What films are out in UK cinemas this week? Reviews from The Accountant 2 to The Friend

Beyond that, there's a huge wealth of options, from a gruesome new take on a classic fairytale in The Ugly Stepsister to acclaimed Belgian tennis drama Julie Plays Quiet, while Naomi Watts stars alongside an ageing Great Dane in The Friend.

Meanwhile, also out is new video game adaptation Until Dawn, a time-loop horror with only a passing resemblance to its source material. We're still awaiting our review of that one, but you can find the rest of our reviews by scrolling down this page.

Of course, several other great films are also still playing in cinemas – including Sinners – and you can also find our reviews of the pick of the films still out in the UK below.

Read on for your weekly round-up of all the films currently showing in UK cinemas.

What films are released in UK cinemas this week? 25th April - 1st May

The Accountant 2

Ben Affleck returns as autistic mob accountant Christian Wolff in this so-so sequel to the equally forgettable 2016 original. This time, he’s embroiled with Treasury Agent Marybeth Medina (Cynthia Addai-Robinson), who is digging into the death of her former boss and the plight of a missing Central American family. To add muscle to the equation, Wolff contacts hitman brother Brax (Jon Bernthal), who comes running despite their antagonistic relationship.

So begins a needlessly complex, largely logic-free plot involving human trafficking. At least Affleck is enjoyably entertaining, whether Wolff is speed dating, line dancing or sun-bathing on the roof of his Airstream trailer home. His chemistry with Bernthal is also a plus, while returning director Gavin O’Connor adds grit to the action.

However, the result is an emotional void; the plight of the aforementioned AWOL family feels more functional than anything. Ultimately, The Accountant 2 is dumb fun if you let it be so, but the moment you start to pick it apart, it simply doesn’t add up. – James Mottram

• Read our full The Accountant 2 review

Julie Keeps Quiet

Co-produced by the Dardenne brothers and partly inspired by Sophocles’s Antigone, this sombre debut feature from Belgian film-maker Leonardo Van Dijl focuses on 15-year-old Julie (Tessa Van den Broeck), a talented player at a provincial tennis academy.

She is training hard to win a place at the national tennis centre, when she learns that her coach Jeremy has been suspended following the suicide of a former female star pupil. Pressure from staff, friends and family mounts on the reticent teenager to testify at a forthcoming tribunal.

In terms of tennis-themed films, Julie Keeps Quiet stands in stark contrast to Challengers, released last year. Shooting in muted colours and in a carefully controlled style, Van Dijl keeps his impassive protagonist at a distance, as he concentrates on her everyday routines of practice sessions, physio treatments and school classes. Aided by Van den Broeck’s unaffected performance, the film retains a sense of mystery, while conveying that Julie’s silence is an act of agency rather than avoidance. – Tom Dawson

The Friend

Pitch-perfect turns from humans and dogs alike help lift this intelligent and gently affecting comic drama above other canine emotional support tales. Naomi Watts plays Iris, a New York-based creative-writing teacher whose friend, Walter (Bill Murray), takes his own life. When Iris is told that Walter left her his ageing great dane Apollo (Bing), she takes in the outsized hound warily while trying to find him another owner.

Though the slow-growing bond between the two feels inevitable, writers/directors Scott McGehee and David Siegel (The Deep End) weave in thoughtful twists on genre clichés. Adapting Sigrid Nunez’s novel, the film-makers juggle tones and dodge easy pay-offs as they explore the complexities of living with grief and doleful dogs in mourning.

Unfolding as a slippery riff on how tricky it can be to navigate other people’s feelings, let alone one’s own, the result gets baggy as plot digressions mount. But Watts’s nuanced study of emotional irresolution engages throughout, while Bing steals the show as casually as he takes over Iris’s apartment. – Kevin Harley

The Ugly Stepsister

Offering a fresh twist on the classic Cinderella fairy tale, this Norwegian horror focuses on a less traditionally attractive member of the family and the grotesque attempts to beautify her. Lea Myren stars as the wallflower sibling subjected to extreme medical procedures by a mother determined to turn her daughter into desirable marriage material.

First-time director Emilie Blichfeldt satirises the gruesomeness and cruelty prevalent in numerous Brothers Grimm stories, although the main thrust of the narrative is a commentary on peer pressure, modern-day attitudes to body image and the perception of glamour.

