Bitch Ass is an off-the-shelf genre flick with some decent ideas and a fun cast, sadly lacking in sufficient inspiration or originality to merit recommendation.

Sadly, despite some cultish potential this aptly-titled debut feature is indeed a lost cause: an incoherent, undisciplined and tedious mess with little about it to truly recommend.

As blades pierce flesh and Carpenter’s iconic theme swells, the film wrestles with provocative imagery it’s not entirely in possession of, but which is nevertheless rich and layered with meaning. Whether transcendental, idiotic or both, the effect is overwhelming, a catechism for a series that has defined modern horror.

As a comedy about contemporary American society it feels weirdly anachronistic, with an uninspired story told with little urgency or novelty.

In its surreal rendering of space and character, Fingers in the Wind offers enough ambition, intelligence and unvarnished authenticity to warrant recommendation.

There is a great deal to enjoy here for devotees of Strickland’s work and the film feels destined to be described as his weirdest piece yet. But underneath that surface strangeness, Flux Gourmet doesn’t quite satisfy the appetite.

Despite its bland paperback title, French writer-director Stéphane Demoustier proves hasty assumptions wrong with his gripping, thoughtful third feature, courtroom drama The Girl with a Bracelet.

A captivating film of deep emotional power; like weeds slowly cracking the pavement above, its movements in isolation are barely felt but its effects are profound.

Nothing particularly unusual or dramatic happens for the first hour of the film, and yet it is so beautifully done and engaging that the whole thing is riveting to watch.

Ultimately, Narvel is the fascist as liberal fantasy. Someone with access to skilled violence, who can unleash it at whim. It’s such a pity that a screenwriter who used to excel at delineating the intricacies of male insecurity and poison now comes out with such a one-dimensional character.

Kline perfectly captures the out-of-jointness of our age, defined by a generation caught by social and economic decline in a state of permanent instability.

Written by first-time screenwriters Darren and Jeff Allen Geare, The Retaliators deserves praise for its storytelling and plotting. For a good hour or so, the direction in which the film heads is destination unknown.

Saint Omer is a deeply intellectual film – Medea is referenced several times as a frame of understanding – but it’s also heartfelt. There is a compassion to the dispassion: an empathy.

Goldin’s career and Poitras’ latest asserts the primacy of the artist as a participant in the world. Something which will make us see the world differently starting from the very walls from which the art might hang: the rooms in which the films are seen.

The Eternal Daughter is very much a minor film for Hogg: a small chamber piece which could be watched as amusing marginalia to The Souvenir diptych. It’s a hangout film for those among you who can’t get enough Tilda Swinton and an incredibly cute dog, and as such it works. It doesn’t really have anything to say, and the meta-ness feels a little tired.

The Son, though perhaps not as original and accomplished as The Father, is nevertheless an affecting, empathetic and intelligent drama.

Alongside The Wrestler, The Whale is Aronofsky at his most compassionate. It’s a gargantuan invitation to empathy and understanding.

The Banshees of Inisherin is a beautifully-shot and deftly-played comedy. It is at once masterful, surprisingly poignant, and profound. Its portrait of a friendship faltering ultimately proves how vital friendship actually is: how vulnerable and naked we are without it.

Wilde has already proven herself as a director with her brilliant debut. Even the hackneyed sci-fi concept behind Katie Silberman’s screenplay wouldn’t have been too much of a problem if it wasn’t for the performances.

In its totality Ava is a powerful and authentic depiction of a vital moment in a young woman’s life.

Ava is a singular vision marking Foroughi as a talent to watch.

This could be seen as a smug, empty exercise in satirical excoriation – and as a smug, empty exercise in satirical excoriation, it’d be one of the best – but there is a genuine heart to the film, as well as intellect. Cheadle, Gerwig and Driver are all superb, while Sam Nivola and Raffey Cassidy give their smart-mouth, role reversal kids an impossible likeability.

An entertaining-enough survival romp that at only 90 minutes long feels oddly slack.

