Graham Fuller

For over an hour, Permission unfolds as a mildly amusing romcom about two modern Brooklyn couples facing commitment crises. Toward the end, the main plot, about a straight pair experimenting with polyamory, takes a dramatic turn.

It would be going too far to say Wonder Wheel is an instant Woody Allen classic, but it’s a reminder that he’s still a force to be reckoned with and a great director of actresses especially.

All credit to Dan Stevens for rendering so vividly a selfish, abrasive character.

Save the highly predictable decider, the on-court battles are satisfyingly fast and fierce, but the tension they generate is undercut by the labored Oedipal melodrama that contains them.

Lost City is the acme of a 21st century prestige picture. Sadly, however, it is one that is also deeply flawed. Gray’s most ambitious movie yet is marred by a story arc that fails to rise or reach a climax, unnatural-sounding expository dialogue, and an unforgivable lack of thrills.

Rebecca Zlotowski’s third feature packs in so many ideas and themes, and boasts so many ravishing and enigmatic images, that it seems choked with riches.

The abutting of Conor’s conscious and unconscious states justifies the pullulating images, but the film’s overwrought tone can grate.

Mendelsohn makes Ray plausibly remorseful, yet the suspicion remains that he’s as creepily self-serving as Humbert Humbert in Nabokov’s Lolita. Mara, meanwhile, is like a seared, broken Alice groping for a way out of a psychic labyrinth - hers is a fearsome performance.

Perversely pleasurable, it works on its own self-conscious terms, though not all audiences will appreciate its English brand of sad-sack humour.

Justin Kelly’s King Cobra bears the distinction of being the first optimistic black comedy set in the world of gay porn production that’s also extremely classy.

Robert Greene’s latest fusion of reality and meta-fiction is fiercely intelligent, but inescapably tars itself with the ghoulishness it critiques.

Van Groeningen conveys kinetically the combined power of a ferocious beat, copious drugs, and sexual energy to endow revellers with transient communal utopianism.

A raucous and outrageously (if harmlessly) crude slapstick comedy.

First-time feature director Don Cheadle has made an invigoratingly bold attempt to structure his film about Miles Davis as an extended visual and narrative equivalent of modal jazz.

It’s no discredit to Steve Jobs, Danny Boyle’s propulsive and iconoclastic biopic of the digital-revolution visionary who democratised personal computing, that it’s a dispiriting study of capitalistic self-aggrandisement – one that leaves a sense of unease despite its ironically upbeat ending.

Unusually for a Spielberg movie, Bridge of Spies is tonally uncertain.

Despite its rich visual evocation of the eponymous port city as a simmering cauldron of vice, corruption, and barbarity, director Mikael Håfström’s film is undone by its tortuous plot, wooden characterisation, absence of narrative tension, and emotional nullity. It simply lacks conviction.