High Life offers an uncompromising mind-bender of a deep space journey through destructive desire, faith, trust and the instincts for good and bad that make us merely human.

Moore’s performance means that we are with Gloria every step of the way, sharing in the little victories and the jolting setbacks.

A Simple Favor wants it both ways, hoping to be a stylish, twisty, trashy thriller while simultaneously acting superior to the genre’s slinky pleasures. Those conflicting strategies do the film no favours.

If Beale Street isn’t quite as seamless as the Oscar-winning Moonlight, this adaptation of the James Baldwin novel still proves to be a stirring, absorbing experience that articulates something ineffable about everyday life.

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.

Buried in makeup that accentuates her character’s hard-luck existence, Nicole Kidman brings such compelling conviction to her role as a tormented detective that she single handedly imbues the film with urgency and authenticity. That proves crucial, since director Karyn Kusama often miscalculates Destroyer’s sense of its own profundity.

Several emotionally attuned performances help paper over Boy Erased’s storytelling weaknesses.

Director Marielle Heller is less interested in the machinations of Israel’s scheme as she is the psychology behind it, giving us a touchingly understated portrait of self-loathing and loneliness.

The distinguishing, and perhaps unsurprising element - given McQueen’s strong characterisation in the past – is that each of the film’s many characters comes fully-formed.

As is often the case with Moore’s impassioned documentaries, 11/9 frustrates as much as it rouses, bouncing from topic to topic without fully digging into any of them. As such, it’s a highlight reel of grievances against government, corporations and the status quo that preaches to the choir.

Skimpy psychological insight, a clumsy structure and what turns out to be a miscast Smith all contribute towards what seems like a wasted opportunity.

Strong, committed performances and the upsetting ring of reality anchor a highly-personal film which cycles through addiction, relapse and rehab in an episodic way, each high as inevitable as the low which follows.

The Front Runner may cover a lot of ground and raise more questions about morality and the media than it can ever answer, but it remains a punchy, absorbing political drama.

Tongue firmly in cheek and sporting a taste for blood, The Predator has some nasty down-and-dirty pleasures, but director Shane Black can’t entirely reconcile his lightly self-mocking tone with the film’s muscular B-movie action.

The new film from ’71 director Yann Demange is best when it pauses to explore the father-and-son drama at the heart of this tale, as well as coldly examining America’s ruinous drug policy.

The result is a fascinating but also in some ways frustrating film, a game of tag that looks resoundingly cinematic but feels like more of a cable or VOD prospect - not least because it lacks the killer punch, the Bannon stumble or revelation that would make American Dharma newsworthy.

This essential documentary is necessarily, unflinchingly grim; the cinematic equivalent of walking in the survivors’ shoes, and a complex, challenging but crucial viewing experience that burrows its immense sorrows deep into the audience’s bones.

A fair bit of historical scene-setting at the beginning means that the picture takes a while to hit its stride. But once it does, there is much to enjoy in this big, brawling ruck of an action movie.

Singer-songwriter Ben Dickey is affecting as Foley, assisted ably by a supporting cast that fights to transcend the drunken-angel clichés of the man’s legacy.

The forlorn feel of Hotel By The River becomes increasingly endearing, and there is a strain of bone dry humour that lightens the mood.

A tight, focused piece of storytelling, Sibel is impressive in the way it also embraces the journeys of the other characters. Sibel’s newfound defiance and confidence in herself also changes her sister and allows her father to actively embrace a more modern view of the world.

If The Nun leaves a haunting impression, it’s of a missed opportunity to capitalise upon a visually distinctive antagonist within an existing hit series. The end result feels like an exercise in joining obvious franchise dots and paving the way for future films.

A saga of complicated relationships, longings and heartbreak sometimes strains to fully develop all its disparate elements. Yet this is still an ambitious feat of storytelling delivered with a sensitivity to mood and emotion.

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

As with his United 93 and Captain Phillips, filmmaker Paul Greengrass has taken a horrifying true story and brought sober perspective to it — in the case of 22 July, suggesting that a community’s response to terror can be as critical to a democracy as the attacks themselves.

Vox Lux is intellectually charged spectacle, with one foot in the Euro-art tradition and the other ankle-deep in the pop zeitgeist.

