The star hopes for some more of that Book Club magic although she’s the weakest link in a trio buoyed by Kathy Bates and Alfre Woodard

The many gasps that met the $100m-plus box office total for 2018’s Book Club were not quite shared by all. The film, a frothy comedy led by four women over the age of 65, might have been an outlier at the time but it proved that once again, when smartly catered to, underserved audiences will come out en masse, a more inevitable result than many seem to think. When Bridesmaids proved this with younger women back in 2011, the industry was lethargic in its response, a wave of adjacent green lights failing to come as expected but Book Club had an instant impact, a string of grey-hued imitators in its wake.

But luck ran out a little faster than expected. Jane Fonda’s 80 for Brady and Diane Keaton’s Poms both fizzled upon release before even a Book Club sequel couldn’t lure audiences out, making less than a third of what its predecessor made. The reluctance of some older cinemagoers to return to the cinema as a result of the pandemic was an issue but so was positioning – nothing felt like an event compared with Book Club – and quality – nothing felt quite as sparky as it either. Keaton, who recently travelled to the UK for a British spin on the formula with Arthur’s Whisky, is trying her luck again with Summer Camp, a similarly lightweight tale of underused older female actors having fun on a bigger stage than they have become accustomed to.

From the love/hate setup and the must-dump boyfriend to the kooky mate and frantic finale this well-crafted love story hits all the classic romcom beats, just don’t expect fireworks

Based on Sophie Cousens’ novel of the same name, and adapted for the screen by the author, this opens with a twinkly tourism-office-style visit-London-for-the-festive-season montage that lets us know from the off that the film will be playing by 1990s romcom rules. You know the sort of thing: a declaration of love delivered against a pressing deadline ideally involving a change of location. As This Time Next year progresses, it quickly becomes apparent that said rules have been thoroughly studied, to mostly satisfying effect, as from the get-go the story hits the expected beats. You’ve got heroine Minnie’s initial antagonism towards her love-match Quinn, a loser boyfriend who must first be seen through and ditched, and of course heartwarming subplots involving careers and family. And getting to see the comforting formula followed faithfully is exactly why you would want to watch the movie, so it’s a job well done.

The actors have been taking notes from the same playbook as the script. Lead Sophie Cookson gives us a very plausible blend of Renée Zellweger and Keira Knightley mannerisms circa the early 2000s. Lucien Laviscount smoulders effectively as the almost-too-perfect leading man. Will Hislop continues the consistently fun work he’s been doing in a small role as the dickhead boyfriend (no British actor is embodying millennial bell-end quite as skilfully right now). One real highlight, who will hopefully see more work off the back of their turn here, is a relative unknown: Charlie Oscar, who knocks it out of the park in a small role as a bakery assistant who somehow sits in the precise middle of a Venn diagram between Bubble from Absolutely Fabulous and the Emily Blunt character in The Devil Wears Prada.

Furry critters and house elves run riot in this annoying kids’ movie, which is heavy on snarky dialogue but low on charm

Made in Russia in 2022, this animated flick has been dubbed in American English for global release, but it seems unlikely that it made much difference one way or another to what is a hectic, charmless and generally annoying piece of family entertainment.

The storyline concerns Finns, a sort of house-elf or goblin, whose stated narrative function is to help human households run more efficiently, and whose function in practice is to be incredibly irritating. The most infuriating one is our hero, Finnick, who, in addition to a grating array of Scooby-Doo style non-verbal vocalisations, comes out with lots of lines that have the cadence of a witticism without actually being funny. You know the sort of thing: “I can’t believe I signed up for this!” or “Where do my tax dollars go?” It’s the brand of sub-Garfield humour whereby the idea of a furry critter paying or indeed being aware of the concept of tax dollars poses fraudulently as a rib-tickler.

Glen Powell plays a mild-mannered professor posing as a contract killer to catch would-be criminals in this diverting noir comedy loosely based on a true story

For this thoroughly entertaining comedy thriller, Richard Linklater finds the distinctive and weirdly uncomplicated register of sunny geniality that he so often gives us – when he’s not working on more demanding movies like Boyhood or the Before series. And yet the question of criminal violence presented in terms of goofy unreality gives this film the flavour of something by the Coen brothers.

It is loosely based on the true story of Gary Johnson, an undercover law enforcement officer in Houston, Texas. Johnson specialised in posing as a “hitman” in exotic disguises, setting up meets with people who wanted other people offed, secretly taping them while they said so explicitly leading to them being charged with conspiracy to murder, while always at risk of having the charge overturned due to entrapment.

Cannes film festival
Seven world leaders – including Charles Dance’s dozy US president – are trapped in a forest in this amusing but bizarre apocalyptic comedy

Cate Blanchett has supplied the strangest moment of this year’s Cannes film festival; for Brits of a certain age, anyway. Her character reverently invokes the name of the late Roy Jenkins, Labour grandee and former chancellor of both the exchequer and Oxford University. Blanchett plays a fictional German chancellor called Hilda Ortmann who mentions Jenkins as the first president of the European Commission allowed to attend a G7 summit (which, as political trivia connoisseurs would say, is “one for the heads”.) Perhaps in her next film Blanchett can do a big speech about Peter Shore.

