Bolstered by a series of fragile, lived-in performances, led by Zac Efron’s astonishing turn as the soulful eldest brother in this seemingly doomed clan, the picture asks troubling questions about fate, fathers and ambition, eventually arriving at some hard-earned answers.

Inshallah A Boy delivers a social realist critique of Jordan’s structural oppression of women and girls.

[A] charming, quirky, dramatically inert new feature.

2018 wears its heart on its sleeve and succeeds as tense, well-paced popular entertainment.

The well-drawn characters, clever plotting and sting of social commentary in a tale of pride and property create an entertaining film that could follow in the wake of Parasite, Squid Game and other South Korean success stories.

Director Paul King brings the same comic sweetness as his acclaimed Paddington pictures, but this delightful, frequently funny musical resides in its own cheeky, bighearted sphere – despite having to adhere to the rules that govern all potential franchises, which treat valuable intellectual property even more preciously than one of Wonka’s prized candies.

A rollicking historical romp with nary a dull moment, The Three Musketeers - D’Artagnan (Les Trois Mousquetaires — D’Artagnan) offers all the sprightly action, jaunty repartee and sumptuous settings a contemporary movie-goer could possibly want.

The Hong Kong action auteur conjures up a few of his trademark over-the-top sequences, but this tale of bloody vengeance is not the most satisfying delivery device for Woo’s unique brand of melodramatic, slow-mo carnage.

Nearly 70 years after the release of the original film, Godzilla Minus One returns the titular beast to its roots as a metaphor for Japan’s postwar anxiety and grief, in the process delivering a stirring spectacle that also contains a palpable emotional undercurrent.

Disney has rarely and so shamelessly plundered its own catalogue — not just in terms of homages to its greatest hits but also in the familiar elements thrown together for this wan fable.

Wagner takes a reserved approach to potentially heart-tugging developments. There is an air of confidence and composure in the film.

Napoleon features exceptional battle scenes as well as tart back-and-forths between these romantic combatants, resulting in a lavish, thoughtful drama that remains entranced and bemused by France’s most notorious emperor — a brilliant strategic mind who could not have been more insecure.

This action-romance provides the requisite thrills while offering new characters and narrative turns, creating a portrait of blossoming evil that is thoughtfully executed.

Unfortunately, this relatively lighthearted instalment, which boasts likeable performances and some unapologetically goofy comedic moments, ends up feeling insubstantial rather than freewheeling.

Beneath all of the visual razzle-dazzle and quick-firing gags, though, Chicken Run: Dawn Of The Nugget is, fundamentally, a familiar, well-executed coming-of-age narrative, in which a youngster is compelled to spread their wings, and parents must learn to let them fly.

While the subtle world-building may be more consistently impressive than the familiar narrative, The Kitchen nevertheless makes its points with style.

Unfortunately, this adaptation of the popular 2014 video game fails at delivering scares or cheeky laughs, resulting in a tedious experience that relies heavily on horror’s most cliched tropes.

A willfully theatrical, proudly retro yet delectably pertinent confection.

Despite its thoughtful ruminations and supple performances, this period drama fails to produce the expected intellectual fireworks.

With the film reminding us that the American system isn’t only failing people with diabetes, the battle for affordable healthcare rages on.

There’s a disconnect between her inventive, impressionistic artistic output – Audrey’s actual work is interspersed throughout the picture – and the film’s flat, rather matter-of-fact look.

Leave The World Behind draws from familiar elements, but this adaptation of Rumaan Alam’s 2020 novel stands apart thanks to its excellent performances and slow, superb escalation of tension.

Emotionally intense and visually arresting, Evolution is rewarding viewing for those willing to enter its austere territory, but the technical virtuosity leaves it on the edge being perceived as of something of an academic exercise. It’s a film easier to admire rather than whole-heartedly engage with.

It is a film in which, over two hours, the maverick Argentinian virtuoso quietly blows up and rebuilds the established language of cinema in challenging but ultimately exhilarating ways.

