‘I had no interest in teen vampire films and turned it down five times. But Joel Schumacher promised I wouldn’t have to wear the makeup and teeth, or have to fly around. Of course, he lied’

Joel Schumacher, the director, wanted me in the movie right from the first time we met. But the script I read was nothing like the magical movie it would become after rewrites and production, and I had no interest in teenage vampire films. So I turned it down about five times – but Joel was determined. He spent weeks explaining his vision, a mix of horror and comedy, and eventually wore me down. We made a deal: he promised I wouldn’t have to wear the makeup, the teeth or have to fly around. Of course, he lied.

A wedding with a dark secret is at the heart of this strange, silly action movie, dragged out by abrupt flashes forward and back

You can’t say the title doesn’t warn you. Quoting the darkest part of the traditional wedding vow and revolving around both matrimony and mortality, this quite silly, rather weird action movie starts with an unnamed bride (Natalie Burn) and groom (Ser’Darius Blain) preparing to walk down the aisle. But before the Wedding March can start, the film cuts to a different point in time where the couple in question are frolicking on the Puerto Rican beach where the film is set and shot. They go to a bar where they meet another, older couple (Jason Patric and Nicole Arlyn) and then another crash cut jumps us to yet another point in the story when the bride is running away from her husband, but is pursued by all seven of the groomsmen from the wedding – including the menacing, misogynist best man (Cam Gigandet) who keeps insisting on reciting his big speech, even as he prepares to kill the bride herself.

Turns out – and stop reading here if you don’t like spoilers – that the bride, groom, and everyone in the wedding party, even the randoms met in the bar, belong or have belonged to another one of those insidious assassination networks like the one in the John Wick franchise and other movies. This one is called the University, which is mildly droll given how dim-witted many of the groomsmen assassins turn out to be. Our girl, still in her skintight lace wedding dress, which gets progressively more blood-stained as the film goes on, battles each one in turn as they stalk her around a fancy villa where she’s hiding out. One starts to wonder who the film-makers think their ideal viewer is supposed to be – perhaps survivors of abuse who dream of wielding broken bottles and chainsaws on men who’ve wronged them?

Best known for her work in 1950s sci-fi, the actor also took supporting roles in films including Bigger Than Life and Magnificent Obsession

Barbara Rush, the female lead of 1950s sci-fi horror It Came from Outer Space, has died aged 97. Her daughter Claudia Cowan, a reporter for Fox News, told Fox News Digital : “My wonderful mother passed away peacefully at 5:28 this evening. I was with her this morning and know she was waiting for me to return home safely to transition.”

Born in Denver in 1927, Rush grew up in Los Angeles and, after studying theatre at the University of California, Santa Barbara, was signed to Paramount Pictures . After making her screen acting debut in The Goldbergs – a big-screen spinoff of the popular radio and TV series – Rush’s breakthrough role came in 1951 in the Oscar-winning sci-fi picture When Worlds Collide , as the daughter of an astronomer attempting to warn humanity they are doomed by a rogue star on a crash course with Earth.

Every pop star gets his own special power in this delightfully goofy Hong Kong action caper

Make no mistake, this caper-heist comedy from Hong Kong, starring all 12 members of the Cantopop outfit Mirror, is pure nonsense, but deliciously so. Presumably intended to tickle the fancy of Mirror’s many fans all over the world, even viewers who’ve never heard of this massive-selling pop group might be amused by the sheer silliness and unintentional campness of it all. As a plus, it’s practically a lookbook for a number of current menswear fashion brands.

The main conceit is that the lads are all members of a secret crime-busting fraternity called the League of Kaito who apparently, per the subtitles: “Hustle in hush, make everyone’s life better.” Which is nice. They are dispatched on missions by an unseen boss, sort of like Charlie’s Angels but with more tracksuits and (fractionally) less eyeliner. An opening montage introduces each of member of the league in turn, who all happen to have the same first names as the Mirror group members in real life, making it easier for the fans to follow their favourite.

After being catapulted to the big time with Drive My Car, the director’s next film Evil Does Not Exist has helped him escape the pressure of his success – and is designed to retain an air of the unknown

The winter sky in the opening shot of Ryûsuke Hamaguchi’s Evil Does Not Exist is a brilliant white, seen through a tangle of spindly tree branches. Set against a radiant orchestral score, the scene looks sublime. But then a dissonant note is heard in the music. Then another. Not everything is as it seems.

