The film’s final scene is also a chilling subversion of normal expectations for the climax of a campground slasher, but the lacklustre 90 minutes that precede it mean that by the time we trudge to the forest’s boundaries, there’s little reason to care who comes out of the blood bath on top.

Remaining loyal to the source material, Boyle’s Kensuke’s Kingdom greets fans of the novel with a safe cinematic counterpart, using an animated format to re-explore Morpurgo’s environmental literature, remaining within the boundaries of the original narrative, arriving at set expectations and nothing more.

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

The naturalistic camerawork and performances ground the film in realism, creating a wry dramedy that refuses to placate us with easy answers or condescension.

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.

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.

The set-up is fascinating and the tension is increasingly grotesque. Yet there are many plodding stretches which Corbet doesn’t succeed in concealing by inserting wild camera movements combined with Scott Walker’s bleak, juddering orchestral score. This music feels like possessed black stallions galloping to hell. It bludgeons you with loud, brash, hysterical horror.

A timely story of broken trust in institutions.

Where The Wedding Banquet really shines is in its characters, not only in its two romantic pairings that feel profoundly real, but also in subverting our expectations of its intergenerational relationships.

While scant on plot and somewhat unfocused tonally, Zhao nevertheless manages to construct a vivid portrait of a community on the fringes without frills or fuss.

The film sorely lacks for surprise or tension, even while it does offer a likably earnest survey of the economic hole that many found themselves in while the world got sick.

The reck­less tac­tics and brazen skull­dug­gery employed by Hayes are car­ried off with a know­ing wink and a toothy grin, but are also plain­ly ludi­crous – to the extent you may end up park­ing your sus­pen­sion of dis­be­lief. Still, when the results are this thrilling, it seems churl­ish to nit­pick about such fan­ci­ful nar­ra­tive manoeuvres.

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.

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.

The desire to create a web of characters as complexly mapped as the LA road network is to the film’s detriment; much like a good heist crew, you’ve got to know when the cut the dead weight.

For all its technical prowess, this is a contemporary action-thriller with a distinctly old-fashioned flavour; one eye on the future and both feet planted in the past.

Audacious as it is, The Five Devils is a remarkably sedate and ominous film which captures the way that the worlds of adults and children harmoniously orbit around one another while always remaining distant, beautiful, unreachable.

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.

Cronenberg’s latest feels more like a late-in-the-day course correction than a victory lap. It’s a self reflexive film, yes, but it isn’t self-congratulatory.

It’s an easy watch – even a mostly enjoyable one, thanks to the great time Cage and Pascal are clearly having – but the dialogue stumbles into cheesy territory more often than not, and overall it feels like a missed opportunity to make a bolder statement about the ruthlessness of the Hollywood machine, or indeed Cage’s enduring celebrity.

The duo’s Indian collaborators are largely absent though, and it all comes together in a rather shallow, often frustrating attempt to bottle up a significant piece of late 20th century film history, devoid of that touch of Merchant Ivory movie magic.

The performances sell everything unique and special about Torres’ approach to this story, and they bring his characters, who already feel so vibrant through their words, alive.

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

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 film not only rejects any criticisms – and there are many! – of the first film, but doubles down on them, delivering an even more hokily disjointed narrative, ramping up the sentimental cut-aways of human/animal camaraderie, and ramming unearned, broad-brush emotion down the viewer’s throat like so much salty popcorn.

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.

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!

The film feeds into the very power structure it sets out to debunk, a frustrating miss that threatens to cloud Comer’s poignant performance.

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.

We may never fully know who Brian Wilson is, but in his resistance of that knowing, we gain clarity on a crucial plank of his latter-day persona.

What distinguishes Laure de Clermont-Tonnerre’s newest interpretation from its predecessors is its deft, mature understanding of what makes both Lady Chatterley and her lover tick.

There are flashes of something more compelling. A handful of softer scenes suggest a more resonant film beneath the surface, and the final third shows signs of progression with a somewhat satisfying conclusion. But these moments remain frustratingly brief. For all its stylistic, sometimes overwhelming ambition, Departures ultimately feels grounded.

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

Despite all its layers The Life of Chuck is nothing more than a set of Russian nesting dolls made entirely of borrowed brilliance.

