David Jenkins

It’s precision-tooled in terms of structure, almost to the point of airlessness, but you’d be hard-pressed to knock back the final 45-minute showdown as anything less than an impressive feat by a filmmaker orchestrating and charting the fine processes of an epic battle.

The film is ambling, gentle and doesn’t strain too hard to force a point, but allows you to appreciate the multifarious nature of life in a city where the spectre of destruction lurks ominously in the clouds.

It’s an intriguing set-up which comes to a surprising head, and while some of the twists are a little contrived, the film as a whole works as a fierce admonishment of western nostalgia for its colonial past.

This 20th anniversary refit/remaster of 2004’s cult rock- shock-doc Dig! proves that no amount of inadvisable retroactive tinkering can diminish the quality of a core product that’s this good.

Even if it does eventually crumble to pieces, it’s a really strong thriller for the large majority of its runtime.

With lots of appealing wildlife and landscape photography to keep things lively, there’s much to cherish in this charming little film.

While there are passages of uncertainty and twists that take their good sweet time to arrive, things come together beautifully, and a finale that combines a series of clever emotional call-backs and another heartening plea for human empathy that’s worthy of only the finest John Lewis ad.

This is on first impression perhaps a very good, uneven film rather than an unequivocally great one.

It’s a film which man­ages to have its daft thrills and con­vinc­ing­ly piv­ot to wist­ful philo­soph­i­cal intro­spec­tion, and while there are cer­tain­ly some rough edges and unex­plored plot avenues, it prob­a­bly counts as one of Boyle’s strongest works this cen­tu­ry.

There are numerous moments where all the signposts point towards a saccharine dirty bomb, and thankfully, the film seldom allows those to detonate.

Escobar’s go-for-broke handling of the material favours fun outtakes, flip humour and nostalgic hat-tips to the days when the Philippines had real gravitational pull as a hub for maverick genre enthusiasts wanted to parlay the beautiful/desolate surroundings into their scuzzy opus. And just when you reach the point where you think that Escobar has finally lost the plot, she crops up on camera and admits just that.

Even to a viewer who’s not particularly taken by their idiosyncratic and knowingly difficult sound, it’s a pleasure to be in the company of two people who are so proficient at articulating their inner feelings.

It’s not a film that does anything particularly new, in the dutifully linear way it tells the story to the ultra-functional shooting style. Yet its satisfaction comes from its careful release of information, it’s ambience of encroaching dread and the subtle psychological twists that push Julie ever closer to that euphoric breaking point.

It’s confident, classical filmmaking, yet despite its many formal and thematic pleasures, doesn’t offer a whole lot that’s new.

The film is a celebration of her life and work, but for such a controversial figure it would have benefited from some dissenting voices on the panel of interviewees, or at least gone a little deeper into her homespun methodology.

It’s in the writing where this one shines. Less in the moment-by-moment dialogue between characters, which is functional to a tee, and more in the way in which the clever plot is constructed and vital details are gradually teased out.

There’s a sense that the makers of Mission: Impossible: The Final Reckoning are biting a thumb at the naysayers and playing the hits one more time, albeit with a little bit more focus on the previous feature installments.

Despite these subtle barbs, Return to Dust ends up as an elegiac love story as the unlikely couple form a bond built on a foundation of total understanding and empathy.

It’s refreshing to see a film like this which opts for an editorial line that’s not just wall-to-wall celebration, and actually attempts to dismantle and dissect its subject rather than merely lionise him to the hilt.

At times it’s a little too ponderous, and sometimes struggles to bring variation and surprise to its runtime. Yet this laconic, meditative drama muses on the nature of time and the revelation that, even though Muzamil’s predicament seems highly unlikely to the rational onlooker, the knowledge he accrues is pertinent to all mortals.

A wildly ambitious, idiosyncratic and very English domestic horror story baked in the mould of Clive Barker’s seminal S&M gore wig-out, Hellraiser, from 1987.

This is the western as a dried, coruscating corpse, left out for the buzzards to feed on.

A jolly throwback to a time when flip, breezy British comedies came freighted with substance, and lots of charismatic performances to boot.

What makes Sasquatch Sunset a cut above what some might perceive to be an extended Funny or Die sketch is that it’s crafted with such care and with a sense of cinematic grandeur, achieved via Mike Gioulakis’ gorgeous, mussy cinematography and the gentle pastoral sounds of The Octopus Project on the soundtrack.

It’s a film which dismantles and reconstructs the stereotypes of Black masculinity in a manner that’s both unsentimental and honest.

Bulk is a self-unravelling noir sci-fi which gleefully ties its various threads into impressive granny knots of self-referrential absurdity.

It was an exciting prospect to see what someone like Jenkins would do while up against the Hollywood machine, but it unfortunately feels like the machine won this bout, if not by knockout, then definitely on points.

Where the film suffers is in its lack of a coherent dramatic arc, as it instead chronicles a chunk of time that marks a confluence of small epiphanies and aching fallbacks.