Brilliantly led by Collette, PJ Hogan’s 1994 story of a lovable loser was the feelgood sensation that rescued the band’s reputation – how can you resist it?

When writer-director PJ Hogan made Muriel’s Wedding in 1994, he surely knew he had struck feelgood-movie gold. But maybe he didn’t realise he had personally authored a pivotal moment in Abbamania’s global history: the momentous transitional phase between the band being taboo-naff and being world-conqueringly beloved. (Maybe Mr Hogan should be getting a cut of the Mamma Mia! musicals and the Abba Voyage live show.) Hogan also gave us our first real view of Toni Collette who started the way she meant to go on: being outstanding in everything she is in.

But back in 1994, it was still appropriate that a loser – albeit a lovable loser – could be depicted as an Abba fan; but this movie gets something right that the endless pedantic jukebox musicals that came later get wrong. This crucial pro-Abba film is not itself obsessed with Abba and the soundtrack isn’t wall-to-wall Abba; our heroine says, once she tastes success, “I haven’t listened to one Abba song. That’s because now my life’s as good as an Abba song.”

Toby Jones plays the spaniel-eyed schoolmaster setting Harry Lawtey’s needy young pupil on course for haughty international stardom

The career of Richard Burton seemed mythic at the time, and more so in retrospect. In Pedro Almodóvar’s latest movie The Room Next Door, Julianne Moore’s character is even shown reading Erotic Vagrancy, Roger Lewis’s account of Burton’s then-adulterous relationship with Elizabeth Taylor in the early 60s, the title taken from Pope John XXIII’s extraordinary denunciation: “You will finish in an erotic vagrancy, without end or without a safe port.” In fact, the nearest thing Burton ever had to a safe port was his inspirational English teacher Philip Burton in Port Talbot, south Wales, whose own frustrated dreams of the theatre were poured into the bright young miner’s son Richard Jenkins, coaching him in acting and even making him his legal ward and getting him to change his surname to Burton to facilitate the teacher’s sponsorship of his Oxford scholarship.

It’s the subject of this heartfelt, vigorously acted, enjoyable, if slightly naive movie from screenwriters Tom Bullough and Josh Hyams, and director Marc Evans. Toby Jones stars as the spaniel-eyed Mr Burton and Harry Lawtey is Richard, a lanky, needy kid morphing into that insufferably haughty and sonorous prince of the English stage. It tells a uniquely painful and dysfunctional story, and does its best to show how Burton’s pride always coexisted with shame and self-hate, and culminated with him playing Hal in Henry IV Part 2 at Stratford with Mr Burton in the audience, the pair effectively enacting their own version of the Hal/Falstaff betrayal scene.

Documentary follows the baloeiros, who illegally build and release huge decorated balloons in cities, from where they can travel hundreds of miles

An intriguing film set in Brazil, first shown last year at the CPH:DOX documentary festival in Copenhagen, in which expatriate Danish film-maker Sissel Morell Dargis takes a look at a unique grassroots cultural phenomenon: the baloeiros, the ballooners. These are groups of young men, as secretive and loyal to each other as Freemasons, who (illegally) build and release huge decorated balloons in cities, from where they can travel hundreds of miles. Why? As kind of graffiti, or a community self-expression, or situationist artform, or just a subversive gesture of pure joie de vivre that does not need or admit of any explanation.

The baloeiros are harassed by the police, on the ostensible grounds that they are part of gang culture, and the authorities encourage local people to inform on those they suspect of building and transporting a balloon. But baloeiros are cheerfully committed to their own kind of public-access artistry. The balloons show colossal images of Sly Stallone and Luciano Pavarotti – aspirational role models and pop culture icons. As Dargis says: “A flying balloon belongs to everyone, even the police.”

Kilmer, who has died aged 65, made his name with Top Gun and The Doors – but his exceptional talents were often under-appreciated by the mainstream film industry

• Val Kilmer, star of Top Gun and The Doors, dies aged 65
• A life in pictures

Why do some movie careers take off … and others go a bit sideways? Val Kilmer was a smart actor, a looker, a terrific screen presence and in later years an under-appreciated comic performer. His finest hour as an actor came in Shane Black’s comedy action thriller Kiss Kiss Bang Bang in 2005, when he was quite superb as the camp private investigator Gay Perry Shrike: a gloriously sleek, plump performance which was transparently – and outrageously – based on Tom Ford. If only Kilmer could have started his acting life with that bravura performance, and shown the world what he could do. Instead, and at a crucial stage in his career, he was trapped in the body and face of a staggeringly beautiful young man.

He could somehow never quite persuade Hollywood to accept him as a leading man and above-the-title player in the mould of his Top Gun contemporary Tom Cruise, who in 1986 played Pete “Maverick” Mitchell to Val Kilmer’s Tom “Iceman” Kazansky. As the 80s and 90s rolled by, Kilmer never ascended to the league of Cruise, Hanks, Clooney and Pitt. Medication for the illness he latterly suffered can’t have helped, and it is a great sadness that fate never allowed him to mature in the same way as, say, Kurt Russell.

