Phil Hoad

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.