Amanda Seyfried and Brandon Sklenar co-star as Sweeney’s secretive bosses in an upstate New York mansion, and director Paul Feig ramps up the sexual tension with evident gusto

Director Paul Feig is known for broad comedy; now he cranks up the schlock-serious dial for an outrageously enjoyable – or at any rate enjoyably outrageous – psycho-suspense thriller in the spirit of 90s erotic noir, adapted by screenwriter Rebecca Sonnenshine from the 2022 bestseller by Freida McFadden. We are back in the sleazy, glossy world of Curtis Hanson’s The Hand That Rocks the Cradle or Joe Eszterhas’s Basic Instinct, but skating quite close, though not too close, to satire.

The scene is a bizarrely opulent mansion somewhere in upstate New York, splendidly isolated among a sea of bland suburban housing; it is approached by a drive, once you have got past the electronic gates. And it is down this avenue that Millie (Sydney Sweeney) nervously drives, wearing fake glasses to make herself look more mature, to apply for the job of live-in housemaid to the wealthy couple that lives there; she is hoping her prospective employers will not notice the worrying inconsistencies in her CV. She is greeted with smiley, Stepford-blond blandness by Nina Winchester (Amanda Seyfried), who appears to adore Millie, and explains that the job entails cooking, cleaning and looking after her young daughter, Cece (Indiana Elle).

The third Avatar chapter erupts with volcanic world-building and thunderous action yet remains a vast, dazzling spectacle in search of an emotional arc

On and on and on it goes. The planet-sized movie franchise of Avatar continues to spin massively in the cosmos – yet without affecting the tides in any other world. Maybe Avatar is the cosmos and its originator James Cameron is the new L Ron Hubbard; the creator, or rather prophet, of a new belief system involving big blue creatures with pointy ears that flap and twitch when they talk, to whom we will all one day be required to bow down when they float past. And while the rest of the cinema industry has quietly abandoned 3D without ever quite admitting it, theatres showing James Cameron’s giant new three-hour hunk of nonsense are still handing out the 3D specs to the customers.

The first film was about human invaders seeking to exploit and colonise the weird tall blue Na’vi people in another galaxy for their mineral resources by piloting “avatar” replicants into their midst. One of these pilots was Cpl Jake Sully, played by Sam Worthington, who fell in love with Neytiri, played by Zoe Saldaña, and stayed behind as a Na’vi – thus infuriating his commanding officer, Col Miles Quaritch, played by Stephen Lang, who since then has died in battle but is now resurrected as a Na’vi avatar, looking scarily as if Vinnie Jones had joined the Blue Man Group. Quaritch’s teen son Spider (Jack Champion) has turned against him and lives with Jake and Neytiri as their adoptive child. In the second film, the Na’vi people found a new world of water. Now in this third film they face the new element of … fire. For the proposed fourth and fifth films, they will presumably tackle earth and wind.

Star turns from Helen Mirren, Andrea Riseborough and Toni Colette can’t stop cartoony sentimentality smothering this film directed by Winslet and written by her son Joe Anders

Kate Winslet’s feature directing debut is a family movie, scripted by her son Joe Anders; it’s a well-intentioned and starrily cast yuletide heartwarmer, like a two-hour John Lewis Christmas TV ad without the logo at the end. There are one or two nice lines and sharp moments but they are submerged in a treacly soup of sentimentality; in the end, I couldn’t get past the cartoony quasi-Richard Curtis characterisation and the weird not-quite-earthlingness of the people involved. Having said this, I am aware of having been first in the queue to denigrate Winslet’s Christmas film The Holiday, that is regarded by many as one of the most successful films of all time.

Helen Mirren is the June of the title, an affectionate but sharp-tongued matriarch who is diagnosed with terminal cancer in the run-up to Christmas, and her entire quarrelling clan will have to assemble in her hospital room. June, with a kind of benign cunning, realises that she can use her last days as a cathartic crisis that will cure her adult children’s unspoken hurt. They are a stressed careerist (Winslet), a stay-at-home mum (Andrea Riseborough), a hippy-dippy natural birth counsellor (Toni Collette) and a troubled soul (Johnny Flynn), plus all their various kids. There is also June’s daft old husband Bernie, played by Timothy Spall, who likes a drink and can’t talk about his feelings, and whose scatterbrained goofiness has a sad origin. Stephen Merchant plays Riseborough’s lovably useless husband and a gentle hospital nurse, played by Fisayo Akinade, is the ensemble’s self-effacing guide to a wiser future.

Trolling wokesters, disparaging Paul Thomas Anderson, insulting Paul Dano … the controversial director plays to type with his list of the top 20 best films of the 21st century

Did Quentin Tarantino just put Paul Dano into the alpha league of the world’s most loved and admired movie actors?

His recent insults aimed at Dano counterprovoked a flood of defensive praise, with Daniel Day-Lewis, Dano’s costar in There Will Be Blood, publicly endorsing it. But was Tarantino’s pronouncement just bluster and flex? Will he end up casting Dano in his next film – a turnaround like Donald Trump making nice with North Korean leader Kim Jong-un after pretty much threatening him with nuclear war? Or are we witnessing a kind of midlife emotional crisis in the heart of one of the most brilliant directors of his generation? I speak as a superfan with reservations.

From stealing a photo for the King of Bohemia to battling the Napoleon of crime on a clifftop, Holmes is witty and watchable in these early Conan Doyle-approved dramas

The British Film Institute has restored three of the short two-reel silent films in the Stoll Pictures Sherlock Holmes series from the early 1920s – and very witty, watchable and spirited entertainments they are too. The star is the English stage actor Eille Norwood, whose handsome, troubled, sensitive face looms out of the screen in extreme closeup in the first of these, A Scandal in Bohemia, from 1921. Dr Watson is played in all of the films by Hubert Willis.

In this first film, our hero demonstrates his talents as a master of disguise; Holmes is approached by the King of Bohemia at his rooms in Baker Street, wearing a mask (so concerned is he about being recognised), although Holmes’s powers of deduction (and of course his own superior mastery of this kind of imposture) allow him to rumble the king at once. He wants Holmes to purloin an incriminating photograph taken of him with a young woman – an “adventuress” is how he quaintly puts it – which could be embarrassing. This is the fashionable stage actor Irene Adler, played by Joan Beverley, and Holmes manages to get on stage with Adler mid-performance to carry out a daring stratagem. But very startlingly, Adler appears to be the one person who can outwit Holmes.