Jennifer Lopez plays a homicidal parent protecting her daughter in this new thriller from Kiwi director Niki Caro.

Jennifer Lopez plays a homicidal parent protecting her daughter in this new thriller from Kiwi director Niki Caro.

https://youtu.be/Awmni5mbyWE

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Jennifer Lopez, by any standard, is remarkable.

She dances, she acts, she sings, she produces, she romances Ben Affleck several times. After 30 years, and her fair share of ups and downs, she's still looking good, at the top of her game.

Lopez's new film The Mother has gone straight to Netflix, which sadly is the fate for many genre thrillers these days.

We meet The Mother - no name given - when she's being held in a safe house by the FBI.

She's about to spill the beans on two high-level bad guys - Adrian and Hector - and it's pretty clear the Feds aren't fit for purpose.

JLo does the job for them - did you expect otherwise? - even though she's nine months pregnant. Wait... what?

The boss of the fatally incompetent FBI squad - a brief cameo from Edie Falco - advises the recovering J-Lo that she's now a real Mother, but she can't keep the baby.

With Hector and Adrian on their trail, she has no choice but to go solo. The selfless Mother agrees to go off the grid but tells FBI Agent Cruise to keep an eye on the baby.

Off the grid means Alaska. 12 years pass, not that you'd know it. The Alaskan climate must be good for the Mother's complexion.

And we wait for Agent Cruise to sound the alarm, otherwise, there's no movie. Without her child in danger - her name's Zoe, by the way - J-Lo can't turn into an action-movie Mother.

Zoe's taken and Jennifer hotfoots it to her rescue. And you soon notice one thing about the film - a rare action thriller from Kiwi director Niki Caro. It's mostly about one person and one person only.

There may be an endless supply of bad guys and a few FBI agents to get in the way, but The Mother is all about The Mother, meaning Jennifer Lopez.

So don't expect early friendships with Agent Cruise or Alaskan neighbour Jons to come to much. The Mother not only has no friends, she doesn't seem to need them.

She does require a daughter, and once she rescues Zoe, a certain amount of chemistry is cobbled together.

The hook at the start is that Zoe has no idea that this bad-tempered superwoman is in fact her birth mother. In fact, she's only interested in getting back home to her non-heroic adopted Mum.

This is clearly the part of the film that Niki Caro responded to most, and to the director's credit, it adds a little warmth to what could easily become a brutal video game…

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Can someone who did bad things still be a good person? Writer and director Zach Braff explores this question in a new film starring Florence Pugh and Morgan Freeman.

Can someone who did bad things still be a good person? Writer and director Zach Braff explores this question in a new film starring Florence Pugh and Morgan Freeman.

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Zach Braff is most famous for playing a likeable doctor in the TV sitcom Scrubs but he's also written and directed independent films like Garden State and Wish I Was Here.

In interviews, Braff comes across as decent and eager to please, which isn't always the best thing when you're making a gritty film like A Good Person.

It's the story of someone failing to face up to one of the worst things you'd have to face. Her name's Allison and she's just got engaged to Nathan, the nicest chap in the world. The best way I can describe Nathan is a Black Zach Braff.

But one day, as Allison is driving Nathan's sister and her husband home, she takes her eye off the road for one terrible second.

Her two passengers are killed, and Allison goes to pieces. The family blames her, she blames herself, she breaks up with Nathan, she turns to prescription drugs.

For a year, the only person Allison sees is her mother, who's at her wit's end, unable to help.

We intercut between Allison and other people affected by the events - the bewildered Nathan, and the daughter of the dead couple Ryan who is forced to live with her grandfather Daniel, Nathan's father.

Daniel's got enough problems of his own without taking on those of a troubled teenager.

He and his son Nathan don't get on anyway, and there's clearly a secret family history there as well.

When you consider that A Good Person is a film written and directed by a part-timer, there was every chance that it could end up as another ambitious failure, despite a heart in the right place.

