Phil de Semlyen

Cramming Amsterdam’s myriad subplots and political angles into a coherent two hours ultimately proves beyond Russell. But tight narrative isn’t really what fuels the writer-director. He’s more about arming electric performers with offbeat, talky scenes and catching the lightning that sparks in a bottle. And the bottle here is full to the brim.

Motel Destino never deviates radically enough from that tried-and-tested Postman template to throw up too many surprises. The result is frisky but fleeting.

Grab your nan, put the kettle on and enjoy some exceedingly fine thesps hamming it up royally.

It’s a lurid psychological horror that’ll thrill midnight movie crowds.

It’s frenetic, brashly executed and so full of shooting, you’ll stagger away with tinnitus.

The authenticity is immersive, even if the historical exposition occasionally feels like prep for an exam no one’s warned you about.

Even with its cramp-preventing intermission, Occupied City’s epic runtime doesn’t deliver the same accretion of emotional power that makes, say, Claude Lanzmann’s nine-hour Holocaust doc, Shoah, so great. Instead, it begins to open itself up to monotony and worse, glibness.

Greengrass’s heart lies in exploring the ways a nation processes such a horrific, unexpected event, but Breivik’s odious ideas also get a comprehensive airing along the way. It makes for an uncomfortable, challenging watch.

Much easier to admire and appreciate than it is to fall head over heels for, The French Dispatch has Wes Anderson in full megamix mode as he packs three short stories into an anthology structure that bubbles with flamboyance and ideas, before keeling over under the weight of own narrative cargo.

And Pattinson? He’s solid enough, but the role seems to neutralise his greatest strengths, stifling his edgy, eccentric charisma under a morose, dutiful shell. He’s just another ever-searching crusader in a shadowy world. Hopefully next time he’ll be able to find the fun.

It’s an old cliché about biopics that if the story wasn’t true, you probably wouldn’t believe it. The Keeper takes it a step further: you know it’s true and you still don’t believe it.

For brain-free Friday night viewing, you could do much worse than spend 90 blood-soaked minutes with not-so-gentle Ben.

The third part of Berg’s unofficial Americans-in-crisis trilogy will play better for US audiences than overseas, but it’s still a pacy and often enthralling disaster movie.

Its trump card, of course, is Zellweger, who blows through the film in a gust of jittery energy, wounded ego and half-buried star quality. The transformation is startling.

A high-altitude horror – think a Bram Stoker reworking of *The Shining* or Shutter Highland – of real craft. Ultimately, though, the plot turns out to be thinner than the air.

Ridley Scott delivers a spectacular but flavourless French history lesson.

Still, if his doc is as toothless as Cookie Monster 2.0, it’s still a nostalgic treat to spend time with the man who gave us Kermit, Big Bird and the Goblin King.

This fun, pacy addition to the dino disaster franchise doesn’t do much that’s particularly new – though what it does, it does with a fair whack of panache.

As a supernatural chiller, In Flames finds itself undermined by its own everyday horrors.

Generic, sure, but gripping enough, Apex has located a corner of God’s own country where the devil reigns.

You’d call it Tarantino-esque but for the pacing and lack of a soundtrack. (Even Tarantino might have cut a couple of these baggy subplots.)

It’s not nearly as good as Logan or X2, but it’s a whole lot better than the eyeball-poking affliction that was X-Men: Apocalypse. On the flipside, it still feels like a fairly pointless retread of Chris Claremont and John Byrne’s The Dark Phoenix Saga, which we’ve already seen (and hated) in Brett Ratner’s 2006 disaster X-Men: The Last Stand.

With the faintest debt to The Exorcist and HR Giger, and a barnstorming turn from Imelda Staunton turn as a nun with some dark secrets of her own, Garai has found an arresting way to position male sexual violence: as an age-old curse that brings with it the bitterest of consequences.

Life in The Damned Don’t Cry is brutally unfair, and Boulifa offers no easy answers. But thanks to the compassionate filmmaker and his two impressive leads, it’s a compelling watch.

If the final act is a bit dull and the anarchic Reynolds factor ends up muzzled, director Rob Letterman makes sure not to lose that self-aware edge altogether, while providing enough Pokémon Easter eggs to satisfy the most demanding fan. He’s also helped invent a whole new movie genre: cuddly noir.

It falls short of enchanting but it's never less than fun and likable. Watch it through the eyes of your inner teenager and you’ll have a blast.

Even by the writer-director’s standards of naturalistic, middle-class restraint, it’s a ruminative experience that borders on slow-going. But The Eternal Daughter is also an ode to mothers and daughters that will leave a few teary messes in the stalls, and it’s beautifully acted by Tilda Swinton in not one, but two roles.

South African director Oliver Hermanus finds plenty of deep feeling and sincerity here but his beautiful-looking, measured period piece gets stifled by its own languors – especially in a first half that needs a slug or two of moonshine to inject some life into it.