Stephen Dalton

The second English-language feature by Berlin-based Brazilian director Karim Aïnouz (Futuro Beach, Motel Destino, Firebrand) is shallow and lurid and not entirely coherent. Even so, it is loaded with enough visual brio, acrid wit and WTF plot twists to hit the target as a surreal, salacious guilty pleasure.

Stylistically limited by its strict adherence to Lerner’s vintage footage, Newport & the Great Folk Dream does little fresh with the music documentary format. But behind its deceptively austere, artless, hand-held aesthetic this deep dive into musical history is actually slickly edited and elegantly structured, with a strikingly clear, cleaned-up audio soundtrack.

Köln 75 is an enjoyably off-beat blend of biopic, historical pageant and music-geek lecture from US writer-director Ido Fluk.

Behind its superficially avant-garde aesthetic, Baby Invasion is a shallow, conservative, masturbatory piece of work. It leaves behind an uncomfortable choice: either Korine has run out of anything interesting to say, or he has actually been trolling us all along.

Adding an extra religious dimension to an already densely packed sociopolitical soap opera, Costa tells a rich story here about the fuzzy line between democracy and theocracy, clashing spiritual values and inflammatory culture-war rhetoric.

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.

The Brutalist aims for symphonic grandeur and novelistic depth. It partially succeeds, though it too often mistakes pomposity for profundity, and bloated verbosity for literary nuance.

This ebullient equestrian comedy thriller is effortlessly enjoyable as camp spectacle, with shades of Almodovar in the mix, even if its twist-heady screwball plot ultimately delivers more style than substance.

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.

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

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

As it gathers to its grim conclusion with the inevitability of Greek tragedy, The Black Guelph becomes a quietly furious critique of power, corruption and lies among Ireland’s elites, from the police to the church to the upper echelons of government.

The Story of Souleymane is more than its individual parts. Scenes fly by, prompted by the move-move-move! ethos of the hustling immigrant. This is a film told close in close quarters. On several occasions, the camera is so close to our hero that you can smell the desperation coming off his skin, which, as richly and darkly lensed by Tristan Galand, is mutedly lustrous.

Blending autobiographical elements with heartfelt homages to Iranian cinema, writer-director Matthew Rankin's charmingly surreal comic fable reimagines Canada as a Farsi-speaking dreamland.

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.

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

Despite a few bumpy moments, actor-director Noémie Merlant's gory feminist horror comedy paints a rowdy, richly imagined portrait of three ladies on fire.

The cumulative effect of all this talent is a life-affirming blood-and-guts carnival of a movie that ranks highly among Audiard’s best, and boldest, work.

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.

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.

Graced by a strong cast, visual poetry and great formal control, this brooding meditation on evil still resonates a century later.

Drunk on its own noble aims and rich ingredients, Megalopolis is a muddled misfire of overcooked kitsch and undercooked ideas.

Kinds of Kindness is lighter on jokes and visual brio than many of the director’s previous films, with an overlong runtime that weakens the twist-heavy tension and punchy rhythm of having three back-to-back stories. Despite a solid-gold cast and some deliciously bizarre fairy-tale plots, it still plays more like a fun personal stop-gap project than a major career step.

On many levels, Evolution is a dazzling high-wire act.

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.

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.

For casually curious viewers, Scream of My Blood is a fast-moving, well-crafted primer on the band, light on background detail but generally compelling.

A little more narrative rigour and psychological depth would have been welcome here. Messy lives do not always require messy films. That said, Tomasz Naumiuk’s whirling, kinetic camerawork has a freewheeling rock’n’roll energy that suits the material.

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.

As a piece of drama, Citizen Saint is opaque and cryptic, leaving many loose ends unresolved. Even so, it is never boring, holding our attention with outlandish plot twists and strong performances. But its key strength is as an exquisite visual artwork, largely thanks to Krum Rodriguez’s gorgeous high-resolution monochrome cinematography, which makes every shot an Old Master tableaux of fine-grained detail and chiaroscuro shadow.

For Anderson fans, Asteroid City will be a pure guiltless pleasure, a full sensory immersion in his dazzling Day-Glo Pop Art toybox. For agnostics, this is still one of the director’s finer efforts, low on the childlike whimsy and forced eccentricity that mars his minor works.

