Simran Hans

There is about as much jeopardy as you’d expect from an action thriller about an obscure land dispute; a tense encounter with an angry polar bear and a phantom hot air balloon are highlights during the endless plodding across the frozen wilderness.

Letts gives thoughtful context to the way he was able to straddle the racially delineated worlds of dub reggae and punk rock, drawing parallels between the merging of subcultures in 1970s London, and the intersection of hip-hop and rock’n’roll in 1980s New York.

Poehler, herself a gifted comedian, doesn’t include her own voice in the film, though we still get a sense of her feminist perspective.

Basholli understands that healing is possible, even if closure isn’t.

Despite the inherent silliness, the actors play it straight. There’s an earnestness to Rylance’s performance, which encourages us to find inspiration in the underdog.

Diallo utilises the visual language of horror – red lighting, empty shower stalls, a gnarled hand that emerges from under the bed – to express the terror of racism and the rot of its legacy.

The latest film from horror director Ti West (The House of the Devil), about a porn movie shoot gone wrong, is ripe with playful winks and nudges.

Zoë Kravitz is a highlight as cocktail waitress turned cat burglar Selina Kyle.

Ostrochovský’s camera emphasises the constricting architecture of both church and state, with its black and white morality and a claustrophobic central courtyard, frequently portrayed via stiff, judgmental God’s-eye shots.

The film’s message is a beautiful one: to integrate our real-life vulnerabilities with the persona we project is to become all the more powerful.

When Fine encourages him to elaborate, Wilson isn’t especially articulate, but his emotional responses to the individual songs are often lucid and revealing.

Hadjithomas and Joreige thoughtfully explore trauma while remaining joyful, animating Maia’s photos, which fizz, crackle and dance to life on screen.

Adams is a vivacious screen presence with a twinkle in her eye, and Jordan can’t quite match her, unable to draw out any real inner turmoil in a character who is respectable to a fault.

Kenneth Branagh’s unabashedly feelgood memoir of growing up in Belfast as the Troubles erupted in the late 1960s suffers from a problem of perspective.

The film is obsessed with deconstructing good screenwriting, the way a line lands, and ensuring clear character motivation.

The smug asides plastered on screen, and the hyperactive inserts of nature documentary footage do nothing to raise the film’s real-life stakes.

Jóhannsson teases the possibility of a monster, but waits to reveal his hand. When he does, there’s more than a touch of gallows humour. I laughed out loud at his audacity, and had nightmares later.

The film is best when it sticks to children’s caper mode, jostled along by gentle toilet humour, bad-tempered barnyard animals and a scene of two kids driving a van across Manhattan.

This thoughtful documentary about Arthur Ashe, the first African American man to win Wimbledon in 1975, understands that representation is only one step towards equality.

The film is a utopian riff on the apocalyptic source material, a Technicolor reimagining flooded with light and optimism.

The film has a cold, abstract beauty.

The film can’t resist revelling in a conservative conclusion outside Buckingham Palace, with a victory banner fluttering against a smattering of St George’s flags.

The film’s bluesy woodwind score has a teasing, goading quality that feels tinged with melancholy; the spectre of Aids hovers around the film’s edges.

Film-maker Jamila Wignot pays particular attention to the specificity of Ailey’s black influences: the church, blues music and his southern upbringing, all of which informed his best-known work, Revelations (1960).

Refreshingly, Farhadi is ambivalent towards his “hero”, and his control over the film’s tone is masterful; what begins as funny and almost farcical, soon shifts into something much sadder and more sobering.

MacKay is muted; his character is teased for his reserve, a quality he shares with the film. Niewöhner gives the sparkier performance, as a passionate German nationalist whose loyalty has flipped.

Simon Kinberg’s film feels aggressively focus-grouped for the girl-boss crowd.

It’s a bouncy, grin-inducing romp through Caribbean takeaways, designer boutiques stacked with Moschino streetwear and one ill-advised trip south of the river.

The story is a little flat, but the gorgeous, hand-crafted puppets and sets give the film dimension.

What’s interesting and unexpected is the film’s subtle acknowledgement of culturally specific generational trauma and displacement.

Alexandra Shipp is a grounding presence as Larson’s girlfriend, Susan, while Garfield fizzes with energy and outsize emotion. He’s a fabulous crier and pitch-perfect as a shrill, preening narcissist who manages, against the odds, to remain resolutely likable.

In theory, natural light is more forgiving than its artificial counterpart: in photographs, it makes the subject look less harsh. Less so here.

Sudanese film-maker Amjad Abu Alala’s radiant drama dares to wonder if death could inspire courage rather than fear.

There’s something touching about seeing the 91-year-old Eastwood in such a reflective mood.

What could have been a disaster in the hands of a less sensitive film-maker ends up an extraordinary feat of care, collaboration and creativity.

As far as the plot is concerned, almost nothing happens, and yet Andreas Fontana’s sinewy debut teems with unseen threat. He crafts an atmosphere of grubbiness despite all the polished surfaces.

