Even though it sometimes feels as if Corsini is trying to keep too many plates spinning, the whole risky exercise pays off to provocative effect.

Its reflections on modern relationships are engagingly comical, cynical and ultimately tender.

This sequel to the unlikely 2012 male-stripper sensation has an agreeably ramshackle spirit and another winning turn from star and producer Channing Tatum. As for the dancing, it’s as deliciously spirited as ever.

It is a nicely-packaged, technically-proficient production that stands out due to its timing, certainly, but also for the power and personality of the female comedians interviewed by the directors.

The Peasants again melds oil paintings (some 40,000 of them) over live-action footage of actors to become a dynamic, immersive drama that brings the pleasures and pains of the past to ravishing life.

It remains a superficial exercise in creepy fun, but – like so many horror sequels – retreading familiar ground proves an exercise in diminishing returns.

The cluttered structure, littered with brusque little flashbacks, repeatedly interrupts the momentum and tension of the story of Nureyev’s most daring leap.

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.

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.

Dead for a Dollar is a revisionist western served up in a traditional twine-tied package.

There’s no question that director Liesl Tommy and star Jennifer Hudson have approached this project with reverence, hoping to highlight the late singer’s importance both as a cultural figure and a symbol of her era. But the cliches that usually attend such biopics — specifically, the need to simplify an individual’s demons and traumas into easily digestible dramatic beats — are especially frustrating here, leaving this overly earnest picture lacking the vibrancy of its dynamic subject.

There’s an observational authenticity that is refreshing in an audiovisual culture whose attempts at self-analysis are too often skewed by melodrama. It’s also heartening to see such delicate stories of ordinary people come to the fore in a country whose filmmakers faces enormous hurdles; technical, financial and bureaucratic.

[Speer’s] damning answers to Birkin’s questions might have threatened to become repetitive if they didn’t paint a horrifying yet bleakly fascinating picture of a man doing something that remains thoroughly relevant today: spinning fake news.

Donzelli’s observations on the working poor don’t dig deep enough, resulting in an overly polished glimpse at the struggles of making ends meet.

This is stylish, commercial storytelling that marks a big leap forward for Ortega and should put Lorenzo Ferro on the map.

Burdened with a drab quest narrative and populated by sweet but unmemorable characters, the studio’s 22nd feature still delivers glorious animation and the occasional tear-jerking sequence. But whether it’s the pedestrian design of this mythical realm or the simplistic story of squabbling brothers in search of their long-lost father, Onward never feels like much of an advancement.

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.

The accomplished third film from Emanuel Parvu, Three Kilometers To The End Of The World is a disaster unfolding in slow motion. Superbly acted and deliberately paced, the film is a compulsive account of the shattering of a family, and of a life changed forever.

Despite its Chinese setting and characters, the movie doesn’t feel appreciably different from so many other previous tales of lost young people who learn friendship through a pet or extra-terrestrial, and the story’s broad humour and pedestrian plotting don’t add much to this perfunctory fable.

This Hamlet sticks to the narrative essentials to produce a terse, pitiless retelling.

Apart from a few quippy anecdotes, the only thing holding Elton John: Never Too Late together is the songs.

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.

Those laudable intentions can too often result in a lethargic narrative. The characters may contain degrees of shading, but they rarely come to life, leaving Nuremberg feeling like a professional but dusty reenactment.

Delgado keeps us invested in the fate of these two girls without tipping the film towards overt melodrama or sentimentality.

There is a big effort put into the world building, which pays off.

Olivia Munn is quite touching as the title character, and the picture cleverly dramatises the conflicting thoughts that bounce around inside us and, often, dictate our lives.

The combination of exuberant energy, wise-cracking humour and warmhearted emotion makes for a captivating crowdpleaser.

Part of what makes Brides so engaging — and not in a passive way – is its closeness to the truth: not just of the Begum story, but life truths.

Taron Egerton brings a desperate energy to his role as one of those entrepreneurs who discovers how business was conducted behind the Iron Curtain. But director Jon S. Baird fumbles the narrative’s tricky tonal balance, resulting in a glib, convoluted film that is never as engrossing as the game these characters are fighting over.

In a way, the film is its own genre – the found-footage documentary. There are no interviews with other people, no self-described experts. Just Hoon, who – adding to the film’s melancholy sense of waste – comes across as an unspoiled, charismatic and mostly amiable young man.

Rob Peace is buoyed by Jay Will’s touching lead performance as the titular aspiring scientist, but the film struggles to bring coherence to this cautionary tale, ambitiously tackling several themes and tones but never quite bringing them together into an engrossing whole.

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 is pretty much exactly the kind of film that anyone familiar with Eisenberg’s body of acting work might imagine he would make: it’s sharp, challenging and wry, but as insistent and uncomfortable as a splinter.

