Will Ferrell and Jamie Foxx are clearly enjoying themselves voicing their very different characters — Ferrell naive and energetic, Foxx cynical and streetwise — but apart from a few inspired moments, the outrageousness soon drags.

Adapted from a chapter in Bram Stoker’s novel, the picture initially has some gory fun with its close-quarters suspense, but Ovredal unsuccessfully tries to elevate his monster movie with flimsy psychological depth and unconvincing emotional underpinnings.

Neill Blomkamp puts the pedal to the metal with Gran Turismo, a high-octane underdog sports drama that boasts electrifying race-car sequences but a badly cliched narrative away from the track.

The imbalance between the sketched, what-if nature of the film and the weight of its visual wizardry is keenly felt.

Lacking the killer instinct of its ferocious titular beasts, Meg 2: The Trench lumbers through the waters, failing as both a gripping thriller and a cheeky ’so bad it’s good’ piece of late-summer escapism.

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.

Taking on one of cinema’s foremost obsessions with a compassionate and ethical approach, Our Body tells the hidden, forgotten and ignored stories of female bodies through their unhurried encounters with the extensive, often invasive, and wonderfully life-saving medical interventions at a Parisian public hospital.

How does where we are from impact on the kind of love we feel? López Riera’s answer, which can be summed up as boy meets girls meets magical realism meets women’s solidarity, is both intimate and ambitious in scope, thought-provoking and emotionally engaging.

Joy Ride could easily have felt like a series of increasingly outrageous skits but, thanks to the chemistry between its leads and the tonal confidence of first time director Adele Lim, it ultimately lands as a raucously authentic comedy.

Irreverent and action-packed without sacrificing charm or emotional resonance, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle: Mutant Mayhem takes a page from the recent Spider-Verse animated films to bring a hip, youthful energy to a very familiar piece of IP, in the process giving us a story that’s fresh and funny.

Aurora’s Sunrise is notable not so much for its use of animation, which is effective but not especially creative or technically groundbreaking, but for the dramatic sweep of Aurora’s incredible tale.

Barraud offers a satisfyingly slippery tale in which we think we know where it might be headed but are constantly met by a little twist or discovery that puts everything into a different perspective.

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.

Despite an appealing cast and some nicely executed moments (not to mention some direct references to the original attraction) Dear White People director Justin Simien’s third feature is mostly a dispiriting experience.

Very British and proudly Black, Edwards’ film juggles tones and formats we’ve never seen put together before and it’s a pleasure to see a first-timer flex her muscles in a part-musical, wholly dramatic story of a recently-released prisoner who takes a shine to his partner’s micro red frock.

Director Yuval Adler taps into the lean story’s Collateral-like intrigue but, outside of Cage’s hair-trigger antics, there is not much surprise here — especially when the filmmaker unveils a twist most will see coming down the road.

It may be fuelled by the schmaltzy lyrics of a boy band, but this is ultimately a clear-eyed celebration of female friendship.

It packs a quiet emotional punch.

Streetwise is too familiar in terms of plot beats to completely stand out from the crowd but its unerring sense of place will nonetheless make Na a director to watch.

It’s an offbeat combination of erudite esoterica and sensory pleasures (many of them music-related) that patient viewers may find beguiling.

Nolan demonstrates his usual prowess for impeccable visuals and stunning craftsmanship within a deeply despairing portrait of an arrogant genius who, too late, realised the impact of his monstrous creation.

While Gerwig and co-writer Noah Baumbach may couch this self-discovery narrative in powder pinks and unrelenting pep, their message is authentic and acerbic: an urgent feminist call to arms wrapped up in a hugely entertaining popcorn movie.

For all the gambits that end up feeling like gimmicks, My Name Is Alfred Hitchcock never stops churning with ideas and ambition. The film pays Hitch the highest compliment by trying to follow his example and never do the expected thing.

There’s a lightness to the film and a loveliness to Feña’s open-hearted struggle.

It’s a technically accomplished work. The score is nervy pulsing and electronic, adding to the propulsion and tension of the storytelling.

