From the strangeness of Peter Strickland's Flux Gourmet starring Gwendoline Christie to the comfort of Mrs Harris Goes to Paris with Lesley Manville, here are the films in cinemas this weekend
Recently, performance art has been making a weird entrance into arthouse cinema. In Crimes of the Future, David Cronenberg released his disturbing vision of a near-future in which artists conduct living autopsies and display their organs. Now, one of Britain’s most surreal filmmakers Peter Strickland (In Fabric, Berberian Sound Studio) is going a more culinary route: following audio-focused performers who do strange things with food at the ‘Sonic Catering Institute’.
The institute is based in a country house, and its research involves ‘sonic cooking’ – an obsession with the sounds of making meals. Gwendoline Christie stars as Jan Stevens, the head of the institute, who oversees the latest residency: an artistic trio led by Elle de Elle (Fatma Mohamed). Also stars a mop-haired Asa Butterfield (Sex Education).
Photo: Curzon
Like a cup of tea and a biscuit, a silly Brit-com is often exactly what you need in times of strife. And Mrs Harris Goes to Paris seems to embody that feeling, packaged with a small, Cinderella sparkle.
Lesley Manville (Sherwood, Phantom Thread) stars as Ada Harris, a 50s war widow and cleaner who’s recently come into a small fortune. She decides to set off to Paris and purchase her dream Dior dress, but the elitist world of French fashion isn’t too keen to embrace her working-class sensibilities. And yet, through the film, they’re gradually charmed by her. Also stars Isabelle Huppert and Jason Isaacs.
Photo: Universal/Ada Film Ltd.
Far removed from her bright and brilliant debut Booksmart, Olivia Wilde's sophomore feature Don’t Worry Darling plunges into weirder depths. And like the nightmares of David Lynch, Wilde looks to penetrate artificial worlds and dig into the darkness underneath.
Florence Pugh (Midsommar, Black Widow) stars as Alice Chambers, a housewife who dotes on her husband Jack (played by the Harry Styles) in a 50s utopian town called Victory. But Alice begins to see the cracks in this suburban vision, seemingly devised by the men of the area.
Photo: Warner Bros.
The history of cinema is peppered with inequality, to the extent that you watch old movies and dread the lack of diversity. But Sidney Poitier, the first Black actor to receive an Academy Award, was the star that paved a more inclusive path for Hollywood filmmaking.
This new Apple documentary Sidney details Poitier’s life from humble beginnings in the Bahamas to well-respected status as an actor and Civil Rights activist. Interviews include Oprah Winfrey, Morgan Freeman, Spike Lee and Denzel Washington.
Photo: Apple
After the dire efforts of Stardust, the world was in need of a galactically good movie about David Bowie. Thankfully, filmmaker Brett Morgan – director of Cobain: Montage of Heck and Crossfire Hurricane – provides a sumptuous feast of glam-rock glory in his new documentary Moonage Daydream.
Weaving together clips from concerts, interviews and music videos, Morgan displays a hallucinogenic tapestry of Bowie’s career. And unlike most documentaries, Moonage Daydream doesn’t admit to unlocking its subject. Morgan reveals pieces forming an amorphous whole, designed for interpretation. As Bowie himself says, ‘I’ve never been sure of my personality.’ Why should Morgan or the audience be any more certain?
Photo: Universal
George Clooney and Julia Roberts have starred in several films together, but Ticket to Paradise marks their first romcom. Directed by Ol Parker (Mamma Mia!: Here We Go Again), the film throws them into a reluctant union as a divorced couple attending their daughter’s wedding. David (Clooney) and Georgia (Roberts) despise each other in that classic screwball comedy way, but they’re more motivated to lance their child's approaching nuptials.
After graduating college, their daughter Lily (Booksmart’s Kaitlyn Dever) travels to Bali and promptly falls in love with a local seaweed farmer (Maxime Bouttier). But her parents, remembering their own rocky marriage, is desperate for Lily not to make the same mistakes.
Photo: Universal Studios
Often the stories behind indie films are more fascinating than those used to market blockbusters, even more so for debuts like Funny Pages. It’s taken 10 years for its director Owen Kline to reach this point, finally helped along by the Safdie Brothers (Uncut Gems) who read his script and joined as producers.
In the film, the aspiring cartoonist Robert (Daniel Zolghadri) decides to quit high school to pursue his comic book dreams. Going even further, he leaves his privileged life behind to live in a cheap and sweaty basement. While working a day job for a courtroom lawyer, he encounters the former colourist Wallace (Matthew Maher). Convinced Wallace is a neglected genius, Robert begs to be mentored by him.
