Leslie Felperin

You can’t help but admire Anger’s audacity, sly humour and film-making chops.

In the end, it all feels a bit like a fashion film or some other branded exercise in style — except that the brand is Ortega’s peculiar and unique vision.

Like an unusually designed coat featuring quirky details and an interesting fabric choice from a young designer’s first collection, Swedish writer-director Mika Gustafson’s feature debut has raw edges and some sloppy stitching in places, but the whole is fresh, directional and beautifully cut.

And in terms of docs about people with disabilities, this one is pretty honest about the mental anguish of losing mobility and – in a sideways fashion – addresses how such a change particularly affects men like Ed and Ben, hyper-masculine dudes whose identities are tied to their physical abilities.

By the end, ballet as practised here does indeed look a bit punk rock.

Marshall goes big on the use of freeze-frames, onscreen graphics deployed when introducing characters, and wink-wink meta jokes, all of which feel pretty tired and early noughties British crime drama by this point.

Despite those based-on-a-true-story bona fides, the script is taut as piano wire, strings of inciting incidents strung like steel cables between concrete coincidences, ironies and tragedy.

Although Coup! has a small cast and unfolds mostly in a secluded mansion during the 1918 influenza pandemic, it packs a lot of flavor, suspense and droll comedy into its slim 97-minute running time, making it fun enough to deserve an exclamation point in its title.

This portrait of title subject Lhakpa Sherpa, the only woman to have summited Mount Everest 10 times, is so densely packed with uplifting moments that at times it feels like emotional mountaineering – but the climb has terrific views.

It’s all a lot, as they say, but those with a taste for maximalism will swoon over the goods on offer here.

The package as a whole, with its sun-bleached palette and colour correction that makes its blues pop, is reasonably entertaining, perfectly suited to watching on an airplane while flying to your next holiday destination.

Director George Kane keeps the energy up throughout, helped along by a game-for-it cast that know exactly how to pitch the material.

This splatterfest horror feature is better than its predecessor much in the same way succeeding Covid variants are better than the early, more lethal strains.

While Sporrer in the lead role is fairly credible, a lot of the line readings by the rest of the cast are stilted in a way that a more experienced or native speaker would have picked up on. The result is that all the other characters except Amanda sound as if they’re in a radio play rather than an actual film.

Other viewers are likely to be more entranced by the film’s borderline magical realist elements, but for this viewer the story felt rote, on the verge of trivializing and exploiting the horrors of the Holocaust. Mileage will certainly vary, but for me there’s very little that’s either original or artistically interesting about The Most Precious of Cargoes.

Norwegian writer-director Halfdan Ullmann Tondel takes some big swings with his first feature Armand, not all of which connect, but the ambition and risk-taking are largely impressive.

Like the best comic fantasies, Rumours has more than a grain of tragic truth to it.

A work that is very recognizably Serebrennikov’s, which is to say it’s nostalgic for the Soviet era, outlandishly celebratory of the callow charms of bohemian youth (compare with his pop-music-themed Leto), baggy to the point of undisciplined (see Petrov’s Flu) and full of long, fluid, roaming, handheld single takes (applicable to nearly all his works).

Merlant obviously knows she’s taking risks with a free-form, genre-bending structure, and that’s cool. It’s just a shame that the end product is so loosey-goosey it’s less a bold sui generis experiment than a hot mess.

Cue group hugs and sappy music as the credits roll.

This fetid stew of sex, death and tech may be an aphrodisiac for hardcore Cronenberg fans, but more casual viewers are likely to find it all rather slapdash and undercooked here.

In the end, the film feels too rollicking and self-parodying to be taken seriously, but it strikes just the right tone to make it a fun Midnight movie.

The ending is a bit flat and anti-climactic.

It all could be too much reality to handle if it weren’t for the fact that mercifully, the film ends on a hopeful note, with the most wicked characters punished for their sins and the good given a second chance. It’s undoubtedly something of a fairy-tale ending, but the kind we need these days.

Thanks to the director’s magisterial knack with actors (especially non-professionals such as terrific adolescent discovery Nykiya Adams, who, as the protagonist, is in nearly every frame of the film), the result is quite entrancing.

