Tim Robey

Smart comedy is already a rarity; smart comedy that looks this good is a once-in-a-blue-moon event.

[Kaufman's] film leaves your head spinning.

It’s considerably too polite to do Philip Roth justice. Only in that single tête-à-tête does it truly crackle with the cold, white heat required.

Camping out at the film’s doleful core is a very skilled Baruchel, so crestfallen and cowed as Lazaridis that to watch him is to feel the years ebbing away in virtual real time. Rise-and-fall stories so often gloat after the bursting of the bubble, but this one is all condolences.

It’s a real tea-drinker’s piece, wanting you to sit down and let its hushed insights, like some earthy infusion, linger on the palate. The incentive is strong to see it again – not immediately, perhaps, but just when it’s just starting to fade on you. The second time, the flavours here can only deepen and unfurl.

There’s a bicep-flexing quality to Landes’s direction, with its bursts of colour and chaos, its conjuration of a surreal experience out of tactile reality. You tumble out of it bruised, bewildered, mesmerised.

Allen’s ambitions with this taut, tart character study might not be stratospheric, but they’re at least moderate-to-high, and his degree of success is exciting.

Breaking down taboos around our attitudes to sex on screen is a laudable project, and one that the British two-hander Good Luck to You, Leo Grande gets at least half right.

Even at practically Kubrickian length, though, the lockstep slaughter barely gives you pause for breath. It’s a barrage, and a blast.

It gives you a family hanging on by a thread, and makes the careful tending of that thread feel so desperate it’s more than a little terrifying.

The whole climax is a delight

Rather than being any particular person’s bright idea for a girlboss fantasy revenge caper, this lousy romp was obviously hatched by an algorithm, and might just as well have been directed by AI.

We’re stuck with Key, a stand-up virtuoso who is thankfully amazing playing a windbag who can’t read the room – a ludicrous ruiner of sunsets, or any other vaguely peaceful moment.

There’s nothing Saulnier does better here than unveil his premise and bring the siblings together for their handful of scenes, but his film remains deftly shot and dynamic to the end.

We are never distracted for long from the gaping sadness of the man and Hawke is brilliant at portraying that despair.

The middle stretch is genuinely scary, though, thanks to the film’s clammy aptitude for trapping us alone in the dark. Somewhere in here, there’s a thesis brewing about how predators ply their trade and cover their tracks while purporting to be the good guys. The product of their actions is ghastly, and it’s lumbering at us fast.

The film’s narrative obliqueness heightens its gallery-piece surrealism. What payoffs we get are affecting, though.

If there’s one reason to see Prisoner’s Daughter, it’s Kate Beckinsale.

This comedy-drama with a surrealist edge is more than strong enough to be worthy of praise beyond Byrne, who is legitimately fantastic.

The movie’s invigorating discourse on sin, lust and love is propelled by a kind of Dionysian glee which keeps it airborne almost constantly.

This is Holmes intentionally slowed down to a hobbling, reflective, end-of-life pace: dare we call it refreshing? It’s a film to rummage around in, picking up old clues, considering their meaning, and turning them in your palm.

It’s the casting of Moore, though, and her willingness to denude herself at 61 – emotionally, as well as physically – that gives The Substance a startling connection with its themes. Not for 30 years has she owned a film with anything like this certitude. Watching her confront the Demi Moore in the mirror, and do it so mercilessly, is extraordinary.

The film’s comedy is loose and generous, and its esprit de corps sneaks up on you with a soft tread.

Denis has made a spellbindingly mysterious object – as nonsensical as existence, maybe, until you give it a quarter-turn, and look again.

While Bill Skarsgård only fitfully impresses as Count Orlok in Robert Eggers’s chilling remake, Lily-Rose Depp proves she’s one to watch.

Deadwyler does magnificent work in it, making bold, risky choices to communicate a near-operatic range of emotion.

Gibney’s problem here, in a way, is his main point: the very lack of transparency about these missions, which operate in ill-defined spheres of international law, obstructs informed public discussion.

What a multiple swansong and beautiful accident The Misfits is.