During the May Day holiday, instead of going to scenic spots to enjoy the sea of people, it is better to watch movies at home comfortably. What are the best foreign films to be released in May? Here are some most worthwhile new films for you.

Hypnotic

Nothing is what it seems in Hypnotic, a mind-bending conspiracy thriller from Robert Rodriguez (Sin City, Spy Kids). Ben Affleck stars as a police detective who is worried by the disappearance of his daughter. He is investigating a series of bank robberies when a mystery woman (Alice Braga) tells him about “hypnotics”: people who have the power to make others believe and do anything they want by saying a single sentence. It will be released on l May in Australia, 2 May in the US & 6 May in the UK.

Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 3

It’s been six years since Marvel’s second Guardians of the Galaxy film came out. Star-Lord (Chris Pratt), Gamora (Zoe Saldana), Rocket (Bradley Cooper), Drax (Dave Bautista) and their buddies are finally back for more interstellar swashbuckling — and this time they’re up against the High Evolutionary (Chukwudi Iwuji). It will be on general release from 5 May.

The Little Mermaid

Another live-action-and-CGI remake of a classic Disney cartoon. But this one is more distinctive than most, because a black actress, Halle Bailey, is playing the title character, who was white in the 1989 cartoon. Besides, the film’s director, Rob Marshall (Chicago, Mary Poppins Returns), argues that his version of The Little Mermaid is progressive (前卫性的) in other ways, too. He told Nick Romano at EW, she and Prince Eric, played by Jonah Hauer-King, “really teach the world about prejudice and about breaking down barriers and walls between these two worlds.” It will be on general release from 4 May.

Fast X

It’s the tenth film in the unstoppable petrolhead series. The new additions this time are Jason Momoa as the vengeful son of a drug lord killed in Fast Five (2011); Rita Moreno as the grandmother of Dom (Vin Diesel) and Mia (Jordana Brewster) ; and Brie Larson as their contact in the secret service. It will be on general release from 7 May.

Popular destinations boosted by films, TV dramas

Over the past year, several films and TV dramas have put their shooting locations into the public spotlight. Let’s take a look.

As a hometown for many overseas Chinese, Jiangmen in Guangdong province, where the drama The Knockout was filmed attracts a crowd of tourists and TV fans. Currently, travel bookings had a 144 percent month-on-month rise.

Filmed within a community, the movie Full River Red grasps the most important part of the buildings, winding streets and characteristic ancient courtyards of the Taiyuan Ancient County in Shanxi, leaving a lasting impression on the audience. During last year’s Spring Festival, the county witnessed a stream of over 400,000 tourists, more than the previous Spring Festival holiday.

Another hot film during last year’s Spring Festival was The Wandering Earth 2, which shows impressive and grand sci-fi scenes. Interestingly, 90 percent of the film was actually shot in Qingdao Shandong province. For sci-fi fans or film lovers, visiting Qingdao to explore the movie’s filming locations has become a popular trend.

Shanghai, known as the “magic city” in China, has once again attracted the public’s attention with the recent popularity of the TV series Blossoms Shanghai. Data from Shanghai’s tourism monitoring reveals that the city welcomed 7.2 million tourists, a year-on-year increase of 16.27 percent during the holiday.

It’s a reader’s rite of passage to walk into a movie theater to see a favorite book come to life and walk out bitterly disappointed. Sometimes, there’s no softening the truth: what you read on the page is so much better than what you watched on the screen. The following are four beloved books that are undoubtedly better than their film adaptations.

Passionate fans of this young adult classic will agree that a true film adaptation of Ella Enchanted does not yet exist. Levine’s 1997 retelling of Cinderella, which earned a prestigious Newbery Honor, was adapted for the screen in 2004, with Anne Hathaway in the starring role. But the movie took significant liberties with Levine’s original plot, adding characters and excluding beloved scenes. The moods of the film and the book feel disparate. As David Rooney wrote in Variety, “The filmmakers also pushed the tone into a far more jokey comic realm, which dilutes the romantic-magical chemistry of the book, downplaying its central idea of a ‘Cinderella’ overhaul.”

This 1850 work of historical fiction about the Puritan Massachusetts Bay Colony in the 1640s has inspired a number of adaptations to film, page and stage, but the most bizarre of these may be the 1995 film starring Demi Moore, Gary Oldman and Robert Duvall. It was labeled “trashy and nonsensical” by Caryn James in the NewYork Times, and is frequently disparaged for changing much of the source material, including the ending. Receiving a shockingly low score of 13% on Rotten Tomatoes, this movie took home the award for the Worst Remake or Sequel at the 1995 Golden Raspberry Awards.

The Golden Compass, published in 1995, is the first novel in the beloved young-adult fantasy series, His Dark Materials, a magical story set in a parallel universe. This first part of the trilogy follows a young girl named Lyra as she embarks on a rescue mission to the Arctic. The widely panned 2007 film took five years to complete, slowed down by disagreements over the script and the direction. The studio bought the rights to the trilogy in 2002 and commissioned Tom Stoppard to write the screenplay. Chris Weitz was hired to direct. But Stoppard’s script was rejected and Weitz was fired. In his place, the studio hired Anand Tucker to direct, though Tucker resigned in 2006. Then Weitz returned to write the screenplay and direct the project. The result was a disappointing (and extremely expensive) movie that cut or changed many elements of the novel.

This bestselling novel from 2002 tells the story of a teenage girl who is raped and murdered and watches her family grieve from heaven. The 2009 film adaptation boasts terrific performances by Saoirse Ronan and Stanley Tucci as the girl and her attacker, but has little else to offer. The fine balance of sentiment and violence that Sebold strikes in the novel is lost in the movie. The film “strikes clashing tones, veering from lightheartedness to heavy-handedness,” Claudia Puig wrote in USA Today, adding that the device of main character narrating from heaven “works on the page but comes off artificial and emotionless on-screen.”