While all the variations on A Star​’s formula are tailored to a specific moment in time, what’s most interesting about Kokuho is the way it trails through an extended period of Japanese history, embedding one in the culture without feeling the need to explain its appeal.

Despite the heavy metaphors and emotionally weighted hauntings, there’s nothing new here – it’s all painfully dull and familiar horror territory.

Make no mistake – The Devil Wears Prada 2 scratches every itch a legacy sequel ought, with callbacks and cameos and jokes galore. But if the first film is Tom Ford and Calvin Klein then this time it’s Vivienne Westwood and Alexander McQueen – less slick, and with something darker underneath.

Running at just under 90 minutes, the film Ekner has crafted not only examines the politics and socioeconomics of each country she visits, but also channels the atmosphere of each locale via potent vistas and exhilarating revelry. The danger she speaks of early on in the film is expressed as a looming threat, yet the final result yields the same mood of a wildly passionate love affair.

As with the titular Ravel piece, this is a work that is mellifluous, melodious and mysterious in equal measure. A Sphinx-like Beer, once again, seems to connect with her director on a level which transcends the purely professional, and through her economic yet forceful use of body language and expression, she makes certain that the film adheres perfectly to Petzold’s immaculate calculations.

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.

It is an experience as moving as it is unnerving, and as the piercing screeching of iron rods announces the Rose of Nevada is to leave port once more, it is we the audience there to wave a pained goodbye, quietly stunned by the ethereal aura of Jenkin’s striking creation.

The film does aim for something a little deeper by also making it about the sheep being forced to acknowledge and experience the realities of death, and there are a couple of moments of sheep-based existential revelation that are surprisingly moving. At its best it even occasionally recalls vintage Aardman, particularly something like the original Chicken Run film.

The impressive momentum of the first hour, in spite of the inherent repetition, dissipates when the onscreen players start loitering and even sitting down to talk. In its third act, this otherwise effective thriller about getting stuck does end up spinning its own wheels.

Lowery’s got the courage of his convictions, and while it’s hard to not hunger for more of the artistry which is so evident (choreographer Dani Vitale also deserves a nod) Mother Mary represents the sort of individual, original storytelling that feels all too rare in an industry pushed more and more towards adaptations, reboots and sequels.

It’s hard to imagine a more superficial and safe film, although there is the suggestion that all the juicy stuff has been compartmentalised and stored up for a possible sequel.

With this film, we get little hints of the Cronin of yore, but there’s also so much dire exposition and necessary genre static in the background that his imprint is less discernible (and enjoyable) than you’d hope it would be.

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.

Jarmusch’s film thrives in acknowledging the ultimate unknowability of our parents.

It’s a shame the film that exists around this technical experiment oscillates between ludicrous and tedious, undermining any scares that might be generated through the wonder of creative foley and effective mixing.

While Halle Bailey and Regé-Jean Page have both delivered respectable performances previously, there’s no spark between the pair and too often it feels as though lines are simply being recited rather than emotions being explored.

While neither director nor screenwriter seem to have anything more substantial to say about female pleasure beyond the fact that it’s important, you do nevertheless find yourself cheering for Florence and Violette when they embrace their selfish side.

What’s surprising about the film is how hopeful it is, zeroing in on human creativity and resilience during the worst of times rather than wallowing in abject misery.

The resulting film is an uneven one – occasional flashes of intrigue are hampered by Fuze​’s strange structure and uncertainty about how funny it wants to be. Although the 90 minute runtime is welcome during an age of ill-advised action film bloat, there’s not much good in a film being short if it’s also largely unremarkable.

The Drama wants you to believe it’s outrageous, but this unnecessary posturing gets in the way of a black comedy that is otherwise well-observed and amusing about the prickly nature of relationships, both sexual and platonic.

What’s most disappointing is that the raw talent is all there, and every single person involved here can be proud of having made quality, soulful, intelligent work in the past. It’s sad, then, that this chaotic compilation effort extorts their celebrity and has them make the subliminal case for an ongoing viewer journey that involves the purchase of a Switch 2 (or, in the case of parents/​carers, maybe having them consider picking up a Virtual Boy on eBay).

