This week’s movie releases

Spectacle has always drawn us to the movies, but the overuse of computer-generated imagery (CGI) and the lack of substantial ideas to prop it up means it’s getting harder and harder to wow audiences these days. Unless, that is, you are filmmaker Christopher Nolan. The latest from the British director – who breathed new life into the superhero genre with the Batman trilogy and invented the mind-heist movie with Inception – marks an all-new attempt to dazzle our eyes and blow our minds. Channelling Kubrick’s 2001 and Spielberg’s Close Encounters … , Interstellar mixes mostly in-camera effects with a plot grounded in the work of theoretical physicist Kip Thorne. And it also stars Matthew McConaughey – arguably interstellar enough all on his own right now – in the lead role of a pilot-turned-widowed subsistence farmer on a future environmentally ravaged Earth. When a plan is hatched to recruit a team to travel through a wormhole in search of a new planet for humankind, he makes the painful decision to leave his two children behind and join the mission. Anne Hathaway, Jessica Chastain, Ellen Burstyn and Nolan regular Michael Caine also star.

Disney family comedy Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day stars Steve Carell and Jennifer Garner as the parents of Alexander (Ed Oxenbould), an 11-year-old boy experiencing the worst day of his life. Wondering why misfortune only befalls him, he’s soon set right when the rest of his family start having their own calamitous days. Puerto Rico’s Miguel Arteta directs.

20,000 Days on Earth is British artists Iain Forsyth and Jane Pollard’s quasi-documentary peek into the creative world of musician Nick Cave. Depicting a made-up day in the life of the Australian singer-songwriter, it documents his creative process and his chats with the likes of Kylie Minogue and actor Ray Winstone.

Writer-director Ira Sachs’ critically acclaimed Love Is Strange stars John Lithgow and Alfred Molina as a gay Manhattan couple whose four-decade life together starts to crumble after they take the plunge and get married.

Isolated case

Based on true events, Mexican moviemaker Kai Parlange Tessman’s Espacio interior narrates the story of a man (Kuno Becker) who is kidnapped and completely isolated from the outside world in a three-by-one-and-a-half-meter cell.

Spanish-Argentinean co-production Blue Lips brings together six different stories directed by six different filmmakers – Daniela de Carlo, Julieta Lima, Gustavo Lipsztein, Antonello Novellino, Nacho Ruiperez and Nobuo Shima – about six people from across the world who, for various reasons, wind up together at Pamplona’s famous Sanfermines festival.

Finally, Ignacio Estaregui’s Spanish comedy Justi&Cia is the tale of a former miner (Hovik Keuchkerian), who, fed up with the state of the nation, decides to become a Charles Bronson-style vigilante, teaming up with retiree (the late Álex Angulo) along the way.