Movies to watch this week: Castaway hell, Paris Hilton doco, Iranian thriller and a tribute to a composer

They wash up together on a remote island which looks a little like the one which became home to Tom Hanks in Castaway, but there’s no sign of Wilson, the volleyball which kept him company. Instead, Linda and Bradley must deal with one another while navigating a radical shift in status.

After treating Bradley’s leg wound, Linda, an avid fan of the TV series Survivor, swiftly rigs up a shelter, secures a supply of drinking water, catches a fish dinner and manages to coax a campfire into being by using two sticks and a lot of friction. After making a feeble attempt to pull rank, Bradley finds that he can do little but lie back and watch her in action.

Raimi, who shot part of the film in Sydney, rejoices in the comedy of exaggeration. Linda’s finest moment comes when she sharpens a stick and goes into battle with a wild boar, emerging blood-soaked and victorious to dump the boar’s severed head beside Bradley on the sand. But the script’s main focus is on Linda and Bradley’s see-sawing relationship – especially when they start being nice to one another. Even though we’re encouraged to conjure with the possibility that romance is in the air, it’s hard to imagine that Bradley could ever be trusted.

And Linda, too, is hiding a few secrets which are gradually revealed as she adapts to her altered circumstances. McAdams brings great verve and humour to the part. Linda in office mode is another exercise in exaggeration, dressed up with a beige cardigan, battered lace-ups and a chronic stoop, all of which highlight the makeover taking place on the island with her delirious discovery of the warrior woman within. The big question is how far she’s going to go with this new version of herself.

O’Brien is also good at ringing the changes. As the two of them sit by the fire one night, exchanging confidences about unhappy episodes in the past, they give every sign of being sincere – something which adds an extra charge to the next inevitable act of betrayal.

There are gaping holes in the plot which become very conspicuous when we reach the end, but Raimi has issued an early warning that he’s not out to make sense here. He treats us a crafty mix of blood, gore and gallows humour featuring two actors inviting us to share in the great time they’re having.

As with Britney Spears or Lindsay Lohan, there was an undeniable vein of misogynist nastiness in how the media treated Hilton in her heyday, though it’s undeniable, too, that Hilton herself made the choice to play up to her ditzy persona in The Simple Life and elsewhere.

What the real person was like underneath it all was anyone’s guess, and I can’t say much illumination is offered by Bruce Robertson and JJ Duncan’s Infinite Icon: A Visual Memoir, a belated tie-in to Hilton’s similarly titled 2024 album (only the second of her career).

The musical numbers are pure camp, of a self-conscious and harmless kind: flanked by buff male dancers in glittery shirts, Hilton strides around the stage whisper-chanting slogans like “Welcome to the bad bitch academy”, which flash up on screen in hot pink cursive.

In between are the confessional segments in which Hilton vows to seize control of her narrative and show us who she is on the inside. This is seldom convincing, and not only because every word out of her mouth is delivered in the same flat, bored tone, whether she’s testifying to her lifelong love of music or describing her former self as “a scared, broken girl who was made to feel like she didn’t matter”.

It would be unfair to jump to the conclusion that the voiceover narration was written by AI, but the flow of banality is so relentless that it wouldn’t make much difference if it had been. “Every smile, every cuddle, every little moment with them feels like pure magic,” she says of her young children, who get about two minutes on camera – possibly not a statement the average parent would make if strict honesty were the goal.

At nearly two hours, Infinite Icon: A Visual Memoir is an endurance test for all but the most dedicated. Still, I emerged not wholly disliking its subject, and willing to believe that being Paris Hilton hasn’t been a bed of roses in all respects: aside from her ADHD diagnosis (“my superpower”), we hear about the abuse she suffered at boarding school and the nightmares she had regularly until not long ago.

Nowadays, she says, she only dreams about “fun, happy things”, like partying and being back at the club. If that’s so, good for her – though it all seems a bit low-energy, to cite another reality TV star of yesteryear.

In cinemas from Thursday

If you’re a fan of Hart’s work as a lyricist, you may be recalling some of his wittiest achievements at this point – The Lady is a Tramp, for one. Even more memorable was his success at getting a line about Schopenhauer into Zip, the stripper’s song he and Rodgers wrote for one of their most sophisticated musicals, Pal Joey.

Linklater and Hawke have had a film about Hart in mind since reading a draft script by novelist-screenwriter Robert Kaplow, 12 years ago. Inspired by a cache of letters sent to Hart by a Yale University student who signed herself Elizabeth, Kaplow created the character of Elizabeth Weiland (Margaret Qualley), a 20-year-old undergraduate who’s formed a strong but platonic attachment to Hart. Hart, however, fancies that he’s in love with her even though he’s homosexual and much of their conversation is devoted to her accounts of romantic adventures with men her own age.

Hart’s own confidant is Sardi’s bartender, Eddie (Bobby Cannavale), who’s keeping him company before the Okahoma! party is due to begin. Elizabeth, too, is going to join him in the bar and while he waits, he treats Eddie to a monologue about the changing nature of Broadway musicals, his resentment of Hammerstein and his feelings for Elizabeth.

When Hawke first read Kaplow’s script, he was too young for the role. Not anymore. But his height remained a problem. He’s 29 centimetres taller than Hart – a difficulty that Linklater and his production team overcame in a variety of ways from lowering the bar stools to digging a trench in the floor. A supremely unflattering comb-over completes the effect.

It’s a bravura effort which has deservedly scored an Oscar nomination. Linklater, a director who’s never afraid of taking a chance, really goes out on a limb here and much of Hawke’s dialogue is delivered in long takes as a stream-of-consciousness outpouring of long-held regrets and frustrations. It also builds into a valediction, marking both the end of Hart’s career and the passing of his kind of musical theatre. At one point, he turns to the bar’s only other customer who turns out to be the New Yorker writer, E.B. White (Patrick Kennedy). Silent up to now, White joins Hart in a conversation which develops into shared paean of praise for the written word.

Andrew Scott plays Rodgers, infusing his fondness and admiration for his old friend and collaborator with a rueful exasperation over his chronic unreliability. He hasn’t yet given up on him – an act of faith which makes Linklater’s uncompromisingly idiosyncratic film even more poignant.