Photo: A24
David Cronenberg is no stranger to controversy, his dark and surreal imagination often disturbing and offending the mainstream. Now, the auteur is back to conjure up more fear and disgust with Crimes of the Future, which returns to his body-horror roots.
Starring Viggo Mortensen, Léa Seydoux and Kristen Stewart, the film is set in a bleak dystopia where the human body adapts to a new synthetic environment. Saul (Mortenson) is an artist who, with his partner Caprice (Seydoux), displays his organs for an avant-garde performance. Yeah: it's a weird one.
Photo: Vertigo Releasing
Whodunnits and slashers have been done to death, but when the genres are tackled and twisted by indie film studio A24, it’s worth paying attention.
Halina Rejin’s second film Bodies Bodies Bodies, based on the short story by Cat Person author Kristen Roupenian, follows 20-something couple Sophie (Amandla Stenberg) and Bee (Oscar nominee Maria Bakalova) as they venture to an isolated mansion – owned by the parents of wannabe alpha male David (Pete Davidson). The party’s already started, with guests including Sophie’s ex Jordan (Industry’s Myha’la Herrold) and the considerably older Greg (Lee Pace).
This housebound horror shakes these zoomers like narcissistic ants in a jar, inevitably making their deepest insecurities and anxieties and resentments rise to the surface.
Photo: A24
With Bodies Bodies Bodies (see above) and the upcoming Knives Out sequel, are we witnessing a resurgence in whodunnit cinema? Well, at least it's a change from superheroes. In Tom George's spoofy meta-mystery See How They Run, starring Sam Rockwell and Saoirse Ronan, Agatha Christie is the key inspiration. She's even involved, in a small way.
A Hollywood director (Adrien Brody) is murdered during the 100th performance of Christie’s 1953 play The Mousetrap. Inspector Stoppard (Rockwell) and his conclusion-jumping colleague Constable Stalker (Ronan) are on the case. Also stars David Oyelowo, Ruth Wilson, Sian Clifford and Reece Shearsmith.
Photo: EPK/Searchlight Pictures
Idris Elba as a genie – what more do you want? In Three Thousand Years of Longing – George Miller’s first film since his blistering, Oscar-winning action reboot Mad Max: Fury Road – Elba plays a Djinn, accidentally summoned in Istanbul by the narratology scholar Alithea (Tilda Swinton).
The Djinn offers her three wishes and tells her his long, long story in the process. But is this, as Alithea suspects, another cautionary tale? Does she dare risk the consequences of a wish come true?
Photo: United Artists Releasing
Often, the stories behind certain films are more entertaining and fascinating than the films themselves. Official Competition, a new feature from Argentinian duo Mariano Cohn and Gastón Duprat, explores those unseen trials and tribulations of the filmmaking process. Specifically: the tense and bizarre rehearsals between two oppositional actors.
Ageing business mogul Humberto (José Luis Góméz) wants to leave behind a legacy, so hires the Palme d’Or-winning filmmaker Lola (Penélope Cruz) to adapt a much-loved literary work. She’s given full control over casting and, for the two leads, hires actors from completely different backgrounds. On one side is the globally famous airhead star Félix (Antonio Banderas) and on the other is the stage actor and mentor Iván (Oscar Martínez); they play rival siblings. Lola’s method is to capture the brothers’ conflict via the real-life tension between the actors.
Photo: Curzon
Since his debut film Get Out, the former comedy actor Jordan Peele offers a fresher take on horror cinema – especially with racial representation. He's marked a turning point in the genre, rebirthing ‘elevated horror’ to the masses.
Nope is Peele's third cinematic endeavour and, once again, he blends the funny with the frightening. It's set on a California ranch, run by siblings OJ (Daniel Kaluuya) and Emerald (Keke Palmer), which supplies horses to film productions. And then one day, a UFO storms into the sky and the ranchers are determined to capture it on film.
Photo: UPI Media
Trains have been a staple in cinema since the medium was invented, as seen in the silent films of Edwin S Porter and The Lumière Brothers. The mode of transport was then crystallised into comedy by Buster Keaton in 1926 with The General, and then turned into a modern action-thriller for The Taking of Pelham One Two Three (both in 1974 and 2009). It even supplied the ideal setting for the Korean zombie movie Train to Busan.
Bullet Train combines action and comedy with a bizarre concept set on a Japanese shinkansen, a type of high-speed train that travels thousands of miles and has carried billions of passengers. A perfect place, then, for a swarm of assassins to hunt each other down. The unlucky hitman Ladybug (Brad Pitt) wants to complete his latest job without any hiccups, but the presence of four other assassins – each with a similar task in mind – doesn’t make that easy.
