Stephen Dalton

An inspired comic thriller.

An atmospheric thriller with a noir-ish undertow and strong visual style, Strange But True puts a classy spin on familiar ingredients. The twist-heavy, logic-bending plot will test audience patience in places, but the whole package is handsomely crafted and rich in strong performances.

Hardcore blasts along like a supercharged computer-game shoot-em-up, bursting with sick humor and splatterpunk violence.

However mindless and heartless it may be, Through the Never succeeds as pure sense-swamping spectacle. It is a blow-out banquet for Metallica fans, and a blockbuster rock-and-rollercoaster ride for any heavy metal tourists curious to see this music played at major-league level.

Cam is a suspenseful mind-bender with plenty of timely feminist subtext. It takes viewers down some unexpected rabbit holes and commendably avoids pandering to male-gaze sex-thriller tropes, even if it ultimately fails to deliver on its grippingly weird early promise.

With a scare factor far greater than its modest dimensions initially seem to promise, The Canal is a polished indie psycho-thriller full of macabre twists and nerve-snapping tension.

A charming little tragicomedy which flirts with savage social satire but never fully embraces it.

White Riot is a timely, engaging exercise in social and cultural history, but a wider focus might have given it deeper context and broader marketability.

Sheikh Jackson is a little too somber and straight-faced for its goofy premise, its protagonists often unsympathetic, its tone sometimes corny and melodramatic. But it is also an offbeat charmer that boldly sets up its bizarre conceit and runs with it.

Finely acted and minutely observed, Ilo Ilo certainly has the texture of real life. The performances feel authentic, the emotional shadings agreeably nuanced.

Despite its relatively unusual setting, Crystal Swan is a largely conventional fish-out-of-water story at heart. But it is elevated above the routine by its excellent cast, especially Nassibulina, and plenty of visual flair.

A minor but touchingly human subplot to the financial crash, Abacus: Small Enough to Jail is both an affirmation and an indictment of the American Dream.

Gebbe has made a robust and compelling first feature, deftly shot and ably acted, especially by its younger cast members.

After 90 years and more than 50 films, Wajda has earned the right to make stagey period pieces like Afterimage, minor codas to a gloriously symphonic career.

Propelled by a steady heartbeat of low-level dread, McNaughton’s classy comeback is a superior genre movie but also a refreshingly old-school, character-driven nerve-jangler with no need for paranormal monsters or flashy special effects.

Another Round ultimately has little fresh or profound to say about intoxication and addiction, but it is an engaging tribute to friendship, family and bacchanalian hedonism in moderation.

It offers little thematically or stylistically novel that devotees of Japan’s most prolific B-movie maestro will not have seen many times before. Even so, the Tarantino-style rollercoaster ride is as effortlessly enjoyable as ever, accentuating the director's lighter comic leanings over his bloodthirsty side.

Limbo is an appealing little gem overall, with a feel-good message about the kindness of strangers that is glib and simplistic but hard to resist.

Driven by nuanced, persuasive performances and shot with an urgent, jittery tension, White Lie is a compelling close-up character study of a recklessly needy anti-heroine caught in an impossible dilemma of her own making.

Featuring a stellar ensemble cast headed by Matthew McConaughey, Hugh Grant, Charlie Hunnam, Michelle Dockery and Colin Farrell, Ritchie's homecoming is a fairly familiar affair, but also refreshingly funny and deftly plotted, with more witty lines and less boorish machismo than his early work.

Alexis Bloom's damning documentary is a competent but conventional affair, highly watchable but low on fresh angles or bombshell revelations.

Perfect Days turns out to be a surprisingly charming, haunting, moving work with deliberate echoes of Japanese cinema legend Yasujiro Ozu.

Glossy and gripping, Czech director Robert Hloz’s ambitious and impressively polished debut feature boasts high-calibre production design and a dense, twist-heavy, techno-dystopian plot that feels at times like an extended episode of the cult Netflix series Black Mirror.

Harrison Ford's fond farewell to maverick tomb raider Indiana Jones balances formulaic blockbuster elements with soulful nostalgia and an audacious time-jumping plot.

