For all that it dances on familiar ground, Firecrackers ends on a pleasingly opaque note. It’s attractively shot by Catherine Lutes, and smartly cast with unknowns, making it more than just a calling card for its young writer/director. There’s much to take note of here foom Mozaffari and her all-female crew.

Blessed with some excellent voice performances, this new King is familiar but still lively enough to encourage audiences to emotionally invest again in story they are already so familiar with.

Sama’s film captures the quicksilver sparks of an artistic moment – the point at which a loose bohemian community collectively finds its voice and forces the mainstream to take notice.

The film is at its most arresting in its slick neo noir middle section.

Kumail Nanjiani and Dave Bautista are a likeable pair that deserve better than Stuber, a strained action-comedy with a clever premise but maddeningly uninspired execution.

Writer/director Benjamin Naishtat’s subtle, twisting, state-of-the-nation drama works effectively as a noir-like thriller, and as an exploration of a country that has lost its moral compass.

There’s a discourse going on here about family and memory, about what we lose if we turn ourselves into work machines who can “pull a 48” (go for 48 hours without sleep) that leeches subtly into the fabric of Kreutzer’s psycho-drama, buoyed by a fine use of setting, camera focus and colour.

Boasting a breezy spirit and Tom Holland’s likeable turn as the titular web-slinger, this new film is adequately rousing and jokey, but too often it has the feel of a transitional chapter which is meant to pivot away from Endgame to whatever producer Kevin Feige has next in store for these heroes.

Annabelle Comes Home has effective scare sequences, especially as the film ratchets up the tension in its final reels, but this sequel ultimately feels too mechanical, and too familiar, to unnerve as proficiently as previous entries.

The wider themes of the film grow more evident through individual elements in which nobody is prepared to listen to the other side of the story, or try to understand a different point of view.

Ines and Emilie have tensions between them which are uncomfortably alive, and Langseth’s script is a gnawing reminder that, even when the date of death is set, family quarrels and resentments can still be corrosive.

While the narrative’s dramas feel paper-thin, even as they touch upon timely themes of equality, multiculturalism and the treatment of refugees, the feature’s optimism always shines.

An energetic, irreverent, autobiographically inspired affair filled with key swapping, children running amok and a rotting 200-tonne whale, the film proves a mixed bag but, given the era on display, its messiness always feels appropriate.

Undemanding movie-goers may enjoy this oddly wholesome entertainment peppered with positive messages about generosity, overcoming adversity and hoping that your karma straightens itself out in this lifetime.

A love story between shelf stackers in a provincial superstore isn’t the most scintillating pitch. And yet, with the aid of affecting performances and a good eye for the virtuoso moves of a forklift truck, director Thomas Stuber mines the magical in the mundane.

Costa’s use of news footage, tapes of incriminating conversations that were made public and acts of self-serving betrayal gives The Edge Of Democracy the feel of an All The President’s Men-style political thriller. Further revelations about her own family and the allegiances of earlier generations turn that aspect of the story into something with the sweep of The Godfather.

Aster’s bold flourishes occasionally fall flat, but Florence Pugh holds the film together — especially when its plotting stumbles or its shocks grow predictable.

This sequel may not be as buoyant as previous chapters, but the filmmakers’ continued commitment to honouring these characters — and to understanding what is so universal about their quest to love and be loved — is worth treasuring.

Thompson brings her reliably spry comedic talents as a new recruit who discovers all the extra-terrestrials in our midst, but she’s easily overmatched by a witless script, laboured plot and, most depressingly, a badly misjudged performance from her usually-charming co-star.

Unshowy camerawork and an understated score both place the emphasis on the largely impressive and naturalistic performances.

A thoughtful and fascinating piece, it’s a game of two halves, however, with Lindeen making heavy work of modern-day footage which tends to drag on the dynamism of the past.

This highly accomplished first feature from Eva Trobisch finds nuance and complexity in a subject which tends to lend itself to extreme depictions; it’s an arresting and candid portrait of a woman whose weakness is her refusal to see herself as a victim.

