Wendy Ide

It’s not an unfamiliar story, but Frank Berry’s delicate drama is immensely moving.

Treasure is a curiously inert work, a film that feels as emotionally grey and underlit as its cinematography.

Slow is a supremely confident piece of filmmaking that negotiates the tricky terrain of non-typical sexualities with sensitivity, humour and a refreshing lightness of touch.

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.

With stately restraint, Bellocchio manages to put the audience in an ever-tightening chokehold of tension and outrage.

Kobi Libii’s film is far too diffident and polite in its approach to leave much of a mark in the conversation about race and representation in US culture.

While DeBose is impressive, the contrived plot of Gabriela Cowperthwaite’s movie hinges, somewhat preposterously, on rational, highly trained scientific minds devolving overnight into paranoid, murderous maniacs.

The small-screen tone of the picture makes it feel like a duff episode of Horrible Histories, albeit with considerably more swearing.

The measured pacing and an overly generous running time might work against the picture, but for the most part, it’s a rich, rewarding and fully fleshed-out drama.

It plays out at the tipping point at which living with loneliness starts to feel easier than tackling the daunting prospect of conversation with a stranger.

It’s a curiously inert affair: constrained, corseted, passionless and saddled with a lumpen, Depp-shaped deadweight where there should be a pulse-racing core of power and desire.

While Sofia Boutella, playing outlaw warrior Kora, brings a balletic elegance to her fight sequences, ultimately this is disappointingly generic stuff.

Stevens is one of several reasons to watch this extravagantly gory botched kidnap horror.

Decent performances from both McGregors can’t breathe much spirit (alcoholic or otherwise) into the film’s listless and generic screenplay.

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

There are moments when Abela disappears and Winehouse bursts on to the screen, like a magic eye picture blinked fleetingly into focus. But the film is wildly uneven and prone to catastrophic misjudgments – in that at least it’s true to Winehouse’s spirit.

It does, though, capture chillingly the terrible, self-perpetuating momentum of war. A war that, in this case, has reached the point at which people no longer know what they are fighting for, only that they are fighting.

It’s a beguiling drama that contrasts the mirage-like quality of hopes against the more tangible solidity of regrets. But while there’s a melancholy magic to it all, the spell is stretched rather thinly over the long running time.

A handsome period piece, shot in striking black and white, A Forgotten Man tackles an intriguing theme, but it’s a little too airless and inert in approach to bring this murky corner of European history to life.

It’s a visceral, breathless rampage, and while it’s a little rough around the edges at times, the picture’s brawling energy makes it an exhilarating ride.

The picture is also perceptive on the dynamics of a newsroom under duress, with Billie Piper terrific as Sam McAlister, the straight-talking producer who managed to land the interview to end all royal interviews.

It’s a decent attempt from director Arkasha Stevenson to tap into the look and the spirit of the original film. And while it doesn’t match The Omen for scares, it does deliver some skin-crawlingly creepy moments.

While not as satisfying as the director’s two previous films – a jarring ending knocks the picture off balance – this uneasy eco-parable is still very much worth your time.

Central to the spirit of the film is Seydou, a gangly string bean with a smile that warms the screen; a teenager who is still enough of a child to believe that manhood means never being afraid. It’s a gorgeous, sensitive performance from Sarr.

A striking first feature steeped in allegory, dust and despair, The Penultimate brings a blend of absurdity and theatricality to a stylised tale of humanity unravelling.

Stolevski’s handling of the balance between jostling high spirits and the creeping dread of loss is supremely confident; his storytelling is fresh, authentic and genuinely exciting.

It’s an appealing little charmer of a film, captured with a pleasingly lithe and lively animation style.

For all its to-the-moment social commentary, the film has roots in the anarchistic, surrealist 60s: Lillian could be a direct descendant of minxy troublemakers Marie I and Marie II from Věra Chytilová’s Daisies, reimagined for the TikTok generation.

With the exception of Stéphane, who becomes more intriguing and less likable with each secret unpeeled, the main characters are a little schematic and two-dimensional. It’s fortunate, then, that the always impressive Calamy is on top form.