Director Akay is not messing around with his disgusted assessments of conservative Turkey in 2020.

As far as film theory goes, it’s hardly revolutionary, but as science fiction, Nope is smart and entertaining as we’ve come to expect from an increasingly captivating filmmaker.

Endless drone shots, perspective switches and too many CGI animals undercut any grit or claustrophobia that Trachtenberg – director of the brilliant 10 Cloverfield Lane – might otherwise have crafted. Meanwhile, the interminable score refuses to quiet down and let the images or emotions speak for themselves.

David Leitch once again proves himself one of the most adept action directors in Hollywood.

The Falling World contains moments of intrigue but a limp script and a cast of unengaging characters make this effort fall flat.

There are moments in the film that just feel wrong, sometimes complex and wrong and sometimes just plain wrong.

Its emotional structure, reconstructing Katia and Maurice’s marriage and their shared passion for exploding mountains, feels far more intuitive and lyrical than its linear narrative structure might suggest. In this, Fire of Love is more portraiture than storytelling.

All Light, Everywhere is, most importantly, a history of our technological attempts to offer objective views of the world. But instead of charting our striving to capture of reality, what is revealed is its fabrication.

A Chiara is arguably Carpignano’s most accomplished work to date, pressing ever further into the interior psychologies of his characters.

Sadly, Love and Thunder proves that it’s possible to have too much of a good Thor.

Sundown is a film full of narrative and emotional surprises, upending the middle-aged bloke having a midlife crisis storyline, with Yves Cape’s cinematography capturing the classy and mundane locations with equally seductive attributes. Roth and Franco’s second rodeo is a melancholic banger.

If not in the right frame of mind, Faya Dayi is difficult to get a handle on. But that, perhaps, is the trick. Instead of trying to pin the film down and understand it logically, surrendering to its poetry and rhythms reveals something altogether more meaningful.

Pleasure is not a morally proscriptive film and seeks neither to venerate nor condemn pornography, but to depict its hollowing effect on those who make it. The film’s title is not accidental; at a time when porn is freely and ubiquitously available, the price of gratification may be cheap, but there is always a cost to be paid.

In one sense, Il buco is a testament to human hubris, contrasting the self-satisfaction of our own temporary structures with the unknowable depth of nature’s works.

Ultimately, Decision to Leave is like a beautiful airport novel of a film. It is far cleverer than it needs to be and is so acted with sly charisma.

It’s impossible not to be beguiled by the sweetness of the comedy, the skill of the performers and sheer craft of the film. But hopefully next time out Kore-eda will use it in the service of a plot which is more believable.

Dhont’s second film is a touching and empathetic treatment of male friendship, superbly acted and beautifully filmed.

Just as we learn to grudgingly like Lizzie, we also see the value in her work as it slowly comes together, emerging from the kiln with new colours and finally being displayed among her family and friends.

In an almost impressive display of ineptitude, Dominion combines the very worst vices of its predecessors in addition to a few new ones for good measure. As well as non-existent characterisation or thematic coherence, quaint concepts like comprehensible scene geography and narrative tension have all but disappeared.

Films such as the exquisite Funny Face, where all the ingredients came together in picture perfect composition, allows us to share, even if only briefly, in this land of fantasy and make-believe.

Oyate isn’t an extraordinary documentary, but in telling the story of some of the United States’ most marginalised and persecuted people, it is certainly an important one.

Bergman Island is at once an ambivalent love-letter to the Swedish master director Ingmar Bergman and a charming study of the complexities of relationships, the creative process, and the ways that one invariably influences the other.

What we’re left with is a sort of Blairite middle-ground where punches are pulled and no one really comes in for too much flack. Where’s the fun in that?

In a just world, Hadžihalilović would be as acclaimed as somebody like Tim Burton, whose greatest films boast a spiritual connection of sorts to the French director.

Men is a hallucinatory provocative work which will provoke laughs and yelps and not a little self-reckoning.

