The goon show: "Athiradi"

The Malayalam campus comedy Athiradi could well be the first feelgood movie in existence to open with a fatal stampede at a rock concert: here's a film that, much like its young hero, learns how to take even disastrous events in its stride. College freshman Samkutty (Basil Joseph, the amiable beta of 2024's Guruvayoor Ambalanadayil) enrolls with limited braincells under what looks alarmingly like the beginnings of a mullet, and precisely zero game around the opposite sex; his very voice sounds like it's attempting to break again. Still, he's a young man with a plan, and the plan is to revive the campus's annual music festival - an event that, as that prologue illustrates, turned deadly five years earlier, when his older brother Joppan (Vishnu Agasthya) was running things and watched on in horror as his sweetheart was trampled underfoot. Joppan has been in a depressive funk ever since, so Samkutty's quest isn't just to install himself as the big man on campus, but to restore both family honour and his brother's mojo. What's unusual is that, for a long while, the comedy in debutant writer/director Arun Anirudhan's film is more administrative than zany, a matter of Samkutty petitioning the relevant authorities in the hope of getting his way. This, it's implied, will be the making of this particular civil engineering student: first he will build it and then, he hopes, people will come. Those of us watching on from the cheap seats can only hope his festival will prove more Field Day than Fyre.

Although it appears to have drawn college-age audiences keen to see an onscreen institution of higher education that looks not unlike their own, Athiradi isn't an especially surprising comedy. We know the girl Samkutty wants, because he makes eyes at fellow freshman Swathi (Riya Shibu, the Delulu of last year's Sarvam Maya) during initiation, and we're pretty sure the festival will go ahead in some form, so all that's left is to guess what the obstacles will be, when they'll appear and how our guy will overcome them. The big intermission twist, emerging from a mass brawl on the outskirts of town, merely carries the film back in the direction of 2024's Fahadh Faasil hit Aavesham. Athiradi isn't as funny as that predecent, but that's not a bad comic model for a young writer-director, nor for a good night's entertainment, and the new movie shares at least two winning qualities with its protagonist: dogged persistence and geniality. You're quite happy to sit there as its foolish schemes unravel and it makes its silly jokes. Early on, we hear gossip that Samkutty has even petitioned the local bishop to bring the festival back - and Anirudhan duly shoots the cutaway that confirms this unholy intervention, complete with befuddled priest; running gags involve the unhip marble company brought on board as festival sponsors, and a synchronised dance troupe who take the form of an angry mob but toss their weapons so as to bust moves rather than heads. (I was going to say Athiradi works from a more realistic base than Aavesham, which had the wackiness of a live-action cartoon, but then I remembered that that mass brawl also involves a malfunctioning robot from the school's science department. Athiradi is very much a comedy for anybody who believes there should be more malfunctioning robots in cinema.) The patchwork second half takes a turn for the postmodern, as the students and their gangster foe (Tovino Thomas) vie for control of Vineeth Sreenivasan, the real-life entertainer (playing himself) who serves as the most illustrious of in-jokes. (For Western readers: imagine Daniel O'Donnell caught up in a Guy Ritchie caper.) And while the finale, in which we sense Samkutty finally becoming a man, hinges on a concrete squirt gun we've previously seen fail in first-reel R&D functioning at long last - there may well be a Freudian reading - Anirudhan also pulls off something more heartfelt involving the festival logo. A minor event in the release calendar, Athiradi is not unlike one of those festivals where everyone behind the scenes gives of their best while the featured artists play the hits: no great surprises, all told, but everyone goes home alive and satisfied - and a cinema ticket is still far better value than a three-day pass. No scam.

Athiradi is now playing in selected cinemas.

For what it's worth...