While the plot itself is a little nebulous, the atmosphere that Abbruzzese creates, through a hypnotic, pulsing electronic score and Rogowski’s febrile presence, is unnerving and intense.

This portrait of lost souls connecting is unassuming, but quietly powerful.

Dumbed-down and stripped of the symbolic subtext of the earlier movies, the picture is not without seat-shuddering thrills, but it’s like a tag-team wrestling bout for monsters rather than a picture with meaning and even a modicum of thought.

A film about two immaculately groomed women gaslighting and goading each other to the point of madness should be a lot more fun than this.

Smart, cynical and at times devilishly funny, the film delivers a crackle of disruptive static to the demonic possession genre.

There’s such tenderness to the storytelling, such empathy and emotional depth, that it broadens the film’s potential audience from kids, who will respond to the cute characters and gentle wit, to adolescents and adults, who will recognise the angst and awkwardness of trying to function alone once again.

If the final act overdoes it a little with the wackily-ever-after feelgood vibes, Mohammadi’s flippantly acidic to-camera commentary emphasises the sharp edges within the family embrace.

It is a fairly familiar crime thriller setup, yet this playful, effortlessly engrossing picture from Rodrigo Moreno takes a series of deliciously confounding turns.

The picture also doubles as a fascinating psychological study of fanaticism, with Poots’s expressive performance unpeeling the layers beneath Dugdale’s fervent belief in her cause.

It’s not unenjoyable, just deeply unoriginal.

There are no leprechauns in this abysmal romantic comedy. Otherwise, though, pretty much no theme-park Ireland cliche is left unturned.

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.

The latest film from Warwick Thornton (Samson and Delilah) is strikingly beautiful, its widescreen vistas rendered in a scorched palette of dust and ochres. But the pacing is languid to a fault and it all gets rather bogged down in allegory.

The film has a boisterous energy, but it’s puerile, phoney and frequently rather cringe.

It’s a robustly entertaining romp.

The compelling Ellis-Taylor goes some way towards tying together the disparate elements. She is a magnetic, dignified presence, persuasive in both the more melodramatic elements of the story and in the academic journey.

While the film doesn’t attempt to explore every aspect and every romantic connection, it does delve satisfyingly deeply into her interior life, explored through her artistic output.

Despite the best efforts of a game John Cena in the title role, the laughs are a little thin on the ground.

Charming and informative as it is, the film may struggle to engage younger audiences accustomed to more overt comedy in their animated movies and less grave-robbing.

Given the vested interest that the business has in the industry and its highly lucrative maverick son, it’s surprising and refreshing that High & Low is as nuanced and thought-provoking as it is.

This picture is more or less equal parts an indulgent, endurance-testing slog and a brilliantly audacious, fiercely political poke in the eye to conventional cinema. I loved every enraging minute of it.

Throughout it all, Knight is a compelling and fiercely persuasive performer.

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

Perhaps, in its polite and unassuming way, the film advocates not just a new way of looking, but also a new way of living.

It’s a wildly original work from De Los Santos Arias, a film with a gleefully wanton approach to form, style and story in which no directorial decision is predictable, and, despite a slightly overstretched running time, no moment is ever dull.

[An] agile, cerebral film.

Tim Mackenzie-Smith’s slightly breathless and overstretched documentary aims for a Buena Vista Social Club-style story of late-life rediscovery but gets a little bogged down in a few too many hagiographic quotes from high-profile fans. Still, the music is sublime.

The Taste of Things defies expectations. There is something refreshingly unconventional about its depiction of the tender, well-worn love between Eugénie and Dodin.

Unfortunately, for all its daring, Eureka is often stultifyingly slow.

An invigoratingly savage Nordic western, The Promised Land is earthy, enjoyable stuff: an expansive, sweeping epic with hope in its heart and dirt under its nails.

What becomes painfully clear is the fact that Bob Marley deserves a better biopic. Still, Lynch’s magnetic presence, and a heartstopping rendition of Redemption Song, almost justify the price of admission.

While it is messy and frequently bewildering, Cuckoo does at least live up to its title, with a commitment to gleefully bonkers twists and a collection of entertainingly deranged supporting performances.

