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Part comedy, part environmental lament, all vibes – Sasquatch Sunset is a very weird, largely gross, yet somehow very charming chronicle of a year in the life of a group of sasquatch, or bigfoots (bigfeet?). Directed by David and Nathan Zellner (2014’s Kumiko, The Treasure Hunter) it follows a family of these apparently mythical beings as they face threat from the natural world and the encroachment of humans on their habitat.  The group of four sasquatch are an alpha male (Nathan Zellner), a pregnant female (Riley Keough), a second male (Jesse Eisenberg), and a child (Christophe Zajac-Denek). Although, you would be unlikely to ever guess that Keough and Eisenberg are in the cast as they’re beneath prosthetics and the sasquatch speak only in grunts and hoots. Their days pass with in-fighting – often because one male or another wants to have sex with the female – searches for food, encounters with other animals, and occasional straying into areas where humans have decimated the forest.  There’s not a great deal more to it than that. Its humour is of the puerile kind, with plenty of farting, vomiting and pathetically wagging sasquatch erections. In one scene, when the sasquatch encounter a road, a sight that terrifies them, they show their distress by taking it in turns to pee and crap all over it. But if there are times when the joke feels rather repetitive, or the screentime stretched a little thin, even at 88 minutes, there is also some well-earned poignancy to it.  It’s very

If prison cells are built to contain the most reprehensible parts of human nature, is it a stretch to believe that they could contain joy too? The evidence is scattered throughout co-writers Greg Kwedar and Clint Bentley’s (Jockey) compassionate, real-life-inspired window into incarceration. Joy isn’t just plausible here, it’s undeniable. As fans of old-school Hollywood gangster flicks will know, New York’s Sing Sing Correctional Facility is one of America’s most notorious maximum-security prisons. But behind its scarred walls, blaring sirens and courtyard scuffles is an unexpected soft side known as the real-life Rehabilitation Through the Arts (RTA) programme, a space for inmates to connect with their emotions via theatrical and artistic expression. (Kwedar and Bentley both worked as volunteers on the programme, and the majority of the film’s cast are RTA alumni with equity in the production.) Alongside teaching artist Brent Buell (Sound of Metal’s Paul Raci), RTA founder John ‘Divine G’ Whitfield (Rustin’s Colman Domingo) has the programme’s members embracing the escapism of creativity, even with his own wrongful conviction hearing looming large. Joy isn’t just plausible here, it’s undeniable However, as Sing Sing neatly demonstrates, make-believe is trickier for some. Hot-headed newcomer Clarence ‘Divine Eye’ Maclin (playing himself) is reluctant to embrace the group’s unconventional methods, despite being cast as the lead in their upcoming play. He’s served 20 years beh

At a dinner party in Québec, attractive 40-somethings drink, chatter and meet new people. It’s initially hard to tell who’s with who – and who’s meant to be with whom. Sophia (Magalie Lépine Blondeau) questions this herself: is she really happy in her routine relationship with Xavier – or should she bed the brash, bearded construction contractor who comes to renovate their new holiday home?  What starts as a lustful relationship with Sylvain (Pierre-Yves Cardinal) turns into something more serious. But well-heeled philosophy professor Sophia becomes increasingly, excruciatingly aware of the cultural differences between them. Is passion alone enough, she wonders? With enjoyable characters and smart dialogue, French-Canadian director Monia Chokri makes her dilemma a very entertaining ride. The French title of this film translates as ‘Simple like Sylvain’, and his simplicities are certainly a target of humour, beautifully delivered by Cardinal. Take lines like: ‘Fruit is for women’, and in response to Sophia’s body insecurity: ‘You’re perfect… you make me hard.’  It may not be deeply romantic – but it certainly is funny But there’s much more to the film’s comedy, and implicitly Sylvain, as Sophia wrestles with her feelings. While many romantic comedies overuse the best friend trope to let us know what the heroine is thinking, Sophia nervously muses out loud on her actions – sometimes during sex. ‘It’s totally irrational…’ she says breathlessly while in a hasty tryst with Sylvain

