Wendy Ide

There are moments when Dune: Part Two feels uncomfortably timely.

Unfortunately, it becomes clear that the film is all backdrop, a boomer nostalgia trip with little in the way of actual story.

This feature debut from the Sydney-based writer and director Samuel Van Grinsven may tackle familiar material – gay coming-of-age stories are hardly uncommon – but it does so with a lustre and style that marks Van Grinsven out as a name to watch. Perhaps even more notable is Leach, a silky, feline presence who owns every moment that he’s on screen.

It evokes a specific time and a place so vividly that you can almost taste the stale cigarette smoke and cheap beer. But while the picture affectionately skewers the youthful pretensions of the aspiring artists, it also allows the students an overly generous space in which to pontificate and navel-gaze.

It’s possibly the most Russian thing ever created, and it’s most certainly not a soothing viewing experience. But there’s something grimly fascinating about it nonetheless.

This impressive first feature from Indian director Shuchi Talati burrows into the skin of its high-achieving, ambitious central character.

Ultimately, the question of what actually happened is just another red herring. The real point of the film is its heartfelt, if slightly trite, message: that it’s the wider world that needs to adapt and accept the differences of children like Minato and Yori, rather than the other way around.

While it leans a little heavily on baffling basketball strategy and court-based machinations, it’s a dynamic and unexpectedly affecting animation.

Here’s a cause for celebration for fans of British cinema: a feature debut that launches not one but two of the most promising talents to arrive in movie theatres for a long while.

The picture’s seductive power lies elsewhere, with a glorious, typically extravagant performance from Eva Green as the treacherous Milady. She’s great fun in a role that might have been tailor-made for her skill set: Milady is vampy, venomous and dripping with goth jewellery.

The aim was to create something “funny, beautiful, spiritual, political, complex, simple and true”. The Scriver brothers succeed in pretty much all of this and, with the film’s quirky, psychedelic style of computer animation, create something genuinely unexpected and visually playful.

There’s considerable cumulative power to these intimate glimpses of kids, from primary school tiddlers to high school graduates, all facing an uncertain future.

It’s an absolute joy.

France is watchable, if not subtle, but the picture labours its message with an overstretched running time and an oddly anticlimactic structure.

It’s a gorgeous, quietly affecting film that finds an unassuming beauty in this simple life in rural China, but which doesn’t shy away from the extreme hardships faced by the very poorest.

The lovely, subtle work from Macdonald, as her character blossoms and her horizons broaden, gives the film a warmth and magnetism.

The fierce intelligence of Fiennes’s work is magnified by Berger’s elegant direction.

It dismantles the lofty ambitions of cinema as great, important and significant, a monument on the cultural landscape. Instead, it shows us art for ego’s sake, and it has a lot of wickedly spiteful fun doing so.

[An] affectionate, frequently amusing documentary portrait.

Powerful and enraging.

Coppola evokes the aching loneliness and isolation experienced by women who simultaneously have everything and nothing.

The child’s perspective on the story means that the film is unquestioning when it comes to the sources of the psychic powers, neatly sidestepping the need for exposition. In a child’s mind, magic is real, black magic painfully so.

Ultimately, One to One might not reveal a huge amount that’s new about Lennon, but it makes him feel bracingly alive in a way few other documentaries have managed.

Fascinating, confounding and continually surprising.

This is not cinema that leaves you feeling good about things. Nor does it tread a familiar path. But I’m Thinking of Ending Things is one of the most daringly unexpected films of the year, a sinewy, unsettling psychological horror, saturated with a squirming dream logic that tips over into the domain of nightmares.

It’s a profoundly uncomfortable piece of filmmaking, a meticulously judged exercise in satirical sadism. But a question mark over the third act climax leaves the audience with a sense of doubt: the ’what’ of the situation is genuinely disturbing, but the ’why’ is more elusive, a niggling inconsistency which undermines some of the picture’s considerable impact.

There are a lot of ideas churning around in this intriguing but scattershot picture, which veers into the surreal and macabre in its quest to explore themes of identity, authenticity and the nature of beauty. Not all of it lands successfully, particularly in the increasingly agitated and fragmented second half.

Küppenheim is terrific, her precision and restraint in the role drawing us into the story.