Phil Hoad

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.

The net effect of Debbie Harry popping up at 10-second intervals on the soundtrack to top up levels of ironic sass is to highlight how that quality is in generally short supply in the script.

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.

The tech may be on the blink, but this striking debut makes humanity seem like a beautiful malfunction.

Partly set in the Mumbai underworld, Rakeysh Omprakash Mehra’s boxing drama aims at Raging Bull grit but has an unfortunately irresistible drift towards late-Rocky melodrama.

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.

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.

Given the inherent lack of drama in the kind of unbreakable faith on display here, anyone wishing to tell the story needs to work much harder than this laboured treatment to wring any nuance, conflict or indeed true sublimity from it.

Like the drilling operation, this was a script in sore need of a clean-up operation.

The directing is serviceable, but some rote imagery – especially the ominous crow of death – also likes to hit us over the head. Reddick should have concentrated on giving the characters that kind of treatment.

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.

This sharply crafted piece talks the talk and finally threatens to walk the walk.

Rose looks great – her androgynous poise reminiscent of the young Angelina Jolie – and does a capable job carrying Vanquish. But you wonder if this noir-filtered, John Wick-apeing thriller is a little too stripped-back for its own good to advance her career.

There is little narrative, beyond the Wembley gig approaching; and, more crucially, little conflict, outer or inner.

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.

The daft title tries to promise splatterhouse brazenness, but actually fesses up to the film’s lack of imagination.

Ivo van Aart’s movie gives full rein to that desire and is snappily directed – but in the end there is something self-satisfied and sententious about his feminist revenge flick.

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.

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

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.

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.

A film about a virus-ravaged country under lockdown should be able to hit cogent parallels at will at the moment – but a numbing repetition is sadly the main payout.

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.

With scant visual bite, perhaps it should’ve been called Evil Ear.

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.

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.

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.

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.