Rachel Walsh responds to an article by Georgina Elliott in which she describes the comfort she felt sitting alone in the cinema after losing her brother

I could relate to Georgina Elliott’s finding comfort and relief in the dark at the cinema (The one change that worked: numb with grief, I sat in the dark, surrounded by strangers – and began to heal, 12 October). After my mum died, I felt like a balloon floating further and further from my life, incorporeal and ghostly.

The cinema was a world within the world to live someone else’s life, experience their triumphs and adventures, and escape the sharpness of my own painful reality.

Nathan Fielder’s secretive Elizabeth Holmes documentary has become a sold-out smash hit and might make Oscars history

Spoilers ahead

If there is one moment that sums up You Can See Everything, the new A24 documentary on Elizabeth Holmes that until this weekend was shrouded in spoiler-averse secrecy, it is, perhaps surprisingly, the one everyone already knows: co-director Nathan Fielder, the droll comedian known for deadpanning subjects into submission, sitting eye to eye with Holmes, the unblinking fabulist of Theranos infamy. In tight zoom, saturation turned up – Fielder’s arched brows and Holmes’s oceanic blue eyes as stark as two magnetic poles – he asks her: “Are you being real right now?”

That question hangs over much of the colossal three-hour movie, particularly a claustrophobic first half that has made headlines since the film’s existence was announced in September. That first half – essentially, the only part of the movie anyone respecting spoiler guidelines and/or the theatrical experience could talk about – takes place entirely in 2023, when Fielder and his co-director Lance Oppenheim, along with a small crew, embedded with Holmes, her husband, Billy Evans, and their two small children in the run-up to her prison sentence for fraud. We watch as Fielder, over a few surreal weeks in a beachfront rental, attempts to puncture Holmes’s indomitable facade of faultlessness. It’s not exactly comedic, this chess game between three norms-ignoring people, but it can be quite funny: TV’s grand illusionist, an absurdist auteur who will go as far as actually obtaining a 737 pilot’s license for the bit, stymied by a world-class fabricator, with her poorly dissembling husband on the side. This section resembles, in feel, the pull of an internet wormhole: the closer you zoom in on a subject, without outside context, the more sense devolves. Was Holmes “being real”, for instance, when she told Fielder, with seemingly complete sincerity, that she has never told a lie in her life? Or when she continued to insist, despite plain reality, that Theranos devices could perform 1,000 diagnostic tests?

She got to torment Don Draper in Mad Men and has just won an Emmy for DTF St Louis. But nothing prepared the star for all the gore as she switched to horror with the Friday the 13th prequel

‘The first time I had the tooth in my hand,” says Linda Cardellini, “I thought, ‘Oh my God, this is what I’m doing.’” The star of Freaks and Geeks, ER, Dead to Me, Mad Men and DTF St Louis (for which she recently won an Emmy) is talking about her pivot towards full-blown horror. In Crystal Lake, the prequel to the Friday the 13th movies, Cardellini plays Pamela Voorhees, the original slasher of the 1980 film. The tooth, by the way, is human and gets embedded in Pam’s knuckle – until she yanks it out with a gruesome, revolting slurping sound.

Casual filmgoers may associate Friday the 13th with Jason, the hockey-mask-wearing serial killer. But aficionados will know that Pam, Jason’s mother, is the villain of the first movie. “He didn’t even have the mask until the third movie,” says Cardellini, who has clearly done her homework. “Pam is the original killer, in vengeance of his death.” (There is some massaging of previous storylines in Crystal Lake, such as moving Jason’s drowning from the 1950s to the early 70s, but since the franchise is flexible enough to have sent Jason into space at one point, a bit of timeline tweaking feels fair game.)

Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim’s headspinning documentary about Elizabeth Holmes is an unprecedented critical success – even with a three-hour runtime

Name: The best reviewed film in history.

Age: Not even out yet, except in the US and Canada.

A local cinema becomes a refuge after Javier Milei’s election ushers in an era of far-right conservatism in Argentina

Cinema halls – or dream palaces, as they’re affectionately called – offer a retreat into the realm of make-believe, and everyday drudgery is left at the door. Though set within a single-screen theatre in the Argentinian city of Córdoba, Ramiro Sonzini and Ezequiel Salinas’s hypnotic film invokes a more porous relationship between the screen and its audience. Here, the messiness of life beguilingly sneaks into this domain of fantasies, blurring the borders between public and private spaces.