It’s satisfyingly gross – there’s plenty of black bile, crunching bones and half-chewed bodies. Russell, best known for her radiant portrayal of a domestic abuse survivor in Adrienne Shelly’s Waitress, is clever casting too.

Hall emphasises the moral grey area by shooting in black and white, an ingenious choice that allows her to light Clare as black or white.

The debut feature from animation studio Locksmith is cute but familiar.

In an improvement on the film’s predecessor, director Andy Serkis dispenses with detailed explanations and instead amps up the humour, leaning into the goofy, flirtatious dynamic between Venom and Brock.

A more conventional director might have chosen to focus on their most famous member, Reed, but Haynes smartly structures the film as a group show, giving space to the women in the ensemble.

Though Brühl is an affable and witty screen presence, there’s no getting round the fact that the film is a vanity project.

[A] tender observational documentary.

Alexis Louder holds her own as the heroine of (and sole woman in) Joe Carnahan’s lean, mean, 70s-inspired action thriller.

The director treats the film as an empathy exercise, hoping to complicate and humanise a terrorist. Yet this is undermined by the obvious red flags that she plants in each section. Saeed’s flight path becomes a foregone conclusion.

The film’s abrupt tonal shifts are jarring.

The journey is a nice excuse to paint Tom into a cheerily cosmopolitan portrait of the UK.

Though this stolid drama, based on a true case, begins as a procedural, about systems, processes and deadlines, it is most absorbing when it zeroes in on one man’s moral arc.

The overall tone is one of wry knowingness, which is DaCosta’s achilles heel.

Whishaw’s intensity is gripping to watch but the character remains opaque; whether we’re meant to read Joseph as experiencing psychosis or simply suffering the unforgiving conditions of city life under capitalism is ambiguous.

Though the film is teed up as a kind of John Wick-style revenge bender, Cage’s star persona is soon smartly subverted.

The fuzzy plotting is balanced by Hall’s brilliantly controlled performance as the caustic, sceptical Beth, whose grief has pushed her to the knife edge of sanity.

From his cheesy narration (“Nothing is more addictive than the past,” Nick solemnly opines) to the movie’s double-crossing femme fatale and nocturnal, neon-lit setting, the director has great fun playing with genre tropes, but it’s unclear whether she’s going for heightened camp.

[A] sensitive, frequently harrowing observational documentary.

Rarely does a half-hour TV show successfully stretch itself into a 90-minute film. It’s a nice surprise, then, that the popular BBC mockumentary works as a feature.

The film is a meticulously, perhaps even cynically crafted crowd-pleaser. Even those alive to its tactics might find themselves wiping away a tear or two.

Indecision and miscommunication, it turns out, are timeless. Sexiness less so, with Jones and Rizwan not quite able to summon the smouldering chemistry of Woodley and Turner.

The ratcheting tension is sadly punctured by unintentionally hilarious scenes of ambitious “research” by journalist Amy (Valene Kane), mostly involving frantic Googling and YouTube tutorials on “how to look younger”.

Directed by Oscar-winner Tom McCarthy (Spotlight), this is a thoughtful, knotty character study, albeit one nestled inside a polished, and less interesting, action thriller.

The film is understated rather than mawkish.

The film’s second half suffers from frantic pacing and overstuffed action sequences.

Dujardin plays it ingeniously straight, embarking on a violent rampage set to French lounge music.

The cartoonish tone of the relentless violence feels at odds with the otherwise sombre, apocalyptic mood.

James’s natural charisma should allow the film to soar but he’s bogged down by an avalanche of distracting cameos, from Gremlins to Game of Thrones.

Writer-director Jeremy Hersh tackles the intersection of race, sexuality, class and disability with rare nuance in this wry indie drama, which observes sharply the trappings of millennial entitlement and liberal hypocrisy.

Alma Pöysti is luminous as Jansson, bringing to life her playful, pleasure-seeking artist’s spirit.

Merlant’s performance is committed, and the film takes her romantic and sexual fixation with the ride seriously, immersing the viewer in her dazzling, neon-lit world.

If writing is a democratic art and social leveller, Marcello indicts the celebrity author as a sellout, steamrolling their way to success.

The film spends scant time exploring the implications of these darker themes, and doesn’t attempt to understand the root of Dreykov’s god complex. Instead, it’s more comfortable in comedy mode.

Pontecorvo seems particularly interested in conveying the gravitas of Lúcia’s spiritual burden, which is anchored by Gil, who is full of quiet intensity and impressive conviction.

Footage of recent concerts and meet and greets is included to showcase both her imperious glamour and how far she’s come, yet we never really get a sense of where she’s been, let alone My Life’s musical and cultural context.

Prior acquaintance with the eight previous instalments of this colossal action movie franchise isn’t necessary for enjoyment of this one – the film’s muscle cars and maximalist approach continue to serve it well.

