GOOD BOY 15

★★✩✩✩

OUT 11 SEPTEMBER DIGITAL

A playful rules-of-dating comedy shifts into a disquieting tale of behavioural grooming in writer/ director Viljar Bøe’s slender Scandi-horror. Katrine Lovise Øpstad Fredrikse plays a selfeffacing student whose moneyed date (Gard Løkke) lives with a man who identifies as a dog. Barking? Perhaps, but Løkke has charm – so who’s to judge? Appealing performances aside, plausibility issues weigh heavily as Good Boy devolves into rote wack-job turf. Even as teasing riffs on ideas to do with BDSM/consent emerge, Bøe’s provocation soon resembles a short-worthy concept given too long a leash.

PUFFIN ROCK AND THE NEW FRIENDS U

★★★✩✩

OUT NOW CINEMAS

This feature-length spin-off from kids’ TV toon Puffin Rock sees Chris O’Dowd return to narrate a (gently topical) new story about displaced wildlife resettling among the familiar faces of the titular island. With its distinctive sense of place – the Rock is located off the coast of Ireland – this is charming stuff, though considerably lighter than coproducer Cartoon Saloon’s other theatrical fare (The Secret of Kells, Wolfwalkers). Running a mere 80 minutes, it’ll keep toddlers entranced, but older kids and accompanying grownups may find it a little insubstantial.

THE QUEEN MARY 18

★★✩✩✩

OUT 28 AUGUST DIGITAL

Once a magnificent transatlantic ocean liner, The Queen Mary is now a creaky tourist attraction. When digital marketer Erin (Alice Eve) and her family are brought aboard to revive its fortunes, they discover some spooky, Shining-style secrets. Mixing two timelines, animation, CGI and even a Fred Astaire song-and-dance sequence, writer/ director Gary Shore’s chiller doesn’t lack for ambition. But the narrative is choppy to the point where it’s rarely clear exactly what’s happening. Meanwhile, having a largely British cast pretending to be American gives it all a strange, deepfake quality.

AFIRE 12A

★★★★✩

OUT 25 AUGUST CINEMAS, CURZON HOME CINEMA

Following 2020’s watery Undine, this is the second in writer/ director Christian Petzold’s Elements Trilogy. Afire assembles a quartet of 20-somethings – among them self-absorbed novelist Leon (Thomas Schubert) and PhD literature student Nadja (Paula Beer) – at a summer house in woods off the Baltic coast. Sounds idyllic, but forest fires are drawing ominously close to the cabin. Resisting straightforward categorisation, this well-acted ensembler combines comic misunderstandings, insightful characterisation and climateemergency tragedy to impactful effect.

T.I.M. 15

Mandroid about the house…

★★★★✩

NOW NETFLIX

Hot on the murderous heels of robot-doll horror M3GAN comes Spencer Brown’s debut feature T.I.M., another thriller that grapples with the potential dangers of AI. Here, prosthetics engineer Abi (Barbarian’s Georgina Campbell) ventures into the remote countryside, joining a sleek tech firm (run by CEO Nathaniel Parker) in the midst of developing a Technologically Integrated Manservant – T.I.M. for short. Played with eerie presence by Eamon Farren (The Witcher), this AI butler is a miraculous piece of kit – he can even impersonate voices...

With Abi hoping to repair her relationship with husband Paul (Mark Rowley) it all feels like a fresh start. But, unsurprisingly, her own personal prototype T.I.M. starts to become increasingly obsessed with her. The foreshadowing begins with shots of T.I.M. ominously chopping wood: the first step towards an inevitable meltdown seeded carefully by Brown and his co-writer/partner Sarah Govett.

Brown and Govett may be addressing familiar AI anxieties, but their explorations of deepfake technology conjure a pertinent warning about the way truth can be manipulated in the 21st century. Alongside the excellent Farren, Campbell gives a committed turn, while Brown builds a believable very-near-future world where self-driving cars and the like are the norm. A big-ideas picture well worth investigating.

THE VERDICT A highly enjoyable, switched-on thriller, spearheaded by a controlled, creepy turn from Farren.