It is at times chilling, morally reprehensible and frightening, but it also proves to be liberating for the central character.

It’s a wonderful film with not an ounce of fat on the bone, and Kaurismäki still manages to thread the needle between a style of ironic detachment and emotions that are big, bold and instantly affecting.

There are as many potential ways to approach a parent-child relationship onscreen as there are parent-child relationships on the planet, but Hogg may have just discovered a new one.

The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes outstays its welcome big time – a serviceable B-movie which replays the series’ inherently-quite-exciting fight-to-the-death storyline, but then inelegantly bolts on an extra hour of vapid soul searching and lore expansion that made this viewer want to bludgeon himself with his own keep cup.

What begins as a genuinely entertaining and well-pitched dramedy quickly becomes ridiculous and out of touch.

This is by far Haynes’ funniest film to date, with shades of Almodóvar in its dramatic zooms and heightened domestic tension.

As entertainment Napoleon delivers without glorifying his military record or painting the man as a hero. It’s a story about power, obsession and exploitation – which arguably is the story of history itself.

Kramer fires on all cylinders in terms of imagery and tone – both are perfectly executed and entirely captivating. Aesthetically, this experiment proves to be a masterful exercise in high camp.

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 confident, classical filmmaking, yet despite its many formal and thematic pleasures, doesn’t offer a whole lot that’s new.

If this cynical and funny consideration of the distance between a person and their curated image in the collective (un)consciousness comes with any caveat, it’s that it, itself, feels ever so slightly synergistic.

Unfortunately, the cast is saddled with a half-baked script, which underdelivers on its promise of a queer, female fight club by seeming to forget that’s a crucial element of the story.

What’s most important here is how Philibert captures the patience of the nurses and attendants, who never ever interrupt or talk down to the people whose conditions and wellbeing are L’Adamant’s raison d’être.

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

This is an assured leap to feature filmmaking for Manning Walker with a strong visual identity and sense of place – yet also one that sharply depicts the grey areas in gender and sexual politics that one is forced to confront as a teenager, particularly as a teenage girl.

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.

It looks like Hammer has returned from the dead.

As an account of Hudson the Hollywood party boy and lothario it is comprehensive, though those expecting a more complex account of the star’s inconsistencies may find themselves shortchanged.

The brevity of the source material is thinly stretched into a two-hour runtime, padded out with tedious subplots and a new, excruciating ending which undermines the initial point of its creation.

The chemistry between Dolan and Macdonald is pure Withnail and I, with Amiss presented as a tragic chatterbox whose splenetic rants are peppered with moments of droll poetry.

It’s stylish and sad and funny and bleak and a thousand other things. But most of all, it’s a pure hit of Sandler and Safdie.

It’s not exactly an ambitious plotline for someone like Fincher, but it’s certainly an engaging one, and the cryptic, constantly evasive protagonist is a puzzle that lingers after the credits roll.

It’s a rosy, adoring view of pubs and clubs as explicitly, perfectly Marxist – a coal country – accented chorus rising in a single voice to inspire us all to a more perfect union.

Aside from well-trodden social politics, Brother’s examination of the myriad ways we respond to grief is what sets it apart from other films that delineate the Black experience.

It’s a fairly standard-issue sequel which pads out its thin-to-invisible storyline with a number of self-consciously garish animated interludes all in varying styles.

It’s engrossing and purposefully strange, and the images of this climate-change-ravaged world of dried lakes and barren grasslands are bewitching and terrifyingly plausible. But when the inevitable twist comes, it makes about as much sense as using a fundraising model Bob Geldof threw together in the 80s to stave off the 4th horseman of the apocalypse.

The film falls flat due to the fact that it’s a tonal disaster zone. It’s like paying entry to a funfair only to find out you’ve wandered into an open counselling session which is being led by a slipshod college undergraduate.

It is profoundly moving to see someone be so open with her audience, the meaning of her lyrics taking on new resonance since first writing them. And we were there, we remember it all.

This is on first impression perhaps a very good, uneven film rather than an unequivocally great one.

Smoke Sauna Sisterhood is a window into an enviable cultural practice of solidarity, as the safe communal space provides a place for gossip and laughter as well as the expression of pain.

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.

The highlight of the film comes right at the end where we see some archive footage of Golda interacting with some of her supporters, and it’s never a good sign in these endeavours when reality is so much more electrifying and vital than the fiction.

The contrast between Balsillie’s ruthless business mind and the awkward Lazaridis and Fregin is entertaining, and avoids the ‘difficult genius’ trope which haunts the subgenre by emphasising that BlackBerry was very much a team effort, and the individualism that followed later is part of the reason it failed.

Far from converting viewers, this merely cashes in on their backward-looking nostalgia, without moving forward to anything better, or even half as good.

Unfortunately, writer-director Chloe Domont’s debut drama fails to make the most of its scintillating premise.