Von Horn understands the gap between Sylwia’s authenticity online – mediated through the safety of a screen – and the intimacy her followers feel entitled to in real life.

The frenetic pacing, intended to sweep the audience along, can’t draw attention away from Irvine Welsh and Dean Cavanagh’s platitude-riddled script.

To suggest Krasinski is only interested in surface thrills feels at odds with the seriousness of his craft. Judicious pacing, clever cross-cutting and visceral sound design build tension, but there’s an absence of soul, and no satisfying sense of what the monsters might be a metaphor for.

Wright is sympathetic and believable, but we never truly get a sense of Edee or her desires outside the bounds of her loss.

With its hero’s journey structure, punchily edited racing scenes and warmly drawn oddball community (a widow, Maureen, is obsessed with Tunnock’s Tea Cakes), the film is shamelessly predictable and thoroughly feelgood.

Crawford is brilliant and bitter as a soon-to-be divorced dad unable to accept his fate.

To call the film meditative would be to undersell Kosakovskiy’s instinct for drama and tension.

For a film about magic, there’s little sparkle to spare.

It’d be easy to mistake the director’s deadpan observation for mocking, but the space he holds for the darker aspects of his characters’ individual stories helps to puncture any cultivated cutesyness.

Unfortunately, the second half is over-reliant on flashy disaster set pieces, blazing towards a predictable, melodramatic conclusion.

Valadez’s expressionist images give texture to the abstract emotions of rage and pain.

Shanley has an Oscar and a Pulitzer (he wrote the sublime Moonstruck, and the stage and screen versions of Doubt). Here, that’s easy to forget, given the cartoon accents and overblown metaphors about horses destined to jump the fence.

The film retains a warm sense of humour about technology’s grip on society.

Levine’s playful deconstruction of tortured genius is a witty and provocative send-up of tyrannical directors, diva-ish actors and over-invested voyeurs alike.

Kawase’s frequent use of handheld camera gives parts of the film a quasi-documentary feel, but it’s the lyrical touches . . . that hit the hardest.

There’s just enough magic and mystery to tease out a supernatural reading of the film, though Petzold encourages viewers to find pleasure in puzzling out his femme fatale for themselves.

The styling is at odds with the otherwise straightforward courtroom narrative. The prestige procedural elements work better; the real-life story is enraging, and it’s fun to see Benedict Cumberbatch’s morally conflicted military prosecutor lock horns with Foster’s icy human rights lawyer.

The spectacle is more involving than the plot, especially the dazzling image of Kong floating skyward, serene and surrounded by purple glowing rocks.

Rosi’s broader critique of violence is implied through footage of a play performed by patients in a psychiatric hospital, and of a children’s art therapy class. He is more interested in the reverberations of conflict than the source, focusing on those who have suffered its effects directly.

There is an incandescence and a buoyancy to the animation that elevates the formula.

The comedy doesn’t work quite as well this way around, though Fowler is extremely likable as a sweet-natured slacker, channelling the endearing guilelessness of Murphy’s original Prince Akeem. Still, there are enough in-jokes and returning characters to keep fans happy.

Maslany is magnetic, her coiled fury and sexual energy threatening to erupt as her placid partner plods along beside her.

Favier is smart on the mechanics of abuse, and the sobering inevitability of her heroine’s downhill skid.

These self-consciously upbeat moments clash horribly with the wider redemption narrative.

The sci-fi stuff is tedious, but Wiig and Mumolo are bawdy and brilliant as ever, their effortless chemistry bolstered by years of collaboration.

Perhaps wisely, Ryan White’s slick documentary chooses not to mine the bizarre scene for comic potential. Instead, he spins the arrest of Siti Aisyah and Doan Thi Huong – economic migrants from Indonesia and Vietnam respectively – into a parable about political corruption.

The showy singer turned actor struggles to modulate his natural charisma, a flirtatious, extroverted energy repeatedly leaking out where it should be muffled.

Sukhitashvili’s subtle performance brings interiority to a character who might otherwise be defined entirely by her suffering.

The ensemble cast electrifies Powers’s dialogue, jockeying between black power and integration, activism and commerce, spiritual clarity, pork chops and sex.

The whole thing feels strangely pedestrian, unable to capture or channel Bowie’s maverick spirit.

The impish Leslie Mann is well cast as his dead wife, Elvira, who provides a jolt of creative inspiration. Judi Dench’s screechy caricature of psychic Madame Arcati is less winning.

Pollard’s decision to eschew traditional talking heads in favour of voiceover interviews allows the archive to take centre stage.

My Rembrandt is at its most interesting when struggling to reconcile the slow, careful work of art restoration with the crass, instant gratification on acquiring such rarefied objects.

The sense of the watering hole as a haven for lost souls – not to mention the threat of gentrification to civic space – couldn’t be more vérité.

Like Barry Jenkins’s If Beale Street Could Talk and Todd Haynes’s Carol, Ashe takes the form of the 50s melodrama and recentres it on characters the genre has tended to ignore. This isn’t as politically restless as those films – it’s less interested in subverting the “woman’s picture” than establishing itself as one.