While the luminous black-and-white cinematography lends a dreamy fuzziness to the images, the narrative concerns are grounded in thorny economic realities. A film projectionist at his local cinema called Pelu (Octavio Bertone) is reassigned to the post of a night watchman due to budget cuts at the city hall. The cinema soon becomes his literal refuge: he moves out of his cramped rented flat and secretly takes up occupation at his workplace. He then welcomes a horde of other outsiders, including his unemployed roommate, an ageing drifter and a sex worker who livestreams her erotic shows from the cinema. Every night, they watch classic films from the old masters – Jean Renoir, Yasujiro Ozu and Robert Bresson to name a few – until the early hours.

He gave Jimi Hendrix his gear, freaked out Frank Sinatra, inspired Norman Mailer – and tried to topple the American war machine. As a documentary about his band the Fugs comes out, the 87-year-old gives a rare interview

“Charles Manson once wrote me a letter saying, ‘If I was as powerful as you claim then you wouldn’t be here,’” Ed Sanders tells me over a video call, savouring the menace in that sentence.

Sanders is an American maverick; a musician, poet, activist, journalist and author whose greatest hit remains his bestselling 1971 book The Family, in which he chronicled the lives, crimes and trials of Manson and his followers. Sanders was well placed to report on crazed hippies, having played a pivotal role in launching the US counterculture – though he very much espoused peace, love and consciousness-raising, rather than Manson’s apocalyptic worldview.

Are film-makers wary of alienating increasingly sensitive audiences by offing a pooch? Or is humanity now just too soft to deal with the trauma of a Turner & Hooch?

There was a time, not so long ago, when watching a film was a clearcut experience. There would be a good guy and a bad guy, and you would know who the bad guy was because they would shoot a dog in the face.

It happened more times than you might expect. Mad Max 2, dog gets shot. Revenge, dog gets shot. Turner & Hooch, dog gets shot. Red, dog gets shot. Man with the Gun, dog gets shot. Badlands, dog gets shot. Dog Soldiers, you’ll never guess.

In the dazzling archival documentary Once Upon a Time in Harlem, a 1972 cocktail party brings together various creative luminaries as they discuss and debate

More than a flowering of the arts at the dawn of the 20th century, the Harlem Renaissance marked the breakthrough moment when Black Americans asserted their creative control, defining a culture that had been purpose-built to exclude them. The imprints were all over the Jazz Age – on bookshelves and radio, in flapper dresses and cloche hats, in Hubert Julian’s daring flights and the fractious debates between Marcus Garvey and WEB Du Bois.

Like the David committee of the Italian Renaissance or the American Revolution’s Continental Congress, the Harlem Renaissance is one of those moments that makes you wonder: what was it really like? The Dark Tower salons? Those Cotton Club nights? The rent parties with all those New Negroes – a heady brew of southern émigrés, Caribbean vanguards and New York lifers – holding forth and hootin’ and hollerin’, high on the fact that they had found one another? Could they appreciate the significance of the moment as they were making it? “I remember being in Brooklyn in the 1990s and seeing various artists around,” says film-maker Liani Greaves, reflecting on her early career working with Tupac on Above the Rim and the director Hype Williams on Biggie music videos. “Brooklyn Moon Cafe was the spot. Sometimes we forget that it is The Now. We’re constantly looking to the next thing, looking outside.”

A mortal twentysomething is caught in a love triangle with two hunky vampire carnival workers in a film with good looks but not much to chew on

‘Does this whole Edward Cullen act actually work?” A distinct Twilight feeling is in the air in this initially enlivening vampire flick, with willowy twentysomething mortal Gemma (Nell Verlaque) caught in the middle of a pointy-toothed tug of war between tender Italian hunk Sebastian (Alvise Rigo) and her bad boy ex Eric (Kieron Moore). When she strolls with her friends into a hot vampire carnival, the ab count nearly outdoes the haemoglobin one. But this good-looking whirligig winds up disappointingly disjointed.

Gemma is still regrouping after her father’s suicide, an unspecified amount of time earlier. So her mum is relieved when she takes a night off from grieving by checking out the local fair with pals Ryan (Corrado Martini) and Olivia (Pauline Chávez). Absent for many years, creepy Eric has apparently joined the circus, featuring as the ostentatiously self-harming Man Who Feels No Pain. But when Sebastian invites Gemma into the carnival’s orgiastic inner sanctum, she learns they are a coven of bloodsuckers who, under leader Toussaint (Jason Isaac), have a strict no-killing code of conduct. Or, in the case of potential initiates like Gemma, obtaining consent. “No means no,” says immortal softboi Sebastian.

