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.