From harried mums to high-stakes magic here are November's best movies

Welcome to ABC Arts' November film wrap.

This month was heavy on mothers in turmoil, as our critics praise Jennifer Lawrence's performance in Die My Love and Aussie Rose Byrne's turn in If I Had Legs I'd Kick You.

November also saw the return of two beloved franchises: magic-filled Now You See Me and action classic Predator — but did either live up to their predecessors? 

Happy watching!

• Die My Love
• Predator: Badlands
• Now You See Me: Now You Don't
• If I had Legs I'd Kick You
• Keeper
• Lurker

Die My Love

It's a big month for mothers losing their shit on screen. With all apologies to Rose Byrne (more on that later), you'd be hard-pressed to find a wilder, more combustible performance this year than that of Jennifer Lawrence in Lynne Ramsay's Die My Love, a rollercoaster portrait of new motherhood that crackles with the kind of go-for-broke acting we see far too little of on screen these days.

Adapted from the French novel, Ramsey's first film in eight years finds the director of Morvern Callar and We Need to Talk About Kevin back at the peak of her power, sizing up the turbulence of womanhood with an unflinching eye.

Lawrence and co-star Robert Pattinson are a young couple who relocate from the city to a rustic fixer-upper in rural Montana, where she already seems to be teetering on the edge of a psychotic precipice (listening to Toni Basil's Mickey on repeat will do that to a girl). When the couple welcome a baby, it's full-tilt psychosis.

It'd be easy for a film like this to lean into armchair psychology, or to explain everything away with a neat line about postpartum depression, but to their credit both Ramsey and Lawrence let things burn in unpredictable ways, capturing the electrifying charge of mental illness without talking down to it with rote diagnosis.

Like the great Gena Rowlands in A Woman Under the Influence before her, Lawrence gives a performance that refuses explanation – by her husband, by the institutions, by pretty much everyone around her. It's a firecracker.

• Luke Goodsell

Predator: Badlands

Resuscitating the Predator franchise has seemed like a lost cause since Arnold Schwarzenegger declined returning for the LA-set sequel. Sure, two Alien crossovers brought in the big bucks, but they were critically mauled. As were middling reboots by Nimród Antal (2010's Predators) and Shane Black (2018's The Predator).

Changing tack, Dan Trachtenberg's revelatory Prey (2022) pitted a spectacular Amber Midthunder's Comanche healer-turned-hunter against the gruesome beast in 1719. His live-action sequel Predator: Badlands, after delivering ace animated anthology film Predator: Killer of Killers earlier this year, stars Kiwi actor Dimitrius Schuster-Koloamatangi as Dek.

Regarded as a runt by his brutal 'Yautja' family, Dek has to witness his monstrous father slay his brother after the older sibling refuses to execute him. Furious, Dek becomes determined to prove himself by bringing back the head of a supposedly unkillable monster from another planet.

Elle Fanning's hilariously perky synth, Thia, undercuts his scaly chest-beating. Sneakily opening a back door to more xenomorph mayhem, she's the AI property of the Alien series' Machiavellian mega-corporation, Weyland-Yutani. Infuriatingly chipper, despite missing her legs like Lance Henrikson before her, Thia insists on tagging along on his quest. Dek grudgingly accepts, designating her a useful tool.

They'll battle deadly beasts, Thia's wicked "sister", and synth drones played by Alien: Earth actor Cameron Brown, also from Aotearoa, where the film was shot. 

Delivering oddball comedy alongside Trachtenberg's frenetically staged action, even if the latter suffers from muddy CGI and too-fast cuts, Badlands borrows from the Predator, Alien, Godzilla and Jurassic Park franchises, miraculously escaping feeling derivative, like Alien Romulus. More please.  

• Stephen A Russell

Now You See Me: Now You Don’t

As Nicole Kidman once said, we come to the cinema for magic — and magician heist series Now You See Me delivers it in an ace of spades (or whatever card of your choosing).

Borderline nonsensical and completely cheesy, neither the 2013 original or 2016's Now You See Me 2 are particularly good movies by most standards. But who cares, when they're this fun? And threequel Now You See Me: Now You Don't turns the dial up even more, as if it was building up energy to burn during its near-decade break.

The plot twists are near-endless; the sleights-of-hand ridiculously complex. The action sequences approach Fast & Furious levels of ludicrous, and include an F1 race through Abu Dhabi. 

There are even more magicians! Our original Four Horsemen — including a mentalist (Woody Harrelson), pickpocket (Dave Franco), escape artist (Isla Fisher) and an arrogant illusionist (Jesse Eisenberg) — are now joined by a trio of gen Z magicians, played by emerging stars Dominic Sessa, Justice Smith and Ariana Greenblatt. (No spoilers, but more familiar faces pop up, too.)

