Movies to watch this week: A stand-up backstory, animated fantasy, home-grown zombie thriller and World Cup drama

Alex has moved from the family home to a pokey Manhattan apartment and he’s settling further into his chronic state of functioning depression when he happens on the Comedy Cellar in Greenwich Village. It costs $4 to get in, and he’s about to pay up when he learns that it’s free for those who are taking a turn at the open mic.

In Mrs Maisel, the funniest stuff goes on backstage and offstage, and the same goes for this film. Alex’s routine attracts a few laughs, but for his audience – and us – his appeal lies in his flair for the confessional. Later, he does make the mistake of getting angry and bitter during one of his sessions, but his usual setting is self-deprecation edged with a mild tone of puzzlement about marriage in its many forms.

As for Tess, unburdened by her husband’s discontent, she’s starting to enjoy her new life. A former volleyball champion, she’s looking forward to the possibility of scoring a job coaching the national team for the next Olympics. And she’s on a date with an old friend when he suggests an after-dinner visit to the Comedy Cellar, where they happen to catch Alex’s act.

Her amazement at her husband’s previously undiscovered talent produces an outcome which surprises them both. It also has a strong ring of reality to it. Cooper, Arnett and their fellow screenwriter, Mark Chappell, have worked hard to come up with a convincing portrait of an ailing marriage and its prospects of resuscitation, but the strain shows and the result is strangely underpowered. There’s very little spark between Dern and Arnett, and while it’s clear that this group of old friends enjoyed putting the film together, they fail to bring us in on the fun.

Is This Thing On? is in cinemas from February 5

In one especially memorable image, Scarlet is viewed from directly overhead, dolled up in white as she advances towards Claudius, the two of them positioned on a red Persian carpet laid slantwise on a chessboard floor. Unfortunately, he’s anticipated the move she’s about to make and has laid a trap of his own, launching her on a voyage through a disorientating version of the afterlife, starting off in a rocky wilderness and moving on to a vast desert where armies clash and crumble into dust.

Time has no meaning in this dimension, so it makes perfect sense for Scarlet to be joined by Hijiri (Masaka Okada), a staunch young paramedic from present-day Japan, with a kind word for everyone and a helmet of dark hair reminiscent of Chris Klein in the original American Pie.

Where Hijiri believes in saving and protecting rather than killing, Scarlet persists in her quest for vengeance even beyond the grave (again, this afterlife is a timeless one, so Claudius exists here too). The idea, perhaps, is that each has something to learn from the other before they move on to whatever their ultimate destiny might be.

This latter section of the film again has some striking images, including a literal stairway to heaven where the steps are delicate strips of cloud. But as the plot gets more convoluted, the logic of the fantasy becomes harder to parse, including the intended message: as often happens in cases like this, the notional qualms about bloodshed are undercut by the evident zest put into staging the fight scenes.

Certainly, when Claudius’ leering henchmen Rosencrantz and Guildenstern (Munetaka Aoki and Shota Sometani) come on the scene, we’re not asked to get invested in whether they live or die – though it’s true that Shakespeare never seemed all that fussed about those two either.

Scarlet is in cinemas from February 5

With three weeks to go, the team is about to take off for a pre-match training session on Saipan in the Northern Mariana Islands before McCarthy can be sure that Keane is joining them.

As far as I can tell, Belfast-based directors Lisa Barros D’Sa and Glenn Leyburn and screenwriter Paul Fraser – a frequent collaborator with director Shane Meadows, another filmmaker with a taste for raw reality – have done their best to stick to the facts of an event that still counts as one of the most inflammatory in Ireland’s sporting history.

What began as “a typhoon in a teacup”, in McCarthy’s words, expanded into a national incident by the day of the match and the film delivers a day-by-day account of how it happened.

Hardwicke’s Keane is a hawk-eyed loner who keeps his few smiles for his wife and family. The affable McCarthy’s efforts to keep calm and persuade everybody else to do the same has always infuriated him. And his mood rapidly worsens when the team reaches its hotel and becomes acquainted with its shortcomings.

The air-conditioning doesn’t work, the catering is terrible, the training field is full of bumps and clumps and the footballs have not arrived. This is the backdrop. The real focus is on the battle of wills between Keane and McCarthy, who are equally intractable. Softened by Coogan’s ever-present sense of humour, McCarthy seems like the more reasonable of the two, but his overtures to Keane go so far and no further.

Every time he picks up the telephone he must brace himself before he can punch in the numbers. And as he already knows, Keane will not give an inch. You can see him thinking about it. Hardwicke invests every silence with great eloquence. But you also know that he won’t budge. He’s furious and his team respects him for it.

The inevitable outcome is a showdown between the two men that elevates a sports story into an undiplomatic incident with implications reaching beyond football. By the time Keane and McCarthy have finished with one another we’ve been treated to a debate on the damage done to Ireland’s national identity. Yes, sport is political.

Saipan is in cinemas from February 5.