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Including Fast X, The Little Mermaid and Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 3 – Nicholas Barber lists this month’s unmissable releases.
1. Reality
On a Saturday afternoon in June 2017, two FBI agents visited the Georgia home of Reality Winner (yes, that’s her actual name), a 25-year-old US intelligence officer who had leaked a secret government document about Russian meddling in the presidential election. The interrogation was recorded, and Tina Satter used the transcript verbatim as the script for an acclaimed play, Is This a Room. Now Satter has turned that play into a gripping chamber piece starring Sydney Sweeney as Winner. The title has a double meaning. It’s Winner’s first name, but it’s also a hint that the film is as close to reality as a drama can be, even as Satter keeps reminding us of the artifice inherent in all art. “Not only is Reality inventively mounted and extraordinarily tense,” says Steph Green at IndieWire, “but across 85 taut minutes, it proves… that Sydney Sweeney is the real deal.”
Released on 29 May in the US.
2. What’s Love Got to Do with It?
No relation to the Tina Turner biopic from 1993, What’s Love Got to Do with It? is a Working Title romantic comedy in the Richard Curtis tradition, but with a cross-cultural twist: its screenwriter, Jemima Khan, used to be married to Imran Khan, the former Prime Minister of Pakistan, so she knows about relationships that span cultural and religious divides. Lily James and Shazad Latif star as Zoe and Kazim, who have been platonic friends since childhood. When Kazim reveals that he is travelling to Lahore to marry a woman from Pakistan he has never met, Zoe decides to make a documentary about his arranged or “assisted” marriage. But will she realise, along the way, that she’d prefer to marry him herself? “Propelled by zingy one-liners and engaging performances, the film is an enjoyable watch,” says Mohammad Zaheer at BBC Culture. “[It] manages to colour within the familiar lines of the genre, yet still bring something unique to the table.”
Released on 5 May in the US and 25 May in Denmark.
3. You Hurt My Feelings
Beth (Julia Louis-Dreyfus) and Don (Tobias Menzies) are a blissfully happy couple. Don is a successful therapist, and Beth is the writer of a well-received memoir. She might be struggling with her debut novel, but Don is a pillar of support and encouragement. But then comes the ultimate betrayal: Beth overhears him confessing that he isn’t a fan of her writing, after all. Nicole Holofcener, the writer-director of Friends with Money and Enough Said (which also starred Louis-Dreyfus) has made a “brilliantly knowing comedy”, says Alissa Wilkinson at Vox. “The film’s expertly sketched characters… portray with great affection the ways we hide the truth from one another out of love – and the resulting film is warm-hearted and rueful and hilarious in all the best ways.”
Released on 26 May in the US and Canada.
4. Master Gardener
As the screenwriter of Taxi Driver, and the writer-director of American Gigolo and First Reformed, Paul Schrader specialises in heavyweight thrillers about “God’s lonely man”: a solitary anti-hero whose obsessively self-contained persona hides a powder keg of pain and violence. So it’s no surprise that the lonely man in Master Gardener ends up doing more than pruning roses. A horticulturalist (Joel Edgerton) who tends to the grounds of a plantation mansion owned by a wealthy dowager (Sigourney Weaver), he seems to be dedicated to his work, to the exclusion of all else. But when the dowager asks him to train her grand-niece (Quintessa Swindell), his long-buried criminal past bursts up through the soil. “For all the film’s provocations, both serious and mischievous, it’s a remarkably elegant, subtle piece, its dynamics tightly reined in,” says Jonathan Romney at Screen. “Edgerton gives an extremely fine-tuned performance, while Weaver is coolly imposing and eventually terrifying.”
Released on 19 May in the US and 26 May in the UK and Ireland.
5. Hypnotic
Nothing is what it seems in Hypnotic, a mind-bending conspiracy thriller from Robert Rodriguez (Sin City, Spy Kids). Ben Affleck stars as a police detective who is haunted by the disappearance of his daughter. He is investigating a series of bank robberies when a mystery woman (Alice Braga) tells him about “hypnotics”: people who have the power to make others believe and do anything they want by uttering a single sentence. “Taking a page from The Matrix, Limitless and Memento – and whole chapters from sci-fi trickster Philip K Dick – this slick mix of special effects and practical ingenuity puts Affleck in a fun position, and the slightly grizzled star’s still got the clench-jawed charisma to pull it off,” says Peter Debruge in Variety. “Keeping up is like working out in a gym where gravity keeps changing. Just when things start to get heavy, the floor drops out from under you.”
