John Bleasdale

This is Payne's most political film since Election and refreshingly eschews the gentle social realism of Sideways and Nebraska for something much more subversive. The pointillist normalcy of those films is used well as a context in which to embed the craziness of his Kaufmanesque high concept.

It’s open to debate whether this claustrophobic little parable means something. It’s devilishly clever but there’s a suspicion that this is beautiful calligraphy without words. And yet with the added circumstance of self-isolation, quarantine and quiet four-walled despair, Vivarium will undoubtedly resonate.

Hill does his best but Jim is woefully underwritten, a shuffling loser who various other characters try to bolster with the dignity of a back story that doesn’t seem to fit his actual behaviour.

Ultimately, Everest is not concerned with the why, but with the how and it's grimly efficient at building up the drama, helped on by Clarke's wonderful character study, even if the film as a whole never quite reaches the dizzying heights of its subject.

Ultimately, Alverson’s The Mountain is arthouse cinema at its frostiest.

The Capote Tapes show a talent that seemed to go to waste while at the same time teasing us with the possibility that there is more yet to come.

Eisenberg avoids, for the most part, doing a Woody Allen impersonation, but his bumbling guilelessness is wearing and Stewart seems out of place, unable to ever quite get over being Kristen Stewart in a Woody Allen movie. In fact, both young leads seem nervous to have been invited and often appear simply pleased to be there.

When Good Kill takes aim at US foreign policy and the advances in military technology, it creates moments of chilling and powerful drama, but this is dissipated and compromised by its mirror-punching domestic drama and its bizarre need to bring about something like a happy ending.

Homecoming gives an empathetic portrait of a family in a phase of change. Girls are becoming women; a mother is beginning to return to life. It has the promise of a prelude.

Although the thriller like approach makes the unveiling of the story intermittently interesting, Human Capital stumbles on its blandly predictable, two dimensional characters and the implausible melodrama of its latter stages.

The characters of Jimmy's Hall aren't really characters as much as archetypes: the saintly mother, the sweetheart, the hero, the villain. This is the kind of film where people don't argue - they debate - speaking in lines from manifestos and creating an incongruity.

Ultimately, Narvel is the fascist as liberal fantasy. Someone with access to skilled violence, who can unleash it at whim. It’s such a pity that a screenwriter who used to excel at delineating the intricacies of male insecurity and poison now comes out with such a one-dimensional character.

Östlund has created a full-throated, roaring comedy of hate against the upper-classes. It is cynical, nihilistic and has no issue about punching down.

The script by Cronin and Stephen Shields blends the familiar with the eerie well and never allows silliness to take over. The performances all round are superb and Seána Kerslake creates a credible heroine – a woman on the edge but who is by no means fragile.

An expertly handled and brilliantly performed feel-good comedy with an original twist.

There’s nary a memorable shot in the whole film. As for Ehrenreich’s performance, it’s honestly difficult to tell how good he is. Remarkably for a film called Solo, with so many characters each one nibbling at the scenes, he hardly has room to shine.

The nighttime tungsten orange of the street lighting and the urine-coloured neon of the interiors makes for a grueling visual experience which is why the daylight of the latter-half offers precious relief.

It soon becomes difficult to dismiss the suspicion that Goldthwait had set out to make a comic horror but forgot to insert any laughs.

Yomeddine is an accomplished appeal for empathy and an entertaining journey of discovery.

The King feels disconnected and unurgent. Despite some wonderful moments, it perhaps lacks the requisite majesty.

Amirpour is a talented director with a wonderful eye but her style lacks substance and her obvious influences - the Mad Max franchise and the wonderful LQ Jones film A Boy and his Dog - are so superior as to almost completely nullify her derivative contribution to the genre.

The performances are fine across the board and Nørgaard keeps things moving efficiently, but this is stylish but televisual fare, ram-packed with familiar hardboiled and shopworn tropes.

Ultimately, Memphis is a bold and bewildering conjuring act, that might mean nothing at all, but the sleight of hand is worth the price of admission.

Kröger manages well with moments of pure cinema in between, and a particularly out-there moment of noise and mayhem which threatens to crush the film and the audience in an audiovisual avalanche. There’s an immersive strangeness that only David Lynch has snuck into mainstream cinema.

Last Breath makes for a very decent entry into the survival genre of films like Touching the Void with the added appeal of the submarine movie and all the claustrophobia and intensity that comes with that.

When You Finish Saving the World is fine. It’s well made, witty, and Wolfhard and Moore are effortlessly convincing in their roles; Wolfhard shucking off his Stranger Things image in the process. The problem – if there is one – is in the smooth snark of the title. There are sharp edges here that never bite.

Adapted by Cianfrance himself, The Light Between Oceans feels overly tied to its previous form.

