The effect is a patchwork rather than an interwoven whole; the wistfully self-reflexive tone will appeal to fans of the less emphatic, more meditative end of the Almodovar spectrum.

Close Your Eyes finally builds a head of emotional steam in its last half hour, while exploring questions of identity and what remains when memory has gone.

While Eighth Grade may look, on its surface, like a typical adolescent comedy, with its underdog protagonist pitted against popular girls and boy crushes, it is more a piquant series of vignettes that form a singular and focused portrait of youthful angst.

The result is a careful chronicle that, while staying true to its observational ethos, nonetheless, leaves plenty of questions – and, occasionally, its audience – behind.

A cinematic symphony more than a classic narrative film, Terrence Malick’s long-awaited The Tree Of Life has moments of breathtaking visual and aural beauty, but in the end it has us longing for the days of Badlands, Days Of Heaven or The Thin Red Line, when the Texan auteur also knew how to spin a good yarn.

Armin seems to get less interesting as a character rather than more as his quest for survival takes priority. Ultimately you wonder whether, dramatically speaking, it was worth wiping out a planet full of people just so that one useless bloke could finally get his act together.

The result is mixed: buoyantly energetic at times, manically unamusing at others and decidedly overstretched.

You could call it whimsical. Absurdist. Contrived. Or an unexpectedly unusual concept album that doesn’t quite come off but was worth the effort. And you would be correct every time.

In its own rather clunky way, the film strikes a blow for feminism in central Africa, and Amina, who strikes several literal blows on the man who impregnated her daughter, ends the film unexpectedly empowered by the experience.

Since so much of Creed’s emotional oomph comes from audience familiarity with the past films, the movie mostly shadowboxes with its past.

Like all of his work, the writer/director’s fourth film in Berlinale competition is elegantly made, ingenious and intellectually challenging. Yet it’s also too much like hard work to be entirely satisfying and, dramatically, it suffers from the same condition as its protagonists: inertia.

Although There Is No Evil is a brave and impassioned work, the seams show.

This ambitious debut features flashes of imaginative visuals, quirky dialogue, and well-meaning messages about gentrification and disenfranchisement.

In its zeal to pay proper respect to Mexican traditions and to avoid any hint of appropriation, Coco fails to give as much attention to its perfunctory characters or mediocre plotting, resulting in a family film which is reverent rather than inspired.

It’s a shame that Giannoli’s film, while ambitious, confidently executed and more than honourable, nevertheless feels like something of a relic.

Although Nitram is a thoughtful exploration of mental illness, highlighted by a strong cast, Kurzel can’t fully transcend what is familiar about this handwringing portrait of a ticking time bomb set to go off.

While American Honey exudes ample energy, this episodic piece doesn’t muster much narrative drive over its daunting running time of two and three quarter hours. There’s probably a stronger, tighter film in here, but fair game at least to Arnold in her commitment to following the winding back roads of filmic experiment rather than the well-mapped highway of storytelling.

Undoubtedly the film’s charm comes from the performances of Kim and Huppert, and scenes involving the pair and their tangible chemistry resonate the strongest.

It’s a film made with honesty, integrity and a certain grace, but it can’t quite overcome an earnestness that was never a problem in Hansen-Love’s best films, which carried their literary and cinematic inspirations lightly.

Hugh Jackman commits fully to his role as a vain superintendent trying to stay two steps ahead of his lies and self-delusion. Ultimately, though, the character and themes feel a little too simplistic — a movie’s paltry attempt to explain the inscrutability of human nature, which is so interesting precisely because it’s so mysterious.

Using his characters as pawns on the chessboard of history, Mountains May Depart culminates in a nostalgic future where the Chinese look back for the identity they have lost.

Joel Edgerton and Ruth Negga play the Lovings as refreshingly ordinary people caught up in the swirl of history, but a benign tastefulness overcomes Loving, smothering chances of a meaningful engagement with the material.

Vaughn brings a tenderness to the role of a man forced into animal violence for the sake of love and the miracle of birth, and the rangy anarchy of Zahler’s deeply kooky film gets under the skin at times. But in the end, you wish some big bad studio boss had been there to cut this director’s cut.

