Donald Clarke

Bloodlines, after that first-class opening section, isn’t quite so clever in its constructions as were the earlier episodes. There is more reliance on out-of-nowhere splatter than on amusingly inevitable disaster.

Too murky. Too little access to the character’s face. It takes a long, long time for the film to redeem itself with the biplane stunt you’ve seen on the poster.

Veiel structures his film with grace and guile.

The Surfer, for all its unpleasantness, offers encouraging evidence that there is still room for existential awkwardness in contemporary cinema. No better, odder man than Nicolas Cage to act that out as the catechism of surfism gains another worthy chapter.

Thunderbolts* works best as a jokey romp at home to tolerable quips amid mounting chaos.

We have a new cinematic poet in Kulumbegashvili, and she doesn’t care if the stanzas rhyme. Difficult. Abrasive. Worth persevering with.

Murray and Watts make something genuinely touching of Iris’s quest to discover what prompted the writer to end it all.

Even the greatest general will lose some control when marching an entire division over hostile highlands. But, far from feeling indulgent, the picture is positively economical in the way it addresses so many ideas – sociological, cultural, historical – while forwarding its rattling, viscera-soaked yarn.

Many will retain understandable uneasiness about the project, but few could deny the technical brilliance and dedication to an austere brief. An essential watch. Though maybe just the once.

There is always room for a post-Beatles doc if it’s this good and this original.

If any recent release has the potential to become a cult classic it is this melodic warning from beneath the earth.

Flow needs to make no specific points about human misuse of the planet. Its generalised sense of environmental dread reminds of something we all know and constantly pretend to forget.

The film does not quite pull off its enigmatic ending, but this remains a startlingly eerie debut that finds new angles to a familiar genre.

So joyous and inventive is each scene that it proves easy to disregard the ambling lack of plot.

No doubt the unrelenting archness will annoy many. But, honed to an economic 93 minutes, Black Bag beats all the current worthless streaming thrillers for wit, pace, style and commitment to the bit.

Mickey 17, adapted from a novel by Edward Ashton, feels like a rickety compromise bolted together from incompatible parts.

An astonishing, unsettling fable of hidden miseries.

This is pure pulp, but it’s good, honest pulp that keeps in time with the backbeat throughout. Good support from Bridgerton’s Charithra Chandran. Not for the squeamish, though.

The dialogue in one pathetically desperate audition sequence is withering in its authenticity. But credit must go to Anderson for turning this staple of drama – like Olivier in The Entertainer, a hopeless victim of changing fashion – into a living, breathing human being.

Good old-fashioned disgusting fun. I had a blast.

Energy does not buzz around this film, but it swells with decency, humanity and quiet bravery.

This is an uncomfortable film, but one that sweeps you along in its momentum.

Mad About the Boy may take place in the safest of all worlds, but it is more connected to the greater sadnesses of life than we had any right to expect. Oh, and it’s still properly funny. Which matters a bit.

More than a few critics have suggested the film ends up losing the run of itself, but few would deny that it remains indecently entertaining up to the last frame. Odd, special, important.

When film-makers aren’t asking people to read their films as westerns they are asking for them to be read as Greek tragedies. For all the commitment of the actors and brooding ambience of the film-making, Bring Them Down can’t quite sustain that comparison.

Blue Road is most memorable for its crisply edited evocation of unlikely triumph.

A knotty, rough-hewn marvel.

If The Brutalist were not so wedded to audiovisual effect, it might play like a lost Great American Novel.