The Workshop conveys a stunningly authentic portrait of French youth today; their class, racial and occupational concerns.

When the film works — or, whenever de Palma brings relatable spirit and charisma to her centrepiece role — it’s a slice of undemanding fluff, serving up an underdog fantasy that probes the difference between the haves and the have-nots without daring to dig too deep.

Beauty And The Dogs is a forthright and accomplished film which deals with its controversial subject matter without flinching. Tautly plotted, it has a pace and tension which mitigates the exhausting spectacle of watching a vulnerable young woman getting bullied and browbeaten by a selection of utterly horrible men.

Even with uneasiness dripping from Smith as Adrian, the acting in 1985 is like the script – stiff. 1985 gets the notes right, and its foreboding look takes us back to a dark age. It’s a lesson worth remembering. Yet with all the prejudice and pain, the film still feels a lot like a sermon.

None of the interactions come across as a sham or an empty formality. Patients are treated with respect, at least in the hearings room.... There’s also genuine and inadvertent humor in the midst of sadness and administrative formalities.

Underneath the entertaining horror, this is ultimately a story of the toxic trappings of masculinity; a world in which keeping a stiff upper lip and resolutely burying your demons can summon the most terrifying of consequences.

Norway’s Roar Uthaug (The Wave) directs it straight up, without even a twist of humour, bouncing Vikander from set piece to set piece with no real attempt at coherent plotting in-between. Yet Vikander is so watchable as the video-game-made-flesh, and the low-fi chase sequences can be so exciting, it’s almost enough. Almost.

Looking and sounding disarmingly like father Tim, Roth imbues Danny with an edgy vim and vigour - reminiscent of his father’s early performances for Quentin Tarantino - and palpable vulnerability which draws sympathy for his righteous anger, however misjudged it may be.

It is a governing sense of restraint that lends the film such an emotional kick, and breathes fresh life into an old classic.

Wim Wenders’ latest is a handsome production which, although it is rich with symbolism, is ultimately not quite as satisfying as it should be.

The Forgiven is a decidedly uneven piece of work.

Director Nash Edgerton never really sinks his teeth into the delectable darkness of his hero’s nemeses, struggling to maintain the right acidic tone.

Director Ava DuVernay emphasises an emotional clarity and narrative simplicity that allows the book’s sci-fi examination of friendship, family and forgiveness to resonate with almost mythic force.

Instances of alchemy abound in the narrative — walls are converted into projectiles, brick courtyards into hungry beasts — but the same magic can’t improve soap opera-like theatrics, the overuse of expositional dialogue or an eagerness to flit between action scenes.

There’s pleasingly little sentimentality and much honesty to be found in Hirayanagi’s screenplay, particularly in its acknowledgement that new experiences can make you lose, as much as broaden, your mind.

Even when the lines uttered sound more like a statement than an actual conversation, Sen remains a master of everything he controls as Goldstone slowly inches towards its bullet-riddled finale.

Although much of the film is effectively claustrophobic, it is too bogged down by exposition to fully take off.

The Cured is at its sharpest when drawing acute political parallels. As a zombie film, the shocks are few/

Guardians of the Tomb, however, takes itself far too seriously, aside from the woeful running commentary provided by the thoroughly expendable Gary as the team plods from one dusty spider-filled room to the next, a sense of repetition quickly setting in.

A shattering portrait of a luckless woman unable to pull out of the tailspin that is her life, Where Is Kyra? is a powerfully moody character study anchored by a remarkable performance from Michelle Pfeiffer.

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.

The result is both a compelling, damning cultural observation and testament to Greenfield’s own visual artistry.

The unflinching rawness of the action has considerable impact while undercutting the dominant jingoistic tone. Despite the team’s tactical strengths, their plans often suddenly unravel because of unanticipated elements, resulting in stomach churning injuries.

A dazzling, studious exercise in found footage excavation and reconfiguration, laced with tongue in cheek.

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.

Able to generate dread and awe with equal skill, Annihilation is an absorbing amalgam of genres and influences, all coming together to produce a dazzling creation as vivid as the hybrid life forms our heroes encounter on their perilous journey.