Feels closer in approach to his early gallery installation work than it does to his narrative film-making.

Even if The Iron Claw doesn’t quite match the bracing originality of the other two films, it still cements Durkin’s status as one of the most consistently impressive American directors of his generation.

It helps that Gordon is a dream of a subject: funny, frank and eminently likable, she challenges preconceptions and prejudices about fatness with wit and grace.

The Settlers shows promise: it’s the work of a daring director intent on developing a distinctive and original voice.

The story works on two levels, first as a prickly critique of the pressures facing Black creatives. But equally satisfying is its depiction of the abrasive, complicated dynamics in a high-achieving family.

A screenplay by White Lotus creator Mike White elevates proceedings with an enjoyably sardonic bite.

The special effects seem shoddy and unfinished and the screenplay struggles to keep up with its own twists and turns.

The impact all but knocks the breath from your body.

The latest from Andrew Haigh is an exquisitely melancholy fantasy-infused meditation on loss and isolation. A luxuriantly sad and skin-tinglingly sensual gay romance, it is propelled by a killer combination of 80s queer pop and a pair of devastating performances from Scott and Mescal.

Union is a solid work about an important subject. Yet, while the observational approach gives the picture an urgency and immediacy, it’s a film that might have benefitted from the addition of more contextual background information about Amazon’s labour practices.

This is a satisfying and impressively acted drama.

It’s a (virtual) life-affirming approach that is certainly affecting, but can feel a little disingenuous.

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

Interviewees tie themselves in knots of gushing superlatives, but the real insights come from the man himself.

Robinson and Bannerman are excellent, warily stepping around each other’s expectations and weighing up the cost of allowing themselves to care.

The scene-stealing standout is Avantika, playing sweet-natured Plastic dimwit Karen. Her comic timing is impeccable; her musical number, a boisterous Halloween party romp titled Sexy, is worth the price of admission alone.

This is a story of survival, but it is by no means typical of the genre – instead it is sensory, tactile; a film that taps into an atavistic, instinctual primal quality that characterises new motherhood.

It’s not bad exactly, but like many film-makers, Clooney is at his most interesting when he’s not afraid to make enemies.

It’s an alchemic combination, this continuing collaboration between Lanthimos and Stone . . . together they unleash in each other an extra level of uninhibited artistic daring that, one suspects, must be rooted in an uncommon degree of mutual trust.

It’s a fascinating and enraging film and a timely reminder of the courage of members of the feminist vanguard.

Perhaps aware of the limitations of the screenplay, director F Gary Gray deploys an irritating arsenal of flashy camera moves and sleight-of-hand edits, but these only serve to emphasise the emptiness of the spectacle.

It’s Statham’s movie – a brisk, slick, ultra-violent action onslaught that yet again demonstrates his ability to redeem just about any old tosh.

Peel back the cliches and there’s something interesting here: a gnawing sense of injustice and biting social commentary.

Like the mismatched team from the Pacific Island, the picture is big-hearted and sweet-natured, but it is also rather lacking in polish and staying power.

It’s a gently inoffensive little comedy from Marc Turtletaub (producer of Little Miss Sunshine and director of Puzzle), with an amiably jovial score. But the picture is elevated by its handling of melancholy themes of ageing and loneliness, and a superb gruff-yet-vulnerable performance from Kingsley.

J.A. Bayona’s adaptation of this much-filmed story is elevated by bracingly muscular action sequences. It manages to sustain a degree of tension despite an overlong running time and the fact that the outcome of the incident is unlikely to be a surprise to anyone.

While Winton’s achievements and his dedication were remarkable, the film-making here is less so. There’s little to set One Life apart from the very crowded field of films exploring equally laudable tales of second world war heroism.

Levy, who also wrote the screenplay and stars in the picture, has made a satisfyingly adult, bittersweet drama which argues that even a seemingly gilded life can be painfully messy.

Borrowing a punky, handmade aesthetic from the famous monthly programme posters, the film collates wildly entertaining interviews with former staff and punters.

