Phil Hoad

It’s a shame that Durall doesn’t find his torrid and sophisticated story the visual register it deserves, leaving The Offering with a humdrum televisual ambience that’s a bit unsatisfying.

If the film is frustratingly nebulous as its layers of reality intermingle, it is a neonatal nightmare that undoubtedly envelops you in its feelbad embrace.

This is a perfectly accurate board-game adaptation insofar as it’s well-packaged, undemanding fun.

It’s a shame that, as it ramps up, this generational tension isn’t dramatised with the sharpness it might have been.

New Life makes the most of Jessica’s fraught interactions on the road, with spasmodic bursts of bubo-popping horror.

Charli XCX’s drive and heart are infectious, even for non-Angels.

The pay-off is a fast-moving, good-looking gallop of Mission: Impossible-style mask play, languorous conniving in courtyards and occasional outbreaks of derring-do that chews up three hours without pausing for quail sandwiches.

Aided by its physical clout, Summit Fever does hit a kind of rhythm near the end – but last year’s The Summit of the Gods is a more substantial look at this kind of obsession.

It still just about puts the id in Hasidic, thanks to spiritually atmospheric cinematography and a twitchy, expressive performance from Davis, who resembles Riz Ahmed, and wards off evil with that most Jewish of charms: heroic self-deprecation.

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

The 68-year-old Chan slips down off Red Hare like a limber teenager. But horse aside, he largely retreads old ground here, with a handful of shambolic dustups that, apart from the enterprising use of a wicker rocking chair, are pretty standard Jackie.

This sharply crafted piece talks the talk and finally threatens to walk the walk.

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.

Too many scenes of sub-vaudeville witchy cavorting suggest Kramer hasn’t completely mastered her own poetic register. But it is bracing to watch her reach for the stylised impact needed to carry her ideas about social identity; exactly the kind of the expressive messiness this wing of the post-#MeToo film industry should be engaging in if the old order isn’t going to reimpose itself.

At 85 minutes, Destroy All Neighbors gets a little indulgent, and the plot, as William finds his creative mojo in the company of his newly acquired ghoulish ensemble, is throwaway. But it’s a gleeful lo-fi rampage all the same.

Both of the leads keep it low-key, with 95-year-old Renaud’s unfussy reminiscences dotted with defiant irony, and the initially unforthcoming Boon opening up under her cajoling as naturally as a flower.

Strangely, given Prieto’s visual acumen, the film is also a bit bland visually, bar a flashy prologue kicked off by the camera sinking into the bowels of the earth. But the story has enough residual power to deliver a dark night of the Mexican soul nonetheless.

Prospective future instalments might want to aim higher than mere competency.

Some of the storytelling gets clotted, leaning too much on the girls shrilly screaming at each other. Bad Things, though, is sharply filmed, with cinematographer Grant Greenberg feng-shuiing the hotel spaces into tone-setting tableaux (with a touch of Twin Peaks’ kitsch).

This hectic fantasia struggles to plumb deeper depths.

Christophe Honoré, now edging into veteran status with his 12th film, once again steps up to the oche of desire and infidelity. But this peppy, flighty and self-involved film – a hybrid of marital drama, chamber piece, erotic farce and crypto-musical – hovers frustratingly outside the bullseye.

Parker clearly has ideas he’s aiming at, but lets his target slip in the fog of war.

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.

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.

Haze is excellent: pacing, weeping, baring his teeth and adding ample unruly emotion to his prison.

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.

A sombre, steadfast argument for art’s life-giving properties.

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

Castillo’s talent for spiritually attuned atmospherics could be her USP among Chile’s current crop of directors with idiosyncratic slants on their country’s recent past.

While Knight and team duck origin-story slavishness that has dogged so much recent franchise work, they succeed in reviving the playful Saturday-morning-serial spirit of the original 80s Transformers.

Despite possessing unusually detailed context for a thriller, it’s a bit like diplomatic efforts in the region: the same old story.

If Atkinson isn’t quite the Coen inheritor he aspires to be, this hectic flurry of schemers, snatchers and low-lifes puts him three-quarters of the way to inventing a new genre: Texan noir farce.

In the end this is a fundamentally genre-subservient film, staying within the safe lines that absolves it from getting close to the true horrors it hints at.

Without any real stylisation to shake up Nolan’s inner realities beyond bog-standard techno-realism, this sunken place has no strong signature of its own – and little to add to the African American experience.

