Robbie Collin

It is less a true-life thriller than a kind of justice procedural – and a sharp, scouring work of moral seriousness from Greengrass.

It feels like a Blazing Saddles gag writ large – no bad thing – and the jab of Mel Brooks humour it provides feels considerably more inspired than the hackneyed split screens, freeze frames and wobbly zooms which are regularly deployed in the rest of the film for winking grindhouse cred.

Despite its well-worn ideas and themes, Gary Ross’s provocative, pulse-surgingly tense adaptation couldn’t feel fresher, or timelier.

For a film that spends so much time with its thighs around other people’s throats, it has a surprisingly delicate touch.

The First Purge is as visually hair-raising as its predecessors, with the usual range of inventively horrible masks worn by the Purgers (the costume designer is Amela Baksic), and a brilliantly achieved transition from a hard-edged, social-realist visual style in the film’s opening act to the overtly John Carpenter-esque gloss and throb of Purge Night itself.

It’s the opposite of what a Borat film should feel like: business as usual.

Wan’s film is a sturdily built supernatural chiller, with next-to-no digital effects or gore, and it delivers its scares with a breezy lack of urgency.

The mood flits between solemn and rascally, and the pacing is measured: this is storytelling at a mosey rather than a trot.

This controlled unveiling of a fuller picture is certainly engaging, but the film has the respectful air of a tribute – to Bernheim, as opposed to her father – and its sheer seemliness means it lacks the intellectual and erotic fizz of Ozon’s best work.

The latest Marvel title is just dollop upon dollop of dourness, leaving its stars no space to show us what they might bring to the franchise.

There is something about the cast’s doughy physiques that has allowed Park’s flair for caricature to run completely berserk, with every character model pushed right to its expressive limits.

It’s hard to shake the suspicion that Depp is playing a type – almost as if he’s trying to replicate the kind of performance Nicholson might have given in the same role. You long for him to roll his sleeves up and grasp the character’s shape and soul himself, ideally without the aid of those distracting prosthetics.

The Hateful Eight is a parlour-room epic, an entire nation in a single room, a film steeped in its own filminess but at the same time vital, riveting and real.

One of those films whose plot and texture are entirely inseparable.

The film looks good and moves well. It earns its initially forbidding running time. It’s driven by human behaviour you might actually recognise.

Farhadi’s screenplay does an artful job of keeping vital fragments of each of its characters secret until the very end. But the climate of over-determined melodrama is rather less involving: characters synopsise their grievances so often, and so thoroughly, that many pivotal scenes have the corny texture of a “previously, on last week’s show” clip reel.

There’s so much in this seething cauldron of a film, so many film-industry neuroses exposed and horrors nested within horrors, that one viewing is too much, and not nearly enough. Cronenberg has made a film that you want to unsee – and then see and unsee again.

It’s a film which understands the pleasure of seeing familiar roads driven with consummate expertise. The F does stand for formula, after all.

Its star isn’t exactly overburdened with Hollywood charisma, and its various argumentative manoeuvres are pulled off with the grace of a reversing bin lorry. But it still politely seizes you by the lapels, makes its case with range and precision, and sends you home with a carbon-neutral fire in your chest.

There’s fun to be had here of an undemanding sort – but anything fresh, or memorable, or remotely unexpected? Neigh, neigh and thrice neigh.

This is an energised romantic drama overflowing with humour and passion.

As before, the act of watching with an audience is part of the fun, with each pin-drop-silent sequence playing as a challenge to viewers to maintain their collective hush at all costs. This is the pleasant surprise of the summer so far. See it. Don’t bring crisps.

it’s often very funny indeed. The mood is often closer to the perkier passages of the Connery films, and the humour feels contemporary and British: the Phoebe Waller-Bridge script polish evidently yielded the desired result.

As filmmaking, it’s as mindless as Hollywood’s worst.

The film is so myopically gripped by the idea of Marvel as endlessly fascinating corporate soap opera that in five years time, you wonder if it will make any sense at all.

It’s a watchable national identity crisis in microcosm.

Indeed, in a genre infamous for feints and teases, Gunn’s kitchen-sink approach feels refreshingly generous, and his excitement for the character shines through.

Aronofsky’s sixth film is not the Noah you know, but a hundred-million-dollar Chinese whisper; a familiar story made newly poetic and strange with a flavour that’s less Genesis than Revelation.