“I started from a place of not knowing anything,” Hamaguchi says of his new film, which sets up a paradisal image of nature to then unsettle it. He speaks with a humility that belies his standing as one of Japan’s most celebrated auteurs. It was late 2021, he recalls; his previous film, Drive My Car , had been released (and would soon be the surprise hit of awards season, walking away with the Oscar for best international feature film). The musician Eiko Ishibashi, who scored Drive My Car, asked the director if he could provide background visuals for her tour. Hamaguchi, a longtime city-dweller, visited her at her studio in the countryside. Inspiration struck as he listened to her music against the sweeping landscapes.

A biologist, a postal worker and a farmer are a charismatic trio at the heart of a documentary that builds an emotional connection between film-maker and subject

Bordering Poland and Slovakia, Stuzhytsya is a remote, sleepy village situated near the Carpathian mountains in Ukraine; it literally means “cold place”. Within the already tiny local population, there exists a gender imbalance: most of the men have left for better job opportunities in the EU and elsewhere. Centring on the women who have stayed behind, Maksym Melnyk’s documentary is an intimate exploration of the hopes, dreams and loneliness that swell in a place seemingly forgotten by the outside world.

Initially observational in style, the film introduces us to a charismatic trio of women. Nelya, a biologist, sweetly lights up whenever she comes across a pile of animal excrement, rich with valuable samples for her sadly underfunded research into the ecosystem of insects. The lack of government support also plagues Maria, Stuzhytsya’s only postal worker. In charge of distributing meagre pensions to the villagers, she is constantly anxious about the lack of stamps provided by the state. Such a shortage would mean a delay in welfare support, which would be catastrophic for the residents.

Eduardo Williams’ opaque sequel follows a group of twentysomethings in Sri Lanka, Peru and Taiwan with a 360-degree VR camera

Following his Locarno festival-winning experimental film The Human Surge in 2016 , Argentinian director Eduardo Williams apparently couldn’t be bothered with part two – which doesn’t exist – and skips straight to number three. That’s also the opaque MO with which he operates in this similarly continent-hopping odyssey; a bleary trail of hopeful and restless peregrinations and chat from three groups of twentysomethings in Sri Lanka, Peru and Taiwan, who often stray without warning into each other’s segments while declaring things like: “I want to see maps of nearby regions and listen to the dreams of my crazy friends.”

Filmed with a 360-degree VR camera that orbits around these pilgrims, a full-blown digital-age existential crisis seems to be in force here. People bemoan bullshit jobs, parse language disparities, contemplate post-tsunami building methods in Sri Lanka. Winding their way to a possible jungle utopia, the Peruvians fret about the local hazards: maybe “mega-billionaires” are living up in the tree canopy. Less defined characters than particles in search of a fixed state, they briefly find one at the end of the forest trail. Suspended in heavenly river water, the talk turns lightly erotic as they pair off into same-sex couples.

Forbes Masson stars in Gary McNair’s version of the gothic novella, Tim Key joins Kitson in an Old Vic two-hander and Jason Manford celebrates all musicals great and small

Robert Louis Stevenson’s ever-compelling “strange case” becomes a solo play, adapted by Gary McNair and performed by Forbes Masson at Dundee Rep earlier this year. Directed by Michael Fentiman, it is the latest addition to Original Theatre ’s impressive collection.

Playing best friends and neighbours whose friendship is destroyed by tragedy, the star leads are ill served by a clunky screenplay

This 60s suburbia-set psychological thriller from French director Benoît Delhomme drops Hitchcock references at the same rate that housewives Celine (Anne Hathaway) and Alice (Jessica Chastain) serve each other passive-aggressive trays of perfectly manicured canapés (pretty much every other scene). From the highly strung Bernard Herrmann -alike score to the coiffed spiral of Alice’s platinum blond hair, to the fact that the film opens with a curtain-twitching character spying through a rear window, Mothers’ Instinct (a remake of the 2018 Belgian film Duelle ) goes beyond Hitch-homage and veers into parody. But the film’s fawning admiration for the work of the Master of Suspense only serves to highlight how heavy-handed the plotting is by comparison.

It’s a pity that the screenplay stumbles, because Chastain and, in particular, Hathaway take to the melodramatic register of the piece like olives to an ice-cold martini. They play next-door neighbours and besties whose close friendship is knocked off kilter after a freak accident results in a tragic death. A film about two immaculately groomed women gaslighting and goading each other to the point of madness should be a lot more fun than this.