As ever with Almodóvar, the healing balms of beauty, art, friendship, love and sex offer some consolation in the darkness, including a small but obligatory queer subplot.

As a piece of investigative journalism it feels a little too fuzzy, but as an imaginative exercise in non-fiction cinema, it is consistently interesting and often hauntingly beautiful.

Even if the screenplay stretches credulity at times, Blanc’s brisk, bouncy, twisty narrative should keep most viewers gripped.

Guadagnino has remixed an imperfect, incomplete book into an imperfect, incomplete film.

An overlong runtime, underwritten characters and some uneasy tonal wobbles dampen the film’s punchy humour and propulsive energy.

The Shrouds feels a little unruly and unfocussed, with too many loose threads and undernourished side plots. Even so, this is still an absorbingly weird autumnal statement from one of the most consistently original screen voices of his generation, still probing away at some familiar psychosexual obsessions, this time under a gathering cloud of looming mortality.

There are decades of unresolved tensions simmering away between mother and daughter in Keeping Mum, which make this Karlovy Vary world premiere almost uncomfortably voyeuristic and a little too self-indulgent in places.

The gentle tone and disjointed sketch-show structure here will appeal to long-standing fans, but Mascots wins no prizes for innovation or progression. The jokes are uneven, the caricatures often overly broad and the plot almost nonexistent.

Even if Werewolf lacks bite as an allegorical horror thriller, it works pretty well as a psychological study of tender young minds struggling to relearn their humanity after years of brutal mistreatment by inhuman adults. The unschooled cast are unusually natural and convincing for child actors, and technical credits are generally superior.

Gameau clearly has good intentions, and generally succeeds in sweetening a potentially bitter subject for easy public consumption.

Despite its title, this mild-mannered feature debut from British TV actor turned writer-director Shelagh McLeod remains determinedly earthbound for most of its duration, more heart-tugging family saga than intergalactic adventure.

This is a genial, humane project with obvious fan appeal. But for anyone expecting a definitive behind-the-scenes film about the making of Star Wars, this is not the documentary you have been looking for.

We are left with a powerful sense that her death was a tragic loss, both privately and publicly, but Can I Be Me never quite tells us why.

The premise of this Hungarian/German/Swedish co-production is solid, even if the execution feels a little slack and the running time too long.

The director's latest rise-and-fall chronicle suffers from a few structural problems that did not bedevil Senna or Amy. Most obviously, the subject is still very much alive, which may explain why this officially endorsed film feels more cautious and compromised than it might have been.

Somewhere in the murky depths of this modestly gripping thriller lurks a more interesting film about real-life monsters, the kind that prey on human minds not human flesh.

The screenplay to The World Is Yours is sporadically hilarious though rarely subtle, relying a little too heavily on boorish stereotypes and slapstick violence for its broad humor.

A Life in Dirty Movies is still a sweet and illuminating journey into cult cinema history, but it would have been more honest and psychologically rich if it had shown us the money shot.

The story is rich in juicy anecdotes and epochal events, even if the man behind these striking images remains a little too elusive throughout.

Klinger is clearly aiming at a hardcore of filmmakers and cinema students, but even that niche audience will only glean incomplete insights into the methods and motivations of his subjects.

A minor addition to the Korean action cinema canon, The Merciless offers thin pleasures in a glossy package.

While Angel brings little new to the lexicon of serial killer biopics, it hits the target as an effortlessly palatable aesthetic experience, more shiny period pageant than probing character study.

The Commune effortlessly entertains at a TV sitcom level, with its pithy dialogue, its chorus of thinly drawn caricatures and its cozy sense of mockery towards the failed social experiments of past generations. But as serious cinema, it feels limited for the same reasons.

The Dance of Reality is a rich pageant of nostalgic narcissism laced with New Age mysticism and fortune-cookie wisdom.

A charming exercise in low-key romantic realism that risks being too subtle for its own good.

The intent is noble and the attention to detail admirable, but the overall effect is obstinately unmoving.

