Strikingly photographed, sensitively acted but torpid in its pacing, this is filmmaking which will require a degree of patience from its audience.

Diane Kruger is compelling in the central role in this pacy procedural thriller which is persuasive in its depiction of contemporary spycraft but less convincing in mounting a case for why she would work for Mossad in the first place.

With a cast impressively headed by James Norton, and cinematography that captures the bleakness of winter and deprivation to grimly palatable effect, Holland’s drama comes across in part as a meticulously mounted, sometimes solemn history lesson.

A superb performance by Affleck, who constructs a touching and believable rapport with his 11 year-old co-star, grounds his low-key directorial and feature-writing debut.

It’s a big-hearted picture, certainly, but one that doggedly labours its message.

What’s both intriguing and enraging about the film is the fact that it so defiantly rejects the language of cinematic storytelling; this is a film which is intended to upend audience expectations.

Singh busts rhymes with the best of them in this energetic, entertaining film that smuggles some urgent social themes in under the cover of a hoary old fable about a handsome pauper who gets the stardom and the girl.

Perhaps the question is not whether the film needed to be so relentlessly grim, but rather whether it needed to be made at all.

Petrunya is careful to maintain the ideal balance, parodying the ridiculous response to its protagonist but never downplaying its realism.

Denis Côté’s eerie fantasy drama juxtaposes the mundane and the parochial with the supernatural, to sometimes disquieting effect.

Deep down this is a conventional and predictably plotted period drama about a clash between bodice-ripping passion and social mores.

With authentic spaces like this around them, Ahn’s actors relax into the realism.

Superbly acted and highly controlled, the film doesn’t afford easy entertainment, its slow pace and weighty sense of narrative responsibility making for heavy viewing during stretches of its extended running time.

Watergate is a fascinating film that both draws disturbing parallels and offers the opposition encouragement.

If tenderness is deployed to ease Shmuel’s grieving, those are not the scenes which give To Dust its special pungency, or what make you laugh. This film is at its best when it goes for the gut.

This comic melodrama wrings every last drop of drama from the set up.

One Child Nation is an utterly compelling documentary that examines the consequences of this staunchly enforced ‘social experiment’. If it stops short of making an explicit political statement, a series of powerful testimonies leaves a harrowing micro-level impression.

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.

Both intimate and epic, American Factory offers a remarkably candid, fly-on-the-wall account ... It’s a deceptively lighthearted look at one of the most significant cultural and economic conflicts of our times.

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

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.

Feels like a Saturday Night Live skit that’s been stretched out over 90 minutes.

If nothing else, this intimate, well-observed drama should prove to be a nice calling card for its first-time feature filmmaker.

Little Monsters doesn’t exactly reanimate the popular subgenre in novel ways, but there’s enough humorous gags, suspenseful scares, fleshy gore, and quite surprisingly, a dash of heartfelt sentiment, to make for an amusing thrill-ride.

There’s nothing more terrifying in this film than the creative talent wasted on such shockingly mediocre material.

As grimly gripping as Them That Follow is, the proceedings have a stacked-deck quality to them, which keeps this compelling tale from being truly galvanising.

This portrait of the artist as a young film-maker will certainly stand the test of time.

It’s intelligent and clever scripting, and except for a few moments where the dialogue is overly expository, as if Burns doesn’t trust his audience, The Report pulls back the curtain on America’s political machinations and one of its most appalling policy decisions and attempted cover-ups with startling clarity.

Photograph’s deliberate pace does bring some rich rewards for the patient viewer, while a lovely ending feels like a throwback to the old-fashioned big screen romances of yore.

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.

This is a gripping, sometimes hypnotising film in which notions of good and evil are less clear-cut than the urgent desire to stay alive.

Anchored by standout performances by Naomi Watts, Octavia Spencer and young Kelvin Harrison Jr., it’s a strong indie film about race, family and trust that should connect with fans of smart, provocative cinema.

Thompson delivers a memorable performance as the abrasive “cold witch,” as someone describes her, perhaps even outdoing Meryl Streep’s Miranda Priestly in The Devil Wars Prada as a delightfully wicked woman of power.

This ambitious debut features flashes of imaginative visuals, quirky dialogue, and well-meaning messages about gentrification and disenfranchisement.

Despite committed performances from LaBeouf, Lucas Hedges and Noah Jupe, Honey Boy ends up feeling indulgent rather than searing, settling into its anguish rather than translating it into trenchant drama.

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.

Mikhanovsky mixes different styles of comedy, but he binds them with a realist approach that grounds everything in an offhand, absurdist tone.