Trying to split the difference between trashy and classy, Red Sparrow is a sleek, juiced-up espionage thriller that overdoes everything: its brutal violence, its dramatic flourishes, its hairpin plot twists, and most certainly its sexpot shamelessness.

Writer-director Chen Sicheng dials the original’s lewd humor down a notch, but still mines stereotypes for easy laughs with Wang delivering his trademark high pitch comedic star turn.

So lush with gorgeous detail it’s like a piece of highly-textured haute couture, there’s also a sharp social message behind the elaborate seams.

Burke — perhaps best-known as the grown-up version of the scary baby in the last films in the Twilight saga — is outstanding as the fragile, yet determined heroine who is terrorised beyond the bounds of sanity but has to remember that she might be doing all this to herself.

For over an hour, Permission unfolds as a mildly amusing romcom about two modern Brooklyn couples facing commitment crises. Toward the end, the main plot, about a straight pair experimenting with polyamory, takes a dramatic turn.

On the whole, 15:17’s slavish adherence to reality ends up arguing that, sometimes, a little Hollywood phoniness can go a long way.

While we can quibble about the underused lead or the meandering plot, Fifty Shades Freed ultimately authors its own most stinging rebuke, closing on an extended montage highlighting major moments and turning points from the trilogy. Tellingly, none of them come from this film.

Coogler (Fruitvale Station, Creed) has fashioned a slightly more earnest variation on the typical MCU movie — one that is still fun and funny, but also rooted in a desire to speak meaningfully about racism, global culture clashes, and the tension between hiding behind one’s borders and helping outsiders in need.

Theron will put to rest any doubts about her feel for comedy; the darker the better.... As Tully, Mackenzie Davis is radiant.

Fortunately, the time-honored theme of brotherhood carries the film over its occasional damp patches along with Ding’s assured handling of stunts and pyrotechnics.

Authenticity rules the day here, the contrast between the banality of daily existence and extreme conduct is the main point of the picture, all of it defined by an insistence on staying close to the actual events and refraining from any attempt at psychological observations or analytical motivations.

Gitai’s personal knowledge of his people and their deep-rooted issues lends West Of The Jordan River a powerful intimacy.

The movie radiates considerable compassion, sensitively addressing issues including addiction, recovery and forgiveness. Joaquin Phoenix’s raw, wiry performance never strives for greatness, which only makes it all the more affecting.

The thin story plays out in a hail of bullets, zombies and action-laden sequences.

12 Strong wants to be triumphant but also mournful, rousing but also thoughtful in its chronicling of America’s place in a changing, complicated world. That tonal nuance is commendable...but the results are more muddled than thematically intricate.

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

Freak Show’s formula, fabulousness and feel-good messaging doesn’t sparkle so much as soak up the glow of its obvious predecessors.

A characteristically rough-edged work, both visually and in the sound recording, the film eschews aesthetic finesse to follow its multiple characters where situations demand, to strikingly vivid effect.

Bernhard Keller’s fine photography gives this tense realist drama a streak of no-frills outdoor poetry, without overstressing its genre affinities. A strong cast, grizzled non-professionals in the great neo-realist tradition, are totally convincing.

Although the sparse dialogue and gradual build requires an investment on the part of the audience, this is an accomplished work.

The fourth installment of the Insidious series has deft scares and some nifty twists, all of which don’t entirely distract from how strangely inconsequential The Last Key ultimately feels.

What The Commuter lacks in nuance, depth, surprises, logic and serviceable dialogue...it can’t make up for in its effective single-location tension or well-choreographed action, though both rank among the film’s modest highlights.

Its emphasis on teambuilding makes The Thousand Faces of Dunjia play like a wuxia riff on Guardians of the Galaxy (2014) but its blend of spectacle and humour isn’t nearly as successful.

This strained musical is content to play to the cheap seats. Earnest in the extreme and armed with lethal amounts of razzle-dazzle, the feature debut of commercial director Michael Gracey is an all-out assault of sentiment, pop songs and dime-store psychology that’s somewhat held together by Hugh Jackman’s likably shameless portrayal of this striving charmer.

