Tara Brady

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.

There are things to admire, but Bring Them Down is a hard film to like.

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.

It remains something to see, interestingly atrocious, misfiring on the grandest scale, and often best watched through the fingers. Megaflopolis might be a better name for it.

My Old Ass sensitively and sweetly negotiates coming-of-age themes, first love, wistful summer recollections and wise-cracking dialogue.

Horror aficionados will find much to admire, but everything about this wild project defies generic expectations. It’s a thriller; it’s a cat-and-mouse game; it’s a truly messed-up love story.

The damaged, rising community depicted in Sugarland are in no mood for apologies. They want accountability.

A late narrative development swerves the meet-cute into less sure-footed terrain. But this remains an encounter to treasure, jollied along by quiet political protest and poignant notes on widowhood.

For a film that depicts the discovery of the Holocaust, Lee is curiously flat and uninvolving. Miller and the images she captured deserve better.

A worthy contender in a British revival characterised by eerie cult classics as Ben Wheatley’s A Field in England, Lee Haven Jones’s The Feast and Mark Jenkin’s Enys Men.