Gitankali Rao’s debut feature is a stunningly realised work of animated film-making.

Eventually, Bonello does draw things together and creates a sense of cohesion in addressing the insecurities, large and small, of a typical teenager who has endured the pandemic lockdown.

Miss Sloane is a shallow but lively thriller which becomes undermined by its makers’ misplaced belief in the profundity of their topical tale.

The movie sometimes overstates its ideas, but Poots keeps Vivarium from being just a coy, chilly intellectual exercise. She adds flesh and soul to what might be the film’s most disturbing notion: In some ways, we all become encased in the lives we have stumbled into.

Come to Daddy starts out like a nasty drama, ends up as a gruesomely gory, coldly comic revenge thriller – and desperately loses its way somewhere in-between.

Wilde’s mighty struggle with himself, with his heavenly talent and earthly lusts, and the meaning of it all resonates so strongly with the direction and performance that The Happy Prince is easily elevated past period Victoriana (and that wallpaper) to move and engage in equal parts.

Jokey rather than funny, and a bit forced when it’s trying to be sincere, Ant-Man has plenty of enthusiasm but not a lot of inspiration.

It is a more stimulating, thought-provoking and entertaining call to arms than anything we are likely to hear from an aspiring President over the next year.

The joy of Men & Chicken is the way the absurdist comedy can dissolve to expose some intriguing philosophical arguments.

It offers an astute perspective on the immigrant experience, multicultural communities, and trying to reconcile traditional and modern cultures — all while telling a tale of love and life that’s authentic, affectionate and amusing.

At a time when comic-book films have become formulaic and interchangeable, James Gunn’s third instalment of Guardians Of The Galaxy feels refreshingly vivid and distinct – a rousing space adventure which is dedicated to delivering both gorgeous spectacle and an emotional wallop.

Zimbalist’s film is all about the highs: at no point will it dig deep. There is zero sense of perspective past the obvious.

The New Zealand landscapes could not be more enchanting, although the story lacks a similar magic.

Couched in fondness and gentle irreverence, his impressionistic archive footage documentary offers whimsical reflections on a lifetime of duty and service.

I Am Mother mostly satisfies as another example of smart and slick indie sci-fi.

In addition to the obviously authentic rapport between the quietly compelling Hill and impressive first-timer Perham, populating the feature’s frames with as many non-actors as possible also adds detail and texture.

He may not add anything new to the spy genre, but Zhang knows how to deliver a ripping yarn with the requisite panache.

It’s the central performance by feature first-timer Mahayni that best demonstrates the picture’s overall charms.

A satisfyingly convoluted revenge thriller in which the dynamically staged, blood-drenched action sequences are a highlight rather than the film’s sole raison d’être.

While it’s impossible not to be somewhat caught up in these climbers’ life-or-death struggle, Everest is oddly uninvolving — it depicts a horrific scenario in an underwhelming, distancing way.

Fans of the enduringly popular ITV period drama series will no doubt embrace this feature film spin-off, which represents a step up in lavish visual spectacle while retaining a comforting familiarity of themes and storytelling style.

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.

Ridley Scott has lost none of his flair for grandeur, but ultimately Gladiator II is diminished by a nagging recognition that this material felt fresher in the first film — and that Denzel Washington’s devilish schemer steals the picture from Mescal.

The film subsides into piled-up shocks and reversals, leaving the actors to bolster the drama with emoting – not always in the most subtle of ways.

This stylish, superficial lark is perhaps too pleased with its central conceit, but director Ilya Naishuller keeps the mayhem and dark laughs rolling at a steady clip.

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.

Rather than the overblown spectacle we’ve come to expect from films of this ilk, Greenland crafts a muscular, barebones survival story that even makes room for some genuine emotion. Hollywood disaster flicks have eradicated humanity many times before, but rarely as unassumingly as happens here.

Unlike Entertainment, which had a cracked energy about it, this has such a somnolent pace, blandly desaturated palette and sombre tone that staying the course can be a challenge.

The spirit king of the Greek Weird Wave has produced a profoundly puzzling, dizzyingly disturbing and dark-hearted set of loosely-connected stories which manage to be discordantly amusing and strangely exhilarating – a cinematic salt-rub.

This film, mostly shot in the UK, is technically suberb. But splitting the pleasures of virtual and reality, Ready Player One never fully satisfies on either front.

The longer The Lodge rolls along, the sheer skilfulness of the execution — the precise manipulation of the audience’s fears — becomes so impressive that one is tempted to simply succumb to its cold, cruel efficiency.

The fearless lead performance from Ruraridh Mollica really gets under the skin of the complex central figure and should elevate him to rising star status.

A bittersweet comedy of manners that sees Allen pushing the boat out stylistically and in narrative ambition, even as he treads familiar ground.

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.

By striving for realism, The Apprentice ends up dramatically flat, the recitation of Trump’s most infamous incidents ... playing out perfunctorily.

John McKenna and Gabriel Clarke have been assiduous in tracking down the participants and their descendants, and deserve recognition for the effort they have put in to raising Le Mans for a new generation of fast car enthusiasts and Hollywood buffs.