The muddled but icily engaging All The Money In The World is a thriller packed with ideas which director Ridley Scott only sporadically delineates with the same vividness as he does his stylish compositions. And yet, this true-life tale of the kidnapping of oil tycoon J. Paul Getty’s grandson maintains its hold, bluntly outlining how the desperate clamour for wealth poisons all those caught up in its frenzy.

The new film is proudly aware of how ludicrous it is...and the sunnily silly plot mostly functions to get the Bellas to their next song-and-dance number or comedic set piece. Yet, it’s impossible to miss the film’s wheezing tone.

Ethel & Ernest is, at its heart, a fond character study.

Galloping across the decades, the film becomes increasingly sketchy and superficial. There is so much detail and substance in the 1970s stretch of this epic that the twists of fate and rueful reflections of later years inevitably feel less authentic and closer to soap opera.

The Latasters rarely put a foot wrong - from their static opening shot in the town of Hapert to the final frames of Miss Kiet in her classroom, this is a beautifully-judged piece.

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.

The space battles and lightsaber duels are appropriately exciting, but Johnson keeps a close eye on the human element that girds this galactic odyssey. Rather than simply regurgitating Star Wars’ past, The Last Jedi emphatically builds on it.

It’s an entertaining, engaging, colourful picture in its own right with decently-handled action-adventure set-pieces and sly comedy, detouring from the expected thrills and spills into body-hopping comedy drama.

An enquiry into the brutal rape of a black woman in 1944 Alabama broadens into an alternative, female-gaze civil rights documentary in Nancy Buirski’s latest.

When writers find it necessary to beef up a screenplay with that tiredest of factory-farmed animated trope, the comedy dance off, one wonders whether a more organic approach to script husbandry might have been preferable.

Layering the life of Irish folk singer Joe Heaney through a flickering lens and leaning on the natural, unadorned voice of the sean nos [old style] singer, this doc/feature hybrid film isn’t perfect, but it is quite perfectly-made.

Writer-director Paul Thomas Anderson has crafted a period drama of startling tonal fluidity, and Daniel Day-Lewis and Vicky Krieps deliver reserved performances that slowly reveal significant depth, transcending the material’s potential plight-of-the-artist clichés to hit at something far richer and more mysterious about desire, ambition and control.

Of a piece with his recent, stately dramas Lincoln and Bridge Of Spies, director Steven Spielberg’s latest brings intelligence and electricity to its study of nimble strategic manoeuvring which is guided by urgent performances from Meryl Streep and Tom Hanks.

Jacoby delivers an adroit portrait of the artist at work in a technical package which wraps itself smoothly around this intense, surprising story.

The sheer energy of the performers, especially an exuberantly funny Mamiya, and the slapstick goofiness of the whole make this an eccentric, hugely enjoyable film - and often, partly because of its relative demureness, a fairly arousing one, with female pleasure and male discomfiture foremost on the menu.

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.

Whatever mild pleasure can be derived from seeing Batman and Wonder Woman team up with other costumed crime-fighters quickly dissipates as it becomes clear that director Zack Snyder has again crafted a lumbering blockbuster that dilutes what’s so stirring about these fabled fictional champions.

Because of the quality of the performances and the sincerity of the execution, Wonder doesn’t need to artificially stir our emotions, so it’s a shame that Chbosky lets the tone get away from him, badgering viewers with his points rather than simply letting the material speak for itself.

Whether quietly watching Nanami gain her sense of self scene-by-scene, or plunging into more dramatic territory whenever Amuro or Mashiro appear, the end result slowly builds, grows and blossoms into an astute, insightful, multi-layered character study.

Long and detailed and frequently terrifying, Alex Gibney’s documentary about a 1994 massacre in a pub in Northern Ireland is investigative journalism at its rigorous best.

Will Ferrell and Mark Wahlberg are a lot less fun this time around, paired with a fumbling John Lithgow and a stiff Mel Gibson as their overbearing fathers who stop by for the holidays.