UK box office Top Ten (for the weekend of May 15-17, 2026):

1 (2) Michael (12A)

2 (1) The Devil Wears Prada 2 (12A)

3 (3) The Sheep Detectives (PG)

4 (new) Obsession (18)

5 (5) Mortal Kombat II (15)

6 (re) Top Gun (12A) ***

7 (new) The Christophers (15) ***

8 (6) The Super Mario Galaxy Movie (PG)

9 (re) Shrek (U) ***

10 (new) Athiradi (12A) ***

(source: BFI)

My top five:

1. Hen

2. Top Gun: Maverick

3. Athiradi

4. The Christophers

5. Normal

DVD/Blu-Ray/Download top ten: 

1 (new) Project Hail Mary (12) ***

2 (9) "Wuthering Heights" (15)

3 (2) Ready or Not 2: Here I Come (15)

4 (6) Hoppers (U) ****

5 (3) Avatar: Fire and Ash (12) ***

6 (7) G.O.A.T. (PG)

7 (36) Cold Storage (15) ****

8 (4) Shelter (15)

9 (1) Scream 7 (18)

10 (12) Wicked: For Good (PG)

(source: officialcharts.com)

My top five: 
1. Cold Storage

2. 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple

3. Nouvelle Vague

4. Wasteman

5. Soul to Soul

Top five films on terrestrial TV this week:

1. Some Like It Hot [above] (Sunday, BBC Two, 2.15pm)

2. What's Up, Doc? (Sunday, BBC Two, 12.45pm)

3. Funny Face (Saturday, BBC Two, 10.35am)

4. Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret (Holiday Monday, BBC Two, 10pm)

5. Love & Mercy (Friday, BBC Two, 11pm)

"Diabolic" (Guardian 21/05/26)

Diabolic **

Dir: Daniel J. Phillips. With: Elizabeth Cullen, John Kim, Mia Challis, Luca Sardelis. 95 mins. Cert: 15

Though it features few recognisable faces, this Oz-shot, US-set indie horror displays a core competency that gets it some of the way to where it’s heading – only to collapse, come the final reels, into the usual hacky manoeuvres. Ten years after fleeing a fundamentalist branch of the Latter-Day Saints, snub-nosed artist heroine Elise (Elizabeth Cullen) has started shunning the advances of boyfriend Adam (John Kim), instead obsessively digging holes in the couple’s back garden and trashing the living room in the middle of the night. (You don’t want to see what she does to a neighbour’s poor dog.) Could it have something to do with the grimy cellar door she feels compelled to paint, or the traumatic baptism we witness in a pre-title sequence? What are the chances?

For somewhere between half and two-thirds of its running time, we’re watching a diagnostic case study. Elise and close pals return to Mormon country – more specifically, the in-no-way ironically named hamlet of Haventon – to undergo a regression therapy involving a local ayahuasca variant; this will strike rational onlookers as ill-advised even before an actual cellar door is uncovered outside the venue and everybody starts throwing up. (Cue the especially dreadful line: “She must have torn internally.”) Thereafter, flashbacks reveal what’s been suppressed or concealed: the younger Elise’s growing closeness to bishop’s daughter Clara (Luca Sardelis) would seem to indicate our girl isn’t possessed, merely bi.

The results prove middling at best, hardly the KO religious conversion therapy deserves and never the campy scream this set-up might have licensed. Cinematographer Michael Tessari gives matters a wintry, low-lit, persuasively un-Australian look, and gathers the odd suggestive image, like a dream sequence scattering of petals. More of that delicacy would have done Diabolic a world of good, but co-writer/director Daniel J. Phillips heads the other way, cranking up the soundtrack’s parping and the underlying Mormonphobia: supporting players go decidedly heavy on the repression and hysteria. Seasoned soap fans will spot Dennis Coard, formerly Pippa Ross’s foursquare second husband Michael on Home and Away, among the church elders. Never mind Elise, what’s got into him?

Diabolic is available to rent via Prime Video and other digital platforms from Monday 25. 

Chicken run: "Hen"

