Film reviews: Breaking Dawn: Part 1 | Snowtown | Oslo, August 31st | Sleeping Beauty | The Future

Our film critics take a look at some of the best and worst of this week’s new releases...

Breaking Dawn: Part 1 (12A) ***

Directed by: Bill Condon

Starring: Kristen Stewart, Robert Pattinson, Taylor Lautner

DESPITE its vamps-versus-werewolves action, the previous instalment of Twilight – the world’s favourite playground love triangle – felt like a stalling exercise, evading the issue of who was going to get off with whom. Though Taylor Lautner’s Jacob stages a late counter-attack by going shirtless within 15 seconds, this resolves that issue decisively, with Bella and Edward (Kristen Stewart and Robert Pattinson) mumbling through their vows at a wedding ceremony so floridly romantic some viewers may wish they’d hired Melancholia’s Udo Kier to plan it instead. Thereafter, it’s all about the newlyweds prepping for their first time: as lovers, then – shock, horror – as parents-to-be.

That appalled fascination with sex remains a sticking point, cuing a final, surprisingly intense eruption of gyno-horror. Yet in director Bill Condon’s skilled hands, this instalment proves more intimate, confining its action to kids in rooms wrestling with the consequences of their own crushes. Such unashamed emotionality – oft-dismissed as “girly stuff” – is actually what distinguishes the Twilights in a market otherwise cluttered with noisy boys’ toys. Minor quibbles aside – the werewolves are stubbornly wooden, and why would a vampire honeymoon in sunny Rio? – these remain the most empathetic event movies in the business. MIKE MCCAHILL

Snowtown (18) ****

Directed by: Justin Kurzel

Starring: Daniel Henshall, Lucas Pittaway, Louise Harris

BASED on the true story of Australia’s most notorious serial killer, Justin Kurzel’s debut film Snowtown offers a bleak, brutal exploration of the way morality can be skewed and innocence corrupted by neglect, hardship … and the presence of a charismatic psychopath. Told from the naïve perspective of 16-year-old Jamie Vlassakis (Lucas Pittaway), the film begins with Jamie and his younger brothers being abused by a neighbour. When his mother’s new boyfriend, John Bunting (Daniel Henshall), gets wind of it, he charges in like a white knight, driving said creep out of the neighbourhood and inveigling his way into their lives as a surrogate father figure. He also becomes de facto leader of the local poverty-stricken community, whose homophobic prejudices find expression in his bullish talk about keeping the streets safe from paedophiles. Just how far he’s prepared to go to achieve the latter is the sickening reality the film gradually unveils, with Jamie increasingly and tragically implicated. Here Kurzel implements remarkable restraint, never indulging in the bloodlust favoured by genre film-makers. His style is forensic, similar in some respects to Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer. The effect is uncomfortable, but unforgettable.

Oslo, August 31st (15) ****

Directed by: Joachim Trier

Starring: Anders Danielsen Lie, Hans Olav Brenner, Malin Crepin