Between the extensive VFX creature work – led by Mike Stillwell and Andrew Simmonds - the performances, the tone, and the life-or-death subject matter, experienced shorts director Pusic has given her debut her all, and observers will take note.

Brie Larson gives Carol the right mixture of sweetness, humour and swagger, underlining the film’s message of self-empowerment with a light touch.

The film-making itself can stumble - this isn’t always a smooth watch; and such heartfelt sentiment sets it apart from more savvily sophisticated similar dramas.

A sure-footed handling of tangled emotional issues creates an involving if small-scale feature.

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.

Running over three hours, and swamped with sex, drugs and over-the-top set pieces, this swaggering drama seems infused with the impetuous energy of its characters, resulting in a film that’s drunk on its own ambition, wildly uneven but never, ever boring.

Using simple means, Kang and his team take banal situations and settings — much of the action unfolds in a city-centre apartment building — and render them just eerie enough to be unsettling.

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 humanity of the enterprise, hovering between sympathy and ironic detachment, keeps the script on course, delivering a story that for all its motley-band-of-brothers clichés feels as authentic as many more pious takes on the Bosnian conflict.

More concerned with creating a slowburn of discomfort than with deploying jumpscares, it is driven by first-rate performances from Bracken and, in particular, rising star Doupe.

It’s impossible to deny the strength of the startling array of thoughts and concepts which Inarritu has brought to life and, ultimately, brings together, although the impact is clearly diluted by his unwillingness to cut.

Rheingold is a helter-skelter mix of coming of age drama, heist thriller, chaste romance and origins story for a star rapper. Akin comes up with some striking moments.

Motel Destino may not make a profound impact, but it does make an impact nonetheless.

Aside from the mother-daughter relationship angle, this splashy, showy assassin picture doesn’t really cover any new ground. But the lack of imagination elsewhere is offset by some impressively slick tailoring – Boksoon really does dress to kill – and extravagantly athletic fight sequences.

If the Zootopia series is about looking past our biased assumptions about others, the new film makes the point most effectively as its two leads open up about their own shortcomings, allowing themselves to be vulnerable. Goodwin and Bateman are certainly most appealing when their characters are at their most genuine.

A cult item par excellence, Bone Tomahawk does for the Western what Gareth Edwards did for Monsters. Long, slow and low-budget, Bone Tomahawk is also disturbingly tense, hyper-violent, and destined to attract an adoring fanboy following.

The first feature film from cinematographer Ellen Kuras is a satisfyingly textured portrait of a remarkable and unusual woman, who had an almost Zelig-like gift for bearing witness to key moments in history.

Even by cult documentary standards, this one finds absurd depths in the peddling of enlightenment.

A sharp screenplay and strong performances give this life as a watchable thriller, rather than just a mere pastiche.

The switch towards something more unexpected is initially disconcerting, but ultimately reveals an ambitious filmmaker striving to subvert expectations.

An unusual and often hauntingly strange film, Angelica is given life thanks to Jena Malone’s impressive performance, which juggles mounting hysteria with a gentle sense of passion.

While this expansion of Frett’s 2023 short of the same name may, at times, feel like it’s being cornered into making a political statement, the nuanced central performance from Stephan James largely prevents the message from overwhelming the story.

A feature that might not always surprise in its story, but succeeds in its authenticity.

Barraud offers a satisfyingly slippery tale in which we think we know where it might be headed but are constantly met by a little twist or discovery that puts everything into a different perspective.

The film offers an engrossing overview of the painstaking, insightful investigations carried out over the years by Lewis and associates.

The Settlers shows promise: it’s the work of a daring director intent on developing a distinctive and original voice.

The documentary, as it grieves for those losses, points to divisions in American society that are as glaring as ever.

A deftly handled cautionary tale, there is a compulsive, creeping horror to this portrait of a man losing all self-respect. That said, it is frequently a tough watch.

While this spin-off to 2014’s more consistently inspired The Lego Movie is a decidedly hit-or-miss affair, it boasts enough giddy good humour and manic rambunctiousness to bludgeon the viewer into submission.

Robert Greene’s latest fusion of reality and meta-fiction is fiercely intelligent, but inescapably tars itself with the ghoulishness it critiques.

Wilde delivers a confident feature directorial debut, mixing humour, embarrassment and poignancy to crowd-pleasing effect.

If it occasionally strains too hard to underline its “rebellious” credentials, with an expletive-laden script, quick cuts, archive pop clips and trippy visuals, the brassy, keep-up-if-you-can approach keeps the authentic cadence of Glasgow and, more generally, helps Moran mitigate the slightly stagey production values and sets.

The film’s destination might be apparent, but the trek through past regrets, race relations and the central subject itself never feels drawn out.

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.

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.

A delightfully clear-eyed adaptation of Charles Perrault’s fable of goodness triumphing over adversity, which brings psychological depth to characters like Cate Blanchett’s magnificent, believable stepmother.

This is a solid and often uncomfortably tense domestic drama.