The Farewell is so fixated on its principle problem that it doesn’t allow its story or its characters to veer from it, or find further complexities in it. There’s only so many scenes a story can take of family members trying to keep the truth from grandma before it become less compelling.

Zac Efron projects the right amount of edgy, empty handsomeness, but the movie’s conceit doesn’t pay enough dividends — especially when trying to reconcile Bundy’s distortions of reality with the actual terror he caused in the 1970s.

Mascaro’s striking aesthetics give the film a texture and atmosphere that aligns the audience firmly with its protagonist; she’s seeking transcendence, and the movie she’s in approximates it one lustrous frame at a time.

However sceptical you feel about Brügger’s approach, and his findings, this is an arresting, troubling work – and, for all the horror, an intensely entertaining one too.

Cutting-edge performance-capture technology gives us a remarkably lifelike Alita, but although Robert Rodriguez clearly loves this pulpy genre material, that affection rarely translates into anything more than an impressive display of technical might.

A bullet-riddled tale of unlikely female empowerment, Miss Bala toys with exploitation and social commentary but doesn’t have the ingenuity or nerve to successfully pull off either.

Animals is a smoothly-made, beguiling tale of female friendship, which, like its protagonist Laura (Holliday Grainger), sometimes feels a little lost, in need of a home.

This earnest tale succeeds thanks to its potent themes — including the tension between old traditions and new ways of thinking — and Ejiofor locates the story’s emotional underpinnings without succumbing to cheap manipulation or mawkishness.

While this flimsy coming-of-age drama over-relies on the Boss’s greatest hits for its emotional high points, this remains a likeable and touching story about finding your own voice.

This meticulously conceived documentary is both a definitive account of the voyage as well as a creative, cinematic you-are-there unfolding of the events that transpired.

Despite a stellar cast led by Julianne Moore and Michelle Williams, After The Wedding never cuts very deeply, staying on the surface of a tale that ought to tear into the viewer’s soul the way it does these tormented characters.

The film benefits from Pugh’s charismatic performance and writer-director Stephen Merchant’s cheery mixture of crowd-pleasing sentiment, wry laughs and genuine sweetness.

It’s ultimately a forgettable lark, amounting to little more than a spiteful attack on the vapidity of the commercial art-world. There’s nothing lampooned here that we haven’t already seen before, whether it be a pretentious art critic or avaricious art dealers.

This English-language remake of In Order Of Disappearance by its Norwegian director Hans Petter Moland doesn’t particularly succeed as a thriller, but the film’s gleeful perversity at refusing to satisfying genre conventions gives it a scruffy integrity all the same.

Although compelling ideas float through High Flying Bird, the film is neither well crafted or intellectually rigorous enough to compensate for a generally lacklustre presentation.

The fun pop-culture riffing remains, but The Second Part lacks the density of ingenuity, humour and whiz-bang action that marked the first film. Rather than bursting with imagination and wit, the sequel feels busy, overstuffed, a little routine.

Offering little in terms of exposition and even less when it comes to dialogue, Fischer’s sophomore effort develops character and, eventually, unsettling moral questions entirely through action, playing as a more consciously political companion piece to J.C. Chandor’s similarly taciturn All is Lost.

The Breaker Upperers might suffer from a too-neat third act, but it wins hearts and hearty guffaws along the way.

[An] earnest, entertaining and imaginative old-meets-new adventure.

Nia DaCosta’s heartland tale, rough around some edges, is a promising feature debut.

Elegantly shot and fluidly edited, What Is Democracy? reveals Taylor’s sure instincts as she shapes the vast sprawl of often disparate, sometimes random-feeling material into a focused, thought-provoking essay that even leaves you feeling that there was so much more to say on the subject.

Understated and confidently judged, it becomes a testimony to the old-fashioned virtues of social-realist storytelling rooted in ordinary lives and timely concerns.

Despite the pyrotechnics of McAvoy’s performances and Willis’s grounded conviction, there’s just not enough here past the high concept of “what if real people were superheroes?”.

Sequences depicting the Selma marches – the first of which led to violent police attacks that were seen on national TV and helped change the mood of the country – are fairly understated, when a more visceral approach might have given the film more emotional heft.

Story strands feel half developed; pacing seems erratic.

Even if The Hate U Give succumbs to cliché on occasion, it remains a surprisingly bold and thoughtful studio film about racism.

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.

It’s the shocking disjunct between his religion and the rabid nationalism of his sermons, writings and declarations that powers Schroeder’s conventional but nevertheless effective long hard stare into the eyes of intolerance.

The film’s coming-of-age story might remain familiar, its emotional arc may be broad, and its messages about self-belief and taking chances fall into the tried-and-tested camp, but DeBlois still builds an engaging, sincere and tender world brimming with depth and detail.

