This Week in Cinemas: The Mandalorian & Grogu Is Everything Star Wars Needed, Backrooms Will Genuinely Unsettle You, and Power Ballad Is the Film You’ll Quietly Cry at and Deny It

🌟 Film #1 — The Mandalorian & Grogu (May 22) 🔥 GO THIS WEEKEND

Let me tell you the exact moment this film had me.

In the final trailer — the one that played at CinemaCon to what eyewitnesses describe as a standing ovation — there is a shot of Grogu meditating in a forest, and over the image you hear the opening notes of Yoda’s Theme. Not the Mandalorian’s theme. Yoda’s Theme. John Williams’ composition, the one that has been telling you for 46 years that something ancient and gentle and deeply good is present in the scene. And then Grogu opens his eyes, and the shot holds on his face for just a beat too long, and you think: this child is going to become something extraordinary.

I have not yet seen The Mandalorian and Grogu. I will see it on May 22, in IMAX, in the largest screen I can find, and I will not apologise for the emotion I feel when Din Djarin walks out of a doorway with that specific music behind him. Some of us have been waiting for this since the Season 3 finale ended in 2023 without the resolution we wanted, and the wait has been exactly long enough to make arrival feel like it matters.

What the Film Is Actually About

The Mandalorian and Grogu is set following the fall of the Galactic Empire, during a period where remaining Imperial warlords threaten the galaxy. The New Republic enlists Din Djarin and his apprentice Grogu to rescue Rotta the Hutt — played by Jeremy Allen White — in exchange for information on a target.

This is, on the surface, a very classic Star Wars premise: a mission, a target, a galaxy in transition. But the emotional architecture underneath it is what matters. Din Djarin now has a home on Nevarro with Grogu and a purpose to root out the Remnant — a far cry from the initial lone wanderer who supported a struggling band of Mandos with his inconsistent earnings as a bounty hunter. This is a man who has found his family and is now protecting it. The film’s emotional core is not the mission. It is the relationship between a man and the child who changed him.

And Grogu — let’s talk about Grogu. Although Force-sensitive and still capable of using Jedi abilities, he made a choice in The Book of Boba Fett to live as a Mandalorian. It remains to be seen if he will get a full suit of armor. The question of who Grogu is choosing to become — Jedi or Mandalorian, path of power or path of belonging — is the coming-of-age story at the film’s heart. That is the stuff that lasts. That is why people are emotional about a CGI puppet.

The Cast: Why Sigourney Weaver Changes Everything

Pedro Pascal is Pedro Pascal — at this point one of the most compelling screen presences in popular cinema, a man who communicates enormous depth through a helmet. But the casting that has me genuinely curious is Sigourney Weaver as Colonel Ward. Beyond her previous role as an X-Wing pilot, little is known about her character. But her mention of revenge in one of the trailers — if even just to decry the suggestion — indicates some of her campaign against the Remnant is personally motivated. A woman who fought in the Rebellion, who now holds a leadership position in the New Republic, who flies an X-Wing and has personal history with the Empire. That is not a supporting character. That is someone with a story. And Jeremy Allen White as Rotta the Hutt — the performance-captured slug whose voice White provides — is the casting choice that suggests Favreau has not lost his sense of humour about this universe.

Also: Martin Scorsese appears as an Ardennian fry cook. I have no further questions about whether this film is going to be good.

The India Watch Plan

This is an IMAX film. Watch it in IMAX. The film was shot for the format, and the specific visual language of Mando’s galaxy — the ship exteriors, the alien worlds, the action sequences — deserves the largest possible canvas. Ticket prices in India for IMAX are higher than standard, and worth every rupee for this one. It will arrive on Disney+ Hotstar after its theatrical window, but the first watch belongs in a cinema.

This is the Star Wars film that doesn’t have to be the start of a new trilogy or prove anything to anyone. It just has to be good. Every early signal says it is.

👁️ Film #2 — Backrooms (May 29, A24) 😰 WATCH IF YOU DARE

Here is what the Backrooms is, if you have somehow avoided the internet’s most enduring horror phenomenon: it started from a creepy image of an empty, yellowish office-like space with old carpet, fluorescent lights, and no people. The idea was that if you “no-clip” out of reality — like in a video game glitch — you end up in the Backrooms. Not something one often considers, but in this case, it was relevant. The original fear is more about being trapped in an infinite liminal space.

Yellow walls. Moist carpet. Fluorescent hum. No exits. Things in the dark.

The YouTube series by Kane Parsons — who was a teenager when he made it — has amassed over 190 million views. He is now 20 years old. He will be A24’s youngest director. Take note of that. A 20-year-old who built one of the internet’s most-viewed horror universes, handed a studio budget, the backing of James Wan and Shawn Levy, and two Oscar-calibre actors. That is either the most exciting thing in cinema this month or a beautiful disaster. Every available evidence points toward the former.

The Story: A Therapist Follows Her Patient Into Nowhere

The cast includes Chiwetel Ejiofor as Clark — a furniture store owner — and Renate Reinsve as Dr. Mary Kline. Ejiofor’s character clicks a door into an infinite carpeted maze in a basement of a furniture showroom that opens into expanding rooms. His therapist, Dr. Kline, enters after him. What follows is a film that leans into practical and digital effects to recreate the endless, unsettling architecture of the Backrooms.