Rather than being thought-provoking or streamlined, instead Dark Phoenix is a frustratingly anticlimactic, familiar tale of misunderstood mutants.

What it lacks in substance is compensated for by Lee’s entertaining performance.

If the film didn’t rest on such composed performances, it might have conjured melodramatic disbelief, but the excellent Fehling and Montgomery play their pivotal figures with the requisite nuance.

The script takes forever to get started, and once it’s going, labours to create a single plausible character. Nor can Taylor, who last handled the dreary The Girl On The Train, wring any suspense from his scenes.

Even for opera neophytes who couldn’t tell a soprano from a tenor, Ron Howard’s brisk, engaging film capably maps out an art form that Luciano Pavarotti ruled for decades, including enough technical insight to go along with an overview of the maestro’s personal and professional highlights.

King of the Monsters delivers what its genre requires. Truly awesome monster scenes fill the screen, often imbued with emotional resonance by music cues.

Like the first film, The Secret Life of Pets 2 is at its best when it concentrates on the unconditional love offered by mankind’s best friends, or gently mocks familiar situations.

Revenge may be a dish best served cold, but Domino dishes it up as a sloppy mess of warmed-over clichés. Instead of his old high style and kinky violence, director Brian De Palma delivers only crude thrills and ugly stereotypes, a soggy bag of junk-food snacks.

Miron’s cinema vérité approach still finds time for contemplation and appealing images of the countryside through the changing seasons. His very promising feature debut remains consistently engrossing through unexpected developments. He even surprises us with the sense of renewal and hope that suddenly blossoms from Kathy’s darkest hours.

Beneath the impish, inventive surface of On A Magical Night lies real emotions around loyalty, devotion and how to ensure love never dies. It is a film as charming as it is touching.

A lively, funny and touching exploration of the way we live now through the filter of two generations.

In Bed with Victoria (Victoria) has its moments but too often falls short of the “oomph” that renders a comedy special.

Sibyl is far less than the sum of its parts, and never manages to shake off a heavy tone which consistently threatens to capsize even the rare funny interludes.

Melodrama is a neglected genre, often delivered with a post-modern twist these days. Brazilian director Karim Aïnouz proves in this stirring, heart-wrenching period film that it can be served straight up and still work a treat.

Rambling but strangely compelling, Oh Mercy!’s documentary bedrock gives the investigation at the heart of the film a real authenticity. From around its midpoint, this uneven film becomes a riveting, compassionate interrogation drama.

Audiences will likely approach the film a series of sketches linked as much by mood as by theme. Some hit the spot, two or three are laugh-out-loud funny, but others seem little more than space-fillers in a film that is both enjoyable and frustrating.

It’s fair to ask whether the world really needs one more story about a flawed, brilliant, lustful older male artist, but Tommaso’s commitment to its own soul-searching fervor is potently feverish.

The film digs into the minutiae, giving off an unmistakable air of expertise, but the screenplay ends up being a collection of footnotes and intriguing digressions without necessarily feeling like an authoritative handling of this sprawling material.

The film can feel slight at times. But it’s eminently watchable.

While it’s important to have seen Canto Uno in order to savour Intermezzo, this film in itself doesn’t seem remotely essential.

Mixing political commentary, ethnography, teenage melodrama and genre horror, the film is an unashamedly cerebral study of multiple themes – colonialism, revolution, liberalism, racial difference and female desire - with its unconventional narrative structure taking us on a journey that’s as intellectually demanding as it is compelling.

On occasion, the sincerity and unabashed emotion can be bracing, but more often this rambunctiously enthusiastic writer-director overestimates how compelling his protagonists’ plight is, giving us a florid melodrama without enough grit underneath the operatics.

The episodic, ruminative and very talky mood suggests something between Chekhov and Eric Rohmer – or at moments, Woody Allen without the humour. That’s not to say that the film is entirely dry, but there’s an earnestness about it and occasionally a leadenness in the acting.

Centred around two exceptional performances, and taking an intimate, documentary-like approach to the drama, Joy effectively explores the devastating traps of abuse and extortion without ever becoming exploitative itself.

