1 A Ghost Story (12A)
(David Lowery, 2017, US) 92 mins
The difficult-to-define director of Disney film Pete’s Dragon returns with this cosmic and sometimes comic exploration of human transience. Rooney Mara and Casey Affleck star, but it’s the wordless bedsheet-wearing spectre that everyone’s talking about. Who’s really under there? Affleck? A stunt double? Or perhaps pop phoenix Kesha, who cameos elsewhere.
2 Atomic Blonde (15)
(David Leitch, 2017, Ger/Swe/US), 115 mins
Subject Atomic Blonde to a feminist critique and it falls down faster than one of its attacking gangs of anonymous henchmen, but Leitch’s action thriller sure looks swish. Charlize Theron stars as an anachronistically styled MI6 agent in 1980s Berlin.
3 Le Doulos (12)
(Jean-Pierre Melville, 1962, Fra/Ita) 109 mins
Jean-Paul Belmondo makes snitching look sexy in a new 4K restoration of Melville’s classic crime thriller. This French film is the missing link between 1931’s The Public Enemy and Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs, although both have more comprehensible plots. Still, when a film is as chic as this, it would be gauche to quibble.
4 Step (PG)
(Amanda Lipitz, 2017, US) 84 mins
Not another in the Step Up franchise, but an uplifting documentary about the lives of a Baltimore dance team. It has charm, training montages and plenty of characters worth rooting for. It’s only depressing that the subtext of these docs – in low-income black America, be exceptional or be ignored – remains mostly unchanged since 1994’s Hoop Dreams.
5 The Big Sick (15)
(Michael Showalter, 2017, US) 120 mins
Boy meets girl, girls slips into a coma, boy continues seeing her anyway. Based on the real-life courtship of star Kumail Nanjiani and his wife, co-writer Emily V Gordon, The Big Sick isn’t the usual stuff of romance, but its emotional honesty makes it the year’s stand-out romcom.
