Monday new releases: 31 March 2025

This week, two films about war­ri­ors bat­tling post-traumatic stress who are forced out of retire­ment one last time in order to fight an emer­ging evil, two films about peace-loving people chal­lenged to take up arms against state-sanctioned evil, and two inno­cents man­age to save the world from cata­strophe in spite of themselves.

In The Return, dir­ect­or Uberto Pasolini (with co-screenwriters John Collee and Edward Bond) goes back to the clas­sics. By choos­ing one of the final chapters of Homer’s Odyssey, they are more inter­ested in the fal­lout from adven­ture than Odysseus’ adven­tures them­selves. When the unre­cog­nis­ably dishevelled former king (Ralph Fiennes) washes up on the shores of his home island of Ithaca, he has been away for dec­ades on a jour­ney that brought glory (the Trojan cam­paign and that wooden horse) but also tragedy. Unwilling to face his people with the truth he dis­guises him­self (eas­ily as it turns out) as a beg­gar and learns what has become of his wife, son and sub­jects since he gal­li­vanted off around the Peleponnese all those years ago.

His wife, Penelope (Juliette Binoche), is sur­roun­ded by optim­ist­ic suit­ors, hop­ing that they can take Odysseus’ place and the riches they think go with it. Their son, Telemachus (Charlie Plummer), is a rebel­li­ous youth who knows everything about what’s right and wrong except how to fix things.

The Return is a classy pro­duc­tion, as you might expect, and the script is suit­ably high­brow without dis­ap­pear­ing up its own fun­da­ment (like William Tell earli­er this year). The dénoue­ment is so viol­ent that it came as a sur­prise to many in our audi­ence – hear­ing people gasp is one of the great pleas­ures of the cinema that just aren’t the same at home – and Fiennes acquits him­self so well you won­der wheth­er he didn’t miss a trick by not mov­ing into action films a long time ago. (Maybe the fail­ure of The Avengers reboot put him off.)

For a long time in The Return, I thought it was a story of post-traumatic stress, of guilt and shame –and it is that – but it also asks wheth­er a war­ri­or can ever really change. Is that danger going to be ever-present, and what does that mean for the people who love him?

The same ques­tion is also at the core of David Ayer’s new col­lab­or­a­tion with Jason Statham, A Working Man, the follow-up to the sur­prise smash The Beekeeper last year. Once again, Statham finds a way to excuse his inab­il­ity to run an American accent by being an ex-Royal Marine, now wid­owed and liv­ing in Chicago to be close to his daugh­ter, whose grand­par­ents keep him at arm’s length. He’s trau­mat­ised by the loss of his wife, his guilt for pri­or­it­ising ser­vice to coun­try over his fam­ily, his impend­ing loss of access to his daugh­ter. He’s liv­ing in his truck in order to save for leg­al fees to fight this injustice but as his truck is worth as much as a small house, you have to won­der if he’s really thought that plan through.

Despite his determ­in­a­tion to “not be that per­son any­more”, he’s sur­pris­ingly quick to get back into action when he sees inno­cent people threatened or, espe­cially, when his boss’s daugh­ter is kid­napped by Russian people traf­fick­ers. Then he’s off to the races, as he becomes detect­ive, judge, jury and exe­cu­tion­er, work­ing his way through the ranks of olig­arch­ic­al hench­men. Each set-piece is suit­ably enlarged on the one before and the “kills” – as they call them – are often quite inventive.

As usu­al, Statham’s lim­it­a­tions are his strength, and the ridicu­lous­ness of the Russians is a joy. I’m per­fectly happy for them to be the all-purpose vil­lains for our cur­rent generation.

The Seed of the Sacred Fig states its alleg­or­ic­al inten­tions up front with the open­ing cap­tions, telling how the ficus reli­giosa wraps its roots around the host plant, “even­tu­ally strangling it”. Yet anoth­er Iranian film, shot in secret and then smuggled out of the coun­try, you have to won­der wheth­er the Iranian gov­ern­ment real­ises that their restric­tions, cen­sor­ship and impris­on­ment are actu­ally caus­ing more mas­ter­pieces to be made than ever before – cer­tainly seems counter-productive.

