Friday new releases: 5 April 2024

Monkey Man, Love Lies Bleeding, Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire, Kung Fu Panda 4 and The Mountain are all in cinemas

This has easily been the most violent week of cinema I have ever experienced. Monkey Man and Love Lies Bleeding have some absolutely brutal and bloody set-pieces, Godzilla x Kong is just one giant punch-up after another and even Kung Fu Panda is mostly fighting.

The difference between Monkey Man and all the others, though, is that all that violence is fuelled by a justified rage, rather than a desire to shock (or a lack of any other way to close out a story).

Dev Patel’s revenge fantasy is yet another work of art about India’s cultural tendency towards dehumanisation of large segments of its population and the damage that is being done in the race to become a capitalist showpiece and global superpower.

Patel himself plays a character known in the credits as “Kid” but who takes on several personas on his way to taking down the corrupt cop who destroyed his village and his future.

When we meet him he is being paid to lose underground bareknuckle fights but there is a method to his masochistic madness. All around him are the poor, the destitute, the hungry (and those who prey on them), while the rich live gilded lives at high end VIP clubs like Kings.

Kid insinuates himself into the upstairs/downstairs world, his eventual shot at his nemesis (Sikander Kher) is a painful failure but the rescue and love he receives from an even more marginalised community than his, spurs him back into action.

There’s a passionate political context to this film which gives it considerable urgency. A pro-Hindu political party is on the verge of taking power and the spectre of religious authoritarianism and corruption haunts the story.

It’s a brutally honest depiction of present day Indian religious and cultural intolerance, so it’s probably no surprise that it couldn’t be filmed there. Indonesia, in fact, plays a lightly-fictionalised version of one of India’s megacities and lots of experienced East Asian martial artists and stuntmen are on hand to provide fodder for the Kid’s single-minded quest for justice.

Monkey Man is a staggeringly violent watch but it’s also an emotional one, the Kid’s fists of righteous fury are powered by sorrow at the direction that India is taking. A magnificent achievement.

There are plenty of yucky moments in Rose Glass’s Love Lies Bleeding – I sat next to another critic and we both found ourselves averting our eyes at some of the grotesqueries on offer in a small-town gothic noir that might have been a Coen Brothers film in their early days.

It’s 1989 (because cellphones would render the story moot) and Kristen Stewart is Lou, managing a gym in a dead-end New Mexico town. A stranger arrives, Jackie (played by Katy O’Brian), passing through town on her way to compete in a bodybuilding show in Las Vegas.

Romantic sparks fly between them, but when Jackie’s ’roid rage causes a disaster, we discover that Lou (and the family she pretends to disavow) are up to their necks in some very bad stuff.