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

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

The Zone of Interest is a gloriously original work and a boldly experimental addition to the canon of high-calibre Holocaust cinema.

As its attention-grabbing title suggests, Everything Everywhere All at Once is a supercharged, sense-swamping, overstuffed feast of a movie.

The latest sci-fi horror fable from Canadian writer-director Brandon Cronenberg is his most deliciously dark, richly allegorical nightmare vision to date. A bleakly satirical, sexually graphic, hallucinatory thriller about wealthy tourists resorting to debauched savagery in a fictional foreign country,

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

This may be one of Jude’s minor works, but it delivers a quietly devastating emotional punch.

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.

There are poetic and profound rewards here, even if Hamaguchi makes us wait too long for this quietly devastating emotional pay-off.

Even if this deceptively artful debut feels a little muted and unpolished in places, it is plainly the work of a skilled filmmaker with ample future potential.

Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy is full of understated, melancholy poetry.

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

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.

This haunting slow-burn psychodrama is superbly acted and quietly gripping, despite some minor plot wobbles and that cumbersome title.

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.

Leap of Faith is an easy, entertaining watch, but it feels like a smaller film than its two predecessors, chiefly because it features just a single long interview with Friedkin rather than a rich chorus of insider insights.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

While Sandoval's hard-working dedication is admirable, and her semi-autobiographical story full of latent dramatic potential, Lingua Franca is ultimately an underpowered, amateurish disappointment.

Without Crowe's brooding performance, Unhinged would just be another forgettable, formulaic, functional B-movie. With the burly Kiwi on board, it is transformed into a forgettable, formulaic, functional B-movie starring Russell Crowe.

The performances here are bloodless, the pacing listless, the dialogue witless almost to the point of deadpan parody.

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.

It is a superior genre piece at heart, but elevated by its high-caliber leads, Imogen Poots and Jesse Eisenberg, plus a script rich in political and cultural resonance.

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.

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

The State Against Mandela and the Others adds little essential to the vast library of documentaries about Mandela and the anti-apartheid struggle. All the same, this is a heartfelt, humane and visually inventive tribute to a fading generation of giants whose principled sacrifices ended up changing history.

There is enough rich narrative potential in The Corrupted for an ambitious state-of-the-nation TV miniseries in the mold of The Wire. Unfortunately, Scalpello and screenwriter Nick Moorcroft take the lowest common denominator route, falling back on tired mob-movie clichés, stock characters and leaden dialogue so generic it could have been written by an algorithm.

In its favor, Amanda boasts subtle, sensitive lead performances from Lacoste and Multrier, who has a rare easy naturalism for such a young performer.

A twist-heavy crime thriller spiced with horror and noir elements, I See You is such a finely crafted exercise in slow-burn suspense that its loopy plot contortions only seem absurd in retrospect.

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.

There are teasing glimpses of artistic genius in A Dog Called Money, but eccentric choices and muddled intentions, too. A talent as strong and singular as Harvey deserves a more probing, less indulgent film than this.

Closely based on the director's own troubled youth, Farming is rooted in rich, complex, potentially gripping material. But Akinnuoye-Agbaje slaps this story together with so little subtlety, he ends up seriously diluting its dramatic power.

This remarkable true story is a finely crafted exercise in slow-building suspense, though it works better as a gripping mood piece than as journalistic investigation, its raw confessional style slightly compromised by niggling narrative gaps and dramatic contrivances.

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.

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."

Scorsese's choice to make this a standalone feature and not a limited series seems mildly perplexing. Anyone hoping for the propulsive dynamism of, say, Goodfellas or Casino may be disappointed. But The Irishman is also on many levels a beautifully crafted piece of deluxe cinema.

The disappointing end result feels less than the sum of the talents involved, a weak script and thin high-concept plot only just held together by smart visual wizardry.

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.

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.

Jenkin's heavily stylized debut is a disorienting experience at first, but it ultimately creates a boldly Expressionistic mood of uncanny beauty and mesmerizing otherness.

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.

This bloodthirsty comic-book fantasy is let down by its infantile humor and derivative, incoherent plot.

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.

