Wendy Ide

Aurora’s Sunrise is notable not so much for its use of animation, which is effective but not especially creative or technically groundbreaking, but for the dramatic sweep of Aurora’s incredible tale.

Mainly, though, the problem lies with a screenplay that fails to create suspense, or even to persuade us to care who killed a brilliant but unpopular hair stylist. Still, credit to the hair and costume design team for a collection of extravagantly silly creations.

It’s a film that obediently hits the predictable story beats, is regularly punctuated by peppy, disposable musical numbers, but shows no inclination to be much more than a nostalgic marketing vehicle for a collection of anodyne pop songs.

For the most part, the film is a towering achievement. Not surprisingly, given Nolan’s preference for shooting on Imax 70mm film, the picture has a depth of detail you could drown in.

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.

This is tense, essential film-making that argues for the importance of serious, balanced journalism in today’s world of factional infotainment, while also showing the cost to those who stand against the tide.

It’s a technically accomplished work. The score is nervy pulsing and electronic, adding to the propulsion and tension of the storytelling.

With Bird Box: Barcelona, as with any film of this outlandish ilk, suspension of disbelief and an appreciation of propulsively destructive action sequences is key. Just don’t expect too many fresh ideas.

Control director Anton Corbijn’s first documentary, Squaring the Circle (The Story of Hipgnosis), is a fascinating and suitably maverick snapshot of a richly creative moment in music history, told through a couple of disreputable hippies who designed some of the most iconic album covers of all time.

With its looming, angular and alienating architecture, and thoroughly considered technological and ethical future landscape, this is a phenomenal and inventive piece of world-building from Prague-based director Robert Hloz.

It’s an uncomfortable watch, but a extremely effective one.

While the film’s conclusion is perhaps a little heavy-handed, the delivery of the message – of women’s reproductive rights and agency over their lives and bodies – is an emphatic slam dunk.

The beauty of Wham!, a key part of the appeal of the band, came from the perception that they were a self-contained unit, a guaranteed good time seemingly impervious to negativity. And for a while, that was true.

It’s not unusual, unfortunately, for the victims of sexual attacks to find themselves distrusted and even accused. What rankles in the film’s approach is that the audience is also encouraged to question her story.

The latest picture from DreamWorks Animation is a likable if slight story of teen crises.

The community support for the embattled shop surprises nobody, except, perhaps Tannenbaum, the ageing hippy whose love of literature is evident on every groaning shelf.

It’s a rambunctious adventure, certainly. But it’s also a film that argues for tolerance and LGBTQ+ acceptance.

The unstoppable force of Lawrence’s charisma notwithstanding, this is not so much tasteless, just a bit bland.

Spectacular archive footage from the event captures an inescapable sense of excitement – infectious, even to cycling agnostics in the audience – and interviews with LeMond and his wife, Kathy, are unexpectedly affecting.

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 cumulative stress of the pandemic is everywhere, as pervasive and ubiquitous as the omicron variant. Beth’s lonely home-working set-up; the eerie quiet in the predawn hours; the brittle desperation in the callers’ voices; the sheer volume of cries for help: it all captures the sense of teetering on the brink, the uncertainty, the unfamiliar anxieties of the first lockdown.

Plus points include a punchy soundtrack of 90s hip-hop, and Anthony Ramos and Dominique Fishback, heroically holding their own as the hapless humans roped into the Transformers’ thunderous mess.

While its ideas might fail to fully coalesce, the film is unnervingly beautiful; an immersive and mesmeric aural and visual experience.

There’s not a frame of this rich, kaleidoscopically detailed animation that isn’t dazzling.

Writer-director Carolina Cavalli (with the considerable contribution of Benedetta Porcaroli in the title role) crafts a refreshingly unconventional and acidic deadpan comic portrait of an offbeat female friendship.

Despite the suitably transgressive nature of the subject matter, Catherine Breillat’s first film in a decade is an oddly muted affair: uncomfortable, certainly, but lacking the disruptive, confrontational jab and genuine shock factor of her earlier pictures.

It looks terrific – as always Hausner’s use of colour and costume is striking and eloquent – but this is a thinly-written picture that operates on a largely superficial level.

It’s frequently an uncomfortable watch and, at points, prompts prickly ethical questions about the potential for the re-traumatisation of documentary subjects. But, perhaps more unexpectedly, this bold and confrontational film is also joyous, playful and in some ways even empowering.