From crime heists to a BDSM love story, here's what's in cinemas this month

Welcome to the ABC Arts February film wrap.

From the loud blockbuster action of Crime 101 to Bradley Cooper's turn to stand-up comedy, and the BDSM love story Pillion, there's something to please everyone this month.

Australians will also finally be able to catch Sirât and The Voice of Hind Rajab, two movies that have been impressing international audiences and will be vying for Best International Film at the Academy Awards next month.

Happy watching!

• Crime 101
• Jimpa
• Is This Thing On?
• Pillion
• Sirât
• The Voice of Hind Rajab

Crime 101

Until Michael Mann's Heat sequel makes it to cinemas, audiences will have to settle for Crime 101.

Bart Layton's (American Animals) latest film sees Mann alums Chris Hemsworth (Blackhat) and Mark Ruffalo (Collateral) pitted against each other as a meticulous thief and the heavily divorced cop on his trail.

Its primary draw is the colourful main cast (including Halle Berry's premium insurance broker and Barry Keoghan's smash-and-grab robber) — all of whom have been swallowed up by the Marvel machine in recent years, and feel more at home chewing scenery in a mid-budget adult drama.

Layton crafts a Los Angeles that feels of its moment, swapping the sodium orange aesthetic of yesteryear with a steely blue vibe, and layering NFT graffiti on top of all the grime.

Hemsworth's antihero protagonist feels like a suitably modern invention: an anxiously detail-oriented criminal who's more at ease seducing a mark than flirting with his own girlfriend. 

There are few surprises, and curiously few action beats to be found in this throwback thriller, but — like much of the 90s cultural output — what was once disposable can now be enjoyed as a quaint pleasure. At least the title is honest.

• Jamie Tram

Jimpa

Australian director Sophie Hyde's semi-autobiographical film Jimpa hews close to the bone in its charting of queerness and intergenerational familial relationships.

A barely disguised stand-in for Hyde, Hannah (Olivia Colman) is an Adelaide-based filmmaker who has written a script centred on the aftermath of her father, Jim (John Lithgow), coming out as gay and leaving their family in Adelaide when she was 13 to find himself as a politically active academic in Amsterdam.

Wrestling with barely suppressed feelings of resentment, Hannah interrogates an existence lived in the spectre of the larger-than-life Jim, who was a monumental force, but a largely absent one.

Complicating matters is the ailing health of Jim, who seeks Hannah's presence as he materially deteriorates. So off she goes to Amsterdam with her non-binary, trans teenage child, Frances — played by Hyde's own offspring, Aud Mason-Hyde — and her husband, Harry (an under-utilised Daniel Henshall). 

Frances affectionately knows their grandfather as Jimpa, and expresses interest in staying with him to escape the cloistered suburbia of Adelaide.

But not even Colman's acting prowess and the way Lithgow brings the flawed yet mercurial Jim into focus can save Hyde's laboured script. Exposition is largely delivered through repetitious, gold-tinged flashbacks in lieu of character development. Dialogue is clunky — Hyde's queer characters touch on hot-button issues through stilted exchanges that ring as didactic as they are unnatural.

Jimpa brings to the fore poignant reflections about a generation of men lost to AIDS, the ethics of dying, and the shifting face of queerness and how it's expressed throughout generations, but its star-studded cast can't render this muddled film coherent.

• Sonia Nair

Is This Thing On?

Bradley Cooper has cemented himself as an impressive actor-turned-director, each film markedly different in subject and style. 

Compared to the scope of Oscar-nominated A Star Is Born and Maestro, Is This Thing On? is a more contained, intimate piece — inspired by British comedian John Bishop's own ascent into comedy, co-written with Will Arnett and Cooper.

Arnett plays Alex Novak, a middle-aged man navigating divorce who dodges a pub entry fee by signing up to an open mic night and discovers stand-up as therapy. 

Less silly than his Arrested Development days but still compelling, Arnett brings real depth here. Laura Dern plays his wife, a former volleyball champion wrestling with her identity after retirement. 

Nothing grand happens; no big fights or bad behaviour. Instead, we catch a couple in a stagnant marriage, who exist but don't - or can't - communicate, and whose separation opens into self-discovery.

The dialogue feels real and cuts to the source of their pain.

Cooper remains a committed cinephile. He tells the story through deliberate framing and handheld close-ups that capture the frantic, swirling energy of stand-up — we feel Novak's mental state while practically standing at the mic ourselves. 

Cooper exclusively shoots Arnett in profile until his first stage appearance. When faced front-on, we see the real Alex.

