Seven Films Worth Your Time, Five That Aren't, and Two Classics You Should Have Already Seen

A Guardian roundup covering 15 UK releases — from Cynthia Erivo's courtroom one-woman tour de force to Johnny Depp's Scrooge and two essential Bowie/Swinton re-releases.

The standout new release this week is Prima Facie, Suzie Miller's stage-to-screen adaptation with Cynthia Erivo carrying the entire film on her back. Peter Bradshaw's phrase 'classical drama' is exactly right — this is the kind of performance that makes you forget there's a camera. The legal procedural frame (a barrister who defends accused rapists until she becomes a victim herself) is a vessel for something much older: the witness who cannot be believed. Whispers in the Woods and 1 in 2 occupy adjacent emotional territory — both are documentary-adjacent works about mortality and inheritance, one ecological, one medical. Vincent Munier's forest film is the quieter achievement: the kind of nature documentary that trusts silence. David Wilkinson's bowel cancer film earns its confessionalism through self-awareness rather than sentimentality. Neither is easy, but both are honest. A Fox Under a Pink Moon is the week's most formally interesting film. Soraya Akhlaghi shot her own refugee journey on a phone over five years, then worked with animators to process what the footage couldn't hold. The result is something between diary, witness testimony, and illustrated memoir — a category the documentary form is still figuring out how to accommodate. Soul Patrol and Give Me the Ball! are more conventional documentary work, competently executed, worth your time if the subject draws you. In the mid-tier, Traces of Justice is the most surprising entry — a Chinese forensic thriller that's honest about its own propaganda content and gripping anyway. Peter Berg's Mosquito Bowl is the most competently made of the three-star group: Berg knows how to stage chaos, and the football-to-combat thematic rhyme lands better in image than in dialogue. Ebenezer is the week's trickiest recommendation — Depp is genuinely funny as Scrooge, the film knows what it is, and that's enough. Fjord and How to Rob a Bank are the week's clear disappointments. Mungiu's child-abuse drama (his second Palme d'Or) is the more painful miss because the talent is undeniable and the material is serious — but Bradshaw's verdict, that it neither blazingly delivers nor intriguingly withholds, is exactly right. The film occupies no position. How to Rob a Bank is simpler: a two-hour anti-capitalist caper that isn't funny or exciting enough to earn either label. The re-releases are the week's real event. The Man Who Fell to Earth (1976) and Female Perversions (1996) are both five-star pieces and both centre on performers — Bowie and Swinton — who were simply doing something that didn't have a category yet. Bradshaw's observation that Bowie's vulnerability looks more authentic now than it did in 1976 is a sharp critical point: some performances age into themselves. Sofia Coppola's Marie Antoinette, also re-released, is the more contested three-star: the anachronistic pop soundtrack is an idea, not a provocation, and the film coasts on that idea without fully committing to it. The week as a whole skews toward documentary and adaptation — only a handful of original fictions in the mix. The strongest work (Prima Facie, A Fox Under a Pink Moon, the two re-releases) is unified by one thing: a performer or creator who had no choice but to make exactly this, in exactly this form.