In cinemas this weekend: Baz Luhrmann jolts Elvis back to life

Elvis, dir. Baz Luhrmann

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.

Good Luck to You, Leo Grande, dir. Sophie Hyde

There’s something so historically British about approaching pleasure and then retreating coyly from it. For the middle-aged, middle-class widow Nancy (Emma Thompson) in Good Luck to You, Leo Grande, she’s bound by the etiquette and decorum of her generation. Women and girls, in her view, should be dignified and should never venture beyond their gendered boundaries. And yet, two years after her husband dies, Nancy decides to consult a male sex worker.

He goes by the fake name Leo Grande (Daryl McCormack). But at the start, you catch a glimpse of his true self: taking off his fetching yellow beanie before submitting to his character. Leo wears a well-defined suit; he's classy, eloquent, and young. From the moment Nancy invites him in to her posh and bland hotel room, she’s bursting with nervous questions. He’s calm and patient; she’s animated and resistant. It’s going to be a long appointment.

Photo: Lionsgate

All My Friends Hate Me, dir. Andrew Gaynord

Growing up is growing apart: people can change so much that they leave their former selves behind. In Andrew Gaynord’s All My Friends Hate Me – a funny and frightening anxiety attack of a movie – the 31-year-old Pete (Tom Stourton) faces these nostalgic demons on his birthday weekend in a country house, organised by his old uni mates.

Where Pete has tried to better himself, even working at a refugee camp, his friends have barely changed. Even worse, they blame him for everything that goes wrong. Memories become confused and forgotten. Pete soon believes there’s a vendetta against him – largely because of Harry (Dustin Demri-Burns), a West Country randomer his friends pick up and get drunk with.

Grappling with claustrophobic paranoia, struggling in that blurred area between intuition and anxiety, and swimming in British black humour, All My Friends Hate Me is one of the best and most intense horror films of the year.

Photo: Premier

Jurassic World: Dominion, dir. Colin Trevorrow

Perhaps now, the franchise won’t find a way. The conclusion to the Jurassic World trilogy – the tame and heavily computerised reboot of the Steven Spielberg classic – will hopefully mark an end to one of Hollywood’s most unnecessary throwbacks.

But at least Dominion is the superior volume, excavating scares and laughs that had been buried since the 90s. This is largely due to the returns of Sam Neill, Laura Dern and Jeff Goldblum, who resume their historic roles so comfortably.

The rest of the film glues together bits and pieces from better movies like Mission: Impossible and Indiana Jones; there’s even one shot that could’ve been in Nomadland. Being derivative is rarely desirable but, when you have a largely underwhelming trilogy, you should be thankful for this kind of thievery. Dominion is an enjoyably silly spectacle, but please: let this unwanted beast become extinct.

Photo: Universal/Amblin

Men, dir. Alex Garland

Writer/director Alex Garland often explores big, mainstream genres in small and intimate ways. His new surreal horror film Men strains for an even tighter scope.

The film is set in the sort of rural English village you pass through when journeying elsewhere. Jessie Buckley (Cabaret, I'm Thinking of Ending Things) plays the recently traumatised Harper, who ventures to Hertfordshire to escape from London. But when a certain male-related trauma resurfaces, apparent in the uniformity of men’s faces in the village – all unnervingly played by Rory Kinnear (Years and Years) – misogynistic terrors begin to stalk her.

Men has already generated polarising opinions with its transparent allegories as well as its admitted underwriting, but this is Garland at his directorial best. He creates a rare, gradual, and unforgettable horror: plastered in curiosity instead of jump scares, with a conclusion that leaves permanent bloodstains in your mind.

Photo: Entertainment Film Distributors/Panther

Bergman Island, dir. Mia Hansen-Løve

Off the Swedish coast lies Fårö, an island now famous for its cinematic heritage. The existential auteur Ingmar Bergman wrote and shot a lot of his movies there: including Persona, Through A Glass Darkly and Scenes From A Marriage.

