Deadpool star goes even more unreal

AN adventure-comedy starring Ryan Reynolds as a bank teller who discovers he’s actually a background player in an open-world video game is showing at the Regal Picturehouse cinema from today (Friday)

Guy, played by Reynolds, is a non-player character (NPC) in the global computer game, Free City.

But thanks to a coding innovation developed by programmers Millie (Jodie Comer) and Keys (Joe Keery) that is inserted into Free City by its publisher, Antwan (Taika Waititi), Guy becomes self-aware. Hence the film’s title, Free Guy.

Realising that his world is a video game, he decides to make himself a hero by creating a race against time to save the game before the developers can shut it down.

Also showing from today is The Courier, a true-life Cold War-era spy thriller starring Benedict Cumberbatch.

He plays Greville Wynne, an unassuming British businessman who ends up playing a crucial role behind the scenes during the Cuban Missile Crisis. At the behest of MI6 and a CIA operative, Emily Donovan (Rachel Brosnahan), he forms a covert, highly dangerous partnership with Soviet officer Oleg Penkovsky (Merab Nindze) in an effort to provide the crucial intelligence needed to prevent a nuclear confrontation.

On Sunday at 12.30pm there is a rare chance to enjoy Wong Kar Wai’s 1990 breakthrough feature, Days of Being Wild.

Representing the first full flowering of the director’s signature style, the film is a dreamlike drift through the Hong Kong of the Sixties that explores Wong’s trademark themes of time, longing, dislocation and the restless search for human connection.

On Tuesday at 8pm The Most Beautiful Boy in the World is showing — a documentary about Björn Andrésen who, aged 15, was cast in Luchino Visconti’s 1971 film, Death in Venice.

Continuing from last week are Jungle Cruise, The Last Letter from Your Lover, Paw Patrol: The Movie, Peter Rabbit 2: The Runaway, Spirit Untamed, Stillwater, Summer of Soul and The Croods 2: A New Age.