Can a film be baffling and rewarding at the same time? Can a stimulating cinematic experience co-exist with the suspicion that the filmmaker has deliberately set out to frustrate the audience? For all who believe the answer to those questions can be ‘yes’, then Sunset (Napszállta), second film by Son of Saul director László Nemes provides a rich seam to explore.

Anyone expecting a progression in Zahler’s work may be disappointed, as the amusingly mannered dialogue starts to feel self-conscious and forced, as does the fatalism.

Despite a strong, affecting performance by Willem Dafoe – who, even more than Kirk Douglas or Pialat’s star Jacques Dutronc, looks born to the part – the director’s pugnacious visual and editing style never impart the kinetic emotional charge of his 2007 drama The Diving Bell and the Butterfly.

It is a striking, sustained artistic achievement, but one as painful and distressing to watch as it must have been to live through.

This is a Western which is rugged and raw, eschewing the genre’s mythmaking for something a little more off the beaten path.

Suffice to say, Suspiria tries to do much, culminating in a finale that’s almost laughably over-the-top. But the passion of Guadagnino’s messy vision — the swirl of emotions he conjures on this grand canvas — has a forcefulness that mostly transcends its sizable flaws.

This magnificently-realised film moves from feeling like a long, dry history lesson to becoming an angrily-direct and emotional tribute to the reformers of the past.

Entertaining and informative as a contextualising accompaniment to Welles’s reconstructed experimental project The Other Side of the Wind...Neville’s film may reveal little that hardcore Wellesians don’t already know. But it offers a lively evocation of the great man’s brilliance, waywardness and pained relationship to Hollywood history.

Ballad doesn’t reinvent the Coens’ sardonic, measured aesthetic, but the anthology’s looser structure allows them a friskiness that is welcome from such masterful veterans.

Taken on its own terms as an unashamedly anachronistic attempt to muster the emotional intensity of the Hollywood melodrama tradition, Cooper’s film must be at least grudgingly acknowledged as a success.

The prolific French director clearly needed to breeze through this one – and the breeziness is infectious.

It’s a safe bet that many contemporary viewers will find the film confusing, abrasive, pretentious and antediluvian in its sexual politics. But there’s no denying the audacity of Welles’s undertaking, and of the reconstruction project. What can be said with certainty is that this version of Wind is perplexing, sometimes exhausting but never less than fascinating.

The craftsmanship on display in Let The Corpses Tan is flawless.

The Favourite is one of those rare films where the energy generated by three talents at the top of their game and the energy generated by their characters swirl and merge in a perfect storm.

While the film doesn’t quite work as a horror, and can stumble as a character piece, Abrahamson has pulled together a sumptuous production which is more than sufficient to keep viewers engaged throughout.

Loveridge doesn’t seem to trust Maya’s natural significance and strains for the doc about her to achieve UN levels of relevance. Taking her for what she is would have been more than enough.

It’s a beautifully made film, with an impeccable lead performance from Ryan Gosling as the sober, sensitive astronaut. Yet it’s also a film which takes elegant flight but stalls across its extended closing sequences; a project which, in its probing of Armstrong’s emotional mechanisms, neglects the development of other characters who might have anchored it more securely.

The film can be difficult to get a handle on, but eventually encourages you to surrender to its poetic moods and distinctive rhythms.

Kin never feels like more than uninspired borrowings from other, better genre films; it’s a story about family without any heart.

The film crafts a framework of superstition and ritual, onto which is hung a vividly realised, if somewhat enigmatic portrait of a child’s life.

Smart writing and an unflinching relish when it comes to the scenes of violence make for a deftly handled genre piece.

While the actors and puppeteers are committed to The Happytime Murders’ surreal reality, they almost do too good a job: This world’s authenticity is so complete that you’re left mostly slogging through how inanimate most everything else about the movie is.

In theory there’s plenty here to engage: a critique of Little England philistinism, the arrival of provocative literature into a sleepy backwater that barely reads, the revolt of a courageous woman against the establishment. Yet none of that comes to life.

Winning and confusing in equal measure, this Japanese animated feature is likely to attract devout admirers but also baffle a significant number of viewers.

