Tara Brady

The Mitchells vs the Machines feels, even without the benefits of a theatrical run, just like summer.

The wild conceit is, against all odds, through smart writing and clever use of CGI and puppets, made palatable. The denouement is pleasingly shocking.

Whispered myths about periods and cleanliness coalesce into a perfect accidental riposte to Judy Blume’s Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret.

As a Liverpool fan, this critic is hardly the target audience. But if this consistently engaging film has a flaw – here are words I did not expect to write – it’s the truncation of the Man United years. It’s the only shock in a fond, fast-moving tribute.

The unlikely friendship between Michael and Kensuke is the heart of a film that touches lightly on environmental themes, loss and history.

Like the village it depicts, the film is meticulously crafted yet oddly two-dimensional: a map, not a place.

This is a fond requiem from a Bowie fan, made with reverence for his art and respect for his privacy.

Following on from Harry Wootliff’s infertility romance, Only You, this confirms the British writer-director as an unmissable talent.

It falls to the charming cast to outshine the flimsy material. Gladstone and Tran are as warm and well-worn as a much-loved bed sweater. Bowen Yang thrums with millennial angst. Joan Chen steals scenes as Angela’s loudly gay-positive mother.

The zingers could be zippier. But what makes the film feel radical is its welcome and unwavering confidence in 2D animation as a comedic anvil. Sight gags pile up, frames stretch and snap, and the fourth wall is wobbly. In a genre increasingly marred by CG realism, Looney Tunes revels in its cartoonish artifice.

The film is not as taut as Kristina Grozeva and Petar Valchanov’s similarly themed 2015 thriller, The Lesson, but its freewheeling authenticity gives it charm and momentum.

The animation remains enchanting and is punctuated by exciting swords-and-sandals action, even if the finished film is not quite the classic we might have anticipated from the talents attached.

In common with LeMond’s career, during which the interloping Yank won over spectators and rivals alike, The Last Rider proves a charm offensive.

Just Mercy is commendably restrained in its courtroom scenes – there is none of the contempt-baiting wailing and gnashing of teeth that too often characterises legal procedurals.

Léa Mysius’s accomplished second feature is the time-travelling, olfactory-driven LGBTQ romance and family melodrama you couldn’t possibly have seen coming.

More analysis of the films would have enriched this entertaining chronicle, but it remains a rollicking account of the most important movie partnership since Powell and Pressburger.

Recent cinematic representations of Jehovah’s Witnesses, notably in Dea Kulumbegashvili’s Beginning, Richard Eyre’s The Children Act and Daniel Kokotajlo’s Apostasy, have not been kind to the Christian denomination. This compassionate story of puppy love – co-written and codirected by the former Witness Sarah Watts – shows more understanding towards the community, through conversations.

Working from a blackly comic script by Austin Kolodney, Van Sant fashions a shouty standoff in the tradition of Network and Dog Day Afternoon.

Dupieux, as ever, writes, directs, shoots, and orchestrates the madness. This isn’t as conceptually neat as Deerskin nor as playfully intertextual as Rubber, but it’s consistently fun.

Director McLeod — another of Lee’s fellow students — has fun with contradictory accounts, tall tales and faulty memories in a film that pulls the rug just as effectively as its subject and inscrutable star do.

Baumbach’s characteristically barbed wit too often makes way for self-indulgence and sentimentality. Ruminations on fame as a hollow, unfulfilling enterprise have all the depth of a disposable contact lens.

It is equally a solid genre effort, characterised by gory set-pieces, discombobulating scenarios, and welcome lashings of feminist revenge.

Working from a libretto by the cult band Sparks, cult director Leos Carax’s English-language debut is unlikely to please mayonnaise mainstream tastes. But for those seeking surprises, spectacle, and shadows, Annette is a marvel like no other.

The pretty pictures and silhouetted, sanitised sex will do well enough for Bridgerton fans, but the material has strayed so far from the source, one wonders why they kept the title.

The Nicolas Cage renaissance rages on and this unsettling Ozpoiltation thriller provides a perfect sandbox for “Nicolas Cage”, the actor who enjoys a good metatextual jape.

The oppressively neon musical numbers and ominous pastoral pronouncements that “secular government was a mistake” are more convincing than the film’s late swerve into Giallo terrain. But the writer-director’s ideas about women as religious enforcers, complicit in their own subjugation, are fascinating.

An engaging chronicle, nonetheless.

The appearance of Malik Zidi rounds off a fine cast and introduces intriguing echoes of the amnesiac romance of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. That and decent tech specs, including some nifty shots from veteran horror cinematographer Maxime Alexandre, offset the slightly cobbled-together feel of the material.