An ensemble cast led by Maggie Smith, Kathy Bates and Laura Linney brings persuasive conviction to period heartwarmer The Miracle Club.

With its looming, angular and alienating architecture, and thoroughly considered technological and ethical future landscape, this is a phenomenal and inventive piece of world-building from Prague-based director Robert Hloz.

It’s an uncomfortable watch, but a extremely effective one.

Balanced on the tightrope between comedy and pathos, the precision-tooled Mamacruz is essentially a sensitively observed character study, with Spanish veteran Kiti Manver delivering a compelling, nuanced central performance as a religiously-repressed woman in late middle age who comes late – in all senses – to the transformative power of her own sensuality.

While the film’s conclusion is perhaps a little heavy-handed, the delivery of the message – of women’s reproductive rights and agency over their lives and bodies – is an emphatic slam dunk.

Ramona is both wonderful and appalling, and Vazquez’s edgy performance drags us entirely into her relentless, thoughtless world, with her flaming red hair, her smoker’s cough, her gravelly tones and her unfailing ability to bring joy and despair to those around her.

What emerges is the story of an extremely close and profoundly charming boyhood friendship – but one where the junior partner couldn’t, or wouldn’t, put the genie of his extraordinary talent back in the bottle once his pal had coaxed it out of him.

Brimming with confidence and swaggering showmanship, Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One further cements this series as a consistently dazzling action franchise.

[An] unusually direct, moving and deceptively simple exploration of love – and of film – as defences against forgetting.

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.

Kristen Lovell has skin in the game of the story she tells, making The Stroll, an oral/archive history of the trans sex workers of New York’s Meatpacking District, a raw and tender memoir.

In between the nudity and four-letter words, the film looks seriously at grief, arrested development and economic inequality, and there’s a sweet rapport between the two leads. A series of irritating plot twists and a predictable trajectory ultimately undercut Lawrence’s bravely brash portrait of a woman going nowhere fast.

Klondike is both despairing – sometimes in a blackly comic vein – and empathetic in the way it sees the incident from the ground up rather than from the sky down.

Project Silence presents us with a kaleidoscope of different characters all caught up in the same terrible nightmare, but very few of them have lively personalities – and the same holds true for the film itself. The dogs may be merciless, but Kim Tae-gon never goes for the throat.

Using simple means, Kang and his team take banal situations and settings — much of the action unfolds in a city-centre apartment building — and render them just eerie enough to be unsettling.

A nail-biting, evocative and utterly persuasive crime drama that is very much a part of the country’s burgeoning film output.

Even when the jokes occasionally fall flat, the ideas are killer.

The cumulative stress of the pandemic is everywhere, as pervasive and ubiquitous as the omicron variant. Beth’s lonely home-working set-up; the eerie quiet in the predawn hours; the brittle desperation in the callers’ voices; the sheer volume of cries for help: it all captures the sense of teetering on the brink, the uncertainty, the unfamiliar anxieties of the first lockdown.

While its ideas might fail to fully coalesce, the film is unnervingly beautiful; an immersive and mesmeric aural and visual experience.

Served up with lashings of homoeroticism, Bunuelian satire, a gay love story and an athletic dance number, its uncompromising nature will delight fans of the visionary filmmaker.

This affectionate hoot hardly breaks new ground with its film-within-a-film structure, but the South Korean auteur attacks the material with such good cheer, populating the story with a collection of daffy dreamers, that it’s easy to root for these characters as they reshoot the ending of a picture some of them are convinced is this close to being a masterpiece.

DC takes the multiverse for a spin in The Flash, an entertaining adventure that outruns its familiar narrative trappings thanks to a playful sense of humour and the arrival of an iconic character in a supporting role.

Creed II director Steven Caple Jr. brings a little playfulness and emotion to the series but, unfortunately, the clattering action and self-important tone remains.

Writer-director Carolina Cavalli (with the considerable contribution of Benedetta Porcaroli in the title role) crafts a refreshingly unconventional and acidic deadpan comic portrait of an offbeat female friendship.

