This small-scale drama is sensitively rendered, examining two people who share a past that they’re only beginning to untangle, resulting in unhappy recriminations that offer little in the way of closure.

The Phantom Of The Open is an amiable little picture which might be dramatically as flat as Mark Rylance’s vowels but still packs a considerable helping of crowd-pleasing charm into its cap and golfing slacks.

The film makes its points — about ableism within the world of sport and broader society — as emphatically as any of Nao’s punches.

The impressive feature debut from Maltese-American writer and director Alex Camilleri manages to be both self-contained, in its depiction of an embattled community, but also unexpectedly far-reaching in its themes. The film is an exploration of masculinity in crisis, of the attrition of traditions by the forces of progress and of the agonies and uncertainties of new parenthood.

While it smoulders with indignation for the injustice that was perpetrated for so many years, Great Freedom is also a love story, a remarkable character study, and an absorbing meditation on what long-term imprisonment for a crime that is not a crime does to the soul.

Rather like the butterfly wings that are its central metaphor, Son of Monarchs is deceptively fragile-seeming, yet robust, structurally complex and vibrantly hued.

The film derives a magnetic continuity, and an unsettling range of dynamics, from Haque Badhon’s performance

Neither the milieu nor the insights are especially fresh, despite the tender tone.

Ron’s Gone Wrong transcends the familiarity of the story (there’s a thematic an overlap with Big Hero 6 and How To Train Your Dragon, to name just two) with deft writing, appealing animation and a big heart crammed into a small malfunctioning robot.

Milocco’s performance manages to walk a thin line between credibility and delusion, a line which is less successfully negotiated by other aspects of the film.

Big, bombastic and full-blooded, Jeymes Samuel’s neo-Western might tick off plenty of the tropes of the genre, but the outlaw energy he brings to the picture makes it feel, if not fresh exactly, then certainly a whole lot of fun.

Never appearing to judge any situation, Kingdon confidently allows the images to tell a fascinating, universal story of inequality and class division, revealing a country that feels more like a capitalist society than anyone’s idea of a Communist state.

Venom: Let There Be Carnage is a grander spectacle than the mediocre 2018 original, offering monster-movie mayhem with a welcome sense of humour about its own ludicrousness.

There’s plenty to gawk at, and to argue over, in this episode - yet No Time To Die is oddly lacking in pleasure or real wit.

With standout performances by stars Denzel Washington and Frances McDormand, expert imagery and striking production design, Joel Coen’s The Tragedy of Macbeth is hardly a tale told by an idiot. But it could actually use a little more sound and fury – and a better idea of what it’s supposed to be signifying.

Da Silveira sets a tone that nimbly flows between comedy, mystery and discomforting satire (the Pastor generally makes the skin crawl), though her occasional wink towards horror offers fun rather than frights, to the film’s detriment.

This intriguing political thriller uses the ideological beliefs of its characters as a jumping-off point, but is most effective when it takes its own stance, and starts to unpick the tiers of exploitation within society.

A promising and emotionally mature romantic drama from British writer-director Harry Wootliff.

All in all, it’s the strength of vision which impresses — the confidence and the brio of a film-maker adapting a novel and losing herself inside it, making no apologies for her interpretation.

A brisk and efficient thriller ... This combination of moral quandary and ticking clock peril makes for a bracing, if occasionally didactic, political drama.

Costa Brava, Lebanon is a terrific feature debut from Mounia Akl which works both as a compelling domestic drama and an elegant political allegory.

It’s a handsome film, but a conventional one, rather missing the opportunity of allowing Salomon’s thrilling uninhibited style to inform the film’s aesthetic.

All seamy New Orleans sleaze, with a neon and nylon aesthetic, the film relishes its own trashiness. But the writing is not focussed enough to make this much more than a cheap thrill.

The Humans is a marvel of slight shifts in tone and rhythm, guided by a uniformly strong cast of actors who deliver naturalistic performances which show the cracks in their characters’ pleasant veneer.

As a viewing experience, The Good House is capable if unexciting, as tastefully waspish as its millieu, with a damped-down pace and a muted score. As an acting masterclass from Sigourney Weaver as a smart woman in denial, though, it’s impressive.

It’s fair to say that in this singular piece of filmmaking, with its dense deep-dive into arcane legend and mythology, selling out is certainly not on the cards for Masaaki Yuasa right now.