This has the brash swagger of The Wolf of Wall Street, but the labyrinthine intricacies of the case may present something of a challenge to anyone not well versed in stock market manipulation.

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

A terrific Penélope Cruz makes up for the lack of colour with her enjoyably strident turn as Ferrari’s permanently furious wife, Laura.

Sofia Boutella shows action-star potential as Kora, a mysterious outsider who has found peace living with the farming commune, but she deserves a better vehicle than this chop-shopped jalopy.

The lush orchestral score, by regular Miyazaki collaborator Joe Hisaishi, is shimmering and exultant. All the elements are in place. So it seems almost churlish to note that this is middling Miyazaki at best.

It’s an interesting exercise – a show-don’t-tell action extravaganza. But Woo resorts to such clumsy storytelling devices . . . that the film is scuppered by its own gimmick.

The lazily generic plot devices (yet again, an ancient evil artefact offers unlimited powers to its holder); performances so thuddingly clunky that much of the dialogue sinks like a boulder in the sea; the lack of any humour whatsoever: these are all minor irritations compared with the picture’s glib trivialisation of the climate crisis.

If anything, this follow-up is even more enjoyable, its appeal boosted by Milady slinking on to centre stage, her weaponised sexuality backed up by her private collection of daggers and swords.

It’s a testament to the quality of writing, and to the action direction, that this never feels as corny or as crass as you might expect.

The result is a film of quiet but considerable power.

Heartbreaking as this story is, the picture’s peppy energy results in a film that is celebratory and defiantly upbeat.

It’s a tonal mess, a film that aims to be an adorably quirky romcom but plays out as such a surreally purgatorial ordeal.

It’s bleak at times, but there is a defiantly celebratory aspect to the film, which finds hope in the solidarity of Black women and dignity in Gia’s quiet stoicism.

Wonka is an effervescent pleasure – an endlessly, intricately charming treasure trove of a movie. And overall, Timothée Chalamet’s fresh-faced take on the central character – bringing a puckish innocence and spry, light-footed energy to one of the most famously jaded misanthropes in children’s literature – works rather well.

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

Disappointingly but perhaps not surprisingly, this sequel fails to match the original on any level whatsoever. It’s not bad exactly, although there’s a synthetic look to the colour palette that feels very try-hard and gaudy next to the lovely, atmospheric earth tones of the first film.

The film is a match for Lars von Trier’s Dogville in its grimly relentless approach to misogyny and sexual violence. A disconcertingly beautiful picture about the ugliness of humanity.

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.

For all its decorous restraint, this is emotionally potent storytelling.

A provocative, superbly acted action drama that combines big-hitting ambition and spectacle with just enough humour to temper the whole end-of-civilisation meltdown scenario.

The film focuses on Taylor’s quest to uncover the perpetrator and learn their motives. And while finally she has a good idea of the former, the answer to the latter remains elusive.

With its nonlinear structure, Maestro feels a little like a scrapbook of life moments – glittering career achievements; crackling explosions of domestic tension – and Cooper keeps up a zesty, kinetic energy throughout.

Mostly, the soundtrack is an unhummable mess of warbled exposition.

A man, even a man as combative as Napoleon, amounts to more than the battles he has fought. And it is in this respect that the film is less successful.

Davis’s deranged games designer Dr Volumnia Gaul and Jason Schwartzman’s showboating compere Lucky Flickerman justify the price of admission.

There is little satisfaction to be found in the picture’s messily uninhibited climax.

This is more of a dutiful plod through the facts than the kind of film that makes history come alive.

The performances, from Moore and in particular Portman, are sublime: both bracingly unsympathetic and wildly enjoyable.

There’s a real emotional heft to the storytelling and Caine, at 90, is a knockout.

It’s a savagely funny showcase for Cage at his very best. But the picture sours somewhat in a third act that departs from crisp character study to target cancel culture, losing some of its biting humour in the process.

Ultimately, one of the key pleasures of the picture is its uncertainty – the niggling doubts that remain, and the sense that a crucial piece of the puzzle is tantalisingly out of reach.

