Ten films to watch this February

Jackass Forever

Prepare to laugh, wince, scream, and thank your lucky stars that you don’t have to sustain severe injuries for a living. Twenty years after the release of the first Jackass film, and 12 years since the third (with only a Bad Grampa spin-off coming between that and this), Johnny Knoxville and his sado-masochistic skater buddies are back. Once again, they perform a riotous series of elaborate pranks and painful-looking stunts, some of them masterminded by Spike Jonze, but these days they take longer to recover.

The gang have been attacked by snakes, bees, spiders and more, and in this film, a grey-haired Knoxville was at the sharp end of an angry bull which put him in hospital. “I got a broken wrist, broken rib, concussion and brain haemorrhage,” he told Variety. “My cognitive skills took a couple of months to come back. I was walking and talking and carrying on a conversation, but I wasn’t 100% for three months.” Talk about suffering for your art.

Released internationally on 4 February

Cyrano

The latest adaptation of Edmond Rostand’s play is a lavish period musical, written by Erica Schmidt and directed by Joe Wright (Darkest Hour, Atonement). Its most striking aspect, though, is that it stars Peter Dinklage as Cyrano de Bergerac, the aristocratic 17th-Century soldier who is afraid to declare his love for the beautiful Roxanne (Hayley Bennett).

The actor is 4ft 5in (1.35m), so it is Cyrano’s height, rather than his long nose, which makes him self-conscious. Jennie Kermode in Eye For Film says that Dinklage fits the “classic role so perfectly that it might have been written for him,” going on to say he “convinces as an individual vastly more intelligent than almost everyone else around him”. Kermode calls the film “Cyrano de Bergerac as it was meant to be… an unmissable piece of cinema.”

Released on 24 February in Australia and New Zealand, and 25 February in the UK, Ireland and the US

Marry Me

In Marry Me, Jennifer Lopez plays Kat Valdez, a Jennifer Lopez-like pop megastar, and Colombian singer and actor Maluma plays Bastian, a Maluma-like pop megastar. They plan to tie the knot on stage during a concert, but when Kat learns that Bastian has been unfaithful to her, just before the big moment, she picks divorced maths teacher Charlie (Owen Wilson) and announces that she will marry him instead.

“It’s pretty far-fetched,” the director, Kat Coiro, admitted to Vanity Fair. “But… the coincidences that have to happen to bring two people together are pretty substantial. Crazier things have happened.” Actually, no, they haven’t. But if Lopez and Wilson want to revive the big-budget, high-concept Hollywood rom-com with an update of Notting Hill, we’re happy to accept their proposal.

Released internationally on 11 February

The Duke

In 1961, Goya’s portrait of the Duke of Wellington was stolen from London’s National Gallery, but the thief was no international criminal kingpin. In fact, the painting was swiped by an eccentric 60-year-old taxi driver and aspiring screenwriter, Kempton Bunton (Jim Broadbent), as a protest against the government’s neglect of UK pensioners.

This stranger-than-fiction yarn has been turned into a loveable comedy co-starring Helen Mirren as Bunton’s wife. Jo-Ann Titmarsh of HeyUGuys says that The Duke tells “an incredible story very entertainingly… thanks to the screenplay by Richard Bean and Clive Coleman, which whizzes along at a fine pace… It is as sweet as the ginger snaps the Buntons dunk into their tea but is never cloying.” Now, though, The Duke is more bittersweet than sweet, as the film’s director, Roger Michell (Notting Hill, Venus), died in September 2021, making this his penultimate film.

Released on 25 February in the UK and Ireland

Moonfall

Sometimes, you go to the cinema to see a nuanced exploration of the human condition. But sometimes you go to see a blockbuster in which a Nasa official (Halle Berry) and a disgraced astronaut (Patrick Wilson) hijack a space shuttle after discovering that the Moon is actually a “megastructure” built by evil aliens.

With a premise like that, it’s hardly surprising that Moonfall is directed by Roland Emmerich, the maker of such sci-fi mass-destruction spectaculars as Independence Day, Godzilla, and The Day After Tomorrow. “On the one hand, this is a disaster movie,” he told Entertainment Weekly, “but it’s also a space movie; it’s about space exploration and doing crazy things like flying inside the Moon. On the other hand, on Earth, their kids are getting into serious trouble. It’s the best of both worlds.”