Here's an unexpected comeback. The writer-director György Pálfi emerged at the turn of the century as the mad professor of Hungarian cinema, compiling one-of-a-kind films from a variety of diverse and unusual angles. 2002's Hukkle, a U-rated symphony of the natural world, was followed by the raw meat of 2006's Taxidermia, a decidedly 18-rated study of human flesh and blood that repelled almost as many spectators as it compelled. Two decades on, Pálfi returns with - and no, I swear I'm not making this up - a movie shot largely from the perspective of an errant chicken. The 15-rated Hen splits the difference between this unique filmmaker's breakthrough works: the singular path it follows allows us to see, on one side, the wonders of nature and, on the other, the horrors of the human sphere. Opening on a tight close-up of creation - an egg emerging from a cloaca - it then plunges us into the ever-staggering processes of factory farming. The egg is warmed, and a chick eventually breaks out; the chick is funnelled through slides and chutes and into a heavily crowded barn, where she grows up. Our heroine is, as it were, a black sheep, her inky colouration distinguishing her from the mass of Easter-yellow and snow-white birds she's farmed with; she will, indeed, be rejected from this process for being different, less saleable, at which point Hen begins to assume an air of the sociopolitical. Initially earmarked for inclusion in a trucker's soup, she escapes at a service station, and thereafter proceeds to having marvellous, sometimes alarming adventures along an especially sunsoaked stretch of the Greek coast. For long stretches, Hen resembles a live-action version of those animations we show our young, or an ultra-leftfield item of the Incredible Journey/Homeward Bound/Babe school; you may at an early point expect the protagonist to start clucking with the voice of a Kate McKinnon or an Olivia Colman.

But no, because this is an actual hen - beady of eye, scarlet of wattle - albeit one who's been granted the kind of close-ups typically reserved for actresses with L'Oréal contracts. Furthermore, she's an actual hen who's been loosed on the real world, where - even after leaving behind the factory-farming environment - death lurks around every other corner. A riotous early setpiece, likely to stand among the summer's best, answers the age-old question of why the chicken crossed the road, in this case a perilously busy carriageway: she was being pursued by a ravenous fox. (Here we should credit the three "stunt chickens" listed in the closing credits, named as Jackie 1, 2 and 3.) Perhaps Pálfi's film is more readily compared to 1998's Babe: Pig in the City, a euphemistic way of warning animal lovers to approach with some degree of caution: you will, I think, spend much of Hen praying for a happy ending in the form of a "no animals were harmed" disclaimer. (Spoiler alert: there is one.) It's not just that the hen has to dodge that fox and a no less hungry-looking hawk (introduced polishing off a fieldmouse without much in the way of contrition); she will also be snatched up at one point in the jaws of a hound and carried right back into the hands of those pesky humans, always plotting and scheming, quick to anger, invariably peckish. Here, Hen crosses paths with the methodology of the recent EO (after Bresson, about a donkey), Gunda (about a pig) and Cow (about a cow): we're looking at humankind through the eyes of one of those poor, unfortunate creatures obliged to share a planet, or just a backyard, with humankind. To borrow a Manny Farberism that sort of fits the bill, those earlier works were white elephant movies, films in which a director bore down on their animal subjects with the intention of Saying Something Despairingly Profound about the world these beasts were led through, kicking and squealing.

Led instead by Pálfi's far lighter touch, Hen reveals itself as a prime instance of termite art, scratching around at ground level with its subject, and seeing what truths these talons scuff up. Although this chicken's legs carry her within touching distance of a prominent theme in contemporary European cinema - and although her eyes appear to register their fair share of human folly - Hen feels like another of this director's experiments rather than any didactic statement, seizing the opportunity to see how far one might take a chicken for a walk. As an experiment, Hen proves surprisingly successful and engaging. Even amid its occasional dramatic lulls - such as a first-half diversion into a freer-range form of farming - the eye is drawn by Pálfi's virtuosic choices: layering Ravel's "Bolero" over footage of the hen clucking around a yard, allowing the hen to waddle into the bedroom of a child watching a documentary about dinosaurs (thereby presenting our heroine with a moving cave painting of her ancestors), a makeover sequence that demonstrates - after a lot of evidence to the contrary - just how hospitable we humans can be at our best. From around the halfway point, Pálfi and co-writer/wife Zsófia Ruttkay offer us two films for the price of one: the chicken's journey, and a drama about those humans pushed into the background. (There are, believe it or not, points where the two stories intersect, and we're led to wonder whether this chicken can pull a Lassie Come Home and save the day. But, again, no: she's just hen.) What's upfront, a feat of staging and editing, is all the more remarkable for the unified and expressive-seeming performance Pálfi has coaxed out of the eight (count 'em) chickens credited as playing the lead role: this, truly, is the Belmondo of birds, climbing, clambering, strutting and posing, taking a delight in her own freedom, and even throwing herself into a late-breaking romance with a brooding cock called Titan. A question: just how much birdseed did Pálfi get through here?