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.

There’s a sense that the makers of Mission: Impossible: The Final Reckoning are biting a thumb at the naysayers and playing the hits one more time, albeit with a little bit more focus on the previous feature installments.

Coogler admirably takes a big swing with Wakanda Forever and it produces a feature that is fluently in conversation with its predecessor, but less so with its position inside the wider franchise universe. There are some noticeable misses, but the value of such intricate and elevated storytelling cannot be discounted.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

This is not guilt-free viewing, closer instead to a doomscrolling spiral into despondence.

Sweetheart doesn’t rely on traumatic storylines and narratives of victimhood to make its audience care about AJ. Her journey isn’t straightforward in any way, but it’s instead relevant and reflective of the queer Gen Z experience. Sometimes there is no resolution. Things stay messy, and that’s okay.

At its best it cuts between historical footage and new material and achieves the awed emotional resonance of connecting history with the present.

Perhaps the most surprising thing about Blink Twice is that its message of female solidarity feels sincere without being cynically corporate. Rather than patting itself on the back for highlighting the importance of women’s relationships, there’s an understanding that women are not a monolith, and embracing each other’s complexities enables us to fight structural inequality better.

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.

Wheatley captures the volatility of emotions during the festive period, where every familial anxiety seems to come to a head, and does so with compassion and humour.

Rather like its robotic protagonist, Brian and Charles is bolted together from misshapen parts that don’t constitute an altogether successful whole. But, anchored by a strong but understated performance from Earl, it’s awkward but ultimately endearing.

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.

Unfortunately the film piles on twist after twist until it ends up in dark territory it doesn’t feel equipped to handle, and the mood sours due to the deployment of a serious subject matter as simply a shocking twist.

It struggles to find nuance in its storytelling approach.

Cordelia is a film of two halves and, unfortunately, only one of them is good.

The Rule of Jenny Pen offers a horrifying hypothetical: what if your final years were spent trapped with a racist bully?

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.

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.

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.

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

The BFG’s greatest strength is its simplicity. This is a film built for children that delights with fantastical details while gently pushing a heartfelt message about the power of dreams.

Like The Last Jedi, The Kid Who Would Be King isn’t concerned about legacy or predecessors, it’s about personal belief regardless of who came before you.

This numbing, relentless barrage of meaningless nonsense feels, more than anything else, like a TikTok doom scroll. Now that’s topical.

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.

Last Swim is a compelling, textured and authentic London coming-of-age story anchored by an exciting new generation of acting talent.

The overarching theme of White Noise – an anxiety around the looming spectre of death – is familiar territory for for the writer/director, as is the psyche of the film’s middle-aged, middle-class white protagonist. This is his most ambitious project in both scale and provenance.

Watching Tatum flex both his comedic muscles (especially when it comes to slapstick) and dramatic chops is utterly endearing and he deserves kudos for this performance. Cianfrance takes a daring swerve away from his usual melancholic working- class love stories, such as the powerful anti-romance Blue Valentine, to deliver a comedy that delivers big laughs and the occasional thrill.

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

A child’s anxieties about what might be under the bed or in the shadows are also precisely those primal fears that fuel horror, ensuring that, with all its obfuscations, evasions and abstractions, Skinamarink strips the genre down to its most basic elements: a vulnerable individual alone in the dark.

Buoyed by a strong performance from Regina Hall, it’s a thought-provoking debut from Diallo, but one, unfortunately, weighed down by hokey jump scares that undermine its much more interesting commentary.

There is pain worth immortalising in the stories of the past, and endless sadness found in a lonely woman’s quiet existence. Yet Mothering Sunday fails to look beyond what the outside world can see, in order to really excavate a truth to be remembered once the holiday has passed.

From its slow build-up comes a rousing finale, with Penelope setting an impossible feat of strength and agility as the benchmark for her new marriage material (as it should be!).

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.

There’s an unde­ni­able charm to this film that makes it easy to be daz­zled by. From its deeply lov­able lead char­ac­ters, who you can’t help but root for, to delight­ful sur­pris­es like a per­fect­ly timed Talk­ing Heads nee­dle drop and effort­less moments of humor. But what makes it tru­ly spe­cial is its heart­felt explo­ration of uni­ver­sal themes like grief, lone­li­ness, and the deep human desire to belong.

