Bright, colourful and relentlessly frothy, Book Club: The Final Chapter is not so much a film as a series of inspirational posters and Italian postcards stitched haphazardly together.

Bold and brave, like its protagonist, Pamfir gorges on its imagery, with the final visual marker sending shivers down the spine.

The combination of a unique personality and a fascinating place makes for a beguiling and poetic film, which blurs the lines between science and art.

Moretti has once again found a way to make a picture that creates edgy comedy out of a process of self-therapy. Some will find the exercise wearyingly self-centred, but that’s to miss the point of a film which turns one man’s obsessions into a comedie humaine.

Ali’s anger and frustration is the engine which gives this heartfelt drama its energy; Bessa’s terrific performance, a thunderous scowl masking his rising anguish, is a considerable asset.

An engaging, authentic, moving film about the way society persists in seeing monsters where there are none.

The end result is a delicate and ultimately touching evocation of first love’s intensity.

Rather like the ill-fated plane, the comedy struggles to land.

The force of Cruz’s charisma — she’s like a cross between Sophia Loren and a solar flare — is more than enough to justify spending time with the family.

It could just all have benefited from a more delicate touch.

At a time when comic-book films have become formulaic and interchangeable, James Gunn’s third instalment of Guardians Of The Galaxy feels refreshingly vivid and distinct – a rousing space adventure which is dedicated to delivering both gorgeous spectacle and an emotional wallop.

Despite the fact that it trades in a dogged familiarity, this magical story still retains some spark.

A coming-of-age tale rendered with humour, sensitivity and intelligence, Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret is a marvellous look at adolescence which is frank but also affectionately attuned to the excitement and confusion of being young.

While it could be described as being more of a filmed play than a piece of cinema, it’s also a riveting, raw work which, in its stripped-back simplicity, magnifies the power of tucker green’s fiercely compelling writing.

An investment on the part of the audience is required, to focus in on the characters and to follow the dialogue. It’s not quite as dry as it sounds. There is a subtle humour in this singular approach, but like the dialogue and the drama (such that it is), it is sidelined.

It’s rather meta since the backstory riffs on the star’s life and reputation, yet Yang gives the proceedings cross-generational family appeal through focusing on the protagonist’s deep bond with his steed.

Lengthy it may be, but this is light-of-touch fare, provocative and satisfyingly enigmatic, and though it feels like a four-hour MacGuffin, it remains an accomplished, literary and self-referential exercise in narrative deferral.

Lengthy it may be, but this is light-of-touch fare, provocative and satisfyingly enigmatic, and though it feels like a four-hour MacGuffin, it remains an accomplished, literary and self-referential exercise in narrative deferral.

Plan 75 may seem like it’s about ageing, but more accurately it is about the importance of community — the hope that someone will remember us after we’re gone.

Ritchie’s tendency for swaggering overkill proves especially ill-advised for the serious story he wants to tell about how the US turned its back on those who helped its War On Terror, resulting in a hollow paean that’s far more convincing as a generic shoot-’em-up.

Matter Out Of Place is a typically sober, observational and engrossing work of ecological-anthropological documentary from Austrian maestro Nikolaus Geyrhalter.

The structure of The Plains is playful and idiosyncratic, rather than formalist or rigid.

It is a shame that director Catherine Hardwicke’s film cannot match its star’s inspired turn, settling for a likeable but strained fish-out-of-water tale.

Stitched together from better pictures - all of which viewers would be better advised to check out - The Pope’s Exorcist’s one saving grace is Crowe who still, despite the hound of hell that is this film, is a significant screen presence who commits to some dialogue that only Satan himself could have dreamed up.

While this psychodrama satirises our tendency to scapegoat our parents for our own failings, Aster is even more searing when he takes Beau’s trauma seriously, resulting in a film with meticulously executed tonal command and emotional nuance.

Some cinema hits you in the gut – this film places you right inside the gut, and while it’s not always a pleasant place to be, it’s a visit you’re not likely to forget.

The film takes commendable tonal chances, but too easily succumbs to easy jokes and unconvincing plot twists.

