Leslie Felperin

There are also good bits in this based-on-a-true-story drama, including the aforementioned performances and a commitment to theology so sincere it’s not afraid to bore an audience with lots of pin-head-fine debates about Godhood. If Gibson weren’t part of the package it might be possible to like it more.

The film engages with Cave and Warren Ellis’ creative bond, one that’s produced some sublime work but also self-indulgent noodling (of which there’s a little too much here). Indeed, some might wish the spotlight was on Ellis more, a fascinating character who may be the more musically gifted of the pair, but not as capable of holding the spotlight like Cave – who has his suits, rumbly baritone and carefully coiffed too-black hair.

It’s a very tolerable watch, if somewhat interminable and rather lacking in proper drama. But perhaps that’s just what an audience of hardened Dion fans would want from a viewing.

Most welcome of all is the generous sprinkling of good one-liners thanks to screenwriter Max Taxe’s witty script, solid direction from Christopher Winterbauer, and a cast with nippy comic timing.

The lonely, uncanny and sometimes unthinkingly violent world of childhood is explored with chilling candor and exceptional skill in writer-director Eskil Vogt’s arthouse horror feature The Innocents.

Writer-director Brendan Muldowney is better at contriving striking images of horror, filmed with umbral gloom by cinematographer Tom Comerford, than at the character and story stuff.

Smart, funny and endearingly sweary even when he loses the power to speak without computer assistance, Barkan is a charismatic character who’s easy to like, although one wonders how much the documentary crew resisted showing anything that might dent the halo the film sets round his head.

In light of the strange, brutal ending that’s more foreshadowed than it seems, it’s hard to work out where Weisse wants to land on issues around the best way to coax talent, especially in fields such as music where you have to put in a relentless amount of hours to achieve the highest results.

It takes proper acting talent, boosted by strong direction from Wladyka, to pull the film along the way Reis does. She’s vulnerable, frightening and relentlessly physical.

It all sort of comes together in the end, but there’s no earthly reason that it should all have taken two hours. Maybe the spoiler is the unfeasible length of the running time.

It’s best not to think too hard about it and just let the striking imagery and saturated colours wash over your retinas.

Although the focus is on one particular nightclub and its owner, the film acts as an accessible slice of jazz history that might usefully entice viewers to learn more.

Although made on a tiny budget, this highly original exercise in folk horror punches well above its weight with snappy dialogue, trippy visual effects and impressive camerawork.

This stands as one of Austrian director Ulrich Seidl’s better but not quite best features in a pretty consistent career, not as scurrilously seedy as him at his worst, or as merciless, but not as ambitious or startlingly insightful as his best.

Andini and her collaborators, especially lead actor Happy Salma, offer a precisely calibrated, emotionally nuanced exploration of one woman going through a mid-life crisis in rural Indonesia during the 1960s that both looks and sounds stunning thanks to above-and-beyond craft contributions.

In a way the film’s best bits are the quiet scenes where the audience is primed to expect something awful is about to happen, only to find the point is not a jump scare but a harrowing emotional insight.

If you prefer to riff on the garment-making angle central to its story, the film is flatteringly and economically cut from fine cloth, cleverly constructed, and only a little marred by flaws in the finishing.

All the corny romance stuff is about as intrinsic to the film’s soft appeal as the scrupulously well-made frocks, encompassing late Edwardian lace and flapper-style dropwaist numbers, and dozens of well-turned cloche hats.

It should be noted that sometimes this feels like just weirdness for weirdness’ sake. Nevertheless, Strickland builds his own worlds with such a distinctive style — down to the fonts, the bilious shades of green and the textures of the silks — that the viewer can’t help feeling pulled into his crazy maelstrom of quirk.

Squint a bit, relax your mind and you might find in it a touching allegory that accidentally corresponds to our own, collective emergence from the oneiric, mesmeric lull of lockdown life, in which sleeping too much and dreaming about dead loved ones could have become the new going out.

It has risibly cliched dialogue and wooden, poorly directed acting from a B-to-G list cast, but it appears to be shot in one continuous take and strictly as an example of choreography and technical skill it’s pretty nifty.

Intimate in every sense, Good Luck to You, Leo Grande represents an affirming, immensely likable British comedy-drama.

Not only is the story compelling, but thanks to how much the event captured the interest of the world’s media, there is a lot of archive footage to splice in among the generous wodges of talking-heads narration from the main participants.

Edited with minute attentiveness, the film switches back and forth between time periods adroitly in a way that always moves the story forward, while the outstanding performances from the whole ensemble, especially the watchful Vauthier and the fierce Issa, anchor the film.

Bruce Willis continues his campaign of reputation self-ruin – not that he has that far to fall – with this cruddy, derivative action thriller.

Although it’s always a treat to see veteran character actor Danny Trejo doing his stuff – playing an ambiguous figure attached to the hotel – both he and most of the rest of the cast deliver their lines with the flat, enthusiasm-free cadences of an ensemble cheesed off with the size of their paycheques and the quality of the catering.

The Commando contains a number of egregious implausibilities and cliches.

With its really smart deep dives into cultural criticism, this is a seasonal stocking overflowing with spooky fun.