Jonathan Romney

In the hands of Romain Gavras – music video wiz and maker of 2010’s eccentric Our Day Will Come – and with a mischievously cast giving its best, the result is ebullient enough to feel fresh.

Scripted with heightened literary cadences by Ron Hansen and Jim Shepard, the film is well crafted in every respect, and marks an acting career high for Katherine Waterston, as well as a fine showcase for the ever more impressive Vanessa Kirby.

This is a ruthlessly controlled drama that achieves its powerful effect by holding back when its dramatic content is most intense.

Dedicated, an end caption tells us, to the victims of martial law, Season of the Devil may be one of Diaz’s more downbeat, even languid works, but it’s no less angry and intense a cri de coeur, albeit one that’s often challenging to connect with.

The Killer is a masterfully engineered piece. Throughout, Fincher pitches his own methodical control against The Killer’s, but also signals the glitches in his protagonist’s logic and flawed self-knowledge.

Some viewers may find it hard to credit the emotional extremes on display here, which seem more to do with the codes of French psychological drama than with the way people might actually behave in real relationships. Indeed, Binoche has not always convinced in conventional terms when playing women in a psychosexual fluster. Nevertheless, it’s something that she specialises in, and she pushes that register a lot further here – and far more compellingly - than in Denis’s Sunshine.

The Adults is a gift to its actors, allowing them to explore the tensed-up taciturnity of emotional repression but also to go haywire with the voices and the crazily choreographed body language.

This debut feature by French director Clément Cogitore has a highly suggestive philosophical agenda, but at the same time functions as a gripping, subtly eerie drama which keeps you guessing even while it maintains its supernatural (or theological) undertow simmering beneath the surface.

The film is sometimes stylishly executed, but its hyper-aesthetic, even rarefied approach, together with a confusing dream-tinged narrative and a general sense of narcotised sluggishness, will make for limited appeal beyond Asian markets and the fanbase for traditional drawn animation.

Even if The Untamed comes perilously close to sabotaging itself at times, this generic tightrope walk is a ferociously individual, highly intelligent piece and a superb, very affecting cast ensure that the human factor remains dominant, however creepily inhuman things may become at times.

Jarmusch fans won’t find much of the director’s signature touch here, as he self-effacingly pays homage to a beloved act – Stooges fans will find plenty to enthuse about in the film’s ample coverage of a little-documented career.

At once a visually expressionistic hymn to female agency and liberation, a psychological thriller that always stays one step ahead of the viewer and a flamboyant reggaeton dance musical, Ema will strike some as a heady celebration of a movie, while leaving others bemused by stylistics that sometimes overpower narrative and psychological plausibility.

The drama’s underlying theme of social and personal conscience clearly lifts Exit 8 beyond the more mechanical aspects of its gaming origins, although Kawamura doesn’t quite handle it without a certain mawkishness.

While this is essentially a fireside chat atmospherically shot, Hopper/Welles is recommended viewing for anyone remotely interested in either personality, or in the history of American cinema.

While Disco Boy doesn’t entirely weave all its threads to satisfying effect, the film crackles with ideas.

This magisterially simple version of a celebrated stage warhorse is a steely, no-nonsense final chapter to Friedkin’s career, as well as a stately farewell to cast member Lance Reddick, who died in March, and to whom the film is dedicated.

The film never entirely transcends its nature as a polemical pamphlet - and despite strong presence in those scenes where Maryam speaks truth to power, Alzahrani doesn’t quite have the charisma to make her substantially more than a representative figure.

Enzo makes a low-key but resonant coda to Cantet’s work, while thematically also being highly consistent with Campillo’s directorial output.

For a story which ponders on late-life exhaustion and loss of curiosity and pleasure, The Room Next Door strikes a defiant blow against ennui, staking out new territory for the director.

Mixing often horrifying war footage with testimonies from a wide range of Ukrainians of varying ages, Freedom on Fire is an urgent, somewhat hectic, at times cluttered film – but that’s partly explained by the fact that Afineevsky has been able to assemble it so rapidly, only six months after the invasion began.

Overall, though, the stylistic consistency and sustained chill of the black comedy make for a satiric focus far keener than, say, the farcical overkill of Triangle Of Sadness.

Effectively a chamber piece spiked with musings on the difficulty of art, the piece is by nature a little stagey as well as talky.

The Nice Guys harks back to the 70s golden age of revisionist detective thrillers, but the result feels too knowingly déja vu, rather than bringing a truly fresh angle.

The newness is subtle and gently perplexing, but very satisfying indeed.

[Quivoron] emerges as a formidably kinetic director, who could easily have a career making pedal-to-the-metal action movies - although her way with character and deep-dive exploration of working-class subculture suggest that she is way too individual to take a straight generic path.

The result is a cheerfully lurid mess that goes goofily off the rails after a slow build, and will offer few surprises for adepts of Lovecraft or of screen schlock.

What gives the film its emotional continuity is a commandingly downbeat performance from Servillo.

Exuberant as it is, The Show treats its basic premise earnestly enough not to come across as merely spoofy. And there’s some considerable wit in the script.