A good two-thirds of Top Gun: Maverick is very solid, if unremarkable, but what really gets it off the ground are its top-drawer flight sequences, staged thrillingly by director Joseph Kosinski.

The final twist is so manipulative and cynical as to be actually enraging.

Morgen presents a sense of Bowie as a man who is in search of himself and who, through philosophy and a bold commitment to art, finds his wisdom.

Crimes of the Future still has its strengths. Howard Shore’s score lends a tragic, almost stately emotional counterpoint to the steel of the wit.

Östlund has created a full-throated, roaring comedy of hate against the upper-classes. It is cynical, nihilistic and has no issue about punching down.

Wells’ debut is a frankly astonishing work which will leave a lasting impression.

Kreutzer employs a variety of subtle anachronisms – servants wearing modern glasses, a concrete wall here and there – to allow herself and Krieps the freedom to introduce a modern sensibility that sticks a middle finger up at the polished production design of most films of this genre as casually as Elisabeth does at the decorum of her courtly life.

What elevates Armageddon Time to something more than a piece of indulgent navel gazing is the way that Paul’s coming-of-age is reflected in the national story which closes a chapter on Jimmy Carter to turn a new page into Reaganite 1980s selfishness, reactionary politics and feral capitalism.

Your appreciation or otherwise of the film is going to be greatly influenced by whether or not you’ve seen the original, and as such Final Cut doesn’t really elbow its way to the front. However, if you can stand the slight whiff of decomposition then this deconstruction is fun and clever.

When You Finish Saving the World is fine. It’s well made, witty, and Wolfhard and Moore are effortlessly convincing in their roles; Wolfhard shucking off his Stranger Things image in the process. The problem – if there is one – is in the smooth snark of the title. There are sharp edges here that never bite.

Its quiet visuals are at the heart of Benediction’s sense of dignity and remembrance. Its language is not the passionate rage of Sassoon’s youth, but rather of the quiet, profoundly sad reflections of his later years.

Proceeding with a linear chronology to the present day, Castro’s Spies does justice to the long trials and many tribulations of its engaging subjects without ever flying too far off the expected route.

The Argentinian director’s follow-up to 2019’s Lux Æterna is a typically difficult watch, subjecting us to the grinding indignities of old age, but it also a deeply moving study of lifelong love and loyalty to the bitter end.

For a debut feature, it’s impressive and thoroughly committed to its vision of Hell on Earth. The atrocities, bleak tension and stomach-churning imagery are unstoppable, the director deeming them necessary for maximum impact.

Is Raimi’s latest effort as rich as Spider-Man 2, as revolutionary as The Evil Dead or as fun as Drag Me to Hell? No. But within the self-imposed confines of the studio machine, Multiverse of Madness is about as entertaining as it’s possible to be.

A challenging and very well considered inspection of familial disintegration, featuring strong performances, Human Factors is a solid entry in the Sundance World Cinema Dramatic Competition.

What distinguishes Skin to Skin from its counterpart is its subject, a man utterly dedicated to his craft and to its rich cultural traditions.

Both Vanderbeque and Duret give star turns here: utterly believable as brother and sister, each performance informs the other as they try to survive each day.

Happening is a naturalistic, heart-breaking and relentless account of the multiple traumas and injustices that cascade when women are denied their basic bodily autonomy.

What is most satisfying about the film is its full and non-ironic commitment to a ludicrously operatic masculinity. There is surely no other way to end such a piece than the way it does.

Benedetta has its cake and eats it, with gratuitous nudity and violence offered up to the audience as a base feast for the eyes. Yet in this indulgence, Benedetta eschews simplistic moralising in favour of a complex vision of female sexuality that is as problematic as it is compelling.

It has its moments, but the film is guilty of being fun but forgettable, much like those numerous spy stories cooked up on typewriters in the quiet hours of night and then lost to history when the guns fell silent.

It is a film about a personal grief which gradually, step by step, takes on a mythic resonance. This is a new and vibrant talent to be watched.

