May movies: What’s worth watchingBy If you’re heading to the cinema or just your couch, our reviewers have you covered with the new releases you need to know about each week.And don’t forget to sign up to our Screening Room newsletter for must-see movies, interviews and the latest news from the world of film. Popcorn not included!What to watch at the movies this week: H is for Hawk, Power Ballad, Backrooms, and Amrum.Artwork by Stephen Kiprillis and Marija ErcegovacLatest Posts10.15amPower Ballad ★★★★By Sandra HallM (98 minutes)It’s a familiar story. A pop star produces a new hit single and a little-known musician comes out of nowhere to claim that the song has been stolen from him.So goes the scenario at the centre of Irish director John Carney’s Power Ballad. During his youth in the US, Paul Rudd’s Rick Power nurtured dreams of stardom but love, marriage and fatherhood effected a change of plan and he’s settled for life in Dublin with his Irish wife, Rachel (Marcella Plunkett) and their teenage daughter, Aja (Beth Fallon). He earns his living singing and playing guitar with a wedding band and, in his spare time, writes songs which never get published.Nick Jonas, left, and Paul Rudd in a scene from Power Ballad.Life changes when American rock star Danny Wilson (Nick Jonas of The Jonas Brothers) turns up among the guests at Rick’s latest gig. Danny is at a career crossroads. He’s trying to reinvent himself after breaking into the business as the star of a boy band and he takes a liking to Rick, treating him to a summary of his worries during an all-night jam session after the wedding.10.04amBackrooms ★★★By Jake Wilson(M), 105 minutesThink of a dentist’s waiting room, or a storage facility or an abandoned call centre, the kind of place so lacking in character it hardly qualifies as a place at all. Picture beige carpet and fluorescent lights. Imagine one bland, empty space opening onto another, like a system of underground caves with no known route to the surface. Then imagine all this filmed by a 1990s camcorder, suffusing the whole vision with the unpleasant opposite of nostalgia.For the internet, Backrooms is a milestone: the first major motion picture to be inspired by a discussion thread on 4chan. But you don’t have to know the backstory to find the horror of the premise familiar. Indeed, the horror is the familiarity, the implication that somehow we’ve been in the Backrooms all along. Perhaps there’s never been anywhere else to go.Chiwetel Ejiofor is caught in the Backrooms, a film that came from internet mythology.A24 via APIt’s a lot to take on board for a filmmaker barely out of his teens. But Kane Parsons, not yet 21, has become something like the official bard of the Backrooms, having started as one of many participants in a subculture born of the online fascination with “liminal spaces”.yesterday 1.36pmAmrum ★★★By Jake Wilson(M) 93 minutesThe further the Nazi era recedes from living memory, the easier it becomes to use it as a cartoonish, all-purpose symbol of evil, as in Taika Waititi’s crassly well-intentioned Jojo Rabbit.Fatih Akin’s Amrum offers a partial corrective to such flights of fancy. While Akin himself was born in 1973, the script is founded on the childhood memories of his friend and co-writer Hark Bohm, who originally planned to direct it himself (he died last year aged 86, a few months after the premiere).Jasper Billerbeck as Nanning, who spends his days exploring sand dunes on a North Sea island as World War II draws to a close. Amrum is a small island in the North Sea, where Bohm’s 12-year-old fictional counterpart Nanning (Jasper Billerbeck) comes to live in the last months of the war when he and his family have fled the mainland (his father, a high-ranking SS officer, is left behind in Hamburg).yesterday 1.17pmH is for Hawk ★★★½By Sandra Hall(M) 119 minutesWe all have our own ways of dealing with grief, but Helen Macdonald came up with a rather extreme solution: she adopted a gimlet-eyed goshawk, christened her Mabel and made a home for her in the small house where she was living as a fellow at Cambridge University.In Philippa Lowthorpe’s adaptation of Macdonald’s memoir, which stars Claire Foy, she allows her obsession with the hawk’s training to take over her life. Friends and family are frozen out and she loses herself so completely in her efforts to understand Mabel’s psyche that she starts to forget about every professional ambition she’s ever had.Claire Foy as Helen Macdonald, with goshawk Mabel, in H is for Hawk.KismetThe book landed on The New York Times bestseller list, much admired for Macdonald’s precise, poetic descriptions of nature, and once novelist Emma Donoghue’s script (co-written with Macdonald) starts taking Helen and Mabel into the countryside, Lowthorpe’s direction brings these words alive with an Attenborough-like attention to the beauties of the landscape and its wildlife, wild being the key word. As one of the avian world’s most efficient killers, the goshawk has no time for the finer feelings of her prey. Once they’re in her grip, they’re dinner and that’s that.11.18am on May 21, 2026The Richest Woman In The World ★★★½By Jake Wilson122 minutes (M)If you were around in France in the early 21st century, you’re probably familiar at least with the outline of “L’affaire Bettencourt”, a long-running, juicy scandal involving feuding family members, leading politicians, vast sums of money, Nazis in the background, and an unlikely odd couple at the centre of it all.For those of us still catching up, Thierry Klifa’s amusing, excellently acted The Richest Woman In the World is a useful primer. Klifa and his co-writers have changed