This is a barrel of fun, an adrenalised, old-school monster movie made with ferocious commitment by It Follows’ David Robert Mitchell. Setting dinosaurs loose in Eighties suburbia stress-tests the marriage of Denise and Greg Platt (Anne Hathaway and Ewan McGregor), and proves prehistoric predators can still scare deliciously.
Vicky Krieps is a guarantor of female integrity, whose characters rail against or ride roughshod over gender restrictions. Star turns from Phantom Thread’s steely ingenue to Corsage’s empress fighting to breathe share a searching, nonconformist intelligence and sensual warmth sometimes sheathed for survival. Love Me Tender’s Clémence seems a defining role.
The strongest element in Tony is the performance that Antonio Banderas gives as ‘Chef’, the owner of a seafood restaurant in the holiday resort of Provincetown in the late Seventies. It’s a subtle, nuanced delivery despite a script which doesn't give the actor much to work with. He could have just drifted into playing a saintly mentor, but somehow Banderas finds complexity in the role.
“How many cancer patients does it take to change a lightbulb? One and then 12 to say, ‘How inspiring.’” Bad taste jokes are all the rage among the kids at the summer camp for teenage cancer survivors in this quirky, uneven, coming-of-age rom-com directed and written by George Jacques, who is an ambassador for the Teenage Cancer Trust and whose mother had breast cancer for long stretches of his childhood. There’s something rather contrived about his project though the cast is impressive and the film is well meaning and sometimes uplifting.
Director Charlie McDowell's The Summer Book is a beautiful, somewhat wistful film that follows the residents of a tiny Finnish island (daughter, father, grandmother) over a summer. The father (Anders Danielsen Lie, of The Worst Person in the World and Sentimental Value) is mourning the death of his wife, whilst his mother (Glenn Close) provides brisk, no-nonsense comfort, and his daughter, Sophia (Emily Matthews), struggles to come to terms with her new life and the loss it involves.
Tom Holland is 30 now, and after a decade in the role his boyish Spider-Man muscularly comes of age in this fourth solo outing.
“Ish” is the name of the lead character in this movie, but it also might be a suffix attached to adjectives describing it. Here we have a sparkish piece full of smallish moments in a quietish town that’s typically dullish and British. For 12-year-old Ish, life is somewhere around okayish.
E Jean Carroll is the all-American modern woman: Miss Cheerleader USA 1964, gonzo journalist, TV counsellor, glossy magazine agony aunt and, latterly, the victor in two civil suits against Donald J Trump. Currently he owes her almost $83 million. Ivy Meeropol’s documentary also shows the price Carroll has had to pay for her choices.
Ratchapoom Boonbunchachoke’s film was a surprise hit at Cannes last year, winning the Critics’ Week Grand Prize. It’s a ghost story that wears its genre trappings lightly, because it isn’t a regular ghost story at all. None of the usual shock tactics are deployed; instead, an offbeat whimsical humour guides the narrative, to an unlikely destination.
Mass shootings and social media combine to fry the humanity of rich New York kid Balthazar (Jaeden Martell) and poor Southern kid Solomon (Sex Education’s Asa Butterfield) in Oscar Boyson’s directorial debut. Co-writing with Ricky Camilleri, he dodges the moralising high ground and experiential dread of previous online and shooter films, preferring to satirise his antiheroes from the inside. The comedy is snarkily black, the ironic vacancy where authentic selves used to be all-consuming, even the title’s comma arching an eyebrow.