Michael Johnston, Inde Navarrette, Ian McKellen and Michaela Coel feature in a quartet of movies released in the week of May 15th, 2026Obsession. Photograph: Focus Features Mon May 18 2026 - 11:30 • 3 MIN READObsession ★★★★★Directed by Curry Barker. Starring Michael Johnston, Inde Navarrette, Cooper Tomlinson, Megan Lawless, Andy Richter. 16 cert, gen release, 109 minA young man (Johnston, strong) wishes that his best friend (Navarrette, incandescent) loved him and comes to regret the wish coming true. Barker, creator of the no-budget found-footage shocker Milk & Serial, has secured a slightly larger war chest – still a relatively paltry $1 million – and made the best American horror of the decade so far. The supernatural premise is unsettling. More disturbing still are the film’s pessimistic conclusions about human relationships. Loneliness is torture. But love is (maybe literal) hell. Navarrette’s performance deserves all the prestigious awards it almost certainly won’t get. DC Full reviewOnce We Were Punks ★★★☆☆Directed by Frank Shouldice. Featuring Justin Kelly, David Meagher, Noel Larkin, Paddy Glackin. 12A cert, limited release, 96 minIn the postpunk years four young men from Cavan came together to form a band called Panic Merchants. Decades later a portion of them came together again to rake over the past in Sons of Southern Ulster. Shouldice’s film joins the new band as they prepare for a gig at Whelan’s, on Wexford Street in Dublin. Along the unhurried way we hear about illness, parenthood and changing attitudes to homosexuality in Ireland. Like the band itself, the documentary has a slightly shaggy feel, but few over a certain age will fail to be moved. DC Full review The Mysterious Gaze of the Flamingo ★★★★☆Directed by Diego Céspedes. Starring Tamara Cortés, Matías Catalán, Paula Dinamarca, Pedro Muñoz, Luis Tato Dubó, Vicente Caballero, Bruna Ramírez, Sirena González, Alexa Quijano, Francisco Diaz. No Cert, Mubi, 107 minSexual desire becomes both contagion and curse in Diego Céspedes’s haunting debut, winner of Un Certain Regard and the Queer Palme at Cannes. Set in a remote Chilean mining town during the early 1980s, the film unfolds against the creeping panic of a mysterious “plague” spreading among local men. As with Julie Ducarnou’s allegorical Alpha, the writer-director doesn’t name the infection, but he leaves little doubt that the spectre spooking the desert is the Aids crisis, albeit refracted through crass jokes, superstition and queer folklore. The childcentric perspective is at least as important as the metaphorical rigour. TB Full reviewThe Christophers ★★★☆☆Directed by Steven Soderbergh. Starring Ian McKellen, Michaela Coel, James Corden, Jessica Gunning. 15A cert, gen release, 100 minMcKellen plays a once-revered painter now fading into embittered irrelevance, surviving on the fumes of former genius while fronting a tawdry television art programme and flogging personalised Cameo-style video messages for cash. Coel is a struggling artist and restorer secretly hired by Julian’s grasping children to complete and forge entries in his feted and unfinished “Christophers” series after his death. What transpires is essentially an extended two-hander between McKellen and Coel, and for long stretches that’s plenty. Unhappily, the script never quite develops the dramatic momentum needed to sustain its ideas. Scenes drift rather than build. A polished theatrical exercise nonetheless. TB Full reviewIN THIS SECTION