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Welcome to the snowbound flatlands of Normal, Minnesota. Population 1,890 – although you might want to downgrade that come the end of this unapologetic blast of old-school mayhem.Bob Odenkirk is caretaker sheriff Ulysses Richardson, shipped into Normal after the previous lawman perished in a whiteout. ‘Good people, small problems’ is Ulysses’ appraisal after calming a petty local dispute, but something isn’t quite right. The nice lady in the yarn shop has a police radio scanner. Shotguns deck the walls of the local diner. And the cop shop armoury has enough C4 to blow up Luxembourg. A botched bank heist by two bungling drifters exposes Normal’s dirty secret: gold bullion stashed by the townsfolk in return for a cut from the Japanese mafia. The Yakuza money is Normal’s lifeblood – and now Ulysses knows, everyone in town, from the postie to the doctor, wants him dead.     Normal is a film of two halves. The first, a smalltown mystery populated with eccentric western stock: Lena Headey’s grungy barfly, Billy MacLellan’s doofus deputy, Henry Winkler’s dodgy mayor, face like a haunted flannel. And the second? The pneumatic chakka-chak of gunfire is absolutely relentless. A throwback to the B-movie thriller that packed the shelves of your local Blockbuster Exploding cop cars. Exploding heads. Ninety minute runtime. No CG. Who makes these films any more? Director Ben Wheatley, whose warehouse shoot-‘em-up Free Fire showed a fluency in the grammar of action cinema, piles on the...

A content creator, a disruptor, a beekeeper and a teacher walk into a bar. Sounds like the set-up for the most 21st century gag – and in a roundabout way, it is. The punchline, as spun in Cédric Klapisch’s (The Spanish Apartment, Call My Agent!) amiable time-leaping comedy, is that these four people are cousins. Their family tree has sent its branches shooting off in the maddest directions. Like Woody Allen’s Midnight in Paris, we’re off time-travelling to a more colourful era in French history to understand their common dominator: a young Norman woman, Adèle Vermillard (a wide-eyed Suzanne Lindon), who sets off to find her own mother in Belle Époque Paris and ends up intersecting with the Impressionist masters. The four distant relatives have been appointed by their wider family to help decide what to do with their great-great-grandmothers’ broken-down Normandy cottage. A supermarket chain wants to buy the land and they must decide what to do with her legacy of art and portraits – in the process learning about her and themselves. (Entertainingly, the wider family gathers on a conference call in which an older relative has a kitten filter on – an unexpected homage to the Zoom Cat Lawyer meme, perhaps.) It’s a great excuse to revisit this gilded age in French history Klapisch is a French director who treats his characters with the care of a Frank Capra, and Colours of Time is as accessible and generous as any of his work – a family dramedy with the sprightly spirit of a...

Lee Cronin’s last film was Evil Dead Rise, an effective and often grotesque sequel to Sam Raimi’s low-budget classic. There was immediate talk of sequels and spin-offs but, given a little more road following its success, the Irish director has chosen an ostensibly different path. He breathes life – or death, more accurately – into another classic horror monster, with a spin on Egyptian mummies that's distinctly Raimi-esque in its goo and gore. Midsommar’s Jack Reynor stars as Charlie Cannon, a rising star journalist on assignment in Egypt for several months with his two children and pregnant wife, Larissa (Laia Costa). But when his young daughter, Katie (Emily Mitchell) is abducted from their garden, their lives are overturned. The police, with the possible exception of idealistic young detective Dalia Zaki (May Calamawy), suspect him of the crime, and no sign of Katie is found. It's quite some time before a strange accident returns her (now played by Natalie Grace) to the bosom of her family. Or at least, something that looks a lot like her. Cue some impressively horrible experiences for the largely blameless Cannons. Cronin, who writes as well as directs, punctuates some slow-burn scenes with regular visceral scares; visceral in the literal sense that bodily organs do not always remain on the inside here. As well as the world’s most upsetting pedicure scene and frequent moments of body horror, Cronin dabbles in the supernatural, social awkwardness, food repugnance,...