The Eternal Memory is a restrained, respectful piece of film-making that takes its lead from its two subjects. It’s wrenchingly sad, but also a testament to the love that endures, even as Augusto increasingly struggles to recognise his wife.

Of the cast, it’s only Iman Vellani, as Marvel fangirl turned superhero Kamala Khan, who seems genuinely excited to be in the film.

Kramer’s vision is distinctive: playful and jarringly lurid. Give Me Pity! is a one-off – and that’s probably a good thing.

A psychological thriller, it’s all the more tense for Green’s smart understatement of the genre elements.

The writing is sharp throughout: Manning Walker has an acute ear for teen vernacular and a sly sense of humour. But some of the film’s most powerful moments are wordless, playing out in tight shots of Mckenna Bruce’s face.

Buckley, as always, is terrific, bringing the picture more emotional potency than it perhaps warrants.

Even if the scattershot plotting doesn’t quite hold together, there’s a wayward energy to the picture and a barbed sense of mischief.

The film’s observational approach means that little context is provided for the techniques used here, or for the lives and circumstances of the daily visitors. But the warm, non-judgmental embrace of Philibert’s approach is profoundly affecting.

Rarely does a music documentary so vividly evoke both the artistic approach and the tricky personality of its subject.

It’s thought-provoking stuff, which also explores our own role, as audience members, in the voracious demand for other people’s stories.

There’s a disconnect between her inventive, impressionistic artistic output – Audrey’s actual work is interspersed throughout the picture – and the film’s flat, rather matter-of-fact look.

Mescal and Ronan are captivating: her watchful, raw-nerved longing; his stinging sense of betrayal. It almost eases us past an overwrought final twist. Almost, but not quite.

The filmmakers switch the focus from the suspense of an uncertain outcome to the central friendship between the two women, a friendship that Diana tends to inadvertently torpedo. This allows both actresses to bring a depth and texture that sustains the picture through the extended swimming sequences.

It’s a peppy sugar rush that should please younger audiences, but the appeal of the series is wearing pretty thin.

It’s predictable but glossily watchable. The main redeeming feature is the crackling charisma of Emily Blunt, in the central role of a down-on-her-luck single mum turned pharma marketing genius.

It is, it has to be said, something of a stretch to believe that this regal woman would be drawn to a dullard such as Ernest, but Gladstone and DiCaprio manage to convince us that this is more than a partnership of expediency – it’s a marriage of real love.

The entertaining blend of quirky absurdism and behavioural neuroscience echoes Baumane’s approach to her family’s history of depression in her previous film. It’s a successful and distinctive formula, albeit one which falters slightly at the film’s uncertain conclusion.

It’s an intense watch; at times infectiously hilarious, at others wrenchingly sad. For the film’s brief running time, there’s an emotional osmosis at play, in both sauna and cinema alike.

The great missed opportunity of this film, with its glossy, handsome design and cinematography, and its genteel orchestral score, is how polite and unadventurous it is – something that could never be said of Dalí himself.

It’s trite and predictable stuff: the laughs are forced; the pathos is over-stewed.

Peck’s film – which, with its themes of race and failures of American justice, has a kinship with Ava DuVernay’s 13th and Garrett Bradley’s Time – is both infuriating and also unexpectedly uplifting in its celebration of family unity.

It’s a chipper, self-consciously adorable romp that will no doubt delight existing fans of the television series. It is, however, laser-targeted at the youngest audience members.

It’s a wildly uneven mess.

Although a little too performatively Scottish at times, this is a competently made weepie that should please fans of the book.

It requires a rare ineptitude to take what is famously one of the most terrifying movies ever made, recycle pretty much everything (including Tubular Bells on the score) but neglect to include the scares.

The comic potential of the collision of personalities is thoroughly mined: Lazaridis the diffident visionary; Fregin the extrovert oddball; Balsillie the driven, hyperaggressive alpha male.

The final message of hope is resolutely upbeat and desperately needed.

Grisliness occurs, accompanied by a score that sounds like knives being sharpened on violins. It’s thoroughly unpleasant, but that’s rather the point.

Minor quibbles aside, this is a remarkable achievement, and a persuasive argument in favour of carte blanche creative freedom for Edwards in whatever he chooses to do next.

