What the film does well though is deliver a precisely balanced combination of jump scares, intense situations and confrontations with truly horrible creatures. It’s an effectively scary story, and it’s through the silence of the audience that you can measure this film’s success. Punctuated by some powerful emotional delivery, the audience is able to connect with characters meaningfully, distracting them from convenient story factors and encouraging willing disbelief.

An audacious and demented film, tailor-made for its recent Midnight Madness slot at the Toronto International Film Festival, Julia Ducournau’s Titane also has intimations of profundity - quite a claim for a film about a woman who is impregnated by a car.

In another era, in a more dramatic coming-of-age story, we would expect something life-changing, possibly terrible to happen. But Gasoline Rainbow remains gentle, optimistic and free-flowing. It’s a vision of America that is almost banal in its lack of menace, an alternative kind of docu-fiction that belies the angry drama of the daily news.

Still, it’s a fascinating psychological thriller, a ghost story with (as Dickens would say) more gravy than grave in its construction.

More care for pacing and character development, and less focus on moment-by-moment wow-factor, would have made a less strenuous film. Still, the sheer exuberance and skill of the visual design and performances are uplifting.

We Were Dangerous is a cracking good story and an auspicious directorial debut from filmmaker Josephine Stewart-Te Whiu.

Though it occasionally gets a little repetitive in its use of archival devil movie and tabloid television clips, Lane’s film is mordantly funny and certainly persuasive in making the case that religion should be kept out of politicians’ dirty hands.

In a Violent Nature follows the traditional path of a slasher and rises above the genre to be something other than the norm.

After The Hunt is elusive, but you won’t stop thinking about it after you see it — that’s a good thing.

Though Who Killed The Expos? isn’t much of a mystery, it’s a good baseball story in the cry-in-your-beer tradition, of what has often been described as a “game of failure.”

The End may literally be a little tone deaf, but it is not morally senseless.

Bonnello wants us to take our time. He’s given it a certain pace that weaves you in if you’re willing to go with it. And things to contemplate if you do.

Jay Sebring… Cutting to the Truth works on a level beyond simply the director giving props to his all-but-forgotten uncle. Its more visceral message is that, “the dead have no rights.”

Strong performances abound while sly and sometimes slapstick comedy lightens the more intense themes of betrayal and vengeance.

Ralph Breaks the Internet is everything that made Wreck-It Ralph enjoyable, painted on a canvas as big as the Internet itself. The satire is sharp and the pace is relentless, a can’t miss combination for a kid outing.

We’re gripped by the tension of Greene’s tautly calibrated performance, as a mother performing a daily high-wire act, trying to keep her family together and her children from harm.

A rom-com it is. A typical rom-com it isn’t.

Cillian Murphy follows up his Oscar-winning role in the epic Oppenheimer with another brilliant performance in a much smaller and more intimate film, but one that also deals with questions about morality and responsibility.

I Saw the TV Glow demands the audience's attention. I can’t say that, even with all synapses firing, I was able to catch every (maybe none) of the nuances Schoenbrun was tossing out. But it’s at times like that when I find it best to relax and experience the film rather than struggle to make sense of it.

Coherence was hard to establish but the memory prompts, the lurid colourization and off-beat editing held the attention.

My feeling is that Rupert Goold’s Judy is as good as it needs to be to stand as a framework for Zellweger’s incandescent performance. Parts of the plot are A-to-B, a lot is unsubtle and a climactic scene involving her most famous song is pure-Hollywood schmaltz. But the worst of Judy is worth the price of admission for the one bravura performance.

Director West makes excellent use of the film's set pieces, from runaway trams to spectacular underwater lava spills. Yes, Skyfire stretches believability to its breaking point. But with comic-book action so firmly planted in most every scene, any attempt at credibility would only be an unwelcome intrusion.

Baker has pitched this as a dark comedy. And thanks to the relentless energy of Simon Rex, the film feels like a comedy.

There are counter-intuitive plot-turns to be sure. But like the best science fiction, The Creator is more about us than about The Other. And it has an emotional core that you seldom find in other action films of its size and budget.

Director Ben Wheatley gives the summer blockbuster the finger, and it’s the funniest damn thing I’ve seen this year. Meg 2: The Trench is flawed to perfection; a satirical pummeling of commercial cinema and the first out of gate with a Barbie send-up.

The complicated part of Huda’s Salon, and the riskiest in terms of holding the audience, is that this is actually the story of two women: Not just Reem, but that of the salon keeper, Huda.

The set-ups and sight gags are deftly handled, though the after-effect is more dispiriting than cathartic. Like Bong-Joon Ho’s Parasite, it’s a film that feels of the moment, that leaves us with the question. And after all this is through, then what?

While there are a few credibility hurdles here (including a lot of butter-fingered gunplay) Patton’s authoritative performance keeps things honest.