There aren’t any isolated moments as cinematic as Byrne’s tender lamp dance in Jonathan Demme’s 1984 concert film Stop Making Sense, but the director’s playfulness is felt.

There are three sides to every story in Ekwa Msangi’s vivid and carefully observed feature debut, and so she cleverly splits the film into thirds, replaying the action but changing the vantage point with each chapter.

This intimate observational documentary explores poverty in Sicily from two different vantage points, drawing poetic connections between lives that don’t appear to touch.

Set pieces . . . are thrilling and judiciously spaced. The performances Clooney draws out are even better.

Reorienting a typically white male genre around themes of feminist awakening and racial tension is an intriguing proposition, so it’s frustrating that Brosnahan remains blank and the film’s pace plodding.

The performances create anthropological distance, not human empathy.

Brits Hunnam, O’Connell and Barden are strangely well cast as its all-American grifters. (Hunnam in particular gives a finely tuned performance as a washed-up smooth talker who still knows how to flirt.)

Stewart is low key and likable, creating real emotional stakes and strategically using her signature shoulders-down shuffle. A pity, then, that she and Davis don’t quite have the romcom chemistry needed to secure the film’s place in the Christmas movie canon.

As Amber becomes more comfortable with her queerness, the taciturn Eddie retreats inwards. Their parallel journeys dispense with a one-size-fits-all coming-out narrative and are handled with a lightness of touch by Irish writer and director David Freyne.

Stokes is a fascinating, elusive protagonist – she was a recluse who enjoyed daily martinis and felt a kinship with Steve Jobs. Yet Wolf treats her archive with reverence, rather than writing her off as an eccentric.

The film is shrewd on male friendship, suggesting that a lot of men are vulnerable and crave intimacy, but are often too poor at communicating to truly reach for it.

Genuine jump scares are bolstered by the film’s spooky sound design, as well as terrific performances from Dirisu and Mosaku, whose terror is palpable.

With Neeson well within the confines of his comfort zone, tailed by corrupt cops and diving out of hotel windows, the film should be better. Yet it drags.

Rubika Shah’s smart, spirited feature debut is a whistle-stop tour of a DIY uprising.

On relationships, July remains as perceptive as ever.

[A] warm, funny and enjoyably rude debut.

Documentaries should be more than a vehicle for information. Here, the message is hard to argue with, but the medium – an excess of music video-style cutting, contemporary pop culture montages and literal music cues – does the material no favours.

The film is called Misbehaviour, but a timid script belies mischief of any sort.

The Roads Not Taken is frequently moving, and a fascinating creative idea, but without sufficient information about Leo’s character to anchor the narrative, it feels too abstract.

The premise of writer Natalie Krinsky’s directorial debut sounds cheesy, and it is, but watching the brooding Nick softening to putty in our goofball heroine’s presence while she remains sparkily oblivious is an earnest pleasure.

Alternately hilarious and spine-tingling, it recalls David Lynch’s Twin Peaks in its serious, penetrating sense of doom.

Hyperactive editing, the jittery rap score and an obligatory acid trip scene grate, but Doff’s social commentary is sharp.

Nolan’s desire to stimulate both the blood and the brain feels earnest. What’s frustrating is that he doesn’t trust his audience to follow along.

The source material is a neat fit for the Italian film-maker, who traversed similarly episodic fairytale terrain with 2015’s Tale of Tales. It’s also a critique of society that feels timeless or, rather, timely – and not just for Garrone.

The use of the notoriously media-shy Margiela’s warm, serious spoken voice helps to create intimacy, even though we never see his face.

Millennial self-interest and performative liberal politics are contrasted with “authentic”, let-it-all-hang-out conservatism. It’s a simplistic critique. Still, the frequently charming Rogen brings enough of his affable, nice guy credibility to each character to ground both loose cannon Herschel and his straight man foil.

Eerie images of a bloodied fingernail and long grass lit by amber floodlights signal Oakley’s sly sense of humour and eye for visual poetry.

This zippy car chase thriller shares some DNA with Joel Schumacher’s 1993 black comedy Falling Down . . . . Both are darkly funny studies and send-ups of emasculated men, with Crowe’s character claiming to have been “dismissed as the unworthiest fuck to ever walk the planet”.

The feelgood tone feels a little flaccid.

High-class sex work is presented as a financial quick fix and a route to female empowerment, but the film’s sex-positive politics gloss over any of the job’s potential pitfalls.

The jokes are brutal and very funny, with Benjamin the butt of most of them.

It might be staged, but it has a scrappy, fly-on-the-wall feel.

The momentum really builds in the third act, but the film’s quieter moments of contemplation are its most striking.

Characters and storylines appear to have been chosen at random by a Woody Allen meme generator.

