bromance, but, putting a fresh spin on some old clichés, it otherwise proves a welcome escapist delight, not least for the sight of a gun toting nun. Father Ted was never like this. It had me at gangster priests. (Amazon Prime)

Promising Young Woman (15)

Named Best British Film and both BAFTA and Oscar winner for Original Screenplay, the feature debut by writer-director Emerald Fennell (a scripter for Killing Eve and who played Camilla Parker-Bowles in The Crown) is also nominated for a raft of Oscars, among them Best Picture, Director and Actress, a deserving nod for Carey Mulligan. She gives a mesmerising performance as Cassie, an emotionally closed-off 30-year-old who once had a bright future as a doctor and now lives with her parents (Jennifer Coolidge, Clancy Brown), who give her a suitcase for her birthday, and works as a barista in a coffee shop manage by her friend (Laverne Cox). By night, however, she hangs out in bars, pretending to be drunk and gets picked up by supposed nice guys who offer to take her home and then try to take advantage of her, at which point she turns on them.

A toxic masculinity rape revenge thriller (though the circumstances are deliberately not made clear until the end as she targets the prime object of her vengeance), told in chapters, it variously has her turning the tables on an opportunistic young professional (Adam Brody), taking a crowbar to an asshole’s pick up truck and electrifying confrontations with the dean of her former med school (Connie Britton( and another lawyer academic (Alfred Molina), both of whom were involved in the aftermath of a group sexual assault on her childhood friend Nina.

She’s also involved with two other characters, a former friend and classmate Madison (Alison Brie) and Ryan (Bo Burnham), a former medical school colleague who’s now a successful paediatrician, with whom she embarks on a romantic relationship. However, both are closely linked to the driving trauma and, as things get progressively darker, her involvement with them is clearly part of her agenda, one that sees her turning up in stripper nurse costume for a stag do.

Lacing the unsettling narrative with dashes of romcom, it keeps you unsure of where it’s heading, making the shockingly unexpected climax all the more jawdropping in its horror and audacity, but also brilliantly laying out Cassie’s careful planning ahead, as the credits play out to track called Last Laugh.

Both consumed with rage, clearly unhinged and wracked with pain, self-loathing and vulnerability, Mulligan is sensational, the film compellingly gathering power and ferocity like some #MeToo Death Wish or Angel of Vengeance that leaves you equally stunned and gratified. (Sky)

A Quiet Place: Part II (15)

Three years ago, in his second film as a director, John Krasinski rewrote the alien-invasion/horror textbook with a film that, white knuckle tense, featured almost no dialogue as the characters, who communicated with sign language, had to remain silent as the invading creatures, while blind, hunted through hearing sound. Now, this time also writing the screenplay, he’s delivered a sequel to match while also cranking up the drama and emotional core.

Although his character, Lee Abbott, died protecting his family in the previous film, he’s written himself in with a prologue that flashes back to when, in the middle of a kids’ baseball match, the creatures first invaded with a terrifying sequence as they rampage through their town, he and his deaf daughter Regan (Millicent Simmonds) and his wife Evelyn (Emily Blunt and their two sons) initially separated, before they manage to pile into the truck and escape. Cut to day 474, Lee and their youngest son, Beau, dead, Regan, surviving son Marcus (Noah Jupe) and Evelyn, now with a new baby, making their way along the sand trail from their ruined farm, lugging an oxygen canister and the radio transmitter device that can disarm the creatures with them, to find a new refuge and perhaps other survivors at the end of the fire they see burning in the night.

And so it is they come upon Emmett (Cillian Murphy), an old friend, who, his own family gone, has forged a secure bolt hole in an abandoned steel mill but who, declaring there’s nothing left worth saving, initially refuses to help other than allowing them to stay for the night. Regan, however, is determined to spread word of the alien’s weakness and sneaks off to ty and find the source of the music, Bobby Darin’s Beyond The Sea, that’s being beamed out like a beacon. Persuading Emmett to follow and bring her back, the film then separates into three different narratives, that of Regan and Emmett as they look to get a boat to take them out to an island where the transmitter is apparently based, including a frightening encounter with a group of feral hostiles and a subsequent bloody alien attack, Evelyn as she ventures back into town to secure more oxygen and medicine for the anxiety-prone Mason whose foot was injured in a bear trap, and he himself, back at Emmett’s sanctuary, looking after the baby with the oxygen running low and a creature on the loose.

Despite dividing the focus, Krasinski never loses his grip on the electrifying tension, delivering series of action-packed set pieces as, over the course of a tight running time, the body count rises, and the characters all find themselves in desperate peril. The secret of the island is eventually revealed, only for what seems like hope found to come crashing down around everyone’s ears. Nor does he lose sight of the fact that it’s the family bonds that are the film’s beating heart, making audiences fully invest in the characters’ fates.

Borrowing elements from Aliens, Jaws and Jurassic Park and again employing a masterful use of sound design alongside jump scares, the pace and drama never let up, with the cast delivering focused and commanding performances, Simmonds in particular taking centre stage as a sort of teenage deaf Ripley using her hearing aid to induce the feedback that cripples the monsters long enough to shoot them. Essentially a bridging film that, with its abrupt ending, sets up the third part, it has Evelyn repeating her mantra to ‘just breathe’. Audiences might need reminding to do so too. (Cineworld 5 Ways, NEC, Solihull; Empire Great Park; Everyman; Odeon Birmingham, Broadway Plaza Luxe, West Brom; Reel; Vue)

Rare Beasts (18)

The directorial debut of Billie Piper, who also wrote the screenplay and stars, this addresses themes of gender roles and female self-esteem and insecurity in a manner not dissimilar to her TV series I Hate Suzie. Piper is Mandy, a self-deprecating 30-something Londoner looking to make a career in TV production, who lives with her terminally ill chain-smoking mother (Kerry Fox) and has a difficult relationship with boozy absent father (David Thewlis) who, while not out of the picture, refuses to take on any family responsibility. She also has a seven-year-old son Larch (Toby Woolf) who is clearly on the spectrum with an array of behavioural problems that, unable to cope, she simply tries to ignore.

