Robbie Collin

Fennell has a sharp eye for outrage, and an even sharper one for hotness, crafting any number of scenarios and images here that may elicit sotto voce phwoars against your better judgement.

The director’s 28th feature is a magnificent slab of dad cinema, with Phoenix a startling emperor and Vanessa Kirby brilliant as his wife.

The Hunger Games prequel plunges us back into the futuristic empire of Panem – but fails to live up to the first films of the franchise.

The shortest of the films yet is also the most interminable, a knot of nightmares that groans with the series' now-trademark VFX sloppiness.

A lot gets packed in here, none of it good.

Nikou’s film is wonderfully astute on love’s unruliness: it wants you to both delight in and despair of it, and have fun doing both.

While the plot often has a trudgy, through-the-motions feel, the same can’t be said for the animation itself, especially in the musical interludes.

This uproarious sequel to the Bristol studio’s beloved debut feature, which premiered at the London Film Festival today, takes what mercifully no one has yet labelled the Chicken Run Cinematic Universe and moves it on precisely one cultural notch.

Nichols’ film delivers a grubbily glamorous blast of underworld machismo of the sort that Scorsese himself made a mid-career speciality: think wildly charismatic performances, elegant camerawork, regular jabs of barbarous violence, and a skin-fizzingly sharp jukebox soundtrack.

The folklore underpinning The Boy and the Heron is crazily sui generis: it rushes and sparkles and sploshes like a child’s imagination, making the sort of synaptic leaps in both image-making and storytelling that should be impossible for an adult brain to pull off.

This pensive science-fiction three-hander, adapted by the Lion and Mary Magdalene director and Iain Reid from the latter’s 2018 novel, quickly settles into its solemn, elliptical groove – and then sticks to it so doggedly, it becomes a tonal rut from which the film increasingly struggles to escape.

Giamatti isn’t playing a type, so much as a man who has taken refuge inside one in order to armour himself against the more exposing aspects of human existence. It’s a riotous but also slyly moving performance of a performance – and, along with Randolph’s, is rightly being talked about for awards.

The Miracle Club’s own manoeuvrings can, at times, feel a bit pat and convenient. But its final moment of reconciliation – Smith and Linney back home by the shore, having pruned back 40 years of emotional overgrowth – justifies the trip.

In a pivotal scene, the younger Nicholas explains to his colleagues that he has faith in ordinary people because, well, an ordinary person is all that he is. One Life’s wholehearted embrace of that sentiment is the root of its limitations – and its potency too.

Stripped back to basics, Saw’s appeal (if that’s the word) is certainly clearer than it’s been for a while; the series isn’t really horror at all, but a revenge thriller taken to deliberately appalling test-your-nerve extremes.

First-time writer-director Chloe Domont beats a sly, perceptive path across this tricky psychological turf.

In every shot, the mix of gritty local colour and artful digital augmentations is riveting: you’re always vaguely aware that what you’re looking at can’t all be real, but the line which splits reality from fantasy is impossible to spot.

How can it be possible that nine years have passed since the previous instalment, yet every facet of this one feels so woefully first-draft? Expend4bles: wh4t a lo4d of cr4p.

El Conde is a visual feast as much as a visceral one, but its artful poise belies its bloodlust. Larraín is making his points here not with fang-like precision, but a gleeful crocodilian chomp.

On a first viewing, I wasn’t quite convinced by some of the glitchy japes Bonello deploys here and there . . . But perhaps he wants us to think of the film itself like its torn heroine: a strange machine whose ghost refuses to give up.

Hit Man trips along on great writing, Linklater’s witty, light-touch direction and a rich sense of place, but what makes it especially pleasurable is Powell and Arjona’s naturally steamy rapport.

There was barely a scene in Dogman that didn’t have me yelping in disbelief.

Given his otherwise grim recent form, Allen himself may have simply got lucky with this one, but the charm and sparkle here are real.

The vibe is documentary plus poetry – a little Andrea Arnold, a little Chloé Zhao – with symbolic touches that might have felt a bit much (see: recurring visions of bison) had they not been so carefully leavened with down-to-earth warmth and wit.

The film’s signature move is poking around the strange psychological grey space between being kept and being caught.

Much of the pleasure of the film is in procedure: watching someone work diligently and knowledgeably towards a goal that just happens to be murder. But a darkly fun tension emerges between its anti-hero’s internalised principles and how he actually behaves when pressed.

Not everything in it lands cleanly, but even its misses excite, and its direct hits are knockouts.

This triumphant adaptation, which premiered last night at Venice, strip-mines Gray’s book for all its funniest, fizziest and sexiest ideas, and leaves the chewier, more literary stuff on paper, where it belongs. I’d say purists might bridle, but speaking as one of them, I wasn’t just relieved, but overjoyed.