Patrick Gamble

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 poignant study of gender politics enshrined within an anthropologically fascinating drama.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

The reticent interactions of Lanthimos’ trio of despairing souls mirrors the faded hopes of a transitory generation of dreamers, yet sadly Kinetta is too lost amongst the small, ostensibly insignificant gestures of its characters to truly grasp the larger movements occurring within the periphery.

Despite being exquisitely shot and flowing with an inescapably graceful stride that seems in accordance with the film's titular dance, The Tango Lesson works far better as a deconstruction of the creative process than it does as a satire on the industry.

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 falling into the occasional genre trap, every step of Catch Me Daddy points to a pair of filmmakers unafraid to make brave and interesting choices.

A conspicuous example of political cinema made into art, The Wild Boys has more ideas in its 110 minute runtime than most filmmakers have in their entire oeuvres; jumping gleefully into the murky waters of gender politics and taking great delight in the overflowing bounty of cinephilic pleasures and vulgar perversities that spurt onto the screen.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

Rarely has China's explosive economic growth been captured with such grace and with such a heavy heart.

What’s most repugnant about Project X is its utter lack of moral consciousness, with the overriding message being that such disregard for property and community deserves little more than a slap on the wrists – a message that couldn’t be more ill-advised in a time of such amplified social despondency.

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.