The new Pretty Woman? This wild caper about a stripper and a shady high-roller is far cleverer, BRIAN VINER writes

Anora (18, 139 minutes)

Verdict: Hilarious and moving

Judgement:

Heretic (15, 110 min)

Verdict: Stylish horror thriller

Judgement:

Little things like this (12A, 98 minutes)

Verdict: – Perfect pitch adjustment

Judgement:

Every now and then, and I admit it doesn’t happen often, a bunch of great new movies come along all at the same time.

It’s like those proverbial London buses that arrive in convoy, just when you were starting to think you might never see one again.

Either way, this week’s releases counter the complaint we film critics hear all the time, as if we’re responsible for it, that there’s never anything worth seeing in theaters.

Just the usual dispiriting diet of weak sequels and superhero nonsense, you say; and sometimes it’s hard to disagree.

But not today. In fact, there may be more stars on these pages than I’ve ever featured in one week, starting with the full complement for the fantastic Anora, which deservedly won the coveted Palme d’Or at this year’s Cannes Film Festival.

Writer and director Sean Baker – hailing from Summit, New Jersey – has reached the top of his game with this funny, sad, moving, energetic, relevant and totally captivating story of a smart, feisty ‘erotic dancer’, the titular Anora, glorious played by Mikey Madison.

One night, at the New York City lap-dancing club where she plies her trade, Anora, known to her friends as Ani, seduces Vanya (Mark Eydelshteyn), the endearingly puppyish but utterly reckless son of a shady Russian oligarch, into offering to pay for her ‘company’ for a whole week.

Her coworkers tell her she won the Lotto, especially when he goes even further and takes her to Las Vegas. There they get married, on a cocaine-fueled whim.

Fortunately, Ani speaks reasonable Russian, which she learned from her immigrant grandmother.

For a moment, she thinks she might have stumbled into a real Cinderella story, one destined for a happy ending.

But that illusion doesn’t last long. When Vanya’s parents, back in the motherland, hear what happened, they send some US-based thugs to solve the problem.

The resulting caper is hilarious but also shot through with tenderness, and Baker takes our empathy in some surprising directions.

I admire all his previous films and loved The Florida Project (2017), but this time he has outdone himself, with the story and screenplay, and also with the casting.

Honestly, I’d give Madison the Oscar for Best Actress right now. But the young Russian actor Eydelshteyn matches her in what I understand was a partially improvised performance.

This vibrantly entertaining film is called an updated Pretty Woman (1990). But it’s much smarter and thought-provoking than that.

Heretic is also a belter, a gripping, intelligent horror-thriller, ideal for those who like to see something scary during Halloween week.

It teases us with fear and menace, both rising slowly but inexorably like floodwaters, after a pair of eager young Mormon missionaries, Sister Barnes (Sophie Thatcher) and Sister Paxton (Chloe East), emerge in the obligatory horror movie rainstorm on the doorstep of a isolated house.

It is the home of Mr. Reed (Hugh Grant), who has previously expressed an interest in their church.

He seems jovial and charming, and the news that his wife is in the kitchen baking a healthy blueberry pie for them to smell is all they need to tempt them over the threshold into some gentle conversion.

Yet they are soon out of their depth; initially less physical than intellectual, as Mr. Reed answers their well-rehearsed banter with his own theological convictions.

Smart and funny, he creatively uses songs from The Hollies and Radiohead, and several variations of the board game Monopoly, to challenge religious orthodoxies.

Yet the physical threat gradually takes shape and builds up to an ending that is perhaps 25 percent overwrought, but still exciting.

The writer-directors are Scott Beck and Bryan Woods, matching their work on the brilliant A Quiet Place (2018). And once again the casting is perfect.

Thatcher and East are both great, but Grant steals the show, giving a perfectly calibrated performance as he continues to bury memories of all those lovable middle-class idiots with another top-notch examination of villainy.

Religion gets a bad rap again in Small Things Like These, a satisfyingly faithful adaptation of Claire Keegan’s acclaimed 2021 novel.

The story is set in 1985 in a small Irish town, where a friendly, introspective coal merchant (Cillian Murphy) comes face to face with the misdeeds of the Catholic Church, or more specifically those of the imperious Mother Superior of the local monastery (Emily Watson). , sparking memories of his own upbringing.

I thought Keegan’s book was a minor masterpiece and so was the film, sensitively adapted by playwright Enda Walsh, gently directed by Tim Mielants, and beautifully, heartbreakingly directed by the wonderful Murphy.

All films now in cinemas.

ALSO SHOW

Writer-director Steve McQueen has said he was inspired to write Blitz (12A, 120 mins, ****) after seeing a faded photo of a black child with other evacuees at the height of the Luftwaffe bombing of London.

That led him to create an East End family of three, whose story he tells in this thoroughly enjoyable mix of fact and fiction.

Single mother Rita (the excellent Saoirse Ronan) shares a terraced house with her nine-year-old mixed-race son George (impressive newcomer Elliott Heffernan) and her father Gerald (played convincingly by musician Paul Weller in his acting debut).

It is September 1940; race and racism lurk. But at its core, Blitz is an old-fashioned adventure story, about a spirited little boy who rebels when his devoted mother reluctantly decides he must be evacuated, jumps off the train and takes him to safety and the difficult way home.

Blitz is a chronicle of that return journey, which, for dramatic reasons, is predictably fraught with danger, with Stephen Graham emerging as a kind of wartime Bill Sikes.

I first reviewed Blitz last month at the London Film Festival and had only one reservation: a Nigerian ARP guard (Benjamin Clementine), while based on a real person, seemed to me to be delivering an entirely made-up monologue about racial tolerance.

But the producer contacted me and explained that the lines were taken from real diaries, so I humbly resign.

I still think the film portrays racism a bit one-dimensionally, but it’s a cracking yarn, very nicely told.

All compelling stories contain at least some truth, or are, like Super/Man: the Christopher Reeve story (****), completely factual.

This is a fascinating, deeply moving documentary about the actor who seemed to have everything going for him, until the fateful day in May 1995 when he was thrown by his horse and ended up paralyzed.

Coincidentally, a few weeks earlier I was sitting next to him at a party in New York watching the Oscars, and like everyone else there, I couldn’t help but be struck by his sheer alpha masculinity.

I have always felt a small personal connection with his story, which is told here, including by his children, with grace and tenderness.

A longer review of Blitz was published last month. Both films are in theaters.