That it's not is down to two extraordinary bits of luck for writer-director Zach Braff.

The first was the attachment of Florence Pugh to the project - currently one of the great guarantees in the film business. That's not entirely good luck, though - she was at the time Zach Braff's girlfriend.

The other bit of luck was less predictable. The great Morgan Freeman, who you'd think had long outgrown little indie films like this one, read the script, loved it and turned up on the set ready to work.

So the unlikely casting of Florence and Morgan turned out to be organic rather than contrived. And as usual, both deliver in spades…

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Simon Morris looks at three films all, one way or another, about friends. They include an Oscar nominee about childhood friendship, another quartet of senior friends on the road, and a low-budget film calling on an old friend to star in it.

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Close is the Cannes Film Festival winner, and Oscar nominee about two best friends whose first year at high school causes friction between them. Written and directed by Lukas Dhont (Girl).

There's been a late run of quiet little art-films in our cinemas, often from last year's international film festivals. The most recent - Close - is a film from Belgium that picked up the Grand Prix at Cannes last year, then was nominated for an Oscar for Best International Film.

It opens on two 13-year-old boys, Remi and Leo, playing happily out in the countryside.

They're not just friends, they're best friends. They're inseparable this year - in fact Leo hangs out more with Remi's family than he does with his own. And this is their last day of freedom before they start high school.

They flop on the grass with Remi's bohemian mother between them and wonder what the year will offer.

Remi is quiet and artistic. He actually plays oboe in a children's orchestra.

Hyperactive Leo has no idea what he wants yet. Perhaps he can manage Remi's career as a world-famous, freelance oboe-player, travelling the world.

Their first day at high school is made easier by the fact they're in the same class. And their easy, intimate friendship is noticed by their class-mates.

And finally someone asks the question: "Are you two together, nudge nudge wink wink..."

And at this moment everything changes - for Leo at any rate. He's a boy who's always keen to be part of the group, as well as Remi's mate.

And for the first time he starts to think how other people may see their friendship. Is it just friendship?

Described baldly like this, the film Close seems more brutal and obvious - I won't say "woke" - than it is. It's essentially a film about friendship rather than the usual coming of age story.

It's that moment before you realise you have to come of age, when the most important - and least complicated - relationship you have in life is with your best friend, before you care what anyone else thinks of it.

And Remi doesn't care what the football boys think. He's happier hanging out with the girls anyway.

But for Leo, the opinion of the cool crowd is suddenly hugely important. He joins the boys ice hockey team and starts to spend less time with Remi.

Hurt and bewildered, Remi can't understand what's happening with Leo, why he's distancing himself from his best friend.

Leo tells him nothing's changed. He's just busy, he's got new interests. But when Remi comes along to watch Leo practice with the team, Leo snubs him…

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Hypnotic is the new film by low-budget thriller maestro Robert Rodriguez. Ben Affleck stars as a burnt-out cop on the search for a bank robber who uses hypnotism to get strangers to do his dirty work.

Robert Rodriguez is famous in the American movie business for doing things his way. He keeps his budgets down by doing much of the work himself - he writes, he directs, he produces, he does his own camera-work and editing.

He even owns his own studio in Austen Texas, complete with elaborate backlot sets. All that cool independence means some big names want to work with him.

Ben Affleck is just the latest of a long line of Rodriguez buddies over the years, ranging from Quentin Tarentino and Antonio Banderas to George Clooney and Johnny Depp.

I guess they're hoping some of that Texas cool rubs off on them. I can't believe they're doing it on the strength of scripts like Hypnotic.

At the start of Hypnotic we meet burnt-out cop Danny Rourke - Ben Affleck - who's in therapy after the tragic, mysterious death of his young daughter.

Her murderer had no memory of the crime. But Danny hopes that getting back to work will help him get over this.

The cops get a tipoff that a downtown bank is about to be robbed. And Danny spots how - a mysterious chap loiters round the front entrance of the bank whispering to certain random people.

You know, like he's hypnotizing them or something.

