And the rest

Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse

(140 mins, PG) Directed by Joaquim Dos Santos, Kemp Powers, Justin K Thompson; starring Shameik Moore, Hailee Steinfeld, Oscar Isaac

Is it possible to equal a film as boundlessly inventive, stylistically bold and effortlessly cool as SpiderMan: Into the Spider-Verse? Could a sequel ever match that film’s freshness, energy and visual verve? The answer, it seems, is an emphatic yes. Spider-Man: Across the SpiderVerse is sublime. There’s not a frame of this rich, kaleidoscopically detailed animation that isn’t dazzling. It takes the basic themes of the first film – adolescent isolation, communication breakdown, the messy, stressful business of growing, of finding your people – and builds whole worlds with them. It’s a dizzying onslaught of ideas and graphic references. It has heart. It even has a font gag.

In the film-making team and in the story there’s a pleasing combination of original talent and fresh blood. Phil Lord and Christopher Miller return as writers and producers, but there’s a new directing team that includes Kemp Powers (Pixar’s Soul). Once again, the story focuses on the bond between fellow Spider-people Miles Morales (Shameik Moore) and Gwen Stacy (Hailee Steinfeld). But there is a host of new characters, each with their own distinctive look, including Hobie (Daniel Kaluuya), a spider-punk anarchist, drawn with a graphic style that borrows from Jamie Reid’s Sex Pistols aesthetic and Jamie Hewlett’s Gorillaz.

It’s densely plotted, almost overwhelming at times; Daniel Pemberton’s score is an Escher staircase of anxiety. But the soul of the film lies in the tiny human details: like the way Miles, about to gain access to an inner Spidercircle, bounces lightly on his toes – still, at heart, an excited kid waiting for a treat.

The Boogeyman

(99 mins, 15) Directed by Rob Savage; starring Sophie Thatcher, Chris Messina, Vivien Lyra Blair

It was only a matter of time before Rob Savage, director of the inventive and terrifying lockdown Zoom horror Host and the anarchic livestream splatterfest Dashcam, was tapped to direct a studio picture. And as this adaptation of a Stephen King short story shows, he certainly knows his way around the genre.

A recently bereaved family – a widowed father (Chris Messina) and his two daughters (Sophie Thatcher, Vivien Lyra Blair) – find that their grief leaves them vulnerable to something malign, a voracious evil entity with arachnid legs and several sets of teeth that dwells in the shadows. And there are plenty of hiding places in the family home, with its murky stained-glass windows and walls that seem to soak up the light like blotting paper.

It’s an effectively spooky horror film but a generic one. Savage’s approach is efficient but workmanlike: he makes liberal use of jump scares and thunderous crashes on the score. It is, in short, the kind of film we have seen many times before, and that’s a pity. Savage could be a disruptive, distinctive voice in horror. He just needs a studio brave enough to let him run wild.

Mad About the Boy: The Noël Coward Story (91 mins, 12) Directed by Barnaby Thompson; featuring Noël Coward

He was the epitome of a certain kind of urbane, aristocratic Englishness. But Noël Coward grew up in relative poverty, in his mother’s boarding house. He was famously erudite but an autodidact (he left school at nine to earn a living as a child performer). He was both a satirist and a sentimentalist; a heart-throb who was covertly gay.

This very enjoyable and informative documentary, directed by Barnaby Thompson, digs into the contradictions underpinning the life and work of one of the most prolific and versatile talents of the 20th century. The film draws on a wealth of archive material, including plenty of Coward delivering waspish witticisms in interviews, but also more personal, previously unseen material culled from his holiday home movies. It’s a fascinating portrait of the man, and of an era – a time in which a wildly successful entertainer had to be wary of wearing a polo neck sweater in public, for fear of inadvertently outing himself.

Amanda

(94 mins, 15) Directed by Carolina Cavalli; starring Benedetta Porcaroli, Galatéa Bellugi, Giovanna Mezzogiorno

Amanda (Benedetta Porcaroli) might be in her early 20s, but she lives, resolutely and fretfully, in the past. She dwells obsessively on a formative childhood moment – a swimming pool accident, from which she was saved by the family maid – and tends to her grudges as lovingly as if they were cherished pets. It’s no surprise, perhaps, that Amanda has no friends. She’s the kind of abrasively quirky character that might turn up in a Noah Baumbach film, here found in a mannered, deadpan comedy that has a tonal kinship with Greek weird-wave oddities.

Carolina Cavalli’s Italian-language feature debut shouldn’t work as well as it does, but this eccentric, eyecatching film about a lonely girl’s quest to rekindle the only friendship she ever knew – as two-year-olds, she and Rebecca (Galatéa Bellugi) were inseparable – is as oddly endearing as it is enraging.

The Old Man Movie: Lactopalypse!

(88 mins, 15) Directed by Mikk Mägi, Oskar Lehemaa; voices Mikk Mägi, Oskar Lehemaa, Jan Uuspõld

Eastern Europe has a tradition of taking animation as a medium to unexpected places. And this gloriously unsavoury Estonian adventure certainly does so, in a madcap adventure that takes place, partly at least, in a bear’s stomach. The animation style is a crude stop motion, the characters have a single facial expression (wideeyed, stricken, a bit deranged, in case you were wondering), the plot involves a race against time, for the Old Man and his grandchildren to rescue a prized cow from the murderous Old Milker, and to save the world from a cataclysmic bovine explosion. It’s very silly, very funny and categorically not for younger audiences.