So Sam Mendes has cast his Beatles tetralogy, but none are from Merseyside. Don’t worry, I’ve just invented the Beatles Cinematic Universe

Sam Mendes has announced the cast for his colossal four-film Beatles extravaganza: Harris Dickinson as John, Paul Mescal as Paul, Barry Keoghan as Ringo and Joseph Quinn as George – and to tumultuous acclaim he brought his Fab Four on stage at the CinemaCon event in Las Vegas, a now well-established affair in the film world, incidentally, satirised in a forthcoming episode of Seth Rogen’s TV comedy The Studio.

I’m sorry to say, however, that Sam has almost entirely ignored the casting suggestions that I made in February last year. For what this is worth, I went with Leo Woodall as Paul, Finn Wolfhard as George, Harry Melling as Ringo and Barry Keoghan as John (though Barry got Ringo in the end). But I like to think that Sam Mendes and his producer Pippa Harris were thinking on more or less the same lines as me. Interestingly, there are no American actors doing Brit accents – just the kind of well-trained British or Irish actors who can fabricate perfect American accents for American roles elsewhere.

Michel Hazanavicius’s sentimental tale about a baby found in the woods features sweet little cartoon birds and rabbits as well as the real horror of Nazi death camps

Directed by Michel Hazanavicius, this postmodern Holocaust fairytale premiered at Cannes last year, and turns out to be a dreamy animated curiosity which is certainly different to the icy realist rigour of other films which have appeared there on the same theme, such as Jonathan Glazer’s The Zone of Interest or László Nemes’s Son of Saul. It is adapted from a novella by author and screenwriter Jean-Claude Grumberg (who collaborated with Truffaut on The Last Metro), whose own father was murdered in the Nazi death camps.

The late Jean-Louis Trintignant has his final credit as the narrator, introducing us to scenes that could, at first glance, be from the Brothers Grimm. We see a dense central European forest … through which a second world war Nazi train is seen speeding through, carrying terrified Jews to Auschwitz. One man, with a wife, young child and a baby makes a desperate decision to throw his baby out on to the snowy hillside in the hope that someone finds it – and someone does.

Outdated attitudes to women are so deep in 007’s DNA that it couldn’t be a female role, but a female villain could shake him into the 21st century

Helen Mirren has said that there is no earthly point in getting a woman to play James Bond because the world’s most famous fictional spy was “born out of profound sexism”.

The first thing to say is that of course she is right. Of course Bond was born of reactionary attitudes and only a bore would point out what the DBE stands for in Mirren’s title. If you doubt the truth of what she says, watch the cringeworthy moment in Goldfinger when Sean Connery’s Bond dismisses his poolside masseuse Dink (played by Margaret Nolan) because he needs to discuss important stuff with Felix Leiter, and as Dink obediently leaves he slaps her behind and says: “Man talk …” Obnoxious.

Writer and director Jed Hart’s debut psycho-thriller is very nearly a decent film but is let down by a script that goes completely awry

First-time feature director Jed Hart starts with a great premise for a low-budget psychological thriller about a very real subject, and he gets good performances from his three actors. Hart’s direction is strong, but it’s better than his script; for me the movie, having established its realist credentials, is let down by a completely unreal and silly ending.

Nicky, played by Lyndsey Marshal, is a hard-working agency nurse who is all alone, a single mum to a son away at uni. She lives a lonely but reasonably content life, listening to classical music, doing yoga and vaguely dating a clueless but nice man called Kevin, played by Barry Ward. But all this is utterly destroyed when a lairy and aggressive guy moves into the property next door and has loud parties with his mates every night until four in the morning; this is the unspeakable Deano (Aston McAuley), who responds with hostile contempt to Nicky’s timidly polite requests to turn the music down – along with some belligerent self-pity: “I’ve had a tough couple of years with my mental health.”

Irish-set remake of Italian film about a bachelor who cares for his elderly mum never quite matches the charm of the original, despite occasional shimmers

Gianni Di Gregorio’s modern Italian classic Mid-August Lunch from 2008, about a middle-aged bachelor caring for his ageing mum and other elderly ladies, has inspired this loose remake: a broad comedy amplifying what could be seen as the original’s queer subtext. Despite one or two sweet touches and game performances, it never comes close to matching the gentleness, subtlety and charm of the original.

The action is transferred from Rome to Dublin and the gay theme perhaps effectively replaces the importance of food in the Italian film. James McArdle is Edward, a YA author and gay man on the verge of major literary stardom, for which an upcoming US publicity tour is vitally important. But he has to take care of his widowed mum Alma (Fionnula Flanagan) who cannot speak after suffering a stroke, and there is some droll comedy with the Stephen Hawking voice enunciating her crisp commands from her iPad.