LASSIE: ANEW ADVENTURE PG

★★★★★ OUT 3 MAY CINEMAS

Cinema’s most famous dog sniffs out a mystery in this gentle follow-up to Lassie Come Home from director Hanno Olderdissen. Dubbed into English from its native German, the story finds intrepid collie Lassie investigating the disappearance of several pedigree chums, assisted by best friend Flo (Nico Marischka) and terrier Pippa. Set in picturesque rural Italy, it’s a sedate outing for the dog detective, with perky performances from canine and human alike. The story packs few surprises, but the visuals delight, and at least the dogs aren’t CGI.

OUR MOTHERS 15

★★★★★ OUT 10 MAY CINEMAS

Winner of the Caméra d’Or five years ago, César Diaz’s debut feature tackles the Guatemalan genocide, otherwise known as the Silent Holocaust. His film centres on Armando Espitia’s Ernesto, a forensic anthropologist whose investigations unearth a surprising familial connection – one that puts him at odds with his own mother. Even as Ernesto faces resistance from those reluctant to confront past atrocities, his journey feels underwhelming and bizarrely slight. Such vital subject matter deserves better: by the final excavation, you’ll wish Diaz himself had dug as deeply.

MUCH ADO ABOUT DYING 15

★★★★★ OUT 3 MAY CINEMAS

Shot over a five-year period, this is a clear-eyed and poignant portrait of ageing, caregiving and dying, courtesy of British documentary filmmaker Simon Chambers. The latter reluctantly becomes the principal carer to his gay octogenarian uncle David, a Shakespeare-loving former actor and drama teacher who lives alone in a leaking, mouse-infested London flat. While Much Ado about Dying reveals the glaring inadequacies of the UK’s elderly care system, it also celebrates its subject’s optimism and charm as he takes centre stage in the final act of his life.

MONKEY MAN 18

Dev Patel is all grown up…

★★★★★ OUT NOW CINEMAS

Hats off to Dev Patel. That the adorkable Slumdog Millionaire star has grown into a commanding leading man is the equivalent of the kid who had sand kicked in his face hitting the gym to sculpt himself into a powerhouse. And now, as star, director, producer and co-writer of Monkey Man, he’s morphed into a one-man army.

We meet Patel’s monkey-masked Kid in the fictional Indian city of Yatana. Battered senseless in an underground fight ring, he’s also reeling from childhood memories of his mother’s death at the hands of Rana (Sikandar Kher), a police chief controlled by corrupt politicians in league with a religious guru. Kid is at the bottom of the caste system, the weight of the elite pressing down on him. But his torments and traumas are about to erupt in a roaring rampage of revenge.

Monkey Man is intense. Maybe too intense, its two-hour run time pummelling viewers with deafening sound design, jagged cuts and shallow-focus close-ups. The bouts seem to shove viewers between the fighters as they go at each other with fists, feet, elbows, knees and teeth. Too much of a good thing? Perhaps, but the result knocks you out. And though Patel borrows from Commando, Rambo, Bruce Lee movies, The Raid and John Wick, he adds enough cultural twists and jabs at weaponised, monetised faith to keep Monkey Man fresh. A brutal triumph.

THE VERDICT Gruelling, exhausting, thrilling: there’s a lot going on in Dev Patel’s directorial debut. Steel yourself.

KIDNAPPED 12A

★★★★★ OUT 26 APRIL CINEMAS, CURZON HOME CINEMA

Veteran Italian director Marco Bellocchio (Fists in the Pocket, The Traitor) here dramatises a shameful event in Papal history. In 19th-century Bologna, six-yearold Jewish boy Edgardo (Enea Sala in his film debut) is snatched from his family to be raised Catholic in Rome, when it emerges that a maid baptised him as a baby. Handsomely lensed, acted and furnished at every turn, it’s an admirable endeavour but a little too staid to truly get the blood pumping. Interestingly, Spielberg once toyed with the idea of bringing this story to the screen.