Judy Blume Forever boasts a lively score — as well as impassioned testimonials from famous admirers, such as Lena Dunham — and proves to be an enjoyable, highly polished production that offers a compelling overview of Blume’s literary achievements and lasting legacy.

Ben Affleck produces one of his most irresistibly entertaining dramas — albeit one that never forgets the capitalist reality of this feel-good story.

Whether it’s the hit-or-miss jokes or the familiar action beats, the film too often plays down to its young audience, valuing rambunctious energy over wit or heart.

For all its visual prowess, the film’s most successful element is its balance of the fantastical with the familiar.

This a film which has all the superficial contours of a profound and intelligent enterprise, but little of the actual content.

Solidly grounded, teeming with thought-provoking ideas, wonderfully atmospheric, and often visually striking, this magical realist eco-fable about a dead mother who returns to transform the lives of her dysfunctional family pays the price for its own high ambition and is simply unable to sustain the intensity until the end. But until then, it’s a hypnotic and entrancing ride.

The blend of character study, Hitchcockian intrigue and an excellent central performance from Aline Kuppenheim makes for a tensely involving tale.

Aside from the mother-daughter relationship angle, this splashy, showy assassin picture doesn’t really cover any new ground. But the lack of imagination elsewhere is offset by some impressively slick tailoring – Boksoon really does dress to kill – and extravagantly athletic fight sequences.

The latest from Spanish director Rodrigo Sorogoyen is a terrific psychological thriller and a brooding, muscular piece of filmmaking which makes the most of both the Galician backdrop and the imposing physicality of Menochet and, as his nemesis Xan, the remarkable Luis Zahera.

Backed by a wealth of archive interviews and a judicious use of clips, Gregory Monro’s elegant documentary should prove irresistible to those familiar with Kubrick’s films and keen to deepen their understanding of his process and filmmaking philosophy.

There’s a great deal of charm and humour to Paik’s work, and to this film, but it’s anchored by his perceptiveness and ability to contemplate weighty themes – and, yes, to anticipate the future.

Pugh and Freeman are superb at embodying their characters’ emotional wounds, but Braff’s melodramatic approach quickly becomes oppressive, clumsily orchestrating wild highs and lows with such inelegance that his protagonists start to resemble helpless pawns he is pushing around the narrative chessboard.

Meyer, who also acts as the film’s editor, is a likeable, informative and honest guide through his extreme experience.

Raging Grace walks its own line between traditional genre filmmaking and contemporary social commentary and, while more effective during its slow-burn first half, effectively draws on the systemic horrors of a traditionally white power structure which purports to help ’outsiders’ while keeping them firmly underfoot.

In true, blunt Aussie fashion, Last Stop Larrimah takes this wild-west story as it comes, and Tancred tells it well.

As she did with Shiva Baby, Seligman shows a keen eye for her characters’ mortification, albeit without her previous picture’s precisely modulated discomfort. By design, Bottoms is a broader, more outrageous comedy, and unfortunately the jokes are not as cutting.

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.

Comic-book fans have seen much of this film before, but Levi at least tries to make it soar.

Whether it’s Skarsgard’s cartoonish villain or the director’s showy nods to Lawrence Of Arabia and Sergio Leone, Chapter 4 plays dress-up rather than feeling like a legitimately rich, involving epic.

Flamin’ Hot is a breezy affair accented by Jesse Garcia’s winning performance as the budding Mexican-American entrepreneur, but this underdog tale ultimately proves to be too unremarkable to generate much heat.

We’ve seen the bones of this creature before, for sure, but some terrific GGI monsters, swampy scares and Driver’s committed performance make 65 a snap-toothed popcorn multiplex movie which, at 93 minutes, is sprightly in comparison with its lumbering rivals.

The latest picture from husband and wife team Ryuji Otsuka and Huang Ji is an engrossing and thoughtful, if slightly meandering, portrait of contemporary China which straddles the impact of Tik Tok, the self-commodification of a whole generation of ambitious young people and the social and shadow of the pandemic.

