Phil Hoad

Building to a remorseless climax, Sims-Fewer and co-writer/director Dusty Mancinelli brilliantly, and times almost unwatchably, overhaul the rape-revenge movie as something far more realistic, traumatised and noxious.

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.

It’s a testament to Scotney’s performance that Millie retains a perverse kind of integrity even as she dupes herself more than the people around her. A shrewd and promising debut.

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

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

Building in power and finesse, Danner oversees a very satisfying dialectical dustup.

Aguzarova is quietly phenomenal, never more so than in the sex scene where, holding her curled-up hands away from Tamik’s body, she manages to be coy, conflicted, detached, expectant and amused all at once.

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

This dense but witty film is never caught short for a flourish.

A riptide of surrealism runs through Chino Moya’s ambitious debut feature, a fantasy suite of tales that don’t so much interlock as butt into one another and blurt out alarming, dreamlike correspondences.

It is an endearing sports film with just enough awareness of where it stands, now that Britain’s imperial legacy is being questioned more than ever, on a larger field.

As for interpreting what it all means, leave that to Burns’s therapist. The flamboyance on display here, though, promises great things.

Matt Vesely’s impressive debut ably stakes out its own territory, not least in the vast distances covered by a single on-screen actor and a handful of vocal performances.

Amid the current explosion of affirmative diversity-driven film-making, there is a kind of strength in such a self-excoriating and uncompromising point of view. Corbine Jr is one to watch.

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

It’s a quizzical time capsule of pre-internet fame from the perspective of a troubled but capable young man who knew his way around a camera.

Narrating the film with occasional gonzo outbursts (“We were so fucking stupid”), Krichevskaya is perhaps over-infatuated with her subject, but then Sindeeva seems like quite a character.

Night of the Hunted may fall a bit short of moral substance, but it certainly holds us in its grip.

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.

Its heartwarming aspect comes framed with real grandeur, and a stark absurdism and tightly wound sentimentality reminiscent at times of Takeshi Kitano.

Kōsaka keeps Okko’s quest light and perky, not fully drilling into the vein of childhood trauma-induced fantasy that the best of Ghibli and Pixar hit upon. It proposes attentiveness to others as a means of self-care, but it has the same brisk impatience with real inner conflict that the grandmother has towards Okko’s outbursts.

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.

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

Hosoda’s delicate, painterly style is perfect for capturing Kun’s evanescent imaginary haven – and conveying the message about the moral courage needed to leave it.

Retrofitting medieval Noh as a world of guitar gods and cavorting dancers, Inu-oh has its two disabled lead characters make a psychedelic plea in favour of slipping loose from dominant narratives, told in a fecund patchwork of styles by Yuasa that asserts its own outsider credentials.

Sud – with plenty of inexorable tracking shots through the family’s chilly condo – efficiently tightens the screw as the twitchy mother and indulgent father first bicker, then are doomed together by their blood allegiances.

Something in the Dirt is so high on its own conceptual supply that it doesn’t invest quite enough in the pair’s deteriorating relationship, and consequently starts to drag. But it wrings a mini-cosmos out of next to nothing, its delicately transcendent visuals – courtesy of Moorhead’s photography background – constantly signposting some higher truth just around the next corner.

If narrative clarity is obviously not top of Uzeyman and Williams’ priorities, the film always looks amazing: fluorescent dream sequences, glitchy cyberpunk overlays, wild character designs (from costume designer Cedric Mizero and makeup artist Tanya Melendez).

It labours for an hour to find its own thematic core, but as the psychological pieces accumulate, the film starts to exert an inexorable pull in its exploration of cognitive dissonance and mental illness.

A halo of kinship, love and the tenacious power of art is gathered around this film.

You will no doubt bail out at some point – but that’s part of the deal. Llinás has done enough to make sure we come back.

Nocturne is simpatico with a protagonist who, in lieu of greatness, decides to steal – then play it like she owns it. An elegant, forking finale proves as much.

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

What this solemn and enlivening documentary plunge into the history of Ridley Scott’s sci-fi classic reiterates is the idea of film as a collective art form – not just the wider circle of writers, performers and technicians beyond the director, but in the case of the truly great films, serendipitous access to a deeper collective unconscious to which we all have the keys – even if few know how to use them.

This clever thriller teeters on the brink of abstraction, and walks a razor wire between horror and an incredulous absurdity meant to stand for how women must live in the modern world: the daily toll of living in fear of aggression, physical assault and withstanding the misogynistic structures that excuse them.

With Russia trying to further circumvent the OPCW, this coolly outraged film shows how Washington’s unilateralism has been a gift to even more belligerent parties.

Wang’s film is a vital excavation of history in danger of being eroded away.

If George Orwell had had a career stint as a Korean estate agent, this is the kind of story he might have turned out.

It has a stubborn, almost literary feel for character that accumulates a baleful momentum by the time the finale hits.

Hu provides no easy resolutions, and evidently found none himself. This epic of futility will have to stand as an epitaph for an extremely promising career cut short.

Madres never loses a strong underpinning of social conscience that seeps into director Ryan Zaragoza’s considered shots.

The slaughter does start to get monotonous, but the film rallies in its final third.

Night Drive doesn’t quite have enough time left to build on sharp interlocking performances by Dalah and Bowen and give their characters the full noir shadings the suitcase coaxes out of them. But it’s still an intriguing alternative routeing for LA night-owl cinema.

The allegory is framed in fabulously lurid B-movie terms.

A delirious and oddly agreeable stopover.

Gavras has seized his chance, staging this uptempo, carnivalesque crime pic with panache and wit.

Ciorniciuc and his co-writer Lina Vdovîi, in allowing events to unfold slowly in front of the camera, have created a beautifully measured portrait of an amazingly resonant topic.

Not just a valuable crash course in digital-age hermeneutics, this is a gauntlet thrown down to film-makers with an old-fashioned belief in the truth.

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.