One Fine Morning Cert: 15, 1hr 52mins
Rating: 
The Pope’s Exorcist Cert: 15, 1hr 43mins
Rating: 
Renfield Cert: 15, 1hr 33mins
Rating:
Suzume Cert: PG, 2hr 2mins
Rating:
Assassin Club Cert: 15, 1hr 51mins
Rating: 
Thanks to James Bond and her memorable appearances as Dr Madeleine Swann in both No Time To Die and Spectre, we all now recognise the French actress Léa Seydoux.
And while she’s totally at home making English-language blockbusters – she has also graced the Mission: Impossible franchise in the past – every now and then she makes a little independent drama so French you can almost taste the croissants. One Fine Morning is one of those.
Teaming up with acclaimed Gallic film-maker Mia Hansen-Love, Seydoux plays a single mother in Paris, still too young to be described as of ‘a certain age’ but already torn between generations.
Her hitherto biddable young daughter is just beginning to play up at school but her father, a much admired professor of philosophy, is the main problem.
Mild-mannered and genial, he suffers from what we assume is early-onset dementia but which actually turns out to be more complicated than that.
Gallic Charm: Melvil Poupaud, Camille Leban Martins and Léa Seydoux in One Fine Morning
The awful hunt for suitable residential care begins, just as Sandra (Seydoux) bumps into a handsome – and married – old friend and begins an affair.
Seydoux is perhaps too young (she’s 37) and too pretty to totally convince, but she gives it her best shot, contributing fully to a thought-provoking film about love, the sheer messiness of grown-up life and the harrowing indignities of old age.
Of the horror hokum currently doing the rounds, The Pope’s Exorcist slightly has the edge for me, partly because it takes its subject matter seriously (don’t worry, there are jokes) and partly because Russell Crowe and the veteran Italian actor Franco Nero are genuinely good as Vatican exorcist and Pope respectively.
Nevertheless, we are on familiar territory as Father Gabriel Amorth travels to a derelict Spanish abbey where the young son of its new American owner is apparently possessed by a demon. It’s a shame that when the boy is so possessed he has the easily recognisable, gravelly northern tones of Ralph Ineson, but it’s a decent effort.
Played far more with tongue in cheek is Renfield, which relocates the story of Dracula and his insect-munching servant, Renfield – or Robert Montague Renfield, as he introduces himself in a long and knowing voiceover – to modern- day New Orleans.
It takes a good long while for the film to feel more than a series of stand-alone scenes, and even longer for a subplot that sees Awkwafina playing a high-minded police officer to gel. But we just about get there eventually, thanks to one particularly good (and, be warned, gory) fight and the fact that while we’ve probably gone to see Nicolas Cage as a camp and toothy Dracula, it’s actually Nicholas Hoult as Renfield we come out admiring.
Always Drac: Nicolas Cage was always Dracula on the set of his new movie Renfield, according to his director, Chris McKay
Suzume is a stunning-looking Japanese animation from director Makoto Shinkai, who made the widely acclaimed Your Name. Suzume is a 17-year-old schoolgirl who stumbles across a mysterious and handsome young man, who tells her the real reason why Japan is so plagued by earthquakes.
What follows is a strange and complex tale of cod-mythology, of doorways and giant worms that disappointingly slows to a sluggish crawl in the second half.
Assassin Club may feature Henry Golding, Sam Neill and Noomi Rapace, but this derivative, charmless, cliche-ridden tale of assassins turning on their rivals is quite terrible.