We first meet her on a date with patronising colleague Pete (Leo Bill) who, after professing to be highly religious, then embarks on a weed-stoked conversation as to how good she would be at oral sex given her teeth. The night doesn’t end promisingly, but the relationship surprisingly progresses, Mandy introducing him to Larch as the film wanders through assorted moments of awkward sex, days out and even a disastrous trip to a wedding in Spain with Lily James as a post-post-post feminist bride. There’s temper tantrums by Larch, blazing rows and all manner of confrontations as Piper’s edgy narrative digs deep into her characters insecurities, Pete not helping by agreeing with all her self-deprecating observations.

Unfortunately, unfolding in a non-linear manner with constant extreme close-ups and stylised performances, the whole thing has a very artificial, theatrical air, including Mandy hearing the inner-voices of women passing by, making it hard to involve and giving the feeling that Piper was perhaps trying just a little too hard to make an impact, and ending up not really making any at all. (Netflix; Sat-Thu: MAC)

Raya and the Last Dragon (PG)

Disney’s first Southeast Asian heroine makes her debut in this stirring animated adventure set in a mythical land in the ancient time of dragons and which serves up an inspirational message about the need for and power of trust.

Taking the shape of a dragon the map, Kumundra was once a united land, but, drawn perhaps by growing discontent among the peoples from its different regions, there came the monstrous Druun, a plague of tornado-like creatures that turned people to stone. In one last valiant effort, the remaining dragons who protected the land combined their power in a gemstone which, before they too were petrified, they entrusted to Sisu who used it to destroy the Druun but who, apparently perished herself in doing so. Leap forward 500 years and the land has become fragmented, the regions, representing their position on the map, now divided into Heart, the densely forested Spine, market-town Talon, the desert wasteland Tail and, isolated and protected from the Druun by surrounding waters, Fang, with the dragon stone and its remaining magic safely protected by Benja (Daniel Dae Kim), leader of the Heart and father to young Raya (Kelly Marie Tran) who, in the opening scenes, earns her right to become one of its guardians. Beja’s dream is to reunite Kumandra, to which end he invites the different tribes to a feast and calls upon them to join together once again. However, duped into trusting Namaari (Gemma Chan), the princess daughter of the Fang leader, Raya innocently leads her to the stone, only to be double-crossed, the gem broken into five pieces and stolen by the other tribes and, in turn, seeing the return of the Druun.

Saved by her father before he’s turned to stone, the story moved on six years as the now grown Raya, dressed in flowing cape, carrying a pretty impressive sword and accompanied by her now equally giant pillbug Tuk Tuk (a sort of armadillo that can curl into a ball which she rides like a spherical horse), is searching the land, seeking to find Sisu who, legend has it, still lives at the end of one of the many rivers, and recover the other gem fragments to destroy the Druun, restore her father to life and, possibly fulfil his dream.

Finally, she does indeed reawaken Sisu (an exuberant Awkafina), who turns out be a somewhat ditzy glowing blue teen dragon (“I gotcha girl. WHO’S your dragon?”) proud of her swimming skills. Unfortunately, Raya’s been followed by Namaari who has her own quest to recover all the gem shards to keep Fang safe and so the film unfolds into a sort of Tomb Raider road movie as Raya and Sisu, who can take on human form, joining forces with representatives from the different tribes, first young shrimp seller Boun (Izaac Wang) aboard his floating restaurant followed, after accompanying battles and escapades, a con baby and her three thieving monkeys and one-eyed warrior Tong (Benedict Wong), all of whom have lost family to the Druun, gathering the shards until only the one in Fang remains to be recovered. Not that Namaari is going to let her get her hands on that.

Deftly mixing action, emotion and humour, the film rattles along, addressing such themes as greed, environmental crises, family and friendship before, prompted by the optimistic Sisu, finally returning to the central message that if you’re going to overcome shared problems, then you need to get past your differences and have trust to work together for a common cause. All that and some farting beetles for the kids. (Disney +; Odeon Birmingham, West Brom; Vue)

Run (12)

Chloe Sherman (Kiera Allen) is a 17-year-old high school senior who, confined to a wheelchair, was born paralysed from the waist down and also suffers from asthma and arrhythmia. Homeschooled by her ultra-supportive loving single mother, Diane Paulson, she’s overcome her ailments, become a skilled electronics engineer and is awaiting news about her university applications, her conditions managed by a series of pills.

Then, one day, she finds a pill bottle in the grocery bag with her mother’s name on it and the pills looks very familiar. She questions this but is told that they’re actually part of her prescription. Not convinced, she starts trying to check things out, somewhat complicated by the fact the internet is down, she’s not allowed a cell phone and mum keeps a close eye on her. However, devising a plan to get into town and visit the pharmacy, she makes a shocking discovery about the medication, which throws her whole life and her mother into a terrifying new light.

Without giving too much way, it won’t be a huge surprise to learn Diane and her motivations aren’t what they seem and that the pills may be exacerbating rather than controlling Chloe’s conditions. There’s further revelation as Aneesh Chaganty’s nailbiting thriller gathers momentum, at one point Chloe having to escape from her locked bedroom by crawling long the roof, finally climaxing in hospital after taking drastic actions. Newcomer Allen is terrific as the determined and resourceful teenager while Paulson delivers a subtle, measured turn in a role that had the potential to be played as a hysterical scenery chewer. Psychologically, it never digs too deeply, but it ratchets up the tension perfectly, ending with a chilling coda that, were it in a cinema, would surely elicit a rousing cheer from the audience. (Netflix)

Saint Maude (15)

Somewhat overly in thrall to Dario Argento perhaps, but this inventive religious fervour gothic horror debut from writer-director Rose Glass with its taught 84 minute running time, undeniably gets under the skin. Delivering an awards-worthy performance of intense complexity in her first lead role, Morfydd Clark is Maud, or at least that’s what she’s currently calling herself, a mousy born again palliative nurse with a Christ complex now working on an agency basis following an incident with a hospital patient. Based in an unnamed seedy British seaside town (it was filmed in Scarborough), her new client is Amanda Kohl (an outstanding Jennifer Ehle), a former celebrity dancer and choreographer now consigned to bed and wheelchair a la Norma Desmond with terminal spinal lymphoma and clearly not long for this world, although, hedonist to the end, she’s not about to forsake drink, cigarettes or lesbian sex (Lily Frazer). Patently unreligious, Maud sees it as God’s mission for her to save this lost soul and bring her to God in the same way she found salvation; however, while Kohl briefly plays long, pretending to feel the Holy Spirit orgasmically within her, it’s clear she’s just cruelly humouring Maud, something she makes abundantly clear at a party that ends in her dismissal. Maud, however, is not done with her yet.

