Insidious: The Red Door
It’s demented ghouls and demons time part V for the Insidious franchise, as the Lambert family head back into that freak-infested netherworld, The Further. This picks up 10 years after the second film (three and four were prequels) as Dalton is heading off to college. But, of course his haunted past is going to follow him into the lecture theatre like a relentless psycho killer. So, you know, Dalton and dad kind of have to go down to the circles of hell once more. Ty Simpkins, Rose Byrne and Patrick Wilson (who also directs this time) are back as the Lamberts, the jump scares will come thick and fast, while the gore should be of the level you’d tolerate on a visit to your local butcher. Basically it’s a horror move for (almost) all the family! Out 7 July
Name Me Lawand
In a month of excellent documentaries, this is the one I defy anyone not to be moved by. Five-year-old Kurdish boy Lawand was born deaf and his life in Iraq was utterly desolate and hopeless. Consigned to the trash heap by the authorities, he faced a future of isolation and solitude in his own speechless bubble. In desperation, his parents took the typically gruelling migration route to Britain in the hope of offering Lawand something better, which is when Edward Lovelace started four years of filming him. Watching the sweetness and smiles gently begin to flow out of Lawand as he learns to communicate and make friends at Derby’s Royal School for the Deaf is as life-affirming as cinema gets. You’ll even forgive the relentlessly soaring soundtrack plucking at your heartstrings. You might not forgive the Home Office for trying to send him back to Iraq though. If you watch this story and fail to shed a little tear, truly you have no soul. Out 7 July
Smoking Causes Coughing
Here’s a movie from French director Quentin Dupieux that out-Marmites Marmite. It’s more durian or money brains. The Tobacco Force are a band of superheroes in garish, ill-fitting outfits with names like Nicotine or Methanol, crusading against the evil of smoking. For some reason, they do things such as blowing up a diabolical turtle monster that looks like a giant rubbery costume you’d buy from a fancy dress shop. But they are jaded and dysfunctional, so they trek off for a team-building retreat while also taking orders from their boss, a grotesque, dribbling rodent. You get the idea? No, well that’s because there might not be anything coherent, such as a plot, here. There is plenty of humour (which didn’t make me laugh) and it’s as wacky as wacky can get. So why am I recommending it? I’m not, I hated it. But if you like the sound of what you’ve read and the amateurish vibe of early John Waters films, this just might be your flavour of the month. Out 7 July
Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One
Prediction: this will be the most intense, frenetic, biggest-dollar-raking blockbuster of the summer. Tom Cruise is back as Ethan Hunt for the seventh time and, apart from him seeming as suspiciously youthful as ever, the action looks more gloriously spectacular than ever too. Besides that motorcycle stunt, there’s exploding submarines, wild car chases galore and a trainwreck to blow your mind. Christopher McQuarrie, who made the excellent last instalment, is behind the camera again, and the always amazing Hayley Atwell joins Vanessa Kirby and Rebecca Ferguson in the cast. What, you want some zeitgeisty relevance too? Well, the villain this time is none other than that worrying spectre on the horizon: AI. Out 11 July
A Kind of Kidnapping
Or maybe this should be subtitled A Very British Kidnapping, because Dan Clark’s darkly comic thriller is unmistakably dripping with home-grown sensibilities. When hard-up Maggie (Kelly Wenham) and Brian (Jack Parry-Jones) decide to kidnap a sleazy politician (Patrick Baladi, better known as David Brent’s boss in The Office), no one wants to pay the ransom. However… as they are about to release him, like any morally unconscionable lowlife, the MP senses a PR opportunity to gain sympathy from voters and refuses to go free. Double-crossing, blood-splattered faces and good ol’ British calamity will surely ensue…. Fun fact: Baladi’s father was the gynaecologist to Colonel Gadaffi’s wife. Out 14 July
While We Watched
If you think Fox News is a hellhole of rage, you haven’t seen network news in India. Vinay Shukla’s documentary follows Ravish Kumar, the prime time host and editor of NDTV India as he battles the tide of nationalism and misinformation he perceives to be sweeping across the media. As other news outlets scream for the death of anyone who they deem to be anti-Indian, as well as for the demise of Kumar and NDTV, he calmly strives to provide balanced reporting and keep his network on air while fielding relentless death threats on his mobile. There is also a lot of eating of goodbye cake, as his staff are inexorably forced to resign due to the pressure. This is an intimate, as fly-on-the-newsroom-wall as you can get portrait of a brave man fighting the good fight against the forces of hatred. And quite the eye-opener too. Out 14 July
Although it’s being released on the same day, 7.99 billion people on the planet are probably oblivious to Christopher Nolan’s star-laden Oppenheimer (see below), and it’s all because of this shocking pink, endlessly teased, viral clickbait juggernaut. Yes, we know full well Margot Robbie’s feet are permanently high-heel-shoe-shaped in the movie, we’re very aware half the world is up arms because they think Ryan Gosling is too old to play Ken, and that the universe ran out of pink paint because it was all used up on the sets. And we know there are clever, sassy brains behind this too: Greta Gerwig (Lady Bird) directs and her husband Noah Baumbach (Marriage Story) helped write it. So, the time is upon us and we can eventually enjoy Barbie and Ken’s adventures in the real world after she is cruelly kicked out of Barbieland. Or, if you think you just might vomit, go and be blown away by Oppenheimer instead… Out 21 July
Oppenheimer
John F Kennedy’s ‘let’s go to the Moon’ speech in 1962 and the incredible feat of actually getting there in such a short space of time wasn’t the first technological miracle that America pulled off. Two decades earlier, the Manhattan Project produced the atom bomb in a similarly miraculous rush to succeed. Of course, the result was a spectacle of horrific awe this time; we’ve all seen the images. Like the project itself, Christopher Nolan has brought in a team of the finest talent the play out the story: Cillian Murphy, Emily Blunt, Matt Damon, Robert Downey Jr, Florence Pugh, Gary Oldman and Kenneth Brannagh to name just a few. As Robert Oppenheimer, the man in charge of building the bomb, Murphy’s cadaverous, haunted face is enough to tell you this is a truly hideous thing that is happening. Shot with Imax cameras, this a BIG, shocking film. According to Nolan, people were walking out of early screenings speechless and ‘devastated’. Out 21 July
Talk to Me
Nothing screams summertime like an… er, edgy horror flick. Even if it’s not exactly peak fright season, this Australian shocker by twin brothers Danny and Michael Philippou – who made their name with YouTube channel RackaRacka – is worth a trip to the cinema. The premise of a group of teens playing a spooky game of supernatural possession with an embalmed hand won’t win any prizes for originality, but the result is genuinely unnerving, thanks largely to a brilliant young cast and frantically kinetic cinematography. A year after her mother apparently committed suicide, Mia (Sophie Wilde) thinks she’s found an answer to why she died throught the fiendish appendage but, you know… things swiftly get out of, ahem, hand. Cue a clenched fistful of properly effective jump scares and, for those who wondered for the first hour whether there’s any actual meaning to the story, an ending offering a tantalising answer (or two) as to what the actual f*** was going on. Out 28 July
