Jonathan Romney

The sheer energy of the performers, especially an exuberantly funny Mamiya, and the slapstick goofiness of the whole make this an eccentric, hugely enjoyable film - and often, partly because of its relative demureness, a fairly arousing one, with female pleasure and male discomfiture foremost on the menu.

You just wish that director Park had managed to execute the film as a whole with the crisp efficacy of some of his individual sequences.

The film’s lavish production values and a comic register more impish than truly acerbic makes this a surprisingly cosy piece of luxury heritage cinema.

The narrative intricacy is daunting but, for viewers willing to keep track, the pleasure lies in the way that Kitano tracks the moves as they advance to an inexorably logical climax.

Above all, there is the generous, often mischievous performance by Cámara, with a promisingly vivid juvenile lead from Nicolas Reyes as young Quinín, and a nice ensemble buzz from other family members, including Patricia Tamayo as mother Cecilia; otherwise it all comes across as a fondly soft-focus blur.

In the film’s favour, it is not afraid of telling bitter truths about violence, hatred and death.

This small, engaging film doesn’t offer much in the way of introduction to Birkin for non-initiates - there’s nothing about her acting career, for example. But for the devoted audience of a star who can – for once – genuinely be called an icon, the film offers a tender and quite illuminating portrait of a mother-daughter relationship seen both within, and far away from, the public sphere of celebrity.

A film of considerable visual poetry and, at times, grandeur, Our Time is unmistakably the work of the ambitious, visionary director behind Battle In Heaven and Stellet Licht, but as a Bergmanesque drama of emotional anguish, the solemn, militantly downbeat Our Time often makes oppressive viewing and at times struggles to justify its nearly three-hour length.

In all fairness, the film is hard to enjoy, not least because its handful of intriguing ideas are so self-indulgently gussied up with ostentatious visual execution.

Although the narrative ultimately goes off the rails, Amamra’s magnetically pugnacious lead gives Animale a consistent pull, while director Benestan’s work with cinematographer Ruben Impens – who also shot Titane – is bustling and kinetic, and intimate when it needs to be.

A screenplay dense with incident and ideological discussion is carried efficiently by fast-moving, sleek direction and sumptuous mise en scene that catches the tone of a changing society and its sudden explosion of capitalist excess. Yet it never quite comes to life as a character sketch.

While we understand Sam’s back story and present situation, we too rarely get a sense of who he is when not struggling against misunderstanding and harsh weather.

Altogether solemn in tone, the film is undeniably handsome, with DoP Benoît Delhomme steeping the Japanese landscape in melancholy atmospherics, but Minimata tends to over-aestheticise its material, not least in the too-elegant recreations of Smith’s black and white imagery.

The episodic, ruminative and very talky mood suggests something between Chekhov and Eric Rohmer – or at moments, Woody Allen without the humour. That’s not to say that the film is entirely dry, but there’s an earnestness about it and occasionally a leadenness in the acting.

It’s a dazzlingly executed, hugely enjoyable act of stylistic homage, but also the poignant story of a dysfunctional marriage and an insightful recreation of a critical and contradiction-ridden period of modern French history.

An oddball hybrid that’s part documentary, part stylistic mish-mash, but wholly celebratory of Mansfield’s often derided ‘blonde bombshell’ image.

The narrative would be sufficiently daunting to follow if the film didn’t make such heavy play on the thin line between fiction and reality; the frequent blurring between the two Saturday Fictions – Lou Ye’s and Tan Na’s – is muddily executed to begin with, without the play being so unconvincing as a piece of stage drama.

It is hard to decide whether Dumont is treating his genre borrowings with belittling contempt, or getting a kick out of the possibilities offered; it seems safe to assume both. And while the overall weirdness has charm and shock effect, once you’ve got over the surprise of Dumont being this flippantly outre the pleasure wears thin.

While some may find Bang Gang a calculatedly chic opening salvo for a feature career, it carries a genuine emotional charge, and overall Husson shows she means business.

One thing that can be said about brazen crime comedy Dog Eat Dog is that it’s a full-blooded venture in every respect, with Schrader and his leads Cage and Willem Dafoe clearly enjoying the gore-soaked frenzy. But the film also feels like a too- familiar reheating of in-your-face Tarantino-style crime tropes.

The Holocaust has undergone some awkward treatments on screen before, but one of the most ungainly recent examples must be Andrei Konchalovsky’s Paradise, a well-intentioned but very soft-edged mess of romance, metaphysics and historical theorising.

A stripped-down drama built around a powerful and sometimes troubling performance by Christopher Plummer.

The film’s eclectic ambitions and increasingly eccentric construction get the better of it, resulting in a very uneven brew.

Despite meticulous visuals and a strong central performance by Mark Rylance, the film feels dramatically ponderous and emotionally inert.

For all its directorial mastery, this austere cine-symposium feels like an artistic blind alley, and one that recklessly presumes an audience of committed chin-strokers with a preternatural attention span.

Ultimately, 11 Minutes is as much a virtuoso party piece as anything - but it shows a veteran director in youthful form, clearly having a ball.

A sometimes mesmerisingly intense lead performance by Alena Mikhailova is the trump card of this sprawling, sumptuously mounted revisionist drama ... But for all its sometimes-crazed energies, it feels ponderous and overwrought.

Joan of Arc is in some ways a more conventional drama than its predecessor, but is still intransigently individual. Yet even with a subject as eternally popular as Joan, it’s hard to imagine the film making waves with a mainstream audience or bringing new revelations to Dumont’s long-term followers.