An early indication of Maud’s mental state comes when she give money to a beggar and walks away advising him not to waste his pain, advice she takes to heart as, echoing ascetics who would self-harm as a form of devout suffering, she inserts a pad with drawing pins into her shoes in an excruciating scene to watch. When the embittered Kohl calls her “the loneliest girl I’ve ever seen”, it’s not just mockery.

Along with the Argento flourishes, Glass’s impressionistic film also draws inspirations from Carrie, The Exorcist (a levitation scene is ambiguously misleading), Repulsion, Morvern Callar and Under The Skin , the brooding lighting and camera work and emphatic score further accentuating the intensity as, varying its perspective from Maud’s internal psychological turmoil and (part driven by images from the Blake illustrations given her by Kohl) delusional out of body experiences (at one point the voice of a subtitled Christ talks to her in ancient Hebrew), it builds to a brace of horrific climaxes after a doubt-fuelled night of carnality on the town as Maud’s sanity finally collapses. It could, perhaps, have done without the digital angel wings Maud imagines herself sporting, a sly halo allusion earlier is more effective, but this undeniably buries its way into your mind with a shudder. (Amazon Prime)

Six Minutes to Midnight (15)

Prior to WWII, in the mid to late-1930s, Augusta Victoria School in Bexhill-on-Sea, East Sussex served as finishing school for the daughters of the Nazi elite, working on the premise that Germany wouldn’t invade and put the girls at risk. It was run by Frau Helene Rocholl (here played by Judy Dench), a German sympathiser well connected to the Nazi regime, Working from this true story and titled from the doomsday clock (though 1154 also has an unlikely narrative role), co-writer Eddie Izzard spins a tale in which he plays Thomas Miller, an undercover British agent who takes the post as English teacher after his spy predecessor disappears (washing up on the shore after being murdered by an unknown assailant) while Carla Juri is sports teacher Ilse Keller who oversees the girls (of whom only Tijan Marei as bespectacled outcast Gretel has anything like a character), and secretly indoctrinates them about the Jewish menace and is charged with getting them bac to Germany so they can’t be taken hostage when war breaks out.

Feeling like a piss poor sub-Hitchcock period melodrama, the longer it trundles on the more ludicrous the plot becomes and the worse the dialogue and the acting, especially with the arrival of James D’Arcy’s clearly shady detective after Miller’s accused of murdering his handler, while director Andy Goddard is so fond of having Izzard running from his pursuers that he repeats such scenes over and over to the point of being ridiculous. Quite what persuaded Dench, who provides some needed gravitas in the circumstances, and Jim Broadbent, who plays a cheery bus driver, to sign on is a total mystery, but then so is the fact that this ever got made in the first place. (Sky; Sat-Wed; MAC))

Soul (PG)

Directed by Pete Docter, this BAFTA/Oscar winner is up there with the very best of Pixar’s animation, a film which, like Inside Out and Up, offers different levels for both children and adult audiences with its cocktail of absorbing narrative, physical comedy, emotional depth and profound intelligence as it addresses, basically, the meaning of life.

Joe Gardner (Jamie Foxx) is a bespectacled, New York middle-school music teacher with dreams of being a jazz piano player like his father, much to the disapproval of his seamstress mother who just wants him to get a job with security. As fate would have it, both opportunities come on the same day. He’s awarded a full time post at school and, thanks to an old pupil, also gets to audition tinkling the ivories for jazz saxophonist star Dorothea Williams (Angela Bassett). She offers him a place with her quartet for that night’s jazz club show, but, as he’s walking home, high on happiness, he falls down a manhole and finds himself a blue blob no nose soul on, quite literally, a stairway to heaven, although here referred to as the Great Beyond. It’s an inter-dimensional realm managed by shape shifting incorporeal beings which look like that 2-dimensional Cubic drawings and are called Jerry (variously voiced by, among others, Alice Braga, Wes Studi and Richard Ayoade), where as yet unborn souls are assigned personality traits at the You Seminar before earning their spark, or purpose, that will give them a pass to begin a life on Earth.

Mistakenly assumed to be a mentor, Joe’s assigned to 22 (Tina Fey), a troublesome soul in waiting with a voice “that annoys people “who, despite the best efforts of Mother Teresa, Copernicus and Gandhi, has no desire to be born at all or transition to Earth. However, with Joe’s body in a coma in hospital, he’s determined to return and, with the help of a Moonwind (Graham Norton), an astral plane pirate captain soul whose human body is aged hippy guru sign spinner on Earth, so he does, except, 22 accidentally dragged along, Joe ends up in the body of Mr. Mittens, the therapy cat, and 22 in his. Now, 22 discovering living isn’t as terrible as she’d imagined, the reluctant buddies must embark on an existential fish-out-of-water quest to switch their souls before 7pm so he can play the gig, but, meanwhile, finding himself one short, soul counter Jerry (Rachel House) is on Joe’s trail to fulfil his quota.

Echoing elements of A Matter of Life and Death, What Dreams May Come as well as Pixar’s own Wreck It Ralph, it’s a spellbinding film, funny and moving by turn, filled with such wonderful set pieces as 22 as Joe’s visit to a barbershop which speaks about finding happiness in what you do even it wasn’t what you original dream and how obsession can cut you off from having a life.