While The Boogeyman — based on the 1973 Stephen King short story about a closet-dwelling stealer of souls — is as narratively generic as its on-the-nose (and oft-used) title may suggest, British director Rob Savage brings an innate humanness and playful spirit that lifts this otherwise-rote monster movie.

A stirring follow-up that tops the formidable original, Spider-Man: Across The Spider-Verse draws us deeper into Miles Morales’ saga while offering the same stunning animation, dazzling set pieces and irreverent humour.

Elemental contains hints of the studio’s wit and poignancy while lacking the inspired execution that once seemed so effortless.

This is a remarkable debut feature; provocative, absorbing and mysterious. There are no easy answers to the big existential questions, just a desire to seek them out with a kind heart and good intentions. In the end you just have to have faith.

Narratively spare ... Less substantial and approachable than Hong’s 2022 features The Novelist’s Film and Walk Up, the fragile, fragmentary In Our Day won’t earn Hong any new fans, but avid followers will enjoy its elusive felicities and love puzzling over its enigmatic gaps.

Although Lost In The Night parades certain familiar Escalante obsessions and contains scenes of striking beauty with something of a Mex-Western feel, it is, at its heart, a fairly conventional crime movie.

The Animal Kingdom sets itself up as a brooding chiller, jump scares, freaky coups de cinéma and all, but gradually shifts gear to become more poetic and tender.

A welcome return ... The Book of Solutions is an ode to time-wasting distractions and shelved projects, one that suggests that perhaps it’s here, rather than in the boring finished stuff, that you can find an artist’s soul.

An intimate but ambitiously mounted ensemble piece, The Old Oak ranks among Loach’s foremost state-of-the-nation dramas.

Despite the suitably transgressive nature of the subject matter, Catherine Breillat’s first film in a decade is an oddly muted affair: uncomfortable, certainly, but lacking the disruptive, confrontational jab and genuine shock factor of her earlier pictures.

Anselm is a portrait of eminent German artist Anselm Kiefer, exploring the man’s spectacular – and often spectacularly sombre – work. Wenders also delves into Kiefer’s biography and his political, historical and literary interests, which chime with the director’s own long-term fascinations to make this arguably the director’s most personal – and certainly most German – film in some time.

The result is the depiction of a seemingly sealed-in, quasi-carceral world, revealing how much China’s current economy – after decades, and multiple phases, of Communism – is now built on old-school sweatshop capitalism, with youth a readily available, and very disposable, commodity.

The Settlers shows promise: it’s the work of a daring director intent on developing a distinctive and original voice.

In Tran Anh Hung’s seventh feature, a passion for food becomes a conduit to exploring an appreciation for the beauty and mystery of existence — as well as telling a delicate, complicated love story.

For all its poetic charm, this is a slender work that comes across as something of a ’mindfulness movie’, in a faintly self-satisfied vein.

A handful of bone-crunching, arrow-whirring, neck-slicing battle scenes allow us some time off from trying to follow the convoluted narrative thread.

Kidnapped hides a bleak and bracing message inside lovely old costumes and sumptuous set pieces .

Fallen Leaves may not set the film world on fire, but is guaranteed to cast a warm glow.

Close Your Eyes finally builds a head of emotional steam in its last half hour, while exploring questions of identity and what remains when memory has gone.

It looks terrific – as always Hausner’s use of colour and costume is striking and eloquent – but this is a thinly-written picture that operates on a largely superficial level.

It truly growls in its depiction of the brutal nature of girl friendship and the shock of the menstrual metamorphosis.

Delightful, occasionally quite moving and always exquisitely crafted, this is a modest charmer about trying to make sense of the world either through art or other pursuits.

Talia Ryder gives a magnetic performance, providing an anchor for a film that is amusing and electric but mostly uneven.

Robot Dreams may be sentimental, but it is also wise, resisting the urge to craft the sort of crowd-pleasing happy ending one might expect. Rather, Berger goes for something truer.

What sets it apart is Thornton’s deep spirituality, examined here as the titular ‘The New Boy’ encounters – and explores – Christianity. But it is not a two-way street: Christianity will never accept who he is.

