Tales of love, hate and eccentricity

The Last Bus is an offbeat story about a widowed pensioner (Timothy Spall) who travels from John O’Groats to Land’s End with his wife’s ashes in a suitcase. He uses only local buses. The people he meets on his journey – the longest one can make in Britain – help him deal with his loss.

Here Today is a gentle film about the friendship between a veteran comedy writer (Billy Crystal) and a street singer (Tiffany Haddish) that blossoms into love.

I Am Your Man, not to be confused with the 2005 documentary about Leonard Cohen, is a wacky tale about a woman who participates in an experiment that requires her to live with a humanoid robot.

Reminiscence is another strange one. Hugh Jackman plays a scientist using technology to relive his past and to find a lost love.

The Nest (Irish Film Institute) has Jude Law as an ambitious entrepreneur who leaves the comforts of his suburban American home and moves his family back to his native England. While living in a manor there he discovers some unpalatable truths about his marriage.

Don’t Breathe 2 is a sequel to a 2016 thriller, Don’t Breathe. Stephen Lang plays a man living in a remote cabin with a young girl he’s raised after she was orphaned in a fire in her house. His life is shattered when a group of kidnappers abduct her. When he goes in pursuit they discover he isn’t as quiet as he appears. Expect lots of violence.

Big Sky (Disney +) has a former policeman and a private detective trying to find two sisters who’ve been abducted by a serial killer on a remote Montana highway.

The Underground Railroad (Amazon Prime) features two runaway slaves finding a secret train that they hope will bring them across the Mason-Dixon line to freedom.

If you can put up with the terrible dubbing in the Argentinian film The Crimes That Bind (Amazon) it’s actually worth it. Nothing is more disturbing than a film about a woman who kills her baby but here the emphasis is more on what drives her to it than the gross nature of the act.

Aretha Franklin is immortalised in Aretha (Disney+), an eight part series spanning a half century of the soul singer’s life and career. Cynthia Erivo is a good lookalike for her.

Another legend, Isabelle Huppert, doesn’t seem to know the meaning of the word “retire”. She appears in Frankie, a film with a sad theme but a light touch, dealing with a terminally ill film star who decides to go on a final journey with her family. It’s the catalyst for many revelations.

Raya and the Last Dragon (Disney +) is set in the fantasy world of Kumandra. Here humans and dragons live together in harmony. The dragons have already saved humanity as the film begins. Now they’re threatened with extinction. Raya, a fearsome warrior, has to find the last one so they repeat such a redemption.