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After five decades in the business and more major acting awards than she has manicured fingers, Isabelle Huppert must have plenty of roles at her disposal. So it’s not entirely clear why she decided to try on Jean-Paul Salomé’s half-baked thriller for size. Yes, the subject matter is genuinely interesting. It’s the true story of Maureen Kearney, an Irish union rep who was subject to a bizarre sexual assault after she accused an energy company of selling its secrets to China. But Salomé's jazz-soundtracked attempts to set this film up as a twisty-turny mystery can’t really hide the fact that it’s a thrill-free zone after the first few minutes. ‘But no matter, we’ve got one of the world's greatest living actresses on board! She’ll patch up the holes in the script!’, its makers may well have reasoned. And on a level, they’re right. Huppert brings an engaging mix of bolshiness and fragility to the role, clinging to her glorious, hyper-feminine uniform of silk scarves, lipstick and platinum blonde chignon as she flips the bird at her concerned, schlubby husband or dodges a chair flung by an enraged energy company boss.  At first, everyone’s sympathetic to her claims that she’s being intimidated by shadowy forces. Then the police start to think she faked the assault, and her life falls apart. But 70-year-old Huppert firmly resists crumbling – her heavily-made-up face shows little emotion. The psychological intensity of her breakdown is further dimmed by the low-budget, daytime-tell

A folk horror with hair-raising making-of tales of its own, The Wicker Man is a reminder that great art rarely comes easily. A grim winter shoot, a battle in the editing suite, an unsupportive studio and original film cans that were famously rumoured to be buried beneath the M4 motorway – you’d have got the longest of odds that it’d be back in cinemas half a century later to dazzle fans afresh. But while the movie gods did not smile on it in 1972, when it was filmed, and 1973, when it came out to mixed reviews and half-empty cinemas, the past 50 years have seen it rightly hailed as a definitively classic – not just a high-water mark of folk horror, the genre it helped birth, but of British cinema. It was originally released as the undercard on a double-bill with legendary filmmaker Nicolas Roeg’s Don’t Look Now. What a week that was at the cinema.  Inexperienced director Robin Hardy, best known at the time as a director of ads, infuses Anthony Shaffer’s ingenious screenplay (adapted from David Pinner's 1967 novel ‘Ritual’) with a gathering sense of unease. The Wicker Man is deeply unsettling long before those still-remarkable final moments, as Edward Woodward’s devoutly Christian policeman, Sergeant Howie, is lured to a remote Hebridean island by news of a missing girl and then trapped by the sybaritic Lord Summerisle (Christopher Lee, never better) in a seemingly ordinary community that acts as a pagan hive mind plotting his demise.  This 91-minute 4K ‘final cut’, shorter th

Best known for a film about a sentient, homicidal tyre (Rubber) and a talking fringed jacket (Deerskin), French writer-director Quentin Dupieux has been busy ploughing a filmographical furrow as idiosyncratic and instantly recognisable as that of, say, Wes Anderson. Tune into his uniquely surreal frequency – wackadoodle ideas delivered with utterly deadpan sincerity – and there is much to enjoy. Those who fail to may find it insufferable. His latest is a kind of horror anthology, which directly references Tales from the Crypt, comprising three tales (although one of them is so short, it’s really more like two tales). The first is about two couples who rent a vacation home, where one of the women (Anaïs Demoustier) finds a 1930s ‘thinking helmet’, enabling a rare sense of peace that leads to a reappraisal of her marriage and her friends – with horrific consequences. Is it a pointed parable about the effects of disengaging from our hectic lives just long enough to re-evaluate them? Or just classic Dupieux daftness? Another is about a young man unfazed by the malfunctioning machine which has ground him to bits. Is it a satirical take on young people’s indifference to the crushing gears of oppression they face? Or simply, you know, Dupieux being Dupieux? Most bizarre of all is the framing device, for which adjectives like ‘zany’, ‘eccentric’ and ‘whimsical’ fall far short. Essentially, the stories are told at a lakeside team-building retreat for ‘Tobacco Force’. Five costumed sup

