ALSO SHOWING
US filmmaker Josephine Decker confirms her status as one of the most daring and inventive directors with this strange, fictionalised pseudobiopic of the famed horror writer Shirley Jackson, author of The Haunting of Hill House. Starring Elisabeth Moss as Jackson, the film uses the writing of Jackson’s second novel, Hangsaman ( 1951), as a loose framework for an outré psychological portrait of the writer that’s as unhinged as some of her stories. What’s fact and fiction here is kept deliberately ambiguous as Shirley bonds with Rose ( Odessa Young), the young housewife of an ambitious but dull academic ( Logan Lerman) employed as an assistant to Shirley’s own husband, the literary critic Stanley Edgar Hyman ( Michael Stuhlbarg), portrayed here as a vigorous intellectual and letch who invites the young couple to live with them, ostensibly so Rose can cook, clean and take care of the agoraphobic Shirley. Decker and her cast have a lot of fun with this weird domestic arrangement and the film succeeds thanks in no small part to an incredible performance from Moss. Cinemas/ Curzon
Borat: Subsequent Movie Film
( 15)
Sacha Baron Cohen’s greatest creation returns to show how the rampant narcissism and idiocy that the first film did such a deft and hilarious job of exposing has become the dangerous norm in Trump’s America. Though the Rudolph Giuliani interview that brings the new film to a close has already been exhaustively analysed and commented upon, the film itself remains a valuable and at times very funny take- down of the wilful ignorance and intolerance coursing through American society. It also boasts a remarkable, star- making performance from Bulgarian actor Maria Bakalova as Borat’s 15- year
old daughter. Indeed it’s Bakalova – posing as a conservative TV journalist – who takes on Giuliani. The nerves of steel she displays are astonishing. Amazon Prime
The Painter and the Thief ( 15)
The restorative power of art is explored in incredible ways in Norwegian filmmaker Benjamin Ree’s brilliant documentary tracking the odd friendship between up- andcoming Czech painter Barbora Kysilkova and Karl- Bertil Nordland, a drug- addicted criminal whom she impulsively asks to pose for her after he’s convicted of stealing her two most valuable canvases from a gallery wall in Oslo in 2015.
Cinemas/ VOD
His House ( 15)
British writer/ director Remi Weekes demonstrates imagination with this ambitious attempt to make an Insidious- stye horror movie rooted in the harsh reality of a Sudanese couple seeking asylum in modernday Britain. Though a little uneven in its efforts to balance genre thrills with social commentary, the film’s twists are imaginatively rendered and the leads, Sope Dirisu and Wunmi Mosaku, are good as a couple struggling to reconcile their past and present lives. Matt Smith co- stars as their case- worker.
Netflix
Relic ( 15)
This Australian horror uses an old woman’s dementia as a catalyst for a kind of haunted house story about the hereditary nature of trauma. What follows is good at dramatising the stressed- out family dynamics of its protagonists ( Emily Mortimer, Robyn Nevin and Bella Heathcote), but there’s a frustrating lack of commitment to its more supernatural elements.
Cinemas/ VOD