Tara Brady

Adri’s gorgeously staged fantasies offer a happy detour that ultimately undermines the film’s emotional gravitas. This remains, nonetheless, a charming coming-of-age portrait with a poignant sense of time and place.

At its best, Laura Fairrie’s entertaining film finds parallels between its subject and her many, big-haired heroines, especially Lucky Santangelo, the leading lady of such bestsellers as Dangerous Kiss and Poor Little Bitch Girl.

The results are uneven yet pioneering and important.

We salute the costume and continuity departments (Betty Austin) on Iris’s consistently bloody frills as she runs, fights and reasons for her “life”. We are with her every step of the way.

The final act descends into chaotic silliness, but watching Dinklage and Pike attempting to out-villain one another is never dull. Deborah Newhall’s costumes would look intimidatingly power-hungry on a clothes hanger, let alone Ms Pike. And there’s a terrifying subject lurking under the dark humour.

Ignore the unassuming title: Ordinary Love is a love story that is extraordinary.

Jalmari Helander, who previously scored an international hit with his Santa-themed horror, Rare Exports, mines every gory set piece for squeals of delight and revulsion. Styled as a midnight movie, Sisu makes terrific use of limited military hardware and a forbidding Lapland landscape.

Every scene, every ride and every development feels dangerous and combustible.

The cast rises to match a huge emotional register culminating in literal and figurative explosions. Audiard’s book reimagines the musical halfway between heated drama and song. Choreography, cinematography, and design equally lean into his Sprechstimme innovations.

In common with the director’s most-admired films – including the Academy Award winner A Separation – this new film seamlessly marries genre kicks and social injustice.

Mortensen’s script tussles between feminist revision and old-school male showdowns, imagining Vivienne as a Joan of Arc-inspired frontierswoman yet subject to the degradations of the era.

Production designer Tamara Deverell and costume designer Luis Sequeira make for an arresting spectacle, one that is, ultimately, too luxurious for the sleazy travelling show and 1940s hoboism at the heart of the movie.

The deadpan tone recalls the drollery of Jim Jarmusch’s Only Lovers Left Alive and What We Do in the Shadows. Montpetit channels the teen angst of a young Winona Ryder. The effect reframes this dark comedy as a species-swapped, harder-edged, very French Edward Scissorhands.

Under the satire, there’s an authentic sense of emotional uncertainty.

In Swan Song, feathers, synchronicity and sheer graft define the world’s most popular ballet.

The writer-director and his cinematographer, Simone D’Arcangelo, evoke spaghetti westerns with wide-angle vistas of forbidding horizons. Odd moments of Quentin Tarantino-style playfulness add to the unease. The perverse, atonal effect is as discombobulating as Harry Allouche’s plucked, appositely bleak score.

An anecdote concerning the “amusing, bright, and always very vinegary” Gore Vidal being caught by a woman police officer breaking into Williams’s New York apartment would, alone, make Truman & Tennessee required viewing.

A jigsaw puzzle, dream sequences and continuous snatches of Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata build towards an uneasy denouement that will leave the viewer guessing and obsessing long after the final credits roll.

The Norwegian writer-director Emilie Blichfeldt roasts conventional heroines and female beauty standards in this gruesome, hilarious reworking of Cinderella.

Working with Gammell, Keough, a granddaughter of Elvis Presley and the compelling star of The House that Jack Built and Daisy Jones & the Six, successfully transitions to the other side of the camera with this respectful take on a community under pressure.

The machinations find a charming focus in the thawing between Del Toro and Threapleton. Both actors bring a jouissance to the slightly jaded milieu.

Trashy stories need plots and character development, too.

A carefully modulated tone allows zombie cows, end-of-life care and jokes about furious masturbation to coexist, sometimes in the same scene.

Dave Davis’s petrified protagonist is nothing short of star-making.

Sorrentino supplies the occasional surreal house-style flourish – a drifting tear observed in zero gravity – but mostly the director leans into the quiet complexities of Servillo’s turn.

The film attempts both an in-depth portrait of the late author and a scattershot meditation on the persistence of his ideas.

The cast is fun. And any addition to the Henry Selick canon is a welcome addition indeed. A future Halloween classic.

The third part in a loose, geographically defined trilogy, as sensitively penned by Loach collaborator Paul Laverty, The Old Oak is a gentler film than the stark austerity painted by I, Daniel Blake or the chilling dissection of the gig economy in Sorry We Missed You. The film is, however, astute in its depiction of a disenfranchised community, ravaged by vulture property speculators and post-industrialisation.