Phil Hoad

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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 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.

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

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.

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.

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