Singer aims for the bleak, gritty texture standard to the genre, and winds up closer to the result of an anonymous recommendation generated by the algorithmic tags of “Bleak, Gritty.”

It’s encouraging that 10 films in, the Saw franchise has remembered what makes it so great: a potent blend of true horror, twisted imagination, comedic timing, and above all, the legend that is Tobin Bell. Whether or not they can write around Jigsaw’s canonical death to bring Bell back again is another matter…

Not only does The Creator work as a good time at the movies, but it is also a reminder that mid-budget, (somewhat) original, crowd-pleasing stories can be told with aplomb.

For devotees, it’s a delightful little morsel, lovingly brought to life as only Anderson knows how, and illustrates his creativity when it comes to adaptation.

You watch this film not so much in anger, but with the shrugging, pitiful sense that each of its stars will be able to buy a new saloon car, or have their pool retiled.

It’s another very special film from this exceptionally gifted and thoughtful (and extremely angry) director.

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

It’s a film which sets up a lot of easy targets, but shifts its aim at the last second to take on – and bullseye – a whole lot of hard ones.

I found myself wishing I could watch a real game directed by Inoue, with such careful attention to detail and an acute sense of drama.

It’s an intimate dramedy that strikes a delicate balance between melancholy and wryness . . . and while perhaps a little slight in content, Fremont is a stylish, sweet evolution for Jalali, and a poignant reflection on the modern immigrant experience.

Its final act is composed of such undercooked plot developments that its emotional stakes lose all import.

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.

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.

The thorny nuances of multiethnic relationships are deeply understood by Celine Song’s directorial debut, Past Lives.

The film makes for a involving and often mordantly funny three-hander, and Exarchopoulos and Whishaw are both superb despite being given the slightly thankless task of clearing things up in Tomas’s wake.

It contains an effervescent combination of haste, impassioned nostalgia, and genuine affection between cast and crew. Going full method is to be commended, but the result is a back-slapping sesh that forgets its satirical intentions somewhere along the way.

While Scrapper might not have the most original conceit, it’s a sweet, heartfelt take on the difficulty of father-daughter bonding, and how to be soft when you’ve tried to make yourself hard to avoid getting hurt.

The heartache of wasted time and missed love is a familiar arena in queer drama and while Lie With Me rets on classic tropes, it still makes for a moving reflection on adolescent love.

Afire culminates in a magnificent and poetic study of subjectivity, exploring the isolated anxieties of creative labour and a simultaneous entanglement of superiority and inferiority complexes, adding another compelling and precise layer of texture to Petzold’s multifaceted oeuvre.

Altogether, the Innocent is a relatively low stakes story of ordinary people doing humbly ridiculous if fairly illegal things – and all the more charming for it.

Bolstered by an entertaining cast, including Insecure’s Yvonne Orji, SNL’s Jay Pharoh, and Perkins himself as the standout, The Blackening turns one of horror’s most problematic tropes on its head and gets justice for all those black characters we never got to know.

he 93-minute runtime is mostly padded out by a plethora of jokes about dicks and bodily fluids which might amuse a group of nine-year-old boys, but is unlikely to impress anyone whose prefrontal cortex has fully formed.

It’s not that Soto has no moves in his arsenal when it comes to achieving a mere modicum of originality, it’s that the formal structure of these films is now so tired and dreary that, even with a few, nifty customisable elements, everything looks and feels like a rehash of something else.

It culminates in a bold exploration of transness, womanhood, Blackness and the sex industry, providing thoughtful and intimate insight into these material conditions and the breadth of experience that lies behind them.

The near-romantic jealousy between long-time friends, and the excruciating but sometimes rewarding difficulty of introducing contrasting friends to one another, are explored to squirm-inducingly funny effect.

Ultimately, the wonderful family movie in here that’s screaming to get out is hopelessly trapped in Disney’s Haunted Mansion.

It feels as if Crialese wants to explore this subject matter without potentially alienating an audience who may disagree with the stance it takes, so everything political is soft edged, and Adri’s dilemma is nudged to the background in the film’s final act.

There is something strangely comforting about Red, White & Royal Blue, as imperfect as it is. It’s a romcom for the streaming era but it has a markedly different vibe to it because it’s fronted by two men.

Cemented by Efira’s restrained, empathetic performance, Paris Memories is a deft exploration of recovery, and a moving tribute to Winocour’s brother Jérémie and other victims and survivors.

Their voice performances lend the story authenticity even at its most ridiculous, while constantly threatening to derail scenes into excitable or mocking chatter, and it’s an adorable delight whenever it does. That messiness in their conversations extends to the film’s thrilling and funny action sequences, mixing it up between slapdash improvisation and the fluidity of a seasoned martial artist.

The writing cannot match the poignancy of Lengronne’s performance. Her emotional immediacy is more interesting than the epic, yet comparatively muted scope of the film.