Photo: PA Media/Sony
We’ve all heard the cliché of walking through fire for your partner, but that's almost literally the case with Katia and Maurice Krafft. As volcanologists, much of their time together was spent examining fiery mountains up close. They travelled around the world to study volcanos, often during eruptions, and filmed their efforts.
For Fire of Love, director Sara Dosa pored through over 200 hours of footage and crafted a documentary showing the strange love triangle between them and their shared passion. Both Maurice and Katia perished in 1996 during an eruption on Mount Unzen in Japan, but their love continues to fascinate through the decades.
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If you want a movie that matches the scorching heat of summer, Where the Crawdads Sing is a perfect choice. Based on the massively popular novel by Delia Owens, the film is set in the fuggy marshlands along the North Carolina coast – following the mythologised ‘Marsh Girl’ as she’s accused of murder.
After living separately from the nearby townsfolk all her life, Kya (Daisy Edgar-Jones) is mocked for her destitution and so stays in her shack to enjoy the surrounding wildlife. But when the body of Chase Andrews (Harris Dickinson) is found, the community point to her. She maintains her innocence, but will anyone believe her?
Photo: PA Media/Sony
It’s been over 40 years since Jennifer Agutter (Walkabout, An American Werewolf in London, Call the Midwife) enjoyed childish adventures by a Yorkshire railway line in The Railway Children. Now, she returns to play the same character for the 2022 sequel The Railway Children Return, which takes place in the thrust of World War II.
The wartime children in this film delight in similar escapades around the railway, only this time there are American soldiers wandering around – some of whom don’t take kindly to their African-American comrades. The children find one such soldier, Abe (Kenneth Aikens), hiding in one of the railway engines. He tells them he’s on a secret mission and nobody can know.
Photo: StudioCanal
Among the numerous superhero franchises within the Marvel Cinematic Universe, Thor was among the most tedious. Not even the thespian skills of Kenneth Branagh (Belfast) could save it. But then the Kiwi director Taika Waititi (Jojo Rabbit) came along for Thor: Ragnarok and injected the outrageous fun the character really needed. And now, thankfully, Waititi returns for this post-Avengers sequel Thor: Love and Thunder.
After the events of Avengers: Endgame, a new threat looms over the heavenly citizens of New Asgard: the vengeful Gorr (Christian Bale). Thor (Chris Hemsworth) comes back to rectify the situation with Valkyrie (Tessa Thompson) and his ex-partner Jane (Natalie Portman), who now has superpowers of her own.
Photo: Disney
The continued enjoyment of Tony Scott’s aerodynamic blockbuster Top Gun is a bit baffling. The 1986 film imagines a fantastical world where planes are exciting, where ripped men play in sand, and where the military antagonists are known only as ‘the enemy’.
But despite a lot of undeserved praise, especially from stinging hands clapping at Cannes, the much-delayed sequel Top Gun: Maverick works as a semi-decent, modern-day improvement on the original – and, thankfully, without drowning completely in nostalgia for Hollywood’s most overrated decade.
Photo: EPK/Paramount
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If someone were to arrange a list of the worst movies to see during heat exhaustion, Elvis would ascend to the top. Does that illness (actually suffered by this critic) bias the review? No. If the issue wasn’t about feeling sick, intense boredom would take its place. And this indulgent, 160-minute Baz Luhrmann biopic of the king of rock 'n' roll is adept at providing both sickness and boredom. Thankfully, Austin Butler’s titular, sweaty, Oscar-bait performance carries you through. Just about.
From the start, Luhrmann (Moulin Rouge!, Romeo + Juliet, The Great Gatsby) resumes his classic alcoholic style: throwing you into nauseating rollercoaster visuals, cut together with the hallucinatory flow of a fever dream.
Photo: Warner Bros.
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The multiverse is usually a playground reserved for superheroes and Time Lords, but Everything Everywhere All At Once embraces the everyday hero. In this case, it's Evelyn (Michelle Yeoh), the head of a local laundrette who's enduring a difficult schism with her daughter Joy (Stephanie Hsu), a potential divorce from her well-meaning husband Waymond (Ke Huy Quan), and a sordid tax audit conducted by an impatient Jamie Lee Curtis.
But out of nowhere – well, in a lift – her husband’s face changes to that of his ‘Alphaverse’ variant. He tells her to follow certain instructions to save the balance of the multiverse. Within the film's inter-dimensional overload – spread with kung-fu fighting, phallic nunchucks and hot-dog fingers – is a touching, existential story of accepting one’s small place in a massive void. As well as being the craziest movie you’ll see this year, it’s also one of the most heartfelt.
Photo: Premier
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