As a screenwriter, Ford has made some brave choices in a difficult, complex adaptation. As a director, though, he veers between delivering far too much, and yet not quite enough.

An ensemble cast led by Maggie Smith, Kathy Bates and Laura Linney brings persuasive conviction to period heartwarmer The Miracle Club.

It’s a fairly conventional, risk-averse piece of filmmaking, but the film’s gentle, meandering story works its way to a conclusion which plays out in a minor key, suggesting that certain cycles are hard to break and that even a seemingly idyllic life comes at a cost.

The debut feature by Belarus-born, US-educated Darya Zhuk may be set in the mid-90s, but with a plot founded on a young Belarussian’s obsessive desire for an American visa, and a sting in the tale that chimes with the #metoo movement, it has a remarkably topical ring to it.

Phillips’ collaborators work in harmony with the natural, nuanced acting; credits across the board are stylish and smooth, with lensing a standout. Also of particular note is the design; a rich, forest-driven colour saturation which suits the hooded houses and shadowy driveways of these traumatised teens.

Sing is colourful, yet at almost two hours, it is also long. Still, if kids aren’t drawn to one singing animal (or familiar voice), there’s always another around the corner, holding up the tentpole.

The result – something like a female-fronted version of Antonioni’s The Passenger - isn’t likely to entirely satisfy anyone in either the arthouse or mainstream camps. But if taken as an oblique tropical reverie, the film definitely has pleasures to offer – not least an oddball but often riveting lead performance by Margaret Qualley.

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 barrier between the real and the fictional encounters is increasingly permeable, as is the line between social norms and unacceptable behaviour, in this freewheeling, spontaneous voyage into the unknown.

Director Phyllis Nagy has crafted a subdued but affecting portrait of that time, strengthened by deft performances from Elizabeth Banks as a sheltered suburban mother whose eyes are opened and Sigourney Weaver as the leader of an underground abortion-facilitation service.

Gatta Cenerentola is on one level a noirish spin on a popular fable, but its real resonance derives from its stimulating contribution to a long-running dialogue...about the good creative and evil destructive demons that pull southern Italy’s largest city alternately towards hope and despair.

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.

A robustly old-fashioned production, it’s a tasteful film which reverberates with the feeling of a vastly different age. As such, it’s gentle escapism for the old, the young, and the nostalgic. Even Thorne can’t give it sufficient dramatic tension to thrill, but a lovely performance from lead Dixie Egerickx, plus stalwart support from old hands Colin Firth and Julie Walters, compensates.

The result is the depiction of a seemingly sealed-in, quasi-carceral world, revealing how much China’s current economy – after decades, and multiple phases, of Communism – is now built on old-school sweatshop capitalism, with youth a readily available, and very disposable, commodity.

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

A paean to the importance of retaining one’s childlike enthusiasm, the animated The Little Prince is itself a charmingly innocent film, lacking some of the storytelling and design sophistication of its Pixar and Dreamworks competitors but nonetheless delivering a sweet, likeable tale.

Everyone here appears to be revelling in the juicy opportunities Earthquake Bird brings to hit up our memories of everything from Fatal Attraction to Single White Female.

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.

An engaging documentary that’s perhaps too enchanted by its own “stranger than fiction” oddness to delve deeply enough into the human drama on display.

Like the wizarding movies to which it’s connected, Fantastic Beasts is better the darker it gets, especially in a robust final reel where the film fully hits its stride.

A thoughtful biopic that grows more involving the more it shrugs off its tendency towards the reverential.

It is, in essence, the celebrated ‘cosmic’ sequence from the Tree of Life expanded into a full-length feature, and many of the audio-visual tableaux it weaves are astonishing, mesmerising, delightful. The problem is that they are not also informative.

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.

This story of a homesick college freshman, played affectingly by Raiff himself, doesn’t break any new ground - it doesn’t even try - but his film is still an appealing charmer.

Engaging to watch and edifying about just how close Paris came to having rubble at its heart instead of the iconic gothic structure Victor Hugo’s hunchback called home, this thoughtful and meticulous re-creation of 24 incredibly dicey hours is mostly thrilling, despite the occasional groan-worthy line of dialogue or borderline dopey secondary character.

Directors Leo Scott and Ting Poo let their subject tell his own story, resulting in a film that’s partly illuminating, sometimes self-indulgent and often quite touching.

Though the action...sometimes has a slightly distracting video game feel, it’s often stirring stuff, and it’s skillfully integrated into the developing relationship between the title character and her mortal man.

Although overstuffed and uneven, at its best Gunn’s Superman combines the most admirable attributes of both character and director, resulting in an ambitious, occasionally stirring film that is weirder, nervier and more thoughtful than most blockbusters.

Dramatically the film can feel a little one-note and overlong. But it stands comparison with Derek Jarman’s Caravaggio as a fascinating portrait of an artist fighting to survive in the cut and thrust of times quite unlike our own.

Emily Watson leads the cast delivering, yet again, a stinging reminder of her talent.

With the film reminding us that the American system isn’t only failing people with diabetes, the battle for affordable healthcare rages on.

