Friday new releases: 22 March 2024

Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire, Wicked Little Letters and Immaculate are in cinemas, Spaceman is streaming on Netflix

I’ve been back writing weekly reviews for nearly nine months and it is somewhat humbling to realise that there has never been any science behind the order these films appear other than ‘this is the order in which I saw them’.

There should be some editorial oversight of these priorities, I suppose – some sense of a ‘headliner’, and maybe that happens when I book the tickets, I don’t know.

Anyway, at 10.20 yesterday morning I was at the excellent Event Cinemas facility at Queensgate, Lower Hutt, for the latest Ghostbusters film. A few die-hard fans were also there. You can get a sense of how much pent-up anticipation there is for a picture by how many are there first thing on a Thursday and, by that metric, Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire should do ok.

This is the second film in the current reboot and I’d missed the first one (Ghostbusters: Afterlife from 2021) which introduced a new generation of ’busters, led by Carrie Coon and Paul Rudd. Missing out on that chapter didn’t seem to matter – none of it seemed to matter, if I’m honest – but you will find yourself carried along in entertaining but forgettable fashion.

The new Ghostbusters have arrived in New York, living in the old fire station, busting ghosts the old fashioned way, travelling in the old white station wagon. OG Ghostbuster Ray Stantz (Dan Aykroyd) is trading in occult merchandise, and YouTubing, when Kumail Nanjiani’s Nadeem brings him a bronze orb that appears to be off-the-charts with spiky spectral energy.

Inside, an ancient God of Ice is trapped but, of course, he soon gets out and starts making a big mess of things. All the ghostbusters – old and new – have to band together to fix things which means that there are rather a lot of characters to keep track of. And give meaningful action to.

All franchise filmmaking is an exercise in nostalgia, but I could feel it really clearly in Frozen Empire. But it’s not the box-ticking that’s most fun, it’s the decent story with good set-pieces, the genuine sense of dread at times, and a villain that can only be defeated by everyone working together.

Thea Sharrock’s Wicked Little Letters starts with some wonderful visual panache – it’s a real bundle of energy – as Olivia Colman’s Edith Swan opens another anonymous poison pen letter in front of her ageing parents (Gemma Jones and Timothy Spall). In high dudgeon, her father walks the Littlehampton seafront to the police station to make a complaint, setting the wheels of the plot in motion.

Based on true events in 1920s seaside small-town England, where the nation was scandalised by the vile and verbose abusive epistles that were being sprayed around all and sundry, the film is a brilliant showcase for Colman and Jessie Buckley, playing her next-door neighbour and the target for blame.

That first act crackles but, somehow, the visual energy seems to fade and we are left with a great script and great performances (all the way down the cast list, no duds) but you can almost treat it like a radio play. At first, I couldn't take my eyes off it, then there was almost nothing to look at.