Robert Pattinson’s sex-sting satire and a creepy-crawly horror, plus other new movies to watch this week

(MA) 107 minutes

The US TV journalist Chris Hansen is closely associated with a particular kind of hidden camera sting, made famous in the 2000s on To Catch A Predator, his signature segment of the network current affairs show Dateline.

The target of the sting, always male, has been lured to a suburban home with the promise of sex with an underage girl or boy met online. Then the sharply dressed Hansen steps out of the shadows, proclaiming the truth like a press secretary for God: all of this has been a ruse, the cops are close at hand, and the target’s perverse desires will soon be put on show for the world to see.

While this form of entrapment may not be especially edifying, it makes for gripping drama. It’s no wonder that the budding filmmaker Lance Oppenheim became fascinated with the show at a young age, setting him on a path that led to the making of Primetime, his first fiction feature after several offbeat documentaries (the screenplay is by Ajon Singh, also a first-timer). Robert Pattinson stars as Hansen, taking time out in between stints as The Batman, another preening vigilante with technology on his side.

(MA) 81 minutes

A couple of years ago, the Australian horror filmmaker Kiah Roache-Turner brought us Sting, a nifty B-movie about a giant spider running rampant in a Brooklyn apartment block, shot in a Sydney studio with Australians doing American accents.

The Spanish director Angel Gomez Hernandez is playing a similar game in Crawlers, which concerns a spider infestation in a rundown LA apartment complex known as Paradiso Palms: the shoot was in Portugal, with an international cast led by Italian star Matilda Lutz (Red Sonja) as the overworked building manager Serena.

Even making allowances for patriotic bias, I’m bound to say Roache-Turner comes out ahead. Supposedly imported from Papua New Guinea, the spiders in Crawlers are disappointingly regular-sized – large enough you’d be alarmed to see one crawling towards the floor, but not so large that it wouldn’t fit in a jam jar.

(M) 100 minutes

Pressure is a weather story. It does the unlikely, spinning the ornery behaviour of a swirling low-pressure system into a tense political drama with worldwide consequences.

It’s set in Britain’s Home Counties in World War II during the lead-up to Operation Overlord, the Allied forces’ D-Day invasion of occupied France, and its unorthodox hero is a crusty Scottish meteorologist pushing an unpopular view of the weather’s imminent intentions.

Group Captain James Stagg (Andrew Scott) arrives at Southwick House, headquarters of the Allied Command, just 61 hours before the scheduled landing in Normandy. He’s to report to General Dwight D. Eisenhower (an imposing Brendan Fraser) who just wants to be reassured that all will be right on the night – that nature will lay on calm, windless conditions with little cloud to obscure the light of a full moon.

(M) 117 minutes

By any sensible person’s standard, Taika Waititi’s Klara And the Sun is an uncommonly annoying movie. But it also might move you to tears – and if it does, I wouldn’t hold you to blame.

The sadness derives from the 2021 novel of the same name by Kazuo Ishiguro, a master of the kind of terribly British tearjerker where the characters are obliged to keep calm and carry on.

The butler hero of Ishiguro’s The Remains of The Day is made of such stuff, and so are the boarding school students in his Never Let Me Go, both previously adapted to the screen with a restraint to match the source material.

(M) 131 minutes. In cinemas.

Oregon teenager Prue McKeel is on a quest. A murder of crows has swooped out of the sky and snatched her little brother while she was taking care of him. Now she must get him back – a mission which takes her into a nearby forest of the enchanted kind we’ve come to know so well from Shakespeare and the Brothers Grimm.

Nobody emerges from these without undergoing some fundamental change and this one is busier than most, heavily populated with witches, warlocks, battling armies, marauding bandits and talking animals.

That’s the premise of Wildwood, the new animated feature from Laika, the American independent studio devoted to stop-motion animation, a painstaking art relying on articulated puppets and handmade sets photographed frame by frame. Wildwood is the studio’s sixth film. Its predecessors, which include Coraline, The Boxtrolls and Kubo and the Two Strings, have all been nominated for Oscars, but only Coraline has been a hit at the box-office.

(MA) 108 minutes. In cinemas

No-one told me Clayface was an actor. Granted, he hasn’t always been an actor: like other enduring DC comic-book villains, the character has been given a new origin story every few years. But reliable sources tell me that through it all, he’s retained a special ability to masquerade as other people, through some combination of advanced psionic powers and sheer showmanship.

The showbiz angle is critical to the gruesome new Clayface movie from British director James Watkins (The Woman In Black) – not a superhero adventure but a traditional exercise in grand guignol, although it takes place in Batman’s hometown of Gotham City and was overseen by the same producers as the recent screen versions of Superman and Supergirl.

The anti-hero Matt Hagen (Tom Rhys Harries) is an up-and-coming movie star whose career takes a downturn when he makes the rookie mistake of sleeping with the girlfriend (Joana Ribeiro) of a mob boss (David Dencik).

(M) 119 minutes

As campy video-game adaptations from the 1990s go, the original version of Street Fighter, starring Jean-Claude Van Damme, sets a high bar. More specifically, the bar is set by the late Raul Julia’s performance as the levitating drug lord and would-be global dictator General Bison, strutting and glowering in his red uniform and peaked cap adorned with a winged skull, more feverishly high on his own supply than most Bond villains ever managed to be.

This new bid to launch a Street Fighter movie franchise is not a direct remake, but as a reimagined version of the character – now known as Lord Bison – David Dastmalchian seems very conscious of not wanting to mimic his predecessor. He goes for a more internalised kind of madness, speaking in uncanny hushed tones and periodically letting his big sorrowful eyes roll back in his head.

Still, he has some welcome moments of flamboyance, including a version of the most famous scene from the original, where Bison confronts Chun-Li (played here by Callina Liang), an Interpol agent who has infiltrated his criminal organisation in order to avenge her father’s death.