Tara Brady

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.

Ardent lovers may well wish for someone to look at them the way Attenborough looks at giant kelp; at another moment, he excitedly recalls forgetting to breathe during his first snorkel.

Screamboat is no classic, but it knows its audience.

These picaresque and picturesque adventures fail to coalesce into a movie. But it’s impossible to argue with Daria D’Antonio’s ravishing cinematography and an unexpectedly moving coda featuring Stefania Sandrelli as an older Parthenope.

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

Just when you think the folk-horror vogue is all played out, along comes Aislinn Clarke’s textured delve into Celtic mythology and intergenerational trauma.

It is a film of many enchantments.

Powered along by youthful exuberance, earthy sex scenes and keen naturalism, Holy Cow is a box-office sensation in France, where it outperformed Anora and The Brutalist. The cinematographer Elio Balezeaux finds winning tableaux in dung, well-used farm equipment and sun-dappled pastures. An auspicious debut for everyone involved.

At its best The Return recalls Pier Paolo Pasolini’s sublime, pared-back Medea, even if the gritty realism of Uberto Pasolini (no relation) does leave one yearning for the magic of that earlier film and the source material.

The moon is square and the action is so daft that it makes the Sonic the Hedgehog sequence feel like the work of Ingmar Bergman.

La Cocina makes watching The Bear feel like listening to Enya in a garden centre.

The director of Stranger by the Lake returns to the deadpan, sexually unstable working-class environs that have shaped many of his previous films with this pleasingly confounding tale of displaced characters and desires.

The best Irish film in a long time.

The grand casting gambit of pitching De Niro against De Niro proves an unnecessary distraction. Curiously bloodless in every respect.

The most distracting flaws are rooted in the problematic re-creation of animated material in “live-action” cinema. The permanent magic-hour lighting is hard to look at.

The loud bangs and snarky zingers that powered their Marvel films towards box-office billions are fine for superheroes but not, it transpires, for a big-hearted teenage heroine and her robot chums.

Edebiri works hard, but her notebook-clutching Nancy Drew asks dimwitted questions, even after the guests start to “disappear”.

Franchise fans will appreciate another glimpse of Plankton’s unlikely hillbilly clan. And there’s plenty of room for traditional SpongeBob bungling. Who knew marital discord could be so much fun for all ages?

Stanfield and Peck movingly channel their late subject against the sweep of history: “The total man does not live one experience.”

Simultaneously folkish and earthy, Delpero’s follow-up to the much-admired convent drama Maternal shares DNA with Small Body, Laura Samani’s equally remarkable tale of spiritual redemption.

More than 100 artists contributed to the homeschool green screen and rough-hewn post-Minecraft animation. The anarchic and imaginative world-building around Batman’s hood is impressive.

The details and atmospherics are diverting. The blindingly obvious plot twist is less impressive.

For all the gloom, this is a lovely, heartfelt creation from the Oscar-winning animator.

The Fire Inside has enough quality to please genre and sports enthusiasts even if it feels like an undercard fixture. For all the talent on both sides of the camera, the nuts-and-bolts script lacks innovation and the pacing neither bobs nor weaves.

The lack of geopolitical context is questionable, but the film-making is sound. The movie’s editor, Hansjörg Weissbrich, maintains a brisk pace. Deftly used snippets of archive footage amplify the documentary realism. A sure-footed ensemble propels the story towards its harrowing conclusion.

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.

There are no big dramas, save for a call up to the office for skipping a school trip. Reiko Yoshida’s script instead foregrounds sincere friendship and the joyful mechanics of songwriting.

The parallel father-and-son storylines may feel a bit too tidy, but Nabulsi’s film is powered along by terrific performances and palpable fury.