Prayers for the Stolen is fundamentally an account of powerlessness, of the insidious ways that forces act invisibly, immeasurably, and often horrifically on those with the least ability to resist them.

Setting his film largely on the dingy confines of an overnight train, Kuosmanen kindles a tender love story between two lost souls.

A Night of Knowing Nothing is a celebration not merely of resistance, but also of joy and art as a political act in the face of despair.

A rollicking masterclass in escalating tension.

Olga’s final sequences suggest a hope for the future, but there is an underlying irony to the superficially-peaceful imagery, rendered horribly prophetic in the current moment.

Paris, 13th District is a paean to the freedoms, the heartaches and the confusion of singledom.

First-time writer-director Blerta Basholli’s feature is an expertly crafted, compassionate testament to the perseverance and defiance of its courageous female collective.

Great Freedom’s non-linear narrative is a worthy device for character development, allowing us to piece together a friendship that begins in suspicion and homophobia but develops over decades into something approaching love. But more than that, it is an expression of the shadows that the past casts over the present, the way that time and place weave themselves together, and their inevitable inescapability as well as how to resist them.

The film is strongest in its first half but the double act between Wright and Pattinson sustains throughout: never has the Bat-Gordon partnership been so well-realised. Inevitably the door is left open for sequels, but The Batman stands up as an incredibly satisfying, grown-up vision of its own.

This is a film about the ordinariness of love.

La Mif refuses to proselytise on the moral character of its subjects; Lora’s terrible confession to the girls at the film’s climax is played not for tabloid revelation, but as a final expression of the flaws inherent in ourselves and the systems we depend on to protect us.

Though the grins, laughter and cheering of the film’s climax is a little too heavy on the sweetness, it’s a harder heart than mine that would fail to be just a little moved by Bunton’s speech about our dependence on one another.

Just as we feel that we have grasped the truth behind the image, it vanishes into thin air: The Real Charlie Chaplin is a Sisyphean task of the directors’ own making.

Petrov’s Flu finds its meaning through sensation, memory and aesthetics, depicting social and political decay in its purest form stripped of the comforting scaffolding of linear narrative.

Telling the story of women bound by oppression, Lingui, The Sacred Bonds is an astonishing film of female resistance and survival.

Veteran Spanish filmmaker Pedro Almodóvar’s latest feature, Parallel Mothers, is as much about his enduring fascination with motherhood as it is the capacity to heal through our connections to the past.

Del Toro’s latest ventures away from fantasy, revealing the monsters in this fable to be all too human.

Gripping and sincerely moving from first to last, Mass is exceptional filmmaking all-round from Kranz and a stellar showcase for the talents of Plimpton, Isaacs, Dowd and Birney.

Told with tenderness and honesty, Cicada is a treatment of trauma that does not judge or preach or take sides, but, in building to its breathless crescendo, goes to show just how much courage it takes to confront the past in order to look to the future.

With wit, grace and a sincere affection for the town of his birth, the writer-director explores the people and stories that populated his childhood.

A near-wordless study of dairy cow Luma’s life and shot from a bovine-eye view, Cow resists the urge to anthropomorphise Luma while eliciting deep empathy for this non-human animal.

Memoria is gloriously weird and it has that most magical quality of making you look at things in a totally different way.

Rooted in the mundane, but told with an imaginative vision, flair and real composure, The Pink Cloud announces Iuli Gerbase as a new creative talent and filmmaker to watch out for.

A joyous, hazy and nostalgia-inflected romantic drama.

Among all the violence, body horror and Giger-esque sexuality, Titane’s most surprising quality is its tenderness.

The franchise reboot we never knew we needed, Resurrections is a wonderfully strange and baffling film, less of a fourth entry in an ongoing saga and more a personal reflection on the original trilogy.

The film as a whole is neither scary nor particularly interested in the nature of its ‘monster’, though it is undoubtedly strange and often unsettling.