While that familiarity is Scream VI’s major strength, it has also become its fundamental flaw. The location may have changed, the kills may be increasingly inventive, but underneath all that window dressing it’s the same as it ever was.

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.

Fennell is in that kind of blow-it-all-up mode, and the result is a spikily entertaining, narratively rackety ride led by a formidable Barry Keoghan in devil-may-care mode.

Certainly the film comes across in its revved-up, fragmented, ramshackle way as a modern Russian epic – with Limonov as a unique anomalous individual, yet at the same time somehow exemplifying the contradictions and neuroses of a tormented modern nation. He also comes across as a human, flawed figure, self-aggrandising, self-pitying, sometimes helplessly romantic.

Battaglia talks candidly as she picks over the pieces of a life that could easily stretch to more than one film.

Kingsman: The Secret Service is so well served in terms of gags, action and style that it bodes well for another savvy spy franchise and even more so for the star potential of Taron Egerton.

The Pod Generation blends its tech parody with more quirky observations of the anxieties of impending parenthood and, if Barthes doesn’t always sink the satire’s talons in quite as far as she might, the film’s sweet-natured hopefulness and charming central couple should see it win over distributors and audiences.

The movie is delightfully odd but not consistently inspired, often straining to rewrite the rules of superhero cinema, a mixture of good and bad ideas all mashed together. Where other comic-book movies lumber along with self-importance, this film is a breezy, amoral lark, which proves somewhat refreshing. But that’s not enough to allow Birds’ hit-or-miss pleasure to soar.

The atmospheric revenge-thriller marks the feature filmmaking debut of actor/writer/director Leah Purcell, who plays the titular matriarch with steely resolve, rousingly adapts her own play and book, and delivers an impassioned film with an unflinching Indigenous and feminist perspective.

Poignant and frustrating in equal measure, The Light Between Oceans aspires to be an elegant melodrama, but the intelligence that director Derek Cianfrance and his capable cast bring to bear eventually becomes overwhelmed by the story’s emotional manipulations.

Though it’s all a bit ridiculous—and Simien, in certain instances, acknowledges the humour in his horror—the film is anchored by Elle Lorraine’s breakout performance.

The more that Nalluri tries to connect Dickens’ personal breakthroughs to those of his fictional character, the less authentic it feels. Inadvertently, this forgettable bauble ends up illustrating just how rare and precious true inspiration is.

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.

Sandra Bullock and Channing Tatum have a great, flirtatious rapport in The Lost City, yet something is missing in this romantic-comedy action-adventure, which sports a funny premise but slipshod execution.

The film is a patchwork portrait that combines the joys and irritations, the petty arguments and the homespun warmth of this environment.

It’s a film with considerable heart and, in Nighy and Ward, the Tinker Bell sparkle of the true film-star.

Bond has seen it all before, this team has done it all before, and the production juggernaut hits every beat with a carefully calibrated precision which can be deeply satisfying but also risk coming across as rote.

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

Desplechin has a gift for examining grief and pain but often leavens the dismay with humour or irony. It is impossible to predict whether catharsis is within reach and that delicate balance is what keeps the proceedings compelling.

Savill keeps the tone upbeat, homing in on her character study. From goofy grins to anxiety-ridden wide eyes, Scotney’s range and talent is clear: her comic timing and commitment to Millie’s mania are exemplary. But in centring her above all else, there are a few too many narrative stones left unturned.

This Ghostbusters doesn’t lazily insert the actresses into the original characters’ roles, instead taking the time to come up with new dynamics — and far more pathos — for this quartet.

When Raimi is allowed to indulge his weird streak — especially during an audacious third act — the picture pushes past the franchise’s predictably polished sheen to arrive at sequences that are livelier and odder than Marvel normally permits.

Late Night director Nisha Ganatra brings a bighearted sincerity and more than a few touching moments, and it is a pleasure to see Lohan back in a major big-screen role. But her charming performance cannot compensate fully for a perhaps unavoidably convoluted plot.

Sure, there’s a strong element of arch playfulness in the exercise, but that doesn’t make the end result any less tiresome. In Eisenstein In Guanajuato, Greenaway is good at making us look, but not at making us care.

Turbo Kid is a wild enough burlesque that the audience can ignore a few things that don’t seem quite right.... Harder to ignore is that Turbo Kid, which was first made as a short, struggles to sustain its energy for 89 minutes of evisceration.

For all its showy, whirring machinations, the film isn’t especially light on its feet — and its murder mystery isn’t very engrossing.

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.

Frauke Finsterwalder’s take on the Empress is a lavish production favouring an accessibly middlebrow, at times almost soapy, approach.

Director Jon Watts’ self-penned script possesses a faultless sense of timing, and it becomes the gift that keeps on giving in the hands of Clooney, Pitt and a fine supporting cast.

It’s a trip, and then some.

