Is it school holidays yet? because it feels like it with four new movies debuting this Friday. That’s not including the one-performance-only screening of pop opera Miley Cyrus: Something Beautiful on the evening of 27 June; South African Indian actioner Run for your life 3; and hour-long Peppa Meets The Baby Cinema Experience, which encourages dancing and singing along.
Plus, you can watch Shrek 2 again on the big screen, along with Kiera Knightly’s version of Pride & Prejudice at select Ster Kinekor theatres, which are also screening a recording of Rossini’s opera The Barber of Seville. Finally, you have until this Sunday to catch the last few days of the annual Encounters Documentary Film Festival at the V&A and Labia in Cape Town, and The Zone @ Rosebank and Bioscope in Johannesburg.
Leading the new features pack this week is high-octane sports drama F1. Brad Pitt plays Sonny Hayes, a washed-up driver who is approached by the owner (Javier Bardem) of a struggling Formula 1 team to return to the Grand Prix circuit and mentor the team’s hotshot rookie (Damson Idris). Does Sonny have one last shot at glory… and redemption? If this is sounding familiar, Top Gun: Maverick’s Joseph Kosinski is in the director’s seat. Created in collaboration with the motorsport’s governing body, you can also watch F1 on IMAX.
Surprise 2022 horror hit M3GAN returns with M3GAN 2.0, which seems to be dialling down the chills and ramping up the campy action that earned the original film a cult following. With M3GAN’s robotic and AI technology stolen and used by a defence contractor to create a deadly military android called Amelia (Ivanna Sakhno), M3GAN’s creator Gemma (Allison Williams,) is forced to rebuild, upgrade and unleash the sassy doll to save the day. But can the ex-doll contain her murderous tendencies?
Ben Foster heads up the cast of psychological thriller Sharp Corner, where a man becomes obsessed with how the sharp corner in front of his new home is responsible for fatal car accidents. Fixated on saving lives, our antihero starts to slip into madness, placing his wife (Cobie Smulders) and son in jeopardy, and threatening to permanently break the family apart. This one has been described as deeply unsettling and enjoyably ambiguous.
Animated adventure Jungle Beat 2: The Past serves as the sequel to 2020 film Jungle Beat: The Movie, and comes from Sunrise Productions, the South African computer animation studio that birthed the multi-media Jungle Beat franchise and its spin-off shows Munki and Trunk and The Explorers. This time, the African animals fall through a time portal and, to return home, must get help from dinosaurs with their own problems: cave alien invasion!