Xan Brooks

It’s a lovely slice of life, a heartfelt New York story – and judging from the brief burst of writing that we are permitted to hear, the postman can rest easy whether he is on stage or at work.

If only more nostalgic music documentaries could muster such a fun, fierce and full-blooded take on old, familiar material. One to One, against the odds, makes Lennon feel somehow vital again.

The film is at its most grimly compelling when it puts her on stage, pinned down by her accusers and fielding questions with a mix of wary contempt and sudden explosions of incandescent rage.

What the film-maker has built for us here is the cinematic equivalent of an Anderson shelter: basic, sturdy and unfussy. It’s there if we need it and have nowhere else to go.

On screen, the man play-acted the qualities of courage and resilience. Off it, he came to embody them too.

Time is of the essence; Eastwood’s 94 years old. He’s not prepared to be cross-examined or sidetracked by pesky minor details.

It’s a tense, tight fairground ride of a film.

Small Things Like These casts a powerful spell.

Anora deepens and darkens with each twist and turn and provides a violent corrective to so many Hollywood fairytales.

The material is sobering and the mountain of evidence needs unpicking. The film-maker handles his brief with the cold, hard precision of an expert state prosecutor.

Class and racial tensions come to the boil in this potent tale of disaffected youth in smalltown France.

Salles’s imperfect, hobbled film tells us that hope springs eternal and that joy is a given and that most happy families will find a way to survive.

It’s a lovely, mordant, tender affair; a lush September song in duet, performed with aplomb by Swinton and Moore as they stroll the secondhand bookstores or lounge by the pool they can’t be bothered to swim in.

The film itself never amounts to much more than a silly, self-satisfied crime caper, but the headline stars look as though they are enjoying themselves and their sense of fun, by and large, is infectious.

Babygirl rolls off the track looking almost as neat and anonymous as a box from Tensile’s upstate delivery warehouse.

It’s too skimpy and self-conscious, more a series of gestures than an organic whole. But Ortega frames his action with a delicious high style, interspersing tense standoffs with formal dance sequences. He gives the impression that all his characters are locked in a bizarre hothouse romance, even when they are chasing or attempting to kill one another.

Midway through, I was all set to file this as a posturing distraction, destined for a life as a high-camp curio. But it ground me down, won me over and by the closing credits, God help us, I was hoping for an encore.

It’s a likable exercise in nostalgia; a joyride through old haunts. Burton’s underworld caper contains plenty of second-hand spirit; what it craves is fresh blood. What it needs is some substance.

The film is fun, broad and exuberant, like a primetime Marxist sitcom, although it does feel indebted to a number of recent, better films around the same theme.

While it would have been good to have Nash’at properly cross-examine these men, his film’s careful approach pays handsome dividends. Hollywoodate teases back a corner of the curtain to reveal a Taliban regime stitched awkwardly over the bones of US occupation. It shows us the soldiers pining for the caves where they once hid, and mourning the glorious death that has somehow been snatched from their grasp.

Crisply scripted by Thomas Martin and directed by Finnegan with a pleasing, no-frills intensity, The Surfer feels resolutely old-school. It’s a low-budget, hard-hitting comic bruiser of a picture: a midlife-crisis movie dressed up as a 1970s exploitation flick.

It’s not The Exorcist, Sorcerer or The French Connection. But it makes for a worthy late addition to the great director’s armada.

The strong, credible performances oil the wheels during these clattering shifts of gear and serve to distract from its occasional moments of implausibility.

Richard Linklater’s latest is a jaunty action comedy that spins its machine-tooled high concept like a bicycle wheel – sometimes with shrewd intent, sometimes for pure fun.

Anderson’s short, sweet, neatly managed production follows the original tale pretty much to the letter.

May December also comes coloured by the lurid downlight of tabloid culture. It could be a pastiche of a psychological thriller, or a playfully misdirected daytime afternoon soap.

Killers of the Flower Moon is monumentally long (206 minutes) and moves at an unhurried pace, but it knows where it’s going and barely a second is wasted. It’s sinuous and old-school, an instant American classic; almost Steinbeckian in its attention to detail and its banked, righteous rage.

Tarik Saleh’s political saga turns progressively knottier and more claustrophobic, almost to a fault. But it’s also horribly tense, richly textured and showcases a terrific supporting performance from Fares as the tale’s shadowy Thomas Cromwell figure.