Rich with a seamlessly integrated jazz score (Joe’s talent for improvisation serving him well away from the piano too), it’s as vivid in detail and colour as it is profound in its philosophising on what constitutes the essence of out very soul as well as pointed observations such as “You can’t crush a soul here. That’s what life on Earth is for!” In a virtual Disney heresy, as Joe comes to learn his true talent might be as a teacher not a musician, it also says that, sometimes, achieving your dream might not be all you hoped for. But that, as Soul so poignantly observes, is what life is all about. (Disney +)

Sound of Metal (15)

Riz Ahmed is on a high. Following on from the critically acclaimed Mogul Mowgli, he’s now another musician whose career is derailed by illness. Here, in writer-director Darius Marder’s debut, he’s Ruben, who, the words ‘Please Kill Me’ tattooed on his chest, plays drums for his singer-guitarist girlfriend Lou (Olivia Cooke) in their gender-reversed White Stripes grungey noisecore duo Blackgammon. He’s first seen pummelling the kit in the middle of a tour while she screams out the song amid distorted guitar.

They’re not exactly making a fortune but they’re doing okay, playing the music they love and sharing a ramshackle RV home. And then it all falls apart when, without warning, in the middle of a gig the sound suddenly muffles and he has to rely on instinct to finish the show. An urgent visit to a doctor reveals that he’s not just going deaf, but, for whatever reason, his hearing has virtually all gone. And it’s not coming back.

Initially, he tries to play by memory, refusing to admit defeat or, even tell Lou what the problem is, but the impact of not hearing what he’s playing or anything in the world around him, threatens to tear him apart. He could have a cochlear implant, but his hearing will never be the same, and, besides, the cost is beyond their means. Instead, he’s persuaded by Lou to join a remote deaf community for recovering addicts overseen by Joe (a compelling Paul Raci, a real-life deaf musician), a no-nonsense Vietnam veteran lip reader who seeks to teach those under his charge to make peace with their condition and not see deafness as a disability.

Hostile at first, especially given Joe’s tough love approach, Ruben gradually begins to assimilate into the community (played by deaf actors), learning sign language (prompting several warmingly rewarding scenes of togetherness), helping out and bonding with the local deaf kids in local school. But despite all this, being away from his music and from Lou exacerbate his inner conflict, eventually resolving to have the operation, whatever the cost, even though it means he can then never return to the community. And so Ruben does recover his hearing, in a fashion, but it’s clear that what once was has gone forever and, in a visit to Lou, now staying with her father (Mathieu Amalric), that could well include their personal as well as professional relationship.

With a gradually unfolding backstory that reveals their shared experiences of addiction (she has scars on her arms, he swapped drugs for drum) that eventually united them, it packs a devastating emotional impact as it charts Ruben’s initial denial, his self-destructive attempt to ignore what’s happening to him, the arguments between the couple, her unswerving support a molten cocktail of anger and empathy, the sacrifices made and the prices paid, all forging a visceral power and sensitivity with a never-better Ahmed at the centre of the storm as he questions his worth as a musician and a man until he finds and accept the new reality of his life.

Ahmed’s performance is perhaps only rivalled by the film’s sound design which takes you inside Ruben’s head to experience his hearing loss directly and also the disorienting distortion of sound he experiences after the implant, it also highlights the quieter moments in Ruben’s journey to acceptance and coming of age. Come on, feel the noise. (Amazon Prime; MAC)

Spiral: From The Book of Saw (18)

Just because it has a more luminous cast list, headed up by Chris Rock and Samuel L Jackson, who must have been at a loose end for the few hours his role must have taken, this doesn’t make the latest instalment in the creaky torture porn franchise any better than its predecessors.

While Jigsaw was consigned to history following the 2017 reboot, there’s now a copycat (with a new insignia) at work, this time targeting not those who take life for granted, but corrupt cops, starting off with one being lured into the subway, knocked out by a figure in a pig mask and waking up to find themselves suspended over a subway track, the only way to avoid death being to rip out their own tongue which has been clamped by a fiendish trap. Much to the special effects dept’s joy, he doesn’t make it, so when Detective Zeke Banks (Rock) arrives on the scene with William Schenk (Max Minghella), the new rookie detective partner he’s been reluctantly assigned after going maverick one time too many, there’s a suitably gory array of dismembered body parts littering the scene. It turns out the dead man was Bank’s only friend on the force (he’s not the precinct’s favourite as he once turned in a corrupt fellow officer).

Starting with the tongue and a badge (the victim apparently regularly lied on the witness stand), before long various other gift-wrapped appendages start arriving at Banks’ desk, as Darren Lynn Bousman (who directed Saws II – IV) wades through a further series of ingenious tortures (including one cop lacerated by a spray of shards from broken bottles) as the plot navigates its way through assorted red herrings, misdirections, flashbacks with Jackson turning up as Banks’s former police Captain father, Marcus, who once ran the department and possibly has his own skeleton in the closet.

While for the most part Rock plays it straight (or at least as straight as something like this can warrant), he still can’t resist indulging in his familiar and increasingly tired in your face shouty humour, making it a toss up as which is more torture, his performance or the traps. The screenplay makes a vague stab at Zeke’s daddy issues, but it’s not overly interested in digging much beyond the basically dick measuring surface of the father-son relationship while reviews that claim a searing post George-Floyd zeitgeist political element must have surely been watching different film. Saw it may be, but cutting edge it isn’t. (Vue)

Stowaway (12)

A Netflix original, this sets up an impossible moral dilemma when, having taken off from Earth on a two year Hyperion mission to Mars, the crew, doctor Zoe (Anna Kendrick), biologist David (Daniel Kim) and commander Marina (Toni Collette), discover that they have an extra member. The title’s a tad misleading since Michael (Shamier Anderson), a support engineer, didn’t sneak on board but somehow managed to get locked in while doing a final check, a sort of space version of failing to ensure no surgical instruments remain in the body before sewing it up.

Initially understandably panic stricken, he calms down and, having nurtured a dream of such a mission, offers to pitch in. The problem is that, during launch, he was injured and one of the life support systems was damaged beyond repair. The other problem is that craft was originally designed for two, compromises were made to accommodate three and there isn’t enough oxygen for four people to make it to Mars. So, with Marina and David agreeing the mission (and its commercial backers) comes first, and with no viable alternative source of oxygen, it seems like a case of last in, first out. David’s ready to offer a painless exit, but Zoe, being a doctor and all, is far from comfortable with taking a life rather than saving it and insists on exhausting whatever steps possible, however dangerous, before bowing to the inevitable after the 20 days deadline.