I Do Not Care if We Go Down in History as Barbarians is a mature, ambitious work from a spirited auteur who has mastered the cinematic rules well enough to break them with confidence.

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.

Examining the idea of paranoia as an engineered reaction, a tool of control that inhibits potential activism and self-expression, it's more than a lesson in living history. It's a powerful argument for how necessary it is to watch the watchers.

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

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.

Like much of Bong’s work, Parasite is cumbersomely plotted and heavy-handed in its social commentary. The largely naturalistic treatment here may also alienate some of his fantasy fanboy constituency. That said, this prickly contemporary drama still feels more coherent and tonally assured than Snowpiercer or Okja, and packs a timely punch that will resonate in our financially tough, politically polarized times.

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.

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.

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

There is no big redemptive payoff here, just a few small victories and hopeful pointers to the future. The struggle continues. But this is still a very necessary story, delivered with rigor and conviction.

Graham begins Run with a solid premise, but he lacks the dramatic horsepower to move the story out of second gear.

It looks and feels far more substantial than most indie debuts, confidently bending genre rules with its minimalist dialogue and hallucinatory plot, which owes more to David Lynch or Lars von Trier than to more orthodox horror maestros.

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 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.

Ghost Stories is a witty and well-crafted love letter to old-school horror tropes.

Mirren always brings a touch of class, of course, even to deluxe schlock like this. But Clarke is something of a blank leading man while the secondary characters are mostly pale phantoms sleepwalking through a thinly drawn plot.

Any meager pleasures that Lies We Tell offers are purely technical.

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.

Clearly weighted towards Gitai's own liberal political stance, but incorporating a range of other views too, West of the Jordan River is a dry and sometimes depressing film, but informative and humane too.

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.

Collins has crafted a mesmerizing modernist memorial to ancient Celtic traditions, even if its determinedly slow pace and diffuse narrative will likely leave some viewers unsatisfied.

For all its high-caliber talent mix, The Snowman is a largely pedestrian affair, turgid and humorless in tone. The cast share zero screen chemistry, much of the dialogue feels like a clunky first draft and the wearily familiar plot is clogged with clumsy loose ends.

ever Here wears the outer clothes of a crime thriller to cloak a more haunting, disturbing, open-ended rumination on voyeurism and identity.

Breathe is clearly aiming for the same heart-wrenching emotional heights as James Marsh’s Oscar-winning Stephen Hawking biopic The Theory of Everything. But this is very much a crude copy, its noble intentions hobbled by a trite script, flat characters and a relentlessly saccharine tone that eventually starts to grate.

The gory carnage is sparingly but vividly staged, the suspense-driven plot twisty enough to tax the brain.

Untaxing as drama, thin as entertainment, but modestly enjoyable as a revved-up caper movie, Overdrive is pure escapist fluff with a light French accent. Which still makes it smarter, leaner and cooler than any of the Fast and the Furious films it shamelessly mimics.

Given the tragic and highly charged events it depicts, All Eyez on Me is oddly low on emotional bite, perhaps because it never feels real. As clean and polished and blandly overlit as a TV soap opera, Boom’s film looks and feels smaller than Tupac’s cinematic life story.

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.

Australian director Jonathan Teplitzky has fashioned a small-scale chamber drama from huge historical events, with a functional script and modest budget that fails to match the grand sweep of its story.

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.

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.

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

Like the cumbersome hybrid animal at its heart, this beast is no beauty. But it is a technically impressive and boldly original statement.

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.

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.

Long Strange Trip is an affectionate and well-crafted documentary, but it would have benefited from a little more of this emotionally raw material and a little less fawning reverence.

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.

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.

A key joy of Karl Marx City is its strong, arty aesthetic.

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.

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

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.

I Am the Pretty Thing That Lives in the House is a lightly gothic murder ballad made with great finesse and a fine cast.

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

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

Not for the squeamish, Ovredal's chilly slab of body horror ultimately proves less than the sum of its forensically fileted parts.

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.

Lady Macbeth mostly operates within established period conventions, but draws fresh blood from antique material thanks to a sparky cast, subtle nods to contemporary race and gender issues, and a hefty shot of gothic melodrama.

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.

David Brent remains an enduring comic grotesque, but this sporadically amusing big-screen resurrection is more cash-in reunion tour than killer comeback album.

