Race

With the Olympic Games starting in three months, it’s time to cash in with those inspiring stories of competition. Jesse Owens embodies the Olympic spirit, winning four track golds at the 1936 Berlin Olympics, comprehensively refuting Hitler’s message of race hate. Owens’s track medal tally remained unmatched until Carl Lewis, 48 years later. It’s difficult to think of a more perfect Olympian.

Money Monster

This is one of those films where it really is better not to have seen the trailer first. Much of the pleasure is in the narrative twists and the developing characters, and the publicity gives too much away. Nevertheless, Money Monster is an enjoyable soft-liberal satire on American TV shows and the wickedness of Wall Street.

Love & Friendship

Jane Austen’s early novel-in-letters Lady Susan has more in common with Vanity Fair or even Les Liaisons Dangereuses than it does with the author’s mature works. Austen’s familiar wit is there, certainly, but sharpened from embroidery needle to dagger. Her eye for social foibles and failings is similarly keen, but lacking the tempering generosity of her later novels.

A Hologram for the King

Tom Hanks is reaching world treasure status, like some third-century heritage site protected by UNESCO. His everyman allure makes him today’s only equivalent to James Stewart. Stewart shocked fans when he played a vengeful man-hunter in Winchester '73, and maybe it’s time Hanks defibrillated us all by playing a cold-blooded killer. In the meantime, here’s A Hologram for the King in which Hanks is very much Hanks and the main reason to pay up.

The source material is...

Sing Street

He did it Once. He did it with Begin Again. Sing Street is Irish writer and director John Carney’s third hymn to music’s inspiring power for his characters to find themselves. Almost too cute for its own good, it’s targeted at the feel-good market with the precision of one of those cruise missiles that can navigate up a jihadi’s u-bend.

Green Room

Adding the Dead Kennedys’ “Nazi Punks Fuck Off” to their set-list when they find themselves playing an Oregon roadhouse filled with neo-Nazis isn’t where The Ain’t Rights’ trouble starts. It’s when this hardcore, hard-up punk band stumble on a woman’s murder by a fellow neo-Nazi afterwards, then get bundled and locked into their dressing-room with her knife-stuck corpse, that their nightmare begins.