Lee Marshall

This spiky black comedy is smart, cool and occasionally funny, in a bleakly cynical way, but it’s also surprisingly dull for long periods.

The temporal leaps don’t distract us from the fact that the plot is threadbare in places.

There is no faulting the radiant performance of Celeste Dalla Porta in her feature debut. It’s the objectification of her character that’s the issue – plus Sorrentino’s trick, here indulged even more flagrantly than in The Great Beauty, of privileging flashy audio-visual tableaux over narrative coherence.

Beautifully shot, with a deft command of period detail and a starry ensemble cast, Costner’s Civil-war set epic offers an old-fashioned celebration of the pioneer spirit – and a clutch of storylines that never quite have time to engage before the film moves on.

Rooted in a great injustice, Lubo ­– the film – becomes a curious, sometimes intriguing but ultimately frustrating portrait of a man undone by that injustice.

We never shake off the feeling we’re watching a filmed play, one whose dramatic crescendos and lulls are relentlessly stagey and stylised.

Strip the neo-noir style and attitude away from Stefano Sollima’s latest, and you get a not particularly original tale . . . But there is one very attractive bonus, aside from the moody Roman settings: the casting of Pierfrancesco Favino and Toni Servillo.

Dogman may have a more intimate, reflective tone than much of his work – at least until its final man-versus-dog showdown – but it struggles to get past that initial cool pitch.

Comandante is a film designed to make Italians feel good about being Italian – about pasta, sentimental songs and strongly demarcated gender roles – while also telling them how to be good Italians – chiefly by saving people at sea, not blindly following orders and getting on with other Italians whose dialects they don’t understand.

Although Lost In The Night parades certain familiar Escalante obsessions and contains scenes of striking beauty with something of a Mex-Western feel, it is, at its heart, a fairly conventional crime movie.

A handful of bone-crunching, arrow-whirring, neck-slicing battle scenes allow us some time off from trying to follow the convoluted narrative thread.

Close Your Eyes finally builds a head of emotional steam in its last half hour, while exploring questions of identity and what remains when memory has gone.

What power it has derives from the knowledge that this shocking story actually happened. When that’s the case, it’s maybe good to have it served straight.

It’s a strange film, one that feels its way through Hasna’s story, changing tack, trying out different methods – including the casting of three different women as the adult Hasna, one of them the director herself, and a final shift into documentary.

The Worst Ones is trying to be both a kind of documentary about its own making and a drama about a guy making another film. Unfortunately, the two don’t mesh.

Buoyed by two outstanding performances – from Adèle Exarchopoulos and first-time child actress Sally Dramé – and shot in ravishing 35mm, The Five Devils is a finely-crafted drama-genre hybrid, let down only by the fact that the story is a lot less interesting than the themes it carries.

With its uneasy and never-resolved conflict of interest between music star vehicle and music star drama and its lack of much at all to say about life, music or the creative process, Taurus ain’t rising anytime soon.

It’s a story with a brilliant conceptual framework that never quite coalesces into a satisfying drama.

Three Floors is not a bad melodrama per se, but has none of the needle-sharp emotional intensity of The Son’s Room (2001).

It’s the tone that’s off here, as it is throughout a film which seems to wink at what it perhaps wants us to see as irony – its soft porn tropes like bondage and flagellation, its over-saturated sci-fi view of a comet’s passing, its horror-influenced vision of the plague – while keeping both eyes firmly open.

The paradox is that in modernising Berlin Alexanderplatz, Qurbani has created an ambitious but also stridently melodramatic moral parable that seems oddly dated.

Starting sedately but promisingly, it sails (literally, in one respect) into a perfect storm of heavy-handed symbolism and sentimentality.

What stands out in relief from the film’s flat characters and pedestrian storytelling is its dramatic core: the killing machine that death row had become in South Africa by the end of the 1980s, with 164 executions taking place in Pretoria Central Prison in the year in which Shepherds And Butchers is set, 1987.

As fragmented as its title suggests, Pieces of a Woman contains parts of a good film, possibly a great one.

Although There Is No Evil is a brave and impassioned work, the seams show.

Two bravura performances can’t disguise the thinness of a script that exposes just how uninteresting this ‘sliding doors’ game can be. The Roads Not Taken redeems itself, partly, through the compassion and sensitivity with which it deals with the mind-ravaging illness at its core.

Egoyan is so impatient to cut through to the emotional truth that he asks us to take on board a series of lazy contrivances that will test even the most forgiving viewer.

For all the commitment that Claes Bang and Elizabeth Debicki bring to the central roles, their characters never really emerge as autonomous beings from the faintly preposterous story they’re trapped in.

Marcello and his committed, compelling lead actor Luca Marinelli deliver an always watchable take on the hoary old story of the struggling artist that is more interesting in its shape-shifting style and texture than in its rather conventional dramatic core.

The latest film from the prolific Olivier Assayas’ makes for a genial, lolloping ride, but it’s also one that will frustrate those with little patience for the script’s casual attitude to coherence.