The film is ambling, gentle and doesn’t strain too hard to force a point, but allows you to appreciate the multifarious nature of life in a city where the spectre of destruction lurks ominously in the clouds.

The filmmaker draws some arresting audiovisual cues into the patchwork of images, but the film lacks some of the goofy wit of British documentarian Adam Curtis, whose own provocative essays at least offer some element of surprise (even when they don’t work themselves).

It’s a supremely well-made piece of work whose function and message never quite manage to transcend the prosaic. Still, in the strange times we’re currently living through, maybe it’s worth sounding that necessary siren one more time for luck.

In showing a working-class Black girl confront a classist, racist establishment, this is also of course a political film, offering an allegorical display of both the claustrophobic power structures in which we live and strive, and the possibility of smashing it to build something better.

George MacKay is the Record Keeper, in charge of interrogating Faithfull, and she very candidly speaks about her life in her own words in order to decipher the gulf between who she really was and how she was marketed.

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.

Despite Boon matching Graham’s quiet intensity and Riseborough’s low frequency depression with a gnashing rebellious streak, the three performances can’t lift The Good Boy from the limitations of its own tethered melodrama.

There’s nothing subtle about these films, from their Eat The Rich messaging to the just-go-with-it in-world lore, but in all of their schlock they strike a welcome tone between winking self-awareness and retro absurdity.

If Sorrentino has a special power as a filmmaker, it’s his ability to draw the very best out of Servillo in any type of terrain, and it’s this wholly committed and natural lead performance which holds together an otherwise slipshod and fatally schematic tale how the cold realities of life and death can feed into the process of politics.

This is primary-colour, major-key storytelling. It is disarming, charming and unafraid to be sincere – especially when it comes to the sparks of inspiration, creativity and connection that are so fundamental to human existence.

It’s a crowd-pleasing package, and Gosling is likeable enough to sell even the corniest jokes.

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.

The story is not particularly forthright in articulating its themes and ideas, and while that may work in the slow-burn pages of a novel, it just feels contrived and manipulative up there on the screen.

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.

On paper, it’s Hosada’s usual tunes blown up on a grander scale. In practice, the results are an overstuffed yet simplistic mess.

It’s a song and dance we’ve seen before, with both Powell and Qualley operating on cruise control.

While It Ends With Us and Regretting You contained at least some decent acting and production value, Reminders of Him is a grim dose of misery and trauma porn punctuated by a terrible lead performance and an undeniable conservative sheen.

With such a moving ode to the symbiotic relationship between dreams and film, a nightmare would be if this is his final word on the matter.

The Bride! doesn’t have a single original thought worth pursuing. The fact that this film appears so shrilly convinced of its radical praxis speaks to a bizarre disconnection from reality.

One can’t help but long for something a little more exciting than ​“pleasant” – Pixar used to lead the animation industry, and they’ve been treading water for far too long.

Sirât is a truly staggering and major film, one that has to be seen to be believed – a masterful gambit of affectionate character and community building that mutates into a work that deals with the primal instincts of human survival and the idea that we create our own gods through the things that we chose to worship.

It’s Fastvold who somehow makes all these elements coalesce with such brio and eccentricity, expanding the possibilities of filmed biography while also making a film that manages to land direct hits to the head, the heart and the gut.

Refusing to take itself too seriously, this spirited contemporary period piece captures some of the insanity that was brat summer – but crucially reminds us there’s something to be said for knowing when to leave the party.

It’s a film not without occasional moments of spark, and flits along quite happily, but Splitsville seems continually intent on undermining itself, and in the process becomes totally forgettable.

Sitting in the crux between comedy and horror, it presents both a stark reappraisal of conditional acceptance and a needle precision critique of mental health awareness.

Wasteman doesn’t imply that either of these men is more or less deserving of being inside or that we should be rooting for one of them over the other. Both men are troubled, sad, selfish and violent, mired in trauma that Dee expresses through bravado and physical domination, which manifests more inwardly in Taylor.

