Allan Hunter

The film itself has a commendable logic and credibility, but perhaps lacks a little of the pulse-racing intensity that might have made it a more obviously commercial proposition.

Lurker is sometimes a little too on the mark.

Initially intriguing, Ashkal grows less satisfying as it struggles to do justice to the disparate elements of the personal, the political and the supernatural.

It does cross your mind that this might all be some jolly wheeze of a mockumentary with Ginghină as a David Brent figure but apparently it is all to be taken seriously.

You have to admire the sheer giddy enthusiasm of filmmaking friends who are fizzing with ideas and able to make a modest budget stretch a long way. The film has a certain visual allure in its gaudy colours and low-budget special-effects. Yet you also long for them to put all those energies into a more focused, far funnier project.

Full of interesting concepts and accomplished animation, Children Of The Sea is less than the sum of its many parts and just seems to lose its way after a very promising beginning.

[A] charming, quirky, dramatically inert new feature.

There are plenty of elements to admire in Amant Double but the endless twists and revelations grow tiresome.

The slick assurance of Bakhshi’s approach makes for an accessible, pacey melodrama but one that can also seem to trivialise the life and death matters at the core of the story.

Galloping across the decades, the film becomes increasingly sketchy and superficial. There is so much detail and substance in the 1970s stretch of this epic that the twists of fate and rueful reflections of later years inevitably feel less authentic and closer to soap opera.

The abiding impression is of an intermittently fascinating film that is a minor work in the ever burgeoning Herzog canon.

Plays like an unnecessary revival of the provocative cat and mouse thrillers that were once a speciality of screenwriter Joe Ezterhas.

The film is hugely impressive in the scope of those interviewed.

Director Nathan Morlando makes a concerted effort to inject dynamism and emotion into the telling of Mean Dreams, but fights a losing battle against the cliched writing and some risible plotting.

Elements of craft and performance are very persuasive but the slight storyline and recourse to awkward flights of fancy make it a film that never quite gels.

Ma’ Rosa is atmospheric and involving to a degree but also feels as if we are in familiar territory.

A restrained production favours story over splatter but eventually delivers a fair amount of gloopy, tentacled creatures and exploding host bodies. That should be enough to satisfy Adams aficionados.

It achieves stray laughs and some clever moments, but not enough to render it more than a strained curiosity.

Skin is a little pedestrian and obvious in its early stages, skirting with the feeling of a television production. It is the nature of the story and the scale of the mountain that Widner had to climb that finally makes it into something more compelling.

The problem with City Of Tiny Lights is a plot that is all too easy to second guess and stretches of dialogue which fail to sparkle.

The material may be slicker but the novelty of the format has faded.

Some of the wit and emotion strikes home and the longer we spend with individual characters the more their story resonates.

Hailey Gates’ ambitious debut feature Atropia is full of comic potential that is never quite realised. The mixture of war games satire, deadpan farce and sweet romance provides amusement along the way without cutting as deep as it sometimes promises.

The issue of immigration couldn’t be more timely or poignant, but everything else in Desierto feels strictly by the book and it is a book we already know from cover to cover.

An increasingly overwrought approach undermines its better instincts and creates an uneven affair.

The film almost works as a love letter to a seemingly ageless, bikini-clad Stone who invests her character with endless energy and enthusiasm. If she is engaged in a losing battle with the lack of originality or spark in the material, then nobody seems to have told her.

The feature debut of Vladimir De Fontenay is an accomplished piece with a committed central performance from Imogen Poots, but the emotional impact is lessened by an air of predictability and the sense that every bit of fresh hope is destined to end in disappointment.

It may have its failings but it is never less than entertaining.