John Bleasdale

Black Mass is ultimately a decent film with some great parts, but unfortunately it falls short of the canon to which it aspires.

There are moments in the film that just feel wrong, sometimes complex and wrong and sometimes just plain wrong.

This affectionate portrait in failure is more in the tone of Darren Aronofky's Venice winner The Wrestler, carried mainly by a brilliantly swollen performance by Schrieber, full of humour and bluff and yet with an intelligence to learn his lessons, slowly, but learn them.

The Childhood of a Leader is a dark, enigmatic piece of work that hovers between visionary greatness and petty domestic triviality. Corbet's inaugural stint behind the camera marks a stunning debut.

Even at ninety minutes Popstar feels too long. The funniest moments are the songs.

Kore-eda has unquestionably added a new, intriguing angle to his meditation on family life in contemporary Japan.

A brutal, crackling and savage Hollywood satire Maps to the Stars knows exactly where it's going, carefully breaking every rule in the book. After carefully constructing his crystal kingdom, Cronenberg launches his stones with dark, mischievous joy.

Paradoxically, the wide-eyed awe produces a narrow vision, heavy on the photogenic, with modern life corralled onto a SIM card and loaded with a platitudinous inquisition.

Crimes of the Future still has its strengths. Howard Shore’s score lends a tragic, almost stately emotional counterpoint to the steel of the wit.

Seidl is a filmmaker of both talent and merit, but the blatant manipulation of his subjects and the nakedness of his own intentions and dribbling fascination make In the Basement irrelevant as a comment on Austrian society as a whole, and only passingly interesting as an unsurprising picture of what some very odd people do in the privacy of their own homes.

The President has an urgent relevance to all too many countries around the world, including those touched by the Arab Spring; a darkly comic and poignant portrait of an Ozymandian fall from grace and the subsequent damage that ensues.

With Vox Lux, Corbet has delivered a towering film, a unique uncompromising vision that reveals the darkness on the edge of town that lurks in the depths of the spotlight. It’s funny, thrilling, deadly serious and achieves genuine depth.

It's gorgeous, lush and fun, but there's an underlying silliness to the endeavour which, despite occasional archness, constantly threatens to trivialise events.

The delight is in the audacity and surprise of the film.

The acting throughout is supremely naturalistic, and the social milieu of both family life and the theatre are carefully observed and lightly rendered.

The House By the Sea is ultimately a deeply satisfying and occasionally moving experience.

An earnest, forensic examination into the slaying of the Israeli Prime Minister.

There are moments of real wonder and delight and Quentin Blake's original illustrations are occasionally glimpsed in the set ups. This isn't an epic of visual wizardry and there's zero irony or clever wit. Rather, Spielberg's latest is an old-fashioned children's tale told simply and with plenty of heart.

The Danish Girl is as handsome yet disappointingly flat as a painting on a chocolate box. It should certainly be applauded for bringing to light an unsung hero of the transgenderism, but in its unremitting tastefulness and sentimentality - even a beating has beautiful setting and a lovely bit of blood - it ultimately left this reviewer as cold as a dip in a Danish bog.

A neat little thriller which unfortunately never achieves plausibility.

Though the farce is occasionally funny, it's as bloated and windy as its comedy policeman Inspector Machin.

This could be seen as a smug, empty exercise in satirical excoriation – and as a smug, empty exercise in satirical excoriation, it’d be one of the best – but there is a genuine heart to the film, as well as intellect. Cheadle, Gerwig and Driver are all superb, while Sam Nivola and Raffey Cassidy give their smart-mouth, role reversal kids an impossible likeability.

Guiraudie's humour is self-referential and at times hilarious. His tendency to shock might seem adolescent but he's also careful to identify taboos that perhaps shouldn't be taboos at all.

It isn't that it's hard going: it simply can't decide what it wants to be. [Cannes Version]

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, 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.

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

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.