The mechanics of revealing who’s behind it all creak like under-oiled hinges.

Alas, the film is an inept, ill-made mess — or as my grandmother would call it, a mishegoss, so muddled and misbegotten it’s hard to perform an evidential postmortem, based strictly on one viewing, of where it all goes wrong.

There’s a bit of soft-core humping and salty talk to break up the tedium, a phenomenon that’s fast disappearing from most mainstream films. The ripe naffness on show makes it somehow entertaining, especially as you can tell the film knows it’s naff.

I can think of few documentaries that are more honest, self-scrutinising and revelatory about ageing, familial love and its limits, and the whole tragicomic process of dying.

While the core conceit is sort of cute, Razooli really can’t direct actors who aren’t already seasoned with prior experience.

The result is a finely observed study of modern manners and mores on a micro-budget that’s nevertheless rich in feeling, especially the cringeiness one might experience from watching other people bicker or hearing people have sex through thin walls.

Sometimes it feels like a cross between a film studies lecture and what happens when you leave YouTube to keep autoplaying while the all-powerful algorithm suggests more and more content.

Back to Black is, like its heroine, flawed and fallible but frequently very affecting.

Writer-director Goran Stolevski’s Housekeeping for Beginners (Domakinstvo za pocetnici) is a fizzy, huggable portrait of a self-made, roughly blended queer family.

Ultimately, the characters’ motivations, like their titular instinct, are weakly delineated, but viewers are well-advised not to worry their pretty little heads about any of that and just concentrate on the pantsuits.

Amusing, uplifting and about as sugary and teeth-sabotaging as caramelized popcorn, The Beautiful Game celebrates the healing power of team sports for those who might feel more pushed to society’s margins by misfortune or choice.

It’s a work suffused with emotional tones and shades, surprisingly not all of them sad even though the subject knew at the time of filming he had mere weeks left before he’d die of cancer.

The section where Lillian tumbles down a film-making rabbit hole is by far the most amusing.

All the characters are rounded, fallible and likable in equal measure, and even if the score is a bit syrupy, it’s a pleasant, engaging watch.

The film gets across the weird weight of lockdown, a time of tension and anxiety but also an opportunity for creative growth none of us saw coming.

Cabrini’s story is rather absorbing and the film offers a lushly mounted portrait of life in 1880s New York, when immigration was just as much of a contentious issue as it is today.

The rhetoric here is slippery as a Pentecostal snake bathed in holy snake oil, to the point where you almost have to admire the film-makers’ tenacity – especially when it comes to swirly-whirly visual effects showing near-abstract pearly gates and deities presenting themselves as rays of luminosity, like celestial lightbulbs.

The camera’s gaze isn’t pitiless but there isn’t a scrap of sentimentality – just an unflinching willingness to look at all of life straight on, without blinking.

Given no one is a novelist or a poet or a filmmaker here, this represents a bit of an adventure for Hong beyond his usual milieu. That said, this is still profoundly slight stuff, thin and ineffable as mist.

Director Gonzalo López-Gallego creates a strong frame around the characters in both visual and narrative terms, while a lovely score credited to Remate, mixed with well-chosen soundtrack cuts, creates a limpid poignancy.

The stars are toothsome and have a fizzy chemistry, while the ending is surprisingly poignant for all its corniness.

It’s sort of impressive how much director Simone Scafidi allows Argento’s dark side to show through all the hype about his genius.

It’s thrilling to see the iconically ugly Transamerica Pyramid skyscraper get trashed in the finale, but otherwise the look of the film is pretty generic.

Sure, it’s entirely possible that the film will find a constituency who will love its mirthless, shouty performances, its tortured random plot twists and its appallingly shonky-looking CGI. But there is also a distinct possibility audiences will turn up their noses at this like it’s a fresh litter box deposit.

There is a fair number of gags and wisecracks that will go over the head of many viewers not steeped in the local lore, argot and history. But the film’s infectious energy, use of in-camera effects, animation and all manner of jiggery pokery is as mesmerizing and giddy as it was when Danny Boyle used many of the same tricks for Trainspotting.

