Patrick Gamble

With God Exists, Her Name Is Petrunya, Mitevska has fashioned yet another bleak satire about Hegemonic masculinity in the Balkans.

An adroit, and trashy thriller leached of all its significance by a plot that spirals uncontrollably into lunacy, Unsane takes the feverish temperature of a country enraged by sexual harassment and decides to turn up the heat.

A slow-burning drama about slavery in all its forms, this austere, visually striking film combines a harrowing period of Brazilian history with devastating accuracy of emotion.

The Commune is a film built around the intangibility and melancholy of childhood memories. What should have been a gritty work about a generation confronted with the implausibility of their beliefs is ultimately a banal and self-absorbed drama.

Effective in articulating how relationships work as a way of transferring and understanding the unspoken and unseen feelings that lay dormant within us all, Netzer's intelligent portrait of a ticking time-bomb relationship sadly lacks the warmth and tenderness required for it ever to ignite.

There's a measured, almost clinical precision to how On Body and Soul is shot that, while in keeping with Mária's great fragility and terrible need for affection, prevents the film from really delivering.

Félicité is an emotionally effective heart-tugger, thanks largely to Véro Tshanda Beya's dignified lead performance.

Sadly, Schroeder lacks the confidence required to elevate this average drama into something more substantial.

A mood piece first and foremost, Abbasi takes the intense feelings of early adolescence, and watches how tragedy transforms them.

Littered with keen observations about modern life and gentle moments of dark humour, this tale of how we live now masks a tender exploration of the human body as the last refuge in a world of binary oppression.

A handsomely crafted, yet overacted revenge tale with a broken moral compass, Prisoners fails to build upon its taut atmosphere of suspense with anything of particular social value.

Uneven, convoluted and laden with far too many twists and turns Creepy sadly struggles to balance both terror and suspense, with any intrigue dissipating long before the film's secrets are eventually unravelled.

Ixcanul may struggle to tackle the larger issue it posits but well represents the lives and rituals of the marginalised community it seeks to give a voice.

The Falling's refreshingly all-female perspective expects the viewer to become wholly caught up in its broad surge of feeling, yet there's something unsatisfactory and disaffecting about the film's asinine finale.

A postmodern experiment in both form and function, Life of Riley's rigidity can at times feel like its restricting its actors, leaving them unable to treads the boards with the same authority they would on the stage.

A desire to avoid sentimentality is admirable, yet Still Alice relies entirely on Moore's performance to mask its multitude of shortcomings.

Schipper's script doesn't quite complement his technical prowess and once you peer behind the smoke and mirrors of the film's one-take gimmick the criminal-underworld lurking behind it feels trite and contrived.... Yet none of this can take away from its pure entertainment factor. An experience akin to a burst of pure adrenaline intravenously introduced to your bloodstream, Victoria remains one helluva ride.

Coherence is a debut of tremendous ambition and potential, yet sadly, despite some genuine moments of tension, the film ironically makes too many wrong turns and its convoluted themes fail to coalesce on a human level, tempering the initial intrigue and culminating in a plaintive sense of admiration, rather than enraptured adulation.

Despite Blanchett's resplendent performance and the comforting assurances that are inherent with any excursion into the reliably innocuous Disney universe it's tough to overlook the fact that there's something depressingly antiquated about Branagh's dazzling fairytale and its regressive sexual politics.

Loaded with unremarkable statements on moral resolve and brimming with arrogance, this desultory study of grief and the need for an artist to suffer in order to create great art is as hollow and throwaway as the redundant platitude it derives its name from.

Each scene is presented like a taro card for the viewer to assign his or her own meaning. Occasionally this can lead to a profound and deeply personal connection to the film whilst at others it can feel like Malick is overreaching; with large swaths of the narrative washing over you like an agreeable summer's breeze.

Choosing to focus more time on the uncoordinated instinctual trends of the subconscious rather than the moralising role of the cognisant, Enemy lacks the humanity to relate to on an emotional level, ultimately tempering the brooding anxiety and distilling our intrigue into mild curiosity towards the oblique narrative rather than fostering the original menace into something more substantial.

Collins' revolutionary-lite rhetoric has become unravelled by the commercially driven decision to split the final novel into two films - ultimately lessening the satirical bite and reverting to the very gender archetypes it originally sought to challenge.

Schechter's latest marks its arrival with a fanfare of style and sass, but lacks the necessary bite to leave a lasting impression.

An otherwise intelligent piece that favours deftness of touch over bombastic thrills, A Most Wanted Man is an efficient espionage drama that, whilst in no way revelatory, is attuned to its source material's non-heroic and morally ambiguous approach to a well-worn genre.

Cheap Thrills is a commendably flawed experiment in imbuing social anxiety with genre shocks.

The film feels like yet another product of the recent studio appropriation of mumblecore as a commodity, ultimately removing any semblance of individualism and feeling like just another product off the factory conveyor belt.

By interchanging bawdy gaiety and a ponderous attitude to emphasise the film's spiritual message, Calvary feels extremely disjointed, struggling to balance its dualistic tone on top of its oversized ensemble cast.

A rollercoaster ride of tongue-in-cheek cliché, there's plenty of fun to be had with this cheekily reverential horror; yet, a dependence on the sexualisation of the female form anchors the film firmly within 'knowing' horror misogyny.

With little action taking place for the majority of the film, this slow boiling story is more of an insightful character study than a heart pounding thriller.

Petzold struggles to keep hold of the reigns, wielding the effects of melodrama with little to no precision or psychological acuity, and leaving the essential romance at the heart of the story to be rendered almost entirely unbelievable.

Kahn floats the idea that it’s not simply God who has enraptured Thomas’ soul, but his desire to exist within a society that accepts him. Sadly the mechanical aspects of the film’s plotting mean these ideas never manage to bubble to the surface

No doubt many will find German’s approach pretentious and overly repetitive.

Accomplished as the filmmaking is, on a certain level the directors’ good intentions fall flat, resulting in an often clever but fundamentally flimsy comedy.