Hen opens in selected cinemas from tomorrow.

"Charlie the Wonderdog" (Guardian 20/05/26)

Charlie the Wonderdog **

Dir: Shea Wageman. With the voices of: Owen Wilson, Ruairi MacDonald, Dawson Littman, Elishia Perosa. 95 mins. Cert: PG

In an ever gappier release schedule, there’s little in the way of a back-up plan for any youngsters and parents shut out of this weekend’s The Mandalorian and Grogu. The major studios’ animation departments have already delivered the blockbusting likes of Hoppers, G.O.A.T. and The Super Mario Galaxy Movie to multiplexes this spring, setting distributors scrabbling to source what instinctively feel like matinee contingency arrangements. If a new, Chinese-produced Tom and Jerry caper doesn’t spark undue enthusiasm, the most immediate family alternative would be this very ordinary Canuck digimation, featuring the voice of Owen Wilson as a dog with superpowers; having tanked in the US earlier this year, Shea Wageman’s film gets repurposed here as half-term screenfiller.

Wageman earns some points for weirdness. The titular pooch is one of a menagerie of household pets beamed up one night for alien experimentation. (Here, this PG-rated entertainment comes close to busting out the probes.) Returned home with the ability to fly and speak in a recognisably Wilsonian drawl, Charlie resolves to use his superpowers for good – becoming, if you will, Bark Kent. Animated hackery sets in with more of American movies’ virulent anti-cat propaganda: neighbour’s puss Puddy (Ruairi MacDonald) breaks bad, pledging to punish his now-cowering owner, and indeed humanity entire, for failing to empty his litter tray. Yes, there’s a digimated litter tray: you fear for those programmers tasked with piling the gravel high.

Forget the legacies of Disney/Pixar and DreamWorks Animation, and Charlie might seem passable. (Wageman is hoping his audience hasn’t encountered 2009’s Bolt, where Disney did something similar with greater pizzazz.) This script has one solid, funny idea – that Charlie and Puddy represent differing responses to the sentience we humans take for granted – but it gets squandered amid the usual frenetic, ten-a-penny setpieces, which zip into the eyes and immediately exit via the ears. For Wilson, invited to summon the howls of a canine with cacti spines in his butt and a loud belch after Charlie overdoes his beloved bolognese, this was doubtless an easy paycheque. Let’s just hope this winter’s ominous-looking Fockers sequel brings the earlier, funnier Owen back.

Charlie the Wonderdog opens in cinemas nationwide tomorrow.

Down by lore: "Cronos"

In his 1992 debut Cronos, the young Guillermo del Toro announced a fondness for design, bric-a-brac, tchotchkes: what if Dracula, the film proposed, but a version of Dracula where the bloodsucker was an objet trouvé, rather than the undead? Its setting, for the most part, would be a Mexico City antiques shop haunted by the ticking of several dozen clocks and operated by the grey-haired, Geppetto-looking Jesús Gris (Federico Luppi), whose first name will become more significant as the film proceeds. One Christmas, Señor Gris takes delivery of a black-market statue whose base contains a golden clockwork device in the shape of a scarab beetle; this he removes before selling the statue on to an American businessman (Ron Perlman). The businessman, it transpires, has been sent this way by his ailing uncle (Claudio Brook) with specific instructions to retrieve the beetle - which, we learn, was originally manufactured by an alchemist to bestow eternal youth on its owner; this it does by clamping onto the owner's flesh and drawing blood, an MO that Señor Gris discovers the hard way. There are gains from this process: the device grants him a fresher-faced appearance (Luppi gets to do the Benjamin Button thing a decade-and-a-half before it was a thing) and injects a renewed vigour into his relationship with wife Mercedes (Margarita Isabel). There are also, he finds, losses: being pursued by those who really, truly want what he's got, all while having to deal with certain enhanced... appetites.

