PICK OF THIS WEEK’S FILMS

First-time French writer-director Coralie Fargeat seizes the exploitation horror subgenre by its privates and refuses to let go as she puts a feminist slant on the bloodthirsty battle of the sexes between a rape victim (Matilda Anna Ingrid Lutz) and her attackers, to echo the fiery indignation of the MeToo and TimesUp movements. Shot on location in Morocco but set in an unspecified sun-baked wilderness, Revenge gleefully embraces gore-slathered visual excess including one whoop-inducing scene of the heroine forcibly removing a sliver of glass with trembling fingers from her eviscerated foot. The film wears its 18 certificate as a badge on honour, spattering the camera lens with bodily fluids, occasionally for comic effect like a climactic scene of two characters slip-sliding uncontrollably down tiled corridors coated in glistening crimson. The aptly titled film serves up that courageous, ballsy retaliation with lashings of stylistic flair.

TULLY (15)

Mother doesn’t know best – she is teetering on the precipice of a nervous breakdown – in Jason Reitman’s beautifully crafted and bittersweet portrait of modern parenthood. The third collaboration between the Montreal-born director and screenwriter Diablo Cody, who won an Oscar for her exemplary script for Juno, conceals poignant home truths behind trademark snappy dialogue and a mistimed sleight of hand that leaves a satisfying lump in the throat. There is undeniable pleasure in unravelling the many layers to Reitman’s delicately observed film and the flawed yet deeply sympathetic characters, who struggle to articulate their fears to each other and prefer to suffer in anguished silence. It is not until a 21st-century Mary Poppins (Mackenzie Davis) materialises in the fractured family home and re-energises an exhausted matriarch (Charlize Theron) with an endless supply of self-help aphorisms that an emotional dam breaks and the words and tears cascade. Theron is the picture’s steady emotional heartbeat.

I FEEL PRETTY (12A)

I feel many things about writer-directors Marc Silverstein and Abby Kohn’s romantic comedy of female empowerment and body fascism, but none of them is particularly pretty. As someone who has struggled with weight issues since boyhood and suffered fat-shaming, I’m acutely aware – perhaps too sensitive – to the deep emotional and psychological wounds that can be inflicted every time you look in a mirror. I’m certain that I Feel Pretty doesn’t mean to offend. Lead actress Amy Schumer has brilliantly lampooned issues of self-esteem, femininity and suffocating convention in her TV sketch show and the hilarious 2015 film Trainwreck. However, here she is at the mercy of Silverstein and Kohn’s script, which piles on misery and self-loathing in the opening hour until it becomes impossible to achieve

redemption, even with Schumer working tirelessly to milk laughs from each set-up.

THE STRANGERS: PREY AT NIGHT (15)

As blood flows freely in the belated sequel to the 2008 horror thriller The Strangers, one victim tearfully pleads with her masked attacker to justify their desire to kill. “Why not?” coldly responds the assailant. Those words would surely tumble from the lips of director Johannes Roberts to explain why he felt it was necessary to return to this gruesome, blood-smeared milieu a decade after the original film drew chilling inspiration from true events to send occasional shivers down the spine. The Strangers: Prey At Night makes no pretence at originality or invention, pitting two desperate parents and their children against a trio of merciless maniacs who conceal their true identities behind creepy masks. Like all horror film bogeymen, these aggressors possess an astonish ability to withstand every bone-crunching blow and petrol-soaked inferno their terrified targets can dole out in the name of survival, reanimating when characters least expect it to claim another victim.

MARY AND THE WITCH’S FLOWER (U)

Based on County Durham-born writer Mary Stewart’s 1971 children’s novel The Little Broomstick, Mary and the Witch’s Flower is a charming if slight animated adventure of self-discovery seen through the eyes of an inquisitive flame-haired girl. Simplicity is the secret of director Hiromasa Yonebayashi’s picture, which eschews narrative sophistication in favour of linear storytelling, broadly sketched characters and a familiar battle between youthful exuberance (good) and world-weary adult cynicism (bad). Visuals are a handsome amalgamation of hand-drawn and computer animation, conjuring a fantastical world of duelling