Wendy Ide’s pick of other films: The Lost Bus, A Big Bold Beautiful Journey, Solo and more

The Lost Bus

(130 mins, 15) Directed by Paul Greengrass; starring Matthew McConaughey, America Ferrera, Yul Vazquez

As the director of United 93, Captain Phillips and 22 July, Paul Greengrass has built a considerable portion of his career from crafting jagged, ripped-from-real-life thrillers that pit everyman protagonists against a merciless and unrelenting threat. His latest picture, the California wildfire disaster flick The Lost Bus, fits this model, with one key difference to the director’s previous factual nail-biters. Rather than a danger in human form – the pirates in Captain Phillips or the extremist terrorists of United 93 or 22 July – the peril here comes from the natural world. Even by Greengrass’s usual visceral standards, this makes The Lost Bus a sickeningly tense experience. There are few things more terrifying, after all, than the brutal indifference of nature.

The film cuts between the perspective of the embattled emergency responders watching helplessly as the flames of the 2018 Camp fire sweep towards the town of Paradise, and that of school bus driver Kevin McKay (a hollowed-out and harassed-looking Matthew McConaughey), who responds to a call to rescue 22 elementary school students from the raging inferno.

Common sense tells us it would be unlikely for a story about a bus full of pre-teens fleeing the deadliest wildfire in California’s history to be made into a movie if they all didn’t make it out alive. Even so, it’s a gruelling watch: kudos goes to the visual effects department for the billowing clouds of choking smoke and sheets of flames, and to the sound design team for the tortured shrieks of overheated metal inside the cinder-covered bus.

A Big Bold Beautiful Journey(109 mins, 15) Directed by Kogonada; starring Margot Robbie, Colin Farrell, Kevin Kline

Call it the Everything Everywhere All at Once effect: numerous arch, high-concept fantasy movies were rushed into production following the unexpected success of the Daniels’ Oscar-winning absurdist sci-fi comedy. The Life of Chuck was one recent example, and now comes the loopy Margot Robbie and Colin Farrell-starring romcom A Big Bold Beautiful Journey. The problem is this self-consciously wacky and contrived fantasy feels gratingly synthetic and insincere. And despite the considerable appeal of the two leads, we don’t even buy their chemistry together, let alone the trauma-hopping, time-slipping device at the heart of the story.

Farrell and Robbie play David and Sarah, strangers who meet at a wedding. Thanks to the overbearing satnav devices in their respective hire cars, they find themselves embarking on an adventure together through portals to pivotal past life events. Director Kogonada (After Yang) drenches the film with hyperreal, super-saturated colours and floods it with gratingly ironic music choices.

Solo(102 mins, 15) Directed by Sophie Dupuis; starring Théodore Pellerin, Félix Maritaud, Alice Moreault

This impressive, nuanced drama from Quebecois writer and director Sophie Dupuis dives beneath the sequins and tulle of the Montreal drag scene to get under the skin of a toxic relationship. Simon (a mercurial Théodore Pellerin) is immediately smitten by a new artist at the club where he performs. Sultry Olivier (120 BPM star Félix Maritaud) seems to feel the same way.

But Olivier has a way of needling Simon’s weak spots, not least his strained relationship with his unavailable opera-star mother. Viewed through the steamy, gauzy haze of the club and an atmosphere sticky with illicit desires, the drag sequences are electrifying; the camera gazes up at Simon’s gorgeous drag alter ego with something like awe. But off stage is where the real drama plays out, in Olivier’s increasingly controlling and undermining behaviour. It’s an uncomfortable watch at times: sharply written and compellingly acted, Simon’s fracturing sense of self and disintegrating confidence is heartbreaking to behold.

Happyend(113 mins, 12A) Directed by Neo Sora; starring Yukito Hidaka, Hayato Kurihara, Makiko Watanabe

In a near-future Japan in which the threat of a cataclysmic earthquake hangs, ominously, over the future, five nihilistic secondary school kids decide to prank their headteacher. What they hadn’t anticipated, however, is the authoritarian crackdown and intrusive surveillance that follows. Best friends since childhood, Kou (Yukito Hidaka) and Yuta (Hayato Kurihara) start to drift apart as Kou becomes more politically active.

This dry, semi-dystopian drama looks terrific: director Neo Sora’s elegant framing captures playful visual details. And there’s a satisfying depth and contemporary relevance to the themes that the picture touches upon: Happyend explores a world in which protest is unlawful and the rights of individuals depend on their cultural background. Kou, of Korean descent, finds himself relegated to second-class status and treated with suspicion. There are pacing issues, but Happyend is an intriguing, slow-burning societal study.

Ghost Trail

(107 mins, 15) Directed by Jonathan Millet; starring Adam Bessa, Tawfeek Barhom, Julia Franz Richter

A Syrian refugee in the French city of Strasbourg, former academic Hamid (Adam Bessa) struggles to balance the opportunity of a new life against the traumas that haunt him from his time as a political prisoner. He’s not alone in this turmoil. As part of a covert network of fellow refugees, he is determined to bring to justice the man who tortured him and countless others in prison.

With its knotty moral questions and acknowledgement of deep-seated emotional scars, Jonathan Millet’s factual drama Ghost Trail shares thematic elements with Jafar Panahi’s Cannes prize-winner It Was Just an Accident. It’s a brooding and introspective piece: like Hamid, this is a film that is torn between burying pain and exposing it for all to see.

Photographs by AP/Sony Entertainment Pictures