Film

Simulant

Dir. April Mullen

Set in the near future, a brilliant global hacker unleashes an A.I. uprising when he removes all restrictions governing android simulants’ thoughts and capabilities, triggering a government manhunt.

AT BEST: ‘A mixture of a heart-breaking love story, sci-fi action. and ticking-clock thriller,’ — Katie Hogan, Filmhounds Magazine

AT WORST: ‘A sometimes confused and always lazy pastiche of warmed-over ideas.’ — Barry Hertz, Globe and Mail

Padre Pio

Dir. Abel Ferrara

The aftermath of WWI sees the first free election in Italy threaten to tear a village apart. Against this backdrop, a friar battles personal demons and spiritual anguish.

AT BEST: ‘It is a minor film, but interesting.’ — Peter Bradshaw, The Guardian

AT WORST: ‘In cinematic confession, no number of Hail Marys could make amends for this.’ — Robbie Collin, The Telegraph

Scarlet

Dir. Pietro Marcello

A lonely young woman who dreams of greater possibilities is seduced to follow the prophecy of a witch she meets in the woods.

AT BEST: ‘The characters and images are illustrated with a fierce and breathtaking beauty.’ — Sophie Monks Kaufman, Little White Lies

AT WORST: ‘The film drifts so far into weightless fantasy that it practically dissipates before one’s eyes.’ — Keith Watson, Slant Magazine

Follow Her

Dir. Sylvia Caminer

Posing questions about the ethical boundaries of social media, an influencer is hired by a mysterious client to write the ending of a screenplay in a remote cabin.

AT BEST: ‘It’s muddled and messy in places, but there’s a lot of fun here.’ — Sharai Bohannon, Dread Central

AT WORST: ‘A clumsy, incoherent, and heavy-handed attempt to comment on a mountain of issues.’ — Alejandra Martinez, We Got This Covered

Brandon Taylor’s The Late Americans depicts a loose circle of lovers and friends who encounter, confront, and provoke one another in a volatile year of self-discovery. “For all their disagreements and misunderstandings and incompatibilities, [Taylor’s characters] are all attempting to make peace with the cosmic bêtise of existence, to figure out how to live without compromising everything they value. It’s beautiful and wrenching to watch them try,” writes Charles Arrowsmith for the Boston Globe Says Harper’s Bazar : “Taylor develops his characters so precisely, they feel like close friends: recognisable, sometimes infuriating, and always worth following to the book’s last page.” Taylor’s apparent “sixth sense” is hailed by Booklist, which suggests it allows him to, “create scenes readers will visualise with ease. At the beginning and ending of things and in confronting gradations of power, and class, ambivalence pervades. Lovers of character studies and fine writing will enjoy getting lost in this.” Meanwhile, Vanity Fair simply says it is a “Finely rendered” novel.

In the late Javier Marías spy thriller, Tomás Nevinson, a retired agent for the British Secret Service is brought back in from the cold for one last assignment. “Marías mesmerises us again and we are swept on by the long, powerful swells of his prose,” writes Lucy Hughes-Hallett in The Guardian. “This is a spy thriller, but it reads like one transposed into music by Philip Glass. A many-layered meditation on mortality and memory and free will and its opposite.” Alex Preston, for the Financial Times, hails Marias, who passed last year, as “One of the most acclaimed Spanish authors of his generation, Marías has always been interested in the spaces between genres… a writer who loves the propulsiveness of the thriller, the page-turning compulsion that drives a reader through Eric Ambler or John le Carré,” and says Tomás Nevinson is “brilliant on the daily vexations of the spy’s life. There’s always a profound interest in the human condition in Marías, the sense of an author who uses the tools of postmodernism to ask deep questions about the way we engage with each other and perceive ourselves.”

A young woman gifted with an ability to navigate the desires of others pretends to be someone she’s not in Emma Cline’s The Guest . “With her propulsive third book, Cline confirms her reputation as the literary prophet of women on the brink… Dreamlike and disaffected, this charged study of class and gender lingers like a bad sunburn,” says Esquire. “Cline is a master of depicting the nefarious and atmospheric menace that often lurks adjacent to our most glittery environments, and she does so here with subdued but no less cutting aplomb,” reviews Vogue, while The Wall Street Journal hails Cline’s descriptions as “frequently bracing and acute, sharpened to icepicks by a stance of amoral neutrality.”