What differentiates Sendijarević’s film, however, is the hot-blooded current of feminine lust that runs through it. Zorić’s Alma stomps, pouts and scowls her way through the film, aware of her sexual power and unafraid to use it to her advantage.

It shouldn’t work yet it does, underscoring the tragedy of corrupted innocence, constricting codes of masculinity and the aftermath of trauma.

The only bum note is the music itself, despite the presence of prestige pop stars including Justin Timberlake, Kelly Clarkson and Mary J Blige.

Gelbakhiani is commanding in his first acting role, metabolising heartbreak and moving with an irrepressible prowling sensuality.

Sci-fi wipe transitions, 70s-style CinemaScope photography, a drone shaped like a UFO, and a cameo from German actor Udo Kier are clever genre flourishes that playfully deliver the film’s anticolonial politics.

It’s not subtle, or particularly clever, though Glow’s Betty Gilpin is fun to watch as an ultra-violent ex-military veteran with a southern drawl.

Laxe has a masterly command of rhythm and pacing. The action feels unhurried, despite the film’s tight running time, and there is a spaciousness to the world-building; attentive sound design and 16mm photography capture Galicia’s damp, green allure.

The performances, especially the brittle Louis-Dreyfus, are admirably grounded, but the script’s comedy wastes time with lazy barbs about European brusqueness and American exceptionalism abroad.

Ruffalo optioned the rights to Nathaniel Rich’s original article and has an executive producer credit on the film; clearly, he has a stake in the material. The actor is excellent as reluctant hero Bilott, muting his natural charisma to create a character who is both taciturn and generous, determined but socially ill at ease.

This Kelly is motivated by an oedipal complex and wears dresses to distract his opponents; The Babadook’s Essie Davis is equal parts fearsome and magnetic as his enterprising sex worker mother. More enjoyable still are the film’s corrupt policemen; the louche, stockinged, pipe-smoking Constable Fitzpatrick (Nicholas Hoult) and virile cartoon villain Sergeant O’Neil (Charlie Hunnam).

The parallels drawn between Fabienne’s life and the stories she’s drawn to are a little on the nose. “What matters most is personality! Presence!” she declares, determined not to fade into obscurity. Deneuve’s luminous performance ensures she won’t.

Subverting the original text’s point of view allows Whannell to privilege his female protagonist while continuing to explore the novel’s theme of untrammelled power.

Kasbe makes the most of his extraordinary access by presenting the film vérité style, preferring to immerse the audience in his characters’ lives to better make the case for each of their choices.

Eye-popping is one way to describe the prolific Japanese director’s 103rd film, a cheerfully pulpy Tokyo-set noir.

Marsden is charming enough, summoning surprising chemistry with Schwartz, and so it’s not total torture spending an hour and a half with the pair. Yet for better or worse, it doesn’t linger.

This harrowing retelling of Norwegian rightwing extremist Anders Behring Breivik’s 2011 terrorist attack on the island of Utøya is less exploitative than Paul Greengrass’s brutal, Netflix-bound, English-language version, but the question remains: does a tragedy have to be turned into cinema for people to engage with it?

Frat boy humour is dressed up in an expensive, arthouse jacket.

It’d be easy to map Gilliam on to Grisoni, a film-maker dogged by his artistic misfires and the mess left in their wake. Really, though, he’s Quixote, stuck in a noble past and wilfully disconnected from a present that jostles uncomfortably close.

There is an elegant, even-handed character study buried within Clint Eastwood’s crisp procedural.

The tone veers haphazardly from tense, high-stakes cat-and-mouse chase to ill-judged satire.

Trey Edward Shults’s bombastic third feature crashes and recedes, leaving few revelations in its wake.

Malick links the lonely labour of working the land with the thanklessness of sainthood, asking questions about devotion, tradition and individual acts of resistance. Mileage (and the film is three hours) will likely depend on your tolerance for the director’s signature poetic style.

[A] remarkable documentary.

The film can’t square the fact that its protagonists are the victims of sexism and yet perpetuate it by sheer virtue of working for a rightwing news channel.

The film shies away from any kind of political commentary, and as a result feels oddly sapped of fire or urgency.

More than 70 civil and criminal charges have been lodged against the family. Marcos flaunted her wealth while her country’s living standards plummeted, and Greenfield’s portrait is damning.

Guy Ritchie’s latest gangster comedy presents itself as a harmless romp, but behind its wink-wink-nudge-nudge humour is a bitter and dated worldview.

Gibney struggles to psychologically penetrate his cold antihero.

The camera’s canted angles and shaky closeups convulse with feeling that the actors can’t seem to summon. Ensemble dance sequences convey neither emotion nor information (except that the felines each have 10 fully articulated human toes). The film is rated U, but many of its uncanny images are sure to haunt viewers for generations.

There’s a pulpy, comic-book noir to this highly enjoyable thriller, whose rules and parameters are clear.

So often, historical films are stale and mired in misery, but Harriet has a rare buoyancy.

