Puss In Boots: The Last Wish (PG)

102 minutes, now showing, 4 stars

Beautiful graphics, a strong supporting cast and a soulful maturity make this a worthy sequel to the 2011 hit, Puss In Boots.

In the new film, Puss (voiced by Antonio Banderas) learns that he is on his final life, having wasted the previous eight on reckless adventures. The terrified feline becomes a house cat and discovers the existence of the Wishing Star, a magical object with the power to return his lost lives. He is joined by his nemesis and romantic partner Kitty Softpaws (Salma Hayek) and a new friend, a kind-hearted but slow-witted dog named Perro (Harvey Guillen).

Puss became a breakout character after appearing in Shrek 2 (2004). One reason was that unlike the other fairy-tale characters that populate the Shrek universe, the cat was instantly relatable. He was a parody of the Mexican swashbuckler Zorro, played by Banderas in the 1998 film and who would go on to be the voice of Puss.

Banderas’ lugubrious voice brought out the campiness that was always there in the suave, hyper-confident Zorro.

American actor Guillen, best known for his supporting role on the vampire sitcom What We Do In The Shadows (2019 to present), gives Perro a heart to match the hole in his head.

Ring Wandering (PG)

104 minutes, now showing exclusively at The Projector, 4 stars

Sosuke (Sho Kasamatsu), an aspiring manga artist, finds an animal skull at his day job excavating a construction site in central Tokyo. He returns that night, hoping for more skeletal fragments to help him complete his long-stalled drawing of an indigenous wolf. Out of the darkness appears an enigmatic young woman (Junko Abe) looking for her runaway dog.

Ring Wandering is an award-winning Japanese fantasy of such naturalism, so quiet in its intent, the viewer is as unaware as Sosuke when he is transported from the present to the 1940s.

The skull has set him on a discovery of his nation’s recent history and is a metaphor for the 100,000 civilian deaths from the 1945 Great Tokyo Air Raid, their bones buried and forgotten under the redeveloped capital.

The melancholic, ever-mysterious rumination on memory is about one self-absorbed youth forming emotional connections to the past and gaining wisdom.

Director Masakazu Kaneko will be present for an in-person Q&A session after the 3pm screening on Sunday at Projector X: Picturehouse. The event will be moderated by Singapore film-maker Daniel Hui.

Ennio (M18)

156 minutes, now showing

Those who missed screenings of this documentary at the recently ended Italian Film Festival can now catch it in cinemas. In The Guardian newspaper, a reviewer called this look into the work of prolific Italian composer Ennio Morricone a “painstakingly detailed, fantastically entertaining, and profoundly exhausting deep dive”.

Morricone gained attention in Hollywood because of his scores for spaghetti westerns the Dollars Trilogy (A Fistful Of Dollars, 1964; For A Few Dollars More, 1965; and The Good, The Bad And The Ugly, 1966). He went on to do Oscar-nominated work in dramas, including The Mission (1986) and The Untouchables (1987).

Director Giuseppe Tornatore conducts interviews with Morricone – he died in 2020, aged 91 – who talks about how he brought his most famous works to life. It also includes testimonials from film-makers Bernardo Bertolucci, Dario Argento, Barry Levinson, Roland Joffe, Oliver Stone, Quentin Tarantino and others.