Released internationally on 4 February

The Souvenir: Part II

Joanna Hogg’s The Souvenir was a coming-of-age drama about a naive film student, Julie (Honor Swinton Byrne), who has a tragic relationship with a suavely mysterious older man (Tom Burke) in 1980s London. But that was just half the story. In the sequel, Julie is working on a student film about her ex-boyfriend, so on one level The Souvenir: Part II is about the making of The Souvenir: Part I.

Based on Hogg’s own experiences, and starring Swinton Byrne’s own mother, Tilda Swinton, this intricate tapestry of fact and fiction was named the best film of 2021 by Sight and Sound magazine – just as The Souvenir was the magazine’s best film of 2019. “Much of the joy in The Souvenir: Part II,” says Melissa Anderson at 4 Columns, “lies in witnessing the once passive, tentative young woman plunge headlong into creative projects, friendships, and romantic dalliances, all the while trying to make sense of the troubled man who had ensorcelled her.”

Released on 4 February in the UK and Ireland

Death on the Nile

After years of delays, Kenneth Branagh and his humongous moustache return for a second Hercule Poirot adventure. Like 2017’s Murder on the Orient Express, it’s a star-studded affair, with Gal Gadot, Annette Bening, Letitia Wright, Armie Hammer, Dawn French and Jennifer Saunders among the suspects and victims aboard an Egyptian paddle steamer. But Branagh promises that Death on the Nile will be racier than the typical Agatha Christie whodunnit.

“For me the inspirations were noir classics, Dial M For Murder, Double Indemnity and latter-day pictures, Body Heat, even Fatal Attraction,” he told Empire. “These hot, lusty atmospheres.” A digitally de-aged Branagh will also appear as a 22-year-old Poirot in World War One flashbacks. “We get a chance to see not only what forged Poirot in the roughly-toughty world that people might not imagine him to have engaged with, but also in the affairs of the heart.”

Released internationally on 11 February

The Worst Person in the World

The Norwegian answer to Noah Baumbach’s Frances Ha, The Worst Person in the World “is a sweet, sad, extremely funny character study that gets to the heart of how it feels to be on the cusp of true adulthood and completely ambivalent about it,” writes Hannah Strong at Little White Lies.

Its heroine is Julie (Renate Reinsve, who won the best actress prize at Cannes), a 20-something who lives in Oslo. Over the course of Joachim Trier’s poignant and inventive comedy drama, she flits between different boyfriends and different career paths, trying to work out how she feels about love, sex, family, work and politics. “From a riotous shrooms trip to an awe-inspiring romantic sequence with shades of magical realism,” says Strong, “it’s as messy and unpredictable as love itself.”

Released on 4 February in the US and 10 February in The Netherlands and Portugal

Jeen-Yuhs: A Kanye Trilogy

In 1998, Clarence “Coodie” Simmons met a 21-year-old rapper in Chicago. Simmons was so taken by his talent and confidence that he resolved to make a documentary about him. Of course, he didn’t imagine that the young musician would soon be one of the biggest stars in the world, but his new friend, Kanye West, now known as Ye, had little doubt that it would happen.

Almost a quarter of a century later, this three-part documentary chronicles West’s phenomenal career, but much of it consists of candid footage of him in his early 20s, before the Grammy Awards, the Kardashians, and the presidential campaign. “It wants you to awe at his hustle (you will),” says David Ehrlich at IndieWire, “be inspired by how he forced the world to see him in the same heavenly light in which he sees himself (it’s complicated), and recognise that West’s polarising complexities are what make him such an invaluable artist… almost five hours flew by like one and could have held my attention for 10 more just like them.”

Released in three weekly 90-minute parts on Netflix, the first coming on 16 February

BigBug

Amélie was one of the most internationally successful French films ever made, but that didn’t help its director, Jean-Pierre Jeunet, get his new film off the ground. “I have been toting this script around in France for four years,” said Jeunet on his website, “and it has been rejected by all (as were Delicatessen and Amélie in their time)… because, obviously, a French comedy with robots doesn’t fit in a nice, tidy box.”

Luckily for us, Netflix stepped in. Jeunet’s first film in almost a decade, BigBug is an offbeat science-fiction satire set in the year 2045, when artificially-intelligent androids revolt against the human race, and four servant robots lock their owners in their suburban home. “The fact that BigBug will not be released in theatres is not a problem,” promised Jeunet, “because… it is particularly suitable for small screens and TV.”

On Netflix from 11 February