Jonathan Romney

The film’s energy and passion (and no doubt, eye for detail) can’t be faulted, but a tighter film could have more pointedly made the connection between the subjects’ brief lifespans and the fate of a young culture of refusal that arguably died when the system it questioned was replaced by a differently oppressive social order.

While Higashi proves adept at embodying both extremes, Karata proves a rather insipid centre to the film, not just because of the actress’s bland pertness but because of the passivity of the character.

There’s no denying the film’s urgency, and audiences will certainly leave with plenty to chew over, but Peck doesn’t aid the thinking process by overloading us, where a more focused reading of Orwell’s key ideas could have yielded a much more cogent argument.

It’s basically espionage adventure, but with a science fiction backbone: Nolan ups the ante on “Mission: Impossible” by making the impossibility not just physical but quantum physical. And he goes about it expertly, bullishly and with giddily perverse intent to bewilder.

You may emerge from Climax, as from a full-on club night, feeling shattered and asking yourself what was the point of it all. But there’s no denying the mastery of Noé and his team, and the extravagant talent of his cast.

An intimate but ambitiously mounted ensemble piece, The Old Oak ranks among Loach’s foremost state-of-the-nation dramas.

Gerbase’s insightful, quietly unsettling picture may, right now, be too close to the bone to attract viewers desperate for hard times distraction; but it deserves exposure, and should attract niche sales both on the strength of newsworthiness and on its considerable cinematic achievement.

With a cast impressively headed by James Norton, and cinematography that captures the bleakness of winter and deprivation to grimly palatable effect, Holland’s drama comes across in part as a meticulously mounted, sometimes solemn history lesson.

This slow-burning, pensively drifting evocation of the times of Sergei Dovlatov is not a conventional portrait, still less a biopic, but an imaginatively realistic recreation of a bygone era of Russian culture.

Younger fans of the modern actioner may find Manhunt a little old-school, especially in its unabashed romantic heart and flag-waving for the square-jawed good guys. But it’s breezy, handsomely mounted fun that shows that Woo has lost neither his mojo nor his sense of poetry.

Garver’s film is above all a celebration of the pleasure of intellectual and emotional response to art (“To be paid for thinking is a marvellous way to live,” Kael says), and a picture of a style of thinking that might be seen as distinctively but non-stereotypically female.

Here, however, his bravura conducting of relatively conventional melodrama material doesn’t affect us as much as his best earlier works. In any case, it’s the actual music that often does the heavy lifting here – with selections from Chopin, Bartok and Bruch, not to mention Grégoire Hetzel’s score, spiralling saxophone capturing the vertiginous register of the whole affair.

The film imaginatively uses a presumably tight budget to claustrophobic advantage.

There’s plenty to gawk at, and to argue over, in this episode - yet No Time To Die is oddly lacking in pleasure or real wit.

The film’s freewheeling dynamism and stylistic elasticity allow Fabian to shake off the stuffier tropes of historical drama.

Vox Lux is intellectually charged spectacle, with one foot in the Euro-art tradition and the other ankle-deep in the pop zeitgeist.

An all-star cast and some showstoppingly horrible hair can’t save Ridley Scott’s medieval epic.

The ultimate problem with this flamboyant, yet oddly oppressive-feeling film is Carax’s bleakly Romantic world view – even working with exuberant wits like the Maels, he’s unavoidably committed to the dark abyss himself.

As Maria, Burow shines in a phenomenally demanding role that challenges us to tune in empathetically to a character whose actions and motives are rarely less than problematic, but are always limned with a fine brush.

An ostensibly old-fashioned family drama that proves, despite an awkward final act, to be one of his most satisfying recent films, and indeed the darkest.

Low-key in mood, Daniel Burman’s film adeptly balances character-driven drama, picaresque street humour and quasi-documentary content, depicting a milieu that will feel intriguingly unfamiliar even to viewers who think that cinema has shown them every possible angle of Jewish life.

Happy New Year… is vigorous and engaging as dark character comedy, but as drama it never quite builds or coheres convincingly.

Some intricately choreographed long takes - Eric Gautier’s photography is superb throughout - enhance a project which is both vivid in its evocation of the recent past, and razor-sharp in the light it sheds on the way that religious and nationalistic fanaticism continue to exert a dangerous sway.

It’s McKirnan’s unflappable performance and energetic humour that hold it all together.

Ziba is a genuine intellectual heroine, and Hekmat conveys a sense of how her introversion and seriousness might set her apart in a hedonistic high-school culture.

This knowingly excessive brew of cartoonish knockabout and macabre comedy horror just isn’t that funny.

A compelling drama that transcends its generic roots.

If Starve Acre seems to walk on well-trodden ground, Kokotajlo is nevertheless adept at inhabiting and revitalising the material. Familiar themes and moods haunt the film with their own uncanny insistence.