Stephen Dalton

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.

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.

The scrambled narrative, listless pace, clumsy stabs at profundity and severe lack of humor will limit the film’s appeal to existing converts and cult movie connoisseurs.

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 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.

Quincy is an unapologetically partisan insider's portrait. The material is rich and the cast list starry, but the overall package veers a little too close to gushing vanity project in places.

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.

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

[A] blankly heroic, clunkingly predictable portrait.

Heli is undoubtedly made with serious intent, but it is also relentlessly depressing and curiously uninvolving.

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

The sleepy-paced, elementally simple plot initially requires a degree of patience, but the story ends up gently absorbing.

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

Not every joke hits the target, and not every thematic tangent is fruitfully explored, but a stellar cast and lively pacing lend comic force to even the weaker lines.

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.

Olszanska gives an impressively intense performance, if a little too mannered at first, but neither she nor the filmmakers ever get beneath the character's skin.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

Baird can be forgiven for a handful of careless and ham-fisted touches. Filth is still a hugely entertaining breath of foul air fueled by McAvoy’s impressively ugly star performance.

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.

Mother is a crisp, sardonic, darkly funny mystery thriller with a claustrophobic feel that occasionally betrays its roots as an Irish radio drama.

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

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.

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.

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