Robbie Collin

A Different Man mulls how cinema – and art more broadly – deals with disfigurement, but has even more fun holding its audience’s toes to the coals.

While there’s still (arguably) some fun to be had with this independent comedy’s double-entendre-friendly title, the laughs – such as they are – don’t extend a great deal further than that.

Kahn never allows his filmmaking to pull focus: at times, the camerawork could almost be documentary footage. But his craft is crisp, and the supporting cast so well picked that the arrival of each witness on screen comes with the satisfying thunk-y feel of an arrow hitting its target.

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

Baby Invasion, which premiered at Venice tonight, may be the stupidest film I have ever seen. And I use the word “may” only because I’m not entirely sure this thing actually is a film in the first place.

As a repeat performance – even a cunningly subversive one – Folie à Deux can’t quite match its predecessor for dizzying impact. But it matches it for horrible tinderbox tension: it’s a film you feel might burst into flames at any given moment.

Queer doesn’t scrimp on provocation and pleasure, but it’s also a beautiful film about male loneliness, and the way a solitary life can so easily shade into a life sentence.

Almodóvar has always been the sole screenwriter of his films – but perhaps in this case, keeping an English assistant in a nearby antechamber might have been a wise move.

As a state-of-the-US historical epic, it boasts all the thematic heft of Once Upon a Time in America or There Will Be Blood. (How did the wave of postwar immigrants remake America in their image – and how did America remake them in return?) But it’s also acted with the colour and fizz of a classical Hollywood comic drama, and shot with the loose, rangy energy of a 90-minute indie cult hit. The tonal mix feels completely unique, but it works.

The Order also works as a gripping procedural in its own right – a long-form game of investigative join-the-dots, built around a series of lethally disciplined action scenes.

Electrifying.

Jolie is given ample space to dazzle, but less to surprise. Dazzle she does though, with a fine understanding of just how camp she can go without proceedings becoming too operatic for their own good.

The baseline for these things should be a little higher than ‘doesn’t retroactively sour you on its predecessor’. Even today – never mind in another 36 years – it’s hard to imagine anyone with the option of watching the source plumping for thi

It’s a funny, insightful, sensationally acted account of art’s capacity to dissolve walls, and heighten, broaden and deepen the reach of our lives.

Romulus might inject an appalling new life into the Alien franchise, but it won’t do much good for the national birth rate.

This bright children’s adventure, loosely adapted from a picture book about a young boy whose drawings become real, feels like the sort of thing Jim Carrey might have made in his first flush of success. It’s silly, relentlessly amiable, and embraces the low-stakes playfulness of its conceit.

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.

The visual effects tower and terrify, but crucially, never as effects. The prevailing sense during every chase, escape and scramble for cover, is one of watching real people battle nerve-wilting odds.

At a time when digital animation is breaking radical new ground, it can be tempting to view the hand-drawn sort as its old-fashioned forebear, with no more scope to evolve. But Momose’s film elegantly proves otherwise: it has the artistry, but also the visionary spark.

“This isn’t your mother’s Mean Girls,” ran the mischievous campaign for last winter’s musical remake of that millennial hit. But this absolutely is your father’s (and grandfather’s) Beverly Hills Cop, and for all its brazen route-one idiocy I ended up wanting to give it a hug.

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.

This is pure filmmaking-by-paycheque: you can virtually hear the clock card machine crunching at the start of every scene, as cast and crew punch in dutifully for another shift.

Hopkins’ performance isn’t good, exactly, but it’s certainly interesting to watch, as the actor seems to swipe his lines of dialogue from the shelf in passing, as if playing a script version of Supermarket Sweep. Goode is restrained by comparison, but then the film does a lot of restraining on his behalf.

Crucially, Kelsey Mann’s film, co-written by returning screenwriter Meg LeFauve, gets Pixar back to doing what they always did best: juggling big concepts in fun and ingenious but also surprisingly wise and moving ways.

The film itself is a mesmerisingly gripping and controlled parable-thriller in which the paranoia, misogyny and rage of the Iranian state are mapped seamlessly onto an ordinary family unit.

It’s a black-and-white period piece invested with a supremely eerie folkloric edge – a bleak historical chapter made timeless, and all the more troubling for it.

Every character in Anora might be an utter nightmare, but they’re also a joy to spend time with, and the cast understand them down to their smallest behavioural tells.

The premise sounds as though it must invite a satirical reading, and there are many well-aimed ironic jabs at aspects of the leaders’ national character and the box-ticking rigmarole of modern politics. But directors Guy Maddin and brothers Evan and Galen Johnson – three beloved cult Canadian experimentalists – also poke fun at the notion that their intentions could be so clean-cut.