Exuberant as it is, The Show treats its basic premise earnestly enough not to come across as merely spoofy. And there’s some considerable wit in the script.

For all the punches thrown and buildings pulverised, The New Empire barely leaves an impact.

Ariane Louis-Seize’s debut feature plays like a coming-of-age genre mash-up, and features a tortured blood-sucker protagonist reminiscent of Only Lovers Left Alive, A Girl Walks Home Alone At Night or even The Hunger, although it is narratively and stylistically striking enough to make its own impact.

It heads into strange and violent territory but is never overly comfortable there – it is always intriguing and defiantly left-field.

While there is no doubting the filmmakers’ admirably humanistic and progressive intentions, however, the picture itself somehow ends up less than the sum of its often-impressive parts.

The clumsy mixture of nostalgia, scares, set pieces, sincerity and wisecracks never gels.

Taking pleasure in subverting romcom tropes and boasting a satisfying attention to detail, Timestalker is a showcase for Lowe’s considerable talents on both sides of the camera.

This is a wonderfully messy genre flick that takes pleasure in offering the kind of startling revelations mixed with sharp barbs that will make many clap deliriously while leaving some wanting more answers.

The questing duo has trusted ‘GTA’ and its trigger-happy denizens: they just need to trust the audience a little bit more that this new world can be enjoyed without the same old beats.

Even for Garland’s adept visual storytelling, supported by daring cuts by Jake Roberts and offbeat needledrops, the core of Civil War feels hollow.

It’s a robustly entertaining romp.

Copa 71 may have a packaged air to it, but the story speaks – loudly – for itself.

In its refreshingly frank look at the end of life, Much Ado About Dying becomes a thought-provoking study of what it means to live.

While Arcadian is far from being a new modern horror masterpiece, it makes for a satisfying B-movie romp.

Despite the tantalising set up, Immaculate is a dull, predictable affair, composed of far too many inconsequential jump scares in lieu of sturdy storytelling.

Rather than truly being inspiring or moving, Arthur The King manipulates and frustrates. Adventure racers may be encouraged to forge their own path, but this film is far from trailblazing.

The Fall Guy is at its best when it captures the frenzied energy, the multiplicity of artisans, and the devoted precision necessary to bring a scene together.

As a star, Patel has rarely been better. And as a director, he grants an intoxicatingly gruesome vision of the kind of gritty vehicles he could steer in the future.

This is a nostalgia play composed of admittedly funny and gnarly moments that do not string together into a satisfying whole.

Throughout it all, Knight is a compelling and fiercely persuasive performer.

Between the strained punchlines and the unsurprising plot twists, the picture feels obligatory rather than inspired.

At Averroès & Rosa Parks, which premiered in Berlinale Special, is a tougher watch than its predecessor, but an extremely accomplished and compelling work.

It’s a wildly original work from De Los Santos Arias, a film with a gleefully wanton approach to form, style and story in which no directorial decision is predictable, and, despite a slightly overstretched running time, no moment is ever dull.

It is hard to decide whether Dumont is treating his genre borrowings with belittling contempt, or getting a kick out of the possibilities offered; it seems safe to assume both. And while the overall weirdness has charm and shock effect, once you’ve got over the surprise of Dumont being this flippantly outre the pleasure wears thin.

The newness is subtle and gently perplexing, but very satisfying indeed.

A documentary that is particularly urgent and eye-opening in the context of the current Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

It’s seductive, fragmented, involving.

The film’s eclectic ambitions and increasingly eccentric construction get the better of it, resulting in a very uneven brew.

[An] agile, cerebral film.

Rooted in a great injustice, Lubo ­– the film – becomes a curious, sometimes intriguing but ultimately frustrating portrait of a man undone by that injustice.

Another End has a lot going for it, not least its command of audiovisual atmosphere and the way it makes the audience work to join the narrative dots before delivering a sucker punch final twist that will encourage lively post-screening debate.

It’s just so hard to buy into Spaceman.

Drive-Away Dolls is frantic rather than inspired, a caper with no sense of the truly madcap.

As Hans Zimmer’s propulsive score juices the drama and thrill of Paul’s quest, Part Two achieves the sort of big-screen momentousness that is too rarely dared in contemporary cinema. Anyone swept away by the 2021 film will hunger to return for a second helping — and be richly rewarded.

An overly precious tone ultimately sinks the writer-director’s attempt to recapture the enchantment of adolescence.

We never shake off the feeling we’re watching a filmed play, one whose dramatic crescendos and lulls are relentlessly stagey and stylised.

Unfortunately, however confidently Macaigne works his genially shambling nerd persona, the comedy of manners never comes across as sharply as you would hope from a director whose comic mode can be relishably trenchant.

