Jonathan Romney

By Allen’s lamentable recent standards, this fitfully entertaining film could be called adventurous, while the reliably cranky Shawn and a stately, vampish Gershon are clearly having a good time and letting us in on it.

Equals just about passes muster as a solid vignette of love against the odds, but when it comes to futurism, its vision is dustily archaic.

Polanski and the supremely genre-savvy Assayas know exactly what they’re doing, and whenever you think you’ve seen it all before, you realise they’re actually doing something else entirely – the film is an expertly navigated maze of misdirection.

In Sam Taylor-Johnson’s Back To Black, Winehouse’s brief, brilliant life is essentially pared down to a tale of poisoned romance.

The awkwardly executed English-language Loving Pablo is a brash but ultimately anonymous, sub-Scorsesean number from Spain’s Fernando Leon de Aranoa.

Forty years after John Carpenter made the defining slasher movie, director David Gordon Green has made a creditable stab, as it were, at reanimating the title.

While we learn little of interest about Sheeran himself, the film is arguably a thoroughgoing demystification of the industrial process behind the modern pop song.

There’s a thin, and very jagged, line between the radical mosaic approach to editing and narrative of a film like Shane Carruth’s Upstream Color and the impressionistic jigsaw vagueness of Woodshock, which simply seems reluctant to commit itself to mere coherence, as if that simply were too unchic.

Jacquot at his best is a master at teasing us with tantalising narrative mazes and false threads, but here we soon find ourselves losing interest in the riddle of where things are headed: the film takes what feels like a very circuitous route to a dead end.

Not so much bleeding edge as screeching edge, Gia Coppola’s Mainstream is a frenetic piece of pop-art social satire that strives to be super-current but feels oddly traditional beneath its eye-searing, pixel-popping surface.

Modi’s ramshackle romanticism never remotely convinces, and – given that it’s about artists who suffered for their radical modernism – it feels terribly dated, stylistically and in content.

Once we realise what’s at stake, and where it’s all likely to go, this grim study of a damaged duo, and of the screwed-up society they live in, offers diminishing returns.

There's a lot wrong with The Brave, with a pace that may be intended to evoke desert languor, but is often plain leaden. Yet The Brave is oddly haunting, if only for its eccentricity. [13 May 1997, p.2]

An unapologetic old-school exploiter going full on for thrills and suspense, it’s undeniably polished and energetic, and features a couple of strong performances from young stars Isabel May and Eli Brown – but it feels fundamentally tasteless, indeed just plain wrong.

Amalric, these days persuasively settling into scuffed middle-aged roles, is effective as ever, but still maintains an anxious look; while Roy’s sometimes ethereal presence strikes a forceful but delicate note as a woman who is at once facing a mystery and who is at the same time a mystery herself.

A work that is uneven in form but arresting in content and especially vital as a commentary on contemporary African society, human rights and disability issues.

By the time we reach a genuinely unnerving climax, Alper has pulled off something special – a film that works at once as a highly-charged suspenser, a savvy piece of tightly-enclosed world-building and a sharp critique of machismo, populism and their very tangible dangers.

At Averroès & Rosa Parks, which premiered in Berlinale Special, is a tougher watch than its predecessor, but an extremely accomplished and compelling work.

Mexico 86 offers Béjo a substantial, compelling lead; it shows the Argentinian-born star absolutely at ease in a Spanish-language role, and using her characteristically low-key performance style to potent effect.