It’s a film about the necessity of holding onto small, precious things in the face of all-consuming fear. Whether that’s an authentic New York slice or your beloved, curiously bombproof cat.

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.

The entries into this wicked compendium are more interesting due to their differences rather than their similarities, suggesting that all types of people have their lives ruined by some variety of existential conundrum. And that is something that creates a sprawling lattice of deep human connectivity.

A brilliant and tense allegory on the human paradoxes of violent conflict.

The Bikeriders is an enjoyable ride and one that Nichols fans will get a kick out of. The ensemble cast is enticing but the tried-and-true story arc isn’t injected with enough rigour to make this the classic it could be.

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.

Razooli clearly has ambition and imagination, and this simple but sweet fairytale is an exuberant adventure with charm to spare.

Despite some pacing issues and the fact it leans a little to heavily on extended visual longeurs, this is a fine second feature from Mortensen.

Witless nonsense is still witless nonsense when it’s in quote marks, and following a strangely detailed set-up, the film lurches into a second half in which the kill count rises exponentially, alongside the feeling of skull-compounding boredom.

It amounts to more than just ‘a heap of broken images’ – it’s a warming depiction of friendship as family.

Although the first 40 minutes in the buttoned-up period setting do drag a little, once The Beast finds its groove, its imaginative and melodramatic spirit are hard to resist. It’s a big swing for the fences from a singular French filmmaker, and one that absolutely pays off.

As a director, von Horn is smart enough to recognise that even the most heinous crimes have a human culprit, and as such his sensitive, unsensational film retains a sense of poise and never strays into soap opera territory.

Jim Davis’ once-witty comic-strip creation is no slouch when it comes to commercial tie-ins, but The Garfield Movie somehow marks some kind of obscene apotheosis of this dark art.

It’s a film that heads to the shadowy spots that most filmmakers on this sceptred isle don’t even know exist; every frame exuding both a breathless confidence and a warped visual literacy which suggests a director on a mission to do anything to make an audience feel something – which is completely refreshing to behold.

While it’s absolutely a blast at the cinema, the dizzying heights that Miller drove us back in 2015 aren’t quite matched a second time around. But all is not lost: Furiosa is still miles better than the dreck Hollywood usually treats us to over the summer, and provided it doesn’t take another decade to get the Fury Road sequel that Miller has been promising, perhaps we’ll reach Valhalla yet.

It passes the test that all these films must undergo with flying colours: yes, it makes you want to watch those incredible movies.

Kingdom certainly has its moments, but the rougher, darker edges of predecessors Dawn, Rise and War have been smoothed out, leaving us with an over-long, relatively low-stakes instalment sorely lacking in originality.

Rohrwacher instead makes connections through something more primal than logic, a flow of images that feels surprising but always intuitive, in the way a dream does.

The film is beautifully staged and executed, maintaining well-defined emotional contours and never allowing things to descend into mainstream sentimentalism.

At various points, the film seems to be on the verge of something riveting.

Frenetic and obsessive, this is still a love story amid the gore and slick of body oil – a heart-pounding, iron-pumping descent into the heady heart of obsession and desire.

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!

But while The Fall Guy is an affectionate and occasionally entertaining tribute to the people professionally flipping cars and taking punches, it neglects the other crucial aspects of what makes a film enjoyable, resulting in a popcorn flick that quickly fades from the memory once the credits roll, sadly lacking the staying power of any of the action greats it references.

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.

It is funny, grotesque, assuredly savvy and very bloody — and one might discern, in its preoccupation with errant parents struggling to get closer to their estranged children, a Message that could be called universal.

This is a grimly refreshing and confident toe-dip into the world of horror, and we hope Duane choses to revisit this atmospherically murky pool.

Fantastic Machine makes for a decent A-level crash-course in media history, before you graduate to Kirsten Johnson’s far superior Cameraperson.

The film is fun. It’s smart and sexy and engaging.

Despite its myopic politics, it’s hard to deny that Civil War is an engrossing film. The performances given by the central cast are quite remarkable, with Moura and Dunst operating as foils and McKinley Henderson providing his characteristic brand of steely gravitas (he also delivers one of the film’s best moments).

As much as the party line insists this film is a celebration of Amy’s musical genius, it is as salacious and cruel as any tabloid cutting from the noughties – only invested in the bloody ballet pump left in the street, not the complexities of living a very public life with addiction.

What begins as an apparently modest, small-scale drama, ends in a moment of ethereal beauty, for both characters and viewers.

So carefully and empathetically constructed – even towards its “villains” – that it feels miles away from didacticism, this shapeshifting ecological tale becomes a yearning rumination on the alienations of modern life, and the quietly violent seams where things in this world are changing and dying rapidly while we lack the language to arrive at the same destination, no matter how much people say they’re listening.