A fascinating, sometimes frightening film which, like its subjects, is perhaps a little too ambitious for its own good.

A tender, intelligent imagining of the playwright in retirement.

This is a film that often feels more assembled than directed, crucially lacking the sheer verve that would enable it to transcend the influences that it proudly wears on its dusty sleeve.

For a movie that’s supposed to be about a modern-day Geppetto bringing his dolls to life, the wooden Welcome to Marwen never makes it out of the toy box.

Jackson’s film is more than a technical tribute: it’s a testament to the bravery and camaraderie of the soldiers, the memory of which has faded like the photographs he brings back to life. In a way, it helps arrest the fear that we are forgetting this futile obliteration of an entire generation.

There’s anger but no insight in Vice, a glib portrait of Dick Cheney that preaches to the choir but becomes less persuasive as it goes along.

Christopher Martin’s documentary adaptation of Conroy’s book is a powerful, humbling salute to a breed of fearless figures willing to risk their lives as they bear witness to history’s unfolding horrors.

Last Letter is snugly nestled at the sugarcoated end of the director’s tonal spectrum with its tale of a family tragedy which revives a high school love triangle decades after it had seemingly ended in heartbreaking fashion.

While this defiantly unflashy film may similarly feel out of step, long on mawkishness and short on dynamic, arresting moments, the purity of its gently mournful tone stays with you.

This is a big-hearted song and dance spectacle for the entire family in which everyone laughs at the same jokes.

A superhero movie with the scope of an epic but the spirit of a mischievous boy, Aquaman is a goofy, uneven adventure that proudly sticks to its loopy vision even if it doesn’t quite work.

Director Travis Knight does his best to balance clattering spectacle with a modest girl-and-her-robot tale. He’s assisted mightily by Hailee Steinfeld, who infuses this uneven action film with significant soul.

This latest in the ‘personal growth through gentle humiliation’ genre is amiable enough, but does suffer from the over-familiarity of themes and plot-points.

Ardalan Esmaili and Soho Rezanejad give the film a real sense of compassion and depth, with their scenes together brimming with depth and a sense of shared history.

The heady fusion of teenage romance, gothic fantasy and Mafia thriller becomes an immersive, atmospheric drama.

Never Look Away is an often moving, thoughtful drama about the correlations between personal experience, politics and art.

There is a mixture of styles in Dead In A Week that never quite gels.

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.

A confident blend of comic-book élan and stirring sentiment, Spider-Man: Into The Spider-Verse finds fresh ways to tell the familiar story of everyone’s favourite web-slinger.

A timely film, capable of sparking vigorous debate.

Grimly upbeat rather than merry, and relentless rather than frenetic, the film’s gritty zest is splashed across the screen with momentum, but also to the point of overuse. It serves a late heist set piece well, yet wears thin in a sea of training, thieving and fighting montages elsewhere.

Contradictory impulses dominate Creed II. This sequel to the 2015 smash hit is both emotional and formulaic, nuanced and shameless, determined to set its own course while slavishly loyal to franchise strictures.

The feature debut of Vladimir De Fontenay is an accomplished piece with a committed central performance from Imogen Poots, but the emotional impact is lessened by an air of predictability and the sense that every bit of fresh hope is destined to end in disappointment.

Saoirse Ronan and Margot Robbie are both superb in muted performances and, while the film’s palace intrigue gets a bit dense, the story never loses sight of its deep compassion for these characters and their shared plight of being held hostage by conniving, belittling, power-hungry men determined to usurp their authority.

As predictable as their tale may be, Chaplin, Tena and Verdaguer serve their characters well, with the former and latter particularly impressing with the material.

The wide ranging perspectives of painters, collectors, dealers and gallery owners makes for a thought-provoking and unexpectedly moving film.

This is a film which fizzes with originality, one which works both as a pacey thriller and a playfully surreal intellectual exercise.

The sequel to 2012’s Wreck-It Ralph boasts a big heart and some clever comedic set pieces, and yet this follow-up fails to match the original’s balance of savvy pop-culture nostalgia and genuine emotional stakes. Ralph and Vanellope are still fun company, but their latest adventure is full of glitches.

Outside of its admiration for mothers, Bier’s film seems to only vaguely hint at other ephemeral ideas, and as a result Bird Box is a curiously hollow experience.

It’s raw religion, and it’s a treasure.

The storytelling in Sex is ho-hum, but the sincerity of the undertaking — and the issues at the film’s centre — make it hard to resist, no matter what objections might be raised.

There’s real magic here, and nothing fake about the emotions which guide it.