After Joss Whedon’s arrival, back in the news with comments from Ben Affleck, the franchise lost a sense of earnest passion that could have sustained a weary DCEU

Nine years after superhero epic Justice League arrived in cinemas, there ought to be very little left to say about how it all went wrong. Zack Snyder shot the film, Joss Whedon substantially rewrote and reshot it, and audiences eventually got to see both men’s versions. Any debate over their relative merits long ago disappeared. Whedon is pretty much cancelled; Snyder has reinvented himself as the writer-director of extremely average ersatz Star Wars movies for Netflix, and an entirely new DC universe is under way that has very little to do with either of them.

To a greater or lesser extent, the world has moved on. But Ben Affleck’s latest comments raise an uncomfortable question about whether Snyder’s departure was ever presented honestly. Speaking to Josh Horowitz on the Happy Sad Confused podcast, Affleck, who played Batman, described the Justice League reshoots as the lowest point of his career, but reserved his strongest criticism for the circumstances of Snyder’s departure. The director stepped away in May 2017, two months after his daughter Autumn killed herself, aged 20, with the public explanation that he needed to be with his family. Affleck, however, alleged that studio Warner Bros had used the tragedy to justify replacing him. “The way in which that was, I thought, used as an excuse was one of the shittiest things I’ve ever seen,” Affleck said. “It was so gross.”

The latest in our series of writers detailing their most easily rewatched comfort films is an appreciation of a smart, funny and tender ode to fan culture

“By Grabthar’s hammer, by the sons of Worvan … you shall be avenged.”

If you have seen Galaxy Quest, those words may bring you close to tears. They mark the moment when Alan Rickman’s character – a Shakespearean luvvie turned sci-fi sidekick – realises that the ludicrous catchphrase he has reluctantly uttered thousands of times does matter after all.

Director Joko Anwar uses horror for social commentary as he skewers corruption and hypocrisy with likable silliness and raucous energy

Given the 2020s horror boom, Indonesia’s prolific Joko Anwar – who has worked more often in that genre than any other – should be better known. Using horror for social commentary, as Anwar has done often in the past, this prison-slasher-satire features the kind of scabrous broadsides against injustice you see in Bong Joon-ho’s films, and Park Chan-wook’s recent No Other Choice. But in skewering the corruption and hypocrisy of the director’s native country, it has its own likable silliness and raucous energy. As the inmates keep saying: this is Indonesia, not Norway!

Fitted up for the murder of his boss, who is found gutted and spreadeagled on a ceiling fan, timid investigative journalist Dimas (Endy Arfian) winds up in the slammer. But murder, immediately followed by the flamboyant flaying of the victim, dogs him wherever he goes: the prison hitman assigned to dispose of him is in turn found in the washroom rendered into flesh origami. Charismatic prison refusenik Anggoro (Abimana Aryasatya) takes Dimas under his wing; as the victims stack up, an apparently clairvoyant member of his clique called Six (Yoga Pratama) admits that all of them manifested a red aura, signifying anger, prior to dying.

Yi-Shan Lo returns to Nepal to follow the route of her best friend’s ill-fated hike in a harrowing but cathartic documentary

A work of deep personal reckoning, Yi-Shan Lo’s debut documentary feature opens with closeups of the film-maker’s own footsteps as she trudges through a snowbound landscape. Her jagged movement mirrors the rugged trajectory of the film itself, which grapples with a harrowing tragedy. In 2017, Lo was about to join her best friends Chun and Yueh on their hiking trip across Nepal when she came down with a sudden illness; she decided to stay behind while the other two carried on. Disaster struck: the pair went missing during a heavy snowstorm and were not found for more than 40 days. Yueh survived, but Chun died from lack of food coupled with hypothermia.

Struggling to make sense of these events, Lo painstakingly retraces the days leading up to and during her friends’ disappearance. She pores over old text messages, Chun’s diaries and footage captured by the Nepali rescue team. These materials shed some light on the ordeal, as well as the pair’s backgrounds. Diving into her personal archive, Lo recalls her burgeoning friendship with Chun at their Catholic girls’ school, where the latter defiantly resisted the institution’s rigid dress codes. Considering Chun’s efforts to express his non-conforming identity and his use of male pronouns, it is even more devastating that he was repeatedly misgendered in death by various news reports.

Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim’s buzzy film was shown on only 855 screens in the biggest documentary opening in North America since Fahrenheit 9/11 in 2004

Nathan Fielder’s nearly three-hour Elizabeth Holmes documentary, You Can See Everything, has opened to an extraordinary $15m domestic box office, the biggest opening weekend for a documentary in North America in more than 20 years.

You Can See Everything, directed by Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim, made $15m (A$21.5m, £11.2m) from only 855 screens, and had more than 2,000 sold-out screenings at the weekend, according to the production company A24. It is the biggest opening for a film playing on fewer than 1,000 screens since Borat opened to $26.5m in 2006.