Hardly a conventional love story, but achingly tender nonetheless, Here is fully present and dazzlingly alive.

The entertaining blend of quirky absurdism and behavioural neuroscience echoes Baumane’s approach to her family’s history of depression in her previous film. It’s a successful and distinctive formula, albeit one which falters slightly at the film’s uncertain conclusion.

The Mission is a thoughtful, fair-minded exploration of what motivated Chau, and also spreads out to confront bigger questions on the legacy of colonialism, the delusions of white saviour narratives and the thin line between faith and fantasy.

Filled with both spectacle and strikingly intimate moments, The Eras Tour is almost too much of a good thing — so many hits, so many memorable set pieces, so many peaks.

Kennebeck’s documentary offers a more sympathetic, thought-provoking version of what motivated Winner’s actions and the morality of whistleblowing.

With a vibrantly charming lead from Griffin Dunne, and enough melancholic worldly wisdom to leaven the humour, Ex-Husbands is an accessible, ostensibly lightweight offering but one nevertheless carried off with expertise, intelligence and empathetic insight.

Exorcist: Believer has none of the creeping dread of the original.

Initially intriguing, Ashkal grows less satisfying as it struggles to do justice to the disparate elements of the personal, the political and the supernatural.

This magisterially simple version of a celebrated stage warhorse is a steely, no-nonsense final chapter to Friedkin’s career, as well as a stately farewell to cast member Lance Reddick, who died in March, and to whom the film is dedicated.

Debut feature director Sebastien Vanicek proves to be adept at wringing every drop of tension out of this slim narrative, elevating this B-movie creature feature to A-grade horror.

While the dramatic destination may be signposted fom the off, this well-observed debut from actor-turned-director Prasanna Puwanarajah handles its themes lightly, leaning into dark comedy rather than melodrama, and that approach, together with strong central performances, serves it well.

With a running time of four hours, Menus-Plaisirs – Les Troisgros is a marathon, even by Wiseman’s leisurely standards. But it is an absorbing film, a forest full of trails for viewers to wander in.

Fingernails’ themes may be a tad trite, but the storytelling’s unfussy elegance helps sell Nikou’s message about the messy vitality of true love.

Rogue One’s Edwards delivers a film which is reliably visually inventive even when the familiarity of the narrative can make it feel oddly stale.

Respectful, frank and moving, this is a small film with a devastating impact.

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.

J.A. Bayona’s adaptation of this much-filmed story is elevated by bracingly muscular action sequences. It manages to sustain a degree of tension despite an overlong running time and the fact that the outcome of the incident is unlikely to be a surprise to anyone.

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.

The heartbreaking plunge into sisterhood and grief that is His Three Daughters is an intensely composed elegy about the devastating effect of saying goodbye to a parent.

Between the highs-and-lows of razzle-dazzle couture there a substantial film here, and a frank portrait of a damaged, evasive man trying to come to terms with what he has done.

The results are often revelatory, offering an unvarnished look at being young, free and unsettled, with the individuals they meet being almost as important as the journey itself.

The results are more dutiful than absorbing.

Writer-director Andrea Di Stefano crafts a tense yet also rather moving thriller-melodrama out of the most cliched premise: a cop who is talked into running a favour for a gangland boss on his last night before retiring. It’s been a while since we’ve seen such a stylish Italian crime thriller.

The filmmakers switch the focus from the suspense of an uncertain outcome to the central friendship between the two women, a friendship that Diana tends to inadvertently torpedo. This allows both actresses to bring a depth and texture that sustains the picture through the extended swimming sequences.

The brisk rhythms and energy of the storytelling ensure that the pace rarely flags, and that every frame of this film about the business of death is bursting with life.

This is a story of survival, but it is by no means typical of the genre – instead it is sensory, tactile; a film that taps into an atavistic, instinctual primal quality that characterises new motherhood.

The Holdovers is crushingly wistful in precisely the way moviegoers have come to expect from Payne.