Its history assignment comes out pretty jumbled but this breezy YA vampire flick shrugs “whatever” and gets back to nailing the undead.

It gets turgid in its final third but backed by director Gigi Saul Guerrero’s cartoonish punch, Barraza’s cantankerous grimace and hair-trigger rejoinders are a pure pleasure.

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

Where it’s lacking in psychological bite, Wardriver’s demi-monde is convincingly venal in general terms. Thomas lends it enough fast-driving attack and romanticised ferment that it might just pass in the darkness for a Michael Mann film.

Belli’s supple direction – reminiscent of Edgar Wright’s pop’n’snap – keeps its energy levels high as it roves around the living room that is its main location; it also exults in the occasional set-piece, such as the players’ Jazzercise routine. There aren’t quite enough of these zany segues, but with a larger budget, you can smell the franchise potential here.

Compensating for there being nothing in the way of any Narnia or Harry Potter-style flitting between realities, this film has crunchily animated brawls every five minutes and a playful embrace of sword’n’sorcery hokum that gives it a little lift.

With Civetta ably dashing off a couple of desperate kidnap attempts, The Gateway manages to scrabble over the line.

It’s not quite the full grand cru period drama from the Merchant Ivory vintage, but rather a semi-sparkling biopic.

The closing stretch – including an exorcism in an imam’s incantation-lined apartment (interior design goals!) – is brutally effective. By this time, Aisha Kandisha is a towering succubus; postcolonial theory stomping in on a pair of terrifying goat’s hooves.

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.

The opportunistic genre-welding holds together thanks to vivid performances. Bolger makes a slightly implausible character arc completely convincing, graduating from panicky improvisation to grim determination.

This has cosmic charm aplenty.

Emblazoned with mouthy Big Short-style info-dumps, and with a phone-selling scene reminiscent of The Wolf of Wall Street, Body Brokers outwardly seems to be aiming for high Scorsesian amoral operatics. But given the originality of Swab’s take, it’s a shame he couldn’t find the film a more appropriate style: at heart it is a more sober film intent on declaring its outrage.

Both leads are good, but the ultra-controlled Løkke – with his poster-boy looks and too-timely smiles – is pivotal to stringing out the farce.

Boarders is baggily structured, and feels overlong as a result. But it’s still an absorbing look at day-to-day involvement in a sport that’s a combination of dynamism and hyper-precision as an activity, but paradoxically nebulous and uncertain as a long-term career.

Director Axelle Carolyn maintains a pleasingly teasing rhythm so it’s a pity that, as the sprightly nursing-home gothic fun winds up, it descends into Scooby Dooish over-explication.

Tightly paced and snappily directed, this is decent-quality Chinese screwball, if a touch overlong.

[A] somewhat bemused memoir-essay about place, cinema and time.

The finale is more of a schmaltzy salute to the guide-dog ethos than intimate documentation of the new owners’ stories. The street training sequences, though – shot in swooping knee-high Steadicam – are thrilling; mini kerbside action movies.

Even in terms of its attempted emotional cross-section of the pandemic, Convergence spreads its net too wide.

It is a shame that either Chinese authorities had a word, or producers decided to aim for brownie points by fitting No More Bets out as an anti-fraud public-messaging spot – because Ao Shen’s thriller is otherwise a snappily directed and intriguing entrée to the industry of online deception.

With Hewlett Jr often chronicling events in cool monochrome, shooting in close proximity if not exactly total intimacy, this snappy scrapbook tips the hat to the infectious creativity of Albarn’s travelling circus.

The film coheres quietly, thanks in no small part to the two excellent child performances.

Initially performed with a slightly incongruous general chirpiness, the film then blazes over the top into a cartoonish frenzy. But otherwise it’s a well-conceived disintegration, with clear sight of the terrain, both outer and inner.

The directors and Dastmalchian – high on his own bogus gravitas – have fun with a fresh premise that reminds us that light entertainment is the anteroom of hell.

The apparently depressing twist gives Linoleum’s entropy-defying optimism successful lift-off.

This intelligently performed film is still a welcome look at a vital and underappreciated duty of state.

The tech may be on the blink, but this striking debut makes humanity seem like a beautiful malfunction.

Restricted to short line readings presumably because of his well-publicised health difficulties, Bruce Willis is not exactly in fighting shape here. But Corrective Measures is still a bracing combination of super-schlock and social commentary.

