From Ryan Gosling’s Fall Guy to Anya Taylor-Joy’s Furiosa, the best films to see at the cinema in May

While this month is topped and tailed with explosive blockbusters The Fall Guy and Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga, in between is a clutch of cracking smaller-scale gems. Curiously, two hot young British stars are giving their foreign language skills a go: George MacKay in The Beast and Josh O’Connor in La Chimera. But first, a thrilling new London director...

Film of the month: Hoard

Like an unexpected glob of sticky bin juice, Londoner Luna Carmoon’s hypnotically strange debut will stubbornly cling to your retinas long after the closing credits. An oddly revolting metaphor, were it not for the fact that from the outset we are plunged waist-deep in trash.

It's 1984 and Cynthia (Hayley Squires) is leading her seven-year-old daughter Maria (Lily-Beau Leach) on a merry treasure hunt through the giant council estate waste carts of south-east London. They’re having a whale of a time, but as they return to a house crammed to the rafters with junk, it’s clear this is a seriously compulsive refuse collection obsession.

So much so that mum reels into a panic when Maria fails to bring her lunchbox remains home from school (we could make Christmas decorations with the orange peel, Cynthia insists). This debris is “our little catalogue of love”, says mum as she manically sing-songs (Carmoon has a brilliant ear for the local vernacular of the era) Maria into a peculiar version of happiness within their hermetically isolated existence.

Then disaster literally comes crashing down. From where the narrative picks up Maria 10 years later (now played by Saura Lightfoot Leon, what a name!), living a “normal’ life in a foster home while expecting her A-level results.

The psychic traces of Maria’s bizarre childhood seem to have faded until one day, Michael (Stranger Things’ Joseph Quinn) comes to stay. A dozen years her senior, and (alarm bells) working as a dustbin man, Michael awakens Maria’s past in all its revelry.

It's a deviant, deeply physical dance these two play, with food, fluids and detritus thrown into the weird mix. One minute they are eating someone’s ashes, the next enacting a beguiling matadorial duel.

Soon, the spectre of her lost mother in all her obsessive eccentricity is haunting Maria once more (“You can’t break a mother’s bonds”, she is told in a wonderfully tender vignette). Will Maria, does she even want to, break free?

Carmoon draws out this tale of motherly/daughterly love and grief with an eye for the visual poetry of dirty, messy, half-forgotten lives, while the ever-shifting, slippery emotional ballad is told with brutal beauty.

With echoes of early Lynne Ramsey, and equally as thrilling to discover, Carmoon is one to watch, starting right here.

In cinemas May 17

The movies you should see this month

The Fall Guy

All we needed from this remake of the (rather average) Eighties TV series starring Lee Majors was some new and improved crash, bang wallop with the lackadaisical comic talents of Ryan Gosling thrown in to seal the deal. What we get is a car-tumbling, explosion-dodging, uproariously meta extravaganza with a dash of rom-com for good measure.

Gosling is a blow-the-bloody-doors-off blast as movie stuntman Colt Seavers, who becomes the titular fall guy in a dastardly film industry conspiracy. Emily Blunt plays the director and the rom to Gosling’s com, while Aaron Taylor-Johnson is the film’s moronically vainglorious megstar, who lives in a penthouse plastered in post-it notes bearing gems such as: “Is it MOMOA or MAMOA?”. Like that nod to Memento, the Hollywood references come hilariously thick and fast. While not quite the most eye-popping you’ve ever seen, the big action set pieces are huge fun.

May 2

Tiger Stripes

Might I suggest parents refrain from terrifying their daughters with Malaysian director Amanda Nell Eu’s excellent debut until long after they’ve had their first period. Easy-going Judy Blume this certainly ain’t. Zaffan is like any other innocent pre-teen: filming dance moves with friends on her phone, secretly trying on her first bra, playing in the nearby jungle. Then “the change” strikes and she’s the first in her class to get her time of the month. While former friends ostracise her with merciless cruelty (don’t worry, they get their startlingly unsettling comeuppance), this phase in Zaffan’s life takes a dark, supernatural and literally metamorphic turn. A creepily sweet allegory of a horror many young girls go through, upliftingly Zaffan does find her carefree dance groove again.

May 17

The Beast

If it wasn’t for a dose of entirely conscious patriotic bias towards a thrilling new British director (see above), this would easily be film of the month. Bertrand Bonello’s 146-minute, time-tripping enigma (wrapped inside something even stranger that there probably isn’t a word for yet) of a love story has the audacity to take on nothing less than The Big One: the human condition.

In 2044, Léa Seydoux’s Gabrielle is still petrified of “the beast”, an unknowable disaster she’s convinced will beset her, despite AI now being able to “clean” most people’s DNA and rid them of tragedy and fear. George MacKay (check out the young man from Sam Mendes’ 1917 and his French language skills!) is her confidante and would-be lover as they hop back and forth between 1910 Paris, contemporary Los Angeles and the future.

There are floods, earthquakes, clairvoyants, a hugely symbolic pigeon – MacKay even turns into an incel for much of the duration. It’s a cascade of metaphors, perhaps too much for some viewers, but at its heart this is about what makes us human: the intensity of love only found through being able to feel the opposite pain too; the joy only possible through also knowing devastation.