A sober PTSD drama with the haunting air of a ghost story, this acute character study from French director Alice Winocour (Proxima) follows the aftermath of a Bataclan-style massacre from the perspective of one survivor suffering memory loss. It’s a sensitive, careful film with real emotional intelligence, but no less gripping for swerving dramatic fireworks in favour of quieter, more observational moments. That survivor, Mia (Benedetta’s Virginie Efira), is a forty-something Parisian translator who we meet happy in her work and, seemingly, in her relationship with a workaholic doctor. And it’s his demanding job that sets in motion a fateful night that sees her caught up in a terrorist attack. He’s called away midway through a dinner date and she spontaneously decides to grab a drink in a nearby bistro. She makes eye contact with a handsome stranger (The Piano Teacher’s Benoît Magimel) celebrating his birthday on an adjacent table, then gunfire breaks out and the rest is a blank.  The film’s title translates as ‘Paris memories’ and it’s memories of the night – or the lack of them – that drives Mia in a quest for answers. It leads her back to the scene and the uneasy solace of a survivors’ support group. Erifa, who won a César award for her performance, is magnetic, essaying a woman of deep compassion who is stuck reliving the night. A tentative spark with Magimel’s rehabilitating survivor hangs in the air as she tries to fill in the gaps.That makes Revoir Paris a kind of psyc

The list of things that Jennifer Lawrence can’t do on screen is a short one – she couldn’t sell us a mop drama in Joy and The Hunger Games: Mockingay – Part 1 remains a fail-safe cure for insomnia – but this boisterous sex comedy is still a surprisingly effective showcase for her range. With a patchy script and uneven tone, it shouldn’t work, but she physically wrenches laughs out of it.  Lawrence plays Maddie, a Montauk, Long Island bartender and part-time Uber driver whose home is under threat from a pile of unpaid property tax bills. When a bitter ex (The Bear’s Ebon Moss-Bachrach, wasted) tows her car, she’s left physically and financially marooned, facing up to losing the house that her late mum left her. Then she spots a Craigslist ad placed by an affluent couple (Matthew Broderick and Laura Benanti, brilliantly deadpan) who want to make a man out of their socially awkward 19-year-old son, Percy (Andrew Barth Feldman), before he heads off to college. This involves overlooking the 13 year age gap and hiring Maddie as an escort. In return, she’ll get to keep a car and the chance to save her family home. ‘You won’t even rent out your house and now you’re going to rent out your vag?’ is her friends’ quizzical response. Indeed, it’s a queasy deal that says a lot about the gentrifying out-of-towners who descend onto the beach community for the summer, forcing locals to become, well, sex workers to survive. In Jaws they get eaten; here, they get complained about, with Maddie a

If record sleeves are the poor man’s art collection, as Noel Gallagher is fond of saying, the work of Hipgnosis is like MoMA, the Guggenheim and the Tate Modern rolled into one.  The two-man art collective – Aubrey ‘Po’ Powell and the late Storm Thorgerson – was behind many of the most famous album covers of the 1970s, from Pink Floyd’s prismatic ‘The Dark Side of the Moon’ – arguably the single most iconic album cover of all time – to Led Zeppelin’s naked-moppets-on-the-Giant’s-Causeway ‘Houses of the Holy’, plus classic images for other British pop and rock legend like AC/DC, Black Sabbath, 10cc, Peter Gabriel and Wings. There’s a great deal of overlap with Roddy Bogawa’s 2011 documentary Taken by Storm: The Art of Storm Thorgerson and Hipgnosis, made while Thorgerson was still alive, and – as the title suggests – heroing his contribution to the partnership. (Humility was not Thorgerson’s strong point; his friendship with Pink Floyd’s Roger Waters ended because Thorgerson claimed credit for Waters’ pig-flying-over-Battersea-Power-Station idea.) Yet it’s hard to imagine the Hipgnosis story being told by a more qualified admirer than photographer-turned-filmmaker Anton Corbijn (Control), whose monochromatic photography was key to establishing the image of 1980s music acts such as U2, The Smiths and Depeche Mode. Underpinned by a new interview with Powell, Corbijn traces Hipgnosis back to their first collaboration, the psychedelic sleeve for Pink Floyd’s second album, 1968’s ‘

What made Chris Hemsworth the Avengers’ MVP – and he was, don’t argue – was his natural knack for joyous self-spoofing as much as his gift for punching evil Marvel entities across the galaxy and wielding a massive hammer like it was a toothpick. The beefy Aussie is such a natural at comedy that this breakneck, stern-jawed Netflix action-thriller – again co-written by Avengers: Endgame directors Joe and Anthony Russo – misses a trick by not employing it. Like his fellow man-on-a-mission John Wick, Hemsworth’s elite operative Tyler Rake, initially found recuperating in a snowbound cabin, doesn’t come packing too many lols. Having a pet chicken and a tragic back story is as far as he gets towards cuddly.  If that’s a major downside here, there’s plenty of upside in a sequel that improves significantly on its hit predecessor. If you like your action flicks lean, mean and to the point, director and one-time stuntman Sam Hargrave has delivered a dream night on the sofa. The spectacle comes in waves, and some of it even cries out for a much bigger screen. Fished out of the river where the first film left him, Rake is reunited with cosmopolitan but lethally resourceful brother-and-sister team, Nik (Golshifteh Farahani) and Yas (Adam Bessa), and is soon in the employ of a cameoing Idris Elba’s mysterious fixer. The new mission? To bust the wife (Tinatin Dalakishvili) and young family of a Georgian mobster out of the anarchic prison in which they’ve been incarcerated purely to keep him

