Anton Bitel

In what is essentially a long, barrelling chase movie, the action is relentless, and has little respect for the limits of physiological suffering let alone physical laws.

The Ice Tower is as fragile and delicate as a snowflake, as disorientating and mysterious as adolescence, and as dark as a winter’s night. For it is a shadowy frío-noir, complete with femme fatale, even as its elusive, edgy narrative is passed down, like keepsake beads or diffracting crystals, from generation to generation.

Ultimately, for all the focus on horrific ​‘cold cases’ from the past, this plays too nice with its characters in the present. Great horror is meaner-spirited and less happy-clappy.

This new The Toxic Avenger is relatively restrained, infuriatingly unfunny, yet entirely on-the-nose for more than just the stench of rot and urban decay that its scenes so frequently evoke. Sometimes the old hits are just better left uncovered.

There is a strong metacinematic element to all this showmanship, and as Zephyr must work out just how much like Tucker she is capable of being, we too are confronted with the nature of our own spectatorship, uncomfortably similar to Tucker’s, for in our window seat on events, we are no captive audience.

Playing like a Jarmusch – or Amirpour – joint, Sister Midnight is a droll, strange, cool freak of a film, never quite finishing its own sentences or following through on narrative expectation.

This is a moving and compassionate fable that honours both the dying and those being left behind, while personifying, without ever demonising, death itself.

It is ecstatically violent, both celebrating and interrogating its own killing spree, as it races towards its final destination.

Here the island’s geography and the natives’ mythology merge into an overlapping mystery which will ultimately bring about the young woman’s emergent self-knowledge, as she metamorphoses into a very different kind of adult.

It is funny, grotesque, assuredly savvy and very bloody — and one might discern, in its preoccupation with errant parents struggling to get closer to their estranged children, a Message that could be called universal.

Far from converting viewers, this merely cashes in on their backward-looking nostalgia, without moving forward to anything better, or even half as good.

The Boogeyman is deftly done, its child-focused stakes are never less than alarming, and its ending, ambiguous and closeted, rings true.

Even as The Beasts flirts with genre, it also remains largely true to the real-life case from which it is drawn, so that the big three-cornered duel that would be the climax of a western comes here at the half-way point and allows the rest of the film to abandon masculine bluster and focus on a quieter female stoicism.

Hidden in Martello-White’s bold, assured calling card is a provocative allegory of black experience in white Britain, as characters get caught in an evolving conflict between estrangement and assimilation, individualism and inauthenticity, pride and self-loathing.

Scream VI is well-made, fast-moving and often painfully brutal, while peppered with the kind of sassy, savvy dialogue that has always been a hallmark of the franchise.

A child’s anxieties about what might be under the bed or in the shadows are also precisely those primal fears that fuel horror, ensuring that, with all its obfuscations, evasions and abstractions, Skinamarink strips the genre down to its most basic elements: a vulnerable individual alone in the dark.

The Pale Blue Eye is all at once a melancholic romance, a revenger’s tragedy, and an intriguing mystery. Its one problem, though, is that it comes with a glacial pace to match its wintry setting.

All the mad metaphysics come rooted in character.

Ultimately this story of a young boy’s emergence exhibits strong teleological leanings, suggesting that all our endeavours – even our apparent failures – ultimately have a purpose in a grander scheme.

Dolan ensures that such myth comes with a dark gothic edge, unnerving, insidious and uncannily ambiguous, as this clan’s internal problems find their expression in highly incendiary rites of Capgras cleansing.

In this oneiric oddity, consumerism is everything, ultimately devouring even the consumer – while the real horror is the exploitative means of production, carefully kept underground beyond the sight of bourgeois shoppers above.

The result is a luridly coloured, transgressively queered piece of self-conscious schlock where cutting is the business of lovesick killers as much as filmmakers – and both cut right to the heart.

Whether Archenemy is a tale of genuine urban renewal, or merely of power shifting without any real underlying change, remains tantalisingly ambiguous.

Director Ivo van Aart and writer Daan Windhorst weave the darkest satire. In essence their scenario pushes at the same boundaries between what is acceptable and unacceptable as Anna’s campaign, even as Femke’s vendetta shifts the argument from merely discursive, theoretical terms to the realm of the viscerally physical.

Carnivalesque both literally and metaphorically, it is a surreal affair, but for all its unnerving strangeness, the depressing subtext is spelt out very clearly.

This is a high-energy caper with lots of larger-than-life characters circling to kill, and two innocents at its centre about whose fate and very survival, against all odds, we are made genuinely to care.

It’s crazy and colourful enough while it lasts, but the fleeting diversions on offer from Sonic’s first big-screen outing pass too quickly to leave much of a footprint in the memory.

It’s a strange, mythically menacing journey through grief and the self-torments of guilt.