Divines; Ghostbusters; The BFG; Star Trek: Beyond and more – review

Houda Benyamina adds a thrilling feminist twist to the ghetto life genre with the direct-to-Netflix Divines

It’s a big, blockbusting week on the DVD shelves, but the best new film heading to your living rooms is one you probably haven’t had the option of seeing in cinemas. Among the most exciting titles yet to receive the direct-to-Netflix treatment, writer-director Houda Benyamina’s first solo film, Divines, is a sharp, swaggering siren call to young women of colour in a France that seems increasingly weighted against them. As Marine Le Pen’s loathsome brand of bigotry gains national traction, this story of Dounia, a hard-up teenage Muslim from the outer Paris estates determined to secure herself a taste of the good life – by hook or, dangerously, by crook – plays as an exhilaratingly amoral, empathetic minority report.

In inviting audiences to hear rather than judge an angrily under-represented demographic, Divines has understandably prompted comparisons with Céline Sciamma’s more pristine Girlhood, but Benyamina’s feminist remix of the thug life genre has a strident voice all its own. It positively bristles with the restless fury and rough-and-tumble wit of its adolescent leads. In its finest moments – boldest among them a freewheeling segue into urban fantasy in which Dounia (sensationally played by Oulaya Amamra, the director’s younger sister) and her best friend steer an imagined, ghetto-fabulous Ferrari – the film cheekily corrects the macho posturing of Scarface and its ilk. Benyamina, who deservedly won the Camera d’Or for debut features at Cannes this year, looks ready to beat a boy-dominated industry at its own game. It deserved big-screen exposure, but you can hardly blame Netflix for pouncing.