It may lack the refined wit and revered pedigree of blue-chip animation franchises such as Toy Story, but it still ticks plenty of lightweight fun boxes for its prime target audience of younger children, with just enough adult humor to keep parents from yawning, too.

Plenty to admire here, if only this tasteful tearjerker lived up to its title with a few more explosive fireworks instead of settling for timid twinkles, ending not with a bang but a whimper.

This very modern brand of post-Warholioan digital fame is a much-debated cultural phenomenon, and Wild Diamond adds nothing especially new or insightful to the discourse. That said, Reidinger does display a rare degree of empathy and understanding towards young women who pursue this kind of tabloid celebrity.

Handsome and intense, Ahmed is a reliably magnetic screen presence, while his punchy real-life chops as a rapper and lyricist also serve him well here. But his screenwriting skills are less assured, and Mogul Mowgli is strangely low on dramatic or emotional bite given its high-stakes storyline. Baggy editing, underexplained context and flat dialogue add to this muted effect.

Stylish but slight, Arnby's debut feature ultimately sticks within werewolf movie conventions, adding little fresh to the form.

Any sense of narrative momentum or intellectual focus quickly unravels as the film evolves into an almost wordless symphony of disconnected images, sounds and music. But the nature-heavy montages are mostly beautiful and bizarre enough to excuse the film’s pretentious excesses.

Strip away the Middle East backdrop and Bethlehem is a fairly routine thriller about good cops, corrupt bureaucrats and armed criminal gangs.

Shot in precisely composed frames, with recurring visual motifs and an eye-pleasing color palette that accentuates blue hues, Tip Top is commendably ambitious in its Godardian attempts to deconstruct the police thriller format, but it's only partially successful.

The first act is great, full of dark portent and bravura film-making flourishes. However, the final hour disappoints, with too many off-the-peg plot twists and too many characters conforming to type.

Initially a caustic and somewhat programmatic checklist of alt-right obsessions, Cuck becomes more tonally and dramatically interesting after it shifts gear midway through, when Ronnie's story becomes a lurid psychosexual nightmare reminiscent of Darren Aronofsky's "Requiem for a Dream."

The plot is diffuse and disjointed, but theater director Andrea Pallaoro’s feature debut scores highly with its exquisite beauty and fine performances.

Breezy and bright, with the stylized look and feel of a stage play, Honore’s bubbly bottle of cinematic champagne runs out of fizz somewhere around its midway point. Even so, there are still enjoyably shallow pleasures to be savored here.

The story ends in a muddled rush, leaving many unanswered questions. Like a newly launched high-end smartphone, Ex Machina looks cool and sleek, but ultimately proves flimsy and underpowered. Still, for dystopian future-shock fans who can look beyond its basic design flaws, Garland’s feature debut functions just fine as superior pulp sci-fi.

British director Sophie Fiennes certainly finds Jones a spellbinding subject in Bloodlight and Bami, securing intimate access to the veteran diva over several years without ever quite managing to spill her secrets.

This well-intentioned meditation of the banality of evil packs a modest emotional punch, but it might have been more powerful if it had shown us a little less banality and a little more evil.

Florence Foster Jenkins is a modestly enjoyable crowd-pleaser, but it ultimately feels smaller than its subject, a deeply conventional portrait of a highly unconventional woman.

Ultimately little more than an extended commercial for his new album. That said, it is an effortless pleasure to watch

The Man Who Feels No Pain is a fun ride, unashamedly zany and eager to please, even if the humor is very broad and the sprawling plot too baggy for an action-driven piece.

The humor is broad, the satirical targets many, the overall effect mixed.

There are just enough laugh-out-loud moments here to excuse the lurches into shameless, tear-jerking sentimentality.

Though handsome in style and admirable in ambition, this sprawling neo-Western never comes together as a satisfying whole.

Most strikingly, for a murder thriller, Killers of the Flower Moon is fatally lacking in dread or suspense.

The film relies on high production values and sense-battering shock tactics to make up for wooden performances and an illogical, silly script. As an exercise in retro pastiche, it impresses. But as a postmodern genre reinvention, it fails to deliver.