Spanish filmmaking great Victor Erice hasn’t made a movie in 31 years. His debut, 1973’s The Spirit of the Beehive, is widely considered to be one of the best films in Spanish film history, so his absence has been keenly felt by audiences, cinephiles and fellow filmmakers alike. His return to the big screen with Close Your Eyes felt like A Big Deal at this year’s Cannes.  Elegantly mysterious, the film’s jumping off point is the disappearance of actor Julio Arenas (José Coronado) from the set of The Farewell Gaze, having completed only two scenes, the first and the last. His friend and director of the film, Miguel Garay (Manolo Solo), has since abandoned cinema and semi-retired to a beachside hut where he keeps a low-profile and survives on translations. But being interviewed on an episode about Julio’s disappearance makes memories resurface, that of their friendship, their work together, and all together more painful ones.  As Miguel – or Mike, as he’s sometimes called – delves deeper into his abandoned project and his memories of who he once was, Close Your Eyes unfolds its exploration of memory, identity and their intersection with cinema. Miguel has made it his business to forget painful elements of his past, and the film gently guides him to remembering himself fully and deeply by sending him on the hunt for his lost friend.  A less eloquent filmmaker would’ve delivered yet another ‘love letter to cinemas’ piece, but Erice’s work operates on a whole different level, he d

There’s a kinetic strength to star-in-the-making Aswan Reid’s screen presence as we first glimpse his unnamed ‘new boy’ attempting to throttle the life out of a policeman much bigger than himself. A scrapper with a mess of sun-bleached hair, he seems to channel the vast majesty of the mountainous desert as they tussle in the dust.In The New Boy, filmmaker Warwick Thornton’s latest reckoning with Australia’s violenthistory, this is a fight the boy can’t win. Forcibly knocked out by a boomerang in a crackingshot that feels like it’s going to rip through the screen, he’s dragged in a sack to a ramshackle orphanage ruled over by Cate Blanchett’s ocker nun, Sister Eileen, sometime during World War II. Covering up the death of the priest who should be in charge, she’s a little too fond of communion wine and fervent prayer. Wreaking a matriarchal variant of paternalism no less insidious for its well-meaning façade, she hopes to scrub out the young Aboriginal man’s spiritual connection to the land and imprint the Catholic faith on him, all blood and thorns.Reid conveys great interior strength as the new boy plays with a mysterious fire dancing around his fingertips under his steel-framed bed in a dormitory full of similarly lost (or stolen) boys. With a child’s wisdom, he can’t quite figure out why anyone would leave the nails dug deep into the wooden wounds of Jesus on the chapel’s cross.Wayne Blair’s groundskeeper George, also a First Nations man, is unnerved by the new boy clingin

By this point you probably know if the Transformers series is for you. We’re now six films in (seven, if you count the Bumblebee spin-off) and this is not a franchise that ever seeks to reinvent the wheels. Each instalment twists and rearranges the same elements – a trinket that could destroy Earth; a silver baddy; a down-on-his-luck human; some vague allusion to ancient civilisation – and surrounds them with impressively animated bot-on-bot action.  Rise of the Beasts is squarely tied to the same formula, but that turns out to be one of its assets. It gives the audience what they’re here for and nothing more. There’s none of the over-complication of the Michael Bay movies, which often featured far too much convoluted human plot and not enough smashing, and it doesn’t bloat its running time. Beasts begins in the non-specific past with a group of animal Transformers, the Maximals, fleeing their home planet as it’s attacked by planet-devouring robot god Unicron and his henchman Scourge. They escape with the transwarp key, a device that would allow Unicron to travel through time and space, eating planets at will. After stashing it on Earth, Transformers’ favourite hiding spot, they disappear. Cut to 1994, where the key is found and accidentally activated by museum intern Elena (Dominique Fishback). That awakens the Maximals and the Autobots, who have picked up a new human friend, Noah (Anthony Ramos), and everyone embarks on a mission to prevent an apocalypse.  By the series’ fa