Faking it ‘til you make it is all well and good, but what happens when you actually make it? How do you keep the wolf from the door, the pretense alive, the lie a reality?  James McAvoy’s likeable directorial debut explores the dark side of that story, speeding off like a souped-up boy racer before wrapping around a lamp post in a moody final stretch that reveals the cost of it all. As charted in 2013 documentary The Great Hip Hop Hoax and faithfully recorded in the former’s memoir, Gavin Bain (Seamus McLean Ross) and Billy Boyd (Samuel Bottomley) were a couple of Dundee wannabe B-boys and bedroom hip hop heads for whom rap music was both an inspiration and a way out. Bonding over skateboarding and a shared loved of Tupac, American street culture was an exit sign from their Scottish council estate. Problem? No one wanted a pair of Scottish rappers. Solution? Reinvent themselves as a Californian rap double act called Silibil N' Brains and hope no one asks too many questions. And as recreated in this twisty rags-to-riches tale, no one did. Not their wolfish record label boss (McAvoy), who sees the dollar signs in a pair of rapping white guys in the era of Eminem and D12; not the UK media types who are take happy to take the pair’s vague Californian back story at face value – even if their professed home town, ‘San Diangeles’, sounds a bit suspicious. Only their mate Mary (The Testaments’ Lucy Halliday) is on hand to remind them that, actually, they’re full of shite.  ...

A contemplative mood piece, Christian Petzold’s Mirrors No. 3 reflects on grief as a moment of transformation, a chance for a new beginning. Petzold centres the story on the mysterious ambiguity of Paula Beer, now his most frequent collaborator, a partnership that defines his cinema as surely as Nina Hoss did in Barbara, Phoenix and Transit. With Beer, he has moved away from the weight of history and politics, turning inward toward intimate gestures and the quiet drama of people failing to bond. The story brings together two women at very different points of loss. Beer's Laura is in a car that almost hits Betty (Barbara Auer) on a country road, a brief, loaded exchange of glances that takes on greater meaning when moments later her boyfriend Jakob is dead and she wakes up in a stranger's house. Betty, by contrast, carries an older, more diffuse grief, a family tragedy that has hollowed out her relationship with her husband and son. One loss is raw, the other long settled into the bones. What binds them is the mystery that connects not only them, but all of us. Not grief, but loss.  Almost the entire film takes place at Betty’s rundown countryside house, with an unusual porch that faces the street like something from the American midwest, a spot stuck between two spaces, as if it has been waiting for something to fill it. Betty seems to recognise something in Laura, though neither woman fully understands what the other needs. It is this mysterious glue that Petzold wants to...

‘Jesus Christ… She’s back.’ Imagine these words in a broad Cornish accent, with a very long pause in between, as a local discovers a little fishing boat washed up on a quiet harbour. Picture this shot on 16mm film, in director Mark Jenkin’s signature analogue style. And so the scene is set for a time-twisting fishing village mystery: one that may never be solved, but remains atmospheric and intriguing throughout.  The Rose of Nevada was lost at sea 30 years ago, along with its small crew, in the days when the fishing village prospered. Now, its scant population includes those still deep in mourning, and those struggling to provide for their families, such as Nick (an excellent George MacKay). When Nick agrees to join a fishing trip on the newly-return trawler, an ominous, superstitious sense prevails. But rather than not coming home at all, Nick returns in a different year: 1993, a few years before he was even born. With him in this time loop is his crew mate Liam (Callum Turner). Rather than being greeted as strangers, they are each welcomed back as a former crew member of the Rose. While the opportunistic Liam accepts being taken for the partner of a local (Rosalind Eleazar), Nick is understandably freaked out to be mistaken for the son of his neighbours: a man he knows to be long dead in the present day. Unlike Sam Beckett in Quantum Leap, who ‘leapt’ willingly into the bodies of strangers to solve their problems, Nick didn’t sign up for this, and challenges Liam’s...

Bridgerton’s Regé-Jean Page is back duelling over damsels in this glossy and visually lavish romcom that has him starring opposite The Little Mermaid’s Halle Bailey and some of the world’s most glorious scenery. Page plays Michael, a Tuscan winemaker who ends up in the Italian equivalent of a ménage à trois with his cousin (Lorenzo de Moor) and his ‘fake’ fiancée. Bailey is Anna, an American culinary school dropout who flies to Italy and squats at her former flame’s Tuscan villa. When she’s caught by his all-seeing Nona, she pretends to be his wife-to-be, while simultaneously falling under Michael’s spell. Ah! Welcome back overly-complicated romcom plots, we’ve missed you.  Obviously, if you’re looking for intellectual stimulation or clever plot twists, you won’t find them here. Instead, producer Will Packer (Girls Trip, Think Like a Man) and director Kat Coiro (It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia) merrily lock in on all those well-worn romcom tropes. It’s not just one parent that’s bumped off for background, it’s four. All the local Italians seem to drive Fiat 500s and drink Aperol like orange juice, stopping just shy of breaking into ‘Nessun Dorma’ over their morning cappuccinos.  Regé-Jean Page’s abs are featured so frequently, they deserve their own credit As well as Page’s abs, featured so frequently they deserve their own IMDb credit, You, Me and Tuscany wastes no opportunity to show off this cinematic corner of the world. DP Danny Ruhlmann’s photography is pure...

