This week’s movie releases

After famously taking more than three decades to make his first four films, Terrence Malick suddenly seems to be on a roll. To the Wonder is his second film in barely two years and he already has another couple in the pipeline. The new work, which was the last film to be reviewed by the great critic Roger Ebert before his death last week, follows in the same mystical vein as 2011’s The Tree of Life, which enraptured some and baffled others. Ben Affleck and Olga Kurylenko play a couple who fall in love in France and move back to his native Oklahoma only for things to go sour. As he reconnects with old flame Rachel McAdams, she turns to local priest Javier Bardem for guidance.

While Bardem crops up again this week in Alacrán enamorado, Kurylenko stars alongside Tom Cruise in sci-fi extravaganza Oblivion. The Cruiser plays a drone repairman on a future Earth devastated by an alien invasion who comes to question everything he knows after helping a mysterious stranger (Kurylenko) out of her crashed spaceship. Morgan Freeman also features in Tron: Legacy director Joseph Kosinki’s adaptation of his own graphic novel.

The powerhouse trio of Al Pacino, Christopher Walken and Alan Arkin come together for comedy drama Stand Up Guys. The Godfather star plays an ageing gangster who’s released from prison after 28 years and sets about making up for lost time with his two old pals. But it soon emerges that one has been put in a terrible predicament by a mafia kingpin.

Young promise

Jonás Trueba, whose charming 2010 debut Todas las canciones hablan de mí showed flashes he might be capable of following in his father’s Fernando Trueba footsteps, returns with his second feature, Los ilusos. A small-scale, black-and-white experimental work featuring Francesco Carril, Aura Garrido, Mikele Urroz and Vito Sanz, it’s described as a film “about the desire to make films, or about what some filmmakers do when they are not making films.”

LOL is a Hollywood remake of the 2008 French comedy of the same name about a teenage girl (Miley Cyrus) struggling with first love and other complications of growing up in today’s YouTube, iTunes, Twitter and Facebook-saturated world. With Demi Moore.

Made from an overtly Christian standpoint, October Baby stars newcomer Rachel Hendrix as a young woman raised by adoptive parents who, after learning she was nearly aborted, embarks on a journey to learn more about her difficult entry into the world.