The Lobster
15, 118 mins
This is the first English-language feature by the Greek director Yorgos Lanthimos (best known for 2009’s Dogtooth), but he hasn’t really had to make a cultural leap. Like his other films, The Lobster invents a world all its own — in this case a society in which singletons (including Colin Farrell’s dweeby character) are imprisoned in a rural hotel and must either find a romantic companion in a few weeks or face a certain extraordinary punishment. As we’ve seen in the past, Lanthimos’s surrealism is sometimes a matter of using elaborate, weirdly designed weaponry to shoot fish in a barrel. Here, a lot of the film’s strangeness has no satirical target beyond the fact that social norms put pressure on people to couple up — hardly a revelation. Another weakness is simply that the movie loses momentum in its later stages. All in all, though, it’s still captivating. It’s full of funny ideas for bizarre scenes and one-off jokes, and the cast — with Farrell’s co-stars including Rachel Weisz, Olivia Colman and Ben Whishaw — draw great things from the earnest, deadpan style required of them.
Pan
PG, 111 mins
Contrary to Monty Python, it seems you can be a very naughty boy and a messiah. That, at any rate, is the thinking behind Joe Wright’s Peter Pan prequel, which shows us its hero (Levi Miller) as a tearaway in 1940s London (a setting of no particular relevance) who goes on to discover Neverland and the startling truth of his origins. There’s a kind of audacity in this invention, but it’s not matched by any great daring in the way the story unfolds. Wright’s wholesome blend of action movie and fairy tale — with Hugh Jackman as a piratical villain and Rooney Mara’s Tiger Lily leading an Avatar-meets-Benetton tribe — is pacy, good-looking and perfectly enjoyable, yet ultimately generic. Its James Hook (Garrett Hedlund) is a roguish friend to Peter and retains both hands throughout the film, so this is a prequel that sets up its own potential sequel. The trouble is, it doesn’t leave you hungry for more.
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Censored Voices
No cert, 87 mins
In 1967, Amos Oz and other young Israeli intellectuals taped interviews with several contemporaries about their recent experiences as soldiers in the Six-Day War. Mor Loushy’s Censored Voices presents excerpts from those recordings, and what we hear is certainly compelling: remorseful accounts of atrocities and prescient thoughts about Israel’s chances of achieving security through occupation. Yet there’s a vexing lack of context. The censorship of the tapes back in the 1960s isn’t clearly described, and though Loushy films some of the former soldiers in the present day, we learn little of what they now think of their homeland and its history.
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Hotel Transylvania 2
U, 90 mins
In the 2012 cartoon Hotel Transylvania, which featured kind-hearted versions of Dracula, Frankenstein’s monster and other classic bogeymen, the main blueprint was Monsters, Inc. In this sequel, it’s more The Munsters. Dracula’s worries about his grandson’s upbringing give us a family sitcom with a mock-spooky spin. Genndy Tartakovsky’s film is basic, garish commercial fodder, but then so is Halloween, and at least this contribution to the season is well animated, with a few adequate jokes. Adam Sandler co-wrote it and voices Drac, so of course that character keeps moaning about the world not being as much fun as it was in his youth. For once, though, this middle-aged nostalgia is put in its place.
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SuperBob
15, 83 mins
Using Shaun of the Dead-style British suburban comedy to bring a superhero tale down to earth, Jon Drever’s small-budget film stars Brett Goldstein as a bloke who happens to have remarkable, world-saving powers, but remains a hesitant bungler in his private life. A bit too hesitant, if you ask me. This may be nit-picking, but I couldn’t help feeling that no superhuman would ever be quite so dithery and unassertive. That viewpoint rather spoilt the show for me, because the hero’s umming and erring is the film’s main way of padding out its likeable but slender comic ideas.
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Howl
18, 89 mins
To the many factors that might delay a rail journey in Britain, it seems we should now add werewolves — at least according to this horror movie. When a late-night train breaks down in a forest, beneath a full moon, the small group of passengers on board, as well as the put-upon guard (Downton’s Ed Speleers), find they are now tinned meat for mysterious beasts lurking outside. There’s nothing original in Paul Hyett’s film, but that’s not to say horror traditionalists won’t enjoy its energetic carnage.