From The Naked Gun to Freakier Friday – these are the films to watch at the cinema and stream at home this month.

Boris Lojkine's powerful drama was the winner of two prizes at the Cannes Film Festival, and has a 100% rating on the Rotten Tomatoes review round-up site. It's the story of Souleymane (first-time actor Abou Sangaré), an immigrant from West Africa who has come to Paris in the hope of making enough money to support his ill mother. But the title, Souleymane's Story, has another meaning: it also refers to the false life story he has to memorise and recite at a legal residency application interview in two days' time. The trouble is that memorising anything is almost impossible while Souleymane is cycling around Paris as a food delivery worker, crossing paths with the police and with people who owe him money, and trying to find somewhere safe to sleep. "Lojkine's narrative is pacy and moves like an edge-of-the-seat thriller," says Namrata Joshi in the New Indian Express. He "also documents the entire industry that gets built around immigration and asylum".

Released on 1 August in the US and Canada

Barbarian, Zach Cregger's twist-filled horror film about the world's worst Airbnb, was a commercial and critical hit in 2022, and now the writer-director returns with a film which, he says, is "more ambitious in almost every way". The Twilight Zone-worthy premise is that 17 children from the same class all wake up at the same moment, walk out of their houses and disappear into the night, never to be seen again. The children's parents (Josh Brolin, among others) are desperate for answers, and their teacher (Julia Garner) is under suspicion. But that, says Cregger, is just the start of the story. Even more intriguingly, he says that he was influenced by Paul Thomas Anderson's multi-stranded ensemble drama, Magnolia. "I love that movie," he told Entertainment Weekly. "I love that kind of bold scale. It gave me permission when I was writing this to shoot for the stars and make it an epic. I wanted a horror epic, and so I tried to do that."

Released on 8 August in cinemas internationally

The Bad Guys was a different kind of DreamWorks cartoon – a stylish heist caper in the Ocean's Eleven mould, except that the criminals just happened to be talking animals. Adapted from Aaron Blabey's graphic novels, the film featured Mr Wolf (Sam Rockwell), Mr Snake (Marc Maron), Ms Tarantula (Awkwafina), Mr Shark (Craig Robinson) and Mr Piranha (Anthony Ramos), a gang of wisecracking criminals who got tired of being stereotyped as scary predators. In the sequel, they're still struggling to be accepted as upstanding members of the community, and things get trickier when they're blackmailed into teaming up with another gang of crooked animals: The Bad Girls. The director, Pierre Perifel, says that the sequel makes the jump from heist film to all-action blockbuster. "We're big fans of Mission: Impossible, and of big action films in particular, and we wanted to dabble and play with that genre," Perifel told Collider. "We're not doing Mission: Impossible, we're doing The Bad Guys, but it has those tropes."

Released on 1 August in cinemas internationally

Darren Aronofsky is known for his abyss-dark dramas; no one goes to see Requiem for a Dream, The Wrestler or The Whale because they fancy a fun Friday night at the cinema. But now Aronofsky has switched to Tarantino / Ritchie mode for a boisterous crime caper set in grimy 1990s New York. Adapted from Charlie Huston's novel, Caught Stealing stars Austin Butler as a baseball-loving barman who is trying to impress his new girlfriend (Zoe Kravitz) when he stumbles into a gangland feud involving a British punk-rocker (Matt Smith), a pair of Orthodox Jewish hitmen (Liev Schreiber and Vincent D'Onofrio), and $4m in ill-gotten gains. "The state the world's in right now...........

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