Geoffrey Macnab

This warped satire is ultimately neither as shocking nor as funny as you initially hope it’s going to be.

The brilliance of Adams’ performance lies in its subtlety and restraint, as well as its emotional rawness. Much of the dramatic tension here comes from her struggle to keep things together: to make appointments on time and to put her family’s interests ahead of her own for once.

A House of Dynamite (which premiered in competition at the Venice Film Festival) stands as a grim and timely warning about the renewed dangers of nuclear proliferation. Another way of looking at it, though, is as the most entertaining Hollywood movie on the subject of potential mass destruction since Stanley Kubrick’s Dr Strangelove.

In what could easily have been a banana skin of a role, Law is surprisingly sure-footed. The British star has clearly studied his subject closely. He captures the Russian president with metronomic precision – his mannerisms, his cunning, his smirks and scowls.

The real way Safdie puts a chokehold on his audience is by examining Mark and Dawn’s physical and emotional weaknesses in such forensic detail. The Smashing Machine may not provide the pay-offs that audiences expect from more conventional sports movies, but this is the most raw and vulnerable that Johnson has ever been on screen. Once you’ve seen him this exposed, you won’t watch his typical action movie stunts in quite the same way ever again.

For all Del Toro’s formal mastery, this Frankenstein is ultimately short of the voltage needed really to bring it to life.

A very cleverly crafted screenplay, co-written by Baumbach and British actor-writer Emily Mortimer, balances the in-jokes with perceptive observations about status anxiety, the vapidity of celebrity culture, and the fragility of family ties.

This is slippery, subversive storytelling that’s very hard to get any firm grasp on – but that is one of its main pleasures.

Alpha has some tremendous moments, but the movie is undermined by its own dense and impenetrable storytelling style. It would surely have worked far better as an immersive installation piece than as a two hour feature.

If everything seems familiar from countless other crime dramas, at least the film is very slickly and creatively directed by Lee.

This, then, is everything you expect from a Wes Anderson film. If you like his work, you’ll love it. If you don’t, you’ll probably break out in hives again.

The Texan auteur’s new film – his 22nd, and the first of two due for release in this year alone – boasts a fine, quirky and courageous performance from Ethan Hawke, but it’s a stagey affair which at times becomes very stilted.

Phoenix’s performance remains powerful and stirring, too. The genius of it is that we can’t help but care for Arthur despite his neediness and derangement. Even during the film’s most apocalyptic and violent moments, we’re always aware that, underneath Joker’s gaudy warpaint, lurks little, feeble Arthur. Against the odds, this ingenious and deeply unsettling film even turns into a bit of a weepie by the final reel.

You could claw together some brilliant short films from the best sequences here, but this 36-years-in-the-making follow-up should make us all question Tim Burton’s modern storytelling sense.

Ultimately, this isn’t the car crash it could have been. It is, though, deeply flawed and very eccentric.

Director George Miller combines speed, grace and explosive violence, emulating Sam Peckinpah westerns and even, at times, the work of Charles Dickens – Furiosa is a bit like a young Artful Dodger, using her wits and courage to stay alive.

At times, it plays more like a sitcom than a story about the legacy of the death camps. Thankfully, it still provides probing insight into everything from casual antisemitism to the plague of historical forgetfulness.

The filmmaker always shows the same painstaking attention to detail as his homicidal hero does to the logistics of murdering his adversaries. Fassbender is well cast and gives a typically committed performance – one leavened by moments of very deadpan humour. However. The Killer also often drifts into the realm of self-conscious pastiche.

In her own coolly analytical way, Coppola makes some trenchant points about the way Priscilla is controlled by the men in her life. She is living in a gilded cage. The wealth and luxury she experiences don’t compensate for her complete loss of freedom.

Cooper shows us his subject’s mix of magnetism, volatility and childlike egotism but he remains a strangely elusive figure. It’s left to Mulligan’s Felicia to crack the film’s sometimes too-shiny facade and to give its story some bruising emotional depth.

Stone gives surely the boldest performance of her career so far, in a role that puts upon her heavy physical and psychological demands.

In its own offbeat way, Asteroid City is an Anderson patchwork of Cold War paranoia and American family values in all their often hypocritical glory. It is every bit as arch as his best work, while still managing to tug hard on the heartstrings.

It’s a closely focused character study, galvanised by the tremendous performances from Portman and Moore, which delves into areas more conventional dramas don’t go near.

The movie consists of a series of chases and fights linked by ever more improbable plot twists. The action is often very inventively staged. James Mangold, who has taken over directing duties from Steven Spielberg, sets a breakneck tempo.

Against the odds, Jeanne du Barry has turned out to be a subtle and well-crafted costume drama with plenty of satirical bite.

Penn and Kaufman’s film about him is sprawling and uneven but also heartfelt and inspiring. It’s informative but has an immediacy which you rarely find in conventional news reports. The documentary leaves you with admiration not only for its subject, the comedian turned wartime leader, but for the doughty Hollywood star who put himself in the eye of the storm too.

In its morbid and provocative way, the film is often funny but it’s thought-provoking and very creepy too.

The pathos is laid on very thick. At times, you wonder why a filmmaker as sophisticated as Aronofsky is resorting to such manipulative tactics. Beneath all its blubber, though, this turns out to be a film with a very big heart.