The key challenge here is presenting these familiar tropes in a novel manner, and Cooper’s knowing sense of humour and her committed cast help bring life to the conventional.

Romería is loyal to its sense of withholding almost until the very end. It is then, finally, that Simon reaches the grand apex of her journey of self-reflection, one that holds in the stunning clarity of carefully chosen words a moving encompassing of how one can only build a sturdy foundation for the future after lovingly repairing the unrectified cracks of the past.

Although Beetlejuice Beetlejuice suffers a little from an overabundance of ideas leading to a bit of a third-act scramble, and its plot points are sign-posted so large you can see them a mile away, it’s a much better-executed and enjoyable film than it has any right to be, charmingly reverent and referential to the point that even its cliche story beats can be mostly excused.

Reflecting on McQueen’s oeuvre, Blitz is a clear culmination of his greatest passions, the film itself feeling at once fresh and well-trodden.

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.

A jolly throwback to a time when flip, breezy British comedies came freighted with substance, and lots of charismatic performances to boot.

It’s an imperfect but enjoyable adaptation, with Wright, like Dinklage, delivering something charismatic but insubstantial.

Even as The Beasts flirts with genre, it also remains largely true to the real-life case from which it is drawn, so that the big three-cornered duel that would be the climax of a western comes here at the half-way point and allows the rest of the film to abandon masculine bluster and focus on a quieter female stoicism.

Don’t call it a throwback though. Despite bearing certain similarities to high-concept action-adventure romantic comedies of yesteryear (namely Romancing the Stone, The Jewel of the Nile and Six Days, Seven Nights), this is a thoroughly modern romp.

What makes Sasquatch Sunset a cut above what some might perceive to be an extended Funny or Die sketch is that it’s crafted with such care and with a sense of cinematic grandeur, achieved via Mike Gioulakis’ gorgeous, mussy cinematography and the gentle pastoral sounds of The Octopus Project on the soundtrack.

Long takes, discursive monologues, slow pans and stylistic shifts allow the directors to forge an inventive cinematic language out of political consciousness; one that eschews the narrative codes of Western cinema, as it blends fiction and documentary, immersion and observation, to provide a multilayered embodiment of marginalised womanhood in contemporary Brazil.

Blurring the line between reality and fiction, Aussel hones in on what it is to lose someone as an adolescent in sequences that are stripped back conceptually but pack an emotional punch.

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

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.

Three Minutes culminates in a contemplation of its central paradox: “The absence in the presence”. It provides a vital memorial to the people whose lives have been lost to time, revealing the significance of preserving film as much as preserving history.

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

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.

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.

By transposing the video essay format to a feature-length affair, Philippe attempts a union of theory (criticism) and practice (documentary filmmaking), and so the very ontology of Lynch/Oz becomes a subject of fascination in its own right.

While the beautiful directorial flourishes are still there – the fluid cinematography, striking performances and airtight soundtrack – Alex Wheatle is the first Small Axe film where the blend between the informative and the pointedly artistic feels a little unsettled.

There is always an issue of sensitivity with documentary filmmaking, but the final film is wanting. Wanting more Marion, and wanting more interrogation of the role public news plays in American life. But that doesn’t mean this documentary isn’t worth your time, Marion was an actionable inspiration and contradictory genius.

The dynamic of the central four is a pleasure incarnate. Equal parts funny and warm, each actor brings a specific dynamism that, when combined with the rest, crackles with life and love.

It’s a testament to the smartness of this casting that Jay Kelly works as well as it does, even if the echos of Hollywood mythmaking are unavoidable.

While Sorkin, Kidman and Bardem breathe life into these sitcom icons, their lives ultimately prove too big and too messy to fit within this film’s constraints.

Heller skillfully portrays the repeated routines of motherhood – breakfast, lunch, dinner, bath time, bedtime – as both meaningful and exhausting.

What elevates Sisters above a standard Hitchcock rip-off, and makes it authentically De Palma, is its typically unsubtle and scathing social critique.

Despite a two and a half hour runtime, All That’s Left Of You feels incredibly compact. There is much owed to Amine Bouhafa (who also scored The Voice of Hind Rajab) and his kaleidoscopic score that prevents us from losing ourselves to a simple sadness.

Although occasionally let down by weak writing and erratic pacing, the film’s visuals are glorious. Unsurprisingly given its creators’ backgrounds, The Deer King is meticulously crafted.

Chaotic and intimate, Gustafson captures the balancing act of sisterhood which at once encompasses brutality and tenderness.

This finely-crafted, often affecting film points not necessarily to another sequel, but to a future where the Overlook and its eerie occupants have been frozen in time and locked away, forever and ever and ever…

What’s most exciting about Dominik’s vision is that it pieces together the most famous images of Monroe to create a collage that pays homage to her ultimate unknowability.

Using interviews with friends and collaborators alongside a rich cache of archival footage, Berg showcases Buckley’s complex personality, and goes some way to argue for his music as radical and experimental.

With a clear vision and understanding of the storytelling, and buoyed by Zach Baylin and Keenan Coogler’s deft screenplay, Jordan makes an ambitious debut that needs more finetuning at times but retains the best traits of the trilogy to remain a suitably introspective, yet thrilling chapter in the Creed legend.

Carnivalesque both literally and metaphorically, it is a surreal affair, but for all its unnerving strangeness, the depressing subtext is spelt out very clearly.

Whether Archenemy is a tale of genuine urban renewal, or merely of power shifting without any real underlying change, remains tantalisingly ambiguous.

If the film doesn’t radically deepen the conversation around the gender politics or financial intricacies of marriage, it does find new textures in the way ambition corrodes intimacy.

Despite the evasive final scenes which avoid resolving or contextualising Hoss’s fragile mental state, Weisse delivers a captivating psychological exploration of the all-encompassing plights of achieving excellence.

It’s with a strikingly minimal amount of dialogue that Haider Rashid’s Europa poignantly evokes how those bearing the brunt of state violence enter a physically and emotionally soul-destroying state of purgatory.

This is a compassionate and educational look into a conflict-ridden area and the women and children suffering at its centre.

A tightly-paced action thriller, Plane competently delivers on the deliciously formulaic tropes of the genre.

Girls Will Be Girls is a sensitive and quiet addition to the coming-of-age genre that is relatable whether you’re a young teen going through love for the first time, or looking back on those exciting yet heartbreaking years of so many firsts.

It’s a brilliant showcase of both McKellen and Coel’s talents. The contrast between them is rich and layered, down to the detail of costume designer Eleanor Baker’s choice of knitwear and corduroys in warm and cool tones.

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

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.