ALSO SHOWING
Luca ✪✪✪
(6+)
This animated Italian-set comingof-age fantasy sees Pixar follow the conceptual leaps of its Oscar-winning Soul with a slight delight for summer holiday viewing. Its eponymous protagonist (voiced by Room star Jacob Tremblay) is an adolescent sea monster living off the Ligurian coast where his family, suffering from Finding Nemo-style parental anxiety, have filled his head with stories about the world beyond the sea to ensure he never ventures into danger.
But when a chance encounter with a Huck Finn-style teenage sea monster called Alberto (Jack Dylan Grazer) reveals he can go on land and look like a normal human kid, he runs away from his overprotective parents (Maya Rudolph and Jim Gaffigan) to nearby Portorosso, where he and Alberto team up with local girl Giulia (Emma Berman) to participate in a race that will enable them to buy a scooter and have lots more adventures. Combining the hazy, lazy sense of freedom found in summertime coming-of-age stories with the fear-of-the-unknown tropes of classic monster movies, Luca is perhaps more derivative than we’ve come to expect from the studio, but it’s still pretty charming as a kids’ adventure movie.
Streaming on Disney+
In the Earth (15)
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Ben Wheatley returns with his wildest film for a while with this a low-budget, pandemic-set folk horror movie, written and shot during lockdown last year. Taking place sometime after the third-wave of an unspecified viral outbreak, the film follows a research scientist called Dr Malcolm Lowery (Joel Fry) and a park ranger called Alma (Ellora Torchia) as they try to reach a colleague of Malcolm’s (played by Hayley Squire) who is conducting experiments to improve crop yields deep within some “unusually fertile” woods on the outskirts of Bristol. Despite ominous warnings about people getting “a bit
funny in these woods,” the out-ofshape Malcolm insists he’s up for the two-day hike necessary to reach his colleague, but soon finds himself on the receiving end of a sharp lesson in folkloric etiquette courtesy of a wooddwelling hermit (Reece Shearsmith). What’s going on is best left unspoiled, though it’s no spoiler to say that even with the allusions to Covid-19 it’s not really about our current ongoing health crisis. Instead the film’s pandemic imagery is deployed sparingly as a relatable backdrop for a psychotronic freak-out that explores in more abstract ways the madness and fear that can set in when isolation and grief distort our ability to rationally respond to things we don’t fully understand.
In cinemas
In the Heights (U)
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Adapted from Hamilton creator Lin-manuel Miranda’s first Broadway musical, this feels like the perfect movie for a balmy summer evening. Set against the backdrop of creeping gentrification in Manhattan’s Latin Americandominated Washington Heights neighbourhood, it’s an exuberant, hip-hop inflected celebration of the power of community and the value of following your dreams. Hamilton star Anthony Ramos takes the lead as Usnavi, the young, comically named manager of a local bodega/grocery store whose fantasy about returning to his father’s Dominican Republic homeland frames a late-coming-ofage story about a group of college-age neighbourhood friends whose lives intersect over the course of a pivotal summer. All of which is standard cheesy musical fare, but what’s not standard these days is the respect John M Chu’s film accords the format. This is a film that understands the thrill of capturing brilliant young performers delivering dazzling routines and letting their skills, not their celebrity profiles, carry the story.
In cinemas