Sophie Monks Kaufman

Andrea Arnold is an exciting director who knows how to create a thick patina of realism within which female protagonists stoically pursue improvement. It’s a little crushing, therefore, that American Honey feels unmoored from anything approaching real life.

It is ironic that Richard Linklater has chosen to homage a film carved out of spontaneous new techniques with one so mired in contrivances that it is impossible for it to breathe.

True Things spins such a familiar tale that its success rides on how convincingly a mood is conjured. It needs to be so raw that the predictable is rewritten anew in the specific chemistry of these characters. Instead, it is, for the most part, a mood piece drained of mood

Although there is much to admire on a technical and craft level, the absence of storytelling innovation gives Old Henry the sleepiness of a familiar lullaby or nursery rhyme.

Günther executes stray powerful moments, but his lack of a handle on the material leads to two hours so meandering that the story drifts away in a haze of boredom.

Hermanus gestures towards a sweeping story and in the process loses the pulse of the material that is there. As the window dressing is lavishly built up, the love story itself slips away.

Garland has always flirted with obscurity, but in his best work this has been anchored by an enveloping depth of feeling. Now he has tumbled down a rabbit-hole here where no mortal man – not even a village of them, all played by Rory Kinnear – can follow.

The puzzling thing about Italian director Gabriele Mainetti’s feature set in 1943 in German-occupied Rome is that, rather than embracing tastelessness a la John Waters, it guns for earnestness despite not having a thoughtful bone in its body.