Lee Marshall

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

Only in certain scenes do story and ideas really mesh

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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