This week’s movie releases

The Marvel Comics’ universe advances another step in Captain America: The Winter Soldier. Having been pumped full of performance-enhancing drugs and frozen during World War II, defrosted super-soldier Steve Rogers (Chris Evans) is still trying to figure out life in the 21st century two years after the planet-saving heroics of The Avengers. But when a fellow S.H.I.E.L.D. agent is attacked, he’s compelled to join forces with Black Widow (Scarlett Johansson) and newcomer Falcon (Anthony Mackie) to get to the bottom of another globe-threatening plot and confront dangerous foe The Winter Soldier. Samuel L. Jackson returns as S.H.I.E.L.D. boss Nick Fury while Robert Redford signs up to the Marvel Universe as Fury’s old confidant Alexander Pierce in this blockbuster from directorial duo the Russo brothers.

An adaptation of Portuguese Nobel Prize-winner José Saramago’s novel The Double, Canadian Prisoners director Denis Villeneuve’s Enemy stars Jake Gyllenhaal as both a morose history professor and his exact doppelgänger, an actor he spots while watching a movie on TV and decides to track down. Their lives end up strangely entangled in this psychological thriller, which also features Mélanie Laurent (Inglourious Basterds) and Isabella Rossellini.

Ten years ago American writer-director Shane Carruth released an idiosyncratic sci-fi drama about time travel titled Primer, which developed a cult following among discerning indie movie fans. Now he’s finally back with an equally out-there second movie, Upstream Color, which features Amy Seimetz as a woman who finds herself kidnapped, robbed and hypnotized after she is injected with parasitic worms. Released from her trance with her life ruined, she strikes up a relationship with a man (played by Carruth himself) who seems to have gone through something similar.

Best known for his acclaimed British movies Last Resort and My Summer of Love, Polish-born filmmaker Paweł Pawlikowski returns with Ida. Set in early 1960s Poland, it concerns a young woman about to take her vows to enter the convent where she grew up having been orphaned in World War II. Before she does so, however, she reunites with her one surviving relative, an aunt who was a former communist state prosecutor, who lets her in on her Jewish origins.

Rocky situation

Julien Leclercq’s thriller Gibraltar follows a Frenchman living in the British colony (Gilles Lellouche) who goes undercover for the French customs police and gradually wins the confidence of a big-shot Colombian cocaine smuggler, taking more risks and earning more money on each step of the way.

Lastly, Spanish comedy Kamikaze is the story of a suicide bomber from a former Soviet republic (Álex García) who is forced to get to know his potential victims when heavy snow grounds their flight from Moscow to Madrid and all the passengers are put up in a mountain hotel. Leticia Dolera, Verónica Echegui, Iván Massagué, Héctor Alterio and Carmen Machi feature.