The film’s best decision is to cast the great Ralph Ineson as an ambiguous local figure of note. With his basso profundo rumble of a voice and air of rough-hewn potency, he’s always a striking figure on stage and screen.

This is not a cuddly version of Godzilla. He is rageful and entirely incomprehensible, seemingly not even motivated by hunger, desire or revenge. Like a god, he just is, an entity that has become death, the destroyer of worlds, as ineluctable as history itself.

The whole shebang is quite bizarre but sort of works, thanks to the brisk pacing of the editing and the joie de vivre that directors Zoya Akhtar and Ryan Brophy inject into the proceedings.

It’s all quite lovely to look at or even just listen to, making for something that can easily be experienced at home while the viewer is knitting or chopping vegetables.

The execution is dire, with cliche-riddled dialogue as cheesy as a packet of Kraft Singles, stodgy pacing, poorly developed characters and shonky acting.

The back half is all over the place and doesn’t seem to know what to say – but Connelly never ceases to be anything less than mesmerising as the kind of older woman full of spit, vinegar and shrapnel who could go off at any second.

This one has all the Norwegian drama of Yuletide in one tidy package, yes sir.

Perhaps the most remarkable moment comes at the end when the elderly Aurora reflects that she doesn’t want revenge, she just wants those connected to the genocide to be made accountable for it: “sat in the chair” of justice.

The direction by Nadine Crocker has all the authenticity of a daytime soap opera. But all the same, there’s no denying that Hedlund and, to a lesser extent, Fitzgerald are pretty good, offering better performances than the film surrounding them deserves.

In the end this feels a bit too much like a knockoff of a superior product, like something one of these guys would sell out of the boot of their car.

Sometimes God is just too on the nose when he makes his creations suffer; but at least Alberdi’s humane, profoundly empathic film-making offers some balm.

There’s nothing sentimental about this documentary, which looks at people with the clear, unflinching gaze of a portraitist.

The lack of cackle-worthy one-liners here and the entertaining but highly predictable last act make this a little bit snoozy for savvier viewers.

The Kitchen also has plenty of inventive ideas, creates heady atmospheres in both its dark and lighter moments, and features vivid performances with a large ensemble.

There’s a certain amount of nasty fun to be had watching the assorted couples get drunk and tear strips off each other, in a metaphoric sense at least, before the violence kicks off – as if Greene were aiming to make a cross between Scream and Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?

Extensive archive news material is drawn on to explain key moments in the struggle over reproductive rights, but mostly the story emerges organically from the interviewees themselves.

There must be some limit to how much content you can generate from the franchise’s core formula, which always finds the titular pack of talking puppy heroes saving their perpetually endangered home town, Adventure City, from an assortment of perils.

Unsurprisingly, it all builds to a bleak conclusion, and the film as a whole is a powerful statement that lingers in the mind long after the final credits roll.

Like so many of his other movies, it’s pithy, punchy, a little shouty at times, but made with brio and swagger.

Indeed, it is not clear how interested director Rudy Valdez is in Santana, or whether he is just doing this gig as a means to an end.

Gasoline Rainbow pays homage to all the road movies that ever were but is still its own quirky thing, uniquely of its time.

Spall keeps the performance tight, projecting not just Jimmy’s damaged psyche but also his wit.

This is very bizarre stuff, even within the traditionally weird parameters of cultural representation in cartoons, but kids won’t mind as it’s one non-stop riot of colour and vroom-vroom movement.

In some ways, it’s one of Hopkins’ best performances from the last few years, beautifully underplayed, eschewing mannerisms or silly accents. It’s just a shame the film itself, directed by James Hawes, with a script by Lucinda Coxon and Nick Drake, is a bit worthy and diagrammatic.

While the landscapes, especially in the parched Sahara section of the story, are dazzling, Carnera’s camera always keeps the focus on the humans, sometimes specks seen from great distances moving through the sand and sometimes studied in close-ups that fill the widescreen canvas.

If cinema is an empathy machine, to paraphrase the late Roger Ebert, then Agnieszka Holland’s new film is one precision-tooled specimen.