all the names and make no pretence of consistently sticking to the facts – but these facts are so remarkable that not much embroidery is necessary.Isabelle Huppert (right) is at her distant best in The Richest Woman in the World. It’s true, to begin with, that Liliane Bettencourt, heiress to the L’Oreal fortune, was for a period the richest woman in the world (she died in 2017, aged 94). In the film she’s known as Marianne Farrere, who has a parallel controlling interest in the fictitious Windler Group, and is played by Isabelle Huppert with the chic remoteness which is a Huppert speciality (if you’ve ever wondered what novelists mean by a “wintry smile”, you can see it demonstrated here).9.39am on May 21, 2026Finding Emily ★★★By Jake Wilson(M) 111 minutesThe impulse to deconstruct romantic comedy is as old as the rom-com itself. Shakespeare made a habit of it, allowing room for his characters to put forward a range of views on love, idealised or cynical or in between.Spike Fearn as Owen and Angourie Rice as one of the Emilys in Finding Emily.Matt Squire/Focus FeaturesThe same kind of debate runs through Alicia MacDonald’s first feature Finding Emily, a better romantic comedy than you’d guess from its forgettable title, set in what could be the most brightly coloured version of Manchester yet put on screen.Speaking on behalf of love at first sight is the youthful hero Owen (Spike Fearn), an aspiring musician who falls for the Emily of the title (Sadie Soverall) soon after they cross paths in the university pub where he works as a sound engineer.10.39am on May 20, 2026Star Wars: The Mandalorian and Grogu ★★★½By Sandra Hall(M) 132 minutesIn brutal summary, the big-screen debut of the interplanetary bounty hunter the Mandalorian and his young apprentice, Grogu, is a massively mounted creature feature. Furred, feathered, fanged and scaled, they come stamping, slithering and swooping across the IMAX screen in such numbers that the stray human members of the cast begin to seem like rare and exotic beings.The Mandalorian (Pedro Pascal) and Grogu in a scene from the upcoming film.Lucasfilm/Disney via APWe’ve been living with the Star Wars franchise for almost 50 years. It all began in 1977 when George Lucas unwisely screened a rough cut of the original to his friends and fellow directors, among them Steven Spielberg, Martin Scorsese and Brian De Palma. The special effects weren’t finished and the lights went up to an embarrassed silence. Then De Palma started tearing into the film.Lucas was distraught, wailing that he’d made a Disney movie. And all these decades later, he’s turned out to be right. His ever-expanding universe has been appearing under the Disney banner since Lucasfilm was sold to the studio in 2012, and the Mandalorian’s latest adventures were originally supposed to play out in a fourth season of the Disney series. Then the studio decided to make it as the first Star Wars feature film in seven years.5.06pm on May 19, 2026Birthright ★★★By Sandra Hall(MA) 94 minutesI’m not sure if Australian writer-director Zoe Pepper’s new film has been designed as a cautionary tale or a black joke on the state of the nation.It’s about an intergenerational war over property, and things get very ugly.Richard and Lyn, played by Michael Hurst and Linda Cropper.Madman EntertainmentCory (Travis Jeffery) and his heavily pregnant wife, Jasmine (Maria Angelico), have run out of options. She’s on unpaid maternity leave, his contract work has dried up, the lease on their flat has expired and they’re homeless.8.42am on May 14, 2026Mother Mary ★★½By Jake WilsonMA (110 minutes)The trailer for Mother Mary proclaims that this is neither a love story nor a ghost story. But whatever other labels might be apt, it’s undeniably a film by writer-director David Lowery (Peter Pan & Wendy), whose name rhymes with “flowery,” and whose work retains its mix of shrewdness and preciousness whether he’s working for Disney or for the independent US studio A24.Michaela Coel as Sam (left) is a revelation alongside Anne Hathaway’s Mary.Mother Mary is one of Lowery’s A24 films, carefully balanced between art and pop, not too explicitly queer but centred on the same kind of charged relationship between two women that fuelled Celine Sciamma’s game-changing Portrait of a Lady On Fire.Anne Hathaway stars as Mother Mary herself, a legendary US pop star who comes knocking one night on the door of British fashion designer Sam Anselm (Michaela Coel). Back when they were both getting started, Sam was largely responsible for Mary’s now-iconic look – but while the two were once inseparable, following a professional break-up they haven’t spoken in years.8.41am on May 14, 2026Obsession ★★★By Sandra HallMA (93 minutes) Be careful what you wish for. It’s a lesson Homer Simpson learnt the hard way during a 1991 episode loosely drawn from The Monkey’s Paw, an early 20th-century classic in horror fiction.Homer acquires his own enchanted paw while on holiday in Marrakesh, ignoring the vendor’s warning that this dodgy souvenir will bring him grave misfortune. Naturally, mayhem ensues.Inde Navarrette and Michael Johnston in Obsession, which starts as a romcom.Focus FeaturesTwenty-six year-old writer-director Curry Barker, a comedian with a passion for the macabre, credits Homer’s unthinking act as an inspiration for his debut feature, Obsession. Having become a YouTube sensation with his creepy collection of short films, Barker and his team cobbled together enough money to embark on this movie. Its Toronto Festival premiere then sparked a bidding war and Barker is now the latest star of the current boom in psychological horror.1 of 2