The do’s, don’t’s and don’t-even-go-there’s of contemporary dating have long been standard fodder for US indie cinema, but they rarely get dissected quite so tartly, or with such weirdly impassive wit, as in The Feeling That The Time For Doing Something Has Passed.

It is a fairly familiar crime thriller setup, yet this playful, effortlessly engrossing picture from Rodrigo Moreno takes a series of deliciously confounding turns.

The actors are reasonably charismatic and the film grows increasingly lovely to look at, while failing to really make a case for itself beyond the superficial pleasures.

The writing is sharp throughout: Manning Walker has an acute ear for teen vernacular and a sly sense of humour. But some of the film’s most powerful moments are wordless, playing out in tight shots of Mckenna Bruce’s face.

Taut, no-frills execution – notwithstanding some gorgeous but altogether untouristic landscape photography by Jeanne Lapoirie – helps to foreground the performances poignantly and compellingly.

Technically, The Goldman Case is a film to admire for all it achieves in such a structured format – emotionally, too, despite the fact the case is very particular, there is so much to engage.

It’s frequently an uncomfortable watch and, at points, prompts prickly ethical questions about the potential for the re-traumatisation of documentary subjects. But, perhaps more unexpectedly, this bold and confrontational film is also joyous, playful and in some ways even empowering.

As sympathetic as Vikander is in the role, this queen remains a bit opaque, her inner life never brought into sharp focus. Katherine may have survived, but she’s still not fully known.

While this story of a mermaid who gives up her enchanted life to follow her heart onto the land has been given the full cutting-edge CGI treatment, the slow pacing, often-overwrought emotion and undeniably outdated story mean that it fails to make much of a splash.

No doubt Black Flies wants to honour the heroism and sacrifice of paramedics — the end credits include a statistic about the alarming rate of suicide in the profession — but it often dehumanises the people in desperate need of their help. Sauvaire seems more concerned with one group’s suffering than the other.

This sparse, atmospheric fable grows markedly in power in the second half, as Banel’s passion takes on an edge of violence and insanity.

Featuring a compelling central performance from Sandra Hüller, Anatomy of a Fall takes a while to engage, but turns into a twisty, thought-provoking drama.

About Dry Grasses is a ravishingly cinematic piece of work that seems designed to spark animated, if not acrimonious, debate.

Haynes makes intriguing work of subtly metafictional psychodrama in May December.

After four hours, there’s no sense you know the city, present or past, or that you ever will understand it. Would maps and timelines make it any more ‘satisfying’? Instead, you are haunted by it..

Lifting his camera to survey the wide open plains of the past, Scorsese extracts an epic Western from horrible real-life crimes committed against the Native American Osage tribe of, latterly, Oklahoma, delivering something biblical, human, yet deeply inhumane.

The Zone of Interest is a challenging rather than conventionally provocative film but, by any measure, essential viewing and a work that will be a vital focus of discussion both in the cinephile world and beyond.

In the end, there’s something just a little too neatly constructed about Monster, something just a little trite about the message delivered after so many narrative twists and turns. Yet there is an emotional delicacy here too that keeps sentiment at bay, at least most of the time.

Ukrainian director Maksym Nakonechnyi’s debut feature is a sensitive, nuanced meditation on war and its effects on the psyche of individuals and nations.

This iconic archaeologist has spent his life digging for the treasures of the past — sadly, Dial Of Destiny does the same thing, pillaging our collective fond memories of a once-great franchise.

This tenth instalment of Universal’s high-octane automotive action franchise puts its foot on the gas early on, and doesn’t hit the brake until the end credits — and, even then, leaves things open for at least one more spin of the wheel. That’s par for the course with these films, but what does come as a surprise is just how fun this well-trodden formula can be.

This is not great or memorable filmmaking but the power of the story and some of the performances make up for that.

Featuring some of the group’s lovably mediocre projects, the documentary neither ridicules their so-so talent nor tries to oversell the purity of their artistic aspirations. Instead, this is a slight, wistful shrug of a picture that’s filled with resignation but also a lot of fondness.