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.

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.

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

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

The visually overworked Dark Match feels oddly underworked at the same time.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

A delirious and oddly agreeable stopover.

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.

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

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

The cranked-up pitchside action is hilarious, like a live feed from inside Cristiano Ronaldo’s head as he replays his own goals reel. . . Translating football into the battle royale format only goes so far, though.

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

The rangy and trenchant Eckhart does convincingly bring the ruckus in a way that suggests an ageing 007. But if that’s a promising sign for this new phase of his career, he can do better than this dour and charmless parade.

Casas has an undeniable nose for middle-class peccadilloes, but tone is everything.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

This pointless, aimless mission is expedited by the usual logic-slips, like inexplicably letting fanatical SS officers escape when you have them at your mercy.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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).

It doesn’t help that the film takes itself with Deliverance-like seriousness, and fails to really acknowledge its absurdity.

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.

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

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.

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.

There is little payoff, with Fickman running shy of the full-blooded commitment to make his film a proper weepie and instead constantly reverting to sassy, annoyingly self-aware comedy that makes light of everything.

The close-knit ethos might well explain the franchise’s gleefully perverse sense of fun, but the truth is this love-in features too much filler.

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

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 is lightweight, forgettable stuff.

James’s sleek telling excels at intertwining the personal and the political with illuminating detail.

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

It’s both by the book and dispiritingly vague.

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.

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

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 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.

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.

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).

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.

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.

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.

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.

Neither slicing under the genre’s surface, nor dicing the heritage well, this reboot is more an unseemly act of IP cannibalism.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

Tradition of course demands that the pert teen sacrifices in such gore fodder be satisfyingly dislikable. It isn’t easy, though, to make stupidity interesting, and Shark Bait is always one-note in its exploitation of its characters.

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.

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

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