Friendship (15)
Directed by Andrew DeYoung
★★★★

WRITER-DIRECTOR Andrew DeYoung takes cringe comedy to painfully funny new heights in this tale of toxic bromance, which will have you wincing and laughing out loud in equal measure. Think Donald Trump and Elon Musk or Trump and the late Jeffrey Epstein. 

The film, which was inspired by DeYoung’s own experience, stars comedian/writer/actor Tim Robinson as suburban father and husband Craig who is mesmerised by his charismatic new neighbour and local TV weather man Austin (a sublime Paul Rudd). The pair become fast friends and embark on adventurous trips until it all goes south due to Craig crossing boundaries. This spooks Austin and Craig then becomes overly needy and clingy.

With their distinctive styles Robinson and Rudd are the perfect foils in this hilarious but understated portrayal of what a break-up between two middle-aged men would look like. 

Robinson is wonderfully weird as a geeky loner who is obsessed with Marvel films and people not giving spoilers away, whose long-suffering wife (Kate Mara, Fantastic 4) has a more loving relationship with their son (Jack Dylan Grazer) than with him.  

The comedy emanates organically from the drama which is cringe-tastic as the film walks a fine line between nightmare and comedy. It is also reminiscent of I Love You, Man (2009) in which Rudd played the Craig character or rather an endearing version of him, but taken to new extremes. 

Just when you think it could not get any more awkward or weird, it does. 
MD
In cinemas July 18.

Four Letters of Love (12A)
Directed by Polly Steele
★★★

SET in Ireland, this is a magical and lyrical tale about art, fate and the sheer power of true love which sweeps you away with its stunning landscapes. 

Directed by Polly Steele, it is based on Niall Williams bestselling novel which he has adapted for the big screen, and follows the lives of Nicholas (Fionn O’Shea) and Isabel (Ann Skelly) who live miles apart but who are soulmates. It examines if and how fate will bring them together.

It isn’t as cheesy as it sounds due to the grounded performances by O’Shea and Skelly and their A list supporting cast, which includes Pierce Brosnan, Helena Bonham Carter and Gabriel Byrne, who play their parents. 

Brosnan stars as Nicholas’s father, a civil servant to whom God speaks to one day telling him to be a painter. He leaves his job (and his wife and son in Dublin) to head west to become an artist, which Brosnan is in his own right. As a result, Nicholas’s life soon unravels due to tragic events. 

It is a beautifully shot and exquisitely acted drama, which requires a leap of faith and an open mind.  
MD
In cinemas July 18.

Tin Soldier
Directed by Brad Furman
★

THIS film, mired in the fantasy of a US comprised entirely of soldiers and traumatised veterans, is both an alarming window into its militaristic culture and an unwatchable stew of violent cliche.

The foot-soldier everyman (Scott Eastwood), in whose fragmented and flickery consciousness the narrative is set, has been through a traumatic war (in trenches, weirdly) and then an equally traumatic PTSD programme conducted in an evangelical Waco-style community where he has fallen in love.

The action, after this perplexing set-up, consists in setting off his own explosions before the FBI, and the Waco nut-job leader, set off their own. Cue exploding houses, dams and arenas, extravagant car-crashes, men in murky corridors with guns, a palpable lack of chemistry between the shouty actors, and the inexplicable appearance of a sub-par Robert de Niro, slumming it amid the gelignite.

Searching for a moral to guide its quasi fascist ethos, the film pronounces: “To a damaged psyche, control is a comfort,” and this alarming authoritarianism is as far as it is able to make sense of itself

Sickening.
AR
On Prime video July 23.

The Ballad of Suzanne Cesaire
Directed by Madeleine Hunt Ehrlich
★

IT is painful not to be able to recommend this listless attempt to portray the life and work of Suzanne Cesaire, surrealist, feminist and anti-colonialist, who resisted the encroachment of Nazi-influenced Vichy France over the lives of her compatriots in French Martinique during WWII by publishing the influential journal Tropiques with her husband Aime.

But this film is so slow, self-indulgent and outright boring, despite its modest length, that I can’t.

It contents itself with long stares at unkempt greenery and intones intellectual assertions: that nature is beautiful (not in this case) and that beauty camouflages colonial brutality (equally not in evidence).

Cesaire had six children and this is given as the reason she turned off the tap of activism, writing and thought. Really? Mumblings about birth being a portal between worlds and access to ancestry simply don’t convince.

An opportunity squandered, and a literary heroine misremembered.
AR
In selected cinemas July 18.