Wendy Ide

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.

It’s a terrific feature debut from British-Indian documentary filmmaker Sandhya Suri – a propulsive neo-noir that holds up a mirror to contemporary India.

The film crackles with energy every time Erradi opens her mouth to sing.

A wildly entertaining, modern-day screwball comedy ... Baker continually ups the ante on the picture’s unruly humour and propulsive pacing.

Catching Fire is more concerned with the mercurial essence of its subject than it is with the nuts and bolts of her life. We learn little, for example, about her family background.

F is an engaging kid-pleaser that celebrates the power of imagination and suggests that the key to overcoming the tough times might have been lurking in our minds all along.

The character of Magalie is so enraging that you would chuck yourself into the Aegean Sea rather than spend two weeks in her company.

The message is not always clear, but it’s an entertaining ride.

At times the film feels almost subversive in its resolute lack of dramatic tension. And yet, as a melancholy mood piece, there’s a haunting quality to this handsomely filmed account of the slow attrition of faith, hope and purpose.

The accomplished third film from Emanuel Parvu, Three Kilometers To The End Of The World is a disaster unfolding in slow motion. Superbly acted and deliberately paced, the film is a compulsive account of the shattering of a family, and of a life changed forever.

The feisty restlessness of Agathe Riedinger’s impressive feature debut belies the profound sadness of its central theme – that for many young women, beauty and pain are one and the same.

Carmoon’s depiction of trauma, grief and mental health in crisis as a kind of putrid, repellent stench that clings to the skin, stings the eyeballs and turns the stomach makes for a queasily insalubrious viewing experience. Hoard is a film I admire, but struggle to like.

There’s something about the folkloric quality of Rohrwacher’s films, their embrace of a kind of earth magic, that prompts people to describe them as fairytales. But this is perhaps misleading. La Chimera is no twinkly escapist fantasy, it’s a film full of grit, thorns and greed.

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.