Tricksy documentary spin on 1928 novel weaves fact and fiction to reconsider and reimagine the time-travelling story for our time

Paul B Preciado’s documentary is a jeu d’ésprit; maybe in fact a jeu d’ésprit about a jeu d’ésprit. It is a meditation on Virginia Woolf’s 1928 novel Orlando: A Biography – which has previously been adapted for stage and screen many times, most famously by Sally Potter in the 1992 film starring Tilda Swinton – about an Elizabethan aristocrat who changes sex from man to woman and magically lives on youthfully into the modern age, an anti-Faustian miracle of survival.

In this film, Preciado stages various scenes in which trans people present their own engaged critique: re-enacting moments from the book, or from their own lives and memories, or their own thoughts about Woolf, sometimes playfully mashing up details of Orlando’s life with their own – and wondering how it would look if Woolf’s creation was forced to endure psychiatric intervention the way they did. The film might occasionally feel a bit self-conscious, but in a way this is a by-product of the film’s experimental nature; trans people are engaging with this fictional literary text in which trans identity has a poetic reality, a visionary reality, precisely that reality which is here found to be empowering.

Steve Carell’s everyvillain starts a dull new life but nemesis Will Ferrell’s Maxime Le Mal has other ideas

Here’s something new in the saga of everysupervillain ordinariness featuring Gru the goofy animated megabaddie (voiced by Steve Carell), with his comedy bald head, pointy noise and foreign accent. We now reach the fourth film in the series; sixth, if you count the two spin-off films about his jabbering yellow sidekick minions.

This franchise from Illumination Entertainment has never come close to the inspired genius of its rival Pixar’s best work, despite the obvious indebtedness to Syndrome from Pixar’s The Incredibles; that mighty film’s influence looks even more obvious now, as Gru and his family have to be moved to a new city and given witness-protection-scheme-type new identities by their faintly exasperated handlers. But it has to be said that the Despicable Me franchise has marathon stamina; it relaxes into its long-established characterisation and storytelling and only a snob would deny this film’s unassuming consistency in delivering family entertainment. And this is, after all, the franchise that gave us the world-beatingly catchy Happy by Pharrell Williams, who returns to write songs for DM4.

Zac Efron plays a heartless airhead movie star who is much too hastily transformed into Kidman’s Mr Perfect

When it comes to age-gap films starring Nicole Kidman, Jonathan Glazer’s Birth is surely impossible to follow. But newcomer screenwriter Carrie Solomon and director Richard LaGravenese are trying it with this romcom for Netflix which, despite a very cute high concept, resolves the unresolved sexual tension too early and jettisons the irony and comedy well before the end of the first act, leaving us with something a bit solemn.

The film in fact reunites Kidman with Zac Efron; they starred together in The Paperboy in 2013. Efron plays Chris Cole, a shallow and vain young movie star in LA who mistreats his much put-upon assistant Zara, kookily played by Joey King. With much pouting and eye-rolling she has to cater to his every whim and it is especially her job to organise the purchase of the special “breakup” diamond earrings that Chris always gives to young women he’s going to dump.

The latest in the alien-terror series finds Lupita Nyong’o connecting with stranger Joseph Quinn as the monsters terrorise a city into trembling silence

The hideous novelty is leaking a little from what now has to be called the Quiet Place franchise, about humans of the future forced to live in a permanent state of tremblingly paranoid silence because they are terrorised by alien monsters who can’t see but will pounce at the slightest sound. This prequel, directed by Michael Sarnoski (the creator of Pig, starring Nicolas Cage) shows two strangers finding a connection on the very first day of the aliens’ attack; it is well made and well acted, with a fervent lead performance from Lupita Nyong’o.

Nyong’o plays Sam, a woman with cancer in hospice care, who is spiky and difficult with her nurse Reuben (Alex Wolff). When longsuffering Reuben takes Sam and other patients for a trip into New York for a treat (oddly, a marionette show – but with very few kids in the audience), the creepy, blind creatures attack. They cause apocalyptic chaos, and Sam finds herself randomly befriending a terrified British law student called Eric, played by the estimable Joseph Quinn, who gave such an intense performance in Luna Carmoon’s psychodrama Hoard.