The Wave is nothing if not ambitious, and in its bittersweet ending it reaches a melancholic, nuanced understanding that once the feminist wave broke, the backlash began. But the kind of complex debates about consent, vigilante justice and empowerment that are deployed here sit uneasily in what is in some ways a classical female self-realisation musical.

Pushing too hard to give The Death Of Robin Hood a sense of gravitas, Sarnoski suffocates his story rather than letting its palpable agony envelop the viewer. This Robin Hood subverts our expectations, but he never gets to breathe.

At nearly two-and-a-half hours, the film ultimately succumbs to blockbuster conventionality and the stifling demands of brand management. But like the timid Adam transforming into the swaggering He-Man, occasionally the picture transcends those confining strictures to become something a little more confident and carefree.

Lea Mysius’s third feature is a taut exploration of family, identity and betrayal, with a claustrophobic atmosphere and strong performances from Hafsia Herzi and Monica Bellucci. But conventional plotting and a relentlessly sombre tone mean that The Birthday Party never truly comes alive.

There’s some enlightening substance and much poignancy in the words of John Lennon and Yoko Ono – but also much egregious AI-created visual ugliness – in John Lennon: The Last Interview,

The sheer enthusiasm is at times infectious, and at other times you wish he’d worked with a forthright script editor. Still, it’s diverting to see an authentic and genuine oddity of a project.

In the art-house cinema of enigma, there’s often a thin line between the mysterious and the murky. Arthur Harari’s The Unknown treads this line with varying degrees of daring and discomfort, but ultimately never feels quite confident enough to lead us compellingly through the labyrinth of its bizarre body swap narrative.

Bitter Christmas remains a cinephile’s film – one whose exploration of emotions ultimately fails to translate into an emotional experience for the viewer.

To be sure, there are moments when one can be amused by the shameless showiness of Refn’s pretentious design. But like that mist enveloping the city, Her Private Hell’s charms dissipate fairly quickly.

There’s plenty of food for thought here, but the script’s penchant for saccharine touches – one aided and abetted by a lilting string-led soundtrack that turns to treacle a little too often – undercuts the authority of the film’s philosophical musings.

The film is most effective in conveying the sense of life’s foundations and certainties being suddenly undermined, and the doubt and panic that creeps into previously happy memories.

When Parallel Tales shifts tones near the end to unveil an unsettling surprise, the film’s confectionery construction cannot bear the jolt. Like Sylvie, Farhadi wants to mine riveting fiction from the flotsam of the everyday, but his imagination proves to be not as formidable as hers.

An uneven mix of melodrama, eccentricity and hyper-male boisterousness never entirely convinces.

While never quite predictable, The Electric Kiss lacks the knowing brio of recent French period pastiches such as François Ozon’s The Crime is Mine or Cédric Klapisch’s 2025 Colours of Time, similarly set in Paris bohemia.

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.

The Devil Wears Prada has become something of a modern classic, thanks largely to its eminently quotable, whip-smart observations about the world of fashion and its enduring sense of style. It’s unsurprising, then, that this sequel (again directed by David Frankel) is cut from exactly the same cloth, deliberately designed to be a narrative retread – albeit with a few Gen Z updates – that should delight existing fans.

The gimmick for this schlocky action picture is that it’s almost entirely dialogue-free. The story unfolds through ambitious action sequences and montages; the film helps itself liberally to the cheese buffet that is 1970s MOR rock.

Here, however, his bravura conducting of relatively conventional melodrama material doesn’t affect us as much as his best earlier works. In any case, it’s the actual music that often does the heavy lifting here – with selections from Chopin, Bartok and Bruch, not to mention Grégoire Hetzel’s score, spiralling saxophone capturing the vertiginous register of the whole affair.

Although the film’s musical performances galvanise, director Antoine Fuqua reduces The King Of Pop to a blandly inspirational cipher.

The script may be a litany of cliches but there’s grit here too, and the vein of documentary truth that pulses behind some rather brazen nationalistic French virtue-signalling keeps us watching.

Lee Cronin knows how to construct suspense sequences and ramp up tension, and there are moments in his portrait of a couple dealing with the traumatic return of their missing child that are legitimately frightening. But the film’s ambitious scope is betrayed by derivative genre ideas that make this tale of the dead disappointingly listless.

While the interviews are largely quite banal, thanks to Song’s expressive performance, they are intriguing. But the picture loses what steam it had once we get to the final two chapters, where the actress is required to transcribe what she remembers of the conversations, memorise them and then perform them for her acting coach.

One thing that can be said for revenge thriller Serpent’s Path, by Japanese genre maestro Kiyoshi Kurosawa, is that its French remodelling stands coherently enough on its own terms, although the result is a murky, over-extended affair.

The Fox doesn’t go far enough, its sombre tone muting its fantastical elements, its weirdness not nearly weird enough to overcome its flaws.

Happy New Year… is vigorous and engaging as dark character comedy, but as drama it never quite builds or coheres convincingly.

Ready or Not 2: Here I Come delivers short-term thrills in an emotionally hollow gore fest.

Marc By Sofia is light on probing insights, instead offering viewers a chance to see a relaxed Jacobs talk to a close friend about his inspirations and artistic philosophy. Still, the uninitiated may crave a more rigorous, extensive overview of the man’s redoubtable career.

Although the two leads have a steamy rapport, their chemistry cannot overcome a predictable and shallow saga about grief and second chances.