Source : the age
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(MA) 118 minutes
Great news from the post-apocalypse: the survivors are, in the immortal words of Derek Zoolander, really, really, ridiculously good-looking – Jacob Elordi, Margaret Qualley, Guy Pearce, Josh Brolin. The not-so-good news: there’s a very good chance someone is going to come along to mess up their pretty faces any minute.
Based on the 2012 novel by Peter Heller, The Dog Stars is set in a near future (2035) when a virus (some sort of flu) has wiped out great swathes of humanity, leading to deserted and rewilded cities and a remnant population scattered throughout the countryside. Scavenging is an option, for now, but ultimately growing your own food is key to survival.
This uneven, entertaining and occasionally ridiculous film is also Ridley Scott’s latest effort to work like there’s no tomorrow. Since Gladiator in 2000, the 88-year-old Englishman has turned out 20 films as director, and a heap more movies and TV series as producer under his Scott Free banner. The history-deprived scavengers of whatever apocalyptic future awaits might well sift the ruins of our civilisation and conclude that Sir Ridley was the movie business, for better and worse.
(MA) 90 minutes
It’s been just a few weeks since the release of Will Gluck’s science-fictional One Night Only, which asked us to invest in the concept of a parallel universe where sex is heavily regulated by an ultra-conservative government, as if this were something we might secretly get excited about.
I Want Your Sex, from veteran New Queer Cinema provocateur Gregg Araki, isn’t science fiction, and whether it qualifies as a romcom is in the eye of the beholder. But here, too, there’s a lurking sense that it might come as a relief if choices about sex were taken out of our hands.
That’s the dream lived by recent college graduate Elliot (Cooper Hoffman from Licorice Pizza), after he’s employed as an assistant by Erika Tracy (Olivia Wilde), an art world It girl 14 years his senior who specialises in pop provocations not entirely unlike Araki’s own.
(MA) 119 minutes
Early in & Sons, we learn in passing that A.N. Dyer (Bill Nighy), otherwise known as Andrew, is not just a bestselling novelist but one of the most successful novelists of all time. Which raises a couple of questions: what are his novels like, and why do people love them so much?
The title of his biggest success, Saturn’s Salute, gives little away. Nor does the Magritte painting on its cover, a large, framed copy of which Andrew has on display in the front room of his house in the country. Is it an occult thriller? An avant-garde work that caught on by fluke? A family chronicle prefiguring the story we’re about to see?
While we’re at it, we might also ask ourselves why, if Andrew is such a big deal, that so few fans come knocking on his door, and why his house is so visibly a shrine to himself and his achievements – given the later scene where he bemoans having wasted his life.
(PG) 110 minutes
Dreams is the second instalment of Norwegian-writer director Dag Johan Haugerud’s Sex trilogy. Narrated in flashback, it’s an absorbingly comprehensive tale about the agonies and ecstasies of first love.
By the time Haugerud has finished exploring his story’s every aspect, you feel as if you’ve been treated to a modern, romantic Rashomon without the bloodshed and the fancy dress.
All three films have been great hits on the festival circuit. The first, Sex, had its premiere in Berlin. The third, Love – finished in 2024 – was a contender for the Golden Lion in Venice, and Dreams won Berlin’s Golden Bear last year.
(MA15+) 107 minutes
Anthony Bourdain lived so much of his life in the public eye that you might imagine there’s not much a biopic can offer other than a replay of the greatest hits. But Tony puts something genuinely fresh on the table by focusing on the chef-turned-author-turned-TV presenter before he became any of that. He is, instead, merely a restless young man of ambition and appetite but no defined talent, until chance nudges him down the path that would be the making of him.
Dominic Sessa, who burst onto the scene as the high-school boarder stuck with Paul Giamatti’s grumpy teacher for Christmas in The Holdovers (2023), plays Bourdain as a 19-year-old. It’s the summer of 1975, and this gangly youth with writerly ambitions and a hankering for a high-school classmate heads to Provincetown with nothing much more on his mind than trying to woo Nancy (English actor Emilia Jones).
