Wendy Ide’s pick of other films: Dying, The Fantastic Four: First Steps, The Bad Guys 2

Dying

(182 mins, 18) Directed by Matthias Glasner; starring Lars Eidinger, Corinna Harfouch, Lilith Stangenberg

A three-hour German film about death, explored through the ice-frosted lens of a family of emotionally unavailable narcissists: Matthias Glasner’s Dying might sound like an ordeal, but this rich, novelistic and mordantly funny Berlin film festival prize winner wears its themes and running time lightly.

A chapter structure portions the story between the members of the Lunies family. Adult son Tom (a remarkable Lars Eidinger, delivering one of the performances of the year) has attempted to heal the scars of his unhappy childhood by immersing himself in his work: he’s a conductor of some note. His younger sister, dental nurse Ellen (Lilith Stangenberg), numbs the pain with alcohol, excess and anonymous sex. Their father, Gerd (Hans-Uwe Bauer), has drifted into the end stages of dementia, far out of reach to his children. And their mother, Lissy (a gloriously toxic Corinna Harfouch), who was never emotionally present in their lives, wears her terminal cancer diagnosis like razor wire – the better to repel any unwanted intimacies from the rest of the family.

It’s a film about the drawn-out process of dying rather than death itself, but it’s also a picture about hope, virtually synonymous with life. For Tom, the purest expression of hope is in the creation of art – shaping a new composition by his troubled friend and collaborator Bernard (Robert Gwisdek). Lorenz Dangel’s gorgeous compositions for the film’s score are showcased to exultant, skin-tingling effect.

A few overwritten scenes notwithstanding, it’s an impressive achievement: a compulsively involving piece of storytelling.

The Fantastic Four: First Steps

(116 mins, 12A) Directed by Matt Shakman; starring Pedro Pascal, Vanessa Kirby, Ebon Moss-Bachrach, Joseph Quinn

It seems that Marvel has finally realised there is little value in making the same identikit movie over and over again. Or, for that matter, in situating each new release in an intricately interconnected world requiring hours of laborious homework to understand. The Fantastic Four: First Steps relaunches characters who have traditionally stumbled on the journey to the big screen. Pedro Pascal is an earnest, fretful Reed Richards, who, along with his wife, Sue Storm (Vanessa Kirby), is about to become a parent for the first time. Joseph Quinn plays human fireball Johnny Storm and Ebon Moss-Bachrach (The Bear) rounds out the quartet as Ben Grimm, AKA the Thing.

The film’s approach borrows a trick from director Matt Shakman’s previous Marvel outing, the vintage-sitcom-inspired WandaVision. First Steps is a standalone picture with no links – as yet – to the wider Marvel landscape, and it works relatively well, not least because of the peppy, 60s-style, retro-futurist design choices. The picture looks great – all atomic age bubble screens and saturated super 16 colours – although as soon as the team heads into space, it falls prey to the generic CGI that is grindingly familiar from numerous other Marvel outings. The quality cast lifts the material, but it’s a pity that some of the strongest actors are buried beneath layers of effects (Moss-Bachrach, Julia Garner’s Shalla-Bal), or in the case of Kirby, behind an immense and distractingly mascara-clagged pair of false eyelashes.

The Bad Guys 2

(104 mins, PG) Directed by Pierre Perifel, JP Sans; voices Sam Rockwell, Marc Maron, Craig Robinson

The animated animal criminals return, and the formula has changed very little; for better (the giddily inventive action set pieces) and for worse (there are so many flatulence gags, it’s a wonder that the cinema doesn’t lift off like a hot air balloon).

Think a child-friendly Ocean’s Eleven with the hyperactive pacing of a Looney Tunes cartoon and a generous serving of extreme silliness. In this instalment, Mr Wolf (Sam Rockwell) and his buddies are reformed characters, ready to enter the workforce. The workforce, however, has other ideas. Frenetic but fun.

Photographs by Picturehouse Entertainment/Disney/DreamWorks Animation