The more times I listen to Frozen II’s rousing anthem Into the Unknown, the more I’m convinced of its earworm quality. It’s as good (and maybe better) than the indelible Let It Go.

Talbot’s film is not perfect. A scene set to Joni Mitchell’s Blue makes its point awkwardly, and the narrative, like its characters, is prone to meandering. Yet as a film about place and personal mythology, it’s hugely moving.

[A] wonky, charming satire.

As a genre exercise, it mostly works; set pieces are tense, explosive and pleasingly gory, littered with flying scraps of metal and meat. Davis in particular is an authoritative presence. As a sequel, it’s baldly opportunistic, grab-bagging contemporary political issues (reproductive justice; undocumented migrants) in a transparent attempt to justify its cultural relevance.

There’s perhaps an over-reliance on voiceover by way of letters and emails, though the film’s unvarnished formal directness is a good thing, given the sensitive material.

It’s not unfunny watching McConaughey smoke a joint from between Isla Fisher’s toes, but some viewers may find themselves less enamoured of Moondog than the film is.

Inspired by real events, the film is at its best when it leans into the action-adventure genre; director Tom Harper smartly uses camera-shake and closeups to immerse the audience in the weather’s volatility.

There’s a note of truth in Bell’s finely tuned performance as a character whose insecurities have calcified over the years, hardening her to genuine goodwill, which she frequently misreads as pity.

This story of motherhood and moral conundrums, of privilege and philanthropy and “worthy causes” is one whose dramatic twists and soapy reveals feel at odds with the cultivated tone of serious, muted elegance.

The new material is fresher and considerably more fun.

Enitan’s trauma is revelled in but for what? Few new truths are learned here. A rushed, redemptive montage towards the film’s end is presented as ickily aspirational.

Probably, the intention was to make explicit the connections between Theo’s past and present, but there’s not enough detail or characterisation for this structural intervention to work. Without those connecting narrative bones, the result is all flab and no flavour.

There is an elegance to the premise – an otherwise straightforward cat-and-mouse chase around a gothic mansion – and a satisfying clip to the rewardingly gory action.

The film works hard to complicate the character of Widner, but flattens the pernicious culture that formed him.

There is something queasy about mining such fresh real-life trauma for popcorn entertainment.

No-nonsense beekeper Hatidze Muratova’s face is as weathered and craggy as the cliff face we see her scaling at the start of this gripping, Sundance-winning documentary.

It’s lighthearted stuff and mostly benign too, save its unashamedly effusive stance on the monarchy.

Perhaps too reliant on the structure of the original article, which tells the events in flashback, the film wraps up a little hastily. Brilliantly, though, the editing is teasing rather than explicit; Scafaria offers just enough of the girls and their bodies to get pulses racing without exploiting them or their story.

With its drab, overpowering score, this tedious drama is nearly as gruelling as the trek up Scotland’s Suilven.

The film’s teen protagonists, meanwhile, are chaste children’s book heroes, but the horror, based on illustrator Stephen Gammell’s drawings, has a gruesome quality that feels too full-on for youngsters.

The scenes of family bonding are tiresome but the action is mostly tense and cheerfully bloody.

Butler is convincingly sturdy as Banning, but the film’s politics are shaky.

Fascinatingly, in this world there are only fascists, making the film’s looming riot police feel like a real and relevant threat.

It’s not unfunny, but one joke can’t sustain the entire movie.

Dern brings a hungry, manic energy to Albert, a sad and troubled woman who used LeRoy as a vehicle to process her own childhood trauma, while Stewart’s performance is typically interiorised and exacting.

The result is goofily charming and a rare, age-appropriate children’s film in which the adults are silly and the kids, especially the girls, are smart.

It is gleefully dorky, hopelessly earnest, sincere, quite possibly to a fault. It unfolds as a series of Springsteen-soundtracked set pieces, each shamelessly engineered to maximise catharsis, cheering and possibly weeping from the audience.

Cameos from Awkwafina, Nicki Minaj and Pete Davidson, and a subplot involving a trio of adorable hatchlings, are amusing diversions, but Jones’s dynamic voice work is the highlight.

This bland, sombre love story from the director of The Lunchbox (2013) lacks that film’s flavour.

Sometimes there is pleasure to be found in brainless action, but the extended video game-style finale left me furious and fatigued.

Patel excels as a smouldering, enigmatic antihero who gradually begins to drop his defences; Apte might be even better as the duplicitous femme fatale.

As a genre exercise, the film starts promisingly enough, contrasting claustrophobic, dimly lit interiors with atmospheric wides of the landscape composed like moody paintings. Worthington-Cox is compelling, by turns twitchy, tentative, stoic and bold. Still, something isn’t clicking.

What’s so invigorating is the way she gives each principle equal weighting, discussing her formal decisions, such as Cléo’s editing or the tracking shots that move right to left in 1985’s Vagabond, with the same intensity and enthusiasm as her more existential motivations (she describes her 1965 summer bummer classic Le Bonheur as “a beautiful summer peach with a worm inside”).