Released on 11 May in Australia, 12 May in the US & 26 May in the UK.
6. Still: A Michael J Fox Movie
In Back to the Future and his other 1980s hits, Michael J Fox embodied youthful vitality, but the actor was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease when he was aged just 29. After seven years of keeping the condition hidden, he went public with it in 1998, and has since campaigned for greater awareness and understanding of the disease. Fox tells that story in his own words in Still, a documentary that splices interview segments with home movies, clips from Fox’s films, and re-enactments of key moments in his career. The director, Davis Guggenheim (An Inconvenient Truth), “delivers the actor’s life story both inventively and with the utmost sensitivity,” says Tomris Laffly at AV Club. “Still is a work of empowerment and empathy, a celebration of Fox’s life as an actor and philanthropist… It’s beautiful stuff.”
Released on 12 May on Apple TV+
7. Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 3
It’s been six years since Marvel’s second Guardians of the Galaxy film came out. In 2018, the year after its release, some offensive jokes made by its writer-director, James Gunn, came to light, and the studio responded by firing him. A few months after that, they hired him again, but by then Gunn was busy working on The Suicide Squad for Marvel’s competitors, DC, hence the long delay. Still, Star-Lord (Chris Pratt), Gamora (Zoe Saldana), Rocket (Bradley Cooper), Drax (Dave Bautista) and their buddies are finally back for more interstellar swashbuckling – and this time they’re up against the High Evolutionary (Chukwudi Iwuji). It will probably be the Guardians’ last adventure, though: Gunn has now signed up to oversee all of DC’s films, and to direct a Superman reboot.
On general release from 5 May.
8. The Little Mermaid
Another month, another live-action-and-CGI remake of a classic (well, almost classic) Disney cartoon. But this one is more distinctive than most, because a black actress, Halle Bailey, is playing the title character, who was white in the 1989 cartoon. Besides, the film’s director, Rob Marshall (Chicago, Mary Poppins Returns), argues that his version of The Little Mermaid is progressive in other ways, too. “The character goes back to Hans Christian Andersen from another century,” he told Nick Romano at EW, “but at the same time, even in 1989, it felt in some ways like a very modern woman, someone who sees her life differently than anyone around her, and goes to find that dream.” She and Prince Eric, played by Jonah Hauer-King, “really teach the world about prejudice and about breaking down barriers and walls between these two worlds.” Also, there’s a singing crab.
On general release from 24 May.
9. Fast X
Yes, it’s the tenth film in the unstoppable petrolhead series (or the 11th if you include Fast & Furious Presents: Hobbs & Shaw), a franchise which started with indie thrillers about undercover cops and illegal street racers and now encompasses global science-fiction blockbusters featuring some of Hollywood’s biggest names. The new additions this time are Jason Momoa as the vengeful son of a drug lord killed in Fast Five (2011); Rita Moreno as the grandmother of Dom (Vin Diesel) and Mia (Jordana Brewster); and Brie Larson as their contact in the secret service. Still, Fast X is about action as much as it is about actors, as the film’s director Louis Leterrier told Esquire Middle East. “They went into space in number nine, and I was like, ‘Okay… there’s no way I can top that.’ But what I can do is do stuff that we’ve never done before practically, such as rolling a one-tonne bomb – an actual one-tonne metal ball – in the streets of Rome, and hope not to destroy the Colosseum.”
On general release from 17 May
10. The Eight Mountains
All of the mountains in The Eight Mountains are unspoilt, idyllic and breathtakingly beautiful. Some of them are in the Himalayas, but most are in the Italian alps, where Pietro (Luca Marinelli), a city boy from Turin, befriends Bruno (Alessandro Borghi), the only child left in a remote rural village. Adapted from Paolo Cognetti’s award-winning novel, Charlotte Vandermeersch and Felix van Groeningen’s spectacularly scenic drama is a sensitive chronicle of their friendship through the decades. “This is the rare movie that understands how tied we are to the physical and psychological spaces of childhood,” says Justin Chang at the Los Angeles Times, “how our families and the traditions they raised us with can be both nurturing and limiting. More than anything, it brings a little-seen world to life with an almost palpable physicality.”
Released on 5 May in Japan, 12 May in the UK and Ireland, and 19 May in Spain and Finland
