Mike McCahill

Gradually, the simplicity yields an idiosyncratic charm.

Tamasha keeps shapeshifting, in ways both intriguing and self-defeating.

It’s a thin, trickledown sort of fun.

If the plot’s familiar, no imagination or expense has been spared in mapping the kingdom it winds through.

Robertson gives himself and his actors time to ponder the board and build convincing relationships and tensions: he’s especially deft around his younger performers, allowing them to register as distinct, often defiant personalities.

Eid proves a dolefully expressive lead, and Wolfgang Thaler’s ever eloquent camerawork is as fascinated by the discovery of bullet shells in the sand – a clue, and a warning – as it is by the punishingly craggy landscape.

It’s a test of one’s tolerance for watching predominantly empty frames – the anonymous performers scarcely count – in the hope something will jolt us from mounting tedium.

Director Prabhudheva’s idea of comedy is broad and very much soundtrack-led.

Little here is going to challenge the opinion of Roth as a bratty provocateur, but it’s still fun to experience a latter-day thriller pushing so many buttons in broadly the right order: if Knock Knock’s no more than a sick joke, it’s been very shrewdly constructed.

One innovation: the application of thrash metal to fight scenes, which at least hushes the shriller voice artists.

Director Nicole Garcia strains to give this pablum social grounding, but hair and make-up overtake her.

Every other scene showcases a northern treasure (Coogan, Thomson, Tomlinson, Stansfield) and looks, feels and – crucially – sounds true to its sweaty-hazy, slightly cramped corner of history.

The actors are committed – Mara, generally waif-like, appears frail indeed – but there’s barely anything worth committing to.

This tardy rehash of fairytale tropes finds sometime genre innovator M Night Shyamalan clinging in abject desperation to the found-footage movement’s careworn coattails.

The debutant director applies himself with the same quiet assurance and attention to detail he’s displayed in his acting projects.

For all The Falling’s period trimmings, its uncanny power resides in these ellipses and blackouts – in elements that cannot be easily rationalised.

Sy is such an attentive listener in close-up that you instantly grasp the frazzled Alice’s attraction; if she’s less well defined, Gainsbourg’s nervy intelligence and clenched-jaw resistance to sentimentality hold the interest nevertheless.

The result may honour the daily reality of medical professionals – the finale’s a credibly fractious staff meeting – but it makes for a patchy, hesitant dispatch, more “er …” than ER.

ABCD2 is the latest film to recognise that – however you gender your gaze – there is an abiding pleasure in watching bodies in motion, and choreographer-turned-director Remo d’Souza keeps nudging more of them on.

Suri is also testing the modern audience’s willingness to suspend disbelief, and the material he’s working with here – unfolding the happenstance-heavy mystery of a woman at the mercy of the men around her – proves barely fit for this purpose, or any other.

Star power aside, it’s a modest, reined-in entertainment, rejecting musical numbers for a simple whistled refrain, and clocking in at just two hours.

Mostly it’s a scare machine, and in this respect Kenan’s is the more efficient telling, its VFX lubricating all that now creaks about the original.

Funny, oddly affecting and cherishably personal.

You emerge from this brutally unsentimental education with your chest pounding and your ears ringing – its radical empathy extends to putting us in not just the same room as its subjects, but the same helpless, despairing position. Some films are made to leave you speechless; for some experiences, there can be no words.

The film is never less than amiable, and rather more spirited and nonconformist than the Transformers movies.

Vengeance has powered countless movies over the years, but rarely can it have been given such a thorough – and thoroughly entertaining – showcase as it gets in Wild Tales.

Winterbottom’s shapeshifting spontaneity has long seemed as much limitation as virtue, characteristic of a filmmaker unable or unwilling to commit to his own better ideas. Here, you feel him hedging around his subject, less out of sensitivity than a constitutional evasiveness, an inability to formulate a clear line of argument.

This tale, more mechanical than human, is finally beyond [Bier's] skillset: it required ruthless tinkering, not the softly-softly approach.