Weighty but fun threequel that dealt with the mysteries of matter, death and eternal life

Forty years ago, the Star Trek movie franchise reached its Solaris stage with this mystic and melodramatic threequel, written and produced by TV veteran Harve Bennett and directed by Leonard Nimoy himself. The Search for Spock (and how that title must have startled everyone still getting over the shock of his demise) dealt with the mysteries of matter, organisms, death and eternal life. The last two of these were especially piquant considering that the audiences at the time had to deal with something that is forgotten now: the unease and even shock at seeing the characters’ faces, so youthful in the concurrently running TV show, looking suddenly older, blown up to big-screen size.

This is a film about the passionate bromance between Kirk and Spock – and above all about sacrifice. In the previous film, of course, Spock had died, thus teaching future franchise creators a lesson about how a death can electrify the fanbase. This one begins by remembering his poignant farewell to Kirk in a small black-and-white panel in the centre of the screen; rather a coup de cinema. And yes, it is a genuinely sad moment, accurately depicted in the famous episode of Seinfeld when George Constanza realises that he is more devastated by Spock’s death than by that of his own wife.

Tobe Hooper’s gonzo massacre movie set the template for so many horror films that were to follow – but retains a uniquely disturbing power all of its own

In 1974, Tobe Hooper released this intimately upsetting and disturbing horror: a gonzo-macabre masterpiece inspired by the true story of serial killer Ed Gein, who was arrested in 1957 for grisly atrocities in remote Wisconsin. (Texas sounds better in the title.)

Hooper’s minimalist shocker appeared just 14 years after Hitchcock’s sleek Psycho, which was also indirectly inspired by Gein (via the novel by Robert Bloch). Psycho is a far more refined variation on the Gein theme, more like Edgar Allan Poe. In contrast, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre feels utterly different: gritty, gloomy, social-realist; a no-budget account of how the Gein horror might have felt to those who actually encountered it. It feels closer, in its down-home style, to something like Barbara Loden’s Wanda, from 1970. Compared with the screeching slashers and their jump scares which it inspired, this is almost … well, not restrained exactly but more controlled, less generically self-aware, readier to defer its shocks. It is pre-formulaic. The first bizarre murder happens with no stabbing musical score on the soundtrack, with the camera positioned unresponsively at the other end of the room.

With Yorgos Lanthimos’s Kinds of Kindness hitting UK cinemas next week, we ask where it features in the pantheon of anthology masterpieces

The Meaning of Life is probably closer to the world of TV sketch comedy, rather than ensemble movie, but the Pythons’ gang-show film was a box office smash and won the Grand Prix in Cannes in 1983 (while Víctor Erice’s The South and Martin Scorsese’s The King of Comedy got zip). With crazy grandiloquence, it took us through all the big questions of existence, and the tragicomic limits of physical pleasure were finally exposed by the restaurant scene in which Mr Creosote explodes. Like John Landis’s portmanteau comedy The Kentucky Fried Movie from 1977, this was full of very chancy, confrontationally bad-taste material that wouldn’t get on television then or now.

Asif Kapadia co-directs backstage access to a tennis great’s final games that includes much crying but too few questions

The tears of Roger Federer, along with the tears of Rafael Nadal and even the tears of Novak Djokovic, are what finally give some point to what is otherwise a pretty bland, officially sanctioned corporate promo for the Federer brand. This documentary for Amazon Prime – co-directed by Asif Kapadia and video content producer Joe Sabia – has behind-the-scenes access, following the final 12 days in the top-flight tennis career of the legendary champion, from his announcement of retirement in 2022 to his emotional curtain-call appearance at the Laver Cup in London, named after Rod Laver, the starry new Europe-versus-the World team tournament that Federer has done so much to develop.

Federer was bowing out with style like the class act he’s always been and as legends such as Björn Borg, John McEnroe, Andy Murray and Rod Laver himself line up to pay tribute, there is a Niagara of tears. And yes, it is genuinely sad. But compare it to Asif Kapadia’s other films about Ayrton Senna and Diego Maradona – his radical and electrifying mosaics of archive footage, which show passionate lives being played out in public … and frankly this looks disappointing. Of course, Federer is a more demure personality, though even this point is treated rather incuriously. The paradox is that this film’s original footage, in contrast to the vividly repurposed material of the Senna and Maradona studies, weirdly looks less intimate and more guarded. Everything here looks as if it has been approved at the highest level.

Sarah Snook and Kodi Smit-McPhee lend their voice talents to Adam Elliott’s ambitious animation that has a strong personal touch

Like Britain’s Nick Park at Aardman, Australian stop-motion film-maker Adam Elliott has shown a natural talent for screenwriting comedy – and for fusing that with the simplicity and directness of his animation style itself, creating a distinctive kind of lovability and pathos and importantly an instinct for the underdog and the outsider. He makes mainstream animation look a bit neurotypical. His 2003 short Harvie Krumpet was an Oscar winner, and Elliot has come to the Annecy animation film festival for the premiere of what’s probably his most ambitious feature-length work yet. It is charming and beguiling, with a strong new personal and even autobiographical strain and, as in the past, he has persuaded A-list voice talent to get involved.

Sarah Snook voices Grace Pudel, who as the story begins is a desperately lonely woman in middle age; she is a reclusive hoarder, surrounded by chaos and snail memorabilia. But she wasn’t always like this. The film introduces us to her life and especially her troubled childhood; and childhood, as her father sagely says, is like being drunk: everyone remembers what you did, except you. She is a twin and very close to her brother Gilbert (Kodi Smit-McPhee) who as a child was a pyromaniac, but only because he wanted to be a fire-breathing street entertainer on the romantic streets of Paris, inspired by their father who was … a stop-motion animator. When grim fate makes them orphans, a callous state system splits the two up, putting Grace and Gilbert on opposite sides of the vast Australian continent.