3 great films to catch in the cinemas now
Wonder Woman
The comic-book world's most famous female superhero finally gets her own movie – and it's an action-packed belter
Before seeing Wonder Woman, I got a sinking feeling. It’s been more than a decade since a woman headlining a superhero film saved the world. I had visions of middle-aged male studio execs huddled together in a conference room Googling feminism and group-thinking how to make a lady-hero. Would the result feel like a two-and-a-half-hour tampon advert? Actually, no. Wonder Woman feels like the real deal, a rollicking action adventure in the tradition of Indiana Jones, with a fully functioning sense of humour and the year’s most lip-smackingly evil baddie.
The plot is functional. It’s World War One and Pine is an American spy who has discovered that evil German chemist Dr Maru (Elena Anaya) – aka Doctor Poison – is cooking up a dirty bomb to wipe out Allied soldiers on the Front. Wonder Woman volunteers to save humankind, strapping on her bullet-repelling bracelets and truth lasso.
Director Patty Jenkins lets the sunshine in. The showdown punch-up at the end drags a little, but the whole thing is carried along by charm and humour. The fish-out-of-water scenes as Wonder Woman arrives on Earth are hilarious. In London, she asks Pine’s loyal personal assistant what a secretary does. She’s horrified by the answer: ‘Where I’m from that’s called slavery.’ This really is Wonder Woman coming to the rescue of the DC Comics universe.
- Cath Clarke
The Lost City of Z
A British explorer sets out into the trackless Amazon in this gripping, spectacular adventure story
The British explorer Percy Fawcett – driven crazy by his obsession to find a lost Amazonian city – vanished in the jungle in 1925. His story has everything you could possibly want in an adventure tale: treacherous colleagues, cannibals with bubbling pots, spears flying out of nowhere, shrunken heads, piranhas, even an opera troupe singing Mozart in the wild. But in the hands of The Immigrant director James Gray (adapting David Grann’s thrilling 2009 book), it has something that most modern filmmakers would skim over in favour of action: a soulful sense of unresolved wanderlust, and an exquisitely developed tension between family responsibilities and the call of greatness over the horizon.
The grandeur of this movie is off the charts. For a certain kind of old-school movie fan, someone who believes in shapely, classical proportions and an epic yarn told over time, it will be the revelation of the year.
- Joshua Rothkopf
A Monster Calls
Young actor Lewis MacDougall impresses in JA Bayona's imaginative but overly sentimental fantasy tale about a child dealing with the horrors of real life
Adapted by author Patrick Ness from his dour, dreamlike not-quite-kids'-book about an imaginative boy who conjures a writhing, ent-like tree-monster to help him deal with his mother's worsening cancer, this ambitious, often awkward, intermittently striking fairytale-horror-cum-disease-drama feels like the movie Del Toro would produce if he was suddenly struck down with Oscar fever.
13-year-old Connor (Lewis MacDougall) is finding life a struggle: his mother Lizzie (Felicity Jones) is dying by degrees, his grandma (a miscast Sigourney Weaver) is brittle and loveless and his dad (Toby Kebbell) only makes the trip back from America when it suits him. So when a 40-foot monster (granite-voiced by Liam Neeson) tears itself out of a nearby yew tree and comes rampaging into Connor's life, he's glad of the distraction. But why has the beast come? To steal him away? To save his mum? Or just to tell him a series of prettily animated fairy stories?
- Tom Huddleston