Tim Grierson

Civil War is an exciting, often giddy pop pleasure.

Whitney is strongest when it connects Houston to the larger history of Black America, illustrating how this glamorous performer grew up in poverty and never entirely escaped the obligation of helping to pull up her underprivileged family members.

Rambunctious and playful, writer-director Nida Manzoor’s feature debut radiates fizzy delight, showing audiences a breezy good time.

As a meticulously coiled study of nasty doings under one roof, Bring Her Back convincingly argues that terror starts at home.

A marvellously colourful and emotional adventure, Raya And The Last Dragon compellingly argues that the world is a dark place — but the only way to heal it is to hold onto hope.

While this spin-off to 2014’s more consistently inspired The Lego Movie is a decidedly hit-or-miss affair, it boasts enough giddy good humour and manic rambunctiousness to bludgeon the viewer into submission.

Before it starts to lose steam in its third act, Trainwreck is a deft blend of laughs, romance and poignancy — not to mention one of Apatow’s most polished, mature works.

While Walker-Silverman couldn’t have imagined his movie’s jarring real-world parallels, Rebuilding is as much a character study as it is a warning about our increasingly fragile planet and the beloved places we call home.

To the end, Okja is as endearing, chaotic and awkward as its title creature. Sometimes, the movie requires the same loving embrace Mija provides for Okja—even though, unlike that portly pig, Okja often lets you down.

The action scenes are predictably magnificent, and an excellent supporting turn from fetching new cast member Rebecca Ferguson helps make this a sexy, propulsive, top-notch thriller.

Hoping to be a stylish, witty conman thriller, The Good Liar starts out as an amusing lark but fails to stay ahead of its audience, piling on the ludicrousness until it’s impossible to take the proceedings seriously.

Overly precious but undeniably affecting, Me And Earl And The Dying Girl travels into familiar dramatic terrain — the offbeat coming-of-age story, as well as the terminal-cancer drama — to deliver something that feels handmade and also heartfelt.

The Yellow Birds is a war movie whose outlines may be familiar — but its emotional clarity gives this drama an almost crushing sense of intimacy.

Deft performances from Lubna Azabal and Nisrin Erradi add heart and soul to this slender chronicle of a de facto family learning to rely on one another.

Though sometimes achingly on-the-nose in its attempts to foreshadow these characters’ destiny, Southside With You radiates enough wistful charm to overcome the well-meaning earnestness.

As she did with Shiva Baby, Seligman shows a keen eye for her characters’ mortification, albeit without her previous picture’s precisely modulated discomfort. By design, Bottoms is a broader, more outrageous comedy, and unfortunately the jokes are not as cutting.

The droll, slight Smoking Causes Coughing plays like a loose collection of Quentin Dupieux’s leftover ideas, but there’s ample charm in these surreal bits and pieces — especially for anyone already on the auteur’s cheekily bizarre wavelength.

Neither a broad farce nor a scathing evisceration of sexism (both then and now), Catherine Called Birdy ends up trapped in a dissatisfying middle ground between those two extremes, a tonal decision that results in only mild laughs and somewhat engaging characters.

Some things never change: the pranks remain juvenile, the stunts continue to range from harrowing to disgusting, and the laughs come at a steady clip, even if there’s more than a little familiarity to the formula by now.

The mirror it holds up to its subjects — and perhaps the audience — is incredibly, sometimes painfully illuminating.

This Dune dwarfs most contemporary sci-fi in its scope and execution, ably juggling multiple characters and settings so that it matches the sprawling drama of the original tome.

Exceedingly thoughtful and self-critical rather than lazily nostalgic, this well-acted coming-of-age tale can sometimes be predictable and muddled, but is steeped in the filmmaker’s sorrow for not recognising the ways in which he and those he loved contributed to an inequitable society that shows no signs of becoming less stratified.

Even if Trier doesn’t have much new to say about oppressive religious belief, childhood trauma or the terror of adolescent hormones, Thelma’s sustained, muted uneasiness gives this genre exercise sufficient gusto.

Although director Wash Westmoreland tackles several serious subjects — sexual liberation, the repression of women’s voices, the power of art to change society — the movie has such a playful spirit that the talking points go down smoothly.

Irreverent and action-packed without sacrificing charm or emotional resonance, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle: Mutant Mayhem takes a page from the recent Spider-Verse animated films to bring a hip, youthful energy to a very familiar piece of IP, in the process giving us a story that’s fresh and funny.

Everything in Hidden Figures is smoothly efficient but also a little anticlimactic and frictionless — the story’s happy ending a little too easily achieved.

Shults has once again made a movie about the terror of family, but It Comes At Night’s confident, ruthless craftsmanship suggests a filmmaker only starting to reach his potential.

Directors Leo Scott and Ting Poo let their subject tell his own story, resulting in a film that’s partly illuminating, sometimes self-indulgent and often quite touching.