The best films to see in cinemas in April: from ‘Warfare’ to ‘A Minecraft Movie’

Blocks will be busted – or at least, rearranged in geometrically satisfying ways – in a video game adaptation that finally answers the question: are there any more video games left to be adapted? But while it’s easy to go all death-of-cinema on this one, A Minecraft Movie does have a fun-looking cast to bring fun and mischief to its cubic setting. Jumanji’s Jack Black, who was born for this stuff, is joined by Jason Momoa and Jennifer Coolidge in a daft-looking but hopefully amusing holiday-filler.

In cinemas Apr 4

It’s not just grizzled men wreaking revenge on April’s slate of new movies. In this A24 horror-comedy, unicorns get in on the act. Jenna Ortega, Paul Rudd, Richard E Grant and Will Poulter are the humans who discover to their cost that the mythological creatures don’t just have those horns for show, when one of their number is used for scientific research by greedy pharma types. Gruesome laughs surely await.

In UK cinemas Apr 4. In US theaters now.

A midlife Marley & Me is the dog-lovers choice this month. Naomi Watts plays Iris, a cat-loving New York writer whose compact, orderly life is upturned when her old friend and mentor Walter (Bill Murray) dies and she inherits his Great Dane, Apollo. The outsized pooch, needless to say, will wreak havoc while slowly winning her heart in a delicate New York story about grief and connection. 

In US theaters Apr 4 and UK cinemas Apr 25.

Revenge is a dish served ice cold in Bohemian Rhapsody star Rami Malek’s new revenge thriller. He plays CIA cryptographer Charles Heller, whose wife is murdered and whose quest to bring her killers to justice is obstructed. Cue some high-tech vigilante justice. Judging by the trailer, it’s a movie that will ask: ‘What if Bryan Mills was really good at computers?’ Laurence Fishburne co-stars.

In cinemas Apr 11

The White Lotus’s Meghann Fahy is a woman on a date that goes wrong in homicidal fashion in a kind of Phone Booth for the Feeld generation. She plays Violet, a widowed mum who turns up at a fancy restaurant for a date with the handsome Henry (It Ends with Us’ Brandon Sklenar), only to start receiving increasingly menacing drops to her phone. Soon ‘white or red’ is the very least of her choices.

In cinemas Apr 11

A music doc with a difference, this snapshot of John Lennon and Yoko Ono’s life together in the lead-up to the pair’s famous 1972 ‘One to One’ concert at Madison Square Garden. Co-directors Kevin Macdonald and Sam Rice-Edwards have found a new way into a well-trodden subject – bed-ins, political upheaval, and the rest – with the help of never-seen-before footage, digging into the couple’s 18-month Greenwich Village period to shine new light on the ultimate countercultural power couple.

In cinemas Apr 11

Ryan Coogler reunites with his Creed star Michael B Jordan for a horror movie set, intriguingly, in the Jim Crow-era of the 1930s Deep South. Racial undercurrents will course through a Black-led vampire film that will be nothing whatsoever like Vampire in Brooklyn. It’s been a big year for actors playing double roles – Robert De Niro in The Alto Knights, Robert Pattinson in Mickey 17 – and Jordan continues the trend as two twin brothers who head back to their hometown to face down an evil force. 

In cinemas Apr 18

To follow up Civil War, Alex Garland has teamed up with ex-Navy SEAL Ray Mendoza for a hyper-visceral snapshot of modern combat. Lean and mean, the A24 movie springboards off Mendoza’s traumatic experiences fighting insurgents in Iraq to follow a cast of young, mostly British stars (Will Poulter, Cosmo Jarvis, Kit Connor, Joseph Quinn) into the maelstrom of urban warfare circa 2006. Bad shit will go down, things will blow up, and we’ll all stumble, dazed, from the cinema.

In cinemas Apr 18

The early word on this Ben Affleck action-thriller has been unexpectedly glowing, so we should probably put aside our misgivings about the dishwater-dull title and get hyped for see Sad Affleck turn Mad Affleck in the cause of justice. As autistic beancounter Christian Wolff (he’d have been called ‘Rain Manslaughter’ in the Van Damme version), he teams up with his estranged, deadly brother (Jon Bernthal) to get to the bottom of a murderous conspiracy. 

In cinemas Apr 25

The month is bookended with two video-game adaptation, but absolutely do not take your kids to this one. A group of fresh-faced twentysomethings goes out into the boondocks where an array of hellish perils awaits. They are killed, and killed again, only to realise that there’s a time loop and they need to make it to dawn to escape. Overseen by David F Sandberg, it’s Cabin in the Woods meets Happy Death Day. Could be the Friday night horror movie outing we’ve been waiting for.  

In cinemas Apr 25