Cath Clarke

Holy Cow is sentimental in the best of ways, with its warmth and hope in human nature.

As visions of apocalypse go, it’s rather lovely: a world lush with nature, animals learning to get by together.

Her poems, read by Giovanni herself and the actor Taraji P Henson, made the hairs on the back of my neck prickle.

It’s perfectly adequate for little kids but with little character of its own and a straight-to-download-style blandness.

Dog Man is packed with goofy gags that whizz past, with no let up from the hectic pace.

It would be grating were it not for Kinnear, and some nicely performed supporting roles.

The trouble with Nick Frost’s knowingly cartoonish and silly comedy paying homage to folk horrors such as The Wicker Man and Midsommar is that Frost has done this kind of movie before, and better.

Kerr’s script doesn’t always match the quality of her interesting, layered lead performance.

There are some lovely playful moments: his favourite elf eats a magic shroom and grows to monstrous proportions. But there is a lot of padding and the decision to stick with the book’s rhyming scheme becomes annoying.

This documentary about [Moth's] life, directed by the actor Lucy Lawless, is a fascinating portrait of a woman who had two mottoes: “no regrets” and “don’t be boring”.

Strangely, this film keeps to the speed limit; it’s like Formula One with enhanced health and safety, slow-paced and a little low on adrenaline.

The film, with its clanging score, felt to me slightly tactless in its approach, like a Hollywood-ised version of a human interest story.

This is a shameless heartstring plucker. But it’s charming and sometimes very funny.

[An] affectionate, nostalgic documentary.

It’s stylishly shot by first-timer Louis-Seize, a bit reminiscent of an early Jim Jarmusch movie with its deadpan sense of humour, never trying too hard, just a little bit too cool for school.

It’s a quiet film, and Panigrahi plays Mira with such poise and intelligence, conveying her innermost thoughts with a slight lift of the chin here or lingering look there.

It slips just a little too easily into the generic pigeonholing of first generation south Asian narratives, but rattles along with fun and energy.

In Camera is the kind of ambitious intelligent cinema that invites your most mulled-over theories. It will exasperate some; others will be engrossed by an intriguing movie.

I didn’t feel the movie maintained the dramatic tension enough to work as a lean thriller, but as a portrait of a toxic man who thinks he could be a contender it’s funny and disturbing, with an impressive lead performance by Aldokhei.

The upside to casting Bea in a comedy is that she’s an absolute hoot. When Hollywood stars play ordinary civilians, there’s often a slumming-it quality to their performances, but Bea is funny and real, sarky and very likable as Gemma, who’s feeling guilty after Nathan dies.

The tension leaks away in the second half; the film could have done with being snipped by a good 20 minutes.

It’s a tender, painful, intimate film, made over several years as we watch four girls in the months before the dance.

The original delivered some big laughs, scenes that were an absolute joy. This is less good-natured; it is a film with streak of misanthropy, more likely to leave a sour taste in the mouth than a smile on your face.

There are some nice enough performances, particularly from Ken Jeong as JJ’s CIA boss and Anna Faris playing the high school deputy principal leading the choir trip. But tonally the movie is all over the place.

Co-directing Unicorns with James Krishna Floyd (the star of My Brother the Devil), who wrote the script, El Hosaini brings a streak of hopefulness to gritty social realism, with the added attraction of superstar drag queens.

Knepp is a heartwarming speck of biodiversity good news among the depressing headlines.

Àma Gloria is a small-scale film, barely over 80 minutes, but it leaves an almighty impression.

Like I say, there’s nothing new here for even casual followers of the food crisis. But it will make you think twice about what you put in your supermarket basket.