Wendy Ide’s pick of other films: Jurassic World Rebirth, Hot Milk and more

Jurassic World Rebirth

(133 mins, 12A) Directed by Gareth Edwards; starring Scarlett Johansson, Jonathan Bailey, Mahershala Ali

There’s an extraordinary moment in director Gareth Edwards’s 2010 debut film, the ambitious micro-budget alien invasion thriller Monsters, that, one suspects, set the course for his future career. A photojournalist and a stranded US tourist, travelling through lands “infected” by alien beings, finally encounter the massive, tentacled creatures up-close. But what should be a scene of terror takes on an unexpectedly transcendent quality, with the two characters awestruck by the magnificent, dreadful beauty of the aliens. In a mankind versus monsters scenario, it’s clear that Edwards’s sympathies lie with the latter.

The director has carried this sensibility with him: his 2014 Godzilla was a love letter to the giant lizard, the human characters relegated to something of an afterthought. And now he brings it to the thankless task of trying to inject some fresh dino DNA into the lumbering Jurassic series. Jurassic World Rebirth takes place at a time when dinosaurs walk among us but, due to environmental pressures, are on the brink of extinction once again. There remains one thriving dino ecosystem, located on a fictional Caribbean island. It’s here that, for unconvincing big pharma-linked purposes, the characters find themselves.

The most successful scene is not the climactic rampage of a freakishly proportioned mutant dinosaur, but a moment of reverential stillness earlier in the film. When hired gun Zora (Scarlett Johansson), nerdy but hot science guy Henry (Jonathan Bailey) and oily, ruthless business type Martin (Rupert Friend) stumble upon a herd of colossal ancient herbivores, they stop to witness their mating ritual: necks the length of a football pitch are sensuously entwined.

It’s a sensational image; one that, like the most memorable of Edwards’s work, encourages us to pause and marvel at the monsters. Unfortunately, the rest of the picture is less distinctive: a serviceable but generic retread of T rex-based peril that will be familiar to anyone who has seen any of the six previous films in the series. The result is not quite an extinction event-level disaster for the franchise, but neither is it a strong argument for its continuation.

Hot Milk

(93 mins, 15) Directed by Rebecca Lenkiewicz; starring Emma Mackey, Vicky Krieps, Fiona Shaw

A fraught relationship between an overbearing mother and her browbeaten daughter plays out to the nerve-shredding aural assault of a chained dog’s incessant barking. It’s an appropriate soundtrack for this savage drama, the directorial debut from playwright and screenwriter Rebecca Lenkiewicz (Ida, The Salt Path). This is storytelling that bares its teeth, but it’s not the most comfortable place to spend time.

Adapted from the novel by Deborah Levy, the film stars Emma Mackey as Sofia, the daughter whose life is on hold while she cares for the demanding Rose (Fiona Shaw) at a Spanish seaside resort. It lacks some of the sensual ambiguity of the novel, and loses much of the tidal flow of its pacing. But it’s superbly acted: Sex Education star Mackey brings a knotty, furious conviction to Sofia, who blossoms in an on-off romance with the too-cool-to-be-true Ingrid (Vicky Krieps) and grows cactus spikes to repel the constant demands of her ailing mother. Fans of the novel may object to elements of the adaptation, not least the daring departure from the book’s plot at the very end. Still, it’s a striking and sweatily atmospheric picture that captures the overheated tensions between a suffocating mother and a daughter who is trying to breathe.

Heads of State

(116 mins, 12) Directed by Ilya Naishuller; starring Idris Elba, John Cena, Priyanka Chopra 

The degradation of the political thriller is one of the more dispiriting trends in cinema today. Compare the lean, dangerous, whip-smart pictures of the 1970s, tangled with conspiracies and bristling with anger – All the President’s Men, The Conversation, The Parallax View – with more recent films.

Earlier this year, G20 starred Viola Davis as a US president and former marine who must defeat a terrorist plot and save the world’s leaders at a summit. Now, in Heads of State, John Cena and Idris Elba play the president and the British prime minister respectively in a feature that trades intellectual thrills for grenades, rocket launchers and exploding planes. Big, dumb action movies – of which this is an adequate example – certainly have their place, but the move to rebrand geopolitics as pulp entertainment is, I think we can all agree, not a particularly helpful development at this point in time.

The film, which leans heavily on the blunt chemistry and muscular banter between Elba and Cena (who previously appeared together in The Suicide Squad), follows the two world leaders as they reluctantly come together after a deranged Russian arms dealer destroys Air Force One.

Jungle Trouble

(81 mins, U) Directed by Behnoud Nekooei; starring Rómulo Bernal, Katherine Clavelo, Alex Teixeira

Look. I’m a parent. I get it. Sometimes, you just need air conditioning and something brightly coloured and noisy to distract the kids for 90 minutes while you switch off and chill. But Jungle Trouble, a grating Malaysian-made, English-language animation about an insufferable superhero-obsessed child who decides to rescue a sardonic, endangered tiger, is not the relaxing, zone-out experience you might be looking for. Shrill, incoherent and so relentlessly irritating that you’ll want to chew off your own fingers and stuff them in your ears, this is shoddy, crudely plotted stuff. Possibly the longest 81 minutes of my life.

Photographs by Universal Studios/ Nikos Nikolopoulos/Prime