11 of the best films to watch this April

From Drop to A Minecraft Movie, these are the films to stream at home and watch at the cinema this month.

David Cronenberg’s latest sci-fi-tinged drama stars Vincent Cassel as Karsh, an inventor who looks a lot like Cronenberg himself. Grief-stricken by the death of his wife (Diane Kruger), Karsh develops camera systems that can be buried with corpses, so that their relatives can watch them on monitors as they decompose. The invention catches on, but one night some graves containing these high-tech “shrouds” are desecrated, so Karsh and his brother-in-law (Guy Pearce) have to work out who was responsible. This may sound like the kind of scenario that the director of Scanners and The Fly might use to justify lots of gory body horror, but The Shrouds is a “restrained, even elegant” film inspired by Cronenberg’s own bereavement, says Steve Pond at The Wrap. “It’s a deeply personal look at loss that finds plenty of time to get creepy but never loses sight of the fact that it’s a movie about grief… Its focus, which never wavers, is always on the feeling of loss, not the sight of gore.”

Released on 18 April in the US

Three of Hollywood’s brightest young stars get together in On Swift Horses, a handsome period romance directed by Daniel Minhan and adapted from Shannon Pufahl’s novel. Daisy Edgar-Jones plays Muriel, the fiancée of an upstanding Korean War veteran, Lee (Will Poulter). He is looking forward to a traditional family life in California in the go-getting 1950s, but when his younger brother Julius (Jacob Elordi) comes to stay, Julius’s gay relationships and gambling sprees help Muriel to understand why she is attracted to women and drawn to betting on horse races. Graham Guttman at Screen Rant calls the film a “quietly devastating [story of] great pain and even greater love, all of which is portrayed beautifully by the film’s all-star cast”, adding: “On Swift Horses, with its sweeping romance and epic nature, feels outside of time, transcending any issues to become something deeply affecting.” On the other hand, the BBC’s Caryn James considers it “a disappointment [that] works much better as an idea than as a film”.

Released on 25 April in the US and Canada, and on 30 April in France

On a remote island in Eastern Europe, fanged and furry monsters called Ochi lurk in the forests. A farmer (Willem Dafoe) is obsessed by hunting them, but when his shy teenage daughter (Helena Zengel) finds an injured baby Ochi, it turns out to be a big-eyed, pointy-eared beastie that bears a striking resemblance to Gizmo from Gremlins and Grogu from The Mandalorian. The girl then defies her father and takes the creature back to its family – a journey that is visualised using practical rather than digital effects. “The Legend of Ochi, the rare A24 family film, is a charming throwback to adventure movies of the 80s like The Neverending Story and The Dark Crystal,” says Brian Tallerico at RogerEbert.com, “complete with original puppetry that reportedly contains not an ounce of CGI manipulation. It feels like a family film made by flesh-and-blood people in an era when computers are doing so much of the work.”

Released on 25 April in the US, the UK, Canada and Ireland

Ryan Coogler has already put his own personal stamp on the sports drama (Creed) and the superhero blockbuster (Black Panther), and now, with Sinners, the writer-director takes on gothic horror. His favourite leading man, Michael B Jordan, plays two gun-toting twin brothers, Smoke and Stack, who go back to their rural hometown in 1930s Louisiana, only to find that the local blues music “can pierce the veil between life and death”. The town is soon infested with vampires – but don’t think of Sinners as a straightforward vampire chiller. “The film is very genre-fluid,” Coogler said in The Hollywood Reporter. “It switches in and out of a lot of different genres. Yes, vampires are an element, but it’s not the only supernatural element in the movie… I’m blessed to have found this medium that I can work out deep philosophical and existential questions that I may be struggling with while contributing to an art form that means so much to my family.”

Released internationally on 18 April

First dates can be awkward, but not many are as awkward as the one in Drop, a high-concept one-location thriller from Christopher Landon, the writer-director of Happy Death Day and Freaky. Meghann Fahy stars as a single mother, Violet, who agrees to have dinner with the eligible Henry (Brandon Sklenar) in a Chicago skyscraper’s restaurant. Everything is going smoothly until someone in the restaurant starts sending threatening messages to Violet’s phone. She is told that there is an intruder in her home, and that unless she poisons Henry, her five-year-old son will be killed. “[Fahy’s] dialled-in performance is thankfully matched by an overarching crispness to the proceedings,” says Adrian Horton in The Guardian. “Just enough flourishes, an enjoyable but not unbearable amount of stress, no wasted time, a perfect match of star, script and style. For those who sort for lean and limber in their thrillers, Drop is a date worth making.”

Released internationally on 11 April

When Alex Garland was making his last film, Civil War, his military advisor for the battle sequences was Ray Mendoza, an Iraq War veteran. This collaboration prompted Garland and Mendoza to co-direct another film, a faithful recreation of a battle which Mendoza himself was in, that plays out in real time over 90 minutes. D’Pharaoh Woon-A-Tai plays Mendoza (alongside Will Poulter, Joseph Quinn and Charles Melton) in what some critics are calling cinema’s most authentic and immersive ever depiction of a wartime firefight. It’s a film that pushes the “war is hell” concept “to its logical, visceral and most infernal conclusion”, says Kevin Maher in The Times. “This is a movie that’s as difficult to watch as it is to forget. It’s a sensory blitz, a percussive nightmare and a relentless assault on the soul.”