The adrenaline never stops pumping in Mile 22, a superficially kinetic thriller that simultaneously attempts to be politically savvy and an ultra-macho shoot-‘em-up. That juggling act proves too sophisticated for director Peter Berg who, in his fourth collaboration with Mark Wahlberg, again demonstrates his sufficient skill at crafting dynamic suspense sequences.

The film delivers a dark coming-of-age tale through the young lead’s uncertain perception, tinged with uneasy implications and poetic flights of fancy.

A film about stellar spycraft that’s been made with comparable steely intelligence, The Spy Gone North (Gongjak) boasts little action but compensates with director Yoon Jong-bin’s considerable ability to weave suspense while depicting the subtle maneuverings of a fraught covert operation.

To be sure, there are meaningful observations here about the ways that money warps relationships and how children struggle with their heritage. But by trying so hard to concoct a blowout party, the movie exhausts and frustrates as much as it enlightens and delights.

It’s a likeable popcorn movie, with some good monster moments, an engaging international cast and Jon Turteltaub helming a family-friendly balance of laughter and mayhem.

The film’s main triumph is the way that the toy characters are evoked.

The violence is never stylized, Córdova showing its subtle, corrosive force in these people’s lives.

Rising star Amandla Stenberg has a few affecting moments as one of the few teen survivors of a mysterious pandemic, but director Jennifer Yuh Nelson’s live-action feature debut mostly walks in the footsteps of bolder and more original takes on similar sci-fi subject matter.

Genre defying and genuinely unexpected, this intriguing urban fairytale takes the mythology of the werewolf story and uses it as a prism through which to view contemporary Brazilian society. Thematically rich, it weaves together fantasy horror elements with commentaries on class, race, sexuality and motherhood.

The narrative intricacy is daunting but, for viewers willing to keep track, the pleasure lies in the way that Kitano tracks the moves as they advance to an inexorably logical climax.

Jude makes us think and makes us feel and succeeds in making Blecher a presence in the film.

Tyrnauer smartly dissects how stifling the era’s sexual politics were — and his affectionate portrait of Bowers sneaks in some balance by critiquing him for writing a juicy tell-all that, in essence, outed people without their permission.

As much as BuyBust seems to be engineered for maximum excitement, it’s not without the complexities that are typical of Matti’s ambitious genre pieces.

For a spell, this sequel to the 2014 hit intrigues because of its insistence on taking time to establish melancholy themes and thoughtful tone. But no amount of Denzel Washington’s weary authority is enough to distract from the fact that this overstuffed, ultimately unsatisfying potboiler merely dresses up its clichés in strained gravitas.

The template may remain essentially cheesy and the men still appear never to have experienced a dance floor. Yet it would be churlish to argue against a film of such smile-out-loud optimism.

It takes its narrative cue from the Bon Secours mother-and-baby home in Tuam, County Galway in which “significant” numbers of dead children have been discovered. Even though this is placed within a potentially-exploitative genre framework, it is still handled with sensitivity and sympathy by this latest female director to flesh out horror tropes.

The sixth film in the series is among the most outstanding, delivering a near-exhausting amount of stupendous action sequences paired with deft character drama and the requisite life-or-death stakes. Fallout is a testament to writer-director Christopher McQuarrie, who gives the proceedings a witty, sophisticated grandeur, and yet the film belongs to Cruise and his seemingly limitless passion for putting himself and his audience through the wringer.

Anyone expecting a shred of originality from this Dwayne Johnson vehicle will be disappointed, but writer-director Rawson Marshall Thurber tries his best to compensate by amping up the over-the-top spectacle, hoping sheer gusto will keep viewers from minding his film’s shaky foundation.

For all its deft style and sympathetic characters, there’s still something missing in We,The Animals. In its efforts to evoke a young boy’s inner-world, it falls short of fully capturing his emotional reality. Jonah’s story should be heartbreaking, but when we see images of him flying over the forest, it’s just picturesque and lyrical.

There are more engaging fireworks, or at least small sparks, when the film begins to dig into the feelings, friendships and jealousies of its two main protagonists.