Parasite is a malign delight from start to finish, with a Machiavellian sense of mischief and a cinematic brio that shows Bong revelling in his Hitchcockian control of somewhat Buñuelian material.

It would be easy to paint him as a tragic figure but Tcheng’s film is more of a celebration than a lamentation, saluting a superstar designer whose life was a triumph of style and substance.

Despite Aladdin’s occasionally arresting moments, this remake’s most potent element is its intentional air of déjà vu.

Once Upon A Time….in Hollywood is beautifully made. Beyond all the ‘Tarantino-esque’ touches of the action, the banter, the violence, the constant movie references, there’s a real craft at play here.

Only in certain scenes do story and ideas really mesh

Focused and thought-provoking, it should be welcomed as a return to form after the disappointment of The Unknown Girl.

Diao’s flamboyant direction means that he often sets up one elaborately staged tableau just for a single shot, those shots sometimes coming in expansive flurries; some action scenes also feature lightning inserts fired off with surreal abruptness, as in the first gang rumble.

Even with an abrupt ending and the sense of unfinished business, Diego Maradona is more satisfying than Kapadia’s previous work.

For all its familiarity, Ly’s film is executed with enormous confidence and energy, building up to an apocalyptic ending that delivers on a gradual build-up of nervous tension.

The abiding impression is of an intermittently fascinating film that is a minor work in the ever burgeoning Herzog canon.

Kuperstein’s roaming camera may sometimes overwhelm the film with its artful choreography, but generally manages to take the viewer by surprise – as does a comic narrative which constantly takes unexpected turns.

The Lighthouse provides a marvellous chamber-drama platform for two actors, Robert Pattinson and Willem Dafoe, who seize the opportunity with gusto.

Arthouse audiences will be intrigued to discover how Sciamma has channelled the fluid energy of her contemporary work into the more constrained environment of a costume drama. It won’t hurt that this is a strikingly handsome production which will be admired on a technical level.

Terrence Malick often wrestles with the cosmic, the spiritual and the eternal, but with A Hidden Life, the meditative writer-director attacks his usual themes from a rewardingly timely and urgent perspective.

Mixing tough US social realism with butch femme poses is an intriguing exercise, although this small, sincere drama never quite resolves the awkwardness of the meld.

Joan of Arc is in some ways a more conventional drama than its predecessor, but is still intransigently individual. Yet even with a subject as eternally popular as Joan, it’s hard to imagine the film making waves with a mainstream audience or bringing new revelations to Dumont’s long-term followers.

An exhilarating cocktail of bloodbath violence and tar-black humour that will be catnip to Midnight Madness programmers and Miike devotees.

How much a viewer will enjoy the convincingly cringe-making portrait on display here will depend on whether one feels empathy for Sophia’s inability-come-reluctance to access the ramp to adulthood or would prefer to reach into the screen and shake her.

The film displays intense emotional seriousness and is finely performed and directed; but further shaping could have revealed the more focused work that’s begging to emerge.

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.

An angry skewering of today’s gig economy as well as a moving drama about a loving family on the verge of implosion which is easily is one of Loach’s very best films.

Beats brilliantly captures the nervy, joyful terror of turning up at a derelict warehouse equipped with a soundsystem and woefully inadequate toilet facilities. And it’s a testament, too, to the uncomplicated platonic love between two lads who both know, deep down, that they are too flakey to stay in contact.

Boldly synthetic in its approach, in everything from colour palette to performance style, this film won’t be for everyone. And the fact that it defies easy categorisation might present a marketing challenge. But for those who engage with it, this oddly off-kilter piece of storytelling should exert a pull every bit as mesmerising as any genetically modified mood-enhancing shrub.

The film is a bracingly confrontational commentary on the direction the country is taking in the Bolsonaro era. Propulsive storytelling doesn’t come at the expense of the vividly sketched personality of the community.

This sloppy horror comedy under delivers on both shocks and laughs.

Rocketman is so energetic that it’s possible to be swept away by its enthusiasm for putting Reg on a pedestal. Too often, though, the film just flattens you, demanding fealty to Sir Elton.