For the most part, though, Frears and co poke fun at the monarchy and do a decent job at presenting the complex relationship between India and England.

It starts an important discussion but doesn’t dig deep enough.

This is uncompromising horror that perceptively taps into contemporary life with visual flair and smarts.

With Medusa Deluxe, Hardiman makes a directorial debut that successfully injects a fresh, vibrant perspective into the murder mystery genre while still employing the dark dread that stands as its trademark.

It’s a small but perfectly formed comedy of manners, with Menzies particularly great as a therapist who finds himself unable to care about the lives of his patients.

It’s a film which dismantles and reconstructs the stereotypes of Black masculinity in a manner that’s both unsentimental and honest.

It’s hard to imagine that any Take That fan would rather listen to badly autotuned covers of their favourite songs than the original recordings. Just hope that someday soon this will all be someone else’s (bad) dream.

A touching sports drama about the here-and-now, rather than victories or defeats.

British-Moroccan filmmaker Fyzal Boulifa’s second feature borrows the title of this Crawford vehicle and retains its melodrama, only to portray an otherwise entirely distinct, compassionately-crafted survival tale.

This archive clip-driven documentary comprises Cousins’ own informed and poetic postulations on the inner-workings of the Hitchcock corpus, as he heads on a jolly, thematically-inclined ramble through one of the great artistic legacies of the 20th century.

Despite these subtle barbs, Return to Dust ends up as an elegiac love story as the unlikely couple form a bond built on a foundation of total understanding and empathy.

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

It’s not a faultless film, but it’s one that sits within the higher echelons of the oft-tawdry biopic form, and also reveals hidden depths to the Nolan project and, excitingly, suggests that we should brace ourselves for anything the next time around.

Gerwig’s filmmaking enriches our world, earnest and joyous and thoughtful. Even under the guise of a piece of massive IP, she maintains that spirit where others have failed.

Its strengths and richness lie more in boasting a potent mix of universality in its rebellion against entrapment within societal ideals of self-worth, as well as cultural specificity and pertinence apropos the impact that white evangelists have over the political landscape in modern-day Brazil.

It’s a fun little diversion that’s more interested in the salacious gossip and anecdotes than it is offering a more broad inquiry into how these artworks more generally enhance the music they’re being used to sell.

While Pixar films have included romance before, there has never been an explicit rom-com made by the studio, and Sohn’s ambition is admirable here, as he attempts to bring new ideas to Pixar amid the glut of sequels and prequels the studio has favoured lately.

If it’s pure action you’re after, there’s plenty to set your heart racing here. Cruise and his long-time directing partner Christopher McQuarrie have once again engineered some truly staggering set-pieces

Salomé is not an imaginative director, apparently content to sit back and watch Huppert command the film with little regard for the rest of his cast and crew.

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

Unfortunately, much of said action is old hat (pun intended), with the bulk of this strangely peril-free offering playing like a refried compendium of golden moments from Spielberg’s original trilogy.

There’s beauty in the film’s brevity, but it still leaves you wanting more.

Perhaps the demand for super low-stakes, “turn your brain off” studio comedies where the only point is cathartic laughter will one day return. It brings this writer no joy to report that No Hard Feelings isn’t the film to usher in that era.

Asteroid City is Anderson’s most complete, rich and surprising film to date, and perhaps his most autobiographical in some obscure, allegorical way, in that it stands as testament to how filmmaking is about bringing artists together and attuning them to a specific wavelength. On a more superficial level, it’s a film which pushes his patented funny/sad dichotomy to its wildest and most enjoyable extremes.

The heavy reliance on CGI is noticeable, particularly because the work is quite ugly (the area from which Barry is able to access the past is a jagged kaleidoscopic eyesore) and while the film benefits from not having a sludgy abundance of fight scenes, the ones it does feature are still largely indistinguishable from any other film.

All the ingredients here are invaluable, and the film’s vision comes alive with a real sense of hope about the soul of Chile and its thirst for change that’s palpable, not imaginary.

Chevalier is ultimately a devastating reminder of a greatness that was nearly entirely expunged from history, and how equal talents lived and died without even being given a chance to put a little more beauty into the world.

In the face of creative genocide (if that’s not too harsh a term for it), we should neither be making nor seeing movies like Transformers: Rise of the Beasts.

Too real for its whimsy and too whimsical to be realistic, Amanda will likely linger on those people who don’t leave their bedrooms much, more than on the reasons why they should – and that stunts its charm.

Millepied’s foray into directing does well to shine the spotlight on Barrera and Mescal’s chemistry, as well as demonstrating how you can tell a story through movement alone.

Were it not for the transcripts, Reality would be a more straightforward addition to the already-oversaturated true crime genre. Satter’s handling of the material and Sweeney’s performance, however, bring this into a more intriguing space where questions of narrative truth, perception and the punishment for honesty are addressed.