Robbie Collin

There’s a subtle, astute parable here about the media’s role in the shaping and streamlining of public morality – happily wrapped in a romp.

For all its world-building sprawl, The Way of Water is a horizon-narrowing experience – the sad sight of a great filmmaker reversing up a creative cul-de-sac.

The film’s tendency to go broad wherever possible renders it fairly un-scary, while in place of Get Out’s deep and needling cultural allegory we instead get pointed jabs at American film and television trends. It’s all good fun as far as it goes, but Story and his cast could have afforded to sharpen their own blades a bit.

All-pervasive millennial unease – the sense the world no longer works as it used to, or should – is Vox Lux’s plangent root-position chord, and the film offers no easy cure – beyond Celeste’s genuinely great, and Gaga-like, music.

Everything that works in Nocturnal Animals is intoxicating, provocative, delicious – and happily, so is everything that doesn’t.

Effectively the Marx brothers’ Duck Soup with a Cuban spin. It looks cheap, which is funny in itself, and satire and spoofery are crammed in until it bulges at the seams.

Like the original, T2 is happy enough spending time with its characters whatever they get up to. Very little that happens in the film seems to affect where it’s going, and the few things that do feel dashed off, almost as an afterthought. It’s also littered with callbacks to the first film – some as stirring as they are subtle, others exasperatingly cute.

[An] impish and riveting talking-heads piece.

Would the film have ideally been a bit smarter? Perhaps. But it gets all of the dumb stuff just right.

There’s an unmistakeable timidity to director Leigh Janiak and Phil Graziadei’s screenplay: it feels odd to watch an 18-rated horror that feels as if it’s going out of its way not to offend.

The Last Duel, which was adapted from a non-fiction book by Eric Jager, is a knotty, stimulating drama with a piquant #MeToo edge and the heft and splendour of an old-school historical epic.

Carax has an unparalleled knack for constructing scenes that feel like vividly remembered dreams – some of the images here carry such a strange dual charge, by turns eerie and drily comic, that you find yourself wondering afterwards if they actually happened, or if your subconscious has been playing join-the-dots.

For a franchise in need of refreshment, it’s anything but a quantum leap.