An intense romance notable for the craft of the filmmaking and Diop’s original approach to complex issues of love, loss and the forces for change that can rise from the ashes of tragedy.

A slow-burn drama with familiar contours but a sure sense of place and a great deal of restrained empathy.

The modest running time ... means that it does feel a little slight and underdeveloped in places. However, there are enough sparks of originality and comic invention throughout to capture those in search of something winningly offbeat and unexpected.

Sometimes a bad film is just a bad film, but Depp is most likely to pay the price.

The film’s scattershot humour doesn’t always land, but even when it does it’s merely masking what is ultimately a gloomy portrait of our walking-dead existence.

If this focus on fleeting pleasures occasionally risks exoticizing the subject, Mayfair’s sensory approach to illustrating an almost unbearable absence of female fulfillment achieves a powerful universal resonance.

The bleak warning of this environmental parable notwithstanding, this is arresting, frequently unsettling, cinema.

Like the strong-minded but somewhat petulant Martina herself, the film delivers plenty of heady sensuality but is mainly skin deep and, ultimately fails to satisfy.

Feel free to ignore the nonsensical plot and tortured musings on honour, revenge, loyalty and destiny. All that matters is how director Chad Stahelski concocts his usual litany of flinty fight scenes, and how Keanu Reeves invests the material with his wonderfully spacey stoicism.

A celebration of scientific excellence and an account of a discovery which has ramifications for natural environments the world over, The Serengeti Rules makes for compelling viewing.

The feature’s heart is in the right place, especially in advocating that age shouldn’t be a barrier. But Poms is a by-the-numbers feature which couples its empowering message with routine gags and muddled conflict.

The human testimony is undoubtedly the most engaging aspect of Another Day Of Life, but the animated sequences earn their place when they provide a sense of the emotional turmoil that Kapuscinski experienced as he faced the chaos and horrors of a war that would continue until 2002.

What you get in these performances is intelligence, emotion and physicality, and when they come together as combustively as they do here, what you get is something extremely rare - a film that catches the messy, hot complexity of life and love.

A though-provoking journey through the search for truth and reconciliation, The Silence of Others emerges as a moving salute to the small victories of determined individuals.

A multi-layered and thought-provoking work of art.

Yesterday is a film we’re all familiar with, for better or worse.

There’s a fine line between giving a voice to the victims of honour killings and putting words into the mouths of people who are no longer able to speak for themselves. The slightly contentious issue with A Regular Woman is how closely allied it is with the real case of Hatun Aynur Sürücü. There is no distance afforded by a layer of fictionalisation and, ultimately, it’s impossible to know how closely the voice of the character in the film matches that of the young woman who lost her life.

Gay Chorus Deep South draws its strength not only from its subject, but also the effective way in which it it presents its arguments.

The film is hugely impressive in the scope of those interviewed.

This story of a frustrated man and the slow recognition of what really matters in his life could, indeed, have come from a Springsteen lyric, but the sketchiness of the premise doesn’t really favour the full cinematic treatment it has been awarded here.

It’s hard to imagine the courage which went into the making of this highly personal documentary. ... With its unflinching candour about both the nature of the abuse and the effect that it had on its victims, the film is a difficult and upsetting watch.

17 Blocks ... is packed with gritty realism, and at times its uncensored honesty almost makes you want to look away.

Carefully made and perfectly acted.

This extraordinary documentary weighs the bleak details – and they are, at times, almost unbearably grim – against moments of lyrical beauty and even humour. It’s a remarkable achievement.

It takes more than simply celebrating rural life and marveling at nature to make someone the next David Gordon Green, let alone the next Terrence Malick. While Yeomans inarguably finds something significant in the slow pace of small towns, the power of narration and the jolt of handheld cinematography, exactly what that is isn’t always clear. In fact, sometimes it’s literally unclear; shots slip out of focus, and some close-ups are so poorly lit the characters’ features disappear.

An aggressively cute family film that’s also a spectacle-driven sci-fi noir-mystery with hints of Blade Runner and the third act of every Marvel movie, this adaptation of the popular 2016 video game throws everything at the audience with such vehemence that the sum effect is overwhelming more than it is entertaining.