Tara Brady

The film occasionally feels as though it is stretching a short-film premise to feature length and its denouement perhaps lacks the devastating pay-off promised by its patient build-up. But even when the narrative falters, the rumination remains compelling.

A deserving winner of the Critics’ Week Grand Prize at Cannes, A Useful Ghost announces Boonbunchachoke as a film-maker of extravagant imagination.

A stomach-churning parting tableau snipes at a culture that monetises insecurity and conflates self-erasure and self-improvement. Don’t bring popcorn.

Manoj gives a beautifully internalised performance, carrying grief, exhaustion and decades of self-censorship in his hunched stances, while Suman provides an earthy, quietly confident counterpart. Save for a noisy outburst from Balya’s dad, who remains determined to marry his son off, Kanawade resists melodrama throughout, puppeting heartstrings with intimate gestures and dreams.

Sossai favours digressions over plot, allowing recollections, landscapes and chance encounters to coalesce into a shaggy hair-of-the-dog story.

Those hoping for a return to the “splatstick” of the possessed hand in Evil Dead 2 or the cartoon medieval capering of Army of Darkness will be disappointed. Instead, Evil Dead Burn brings a convincing new-French-extremity energy to the Deadites. Regrettably, that’s not really who they are. Where did the groovy go?

Johnson films the action in the same freewheeling documentary style as the television series, mixing hidden-camera encounters with unsuspecting members of the public and increasingly ambitious set pieces. The result preserves the scrappy, improvised amiability of the original while expanding it into a diabolically clever comedy, poignantly pivoting around two chums as they confront the distance between youthful certainty and middle age.

Director Pierre Coffin, making his first solo outing on the franchise while once again providing the voices of every single Minion, leans heavily into the characters’ roots in slapstick. The result is packed with affectionate nods to pre-Code Hollywood, while also finding room for playful references to Singin’ in the Rain, Jaws, The Blob and The Matrix.

Running just over 90 minutes, Blue Heron juggles painful memoir and self-reflexive film-making with remarkable assurance. Anchored by strong performances, particularly from Réti and Beddoes, it is a surgically precise and poignant exploration of how families mythologise and editorialise the pain away.

Ironically, the film is too concerned with the abstract business of genius to give enough space to the gifted folks on screen.