The clichés start to arrive in rapid succession. Even the most moving performances cannot disguise their obviousness.

At its core, The Kill Team has one great performance, and some important things to say – about the dangerous appeal of the strong, and the easy malleability of the young. It’s well worth watching, and thinking on. It’s just a shame that that great performance isn’t matched by all the others – and that what the film has to say is said in such a dutifully by-the-book way.

Bryan Cranston creates a potent sense of Trumbo as a reasonable man, full of charm, eloquence and principle and he is surrounded by a string of performances to savour.

It’s a story with a brilliant conceptual framework that never quite coalesces into a satisfying drama.

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.

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.

Franco manages to maintain credibility as he ramps up the emotional stakes, creating situations in which the viewer longs to jump into the screen and change the course of events.

A World War II romance-thriller that starts off smartly but sputters to an underwhelming finale.

Whether Medusa Deluxe quite convinces us that it needed to be a one-shot exercise, it’s carried off niftily — the electric performances, from a super-alert, bristling cast, giving a feel of live event to the action, framed in Academy ratio.

This clever, heavily meta picture has fun both mocking its own existence and trying to find enough twists to justify itself. The result is a film which is superficially appealing even if it is ultimately undone by the contortions necessary to keep the irreverent sleight-of-hand going.

One of Pixar’s most beloved characters gets an origin story with Lightyear, a lacklustre sci-fi adventure which misses the wit and wonder that have been the studio’s hallmarks for decades.

What it lacks in novelty, subtlety or character, it partially makes up in sheer abandon. This is a big, loud, violent, gleefully gory sledgehammer of a film with, crucially, a careful tongue in cheek.

For all his shame, and the shuttered windows and disconnected webcams that block out the world outside, there’s a magnetism to Charlie and his big, overburdened heart which draws others – and us, as an audience – to him.

The later stretches, which are forced to become oblique and symbolic in the absence of any hard evidence about what really happened to the sailor, showcase some of Firth’s best screen work.

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.

There’s real feeling in this story — and a genuine desire to challenge audience expectations — which is laudable but only takes Stillwater so far.

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.

Moshe is not the first filmmaker to grapple with theories surrounding the manipulation of the fabric of time but his intimate approach, coupled with strong performances, make this an intelligent homespun take on a familiar subject.

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

Wiig is terrific, but there’s just not enough of her. It truly is a wonder to see an A-lister like Chris Pine embrace the traditional female support role of the pretty sidekick so winningly, while Gadot is as smooth as silk and never less than watchable. The team is there, but this is most definitely a sequel.

The film also has plenty of faults. One of the main problems is that Ophelia is still under-written.

There’s ample amusement in the twists, betrayals and revelations that unspool. But Bad Times never really transcends the inherent limitations of its setup; it’s fun, but fleeting.

The Choral is a narratively jumbled film whose unrestrained sweetness and adept ensemble tie up some of the film’s looser ends.

George Clooney and newcomer Britt Robertson are solidly compelling, but Tomorrowland remains only a moderate success, its ingenuity, wit and enormous heart too often at odds with a ho-hum story and tentpole conventionality that the film tries so hard to transcend.

For those who remain seated, this is a strange and forthright cinematic object with considerable rough-hewn charm. Those who recall Jesus Christ, Superstar will feel faint pangs of familiarity at the mix of sincerity and crazed audacity.

Hardly lacking ambition or verve, this amped-up fairy tale comes complete with social commentary and a grownup examination of the consequences of seeking connection, but the episodic, intermittently engaging saga frustrates more than it enchants.

Dark Night is a drama of grim inevitability.

Wittock has neatly sketched out her subject and a groovy neon palette for scenes involving Jumbo “himself”, but the story and general characterisation remains broad and thinly developed.

There’s a great deal of fun to be had watching Hardiman play out her cards; we know the hand she’s holding, but it’s a nice-looking deck nonetheless.

Jack Black’s mildly theatrical, knowingly hammy performance is but one of this horror-comedy’s overdone elements, and the film fails to rise above the level of perfunctory effects-driven spectacle.

El Planeta writer-director Amalia Ulman’s second feature tackles exploitation and cultural tourism, the film’s genial surface belying a quiet anger underneath.

Jean Dujardin is quietly excellent as the French officer whose growing conviction that Alfred Dreyfus (Louis Garrel) is innocent of treason puts him on a collision course with his superiors. The Oscar-winning actor provides the film with its soulful centre, despite the familiarity of the material and its procedural tone.

Although it is initially intriguing to see Nick and Donnie put aside their differences to form a fragile truce, their wary partnership does not generate much spark.

The romantic comedy-drama Rules Don’t Apply is, by turns, fizzy and melancholy, nostalgic and clear-eyed, but it never builds to anything especially substantial.

While there’s no doubting its huge ambitions, The Battleship Island turns out to be a disappointing misfire.