The grimly effective 2008 home invasion shocker gets a strange semi-remake that sucks out all of the suspenseIn a genre in which innovation is increasingly resigned to the furthest outskirts, there’s something almost admirable about just how staggeringly redundant The Strangers: Chapter 1 is, early contender for 2024’s most pointless horror movie. It’s...

Cannes film festival Francis Ford Coppola’s question – can the US empire last forever? – may be valid but flashes of humour cannot rescue this conspiracy thriller from awful acting and dull effectsEveryone who loves cinema owes Francis Ford Coppola a very great deal … including honesty. His ambitious and earnestly intended new film, resoundingly dedicated...

Cannes film festival Toads who sweat hallucinogens, lonely pre-teens and a sudden German in a kilt: Arnold’s pick’n’mix latest dives as much as it soarsAndrea Arnold’s flawed, garrulous new movie is a chaotic social-realist adventure with big, chancy performances, grimly violent episodes, tragedy butting heads with comedy and physical existence facing...

Cannes film festival Lou Ye’s docu-realist film starts as sophisticated comedy, morphs from looking like a zombie apocalypse to intimate drama, and evolves into a tribute to how a nation handled traumaOut of agony and chaos, Chinese film-maker Lou Ye has created something mysterious, moving and even profound – a kind of multilayered docu-realist film,...

Marija Kavtaradze’s new film is a love story with a truly radical approach to intimacy. She reveals how she made a will they/won’t they tale that strays into little-known territoryThey meet cute in a dance rehearsal studio. She’s a contemporary dancer teaching a class of deaf teenagers. He’s the sign language interpreter. When he walks into the room...

Cannes film festival Nyoni uses unsettlingly playful surrealism in this account of a malign uncle and the family mythmaking that effaces his crimesRungano Nyoni is the Zambian-Welsh film-maker who in 2017 had an arthouse smash with her debut, the witty and distinctive misogyny fable I Am Not a Witch. Her new film is an oblique, intensely self-aware...