As gripping onscreen as it was onstage, London Road remains a work of great finesse and originality.

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.

Reclaiming Kristina as an icon of queer liberation and female empowerment is a worthwhile premise, but sadly the finished film is a stodgy multinational pudding that fails to give this concept wings.

Both surreal and sinister, it feels like we are watching a real-life version of The Truman Show.

For all its limited ambitions, The Ones Below serves its purpose as a solid calling card for Farr's filmmaking future, a gripping exercise in domestic suspense that sets out its stall on the shoulders of giants.

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.

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.

Take a pinch of Top Gun, stir in a generous dollop of The Right Stuff, add a light sprinkling of Mad Men and you have the formula for this uplifting documentary portrait of former Apollo astronaut Eugene Cernan.

Dad’s Army is hobbled by too much broad slapstick and labored clowning.

This is a solid and detailed record of an extraordinary protest movement.

[A] blankly heroic, clunkingly predictable portrait.

Lack of originality and self-awareness prove to be a fatal combination. There is something way too familiar about Hoffman's rites-of-passage portrait of wasted youth, with its inevitable soundtrack of fashionable angst-rock and predictably retro-cool cult-movie influences.

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.

Kill Your Friends remixes a brutally funny novel into an entertaining if somewhat familiar big-screen tale of amoral, chemically-fuelled decadence.

In its favor, The Last Witch Hunter boasts some terrific production design and digital effects.... Less impressively, Eisner’s movie is clogged with cardboard characters, flat dialogue and a sluggish middle act that gets lost in too much fabricated witchy folklore.

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

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.

It will not teach you very much about either autism or Metallica, but you will leave the theater smiling.

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

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.

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.

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

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

Absolutely Anything is a flabby misfire full of labored slapstick, broad caricatures and groaningly absurd plot twists.

With its secret gadgets, poison pills and furtive assignations in snowy graveyards, it is also an enjoyable throwback to the cloak-and-dagger heroics of classic Cold War cinema.

The Amina Profile is an absorbing, artfully assembled and timely reconstruction of a fascinating digital-age hoax.

A Hard Day offers a masterclass in throat-squeezing, stomach-knotting suspense.

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

As a whole, Amy is an emotionally stirring and technically polished tribute, its sprawling mass of diverse source material elegantly cleaned up, color-corrected and shaped into a satisfying narrative.

Loosely inspired by real events, the plot is time-scrambled and non-linear, hinting at Quentin Tarantino levels of post-modern playfulness that sadly never materialize.

Strip away its gorgeous wintry landscapes and we are left with a symphony of ponderous New Age mumbo-jumbo masquerading as philosophical wisdom.

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.

An inspired comic thriller.

Though heavy-handed in places, The Mafia Only Kills in Summer is a generally charming and engrossing debut feature.

Over the long haul, the Wolfe brother never quite provide enough psychological and emotional ballast to flesh out their complex, conflicted characters. But these are minor flaws in an otherwise confident, gripping, highly charged debut.

It is a testament to the immersive immediacy of Victoria that the scale of its technical achievement only really dawns on you afterwards.

Do not be fooled by the playful, irreverent tone. Behind its attractive surface sheen of lusty humor and ravishing visuals, this Trojan Horse drama makes some spiky topical points about the lingering scars of slavery, feudalism, misogyny and racism.

Do not expect blazing emotional fireworks, just finely calibrated performances and deep reserves of inner torment.

Mortdecai is an anachronistic mess that never succeeds in re-creating the breezy tone or snappy rhythm of the classic caper movies that it aims to pastiche.

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.

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

Effie Gray is an exquisitely dreary slice of middlebrow armchair theater which adds little new to a much-filmed story.

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.

Tales of the Grim Sleeper is unusually somber and conventional by Broomfield's standards, relying more on slow accumulation of detail than caustic commentary or ambush interviews. But it has a quiet emotional force which pays off during the powerful final sequence.

While Avery handles the kinetic action set-piece with impressive swagger for a first-timer, his self-penned screenplay is a major weak point.