This mostly competent but largely uninteresting, bordering-on-silly work upholds the Allen tradition of just carrying on as usual

If you were programming a season of the best of the worst from Nicolas Cage’s filmography – in other words, his most interesting/outlandish/crazed performances in low-budget films – this kooky thriller would certainly be a good candidate.

Given the chemistry between the two leads that could restart a dormant nuclear power plant, viewers are likely to come away sated with pleasure after seeing this delightful work.

Interviews with various journalists, local law enforcers, politicians and FBI agents lay out the nitty-gritty of the story. Lashings of onscreen text spell out the statistics and figures, which is helpful. The caricatures of the various grifters are distractingly tacky, though, and somewhat lower the film’s tone.

It’s nice to see the old tension between selling out and staying pure never goes away in any corner of the film-making world.

Let’s just say that morally, The Killer is all over the place, which may alienate some viewers. Others may delight in both the protagonist and the film’s puckish, zero-fucks-given attitude, one that seems entirely, atheistically uninhibited by fear of a punitive deity or higher moral purpose.

If Asteroid City was a too-rich 20-course tasting menu, The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar is a deliciously calibrated amuse-bouche.

The latest in a 10,000-mile-long line of adaptations of Journey to the West, the 16th-century Chinese novel attributed to Wu Cheng’en, bounces along energetically, and has some exceptionally fun frills around the edges, such as a flouncy vocal performance from Bowen Yang as spiteful, effete baddie the Dragon King, who gets to sing the film’s best musical number.

Some viewers may find it a little too pulpy, reliant as it is on boilerplate dialogue, and it is not exactly rich in subtlety. All the nuance is in the grace of the fight scenes, as lovingly choreographed as a production of Swan Lake.

Truly, this covers the whole spectrum of experience, all of it eloquently explained by the subjects, an assortment of women who tell their truths about clients who can’t be honest with themselves, their complicated relationships with friends, family and cis women, the legacy of slave culture, and their favourite portable electric shavers.

The result is a sly, often playful but ultimately moving study of community, generational anguish and atrocities covered up by the state that blends documentary technique with originality and polished storytelling skill.

The whole collaboration feels undeniably stagey, but it’s still an empathic and frequently moving work that touches on the sheer volume of callers that workers like Thompson’s character, often unpaid volunteers, must contend with every day.

Poetic, painterly work Users looks and sounds stunning, but remains thematically a little too diffuse for its own good as it meditates on our children and the future they will inhabit, where perfect machines replace imperfect parents.

While the cast’s dancing is very good, on the whole, the acting suggests less training. But that fits the semi-professional vibe even better, creating a work that feels light, quick and quite dirty in every sense.

The inevitable North American remake will no doubt pump more technology into its iteration, but a more efficient, streamlined approach toward pace and editing wouldn’t have hurt this original and striking work.

Wim Wenders’ latest documentary Anselm offers a mesmerizing, cinematic catalogue of German painter-sculptor Anselm Kiefer’s deeply tactile, maximalist oeuvre.

Youth (the parenthetical subtitle Spring heralds a projected series of films) is consistently engaging, even if it’s not always easy to see what the whole package is trying to say that couldn’t be said with more brevity.

This challenging, extremely violent, ravishing-looking, intricately plotted adaptation by Kitano of his novel is of interest for its fresh take on a musty genre. That said, it could feel like a slog to watch for viewers who aren’t fans of sword-wielding, screaming samurai movies.

A few more passes through the editing suite have improved things, but the film is still a raggedy-assed mess, with apparently significant characters’ stories pruned back to stubs and loose endings like blasted shards.

It’s predictable but tightly staged and well paced, and if you’re scrolling through the streaming platform looking for something fresh, it’s not a bad choice for switch-your-brain-off entertainment.

The use of music and sound design is very thoughtful throughout, capturing the way music by street performers makes life in the city feel like a musical all the time while the murmur of traffic and general hubbub creates its own atonal backing track.

The movie goes downhill into predictable territory, finally landing in a soggy quagmire of talkiness and would-be profundity expressed in voiceover at the end. But at least the visuals are nice, with Ceylan’s signature use of snow-capped landscape and wide-angled lensing to the fore.