Xan Brooks

True Things is not a bad film, exactly. The actors play it like they mean it, while the drama itself carries a natural dry charge. But it’s unambitious, sometimes clunky and doesn’t wrong-foot us once.

Julian Roman Pölsler's bewitching debut manages to be at once a creepy sci-fi parable, a feminist Robinson Crusoe and a clear-eyed ode to the wonders of nature experienced in solitude. Walden pond with added wall.

It plays as cut-price Le Carré; a recording of a recording of superior films. The picture is fuzzy, and the plot becomes garbled.

Schirman's film (produced by the team behind Man on Wire and Searching For Sugarman) is as gripping as any high-concept Hollywood thriller and as psychologically knotty as Greek tragedy.

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.

If it's possible for a picture to be at once ideal and imperfect, then Damsels fits the bill.

There is little in the film's pitch-black interior that wasn't tackled better – with more bite, wit and abandon – in "Happiness," "Welcome to the Dollhouse," or "Storytelling."

If the film finally doesn't tell us anything we did not already know, the approach makes a worn-out old tragedy feel supple and urgent.

Viewed as an acting masterclass, the film is bruisingly impressive in its way. The principal actors raise the roof; each gets to do their big turn for the camera. But it feels a little schooled, a little staged, like a workshop at the Actors’ Studio.

On first release, Arthur Penn's 1976 western found itself derided as an addled, self-indulgent folly. Today, its quieter passages resonate more satisfyingly, while its lunatic take on a decadent, dying frontier seems oddly appropriate.

British writer-director Edgar Wright takes a grab-bag of 1960s ingredients, paints them up and makes them dance to his tune. His film is thoroughly silly and stupidly enjoyable.

A quality cast tackle the script’s various twists and turns with aplomb. But the tale itself feels cumbersome and over-furnished, listing under the weight of its bolt-on subplots and endless reams of dialogue.

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

How ironic to realise that the greatest Mitt Romney campaign ad should arrive too late to save him.

A less polished director might have become lost and confused along the film’s lengthy running-time. But Payne’s handling is perfect. He never puts a foot wrong, rustling up a picture that is as bright as a button and as sharp as a tack.

The disparate ingredients do not always gel. But in fits and starts Bombay Rose casts quite a spell.

West of Sunshine’s rough, down-at-heel Aussie vibe prompts one to set it alongside other recent bawlers and brawlers, such as Kriv Stenders’ Boxing Day or David Michod’s Animal Kingdom. But Raftopoulos is altogether more protective of his characters, shielding them from full-blown horror, clearly wishing them well even as they stumble and fall, and his film works best in tenderly framing a burgeoning father-son friendship.

Lars von Trier's Nymphomaniac bludgeons the body and tenderises the soul. It is perplexing, preposterous and utterly fascinating.

Robert Wise's adaptation of the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical still has a little soul in its bones, with its reactionary nature tempered by Ernest Lehman's supple screenplay, and its elephantine running-time eased by a set of songs that lodge in your system like hookworms.

The Congress contains tricks aplenty and ideas in abundance. The problem comes in herding these scattered, floating elements towards a satisfying whole.

Full credit to Korine, who sustains this act of creative vandalism right through to the finish. Spring Breakers unfolds as a fever dream of teenage kicks, a high-concept heist movie with mescal in the fuel tank.

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.

It’s a thorough, measured, often illuminating portrait, aided by readings from Highsmith’s unpublished diaries and interviews with her ex-lovers.

It is so laden with highly charged set pieces, so dappled with haunting ideas and bold flights of fancy that it finally achieves a kind of slow-burn transcendence.

The respective charms of Sandra Bullock and Channing Tatum receive a rigorous workout during the course of this caffeinated, overeager adventure romp – to the point where significant signs of wear and tear begin to appear.

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.

Three Thousand Years of Longing is guileless, open-hearted, like an antiquarian bookseller’s dream of The Thief of Baghdad. It’s so defiantly out of step with fashion that there’s finally something faintly glorious about it.