York film preview: Ghostbusters, Immaculate and The Persian Version

Bustin’ makes me feel old…

This summer, it will be 40 years since audiences first stumbled dazed and delighted out of the cinema, having just watched four New Yorkers splatter the streets of Manhattan with the remains of a 100ft marshmallow man.

I wonder how many of those punters came away from that inaugural viewing with a fervent hope in their hearts that four decades later they would get the chance to watch a venerable Venkman trade reheated quips with a senescent Stantz?

If that was you, you’re in luck, as Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire sees the gang back on their old NYC stomping ground – while there are more spooky goings on in nunsploitation chiller Immaculate and a talk show goes diabolically wrong in Late Night with the Devil.

Stay safe out there, and remember – don’t cross the streams…

New releases

Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire

Busters old and new reunite for this second latter-day sequel to the classic supernatural comedy, which moves the action back to where it all started.

The story sees the next-generation Spengler clan leave their Oklahoma home to help the origi-busters back in New York, where they’ve set up a secret research facility – but when the discovery of an ancient artefact threatens to usher in a new Ice Age, it’s time to fire up the proton packs once more.

Paul Rudd, Carrie Coon and Finn Wolfhard reprise their roles from 2021’s Ghostbusters: Afterlife, while Messrs. Murray, Aykroyd and Hudson are back to show the newbies how it’s done, as well as butting heads with their 80s nemesis, smarmy government official Walter Peck (William Atherton).

Immaculate

Still riding high from the success of her hit romcom Anyone But You, Sydney Sweeney swaps bickering in a bikini for whimpering in a wimpole in this freaky horror set in an Italian convent.

Sweeney plays devout young nun Cecilia, who journeys to Italy to take up a new role in an institution which cares for elderly sisters in their last days – but when she falls miraculously pregnant, she begins to have increasing doubts that the peaceful community is all that it seems.

If that all sounds a bit The Nun 2.5, intriguing reviews suggest that while you can expect plenty of popcorn-spilling jump-scares, this is an altogether less convent-ional (sorry) take on this well-worn subgenre.

The Persian Version

Winner of the Audience Award at the 2023 Sundance Film Festival, this colourful culture-clash comedy-drama centres on the fraught relationship between a young Iranian-American woman and her mother.

New York filmmaker Leila (Layla Mohammadi) finds her worlds colliding when her family reunite in the city while her father has a heart transplant – and the struggle to keep her two lives separate becomes harder when the clan discover that she is pregnant after a one-night stand.

In a bid to better understand her disapproving mother Shirin (Niousha Noor), Leila begins to dig into the reasons that caused her to move to America, and uncovers a surprising secret history in the process.

Other screenings

Other new releases and previews

Not since the glory days of Alan Partridge has a chat show gone quite as wrong as in 70s-set chiller Late Night with the Devil, which sees a past-his-prime TV presenter attempt to revive flagging ratings by interviewing the demonically possessed survivor of a Satanic cult.

What could possibly go wrong? Head to Cineworld, City Screen and Vue to find out (showing daily from Fri 22nd).

The always compelling Franz Rogowski (seen recently alongside Ben Whishaw in last year’s relationship drama Passages) stars in Disco Boy, which previews at City Screen on Weds 27th – according to Variety, there’s more than a hint of the Claire Denis classic Beau Travail on display in this tale of a member of the French Foreign Legion who crosses paths with a guerrilla fighter in the Niger Delta.

City Screen’s series of screenings from the Japan Foundation Touring Film Programme continues on Thurs 28th with Shadow of Fire, which follows an orphan and a destitute woman scrabbling to make a living in post-World War II Tokyo.

Over at Vue, Mobile Suit Gundam SEED Freedom might sound like the kind of thing someone with extreme concussion would say if you asked them how many fingers you were holding up, but it’s also the title of the latest chapter in a cult sci-fi anime saga, screening daily from Sat 23rd.

And it’s time to rock out like a drivetime DJ circa 2002 when Nickelback: Hate to Love looks back at the Canadian group’s meteoric rise to fame courtesy of perennial earworm How You Remind Me, and how they weathered the online vitriol that followed – get headbanging at Everyman and Vue on Weds 27th.

Family-friendly films

With Easter almost upon us, cinemas are ramping up their budget viewing options this week: you can catch Ice Age and Ice Age: The Meltdown at Cineworld daily from Sat 23rd (tickets £2.50 for each), while Vue’s Mini Mornings slot offers Antipodean animation Combat Wombat: Double Trouble (daily from Sat 23rd, £2.49).

City Screen are showing Disney’s latest Wish in their Kids’ Club strand on Sat 23rd and Sun 24th (£3.30), plus TV faves Pip and Posy and Friends on Sat 23rd and Mon 25th (£5.00), while Everyman’s Toddler Club is pigging out with Peppa’s Cinema Party on Fri 22nd and Sat 23rd (£6.25 child/£8.65 adult and toddler).

There’s also an Autism-Friendly screening of Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire at City Screen on Mon 25th (£6.20 child/£8.20 adult).

Connery x Cage and Indy feels his age: old favourites back on the big screen

Celebrating Black sisterhood on screen, City Screen’s excellent GIRRRL! season continues on Sun 24th with a screening of Set It Off, a 1996 heist movie starring Jada Pinkett Smith and Queen Latifah which has been on my watchlist ever since it was singled out by Mark Kermode as something of an underseen gem in his Secrets of Cinema BBC series.

With Japanese director Hirokazu Kore-eda’s psychological thriller Monster now on general release, City Screen are revisiting one of his earlier films on Tues 26th in the form of 2004’s family drama Nobody Knows, which follows four young siblings left to fend for themselves when their mother disappears.

Oh-so-chic period drama Mrs. Harris Goes to Paris is this month’s Dementia-Friendly screening at City Screen (Mon 25th), while its polar opposite, 1996’s Connery and Cage action classic The Rock, screens in Everyman’s Late Nights strand on Fri 22nd; they’ve also got Throwback screenings of Christopher Nolan’s sci-fi odyssey Interstellar on Sun 24th and Tues 26th.

And finally, Vue’s journey through the Indiana Jones annals arrives at 2008’s little-loved Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, the film that paved the way for all those other ‘legacy sequels’ offering children of the 80s a potent cocktail of wistful nostalgia and inevitable disappointment.

You can catch it from Fri 22nd to Sun 24th – but if for any reason you should not wish to do that, Vue are also taking us back to Indy’s glory days with screenings of Raiders of the Lost Ark (Sat 23rd, Mon 25th), Temple of Doom (Sat 23rd, Tues 26th) and The Last Crusade (Sat 23rd, Weds 27th).