Lurker is sometimes a little too on the mark.

Featuring a rousing finale — two of them, actually — and substantial nostalgic pleasures, the new film can’t quite balance its desire to be both wistful and escapist, knowingly cheesy and surprisingly touching.

Despite a sterling effort from Thompson, neither the comedy nor the character arcs are fully satisfying.

Whether it’s Skarsgard’s cartoonish villain or the director’s showy nods to Lawrence Of Arabia and Sergio Leone, Chapter 4 plays dress-up rather than feeling like a legitimately rich, involving epic.

Although compelling ideas float through High Flying Bird, the film is neither well crafted or intellectually rigorous enough to compensate for a generally lacklustre presentation.

Despite an honourable commitment to exploring how severe adolescent trauma casts a long shadow over a person’s life, the film’s patina of pain eventually grows repetitive, undercutting the sensitivity Stewart and her lead bring to the proceedings.

Lost City is the acme of a 21st century prestige picture. Sadly, however, it is one that is also deeply flawed. Gray’s most ambitious movie yet is marred by a story arc that fails to rise or reach a climax, unnatural-sounding expository dialogue, and an unforgivable lack of thrills.

It’s a (virtual) life-affirming approach that is certainly affecting, but can feel a little disingenuous.

Fate is a blunt instrument here. Yet you still wind up asking for more depth from the characters for whom Hittman is asking you to feel something.

It stretches character credibility, and resorts too much to criminal-underworld cliché and the driving pace of its own perpetual motion, which curiously does nothing to paper over the longueurs in certain over-stretched sequences. You come out on a high of sorts – but it soon fades.

Ultimately, all we have to hold on to in a story that lurches inexorably into CGI absurdity is our emotional connection with Stewart’s lost, lonely character.

Prophet’s Prey is more effective at presenting the enigmatic figure of the Prophet himself. His drawling somnolent voice hovers over the movie like a menacing ghost.

There’s a terrific film in here somewhere, with upmarket echoes of the exploitation thriller tradition of the 70s, but it gets lost in overstatement and a surfeit of plot reversals.

Love Lies Bleeding makes no apologies for its stylistic boldness or its rising body count, but its swagger cannot hide a nagging hollowness underneath.

The film struggles to juggle its combination of rage and humour, satire and sadness, but the game performances mostly help gloss over the material’s familiarity.

Fremon Craig doesn’t radically alter the conventions of the coming-of-age narrative, and so a general predictability settles over the proceedings pretty quickly. With that said, though, she does a good job observing the relationships between her central characters.

Boasting a few nifty action sequences and the always-compelling Jackman, Logan self-consciously aspires to retire this iteration of the steel-clawed hero with epic grandeur, and the results are often rousingly bleak. And yet, the risks taken...only make the formulaic redemption story and clichéd emotional underpinnings increasingly frustrating.

Fitfully-entertaining, the film says many things in many different ways about one subject – the de-sensitising effect of the have-it-all media age on young people. Prolonged exposure to it will certainly reawaken the senses, although not in a way that’s always welcome.

The abutting of Conor’s conscious and unconscious states justifies the pullulating images, but the film’s overwrought tone can grate.

A film of two halves, Cloud’s excessive, bullet-strafed second section is more effective than the restrained and sluggish first part. The themes it explores are uncomfortably of the moment.

Only in certain scenes do story and ideas really mesh

It’s ultimately unsatisfying—more style than substance.

The Image Book if nothing else, is inestimable, in that it defies normal estimation or assessment; to encounter a film this intransigently confrontational by an artist who shows no sign of softening will be a nightmare for many, but yes, for many a privilege and a pleasure.

Despite some clever moments and a similar commitment to gloriously over-the-top violence, the follow-up lacks the inspiration and sheer fun that defined the original.

Although director David Gordon Green commendably opts for a realistic, unfussy depiction of Bauman and his on-again/off-again girlfriend (played with welcome grit by Tatiana Maslany), Stronger feels more perfunctory than lived-in.

Despite a strong, affecting performance by Willem Dafoe – who, even more than Kirk Douglas or Pialat’s star Jacques Dutronc, looks born to the part – the director’s pugnacious visual and editing style never impart the kinetic emotional charge of his 2007 drama The Diving Bell and the Butterfly.

