Wendy Ide

Sirocco And The Kingdom Of The Air Streams is a beguiling and surreal story of sisterhood and survival.

The combination of a unique personality and a fascinating place makes for a beguiling and poetic film, which blurs the lines between science and art.

While the film lacks the bravura flourishes that characterised Powell and Pressburger at their peak, it’s an engrossing celebration of two of British cinema’s most distinctive voices, and their creative harmony.

Surface similarities to Groundhog Day are relegated to background noise, thanks to the crisp writing and the nihilistic bite of the humour.

There is a bruising authenticity to the picture that comes, in no small part, from a lengthy and meticulous casting process.

A winning, if whimsical, account of an ordinary woman achieving the extraordinary.

[A] silly, shallow romcom, which is as thin and predictable as Kat’s tinny pop songs.

Timothy Greenfield-Sanders’s generous documentary is a fitting tribute to the late, great author.

This is not just a visual treat, it’s a rewarding and unexpectedly engrossing piece of female-led storytelling.

What’s particularly striking is an inventive sound design that tunes us in and out of the blood-pounding fury in Roman’s head – a place, we soon realise, which is not somewhere that’s comfortable to linger.

There are charismatic figures fronting the movement, but the real power comes from each of the many shared, sad stories from women whose lives were affected by the law.

This sensitively structured psychological drama benefits from first-rate casting.

The meditative experience is heightened by Wenders’s innovative use of sound: indistinct whispers flutter like bats through the cavernous spaces.

Hit Man takes Powell’s amiable, supporting actor appeal (Top Gun: Maverick) and hones it to a star quality of such laser-beam intensity, you start to fear for your eyesight. It breathes fresh life into the played-out hitman genre – and contains what may be one of the top five winks in movie history.

There’s a despairing inevitability to the film’s incremental pacing – we feel every aching minute of the nearly two-and-a-half-hour running time. It’s not exactly fun, but it’s a relentlessly powerful piece of film-making.

There’s a languid kind of magic to Koberidze’s approach, which, with its enchanting score, digressive montages and sparse dialogue, has roots in silent cinema but also feels refreshingly and genuinely original.

Richly detailed and superbly acted across the board, the film cast a scathing eye over the rigid social constraints that ensnare anyone who fails to conform.

A celebration of scientific excellence and an account of a discovery which has ramifications for natural environments the world over, The Serengeti Rules makes for compelling viewing.

It’s a masterclass in using a stripped-back, minimal approach to gripping effect, evident throughout Ilker Çatak’s terrific, taut, Oscar-nominated drama.

It’s a tough watch – at the start, she suggests that we “close our eyes and take a deep breath if we need to” – but a brave and important one.

This terrific, unexpectedly moving documentary portrait captures the man at work.

The music they create together is emblematic of the central problem. It’s sterile, manufactured and utterly fake production-line pop masquerading as some kind of indie rock spotify sensation.

The slow-motion breakdown of a family is tracked by a lens that initially sought out intimacy and celebration, but finds itself, as the years pass, increasingly distanced from figures caught in its time capsule of a frame.

The use of animation is sometimes a little crude, but the homespun aesthetic works well with the quirky nature of the story which unfolds.

The sex is like tennis: fierce, combative bouts in which there will always be a winner and a loser. And the tennis, ultimately, is like sex: an ecstatic consummation between two perfectly matched people at their glistening physical peak.

What a joy is a documentary that neither talks down to its audience nor diminishes its subject.

There’s a bracingly astringent bleakness under its surface layer of melancholy humour; a biting, sharp edge that counters the occasional lurch towards sentimentality.

This remarkably assured debut ... uses the medium of cinema to its fullest extent, both visually and aurally.