Sparky, kaleidoscopic and boldly honest about the tougher side of growing up, Inside Out 2 is Pixar’s most profound and moving movie since, well, Inside Out. Kudos, of course, to Turning Red, with which it’d make a perfect puberty prep double bill, but this cerebral coming-of-age adventure feels like the studio rediscovering its mojo and putting it to dazzling use. It kicks off with a quick catch-up to reintroduce the five anthropomorphised emotions who control the now 13-year-old San Francisco high-schooler Riley. There’s the upbeat Joy (voiced by Amy Poehler), morose Sadness (Phyllis Smith), nervy Fear (Tony Hale replacing Bill Hader), snarky Disgust (Liza Lapira taking over from Mindy Kaling) and the volcanic Anger (Lewis Black). They’re the basic set of emotions who now harmoniously collaborate over a sci-fi console to help her navigate late childhood.  Only, as the flashing ‘Puberty Alarm’ on the HQ console indicates, she’s not a kid anymore. A clutch of new emotions arrive, led by the high-energy Anxiety (voiced with ten-cups-of-coffee exuberance by Maya Hawke) and egged on by Envy (The Bear’s Ayo Edebiri), while Ennui (Adèle Exarchopoulos) provides sardonic commentary from the sofa and Embarrassment (Paul Walter Hauser) hides inside his hoodie. As Riley heads off to ice-skating camp with her besties and a posse of daunting older kids she’s keen to impress, all that delicate balance gets thrown out the window – literally – just when she needs it most. It’s Pixar’s brai

Heeeere’s (another) Johnny! Unlike his namesake in The Shining, the killer in this surprising spin on the backwoods slasher isn’t messing about with a slow mental freefall. He starts enraged and gets ragey-er, emerging, undead, from the soil of a whisper-quiet forest and having it echo with the screams of his victims as he pursues a stolen keepsake. Homaging classic horrors like Evil Dead, Friday the 13th and The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, while smartly subverting their rhythms and ingeniously switching viewpoint from victims to killer, writer-director Chris Nash has delivered a debut to pin you to your seat. The Canadian filmmaker invites you to ride shotgun with a decaying, hulking and faceless monster known only as ‘Johnny’ (Ry Barrett). Camera fixed over his shoulder, third-person-shooter style, he lumbers through the woods dispatching a gang of horny, bickering twentysomethings in increasingly gruesome style. With flies buzzing around his decaying flesh, and the disquieting sound design cranking up every trudge, axe-blow and snapped bone, this remorseless ramble builds to a crescendo of violence will have gorehounds whooping and everyone else reaching for the barfbag. The implied stench is so palpable, you’re glad William Castle isn’t still around to Smell-O-Vision this one.  Someone whose hallmarks are all over this singular shocker is foley artist Michelle Hwu, a games developer-turned-sound wizard who must have got through piles of melons in creating the hollow thwack

Watching this sturdy, sensitively acted Old West drama, it’s easy to wonder how many westerns Viggo Mortensen would have made if he’d been kicking about in the ’50s and ’60s. With his rugged visage and stoical quality, no actor looks more at home on a horse, caked in dust, or chewing over a moral quandary that will inevitably end in someone being punched through a saloon window.The writer-director-star’s shakily titled but very watchable The Dead Don’t Hurt – his fourth western after Young Guns II, Hidalgo and Appaloosa – finds an affecting new way into the genre. Set mainly in the 1860s, it’s a homesteader drama nestled (literally) in a valley beyond which those age-old western staples – corrupt lawmen, vicious blackhats and innocent townsfolk – exert an irresistible and tragic pull. Mortensen’s Civil War veteran, Holger Olsen, a Danish immigrant roped into becoming sheriff of a small Nevada town, is introduced watching on when an innocent man is sentenced to hang for gunning down some locals. The murderous son of the local cattle man (Brit actor Solly McLeod) is the obvious culprit. Surely Olsen will intervene heroically and stop this miscarriage of justice? Except, no. Mortensen the screenwriter and director isn’t interested in turning Mortensen the actor into a Randolph Scott, Jimmy Stewart or Gary Cooper hero. The upstanding but flawed Olsen is a study in believable complexity: a taciturn ex-soldier whose gentle nature can harden into quiet anger like adobe on an outhous

Yorkshire, 1996: 11-year-old Claire convinces her little friend Danny to distract a shopkeeper while she pockets some sweets. When she returns to collect him, however, Danny has been snatched – the victim of a serial child abductor. Although the man is later arrested, his young victims are never found, presumably buried somewhere on the Yorkshire moors. Twenty-five years later, having served his sentence, the perpetrator is about to be released, prompting Danny’s desperate father, Bill (David Edward-Robinson), to convince Claire (Sophia La Porta) to help him search the moors once again, hoping to find evidence of the crimes, and perhaps – finally – Danny’s body. They both know it’s a fool’s errand; a retired detective (one of the late Bernard Hill’s final roles) illustrates the vastness of the unforgiving, treacherous moorland in an effective scene employing overlapping Ordnance Survey maps. There’s more to this than meets the eye, however. Claire discovers that Bill is employing divination to try to pinpoint Danny’s location, which sets her sceptic-o-meter bleeping. Yet the further they explore, the more Claire feels the supernatural power of the foggy, boggy marshland, with its impassive standing stones and 5000-year-old rune carvings. Before long, Claire’s scepticism – and the audience’s – are challenged. You may feel the fog closing in around you in the cinema Most horror films weigh in at around 90 minutes, but first-timers Paul Thomas (screenwriter) and Chris Cronin (di

