HEART OF STONE 12A

★★★☆☆ OUT NOW NETFLIX

Netflix’s Mission: Impossible-style spy thriller lights the fuse with a fun pre-credits sequence, only to fizzle out with a formulaic second half. Gal Gadot brings star wattage as Rachel Stone, a tech-savvy operative working for a playing-card-themed spy organisation aided by a superpowered AI. Enter mysterious hacker Keya (Alia Bhatt), who infiltrates a mission to get to the clandestine group. Director Tom Harper injects Heart of Stone with explosive fights and spectacular stunts, making for rollicking genre fare, but you won’t need an AI tool to help you predict how the third act is going to play out.

RALLY ROAD RACERS U

★★★☆☆ OUT 15 SEPTEMBER CINEMAS

With a familiar underdog plot template, this animated racing movie draws on many recognisable influences to tell the story of a plucky slow loris, Zhi (voiced by Jimmy O. Yang), who has to win the four-day Silk Road Rally across China to save his granny’s home. Bolstered by frequent silly gags and an impressive voice cast (including J.K. Simmons, Chloe Bennet, Sharon Horgan and John Cleese), the film doesn’t quite reach the higher tier of cinematic animated releases, but is diverting enough to keep young kids thoroughly entertained.

BROTHER 15

Fraternal flame…

★★★☆☆ OUT 15 SEPTEMBER CINEMAS, CURZON HOME CINEMA

Adapted from David Chariandy’s autobiographical novel, and dedicated to ‘our immigrant mothers’, Clement Virgo’s potent melodrama tells the stories of two Black Jamaican-Canadian brothers growing up in a single-parent household in the working-class inner-city Toronto neighbourhood of Scarborough.

The younger sibling Michael (Lamar Johnson) lacks confidence and has an introverted nature, while older brother Francis (Aaron Pierre) is popular, physically imposing and protective towards both Michael and their mother (Marsha Stephanie Blake), who works night-shift cleaning jobs to make ends meet. Can her sons avoid the scourges of gang violence and police brutality that afflict their community?

Shot in widescreen, Brother shifts backwards and forwards between three different time periods – 1991, 1981 and 2001. Initially this device feels disorientating, yet gradually it helps build a sense of dread about the story’s tragic trajectory. Over the decades the family apartment is a key location, by turns a place of happiness, refuge, imprisonment, grieving and ultimately healing. Music is also a connecting thread throughout, with the fusion of reggae and hip-hop reflecting the hybrid cultural identities of the protagonists, while Nina Simone’s cover of Jacques Brel’s Ne me quitte pas is deployed to poignant effect. And the vivid performances from Johnson and Pierre successfully convey the deep fraternal bond between Michael and Francis.

THE VERDICT Powerful acting and assured direction combine impressively in an intergenerational immigrant drama.

THE LESSON TBC

★★★☆☆ OUT 22 SEPTEMBER CINEMAS

The Oscar Wilde-attributed quote that ‘talent borrows, genius steals’ is playfully reconsidered in this contemporary country-house melodrama from screenwriter Alex MacKeith and British director Alice Troughton, making her feature debut. Self-consciously divided into three acts, plus epilogue and prologue, The Lesson follows an aspiring writer (Daryl McCormack) who accepts a live-in tutorial position at the rural mansion of novelist (Richard E. Grant) and his enigmatic wife (Julie Delpy). The result is enjoyably acted and skilfully shot, yet becomes less convincing as it embraces thriller conventions.

STRAYS 15

★★☆☆☆ OUT NOW CINEMAS

The doghouse is too good for this crude comedy, a ribald riposte to talking-pooch heartstirrers such as A Dog’s Purpose that ups the ante relentlessly and tiresomely. Will Forte sets the tone as a horrible serial masturbator who dumps unwanted dog Reggie (Will Ferrell) in the city. Duly, Reggie falls in with a scrappy Boston terrier (Jamie Foxx) and plots revenge. There is something rather admirable in director Josh Greenbaum’s go-for-broke approach, but long before Brett Gelman’s canine-catcher rolls around in doggie-doo you might be wishing you were Homeward Bound yourself.