At one point, she tells Michael a story from her past about putting her life at risk trying to rescue a drowning man and, quite frankly, if that doesn’t tip you off where this is heading then you deserve trudging through the slow and interminable slog to the anti-climactic finale, where you’ll only be gripping the edge of your seat to avoid falling off with boredom. The cast do what they can but the screenplay affords little beyond two-dimensional characterisation and for all the supposed tension of the situation, there’s precious little intensity to the performances. Like the fate facing those on the Hyperion, the film runs out of oxygen long before it gets to its final destination. (Netflix)

Those Who Wish Me Dead (15)

Having written Sicario, Hell or High Water, Wind River and, most recently, Tom Clancy’s Without Remorse, Taylor Sheridan is behind the camera this time round for Michael Koryta’s adaption of his own novel, a frankly overly melodramatic thriller in which, having murdered his forensic accountant father after he uncovers high level government corruption, a couple of sociopathic hitmen (Aidan Gillen, Nicholas Hoult), first seen posing as electric company inspectors to murder a Florida district attorney and casually blow up her house, set fire to a Montana forest to tidy up loose ends and provide a distraction from their killings when the victim’s adolescent son, Connor (Finn Little), escapes clutching his dad’s evidence. Fortunately, the first person the kid stumbles on is Hannah (Angelina Jolie), a smokejumper whose been transferred to a remote outpost after being traumatised in a recent blaze. He needs someone to protect him, she needs to atone for the young lives she was unable to save in the aforementioned incident.

And that’s pretty much all there is to it. Taking refuge in a watchtower, the pair are tracked down by the assassins, who have taken captive Hannah’s ex, Ethan (Jon Bernthal), the local deputy, whose pregnant wife Allison (Medina Senghore) manages to see the killers off and sets off to to find hubby armed with a shotgun.

Hoult and, especially Gillen go about their bloody work with cold detachment, piling up the bodies with abandonment, the latter so fixated on his completing the job that he pays almost no regard to the fact the side of his face has been seared to a crisp when Allison struck back.

Characterisation is never more than one dimensional and the cat and mouse narrative plays out with increasing implausibility, but Jolie, in her first action role in years, is solid as the loose cannon who may be harbouring a death wish, Connor is remarkably resilient for a kid whose just seen his dad riddled with bullets and everyone else, including brief cameo by Tyler Perry’s as the hitmen’s boss, does what the script requires of them. Sheridan uses the Montana wilderness to full effect and the scenes of the fires sweeping towards out fleeing heroes are genuinely thrilling, just as he also keeps the tension at a white knuckle level. Lean and efficient, it’s firmly old school 90s action movie fodder and none the worse for that. (Vue)

To The Stars (12)

Set somewhere in the 60s in rural Oklahoma, bespectacled wallflower Iris Deerborne (Kara Hayward) lives with her heavy drinking and sexually frustrated embittered mother Francie (Jordana Spiro), and her kindly but ineffectual father Hank (Shea Whigham). Suffering from a bladder problem that’s earned her the cruel school nickname of Stinky Drawers she has no friends. Until, that is, attractive, worldly wise and feisty new girl in school Maggie Richmond (Liana Liberato) sees off a bunch of bullies harassing her (‘cowfuckers’ she shouts after them) and, Maggie, a fantasist having her own troubles and less than perfect parents (Malin Akerman, Tony Hale), the pair gradually develop a mutually supportive friendship, the latter making it a mission to help the former find her inner beauty and self-confidence in the face of the usual bitchy classmates. Cue a makeover with the local beautician and hair stylist Hazel (Adelaide Clemens) and a gradually blossoming potential prom date romance with Jeff (Lucas Jade Zuhman).

As such, directed by Martha Stephens from a screenplay by Shannon Bradley-Colleary, originally shot in black and white, but now in colour, the film is both tender and gentle in following the chalk and cheese friendship, the chemistry between the twin leads fully engage you in the rights of passage narrative but then, in the third act it inexplicably goes off the rails by introducing a contorted lesbian twist pretty much out of nowhere that has the town’s seething latent intolerance boiling over like the mob out of Frankenstein, a collapse into melodrama from which it never recovers despite a last minute attempt at reasserting its bittersweet poignancy. (Sky)

Tom and Jerry (PG)

Back in 1988, Robert Zemeckis came up with the inspirational idea of combining live and action and animation in Who Framed Roger Rabbit. Now director Tim Story attempts the same with this big screen update and expansion of the slapstick cat-and-mouse cartoon shorts of the 1940s and 1950s. The result is pretty much the polar opposite.

Here, a game but criminally humiliated Chloë Grace Moretz hustles her way into a job at an upmarket New York hotel were a big society wedding of two Instagram celebs is due to take place. Coincidentally, Tom and Jerry have also snuck into the place, naturally leading to all kinds of knockabout fun and threatening the chef’s (Ken Jeong) hopes of a Michelin star. Well, perhaps fun is pushing it. There’s just so many things wrong here. For a film surely intended for a family audience, all the stuff about the difficulties in getting a job feel way off beam, the attempt to be hip and cool with its rap soundtrack and jokes about Drake, T.I. and TikTok are as crass as introducing Tom pretending to be a blind hip hop street musician while he and Jerry are relegated to supporting roles in their own film. And to top it all off, unlike the sophistication of the Zemeckis classic, this just superimposes flat two-dimensional animation over the live action to jarring effect.

Still, Michael Peña and Rob Delaney as the events manager and hotel boss, respectively, manage to milk a few laughs and the kids will be in hysterics at the obligatory poo gag with the Bobby Canavale-voiced bulldog crapping on the sidewalk. But that’s truly clutching at straws. (Amazon Prime, BT TV, CHILI, Google Play, Rakuten TV, Sky Store; Odeon Broadway Plaza Luxe; Vue)

Tom Clancy’s Without Remorse (15)

Functional rather than inspired, this looks to launch another Clancy franchise, here spearheaded by Navy Seal John Clark (Michael B Jordan) who, at the start of the film, is part of a behind enemy lines black ops mission in Syria to rescue an American agent being held captive. That’s duly accomplished and all the bad guys eliminated, except it turns out they aren’t insurgents, they’re Russian and the team has been duped by the CIA, in the form of the devious Ritter (Jamie Bell), who had information the Russians were supplying arms,

Clark’s not best pleased, but is ordered to let it lie. Which he does until the Russians come looking for revenge, since one of the dead was the son of a high ranking diplomat, taking out members of his team, an attack on his home leaving two assailants dead and him badly wounded, but his pregnant wife murdered. Recovering, he wants revenge on the killer who got away, but, while it may be an enemy attack on American soil, Ritter wants it swept under the carpet, a tit for tat killing, to appease the Russians and not endanger relations. However, Clark very pointedly and coldly assassinates the diplomat, looking to force a situation wherein he gets to go after his wife’s killer, and, while Ritter opposes this, the Secretary of Defence (Guy Pearce) endorses Clark to be part of the black ops incursion into Russia.

