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.