This is an archetypal Anderson film: mannered, fussy, obsessively designed – normally irksome traits, but in this alchemic instance it’s an utterly delightful combination.

It’s maliciously effective, up to a point: an enjoyably lurid piece of classy-trashy psychological warfare. Unfortunately, both the plot and the performances boil over in the third act, and the film loses much of its icily calculated cool.

The space that Mungiu leaves, both physically, with his immaculately composed wide shots, and temporally, in the unhurried plotting, allows for a satisfying complexity, and an eventual swerve into dreamlike symbolism.

Ultimately, Dumb Money may not be as revealing about the financial markets as it is about the rallying power of the internet.

Watching the cast of Expend4bles, the latest instalment of the thunderously dumb veteran mercenary franchise, sweating and straining their way through the “casual banter” section of the screenplay is like watching contestants on The World’s Strongest Man attempting to climb a ladder while carrying a tractor tyre. It’s painful.

Unfortunately, it all rather stumbles with an overwrought final act that disintegrates under scrutiny and hinges on a key character’s unlikely ability to remember, verbatim, every word he has ever read.

The volcanically sweary dialogue doesn’t quite disguise the naivety of the feelgood trajectory, and the ending feels clunky, but this is a boisterous and disorderly charmer of a picture nonetheless.

It’s enjoyable, if familiar.

It’s admirably understated film-making, shot in restrained black and white, with a tight aspect ratio that evokes the walls closing in around Donya during the long insomniac nights.

This is a giddily entertaining and celebratory drama that hints at the emotional bruises under the sparkly lurex leotard and false lashes.

It’s a solid, sensitively handled study of the aftermath of a trauma, elevated by tricky, unexpected revelations about Park.

Allan Brown, a textile artist, speaks eloquently of the rich symbolism of taking something that is a source of pain, stripping it of its sting and, over the years, gradually reshaping and repurposing it into a thing of beauty.

The brisk rhythms and energy of the storytelling ensure that the pace rarely flags, and that every frame of this film about the business of death is bursting with life.

Whether or not there’s a factual basis to the story, it’s undeniably an absolute blast.

The first feature film from cinematographer Ellen Kuras is a satisfyingly textured portrait of a remarkable and unusual woman, who had an almost Zelig-like gift for bearing witness to key moments in history.

There has been no shortage of films that deal with Europe’s current refugee crisis over the last decade or so. Still, this picture, with its supremely confident handling of a fractured, fragmented structure and its twin driving forces of compassion and fury, is undoubtedly one of the best.

While there’s a sense that Korine is fully at peace with a lack of meaning in his work, it’s doubtful that he was aiming to be boring.

It’s a gripping piece of film-making: a propulsive, kinetic account of a grassroots campaign captured at what would seem to be considerable personal risk to both the subject and directors. And as a snapshot of a curdled, corrupted political system, it is eye-opening and at times genuinely terrifying.

While there are no surprises here, there are visceral kicks to be found in the businesslike efficiency of McCall’s retribution, and the devilish glint in Washington’s eye as he delivers it.

The picture, by Mexican director Alejandro Monteverde, is an earnest and well-intentioned attempt to engage with a very real and harrowing issue. It’s also a thunderously crass and manipulative movie that is hampered by erratic pacing, pantomime bad guys and an overfondness for shots of Caviezel weeping God-fearing, manly tears.

It’s dour, certainly, but the sense of bone-tired exhaustion and crushed hope that linger like pipe smoke works rather effectively for this particular case.

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

Mostly Regan’s unfiltered approach brings a fizzing unpredictability and vitality to this abrasively empathic exploration of a father-daughter bond.

Strays is a film that leans heavily on gross-out gags and a pre-adolescent fascination with pee and poop.

The force of Cruz’s charisma — she’s like a cross between Sophia Loren and a solar flare — is more than enough to justify spending time with the family.

The screenplay is a rudimentary thing – scaffolding to support the set pieces – that starts to creak whenever it attempts any depth of character. But the action is terrific, with a screaming, tyre-shredding extended car chase around Lisbon’s tight, cobbled alleys a breathless and exhilarating highlight.