The latest trailer reveals something that upgrades this from creepy to genuinely fascinating: poolrooms and other new liminal spaces as multiple characters explore the Backrooms at the same time. The trailer further emphasises the movie’s mix of traditional filmmaking techniques and found footage. So it is not one person wandering alone through yellow corridors. Multiple people. Multiple levels. Different liminal spaces. A world with internal logic that Parsons has been building for years and is now, for the first time, showing us at full scale.

Why the Producers Are the Most Interesting Thing About This Film

James Wan made Saw. Shawn Levy made Free Guy and the Night at the Museum franchise. Osgood Perkins directed Longlegs and The Monkey. Peter Chernin’s company made Hidden Figures and Ford v Ferrari. These are not people who back films carelessly. The fact that all four of them looked at Kane Parsons’ YouTube series and said “we want to make this with this specific 20-year-old” is the strongest signal available that what Parsons has is genuinely special, and that the film reflects that.

My Honest Assessment

I am predisposed to love this. The Backrooms YouTube content gave me actual unease in a way that very few horror things have since I was a teenager, and the specific quality of that unease — not jump scares, not gore, but the profound wrongness of a familiar space that has gone wrong — is the hardest thing to recreate in cinema. Either Parsons has found the way to translate that specific feeling to a theatrical scale, or the thing that makes it terrifying (the intimacy of the YouTube format, the lo-fi found-footage texture) is lost in the upgrade. The trailers suggest the former. The film has strong potential to become a new benchmark for liminal horror.

Book an aisle seat. You may need to leave briefly.

A24 has released a commercial for a fictional furniture store from the film called “Cap’n Clark’s Ottoman Empire” — a VHS-style vintage ad spoof. The marketing alone tells you this team understands exactly what they’re doing.

🎵 Film #3 — Power Ballad (May 29 limited, June 5 wide) 💛 YOUR NEXT FAVOURITE FILM

There is a very specific kind of film that John Carney makes. It is set around music. It is about people whose creativity has been squashed by circumstances — by age, by failure, by the particular cruelty of an industry that moves on without pausing. It usually contains one scene of a late-night jam session where two people discover each other through the songs they play, and that scene is always the best scene in the film. Once had it. Sing Street had it. Flora and Son had it.

Power Ballad has it too. Except this time it is Paul Rudd and Nick Jonas, in Ireland, at 2 in the morning, and one of them is about to steal the other one’s song.

The Story (Which Sounds Simple and Isn’t)

Rick (Rudd), a past-his-prime wedding singer, meets fading boy-band star Danny (Jonas) during a gig. The two bond over music and a late-night jam session. But when Danny turns one of Rick’s songs into the hit that reignites his career, Rick sets out to reclaim the recognition he believes he deserves — even if it means risking everything he cares about.

That premise — the song that was stolen, or borrowed, or misappropriated, or inspired (depending on who’s telling the story) — is deceptively rich. Rick’s journey becomes less about music and more about reclaiming identity, recognition, and self-worth. It’s not just about success — it’s about timing. And timing can ruin everything.

Every creative person who has ever been overlooked, whose work was borrowed by someone with a bigger platform and a more photogenic face, who watched someone else receive the credit for the thing they made — they will feel this film in a specific place. That specificity is what John Carney is extraordinary at.

The Paul Rudd and Nick Jonas Question

Look, the honest concern before SXSW was Nick Jonas. Not Paul Rudd — Paul Rudd has been quietly excellent in everything from The Catcher Was a Spy to his MCU work to this, and his ability to play genuinely sad without being mopey is a rare and undervalued skill. But Nick Jonas — real-world pop star playing a fictional pop star whose career is fading — carries the risk of being slightly too on-the-nose, too self-aware, too cute in its casting.

The SXSW reviews suggest this worry was unfounded. Power Ballad won over audiences at South by Southwest earlier this year. The film currently holds a 92% Fresh rating on Rotten Tomatoes. Deadline’s critic noted it has “the potential to serve as a feel-good movie for a date night or a comfort watch for artists who want to feel valued in an oversaturated creative landscape.” And Gold Derby notes the film’s original songs could be a path back to the Oscars for Carney, who won Best Original Song for Once in 2008.

Nick Jonas also shaved his head for the role. When a pop star shaves his head for a film he believes in, you believe in the film a little more too.

Who This Is For

Power Ballad is for everyone who cried at the end of Sing Street and then immediately watched it again. It is for anyone who has a song they wrote in their twenties that they never finished. It is for every musician who played weddings and wondered, just once, whether this was going to be it forever. It is for date nights where you want to feel something real together. It is for the Sunday afternoon when the mood is slightly melancholy and slightly hopeful and you want a film that meets you there.

John Carney has never made a bad music film. He has made one transcendent one (Once), one underseen gem (Sing Street), one quiet delight (Flora and Son). Power Ballad, on all available evidence, goes in the second or third category. That is not a criticism. That is one of the better recommendations in cinema right now.

The Verdict: Where to Spend Your Week

FAQ — Quick Answers

Three films. Three very different emotional registers. One genuinely good week to be a cinema-goer. 🎬

Which one are you watching first? Drop your pick in the comments — and if you’ve already seen any of these, tell us what you thought! 👇

Emily

Popcorn in hand and a opinion ready — Emily covers movie reviews, box office buzz, and all things cinema at Popcorn Review.