Catherine Bray

Written and directed by Kirk Jones (“Waking Ned Devine”), the film wrestles enthusiastically and mostly successfully with the potential pitfalls of making a funny yet respectful project about a condition that sometimes lends itself to laughter, even as it wreaks havoc with Davidson’s life in serious ways.

It always feels as if the people making this movie are having fun, and while that’s never a guarantee that the audience will too, it’s certainly the case here.

This is a fascinating and neatly realised horror riff on the 2020s’ most popular genre.

This is an all too rare romcom that delivers on every level. If you’re looking for well-drawn characters caught up in an outlandish situation that generates plenty of laughter and sentiment, look no further. Oh, and it’s sexy too. What more could you want?

Some films prioritize a strident political cause, others set out to terrify or thrill. This touching and simple story from Japanese filmmaker Hiroshi Okuyama, premiering in Un Certain Regard at Cannes, is a gentler affair, with modest ambitions that it realizes effectively.

It uses its supernatural premise to explore some very human behaviour.

A Useful Ghost is an entertaining and moving – if also somewhat sprawling – fable of love and loss that isn’t quite like anything you’ve seen before.

A funny but also melancholy piece of work. It’s more interested in maintaining a consistent and sincere emotional connection than in wild virtuoso showboating.

So, is it all just high-concept pornography? Well, yes and no. The majority of the runtime consists of sex scenes, but they are punctuated with slogans which flash onscreen during and after the action, almost like demonstration placards at a march in support of sexual and political liberation.

As fun as the boys are, this is Barrera’s show. She is tremendous, and seemingly having a tremendous amount of fun.

This film is a necessary howl of rage, one that argues cogently — via the simple expedient of capturing life as it is lived — that to ignore what it happening in Afghanistan is to condemn half the population of the country to oppression under a dictatorship that is both political and personal.

There are a couple of not-quite holes exactly, but slightly threadbare patches. More importantly, the narrative isn’t really the point; this is first and foremost a tense portrait of a toxic relationship, and a brutally compelling one at that.

The film has so much energy that its overall tone is fundamentally invigorating; this is the cinema of euphoric nihilism, and it’s a welcome return to form for Moreau.

It’s not for everyone, but for gorehounds this film delivers and then some.

McAvoy is the most compelling reason to see this one. The original may be darker, but it didn’t have McAvoy.

If we’re nitpicking it’s fair to say that neither of the couple’s interior lives are as fully fleshed out as would be permitted in a novel, but maybe they don’t have to be: they function as avatars for romantic hopes and dreams as much as anything, delivering all the vicarious pleasure and pain that we’re looking for when we tuck into a good romance

From a horror fan’s point of view, this is an absolutely fascinating experiment with form.

Kill’s objectives are achieved with an energy and enthusiasm that make it a tasty piece of action cinema which doesn’t pull its punches; it’s finger-cracking good.

The Nature of Love refreshingly centers the female adulterer’s experience, in a richly comic mode.

Audiences hoping for lashings of graphic violence may be disappointed that not all of these problems involve gallons of blood – this is a relatively gore-free thriller – instead, it’s all aboard and anchors aweigh for some larky tension between likable characters who find themselves plunged into a nightmare scenario.

To a Land Unknown is a film crafted with tremendous empathy.

Sharp, funny and strongest when it stands on its own two perfectly manicured feet, this snappy musical successfully updates the original Mean Girls template for a fresh audience.

You’re never left in any doubt that The Sacrifice Game is made by film-makers with affection and respect for horror movies – but it might not be the type of horror movie you thought it was at first sight.

Scott's take on Napoleon is distinctively deadpan: a funny, idiosyncratic close-up of the man, rather than a broader, all-encompassing account.

Directed with verve and enthusiasm by 37-year-old former bank employee Lokesh Kanagaraj, who moved into directing after winning a short film competition, the influence of the likes of Quentin Tarantino on all of this is very much evident.

They say you can’t teach an old dog new tricks, but maybe they’re wrong: on this evidence, Guy Ritchie can absolutely learn how to make a Paul Greengrass film, delivering a handsome slice of serious war drama.

More a portrait of Kiefer’s work than a standard biographical study of Kiefer himself, “Anselm” is a very particular study of a singular man’s soul, told through images of his oeuvre, augmented by sensational use of archive rendered in 3D.

The film is intriguingly anthropological in its take on America as a subject, viewed less through the prism of what American might signify as a nation, than how America might feel as an experience — there’s a sense of disintegration and incipient violence seeping through everything, which occasionally explodes to entertaining effect, but there’s clearly deep affection there too.

It’s the unique rhythm of the way that this film is written and cut that elevates it beyond a standard millennial malaise movie.

Where “Seven Kings Must Die” is most interesting, however, is in its approach to religion, sexuality and culture. While it’s tempting to see our current era as unprecedented in its social blending of diverse faiths and identities, early medieval England gives contemporary Western society a run for its money in this respect.

This film is a slightly slipperier customer than a topline summary would suggest, with tonal shifts that shouldn’t work, but somehow do.

Newcomer Marder’s performance is a thoroughly engaging one. She manages to demonstrate both screen presence and likability, despite a role which requires her to represent youthful optimism to an almost symbolic degree.

this compassionate film is as much about its very specific Cambodian setting as it is the characters, with the film’s standout star its neon-pastel location work.

Despite their lack of experience, the Fontana sisters do a lovely job of sketching an intimate yet at times claustrophobic bond.

Radio Dreams is a witty, low-key exercise in deferred gratification.

Fleischer-Camp and editor Jonathan Rippon’s subtle recontextualizations illuminate the family’s attempt to live their lives as outlined in omnipresent commercials as both illogical and understandable — this is not a film intent on hanging its subjects out to dry.

Serving as co-editor as well as writer and director, Emiliano Rocha Minter is very much the author of all the chaos wrought here, and his thoroughly arresting vision could squat quite comfortably alongside Hieronymus Bosch’s depiction of hell.

It’s heartening to see Ransome’s fiction taking on a new and more independent form, suggesting an ongoing relevance for a series of books that could easily be viewed as too dated for modern children. As the kids put it: Swallows and Amazons forever.

A late third-act turn into sentimental territory, in which the original show’s misanthropy is sugared up, may feel artificial to viewers drawn to the series’ persistent despairing streak; still, it makes a certain sense given that the film would otherwise entirely lack an emotional arc.

The fictional character Huppert creates is simply so lived-in and plausible that to insist Michele react differently to her own lived experience would be as obstinate as insisting that a person in real life cannot possibly feel the way that they say they feel. Whatever your take, it's a film that will inspire debate for decades to come.

Raw is a deliciously fevered stew of nightmare fuel that hangs together with a breezily confident sense of superior craft.