Tara Brady

Laurent Tangy’s slick cinematography adds to the sense that we’re watching a luxe commercial. But for what? It’s impossible to figure out who this empty film is for or why it exists in the first place.

Fans of the playful meandering of the Romanian auteur Radu Jude will likely enjoy the haphazard storytelling and epic travelling shots.

The ever-reliable Dyrholm is both charismatic and curdling as the grubby matriarch. But most of the film is writ large and affectingly in Sonne’s agonised face.

The final reveal is as unnecessary as it is predictable, and the pace can be as glacial as the setting. No matter. The Damned is powered along by suspicion, atmospherics and an unforgettable landscape.

Risk and bondage are seldom as playful as they are in Babygirl.

The first half of the film is spellbinding; Eggers and his cinematographer, Jarin Blaschke, brilliantly redeploy the grammar of German expressionism to make Dracula (or thereabouts) scary again.

A series of indelible images coalesce into a powerful chronicle of institutional abuse and racial inequality.

This is a Terrifier movie: everything is bigger and scarier, including the psychological damage.

How to Make Millions Before Grandma Dies, the debut feature from the writer and director Pat Boonnitipat, is a warm, witty tear-jerker improbably rooted in elder exploitation.

Adam Arkapaw’s dynamic cinematography, the pulsing electronica of the director’s regular composer (and brother) Jed Kurzel, and a snarling script make for a taut and gritty thriller that could pass for a moody, rediscovered early-1970s classic originally shot sometime between The French Connection and Death Wish.

The misused music and hollow visuals set the tone for a vacuous film that frequently feels like an overstyled catalogue shoot.

A swaggering, unapologetic appearance by Yair Netanyahu, the premier’s son and presumed successor, signals a continuation of the family’s legacy.

With the cinematographer David Gallego, the sound designer Olivier Dandré and a superb ensemble cast, Nyoni has crafted indelible tableaux, powered by dark survivors’ humour, blistering originality and retaliatory fury.

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.

This dull-witted, soundstage-bound Christmas romance has festive trimmings and a clockwork plot.

Fair play to Abigail Barlow and Emily Bear, the songwriters drafted in to replace Lin-Manuel Miranda: Moana 2 can’t quite match the showstopping highs of the original film’s How Far I’ll Go, but the songs are consistently, toe-tappingly good.

The film, which always feels like classy telly rather than a pioneering effort befitting its subjects, might have made more of this dilemma.

The results are uneven yet pioneering and important.

The film never lets up. Pieced together from carefully colour-graded archive footage and the contemporaneous testimonies of Khrushchev, Andrée Blouin, In Koli Jean Bofane and Conor Cruise O’Brien (narrated by Patrick Cruise O’Brien), Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat finds an unlikely villain in its propulsive score: jazz.

There are cruising parallels with American contemporaries the Ross Brothers and Halina Reijn, but this daisy chain has an earnest, festive charm unlike any other. It’s a vibe.

Blitz lacks the emotional heft of Hunger or the director’s Oscar-winning 12 Years a Slave, but it’s an absorbing, reliable depiction of a much-mythologised historical moment.

Fine lessons about good manners and decency are wrapped up in fun and fur.

In delicate movements, the miserabilism of Small Things Like These coalesces into a wonderfully understated seasonal catharsis.

Chan-wook Park’s regular cinematographer Chung-hoon Chung trains his camera on dark, snaky corridors and Thatcher and East’s terrified faces as the Mormon girls realise the hopelessness of their predicament. It’s no fun for them, but it’s never dull for us.

From Wim Wenders’s Hammett to Hirokazu Kore-eda’s The Truth, the English-language debut is a rock on which many directors have run aground. So it proves with Pedro Almodóvar’s The Room Next Door, a picture stuffed with good performances, pretty things and weighty dialogue that nonetheless fails to coalesce into the shape of an Almodóvar film.

Kendrick proves herself a formidable talent on both sides of the camera. The timeline can be choppy, but this is as considered as it is chilling.

Tung, an occasional actor who has won seven Hong Kong Golden Horse awards for his choreography, brings poignancy and authenticity to the thrills and spills.

Unrequited love is seldom so much fun.