A general lack of detail ends up meaning that a lot of the film’s emotion and ideas are stated directly, whether through Murphy’s jittery (and at times quite contrived) performance, or via a voiceover device.

Dav Pilkey’s beloved children’s graphic novel series was adapted about as faithfully as possible, fully capturing the puerile (literal toilet humour) and subversive (critiques against the education system’s expressionless rigidity education system) spirit of Pilkey’s work in a consistently hysterical and dynamically-animated treat of a film.

Starve Acre is an undeniably impressive addition to this mini-movement, but it’s perhaps one that works better as a slow-burning aesthetic exercise than as either a nerve-rattling horror or an excavation of national myth, history, or identity.

This new The Toxic Avenger is relatively restrained, infuriatingly unfunny, yet entirely on-the-nose for more than just the stench of rot and urban decay that its scenes so frequently evoke. Sometimes the old hits are just better left uncovered.

Mizrahi films one-on-one interviews with a shallow depth of field, so that her subjects appear with the occluded intensity of their own remembrances.

That is why, as over-the-top and broad as it sometimes is, Summer of 85 is also one of Ozon’s most moving films to date.

The film is at its best when holding back details and sculpting fine character details, but the intensity is ramped up far too early and it becomes increasingly tough to take the plot seriously, or build an emotional connection with its climactic revelations.

While there are passages of uncertainty and twists that take their good sweet time to arrive, things come together beautifully, and a finale that combines a series of clever emotional call-backs and another heartening plea for human empathy that’s worthy of only the finest John Lewis ad.

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

Mr. Malcolm’s List isn’t reinventing the Regency wheel, but like any good end-of-summer fling, it is a pleasurable experience that ticks every box — while not outstaying its welcome.

While its success outside Italy remains to be seen, del Toro and Zemeckis will have to pull a lot of strings to better Garrone.

Carmen Emmi’s fraught debut Plainclothes has the makings of a steamy, provocative thriller, but seems disinterested in meaningfully grappling with the implications of its premise.

While heartbreak is imminent as it is a coming-of-age film, the absence of hopelessness brings a lightness to the film not begotten by hollowness, and you may even find yourself with a melancholy smile, as Nora’s metamorphosis is complete: she breaks out of her cocoon.

The Housemaid lacks the guile to transform its flaws into future camp classic material – it feels like a sign of the times: a film which holds the audience’s hand at every turn while gesturing at the very real issue of domestic violence, yet keeping things just light and sexy enough that no one will be bummed out this holiday season.

Paying homage to a true hometown pioneer, Stephens’ portrait of a gentleman who knows how to be nothing but entirely himself is a compassionate and colourful character study.

While some of Aronofsky’s auteurist stamp gets lost restaging some of Gotham’s greatest cinematic hits, Caught Stealing hardly feels like director-for-hire work.

It’s a model of old school screen storytelling, where the robust individual elements coalesce into the exact sum of their parts and not a single ounce out either way.

Garland’s film seems to be an attempt to highlight the very real misogyny within the modern world that has no insight on the subject beyond Women Have Always Had It Quite Bad.

There is a strong metacinematic element to all this showmanship, and as Zephyr must work out just how much like Tucker she is capable of being, we too are confronted with the nature of our own spectatorship, uncomfortably similar to Tucker’s, for in our window seat on events, we are no captive audience.

It’s a decently constructed piece of fluff that is way too soft to exert any real lasting impact. Yet the reason to see it is for Bardem’s masterful, completely committed lead turn. The real comedy gold comes from his blink-and-you’ll-miss-it expressions and mannerisms that usually come when he’s listening to other people talk.

Director Ryan White delivers an entertaining, albeit highly selective account of this project, brushing over any details that might lend this story a modicum of existential weight.

That emotional core is missing in Twisters, even with a few stabs at highlighting the human cost of America’s inadequate tornado warning and damage mitigation systems.

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.

Exaggerated misdirections do nothing to prevent Drop‘s eventual reveal from feeling obvious and contrived, to the extent that even a svelte 90 minute runtime starts to feel like a stretch.