Haley Lu Richardson and Owen Teague are both excellent at conveying everything that remains unsaid between these estranged siblings, eschewing melodramatic flourishes for stoic insights.

Essentially a frothy bagatelle, and sometimes overworking the slightest of jokes, nevertheless this lively, sleekly executed farce from the Argentinian makers of black comedy The Distinguished Citizen offers comic and visual pleasures alike, plus crisp acting from its lead trio.

Writer-director Potsy Ponciroli has crafted a taut Western that borrows heavily from familiar themes and storylines, but it has been constructed with such confidence and precision that one can’t help but be seduced by the picture’s stripped-down spell.

The free-flowing style, aided by dreamlike editing from Isabel Freeman, is both playful and sombre, offering a captivating snapshot of a young artist trying to make sense of her complicated self.

An intense combination of apocalyptic nightmare and family psychodrama. ... A provocative, rigorously composed film that confirms Paxton as a singular talent after a string of award-winning shorts.

La Caja is a canny blend of detective story, political drama and rites of passage vignette, and is the sort of film that comes across as so simple and direct that it’s easy to miss how meticulously conceived and constructed it is.

A powerful and troubling drama about the Stalin era. ... This is a film to revel in, and to argue about – and for some, no doubt, to recoil from – but it’s one of the most original works of the year, and a stand-out of what is proving a rich spell in Russian cinema.

Garbus’s approach is respectful, never hagiographic and allows room for consideration of Cousteau’s professional regrets and personal failings.

There’s no shortage of familiar elements here, and yet one can’t deny the empathy Levinson brings to the material.

West and Cohen reflect some of Murray’s unassuming nature in a diligently assembled, absorbing film that treats its fascinating subject matter with respect.

The result is engaging, tender film-making which tugs at the heart-strings, spurred by a sympathetic cast and the young lead, newcomer Jude Hill.

Whether the pen is mightier than the sword may be up for debate, but as this engaging and hopeful documentary by Rintu Thomas and Sushmit Ghosh shows, words have the power to change things when wielded carefully.

From the film’s first moments, the audience can guess exactly how the story will pan out, and the pleasure is watching Eastwood gracefully negotiate every well-worn twist and turn.

The film ultimately feels like a superficial examination of rich subject matter.

Director Stephen Chbosky badly mishandles the material, resulting in an increasingly frustrating experience in which Evan’s inability to come clean leads to a string of emotional manipulations that sometimes border on cruel.

It’s a lean drama that cuts no slack.

Provocative Italian feature Bad Tales is one of those films that aren’t afraid to confront you with the grimmest aspects of the human condition, but yet leave you feeling strangely exalted by the sheer cinematic invention involved.

This tense, memorable study of one man’s breakdown and the unreliable stories it generates may not live up to the promise of its first excellent half hour, but it is still an audacious piece of filmmaking, one that imprints a memorably skewed worldview on the ears and retina.

This is filmmaking which echoes Cohen’s music style – it’s contemplative, searching and stripped back, but it can also be somewhat navel gazing, ponderous and very slow.

Directed with brisk efficiency by Philip Noyce, the mix of adrenaline-rush emotion, manipulative melodrama and moralising is surprisingly entertaining in the moment.

The storytelling ends up a little too murky to be the grand commentary on privilege and exploitation McDonagh intends.

In Pearce’s sure hands, the film sustains its tension, even as it sideswipes the audience with slickly executed change of tone.

Boxily framed, the film tries out several visual looks, wandering tonally through its own aesthetic maze.

It’s an elegant piece of filmmaking, if a little too decorous at times.

The latest picture from Melanie Laurent is a strikingly beautiful production which delves deep into the ugliness at the roots of psychiatric medicine.

Il Buco proves that cinema still has the capacity to astonish in a very innocent, childlike way as a medium in which light illuminates a black screen and creates beauty.

The actors lend sincerity to the proceedings, but the film keeps cheating to achieve its dramatic payoffs.

There’s a slight lack of dramatic tension in much of the lead-up to its harrowing finale, with too much weight placed on the capable shoulders of the French-Romanian actress Anamaria Vartolomei.

This impressive feature from Alexandre Moratto takes the topic of modern-day enslavement as a jumping-off point for a morality tale which gets increasingly knotty and satisfying as it goes on.

