PALM SPRINGS ★★★★☆
Directed by Max Barbakow. Starring Andy Samberg, Cristin Milioti, Peter Gallagher, JK Simmons. Amazon Prime, 90 min
Samberg and Mlioti play attendees at a wedding in the eponymous Californian city who find themselves trapped in an apparently unbreakable time loop. Each morning they wake up hours before the nuptials. Yes, Barbakow's inventive comedy – which achieved a record-breaking sale at Sundance – is very much in the mode of Groundhog Day, but it finds its own rhythms and its own humorous tones. This is a cooler film that works a little harder at philosophising the dilemma. Samberg is reliably dry with his quips. Milioti breaks through with an assertive comic turn. DC
SEQUIN IN A BLUE ROOM ★★★★☆
Directed by Samuel Van Grinsven. Starring Conor Leach, Simon Croker, Jeremy Lindsay Taylor, Anthony Brandon Wong. VOD, 80 min
Stylish debut in the style of Greg Araki concerning a teenager's interactions with a mysterious hook-up app, which manifests on screen as a series of headless torsos and peccadillos. For all the lurking dangers, Van Grinsven's film, co-written with Jory Anast, is never judgmental of its hero's digitally aided cruising. Instead Sequin in a Blue Room quietly contemplates generational differences in the LGBTQ community and casts an otherworldly spell around Sequin's encounters. Hogwarts with more plastic curtains and bucking. TB
A COMMON CRIME/UN CRIMEN COMÚN ★★★☆☆
Directed by Francisco Márquez. Starring Elisa Carricajo, Mecha Martínez, Cecilia Rainero, Eliot Otazo, Ciro Coien Pardo. IFI Player, 96 min
This understated Argentine drama marries class division and things that go bump in the night. Its heroine (a brilliantly distracted Carricajo) is an academic whose privilege is writ large in conversations about Foucault's The Order of Things and close-up cinematography that doubles as a visual bourgeois bubble. The film is bookended by fairground rides, suggesting a political obliviousness, but this slow (too slow?), delicate ghost story refuses to go full-Babadook or to trumpet its meanings. That can make for frustrating viewing, but A Common Crime is a fine curio. TB
THOSE THAT, AT A DISTANCE, RESEMBLE ANOTHER ★★★☆☆
Directed by Jessica Sarah Rinland. Mubi, 67 min
Rinlan's economic documentary details the restoration of an ivory box, the recreation of an elephant tusk and other related tasks. Shot in 16mm, with a narrow ratio, Those That… could easily be mistaken for an emanation of the 1970s (the director's own pinkly varnished fingernails press home the case) were it not for the appearance of contemporary technology such as a 3-D printing. The lack of incident forces the viewer into pondering the questions being implicitly asked. What is a copy? What is an original? DC