The film follows a slick, predictable rise-then-fall narrative structure full of boisterous montages when things are going well and sombre music once the good times end.

The result is an engrossing exercise in empathetic humanism, unhurried and uninflected; the various sections of the film are divided by ruminative fades to black.

Like the mismatched team from the Pacific Island, the picture is big-hearted and sweet-natured, but it is also rather lacking in polish and staying power.

The film can sometimes be dramatically simplistic, relying on perfunctory montages and creaky expositional dialogue, but Domingo ensures that Rustin is a layered and vibrant character, pushing Rustin to be bolder than it otherwise is.

The elegant tone undercuts the material’s inherent bite, ultimately defanging a picture that eventually shifts into a twisty thriller.

Janet Planet is alive with possibility, not just for the youngster but also for the remarkable writer-director who announces her big-screen ambitions with stunning force.

Whether or not there’s a factual basis to the story, it’s undeniably an absolute blast.

The first feature film from cinematographer Ellen Kuras is a satisfyingly textured portrait of a remarkable and unusual woman, who had an almost Zelig-like gift for bearing witness to key moments in history.

This is an ambitious, often provocative interrogation of masculinity, cancel culture, social media, and the power of celebrity through a humorous lens.

Kendrick’s measured approach pushes against genre expectations — which will no doubt disappoint viewers accustomed to streamable docuseries. Yet that makes her film an assured subversion which elicits both engrossing chills and surprising humor.

American Fiction can be tender and also brutally funny, wise but also sometimes rushed in its attempts to tie up its many threads. The film is always alive with ideas and filled with compassion for its complicated characters, however. Like a good novel, it’s very hard to put down.

This genial comedy/noir is a genuine crowdpleaser – funny, sexy, clever and confident in building a low-key humour which hits the target over and over again.

The gritty realism of Io Capitano’s story is leavened throughout by recognizably ‘Garronian’ touches; pools of magic realism, theatrical set pieces of colourful intensity.

Logic, though, is not at the forefront of The Nun II which, like its predecessor, attempts to force the fear through endless jump scares and bombastic music rather than take time to build any real tension.

Garner and co-star Jessica Henwick navigate the picture’s mixture of drama, suspense and horror superbly, leaving the audience fearful that this slow-burn powder keg will eventually go off — although we’re not sure who the casualties will be.

Sarsgaard is characteristically impressive, his gentle performance holding onto its mysteries and maintaining a dry delicacy that eschews Hollywood demonstrativeness.

As with his award-winning debut, the French filmmaker sometimes risks heavy-handedness to make his points, but his argument’s brute force is amply persuasive.

An unusual underdog saga about an ordinary investor who inspired a grassroots movement that scared Wall Street’s major hedge funds, Dumb Money is a snappy, entertaining picture that taps into a lingering resentment about how rigged the financial markets feel to many Americans.

The picture’s initial comic energy proves hard to sustain even with a short runtime, though, as the jokes start to feel strained and the numbers grow uninspired.

This is an undeniably moving story, and Winson — who died in 2015 aged 106 — a man worth honouring, but One Life comes across as an orchestrated tearjerker.

A confection that is equal parts murder mystery, old-fashioned ghost story and supernatural thriller, the third instalment of Kenneth Branagh’s Hercule Poirot series proves to be the most enjoyable.

The film finds an unexpected way to reach its happy ending, but ultimately Quiz Lady is a fun premise seeking a sharper execution — unlike the brilliant Anne, Yu and her cast don’t have all the answers.

Grant Singer’s feature directorial debut suffers from an overinflated sense of grandeur and a frustratingly convoluted story, reaching for dramatic heights that it hasn’t earned.

There has been no shortage of films that deal with Europe’s current refugee crisis over the last decade or so. Still, this picture, with its supremely confident handling of a fractured, fragmented structure and its twin driving forces of compassion and fury, is undoubtedly one of the best.

Strip the neo-noir style and attitude away from Stefano Sollima’s latest, and you get a not particularly original tale . . . But there is one very attractive bonus, aside from the moody Roman settings: the casting of Pierfrancesco Favino and Toni Servillo.

