New movies to watch: Glen Powell’s dark comedy, a Charli XCX mockumentary, Maggie Gyllenhaal’s Frankenstein and a docudrama

In the original, set among the Edwardian upper classes, you could relax and overlook the callousness of this concept – not to mention its blatant political incorrectness – because the airy urbanity of the performances and Guinness’s shape-shifting skills placed the action in some rarefied realm safely removed from the reality of everyday life.

The new film is also full of rich, privileged, bigoted people but we’ve seen so much of contemporary upper-class New York in movies that it’s anchored by an air of familiarity. And there’s no Guinness.

Instead, we have glamour boy Glen Powell doing his best to camouflage the cruelty of his plotting with charm, together with the knowledge that he’s an underdog out to take revenge for the neglect he has suffered at the hands of his fabulously wealthy relatives.

The narrative unfolds in flashback from a prison cell, where Powell’s Becket Redfellow is facing imminent execution for murder. He’s talking to a priest but his confession becomes his life story, starting with his mother’s illegitimate pregnancy. Her flinty old father, Whitelaw Redfellow (Ed Harris), disowns her because she’s choosing to keep her baby. And after the sudden death of her new husband, she becomes a single mother, filling the young Becket’s mind with tales of the inheritance which should rightfully become his one day. Then she, too, dies. Becket is now an orphan, and after his grandfather refuses to help him, he’s swept into the foster care system.

When we catch up with him again, he’s working in a tailor’s shop in Manhattan and still nurturing dreams of coming into the Redfellow fortune. And it’s not long before he starts calculating the number of family members who must die before that becomes possible.

There are a few laughs in all this. Powell makes a likeable lead and the action sequences are reasonably inventive with some adroit bits of choreography, but none of this outweigh the plot’s fundamental flaws. Some of them stem from sloppy logic, but most of the characters are underdrawn and the twists are clumsily contrived. By the time it had completed its many convolutions, I had lost patience and was thinking nostalgically of the original.

Having long outlived his creator, the monster (Christian Bale) now goes by “Frank,” which is how he introduces himself to the skittish Dr Euphronious (Annette Bening), at first covering his face to hide his stitches and scars.

After more than a century of celibacy, Frank now craves a companion of his own kind, which is to say a woman brought back from the dead. The doctor initially baulks, but with her credibility as a mad scientist at stake, eventually accepts the challenge.

In turn, the newly resurrected Bride (Jessie Buckley) doesn’t instantly view Frank as the man of her dreams. But she gradually adjusts to his desires, under the pressure of circumstance and the mistaken belief that they were husband and wife even before her supposed “accident”.

All this is happening in the Chicago of 1936, the height of the gangster era. Soon this misbegotten pair will be racing across the country like Bonnie and Clyde, pursued by vengeful mobsters as well as a forward-thinking police detective (Peter Sarsgaard) who shows his nice-guy bona fides by letting his secretary (Penelope Cruz) do his work for him.

Say what you want about The Bride!, it doesn’t lack for ideas. Buckley has a second role as Mary Shelley, the original creator of this entire fictional universe, ranting from a black-and-white netherworld and occasionally appearing to the Bride in dreams. The director’s brother Jake Gyllenhaal shows up as a movie star in a subplot that amounts to an extended tribute to the Puttin’ On The Ritz sequence from Young Frankenstein, although there really is no topping the original.

Bale’s witty performance as the slow but mostly well-meaning Frank is consciously in the Boris Karloff tradition (as is his makeup). But there’s an absence in the middle of all the hubbub. Where we ought to feel the Bride’s synapses fizzing, Buckley seems tentative, as if struggling to get a handle on the character she’s meant to be playing.

In the circumstances, this is understandable. Sometimes the Bride seems to speak directly for Gyllenhaal herself, schooling men on the importance of consent. Yet often she passively goes along with Frank’s plans, including letting him drag her to the same movie over and over.

Granted, we’re talking about an amnesiac with no clear sense of her own identity. But even so we’re a long way from the feral quality of Emma Stone in Poor Things, another nominally feminist Frankenstein riff, or even the verve of Margot Robbie’s Harley Quinn, who belongs to a different branch of the same family tree.

In principle, the Bride is a single individual, in contrast to Frank, who was assembled from bits and pieces of multiple corpses. But as a fictional creation, she never adds up to a cohesive whole, any more than does the movie bearing her name.

Hind, the last survivor, then spent more than an hour on the phone with staff at an emergency dispatch centre run by the Palestinian Red Crescent Society on the West Bank, who undertook to send an ambulance as fast as possible.

Set over a couple of hours in a single location, The Voice Of Hind Rajab is a dramatisation of their efforts that borrows much of its technique from Hollywood thrillers and equivalent TV shows, with handheld camerawork and sympathetic characters racing to save the day.

The real-life emergency operator, Omar Alqam, is played by Palestinian actor Motaz Malhees as a charismatic maverick whose mounting distress we’re invited to share, especially when he’s raging against colleagues who insist everything be done by the book.

Hind herself remains offscreen, aside from a few photos. But it’s here Ben Hania makes her boldest move, for better or worse. As we’re told at the outset, the voice we hear on the other end of the line belongs to the actual Hind Rajab, sourced from the recording of her call (with her mother’s permission).

There is a calculated moral gamble. Ben Hania evidently feels that in desperate times, it’s necessary to bypass normal procedures, just as Omar does: there are moments when the character seems to be arguing for the film’s right to exist, as when he points out that images of the bodies of children killed in Gaza are all over social media.

I found the use of raw reality within what amounts to a traditional suspense framework not so much offensive as jarringly misjudged, rendering the craft of Ben Hania and her team beside the point (this includes the actors, however talented they might be).

Whatever I might feel listening to the desperate pleas of a young child in the last hours of her life, it has nothing in common with how I might respond to a work of art. Nor, certainly, does the experience qualify as entertainment.