Needless to say, things don’t go smoothly and not everything or everyone is what or who they seem, with it at times looking as though Ritter is trying to precipitate hostilities. It’s not too hard to spot where the trail leads, but written and directed by Taylor Sheridan and Stefano Sollima, the team behind Sicario: Day if the Soldado, it serves up its maverick Rambo-style thrills efficiently enough with some extensive and graphic bloodletting and violence that includes a sniper showdown in Murmansk, a narrow escape from prison guards in the pay of Russian mobsters and a hairy underwater sequence after the team’s plane is shot down.

There’s not a huge amount of character depth but the leads bring what they can to the table, Jordan handles the physicality with impressive power while allowing his eyes and facial expression do the emotional drama, Queen & Slim’s Jodie Turner Smith makes a good job of her underwritten role as Clark’s superior officer Karen Greer, while Bell is clearly enjoying the chance to play a darker role. At the end of the day though, for all the twists, turns and shadowy conspiracies, there’s not a huge amount of meat on the narrative bones, essentially serving as a set-up for the sequel promised in the post-credits meeting between Clark and, well that would be telling. (Amazon Prime)

The Trial of the Chicago 7 (15)

As in his screenplay for A Few Good Men, writer-director Aaron Sorkin delivers a powerful courtroom drama with his recreation of the 1969 trial of the seven protestors accused of inciting a riot against the Vietnam draft that proved to be one of the most infamous chapters in American legal history. While it does fictionalise some incidents, some of the seemingly most unlikely moments, such as the judge ordering a defendant to be bound and gagged or barring the testimony of the former Attorney General of the United States, are all taken from life.

When President Johnson order a doubling of the draft, from 17,000 to 35,000 per month, anti-war factions took to the streets in protest, planning to convene at and disrupt the Democratic National Convention in the summer of 1968 in Chicago. Among them were non-violence favouring Tom Hayden (Eddie Redmayne), leader of the Students for a Democratic Society; Jerry Rubin (Jeremy Strong) and Abbie Hoffman (Sacha Baron Cohen) from the Youth International Party (Yippies) and the older but equally committed David Dellinger (John Carroll Lynch).

A year on from the Chicago Police and protesters violent clashing in and around Grant Park, the leaders, along with Lee Weiner (Noah Robbins), John Froines (Daniel Flaherty), Rennie Davis (Alex Sharp) Bobby Seale (Yahya Abdul-Mateen II), the national chairman of the Black Panther Party who had no actual connection to the others or involvement in the protest, and was only in Chicago to give a speech, were charged with conspiracy to cross lines with the intention of inciting riots.

Opening with a montage of historical events that take in the King and Kennedy assassinations, alternating between courtroom dramas, recreation of the protest and sessions at the home of liberal attorney William Kunstler (Mark Rylance) to plan strategy while rising legal star Richard Schultz (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) puts together the prosecution case, despite reservations as to whether there should even be a trial, the film gathers in power and indignation as District Judge Julius Hoffman (Frank Langella) conducts the courtroom as his personal fiefdom, walking roughshod over constitutional and legal rights, hammering home his clear prejudices and bias with a gavel and contempt of court orders in his contempt for the accused and their representatives as they, understandably, protest about his handling of the trial.

Michael Keaton puts in a late appearance as former Atty. General Ramsey Clark, whose testimony to the jury was refused by Hoffman, although the film does reveal what he would have said and while certain events rejigged in the timeline and there’s degree of dramatic licence, fuelled by commanding performances (a frizzy-haired Baron Cohen stealing the show – . “We’re not guilty because of who we are. “We’re guilty of what we believe” – and proving he’s more than a comedic actor) that fully engage you in proceedings even as Hoffman and Rubin play the courtroom farrago for laughs. (Netflix)

The United States vs Billie Holiday (15)

A jazz legend who died at the age of 44, surprisingly, given her colourful life, Billie Holiday has only even been the subject of one film, Lady Sings The Blues in which she was played by Diana Ross. Now, courtesy of director Lee Daniels and writer Suzan-Lori Parks, there’s a second, Andra Day’s Golden Globe winning portrayal of ‘Lady Day’ wiping the floor with Ross in a film that pivots around her sustained persecution by the US government in the wake of her 1939 recording of Strange Fruit, a chilling song (written by a Jewish schoolteacher from the Bronx) about the lynching of a black man in the Southern states, that was deemed a potential racial powderkeg in an already volatile 40s America. Pressure was exerted to prevent her performing the song in concert and, since she couldn’t actually be busted for singing it, Harry Anslinger (Garrett Hedlund), the jazz hating racist who ran the Federal Bureau of Narcotics, recruited former G.I. Jimmy Fletcher (Trevante Rhodes), one of the nine black FBI agents of the time, to go undercover and bust her for narcotics. In the trial from which the film takes its title, she was sentenced to a year and a day in Alderson Federal Prison Camp in West Virginia.

She emerged clean and performed in a triumphant comeback at Carnegie Hall, but was soon back on smack, banned from singing in clubs that served alcohol, beleaguered by continuing federal harassment, management troubles and a tangled love life that entailed her abusive husband, manager and pimp Louis McKay (Rob Morgan), her trombonist, her trumpet player (who was also her dealer) and even Fletcher who had fallen in love with her and sought to protect her, especially when, with McKay’s connivance, she was raided and stitched up for possession again.