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

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.

With his reedy voice and fractionally mis-set eyes, Segan exploits his unsettling qualities in a deadpan performance that he lifts, as director, with pleasingly snappy, almost comic-book-like direction.

The four-part shuffle keeps it lively, and Naud is an imposing black hole.

Despite the uneven execution, Condor’s Nest has just enough bite.

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.

Right down to its blaspheming finale, The Exorcism of God burns with a subversive desire to rip back the veil on the church’s earthly corruption – but the iconoclasm is somewhat undermined by the daft horror mechanics Venezuelan director Alejandro Hildalgo props it up with.

Fleshed out in 3D animation, the action – feinting, pivoting and occasionally soaring high above the stands – feels resplendently immediate.

It’s hard to deny Fuhrman’s pinch-faced vehemence and the film’s hallucinatory verve.

Barfoot taps into liminal terrors more effectively through the visuals, from the gracefully shot fugue states experienced by stepmother and surrogate son, to a sinewy barrelling nightmare-beast that has apparently escaped from a Chris Cunningham video.

Becoming Cousteau is no hagiography, but greater distance might have also allowed Garbus to reflect more on the man’s environmental legacy.

There’s nothing revolutionary here, but the hybrid of old-style battle manga with a more modern oneiric sensibility feels a little different from standard superhero loudhailing.

Dolph Lundgren and Scott Adkins make a fine odd couple in this meatily satisfying action film – once it gets moving.

How Herbig fails to capitalise on the sheer physical terror of their flight – the balloon’s basket is more a flimsily strung boxing ring – makes you wish someone like Werner Herzog had mounted this mad escapade for real.

Rose looks great – her androgynous poise reminiscent of the young Angelina Jolie – and does a capable job carrying Vanquish. But you wonder if this noir-filtered, John Wick-apeing thriller is a little too stripped-back for its own good to advance her career.

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.

Ivo van Aart’s movie gives full rein to that desire and is snappily directed – but in the end there is something self-satisfied and sententious about his feminist revenge flick.

There is little narrative, beyond the Wembley gig approaching; and, more crucially, little conflict, outer or inner.

Bar Fight! wants to be the best night out of your life, but – mistaking dodgy drunken acting for ambience – it feels pretty ersatz throughout, like one of those pseudo-Irish bars that has bought in all its decor.

All the exertion – fleshed out in visuals that veer from Astro Boy-aping cutesiness to interestingly rough closeups, as if the animation itself is fraying in the heat of battle – pays diminishing dividends. The panoply of powers begin to seem interchangeable, the character arcs dim.

Hounded’s take is caricatural enough to neuter much sense of actual threat and stop it from being the Brit multicultural answer to Deliverance it sometimes feels like it’s stretching for.

Perhaps this works for gamers, or within the context of the larger Sword Art Online mythos, but it seems a painfully rote instalment – a bit like being stuck watching a particularly garrulous and boring YouTube gamer.

Liu almost manages to throttle up how Lei and the instructors push themselves and their planes into something dramatically interesting, but it never ignites. In the meantime, this is less a movie, more a flying foreign policy document.

For a film that aims to promote religious diversity and freedom of thought, its metronomic alternation between time frames, narrative slavishness and laughable coda have a suffocating sense of orthodoxy.

Dark Asset finally finds a semi-satisfying groove as John’s grand design is revealed, even if it consists of too many borrowed parts to be a real quantum leap.

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.

This tale of freelance underworld fixer Akilla Brown, played with careworn wisdom by Saul Williams, doesn’t live up to its sharp tailoring and has too much faith in fatigued beats from the gangster-film locker.

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

This is the cinematic equivalent of the stopped clock telling the right time twice a day: a film full of stylistic overkill suddenly runs into the material that justifies it.

A film about a virus-ravaged country under lockdown should be able to hit cogent parallels at will at the moment – but a numbing repetition is sadly the main payout.

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

The net effect of Debbie Harry popping up at 10-second intervals on the soundtrack to top up levels of ironic sass is to highlight how that quality is in generally short supply in the script.

The directing is serviceable, but some rote imagery – especially the ominous crow of death – also likes to hit us over the head. Reddick should have concentrated on giving the characters that kind of treatment.

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

The daft title tries to promise splatterhouse brazenness, but actually fesses up to the film’s lack of imagination.