The trademark brutal violence remains effective, and Zahler maintains a pervasive feeling of dread throughout his films, but Dragged Across Concrete shows the limits of taking the game long.

Sweet Red Bean Paste is a modest film which seeks profundity in the detail of life.

Franco has a hardlined style and a kind of story that play like an apprentice Haneke. However, as each film arrives, the power diminishes, because the stories are now easily predictable.

Alongside The Wrestler, The Whale is Aronofsky at his most compassionate. It’s a gargantuan invitation to empathy and understanding.

In its determined avoidance of sensationalism, it finds itself stranded in an empty space so understated, it is genuinely difficult to understand what, if anything, it is saying.

The film itself is utterly uncontroversial, solid, occasionally stolid, and perfectly fine.

There's a wry comic sensibility that sees Hughes himself as an absurdity who seems half aware of his own ridiculousness.

Character and psychology aren't really the point here. Bozon's world is one of adult grotesquerie splatting against the wall of youthful hostility.

Compared to the sophisticated and nuanced horrors of Black Mirror, Little Joe feels like a fairly straightforward riff on a very familiar idea.

Mitchell’s third film feels like a script that was locked in a drawer after numerous rejections but now can be brought out and pushed through with clout earned from the success of It Follows.

Efira is a dominant and compelling presence and Sibyl is frequently funny. Ultimately, it never quite squares the circle of the comedy and the pain, but Triet is a sophisticated filmmaker and this – her third feature – is further proof of great talent.

The result is a beautifully entertaining film. It is witty and the scenes between Gerwig and Pacino fizz alternately with flirtation, humour and occasionally rage.

Mektoub My Love is an often beguiling work, drenched in beauty and humour and an inclusive warmth.

Phoenix has created a masterful performance for a film which itself feels like a masterpiece: a cracked masterpiece.

A neat little thriller which unfortunately never achieves plausibility.

It is difficult to work out what to dislike most about Victoria and Abdul: the literal foot-licking or the cliché-ridden plot, but the greatest shame is the waste of a genuinely fascinating piece of history and a world-class Judi Dench performance.

The Wait consistently defies common sense in order to sustain the thin narrative.

A fluid, dreamlike tone poem of mothers and fathers, death and continuance.

Hopefully, Soderbergh’s film will raise more awareness as well as a chuckle.

Ultimately, Benson's Eleanor Rigby disappears into the gap between its rom-com and drama stools.

This is a good solid three star movie. Which is perhaps where Snyder should be anyway, away from the extremes of deification and vilification. When he’s not trying to be great, he can actually be quite good.

This is a powerful and beautifully shot film of love and survival.

That the drama should hinge on a series of bizarre novelistic coincidences and the irrational dopiness of the characters with whom we're supposed to empathise drains the film of realism and sends us into Mills & Boon territory.

An entertaining and suitably gruesome gangster thriller which nevertheless feels like a missed opportunity.

The Seasons in Quincy is most compelling when we and it listens to Berger or captures him listening to someone else.

Jupiter's Moon is a highly ambitious and thoroughly entertaining trip and if the politics is more backdrop than subtext, what remains is compelling and occasionally beautiful enough for you to enjoy the flight.

A well-behaved and unashamedly populist film, the kind that could be shown in schools and community centres, Akin's The Cut remains an undeniably important film regardless. What it does extremely well is to movingly illustrate a terrible moment in history which has been sadly neglected in the West and actively suppressed in other parts of the world.

Ultimately, Sorrentino’s sympathies lie with Berlusconi because – in their vacuity and their need to impress – they have something in common.

With a fantastic stunt team, a gamely macho star and some wonderful editing, Rollerball is so convincing, urban legend had it there were fatalities during the shoot.

The style, one senses, is overcompensating for a narrative slackness that has nowhere particular to go other than anti-climax. That's not to say that Manglehorn isn't a good film - it is. It's just that Pacino's seasoned performance deserved a great film.

Visually arresting and well-acted, Dogs shows promise but one would have hoped for some new tricks.

Despite its manifold flaws, Jackie & Ryan is still oddly watchable.

It’s just Huppert on autopilot and like that dry white wine, you can have too much of it.

There are the occasional moments when Bushwick lets on that it knows that this is all truly awful.

Garrel and Miller manage to create a credible chemistry.

Aïnouz has eschewed the post-modern fun of Yorgos Lanthimos’ The Favourite for a much grimmer, darker vibe. This is the kind of film where torches most definitely gutter and men call out directives “on the orders of the king!” But for all the weighty gravitas of Simon Russell Beale as a conniving bishop and Eddie Marsan as a conniving noble bring to bear, the story never takes the history seriously enough either.

