Sewer-surfing with Jacob Rees-Mogg. The world’s smallest escape room with the cast of Riverdance. An Arctic research station with Keith Lemon.
Sorry, I’m just trying to think of any location/company combo which I’d find even less appealing than ‘Stuck on a non-stop party island with a tech billionaire and his mates’.
It’s a sign of how out of touch with the modern world I am that this is apparently a desirable experience, at least for the heroine of Blink Twice – or it is until it starts going about as well as Florence Pugh’s trip to Sweden in Midsommar.
Plus, Irish rappers Kneecap star in a music biopic like you’ve never seen before, and a troubled ‘tec is on the case in noir mystery Only the River Flows…
New releases
Blink Twice
Zoë Kravitz steps behind the camera for this highly anticipated psychological thriller about two friends whose holiday of a lifetime takes a decidedly sinister turn.
Naomi Ackie (who made her breakthrough in 2022’s Whitney Houston biopic) stars as Frida, a cocktail waitress who finds herself whisked away to the private island of tech billionaire Slater King (Channing Tatum) for a few days of non-stop partying.
It’s not long before she starts to sense a disturbing undercurrent to her idyllic surroundings – and when her best friend Jess (Alia Shawkat) mysteriously disappears, she finds herself plunged into a nightmarish fight for survival.
| Cert 15, 102 mins | |
| Cineworld, Everyman, Vue | |
| From Fri Aug 23 | |
| More details |
Kneecap
There’s more than a hint of Twenty-Four Hour Party People to the trailer for this raucous portrait of the titular up-and-coming Irish trio, who are famed for rapping in their native language.
If the band – Mo Chara, Móglaí Bap and DJ Próvaí, who all play themselves in this semi-fictionalised re-telling of their origin story – are not yet the stuff of musical legend like New Order and Happy Mondays, there’s a good chance that this hotly tipped film could change that.
An irreverent, politically charged tale of the band’s drug-fuelled journey to fame and fortune, it’s been hailed by NME as ‘not only one of the standout films of 2024, but arguably one of the best music biopics of all time’ – which, even taking that publication’s fondness for hyperbolic overstatement into account, ought to at least mean it’s quite good.
| Cert 18, 105 mins | |
| Cineworld, City Screen, Vue | |
| From Fri Aug 23 | |
| More details |
Only the River Flows
A serial killer stalks the rain-lashed streets of Jiangdong province in this atmospheric, 90s-set Chinese film noir.
When an elderly woman is found brutally murdered, world-weary detective (is there any other kind?) Ma Zhe (Yilong Zhu) is sent to investigate, setting up his headquarters in the dilapidated environs of the town’s old cinema.
Unconvinced that his colleagues have arrested the real culprit, Ma continues to probe into the rural community’s dark secrets in a film which Time Out has compared to Bong Joon-ho’s early hit Memories of Murder.
| Cert 15, 102 mins | |
| City Screen | |
| From Fri Aug 23 |
Other screenings
Summer holiday round-up
All aboard at Vue for a new animated take on the tale of Noah’s Ark (screening daily), which crowbars a talent show into the traditional Biblical saga and earns the customary two-star review from the Guardian for its trouble.
Also continuing daily at Vue this week are canine-feline team-up Gracie and Pedro: Mission Impossible, eco fable Ozi: Voice of the Forest and castaway adventure Kensuke’s Kingdom.
The 15th anniversary re-release of Laika Studios’ debut feature Coraline continues with a mixture of 2D and 3D screenings at Cineworld and Vue (both daily); it’s also showing at Everyman (2D only) from Fri 23rd to Mon 26th, plus Thurs 29th.
The Garfield Movie is this week’s budget viewing choice at both Cineworld (tickets £2.50) and Vue (£2.49), showing daily, while Everyman’s Toddler Club has screenings of Disney’s Wreck-it Ralph on Fri 23rd and Sat 24th (£6.25 child/£8.75 adult plus toddler).