A mix of fly-on-the-wall material with archive footage and interviews, Maya And The Wave is a by-turns exhilarating and infuriating exploration of how, for a woman, talent is often not enough to cut through.

Reticence is also the keynote of The History of Sound’s two riveting central performances.

Not very funny and never especially touching, this Dora feels dispiritingly perfunctory — a two-hour babysitting tool that leaves little impression.

It may be a touch overlong – perhaps because everyone has to stop running to sing songs at regular intervals – and the emotional beats familiar, with moments of poignance, tragedy, gruesome comedy (a decapitated zombie in a snowman suit) and absurdity.

Director Gavin Hood gives the proceedings a rousing electricity, and he’s aided by a cast which leans into the story’s urgency and continued relevance.

Van Groeningen conveys kinetically the combined power of a ferocious beat, copious drugs, and sexual energy to endow revellers with transient communal utopianism.

The directorial debut of Orphanage screenwriter Sergio G. Sánchez is powerfully frustrating, undone by an ornate storytelling style in which twists only beget more twists, all in service of some fairly obvious observations about guilt, self-deception and devotion.

Rogue One’s Edwards delivers a film which is reliably visually inventive even when the familiarity of the narrative can make it feel oddly stale.

It’s not until the end credits roll that one realises that Monster Hunt 2 is essentially an amiable detour in a bigger story, or enterprise, since Wuba is no closer to fulfilling his destiny. Yet when you have a star of Tony Leung’s magnitude selling out with such panache, it seems churlish to complain.

Taut, no-frills execution – notwithstanding some gorgeous but altogether untouristic landscape photography by Jeanne Lapoirie – helps to foreground the performances poignantly and compellingly.

The combination of archive footage, fresh interviews and extensive dramatic reconstructions is tightly edited. Hobinkson makes the most of a hugely involving story and a collection of fascinating individuals.

While this slow-motion tragedy sometimes risks more than it can deliver, the film’s cumulative effect stuns nonetheless. Ashton Sanders heads a fine cast that forcibly articulates the everyday landmines African-Americans have to navigate in a white society that often seems intent on destroying them.

It’s a classic underdog story, effective for its engaging chronicle of outsiders trying to change the system.

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.

Beneath all of the visual razzle-dazzle and quick-firing gags, though, Chicken Run: Dawn Of The Nugget is, fundamentally, a familiar, well-executed coming-of-age narrative, in which a youngster is compelled to spread their wings, and parents must learn to let them fly.

It may take a while to acclimate to the film’s off-kilter rhythms and strange happenings — not unlike the film’s protagonist, an outsider entering the forbidding Alaskan wilderness — but Saulnier has crafted his most mature effort to date, mixing his love for pulp fiction with a sombre examination of the inexplicable evil all around us.

Weisz shows her Oscar-winning talents by hitting precisely the right notes throughout My Cousin Rachel: from warmth to guile to chilly practicality.

For all its breezy animation, the film can’t match the vividness of its subject.

The filmmakers switch the focus from the suspense of an uncertain outcome to the central friendship between the two women, a friendship that Diana tends to inadvertently torpedo. This allows both actresses to bring a depth and texture that sustains the picture through the extended swimming sequences.

The sci-fi horror-thriller Ash makes the most of a minimal budget, casting Eiza Gonzalez as the lone survivor on a distant planet whois unsure how she got there or who she is. With Aaron Paul playing a fellow astronaut trying to help jog her memory about a massacre that occurred at the base, the film quickly establishes an aura of paranoia and bad vibes, paving the way for deft twists and an appreciably gory finale.

With style, strong performances and emotive use of mis-en-scene, On Swift Horses is a flawed but intense critique of Americana.

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

Jackson’s film is best enjoyed for the quality of the performances and the typical richness of Hare’s screenplay.

There’s something deeply compelling about this deliberately odd, carefully-calibrated neo-gothic fable, which suggests that rehabilitation can be found in the darkest of places, and that true freedom is simply a matter of trust.

Ritchie’s tendency for swaggering overkill proves especially ill-advised for the serious story he wants to tell about how the US turned its back on those who helped its War On Terror, resulting in a hollow paean that’s far more convincing as a generic shoot-’em-up.

Pleasantly entertaining, Pitch Perfect 2 scrabbles for a raison d’etre, however, hoping that goodwill from the first show, coupled with a few raunchy gags and cameo appearances, will be enough to get by in the post-Glee age.

Sometimes the comedy is too broad, sometimes the targets are too easy, but this acting duo repeatedly reach for something deeper in the material, leaving the viewer uncertain if their characters are manipulators or true believers.

In a whizzing carousel of no war, no surprises, no peril, just 1920s frockery, Downton Abbey: A New Era delivers exactly the same as every other incarnation of Downton Abbey, only with a tearjerker ending for the core fanbase.

More a gloss than an insightful dissection, this documentary frustrates by sticking to the man’s surface, reducing his words to commendable sound-bites rather than deeply exploring them.

I Want Your Sex ends up being more fizzle than sizzle.