Their target? A corrupt multi-millionaire South African diamond miner, played with absolute glee by Rosamund Pike (Gone Girl).

Is there simply way too much going on, and do some characters get completely lost? Absolutely. Are its jabs at gen Z clever? Not really. Does it drag a little between action scenes? Sure. But just like a true magic show, you'll have the most fun with Now You See Me: Now You Don't if you leave your scepticism at the door and just enjoy the smoke and mirrors.

• Jared Richards

If I had Legs I'd Kick You

Who knew Rose Byrne had a performance like this in her? No doubt the Australian actor's years of experience navigating drama, comedy and horror prepped her for this full-bodied, career-high role as a frazzled mother whose life takes a turn from beleaguered exasperation to the hellishly, often comically surreal.

In American writer-director Mary Bronstein's nerve-jangling portrait of one woman's psychological unravelling, Byrne stars as a Long Island therapist caring for a bed-ridden daughter who we never see, but whose constant protests – she's hooked up to a machine to keep her alive – rattle like an aggrieved symphony. 

When their apartment is flooded by a freak incident that feels almost supernatural, the strained pair is forced to relocate to a low-rent motel, where life quickly becomes one battle after a mother.

Bronstein, a one-time mumblecore filmmaker and collaborator of Greta Gerwig and the Safdie brothers, might twist the dramatic screws to a point of near exhaustion, but she's also adept at moments of pitch-black comedy and oddball detours (is that an animatronic hamster?).

Playing a colleague to Byrne's shrink, talk-show icon Conan O'Brien gives a rare – and compellingly nuanced – dramatic performance, while rapper A$AP Rocky adds levity and warmth as a motel resident connected to the dark web. 

But this is Byrne's show; even at her most stretched, the actor is never less than committed to this complex, contradictory study in the perils of parenthood. Expect it to be a major awards-season player.

• Luke Goodsell

Keeper

After Longlegs' FBI procedural and The Monkey's splatter comedy, divisive horror auteur Osgood Perkins returns to his minimalist roots. 

Keeper — his third film in two years — keeps its secrets close to its chest; there's a secluded cabin, an anxious couple with something to hide, and an invasive presence knocking at the door, all unwinding like an Architectural Digest video from hell.

Tatiana Maslany's (She-Hulk) Liz is an artist tentatively trying monogamy on for size, even when it comes in the form of a gifted beige cardigan. At a weekend getaway with her partner Malcolm (Rossif Sutherland), she's seemingly besieged by an array of ambient hostilities (glimpsed exclusively in silhouettes, out-of-focus smears and flickers of movement) to which Malcolm is oblivious, wilfully or otherwise.

Horror fans will likely know whether or not Perkins's cryptic, vibes-heavy sensibilities are to their tastes. For newcomers, Keeper is as good a place to start as any. The cabin's vaulted ceiling and angular geometry play well with the director's love of off-kilter compositions, which help impart a surreal quality to its frigid relationship study. It's a lot of polish for not a lot of substance, but there's a pleasure to seeing those wood-paneled surfaces shine.

• Jamie Tram

Lurker

"What's the difference between love and obsession?" sings Saltburn actor Archie Madekwe's cockily emerging pop star, Oliver, in Beef and The Bear writer/director Alex Russell's deliciously devious debut feature, Lurker.

Carving out a social media-spruiked niche in American indie music, Oliver causes a scene when he drops into the op shop where mercurial French-Canadian star Théodore Pellerin's ambitiously clingy Matthew works. Googling Oliver's favourite track, Matthew sneakily pops it on to strike up mercenarily planned conversation, stroking the musician's ego so he can inveigle his way into his exhilaratingly cool world.

But who's using who? Oliver leaps on an ambiguously infatuated Matthew's yes-man desperation, pressing him into service as an unpaid documentarian, armed with a camcorder he barely knows how to use. The infiltrator's suddenly ubiquitous, awkwardly insidious presence irks Oliver's crew, including real-life rapper and stand-up comedian Zack Fox's prowling Swett, and Eighth Grade actor Daniel Zolghadri's hapless Noah.

Brazenly clawing up the chain, despite the eyebrow-raised distrust of Bottoms actor Havana Rose Liu's fixer, Shai, Matthew's no sooner crowing about his new-found parasocial 'closeness' with Oliver than one-time colleague Jamie (The Killing of a Sacred Deer's Sunny Suljic) muscles into his tenuous territory.

What follows is an unpredictably twisted dark comedy full of excruciating discomfort. Boy Erased and Never Rarely Sometimes Always actor Pellerin once again proves his mettle alongside an equally adept Madekwe, as Russell's sharp-eyed commentary skewers our fascination with manufactured.

• Stephen A Russell