Drive-Away Dolls revels in ridiculousness, allowing nothing serious get in the way of a good joke.

While the film extends a certain empathy towards its subject’s mighty fall from grace, it does not let him off the hook, and it ends as a multi-dimensional study of a man who has lived a life of such extreme entitlement that sincere contrition simply does not compute with him.

By gambling with the flimsy dice of morality, the director crafts a film that successfully bypasses the traps of the gratuitous to find its way towards an uncomfortable but ultimately rewarding catharsis.

Renck’s film floats along with a unique grace, reckoning with the weight of paternal legacy and human folly with sincerity, achieving something quite profound in the process.

Maestro is a film to be swept along by, as heady and bombastic as a golden-age Hollywood musical.

Memory’s relatively restrained hundred-minute runtime is bloated with repetitive sequences focused on the characters navigating the world physically rather than emotionally, suggesting that even Franco fails to grasp the vast potential of the parable at hand.

Designed to replace the controversial final two episodes of Neon Genesis Evangelion, The End of Evangelion expands the series finale’s contemplation of emotional crutches and human connection to an apocalyptic scale.

Perfect Days encourages a sort of radical presentness in our own lives – learning how to truly connect with our existence, even when it’s difficult or causes us to confront unpleasant truths.

What’s sad about the film is that the feather-light comic tone seems to preclude any deeper insight into what are, on paper, a set of potentially fascinating and psychologically deep characters.

The first half of Dune: Part Two is among the best things that Villeneuve has ever done, though the sheer eventfulness of the plot and a bustling retinue of side-players (Austin Butler upgrading Sting’s cod-pieced ninny from the 1984 film into a hairless psychopath is worthy of mention) means that the final act does feel rushed.

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.

Even if you know how this famous story ends, the final act is an exercise in tension-building that makes this visceral survival drama memorable long after the credits finish.

The film doesn’t strain for meaning or metaphor, instead just showing us the events over a certain period and allowing us to sample and chew over them as we would heaving plate of delicious food. Just a wonderful film.

There’s just something gratingly cheap about the affair, from script to cinematography to performances, as if no one involved wanted to be there.

Occupied City is a staggeringly ambitious feat of emotional stamina and in the unrelenting litany of horror stories presented here, one thing is clear: he wants us to remember something, anything.

This is the western as a dried, coruscating corpse, left out for the buzzards to feed on.

It’s a realistic, sensitive but never cloying call for kindness and empathy – something that shouldn’t feel novel in this day and age, but sadly does – and encourages viewers to reconsider how they view fatness, and in turn, fat bodies.

While this version of events is perhaps not as accurate, its emotional honesty and narrative sincerity is unquestionable. It’s an incredibly heavy and sobering film, but one that has been made in the spirit of paying tribute to the Von Erich boys.

It’s a biographical film where, to ask “why?” in regard to Marley’s sometimes obscurely-motivated actions would risk placing him in an ambiguous light. And so we instead trot through a series of highly manicured and stage-managed Wiki hit points and pause every few minutes for a musical interlude.

To Vaughn’s credit, at least Argylle isn’t as gleefully misogynistic as the Kingsman films, but that’s a bit like saying “Well, at least the pigeon shit didn’t get in my mouth” after a pigeon has shat on your face.

There are some great things in this film, yet its intentions are swept up in a mire of tonal indecision and cynicism masquerading as irony.

Migration is not an ambitious film, and doesn’t seem to have anything important to say about why one might migrate and the lessons we can learn from this rather arduous but necessary endeavour.

The Zone of Interest seems to welcome division in its responses – such a bold, horrifyingly eerie work serves as a catalyst as much as an artistic statement.

Director Blitz Bazawule does well to draw out multifaceted performances from his cast, particularly Barrino and Brooks, and with them the big emotional beats all manage to land well enough. Yet the musical flights of fancy feel creatively bound by the stage adaptation and lack a certain eccentric pizazz.

It’s a ghost story, but it’s a love story too. One that will break your heart.

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

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.

The result is a teen movie with an identity crisis.