The best thing about The Christophers may be the fact that it exists at all. At a time when any good news is welcome, Steven Soderbergh has reminded us that, yes, old-school artistry is still valued and viable.  On its surface, this miniscule movie is about a famously difficult painter, Julian Sklar (Ian McKellen), and the young restorer, Lori Butler (Michaela Coel), attempting to exploit his dotage. But this is a Soderbergh joint, with a prickly script written by his frequent collaborator Ed Solomon (Mosaic). So clearly, there’s more to the story than the initial set-up, in which Julian is eking out his final years in resentful boredom until Lori shows up as his inspiring new assistant.She’s actually a forger secretly hired by his children – a mischievous James Corden and a disappointingly underused Jessica Gunning – to finish a series of paintings inspired by a long-ago lover. Julian has hidden his half-done ‘Christopher’ canvases in the attic, so if Lori can sneak up there between tea fetching and brush cleaning, everyone stands to make a fortune when he dies. Well, everyone but Julian, who’s delighted to discover one last opportunity to beat others at their own game.That’s all laid out early, so here’s the only twist you need to know: the cat-and-mouse structure is just a scaffold, for a series of erudite debates between two people with more in common than either realises.  Here’s a reminder that, yes, old-school artistry is still valued  Coel keeps us on edge by...

A filmmaker who could spin a seductive interpretation out of Bleak House, François Ozon definitely extracts all the juice from Albert Camus’ famous 1942 novella L'Étranger. The existential tale has been a holy text for angsty teenagers and Gitane-puffing sophisticates for generations. None of them will remember it being quite this horny.  The Swimming Pool and Young and Beautiful director is a visual stylist and he amplifies the sensuality of Camus’ great antihero Meursault (Benjamin Voisin) in dazzling ways, with Manu Dacosse’s gorgeous monochrome lighting finding light and shade in colonial Algiers. If there’s a better-looking film this year, it’ll be a thing to behold.  Played with an inscrutable kind of magnetism by Ozon’s Summer of 85 lead Voisin, Mersault is a clerk, a cog in the machine of French colonialism – a man for whom life is a series of motions to go through and moral and emotional judgments are meaningless. He makes little distinction between his scummy pimp neighbour Raymond (Pierre Lottin), whose abuse of a young Arab woman (Hajar Bouzaouit) brings violence to his door, and the self-pitying dog-beater upstairs (Denis Lavant’s rumpled face telling a thousand stories). He makes no outward sign of grieving his mother’s death. He is, to the eyes of his countrymen, an unsettling enigma.   If there’s a better-looking film this year, it’ll be a thing to behold His affair with beautiful young typist Marie (Rebecca Marder) is expanded from the book, injecting...

Adulthood is often compared to a treadmill for the way the daily grind of responsibilities and obligations manufactures the illusion of forward progress, keeping us running after goals that remain out of reach until we collapse in the same place we started.  But what if life is actually more like an inescapable underground station, where every corridor looks identical and the walls occasionally drip blood and produce hallucinations of crying babies and mutated rats? That’s where director Genki Kawamura takes us with his video-game adaptation. Same difference, maybe, but a much more useable concept for a horror movie.  A sparse, small-scale mindbender, Exit 8 is based on the viral video game of the same name and, for the first few minutes, plays like it. An unnamed young man (Japanese pop star Kazunari Ninomiya) rides a cramped subway train to his temp job in Tokyo. As he disembarks, he receives a phone call from his ex-girlfriend. She’s pregnant. In his disorientation at the news, it takes him a moment to realise he’s walking in circles – down the same white-tiled hallway, past the same robotic NPC carrying a briefcase.  All that tablesetting is presented in a single, unbroken POV shot; once the protagonist recognises that something is amiss, the perspective changes, and that’s when the game, for him, truly begins. A helpful placard explains the rules: ‘If you find an anomaly, turn back immediately. If you do not find any anomalies, do not turn back.’ The goal, of course,...