Alpha
Directed by Julia Ducournau
★

MERCIFULLY, this half-baked turkey arrived — in the dodgy packaging of “official Cannes selection” — well ahead of Xmas and won’t set the tone, and a more meritorious festive serving will still come.

The central character Alpha (a gifted Melissa Boros) is a 13-year-old schoolgirl who has, unbeknown to her, an “A” tattooed on her left upper arm with a dodgy needle — all in appropriate horror-film standard gory close-up — while tripping at a teenage drugs party.

There is a pernicious and baffling virus doing the rounds in Paris but with little fuss. So much so that few appear to take any precautions. Still Alpha’s blood-leaking tattoo, and later the arm where test blood was taken, sow panic, if sadly of the farcical type.

As the disease progresses the afflicted individuals undergo a slow petrification, gradually turning into what looks like choice Carrara, white marble statues, a process reminiscent of the Greek gods’ proclivity for turning the unruly into stone.

Alpha’s single mum Maman (Golshifteh Farahani), who is a doctor, becomes “adequately horror-hysterical” by the thought of her daughter’s infection, a condition augmented by the arrival of her beloved addict son Amin (a measured Tahar Rahim).

The audience is spoon-fed the screenplay in a series of tedious and unimaginative sequences, which infuriate with their lack of consequential coherence or drama.

In the final take Amin turns to dust as an allegorical Sirocco engulfs the estate where they live. Yawn!
MB
In cinemas November 14

Park Avenue (12A)
Directed by Gaby Dellal
★

FIONA SHAW seems to specialise in films about dysfunctional mother-daughter relationships where she plays the controlling and deceitful side of the equation. Is the pain inflicted by the narcissistic widowed matriarch from the propertied classes such a social scourge that it demands all this attention?

She performs with the same agonising frankness as she did in the excellent Hot Milk but this time the plot is paper-thin. Basically, her husband was gay and shot himself, and she never told her daughter, although she has no qualms boasting about the artefacts stolen from China that account for her wealth.

Meanwhile the film drowns in a stupefied gaze at all the fusty details of high bourgeois New York: its door handles, lifts, hats, shoes, furniture and walk-on parts for black comedians. Like Shaw’s character, this movie dies on its feet.
AR
In cinemas November 14

The Running Man (15)
Directed by Edgar Wright 
★★★

SET in a dystopian US in the near future, under totalitarian rule, where fake news and deep fake videos are rife, dissenters are eliminated and the gap between rich and poor is unfathomable. Now, that may all seem a bit too much on the nose. 

However this is a faithful adaptation of Stephen King’s novel, which he wrote in the early 1970s but first published in 1982 under his pseudonym Richard Bachman, and which he set in 2025. It is like the mirror he held up to US society today. 

Directed and co-written by Edgar Wright with his longtime collaborator Michael Bacall, it follows working class Ben Richards (a phenomenal Glen Powell), who agrees to appear on the popular but deadly TV show The Running Man in order to get his sick young daughter lifesaving medication as he cannot afford medical insurance. To win he has to survive 30 days while being pursued by professional assassins as his every move is televised live. 

This is thrilling action-packed political sci-fi which features a fabulous homage to Arnold Schwarzenegger who starred in the original 1987 film, and ends on a cathartic note. 
MD
In cinemas now

Left-Handed Girl (15)
Directed by Shih-Ching Tsou
★★★★

THIS vibrant yet haunting debut feature by Shih-Ching Tsou is a beautiful drama about a single mother and her two daughters who return to Taipei to run a night market stall, where they each struggle to adapt to their new life and surroundings. 

And everyone has something to hide in this slow burner, that Tsou co-wrote with her longtime filmmaking partner Sean Baker (Anora) and which is anchored by a film stealing performance from Nina Ye as the five-year-old I-Jing, who adores her rebellious older sister (Shih-Yuan Ma).

Ye, who was herself five at the time of filming, is captivating as a left-handed young girl whose grandfather bans her from using her left hand, which he claims is the “devil’s hand.” Traumatised, she embarks on a shop-lifting spree, blaming it on said devilish hand, which sparks the unravelling of dark family secrets and upends all their lives. 
MD
In select cinemas November 14 and on Netflix November 28