Younger viewers can enjoy Bluey at the Cinema: Family Trip Collection at Vue (daily, £3.99) and City Screen (Sun 25th, £5.00) – and as ever, there’s a daily dose of double Donaldson at Cineworld in the form of The Highway Rat & The Snail and the Whale (£5.00).
Other new releases and previews
Bill Skarsgård gets gothic in The Crow, a remake of the 1994 cult favourite which is bound to ruffle some feathers – head down to Cineworld, Everyman and Vue to see how it compares (showing daily).
Cinematic twitchers won’t know where to look first this week, as there’s also a Cuckoo flying into Vue (daily) – Hunter Schafer (Kinds of Kindness) stars alongside Downton’s Dan Stevens in this German Alps-set horror.
Over at City Screen, period drama Widow Clicquot (daily except Mon 26th) raises a glass to the woman known as the ‘Grande Dame of Champagne’, while on Tues 27th you can catch a preview of highly acclaimed drama Sing Sing, in which a theatre group provides hope for the inmates of a maximum security prison.
Fans of US sitcom Broad City can see what star Ilana Glazer did next in pregnancy comedy Babes, showing in Everyman’s Beyond strand on Tues 27th and Weds 28th.
And because no global mega-tour is complete without an accompanying concert film, and no concert film is complete without a clunky title, Seventeen Tour ‘Follow’ Again to Cinemas (Vue, Sat 24th) showcases the K-Pop sensations ‘rewriting history every step of the way’, according to the blurb, which sounds frankly exhausting – good job there’s so many of them.
Goldblum’s metamorphosis and all about the Force, this is: old favourites back on the big screen
City Screen are inviting cinemagoers to the spend the bank holiday in a galaxy far, far away as the original Star Wars trilogy screens across the weekend: Han shoots first in Star Wars on Fri 23rd, Sat 24th and Sun 25th, Darth’s the daddy in The Empire Strikes Back on Sat 24th, Sun 25th and Mon 26th, and the Ewoks have a dance-off in Return of the Jedi on Sun 25th and Mon 26th.
Star Wars fans will be well served over the coming weeks, with both Cineworld and Vue screening every film in the saga to date – Cineworld’s Star Wars Sundays season kicks off this week with The Phantom Menace, showing on Sun 25th and also, slightly confusingly, on Fri 23rd (which I presume they’re calling Feel the Force Fridays).
Meanwhile, the summer of Spidey continues with the Garfield movie, aka 2012’s The Amazing Spider-Man, which saw Andrew Garfield take over web-slinging duties from Tobey Maguire, getting entangled with Emma Stone’s Gwen Stacy and a reptilian Rhys Ifans – it’s showing at Cineworld from Fri 23rd to Sun 25th, and Vue on Sat 24th and Sun 25th.
There’s a rather less heroic human-insect hybrid on offer at City Screen as Jeff Goldblum starts going through some changes in The Fly on Fri 23rd, kicking off a bank holiday quadruple bill of 80s classics: it’s followed by comedy drama Broadcast News on Sat 24th, fantasy epic Excalibur on Sun 25th and a Dementia-Friendly screening of Moonstruck on Mon 26th.
Keeping it 80s, Everyman invite you to spend summer in the Catskills with Throwback screenings of Dirty Dancing on Sun 25th and Tues 27th, while John Cusack has the time of his life Being John Malkovich in Spike Jonze’s marvellous metaphysical melodrama, showing in their Late Nights strand on Fri 23rd.
And finally, Vincent and Jules celebrate three decades of discussing the finer points of European cuisine as Pulp Fiction returns to cinemas for its 30th anniversary: grab a Royale with Cheese and head over to Cineworld (Sat 24th, Mon 27th), City Screen (Fri 23rd, Mon 26th) and Vue (Fri 23rd, Sun 25th, Tues 27th).