All the entertaining villainy has the effect of making Andy’s quest – to shape her new role as Runway’s features editor into something truly worthwhile – look even duller, and her romance with nice-guy Peter (Patrick Brammall from Colin from Accounts) completely pointless.

It is a brash, funny, extravagant spectacle about sex and death, pain and pleasure, and – most of all – fashion. Milkmaid corsets, vintage Chanel, latex wedding dresses. Move over, Kate Bush. There’s a new Wuthering Heights look in town.

Crucially, the film is very funny, but like Alex (and Bishop), in a gentle, unprepared sort of way that feels like having good mates over for dinner.

H is for Hawk wants desperately to make you feel the raw blankness of grief and the healing power of nature, but in the end feels more like a kids’ wildlife documentary: beautiful but bloodless.

I’m not convinced that the heavy violence is entirely warranted, but the whole thing is at least unfailingly kitsch, and when the storylines merge they do so seamlessly.

It is a story of family and relationships, of life’s inevitabilities, and the surprises we can nonetheless carve from those. Its gut-wrenching despair is matched by a strange optimism, a powerful embrace of the possibilities of life and love that stays with you long after the end credits roll.

The film’s very last moments are perhaps a little saccharine, but honestly, by this point, you’ll forgive it anything. Supremely confident and stylish film-making that markets itself as big yet feels somehow small, in the sense that extraordinary care is paid to each scene, each modest conversation. Marty’s self-belief may sometimes be unearned, but this film’s absolutely isn’t.

Song Sung Blue’s best moments are when it focuses on its beautifully ordinary love story.

Goodbye June is preoccupied with sentiment in a way that might feel great for a two-minute Christmas ad, but just doesn’t work for an entire film. Still, Winslet is a confident director and Anders has an eye for relationships.

The film never rises above its clichés.

This film has the conversational dexterity and comedy of early Woody Allen films, the sadness of Lost in Translation, and the appealingly self-referential celebrity heft of Notting Hill. It is Baumbach, Sandler and Clooney at the top of their games, in a game where the audience is very much invited to play.

Melodramatic to the end, it’s difficult to imagine a more perfect home-watch film for cosy winter nights. Knives Out die-hards: we are back.

It doesn’t quite reach the heights of Part One, but this is still a highly entertaining display of what musical theatre can do on screen with top level performances and a true affection for the world-building.

This hybrid never feels quite cohesive enough, the pace somehow both rushed and yet too slow. One feels Vanderbilt’s panic at the enormity of the topic. That’s not to say there isn’t a lot to admire.

Die My Love is simply too odd to appeal to everyone – but anyone familiar with the despair induced by listening on repeat to “I like to eat apples and bananas”, while wondering where their life, identity and bodily autonomy have gone, will find truth, if not solace, in its singularity.

Tár is a film of rare and wild excellence.

Glazer’s uncompromising and chilling vision of evil is unlike any other film about Nazism.

What the film does so well, though, is bring enormous compassion to a story that initially seems to despair for the world.

The Bear’s Jeremy Allen White plays Springsteen in a performance that hits all the right beats, including some enjoyably sweaty, raspy musical set pieces (White sings the numbers himself), without ever elevating the role to anything greater.

Oscar Isaac is ideal as Dr Victor Frankenstein, a fevered, charismatic, and darkly obsessive oddball. He’s passionate and intense, driving the plot forward with powerful force.

This dazzling array of top tier actors have to spend most of their time discussing how bonkers the totally sane Lo seems, and so they never get past two-dimensional characterisation no matter how hard they try.

It manages to avoid cliché, making Kerr tender in one moment and dubious the next, smashing in doors and, at his worst in the throes of addiction, collapsing into sobs

The script for unconventional romantic comedy A Big Bold Beautiful Journey spent some time on Hollywood’s Black List, where well-liked but not yet picked up screenplays sometimes linger for years. It’s a shame it didn’t just stay there.

One Battle After Another is a film about legacy, about fathers and daughters, about the fight against an all-too-real American government hellbent on white supremacy, militarism, and oppression. Yet it also manages to be one of the most touching and absorbing thrillers of the year. Make no mistake: Paul Thomas Anderson is a genius.

Spinal Tap II: The End Continues may not have the brown M&M joke or cultish appeal of its original, but it gets great and lovable mileage out of just how good those first jokes were – mini-Stonehenge replica included. You’d have to be a curmudgeon not to think it was fantastic fun.

Honey Don’t! is another misfire, feeling bizarrely like an ersatz Tarantino. Given the Coens’ track record of making some of the smartest crime films in recent memory, it’s troubling how flat this one feels. I sincerely hope Ethan Coen hasn’t lost his knack.

Caught Stealing’s zany mix of comedy and drama tests your patience at times – though its crackerjack sexual tension is hard to argue with, and Austin Butler is a genuine, stop-and-take-notice screen presence. His charisma may well hold the whole inchoate package together, as he stammers and shrugs his way through the electric energy of the city.

It quickly becomes difficult to care about any of it.