The five best films to watch over the summer holidays, including Hit Man

Hit Man (Netflix) Richard Linklater is such an assured filmmaker it can sometimes feel like he’s barely doing anything at all behind the camera, but you only have to compare his effortlessly cool film Hit Man to recent disaster The Fall Guy to see what a masterful director he really is. Where that film was a mess of annoying references, mindless action and simulated movie moments, Hit Man takes its titular movie trope, turns it on its head, and uses it to facilitate one of the sexiest and funniest romantic comedies in years (a low bar to be sure, but still…). Read the full review here

Challengers (Video on demand) Luca Guadagnino serves up an ace with Challengers, a sexy, funny, emotionally wrought tennis drama set during a single match, but encapsulating 13 years of friendship, rivalry and sexual misadventures. The players are Art Donaldson (West Side Story’s Mike Faist) and Patrick Zweig (Josh O’Connor) – the former a confidence-rattled top seed in need of a few easy wins en route the US Open, the latter a raffish also-ran scraping together a living on the less prestigious challengers circuit. That they have history is clear from the way they stalk each other on opposite sides of the court and keep eyeing up the same beautiful woman (Zendaya) watching closely from the crowd. Read the full review here

Poor Things (Disney+ and video on demand) “Readers who want a good story plainly told should go at once to the main part of the book.” So wrote Alasdair Gray in the faux introduction for Poor Things – and so director Yorgos Lanthimos obliges, sort of, with this entertainingly ribald adaptation. Excising the frame stories, the Glasgow setting and everything Scottish bar Willem Dafoe’s wavering accent, the Greek director of cult favourites Dogtooth and The Lobster has used the box office and Oscar-winning success of previous film The Favourite to bring the twisted story at the heart of Gray’s 1992 opus to life in sumptuous, phantasmagorical fashion. That story revolves around Bella Baxter (Emma Stone), whom we first glimpse from behind leaping from Tower Bridge in full technicolour and next see in monochrome, childlike and inquisitive, bashing away on a piano with her feet… Read the full review here

Hit Man

All of Us Strangers (Disney+ and video on demand) In his brilliant film All of Us Strangers, 45 Years director Andrew Haigh puts an usual spin on explorations of gay identity and family life with a high-concept conceit that initially hints at sci-fi, but turns out to be more of a ghost story about residual grief, one with the emotional kick of something like Truly, Madly, Deeply or Hirokazu Kore-eda’s After Life, but with darker elements that might also put you in mind of Don’t Look Now. Not that those reference points really do an adequate job of summing up what Haigh has accomplished here. Suffice to say, the film’s more fanciful elements are handled with such go-with-the-flow naturalism and confidence that it’s easy to accept the fact that it operates in a kind of dreamy liminal space, one that’s just decipherable enough to feel like you’ve got a handle on the plot, but just ambiguous enough to open up other possible interpretations long after its astonishing final scene plays out. Read the full review here

Love Lies Bleeding (Video on demand from 2 July)

A wild, audacious, crime-soaked love story, Love Lies Bleeding it takes its 1980s bodybuilding backdrop as a creative cue to deliver a pumped-up slice of entertainingly lurid pulp fiction. The sophomore feature of Saint Maud’s British writer/director Rose Glass, it casts Kristen Stewart as Lou, the mullet-sporting manager of a rundown New Mexico gym whose strained relationship with her gun-running father (a menacing Ed Harris) comes to a violent head with the arrival in town of Jackie (Katy O’Brian), an Oklahoma drifter en route to a bodybuilding contest in Las Vegas. Read the full review here