Rumours is an amusing drawing-room absurdist comedy, co-written and directed by Canadian film-maker Guy Maddin with his longtime collaborators, the brothers Evan and Galen Johnson. The title is inspired by the 1977 Fleetwood Mac album, because of the emotional crises that are said to have accompanied its recording. The setting is a forest in the German town of Dankerode in Saxony where a fictional G7 summit is taking place. Seven government heads have gathered to discuss an unspecified (but apparently ecological) crisis and to draft a lengthy and fantastically unhelpful communique which, as Hilda murmurs to her French counterpart, President Sylvain Broulez (Denis Ménochet), should be worded vaguely enough so they are not committed to any specific action.

The US president Edison Wolcott is ageing and somnolent; he is played by Charles Dance, confusingly with his own English voice, and the script has a joke about Dance being apparently unwilling (but surely not unable) to do an American accent. British PM Cardosa Dewindt (Nikki Amuka-Bird) is stressed because she had an affair at the last G7 summit with troubled Canadian premier and ladies’ man Maxime Laplace (Roy Dupuis), who also carries a torch for European Commission secretary-general Celestine Sproul (Alicia Vikander) and has a moment with Hilda. Rolando Ravello plays the nervy Italian PM Antonio Lamorte and Takehiro Hira plays Tatsuro Iwesaki, the modest, shy Japanese premier.

Cannes film festival
Moore plays a fading Hollywood star whose career is set to be axed by misogynists when she’s offered a secret new medical procedure

Coralie Fargeat, known for the violent thriller Revenge from 2017, now cranks up the amplifier for some death metal … or nasty injury metal anyway. This is a cheerfully silly and outrageously indulgent piece of gonzo body-horror comedy, lacking in subtlety, body-positivity or positivity of any sort. Roger Corman would have loved it. It’s flawed and overlong but there’s a genius bit of casting in Demi Moore who is a very good sport about the whole thing. And as confrontational satire it strikes me as at least as good, or better, than two actual Palme d’Or winners: Julia Ducournau’s Titane and Ruben Östlund’s Triangle of Sadness.

The Substance is a grisly fantasy-parable of misogyny and body-objectification, which riffs on the crazy dysfunctional energy of Roger Vadim and Jane Fonda with borrowings from Frankenheimer and Cronenberg. It’s about successful careers for women in the media and public life being contingent on being forced to keep another, older, less personable self locked away. But unlike Dorian Gray’s portrait, this can’t simply be forgotten about, but continually tended to. Fargeat saves up an awful reckoning for an odious media executive called Harvey, but in an interesting way locates her horror in women’s own fear of their younger and older selves.

Great scenery and a joyous Kristin Scott Thomas are outweighed by one infuriating lead character in Marc Fitoussi’s friends reunited French comedy

The closest of schoolfriends in 1989, despite their wildly contrasting personalities, risk-averse introvert Blandine (Olivia Côte) and gobby showoff Magalie (Laure Calamy) fell out spectacularly (full details are hazy, but it involved a boy) and lost touch. Now, thanks to the adult son of Blandine, who worries that his divorced mother is in danger of closing herself off from the world, the pair are reunited and find themselves embarking on the trip they dreamed of as teenagers: to the Greek island of Amorgos, location of the film The Big Blue. Except that, owing to erratic nightmare Magalie, they are kicked off the ferry for fare-dodging on to another island.

Two Tickets to Greece has some appeal: stunning scenery, Instagrammable taverna chic and the unexpected pleasure of seeing a cast-against-type Kristin Scott Thomas letting her hair down as a boho jewellery designer. But the character of Magalie is so enraging that you would chuck yourself into the Aegean Sea rather than spend two weeks in her company.

In UK and Irish cinemas now

Cannes film festival
Noémie Merlant’s first film as a director is relentlessly silly, self-indulgent and unsuited to its themes of misogyny and sexual violence

Here to prove that “actor project” movies are always the ones with the dodgiest acting is the otherwise estimable French star Noémie Merlant who presents her writing-directing debut in Cannes, with herself in a leading role and Céline Sciamma on board as producer and credited as script collaborator. It’s got some funny moments and there’s a great scene in a gynaecologist’s treatment room whose calm, straightforward candour completely annihilates all those other coyly shot gynaecologist scenes you’ve ever seen in any movie or TV drama. And the opening sequence is very dramatic, centring on a woman whose story is sadly neglected for the rest of the film in favour of the younger, prettier people.

But I have to say that the film is relentlessly silly, self-indulgent and self-admiring with a certain tiring kind of performer narcissism, always tending towards a jangling tone of celebratory affirmation which can’t absorb or do justice to the themes of misogyny and sexual violence that this film winds up being about. The cod-thriller scenes of corpse disposal do not convince on a realist level (though given that these corpses keep coming back as unfunny ghosts, a realist level is not needed) and do not work as comedy either.