ALSO SHOWING
Everything Everywhere All At Once
(15) JJJJ
A family drama rendered as a wild, interdimensional martial arts fantasy, Everything Everywhere All At Once takes the suddenly in vogue concept of the multiverse and uses it to drag Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon star Michelle Yeoh through infinite versions of her character’s life as she tries to figure out how to fix her dysfunctional relationships with her husband, her father and, especially, her Gen Z daughter.
Yeoh plays Evelyn Wang, a first generation Chinese American immigrant living – as one character puts it – the worst version of her life: the laundry business she runs is being audited; her meek but kind husband (Ke Huy Quan) is trying to build up the courage to divorce her; her gay daughter (Stephanie Hsu) is frustrated that she won’t accept her for who she is, and the disapproving father (James Hong) she defied as a young woman has just arrived from China for a visit. The film then uses a meeting between Evelyn and her stern tax officer (Jamie Lee Curtis) as the mundane catalyst for the arrival of an ally from another dimension convinced she’s the saviour of every branching universe in existence.
What this means for the movie is that Evelyn gets to visit multiple alternate versions of her life to acquire the requisite skills to stop the forces of chaos engulfing everything – a conceit that lets directing duo Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert (collectively known as Daniels) go nuts by having worlds collide in which characters become glamorous movie stars, hotdog-fingered lovers, roughly sketched cartoons, piñatas and, at one point, a pair of telepathic rocks.
General release
Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness
(12A)
JJJJ
Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness largely lives up to the promise of its title thanks to the wildly inventive, entertainingly chaotic
visual style that director Sam Raimi honed on his Evil Dead slapstick horror trilogy. Indeed, those films provide an amusing reference point for what is, in effect, Marvel’s first horror film.
Doctor Strange’s cosmic shenanigans notwithstanding (he’s played once again by Benedict Cumberbatch), the action gets entertainingly gruesome by pitting him against Elizabeth Olsen’s Wanda in a film bursting with so much energy it’s a joy to get dragged along. General release
Vortex (15) JJJJ
With Vortex, Irreversible director Gasper Noé returns with his most humane film to date: a daring dementia drama following an elderly couple as their lives are torn apart by the disease. Noé symbolises this early by literally drawing a line down the centre of the frame to separate Liu (Dario Argento) and the Alzheimer’s afflicted Elle (Françoise Lebrun) as they lie in their beds asleep. The rest of the film takes place in split screen as we follow their interactions over several fraught weeks as they rattle around their boho Parisian apartment leading to a subtly devastating and moving finale. General release
Father Stu (15)
J
In Father Stu, Mark Wahlberg plays an over-the-hill amateur boxer who decides to move to Hollywood to break into acting, but instead has an encounter with Jesus and decides to devote himself to the priesthood instead. Based on a true story, the film takes many bizarre turns – including Stu converting to Catholicism to hit on a woman he’s stalked, then ditching said woman after a neardeath motorcycle accident – but never questions any of them, preferring instead to serve up a a hokey redemption drama about the value of suffering.
General release
Alistair Harkness