Whether it’s the sheer weight of the narrative repetition - which involves rewatching a brutal rape - or the two-men/one-woman perspective, which results in an underwritten character and a strained performance from Comer, The Last Duel is crushed by the weight of its own armour.

A claustrophobic thriller about a disgraced cop trying to undo his past mistakes over the course of one supremely stressful night, The Guilty boasts a clever close-quarters conceit that ends up feeling more like an actorly exercise than a gripping human drama.

Writer-director Bogdan Mirica makes a very assured feature debut, juggling an accretion of sinister clues and slow-burn allegiances at a low-key pace kept humming thanks to attention-getting widescreen panache.

Whatever else could be said about this competent and generally pretty entertaining latest addition to the series, surprising it is not.

More informational than revealing, John Hoffman and Janet Tobias’ documentary makes the case that in times of great uncertainty concerning mysterious diseases, calm reason and unassailable science are our staunchest allies — two assets the 80-year-old immunologist possesses to ample degree.

There are moments when, like the gaudy lights of Acapulco, Sundown flickers into something rather special when seen from the right angle, in the right mood: a film about a goodbye to life which is also a film about a kind of afterlife.

Free Solo wife and husband directors Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi and Jimmy Chin are forensic in the detail they provide and the range of testimonies they have assembled; the result is a tense, absorbing documentary with a strong emotional charge.

Marcel The Shell With Shoes On manages to harness enough of what initially made this diminutive protagonist such an unexpected treat; in particular, Slate’s endearing vocal performance.

Ultimately what makes this an unusually rewarding picture about motherhood is the fact that it shatters the binary distinction between the good mother and the bad one.

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

It’s a blast. Last Night In Soho is the kind of good time which isn’t over until someone’s either crying or bleeding. And oh, how we’ve all missed those nights!

This Dune dwarfs most contemporary sci-fi in its scope and execution, ably juggling multiple characters and settings so that it matches the sprawling drama of the original tome.

Its odd meld of drab suburban casinos, wrapped motel rooms, nightmarish Iraqi torture sequences and military correctional facilities where the furniture is bolted to the floor, all build to a video-artist vision that comes bursting surprisingly out of an old-school box – and results in one more male-slanted Paul Schrader script about a haunted man at a crossroads.

The boisterousness remains, as does the unreconstructed maleness that has often been a jarring mannerism in his work. But new intimacy also yields a lightness and tenderness that are a welcome addition to Sorrentino’s palette.

If The Power Of The Dog isn’t the absolute killer coup that Campionites might have hoped, this is her most thoroughly conceived, consistently involving drama for years: taken all in all, pretty much the full visual, dramatic and, indeed sonic package.

This comfortable armchair of great, old-school cinematic craft is made all the more embracing by Iglesias’s nuanced soundtrack. But we’re jolted out of that seat, and made to stand in admiration, as the film deftly weaves together two tales of removal – one maternal, the other political and historic.

When the film thoughtfully dissects the fable’s patriarchal attitude, this Cinderella can be touching and light on its feet. But too often, whether because of the subpar songs or the hit-or-miss comedy, Cannon’s rethink struggles to consistently dazzle — it’s a glass slipper that doesn’t quite fit.

What gives the film a force that balances out the delicacy is a commanding, charismatic lead by Wendy Chinchilla Araya, best known as a dancer, whose highly physical presence in turn evokes Clara’s sensitivity, isolation, vulnerability, fury and – despite the pressure to keep it hidden – powerful sexuality.

Thrillingly inventive, satisfyingly textured and infused with warmth and humanity, this is a triumph.

Anais Volpe’s debut feature celebrates a female friendship as it runs the gamut from jubilation to lamentation.

This zig-zagging emotionally perceptive tale of an American writer abroad and the women he has bedded — or perhaps merely written about having bedded — is accomplished French filmmaking the way arthouse denizens like it.

It’s the kind of horror which eschews jump scares in favour of a more subtle, gauzy sense of unease, a slow-burning discomfort that creeps up on the audience like a half-seen shadow. It’s not exactly terrifying, but there’s an oppressive sense of menace which is magnified by the high-quality performances from the two young stars, and by the nervily watchful camerawork.

