Tim Robey

It manages a light, improvisatory mastery, an immaculate hold on tone, and a grave yet sunlit tableau of an ending, with each one of these faces turned in collective mourning, that I’ll never forget.

Where Fassbinder crafted extraordinary tableaux of self-parodic misery, such as the drunken, prostrate Petra diving for the phone on her white shag carpet, Ozon breezes through this exercise instead with his usual snappy relish. He has plenty to say about the original’s magnificence, but perhaps not an awful lot to add.

Dark Glasses is mainly just flat, but it could definitely have done without this all-round disgrace of a dog performance – quite enough to have Uggy from The Artist shielding his peepers with a front paw.

The film has an impetuous, let’s-try-it-on quality that makes it a modest pleasure.

Flux Gourmet plays like a gonzo skit, and is hilariously unabashed on that level, but there’s clearly a level of commentary here regarding the crazy whims of artistry, the trouble with getting funded by people whose opinions you despise, and the shrivelled incompetence of anyone paid to write about your work and consume it when it’s served.

Take one high-concept format, two big stars and lots of songs... this romcom isn’t perfect, but you can’t help rooting for the main couple.

Branagh exploits a star-packed cast to distract us in all directions. The trouble is, it sometimes feels like a dozen actors signed on, then drew lots to see who was playing whom.

The film sounds actively embarrassed by what it’s trying to pitch, and reverse-engineers its sci-fi elements to fit the default disaster template Emmerich could apply in his sleep. We’re promised the Moon, but sold a lemon.

Laugh for laugh, it may well be a series peak. I bow down to the perfection of one immaculately organised prank in a furniture shop, especially when innocent bystanders weigh in with their “He went all up in the ceiling!” comments.

This chamber-horror oddity from the English actress-turned-auteur is too weird, too wonky; intermittently gross, and often gruelling.

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.

Without giving in to bromides, the cha-cha, surprisingly feel-good rhythms of Nagy’s direction make this heroine's sudden sense of purpose rather exhilarating.

The film fares best when the chief negotiator, a fellow Marine vet played by the late, great Michael Kenneth Williams, steps into the fray. It’s one of his final performances, and a wary, angry one that elevates the material.

The film gets too caught up in its svelte, talky stylings to stay properly watertight as a suspense piece, and when it goes for broke in the last reel, it has too many characters – major and minor – behaving like buffoons. It definitely could have ended better.

Not one of the quartet misses the opportunity to do some of their very best work here.

As a giant window on all this toil, the film is full of news, insights and revelations without pushing a dogmatic thesis: it’s as open-ended and humanly interested as documentaries get.

The killings themselves are run-of-the-mill, jump-scare assaults staged with minimal invention or flair, which only makes the film’s box of tricks look emptier: there are even quips about how we’ve seen it all before, at which I found myself duly nodding. It gets almost too meta to function.

While it’s fully grounded as a family portrait, overlaid on it still is that type of cosmic optimism which makes Mills’s work so lovely. I’m not even sure we fully deserve it, but it would be sheer masochism to turn it down.

Boiling Point grips remorselessly while it’s spinning all these plates, and somehow ladles onto them a smorgasbord of great, frazzled acting from all concerned.

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 distinctive charms of Wain’s aesthetic certainly come over, especially daubed across the lovely end credits, by which time this jumpy curio, with almost palpable relief, has laid itself to rest.

It shows so much blood being spilled in the name of democracy, and so many tears shed, that it’s next-to-impossible not to be fired up.

There are snatches of fun to be had early on, before the teasing gimmickry about reality and fakery expires. But the second half is just a slavish rehash of all the series’ best-known tropes. Unlike Alice in Wonderland, crossing through this looking glass, we may simply wind up less and less curious.

The film frustrates because it’s frictionless, almost completely devoid of credible conflict, and generally keen to sail through as a testament to everlasting love at its most altruistic.

We’d give the lazy set-up a pass if sufficiently fun things started happening off the back of it.

As a debut, it’s grungy, overscaled and rarely far from cliché. But it also has guts, and there’s a vigour to the acting that pulls it through.

It’s never outright bad – not unforgivably so – but comes off muted, diffuse and generally half-baked.

Stone packs a ton of information in, then lurches to a halt; while he milks Kennedy’s mistrust of the three-letter agencies, his grasp of “what really happened” is still fundamentally guesswork. Still, he does persuade us of smoking guns out there that weren’t Oswald’s, or anywhere near the book depository.