Grainger (soon to be seen in Sophie Hyde’s brilliant, jagged Animals) is a magnetic and sensual foil to the frowning, reliably expressive Paquin. The flirty tension between the two feels quietly credible, the camera occasionally shuddering with desire. A pity, then, that this sweetness is lost as the film makes a tonal swerve in its final third.

The film works better as a comedy than a horror, skewering its ignorant US tourists, and better still as a spiteful relationship drama.

Debicki (The Tale, Widows) is wonderful as Woolf, a wry and solemn observer, but the rest of the film is all too literal.

Back in New York and with Iron Man gone, everyone’s asking Spider-Man if he is going to be the new lead Avenger; Holland is an endearing and quick-witted enough presence to suggest he might just be up to the task.

Variously gorgeous, ethereal, artful and tacky, both Anne’s film and Gonzalez’s are sustained by a throbbing sexual energy, aided by French electronic act M83’s twinkling, club‑inspired score.

There are some gory moments (a man’s leg is sliced, the flesh falling off like meat from a rotisserie, and a sleazy character has a grisly encounter with a lawnmower), but the film extracts more laughs than genuine scares.

In its attempts to provide an antidote to the Marvel Cinematic Universe’s catalogue of liberal fantasies, the film swings too far in the other direction.

There’s comedy in its depiction of the Swedish prime minister as a caricature of even-temperedness, but from its gaudy 70s costuming to its goofy, wobbling tone, everything about this film feels uncomfortably broad.

Indeed, I’d have happily watched Cox flirt with Rosanna Arquette’s museum curator for 90 minutes; her game attempts to parrot his Gaelic and a tentative kiss while gardening, knee-deep in soil, are strangely charming.

Those who enjoy Blumhouse productions for their unabashed silliness will be pleased to discover a sticky slice of schlock, with both household appliances and prosthetic genitals given their genre moments.

The ugly visual effects are outdone only by the sound design, which is relentlessly loud and thunderingly tedious. Verbal exchanges between the humans are devoid of wit and barely functional in communicating the story.

The film’s formal qualities obscure Nemes’s intentions instead of illuminating them. It’s all too vague to function effectively as either a commentary on the build-up to the Great War or as the story of a woman looking to find her place in a city predicated on rigid, gender-determined hierarchies.

Hawkins seems beguiled by Manning’s natural charisma, and more interested in the highs and lows of her personal reckoning. These are fascinating in their own right, yet more context might have made this feel like more of a definitive portrait.

Mena Massoud’s boyband haircut brings a certain charm, but like the rest of the film, he’s blandly competent.

[A] charming sequel.

Wilde expertly modulates the giddy highs and bittersweet lows of being a teenager, as demonstrated in the way the film’s house party climax crests and then crashes.

The film lurches into conventional horror-thriller territory as it progresses, though there are interesting moments.

The CGI critters are seamlessly integrated with the 35mm cinematography, the film stock’s grain smoothing the visual tackiness.

The gravitational pull of sex, death and the void is palpable.

Writer-director Victor Levin’s caustic take on the romcom works better as a treatise on the genre than as an example of it. The staging of the individual scenes feels like an afterthought, with the stars and script doing all the heavy lifting. Still, the scaffolding is there.

Clearly, it’s intended as a vehicle for Wilson, who is credited as co-producer, but it’s Hathaway who steals the show.

The dilemma she presents is ethical: is it fair to ask someone to traumatise (or retraumatise) themselves for the sake of art? Rather boldly, it seems as though Decker is also asking the question of herself.

This one hits its stride somewhere in the middle, bounding confidently towards its hopeless, poetic conclusion.

There’s a tepid, cross-cultural romantic comedy trapped inside this televisual hostage drama. The reliable Moore is trapped too. Even she can’t animate the material, leaving the graphic denouement feeling like a bum note.

The final battle is giddily cathartic, but the catharsis arises from prioritising character development over plot and spectacle. This, I imagine, will be the Avengers’ legacy.

Mostly, though, as a B-movie, Greta works; the moments in which it leans into its own silliness are its best.

Directed by Tina Gordon Chism, co-writer of What Men Want, the film is cute enough, even if key ideas aren’t especially novel: it’s lonely at the top; we need to connect with our inner child; everyone is insecure as a teenager.

The attempts at authentic stoner dialogue soon become tedious, with too little plot or character development grounding the inanity (Hill’s self-written script also features an eyebrow-raising overuse of the N-word).

Inviolata is Italian for “unspoiled”, and the word could apply to its people as much as their straw-gold land.

The film feels more like an elbow in the ribs than a slap on the wrist, revelling in the miscommunications between Susan the Sasquatch’s literal-minded monkey brain.

The film’s sometimes tiresome sense of humour is laddish in its embrace of viscera (blood, boils, vomit and live spiders all feature), but as the narrative trots (or, rather, plods) along, its men are revealed to be endearingly less so.