The Secret Agent is, of course, a film of its own, and feasibly Mendonça Filho’s most refined, outright-auteurist work yet. Moura anchors this tale of history as an afterlife with a terrific encapsulation of the kind of hopelessness that masks itself as resilience, his gaze infused with the aching longing of a future condemned to remain possibility.

The director has described his film as a poem, but its rhythms feel more abstract, like recalling the best concert of your life in a dream. Brilliantly forgoing nostalgia to frame Elvis in the present, Luhrmann offers the closest experience of a live Elvis show that we may ever see. And like the Vegas residency, EPiC deserves a standing ovation when Luhrmann’s curtain falls.

With its vibrant use of colour, expressive character design and flights of expressionist fancy, Little Amélie offers a lyrical vision of early-years development and so much more.

There was room to do something ridiculous here – it bears repeating: this is a film about a killer whistle. Why is it taking itself so seriously?

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.

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

Filtering the tale through Lamia’s childlike whimsy allows the colourful, polished cinematography to sing.

Ultimately The Strangers: Chapter 3 offers no redeemable qualities and is so vacuously unremarkable that it is already in the process of being forgotten.

The direction by Davies Jr is top-notch, not just in how he is able to capture the fine nuances of the actors on camera, but also in how they are immersed in the chaotic mêlée of Lagos at this powder-keg moment.

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.

There is nothing that resonates below the surface here; this is a half-remembered story dressed in a beautiful gown that seems destined for TikTok fan edits and Pinterest mood boards rather than soul-stirring emotional catharsis. We are guided by the hand, instructed on how to feel at every moment, and trusted with nothing.

A couple of really random and contrived twists in the fourth quarter make it hard to invest emotionally in the climactic, must-win game, though there’s just enough humour and heart to scrape a last-second win.

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.

The story unfolds at breakneck speed, with never a dull moment.

There’s a potent earnestness about The Chronology of Water – Stewart shows a deep empathy for her subject, and Yuknavitch’s memoir is transformed with an unapologetic confidence.

Raimi uses Send Help as an opportunity to flex his patented formal dynamism, and while the camera is a little more sedate than the elasticised excesses of films like Evil Dead II or the underrated Darkman, he’s still a master of of using movement and framing to create emphasis and draw us closer to the characters and their heightened emotions.

As a writer and director, Sweeney shows much promise, at times demonstrating the swaggering confidence of the Canadian upstart, Xavier Dolan – the pair even look quite similar. Yet the film works best as a showcase for exemplary range of O’Brien.

A horror film about the brazen folly of attempting to domesticate a chimpanzee, or even about the terrifying reality of rabies (which is almost always fatal once a patient is symptomatic) should work. Unfortunately Primate has little interest in its own subject matter – technical plot holes and interchangeable characters aside, there’s no consideration given to Ben’s role within the Pinborough family, let alone the macabre history of domestic chimp attacks in America.

With lots of appealing wildlife and landscape photography to keep things lively, there’s much to cherish in this charming little film.

Even as the death roll of capitalism continues to clutch Hollywood in its jaws, No Other Choice proves that, in the hands of a master, there’s still fertile ground to be found. His biting, incendiary dramedy calls into question how much we’re willing to accept – and how far we’re willing to go – in the name of preserving our own comfort.

If you’re being generous, you might chalk this up as being increments above some of Statham’s more overtly schlocky outings, but if anything, it offers up less of what you want if you’re going to see a Jason Statham movie.

It is ironic that Richard Linklater has chosen to homage a film carved out of spontaneous new techniques with one so mired in contrivances that it is impossible for it to breathe.

The actors’ effervescent chemistry powers the film along wonderfully.

The performances too somehow emulates the game’s awkward, unnatural voice acting, a key contributor to both works’ uncanny dreamlike ambience. Rarely has a film better evoked a PlayStation 2 game.

If the film occasionally falters with its relative lack of incident across nearly two hours, Foy’s performance – especially in the transfixing training scenes captured in long, unbroken takes – tells several stories on its own.

Fiume o morte! explores the dangerous, empowering nature of fascism, and how certain forms of aggression would seem fair game under a régime that rules by such inhumane edict.

