Riddle of Fire (USA 2023: Dir Weston Razooli)

Do you remember when you were young, when the summers stretched out in endless days of carefree splendour, when you and your mates plundered your collective imaginations to create play stories that you adapted and constantly changed in response to what was happening around you?

Yeah, me neither, but Weston Razooli does and in his first meandering, witty and at times almost formless feature, he brings that childish sense of wonder to our screens.

In Ribbon, Wyoming, three young people - Alice (Phoebe Ferro), Hazel (Charlie Stover) and Jodie (Skyler Peters) - going by the collective name of 'The Three Immortal Reptiles', break into a warehouse and liberate a brand new interactive video game. 

When they get it home and plug it in, they find out that the host TV has been passworded; and only Hazel and Jodie's mother (Danielle Hoetmer) knows what it is, but she's sick in bed. Mum does a deal with the kids; if they can bring her back a blueberry pie from the local store, she'll fess up with what they need.

But a simple task becomes effortlessly complicated. First the store has no pies; the baker is off sick, and a visit to her house for the recipe ends up in a quest for the ingredients, including a special egg. There's some stowing away, a trip to Magic Mountain and a run in with The Enchanted Blade Gang, led by Anna-Freya Hollyhock, an evil witch (Lio Tipton) and her daughter Petal, a forest sprite (Lorelei Mote).

The Three Immortal Reptiles

If all this sounds rather whimsical you bet it is, but the blissed out 16mm photography and the Sid and Marty Krofft style setup, not to mention fabulous performances from the three kids, make this one a real oddity. 

Granted at nearly two hours the shaggy dog story, which runs out of steam more than once, could do with a little grooming, but there's always something going on in the corners of the frame, and Ferro, Stover and Peters are fabulously natural (actually it feels like most of this was ad libbed). 

In fact Riddle of Fire has something of the feel of an early John Waters movie except that everyone keeps their clothes on and nobody licks dog shit. There's a certain knowingness that undercuts the charm here, and the inclusion of Riz Ortolani's rather out of place theme from Cannibal Holocaust supports this. 

Riddle of Fire will be released in UK cinemas on 7 June 2024.

Oh and you can play a Riddle of Fire shoot 'em up game over on Razooli's website here.

Founders Day (USA 2023: Dir Erik Bloomquist)

Bloomquist's previous features have included some smart takes on the horror genre, including 2020's Ten Minutes to Midnight and the following year's Night at the Eagle Inn. 

Founders Day is a slasher fashioned in a decidedly post Scream way, fitting right in with the most recent instalments of that franchise.

Against a political backdrop in the small fictional town of Fairwood (in reality New Milford in upstate New York), two politicians are slugging it out in the lead up to Mayoral elections and a forthcoming tricentennial. Present incumbent Blair Gladwell (Amy Hargreaves) is facing opposition from the slick Harold Faulkner (Jayce Bartok) who is worried about the impact on his reputation from his out lesbian daughter Melissa (Olivia Nikkanen) and her girlfriend - who is also black - Allison (Naomi Grace). The Montague and Capulets situation is exacerbated by Melissa's brother Adam (Devin Druid) having dated Gladwell's daughter Lilly (Emilia McCarthy)

When Melissa is attacked by a killer with a mask, her body thrown over a bridge into the fast moving river, everyone assumes that she's dead; the town responds with horror and there's a request to postpone the tricentennial celebrations. But the (political) show must go on, and as the subplots pile up, and characters reveal their collective back stories, it looks like no-one in the town is safe.

The movie wears its cynical heart very much on its sleeve; despite the attempts of the politicians to engender respect, small town life seems to revolve around petty rivalries and people being mean to other people. No one is likeable here.

The killer - sporting a Founders wig and wielding a gavel that doubles as a knife - is a threatening presence, but the overall animosity on display means that his actions become just one more nasty thing in a community of horrible people; clearly the social media trend of forcing binary opposites  - pick a side! - seems to be a significant contributor. A lollipop sucking (please!) police chief, Commissioner Peterson (Catherine Curtin) proves fairly useless as the body count rises, but in the end that's irrelevant; the killer reveal comes too quickly in the movie, ruining the pacing and making the thing about half an hour too long. 

Where Founder's Day does have something to say is in the inanity of contemporary political discourse, although its script isn't smart enough to fully exploit this, and it doesn't have the resources to convince the audience of a town in crisis, what with sparsely populated crowd scenes and a shallow plot. Rather disappointing. 

La Chimera (Italy/France/Switzerland/Turkey 2023: Dir Alice Rohrwacher)

Josh O'Connor (looking a little like Jean-Paul Belmondo in the movie's poster) is Arthur, who when we first meet him, dishevelled in his white suit and snoozing on a train, is newly released from prison. He's woken by the ticket inspector and provides, not the usual proof of travel, but a letter of passage from his previous custodian. His crumpled good looks pique the interest of three local girls travelling in the same compartment; Arthur compares the profile of one to something ancient, which intrigues them further. But their interest wanes quickly when a cheeky travelling salesman, pointing out that Arthur is not exactly box fresh, receives a duffing up from the ex con. 

It's a brilliant start to a film which pretty much summarises what to expect in the next two hours; mysterious, beguiling but always humane. It's the late 1980s - rather accurately depicted in terms of the costumes - and Englishman Arthur is on his way back to his friends, although he eschews their plans for a homecoming party in favour of returning to his home; literally a tin shack on the side of a hill, in which examples of his 'trade' are placed. For Arthur has a skill of being able to dowse accurately to pinpoint the location of hidden artefacts. This talent is referred to as a chimera in the movie, whereas the real meaning of that word suggests something which is hoped for or illusory; an accurate definition of the whole film. 

Arthur of course has a hidden sorrow; thoughts of a lost love, Beniamina (Yile Yara Vianello). While his friends wait for Arthur to return to their lucrative scavenging gig, he seeks out his former lover's mother, the mysterious Flora (Isabella Rossellini), who lives in a decaying Tuscan villa surrounded by a group of young women who may be relatives and also refer to her as 'mum'. Attending Flora is the meek housekeeper, Italia (Carol Duarte), who in turn has secret children and who nurses a desire to sing, albeit an ill advised one.

Why provide all these details? Because La Chimera is an unhurried exercise, very novel like in its disarmingly loose construction, in gathering together people who make up communities, and it's the accumulation of fairly sketchy characterisation that provides the bedrock on which to view the tortured Arthur. The ex con cannot stay away from his talent for long; he's here for one last quest, to unearth antiquities that will make he and his team rich people by selling on to the supposedly respectable dealer Spartaco (Alba Rohrwacher, the director's sister).

O'Connor is startlingly good in this; it's hard to believe that this is the same actor who portrayed Prince Charles in The Crown. In his increasingly dirty white linen suit, his penchant for cigarettes and his bemused expression, he recalls Elliott Gould's portrayal of Philip Marlowe in Robert Altman's 1973 movie The Long Goodbye. His almost supernatural connection with the contents of the tombs that he plunders links him with his (assumed dead) former love via - literally - a thread.

Rohrwacher takes a lot of risks here - fourth wall breaking, some speeded up scenes redolent of silent comedy - and a freewheeling style that takes in parades, larking about and always Arthur's haunted face. Aided by Helène Louvart’s gorgeous photography La Chimera conjures up classic Italian cinema - think Fellini and De Sica - and is simply joyous.

La Chimera is released in cinemas from 10 May.