Critics’ choices for the week ahead

Cinema

Their Finest Lone Scherfig’s new film peeks at the Ministry of Information mid-Blitz, as the staff, newly joined by Gemma Arterton’s aspiring writer, scramble to make a morale-boosting short film on Dunkirk. Fittingly, the film rips along like well-honed propaganda, and that’s meant as a serious compliment. 12A cert, 117 min

The Zookeeper’s Wife

Niki Caro’s wartime drama about the woman who harboured 300 Jews in the storerooms of Warsaw Zoo might have benefited from a tighter rewrite, but it’s an emotionally testing watch, none the less. Jessica Chastain brings intensity, poise and a heavy accent, while Daniel Brühl, as Hitler’s head zoologist, may have never been “Brühlier”. 12A cert, 127 min

Rules Don’t Apply

Here is Warren Beatty’s long-brewing Howard Hughes project: not a biopic, exactly, but a bittersweet farce about an aspiring starlet (Lily Collins) and a handsome chauffeur (Alden Ehrenreich) in Fifties Hollywood, who get trapped in the womanising aviation mogul’s orbit. 12A cert, 127 min

The Sense of an Ending

Julian Barnes’s novel about the slippery nature of the past is a tricky prospect for cinema, which playwright Nick Payne and director Ritesh Batra grapple with in this adaptation. Jim Broadbent is Tony, a divorced Londoner in his sixties forced to reassess everything that happened in his school days, when his friendship with a brilliant contemporary and first relationship came unstuck. 15 cert, 108 min

The Handmaiden

Perverse Korean stylist Chanwook Park (Oldboy) has taken on

Fingersmith, Sarah Waters’s saga of scheming and seduction in Victorian London – which is to say, he’s converted it into a twisty, heartless ice sliver of a film, transposed to early 20th-century Korea with one hell of a costume budget, about the evermutating relationship between a poor maid (Tae-ri Kim) and her hysterical mistress (Min-hee Kim). 18 cert, 156 min

Fast and Furious 8

If you’ve somehow missed out on Universal’s colossal street-racing franchise thus far, imagine if someone loaded 10 body-builders into a Lamborghini and threw a bomb at them. This latest episode can’t help but look artless in a post-Mad Max:

Fury Road world, but its glistening cast, including Vin Diesel, Dwayne Johnson and an on-form and very welcome Jason Statham, are too charming to resist. 12A cert, 136 min