Fresh take on well-spun yarn

With a few subtle tweaks to modernise the concept, Jon Watts has created a story with a teenage protagonist that makes the audience get behind the little guy, giving it a working class hero vibe

Spider-man: Homecoming (12a)

Tommy’s Honour (PG)

It Comes At Night (15)

Song to Song (15)

There’s no escaping the titular significance of

Spider-man: Homecoming.

The first Spiderman movie made in collaboration with Marvel Studios, it feels like he’s finally back where he belongs. That’s not to diminish Sam Raimi’s Tobey Maguire-starring take on the web-slinger. But after Marc Webb’s confused, Twilight-influenced reboot with the far-too-old-fromthe-start Andrew Garfield, this new outing makes Spider-man relevant and distinctive again, modernising him without losing sight of what makes the character so appealing.

Neatly dispensing with the spiderbite back-story in a throw-away line of dialogue, the film introduces us to Peter Parker (British actor Tom Holland) as a super-powered 15-yearold whose desperation to take off his “superhero training wheels” and join the Avengers is making him more reckless than his mentor, Tony Stark (Robert Downey Jr), would like. Cast when he was still a teenager, Holland (who’s only just turned 21) can still credibly play a bouncingoff-the-walls school kid and his first scenes here are full of manic teen energy, shot, as they are, in the style of an iphone video diary. It’s a funny

concept, and the vlogging format also slyly updates the character’s traditional interest in photography in a way that isn’t forced.

That’s not the only update that feels seamless. Director Jon Watts

(Cop Car) follows the lead of the new Star Wars movies by filling the film with a racially diverse cast of relative newcomers that includes Grand

Budapest Hotel’s Tony Revolori as Peter’s high school nemesis Flash Thompson, Jacob Batalon as his hilariously nerdy best friend Ned Leeds, Laura Hallier as his love interest Liz, and Disney Channel graduate Zendaya as his sarcastic, eye-rolling teammate on the school’s academic decathlon squad. All of which adds authenticity to a teenoriented film that may reference John Hughes movies with a shout out to

Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, but doesn’t exist in the same privileged bubble. That’s important too because Spiderman is one of the few prominent blue-collar superheroes. He’s not a god like Thor or a billionaire like Stark: he’s a kid from Queens, living with his struggling-to-make-endsmeet Aunt May (Marisa Tomei). As Stark says of him at one point, he has a working class hero vibe that’s almost “Springsteen-ian”. The film also smartly – and presciently – taps into how that can go wrong courtesy of its villain, the Vulture, aka Adrian Toomes. Played by Michael Keaton (a choice piece of casting given his own super-hero legacy with Batman and Birdman), he’s a forgotten guy whose determination to run a legitimate business operating salvage crews that clean up in the aftermath of superhero battles is blocked by government and corporate

bureaucrats coming in and claiming the spoils for themselves. Embittered, he’s taken to selling repurposed hi-tech alien weaponry on the black market, making him the street-level equivalent of Tony Stark before Stark became Iron Man. That also makes him the perfect nemesis for a friendly neighbourhood superhero who’s trying to find a balance between the demands of both heroism and homework. The film reflects this dynamic in the action: there’s spectacle here, but not the deadening, city-levelling sort that’s grown tiresome in recent years. Instead

Spider-man: Homecoming is that rare thing: a superhero movie about where the little guy lives and why it’s always worth saving.

The most depressing thing about Jason Connery’s golfing melodrama

Tommy’s Honour is how predictably cliché-ridden it is. A film about the birth of the modern professional game told through the prism of a creaky father/son story, it stars Peter Mullan as Old Tom Morris, one of the first winners of the Open championship whose acquiescence to the aristocracy that controls access to the game is challenged by the buccaneer attitude of his more talented son, Young Tommy (Jack Lowden). Though Lowden makes the best of a poorly-written role and Mullan’s natural gravitas lends a degree of credibility to proceedings, the latter’s status as a caddy does Clockwise from main: Spider-man: Homecoming; Song to Song; It Comes At Night; Tommy’s Honour seem appropriate: he does a lot of heavy lifting for very little reward.

2017 is shaping up to be a banner year for subversive horror. Following

Get Out and The Transfiguration, Trey Edward Shults’s sophomore feature It Comes At Night marks him out as another great new auteur of the genre, with a post-apocalyptic home-invasion drama about the way isolationism breeds deadly paranoia. Joel Edgerton and Carmen Ejogo star as a couple living with their 17-yearold son (Kelvin Harrison Jr) in a fortress-like woodland retreat in the aftermath of a plague that appears to have decimated the world around them. When a stranger (Christopher Abbot) arrives at their door one night, they’re forced to make a decision about whether or not to welcome him and his family into their home.

His first scenes are full of manic teen energy, shot, as they are, in the style of an iphone video diary

What follows is spare, unsettling and brilliantly directed. Terrence Malick’s new film Song To

Song also has a bit of an apocalyptic vibe. Like the Native American chief at the end of The New World and the mournful T-rex in Tree of Life, the solipsistic protagonists of this meandering tale about music scene hipsters trying to make sense of their various existential crises feels very much like a meditation on a class of people whose dominance of the world is coming to an end. Starring Ryan Gosling, Rooney Mara, Michael Fassbender and Natalie Portman, the film will likely infuriate many, but it also feels like Malick is genuinely wrestling with mortality in a way no other filmmaker is even attempting. ■