While there are admittedly some jarring notes, Lost And Love is an ambitious and assured debut, and sounds a note for Peng as a name to watch.

Miike is on fine form, never losing his sense of humour, or sense of character, even as yet another axe is embedded in yet another skull.

Although rarely as compelling as the estimable director’s finest achievements, it certainly merits attention as a sumptuously detailed evocation of a rarefied world defined as much by a unique set of rules as its abundant material comforts.

Comedy is a serious business and it is Earl and Hayward’s deadpan delivery, coupled with Archer’s maintenance of a documentary shooting style in the face of the ridiculous, that ensures the situation generates physical and verbal laughs.

Krampus, when he eventually shows his cards, is a dark delight, but this film has more to offer than a single monster – Dougherty has a few puppet side-shows, including elves, a clown which comes right out of Poltergeist’s closet and some stuffed animals which are the satanic mirrior images of our Toy Story friends. Ho, ho, ho, indeed.

A little more venom or bite might have been welcome but this is still an entertaining skewering of celebrity and the way a single day can flip from triumph to outright disaster

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

Brainwashed doesn’t deliver the opposing views you might like to see aired in a film like this - it’s not a debate for her, even though some film professionals still think it is - and Menkes shows possibly too many clips from her own films (as illustrations of the right sort of take), particularly as this lucid documentary draws to a close. Yet still it’s vigorous, often brash, and full of information.

A Shape Of Things To Come may not offer any grand insights into the never-ending battle between humanity and nature — between taking part in society and leaving it all behind — but this minor-key documentary suggests that, like some wild animals, Sundog is perhaps someone you don’t want to corner. There’s no telling what he might do.

While the first half of Rotting In The Sun may be overly self-indulgent, once Silva gets himself out of his system, he gives his skills and Saavedra an opportunity to shine.

Exploring a bewildering range of issues from ideas of masculinity to assisted suicide and the fraying of societal ties, Staying Vertical is wildly eccentric, darkly comic and filled with you-don’t-see-that-often moments which are liable to render it an acquired taste.

The beloved animated character’s latest big-screen adventure is an amusing romp full of the expected horrible puns, dopey slapstick and generally cheerful vibe.

Andrea Riseborough gives a guttural and reliably first-rate performance as the titular Leslie in Michael Morris’ painfully earnest feature debut about the limits of control.

Notable for the crispness of the lensing, Jose is deceptively simple but punches above its slight weight.

Exceedingly thoughtful and self-critical rather than lazily nostalgic, this well-acted coming-of-age tale can sometimes be predictable and muddled, but is steeped in the filmmaker’s sorrow for not recognising the ways in which he and those he loved contributed to an inequitable society that shows no signs of becoming less stratified.

There’s plenty to admire in this trim, nearly dialogue-free 97-minute drama, not least Mads Mikkelsen’s raw performance as a downed airman waiting for rescue in the Arctic wastes, and the widescreen majesty of the Icelandic landscapes that stand in for the film’s polar setting.

Richards is such a fun interviewee that there’s no point kvetching about the film’s superficial treatment.

This deviously constructed puzzle film plays cat and mouse (or to be exact, pet rat) with the viewer, yields subtly disconcerting insights into the fault lines of bourgeois life, and features terrific lead performances from Sabine Timoteo and Mark Waschke.

More like the testimony of an enthusiastic, fully committed supporter watching, in close-up, a populatoon reclaiming its rights, Afineevsky’s film accepts as a basic premise that Yanukevych is the villain. Anyone who differs should look elsewhere.

A film directed by Katie Holmes (and produced by Tribeca co-founder Jane Rosenthal) is a curiosity, and in this case a competent curiosity - no less competent than most of the independent films out there.

The laughs are split between deft sight gags and set pieces, and goofy word play.

Lacking nuance in its early stages, it matures into a more considered, moving tale that effectively blends the personal and the political.

The end result proves commanding and fascinating, even if it’s not wholly satisfying from start to finish.

Rather than attack his subject with bristling anger, Arcand approaches it with world-weary wit and the kind of warming optimism that might not appear out of place in a Frank Capra classic. The result is a little old-fashioned but also surprisingly endearing and feels like some of his best work in a while.

Writer-director Todd Stephens can allow quirkiness to overwhelm the thin narrative, but the story’s emotional underpinnings guide the film past its occasional rough spots.

It takes a little while to adjust to the film’s strong and deliberately oppressive stylistic approach, but Hinterland successfully avoids being swallowed up by its own aesthetic via the narrative’s propulsive momentum and the magnetic central performance by Muslu.

Warped visuals and layered dialogue give a sense of Dylan’s psychological battleground, while the use of reflective surfaces underscores Wang’s exploration of identity and perception.

Unusually for a Spielberg movie, Bridge of Spies is tonally uncertain.

The film may be short on analysis, but it’s clear that systematic government failures at the local and state level have created a toxic climate, and Whose Streets? displays the seething emotions that resulted.

The closer the documentary gets to individual musicians and their histories, the more engaging it becomes.