Bulk is a self-unravelling noir sci-fi which gleefully ties its various threads into impressive granny knots of self-referrential absurdity.

The Bone Temple offers a heady mix of stomach-churning violence, absurdist humour and surprising glimmers of tenderness.

Even setting aside its subject matter, it is an astounding feat of dramatising real events with an eye on the cinematic, yet it delivers such a punch to the heart that one hesitates to recommend it without qualification.

An American impulse for neat endings and recognisable stories gets in the way, but Rental Family is still beautifully written and gives little windows into Japanese life, from a Monster Cat festival to a rural diversion with breathtaking scenery, with Fraser’s endearing everyman as an emotional linchpin that viewers will love.

It’s well meaning and all done with the best of intentions, but it doesn’t really say or do much more than the BBC documentary did nearly 40 years ago.

In concept and design, Sachs channels The Bitter Tears of Petra Von Kant, with its thick, polar white rug, heavy-gloom atmosphere, mosaicked lounging, chamber setting and never-ending exposition; Kiarostami in its tasteful docudrama-crew reveals; and Warhol in its high-concept simplicity. It’s Sachs’ best film yet.

The leads, at least, give individual scenes a little character.

Dreamers is slight but effective, and perhaps doesn’t quite come back from a twist that occurs about two thirds of the way in when Isio’s situation suddenly changes.

It’s a creative and admirably earnest endeavour, but one that will most certainly live or die on your tolerance for Torrini’s winsome warbling.

In Hamnet, art is presented as a two-way whisper, as a codeword for connectivity and as a way to unlock doors to the future, and living.

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 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.

Although the third act sags a little under the weight of Marty’s hubris, it’s impossible to deny Safdie is working at a remarkable technical level. Just as Good Time and Uncut Gems played to the strengths of their stars while also transforming them, Marty Supreme challenges Chalamet and he meets the play with fleet footwork.

Skarsgård is the best he’s been in years as a father fundamentally unable to articulate himself in any way other than his work, and oblivious as to why his daughters feel such frustration with him for a lifetime of distance, and there’s keen wisdom in Sentimental Value’s observation of the gulf between who our parents are and who we wish they were.

Some will find the earnest silliness which ties a lot of Fire and Ash​’s beats together tiresome, but – along with the work of some very gifted digital artists – it’s what keeps them feeling real and not just empty capitalisation on a billion dollar box office.

The images within the film are too general and familiar – there is nothing new about what Johansson is attempting in her directorial debut, which leads one to wonder why she bothered making it at all. It’s not a disastrous film – in fact, it’s quite inoffensive. But this glaring niceness reflects a crucial lack of ambition, and that seems more egregious than taking a big swing.

It’s a tender and warm film about missed connections and ships that, for whatever reason, end up passing in the night.

Lurker is an excellent showcase for the talents of Théodore Pellerin (quietly marvellous in every role he takes) and an intriguing first step as a feature filmmaker for Alex Russell.

The film sits somewhere between hope and realism, an ode to public service for an audience whose optimism is running low.

It’s a love story for our time and for all time.

Poitras questions him on the less glorious moments of his career, too, so that he emerges as a flawed human rather than a bastion of perfect judgement. This is not a perfect documentary either, with the breathless dash through his post My Lai journalism sometimes feeling overwhelming. Yet perfection is not the point when something impossible has been bottled: it’s something called the truth.

It’s a beautifully written and executed work, one of Panahi’s most formally straightforward yet powerful, gripping and generous.

In an entertainment landscape saturated with whodunnits, it’s impressive to see Johnson maintain his topical observations and satirical jabs while confidently recalibrating to provide a mystery that shows the genre still has something meaningful to say.

As an awards-bait biopic, Christy is basically solid; as another chapter in the star text of a soon-to-be-28-year-old woman basically no one on the internet can ever be normal about, it’s interesting – and also, given the entrepreneurial Sweeney’s social-media savvy, quite a canny bit of positioning.

While there’s a sense that the thesis here lacks originality, there are enough audiovisual flights of fancy to keep the cheeky intellectual jiggery-pokery ticking along nicely.