Tara Brady

It acknowledges loss without overshadowing its protagonist, passionately insisting on personhood and dignity even as the heroine’s awareness drifts away.

Dosa and her editors resist catastrophising, allowing cracking ice, flowing water and silence to shoulder the film’s emotional weight.

Stripped of the bells, the whistles and the cheering crowds, what remains is impossible to romanticise: an exhausted, tortured animal, a man performing hypermasculinity to the point of self-annihilation, and inexcusable barbarism.

At just 71 minutes, Erupcja is more sketch than statement. But its potent snapshot of roads not taken stays long after the credits have rolled.

Scoot McNairy gives Steve a dog-eared appeal that makes his irresponsibility inseparable from his warmth.

Ejiofor cleverly manifests a character caught between psychic dislocation and male privilege; Reinsve’s wounds are deeper but palpable beneath her collected facade. Mark Duplass deepens the mystery as a cryptic scientist. The bigger stars, however, are Danny Vermette’s production design and Parsons’s exquisite direction.

The film’s musical flourishes and takedown of gay and straight cliches are always amusing, if old-school end of the pier.

The friendships feel equally authentic, even when the source material, largely composed of inner monologues, can sound polemic transposed to the big screen. Enda Walsh’s script compensates with beautifully constructed interpersonal relations between swipes at capitalism, landlords and generational decline. Simon Tindall’s fluid camerawork adds to a textured sense of place.

Minotaur works best as gallows humour: a chronicle of a selfish, privileged class trapped in systems they helped create, trying to bury bodies while pretending nothing has happened.

Shot in icy widescreen compositions against the stark beauty and avalanches of Norwegian precipices, Fjord sustains nail-biting tension across its lengthy running time through meticulous pacing, confirming the Palme d’Or laureate as one of contemporary cinema’s sharpest moral observers.

Visually, Paper Tiger recreates grimy late-1980s New York with exquisite period detail. Gray’s long-standing questioning of masculine braggadocio and the fallacy of the American dream remains one of the richest seams in US cinema.

At times the film-within-a-film structure is busy and overcomplicated. Almodóvar gradually pulls the threads together into a sharp and unexpectedly brilliant punchline. If only he had let us in on the joke a little earlier.

It’s an improvement on the 2022 movie, but Tom and Jerry have become supporting players in their own film, pushed aside for an assortment of flimsily sketched newcomers who absorb most of the screen time.

Mundane routines acquire a creeping dread, with barns, kitchens and farmyards becoming landscapes of unspoken terror as the heroine clucks her way through a compelling story.

The Unknown reworks the body swap, a trope favoured by goofy romcoms, as elevated horror.

Though the final act regains some manic energy with ambitious, large-scale action, the composer Michael Abels’s relentless strings, overly extended gunplay and an unkillable creature become exhausting. And that’s before we are promised a sequel. It’s fun. But make the fun stop.

At the heart of the film is 11-year-old Lidia, raised within this fiercely loving queer household. Through her eyes, Céspedes captures the tenderness and volatility of a family under siege.

The camera dutifully records esteemed actors – including one Corrie veteran, as it happens – talking in beautifully appointed rooms, but it seldom finds the cinematic spark that might elevate the drama beyond a polished theatrical exercise.

The Sheep Detectives, a family-friendly whodunit that marries pastoral whimsy with unexpectedly weighty themes, is a rare, woolly beast.

The set list could use a few more upbeat numbers, but the project finds a heartfelt focus in the fans, who sob, snivel and bawl their way through loud, dramatic singalongs. Trembling manicured hands hold thousands of iPhones aloft.

Reflection in a Dead Diamond cares not a jot for the confines of conventional narrative and identification. This is cinema as bombardment, as fetish, as swooning fan collage. Who needs a new Bond film?

This is not horror gussied up as allegory or prestige: it is, pleasingly, a straight ghost story, executed with rigour, a swipe at misogyny and a sly sense of fun.

Taking cues from the gameplay, this compelling psyche-out is deceptively simple.

Backed by the kind of production budget normally reserved for resurrected dinosaurs running amok in a theme park, this long-gestating biopic of Michael Jackson offers two solid hours of cosplay karaoke.

The script, written by the director and Tibério Azul, occasionally fumbles its dystopian framework. But the journey has enough vigour, underpinned by ideas on autonomy and ageing, to sustain its adventure.

Mostly the film is a showcase for Jude Law’s increasingly impressive late-career metamorphosis. The actor, who has spent recent years successfully probing wounded masculinities (The Young Pope, Firebrand), brings a strikingly controlled energy to his portrayal of Vladimir Putin as a lofty and weaponised civil servant.

The coda veers into the conceptual chaos of weaker, later Paranormal Activity instalments, but it’s a promising start for the director’s proposed trilogy. Keep ’em coming.

Not atypically for a portmanteau picture, this surprise winner from last year’s Venice film festival is intermittently arresting and wildly uneven.