Lee Marshall

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

Only in certain scenes do story and ideas really mesh

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

The script puts artsy effect before character credibility.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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