Bulk is a self-unravelling noir sci-fi which gleefully ties its various threads into impressive granny knots of self-referrential absurdity.

Van Sant directs with a steadiness that occasionally borders on pastiche. He resists sensationalism, which is no small feat given the bombastic source material. The hostage sequences are gruellingly tense, but the film never quite finds a rhythm beyond escalation, monologue, negotiation, repeat. For a story and subject this strange, the filmmaking flourishes are conservative.

The satire isn’t quite as sharp as you would hope though.

It was an exciting prospect to see what someone like Jenkins would do while up against the Hollywood machine, but it unfortunately feels like the machine won this bout, if not by knockout, then definitely on points.

The filmmaking is raw and tense, with the young cast suitably disappearing into their roles as anonymous SEALs and the filmmakers seeking to get as close to reality as one can get without projecting literal bodycam footage of a war zone onto a cinema screen.

This is certainly the most stylishly directed of all the sequels. But still, its ironic self-consciousness about how tired its material has become does not ultimately make it any less tired.

The always great Farrell attempts to imbue his doomed gambler with a sliver of naïveté́ as he stumbles towards the story’s foregone conclusion, but there is little that can be done to compensate for this feeling of inevitability.

Where the film suffers is in its lack of a coherent dramatic arc, as it instead chronicles a chunk of time that marks a confluence of small epiphanies and aching fallbacks.

There’s the nagging feeling that this one is very content to rake old ground rather than search for a new way to express these important, if rather boilerplate ideas. It’s laudable that these lessons are being passed on to a new generation, but it’s hardly new or exciting terrain for storytelling.

The Inspection is a powerful yet unsettlingly inconclusive account of an important, haunting period in a man’s past.

There is something a little boilerplate in how the film is structured which prevents it from offering anything particularly original. Were the visuals not so gorgeous, you might even see this as material primed for the small rather than big screen.

The first half of You Resemble Me is gripping in its neorealistic, social realist approach.

The film does well to capture the probing literary spirit of Murakami, even if it doesn’t quite manage to channel the intense emotional aspect of its work, instead coming across as dryly ironic and detached.

The film is a triumph of special effects, certainly, but its narrative ambitions are more modest and predictable.

There’s promise here. A broader cinematic universe that feels cohesive, filled with amusing cameos and, for the first time in years, a DCU that feels like it has a faint pulse are all very welcome. But whenever the film strains to address Big Ideas, it’s painful.

A lived-in naturalism creeps in as the camera is constantly kept at arm’s length. At its most effective, this style enhances the honesty, intimacy and intensity that guides the riveting narrative. Yet as the film progresses, it elicits a rather unwelcoming distance and impatience that make it difficult to remain totally immersed.

It’s not a bad movie, and it lives up to the standards that it sets itself, but it is as throwaway as a killer Tamagotchi.

Hope Gap doesn’t go as deep into questions of love and loss as Nicholson’s 1993 screenplay for the CS Lewis biopic Shadowlands, but it benefits from the focus on an adult son, for whom the end of his parents’ marriage is shown to be just as hard to accept as it would be for a young child.

Although the script does have a zippy, wisecracking feel, there’s also an earnestness at play: the characters embrace the strangeness of their world without ever feeling the need to remark on it. In short, this is a film that is fun while also taking its premise somewhat seriously.

Visually, the film favours documentary orthodoxy over the formal risk that Bowie himself represented. For an artist who treated identity as performance and disappearance as strategy, the film’s restraint feels curiously conservative. But The Final Act is not attempting reinvention so much as consolidation.

The throbbing interpersonal strains intensify with a gentle logic, even if, tonally, the film does sometimes stray into a mid-tier streaming dramady serial at times.

Its recourse to human suffering as a way to jerk a viewer to react feels tiresome after a while, and it’s not helped by an ending which serves as a quick-fix band aid suggesting that sublime happiness is just an unlikely plot twist away.

The film, totally dégagé about its own ludicrous lameness, really doesn’t give a fuck.

There’s clearly a lot at play: guilt, grief, purgation, conformity, electoral fraud, and the prison industrial complex to cap it all off. What may have been appropriately lolled out on paper feels distending within a 105-minute runtime, where big, salient ideas are brought only to a simmer.