If you go into Bad Boys: Ride or Die expecting a meta Will Smith Oscar slap joke, you’re going to be sadly disappointed. Instead, the fourth instalment of the series, directed by Bad Boys For Life duo Adil El Arbi and Bilall Fallah, plays the franchise playbook to a tee: bickering buddies; exploding cars; over-the-top gunplay; filtered Miami skies; loved ones in peril; Mark Mancina’s insistent theme tune. It’s the formula as advertised but Ride Or Die gets by on the well-honed dynamic between its two likeable stars. Before it settles into its well-rehearsed moves, the film does pitch a curveball. In a bold move for a Jerry Bruckheimer blockbuster, the film opens with Martin Lawrence’s Marcus Burnett suffering a heart attack, dying momentarily and entering into a dreamlike afterlife (you can tell the filmmakers are Belgian) where he meets the late Captain Howard (Joe Pantoliano). Once revived, Burnett feels free and immortal. But, with Burnett testing his theories by wandering into traffic, it’s an extended joke that never really lands. When the plot shows up, it’s a tired affair as Mike Lowrey (Smith) and Burnett have to clear the name of Howard, who is posthumously being framed for being in league with a drug cartel, forcing our heroes to work outside the system (if you can’t guess the Big Bad from the get-go, you’ve never seen a movie before). It gets by on the well-honed dynamic between its two likeable stars While eschewing the lurid elements of the Michael Bay films (og

Guerilla filmmaking comes with certain stereotypical connotations: small scale; shaky, handheld cameras; maybe murky lighting. None of those apply to Iranian filmmaker Mohammad Rasoulof’s meaty and masterly family drama. Shot underground-style in Tehran in late 2023, a film decreed illegal by the country’s theocratic regime is as guerilla as they come – although from its scale, ambition and style you’d never guess it was made on the QT, in constant danger of being shut down and all concerned being chucked in jail.  Rasoulof, who has now fled his homeland and gone into hiding, has delivered an urgent message from Iran’s frontlines that’s wrapped inside a slyly funny family drama and slowly infected with clammy paranoia. It clocks in at three hours but not a scene feels superfluous as its central quartet – dad, mum, two teenage daughters – squabble, fall out and finally implode in a subversive final act. Dad is the portentously-named Iman (Missagh Zareh), an upstanding 20-year veteran of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Court who comes home one day with a new job – and a sidearm. He’s now in charge of investigating those charged with crimes against God. ‘God’, of course, really means a theocratic regime that just wants him to rubber-stamp a series of death sentences.  The promotion means instant changes for his wife, Najmeh (Soheila Golestani) and daughters, outspoken Rezvan (Mahsa Rostami) and the younger Sana (Setareh Maleki). Their comfy middle-class life now requires safeguardi

Bertrand Bonello’s sci-fi epic-cum-period-romance-cum-stalker-thriller is absolutely teeming with ideas. That they don’t all come together in an entirely convincing way doesn’t spoil the overall effect of something thought-provoking, very handsomely made, and appealingly weird. To explain it in its most basic terms, in 2044 France, A.I. has taken charge, following an unspecified event that left the atmosphere apparently inhospitable (everyone wears masks outdoors) and the population heavily depleted. Human emotion, which is blamed for the event, is now considered dangerous, and any person who wants to advance in this new society has to purge themselves of all complex feelings. Not just the feelings they have now, but anything they might be hanging onto from past lives. Keen to get out of her boring job, Gabrielle (Léa Seydoux) submits to a process of ‘purification’, stepping back into previous existences in an effort to make peace with them.  In each lifetime she encounters a man, Louis (Femme’s George MacKay), to whom she is always attracted. In 2044, he’s an alluring stranger with whom she keeps crossing paths. In 1910, he’s an old acquaintance who turns her head, even though she’s apparently happily married. In 2014, he’s a furious incel to whom a deeply lonely Gabrielle is drawn. It’s loosely inspired by Henry James’s ‘The Beast In The Jungle’, about a man whose life is crumpled by his unshakeable belief that something terrible is going to happen to him. In Gabrielle’s ca