Four new films to see this week

Directed by Tim Burton. Starring Michael Keaton, Winona Ryder, Catherine O’Hara, Justin Theroux, Monica Bellucci, Jenna Ortega, Willem Dafoe. 12A cert, gen release, 105 min
When this wan sequel to Burton’s second feature opened the Venice International Film Festival, the cast seemed insistent on stressing what a jolly good time they had making the thing. All the fun is on the screen. Look, here’s Dafoe as the ghost of a B-movie star who still thinks himself a noir hero. Ryder, reprising the role of Lydia Deetz, is now the host of a terrible occult show on the telly. Jenna Ortega is up to something else. The governing mood is chaos in a film that can’t decide what story to tell. Watching it is like being the only sober person at a party. Full review DC
Directed by Daniel Kokotajlo. Starring Matt Smith, Morfydd Clark, Erin Richards, Robert Emms, Sean Gilder. Limited release, 98 min
Deeply unnerving horror following a couple who, living in a remote corner of Yorkshire, fall in with the old religion after their son dies unexpectedly. The impressively drab efforts of costume designer Emma Fryer and production designer Francesca Massario make one feel trapped in a grimmer, excised sequence for Ken Loach’s Kes. Clark, a formidable screen presence in Saint Maud, is well met by Smith, as the pair descend into possession. A worthy contender in a British revival that includes such eerie cult classics as Ben Wheatley’s A Field in England and Mark Jenkin’s Enys Men. Full review TB
Directed by Jeremy Saulnier. Starring Aaron Pierre, Don Johnson, AnnaSophia Robb, David Denman, Emory Cohen, James Cromwell. Netflix, 131 min
Effective thriller from the director of Green Room and Blue Ruin concerning conspiracies within a small town. The feuding rednecks and neo-Nazi skinheads that menaced the director’s earlier films are here swapped out for an unholy nexus of racial profiling and systemic corruption. Real-world news headlines concerning dashcam footage and conflicting police reporting are lightly evoked in a script pitched somewhere between Rambo and Cop Land. There’s some fun, too, with police radio codes. Pierre, who replaced John Boyega after the latter’s controversial departure, is a convincing and charismatic action hero. Full review TB
Directed by Ross Killeen. Featuring Asbestos. PG cert, limited release, 77 min
The artist Asbestos interrogates, with great sensitivity, his mother’s Alzheimer’s disease in a striking documentary that often plays in conventional observational style. We hear a great deal from the family as father and son do their best to communicate with their sometimes confused relative. The film is, however, also in discussion with Asbetos’s art. The impermanence of one chalk-based project has obvious parallels with what goes on in the brain. Elsewhere, altered footage illustrates his mother’s memories concerning a close shave at the time of the Dublin and Monaghan bombings. Imaginative stuff. Full review DC
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