ALSO SHOWING
Synchronic (15)
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Time travel gets an intriguing twist in this trippy head-scratcher from cult directors Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead (The Endless). Starring Anthony Mackie and Jamie Dornan as a couple of overworked New Orleans paramedics who find themselves dealing with the fallout from a new designer drug that can time-warp people into the past, it smartly makes Mackie’s character the lead and uses his racial identity to up the stakes of a film intent on finding a literal way to highlight the hostility of the past. Though not working with huge resources, Benson and Moorhead make sparing use of atmospheric visuals to capture the wooziness of their reality-bending premise and there’s an admirable attempt to set out the rules of the world without resorting to reams of exposition. One character’s explanation for how time works uses a vinyl record as a prop and it’s a masterclass in economic storytelling. But it’s the way Benson and Moorhead then integrate this idea into the structure of the film as a whole that really kicks things up a gear. Like Brandon Cronenberg’s recent Possessor, this is bold, ideasdriven sci-fi told with real flair.
On demand
The Capote Tapes (15)
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After two very good, fairly comprehensive biopics of Truman Capote, there might not seem like much need for another film about why the prodigiously talented author failed to complete another novel in the wake of In Cold Blood’s creatively and psychologically vexing gestation. Nevertheless, this documentary has a crack at explaining what happened with Answered Prayers, his thinly veiled novelistic exposé of New York high society, of which only three chapters were ever published. The film, from debut director Ebs Burnough, suggests that his vengeful motivation for writing it might have been what finally destroyed him – but it’s also at pains to make a rather banal connection between Capote’s gossipy, back-stabbing final years and the emergence of reality television. It’s also rather slippery in its presentation of the titular tapes as something of a treasure-trove of never-before-heard interviews with friends and literary peers. Conducted by George Plimpton, these interviews formed the basis for Plimpton's bestselling 1998 oral biography of Capote, which in turn became the source material for Infamous, one of the aforementioned biopics – so it’s not as if the information has never been in the public domain before.
On demand
The Dig (12A)
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This tastefully tame bit of BAFTA bait is built around the famous Sutton Hoo excavation of an Anglo-saxon burial ship in Suffolk on the eve of the Second World War. Ralph Fiennes plays Basil Brown, the self-taught archaeologist hired by widowed landowner Edith Pretty (Carey Mulligan) to excavate some very large, very mysterious mounds of earth on her vast estate. When Basil uncovers a site of great historical importance, it’s not long before the London cognoscenti swoops in to take over. Despite the restrained tone, the film really is this schematic. Lily James, Ben Chaplin and Johnny Flynn co-star.
Netflix
Palmer (15)
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As an ex-con forced to take on parenting duties for a gender non-conforming eight-year-old, Justin Timberlake is on good form this a formulaic but well-made redemption melodrama. It helps that Timberlake’s young co-star, Ryder Allen, is such a sweetheart: it’s hard not to root for them as their mutual outsider status underscores the film’s nicely handled message about the value of accepting people for who they are.
Appletv+