Liam Lacey

That the movie also inspires more wholesome feelings is entirely thanks to Ferreira (Euphoria), whose character communicates enough warmth, energy and emotional fragility to make even a doubtful curmudgeon soften a little.

Thick with dank atmosphere and well-acted with a cast that includes Colm Meaney and Barry Keoghan, it’s a drama about angry men with mommy issues that starts with a slow burn and ends up to its ears in gore.

With the one-off low-budget Nutcrackers, Green says he wants to pay tribute to the rough-edged adult-child comedies of his youth, films like The Bad News Bears and Uncle Buck. The result is a film that often feels, beat by beat, like you’ve seen it somewhere before.

Performances are, predictably, strong with the 85-year-old Hopkins, bouncing about like a bantam-weight fighter, and Good, in the more restrained role, calmly watching the phenomenon as much as responding to it, eventually wearing down his opponent with compassion.

The film is, in a word, ostentatiously odd. Whether one finds it insightfully askew or laboriously quirky will be a matter of taste.

A bawdy comedy about male strippers that lives up to mediocre expectations, Back On the Strip is directed and co-written by Chris Spencer who has previously worked with the Wayan Brothers comedy team.

Even with its decent performances and polished production values, Persian Lessons never clears the hurdle of its improbable premise, an idea that could serve as the setup for a bad-taste Mel Brooks’ sketch.

While limited by a weak script, the film has beautiful locations, an over-qualified Australian cast, and a novel companion.

Kawase’s attempt at a healing, nature-loving cathartic conclusion comes across as campy, as if a scene from The Blue Lagoon was accidentally attached to a Japanese nature documentary.

There’s nothing here that sparks surprise. The film remains mechanical and stilted, like some grim combination of taxidermy and ventriloquism.

Without having spent enough time to establish the background of the characters and their conflicted motives, Hunt leaves us bystanders to the mayhem.

Please Baby Please has one thing going for it: A chance to watch gifted actors do some daredevil freestyling. In moments, it’s almost enough.

The documentary, Goodnight Oppy, is the sort of film you expect to see at your local museum or science center for school-age children. It’s a real-life Wall-E story, that’s easy to follow, full of emotion and Hollywood budget, and intended to elicit wonder and admiration for the National Aeronautics and Space Association.

Director Sarin plays around a little with the candy-coloured palette, with lots of quick snapshots and backdrops (shot in Montreal and Mexico), giving the film a sort of photoplay episodic structure. But there’s little dramatic build-up.

So, points for shoe-string filmmaking on several fronts. But however open-minded one might try to be, it’s hard to imagine how high, or how low, you’d have to be to recognize human beings in this grungy geek fantasy.

At two hours of repetitive heists and costume changes, Bandit grows bloated and progressively tiresome.

Purcell’s performance and ambition in reframing this foundational Australian tale are admirable. But her version of the story would be more resonant if it held more mystery and less message.

What works as edgy comedy is determined by what you can get away with. Having introduced depression and virtual incest, I Love My Dad just isn’t adroit enough to find a credible happy ending escape hatch.

These images tantalize, but without satisfying, like a trailer for a narrative that would work better as a long-form series.

To give Noé’s credit, he used the Saint Laurent fashion money to practice the split-screen technique which is employed far more movingly in Vortex. He also made the only fashion ad I won’t instantly forget.

The new documentary Mau by the Austrian brother team of Benji and Jono Bergmann offers some insight into what is termed “design thinking,” the idea that creative design process influences almost every area of human life. Unfortunately, the film is far too busy admiring its subject to offer much insight into the discipline’s real-world applications.

The trouble starts with the script, which wobbles between an investigative thriller and a psychological study.

Moon Manor is in a middle ground, a fiction that claims to be “true-ish”.

As the film progresses, the idea of using a school shooting as a subject for a thriller feels deeply ill-conceived, undermining the gravity of the subject it attempts to address.

As a study in mutual traumatic grief between doctor and patient, Marionette has some resonance, but the emotional core of the story is smothered by its irritating intellectual pretensions and altogether too much wood paneling.

Dasha Nekrasova’s bored gamine onscreen presence is quite funny (she suggests a jaded Emma Watson). But much of the acting here is atrocious and the slash-and-splatter ending disappointingly conventional.

Running a long 145 minutes, it’s bleakly cartoonish polemic with few laughs or dramatic peaks, despite a climactic mad-as-hell speech from DiCaprio, some ineffectual pantomiming from Streep, and some third-act forced solemnity.

There’s a sense that the film is attempting to navigate a sort of Atom Egoyan-like exploration of the ripple effects of trauma but it stumbles over a mishmash of a screenplay — the clumsy fragmentary flashbacks, the rushed climax and time-jumping, cross-cutting wind-up — none of which are improved by David Fleming and Hans Zimmer’s generic thriller score.