Donald Clarke

This remains a shamelessly minor work without a single fresh idea in its head.

The miracle is that, from tragicomic opening up to a closing blast of Fontaines DC’s In the Modern World, Nino remains an affirmative experience throughout. Highly recommended.

The gags are plentiful. Old pals are still upright. But the sense of a finger wagging throughout can’t help but temper some of the fun.

At its best, this classy production reminds us why any film by this director deserves to be treated as a major event.

Unfortunately, the film takes too long to get to a destination – a festering hive of human corruption – that’s inevitable given the first 20 minutes of boozing, humping and double dealing. The dialogue feels inauthentic. The decadence is forced. Nothing about this is very much fun. Mr Barry Lyndon need not beware.

All solid good fun. All professionally honed. A minor miracle.

For all the unfortunate messiness of the film’s later stages, Tuner, shot energetically by Lowell A Meyer, remains engaging throughout thanks to consistently original performances and notably witty dialogue.

What keeps Power Ballad flowing is the juice of the dialogue, the comic humanity of the plotting and, above anything else, that charmingly ingenuous belief in pop music as something that truly matters. Good work.

The actors are unlikely to be confused with Gary Cooper and Jean Arthur from the Capra flick, but they have a spring-fresh charm that remains pleasing throughout.

The film ultimately amounts to not much more than an empty distraction of the old school. That is not altogether a bad thing. A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away we were happy with that on a rainy afternoon.

Shot in chiselled light by Lukasz Zal, who was behind the camera for the first two films in the trilogy, Fatherland also becomes, as the car moves eastwards, increasingly taken up with the ravages of grief and the responsibility of the artist. Those themes come together in a beautiful, sad epiphany that closes out a terse film with divine economy.

This picture is, in part, an attempt to assuage guilt at enjoying the teen-camp slasher at its most misogynistic and transphobic. It is also, as the director would admit, an amusing send-up of where they now find themselves.

The film is very much about male discomfort with tenderness, and Keoghan neatly communicates his internal conflicts in a mature performance. Keough continues to make her case for being one of the era’s great chameleons.

Shot in perennial murk, relentless in its cruel focus, Obsession is, at its heart, a deathly serious film with a troubling message to convey. Well worth enduring (if that’s the word).

This is ultimately an inspirational yarn focused on the value of standing by convictions.

At its best, The Devil Wears Prada 2 engages saltily with the social and economic changes that have set in since the 2006 original. One yearns for a little more of Miranda’s amusingly half-hearted attempts to accommodate woke restrictions on her acidic put-downs.

Philippe brings few stylistic flourishes to the film, but the fascinating conversation, punctuated by delving into her personal archives, should be more than enough to satisfy the serious cinephile. She is kinder about Hitchcock than some of his other female leads. She is realistic about the rigours of the studio system.

For all the eccentricity of its premise, Rose of Nevada has things to say about how easily we can become disconnected from the relatively recent past.

The film is about the cost of success. It is about the emptiness of fame. It is about the companionship of women (in small groups and in vast stadiums). Those themes are expounded with an invention and wit that add bounce to a film draped in rich, oil-painterly gloom. Approach with the most open of minds.

The film exists to give Lopez an opportunity to bring the house down. She does that, but it’s not quite enough.

The picture, shot in Ireland and Spain, will prove a blast for those who like their horror propulsive, transgressive and (in a good way) nauseating. Cronin and his team haven’t quite solved the age-old problem of what to do with the Mummy, but they have confirmed that it remains a dilemma worth tackling. The film deserves the pharaoh’s ransom it will undoubtedly make.

Camus’s prose is heard as we sink into intellectual concerns that obsessed French intellectuals through the 1950s. But it remains a gripping piece that treats its source with great respect.

As ever, all these thumping stereotypes would matter less if there was some chemistry between the two leads. Page has sufficient charisma to skirt through the absurdity unscathed. In contrast, Bailey seems dazzled and bemused – neither crafty enough nor ingenuous enough to make sense of the central deceit.

The screenplay blows it at the close with an absurdly clunky flashback that ties up every loose end with improbable neatness, but this remains a decent class of red-meat actioner for a now underserved audience.

Revelling in bright fabrics and seductive horizons, the director, despite all the conflicts, is here to argue for both the warmth of traditional families and the excitement of contemporary youth culture. No film other than Sirat has, this year, made such compelling use of music.

It would be a mistake to seek too many lessons from the film. Its great achievement is in the creation of a timeless nowhere that is both drawn from history and independent of it. That is the absurdist ideal.

A humane work devised by serious minds.

Resurrection, shot with extravagant beauty by Dong Jingsong, makes more sense on first viewing than the director perhaps allows. Each story is whole in itself. But it has the quality of a gorgeous knot that will never fully be untied.