The smouldering animosity of an impoverished small town towards two outsiders, combined with the contained tension as a precarious alibi collapses, one chance event at a time, means that the film should resonate with audiences looking for effective genre material.

It’s a testament to Macdonald’s performance (and later, to Khan’s charm) that we share her passion for puzzling.

With more inspired lunacy or smarter plotting, Lobster Cop could have been a surprising treat. As it is, this is perfectly digestible light entertainment that won’t have anyone coming back for seconds.

A documentary of stunning beauty and tragic violence.

Us and Them may be too familiar to thoroughly distinguish itself from the spate of similarly themed love stories that have been churned out following the breakthrough success of Zhao Wei’s So Young (2013), but it’s certainly one of the more nuanced entries in the cycle and bodes well for Liu’s future behind the camera.

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.

Paul Rudd and his equally likeable cast mates find the heart and humour in familiar comic-book theatrics, resulting in a film which is less concerned with generating awe than in delivering plenty of goofy grins.

It’s a powerful, profoundly uncomfortable watch.

No matter how commanding Benicio Del Toro and Josh Brolin might be, Soldado is a less inspired or thoughtful redo of its predecessor, jettisoning nuance for amped-up nihilism.

It’s to Hepburn’s credit that Never Steady, Never Still avoids any of the histrionics or melodrama often associated with such stories. Instead, she offers keen-eyed, compassionate observation of the impact of illness that, while not shying away from its emotional toll, celebrates the strength and sanctuary a family can provide.

A thoroughly enjoyable, visually ravishing feminist Western played out in the widescreen vistas of rural Indonesia, Marlina The Murderer In Four Acts weaves basic elements into a tale worth telling splendidly accompanied by a sit-up-and-take-notice musical score.

This is a downbeat slog of a film which tells a not particularly involving story.

Sunday’s Illness doesn’t put a foot wrong.

Tag is all strained sentimentality and obvious observations about men’s inability to leave childish things behind.

If there’s one quibble with this nimble entertainment, it’s that Bird’s eye-popping flair outpaces his story’s emotional resonance. Incredibles 2 is such a fleet treat that it doesn’t always stop for its characters’ pathos to really connect.

No matter how melodramatic the story becomes, and how much the emotions boil, What Will People Say at least tries to understand both sides of this cultural and generational divide.

Like many movies set in colourfully bleak futures, Hotel Artemis can’t sustain the novelty of its initial world-building.

British actor and TV host James Corden gets a bigger role in the story’s last act, but even his cuddly charm and pop culture cachet fails to bring this surprisingly flat action comedy to life.

Spain’s J. A. Bayona is essentially stirring the same Jurassic pot here, with little that’s inspiring from his cast, unless you count the dinosaurs.

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.

Despite the congested narrative, there is much to keep audiences entertained including the compelling performances by the entire cast.

Despite the endearing reticence of its subject, Westwood: Punk, Icon, Activist uses interviews, archive footage and intimate fly-on-the-wall access to get (almost) to the heart of this remarkable woman; although one suspects that Westwood will always keep some secrets firmly up her sleeve.

Unsettlingly perceptive as well as absurdly comedic, Under the Tree chronicles domestic tensions left to fester; when grudges branch out like a leafy tree in a suburban backyard, everyone suffers.

Director Baltasar Kormákur makes good use of location filming on the open waters, giving this melodramatic tale a dose of realism, but this true story is never as harrowing as the subject matter would suggest. Blame it on a misjudged narrative device and Adrift’s generally adolescent approach to relationships and maritime emergencies.

Though the script rarely makes an unexpected choice, it’s the way that the film dissects its many underlying complications that matters more than eschewing predictability. Calmly, but filled with feeling, Graizer lets his protagonists’ actions and choices subvert the norm.

Aping sporting conventions, The Workers Cup relates a riveting underdog tale about a quest for glory, while simultaneously probing the reality faced by the poorest people in the world’s wealthiest country.

Like taking a dip in alluring yet choppy surf, as its characters do often, it’s equally vivid and calm, swelling with emotion yet still in its approach.

The remake of Papillon doesn’t lack for potential metaphorical riches, yet this brutal, bruising film never quite connects with its deeper themes, resulting in a story full of suffering but not enough transcendence.