Tim Robey

The film has a sheepish, hair-shirt quality, as if it wants credit for intersectional largesse. What it does do quite well is challenge the temptations of unquestioning nostalgia.

Mark Chappell’s script has a refreshingly high laugh-rate as these things go, with a seam of pure English silliness that sets it well apart from Knives Out, without gunning for anything like that league of plot ingenuity. It’s closer, really, to doing for Christie what Scream did for the slasher flick – goosing the formula with winks and tickles.

The Forgiven concentrates on awful people doing awful things they’ll pay for unless they can avoid it, but as morality play it’s stuck in a rut, with an ending that just seems to have stumped McDonagh – it dissipates.

It’s in the wit department that this trifle wobbles most, dodging irony and cosying up with convention.

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

Director/co-writer Babak Anvari made a startling debut with Under the Shadow (2015), but like his follow-up, Wounds (2019), this is a shakier pot-boiler – diverting, provocative in spots, a little head-scratchy in plot terms. The secret weapon is Ascott, an actor you itch to see cast in more films

Shot entirely in Welsh, this pristine debut from Lee Haven Jones has a methodical chill to it, laying steady groundwork for a buffet of grotesqueries. It’s horror-satire, with its eye on environmental plundering, and a demonic revenge to exact.

[Folman's] new film, Where is Anne Frank, doesn’t need to make sense of Anne Frank’s diaries – they speak for themselves – but instead builds a bridge to the present day, where Folman finds a troubling deafness to the very lessons, and alarm bells, that her legacy ought to have guaranteed.

Taken as a speculative romance, and in the right matinee spirit, it’s lushly engaging, with a star pairing that – appropriately – rivets.

With its meathead sensibility, Day Shift is always most comfortable hacking and slashing. These set-tos can be reasonably tasty, but everything else? Way more seasoning, please.

The script makes a heavy meal of Naru’s personal growth, where a concentration on pure survivalist reflex would have made it leaner and meaner. But when the film knuckles down in sequences of wordless action, it slays.

The oddity, and pretty much sole selling point here, is Phillips, a delightful stalwart of British telly for years, fronting a coy Australian sex comedy of almost dogged, determined mediocrity. Writer-director Renée Webster is at least to be credited with grasping her star’s flummoxed appeal in a rare leading role.

It’s the film that’s hell – and a very dull, desperate hell at that, as if these dungeon masters have realised we aren’t sufficiently scared by the main event, and try throwing the kitchen sink at us, almost literally.

It would be hard to overpraise Burghardt, a debuting actress on the spectrum whose scenes are so tender, relaxed and generally sweet she deserves at least half the credit.

This is at the very least a beautifully designed failure, marrying crepuscular photography with faultless art direction, and blessed by a gorgeous, otherworldly score by Augustin Viard, a specialist in the ondes Martenot. It looks and sounds so darkly inviting – but sends you home unsated.

With its watch-through-your-fingers cringe factor, this is an excellent black comedy of amiss-ness all round. It’s about millennials, their fibs, and their failures.

What keeps it on its feet is the snappy direction of Jeremiah Zagar, a Philly native who shows off his home town with unmistakable pride, and has a lot of vivid strategies for what the camera’s doing (there are more time-hopping match cuts than I could count) or which song to put on top.

The moment-to-moment incoherence of Dashcam makes it maddeningly hard to figure out what’s happening – the “WTF?”s that appear in the chat-box might just as well be our own. There’s a certain delirious energy to it.

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.