Phil Hoad

This hectic fantasia struggles to plumb deeper depths.

Here is a visually epic and surprisingly positive documentary about a maligned subculture: football ultras.

Amid this farrago, the political critique comes over more like accidental backspatter than meaningful statement.

With an unerring but sardonic sense of how death presses in on us all, this is a promisingly pungent debut from Mitchell.

This is a memorable education in the laws of the tween jungle.

There are serious points raised with wry obliqueness here: about police racism, land theft and, more positively, ancestral continuity. (Perhaps to keep the indigenous focus, Endless Cookie skirts the issue of Seth as a white chronicler.) But it’s also equal parts hallucinations in coffee froth of rutting caribous – and a palpably radiating love for community – in this often hilarious spawn of the likes of Fritz the Cat

Visually ravishing though it is, Scarlet is a hefty disappointment from director Mamoru Hosoda, a leading light from whom we expect more than an incoherent and overbearing fantasy.

It might work if Rita was a more appealing protagonist, capable of wringing out gallows humour or personal tragedy from her predicament.

Where it initially threatens to be a new The Thing, it finally serves up sloppy zomcom; just about enough for a Friday night but not much else.

If it’s not quite devious enough overall, Redux Redux still opens up a punchy murder-revenge side alley for the genre.

Doeren clearly has a feel for the bear necessities, but the human interest hardly gets its boots on.

At one point, Michel Troisgros insists that cuisine is not cinema, but real life. But Wiseman continually spotlights the importance of close observation in ingredients, taste, preparation and presentation that enables the elevation of the material world into art; from creme brulee forensics, to the staff finicking with the tableware until the setting is just-so.

Fully committed to a radical irresolution, this simultaneously alienating and beautiful film bears repeat viewing.

Conti manages the feat of being funny, emotionally astute and kinda sexy throughout.

The issues are fundamentally the same: the enforced invisibility of a class of economic migrants who are now so numerous that many game the system, doubling their exploitation. Sangaré’s exemplary, unfeigned performance helps them speak.

Dockery maintains rigour and bite at the centre as the genial jailer, and there’s an edginess to Spielberg’s direction, the camera roving around this posse of junior desperadoes and suggesting she may have inherited a certain cinematic intuition. But, like the abomination upstairs, she takes a ragged first bite here.

It may think it is tilting at the dream factory, but Somnium simply feels tired.

Deeply caught up in decoding this tradition, perhaps Serra is too beholden to it. If only this admittedly riveting examination of dark human compulsions had found a way to also articulate the perspectives of the animals for whom the arena is a lethal experience.

If this hymn to love’s persistence wobbles occasionally, it’s good to see an independent British film going for broke.

Sadly, this tonally shaky and borderline-sociopathic outing doesn’t have the class or skill to be part of the much-needed renaissance for the genre.

If following The Unholy Trinity’s various tracks is sometimes frustrating, it’s still rare enough: a red-blooded and essentially satisfying western.

Even if the skimpy detailing of Sal and Vince’s past leaves the finale verging on sentimentality, rather than fully exposing the self-inflicted wound it’s supposed to be, Salvable’s overall melancholic undertow is hard to resist.

Developed by China’s Supreme People’s Procuratorate and directed by butt-kicking luminary Donnie Yen, The Prosecutor is a bizarre mashup of courtroom procedural and action flick; it is just as keen on lionising due process and the “shining light” of Chinese justice as it is on reducing civic infrastructure to smithereens in several standout bouts.

Mäkelä is too in bed with his protagonist’s objectives to develop the kind of perspective that might yield richer insights into the life/art trade-off.

Despite its somewhat diffuse centre, Collins’ film still has a straightforward poignancy, with subtle and dignified performances across the board.

Forget the adulterated, Communist party-sponsored attempts at blockbusters of the past, self-taught animator Jiaozi’s film is an utterly self-assured pageant of Chinese mythology that, with head-spinning visuals, is a fine technical advertisement for what the country is capable of, in this case on a comparatively small $80m budget.

This has cosmic charm aplenty.

Hunt, though, gives an excellent performance in the lead role, agilely running the gamut from deadened admin serf and hipster-bar dating veteran, to infatuated young lover, to abuse victim. She brings emotional suppleness and complexity to what is – despite some flaws – a bold and stylish take on the endless samsara of digital romance.