★★★★★ Saela Davis and Anna Rose Holmer are a little-known writing and directing partnership based in Brooklyn, New York. But their standing is due a considerable elevation on the strength of God’s Creatures, a film that wields its simple premise with devastating impact.
★★★★☆ Putting her talents behind the camera, Chilean actor-turned-director Manuela Martelli’s debut feature is a gripping study of paranoia during the early years of the Pinochet regime. As historical noir, Martelli’s film is thrilling, but as a document of the comforts of complicity and the terror of resistance, 1976 is visceral.
★★★★☆ Having horrified audiences most recently with 2020’s Possessor, Brandon Cronenberg is about to make an even bigger arterial splash with Infinity Pool, a lysergic hymn to ritual bloodletting and spoilt Westerners who enjoy languorous holidays in other people’s misery.
★★★☆☆ Her first film as director since 2017’s heady study of adolescence, Ava, Léa Mysius’ latest is an oft-gripping magical-realist mystery drama with faint whiffs of horror. While The Five Devils doesn’t quite have the clarity of vision of her previous picture, its emotion, erotically-charged themes and puzzle-box structure leave much to recommend.
★★★☆☆ It’s 1918, and the elderly woman that terrorised the screaming youths of X is still a tender young thing, stuck on her parents’ farm and dreaming of a life of stardom in faraway Hollywood. How far removed from that wizened psychotic killer this cherubic vision now stands.
★★★★☆ There is tragedy and there is comedy, but the hinterland has never really received a proper definition. Melodrama suggests histrionics and musical accompaniment milking the emotional teat. Drama is too broad. And anyone who suggests “dramedy” should be punished. It would be “dramedic”.
★★★★☆ One year on from the events of the previous franchise entry, Ghostface is up to their old tricks again, slicing and dicing their way through a new batch of shrieking victims, the action now shifted to New York. With the new generation of Screamers now firmly installed, headed by the Carpenter sisters Sam and Tara (Melissa Barrera, Jenna Ortega), can the ghost(face)s of the past be laid to rest?
★★★☆☆ His heavyweight champion status secured, the now-retired Adonis Creed (Michael B. Jordan) spends his days lounging around his Hollywood mansion, having tea parties with daughter Amara (Mila Davis-Kent) and running his gym with coach Little Duke (Wood Harris). But when a long-forgotten figure from Adonis’ past returns, his future is thrown into question.
★★★★★ Léo (Eden Dambrine) and Remi (Gustav De Waele) are best friends. At 13, they are intelligent and autonomous enough to be allowed a certain freedom, but still full of the childish and spontaneous joy of being and imagining. They pretend villains are attacking the castle, run through the flower fields, and have so many sleepovers together that Leo’s mum wonders aloud if he’ll ever come home.
★★★☆☆ “Family isn’t a word…it’s a sentence”. So ran the tagline to The Royal Tenenbaums. For Hirokazu Kore-eda it could be argued that it’s a whole career. From Still Walking to the Palme d’Or-winning Shoplifters, the Japanese auteur has spent the greater part of his career delineating the lines of attraction and repulsion, the dynamics of duty and care that make up families – both real and alternative.
★★★☆☆ Ant-Man’s (Paul Rudd) third standalone outing confirms his status as among the Marvel machine’s most reliably entertaining, if middling, product lines. Ant-Man and The Wasp: Quantumania may be lacking in any discernible drama or emotional stakes but it is easily one of the most solidly entertaining and spectacular of Marvel’s ‘Phase 4’ run of film and television.
★★★☆☆ As she drives down a narrow, poorly lit road through a forest, a woman is momentarily distracted and veers into the path of an oncoming lorry. Swerving, she avoids catastrophe and stops the car to check on the child on the back seat, still blissfully sleeping. Death is always close in producer-turned-director Cory Choy’s debut feature Esme, My Love, a magical-realist drama that is consistently intriguing but never quite fulsome enough to become compelling.
★★★★☆ “Love is not enough,” is the advice given to the parents in French playwright Florian Zeller’s sophomore feature film The Son, which closes the diptych begun by The Father. It is wise advice and goes against so much that we instinctively feel about parenting and childcare. All we need is love, surely? Unconditional love.