French director Mia Hansen-Løve (Eden) uses Fårö as the setting for her latest film Bergman Island. Tim Roth and Vicky Krieps star as a married couple, both filmmakers, who hope to find inspiration on the island. But their relationship is tested as reality and fantasy begin to blur. Mia Wasikowska (Crimson Peak) also stars.

Photo: MUBI

Top Gun: Maverick, dir. Joseph Kosinski

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

Everything Everywhere All At Once, dir. Dan Kwan and Daniel Scheinert

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

Vortex, dir. Gaspar Noé

‘To all those whose brains will decompose before their hearts,’ runs the dedication by Gaspar Noé at the start of his gruelling new dementia drama Vortex.

You never leave a Noé film without a part of it seeding and growing inside you, his bleak themes and transgressive style securing himself in the New French Extremity film movement. This latest exercise still writhes in that nihilistic arena. However, there’s an unusually poignant, tragic, and non-violent intimacy about Vortex: showing the auteur in a different shade of horrible.

The film follows the later lives of an elderly couple known only as The Father (Dario Argento) and The Mother (Françoise Lebrun), the latter of whom struggles with dementia. Noé severs the screen in two: capturing the differing perspectives of the couple at the same time in split-screen. Their mundanity hypnotises and sucks you in – your eyes tracking from one screen to the other like a pendulum grabbing your consciousness. It’s a deep, depressing experience, and close to a work of genius.

Photo: DDA

Downton Abbey: A New Era, dir. Simon Curtis

There’s a common view among critics that there’s no such thing as a guilty pleasure – you like what you like, and that’s it. But that’s nonsense when a Downton Abbey movie sequel exists: the guilt reliably lurking around the proper, grandiose and nostalgic 1920s setting. Despite the stiff upper lips and resuming of a period people enjoy without considering the bad parts, returning to the country estate is like embracing an older family member.

Superior to the first film, A New Era rightly disposes with cinematic gestures and compresses what might’ve been a whole season of the Julian Fellowes drama into a two-hour movie. Two plots wrap around each other. One half of the Abbey is tripping off to the south of France to investigate a claim by Aunt Violet (Maggie Smith) on another house, left by a potential past lover. The other half host a film crew shooting a silent period piece inside the estate, introducing Dominic West and Laura Haddock as famous movie stars.

A New Era is funny, sublime, and aristocratically silly, but also serves as a poignant conclusion that needs no further volume.

Photo: UPI/Focus Features

The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent, dir. Tom Gormican

It’s always hard to predict where Nicolas Cage will go next, which is precisely why he’s such a fascinating performer. His roles jump from surreal to poignant to incredibly crazy. The new meta-comedy The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent belongs to the latter category, with Cage starring as himself in one of his wildest and most ridiculous films to date.

This version of Cage is struggling as an actor. He's torn between the machismo he’s often presented on screen and the narcissistic insecurities rattling inside his actual self. He’s suddenly offered $1 million to appear at the party of a wealthy Nic Cage fan, Javi (Pedro Pascal). They develop a fun bromance. But unfortunately, Javi happens to be a wanted arms dealer.

Photo: Lionsgate/Panther

The Northman, dir. Robert Eggers

Cult horror filmmaker Robert Eggers (The Lighthouse) reaches into the mainstream with his new Viking revenge drama, inspired by the Norse saga of Amleth (which also inspired Hamlet). But he doesn’t fall into the same traps as many indie directors who’ve turned to bigger movies, resuming his signature style – as strong and powerful as the erupting volcano that opens the film. It’s bold, bloody and foul: qualities to which Hollywood could and should aspire.

Operation Mincemeat, dir. John Madden

There’s a nostalgic surfeit of WWII movies showing honourable British gents saving the world from the Nazis. Maybe this cinematic notion of nice, strapping men – sporting beautiful suits and good manners – indulges fantasies that Brits love to tell themselves. But their proud display in John Madden’s period spy drama Operation Mincemeat is charming nonetheless.