He’s a long way from the confident, ebullient raconteur we know from TV; he’s diffident, full of bull and wracked with insecurity.
(R18+) 128 minutes
Kristen Stewart has done anything but play it safe since she became a teenage star in the Twilight series.
She’s looked far beyond Hollywood, winning a César Award for her role in Olivier Assayas’s Clouds of Sils Maria as well as Oscar and Golden Globe nominations for her performance as Princess Diana in Pablo Larrain’s flawed biopic, Spencer.
But her adventurous career has attracted fewer headlines than a love life even more colourful than her hairstyles. It began when she and her Twilight co-star Robert Pattinson got together in 2009 and culminated last year with marriage to her filmmaker girlfriend.
(M) 131 minutes
“This whole scenario is way more melodramatic than it needs to be,” muses Matthew McConaughey halfway through The Rivals of Amziah King, where he plays the swaggering beekeeper of the title.
Besides illustrating that Amziah’s dialogue can similarly be wordy to a fault, the line might be applied to the story we’ve been following, which is probably just what writer-director Andrew Patterson had in mind.
A wilfully convoluted tall tale, the movie aims to give us a bit of everything, starting as a rowdy comedy, developing into a vigilante thriller, then shifting gears once more for the sentimental finish.
(MA) 109 minutes
Icelandic director Hlynur Pálmason pushed the cold climate drama to its bleakest extremes in his first two films, Winter Brothers and Godland.
With The Love That Remains, he has a change of heart, letting a little sunshine in. It’s an intimate tale about a family in transition and its atmosphere is brightened by the uninhibited presence of Pálmason’s three children and an Icelandic sheepdog called Panda who took out the Palm Dog Award at Cannes this year.
If this makes it sound as if Pálmason has gone soft, think again. We never learn why Anna (Saga Garðarsdóttir) and her husband, Magnus (Sverrir Páll Guðnason), a deep-sea fisherman, have decided to separate while remaining the best of friends but it soon becomes clear Magnus isn’t altogether happy with the arrangement.
(M) 102 minutes
Romantic comedies set in science fiction dystopias aren’t exactly common. Indeed, I’m not certain the idea has ever been done before. But if anyone can bring off the challenge of merging Sleepless In Seattle with The Handmaid’s Tale, it might be Will Gluck – almost the only rom-com specialist remaining in Hollywood.
By any standards, the premise of One Night Only is a lot. Travis Braun’s script is set in an alternate version of the present-day United States, where sex outside marriage has been outlawed, and every citizen over 18 is fitted with an electronic tracker that alerts the authorities of any transgressions.
As a concession to liberals, the restrictions are lifted for one night a year (Braun seems to have drawn inspiration from the Purge films, in which there’s a similar annual opportunity to commit murder). Three years into the new regime, the night in question has become an unofficial erotic festival, with much of the adult population racing round town looking for the right person to hook up with.
(M) 100 minutes
In The End of Oak Street, Jurassic Park comes to the suburbs although, strictly speaking, it’s the other way around. The Platt family wakes one morning to find that their suburb, Flowervale, has been transported to some mysterious corner of the cosmos, where every species of dinosaur roams free with predatory intent.
It comes as no surprise to learn that the disaster master, JJ Abrams, has had a hand in this. His company, Bad Robot, produced the film and it’s directed by David Robert Mitchell, whose low-budget horror movie, It Follows (2014), became a box-office hit and achieved cult status among horror’s ever-growing fan base.
It’s set in the 1980s because Mitchell is out to recreate the spirit of Poltergeist and other Spielberg family pictures he loved as a child; he and his crew have done a deep dive into the period detail. As well as finding their Oak Street in Wisteria Gardens, a street in Atlanta that looks as if it has remained unchanged for the past 60 years, they have brightened the soundtrack with highlights from ’80s pop charts and planted 1980s commercials on the Platts’ TV. They eat Froot Loops for breakfast and there’s no sign of a computer.
