Renfield

Nicolas Cage as Dracula, a script from Rick And Morty writer Ryan Ridley and directed by Chris McKay, who helmed The Lego Batman Movie? Hell yeah, we’re in. Inhabiting the same territory as envelope-pushing vampire mockumentary What We Do In The Shadows – i.e. it doesn’t take itself too seriously – Renfield riffs on Bram Stoker’s famous novel by dropping the titular character into modern-day New Orleans and having him fall in love with a traffic cop called Rebecca Quincy. Naturally Count Dracula isn’t happy that his former lackey has deserted him and sets off in pursuit. Alongside Cage are Nicholas Hoult as Renfield, American comedian and rapper Awkwafina as Quincy and – a boon for cineastes – Shohreh Aghdashloo, star of cult (and once thought lost) 1976 Iranian masterpiece Chess Of The Wind. She plays a New Orleans mob boss.

April 14

Suzume

One of the highest grossing films in Japan last year and a hit at this year’s Berlin Film Festival, this anime from director Makoto Shinkai pitches 17-year-old high school student Suzume Iwato into an adventure featuring statues which turn into cats, ghost doors that pop up in unlikely places, and a mysterious traveller whose job it is to stop supernatural worms causing earthquakes and destroying Japan. The film is inspired in large part by the 2011 earthquake and tsunami which killed nearly 20,000 people on the country’s east coast. Fans of the more issue-y end of the Studio Ghibli spectrum will love it – think Grave Of The Fireflies or The Wind Rises – and if you want to check out other films by Shinkai, begin with his affecting 2016 body swap romance Your Name.

April 14

Get unlimited access to The Herald for only £2 for 2 months

👉 Click here to sign up for this offer

Pacifiction

For his performance as Monsieur De Roller, French High Commissioner on the Polynesian island of Tahiti, Benoît Magimel won a César Award, the French equivalent of the Best Actor Oscar. The film itself – the title is a combination of the words pacific and fiction – screened in competition at last year’s Cannes Film Festival, winning Spanish director Albert Serra plaudits for his gauzy, painterly image-making and what one critic called a “stealthy evocation of pure evil” with “intriguing new hints of David Lynch”. The plot takes in everything from nuclear testing to the high-handed treatment of the indigenous peoples, set against the background of De Roller’s final days in post. If you like your arthouse cinema slow, widescreen and moody, this one is for you.

April 21

Asteroid City

A new Wes Anderson film is always to be welcomed, though reviews for 2021’s The French Dispatch were less adulatory than usual. Hopefully Asteroid City will set the American director back on his throne as the Crown Prince of Indie Quirk. A world premiere is scheduled for May’s glitzy Cannes Film Festival and alongside a bus full of returning favourites – Jason Schwartzman, Tilda Swinton, Edward Norton, Adrien Brody, Jeff Goldblum, Scarlett Johanssen, Willem Defoe, Jarvis Cocker etc. – Anderson welcomes a few new faces, chief among them Tom Hanks and Maya Hawke. What no Bill Murray? He was due to feature, but he contracted Covid-19 just prior to shooting. And so to the typically Andersonian plot: in a fictional American desert town in 1955, children and parents gather for a Junior Stargazer convention and a little light romance. What could possibly go wrong? It's not like aliens will land, right?

June 23

War Pony

The title makes it sound like a War Horse prequel, but this directorial debut from Riley Keough, granddaughter of Elvis Presley, couldn’t be further from it. Keough has already proved herself in front of the camera thanks to vivid performances in films like American Honey and Mad Max: Fury Road, and on the basis of this she may well have a fruitful career behind it too. Keough also co-wrote the script along with best friend Gina Gammell and two extras she befriended on the set of American Honey, Bill Reddy and Franklin Sioux Bob. Here she employs a cast of non-actors for a story about two young men from the Lakota First Nation tribe living in the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota. They are Matho (LaDainian Crazy Thunder) and Bill (Jojo Bapteise Whiting), whose lives become intertwined as the story progresses. The film screened at Cannes last year and won the Camera d’Or for best first feature. Oscar winning director of Nomadland Chloé Zhao covered very similar territory in her 2015 debut Songs My Brothers Taught Me, but hers are fine footsteps in which to follow. Expect more good things from Riley Keough.

