Movies to see this week: George Clooney in full movie-star mode, a new horror and a Gaza doco

The accents of the Aussie leads pass muster as far as I can judge, and Phillips and his team have been careful about avoiding gum trees and ensuring steering wheels are on the left. Harder to gauge is how accurately they have portrayed the secretive Fundamentalist Church of Latter-Day Saints, a real-life breakaway Mormon sect sometimes described as a cult.

A decade after being expelled from the FLDS in her teens, Elise (Elizabeth Cullen) is striving to live a normal life with her boyfriend, Adam (John Kim), but suffers from fits of insanity during which she’s capable of digging holes all over the backyard or slaughtering the neighbours’ pets.

The answer, according to her therapist, is to confront her half-forgotten but evidently traumatic past. Reckless even by the standards of movie therapists, he hooks her up with a mother-son team of psychedelic healers (Genevieve Mooy and Dennis Coard) aligned with the FLDS, who operate out of a cabin deep in the Utah woods and speak in a lilting manner that sounds almost but not quite Irish (a dialect coach is credited).

Under the supervision of this dubious pair, Elise and Adam enter what is referred to as the “dream state”, making Diabolic the fourth or possibly fifth film I’ve reviewed in the past month in which characters take a psychedelic trip of some kind, in contexts ranging from comedy (Good Fortune) to horror (Keeper) to documentary (the locally made Edge of Life).

Maybe this reflects our changing world, or maybe it’s just caught on as a device allowing filmmakers to cut to the chase. Phillips doesn’t go all in on trippy imagery, but the drug does give Elise a chance to relive repressed memories, filling in some of the missing pieces of her backstory.

Other ambiguities linger, not always effectively. It’s not wholly clear if we’re meant to see the FLDS purely as a repressive, evil institution, or as fundamentally correct, despite everything, about how reality works.

Nor is it clear what tone Phillips is aiming for. The style is muted and moody in “elevated horror” fashion, but the dialogue is on the flatly literal side, and there’s a tendency to rush through major plot developments to get to the jump scares.

On the whole, the film works best the nearer it comes to being a character study: Cullen’s hushed, abrupt delivery sometimes recalls Nicole Kidman’s way of playing raw, damaged characters (as does her hair, unkempt fringe and all). For both Phillips and his star, Diabolic may be a practice run for something bigger – whether the next chapter happens here or in the real US.
Diabolic is in cinemas from Thursday, November 20

Farsi says that she sees Fatma, who is the same age as her daughter, as a mirror image of her teenage self. She was 18 when she escaped Iran after being arrested and imprisoned two years earlier as a dissident. She’s been based in Paris ever since, making documentaries, dramas and an animation, while continuing to speak out against the Iranian regime.

In 2024, after trying to get into Gaza, she was filming Palestinian refugees in Cairo when she heard about Fatma and the photographs she was posting online. By the end of April, their phone calls had begun.

In one early conversation, Fatma recalls the morning of October 7 when she woke to the sound of Apache helicopters to see white lines striping the sky. Unable to understand what was happening, she had no hint of the carnage to come. Nor did she foresee the fact that food and how to get it was about to become an overriding preoccupation. Chicken, chocolate and Nescafe feature prominently in her daydreams, she tells Farsi. “I miss everything.”

By the end of June, the Israeli army is in the area, the bombing has intensified and the family is told to evacuate to the west. Fatma takes her camera but everything else is left behind in the house and they walk. It sounds like a hair-raising journey but they have now arrived back home and they’re looking for food and clean water, with the sound of the bombing getting closer. Managing a nervous laugh, she says: “I’m shaking.”

We meet her brothers, who are curious about Farsi, one of the few foreign women they have met, but their lack of English makes them too shy to speak to her. And Fatma’s smile fades when she talks of the friends she has lost. Then, a few months later, she admits that she is suffering from depression along with a lack of focus because she is always hungry.

During their last conversation in April this year, the mood lifts. Farsi has heard that the film has been accepted for the independent film section of the Cannes festival and the conversation ends as the women dare to raise the possibility that Fatma might get permission to be there. It’s a glimmer of hope banished only seconds later by a devastating postscript delivering news of a very different ending.
Reviewed by Sandra Hall

Put Your Soul on Your Hand and Walk is in cinemas from November 20

Still, there comes a time when you have to ask yourself what it’s all amounted to, especially given the sacrifices he’s made to stay at the top: the failed marriages, the friends left behind, the time away from his kids.

Baumbach co-wrote the screenplay for Barbie, directed by his wife, Greta Gerwig, and like Barbie, this film can be viewed as a variant on the Pinocchio theme: the puppet yearning to become a real boy.

Jay’s mock-heroic quest takes him from LA to Paris, where he reunites with his younger daughter Daisy (Grace Edwards), and then on to Tuscany, where he’s due to receive a special tribute teed up by loyal manager Ron (Adam Sandler). This cues a series of flashbacks covering different aspects of his past, in which he’s sometimes played by young British actor Charlie Rowe.

It sounds potentially corny, and also like an uphill battle to keep us interested in the internal struggles of this extremely fortunate man. The movie keeps threatening to turn sentimental and finally does: with a bit of rejigging, the final sequence could have been left out altogether, which would have been a good idea.

Still, up to that point Clooney, Baumbach and the film’s co-writer Emily Mortimer between them offer a partially satirical, mostly clear-eyed take on their hero: his sunny self-involvement, his genuine but also possibly limited talent, and the way his celebrity operates as a force field affecting everyone around him.

Much of the time this is less a film about Jay than about how the supporting characters react to the Jay-shaped space at the story’s centre. It’s also about the nature of acting, generously allowing one cast member after another a chance in the spotlight – with Sandler, in his heyday a bigger star than Clooney ever was, coming closest to stealing the show.

The nudging self-awareness peaks with the casting of Billy Crudup as a gifted acting school classmate of Jay’s who dropped out of the industry (he’s become a “child therapist”, a typical Baumbach gag). In reality, Crudup never quite achieved the stardom that once looked like his for the taking, though it’s easier to imagine him playing Clooney’s role here than the other way round.

Given Baumbach’s own career has lasted almost as long as Clooney’s, he might be wondering if he in turn could be described as a “hero of cinema”, a label pinned on Jay by a fan. Not quite, in my eyes. But a man who can envisage Sandler and Laura Dern as a couple who never were has at least occasional flashes of genius.

Jay Kelly is in cinemas from November 20