David Jenkins

You watch this film not so much in anger, but with the shrugging, pitiful sense that each of its stars will be able to buy a new saloon car, or have their pool retiled.

It’s another very special film from this exceptionally gifted and thoughtful (and extremely angry) director.

It’s a film which sets up a lot of easy targets, but shifts its aim at the last second to take on – and bullseye – a whole lot of hard ones.

The film makes for a involving and often mordantly funny three-hander, and Exarchopoulos and Whishaw are both superb despite being given the slightly thankless task of clearing things up in Tomas’s wake.

It’s not that Soto has no moves in his arsenal when it comes to achieving a mere modicum of originality, it’s that the formal structure of these films is now so tired and dreary that, even with a few, nifty customisable elements, everything looks and feels like a rehash of something else.

It feels as if Crialese wants to explore this subject matter without potentially alienating an audience who may disagree with the stance it takes, so everything political is soft edged, and Adri’s dilemma is nudged to the background in the film’s final act.

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

This archive clip-driven documentary comprises Cousins’ own informed and poetic postulations on the inner-workings of the Hitchcock corpus, as he heads on a jolly, thematically-inclined ramble through one of the great artistic legacies of the 20th century.

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 not a faultless film, but it’s one that sits within the higher echelons of the oft-tawdry biopic form, and also reveals hidden depths to the Nolan project and, excitingly, suggests that we should brace ourselves for anything the next time around.

It’s a fun little diversion that’s more interested in the salacious gossip and anecdotes than it is offering a more broad inquiry into how these artworks more generally enhance the music they’re being used to sell.

It’s such a lovely set-up, you wish the filmmakers had attempted to do a little more with it.

Unfortunately, much of said action is old hat (pun intended), with the bulk of this strangely peril-free offering playing like a refried compendium of golden moments from Spielberg’s original trilogy.

Asteroid City is Anderson’s most complete, rich and surprising film to date, and perhaps his most autobiographical in some obscure, allegorical way, in that it stands as testament to how filmmaking is about bringing artists together and attuning them to a specific wavelength. On a more superficial level, it’s a film which pushes his patented funny/sad dichotomy to its wildest and most enjoyable extremes.

In the face of creative genocide (if that’s not too harsh a term for it), we should neither be making nor seeing movies like Transformers: Rise of the Beasts.

One thing that lifts this above the type of hospital-based docu-drama that are ten-a-penny on the small screen is that Paravel and Castaing-Taylor locate a uniquely cinematic quality to the footage.

This tale of a tough loner forced to test his mettle certainly has political resonance beyond its intimate telling here.

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.

A fiery, confrontational missive from one of the finest dramatic writers in the business.

It offers a spitefully funny takedown of a culture which sees no differences between the acts of soul-bearing and self-abasement, and just when you think Borgli couldn’t twist the knife any further, he does just that.

While there’s a loving homage element to the film, Cronin isn’t merely attempting to ape the hysterical dynamics and acrobatic camera moves that Raimi made his trademark.

Pacifiction is by far Serra’s most serious and sombre film to date, an epic of neutered power and human expendability – a death-knell for humanity rendered as a tropical daydream.

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.

There’s no real moral centre to the film – it’s a depth-free caper which only demonstrates negligible interest in any wider ramifications of these types of big money boardroom IP raids.

The film does well to capture the probing literary spirit of Murakami, even if it doesn’t quite manage to channel the intense emotional aspect of its work, instead coming across as dryly ironic and detached.

There is something a little boilerplate in how the film is structured which prevents it from offering anything particularly original. Were the visuals not so gorgeous, you might even see this as material primed for the small rather than big screen.

Audacious as it is, The Five Devils is a remarkably sedate and ominous film which captures the way that the worlds of adults and children harmoniously orbit around one another while always remaining distant, beautiful, unreachable.

As a follow-up to her exceptional – and sadly underseen – An Easy Girl from 2019, Other People’s Children could and should finally cement Zlotowski’s place in the top class of European auteurs.