Nothing beats going to the movies and seeing the latest blockbuster.
This week’s film is Holy Spider, a crime/drama starring last year’s Cannes Film Festival best actress.
Meanwhile, Martin Scorsese executive produces the documentary Dreaming Walls: Inside The Chelsea Hotel.
Continue reading for a roundup of this week’s releases.
Holy Spider
In this outstanding arthouse true-crime thriller, Zahra Amir Ebrahimi rightfully earned best actress at last year’s Cannes Film Festival as Rahami, the fictional intrepid female reporter trying to track down ‘The Spider’ (Mehdi Bajestani).
In 2000-2001, the Spider, a combat veteran and allegedly devoted father, murdered 16 prostitutes in Iran’s second largest city.
The Spider’s hallmark move was strangling victims with their own head scarves, claiming he was waging a jihad against vice.
What makes filmmaker Ali Abbasi’s unique film so intriguing is that it isn’t so much a portrayal of a serial killer as it is of the misogynistic society that transformed him into a hero.
It’s arrestingly stylized, blending true realism and sensitive character work with gritty amounts of grindhouse exploitation.
18. Out Friday in cinemas
Dreaming Walls: Inside The Chelsea Hotel
The guest list at New York’s Hotel Chelsea includes a slew of rock’n’roll royalty. From Jimi Hendrix to Madonna, Jack Kerouac to Janis Joplin, everyone who was anyone in the twentieth century slept here.
However, this elegiac documentary (executive produced by Martin Scorsese) focuses on the Chelsea’s last surviving occupants – the quirky, grumpy, usually geriatric, forgotten remnants of another age when Manhattan was an epicentre of the avant-garde.
It thinks you’ll already be in love with the hotel’s past, as it’s shot dreamily amid the ghostly disarray of its decade-long reconstruction work.
If you are, it may conjure up a touching séance with the spirits within its walls. If you aren’t, you’ll discover that it leaves far too many unresolved questions.
15. Out Fri in cinemas and on demand
Also out this week
Alice, Darling
In Mary Nighy’s debut thriller, Anna Kendrick plays a woman pushed to her breaking point by her psychologically abusive lover (Charlie Carrick).
15. Out Friday in cinemas
Bank Of Dave
Heartwarming British film about Dave Fishwick (Roy Kinnear), a self-made millionaire from Burnley who established his own micro-bank to fund community projects.
12. Out now on Netflix
More Than Ever
Gaspard Ullliel, who died in a horrific skiing accident last year, makes his final movie appearance as a 30-something whose fiancée (Vicky Krieps) had a terminal disease.
15. Out Friday in cinemas
The Substitute
A substitute literature teacher (Juan Minujn) struggles to connect with the dangerous minds of high school kids in a drug-infested Buenos Aires neighbourhood.
15. Out Friday in cinemas