Branagh, in his direction and especially in his performance, can’t help but overdo the cheeky artificiality, which keeps Murder feeling more like a well-designed exercise than a delectable thriller.

Director Mark Grieco grabs our attention by going beyond the obvious. Exploring the consequences of well-intentioned actions and providing a sense of the much bigger picture transforms A River Below into an unexpectedly compelling proposition.

The new film is hardly a comedic lump of coal, but the broad, sitcom-y material has inherent limitations that no amount of shameless, gleeful silliness can overcome.

An exemplary sequel, the film retains the innocence and beguiling lack of cynicism of the first film, but moves on to explore other motifs

Twomey’s mastery of colour and exquisite blend of traditional Afghan-inspired imagery with cel animation techniques is not matched by such a confident command of tone, which rarely shifts out of a single mournful register.

Touching on the pressures of living in a patriarchal society, as well as exploring attitudes towards nationality and sexuality, the film unpacks a raft of parallels in its three stories, leaving seemingly disparate characters with the same choices.

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.

Driven by strong performances, this is, however, a more conventional piece than other recent pictures which explored crises of faith.

An oddball hybrid that’s part documentary, part stylistic mish-mash, but wholly celebratory of Mansfield’s often derided ‘blonde bombshell’ image.

The proceedings are often stifling, but not without their prickly pleasures.

The subject matter may be familiar — despairingly so — but writer-director Jason Hall (who previously wrote American Sniper) imbues it with specificity and no-nonsense drama that make the plight of physically and emotionally wounded soldiers sting all over again.

In its zeal to pay proper respect to Mexican traditions and to avoid any hint of appropriation, Coco fails to give as much attention to its perfunctory characters or mediocre plotting, resulting in a family film which is reverent rather than inspired.

Bad Day succeeds because of the quality of the craftsmanship, the decision to bring a more measured perspective to typical thriller conventions and the performance of Nigel O’Neill who makes a very human and flawed avenger.

It makes for powerful and stimulating viewing whether or not a game is being played with viewers.

The film’s deadpan good cheer makes room for big-budget spectacle and a modicum of emotional depth, but a self-effacing vibe and pop-culture giddiness work the best here — necessary countermeasures as Marvel fights against the inevitable creative fatigue incurred after a decade of multiplex dominance.

It would be going too far to say Wonder Wheel is an instant Woody Allen classic, but it’s a reminder that he’s still a force to be reckoned with and a great director of actresses especially.

Cerebral and emotional, Tempestad is a road movie fuelled by the memories of unjust punishment. It’s a bumpy but illuminating ride.

It’s a rare inside glimpse of how a cosmic moment is stitched together.

An intimate, deeply felt engagement with profound matters of life and death.

Jo Nesbo’s Harry Hole series is comprised of page-turning, airport-blockbuster Scandi crime potboilers; Alfredson scorches the seventh, The Snowman, with such art-house intensity that it eventually melts into an exhausted puddle.

Thankfully never taking itself too seriously, the latest Jason Blum-produced comedy-thriller is happy to carve out its spot as the horror-themed, millennial-focused Groundhog Day, and to have fun doing so. A dynamic lead performance and a willingness to keep things short and snappy also ensure viewers won’t mind venturing into rehash territory.

Kosinski settles for a simplistic ending, and the film can’t avoid certain narrative predictability, but for all its conventionality, it’s also brave enough to push against those conventions to find the humanity within its heroes.

When it comes to the action scenes, Campbell’s unfussy style works well with Chan’s choreography.

The Holocaust has undergone some awkward treatments on screen before, but one of the most ungainly recent examples must be Andrei Konchalovsky’s Paradise, a well-intentioned but very soft-edged mess of romance, metaphysics and historical theorising.

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.

No matter what Oplev throws at us, the film refuses to catch fire and just grows sillier and more contrived as it unfolds. It never feels distinctive and often has the air of just another entry in the Final Destination series.

A ravishing visual colossus, Blade Runner 2049 more than lives up to its predecessor’s legacy as a groundbreaking mixture of sound, images and mood.