Released on 11 April in the US and Canada, 16 April in Spain, 17 April in Australia, Brazil and Germany, and 18 April in the UK

If you finished watching Peter Jackson’s series, The Beatles: Get Back, and you wanted to know what John Lennon got up to after the Fab Four broke up, then One to One: John & Yoko could be the film for you. Directed by Kevin Macdonald (One Day in September, Marley) along with Sam Rice-Edwards, the documentary chronicles the 18 months in the early 1970s when Lennon and Yoko One lived in Greenwich Village, New York. It covers the only full-length concert Lennon played after his time in The Beatles – but that was just one of the couple’s many endeavours during their stay in the Big Apple. “Drawing on televised interviews, taped phone calls with agents and managers, and personal film footage,” says David Hughes in Time Out, “Macdonald charts the couple’s determination to fight for any worthy cause that crosses their eyeline, from the Vietnam War to fundraising for remanded prisoners unable to afford bail. The pair’s artistry, individually and collectively, seems to be matched only by their energy and moral clarity.”

Released on 11 April in the US, the UK and Ireland

What if Die Hard was set at a meeting of the world’s most powerful political leaders? And what if the US president in Air Force One was a woman? The answer to both of these questions can be found in G20, a gleefully over-the-top action thriller directed by Patricia Riggen. Viola Davis stars as US President Danielle Sutton, who is at a G20 summit in South Africa when a terrorist group takes the guests hostage. What the bad guys (led by Antony Starr from The Boys) haven’t counted on is that the POTUS is an army veteran, and even when she’s wearing a cocktail dress, she can fight with the best of them. “It was the sort of thing you’d imagine as a kid, just playing the most heroic character you could possibly play,” Davis told Variety. The only question the film doesn’t answer is whether the sequel will be called G21.

Released on 10 April on Prime

A Minecraft Movie is a children’s adventure co-starring Jack Black, and adapted from a video game about a colourful fantasy world being threatened by infernal invaders. Does that sound familiar? If so, it’s because the very same summary applies to The Super Mario Bros. Movie. Still, that was the second highest grossing film of 2023, so maybe A Minecraft Movie will be just as lucrative. The difference is that the new film, which also stars Jason Momoa and Jennifer Coolidge, has live-action actors in a CGI world. Also, it’s directed by Jared Hess, the maker of such eccentric comedies as Napoleon Dynamite and Nacho Libre. “By some force of alchemy, his cockeyed look at things – a mix of deadpan delivery, garish colours, and exaggerated interactions – is weirdly perfect for this adaptation,” says Jordan Hoffman in Entertainment Weekly. “There’s an ‘anything goes’ attitude here… [and] this loosey-goosey attitude is a breath of fresh air after so many family films that seem preordained by lore.”

Released internationally on 4 April

With a dynamic that’s not a million miles away from the central relationship in A Real Pain, Sacramento is an indie comedy about two mismatched male friends – one neurotic, the other annoyingly outgoing – embarking on a trip together. Glenn, played by Michael Cera, is even more anxious than usual because he is about to become a father, while the extrovert Rickey, played by Michael Angarano, is traumatised by the death of his own father. Could a weekend in Sacramento, California help them to overcome all of their issues? Angarano is also the co-writer, co-producer and director of a film that features both his ex-partner, Kristen Stewart, and his current partner, Maya Erskine. David Ehrlich at IndieWire says that Angarano “graduates from overeager dilettante to unusually shrewd comic director” with Sacramento. “Its casual nature and outward lack of ambition belie how well it manages to convey the terror that change brings into our lives, the mania of trying to deny it, and the relief that comes from recognising that someone else in your world is changing with you.”

Released on 11 April in the US

Ang Lee’s second film, The Wedding Banquet, was a romantic comedy about a gay Taiwanese New Yorker who marries a Chinese woman so that she can get a green card, only for his unwitting parents to mark the occasion with a lavish party. The film made Lee’s name as a director when it was released in 1993, and it went on to be nominated for an Oscar and a Golden Globe. Now it has been remade by Andrew Ahn (Fire Island), with a stellar cast that includes Bowen Yang (Wicked), Lily Gladstone (Killers of the Flower Moon) and Kelly Marie Tran (Star Wars: The Last Jedi). Ahn moves the story to Seattle, adds a subplot about fertility treatment, and rejigs the nationalities and generations so that the visiting relative is now a grandmother (Minari’s Youn Yuh-jung) from South Korea. “An intended marriage of convenience still lies at its heart,” says Amber Wilkinson in Screen Daily, “but the relationships are given a modern makeover as Ahn probes questions of commitment and celebrates the families we choose to make for ourselves”.

Released on 18 April in the US and Canada