The pace is gently hypnotic and the topic fitfully interesting, but the format will test the patience of all but serious art-cinema fans with its narrow focus and chilly film-school minimalism.

Chadha has distilled a fascinating and epic true story into a starchy, stuffy, sanitized period piece that never fully engages on an emotional or educational level.

Perpetually shifting gears between playful sci-fi pastiche, quirky rom-com and apocalyptic thriller, Before We Vanish might have worked better as a single dedicated genre, but it becomes a little scrambled trying to cover several at once.

This solidly crafted Ridley Scott production is sprinkled with classy ingredients, including Alicia Vikander as headline star. But it is also a fairly flat treatment of over-familiar plot elements, and fatally low on the key psycho-thriller elements of suspense, surprise and dread.

Pixie is a trigger-happy comedy road movie that relies more on boorish energy than wit or charm.

There is ample material in Fortunata for a heart-rending tale of blue-collar female empowerment, but Castellitto’s noble intentions get swamped along the way in incontinent floods of histrionic excess, broad caricatures, clumsy allusions to Greek tragedy and psychodrama subplots that feel like half-baked afterthoughts.

A banal and patronizing cautionary sermon for lovestruck ladies torn between heart and head, sexy-dangerous bad boys and dependably dull husband types.

While not exactly a misfire, Rodriguez and Cameron's joint effort lacks the zing and originality of their best individual work.

Mary Magdalene is an uneasy viewing experience, ponderous and disjointed in places, but also crafted with conviction and a strong aesthetic vision.

This unresolved maritime mystery feels oddly flat and functional, diluting a tragic tale full of unanswered questions into an anodyne middlebrow weepie.

Big on atmosphere but low on drama, DAU. Natasha is fascinating conceptually but weak cinematically.

While the fuzzy take-home message of peaceful coexistence is something most viewers can get behind, it is also too simplistic and banal to sustain an entire movie.

Constantine’s skills as a first-time dramatist are a serious weakness here. Though the subject matter is rich and the soundtrack terrific, character and plot take a back seat.

No Escape is a pedestrian but modestly gripping nerve-jangler from writer-director John Erick Dowdle.

Hawke is natural casting as Baker, sharing enough facial similarities to capture some of the late jazz icon's chiseled, hollow-cheeked, fallen-angel beauty. He gives an unshowy and vanity-free performance, all soft-spoken mischief and brittle arrogance, but laced with just enough blood, sweat and tears.

War on Everyone is a little too keen to advertise its own cleverness. The characters feel more like random collections of quirky tics than real people.

This prosaically competent comedy-thriller turns a rich true story into a tonally uneven blend of lukewarm laughs and low-level suspense.

A small-town coming-of-age story blown up to rock-opera dimensions, And Their Children After Them puts a roaringly romantic widescreen frame around some well-worn dramatic themes, but never quite hits the epic emotional high notes it strains to reach.

Of course, ravishing Malick-esque visuals cannot quite excuse muddled plotting, portentous dialogue and wobbly performances. But In Full Bloom is still an impressively polished debut feature, admirably ambitious and elegantly crafted.

Ahluwalia has striven for a very self-consciously arty aesthetic here, more Gus Van Sant than Michael Mann. This is a commendably bold way to approach material that might otherwise have drifted into routine lowlife crime-thriller territory, but it also drains a rich story of narrative momentum and emotional punch.

Wheatley's riotous Looney Tunes action comedy is a sporadically amusing assault on the senses, but it looks like it was more fun to make than to watch.

Unashamedly formulaic and relentlessly puerile, The Festival is no better than it needs to be, which may be as much commercial calculation as artistic limitation.

Hong has a distinctive voice and an interesting track record, but his latest exercise in flimsy whimsy is for indulgent hardcore fans only.

Rarely have so many classy ingredients added up to such a muted, muddled, multi-story mess. Of course, it is still better to make an ambitious failure than a boring success. A true disaster movie, in all senses, High-Rise is ultimately an ambitious, brilliant failure.

[A] blankly heroic, clunkingly predictable portrait.