Brief and to the point, Honeyland proves more meditative than its premise suggests.

It’s an elegant film, reckoning empathetically with an extremely complex topic, but there’s a slight sense that something is missing, keeping The Room Next Door from ever really becoming truly great.

It studiously documents the various ways that Hamid makes his case, even though there’s never that much depth to the character beyond his cloak-and-dagger maschinations and a pressing desire for justice.

Like Imitation of Life, The Last Showgirl treats high-gloss femininity as a form of false consciousness, an ideal imposed upon women that ends up alienating them from each other, particularly mothers from their daughters.

A film of haunting unease, but not perhaps the complete package.

It’s all exceptionally silly, and fans of the first film might find the first hour little more than a rehash of Smile, but there’s still something admirable about Parker Finn’s gusto.

It’s a satisfying film, even though it lacks closure. Nothing is unnecessary or over the top – so Moll doesn’t push the boat out.

It’s a sweet film that hits all of its modest targets and works largely because it avoids vapid pop culture references and ironic humour that would be out of date within a month of release.

It’s the enigma of Marc-André that makes this such a compelling documentary.

It’s a bold play worth seeing, if only to watch Marlon Wayans get the ball and run.

Timely, anguished, and ultimately cathartic, the movie meets its moment.

While Raimi injects as much soul into this sequel as the Marvel blueprint will allow, it’s difficult to see the film as anything other than a cog in a bigger machine.

Ultimately the mash-up of genres doesn’t quite come together in a satisfactory manner, clashing to the point of whiplash.

As a folkloric meditation on the relationship between human and environment, mother and child, Alegría’s film has an earthly mystical quality to it, moving through its minimal plot with fluidity and enticement.

It’s a film with some decent feel-good credo (if that type of thing floats your boat), and there’s certainly value in having a film about mature characters that isn’t horrendously winsome and patronising.

We don’t hear from law enforcement as to why the raid happened in the manner it did, and why it ended in a humiliating capitulation. Yet there’s definitely a rousing prescience to a film like this at such a politically precarious moment, and perhaps we should take this rare happy ending with a pinch of salt.

Playing out as part psychological chiller and part supernatural horror, it navigates parental fears and family secrets in a sinister liminal space.

Where Ozon presents as an ironist in much of his work, skewering genres and retro styles, there’s a refreshing seriousness to this mad endeavour that demands attention, even when some of the choices he makes don’t feel entirely right.

It’s a pleasant film, albeit one which makes its point fairly early on and then restates it in various, sometimes sentimental ways. The film lacks for a strong narrative arc, and instead opts to filter stories and histories through the present moment.

It’s a bittersweet story, foreshadowed by his descent into alcoholism, yet the film manages to retain a purity of heart that will likely move any Burton fan.

Like close-up magic, the Now You See Me films function best when you soak in the vibe rather than get close enough to unpick any machinations of magic trickery.

The film’s thesis is often a little obvious, yearning for a return to a brand of architecture whose half-life isn’t so slim, but ignoring the arduous and exploitative construction methods that were used to produce those grandiose structures of yore.

A documentary might have offered more of an insight into the uniquely masculine form of psychopathy that prospers on Wall Street and Reddit alike.

The visuals are compelling but something is missing. The tone is too flat and the world-building too smooth for this film to ever come fully to life.

Zippy duologues, expertly teased beehives and stunning late ‘60s costumes may make this pro-choice message more palatable to the masses but ultimately the film pulls its punches, never lingering long enough on a single scene or tragedy to let the impact of these women’s work consume the audience.

There’s just nothing here to cement The Boys in the Boat as anything other than a sort of interesting story made in a competent but uncomplicated manner.

Lamb’s premise is intriguing too – a pleasing twist on the familiar horror trope of monstrous motherhood. Even so, the imaginative conceit is let down by a rather sudden and underwhelming climax.

This is simply a generic and brutally efficient tearjerker – like its title, it aspires to archetypal grandeur and lands somewhere blander.

For all its convention, Oscar Harding’s A Life on the Farm remains an elegy for amateur filmmaking, while also allowing for the survival of Carson’s work, which though brilliant, remained undiscovered and unrecognized until now.