Less like a drama than a statement, Chevalier’s characters do not grow but diminish. None of Attenberg’s charming insouciance is in evidence here although she never defines any of her victims too precisely, she is blunt and even cruel at times.

The Worst Ones is trying to be both a kind of documentary about its own making and a drama about a guy making another film. Unfortunately, the two don’t mesh.

Final Account is shocking footage which hasn’t quite made the leap into being a forensic film.

Despite the suitably transgressive nature of the subject matter, Catherine Breillat’s first film in a decade is an oddly muted affair: uncomfortable, certainly, but lacking the disruptive, confrontational jab and genuine shock factor of her earlier pictures.

Undemonstrative but at the same time oddly compelling - rather like its eponymous main character - Felicité is a challenging, perhaps overlong, but also quietly resonant slice of new African cinema.

It’s the tone that’s off here, as it is throughout a film which seems to wink at what it perhaps wants us to see as irony – its soft porn tropes like bondage and flagellation, its over-saturated sci-fi view of a comet’s passing, its horror-influenced vision of the plague – while keeping both eyes firmly open.

Even for Garland’s adept visual storytelling, supported by daring cuts by Jake Roberts and offbeat needledrops, the core of Civil War feels hollow.

It does cross your mind that this might all be some jolly wheeze of a mockumentary with Ginghină as a David Brent figure but apparently it is all to be taken seriously.

Natasha certainly proves that Khrzhanovsky is a risk-taker, and his actors even more so. But it’s a puzzling, inconclusive drama that doesn’t quite hold its own outside the parameters of the overall project.

Marcello and his committed, compelling lead actor Luca Marinelli deliver an always watchable take on the hoary old story of the struggling artist that is more interesting in its shape-shifting style and texture than in its rather conventional dramatic core.

We never shake off the feeling we’re watching a filmed play, one whose dramatic crescendos and lulls are relentlessly stagey and stylised.

This docudrama, recounting the background to Isabel Wilkerson’s acclaimed 2020 study ’Caste’, is an unwieldy, fragmented hybrid that comes across very much as an educational project, never quite gelling as narrative.

Okja is fun, if sometimes over-egged, as an adventure romp, but flounders in overstatement when it comes to satirical intent.

This depiction of young people facing up against school and state authoritarianism lacks a certain urgency, despite its manifest intelligence and craft.

You have to admire the sheer giddy enthusiasm of filmmaking friends who are fizzing with ideas and able to make a modest budget stretch a long way. The film has a certain visual allure in its gaudy colours and low-budget special-effects. Yet you also long for them to put all those energies into a more focused, far funnier project.

A slight story that aspires to be a thriller but ends up as a rather flat melodrama about a rock-star generation struggling to deal with its twilight years.

Full of interesting concepts and accomplished animation, Children Of The Sea is less than the sum of its many parts and just seems to lose its way after a very promising beginning.

Jonze’s film (his first full-length feature since 2013’s Her) sits in an awkward gap between live performance and event cinema.

Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight is the kind of bold swing with difficult material that does manage to earn your respect.

Neither a broad farce nor a scathing evisceration of sexism (both then and now), Catherine Called Birdy ends up trapped in a dissatisfying middle ground between those two extremes, a tonal decision that results in only mild laughs and somewhat engaging characters.

Everything in Hidden Figures is smoothly efficient but also a little anticlimactic and frictionless — the story’s happy ending a little too easily achieved.

Even those with only passing knowledge of Williams’ challenges—with drugs, alcohol, and self-esteem—aren’t likely to find any new revelations about the comic genius.

Performance aside, the key issue is that endless griping about a shitty marriage – even the marriage of arguably the pre-eminent figure of 19th century literature – is a drag.

Eternal You acts like a modern day Wizard Of Oz as it lifts the curtain on the intricate processes of bringing the dead to life.

It evokes a specific time and a place so vividly that you can almost taste the stale cigarette smoke and cheap beer. But while the picture affectionately skewers the youthful pretensions of the aspiring artists, it also allows the students an overly generous space in which to pontificate and navel-gaze.