While it is messy and frequently bewildering, Cuckoo does at least live up to its title, with a commitment to gleefully bonkers twists and a collection of entertainingly deranged supporting performances.

Murphy’s performance, Tim Mielants’s controlled direction and subtle emotional heft combine to make this low-key adaption of Claire Keegan’s Booker-nominated 2021 novella very much a proposition to be reckoned with.

A likeably offbeat and disarmingly self-aware documentary essay on how humans deal with the immutable transience of the universe, Ian Cheney’s globetrotting Arc Of Oblivion should leave a trace in the minds of receptive viewers.

Bobi Wine is an intimate portrait of a hugely engaging figure that also serves as a sobering warning about the seeming impossibility of democratic change in a dictatorship.

No matter how likeable Cassie and her friends are, they are powerless in the face of a plot that goes through the motions, revealing ‘shocking’ twists about her past and building to an overblown finale. Madame Web argues that no one’s future is written, but it is very easy to see exactly where this film is going.

The central performance has a likeable, modest charm, and King Richard director Reinaldo Marcus Green resists the typical, unwieldy cradle-to-grave biopic narrative approach. Yet he fails to breathe much life into this underwhelming drama.

Overall, though, the stylistic consistency and sustained chill of the black comedy make for a satiric focus far keener than, say, the farcical overkill of Triangle Of Sadness.

Eternal You acts like a modern day Wizard Of Oz as it lifts the curtain on the intricate processes of bringing the dead to life.

This tale of a bestselling spy novelist who finds herself embroiled in real life espionage has some fun moments, an impressive cast and explosive set pieces (not to mention some strong echoes of classic eighties adventure series Romancing The Stone) but, in its attempts to keep audiences guessing, ties itself up in knots.

It is a premise that facilitates a forensic examination of China’s family planning model within the quasi-futuristic trappings of its urbanised present. It is also paradoxically highly specific in its subject yet incredibly difficult to pin down in terms of its broader identity, as it skilfully skirts genre lines.

While Will and Harper’s friendship gives the film its strongly beating heart, the casual reactions of strangers often also prove to be moving.

This is no superficial recounting of yet another injustice against native people.

Union is a solid work about an important subject. Yet, while the observational approach gives the picture an urgency and immediacy, it’s a film that might have benefitted from the addition of more contextual background information about Amazon’s labour practices.

This is a satisfying and impressively acted drama.

It is to Jacobsen’s credit that she highlights how apparently minor decisions can suddenly feel weighty.

While his film may dabble in varying points of view, it never manages to delve into the subjectivities of the characters it is trying to capture – even the ones it clearly cares for.

Zimbalist’s film is all about the highs: at no point will it dig deep. There is zero sense of perspective past the obvious.

It seems to encapsulate a generation’s dreams and disappointments, torments and triumphs. Even if it takes place on the other side of the world, it’s still a story we all know when we see it.

Despite the sentimental score, which unnecessarily ramps up the emotion, Daughters is honest about the fact that this programme is not a magic bullet, just one important step on the road to change.

Cinematic essays take many forms: few are as fragile and contemplative as Porcelain War.

Instead of treating the star’s life chronologically, they move between a consideration of his career and his spinal injury advocacy work in the wake of the devastating 1995 horse-riding accident that left him paralysed from the neck down. The result has the engaging feel of a dialogue between the pre- and post-accident Reeve and his family as his views and his life shifted as a consequence.

Mbakam has brought the patience of a documentarian to a character study that lets the details create an accumulative affect.

The funniest thing to come out of Belfast since [fill in the blank if you can], Kneecap is a riot which strains let’s-form-a-band film tropes (they’re the ‘shit Beatles’ via The Commitments), stirs in some Monty Python, sucks up the Young Offenders in all its shell-suited glory and blows it out at audiences in a blast of two-fingered audaciity.

Writer-directors David Zellner and Nathan Zellner’s fifth feature is easily their finest, a portrait of a Bigfoot community that starts out as an absurdist comedy before slowly transforming into a moving study of survival and loss.

Tears may well be shed but it is the actors who are delivering the goods rather than the script.

It’s a (virtual) life-affirming approach that is certainly affecting, but can feel a little disingenuous.

The film’s randomly generated structure manages to cohere enough to make the experiment mostly a success.

Even when the film risks becoming overly precious, Ronan keeps Rona’s struggles gripping. It is a tale not so much of triumph as one of melancholy resilience.

McBaine and Moss offer a celebration of the young women attendees alongside a consideration of the everyday sexism many encounter.

What results is an affecting tone poem which ruminates on the passage of time and the passing of traditions from one generation to the next.

The story is sometimes weighed down by an aggressive earnestness but, despite some overreaching and tonal inconsistencies, there is no denying the raw anguish that both Kaphar and his protagonist are trying to heal.

