Wendy Ide

The Fire Inside, which was scripted by Barry Jenkins (Moonlight) and directed by cinematographer turned first-time feature film-maker Rachel Morrison, understands that, with storytelling as with fighting, sometimes all you need to do is stand firm and land the punches.

Incoherent, inelegantly choreographed and shot with a colour palette reminiscent of one of those noxious American Candy Stores that have popped up all over London like an outbreak of herpes, this Valentine-themed martial arts action picture is one of the worst of the year so far.

Dog Man, the half-dog, half-cop protagonist of Dav Pilkey’s Captain Underpants spin-off book series, is a gloriously funny creation.

Bring Them Down is an impressive first feature from Christopher Andrews.

For all the talk of gamechanging comedy genius, Saturday Night ultimately plays it rather safe: it’s closer to a Noises Off-style romp transposed to a TV studio than the blast off of a cultural revolution.

Great turns don’t always amount to a great picture, and the unfortunate consequence of this no-frills directing approach is that the film-making can feel rather flat and functional – a display cabinet for the acting rather than a vital piece of storytelling.

It isn’t breaking new ground, but the feature debut from TV director Drew Hancock is pulpy, bloody fun.

By the Stream is a wry comedy of manners that muses, in its unassuming way, on the creative act.

The wildly uneven wedding clash comedy You’re Cordially Invited is certainly in the vicinity of terrible on numerous occasions.

With its wide-eyed lack of cynicism and the crystalline delicacy of the animation, this is a heart-swellingly lovely work.

This is not the first documentary to deal with thwarted creative ambitions. It may, however, be the one that most effectively and entertainingly cocks a snook at the very fates that conspired in the first place.

The screenplay dwells obsessively on certain aspects and rushes blithely past others. The craft of the film-making, though, is exemplary.

The combat sequences and SUV shootouts are grimly efficient, but the picture is baggily paced.

The element that makes this intriguing – the ghost POV shooting technique – is also a problem, undermining the suspense and distancing the audience from the vulnerable girl whose fate is in the balance.

Very silly, but pulpy fun.

The film’s main asset is Apte, a gifted physical comedian who puts the dead into deadpan, and loads every gesture with an aggressive, almost demented slap-stick infused humour.

Essentially, for all its sci-fi/disaster/zombie movie trimmings, at its heart the film is a mismatched buddy movie that celebrates the bond from birth between Porky and Daffy.

The film soon runs out of bite, with a plot that repeatedly chews over the same thumps, bumps and rattled doors, and the same shadowy menace in underlit basements.

It’s an alienatingly ugly technique and a mawkish tear-jerker choked up with synthetic sentimentality. You start to envy the dinosaurs their extinction event.

Chalamet’s Dylan sucks so fervently on his cigarettes it’s as though he’s breathing in the genius of the musical heroes who came before him. But while he radiates insouciant charisma and channels the once-in-a-lifetime talent, he reveals next to nothing about Dylan as a person. This is not necessarily a failure in Chalamet’s acting. It’s a deliberate choice – the film is called A Complete Unknown, after all, and it’s a manifesto as much as a title.

Diwan relocates the action to Hong Kong and remakes Emmanuelle as a glossy but dispiriting treatise on the emptiness of the corporate world, punctuated by lots of panting, lip-chewing abandon.

From the intimate restraint of the early scenes, Delpero’s direction becomes more fractured and abrasive. It’s a remarkable work.

The famous apple incident is a taut centrepiece for Nick Hamm’s picture, and the action sequences are propulsive. The casting, however, is questionable.

It’s all very sweet and well-meaning, yet this story of redemption is a naïve and very pastel coloured portrait of a Yakuza veteran.

It’s a tricky balance, and one that the film doesn’t always quite pull off, between sounding a warning and screaming with existential terror; between galvanising the audience into action and plunging them into despair.

A masterpiece.

We Live in Time is let down by the jarring product placement (take a bow, Weetabix and Jaffa Cakes) and by the aggressively anodyne score, which sounds like the kind of reassuring, hand-holding mulch that might be played in a dentist’s waiting room.

While I had more time than many of my fellow critics for the two previous movie spin-offs from the Sega video game series, it turns out that you can, in fact, have too much of a good thing.