The superb casting of the two lead co-stars, who were only told the outcome of their characters storylines on the day of shooting, really buoys the film.

Monkey Man is an energetic and thoughtful debut feature that leaves one excited about what Patel’s future as an action star might look like.

Despite its laid back tone and a committed performance from Erivo, the film lacks for surprise and innovation, slowly edging towards a revelatory climax that only the most narrow-sighted of viewers would not have seen coming from a million miles off.

Where this film excels is in the basics – it doesn’t take any risks and just choses to do the simple things well.

Unfortunately, Disco Boy is afflicted with the curse of trying to pack too much (in terms of both style and substance) into its 92-minute runtime, rendering it incapable of saying much at all.

Silver Haze is a hacked-away crosscut of life on the social fringes, a Molotov soap opera powered by committed performances and containing characters who are, to a man, sculpted with genuine depth and humanity.

The Sweet East takes an admirably measured look at societal fracture in the modern age, and its use of arch provocation becomes a device to represent a highly recognisable vernacular of despair, where obscenity (both verbal and corporeal) is the only language that cuts through the chaff.

It’s hard not to feel like Sakamoto is in the room with you.

Less productively, more trendily, Çatak’s film becomes a chain-reaction melodrama: acted by self-serious types, scored by tightly wound strings, dependent on characters saying the wrong things and leaving the right ones unsaid with jaws firmly, sardonically clenched.

It’s a chilling and expertly constructed work which goes on to suggest that our finicky anxieties will end up getting the best for us.

One thing to emphasise is that this is a very funny film, yet the humour doesn’t ever come from jokes or contrived set-ups. It’s more a sense of looming realisation that this caper – explained and justified over a single pint in a pub – is even more flawed that we ever might have imagined.

Despite the best efforts of DoP Elisha Christian to create a striking visual identity, the film ultimately brings little to well-trodden cinematic ground, even in its hell-for-leather finale.

Robot Dreams is Berger’s first fling with animation, and he takes to the new artform with evident and infectious enthusiasm.

Everything about the film is undercooked and lazy, and one is led to hope that this franchise is put back in the deep freeze for a very long time.

Road House’s limp, jokeless dialogue leaves the viewer plenty of time to consider how lazy the whole affair feels.

Pain, pleasure, the desperate urgency to express yourself and the sincerity of youth coalesce to electrifying ends.

While beautiful, the impression left by Banel & Adama is confusing.

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.

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

Drive-Away Dolls revels in ridiculousness, allowing nothing serious get in the way of a good joke.

While the film extends a certain empathy towards its subject’s mighty fall from grace, it does not let him off the hook, and it ends as a multi-dimensional study of a man who has lived a life of such extreme entitlement that sincere contrition simply does not compute with him.

By gambling with the flimsy dice of morality, the director crafts a film that successfully bypasses the traps of the gratuitous to find its way towards an uncomfortable but ultimately rewarding catharsis.

Renck’s film floats along with a unique grace, reckoning with the weight of paternal legacy and human folly with sincerity, achieving something quite profound in the process.

Maestro is a film to be swept along by, as heady and bombastic as a golden-age Hollywood musical.

Memory’s relatively restrained hundred-minute runtime is bloated with repetitive sequences focused on the characters navigating the world physically rather than emotionally, suggesting that even Franco fails to grasp the vast potential of the parable at hand.

Designed to replace the controversial final two episodes of Neon Genesis Evangelion, The End of Evangelion expands the series finale’s contemplation of emotional crutches and human connection to an apocalyptic scale.

Perfect Days encourages a sort of radical presentness in our own lives – learning how to truly connect with our existence, even when it’s difficult or causes us to confront unpleasant truths.

What’s sad about the film is that the feather-light comic tone seems to preclude any deeper insight into what are, on paper, a set of potentially fascinating and psychologically deep characters.

The first half of Dune: Part Two is among the best things that Villeneuve has ever done, though the sheer eventfulness of the plot and a bustling retinue of side-players (Austin Butler upgrading Sting’s cod-pieced ninny from the 1984 film into a hairless psychopath is worthy of mention) means that the final act does feel rushed.

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.

Even if you know how this famous story ends, the final act is an exercise in tension-building that makes this visceral survival drama memorable long after the credits finish.

The film doesn’t strain for meaning or metaphor, instead just showing us the events over a certain period and allowing us to sample and chew over them as we would heaving plate of delicious food. Just a wonderful film.

There’s just something gratingly cheap about the affair, from script to cinematography to performances, as if no one involved wanted to be there.

Occupied City is a staggeringly ambitious feat of emotional stamina and in the unrelenting litany of horror stories presented here, one thing is clear: he wants us to remember something, anything.

This is the western as a dried, coruscating corpse, left out for the buzzards to feed on.