It's been ages since I've seen such an old-fashioned, B-movie setup like this - a criminal mastermind seems to be getting ordinary people to do his dirty work for him.

Call it nostalgia, but I found myself going with Hypnotic for a while. Certainly, more than I usually do with Rodriguez's Grindhouse movies.

Our hero Danny is shocked when supervillain Dellrayne gets away with the mysterious contents of the bank's safe deposit box.

But at least now he has a clue. The original tip off was given by someone called Diane. So, Danny goes calling.

Diane is played by Brazilian star Alice Braga, and she soon finds herself trapped in a bog-standard, Robert Rodriguez role - looking sexy while delivering increasingly ludicrous exposition.

It's her job to explain to Danny that the crime was committed by a so-called "Hypnotic".

In neo-noir thrillers the temptation is always to favour intricate plots over character, and that's pretty much what happens here.

If Rodriguez had simply stayed with our hero chasing the villainous Dellrayne, falling for the enigmatic Diane along the way, all might have been OK.

But Rodriguez wanted to make something less pedestrian. What is this - a 1960 Roger Corman movie or something? …

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Book Club 2 The Next Chapter sees four long-time friends take off on a Bachelorette trip to Italy when one of them gets engaged. Starring Jane Fonda, Diane Keaton, Candice Bergen and Mary Steenburgen, and directed by Bill Holderman (Book Club 1).

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Jos is an affectionate film about a half-forgotten West Coast photographer, Czech-born Joseph Divis.

Jos is the story of someone most of us have never heard of - a Czech immigrant called Joseph Divis who came to New Zealand in the dying days of the Gold Rush, and became, almost despite himself, a significant photographer.

It's a labour of love for the two film-makers - researcher Robyn Janes and director, cinematographer and editor Dave Kwant - but also for the two men whose interest inspired the movie.

Simon Nathan was interested in the history of the South Island's West Coast, while Brian Scadden is a photography historian and collector of ancient cameras.

The hook of Jos is watching Brian attempt to recreate come of Jos Divis's best photographs using the same equipment.

What draws you into the documentary Jos isn't Divis's riveting life story, or that he's some sort of overlooked master.

It's the pictures of New Zealand being born before our eyes - the places, the people, the change from the posed colonial portraits to contemporary snapshots.

Divis arrived in time for the last hurrah of the gold-mining era, just after World War I. He even struck it rich, more than once. But, like so many successful miners, once he found it, he spent it immediately.

By the end, very little remained after 50 years living in a country that was never really his. Apart from the photos, many of which featured Jos himself standing awkwardly at one side of the frame.

But unlike the modern selfie, Divis isn't putting himself forward. These pictures are not about him, he's just a witness, capturing something that will otherwise vanish unremarked.

The film Jos is a bit like that too. At just 46 minutes long, it's a glimpse at two lives - Jos, and the young country he watched grow up.

https://youtu.be/EgEp7Cx-AC8

Listen to Kathryn Ryan speak with Dave Kwant, Simon Nathan and photographer Brian Scadden on Nine to Noon.

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Cairo Conspiracy is a thriller set in Al-Azhar university, the centre of Sunni Islam. An innocent young student finds himself being used as a spy to manipulate the election of a new leader. Directed by Tarik Saleh (The Nile Hilton Incident)

Cairo Conspiracy, directed by a Swedish-Egyptian film-maker Tarik Saleh - started out life under the more cryptic title Boy from Heaven.

Saleh was inspired by Umberto Eco's novel and later movie The Name of the Rose, in which he smuggled philosophic questions about power and religion into a medieval whodunit.

Cairo Conspiracy tackles similar subjects from a Muslim angle, but in the guise of a John Le Carre spy thriller.

The story opens in a poor fishing village, where young Adam works for his father. But fate has plans for him.

His local imam, impressed by his hard work at school, has put his name forward to the Al-Azhar university - the centre of Sunni Islam. Adam gets the good news - a scholarship.

