Pixar’s wildly entertaining return plus other new movies to watch this week

Mabel (Piper Curda) is a miniature cyclone in human form who relentlessly torments her science professor, Dr Samantha Fairfax (Kathy Najimy), with her campaign. And she’s fascinated when she stumbles on Dr Fairfax’s latest research into animal behaviour. The professor and her team have come up with the means of temporarily transferring human brains into animatronic models of various animals. These are then sent off to communicate with the real thing. Naturally, Mabel snatches up an animatronic beaver from the lab, makes the necessary transfer and heads off to the pond, preparing to mingle.

Pixar was making animated comic creations out of animals and inanimate objects long before it ventured into the human world, and it has come up with an inspired bunch of furred, feathered and flying comedians this time round. Mabel begins by making a firm friend out of the beaver colony’s monarch, King George (Bobby Moynihan), an enlightened ruler who likes to brighten up his tribe every morning by leading them in a cheery aerobics session. And Meryl Streep goes into Margaret Thatcher mode to voice the Insect Queen, a hawkish butterfly with an inflated self-image who wants to go out and squish a few humans after being told about Mayor Jerry’s plans.

It’s a cautionary tale. Everybody is taught a few valuable lessons in interspecies relations by the time the dispute has been resolved, but for Mabel, it’s a coming-of-age tale. As well as learning about the benefits of moderation, she discovers that people – and animals – can change for the better and that compromise is an art.

Pixar has had a tough time lately with its efforts to make hits out of original stories rather than having to rely on sequels and spin-offs for box-office success. It’s been a while since its glory days and this one isn’t quite up there with the best, but it’s a wildly entertaining return to form.

Hoppers is in cinemas now

Anyway, now she’s out her first priority is to seek out Maria, with the aid of a friendly low-life played by Australia’s Angus Sampson, doing his gravel-voiced thing (Sampson fans stay calm: he’s only around for two scenes).

The information he supplies leads her to a hotel for the mega-rich known as The Virgil, which is a giveaway if you’re familiar with The Divine Comedy, since Virgil was Dante’s guide through the nine circles of hell, and the hotel has nine floors, which is all pretty cool, though perhaps not as cool as it sounded when Sokolov first thought of it – when he was 16, let’s suppose.

Never mind. Asia has already been warned there are nefarious things going on at the Virgil, where the hired help tends to disappear, the proprietors being careful to select undocumented immigrants and others who won’t be missed.

Still, when she steps through the door, the atmosphere of stagnation – symmetrically framed corridors stretching into the distance, carpeted in mouldy blue-green – suggests we might be in for a slow burn, more The Shining than John Wick.

That proves to be misdirection. I won’t get into spoilery details, but soon after, the story takes the first of its hard turns and becomes an open tribute to Kill Bill (here’s where the flashbacks filling in different characters’ backstories kick in). I would also wager that Sokolov is familiar with Gareth Evans’ modern martial arts classic The Raid, with Iko Uwais as the scrappy hero battling his way up the floors of an Indonesian apartment building, enabling the same set to be used over and over.

The story here also has an outright supernatural component, which opens up a lot more scope for gore, often achieved through old-fashioned practical effects, and harking back to the jokey tone of Evil Dead 2 or early Peter Jackson (there is, for instance, an eyeball that scuttles around on its own).

More in line with expectations for 2020s horror is an element of unsubtle social allegory, although I don’t know how seriously we can take an attack on the rich that’s backed by Warner Bros and features familiar Hollywood faces like Patricia Arquette and Heather Graham among its villains.

Seriousness, certainly, is a long way down Sokolov’s list of goals: he’s having fun, and hoping we are too. They Will Kill You is not on par with any of the sources it borrows from, and though the running time is tight and the pace relentless, my patience with its weightless silliness gradually ran out.

Still, I felt a degree of fellow feeling with its spirit, as if Sokolov were saying, breathlessly, aren’t movies great? Yes, Kirill, they are.

They Will Kill You is in cinemas now

These tics, nonetheless, are the source of nearly all the film’s comedy and drama. Up until the age of 12 or so, John is a well-liked, sociable lad, good at football and confident enough to ask a girl on a date in his first week at a new school. But then he starts jerking his head, yelping like a dog, and making bizarre obscene remarks, especially to his outraged teachers.

All this may be factually accurate, but I Swear is also something of a Cinderella story. The young John is caned at school, reprimanded at home, and humiliated everywhere – and no-one shows any sign of grasping the nature of his condition, which baffles him as much as anyone else.

When we jump forward over a decade, things haven’t much improved, with the unemployed John still living at home with his controlling mum Heather (Shirley Henderson). But gradually he turns his life around with the help of a far more positive mother figure (Maxine Peake), a former mental health nurse who makes it her business to develop his potential.

All this is managed with a degree of nuance, at least where the performances are concerned: Henderson is careful not to make Heather into an outright villain, while still showing us how the character weaponises her misery.

But at nearly two hours the film plods a bit. Jones has no qualms about using John’s condition to supply a burst of anarchic energy whenever the inspirational formula threatens to flag, but he plays it safe when it comes to the more difficult questions presented by the material, in particular whether John’s tics reveal anything meaningful about him as a person.

The reasonable, compassionate answer has to be that they’re simply a matter of misfiring signals in the brain. Still, the experience of watching I Swear is an oddly divided one, in which John’s bad language – sometimes accompanied by actions such as hitting or spitting at his loved ones – offers a sort of jeering running commentary on the movie’s earnest good intentions.

I Swear is in cinemas now