Tim Robey

Achieving the gossamer profundity of one of Alice Munro’s short stories, her film is about the uninterrogated privileges success brings and the envy they can easily spawn.

All his usual strengths fail him in a different culture here, perhaps because the veneer of venal cynicism that ought to be the film’s top layer is so easy to scratch through. Digging for the pathos hardly takes us long, especially with one of the director’s most cloying scores handing over a shovel.

The film’s craft, with its shivery wooded landscapes and deep focus, is consistently strong, and the acting – especially from State, but also many of the bickering village ensemble – spices up what might have been a route-one polemic.

It’s profoundly compelling, expertly made, and quite intentionally horrifying.

The shot-making is sensational, and the film knows it; the camera does things you’ve never seen before, say with focus in an interrogation room mirror, and the whole saga’s edited as though Park can’t wait to show you what’s up his sleeve.

Moonage Daydream, a wildly creative tribute to everything Bowie achieved over four and a half decades, sets a sky-high bar as cinematic fan-service, and it leaves you buzzing.

The film has a beguiling looseness – it captures that familiar holiday feeling of good days and bad days, or moods turning for no particular reason, other than maybe spending a bit too long in each other’s company.

Seydoux has unfakeable chemistry here with a perfect-as-usual Poupaud, the leading man in French cinema who seems most incapable of putting a foot wrong.

Gray has taken a dicey risk here, by thinking through white guilt from such an unapologetically personal place. In this retrospective mea culpa, he’s trying to be honest about his own conscience and childhood regrets, but also examining the multiple failures of education that set these two kids on such divergent paths.

It’s as much a film about legal process as social injustice, and the nitty-gritty is eye-opening.

The movie isn’t awful, just sapping and strained.

I’ve rarely felt more impaled on the fence by a film, because, exactly as promised, it’s everything at once – good and not good; fresh yet still a formula; cramped, strenuous, full to the brim.

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

With the filmmakers almost palpably high-fiving between these takes, it’s no surprise they wind up with a star performance that has to count as one of this star’s most strenuous. Treated as this zoo exhibit, he isn’t unleashed to express himself creatively. He’s caged.

Daniel Roher’s shrewd portrait makes the point that Navalny is half-politician, half-journalist; blending the two with his affable charisma on camera, which even extends to goofing off on TikTok, he has exactly the man-of-the-people touch that would be most likely to qualify him as a political threat.

A cram-it-all-in adaptation of Ben Macintyre’s 2010 history book of the same name, which knuckles down to its task with sleeves rolled, upper lips stiffened, and vast sheaves of exposition to whip through.

Though this be madness, yet there is method in’t – Alexander Skarsgård's Prince Amleth rampages through a mythological epic of savage beauty.

With the best will in the world, Metz drags us through a labyrinth of intrigue but messes up the crumb trail. We’re left disorientated, and underwhelmed.

This is hardly the sound of artistic burnout. No mean videographer either, Hoon departed with a great deal left to say.

It’s the rapport between the actors – or the anti-rapport, to start with – that makes this such a winning diversion.

By managing to keep faith with this fast-unravelling person, even in her most bozo moments of losing the plot, Wilson turns in her best and bravest work in films to date.

It’s warm, cosy and very Linklater: it definitely exudes more chill than urgency.

Something went wrong here – it feels like the final cut of the film is either the victim of duff scripting choices, or made equally duff attempts to fix them. It’s a pity, because it wastes Affleck’s solid efforts, and thwarts the picture Lyne got halfway on screen: a portrait of an affluent marriage as a toxic sham, with all the solidity of a Love Island merger.

There’s almost nothing the film does well, but that doesn’t stop it donning a winner’s smirk while it copies every 1980s science fiction smash you’ve ever seen.

The performances command respect, even when the script is caught feeding characters stock laugh lines you don’t quite believe, or seeming to fumble (or compress?) whole subplots to duck away from the melodrama it might otherwise have become.

As a critic-turned-partisan who also narrates, Krichevskaya is the right kind of observer here on paper. But there’s too little airing of her own views at the time of walking out, when she didn’t have faith in Dozhd’s true independence.

That the film winds up cramped, underwhelming and strangely thwarted is hard to square with all the effort up on screen – or perhaps it just feels too much like effort.

With better pacing and jokes, the film could have been a goof-off exercise to satisfy the midnight-madness crowd.