Monday new releases: 14 April 2025

In James Hawes’ The Amateur, Rami Malek plays a devoted but slightly absent-minded hus­band whose wife goes over­seas on busi­ness for five days only to be killed by ter­ror­ists, and I’ve just dropped the editor-in-chief off at the air­port so she can go away for five days, so you’ll for­give me if I’m not wild about the premise of this film.

Malek is Charlie Heller, a mild-mannered CIA ana­lyst enraged by his super­i­ors’ unwill­ing­ness to go and get revenge on his behalf and so takes mat­ters into his own inex­per­i­enced hands. What he doesn’t real­ise is that he has stumbled across a con­spir­acy that goes to (almost) the very top of the agency and his globe­trot­ting efforts at met­ing out justice have made him a tar­get for just about every­one. Luckily he dis­cov­ers a tal­ent for – word of the moment – leth­al­ity that doesn’t involve hand-to-hand combat.

This is some well-made tosh dis­tin­guished mainly by the fact that Malek plays it like it’s Tolstoy. He’s a real human deal­ing with grief, fear and rage but he’s sur­roun­ded by car­toon char­ac­ters and, des­pite the effect­ive dir­ec­tion by Slow Horses’ Hawes, it pays not to look too closely at what’s going on with the plot.

It’s not entirely clear what Heller’s pro­fes­sion actu­ally is. He works in the Decryption Department in the 5^th level of the Langley base­ment but has a nice office fur­nished with some vin­tage hi-fi gear and has his own anonym­ous source sup­ply­ing him with tera­bytes of secrets. Like I say, don’t kick the tires too hard on this one but it’s a classy diversion.

The Cats of Gokogu Shrine is a lovely minor-key doc­u­ment­ary that uses the colony of street felines that inhab­it (or infest depend­ing on your point of view) the tiny oyster fish­ing vil­lage of Ushimado as a way to show us aspects of Japanese cul­ture and the impact of chan­ging demo­graph­ics. The pop­u­la­tion of Ushimado is age­ing and the main­ten­ance of the Gokogu Shrine is largely up to two octo­gen­ari­ans who tot­ter up the steep stair­case reg­u­larly to sweep, weed and water the garden.

The con­tent below was ori­gin­ally paywalled.

The cats seem to be mostly vis­ited by non-locals – young­er people who can’t have pets in their city apart­ments. Locals com­plain that the people who vis­it the cats are not the ones who do the clean­ing up after them, but it’s the guests who ensure the cats are at least fixed. In fact, the pop­u­la­tion would be drop­ping if it weren’t for the fact that the shrine is a pop­u­lar place to leave aban­don kittens.

Director Soda Kazuhiro has been mak­ing doc­u­ment­ar­ies for film and tele­vi­sion for dec­ades but the last few have been in this “Observational” series where he refuses to research or pre­pare any­thing before get­ting his cam­era out. The stor­ies simply emerge over time and he’s not afraid to make him­self a char­ac­ter if that’s what the top­ic demands. I’d love to see more of his work.

Arriving under­cooked in cinemas is a satir­ic­al mon­ster movie tak­ing pot­shots at the soft tar­get of phar­ma­ceut­ic­al olig­archs. In Death of a Unicorn, Paul Rudd plays a wid­owed fath­er and cor­por­ate law­yer vis­it­ing the remote lodge of his ail­ing boss, played by Richard E. Grant. He’s on the verge of a big pro­mo­tion but only if he can prove that he’s a good fam­ily man – hence the unwill­ing par­ti­cip­a­tion on the trip of his goth daugh­ter (Jenna Ortega).

On the way, a com­bin­a­tion of poor cell­phone recep­tion, aller­gies and bick­er­ing means they hit a creature who has strayed on to the road. It’s an actu­al uni­corn and it turns out to be pretty hard to put of its misery.

Several poor decisions later and the beast – and its magic­al heal­ing prop­er­ties – are now in the hands of the cap­it­al­ist pigs and its much more scary par­ents are com­ing to get it back.

I wanted more of Anthony Carrigan as Griff, the etern­ally put upon manser­vant, and less of the failson Shepard (Will Poulter) and I also wanted there to be more prac­tic­al versus digit­al effects. I like my mon­sters to have that tact­ile qual­ity and their impacts to be more visceral.