The minefield of dysfunctional familial relationships is addressed with dark humour, helping to undercut the scenes of primitive, barbaric surgery that more squeamish viewers may find discomforting. All told, the film presents an unsettling blend of folklore and feminism that, while well intentioned, ultimately asks more questions than it answers.

Nonetheless, it’s held together by a captivating, heartbreaking performance by former child star Myren as the supposedly unlovable ingenue. – Terry Staunton

Best of the rest still showing in UK cinemas

Sinners

Director Ryan Coogler’s fifth feature is a messy, muscular mash-up of historical drama and trigger-happy horror. It follows bootlegging brothers Smoke and Stack (both played by Michael B Jordan), who return home to Mississippi after years working for Al Capone.

With plans to set up the Delta’s greatest juke joint, they recruit their young cousin Sammie (Miles Caton), a promising bluesman whose preacher father warns against playing the devil’s music. But Sammie can’t resist, and it’s his artistry that becomes the catalyst for the horrors that follow. Soon, silver-tongued vampire Remmick (Jack O’Connell) wants an invitation to the party, too.

Coming after Coogler's stint directing two Black Panther films for Marvel, Sinners asks prickly questions about creativity and the price of assimilation. What parts of your culture might you be willing to give up in the name of fellowship and love? And what good is harmony if you can’t play your own music? The film’s grandstanding centrepiece truncates a centuries-long timeline of cultural expression into one literally barn-burning anachronistic musical number. It’s the most ambitious moment in a movie loaded with them. – Sean McGeady

• Read our full Sinners review
• Read our interview with stars Hailee Steinfeld and Wunmi Mosaku

Warfare

This viscerally intense Iraq War film is co-directed by Alex Garland (Ex Machina) and former US Navy Seal Ray Mendoza, who had previously worked as a military supervisor on Garland's previous effort, Civil War (2024). Based on Mendoza’s own experiences, it follows a platoon of American soldiers in real time after a botched surveillance mission sees some of their number sustaining life-threatening injuries.

The film is unsparing in its depiction of the senseless barbarity of war, and includes several blood-curdling moments which will cause viewers to swiftly avert their eyes. Meanwhile, the young cast – which includes Will Poulter, Cosmo Jarvis, Kit Connor and Joseph Quinn – all turn in impressive, highly committed performances.

But while it is undoubtedly well crafted, barely putting a foot wrong from a technical standpoint, the film suffers from a lack of strong character work amid the relentless onslaught of gunfire and becomes difficult to fully engage with. Beyond the admirable but fairly rudimentary notion that war is hell, Warfare doesn’t leave the audience with much to chew on. – Patrick Cremona

Drop

Smartphone tech and old-school star power combine in this pleasingly constructed romantic thriller from director Christopher Landon (Freaky). Meghann Fahy plays Violet, a single mum and domestic abuse survivor visiting a skyscraper restaurant to meet Henry (Brandon Sklenar), her first date in years. Soon, AirDrop-style messages on her phone reveal that there’s a masked man in her home who’ll kill her sister and son if Violet doesn’t obey orders to secretly poison Henry.

Jillian Jacobs and Chris Roach’s script simmers nicely with first-date nerves and deadlier anxieties, and handles its abuse subtext well. Establishing that the message sender must be in close proximity to Violet, the writers also play up the paranoia by weaving in plenty of vivid support characters, all of them fun potential villains.

Landon’s flair for juggling tension and comedy proves agile, too. While the plot logic and climax don’t withstand scrutiny, terrific turns from Sklenar and a persuasively fraught Fahy help to ensure you don’t care too much in the moment. – Kevin Harley

• Read our interview with director Christopher Landon

A Minecraft Movie

A Minecraft Movie does its level best to bring us the joy of this wildly popular 3D sandbox game. Led by Jack Black, he’s joined by the muscle-bound Jason Momoa and The White Lotus’s comic goddess Jennifer Coolidge, each bringing their own brand of lunacy to the Minecraft universe.

Their combined energy powers this film through, even when the plot flags or gets bogged down by visual effects. Meanwhile, despite all the Easter eggs for gamers, there’s plenty of other things for non-players to enjoy, with Jack Black going full Tenacious D (yes, he sings) and the long-haired Momoa looking amusingly lame in retro outfits (leather jackets, with tassles).

