Film Carew: The Grand Budapest Hotel, Only Lovers Left Alive, In A World & More

Like all Jim Jarmusch films, Only Lovers Left Alive is a simple proposition: Vampires as Junkies. Tom Hiddleston and Tilda Swinton are the undead Adam & Eve, a visual Yin & Yang: he a Jack White doppelganger, uptight and unsmiling in head-to-toe black; she an albino apparition in all white, delightful even to telesales customer-service reps. They linger languorous in ramshackle ruins in the decaying wilds of Detroit and Tangier, surrounded only by records and books, musical instruments and ideas; waxing philosophical whilst waiting for their blessed fix. Each has their own doctor on hand as dealer, one who can supply them with the good stuff, pure blood untainted by rampant 21st-century toxicity. To make the metaphor even more explicit, when each take their 'hit', they flop, eyes rolling back in ecstasy, Jarmusch's god's-eye perspective hovering above them, as if inhabiting their reverie.

Amidst this minor premise, Jarmusch does as always: sustains scenes around droll jokes, favours slow takes, rifles through the history of art, and deals in the currency of cool. There's cool dudes and cool broads, cool cars and cool guitars; Hiddleston spending his undead nights making loner psychedelia and covertly releasing it with an anonymity (“180 gram vinyl, triple LP, all black, no printing”) that's sparked a Jandekian mystique. Jarmusch —who plays in Sqürl, collaborates with Jozef van Wissem, and curates ATP bills— makes Only Lovers Left Alive, with its vintage recording gear and White Hills/Yasmine Hamdan shows, as much about music as anything else. But, in a broader sense, it's about the making of all art; how the transcendent act of creation comes into conflict with vanity, insecurity, politics, and popular opinion when turned out unto the world. Jarmusch is clearly speaking through his characters, writing vampires having put him in a self-conscious mood; his lovers possessing the immortality that's the impetus for art immemorial.

In a world where feminist rom-coms are box offices successes... there's Lake Bell hoping

IN A WORLD…

Lake Bell takes centre-stage as writer/director/star of this affable indie rom-com, in which the insular world of professional voice actors —its title riffs on the classic 'Voice of God' pronouncement opening blockbuster trailers— is the setting for a family psychodrama big on bitterness, rivalry, and male insecurity. Fred Melamed plays Bell's father, a three-testicle patriarch who grows incensed when his daughter horns in on his trailer-voice-over racket. In both the family drama and the varying sexual intrigues (involving Demetri Martin and Ken Marino), Bell writes with a feminist slant, and this casts tired tropes in new light that's engaging, and at times even unexpected.

Puzzle this: "Where did I leave the base of the bed?"

CHINESE PUZZLE

Cédric Klapisch reunites the principle cast —Romain Duris, Audrey Tatou, Cécile de France, Kelly Reilly— from The Spanish Apartment and Russian Dolls, with a third, 10-years-on installment that may be the series' most interesting picture. The first was a slight, pleasant comic riff on 20-somethings studying abroad; the second was a lamentable take on the dire dude-turning-30-has-to-settle down sub-genre. After The Spanish Apartment worked with EU symbolism, Chinese Puzzle is a portrait of globalisation: Duris, the writer who serves as stand-in for the filmmaker, now 40, relocated to New York to be close to his kids post-divorce. It's a film about the messiness of a world of transient peoples and ephemeral unions, and how those seeking happiness need embrace chaos.

We like father, son and film

LIKE FATHER, LIKE SON

'Switched at birth' is a dramatic trope as old as time immemorial, but Hirokazu Kore-eda is the kind of filmmaker who can grant even the most questionable premise —like Air Doll's blow-up-sex-doll-comes-to-life hook— cinematic grace, thematic weight, and dramatic depth. Turning, as ever, away from the sensational, Kore-eda settles his story in the domestic: the swapped sons having spent six years being raised in contrasting situations (one in a rural, middle-class shambles amidst many children; the other in a single-child, upper-class, high-rise apartment of quietude and order). What we're essentially circling around the old 'nature vs nurture' debate: whether it's the genes or the environs that shapes a child, and bonds a family. Kore-eda is most interested in what that means in patriarchal Japan, where the first-born son is still a totem, and is unafraid to suggest that fatherhood may be, for some, work of pure vanity. But Kore-eda is a deft director of children (from Nobody Knows to I Wish), and the film, eventually, becomes about the feelings of the children being put thrown into the middle of this 'debate'.

"They can't actually see me, right? Coz, y'know I am in my nightdress still."

THE INVISIBLE WOMAN

Ralph Fiennes is in similar form in The Invisible Woman: his second directorial feature finding him playing Charles Dickens as an effusive raconteur and wound-up source of radiant life; a Literary Icon who works hard, plays hard, and falls hard for Felicity Jones's milquetoast waif. A family man of dull wife and endless reams of children, he's himself suspended in a fantastical childhood; unable to cope with the passions aroused by a girl who can unpack his work like a critic. Starched period-pieces about scandalous affairs are the stuff of rote tedium, but Fiennes shows himself to be an unexpectedly-thorough auteur: the film shot in lowlight interiors, sparsely scored, exquisitely sound-designed, and dotted by moments of keen cinematic grammar. There's hints of socio-realism, and even something leaning towards existentialism; screenwriter Abi Morgan less concerned with passion and scandal than suffering and isolation; yearning for love in a lonely world an attempted, momentary flight from mortality.