Even though it’s a story that severely lacks for surprise, in both the silly nature of the tests and the question of Anna and Amir’s latent bond, the actors take the material seriously enough for the film to remain engaging enough.

The film excels in nasty generic thrills, even if there are some fictional elements of the story which undermine its apparent allyship to the victims.

As a writer and director, Sweeney shows much promise, at times demonstrating the swaggering confidence of the Canadian upstart, Xavier Dolan – the pair even look quite similar. Yet the film works best as a showcase for exemplary range of O’Brien.

Clearly taking inspiration from Italian neorealism, Camilleri never embellishes or trivialises the landscape of fishing in Malta but rather presents it as it really is. Luzzu is a foreboding warning with no climax. A quiet call to action in the vein of Andrea Arnold’s Cow.

After the self-contained and simmering Assistant this feels like Green’s attempt to make similar material more accessible.

What lifts Mirza’s film above the pack is that it is alive with colour and music, her characters are endearing and, while a little fragmented towards the end, the writer/director at least makes sure it’s a pleasure to reach that point.

It’s a fascinating, chilling, if limited study of how the endless cycle of global warfare plays out.

The film may not be lacking in emotion – Tengarrinha’s emotions are portrayed through the combination of realism and surrealism – but this ultimately comes across as disconnected due to the lack of political contextualisation, leaving an emotional weight missing from the film.

For all his puerile instincts, Gunn is able to create stakes in this film that feel real and meaningful – perhaps because of the care that has gone into fleshing out this group of characters over the course of three films (and all their supplementary appearances).

It’s such a lovely set-up, you wish the filmmakers had attempted to do a little more with it.

It’s an accomplished directorial debut, focusing on the power of faith and the strength of motherhood to become symbiotic beasts fighting for dominance in its hero’s mind during her quest for autonomy.

Once you get used to some of its perplexing choices, there’s fun to be had here. De Niro has delicious chemistry with himself, which becomes more amusing when imagining how he would have been performing these duologues to an empty void.

What we can do, like these journalists, is bear witness to the pain in the hope that it transforms into an urgent, rallying cry, and address our universal capacity to connect with the pain and suffering of others.

Despite this contrived narrative and the group’s aggravating attempts at humour that land like dead fish – including multiple “that’s what she said” lines and a “not a today Satan” – Something in the Water succeeds in creating tension.

It’s a hushed yet effectively emotive drama that’s bolstered with the addition of Mikhail Krichman’s stunning cinematography. Yet sadly, it’s hard to overcome the film’s biggest weakness – the ripple effect that comes from its overcomplicated characterisations.

After so many punishing stories, most recently 2022​’s Tori and Lokita, it’s hard to begrudge them the raw sentiment and mostly happy, hopeful endings of their newest one. But it comes too easy, in a film so artfully and opportunistically structured, which jumps from dramatic peak to dramatic peak as if skipping tracks on an album.

Ultimately, Once Upon a Time in Uganda would have benefitted from diving much deeper into the making of the studio’s many iconic productions, but by mirroring Wakaliwood’s lively, exuberant energy, still comes together as a thoroughly entertaining crowdpleaser.

It’s a slow, detailed procedural, one which carefully draws you into its dismal intrigue – and it’s engrossing for much of its runtime.

While this is ultimately a film about taking the time to appreciate what you have and enjoying every step of your way, the overall impression remains one of haste and only occasionally contagious overexcitement.

Sono has flow to spare, but samples heavily from icky fanboy culture.

It’s an engaging movie about being able to control one’s destiny, but the wait continues for when this director will pull something truly heartfelt out of the bag

Garbus never tries to conceal Cousteau’s flaws. For her, in order to understand where we are now, we first need to understand where we came from, and Cousteau represents that touchpoint.

A couple of really random and contrived twists in the fourth quarter make it hard to invest emotionally in the climactic, must-win game, though there’s just enough humour and heart to scrape a last-second win.

The film does aim for something a little deeper by also making it about the sheep being forced to acknowledge and experience the realities of death, and there are a couple of moments of sheep-based existential revelation that are surprisingly moving. At its best it even occasionally recalls vintage Aardman, particularly something like the original Chicken Run film.

