Christina Newland

You don’t have to profess any special interest in the subject to have a fantastic time at the cinema with Conclave, which is part political thriller, part catfight, and utterly compelling.

Obsessed by rooting his supernatural folk tales in the realities of historical life, Eggers turns Nosferatu into a gothic horror fairy-tale. It’s retro in the best sense of the word.

Jenkins is the kind of talent who can turn his hand to almost anything and Mufasa is a respectable film as a result.

It rewards the viewer with a sense of the vast beauty – and sadness – a fleeting love affair might provide. It’s a brief thing, maybe, but it also lasts a lifetime.

I didn’t want this movie to be dull – I would have settled for enjoyably bad – but unfortunately, it doesn’t even manage that.

When Heller is metaphorically exploring the potentially horrifying physical transformation of pregnancy and post-partum life – and the personal sacrifices of identity, career, and self that women face when they become mothers – Nightbitch has a lot of smart, real things to say.

Joy doesn’t reinvent the wheel, but it satisfyingly brings these stories to the screen in a typically prosaic, no-fuss British manner.

Exhilarating, satisfying, classical with a touch of tongue-in-cheek: Gladiator II ticks all the boxes, and does it with panache.

A beautifully simple story of moral courage in the face of complicity, Small Things Like These is one of the best films of the year.

Mikey Madison gives a sparky, vulnerable, devastatingly real breakout performance as a strip-club dancer and sometime-sex-worker. Filmed with neon-lit nocturnal verve, Anora is as gorgeous to behold as it is deranged.

The film’s inability to find a single tone – comic, cathartic or otherwise – makes it feel like a failure on all fronts, and the constant intrusion of loud, obvious pop needle-drops (and even a full disco-dancing sequence) don’t help.

A fresh Stephen King adaptation should be exciting. It’s a shame, then, that Salem’s Lot – a small-town vampire chiller set in 1970s Maine – has absolutely zero new ideas or even a particularly frightening take on the old story.

Glossy, grotesque, and intriguing even as you hate yourself for getting sucked into it, this isn’t an awful film. It just shouldn’t exist.

What a staggeringly stupid film. Joker: Folie à Deux is a sequel that did not need to exist. It’s an unspeakably self-indulgent, two-hour-plus beast of hodge-podge musical numbers wedged between drab prison and courtroom scenes.

There’s a sense of tinkering originality to the film that feels unlike anything else being made at the moment.

The plot isn’t always watertight, but The Substance nails the way female youth and beauty can steam-roll and flatten out the existence of older women.

For every engaging character-driven moment or bit of warm humor (Giovanni angrily shouting “I’m going to call Martin Scorsese” certainly got the audience in Cannes laughing), there’s unearned, even irritating quirkiness.

Most of the movie’s machinations seem merely in service of deepening the central gambit, which is to follow Mona’s journey and to look cool while doing it. On that front, it succeeds, but the movie’s charms are limited when the originality it purports to offer only feels like a bit of a costume.

Old Henry is a retread of the same dusty plains and macho bonds we’ve seen too many times before. It tells its slim story competently, but it does so little beyond that that it can’t help but feel mediocre.

A complete, if slightly overlong, view of Tina Turner’s life and career, the film is a deeply felt portrait of audacious talent and reinvention. The results are incredibly poignant.

This stylish, quietly suspenseful crime film offers a rejoinder to the typical macho ’70s genre, focusing on the female experience in a compelling, nuanced way.