Robbie Collin

It’s tough stuff, though the skateboarding interludes, full of low-gliding camerawork and Jackass-like gallows camaraderie, go a long way towards leavening the gloom.

It is two and a half hours of self-reflexive torture porn with an entire McDonald’s warehouse of chips on its shoulder, and a handful of genuinely provocative ideas which, exasperatingly, go nowhere much.

Maoz’s control of tone is meticulous and his technique swaggeringly assured, making Foxtrot a film that works best in the spine-prickling moment.

The film’s scope is limited, but as far as it goes, All Is Lost is very good indeed: a neat idea, very nimbly executed.

The film bears its real-world resonance as lightly as a button, thanks both to the steady supply of well-turned one-liners and the rippling chemistry between Nanjiani and a never-better Kazan, who’s so disarmingly funny here that I kept catching myself pulling puppy-dog faces whenever she was on screen.

King’s fluid direction of her four actors means the snug setting never feels dramatically constricting, while their jostling performance styles make each combination of voices feels like its own distinct treat.

Flawed but compelling ... [A] hallucinatory gimmick feels a few rewrites away from working smoothly, and the thematic linking of Philippa’s plight with that of her subject’s never quite convinces. But Hawkins is quietly impressive.

[Sachs'] subtle, often quite special film shows us a shared life as a series of impositions: sometimes we’re imposed upon, and sometimes we do the imposing, and love is the net result.

Neither clever nor stupid enough to work.

Watching del Toro’s film felt like playing with toys as big as skyscrapers, but everything about this successor feels trinket-sized.

Historical epics are rarely light on their feet, but The King sets new standards in the field of galumphing: the film moves like a rhinoceros through porridge.

It’s mostly very charming, if perhaps a bit self-consciously so, given Fleischer Camp’s tendency to gurgle delightedly on camera at every other line.

The Eternal Daughter is a minor film at least partly by design, but it leaves an ethereal trail of sadness and creepiness.

Blue might be the warmest colour elsewhere, but here it’s just a bit tepid.

That tension niggles away within The Highwaymen, a sporadically stodgy, dour production which often seems painfully aware that the really fun stuff is happening out of shot. But then Costner and Harrelson get to talking, the light lands on their features just so, and the film casts its own curmudgeonly spell.

Seydoux is coolly enthralling throughout: her mask-like face, often streaked with a single, strategic tear, mirrors the fundamental blankness of her line of work. Thanks to her performance, France is never less than intriguing. But it’s also extremely hard to get along with – a broadcast-news parable whose sense of purpose keeps fuzzing in and out.

The awkward middle course charted by new director James Foley (Glengarry Glen Ross, House of Cards) and his cast is unsatisfying in terms of head, heart and, well, elsewhere. It’s an alleged 18-rated, adults-only filth-fest that behaves like a flustered PG.

While it too often sands the complications off what you sense should feel like an uncomfortably splintery issue, in its best moments, it’s a quietly fearsome piece of drama.

Audiard’s expressionistic flourishes are in shorter supply here than usual, although the shootouts have a dreamlike quality, with pistols blasting showers of sparks like miniature steam train funnels.

Endless Poetry may not quite live up to its interminable billing, but there’s certainly lots of it, and a little goes a long way indeed. But a long way is the distance Jodorowsky wants to take you.

I can’t recall the last time I was so staggered by a film’s craftsmanship while feeling almost nothing else about it at all – little fear, less sadness, and barely a spark of actual excitement at anything beyond the high-wire nature of the filmmaking enterprise itself.

Adams almost makes it work through sheer force of musical-comedy will: her mimicry of “classic wicked stepmother poses” is a scream, and despite the thin material, she never looks less than fully, beamingly engaged. Even so, it’s hard not to wish she’d just stuck with her happily ever after first time around.

It’s a modest but polished psychological drama that keeps threatening to mutate into an old-fashioned toxic relationship thriller – and the tension between what it actually is and where it might be going makes it an enjoyably nerve-jangling watch.

The film unquestionably dices with slightness. But you don’t leave the cinema feeling that something was missing, and Tomlin, who appears in every scene, constructs a persuasive and highly watchable character.

It’s here to burnish one performer’s legend while laying the foundations of another’s. But there’s still lots of fun to be had in its twisting, telescoping hall of mirrors.

Dialogue aside, the craftsmanship is unimpeachable, and Gray takes a timeless approach to pacing and camerawork: even the sunlight is sepia-tinted. But the grand themes of loyalty and ambition never catch fire, and the film’s few truly memorable moments are invariably its smallest.

The action sequences here are armrest-gripping fun, and you only wish DeBlois and his animators had been even more confident; held their shots even longer; allowed us to enjoy the whistle of the wind and the curve of the dragons’ flight paths without hurriedly cutting away to another angle, and another, and another. When the film flies, it soars.

You’re left wishing that Adler had focused more on the no-win moral tangle of the handler-informant relationship, and less of the mechanics of its execution.