June 9

The Herald:

Lola

This likeable found-footage curio from Dublin-based director Andrew Legge screened at the 2022 Edinburgh International Film Festival and stars Emma Appleton and Stefanie Martini (recently seen starring in BBC One’s The Gold) as Bohemian sisters Martha and Thomasina Hanbury who live in splendid isolation somewhere in England. The year is 1941 and boffin Martha has cooked up a machine which intercepts television broadcasts from the future. As Thomasina films her sibling’s endeavours (all in black and white, of course) we see how the machine could change the course of the war – though not, perhaps, for the better. There’s a great scene in which the sisters tune in to see David Bowie-as-Ziggy Stardust performing Starman on Top Of The Pops in 1972, later dubbed the most influential four minutes in British television history. The Divine Comedy’s Neil Hannon penned the soundtrack.

Out now

Beau Is Afraid

American writer-director Ari Aster is fast making a name for himself as a creator of what’s known as arthouse horror – films which borrow from the first form in terms of cinematography, say, or narrative technique but whose themes sit firmly in the second. He has already had minor hits with 2018’s Hereditary (Toni Collette inadvertently dips into the occult: bad idea) and 2019’s Midsommar (Florence Pugh goes on holiday to rural Sweden: big mistake, hasn’t she seen The Wicker Man?). He returns here with perhaps his strangest film yet. Joaquin Phoenix is the titular Beau, a man who struggles with anxiety but who has to make the journey to his childhood home when his mother dies. It has been described as a “decades-spanning surrealist horror film set in an alternate present”, though studio A24 just calls it “bold and ingeniously depraved”.

May 19

Loving Highsmith

Texas born crime writer Patricia Highsmith is best known for Strangers On A Train (published in 1950 and snapped up almost immediately by Alfred Hitchcock) and for the five novels she authored featuring amoral killer Tom Ripley (known to fans as ‘the Ripliad’). But Highsmith led both a double life – she was gay in an era when intolerance was still rife – and a troubled one, on account of her spells of depression and alcohol dependency. Directed by Swiss film-maker Eva Vitija, this documentary uses archive footage, diaries, notebooks and the intimate reflections of lovers, friends and family members to produce an in-depth portrait of a woman who was as brilliant as she was difficult, and whose work returns time and again to a central obsession: identity. Narration is by Gwendoline Christie, the Emmy Award-winning British actor whose credits include Game Of Thrones, Top Of The Lake and the recent Netflix hit Wednesday.

April 14

Sisu

Finnish director Jalmari Helander is best known for Rare Exports: A Christmas Tale, a black comedy horror showing a side of Santa Claus you really don’t want the kids to see. In this blood-splattered period drama he turns to the so-called Lapland War of 1944 which pitted Finland against Nazi Germany. Into the middle of it all comes gold prospector Aatami (Helander regular Jorma Tommila), who seeks revenge on, well, most of the German army after he strikes it big then has his nuggets pinched by them. Bad move on their part: this guy’s like a Finnish Rambo.

May 26

The Flash

The behaviour and various legal entanglements of The Flash’s 30-year-old star Ezra Miller have caused endless amounts of offscreen noise, but there’s a growing feeling among fans of the DC Comics superhero that this first big screen outing for the character could be a doozie. And it’s not just the fans: “I will say here that Flash is probably one of the greatest superhero movies ever made,” DC Studios head James Gunn told reporters in January ahead of the trailer’s unveiling in a premium spot during the Superbowl. We’ll see about that. Miller, whose preferred pronoun is they, played The Flash in cameo appearances in Suicide Squad and co-starred in ‘team-up movie’ Justice League. But here they get a story to themselves as The Flash travels back in time to prevent his mother’s murder, aided by his younger self, an older Batman (Michael Keaton) and Supergirl (Sasha Calle). The director is Andy Muschietti, who helmed big budget horror flicks It and It Chapter Two, and the script is by British writer Christina Hodson, who also penned Suicide Squad sequel Birds Of Prey. It filmed partly in Glasgow too, so there's another reason to watch.

June 16