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.

There are points here where it feels as if Linklater was trying to make a gender-switched version of Fassbinder’s tragic The Bitter Tears of Petra Von Kant, but without really leaning into the forceful bitterness and agency of the protagonist, and opting to have the text make a more profound point about the precarious nature of power and influence.

Though not beyond salvaging as The Carpenter’s Son offers some moments of biblical horror, including an Hieronymus Bosch-like depiction of hell, it doesn’t succeed in pushing past mild discomfort. There is still not enough to drag it down into truly blasphemous depths.

In what is essentially a long, barrelling chase movie, the action is relentless, and has little respect for the limits of physiological suffering let alone physical laws.

The Ice Tower is as fragile and delicate as a snowflake, as disorientating and mysterious as adolescence, and as dark as a winter’s night. For it is a shadowy frío-noir, complete with femme fatale, even as its elusive, edgy narrative is passed down, like keepsake beads or diffracting crystals, from generation to generation.

With no substance and no style to be found, all that is left in Wicked: For Good is two actresses, doing more than just belting their hearts out by giving genuinely compelling performances.

It’s uncomfortable and often disturbing viewing, but Osit’s unsentimental, self-critical and refreshingly thoughtful approach makes Predators one of the most valuable entries into a saturated genre, prioritising ethics over emotion.

To add insult to injury, just when things are finally about to get nasty, a character effectively sits us down for a tedious exposition dump that explains the whats, whys and hows of it all. It’s this very lack of trust in its viewers that comes as the film’s most upsetting development.

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.

Alpha is as thorny as her previous two features, but there’s something lonely and longing here too.

There’s a few decent performances in the mix (the kids especially), and Cumberbatch goes all-in (and then some) on the concept, but otherwise this flails as saccharine self-help cinema without any real sense of authentic human behaviour.

The brash message of the film may amount to little more than ​“smash the system”, but it’s a message that Wright has ignored in a film that sorely lacks for imagination and edge.

Vanderbilt seems to have his intentions in the right place, but the delivery has all the substance of Crowe’s prosthetic belly.

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.

Throughout, Dragonfly plays with perspective, fascinated by the potential of others and what people are capable of. However, the film’s final note is deeply cynical, as if it is embarrassed by the sincerity of its genuine and vital message.

Fonzi doesn’t sugarcoat this tale, nor does she attempt to make it feel entirely like a piece of activist filmmaking that’s entirely serving a political cause (even if, in many aspects, it is). Yet through her canny pacing and shot choices, she elevates this material far above what might have been expected of it.

Predators: Badlands might not be on the level of Trachtenberg’s 2022 Predator spin-off, Prey, but it has its pleasures. It’s a smart kind of stupid that hits the lowest common denominator in terms of story as a means of revelling in the strangeness of the world building. Each scene serves its purpose and the movie, running not much longer than 100 minutes, never wears out its welcome.

The result is a melancholic, Terrence Malick-ian vision of a place that is brutal, beautiful and forever lost to time.