To be sure, there are meaningful observations here about the ways that money warps relationships and how children struggle with their heritage. But by trying so hard to concoct a blowout party, the movie exhausts and frustrates as much as it enlightens and delights.

Ultimately, the picture’s energetic swirl comes across as slightly hollow, its barrage of themes and impulses never finding harmony.

Grappling with serious themes, this wistful comedy opts for a sentimental tone that’s out of rhythm with the more realistic, tough-minded story that occasionally asserts itself.

Strenuously heartfelt, Tick,Tick…Boom! belts it out like a pro, but increasingly feels as if it’s raising the volume to an emptying room.

Whatever the film’s flaws, this is certainly the most unrepentantly confrontational work we’ve yet seen from Jude - and perhaps from any Romanian director. And, as the beleaguered, improbable figure of scandal at the centre of it all, stage actress Pascariu impresses with a crisply reserved performance.

Robinson is a precise, empathetic and informed speaker and a righteous man who, in sisters Emily and Sarah Kunstler’s documentary, is every teacher you might have ever wished for as a student, but who deserves a larger stage.

While Eye In The Sky is effective in building suspense and making a talk-y drama compelling, these techniques are in service to high-minded, heavy-handed filmmaking that buries troubling wartime questions in simplistic rhetoric.

An inability to crack the movie’s central mystery — why abandon your dreams to help facilitate someone else’s? — leaves the project feeling a bit like a missed opportunity.

Perhaps it’s simplistic to say that director Mira Nair has fashioned a good-looking but Disney-fied version of actual events, and yet the studio’s predictably uplifting-at-all-costs blandness slowly but methodically drains the material of its richness.

His fans will probably adore it, think it cute and original, the rest of the audience will sigh again in resignation and wonder whether this game of cinema riddles does have anything significant to say behind its smiling, insouciant wrapping.

As a director, Jordan has produced polished, briskly paced entertainment but what’s disappointing is that, quite often, Creed III hints at being something more.

The reason it still mostly works is because the actors play it straight, with Rutherford displaying a sense of directness that compensates for the occasionally wobbly tonal shifts. The few instances of slapstick, however, are always more awkward than hilarious.

A bright, light confection about resilience and joie de vivre into old(er) age that’s as predictable as it is disposable.

Although the story’s point is clear, the plotting is thin, and it can be easy at times for viewers to feel as confined as the prisoners. But the production design – all grey cement walls, with that platform cutting through the center of the screen like an infernal dumbwaiter – is superb.

One can feel Williams’ anger at an America that imperils young Black and Latino men, viewing them only as potential threats, but the picture never fully gets a handle on its mixture of satire and seriousness.

Directors David Alvarado and Jason Sussberg don’t dig deeply enough into their complex subject, while spending too much time on the same distractions that are compromising Nye’s focus.

In their scenes together, Clear and Duggan spark beautifully, navigating their characters’ emotional highs and lows with a mix of caustic wit and often moving vulnerability.

Although this action-adventure moves briskly enough, audiences may ultimately crave a film whose storytelling is as inventive as the vibrant images that splash across the screen. But as Puss will learn, some wishes don’t come true

Despite committed performances from LaBeouf, Lucas Hedges and Noah Jupe, Honey Boy ends up feeling indulgent rather than searing, settling into its anguish rather than translating it into trenchant drama.

To the credit of all concerned, however the one-take approach feels appropriate and organic, rather than gimmicky or stunt-like.

While this new film is that rare visually striking indie comedy, the clever dialogue and potentially provocative scenarios eventually fizzle, resulting in an unfocused commentary on the absurdity of modern love that is, itself, far removed from reality.

One thing missing in Pablo Larrain’s new movie is a touch of Luis Bunuel. Without it, the fierce sarcastic attack he launches against the Catholic Church looks a little too much like a self-motivated settling of accounts, terribly angry and lacking a perspective that would put it all into the right context.

Wielding an ambitious visual strategy and volatile political commentary, Athena explodes but then fizzles, its often arresting images slowly undone by fuzzy ideas and a self-important air.

Despite a twisty, juicy and compelling story, there remains a staid conventionality that keeps the political and thematic undercurrents from being explored as satisfyingly as one might hope.