Intermittently entertaining and laudably short, for all its best intentions Cymbeline is cursed by doing again what others have done better.

It might be that there’s a meatier version of the film – a Carlos-style miniseries perhaps – but as it stands, shifting between a lighthearted caper and more consequential political tragedy, Wasp Network is an entertaining fumble.

Superficiality soaks the entire film.

Saturday Fiction certainly demands patience, shrouded at first in a smog of exposition.

This is a timely and necessary reminder of Trump's practices, but like Michael Moore's Michael Moore in Trumpland, this seems like another missed opportunity, a wry exasperated sigh, when we desperately need some full on rage.

With a filmmaker as intelligent and controlled as Nemes, Sunset has the assurance that everything has a place and the confusion is intended. But even this has a paradoxical effect.

Jarmusch has opted for a stumbling dead so indulgently pleased with itself that it resembles little more than a precocious home movie filled with familiar faced pals all of whom find the joke funnier than any audience will.

The alienness of humanity, when seen from another perspective, is evident throughout the film.

Both leads produce solid performances despite a sloppiness in both the direction and the writing.

Of the many problems the film has, it’s the different plots that never quite bounce off each other.

There's a lot that's wonderful about Andrei Konchalovsky's Holocaust drama Paradise and yet there's something fundamentally wrong with the film.

The thoughtfulness of Plummer's performance is not matched by a script that forgets human logic in favour of narrative tricksiness that ultimately undermines the initially intriguing premise.

Fans of Kawase will likely enjoy this delicate tale of people finding their way in the dark.

The trajectory of success and excess followed by last act redemption is familiar to the point of parody, and the ploys with time come over as gimmicky attempt to inject an element of surprise into the otherwise predictable narrative.

Your appreciation or otherwise of the film is going to be greatly influenced by whether or not you’ve seen the original, and as such Final Cut doesn’t really elbow its way to the front. However, if you can stand the slight whiff of decomposition then this deconstruction is fun and clever.

The fact of the matter is that Refn has now become so predictably shocking that the truly shocking thing for him to do would be to make a film without attempting to shock.

Though an entertaining-enough stab at a new kind of orgiastic extravaganza, Noé's Love is so mired in its own hang-ups and conservative gender views that it never gets past the first stroke.

The dénouement when it comes doubles down on the madness and 11 Minutes is never boring, but neither is it quite as revolutionary as it thinks it is.

All of Gilliam's little details are fun and there are some laugh-out-loud lines, but the actual story itself is never compelling and simply doesn't zip as it should.

Mitchell's understanding of punk seems to be the brandishing of two or three cliches, shouting a lot and name-checking bands.

The Offence is almost the definition of murk, unrelenting and unforgiving.

Côté employs a methodical reticence that often leaves the viewer guessing as to the significance of the images we are seeing.

There are some dumb thrills to be had but there is also the sense here of an ambition not quite realised.

The material is weak, overly familiar and cliché-ridden. Dolan throws the cinematic sink at it but his latest feels like a shorter, not particularly watchable sequel to August, Osage County.

It is as glitzy and gaudy as the festival itself, with its vacuous politics drowned out by the thunderous sound of it slapping its own back.

Although there is certainly tension at moments and Driver once more proves himself an actor of great promise, Hungry Hearts falls between two baby chairs - neither satisfying as a thriller nor convincing as a drama.

Wilde has already proven herself as a director with her brilliant debut. Even the hackneyed sci-fi concept behind Katie Silberman’s screenplay wouldn’t have been too much of a problem if it wasn’t for the performances.

The Son, though perhaps not as original and accomplished as The Father, is nevertheless an affecting, empathetic and intelligent drama.

The Leisure Seeker is dry-eyed even at its most moving and a celebration of love even as it reaches its end.

Dark, lurid, sadistic and powerful, it is at the least a fascinating and bold debut, and promises better to come.

It may be stuck in the past, with its hoary clichés about the call girl with the heart of gold and the incurable romantic, but the whole thing fizzes with such joie de vivre that the anachronisms only add to its overwhelming charm.

Few of Planetarium's many strands are neatly tied together. There's an ambition to almost every shot as Zlotowski creates a rarified version of nighttime Paris.

Doremus doesn't appear to take the world he has created at all seriously. The rules shift and bend, are observed - or aren't - according to the exigency of the narrative, which ultimately renders the whole exercise fundamentally unconvincing and fatally irksome.

This is the kind of oddball midnight movie that could easily gain a cult following and there are delights to be had in the midst.

After all is said and done, ‘The House that Lars Built’ is an impressive construction for an obnoxious purpose. In fact, the best criticism comes from Talking Heads and their song Psycho Killer: “You’re talking a lot but you’re not really saying anything.”