It’s a realistic, sensitive but never cloying call for kindness and empathy – something that shouldn’t feel novel in this day and age, but sadly does – and encourages viewers to reconsider how they view fatness, and in turn, fat bodies.

While this version of events is perhaps not as accurate, its emotional honesty and narrative sincerity is unquestionable. It’s an incredibly heavy and sobering film, but one that has been made in the spirit of paying tribute to the Von Erich boys.

It’s a biographical film where, to ask “why?” in regard to Marley’s sometimes obscurely-motivated actions would risk placing him in an ambiguous light. And so we instead trot through a series of highly manicured and stage-managed Wiki hit points and pause every few minutes for a musical interlude.

To Vaughn’s credit, at least Argylle isn’t as gleefully misogynistic as the Kingsman films, but that’s a bit like saying “Well, at least the pigeon shit didn’t get in my mouth” after a pigeon has shat on your face.

There are some great things in this film, yet its intentions are swept up in a mire of tonal indecision and cynicism masquerading as irony.

Migration is not an ambitious film, and doesn’t seem to have anything important to say about why one might migrate and the lessons we can learn from this rather arduous but necessary endeavour.

The Zone of Interest seems to welcome division in its responses – such a bold, horrifyingly eerie work serves as a catalyst as much as an artistic statement.

Director Blitz Bazawule does well to draw out multifaceted performances from his cast, particularly Barrino and Brooks, and with them the big emotional beats all manage to land well enough. Yet the musical flights of fancy feel creatively bound by the stage adaptation and lack a certain eccentric pizazz.

It’s a ghost story, but it’s a love story too. One that will break your heart.

These stories are already the stuff of cinematic legend, but that doesn’t make their retelling any less compelling.

Kaluuya and Tavares are bold in presenting gentrification as the cultural murder that it is while also celebrating, with clear eyes, the regular person who lives on in spite of it.

The result is a teen movie with an identity crisis.

The trio’s company is so embracing that it is hard to say goodbye. The benefit of the Yuletide setting is that Payne has gifted us a film intended to be watched every year. It feels like finding an unwatched classic under the tree on Christmas morning.

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.

The film is a celebration of her life and work, but for such a controversial figure it would have benefited from some dissenting voices on the panel of interviewees, or at least gone a little deeper into her homespun methodology.

What we have is a generic addition to an already oversaturated genre – one that doesn’t even have the sense to make use of Statham’s often underutilised comedic talents.

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.

Poor Things showcases the director at his most playful and comedic, weaving his otherwise evident political critique into the complex character of Bella: a new kind of woman, a tabula rasa. How pleasurable it is to witness an evolution like Bella’s, with wonder and admiration.

It’s a strange, disjointed film that lacks a clear structure and a satisfying denouement, even if O’Neill excels at channelling her prior years in the emotional doldrums via her stern, seen-it-all-before manner.

This is also a film that benefits from occasional glimmers of lightness, which contribute to a more rounded sense of who Winton was as a person while providing some respite from the weighty subject matter.

This is an exhaustive and lively document of a cult scene that you’re very happy it existed, but maybe don’t want to be a part of yourself.

In Next Goal Wins, Taika Waititi depicts Samoans the same way he depicted Hitler in Jojo Rabbit: as absolutely adorable.

The real beauty of Priscilla is its delicate portrayal of the all-consuming fire and flood of first love, and what happens when you grow up, and begin to realise the fairytale doesn’t always have a happy ending.

Driver is very good in the lead, pulling back some of the favour lost on his futzed stereotypical take on an Italian in House of Gucci. But it’s Cruz who adds the real nitro to this film.

It’s an intriguing set-up which comes to a surprising head, and while some of the twists are a little contrived, the film as a whole works as a fierce admonishment of western nostalgia for its colonial past.

The Boy and the Heron is richly self-synthesising and achingly sentimental, collating artistic motifs from across the Miyazaki filmography and nakedly articulating the hopes it places in the next generation.

What we have is a completely fumbled, cobbled-together movie-esque collage of unwatchably fuzzy CGI in which ten thousand percent more effort has been put into making floaty underwater hair look authentic than it has to the script, story, characters, drama, attaining a sense of basic logic, meaning, etc… So no, it will not do.

It’s precision-tooled in terms of structure, almost to the point of airlessness, but you’d be hard-pressed to knock back the final 45-minute showdown as anything less than an impressive feat by a filmmaker orchestrating and charting the fine processes of an epic battle.

On the evidence of the astonishingly-assured debut, Earth Mama, we’ll be seeing work from writer-director Savanah Leaf for many years to come.

The 3D aspect is often used to mesmerising effect, and dovetails perfectly with an artist whose work often demands the viewer inspect it from multiple angles and vantages.

This is a film that has been double dipped in lavish spectacle and then generously sprinkled with all the charm, silliness and wit found in Roald Dahl’s source novel.