david-meldrum

Reminiscent of Inside Out - not surprising given that debut feature director Domee Shi has credits on both of those films - this takes the idea of turning into a giant red panda when emotions are heightened as a way of exploring puberty for adolescent girls. Funny and charming, and not afraid to be downright weird, it's well-intended and bound to be helpful for many girls experiencing the vagaries of that messiest of life-stages. But it may lack the greatness of the Inside Out films, and be a bit too liable to default to the bland animated film trope of the self-actualised, we're all OK as we are, type. It's fair to say my adolescent daughter likes it but doesn't love the film; she doesn't seem to connect with it in the way she does with the Inside Out films. But it may be, of course, that never having been an adolescent girl, there are things I'm missing.

I wasn't as persuaded by Call Me By Your Name - Guadagnino's previous, very successful film - as many others were. I found it took itself far too seriously, apart from one very important issue about its central premise which it didn't take anything like seriously enough. So I was pleased to discover quite how enjoyably this was.

A love triangle between two male tennis players and the wife/coach of one of them who also used to play, it threatens to be all surface and no depth. But it isn't. For a start the surface is quite something in and of itself - glistening with sweat, sex, wit, and the physicality of top-level sport, with a brilliant score from Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross. The cinematography is quite something, every trick in the book employed in a way that invites the viewer in rather than causing us to be pulled out of the narrative by visual artistry. The tennis sequences themselves are brilliantly staged, with real variety and intensity - the sequence from the point of view of the ball being simply staggering.

But what sets this apart is Zendaya's performance as the ex-pro/coach/wife/lover, not a submissive love interest being fought over, but a woman taking control of her body, her relationships, career and life, and more than able to pull all the strings she needs to achieve what she's set her mind on. It's a brave, captivating performance that lifts the film from entertaining surface enjoyment to a different space of gender politics and power dynamics.

All in all, a triumph - a surface sheen to die for, and Zendaya's strongly defined depths to meditate on.

It's many years on from War For The Planet Of The Apes, humans are reduced to the occasional band of scavengers, and apes rule. Two visions of what apes can and should be fight for supremacy, as much a war of ideas as weapons. As such, this fourth film in the rebooted franchise is a film talking about how we interpret politics and religion - how we fight for the 'right' interpretation of what has been handed down to us. It is a little overlong and attention testing at points; twenty to thirty minutes could probably be lost from the overall runtime to the film's benefit. But it's a good entry in what remains one of the most intelligent franchises around, with spectacle and ideas combining well. Freya Allan does a good job as the film's only human character of any note, but this series belongs to the huge supporting cast who have taken the ground-breaking baton handed on by Andy Serkis and run with it; this series continues to be a terrific example of story and character-driven effects work. The final set-up for subsequent films feels a little laboured, but the real test of that will come in whatever follows.