Arnett spent six weeks doing clubs nightly in New York under the pseudonym Alex Novak to prepare, and it shows. The abrupt ending doesn't entirely convince, but there are golden nuggets here, even if the film is undeniably about a white man's midlife crisis.

• Ying-Di Yin

Pillion

If you've signed up for gay bikers and BDSM, you might be surprised by Pillion co-star Harry Melling's Colin in the bright-striped blazer, braces and straw hat of a barbershop quartet.

Shy but angelic-voiced, he harmonises in the pub alongside his dad, Pete (Douglas Hodge), after being sworn at all day as a parking inspector. 

This happy-enough, if humdrum, existence is shaken when a leather-clad Alexander Skarsgård's intimidatingly handsome biker, Ray, clumps creaking onto the scene.

Commanding Colin to meet him on the high street on Christmas night, the younger lad dutifully shows up in his dad's old leather jacket. 

Awkward and fumbling, he's inducted into the submissive business in a back alley, as Ray commands him to get on his knees and lick his boots; that, and the most overtly engorged prosthetic since Samson in 28 Years Later.

Writer/director Harry Lighton's limber debut feature, adapted from the novel Box Hill by Adam Mars-Jones, isn't as easy to pin down as Colin is by Ray.

Non-judgemental about their consensual arrangement, with Colin expected to cook, clean and sleep like a dog on a rug at the bottom of Ray's bed, Pillion embraces quirky comedy in his "aptitude for devotion", bittersweet melancholy, a Tiffany banger, and former Scissor Sister Jake Shears as a perky fellow sub.

Melling is marvellous; his wonderfully expressive face writes lines that go unsaid, with Skarsgård's icily indecipherable Dom an erotic mystery. The mighty Lesley Sharp, as Colin's cancer-stricken mum, bites, but Pillion unzips straight-laces, revving its enigmatic engine to bend expectation.

• Stephen A Russell

Sirât

Searing, shocking and stomach-dropping, Sirât is a film you'll likely only watch once — an unforgettable journey through the cruel beauty of Morocco's desert, set to the throbbing techno of nomadic ravers drowning out the outside world and an erupting World War III.

Winner of Cannes' Jury Prize and Oscar-nominated for Best Sound and Best International Film, Sirât follows Luis (Sergi López), a middle-aged Spaniard in search of his missing daughter who we meet flyering crowds at the desert dance party with his pre-teen son Esteban (Brúno Nuñez).

With no luck, they head to the next party deeper in the desert, following an eclectic clan of five nomads, all played by non-actors sharing names with their characters. 

What follows is as equally awful (though, notably, not as violent) as anything in films by Gaspar Noé, Julia Ducournau or your pick of auteur-provocateur. Do not spoil it.

Where Sirât goes from there is jaw-dropping, more than justifying its namesake — Islam's bridge to Jannah (paradise) from which sinners fall, described in the Hadith as thin as a strand of hair and as sharp as a sword. 

But it's not shocking for the sake of shock; this is a quietly probing film, holding its characters' feet to the fires of hell for a greater purpose.

It's a sublimating watch, too, as cinematographer Mauro Herce captures the Sahara's sheer majesty, from the horror of ceaseless horizons to its radiating, indifferent heat. 

Meanwhile, the irresistible, overwhelming techno of producer Kangding Ray propels us through the desert, throbbing beats giving some momentary release.

• Jared Richards

The Voice of Hind Rajab

It's January 29, 2024, and five-year-old Hind Rajab is trapped in a car while under fire in Gaza. She's alone, terrified, and unable to escape. It's now up to a handful of Palestinian call centre volunteers to get an ambulance to her in time.

Never teetering into misty-eyed sensationalism, director Kaouther Ben Hania keeps the gruelling search-and-rescue narrative grounded with a superbly tight cast and the use of Hind Rajab's real voice (the film takes genuine distress calls recorded by the Palestine Red Crescent Society and uses actors to dramatise the events around them). 

You never forget that these characters are very much real people, as was Hind Rajab.

The entire film takes place inside the Palestine Red Crescent centre, which makes the use of sound particularly powerful. 

There is — intentionally — very little fanfare in both the look of the production and the scripted dialogue, as Hania opts for steadfast realism. The recorded calls are the linchpin for the entire film: after all, nothing is more shocking than the truth.

If you only watch one film about the Israel-Gaza conflict, let it be The Voice of Hind Rajab: it's a bold and necessary work. 

The stark reality of it makes it tough to critique — especially on the usual merits of visual artistry and storytelling. So, instead, I urge everyone to watch it as soon as humanly possible.

• Silvi Vann Wall