Some people will always want what they do not have, but it is hard to imagine anyone feeling short-changed by such a tonally rich, thematically ambitious film.

The film lacks the teeth to be an incisive takedown of romantic comedies — in truth, it works best at its sweetest. Dewey communicates a lifetime of longing in those soulful eyes that pop through Monster’s makeup, and Barrera brings an endearing amount of dorky energy. But whenever these characters leave the house, the problems start — both for their relationship and the film itself.

Hvistendahl gives her ensemble time and space to deliver the conflicted emotions they are feeling, a mixture of shock and longing playing out on their faces and in their movements.

There’s a lightness of touch to the performances, with Silver encouraging his actors to improvise on-set. Events may have made Ben something of a sadsack, but Schwartzman ensures there is still a glimmer in his eye, a hint that his lust for life is simply dormant.

The fantastical elements soon fade away and the film becomes grounded in the tender realities of growing up, finding oneself and questions about love, sexuality, home, family, and the future.

So many films have tackled the underlying tensions between diametrically opposed family members, but here Eisenberg sidesteps cliches, consistently complicating our feelings about these nuanced cousins.

Love Lies Bleeding makes no apologies for its stylistic boldness or its rising body count, but its swagger cannot hide a nagging hollowness underneath.

The ending is simultaneously satisfying and slyly subversive, allowing an unravelling of ideas that should lead audiences to think about what they have watched.

The film proves to be a sleek, efficient exercise, with Soderbergh riffing on the conventions of the haunted-house thriller while applying intelligence and technical mastery.

Making his debut, writer-director Josh Margolin combines acuity and playfulness in a funny action-drama whose spirit animal is Mission: Impossible.

[Boden and Fleck] marry splashes of dry humour to gallons of blood, and feature every musical genre from punk to hip-hop while connecting the stories to a strange green glow in the sky. If the end result never quite achieves the style and bite of the likes of Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction, it is still a lot of fun.

Unfortunately, the film tends to underline its points, turning a clever idea into a fairly obvious one, and Love Me’s self-consciously innocent/sweet tone can become grating. But what holds the film together is the intelligence and commitment the two stars bring to this occasionally mawkish tale.

The spell that the writer-director slowly weaves is intoxicating.

Amir Ebrahimi gives a remarkable performance that’s a smart mixture of fiery and openhearted.

Frida is not just a broad brush affair; the artist is noticeably present.

Giving her characters shading and the story space to breathe, Talati has created a quietly captivating, sharply observed film.

Filmmaker Lina Soualem’s sentimental journey with her actress mother Hiam Abbass becomes a powerful celebration of lives marked by separation, exile and erasure.

This charming story . . . has a deft, audience-friendly lightness of touch, focusing on Armenia’s people rather than its difficult history. Nevertheless, it firmly makes its points about displacement, cultural cleansing and the difficulties of returning home.

Alex Schaad’s spiky, good-looking debut feature takes a clever concept and develops it into a witty, provocative exploration of identity, gender fluidity, sexuality and the pursuit of happiness.

While a few of the new songs are keepers, too often the razzle-dazzle distracts from a familiar but resonant look at the pain and pleasure of adolescence.

Jacquet makes the fundamental miscalculation — at least for non-French audiences — of assuming that his endless musings about why he is drawn to this part of the world, delivered at length in his own voice, are, well, sufficiently interesting.

The chemistry between these three is the film’s greatest strength, and Good Grief plays best as a love story between friends.

As the mysteries behind the strange occurrences are slowly revealed, this underpowered horror film starts to drown in cliches and predictable plot twists.

The shame this film provokes – or should provoke – in collective society will make it difficult and distressing viewing. And there’s no beauty to show here, despite former cinematographer Kelly’s accomplished work. There’s always love, though. If only there was more to go around.

It’s Eva Green who steals the elaborate show, making villainy seem like the best possible career choice for a beautiful woman, circa the 1620s.

As a film concerned with the power of perception, The Goldfinger largely succeeds as a style exercise.

Much like the original, The Lost Kingdom boasts a gleeful exuberance, whether through Bill Brzeski’s eye-popping production design or in Rupert Gregson-Williams’ knowingly overdramatic score. There is a boyish zeal to Wan’s filmmaking, which is not afraid to embrace the goofy or the playful.

That balance of despair and hope, dark reality and a feel-good ending is not always perfectly executed but, as the picture navigates its plot twists and reaches its moving finale, the tonal discrepancies begin to feel insignificant.

The Boys In The Boat is heartfelt and smoothly executed, but this inspirational drama cannot outrace the filmmaker’s staid, undemanding approach, which turns even the most stirring moments into predictable plot points.

Unfortunately, there is not much ingenuity or inspiration to Snyder’s vision.