It tries to mine humour and a bit of horror from the era but fails to make much of an impact in either genre.

Ruizpalacio’s purpose is to present the harried workplace as a microcosm of American capitalism, its obsession with abused undocumented immigrants, anger at women’s reproduction rights and devotion to the churning machinery of consumption. The message isn’t new but, in the present moment, the sheer bluntness of the critique feels liberating.

Peck’s fleet approach briskly compresses a great deal of information without clumsy interview setups and joins the dots between Black political and artistic freedom then and now while literally gives an important activist-artist a voice again.

The film gives us a glimpse into the band’s attitude (relaxed and casual) and their easygoing dynamics and relationships, and their very British sense of humour with its slightly satirical flavour.

With the one-off low-budget Nutcrackers, Green says he wants to pay tribute to the rough-edged adult-child comedies of his youth, films like The Bad News Bears and Uncle Buck. The result is a film that often feels, beat by beat, like you’ve seen it somewhere before.

For a biopic about Maria Callas, one of opera’s most vivacious personalities, director Pablo Larraín’s visually sumptuous Maria is unusually downbeat.

Wicked can at times feel like a movie that’s one brick short of a road. But when all is said and sung, it’s still a road paved in gold.

The film is long, a shade under two and a half hours, but Scott knows how to pace things so they don’t drag.

A non-stop action movie with just enough plot to stitch together more action scenes, Red One is as soullessly fast and furious as you’d expect from scripter Chris Morgan of Fast & Furious franchise fame.

The genuine cathartic effect of the film is achieved by an accumulation of smart choices, including the dryly witty narration, the ingenious visual surreal world building using kids’ crafts table materials, the strong voice cast (including vocal cameos from Eric Bana and Nick Cave) and an elegant classical-style score.

The unusual narrative device described as a “docufiction hybrid” at the heart of Starring Jerry as Himself is at once clever and heartbreaking.

Expect deep conversations to follow your screening.

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.

Clapin uses animated interludes to flesh out his human characters — his previous feature was 2019’s Oscar-nominated animated film J’ai Perdu Mon Corps (I Lost My Body). It’s an effective and beautiful way of turning emotions into visuals.

The Piano Lesson is a hugely energetic, albeit often bittersweet, film.

Superficially, it plays like an indie buddy comedy. But this film walks lightly and comes at its subject matter so obliquely, that it never aims to overwhelm the viewer. It’s about a multitude of deep emotional things, including grief, intergenerational trauma, and the complexities of love.

It’s a powerfully emotional story built on a foundation of surprising historical accuracy. This film treats us to a cross-section of the civilian experience of World War II that isn’t typically thought about.

Beneath the soft storybook ending, there’s a hard emotional knot here in an exploration of how the scars of poverty, abuse and neglect are bound up with family love and interdependence, and how those contradictions are what prime the springs of imaginative creativity.

For film nerds and fans of classical and orchestral music, it’s absolutely gold.

There’s not enough under the hood, and the screenplay sometimes strains to tell us (rather than show us) the complexities of the reality it’s creating.

With its quirky take on a doomsday scenario and a hero you could tuck into your pocket, Hanky Panky lives up to its title as a mischievous slice of offbeat nonsense.

A great script and a great cast are key to Juror #2, a gripping moral study dressed up as a courtroom drama.

The film’s various elements do not quite meld, and despite a few strong performances, none of the characters feel fully three-dimensional.

Watching the movie Here is a bit like eating a Big Mac — it’s all fine and inoffensive in the moment, but you don’t want to look too closely or think about it too much afterward.

In a sense, Dahomey, which runs just over an hour, is also a ghost story as well as a creative conversation between the past and present.

The film is an exploration, a combination of fan worship, curiosity, and surprising insight into the making of Chasing Amy as well as its significance to the LGBTQ+ community and even to the cast and Smith himself. In a haphazard but honest way, Rodgers brings a new appreciation to the film.

An audacious and absurdly entertaining genre-hopping musical thriller set in Mexico, Emilia Pérez tells the tale of a drug cartel boss who enlists the talents of a junior lawyer, played by a Zoë Saldaña, to help him undergo gender-affirming surgery, then entangles her in his quest for redemption.

Is it worth the wait? I mean, if you’ve already sat through The Last Dance — and I can’t advise that you do — then you might at well see it through to the bitter end. And I do mean bitter.