The Zone of Interest ★★★★★
Directed by Jonathan Glazer. Starring Christian Friedel, Sandra Hüller, Medusa Knopf, Daniel Holzberg, Sascha Maaz, Max Beck, Wolfgang Lampl, Ralph Herforth, Freya Kreutzkam. 12A cert, gen release, 105 min
Chilling, singular drama, very loosely adapted from Martin Amis’s novel, charting the mostly humdrum home lives of the commandant of Auschwitz and his family. The cast moves through a recreation of the middle-class home while up to 10 mounted cameras record their activities. We see no violence, but Johnnie Burn’s brilliant sound design offers near-ambient aural reminder of the historical truth. Gunshots. Muffled screams. Few reviews have managed to avoid mention of Hannah Arendt’s “banality of evil”. Fair enough. It is all there. Bourgeois complacency while millions die over the garden wall. Will be discussed for decades to come. Full review DC
American Fiction ★★★★☆
Starring Jeffrey Wright, Tracee Ellis Ross, John Ortiz, Erika Alexander, Leslie Uggams, Adam Brody, Issa Rae, Sterling K Brown. 12A cert, gen release, 117 min
Wright, in the performance of a lifetime, plays an author and academic who becomes accidentally successful after his pastiche of hard-knock black fiction gets taken seriously. Meanwhile, he juggles a host of family problems. Adapted from Percival Everett’s 2001 novel Erasure, this season’s edgiest comedy rightly arrives with garland of Oscar nods and audience awards. White gatekeepers alternatively take offence of behalf of others or repeatedly reward the most outrageous stereotypes. Others insist that people should be allowed to enjoy things. Cultural crises are seldom so entertaining. Full review TB
Blue Giant ★★★★☆
Directed by Yuzuru Tachikawa. Voices of Shôtarô Mamiya, Amane Okayama, Yuki Yamada. 12A cert, gen release, 120 min
Arriving in Tokyo from a small town, Dai Miyamot has been playing the saxophone for four years, but what he lacks in longevity he makes up with unbounded passion. When he isn’t practising, he’s running in cold weather and practising under bridges to improve his breathing capacity. This keenly anticipated adaptation of Shinichi Ishizuka’s manga about a teenager from rural Japan striving to become the world’s greatest jazz musician is part bildungsroman and part Rocky with jazz. It’s as improbably close to watching a live performance as animation can get. A swooning big screen experience. Full review TB
Argylle ★★★☆☆
Directed Matthew Vaughn. Starring Henry Cavill, Bryce Dallas Howard, Sam Rockwell, Bryan Cranston, Catherine O’Hara, Dua Lipa, Samuel L Jackson, John Cena. 12A cert, gen release, 139 min
The latest arch thriller from Matthew “Kingsman” Vaughn casts Howard as an espionage novelist who gets dragged into real-life spy shenanigans. Rockwell is on hand to protect her. Cavill plays the imagined heroes of her books. We all know what Vaughn does. Argylle is all flash, all brass and all MacGuffin. Too much CGI. Too much everything. And yet. Howard is so irrepressibly charming the film proves hard to wholly resist. One must also grudgingly acknowledge Vaughn’s dedication to an epic mayhem that strives towards a blend of Bollywood, Hong Kong action and golden-age musical. Not the worst. Full review DC
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