Phil Hoad

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.