What's notable revisiting Cronos now, in the wake of del Toro's more expansive and extravagant American studio productions, is its underlying economy. (Not for del Toro the indulgent sprawl of Francis Ford Coppola's Bram Stoker's Dracula, released the same year. Not yet, at any rate.) This script works to a tried-and-tested three-act structure: thirty minutes of set-up, thirty minutes of transformation (wherein bloodsucking becomes analogous to addiction: not for nothing does it involve a metal spike, and licking up blood from bathroom floors), thirty minutes of resolution. As has always been his wont, del Toro chooses to doodle over the top of this framework, in this instance with an insectoid reading of the Bible, a ludic streak that could only have been put here by a lifelong collector (Gris compares the device to having a toy, but not the instructions), a blackly comic visit to a funeral parlour apparently staffed by Wolverine and Guildenstern, and rich handfuls of lore tossed in like the soil in Dracula's coffin, some eternal, some entirely of del Toro's own invention. Restored as recently as 2024, Cronos continues in this vein to make ancient legend seem new again: it certainly doesn't seem dated at a moment when certain American billionaires are recycling their own bodily fluids in a bid to stick around longer and witness the full extent of the destruction their capitalism has wrought. As del Toro has long understood, we have no need to invent ghouls when so many walk amongst us.

Cronos is now showing in selected cinemas, available to rent via the BFI Player, and on Blu-ray via the BFI.

Gunsmoke: "Normal"

After a decade and a half of restless graft on the cinema's indie fringes, Ben Wheatley appears to have wound up more or less where he wants to be. Every now and again, he'll veer off into experimental, leftfield territory - as was the case with his most recent venture Bulk, with which he's just toured the arthouse circuit. In between times, however, he knocks off a highish-profile, well-compensated American gig - such as 2023's The Meg 2: The Trench - which then allows him to go off and make another foray into more experimental, leftfield territory. (This viewer still hopes Wheatley will someday return to the project that began life as Colin, You Anus, but that may well depend on the BBC not blowing its annual drama budget on Richard Gadd's latest attempt to work through his issues while avoiding paying for therapy.) Normal, a job-for-hire from a script by John Wick III and Nobody scribe Derek Kolstad, opens as Wheatley's stab at a Coen Brothers movie: its title refers to a small, snowy Minnesotan backwater whose recently deceased sheriff went by the altogether familiar name of Gunderson. The sheriff's interim replacement, who goes by the no less familiar first name of Ulysses and is played by Bob Odenkirk, is settling in as we first join him, surrounded by what his voiceover calls "good people, small problems". What he discovers over the course of the movie is that this small, quiet, normal town is, in fact, properly weird rather than merely quirky, covering up - as it has been - not just his predecessor's mysterious death, but the vast sums of money concentrated hereabouts, and the jawdropping array of weapons locked away in the police precinct's backrooms.

What develops is a multiplex variant of the small, messy situations Wheatley worked through first on TV's Ideal, then in his feature debut Down Terrace, and more recently in 2016's one-location shoot-'em-up Free Fire: the plot, indeed, turns on an attempted bank robbery that goes awry in unusual, unexpected ways. Leaving Coenland behind, Normal next turns left into a John Carpenter scenario, Kolstad's script passing sly comment on the death of Main Street, American self-interest and the perilously easy availability of guns across the continental US, before turning decisively right into cartoon violence, much as Nobody did before it. As was the case there, your mileage may vary: a little of this gruesome Looney Tunes stuff tends to go a long way. If I found Normal an improvement on the slipshod and slaphappy Free Fire, it's because a) Wheatley's working with American money here - giving him more varied shit to blow up - and b) Odenkirk's hangdog humanity provides a steadying counterpoint to all the knockabout nonsense going on around him. The movie that finally emerges through a thick haze of gunsmoke, its face blackened, its hair all up on end, is more than a little ramshackle, bordering on the glib. Just as a job of writing and direction, it feels like a technical or mechanical exercise, reliant on the hero eventually circling back to every last one of the plot points set up in the first act and on those behind the camera finding new ways to film shootouts and instigate shootouts. I spent much of Normal's back end thinking fondly of 2012's underseen The Last Stand, which had Arnie in the Odenkirk role and now feels like a relic of the last moment when independent producers had real money to spend on explosions. The cherry bombs Wheatley tosses our way here will just about do if you're at a loose end of a Friday or Saturday night - and they'll have to do: parsing the threadbare release schedule, it's not as if we're getting a big-budget, Bruckheimer-level action picture this summer, more's the pity.

Normal is now showing in selected cinemas.