An unusually strong slate of new releases leads this week, and also an epic-bacon Bill Skarsgard action movie narrated by H. Jon Benjamin (the Le Samouraï rerelease hopefully cancels that out). Challengers sees Luca Guadagnino discover his true calling for deliberate but high-emotion melodrama, where idle flirtations mutate over a decade into earth-shaking lust and competition. Civil War sees Alex Garland thankfully leave behind the thudding “surrealism” of Men to say absolutely nothing about modern America in his movie supposedly about where modern America is headed, and instead make a strong meathead Children of Men wannabe whose idiot centrism may even become fascinating ambivalence. The Boy and the Heron sees Hayao Miyazaki take “fascinating ambivalence” to dazzling places, where the former title question “How do you live?” is the only solid ground to stand on through the apocalypses and waves of magical creatures; it’s not not a greatest-hits package, but it’s a very affecting one, especially when one of the hits is Celine Sciamma’s. And Stress Positions sees first-time feature director Theda Hammel stage a farce of 21st-century woes (sexual surveillance, white-gay-male toxicity, terrible cis art about trans people, food-delivery apps, and YouTube explainers about the Middle East among them) against the backdrop of maybe the nadir of COVID lockdown, and it’s often funny and hostile enough to get over the big hump of “why would I want to re-experience this?”.

Abigail (Universal)
The Boy and the Heron 4K (Shout Factory)
Boy Kills World 4K (Lionsgate)
Challengers (Warner)
Civil War 4K (Lionsgate)
Come Back, Little Sheba (Kino)
The Country Girl (Kino)
Dark Angel 4K (Shout Factory)
Ghoulies II 4K (MVD)
The Hairdresser’s Husband (Kino)
Lady Killer / The Strange Monsieur Victor (Grasshopper)
Lilies (Strand)
Le Samouraï 4K (Criterion)
Storytelling (Shout Factory)
Stress Positions (Decal)
Tarot (Sony)
True Detective: Night Country (Warner)
Turbulence 4K (Kino)
Twister 4K (Warner)