The latest Monster instalment, about the 1892 Borden axe murders, is packed with periods and beheadings, and feels like it was made up as they went along

Okaaay – here’s what I think must have happened. Some time in the past year or two, Ryan Murphy discovered that women menstruate. Incredulous but enthralled, he rushed off to share the news with his soon equally incredulous and enthralled little friends. After confirming the basics they all looked at each other for a moment in silence as they contemplated this crazy, secret habit of the wimminz. And then Ryan said: “You guys? We have got to make a show about this!” The others nodded in fervent agreement and off they all ran.

The result is the utterly bonkers, blood-soaked, borderline-fetishistic fever dream that is The Lizzie Borden Story – the latest entry in Murphy’s popular anthology series Monster. This one is written by Ian Brennan and directed in the main by Max Winkler, the pairing responsible for the series’ previous offering, last year’s lamentable The Ed Gein Story. As, I presume, a gesture to the sex of this one’s subject, there is a female director for two of the Lizzie Borden episodes – Sarah Adina Smith – but it doesn’t really dent the vibe. Think: the gleeful disgust of a roomful of adolescent boys being taught about the female reproductive system in PSHE. It is now an eight-hour miniseries starring Rebecca Hall. We live in strange times.

There’s a committed performance from a spunky Adria Arjona in the Guest director Adam Wingard’s decent B-movie but it’s missing some sharper weaponry

There’s something rather fascinating about an indie director who heads to the A-list before returning to their roots, a wider skillset and different perspective gained for better or worse. Working within a stricter system – the tiniest of choices being agreed upon by the largest of committees – can often be a creatively crushing experience that we’ve heard gruesomely detailed by many who survived it but the expansion of what one is allowed to technically do with a bigger budget can also be instructive and enriching. The dream scenario is bringing back the good and allowing the bad to inspire new work that makes the most of how unshackled one again now is.

There are plenty of examples of how this hasn’t worked. Neill Blomkamp following Elysium and Chappie with chintzy low-budget horror Demonic (easily his least effective film although since opening his own AI “studio” I imagine the worst is yet to come), Marc Forster following Quantum of Solace and World War Z with a blind Blake Lively film that, ironically, no one saw while Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck went from the greatness of Half Nelson to the blandness of Captain Marvel to the headache of Freaky Tales. But then we were also gifted with the hometown intimacy of Alfonso Cuarón’s Roma after he came back from space for Gravity and Hogwarts for the Prisoner of Azkaban while Karyn Kusama brushed off the nightmare of Æon Flux with the brilliantly creepy dinner party thriller The Invitation.

Cannes film festival: Sachs’ film about an HIV-positive actor in the homophobic Reagan-era 80s is well-intended, but Malek’s mannered performance is hard to love

This film from writer-director Ira Sachs gives us premium-strength, undiluted Rami Malek – but I have to say that his overripe performance and self-conscious mannerisms here are perhaps even more oppressively insistent for being conveyed relatively quietly in spoken dialogue. And not quietly at all in the singing scenes. Malek is a performer whose style is as distinctive as those of John Malkovich or Jeff Goldblum. But it works best with a light touch in the direction and material. Things never really come together here.

The Man I Love is a film about gay culture in 1980s New York, at the height of the reactionary homophobia of Reagan’s America, with HIV-positive men coming to terms with their condition and with the callous bigotry of the political zeitgeist. In one hospital scene, we see the authorities’ icily unsympathetic attitude. Malek plays Jimmy George, a much admired and charismatic actor and performance artist in New York who has just emerged from a three-week stay in hospital after a life-threatening HIV-related crisis. Now he is starring in a new stage piece based on André Brassard’s 1974 film Once Upon a Time in the East, playing the stormy and defiant Hélène, who sings with a band.

Peter Hujar captured a queer Manhattan demi-monde that is now lost to Aids. Whishaw reveals what he learned playing the photographer in a minimalist film being hailed by some as a masterpiece

On 19 December 1974, the writer Linda Rosenkrantz went round to her friend Peter Hujar’s apartment in New York, and asked the photographer to describe exactly what he had done the day before. He talked in great detail about taking Allen Ginsberg’s portrait for the New York Times (it didn’t go well – Ginsberg was too performative for the kind of intimacy Hujar craved). He also described the Chinese takeaway he ate and how his pal Vince Aletti came round to have a shower. And he fretted about not being paid by Elle magazine.

So what did Ben Whishaw, who plays him in the new film Peter Hujar’s Day, do himself the day before? The actor, on a video call from his home in London, rubbing his hands through his hair in a worried manner, says he could probably describe it in “about five sentences”, but after some persuasion attempts to give a flavour. “I got home from filming and I got the chicken that I’d cooked the previous day and eaten half of and I finished it. Well, not finished it but continued eating it and then had a glass of wine and fell asleep at half past nine. Boring. But, um, maybe there’s no such thing as boring.”

Emma Mackey, Jamie Lee Curtis, Albert Brooks, Rebecca Hall and Woody Harrelson are among the stars lost in the writer-director’s baffling misfire

Ella McCay, a new comedy drama written and directed by James L Brooks, feels like a relic, and not just because it’s set, seemingly arbitrarily, in 2008. Broadly appealing, well cast, neither strictly comic nor melodramatic, concerning ordinary people in non-IP circumstances, it’s the type of mid-budget adult film that used to appear regularly in cinemas in the 90s and aughts, before the streaming wars devoured the market. Even its lead promotional image, turned into a life-size cardboard cut-out at the theater – Emma Mackey’s titular Ella in a sensible trench coat, balancing on one foot as she fixes a broken block heel – recalls a bygone era of films like Confessions of a Shopaholic, Miss Congeniality or Little Miss Sunshine, that would now go straight to streaming.

To be clear, I miss these types of movies, and want to see more of them. I want to see a lighthearted but realistic portrait of a 34-year-old woman serving as lieutenant governor of an unnamed state that is, judging by the college football paraphernalia and the vibe, probably Michigan. I want to still believe in the possibility of smart and sentimental popcorn fare whose low-stakes drama insists on the inherent inconsistencies and decency of people. I especially would like to say that Ella McCay is an admirable final salvo (or so) for Brooks, the 85-year-old writer/director/producer whose prolific career includes both iconic sitcoms (The Mary Tyler Moore show, Taxi and the Simpsons), and now-classic films (Terms of Endearment, Broadcast News and As Good As It Gets).