This week’s movie releases

The Lego sets have been unleashed, the video game unveiled and the action figures let loose for the brontosaurus-sized release of Jurassic World, the fourth film in the dinosaur disaster franchise originally begun by Steven Spielberg back in 1993. As he did for 2001’s third part, the star director takes a back seat as executive producer here with Colin Trevorrow – who previously made indie comedy Safety Not Guaranteed – calling the shots in a film that also features a whole new cast, including Chris Pratt, Bryce Dallas Howard, Vincent D’Onofrio, Ty Simpkins, Nick Robinson and Omar Sy. Twenty-two years after the events of the original movie, a theme park featuring real-life dinosaurs is firmly up and running on Isla Nublar, off the Costa Rican coast, owned by multinational the Masrani Corporation. In an attempt to up visitor figures, the park has bred a mean mother of a genetic hybrid dinosaur, dubbed Indominus rex, only for it to escape and embark on a deadly rampage.

Previously adapted by John Schlesinger almost 50 years ago, novelist Thomas Hardy’s 1874 classic Far from the Madding Crowd gets a new cinematic revamp courtesy of Danish Festen director Thomas Vinterberg. Carey Mulligan takes over from Julie Christie as Bathsheba Everdene, the headstrong Dorset landowner who finds herself contending with three contrasting suitors: shepherd Gabriel Oak (Matthias Schoenaerts), military man Frank Troy (Tom Sturridge), and the wealthy and more senior William Boldwood (Michael Sheen).

US comedy Get Hard stars Will Ferrell as a hedge fund manager sentenced to 10 years in San Quentin for fraud and embezzlement who hires an African-American car washer, played by comedian Kevin Hart, to teach him how to survive on the inside.

Directed by Joaquín Oristrell and featuring a who’s who of Spanish acting talent – including Sergio Peris Mencheta, Estefanía de los Santos, María Botto, Raúl Arévalo, Marta Etura, Juan Diego Botto, Goya Toledo and Antonio de la Torre – Hablar is a drama rooted in Spain’s economic crisis that mimics the likes of Hitchcock’s Rope and Alexander Sokurov’s Russian Ark in being shot in one single 75-minute take. More remarkably, rather than unfolding in the comfort of a single, enclosed space like those two antecedents, it all takes place on the vibrant streets of Madrid’s multicultural Lavapiés neighborhood as an assortment of characters meet, talk, argue, cry, laugh, rob and hug.

French connections

Films from two major French filmmaking talents are also out this week. Olivier Assayas, director of the Carlos miniseries about notorious 1970s terrorist The Jackal, returns with Clouds of Sils Maria, which stars Juliette Binoche as an actress asked to revisit the play that made her famous 20 years before, this time portraying an older character. Chloë Grace Moretz plays the Hollywood starlet who steps into her original role and gives her a discomforting glimpse of her younger self, while The Twilight Saga’s Kristen Stewart features as her assistant.

Originally a four-part miniseries, Li'l Quinquin sees the normally ascetic Bruno Dumont move into surreal comedy with an oddball murder mystery that sees a bumbling policeman having to contend with a young prankster as he proceeds to investigate the discovery of some human body parts inside a cow carcass on the northern French coast.