The final act loses its way, with a boring battle that feels inconsequential, but for the most part, this strikes a neat balance for aficionados and newbies. And however wayward the last portion is, there’s a voice cameo from a well-known comedian that is truly a moment of beauty. – James Mottram

• Read our full A Minecraft Movie review
• Read our interview with director Jared Hess

Mr Burton

The formative years of Richard Burton come under the microscope in an absorbing drama chronicling the actor’s relationship with the inspirational teacher from whom he took his professional name. Set in post-war South Wales, the film features Toby Jones as mild-mannered educator and aspiring playwright Philip Burton, who sees something special in the teenaged Richard Jenkins (Harry Lawtey), but must help the lad overcome the hurdles of a staunchly working-class upbringing and potentially destructive self-doubt.

Beautifully photographed and richly atmospheric, director Marc Evans creates an engrossing study of an initially unlikely friendship between two individuals striving for better things. Jones turns in a masterful, sympathetic performance, and there’s eye-catching support from Lesley Manville as his landlady and Aimee Ffion-Edwards as Richard’s encouraging older sister.

However, Lawtey is the true star of the piece, a mesmerising presence both in early scenes as the rough-around-the-edges pupil and in latter stages of the narrative, when his volatile personality threatens to derail a thespian career before it’s barely begun. – Terry Staunton

• Read our interview with Harry Lawtey
• Read our interview with Kate Burton

Black Bag

Steven Soderbergh and a crack cast have great fun with a stylish spy yarn that’s pitched, delightfully, as a domestic chamber piece. Dapper intelligence operative George Woodhouse (Michael Fassbender) is informed that there’s a mole in his workplace, and his elegant wife Kathryn (Cate Blanchett) is one of the five key suspects.

Seemingly unfazed, George invites the unsuspecting parties (all of whom are romantically linked) to a dinner at his and Kathryn’s luxury London townhouse. Once he spikes the meal with truth serum, the gathering gets off to the races.

David Koepp’s witty, erudite screenplay recalls the acerbic drama of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf as the guests – played beautifully by Tom Burke, Naomie Harris, Regé-Jean Page and Industry star Marisa Abela – are denuded of their inhibitions.

Words are louder than actions throughout, but Soderbergh’s deft handling of the material (as director, cinematographer and editor) ensures that the absence of any expected punch-ups never matters.

Fassbender proves a mesmerising presence throughout, whether putting his suspects through a polygraph test or facing the possibility his wife may be involved with stealing a device that would cause nuclear meltdown. – Jeremy Aspinall

• Read our full Black Bag review

Snow White

Rachel Zegler sings her heart out as the title character in Disney’s live action update of its first-ever animated feature. After her mother dies, Snow White’s father (Hadley Fraser) remarries before disappearing off to war. Following a period relegated to the castle kitchens, the innocent Snow White is sent to die in a forest by her jealous stepmother (Gal Gadot) – but our heroine instead stumbles upon a gaggle of friendly dwarves.

These seven no-longer-titular characters were a source of controversy during production, and the studio’s solution is to render them entirely in CGI to match their original 1937 designs, maintaining an air of cartoonish unreality. This only partly works, not least because the dwarves remain paper-thin as characters. Gadot, meanwhile, is far too buttoned-up to truly terrify as the story’s classic villain.

Yet, there’s still a lot to like about this remake; it remains a charming, if not necessarily timeless, fairy tale and provides a fine showcase for Zegler to embody – and carefully update – the original Disney princess. – Jayne Nelson

• Read our full Snow White review

Mickey 17

Robert Pattinson is the hapless soul who gets to die another day in this slick sci-fi comedic parable from Parasite director Bong Joon-ho. Pattinson’s Mickey Barnes escapes his troubles on Earth, signing up for a space colonisation mission led by Mark Ruffalo’s Trump-like megalomaniac.

A so-called ‘expendable’, Mickey gives his life to keep others safe. If he perishes, the boffins on board simply ‘re-print’ another iteration. But trouble brews when the seventeenth Mickey survives certain death and returns to the ship to find his follow-up clone.

A wild mix of physical comedy, especially from Pattinson, social satire and absurdist humour, it’s a visually engrossing ride into the future in much the way Bong’s 2013 film Snowpiercer was. Adapted from Edward Ashton’s novel, it’s packed with weirdness – from cute/creepy CG critters to comedian Tim Key in a pigeon costume to the most disturbing ménage à trois you’ll ever see (with Naomi Ackie and two Pattinsons). Like a demented twist on Douglas Adams, it’s another fearless work from the Korean filmmaker. – James Mottram

• Read our full Mickey 17 review

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