ALSO SHOWING

Love, Simon (12A)

This is a sweet and funny US teen comedy starring Nick Robinson (Jurassic World) as a well-adjusted high school student trying to figure out which closeted gay kid in his class might be the person he’s falling for online. It’s fun to see a well-written and acted mainstream movie that doesn’t treat gay sexuality as either a tragedy or something devoid of hormones.

A Quiet Place (15)

A post-apocalyptic creature feature in which the monsters hunt by sound,

A Quiet Place exploits its ingeniously simple premise by using silence to amplify terror at a time when too many horror films coast by on clanging jump-scares. It uses the self-imposed limitations of its story to its advantage while a great cast makes the human drama relatable. John Krasinski, also co-writer and director, is good as the father suddenly reckoning with his need to protect his family, but it’s Emily Blunt as his pregnant wife and deaf actress Millicent Simmonds as their daughter who steal the show.

Wonderstruck (PG)

Coincidentally, Simmonds is also excellent as the star of Todd Haynes’s affectionately oddball kids’ film about a pair of deaf children running wild in New York 50 years apart. Based on the part prose/part picture-book novel by Brian Selznick (Hugo), it’s an unsentimental ode to both childhood and cinema thanks to a structure that blends a 1920s-set silent film (starring Simmonds) with a grittier, 1970s-set coming-of-age story (starring newcomer Oakes Fegley). Haynes’ ability to capture a child’s-eye view of New York with all its dark fairytale allure makes this stand out.

120 BPM (15)

This is a Cannes-winning dramatisation of the French activism movement Act Up and their efforts to raise awareness of the Aids crisis in Paris in the 1990s. Writer/ director Robin Campillo’s semiautobiographical film, in a brilliant and truthful way, zeroes in on the limbo-like existence of French youth at a time when the government was burying its head in the sand. ■