Set in Rome’s sprawling Cinecittà studios in their 1950s heyday, Finally Dawn is a rich, shape-shifting fairy tale, an odyssey of empowerment about a vulnerable girl navigating her way through a day and night of enchantments and dangers, using her weakness as a kind of magic shield.

An invigoratingly savage Nordic western, The Promised Land is earthy, enjoyable stuff: an expansive, sweeping epic with hope in its heart and dirt under its nails.

Drawing from elements of his own childhood, Miyazaki has dreamed up a fantastical environment in which anything seems possible — including the potential to remake oneself.

This docudrama, recounting the background to Isabel Wilkerson’s acclaimed 2020 study ’Caste’, is an unwieldy, fragmented hybrid that comes across very much as an educational project, never quite gelling as narrative.

While the first half of Rotting In The Sun may be overly self-indulgent, once Silva gets himself out of his system, he gives his skills and Saavedra an opportunity to shine.

Dogman may have a more intimate, reflective tone than much of his work – at least until its final man-versus-dog showdown – but it struggles to get past that initial cool pitch.

Coup de Chance is not a major reinvention, but it does have more spirit and joie de vivre than anything Allen has done in a while. A sharp, lively cast shows that he is actually rather good at directing in French, and the stars seem accordingly to be having a good time in this light comedy that takes an unexpectedly dark turn.

It is an absorbing film of quiet power.

Each of the film’s three strands has its own dramatic flaws and virtues. But what is most intriguing is the way that the stories are braided, both in editor Anita Roth’s intercutting and in the establishing of visual parallels.

While there’s a sense that Korine is fully at peace with a lack of meaning in his work, it’s doubtful that he was aiming to be boring.

It is a unique story, told in a distinct way.

The Killer is a masterfully engineered piece. Throughout, Fincher pitches his own methodical control against The Killer’s, but also signals the glitches in his protagonist’s logic and flawed self-knowledge.

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.

Their marriage was unequal, and so is the film, but Maestro is honest about the larger-than-life flaws of its central character, and Cooper is impressive in the role.

An episodic string of very uneven vignettes, the film benefits hugely from the unifying presence of artist Pousti — a non-pro, like the rest of the uneven cast — who dominates nearly every scene with a genial, subdued intensity as the thirtysomething, bear-like Mr Amir.

Even as the film sails insouciantly into a rarefied imaginative stratosphere of its own, it’s anchored to emotional reality by a dazzling performance by Emma Stone – if anything, outdoing her revelatory turn in The Favourite.

The latest from Andrew Haigh is an exquisitely melancholy fantasy-infused meditation on loss and isolation. A luxuriantly sad and skin-tinglingly sensual gay romance, it is propelled by a killer combination of 80s queer pop and a pair of devastating performances from Scott and Mescal.

Its layered story, about a rich man and the extraordinary book that changes his life, is particularly well-suited to Anderson, who revels in such Russian Doll narratives and delivers the story as a dramatic reading, narrated by its characters.

The man himself and the machine tend to become confused in a swirl of dark glasses and wet raincoats in a production-perfect Italy of the late 1950s.

El Conde comes across as a well-funded toyshop for Larrian to play in, indulging flights of fantasy, paying homage, and exacting a retribution which could, should, have been a far more effective sandblast from a man who has spent much of his creative life holding this particular vampire to account.

Comandante is a film designed to make Italians feel good about being Italian – about pasta, sentimental songs and strongly demarcated gender roles – while also telling them how to be good Italians – chiefly by saving people at sea, not blindly following orders and getting on with other Italians whose dialects they don’t understand.

To reveal much at all about the film’s abrupt change of register around two-thirds of the way in would be unfair. Suffice to say that if The Mountain has been a very austere, mid-life-male variation on Into The Wild up to now, it soon feels like we are watching a Gaspar Noé movie, with a little dose of Miyazaki thrown into the mix.