This is a grimly efficient IP cash-in that defuses any potential scares with a hot-pink colour palette and a bunch of oddly specific and distracting product placements.

Fortunately, the twin charisma assault of the two leads adds considerably to the film’s appeal. It turns out that watching two impossibly beautiful boys making cow eyes at each other might be just the escapist pulp we need right now.

Shot on film, using vintage equipment, the picture has a scrappy, tactile quality, its ghostly black-and-white images scratched and scorched. Meanwhile, Neil Hannon’s smartly used score envisages a chilling authoritarian future for pop music.

It is blithely unquestioning of what the frenzy over glorified Hacky Sacks actually tells us about society.

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.

This sparse, atmospheric fable grows markedly in power in the second half, as Banel’s passion takes on an edge of violence and insanity.

It’s an intriguing idea that might, perhaps, have sustained a short film.

It’s not the kind of film that nails the audience to its seats; rather, it’s a quiet, observational piece of storytelling that pieces together the budding relationships between the labourers.

With a smile that frays a little around the edges, and a peppy enthusiasm that can’t quite hide the doubts, McAdams wrings every last drop of pathos from her scenes, almost upstaging her screen daughter in the process.

It’s slick, unchallenging and perfectly enjoyable, but it’s hard to see the point of a remake of Ron Shelton’s 1992 mismatched buddy movie about a pair of basketball hustlers who reluctantly team up.

This very enjoyable film explores his extensive body of work, much of it daringly ahead of its time; it was Paik who, long before the concept of the internet had taken root, first broached the idea of an electronic superhighway.

This is subdued storytelling that, while it drags a little in its pacing, asks tough questions about society’s relationship with elderly people.

If anything, the writing in this chocolate-box travelogue of a sequel is even lazier than that of the first film, with much cackling innuendo and sparkly narcissism, a couple of clumsily engineered long-distance domestic crises and interminable heartfelt speeches that made me cringe so hard I nearly dislocated my spine.

Sweeping and novelistic in scope, the film, adapted from an Italian bestseller by Paolo Cognetti, combines the earthy, rooted grit of Jack London with the vivid emotional landscapes of Elena Ferrante.

As this terrific and very moving documentary shows, the society, fuelled by bickering, biscuits and cinephilia, is a lifeline for its members, who weather bereavements, loneliness and fiercely argued creative differences within its peeling walls. Lovely stuff.

It’s a bold, arresting debut from writer-director Dmytro Sukholytkyy-Sobchuk, who balances muscular, crime-thriller tropes against moments of striking, unsettling beauty, tension and urgency against knottily complex character development. Highly recommended.

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.

It’s a gentle piece of Arabic-language storytelling, one that softly, slowly enfolds the audience rather than propels them on a journey.

While the symbolism can land a little heavily at times, Bessa’s fiercely committed performance and the palpable anger in the storytelling are the picture’s driving force.

Classic rock needle drops and showy, snaking, single-shot action sequences – both GOTG trademarks – abound in a picture that balances a slightly overstuffed storyline with mischief, humour and the biggest of hearts.

Rather like the ill-fated plane, the comedy struggles to land.

While it could be described as being more of a filmed play than a piece of cinema, it’s also a riveting, raw work which, in its stripped-back simplicity, magnifies the power of tucker green’s fiercely compelling writing.

An investment on the part of the audience is required, to focus in on the characters and to follow the dialogue. It’s not quite as dry as it sounds. There is a subtle humour in this singular approach, but like the dialogue and the drama (such that it is), it is sidelined.

This handsome biopic by Lasse Hallström, with his daughter Tora Hallström in the role of the younger Hilma, attempts to redress the balance.

The Super Mario Bros Movie is a frantic Easter egg hunt of a film that does the bare minimum to please its loyal existing fanbase. Those less enthralled by the antics of the moustachioed Italian plumber will wonder which of Donkey Kong’s weaponised barrels this joyless, noisy mess was scraped from.

