The CineBlog

When it comes to high school movies about teenage girls, you might feel like you’ve seen it all before. Bickering between cliques, the race towards their first significant sexual experience, getting dolled up for a wild night of finding themselves – it’s all present and correct in Our Ladies, but this film delivers schoolgirl sins in such a gloriously funny, brash and unashamedly thirsty way that it succeeds in standing out from the crowd. ...

Gemma (Imogen Poots) is a teacher. Tom (Jesse Eisenberg) is a gardener. They’re a couple – a happy one. And, as happy couples do, they’ve started looking for their first home. It’s this search that brings them to Prospect Properties, where they meet creepy and persuasive estate agent Martin (Jonathan Aris). He convinces Tom and Gemma to visit one of Prospect’s show homes in the ‘Yonder’ development. They follow him to number 9 – a perfectly nice house on a perfectly nice street, each building uniformly painted a sickly shade of mint green. When Martin leaves and the couple struggle to find their way out, Vivarium descends into a surreal suburban nightmare that will make any millennial watching glad that they’ll probably never get on the property ladder. ...

Major Roy McBride is good at compartmentalising. Becoming orphaned (or so he thinks) at a young age, his wife leaving him, almost plummeting to his death from the International Space Station – these are all just things that get stowed away in little boxes in his brain, not to be looked at and most definitely not allowed to interfere with his mission. After the Earth experiences immense power surges originating from the depths of the solar system, Roy (Brad Pitt) is sent on a mission to Mars. His superiors believe that his father, previously missing presumed dead, could in fact be alive – and responsible for the surges that pose a huge threat to life on our planet and beyond. ...

Once in a while, a film comes along that reminds you why you love movies so much. And sometimes, it’s from where you least expect it – no franchise, no wealth of IP to draw from, no 22 films worth of worldbuilding. Sometimes, it’s the little guys that surprise you. Booksmart is one of them. Booksmart takes place over only around 24 hours. It follows BFFs Amy (Kaitlyn Dever) and Molly (Beanie Feldstein) on their last day of high school. They’ve spent their entire time at school dedicated to getting excellent grades so they can get into the colleges of their dreams, looking down their noses at the popular party kids along the way. ...

What makes a family? Is it blood? A birth certificate? Or is it who you choose to call your brothers, your sisters, and your parents that matters? This is a question made all the more poignant for a kid in the foster care system like Billy Batson (Asher Angel). Separated from his mother as a toddler, Billy has made it his mission to find her. We meet him as a mildly delinquent teenager, tricking cops so as to get hold of the address of the next Ms Batson on his list; but after another failed attempt, he ends up in a group care home in Philadelphia, thrown amongst an endearing but overwhelming mix of brand new siblings (though he doesn’t see them that way, at first). ...

Feelings, or rather the lack of them, are at the heart of Cory Finley’s Thoroughbreds. Set in a luxurious but lifeless suburb, this clinically cool, blackly comic thriller chronicles a friendship between upper-class teens Lily (Anya Taylor-Joy) and sociopathic Amanda (Olivia Cooke), a character that admits she experiences no feelings whatsoever. That doesn’t make her a bad person, she claims – she just needs to try a little harder to be a good one. ...

Natasha Lyonne is staring at herself in the bathroom mirror; tap running, someone banging on the door. Harry Nilsson’s lyrics (‘gotta get up, gotta get out, gotta get home before the morning comes’) reverberate through her ears for the 10th time. With her signature curly ginger hair and dressed like some kind of fucking epic modern glam rock star, she paces through the party and hears her best friend Maxine say ‘Sweet birthday baby!’ – for the 10th time. ...

Let’s set the scene. It’s 2 years after the events of **Captain America: Civil War. Scott Lang (Paul Rudd) is still under house arrest for breaking the Sokovia Accords by helping Cap and Bucky in that mega airport fight, but is about to be released. Thanks to Scott using their technology to get involved in Civil War, Hope van Dyne (Evangeline Lilly) and Hank Pym (Michael Douglas) are also in trouble with the authorities, but are on the run. That hasn’t stopped them developing the Pym particle though, with them trying to figure out how to get back Janet van Dyne, Hank’s wife and Hope’s mother, from the quantum realm. ...

The latest film in The ConjuringUniverse, The Nun has been hyped up as the darkest chapter so far. Based around the cameo of Valak, the demon nun from **The Conjuring 2, it is a spin-off prequel that aims to be an origin story of sorts of one of the most terrifying monsters of modern horror. Unfortunately, Corin Hardy’s breakout feature is a lacklustre horror bore. Following the apparent suicide of a nun in a remote abbey in rural Romania, Father Burke (Demian Bichir) is enlisted by the Vatican to investigate what happened. ...

It’s the year 2028 and there’s a riot going down in LA thanks to big business shutting off public water supply. We meet Sharman (Sterling K. Brown) in the middle of a bank heist with his brother. With time ticking away, they make off with what they can, but him and his brother end up injured in the process. And so, they head to Hotel Artemis; a members-only hotel with select rooms (named after cities), where criminals go for the very best healthcare and medical help when they’ve injured during a job – and need some discretion. ...