Consisting of three non-fiction segments and four narrative instalments, the film is refreshing in its understated modesty. If anything, the shorter running time seems to energise the directors, who tell miniature stories with a minimum of fuss but careful attention to the emotional fallout of life under quarantine.

It’s a film that rises above a few heavy-handed directorial touches to weave, over its admirably lean running time, a tapestry of sisterly bonds and fissures that also has plenty to say about the film’s setting, the dense, oppressive urban Palermo.

This is a compulsively watchable drama which taps into some genuinely intriguing themes. A twisted and tangled final act makes heavy weather of some of its reveals, but Binoche is terrific throughout.

What the film does brilliantly is compose a symphony of social awkwardness, with Anne as its virtuoso focus.

An uncomfortably un-restrained Whishaw, and an enhanced, aggressive sound design make Surge a raw experience and its eventual lack of any deeper insight is a little like rubbing salt into that experience.

Director Nia DaCosta’s follow-up is both bitingly satiric and elegantly suspenseful, illustrating how race and class still bedevil modern life. Produced and cowritten by Jordan Peele, and featuring an arresting performance from Yahya Abdul-Mateen II, Candyman has an unmistakable anger embedded within its scares, persuasively depicting how Black Americans feel traumatised by a country that treats them like monsters.

As the action sequences grow more elaborate, Shang-Chi loses a little of its personality, succumbing to de rigueur effects-driven spectacle. Granted, some of these scenes can be stunning, but the visual pizzazz means less than Liu’s graceful navigation of this tale of a man who long ago fled his father and must finally face him. It’s these intimate character moments that help distinguish Shang-Chi from other MCU pictures.

La Civil paints a compelling picture of a society in which nobody can be trusted and everyone is complicit in a neverending cyle of violence, intimidation and revenge.

The Lost Leonardo is one of those rare documentaries in which almost everyone involved volunteers their loose-lipped testimony, seemingly unconcerned as to the dubious light in which it may place them, and Koefoed turns it in at a snappy 96 minutes with all the bells and whistles of a doc crowd-pleaser.

It’s hard not to wince sometimes, even amid all the lewd jokes and proud sexuality in the face of a no-hope future.

There’s no question that director Liesl Tommy and star Jennifer Hudson have approached this project with reverence, hoping to highlight the late singer’s importance both as a cultural figure and a symbol of her era. But the cliches that usually attend such biopics — specifically, the need to simplify an individual’s demons and traumas into easily digestible dramatic beats — are especially frustrating here, leaving this overly earnest picture lacking the vibrancy of its dynamic subject.

Co-directors Ainsley Gardener and Briar Grace Smith tell a sprawling story of separation and disposession which feels both intimate in terms of its setting and epic in resonance.

Ryan Reynolds is endearingly wholesome as this likeable digital nonentity, but once the story’s initial burst of cleverness fades, director Shawn Levy becomes bogged down in convoluted plotting and the overfamiliarity of his seize-the-day message.

Beckett, though, has better films in its DNA - it is by no means original. What it mostly serves as is a reminder of what is missing from independent cinema - and may well be gone for good.

In all fairness, the film is hard to enjoy, not least because its handful of intriguing ideas are so self-indulgently gussied up with ostentatious visual execution.

Margot Robbie and Idris Elba shine, balancing humour and edginess in a blockbuster studded with visual wonders and inspired set pieces.

Although the premise is undoubtedly far-fetched, Malaysian director Sam Quah succeeds in constructing the kind of tightly wound suspense piece for which disbelief can be suspended.

This overstuffed adventure-comedy barely takes a breath while bombarding the viewer with spectacle, special effects and one-liners — but what ultimately makes the film so likeable is the flirty rapport between Dwayne Johnson and Emily Blunt as a mismatched pair in search of a magical tree somewhere deep in the Amazon.

The brilliantly sustained mood and matter-of-fact absurdity of Valdimar Jóhannsson’s impressive debut is slightly let down by a pay-off which doesn’t entirely land. Still, the majority of the picture is strong enough to satisfy audiences with a taste for folk horror oddities, even if the ending isn’t quite as punchy as one might have anticipated.

The exceptional level of craftsmanship — which includes some seamless, low-key special effects — wouldn’t be nearly as affecting without the comparable care Lowery brings to this story.

It’s his most mature film, an unabashedly and audaciously experimental work.