This week’s movie releases

A culture-clash comedy shedding light on a little-known slice of British social history, Pride is the true story of what happened when London gay activists formed an unlikely alliance with striking Welsh miners in the 1980s. Uplifting and hilarious, it’s told with an irrepressible exuberance not normally associated with such socially conscious material – and all the more entertaining and moving for it. It’s 1984 and the UK miners’ strike is in full swing: identifying with their struggles against the police and press, activist Mark Ashton (Ben Schnetzer) and a gaggle of supporters, including extrovert actor Jonathan (Dominic West) and shy, still-half-in-the-closet teen Joe (George MacKay), decide to raise money to help their cause, driving down to a Welsh village to hand over their donations in person. They’re greeted with open arms by some, including union leader Dai Donovan (Paddy Considine), and suspicion and outright hostility by others, but not enough to stop the communities from clicking. All the broad comedy you might expect from such a collision of worlds is present and correct in this euphoric celebration of solidarity that prefers to play down the darker aspects of the groups’ real-life struggle. But, crucially, it never disavows them: Stephen Beresford’s adept script also has room for the things that don’t work out perfectly – the prejudice, the beatings, AIDS – but always with an optimism that suggests that, one day, they will. Wholly recommended.

Set in New York in 1981, thriller A Most Violent Year is the third feature from J. C. Chandor, the director of impressive financial crisis drama Margin Call and near-silent stranded-at-sea adventure All Is Lost. Inside Llewyn Davis’s Oscar Isaac stars as the owner of a heating oil firm struggling to resist fighting back against the violent truck hijackings ruining his business. Jessica Chastain plays his goading, mob-connected wife, while David Oyelowo – last seen as Martin Luther King in Selma – is the assistant DA delving into his firm’s finances.

Arriving hot on the heels of the Penguins of Madagascar, Home is another DreamWorks animated adventure, this time about a cutesy purple alien called Oh (voiced by Big Bang Theory’s Jim Parsons) who’s been cast out by his own race, the Boov, for letting their enemies know that they’re hiding out on Earth. As the Boov tries to push humankind out into various far-flung reaches, Oh hooks up with Tip (pop star Rihanna), an earthling youngster who’s been separated from her mom. Other voices are provided by Jennifer Lopez and Steve Martin.

López also crops up this week in psychological thriller The Boy Next Door. The Latino star plays a schoolteacher going through a divorce who has a one-night stand with a teenage neighbor who develops a dangerous obsession with her. Rob Cohen (The Fast & the Furious) directs.

One angry man

In one of his last roles, Robin Williams plays an irascible grump who’s wrongly informed he has just an hour-and-a-half to live in comedy-drama The Angriest Man in Brooklyn. As he rushes around town trying to make amends for all his past wrongs, his doctor seeks to track him down to explain the mistaken diagnosis. With Mila Kunis, Melissa Leo and Game of Thrones’ Peter Dinklage.

Also out this week, Abel Ferrara’s biopic Pasolini sees Willem Dafoe step into the shoes of the Italian film director, poet and intellectual in the days before his life was tragically cut short in highly lurid circumstances.

Meanwhile, National Gallery is veteran US documentarian Frederick Wiseman’s three-hour frame-by-frame journey around the masterpieces and inner workings of the renowned London art institute.