Two couples meet up for an apparently convivial meal, except that there’s a minefield under their feet. And when they trigger an explosion, one of the couples will be left trying to pick up the pieces. 

For factual footage from battle zones, we once used to rely on people toting heavy cameras who went in and out of the fields of war. The successors to news camera legends like Mohamed Amin and Rory Peck are still with us, but the most immersive, longitudinal studies are now in the hands of citizen journalists with iPhones and Sony Alphas. They patch together Oscar-winning gonzo docs from terabytes of footage kept under the bed.

It’s a big ask of an audience to watch a film which for most of its two hour running time, focuses on just two actors, even when they are doing their best work.  It’s impossible to fault Woody Norman, the young British actor who first attracted praise on C’mon C’mon. Here he is playing 13-year-old Roy, a sensitive London schoolboy with a mop of unruly dark curls and expressive dark eyes. His parents’ relationship is long over when he takes up his estranged French father’s invitation to live for  a year on an uninhabited island in the Norwegian fjords. 

How to Live on Earth should be compulsory viewing in every classroom, boardroom, town hall and government office on the globe. Billed as a “how-to video” the documentary offers hope as well as a realistic view of the dire straits our planet is in.

Director Fredi Devas worked with David Attenborough on seasons two and three of Planet Earth, recording the stunning beauty of nature so as to bring home what our gung-ho economic policies are destroying, but without suggesting any realistic alternatives.

Modesty is the last refuge of fantasy franchises once too big to fail. Much like The Mandalorian and Grogu and Captain America: Brave New World, Supergirl is a scaled-back sf story with minor-league villains and a manageable quest. Two films into James Gunn’s DC Extended Universe reboot, it already feels like a fill-in.

If screwball noir is a subgenre (encompassing Something Wild,  Fargo, The Long  Kiss Goodnight,  Wild at Heart, After Hours), then Anders Thomas Jensen is its Danish proponent.  The Last Viking is a highwire act in which throwaway comic barbs delivered at a clip are interrupted by brutal violence, ostensibly with the aim of keeping the audience ricocheting between laughs and gasps.  Whether it wor

It’s the summer vacation and eight-year-old Sasha (Eylul Guven) and her three brothers have moved into a new house on Vancouver Island with their Hungarian parents. The kids trampoline, visit a wildlife preserve with their mother, walk on the beach, make paper boats and sail them in the kitchen sink. Dappled sunlight is filtered through trees. There’s a feeling of boredom and of time passing slowly. Their father (Adam Tompa) silently films everything on his video camera.

Nineteen-ninety-five was the dawn of the internet for most people, and the same year saw the release of the first Toy Story movie. Yet cyberspace and “tech” has rarely intruded into the frantic playroom of the Toy Story characters. Toy Story 3 (2010) was at one stage due to have them searching for one of their kin on the web until that script was ditched. (It was a brief time when the franchise was taken away from Pixar, the legendary outfit that pioneered cartoons done by computer chip.)

Fans of classic Hollywood movies are liable to suffer a stab of frustration these days, when polls or vox pops canvas people’s favourite films. Selections seem to skew towards the worthy; there’s a performative whiff to a lot of it. Those Criterion Closet Pick videos are a case in point: “Pixie Buttermore, breakout star of Slithering Zombies 4, selects Woman in the Dunes”. God forbid somebody should pick something from the Golden Age.

Madfabulous, director Celyn Jones’ retelling of the true story of an heir who bankrupted a peerage, is a truly beautiful film – worth a watch if only for the excellent outfits worn by its iconic queer antagonist (played by Callum Scott Howells).