Devout, literate and humble, Adam seems to be an ideal student at such a place. But no sooner has he arrived in Cairo when events take a dramatic turn.

The Grand Imam suddenly dies, and all attention turns on who will replace him.

The Government takes a very keen interest. In fact, the President For Life has already made it clear who he wants to take that role.

His chief Secret Service operative, Colonel Ibrahim, is ordered to fix the election.

Ibrahim already has spies in high places, but his best placed one - Zizo at Al-Azhar - is nervous. Zizo wants out before his cover is blown, and he thinks he's found the "angel" to replace him. He's young, he's religious, he's only just arrived from the sticks - Adam's your man.

Zizo's paranoia proves justified. No sooner has he struck up a friendship with young Adam than he's brutally murdered in the street.

But for Colonel Ibrahim, there's no point crying over murdered spies. He's got an election to fiddle, and rival candidates to discredit. He bullies Adam into providing him with information.

But what lifts Cairo Conspiracy above the usual Netflix thriller is the characters of Ibrahim and Adam.

The former - scruffy, good at his job, ruthless - is also not as corrupt as he appears. And Adam, the virtuous boy who's literally worn the Shoes of the Fisherman - if I can mix my religious metaphors - may be naïve, but he's no idiot.

The spy-masters, the cynical politicians, and the sinister Muslim Brotherhood all try to get him to toe the various lines…

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Guardians of the Galaxy 3 is, apparently, the final of the franchise, starring Chris Pratt, Zoe Saldana and the voices of Bradley Cooper and Vin Diesel. Directed by James Gunn before he crosses over to Marvel rival, DC Comics.

A few years ago, I made the bold claim that the best producer in Hollywood was Marvel Comics' Kevin Feige.

All those early pictures - Iron Man, Captain America, Thor, culminating in the all-star Avengers - not only had size and scope, but good characters, good scripts and an admirably light touch.

Above all they had that Hollywood staple over the decades - "heart". There's a fine line between sentiment and cheese, just as there's one between thrilling action and unpleasant violence.

For ten years Kevin Feige trod them both like an ace tightrope walker.

But since then, the Marvel movies have started to stall. There are too damn many of them for one thing, and too many plot points over too many years we're all expected to keep up with.

Feige the Movie Wizard has turned into Feige the Comic-Book Geek.

The one Marvel director who seems to remember what makes an action-adventure movie work is the Guardians of the Galaxy auteur James Gunn. And he's proved it a few times now.

Ten years ago the first Guardians film arrived pretty much unheralded.

It featured characters no-one had heard of. They included a neurotic raccoon, an ambulatory tree, an enormous chap who may be the stupidest character in movies and two homicidal sisters - one green, one blue.

The cast members weren't much more of a safe bet. The biggest names - Zoe Saldana, Bradley Cooper, Vin Diesel - were either covered in makeup or merely voices attached to digital effects.

They were led by a podgy comedian called Chris Pratt, who spent time in the gym and came out as legendary hero Star Lord.

Except no-one calls him that. They just call him Peter Quill. If that.

No-one expected anything of Guardians of the Galaxy until it hit big, thanks to a terrific script - by James Gunn - being beautifully directed - again by James Gunn.

He did it again - Guardians of the Galaxy 2 - and then suddenly fell foul of the 2020s.

Some tasteless old tweets from his feckless youth came out to bite him, and suddenly Gunn found himself cancelled.

But of course nobody's so cancelled in Hollywood that they can't come back if there's a buck in it.

Marvel's rivals, DC Comics, snapped him up to make a sequel to the fairly ho-hum Suicide Squad. And Gunn defied all expectations again by making the follow-up several times better than the original.

Now no longer cancelled, Gunn was rehired by Marvel to make the third - and final - Guardians of the Galaxy. …

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Simon Morris welcomes three movies that show a marked improvement on the last few weeks - the first bug blockbuster of the season, and two award winning films from North Africa - one from Egypt, one from Morocco.

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