Stephen Dalton

The director is such an engaging presence onscreen — wry and humane, balancing sly social commentary with a playfully child-like attitude — that even a minor autumnal work like this is still a heart-warming mood-lifter.

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

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

This schlocky horror picture show combines a zesty young cast with an infectious comic energy.

This unflinching yet compassionate depiction of marginalized misfits boasts a few pleasingly poetic flourishes, but it suffers from some common first-time director flaws, notably a listless narrative, thinly developed characters and a relentlessly somber mood.

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.

For all its narrow focus, this is a pleasingly personal breakdown of a fascinating episode in recent European history, tightly composed and crisply edited, with an appealing undertow of dry humor and some cautionary lessons for modern voters.

As a immersive primer on the first-hand experiences of British soldiers, this innovative documentary is a haunting, moving and consistently engaging lesson in how to bring the past vividly alive

Johnny English Strikes Again is an oddly mirthless addition to the series.

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

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.

The splatter violence is fairly tame by modern gore standards, and the episodic narrative sags in places, but the ecological subtext and feminist folk-horror elements make this almost entirely female-driven road movie an agreeably fresh addition to the zombie canon.

Dolan has labored hard to yoke together these tricksy, time-jumping, intertwined plots, reportedly editing down a mountain of material over two years. In the process, a whole character played by Jessica Chastain was surgically removed. But however long he tinkered, Dolan has not quite salvaged a story whose default setting seems to be mirthless, ponderous navel-gazing.

Crucially, like its predecessor, Gloria Bell maintains a warm but rigorously unsentimental tone despite material which could easily lend itself to mawkish sentimentality.

Corbet's high-caliber melodrama combines food for thought with sense-blitzing spectacle. Between screaming tantrums and booming anthems, it leaves us with a nagging sense that history never quite repeats itself, but sometimes rhymes. Usually to a thumping disco beat.

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

A fable-like story about a young African girl banished from her village for alleged witchcraft, it blends deadpan humor with light surrealism, vivid visuals and left-field musical choices.

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.

With an ineptitude so thorough it borders on genius, Cummings achieves the rare feat of making Sheeran appear even more boring in person than he is on record.

Sadly, Berk’s stale screenplay simply lacks the heft or depth to lift it above third-hand homage to earlier, better, smarter films.

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.

As an experiment in collaborative, exploratory docudrama, The Dead and the Others is an admirably committed enterprise. Sadly, as a cinematic experience, it is flat and functional.

As a timely yarn about the mistreatment of minorities, both in Sweden and worldwide, Border is rich in allegorical layers. But as a thriller at least partially rooted in supernatural genre conventions, its relentlessly dour Nordic glumness drags a little. Social realism and magical realism make uneasy bedfellows.

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

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 premise is smart, the ingredients classy and the overall look stylish. But Niccol’s paranoid anxieties about the totalitarian dangers of cyberspace feel oddly glib and dated, light on thrills or narrative logic.

The Endless is not just about latent power struggles within cults but also within families, and about how both are eclipsed by more ancient, malevolent cosmic forces.

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.