Taika Waititi's latest film sucks the emotion out of a beloved story

This month, claymation studio Laika delivers its first feature in more than five years, video games are back with Street Fighter, and another Colleen Hoover novel gets the cinema treatment in Verity.

Plus, Taika Waititi tackles a beloved story with Klara and the Sun, and Jane Austen's debut novel gets a face lift for a new generation.

• Clayface
• The History of Concrete
• Klara and The Sun
• Sense and Sensibility
• Street Fighter
• Wildwood
• Verity

Clayface

After the embarrassment of Marvel's Morbius (2022) and Kraven the Hunter (2024), you almost have to admire the hubris it takes to make a standalone supervillain movie these days.

The idea behind Clayface, initially pitched by horror filmmaker Mike Flanagan (Carrie), is genuinely solid: take a B-list Batman villain, dramatically scale down the budget of your regular superhero flick, and lean hard into creature feature thrills.

Tom Rhys Harries stars as Matt Hagen, a young Academy Award nominee who suffers an ugly encounter with a formidable Gotham kingpin (David Dencik) and leaves with a carved-up face.

Unceremoniously booted from Hollywood, he resorts to trialling for an experimental nanobot treatment designed by Naomi Ackie's brilliant scientist, Caitlyn.

The treatment appears to work, only for Hagen's face to melt off under severe emotional distress. There are benefits, though; the new flesh can repair itself and even sculpt itself into new identities.

In our current era of homogenised superhero flicks, director James Watkins (Speak No Evil) has made a gleefully grisly outing that firmly operates within its own genre space — but like its antihero, the film barely hangs together.

The gritty mob revenge arc is tiresome, while the love story between Caitlyn and Matt is undermined by dated gender tropes. There are, however, flashes of Hollywood satire that could have been in conversation with The Substance.

Those looking for a body horror spectacular have few choices this Halloween — assuming they have already seen the excellent Resident Evil. This more or less does the job.

• Jamie Tram

The History of Concrete

Things you might expect from the title: a report into the declining quality of modern buildings and roads, an interview with a guy whose job is to remove gum from the footpath, an explanation of the difference between concrete and cement.

Things you probably won't expect: a look behind the scenes at Hallmark movies, tattoo taxidermy, a 3,100-mile (5,000-kilometre) race around a single city block.

Documentary-maker John Wilson came to prominence with his HBO series How To with John Wilson, each episode of which approached its subject — from small talk to scaffolding — in a similarly idiosyncratic way. This movie works both as an extended version of that show and an examination of what it means to make and sell a documentary about a seemingly mundane topic like concrete without the backing of a major studio.

At one point in The History of Concrete, Wilson hires a cinematographer in another city to capture footage of a fast-food store. He receives drone footage, filmed in pristine hi-def, leading him to worry aloud that this is what all documentaries will become: pretty, top-down shots, completely divorced from the experience and strangeness of the everyday.

Wilson's own approach is the complete opposite: lo-fi and grounded. And by pointing his camera down — at footpaths, where he comes across the unexpected, like a guerilla fishpond, or at the members of society that a grander documentary would ignore — he discovers stories that should be too strange to be true and characters who are uniquely themselves.

Perhaps there are a few too many threads, and some connections can feel forced, but overall it's funny, good-natured, informative and insightful about a range of subjects. Including, occasionally, concrete.

• Sky Kirkham

Klara and The Sun

Japanese-British speculative fiction writer Kazuo Ishiguro is no stranger to cinematic re-imagining of his bestselling books, but Taika Waititi's overly mawkish, one-note adaptation of his eighth novel Klara and the Sun may be the worst one yet.

Solar-powered robot Klara (Jenna Ortega) is an AF (Artificial Friend) who pays daily felicitations to the glowing orb in the sky and yearns to be chosen as a child's lifelong companion. When she is finally selected by Josie (Mia Tharia) — a bright and troubled young woman who struggles with a mysterious illness — she's inducted into a fractured home seething with an undercurrent of dread, secrets and misunderstandings as she sets about trying to save Josie.

Ishiguro's original novel thrives on subtext and things left unsaid. Written in simple prose, the almost childlike cadence mimics the incomprehension of a robot learning about the intricacies of the world and humans for the first time.

Waititi's adaptation sacrifices subtlety and nuance for head-thumping whacks of exposition artlessly shoe-horned into the text. Everything is spelt out, but not much is revealed.

Inhabiting Klara with her wide-eyed naivety and awe-struck wonder, Ortega does the best with what she's given, but Tharia devolves into a stereotypical sulking teenager as Josie, and Amy Adams has a perennially odd countenance as Josie's mother.

Co-writers Waititi and Dahvi Waller have flattened the complexity, darkness and transcendence of the source material into something altogether more rote and saccharine. We don't learn so much about the deep, imperfect bonds that exist between humans and their obligations towards one another as we do journey along on a cliched journey of love, sacrifice and acceptance.

• Sonia Nair

Sense and Sensibility

Adaptations of Jane Austen's stories are often met with trepidation, but Georgia Oakley's Sense & Sensibility will satisfy.

When their father dies, the Dashwood women are turfed out of the family home. Amid changes, sensible Elinor (Daisy Edgar-Jones) meets honourable Edward Ferrars (George MacKay) and forms an instant connection, while impulsive Marianne ( Esmé Creed-Miles) is swept off her feet by the charming Willoughby (Frank Dillane). Together, the sisters navigate duty, desire, love and heartbreak.

