Lupita Nyong’o stars as a poet with cancer who wants to live a little in this beefed-up disaster movie set in New York

It could be the idea of setting the Quiet Place prequel in New York, one of the noisiest places on Earth. Or perhaps it’s because the intimate, taut horror premise of the first two pictures is beefed up with some robust city-smashing disaster movie muscle. Maybe it’s the casting of the always excellent Lupita Nyong’o in a textured and complex role – she plays Sam, a poet and a terminal cancer patient who just wants to live a little before she dies. All of this combines to ramp up the impact of A Quiet Place: Day One considerably, compared with its immediate predecessor. It’s a bleak, bruising but also curiously life-affirming account of the start of the end of the world. The directing baton has been passed to Michael Sarnoski (Pig), who co-wrote the film’s deft, light-footed screenplay with the original writer/director, John Krasinski. And while there are a couple of underdeveloped plot points (the discovery of an alien egg nursery is rather thrown away) and an over-reliance on Sam’s unfeasibly unflappable cat as a device, for the most part, this is a stylish and satisfying prequel that elegantly integrates Sam’s poet’s sensibility into the storytelling.

• In UK and Irish cinemas now

A young girl and her made-up friend are separated in an exquisitely drawn anime reminiscent of Studio Ghibli

The third feature-length film from the Japanese anime outfit Studio Ponoc (Mary and the Witch’s Flower), The Imaginary (adapted from a children’s book by AF Harrold) is a beguiling, if slightly convoluted, fantasy about an imaginary friend called Rudger, who finds himself separated from Amanda, the little girl who dreamed him up. There’s a thematic parallel with John Krasinski’s live-action adventure IF, but with its exquisite hand-drawn animation and undercurrent of uncanny oddness, The Imaginary (which is released theatrically in its English language version) has more in common with the output of Studio Ghibli – perhaps not surprisingly, since the director, Yoshiyuki Momose, served as the key animator on Spirited Away and other classic Ghibli titles.

• In cinemas now and on Netflix from 5 July

Stone, Jesse Plemons and Willem Dafoe head the cast in the Poor Things director’s odd three-part study of control whose central idea proves elusive

Cannibalism. Auto-amputation. Obsession. Delusion. A glum, bearded, entirely silent man whose initials are RMF. Numerous themes and plot points are nipping away at the bones of Yorgos Lanthimos’s follow-up to Poor Things. An unwieldy triptych of not quite connected stories, starring the same repertory group of actors – Emma Stone, Jesse Plemons, Margaret Qualley, Willem Dafoe, Hong Chau, Mamoudou Athie and Joe Alwyn – in different roles in each of the three chapters, Kinds of Kindness leans back into the surreal cruelty and bizarro-banal logic of the director’s earlier films. Dogtooth is an obvious reference, but there’s also an element of The Lobster’s twisted relationship politics here.

But despite the recurring themes in the three stories, a unifying idea or central thesis that ties them together proves to be frustratingly elusive. Two things are undeniable, however. The first is that kindness of any kind is conspicuously absent in the film. The second is that Lanthimos is evidently fascinated (to a degree that may not be entirely healthy) with the idea of total control and subjugation of free will.