Catherine Bray

Mordini’s film, though, is a handsomely made, stylish-looking piece of cinema, with some beautifully lensed racing scenes and great 1980s wardrobes – but when you sit down to watch something called Race for Glory you do want your heart to beat faster. This can’t quite get away from the lurking sense that it could do with just a little bit more rev in its engine.

The sight loss the children are experiencing is irreversible, and it’s naturally difficult to find the positive angle on that, but their parents are determined to give it their best shot, and the film follows their lead.

There is an undeniable energy and spookiness to this low-budget chiller, which makes intelligently modest use of digital FX in a way that some bigger-budget projections would do well to emulate.

This horror bonanza, the eighth instalment in the V/H/S anthology series, is a mixed bag, with some very high highs and regrettably poor lows.

It may not stick around in your memory with the persistence demonstrated by the entity towards its victims, but it passes the time chillingly enough.

It drags a little in places, despite the appealing animation style, which really comes into its own during the action sequences.

You’ll spend the next 90 minutes finding out, and for the most part that’s a brisk and painless journey that romps merrily along, powered by its own cliches and memories of better movies, in a way that’s more comfortingly familiar than wearisome.

Where the film runs into some difficulty is in sustaining its initially very promising mood of incipient violence. Withholding revelations can be an effective strategy, but it’s perhaps slightly overused here, as the result feels ever so slightly dry.

For veteran viewers who’ve seen it all before, it’s not exactly the Second Coming. But novice nunsploitation audiences might find this habit-forming: a stylish enough entry-level initiation.

While the craft team here feel at the top of their game, delivering scene after scene of perfectly composed glossy, grimy, sweaty tableaux, the script could have used a bit more time to sharpen up. Still, there are some zingy, zesty sequences here that really pop.

While it may have more punch as chilly horror-drama than allegory, it’s a decently put together film.

Existing as a labour of love isn’t enough by itself to earn any film a pass mark, but when the result is a committed piece of indie genre work with a suitably silly sense of the macabre, this gets the job done.

Despite Zellweger’s appealingly warm, vulnerable performance, the film itself is a mixed bag.

The screenplay isn’t nuanced enough to switch between modes in a way that feels intentional and the result is the sense that there are a few different films jostling for attention.

Despite quality performances from both leading lads, Land of Bad won’t exactly knock anyone’s socks off.

The filmmaking is at its most successful when it moves away from dialogue-driven sequences and into the more visual, visceral aspects of Nejma’s chosen line of work.

It is an odd, mostly compelling yarn, and acted with gusto and shot with real physical commitment to the wide open spaces and raw chill of the elements.

Director Pete Travis’s film is distinguished by some transposition of noir tropes into cultural spaces not traditionally associated with the genre — from the London bar scene to a mosque — that keeps things from feeling too déjà vu.

There are some decent PG-rated thrills and scares for the preteen audience, but adults are unlikely to find it especially convincing, with clunky dialogue and a generic score letting down a solidly traditional spooky mystery.

The longer it goes on, the more we find ourselves in therapy-land, in contrast to the zingy, zesty territory in which we began.

In many ways this fairly nondescript film is the perfect vehicle for potentially dystopian tech: it’s under the radar, inauspicious and not likely to find itself widely watched.

It’s a Wonderful Knife is diverting enough to start with, as the plot clicks efficiently into motion with the requisite stabbings and impalings. Unfortunately, there’s not enough fuel in the engine – the characters don’t have quite enough to do, we can’t care quite enough about them, and the world-building is nearly-but-not-quite convincing.

The cherry on top of this admittedly weird cocktail is a strong streak of genuine sensuality – if it’s your first encounter with tentacle sex on screen, you might be surprised how appealing Heimann and his cast have managed to make it seem.

Riper than the ripest of ripe Brie, this crime caper provides a ridiculous vehicle for the talents of pretty much everyone involved, all of whom appear to be having a splendid time. Taken on these terms, viewers probably will too.

Unfortunately, because it's so cinematically inert, all that craft and talent seems wasted. Let's hope his next film sees him working on another Dolan original.

Well-behaved to a fault, Happiness for Beginners is sweet but a little tentative.

Chalk it up to an insufficiently distinctive screenplay and underwhelming plot, but for Travolta, Cash Out feels more like a mercenary case of cashing in.

It’s not just the demonic possession victims whose eyes will be rolling back in their skulls – none of this should work, really, and yet the film just about gets away with it, proving the Lord truly does move in mysterious ways.