At its core a story about how she was betrayed, by the government, the men in her life and her own addiction, there’s a lot of baggage to pack in as Holiday seeks to rise from every blow that knocks her down, both figuratively and literally. Unfortunately, as such, framed by an awkward late 50s gossip rag interview (with Leslie Jordan seemingly channelling Quentin Crisp) and largely redundant sidebars involving her film star friend and occasional lover Tallulah Bankhead (Natasha Lyonne), the film often finds itself sprawling, dramatically, stylistically and emotionally, punctuating the often overheated narrative (which includes heroin high flashbacks to Holiday’s childhood and hooker mother) with several musical sequences which, even though Day’s singing of numbers such as Ain’t Nobody’s Business If I Do is as striking as her acting, unbalance the focus and momentum. It closes with a punch, however, with an end title noting how, 100 years after a version of it was first introduced, the Emmett Till Anti-Lynching Act remains unpassed by the Senate. The film could have done with a little more of that anger. (Sky)

Verdict (15)

Grim and depressing from the opening credits until the closing ones, written and directed by Raymund Ribay Gutierrez, this Kafkaesque Philippines drama opens with the brutal beating of Manila housewife Joy Santos (Max Eigenmann) by her abusive, drunken low life crook husband Dante (Kristoffer King), that leaves both her and their six-year-old daughter Angel (Jordhen Suan) bruised and bloodied. She slashes him with a knife, grabs Angel and makes her escape to the local police station dedicated to dealing with such cases to report the assault and he’s taken into custody and the rest of film follows the process as the case comes to trial. The evidence of his brutality is incontrovertible, but she still has to describe what happened while he’s in the same room and go through the bureaucratic red tape process to prove it. She has a dedicated but overworked prosecuting attorney, while his family arrange for an expensive morally bankrupt lawyer who sets out to refute all her accusations, discredit or intimidate witnesses and even seek s to make him the look the victim of attempted murder. Throughout all of this, Dante continues to bully her.

Shot in long takes with a cinema verite approach, the growing sense of where this is all heading makes the unfolding imperfect Filipino system almost unbearable to watch as the survivors of abuse are eaten by the machine and especially when Angel is forced to testify and manipulated by the defence. There is a dramatic final twist that negates the trial process and offers a kind of salvation for Joy, but the film is unambiguous in its message about women like her who don’t have the good fortune of a screenwriter’s trump card. (Amazon Prime, BT TV, CHILI, Google Play, Rakuten TV, Sky Store)

Villains (15)

A blackly comic, table-turning spin on the home invasion genre, this gets under way with low rent Bonnie and Clyde couple Mickey (Bill Skarsgård) and Jules (Maika Monroe), robbing the latest in string of gas stations to amass enough cash to get to Florida and start a small business. Calling each other Pumpkin and Honey Bunny, they’re not the brightest of sparks and their getaway car runs out of petrol on the outskirts of town, sending Mickey into a panic, she calming him down by wafting her hair across his face. They decide to walk, but then, armed with a gun, a bag of cash and a small pharmacy worth of drugs, they see a nearby house and decide to break in and steal the car. The place is empty, or so it seems until they venture down into the basement to find a little girl (Blake Baumgartner) chained to a post. She doesn’t speak, and horrified at what appears to be a kidnapping, they decide to free her and take off, but while searching for something to unlock her, the owners (Jeffrey Donovan, Kyra Sedgwick) return and, in short order, the kooky criminal lovers find themselves the ones on the wrong bondage end of the situation. Eventually announcing themselves as George and Gloria, their captors are a creepy pair, he all polite Southern charm masking a psychopathic sadism and deep-seated insecurity, she clearly away with the fairies cradling a china doll as her own baby (their infertility the backstory to her madness and why the girl’s in the basement) and doing an erotic dance to arouse the tied-down Mickey. With their clothes, manner of talking, the house – with its antique TV set, they’re like something out of The Hills Have Eyes were it set in mid-60s rural America.

As the advantage shifts back and forth between the two couples, the film builds a deliciously nasty tension (at one point a cop arrives investigating the fugitives who seems to be lining up as another victim) while stirring together a potent cocktail of David Lynch unsettling psychosexuality and Tarantino pulp noir, the two sets of actors delivering perfectly judged performances that balance extreme and controlled manic in equal measure, the film making no excuses for where it wants its audiences sympathies to lie even while Gloria’s frustrated dreams of motherhood render her a sort of Miss Havisham figure by way of Mommie Dearest. The way everything eventually resolves isn’t entirely unpredictable given what comes before, but even so this engaging oddball crime caper leaves you with a certain sense of satisfaction that it’s exactly how things should be. (Sky)

The Virtuoso (15)

Anthony Hopkins gets to phone in a performance, most of his scenes shot seated at a desk in one room, in this workmanlike thriller as the mysterious paymaster who doles out assignments to his assorted hitmen, One such is Anson Mount’s unnamed contract killer, the taciturn son of one of his old army buddies from Vietnam, who’s the film’s ostensible silver fox star, lives in a remote woodland cabin where he befriends a white collie than keeps turning up and narrates, in dry, deadpan second person style, the requirements that go make a perfect assassin, a virtuoso.

When his latest job results in collateral damage involving the mother of a young boy, he can’t shake it from his mind so, to get him back into shape, he’s handed another job, the details on a piece of paper just saying white rivers and giving a time and a place, Rosie’s, an out of the way diner. Turning up at night, the place is empty save for a man and a woman who may be a couple and a man (Eddie Marsan in essentially a cameo) seated at the counter who’s clearly packing a gun. Could one of these be his target? At one point the local deputy (David Morse) drops by.

Checking into the local motel, taking the room next to Marsan’s character, he proceeds to devise a plan and also returns to the diner where the sultry waitress, Dixy (Abbie Cornish), who’s depping for her sick aunt, has been clearly coming on to him. Returning to the motel she joins him and while she’s sleeping, he slips out to visit the couple from the diner, where, inevitably, further complications and bloodshed ensue.