And here’s the problem for Statham’s super spy: for all the Ukrainian gangsters he nuts and helicopters he pilots, Orson Fortune is just not particularly interesting or fleshed out as a character. Plaza and Grant, meanwhile, steal every scene they touch.

For all its affable charm, there’s something slippery and disingenuous about this film.

This solid but familiar drama is acted with conviction; Watson and Mescal are equally compelling. But there’s only so much a quality performance can do – and the film leans heavily on shots of Watson’s troubled face – when the material is a well-meaning but dourly rote exploration of cycles of violence.

Földes’s matter-of-fact approach to storytelling balances the tendency towards quirkiness in the material. Dream logic coexists with the crushingly mundane, in a picture that also showcases the director’s musical talents with an intricate and involving score.

This crime caper has a certain frenzied energy, but it’s sloppily plotted, crass and so dumb, you wouldn’t trust it to use cutlery unsupervised.

When the film is this much fun, who cares if Grant recycles some of the greatest hits from his gag repertoire?

Blending science fiction and magical realism, environmental catastrophe and family secrets, Francisca Alegría’s heady mystery is an ambitious and murkily atmospheric debut.

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

Aside from the mother-daughter relationship angle, this splashy, showy assassin picture doesn’t really cover any new ground. But the lack of imagination elsewhere is offset by some impressively slick tailoring – Boksoon really does dress to kill – and extravagantly athletic fight sequences.

The latest from Spanish director Rodrigo Sorogoyen is a terrific psychological thriller and a brooding, muscular piece of filmmaking which makes the most of both the Galician backdrop and the imposing physicality of Menochet and, as his nemesis Xan, the remarkable Luis Zahera.

Deftly written, directed with a light hand and acted with honesty and heart, the picture captures moments of acute sadness without ever sinking into sentimentality.

Billy’s inane babbling gets a little wearing, but the action sequences, featuring dragon-based mayhem, cyclopes and an army of formidable hell unicorns hopped up on candy, are pacy and fun.

Goth is riotously entertaining throughout, but two specific scenes, in both of which the camera rests solely on her face for an extended shot, capture the full force of her unnerving talent.

The only notable development is just how rapidly a satirical skewering of genre formulas can become thuddingly formulaic.

Lunana’s appeal is hard to miss: though rather naive in its messaging and unashamedly sentimental, the film is so pure of spirit and so open-hearted, you want to breathe it in, to fill your lungs with it.

The latest picture from husband and wife team Ryuji Otsuka and Huang Ji is an engrossing and thoughtful, if slightly meandering, portrait of contemporary China which straddles the impact of Tik Tok, the self-commodification of a whole generation of ambitious young people and the social and shadow of the pandemic.

Approach with a strong stomach, and don’t bother trying to keep a tally of the body count.

Jordan is doing double duty here, directing as well as starring in this solidly by-numbers chapter in the ongoing Creed saga. He does a workmanlike job – the fight sequences are thrillingly visceral, but his weakness for cheesy montages and the film’s formulaic screenplay ensure that the picture was never going to take the franchise anywhere new.

Shipton is a fascinating character – abrupt, ill at ease with the voracious press attention, but also possessed of a sharp, unusual intelligence that tends to veer off at jarring tangents.

Some of the picture’s taut focus and pacing are lost to an unnecessary cancer subplot involving Eli’s family; like the journalists it follows, the film works best when it is tenaciously single-minded.

The sparky chemistry between James and Latif leaves few surprises in how it all pans out, but it’s an unexpectedly, disarmingly sweet film.

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.

It’s a film that requires considerable investment from the audience, and one that rations its rewards even to those who fully commit to the experience. Still, Schanelec’s approach draws the audience in, even as it holds them at arm’s length; she is uncommonly fond of wide shots. It’s an oddly fascinating endeavour.

It’s a distinctive work, both visually – the stark black and white photography accentuates the uncanny, almost lunar pockmarks on this scarred terrain – and in terms of its intriguingly detached outback noir storytelling.

The directors’ first joint feature is a tremendously effective revenge movie; a picture that reframes the neo-noir by harnessing a hate crime and diverting its power into a thrillingly transgressive erotic thriller.