What films are out this week at the cinema

This week we have a crime/drama called Holy Spider featuring last year’s best actress at the Cannes Film Festival.

Meanwhile, we have a documentary called Dreaming Walls: Inside The Chelsea Hotel and is executively produced by Martin Scorsese.

Read on for a selection of this week’s releases.

Holy Spider

Zahra Amir Ebrahimi rightly won best actress at last year’s Cannes Film Festival as Rahami, the fictional intrepid female reporter determined to hunt down ‘The Spider’ (Mehdi Bajestani) in this superior arthouse true-crime drama.

The Spider is a war veteran and apparently loving father who murdered 16 prostitutes in Iran’s second largest city in 2000-2001.

Declaring he was ‘waging a jihad against vice’, the Spider’s signature move was strangling victims with their own head scarves.

What makes director Ali Abbasi’s distinctive movie so interesting is it isn’t the portrait of a serial killer, so much as of the misogynistic society that turned him into a hero.

Arrestingly styled, it impressively and uncomfortably meshes authentic realism and subtle character work with grimy doses of grindhouse exploitation.

18. Out Friday in cinemas

Dreaming Walls: Inside The Chelsea Hotel

The guest list of New York’s Hotel Chelsea is a roster of rock’n’roll legend. Everyone who was anyone in the 20th century, from Jimi Hendrix to Madonna, Jack Kerouac to Janis Joplin, has slept here.

This elegiac documentary (executive produced by Martin Scorsese), however, chooses not to focus on these icons but on the Chelsea’s last surviving tenants – the quirky, cranky, mostly geriatric, forgotten leftovers of another era when Manhattan was an epicentre of the avant-garde.

Dreamily shot amid the ghostly chaos of the hotel’s decade-long renovation work, it assumes you’ll already be in love with its history.

If you are, it might conjure a poignant séance with the spirits in its walls. If you aren’t, you’ll find it leaves far too many questions unanswered.

15. Out Fri in cinemas and on demand