Photograph is decidedly old-fashioned and the outcome is never in doubt but the craft is impeccable, the performances low-key and likeable plus there is something persuasive about Batra’s gentle worldview, his faith in people and love restorative.

A curiously bloodless account of a real-life disaster that has moments of gripping tension punctuating long stretches of fatally understated business as usual.

The muddled mix of documentary rawness and fable-like naiveté prevents it from fulfilling its parable pretensions.

A slyly subversive insight into the role of women in the Israeli military, this is a surprisingly compassionate satire that makes its political points without resorting to caricature.

It’s beautifully designed and pleasantly quirky, with fun performances from the cast, yet the arch narrative style and structure can make the whole feel thin and unsatisfying.

Here both Greenaway's strengths and weaknesses are on show as he toys with the viewers' capacity to ingest blurring metaphors and convoluted content.

Gentle, likable and profoundly touching, it makes you want to dig out the hiking boots and make the same journey.

This would have been a striking calling card, and it’s still an impressively solid piece of genre filmmaking with great cinematography and score. But there’s not much here of the ambition of Animal Kingdom, leaving Michôd in ‘difficult third movie’ territory. Let’s hope he gets a move on this time.

As long as you don't mind making fun of the afflicted, there are some killer comic moments.

For its writer-director, Sky Captain was a labour of love. For almost everyone else - including the wooden cast - it’s just a labour.

Marie Antoinette is gorgeous, giddy, gilded filmmaking.

The pace drags terribly, however, and the period detail is distractingly off in small ways that become annoying. Thankfully, though, things perk up with a bravura finale, when Merrill finally takes the witness stand before the dreaded inquisitors.

Stagey filming aside, this is a sharp and controlled study of celebrity obsession.

The film veers from quasi-real to cartoonily silly and scenes either drag or whirl by too fast.

Has its moments of spectacle and danger, but offers too few genuine insights or rite-of-passage epiphanies.

Bolt’s golden era may be too recent and the sponsors too dominant for any real warts to be included, but his charm and sheer physical wonder make this a compelling watch regardless.

One of the liveliest, wittiest, cleverest cheapies ever made.

Absorbing if not quite insightful, due to a fair degree of self-editing, this remains a moving, often melancholic document of a fabulous songwriter and singer whose legacy becomes ever more obvious as the years pass. A must for fans.

Largely, real emotions are substituted here by people swearing and trying to kill each other, which adds up to a shamefully dehumanising piece of work.

Prince Of Egypt is epic storytelling on the grandest scale. Big imagery, big themes, big emotions - all met head-on and accomplished triumphantly within a film that is in essence a live action movie - more precisely a Steven Spielberg live action movie - writ cartoon.

Dreams and nightmares, innocence and experience, civilisation and nature… an elegiac horror/neo-noir debut that captures a snapshot of America’s lost soul. Director Joshua Erkman is one to watch.

Alien: Romulus plays the hits, but crucially remembers the ingredients for what makes a good Alien film, and executes them with stunning craft and care. It is, officially, the third-best film in the series.

Shorta is a Molotov cocktail of a movie. For co-directors Ølholm and Hviid, it’s a Hollywood calling card. For the rest of us, it’s a tense actioner, anchored by powerful performances from its leads, who add layers to good cop/bad cop clichés.

The best things about the first film — the characters and music — once again sing in a frequently dazzling if narratively flawed sequel that’s better at being sensory than sense-making.

Capping an unusual trilogy, MaXXXine is an intense woman-fights-back thriller. Mia Goth’s Maxine is what you’d get if the Robert De Niro and Jodie Foster of Taxi Driver were fused in the telepod from The Fly.

Luckily, the two leads’ chemistry make it a happy, if not completely satisfying, ending.

Not as dark as its source material, Wanted works exceptionally on its own terms. McAvoy crashes the A-list, Jolie finally gets to be as big a star on screen as she has been in print, and Bekmambetov proves the most exciting action-oriented emigré since John Woo.

Casablanca Beats hits a lot of clichés on the educational-drama cue sheet, but still manages to find bracing new variations on the formula. The lesson plan is familiar, but it’s still worth attending this school of rap.