1: Green Room (18)
(Jeremy Saulnier, 2015, US) 95 mins
This skilled siege thriller descends into horror when Anton Yelchin, Imogen Poots and co get holed up backstage at a lawless venue in the middle of nowhere, with Patrick Stewart and his neo-Nazi attack dogs baying for their blood. Be warned: the body count gets high.
2: Everybody Wants Some!!
(15) (Richard Linklater, 2016, US) 117 mins
America’s official youth historian casts his mind back to college life circa 1980: a time when disco was giving way to punk and men were inclined to sport tiny shorts, cut-off sleeves and handlebar moustaches. The focus this time is the jocks for a change, a campus baseball team whose pre-term bonding rituals, skirt-chasing expeditions and incurable competitiveness make for some delightful character comedy.
3: Mustang (15)
(Deniz Gamze Ergüven, 2015, Fra/Ger/Tur/Qat) 97 mins
In contrast to idyllic American boyhood, Turkish girlhood is literally a form of house arrest here. Life changes overnight for five orphaned sisters: from carefree school days to a regimen of curfews, virginity inspections and arranged marriages. Seeing the fate of her elder siblings, youngest sister Lale treats the situation like a prison break, which brings a note of tension into an all-too-believable scenario.
4: Captain America: Civil War (12A)
(Anthony & Joe Russo, 2016, US) 147 mins
The Marvel stable lines up behind either Chris Evans’s Captain or Robert Downey Jr’s Iron Man for a superhero faceoff that lives up to expectations, and manages to touch on the real world in a way Batman v Superman didn’t. The comic-book character-packed cast makes it feel like another Avengers sequel; Avengers Disassemble, perhaps.
5: Son Of Saul (15)
(László Nemes, 2015, Hun) 107 mins
A Holocaust drama like no other, limiting its focus to a Jewish concentration-camp prisoner assisting the Nazis in the grimmest of tasks, while pursuing his own tragically futile agenda. We follow this stricken worker throughout, glimpsing the broader atrocities in the margins – but that is enough to communicate the full horror.