The film works hard to summon an air of mystery and tension, but anyone who hasn’t worked out what’s going on from the moment he arrives at Rosie’s is clearly new to the genre, the film far less clever than it thinks it is. Despite a not even cursory attempt at an American accent, Hopkins at least gets to deliver one memorable and chilling monologue in a cemetery, even if he is recycling Hannibal Lecter in the telling, and Cornish is always value for money even in a thankless role like this, but the requirements of the character mean Mount is a blank throughout (it’s safe to assume the dog is supposed to signal some sort of humanity within him), making it almost impossible to care about what happens to him. Despite the title, this is very much a duffer. (Amazon Prime, CHILI, Google Play, iTunes Rakuten TV, Sky Store, TalkTalk TV, Virgin Movies)

Wander Darkly (15)

Unwed partners and proud parents of a new baby girl, gallerista Adrienne (Sienna Miller) and carpenter craftsman Matteo (Diego Luna) are on their way home from an event and start bickering over her talking to an ex-boyfriend and whether, given the dysfunctional relationship, they should even be together. He distracted, the car is involved in a head on collision. She wakes up, covered in blood, in a hospital, looking own at her body in a bed and hears herself pronounced dead. She’s horrified and, not yet ready to cross over, successive scenes see her witnessing her distraught parents, her mother (Beth Grant) taking care of the baby, and Matteo unable to deliver the funeral oration.

As the film develops, she discovers he can see her and together they relive and re-enact memories of their time together, one giving way to another, although, tellingly, these don’t always share the same perspective, affording insights into the more complex and deeper nature of their relationship, while she’s conscious of being stalked by some hooded figure.

It’s familiar territory, though less often told from a female viewpoint, but, while the chemistry between the leads sparks the narrative, the dialogue by writer-director Tara Miele is often laboured and clumsy it not entirely hard to figure out the twist to which it’s leading, although the poignantly closing scene certainly compensates. (Amazon Prime, BT, CHILI, Google Play, iTunes Rakuten TV, Sky Store, TalkTalk TV, Virgin Movies)

The Woman In The Window (15)

He may have directed Atonement, Hanna, Pride and Prejudice and Darkest Hour, but Joe Wright is clearly slumming it here with this potboiler Rear Window knockoff adapted from the airport paperback of the title. For reasons not explained in all their tragic detail until much later, child therapist Anna Fox (Amy Adams) is separated from her husband (Anthony Mackie) who has custody of their daughter, and has become agoraphobic, unable to leave her sprawling Manhattan house where, when not having sessions with a visiting shrink (screenwriter Tracy Letts) and apparently continuing her practice though we never see any evidence of that, she spends her time staring out the window.

When new neighbours the Russells move in, the teenage son, Ethan (Fred Hechinger), comes across to bring a gift from his mom and Anna’s instincts tell her there’s something troubling him. Well, that’ll be his strict and bullying father Alistair (Gary Oldman in a glaringly bad blonde wig), who gives her a verbal barrage about her inappropriate relationship with his son. The next night, the victim of an egg-splattering attack by Halloween kids, she’s saved by Ethan’s mother Jane (Julianne Moore, stealing the film in her brief cameo) and the pair bond over a few glasses of wine. Not long after, peering into the Russells’ bedroom with her camera, she sees Jane being murdered by Alistair. The cops are duly summoned, but there’s no body and the detective (Brian Tyree Henry) put it down to hallucinations caused by her medication. And drinking at the same time. Plus, there’s the fact that Russell brings along his wife, who, accusing her of being a voyeur, is very much alive, except (played by Jennifer Jason Leigh) this isn’t the woman she met earlier, and Ethan insists she’s never met his mother before.

So from Rear Window we move into Gaslight territory as Anna starts to believe she really is going crazy, until, that is, she finds evidence that the other Jane existed (a reflection in a photo of a wine glass, an earring by the bed of David (Wyatt Russell) her creepy ex-con lodger in the basement.

Assuming her flat performance is intentional, Adams does a decent job of capturing Anna’s mental state, but even this – and an unexpected car crash into her living room – can’t inject life into a film riddled with holes and contrivance, not to mention a history of reshoots, poor test screenings and the revelations about the novel’s author’s alleged sociopathic behaviours, that rather than being a nailbiter is ploddingly pedestrian with a climax that seems likely to be drowned out with hoots of derision. (Netflix)

Words On Bathroom Walls (12)

An impressive contribution to the teen dysfunction genre, director Thor Freudenthal brings to life the struggle with schizophrenia through the character of Adam (Charlie Plummer) who, with dreams of becoming a chef, tests his recipes on his single mother Beth (Molly Parker). Life’s complicated by the conflicting voices in his head, physically manifested on screen by imaginary characters such as the oversexed-best-friend figure (Devon Bostick), a supportive hippie girl (AnnaSophia Robb), a manifestation of a romantic ideal from an earlier school, and a burly, cigar-smoking, baseball bat wielding bodyguard (Lobo Sebastian) who seeks to keep the hallucinations under control and step in when Adam’s threatened. In addition, there’s that back smoke and voice whispering to him, prompting episodes that have finally brought him to a Catholic school as his last chance and which agrees not to make his condition public. In an attempt to find normality, he also agrees to a course in experimental medication that banishes his attendant hallucinations.

Here he encounters Maya (Taylor Russell), a bright if blunt-spoken kid who runs a profitable hustle in writing papers for her wealthier classmates (it’s not her only secret) and who, after an initial one-upmanship friction, he gets hired as his after-school tutor. There’s also the resident sympathetic priest (Andy Garcia) he can talk to about things weighing him down. Meanwhile, home life is complicated by mom taking on a live-in lover, Paul (Walton Goggins) who, it would appear is wary of Adam (he hides the kitchen knives) and seems to be pushing to have him committed to professional care. Crises erupt when Maya’s cheating is exposed and the flinty school principal, Sister Catherine (Beth Grant) always on the lookout for Adam to regress, pulls the rug out from under him.

A sort of teen variation on Good Will Hunting, the voice overs and scenes of Adam talking to his never seen shrink feel a touch clunky on the exposition front, but along with the hallucination, the words of the title that play an important part in the narrative, and the slowly gestating romance, not to mention an emotional twist in your expectations, this is a heartwarming gem about acceptance and overcoming adversity. (Amazon Prime, CHILI, Google Play, iTunes Rakuten TV, Sky Store, TalkTalk TV, Virgin Movies)

New Films 19th June 2021 by Mike Davies

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New Films 19th June 2021 by Mike Davies