There’s a sense of Stranger Things camaraderie among Billy and his foster siblings, who are actually fun to spend time with, and the film’s message of found family is a sweet one. Still, its overblown finale overstays its welcome, teeing up the team as mainstays in the inevitable sequel.

Cameos from Pete Davidson and 30 Rock’s Tracy Morgan are enjoyable diversions but the jokes themselves are less high-concept, hinging on the men’s thoughts, which are mostly predictable (and predictably crass).

The material feels more like a play than a film, its drama shrunk down into a single, digestible day, but it’s affecting in its muted seriousness.

Rafeea, a non-professional actor and Syrian refugee, is the film’s secret weapon. At times, the tragedy unfolding on screen feels borderline unwatchable, but his strange, fascinating, eerily adult face offers a litany of minute expressions. There is a wisdom, a soulfulness, and an icy, angry candour that feels lived rather than performed.

Simon’s fly-on-the-wall mode is a distancing tool, but shouldn’t be confused with ambivalence. Exposing the mechanics of decision-making is an implicit reproof of increasing conservatism, both of La Fémis itself and the film-makers they are producing.

I’m a huge fan of Cornish’s 2011 debut Attack the Block, but this film isn’t nearly as energetic or enjoyably wacky as its predecessor. In fairness, it’s pitched at a considerably younger audience, but at two hours it drags; less patient children may struggle.

The tone is weird, seesawing between broad comedy (Tig Notaro and Octavia Spencer as hardened adoption agency workers) and manipulative melodrama (I hate to admit it, but a standoff between Pete, Ellie and Lizzy moved me to tears).

At times, it feels as though we’re watching something we’re not supposed to be seeing, such is the detail of the emotional degradation on show; in this sense, it’s impossible not to read it as something of a nihilistic suicide note.

Kechiche is quite brilliant at using stretches of time to create space for actors to let their characters breathe. It’s a sleight of hand that makes the intimacy on screen seem as though it’s unfolding organically, deployed to particularly dexterous effect in one sequence that takes place in a bar.

The film feels thin, drab and ultimately unable to harness the collective power of its otherwise talented cast.

I like Branagh’s eye for landscapes too; space is used elegantly, while widescreen canvases glow green and orange.

The final set piece is a little protracted, but the jokes are mostly sharp and enjoyably self-referential and the songs still catchy (one track is titled Catchy Song).

For a movie about the undead, Japanese director Shin’ichirô Ueda’s horror comedy is certainly lively.

There are a few rascally moments, such as Jim Broadbent settingoff roman candles in his back garden, but mostly it’s a staid affair, laden with dragged-outscenes of the gang doing thejob.

Mimicking the relapse-recovery cycle of addiction, the film’s timeline moves in unsatisfying narrative circles that stall the already shallow stakes.

The metaphors are messy (trauma makes people extraordinary?) and the pacing’s off, but it’s fun to see the individual films’ universes crossing over.

Inevitably, some chapters work better than others but it’s an interesting, sideways look at how violence can serve as a catalyst rather than a climax and how it can change – and galvanise – a community.

The film works as a collage of everyday moments that dovetail seamlessly between the sublime and the banal. Indeed in its most mesmerising scenes, the alchemy of duration and focus elevates these moments to something more profound.

Though the references are familiar, it’s a fresh direction for the macho franchise.

The film fetishises female strength, but only in its ability to prop up men; its women remain prettified empty shells.

Malaysian-born writer-director Yen Tan shoots stylishly in black and white 16mm, each frame a tasteful photograph. What’s most skilful, though, is the way he succeeds in complicating archetypes.

Most irritating is the murder scene itself, which sees both women stripping nude, seemingly in order for the camera to leer more effectively at their bodies rather than to spare them getting their petticoats bloodied.

At a slow two hours plus, the film feels stretched.

Though the film suggests a hardiness borne of her working-class background and mobster father, Polina remains fairly opaque. At least the contemporary dance sequences are beautifully mounted; French choreographer Angelin Preljocaj has a co-director credit on the film.

The film isn’t totally unenjoyable, but it isn’t particularly coherent either.

The film’s critiques are unimaginative, tutting at how territories attack first in order to consolidate power, as well as the spectacle of war itself, bystanders crowding the balconies of the ship-like city, shrieking as guns and lasers fire at the wastelands below.

There’s lots to love here, not least the animation itself, which uses split screens, Ben-Day dots and onomatopoeic text that mimic the tactile experience of reading physical comics – panels, hatching and primary colours intact and ready to leap off the page.

Based on the true story of a group of Swedish men who competed in the synchronised swimming world championship, Swimming With Men is reminiscent of The Full Monty, its feelgood climax landing with a welcome, if gentle, splash.

This unwillingness to divulge anything truly intimate, combined with the film’s jumbled chronology, gives the whole thing a thin, Wikipedia-ish feel. Jett says she wants to offer her fans “a primal release”. A pity, then, that this film about her is so repressed.