Gabrielle refuses to let go of this part of her, which is borne out when she meets three seemingly enviable, AI-cleansed women in a club who tell her: “The catastrophe is behind us and we’re bored shitless.” This is a mind-bending masterpiece told with flourishes that swoop and jolt from ravishingly sumptuous to deliciously clinical, while the ending is simply, monumentally memorable.

May 31

The films you might want to see this month

Blackbird Blackbird Blackberry

You’re unlikely to see much Georgian cinema in your lifetime, but here’s a charming little gem from Elene Naveriani. Etero is a 48-year-old virgin, living a stubbornly single life in rural Georgia, her sole sources of joy being picking blackberries and spotting the occasional blackbird. The women of the village ridicule Etero for being overweight and feel openly, cruelly sorry for her not having a man (their traditional marker of true womanhood, regardless of how badly that man might treat you). “At least they don’t throw dust in my eye and call it love,” retorts Etero wonderfully.

Then a startling near-death experience changes everything for Etero. Unexpected passion comes calling, but this woman isn’t going to give up her freedom and independence. As Etero, Eka Chavleishvili is utterly entrancing in her stone-faced ferocity to not let her agency crumble under the force of love. A bittersweet tribute to female empowerment, were it not that the sour tastes rather delicious too.

May 3

La Chimera

Josh O’Connor (currently wowing cinema crowds opposite Zendaya in Challengers) shows off his foreign language chops in Alice Rohrwacher’s unruly, ramshackle Italian drama. As Arthur “the Englishman”, O’Connor (mysteriously smouldering as ever) has returned from prison to his roistering extended family of grave robbers, looked over by matriarch Isabella Rossellini, where his spooky talent for locating the tombs with the most bountiful booty is in high demand.

There’s magical realism, a dark thread of lost love and barrel-loads of wild, minstrel madness from the band of thieves. Reminiscent of the films of Emir Kusturica, audiences are likely to adore this. Unless, like me, they find it all rather too contrived.

May 10

Two Tickets to Greece

So, I didn’t find that title particularly inspiring. Nor the storyline: a son surprises his uptight, post-divorce, depressed mother by setting her up with a wildly extrovert, long lost schoolfriend for a holiday to the Cyclades islands. However, this is a surprisingly intelligent and gently wry take on the middle-aged women finding themselves in the Med genre.

Olivia Côte is the dull chalk to Call My Agent! star Laure Calamy’s OTT cheese as they clash ferociously over the ways they have decided to live their lives. Meanwhile, Kristin Scott Thomas gets to dazzle with her Français and a glorious, scenery-munching turn as an opium-smoking, libertarian boho. Beam me up, Scotty! This is the ideal pre-summer appetiser for a certain audience (possibly of a certain age), but universal in its focus on the life choices we all make.

May 17

Top of the docs

May's best documentaries

The only thing certain in life? Death, of course. We quip about it quite readily, but the subject isn’t so easy to broach when it’s all too real and close to home. To coincide with Dying Matters Awareness Week (May 6 to 12), here are two extremely personal and rather beautiful films that offer a fresh perspective on popping your clogs.

Much Ado About Dying (May 3) follows Simon Spencer as he cares for his effervescently eccentric, gay actor uncle David in his twilight years. Living in a deathtrap house of clutter, chaos and mouse droppings, David defiantly and flamboyantly recites Shakespeare while Simon worries, fixes and tries to make life better for his uncle as misfortune and disaster strikes. If you never thought it’s possible to die with a smile on your face, seeing David plough on cheerfully right up until the end might well change your mind.

A whole different kettle of fish is Red Herring (May 3), as director Kit Vincent who was diagnosed with a brain tumour aged 24. “Will you get a new boyfriend when I die?” he asks his girlfriend casually before turning the camera on his parents, particularly father Lawrence, for much questioning of how dad is coping.

Among a host of distracting new hobbies (including creating a mini farm growing medicinal cannabis for his son), non-Jewish Lawrence has turned to Judaism for understanding, which provides a wealth of wisdom and solace. The exchanges between father and son are fascinating and heartbreaking, and huge credit to Vincent for making a deeply nuanced, moving film with barely a hint of darkness.

Also out this month

Fistfuls of violence! Lesbian romance! Female bodybuilders! And Kristen Stewart!! 1980s neo-noir Love Lies Bleeding (May 3) from Rose Glass (St Maud) should at least pack a bloody punch.

Will the humans and monkeys ever get on? Not if badass primate king Proximus Caesar in Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes (May 9) has anything to do with it.

In IF (May 17), Cailey Fleming, Ryan Reynolds and a gigantic, cute purple thing are on a mission to reunite imaginary friends with the humans who abandoned them. It’s directed by John Krasinski (A Quiet Place) and actually looks rather fun.

Kept under lock and key until its Cannes world premiere later this month, Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga (May 24) will have Fury Road fans chomping at the bit. Not least because instead of Tom Hardy in the lead, we have the infinitely more engaging Anya Taylor-Joy. Fingers crossed for a screen-shattering finale to the month...