It all feels a little toothless.

Well made and with relatability and stark intensity, it’s by no means a disappointing film. But with the zeitgeist now so attuned to red flags in relationships, its message arrives a little out of time.

Much like what the film’s themes speak to, this debut alludes to a brighter future, and serves best as the foundation upon which Malcolm Washington’s greatness will be built upon rather than a monument to it.

One can’t help but long for something a little more exciting than ​“pleasant” – Pixar used to lead the animation industry, and they’ve been treading water for far too long.

It’s a timid offering from a once-bold studio, and although it’s better conceived and more enjoyable than many of the studio’s recent projects, retaining the charming design style and thoughtful touches which have made Pixar one of the world’s most beloved animation studios, it – ironically enough – lacks the emotional gravitas of its predecessor.

The idea of finding that perfect other but having to back away due to circumstance certainly has value, though Tezel does paint Kira and Ian as the only pure souls in a world of self-involved fools. And as such, they’re never entirely likeable or relatable heroes.

There’s still a great deal to admire, in particular the rich cinematography of Jarin Blaschke (best known for his collaborations with Robert Eggers) which creates a pleasing contrast from the sinister scenario, and the affection with which Shyamalan treats all his characters. Sure, there’s violence, but there’s a whole lot of love too.

Seidi Haarla gives a winning, intelligent performance as a naturally very clever person made to feel small and helpless in a strange land. But Yuriy Borisov pops from the first moments you see him: his hunched-shoulders posture; his abrupt, agitated movements and boxer’s duck-and-weave walk; the animalistic way he tears into food, impatiently and avidly.

Haapasalo uses warmth, respect and empathy as her modus operandi, allowing her trio to wade through the liminal cusp of adulthood – no longer teenagers, yet not quite young adults – as they search for meaning through friendships, fleeting situationships, and budding romantic connections.

It’s just floating in a no-man’s land, a charming but impersonal film about a deeply personal journey.

With a mix of righteous anger and abiding serenity, Thornton terraforms the Wild West of his home nation into a spiritually parched landscape.

Watkins’ slick direction and McAvoy’s frankly terrifying performance make this an effective, worthy if not essential entry into the “If you go out to the woods today…” creepy canon.

Surprisingly, Fast X emerges as not only Leterrier’s best film but one of the most enjoyable entries in the entire series. A great deal of this can be attributed to the fact that this film, to an extent heretofore unseen, acknowledges and embraces just how absurd this franchise is.

Dosa’s film is a slick, moving and cutely Herzogian portrait of this loving, monomaniacal couple who straddled the line between the eccentric and the earnest.

The eventual reveal of the who and the why provides satisfying resolution, though the reward feels petty in comparison to the film’s freestanding pleasures: the tremulous discovery of love, the crystalline peace of unsupervised play, and above all else, the transportive score from the late Ryuichi Sakamoto, a masterwork within a minor work.

It’s superior to the stuffy, lore-obsessed recent Scott films, yet doesn’t hold an atmospherically flickering candle to the original or its sequel. It also doesn’t have the rough-and-ready, overreaching character of Fincher’s famous folly. Yet it makes for a decent time at the pictures, and the grinding first half is worth enduring for a pleasantly rip-snorting finale.

It’s a competently made and compellingly acted film which will hopefully lead to us seeing a lot more of both filmmaker and lead actor.

There is something sweet about The Idea of You, even if it is a total fantasy. Perhaps it’s simply the winning charm of Hathaway and Galitzine or the novelty of a rom-com featuring a leading lady over the age of 25. More of that, please!

Director Christian Schwochow’s staging is unostentatious to the point of coming across as pedestrian, but the film is ultimately engaging thanks to the dilemmas wrestled with by the script.

Despite the strong performances by Cumberbatch and Foy, the complex weaving together of symbolic strands feels contrived; they hang loosely together by a precarious thread.

Scenes flicker between joyful hit and bemusing miss and it feels as if the film has been thrown together in a manner that feels experimental. The script, meanwhile, is too rudimentary to match the full satirical potential of the premise.