In a middle-class fam­ily, the fath­er (Missagh Zareh) has been pro­moted with­in the Justice Department to a Judge-Investigator, a sens­it­ive and pres­ti­gi­ous pos­i­tion. His wife (Soheila Golestani) is wor­ried that if their daugh­ters get involved in street protests it will risk their status and their shift to a big­ger flat. He is more con­cerned that his pos­i­tion makes him a tar­get for revenge and he brings home a pis­tol for self-defence. As any stu­dent of Chekov knows, there’s only one pos­sible outcome.

Powerful and thrill­ing on its mer­its, Sacred Fig grows into mas­ter­piece status when taken on that alleg­or­ic­al level. The fath­er rep­res­ents the state, increas­ingly des­per­ate to main­tain con­trol but also col­lapsing from with­in due to the mor­al con­tra­dic­tions he has to live with every day. The moth­er is the trust­ing cit­izenry, want­ing to make the best of a sys­tem that is clearly flawed but what can you do? And the daugh­ters are the future, risk­ing their lives on the streets.

It turns out that, for a long time, I’ve been con­fus­ing German theo­lo­gian Diedrich Bonhoeffer with Pastor Martin Niemöller (who wrote that poem about ‘first they came for the social­ists …’) so when I saw the title of the Bonhoeffer bio­graphy (Bonhoeffer: Pastor. Spy. Assassin) I thought to myself, well, that escal­ated quickly.

Turns out that I wasn’t a mil­lion miles away, as Niemöller (played by August Diehl) is a char­ac­ter in the film as their paths crossed reg­u­larly before Niemöller was interned by the Nazis in 1938. Bonhoeffer and Niemöller had dis­agreed dur­ing the early years of the régime about how far to take their resistance.

The film is one of those values-based, faith-based pic­tures but I don’t mind the ones that don’t get too fix­ated on mir­acles or bible-literalism (there were trail­ers for two of those before this film yes­ter­day). Bonhoeffer (Jonas Dassler) was a theo­lo­gian and pro­lif­ic essay­ist and author whose res­ist­ance to the Nazis res­ul­ted in his exe­cu­tion just a couple of weeks before the end of the war.

To my unsoph­ist­ic­ated mind, this is a film about faith and then, how does that faith serve you in the world? What good is faith if it doesn’t help you see the dif­fer­ence between right and wrong and then help you decide what to do with that know­ledge after­wards? The film sug­gests that Bonhoeffer threw his paci­fism under the bus when the Nazi atro­cit­ies became intol­er­able but there are some sug­ges­tions that the film exag­ger­ates this trans­form­a­tion for dra­mat­ic purposes.

I can’t com­ment on the his­tory, but I did think that the wrestle that goes on with­in this fic­tion­al­ised Bonhoeffer was an inter­est­ing one and there was stuff in there that I didn’t know about the Nazis com­mand­eer­ing of organ­ised reli­gion (and of the organ­isers of religion).

Looney Tunes: The Day the Earth Blew Up is a kind of ‘proof of concept’, demon­strat­ing that hand-drawn, gag-driven, sur­real­ist anim­a­tion still has a place in a world dom­in­ated by sen­ti­ment­al old Pixar and Disney. To that end, it’s per­fectly fine. In this ver­sion of the char­ac­ters, Porky and Daffy are brought up togeth­er by kindly Farmer Jim who then expires, leav­ing them the house which they promptly – but good-humouredly – trash.

Needing money urgently to fix their roof, they get jobs at the loc­al Bubble gum fact­ory just as the new fla­vour is about to be launched world­wide and turn the world into gum-chewing zom­bies. Not quite as anarch­ic as its pre­de­cessors, after sav­ing the word from the ali­en gum invaders, Porky and Daffy are them­selves saved by some­thing as pro­sa­ic as an insur­ance policy. How straight!