The Film Verdict

Where legendary film director Ernst Lubitsch was famous for his “touch,” Iñárritu’s aesthetic style is more akin to a Godzilla-sized stomp.

This sprawling epic is lavishly mounted and richly layered, sometimes to its own detriment. But it is also a visually ravishing, boldly ambitious, unapologetically high-camp celebration of queerness, artistic creation and sexual liberation.

There’s a lovely central story in Forgotten Island, about two lifelong best friends whose relationship may or may not survive one of them going abroad for college, and the movie buries that story in so much plot, mythology, magical creatures, and mini-quests that it dares viewers not to lose the thread.

Director David Ayer and first-time screenwriter Cameron Alexander aren’t reinventing the wheel when it comes to survival tales, but they do so with unsparing efficacy, delivering moments of both suspense and compassion. It immediately joins the ranks of Field of Dreams and Saving Private Ryan as a movie that allows men to cry.

What The Spiral may lack in meticulous build-up it makes up for in successive pay-offs.

Like Hannah Einbinder’s character in Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma, hired to breathe life into “zombie IP,” director and co-writer Zach Cregger brings his trademark horror-comedy combo to the goings-on at the Umbrella Corporation, resulting in a sprightly, terrifying, and utterly entertaining hunk of blood-candy that will no doubt give the franchise brand new life.

The result is akin to a thoughtfully curated scrapbook, guided by a narrator with a gift for involving storytelling. Be warned, however: watching Rehearsals for a Revolution is an exercise in getting your heart broken again and again.

It is a rewarding trip but not an easy one.

There is plenty of material here for a long film, but Moretti keeps things tight and the action is full of surprises. It’s a pleasant comedy.

Theo Rollason's found-footage documentary paints an intimate, absorbing, timely portrait of radical gay film-maker Derek Jarman during a stormy political period. Queer Edward II is scrappy and disjointed in places. That said, it gathers force into an intimate, humane, politically engaged film that partly plays like a time capsule of ancient history but sometimes feels like it could have been made yesterday.