Inevitably harrowing and sickening in places, but with tender and uplifting moments, Night Will Fall is a somber treatment of a serious topic which earns its place in the broad pantheon of Holocaust-themed cinema. It is just a shame that Singer's worthy memorial feels a little too small for its world-shaking theme and world-famous cast list.

Even if it tells us nothing new, Pulp is still a handsome cinematic homage to a unique band, a proud city and the unifying power of pop music.

An initially promising genre reboot ends up feeling like a major failure of nerve.

It is difficult to believe a single word of it, still less to care about these relentlessly selfish and short-sighted characters.

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.

Haunting and atmospheric, For Those in Peril proves that creeping grief and guilt can deliver just as much dread-filled dramatic tension as a straight horror movie.

This film’s thin charms lie not in its authenticity but in its zippy energy, good-looking cast and mild sprinkling of action.

Strickland and Fenton bring an extra layer of visual invention, smartly expanding on the show's pre-existing video elements and adding their own bespoke cinematic touches.

Red Army is a slick, witty, fast-moving blend of sports story and history lesson.

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.

Goldberg has made a commendably adventurous and mostly enjoyable meta-comedy that recalls both the best and worst of 1970s Hollywood.

There are so many witty touches and sharp little observations here that The Strange Little Cat can be forgiven for ultimately making no dramatic statement.

A clumsy high-school sex comedy which tries too hard to be both shocking and endearing, falling short on both counts.

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.

An uneven mix of serious issue movie and sensational thrill ride, Honour is no masterpiece, but it is an accomplished debut.

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

Drones is not exactly subtle, but it is a commendable attempt to dramatize a hot contemporary issue without resorting to clumsy didacticism or obvious political bias.

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.

An ingenious micro-budget science-fiction nerve-jangler which takes place entirely at a suburban dinner party, Coherence is a testament to the power of smart ideas and strong ensemble acting over expensive visual pyrotechnics.

Beautifully shot with an acute eye for crisp composition, this intimate mood piece explores the subtle intricacies and low-level power struggles of long-term love in forensic detail.

An unflinching portrait of state-sponsored evil, Manuscripts Don’t Burn feels like the work of an angry artist who has been jailed, censored and harassed too long. This time it’s personal.

A deluxe multi-character drama that blends real history with semi-fictionalized spy thriller and soap opera elements, Burning Bush feels in places like an extended Czech remake of the Cold War-themed German Oscar-winner The Lives of Others.

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 real problem here is not the shameless blurring of fact and fiction, but how unforgivably dull it all seems.

Dolan's fifth feature feels like a strong step forward, striking his most considered balance yet between style and substance, drama-queen posturing and real heartfelt depth.

With its splashy paintbox palette and jaunty pop soundtrack, All Cheerleaders Die just about hangs together as a cheerfully goofy romp.

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

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.

Though not the finest screen outing for Coogan’s best-known alter ego, this is a worthy addition to the ever-growing Partridge archive, with enough weapons-grade comic zing in the first half to excuse the less sure-footed second.

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

A Field in England is a rich, strange, hauntingly intense work from a highly original writer-director team.

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

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

The tone veers into film-fan geekery in places, but Jodorowsky is such a natural showman and irrepressible egotist that his ancient anecdotes never become tedious.

The young Spanish director Eugenio Mira and his American screenwriter Damien Chazelle have fun paying homage to the pulpy potboilers of yesteryear.

Weekend of a Champion begins as a motorsports movie but ends up a portrait of two wily elder statesmen who have survived into their seventies by skill, stealth and sheer luck.

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.

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.

The film’s facile message of cross-cultural unity owes more to fairy tale than reality, but the action is slick and the story gripping.

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.

Halfway between a guilty pleasure and a missed opportunity, it makes the crucial mistake of treating curious viewers like deferential subjects, demanding far more sympathy than it deserves.

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

Omirbaev fails to invest either the murder plot or its political subtext with much suspense or conviction.

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

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

The film repays patient viewing as it evolves into an engrossing, nuanced, philosophical drama.

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.

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.

A lean 91 minutes long, Cult of Chucky is part self-spoofing slasher, part lowbrow bloodbath and all guilty pleasure. There are plot holes here bigger than Trump Tower, and almost as ridiculous, but only the most joylessly wrong-headed film critic would waste mental energy unpicking them.