Benjamin Lee

There’s clearly a more nuanced drama to be made from this story but given the scale, there’s still a lot here to praise.

Like Beckett trying to escape his pursuers, it’s a scrappy little film but one worth keeping up with.

Gilroy avoids the ghoulish extremes of Tom Ford’s Nocturnal Animals and offers up a believably pretentious battleground. He’s as invested in crafting a fully fleshed art world as he is in creating a full-on horror film and while the two often blend well, at other times, his concoction is far less effective.

There’s nothing markedly necessary about universe expander Army of Thieves, niche fan service that gives backstory to a character who we know dies later on, but Schweighöfer, also acting as director, keeps his frothy caper afloat with a light knockabout tone, never insisting the film as anything that it isn’t.

It’s in the film’s queerest moments that things feel most inventive, narratively and visually, as Bratton steps most firmly outside of the hemmed-in army drama formula and finds ways to make his film sit and thrive in the Venn diagram between military machismo and homoeroticism.

It’s when the script leans into the story’s specificities that the film is at its most compelling – when intersectionality causes ruptures within the group, when we see civil rights giants fail to understand the hypocrisy of their homophobic bigotry, how Rustin manages his queerness in public and in private – and these moments help to provide depth to some of the flatness that’s in the more standard-issue scenes.

Premiering as one of the more proudly mainstream offerings at this year’s Toronto film festival, David Oyelowo’s sweet-natured family adventure The Water Man gives us our first look at a commercial conductor in training, aiming to excite and thrill with adventure while making an unashamed appeal to our emotions shortly after, a Spielbergian combination that many have tried and failed to perfect.

There’s a rare unpredictability that initially proves alluring, at least until that confusion starts to feel less intentional.

All Day and a Night is a weightier alternative to the average Netflix original and while imperfectly realised and scrappily plotted at times, it’s another promising sign that, away from the easy-to-digest content, there’s room on the platform for much much more.

Even if some of the late-stage plotting seems sloppy and increasingly preposterous, there’s a callousness to the brutal last act that, together with the far patchier, yet similarly hard-edged First Purge, feels like a definite product of the time we’re in, as war on terror-era torture porn did in the mid-2000s.

While Something from Tiffany’s is unlikely to rise to the higher regions of any genre fan’s best-of list (it’s too frothy to even rise to the middle), there’s something engagingly earnest about its relative lack of meta self-awareness and robust attempts to look and feel like the studio meet-cutes so many of us were raised on.

Tetris finds its fun in the details of contracts and the specifics of deal-making, realising that even when it’s not on a screen in your hands, it’s all one big game.

While it’s far from the firestarter it could have been, there’s more to this than its release would suggest, an angry, slickly directed thriller that still manages to generate enough of a spark.

Captive State is imperfectly constructed, at times frustratingly so, but it’s trying, doggedly, to do something different and given the bland efficiency of so many wide-releasing sci-fi movies, that’s hard to fault.

His to-the-point revenge thriller Silent Night isn’t good enough for us to erupt into the applause Woo has so often deserved, but it’s also not bad enough for us to mourn the film-maker that he once was, a mostly competent exercise that serves less as a victory lap and more as a warm-up.

Unlike the woozy love at its centre, Summer of 85 doesn’t haunt in the way that it should. It fades when it should burn.

While a dedicated Bening gives her all in a tough, physically demanding role, deserving of at least another nomination if not necessarily a win, it’s Foster who steals the film with a fine reminder of her easy charisma.

The film’s old-fashioned nature is a plus and a minus, delivering us the satisfying beats we’ve come to expect from such a story, yet also giving it a dusty, dated feel, playing like a mid-90s TV movie stumbled upon late at night.

There are moments of crushing emotional weight but as the film progresses, they start to carry less power.

Like with his Halloween reinvention, the film is trapped between the serious and the silly, a thinly etched tale of a father dealing with grief and faith jarring next to scenes of a demonic child screaming the C-word while spitting slime. It’s better when it leans into the latter, a schlocky night out at the movies made with more competence than most recent horrors but one that is unlikely to make a believer out of die-hard fans.

It works for the most part because of Ruben and Cash and the spiky chemistry they share.

It’s pure hagiography and taken as that, it’s skillfully assembled, even stylishly so at times, and Kilmer’s insights into his art skirt just the right side of Inside the Actors Studio indulgence but as a portrait of a star known for his rough edges, it’s all far too smooth.

It’s a slight movie at times, unfocused at others, even plodding in parts, and I didn’t leave the cinema entirely convinced that it was the most satisfying way to tell this particular story but I did leave feeling confident in both Jackman’s prowess and Finley’s promise, yet to be fully realised.

Official Secrets is a well-intentioned retelling of a daunting act of courage and as a vehicle for informing more people of who Katharine Gun is, it’s effective, carefully laying out the incremental stakes as well as her noble intentions. Credit for this however lies almost solely with Knightley.

Khan’s script is one of competency rather than creativity: a sound structure, a propulsive pace and a learned awareness of genre conventions but dialogue that often feels a little first draft, a little placeholder-heavy, zingers not really zinging quite as they should.

Held together by Molina’s typically commanding voiceover, Remarkably Bright Creatures is a simple, heart-first drama of broken people trying to put themselves back together.

The Half of It is a strong, warm-hearted and quietly progressive addition to the expanding Netflix teen movie pack which treats its target audience with the respect they deserve.

It’s a film that’s good enough that you want it to be better, a rare genre example of less not proving to be more.