Despite a smorgasbord of high-octane action filmmaking, its thimble-deep characters and strained political commentary repeatedly stall what should be a wonderfully trashy shoot-‘em-up.

I’m Your Woman benefits greatly from its off-kilter rhythms and intuitive digressions, even if it can be tonally uneven and a little obvious thematically at times.

A memorable take on the hiphop movie.

Personal and committed as the film clearly is, it won’t come across as a revelation for adepts of this pensive brand of slow-burning visual poetry - of which this seems a reticent and somewhat old-fashioned example.

The film lacks the teeth to be an incisive takedown of romantic comedies — in truth, it works best at its sweetest. Dewey communicates a lifetime of longing in those soulful eyes that pop through Monster’s makeup, and Barrera brings an endearing amount of dorky energy. But whenever these characters leave the house, the problems start — both for their relationship and the film itself.

Director M. Night Shyamalan crafts an exercise in tense claustrophobia, teasing the audience with the question of whether their preposterous beliefs are correct — a riddle complicated by our familiarity with this filmmaker’s fondness for third-act twists.

Like the characters it follows, this first feature from director Jaydon Martin is unpolished, honest and a little rough around the edges at times.

The effort is strenuous; all 128 minutes of it. But it’s almost as exhausting to watch as it must have been to make.

Elements of craft and performance are very persuasive but the slight storyline and recourse to awkward flights of fancy make it a film that never quite gels.

Helped enormously by deeply-felt performances from Ellen Page and Allison Janney, this film mostly overcomes its unevenness by finding rich pockets of emotion and insight.

A sober, thoughtful documentary that combines a lament for a lost Eden with a rousing call to action.

Throwing darts at genre conventions while honouring what is eternally mythic about the milieu, this comedy-drama draws off-kilter performances from Robert Pattinson and Mia Wasikowska that subtly (and sometimes not so subtly) reframe archetypes and consistently set us back on our heels.

For all the film’s provocations, both serious and mischievous, it’s a remarkably elegant, subtle piece.

Suite Francaise exudes a sense of glossy class in its design, staging and costumes and its lead actress Michelle Williams is especially fine, responding perfectly to a role that could have been tricky.

Director Juan Carlos Medina (Insensible/Painless) fails to muster Golem’s many moving parts, and tension leaks from the film like the blood from one of its many savaged corpses.

The economical, precisely calibrated screenplay is nicely filled with enough simmering conflicts, character flaws and guilty resentments to keep you intrigued by what lies beneath the surface of these comfortable, middle-class lives

A love-all crowd-pleaser for the most part, more Borg than McEnroe thanks to an arresting performance from lookalike Sverrir Gudnason.

Foy is terrific in a film which balances bruising candour about mental health issues against arresting wildlife photography and a fervent appreciation of the natural world.

Admirers of Soderbergh’s experimental tendency will applaud the film’s execution – it was shot on the iPhone 7 Plus – while this story of a tenacious woman fighting all odds should have added appeal in this #MeToo moment. For a mainstream genre piece, however, the narrative execution is a little too cavalier to guarantee audience satisfaction.

It’s an aggressively stirring account of a nation painfully enduring catastrophic conflict as prelude to independence.

Fingernails’ themes may be a tad trite, but the storytelling’s unfussy elegance helps sell Nikou’s message about the messy vitality of true love.

What ultimately hampers the film is that, once the agonising dilemma is introduced, the script quickly becomes a standard survival-in-space saga, recalling everything from Gravity to The Midnight Sky. The performances are nicely modulated, though, resisting the story’s inherently melodramatic qualities and instead focusing on trying to solve the problem at hand.

There are flashes of the incisive, caustic insight of his Force Majeure and Palme d’Or-winning art-world satire The Square. But this rather laborious take on the excesses of capitalism, depicted as a luxury yacht headed inexorably for farcical disaster, lacks the pitiless ironic cool that made those two films so memorable.

Bezhucha seems to have spent all his effort and imagination on the journey: the destination an afterthought, the denouement bizarrely prolonged, and all but written in a flashing neon sign above the Blackledges’ heads.

Lipovsky and Stein’s first feature as collaborators exudes a grungy, second-hand feel, and the movie doesn’t have the confidence or vision to breathe new life into its narrative clichés. Instead, the pair lean on the sincerity of their storytelling, crafting a paean to broken families and exploring how children process unspeakable loss.

Larrain uses the familiar narrative structure of the flashback and adds some operatic grace notes to deliver a performance-led film that is never less than expected – but also never less than watchable.

What saves this uneven material is the actors’ committed, anguished turns.

Split is a highly effective, nerve-shredding horror movie that makes the most of its claustrophobic setting, familiar setup and psychological gimmicks

Wheatley’s hyperbolic set pieces feel perfunctory rather than euphoric or hilariously bombastic.

The debut feature from actress Lisa Brühlmann, Blue My Mind brings a surreal spin to the coming of age story, and is an effective showcase for a striking cast of young performers.

There’s a freshness to the characterisations, a good eye, and for a time Cronin constructs a tense guessing game as to whether it’s mental breakdown or supernatural forces at play.

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.