Audiences will likely approach the film a series of sketches linked as much by mood as by theme. Some hit the spot, two or three are laugh-out-loud funny, but others seem little more than space-fillers in a film that is both enjoyable and frustrating.

Only in certain scenes do story and ideas really mesh

Mixing tough US social realism with butch femme poses is an intriguing exercise, although this small, sincere drama never quite resolves the awkwardness of the meld.

Piranhas feels a bit like a teen movie that just happens to have a Cammora backdrop, rather than a serious, nuanced drama about the paranza system – essentially, the grooming of underage kids as drug runners and Mafia footsoldiers.

Deep down this is a conventional and predictably plotted period drama about a clash between bodice-ripping passion and social mores.

There are more engaging fireworks, or at least small sparks, when the film begins to dig into the feelings, friendships and jealousies of its two main protagonists.

It’s a small, worthy, film that works reasonably well, although there’s something a little too linear about its structure.

A mid-budget mis-fire after the director’s promising indie debut, Bang Gang, Girls of the Sun seems more concerned with staging sisterly bonding sessions amidst the rubble than in developing what might have been an intriguing story – about how war can reshuffle social and gender inequality.

There’s an observational authenticity that is refreshing in an audiovisual culture whose attempts at self-analysis are too often skewed by melodrama. It’s also heartening to see such delicate stories of ordinary people come to the fore in a country whose filmmakers faces enormous hurdles; technical, financial and bureaucratic.

This plodding drama, centring on the friendship between a young German DJ and an ageing expatriate, never shakes the dust off the pages.

What’s lacking here, mostly, is a clarity of vision and control of tone that would give this prestige Euro-Western’s mannerisms a focus.

Undemonstrative but at the same time oddly compelling - rather like its eponymous main character - Felicité is a challenging, perhaps overlong, but also quietly resonant slice of new African cinema.

In Moverman’s hands, it becomes a contemporary American fable about savagery lurking behind civilised facades, about class and racial divisions in a country that calls itself united, and about ethical vacuums in a connected, online society. It’s also an unbalanced, uneven ride, a distracting hot and cold shower of intense scenes featuring four terrific actors and long, meandering passages of flashback filler.

A film that, after its initial promise, descends, at times, into TV-historical-drama mannerisms.

War On Everyone is essentially a clothes hanger for smart one-liners, verbal and visual, and its success will depend partly on how folks like the look of the clothes hanger.

A cinematic symphony more than a classic narrative film, Terrence Malick’s long-awaited The Tree Of Life has moments of breathtaking visual and aural beauty, but in the end it has us longing for the days of Badlands, Days Of Heaven or The Thin Red Line, when the Texan auteur also knew how to spin a good yarn.

As with babymaking, the conception is more fun than the delivery, which comes perilously close to turning our knocked-up heroine’s kill list into a series of very dark alt-comedy sketches.

A meandering, sluggish tale that offers moments of great beauty but ultimately feels like a ragbag, take-your-pick bundle of poetic and spiritual suggestions inspired by China’s great Yangtze River.

Some moments of poetry and emotional truth lurk in among the pretentious high grass. But the sometimes baffling dialogue is a serious subtitle endurance test ­for non French-speaking audiences.

After the tense opening, coherent drama goes by the board.

Ultimately, all we have to hold on to in a story that lurches inexorably into CGI absurdity is our emotional connection with Stewart’s lost, lonely character.

Kurosawa remains a master of twilight-zone atmosphere, but this extended metaphor for the grieving process relies too heavily on ambience alone.

The script puts artsy effect before character credibility.

Sure, there’s a strong element of arch playfulness in the exercise, but that doesn’t make the end result any less tiresome. In Eisenstein In Guanajuato, Greenaway is good at making us look, but not at making us care.

It stretches character credibility, and resorts too much to criminal-underworld cliché and the driving pace of its own perpetual motion, which curiously does nothing to paper over the longueurs in certain over-stretched sequences. You come out on a high of sorts – but it soon fades.

If some of this loud horror material looks frankly absurd, that’s only, Amenabar would no doubt argue, because it reflects the hackneyed, trick-or-treats way in which we give form and body to our night fears. Fine, but for a thriller to thrill, such didactic admonishments are not enough.

A slight story that aspires to be a thriller but ends up as a rather flat melodrama about a rock-star generation struggling to deal with its twilight years.

In the end, for all the plot tension and genre tastiness –underlined by some acidic colour photography and lighting that plays up sickly yellows and purples – there’s just something a little too mannered about the exercise.

Vaughn brings a tenderness to the role of a man forced into animal violence for the sake of love and the miracle of birth, and the rangy anarchy of Zahler’s deeply kooky film gets under the skin at times. But in the end, you wish some big bad studio boss had been there to cut this director’s cut.

Does the alternation between documentary inserts and sci-fi superstructure work? Not always – more than once it’s a wrench to be dragged back to Ghost’s basement. But Kapadia and his co-scribe Tony Grisoni seem to understand that the pummelled audience can take only so much cinematic doomscrolling.