Australian novelist Diana Reid, in a triumphant screenwriting debut, shifts the love story to sisterhood. The polar-opposite siblings must learn from each other's qualities in order to find balance. Creed-Miles is a revelation, playing Marianne with a visceral, modern feeling — proof that Regency women felt just as fiercely. Dillane is deliciously devilish, while MacKay and Herbert Nordrum's Colonel Brandon are suitably romantic.

There's a pleasing looseness throughout — Oakley and costume designer Grace Snell let everything breathe — from undone hair and borrowed clothing to sisters roaming freely through grassland, eating berries that stain their dresses. Oakley has said we can't know how women behaved in private, so why not imagine liberation? That freedom reaches the ball, where characters step outside of social norms, and dare we say it, touch. British choreographer Holly Blakeley makes the dancing sensual and at times primal.

Oakley's film happily bends the rules, making Austen's first published novel feel like her most modern. Sense & Sensibility (2026) is a visually stunning adaptation for a new generation.

• Ying-Di Yin

Street Fighter

Stunt casting, barely existent plot, tonal inconsistencies, goofy catchphrases, vaguely sexist dialogue: for a movie so obsessed with nostalgia, the only thing Street Fighter really gets right about the 90s is precisely how bad a certain type of action film was.

Inspired by the classic arcade game, the story begins with a flashback (the first of a series of animated segments, which are the highlight of the film) to 1987, where Ken (Noah Centineo) watches his friend Ryu (Andrew Koji) win the inaugural World Warrior tournament, but only at the cost of unleashing a dark power onto the world.

Six years later, Ryu is in hiding, and he and Ken are estranged, driven apart by the death of their master. 

M. Bison (David Dastmalchian), an evil dictator, launches the second edition of the tournament to draw Ryu out and steal his power for himself. 

Street Fighter is stuffed full of plot but forgets to have an actual story. Characters lack development, history, and even motivations. Allegiances come and go just long enough to get to the next scene, and cameos last just long enough for fans to feel serviced.

But this isn't a film you watch for the plot, and none of this would really matter if the fights were satisfying. There are a few well-choreographed scenes, and fans will enjoy seeing the characters' special moves brought to life. But too often, the editing is choppy, the fight action is built around video game nostalgia, and the outcome is rendered weightless by the storytelling: characters amass bruises, but everyone rebounds to full health pretty much immediately, and there are few lasting consequences from the combat.

The film doesn't even have the good manners to end in any meaningful way. The entire effort ends up being little more than a pre-title scene for the eventual sequel. Perhaps this will bomb badly enough that the follow-up doesn't eventuate.

• Sky Kirkham

Wildwood

Only a week after Greta Gerwig's Narnia trailer dropped, fans of YA fantasy epics have already had their prayers answered. 

Laika Studios — long renowned for expanding the possibilities of stop motion — have brought their tactile handmade craft to the jaw-dropping expanse of Wildwood. Each detail of its hidden kingdom is expressively animated by hand, spanning fiery battlefields and bustling villages populated by hundreds of bespoke puppets.

It has been a long time since a blockbuster inspired so much awe.

Impressively, the unprecedented scale of Wildwood's production never loses sight of its story. Portland teen Prue (Peyton Elizabeth Lee) and neighbourhood dork Curtis (Jacob Tremblay) embark on a breathless chase through the veil after a murder of crows kidnap Prue's baby brother, catching the attention of a wicked governess, Alexandra (Carey Mulligan), and her legion of musket-wielding coyotes.

It's tropey, yes, but what's immediately striking is director Travis Knight's (Kubo and the Two Strings) grown-up approach to its genre. This magical realm has been ravaged by war; the few friendly faces who greet our heroes are expendable. Those looking for a breezy Disney-esque fairytale may feel blindsided by its upsetting violence (though adorable talking animals are in abundance).

On the other hand, adolescents learning to come of age within a corrupt, decaying world will likely align with Prue's plight. Good old-fashioned heroism, in all its shapes and sizes, ultimately prevails.

Magic might not exist in our world, but what Wildwood has achieved with stop motion animation is the closest we may get to it.

• Jamie Tram

Verity

Enjoyment of Verity, the adaptation of Colleen Hoover's 2018 novel, largely comes down to how you feel about Dakota Johnson: for some, her persistently blasé, disaffected performances are effortlessly cool; for others, they're weird and off-putting. Her latest turn in Verity, as talented but unsuccessful writer Lowen Ashleigh, does nothing to overturn her reputation as aloof or robotic, but for many, that's the point.

When Lowen is hired to finish the last novel of recently paralysed literary superstar Verity Crawford (Anne Hathaway), she finds a confessional memoir detailing Verity's life of lies and sociopathy. The discovery makes her suspicious of the supposedly catatonic Verity and concerned for Verity's family — especially Verity's nice-guy husband (Josh Hartnett, relishing his dirtbag-dad renaissance).

The film cribs heavily from Alfred Hitchcock's 1940 adaptation of Daphne du Maurier's novel Rebecca, stripping away all nuance to ask the question: What if Rebecca kinda deserved it? The constant shifting between time periods as Lowen reads Verity's memoir might work on the page but is clumsily executed on-screen. Sound is a particular weak spot, with tense moments undercut by unresponsive soundscapes and an excessively melodramatic score by Volker Bertelmann.

It's impossible not to compare Verity to The Housemaid: both are adaptations of best-selling domestic thrillers with mid-2000s screen-sweethearts going full Joan Crawford as the villain, up against dire performances from big-name leads. What The Housemaid had that Verity doesn't is Paul Feig, a director who understands camp. Director Michael Showalter (The Eyes of Tammy Faye, The Big Sick) plays Verity completely straight, making for a film at odds with its ludicrous script.