At The Movies: The Substance and The Ministry Of Ungentlemanly Warfare take you on a wild ride

The Substance (M18)

141 minutes, opens on Sept 26
★★★★☆

The story: Cannes Film Festival 2024’s Best Screenplay winner earned a 13-minute standing ovation, especially for Demi Moore’s performance as a Hollywood has-been offered a miracle youth serum. She is Elisabeth Sparkle and, with a single injection, her spine violently splinters to birth a supple sexbot named Sue (Margaret Qualley).

The Substance is written and directed by Coralie Fargeat as if understudying David Cronenberg of The Fly (1986). But the French talent (Revenge, 2017) is capable of her own bloody baroque excess in a female body horror satirising the cultural obsession with youth.

The studio boss (Dennis Quaid) fires Elisabeth on her 50th birthday. Men impose the impossible beauty standards women then destroy themselves to surpass, and Elisabeth becomes her own worst enemy in her deadly contest with Sue – her idealised self-image and a manifestation of her self-loathing all at once – to regain her career when her 20-year-old clone becomes America’s hottest babydoll.

The treatment has a regimen for maintaining their symbiosis. The more ruthlessly Sue abuses it for her ascent, the faster Elisabeth’s monstrous ageing, isolated in shame in her luxury Los Angeles apartment. Pestilent fluids and her teeth falling out are just the start.

Moore is the comeback star, however eye-catching Qualley with her wriggly Spandexed tushie. Now 61, Hollywood’s highest-paid actress of the 1990s for Striptease (1996) and G.I. Jane (1997) bares her body – mutant breasts included – and defiant anger in a role she understands well.

It is inspired casting.

Top marks, too, to the hyperreal production design and morbid prosthetics. The fever dream is brazen, grotesque, deranged and bluntly entertaining as Elisabeth decomposes.

Hot take: Tragicomic and horrific, this insane takedown of the commodification of women is an instant cult classic.

The Ministry Of Ungentlemanly Warfare (NC16)

122 minutes, Prime Video
★★★☆☆

The story: A film based on recently declassified files of the British War Department. In 1942, during World War II, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill (Rory Kinnear) sanctioned a covert sabotage operation to cripple German U-boats around the Spanish island Fernando Po off the West Africa coast.

If discovered, the agents would be court-martialled. Botch the assignment, code-named Operation Postmaster, and Britain falls to Nazi Germany. The stakes could not be higher.

Except the director behind The Ministry Of Ungentlemanly Warfare is Cool Britannia’s cheeky chappie Guy Ritchie, adapting from Damien Lewis’ 2014 non-fiction book Churchill’s Secret Warriors: The Explosive True Story Of The Special Forces Desperadoes Of WWII.

“Remember, gentlemen, to have fun” will therefore be the rules of engagement per swashbuckling team leader Gus March-Phillips (Henry Cavill).

The last was the inspiration for James Bond, whose creator, Ian Fleming (Freddie Fox), is a royal naval officer involved in coordinating this wartime men-on-a-mission throwback to The Guns Of Navarone (1961) and The Dirty Dozen (1967).

The adventure is jaunty, and the heroes assembled by March-Phillips are Ritchie’s usual entertaining scallywags: namely, an Irish sailor (Hero Fiennes Tiffin), a Danish archer (Alan Ritchson), a munitions expert (Henry Golding) and a saboteur (Alex Pettyfer).

Their allies on the ground are an African casino operator (Babs Olusanmokun) and a Jewish actress-spy (Eiza Gonzalez), who must distract-seduce a Gestapo sadist (Til Schweiger) at the climactic costume ball as the boys get down to blasting the SS fleets along with a gadzillion fascists.

This is a good-conquers-evil escapade where the evil are one-dimensional villains and the good are very suave, never breaking a sweat amid the derring-do.

Hot take: A coalition of colourful characters go rocknrolla, Guy Ritchie-style, in a breezy escapist combat caper.