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.

The solo directorial debut of Bobby Farrelly goes for broad laughs and a crowd-pleasing spirit, never mocking its disabled characters but, instead, celebrating their irreverent sense of humour and athletic skill. Unfortunately, that does not keep Champions from feeling patronising and cloying at times.

It’s an engaging drama, if not an especially resonant one

This likeable, terribly contrived charmer is helped by a game cast that almost gets away clean, ultimately hampered by a script that impishly (but not always confidently) switches between tones.

A deft and satisfying police procedural in command of its unusual tone, The Night of the 12th (La Nuit du 12) is perfectly cast and constructed with quietly thrilling rigour.

It’s McKirnan’s unflappable performance and energetic humour that hold it all together.

It’s clear that this one is waving a flag for the positive possibilities of an empathetic, culture-centred approach to mental care.

Tótem embraces chaos and bustle in an ensemble drama of a family living through crisis. This thematically rich piece offers a set of vivid character studies, while musing on life, death and time – largely from a child’s perspective.

As Maria, Burow shines in a phenomenally demanding role that challenges us to tune in empathetically to a character whose actions and motives are rarely less than problematic, but are always limned with a fine brush.

The film’s delicacy of touch comes through not only in the bittersweet love story at its centre, but in a wealth of seemingly marginal details.

It’s a film that requires considerable investment from the audience, and one that rations its rewards even to those who fully commit to the experience. Still, Schanelec’s approach draws the audience in, even as it holds them at arm’s length; she is uncommonly fond of wide shots. It’s an oddly fascinating endeavour.

Undeniably well-meaning and impassioned about the country, its people and its struggle, documentary Superpower is a cluttered account of the war so far, the facts distractingly filtered through the dominant idea that the Hollywood actor is there on the ground, filming history as it happens.

It’s a distinctive work, both visually – the stark black and white photography accentuates the uncanny, almost lunar pockmarks on this scarred terrain – and in terms of its intriguingly detached outback noir storytelling.

While, on one level, it seems to belong to international cinema’s increasingly prevalent strain of climate catastrophe dramas, on another it’s a brittle character piece, a comedy of social embarrassment with a dark and ultimately tragic undertow. Until, that is, a coda ties it off in another register entirely.

Suzume is hardly a film for all tastes, but is certain to thrill anime buffs across all ages and continents.

[A] polished yet unexpectedly affecting documentary.

The droll, slight Smoking Causes Coughing plays like a loose collection of Quentin Dupieux’s leftover ideas, but there’s ample charm in these surreal bits and pieces — especially for anyone already on the auteur’s cheekily bizarre wavelength.

The subtext of In Viaggio (which translates as ‘Travelling’) is that it is while on the road, away from the close confines of the Vatican, that Pope Francis is at his most uninhibited and, therefore, most revealing.

As a director, Jordan has produced polished, briskly paced entertainment but what’s disappointing is that, quite often, Creed III hints at being something more.

What power it has derives from the knowledge that this shocking story actually happened. When that’s the case, it’s maybe good to have it served straight.

Unlike its zonked-out predator, Banks’ film rarely feels similarly energised.

The directors’ first joint feature is a tremendously effective revenge movie; a picture that reframes the neo-noir by harnessing a hate crime and diverting its power into a thrillingly transgressive erotic thriller.

In the end, there’s perhaps just too much sheen to this heartfelt portrait for it to really bite. But it remains a touching tribute to a woman who, von Trotta suggests, pitted a radical desire to question everything against the comfortable certainties of the men who surrounded her.

Golda is a tentative step towards looking at that inflammatory era with the depth it needs and that’s worthwhile: but plucking Golda out of her own life and that time out of its wider context still feels like a missed opportunity.

The latest documentary from Mexican-Salvadoran filmmaker Tatiana Huezo (Tempestad) is an intimate, immersive portrait of a way of life – its rhythms, hardships and its communal joys – told through the eyes of the young people who rarely question it.

Rolf de Heer’s wordless allegorical drama explores its themes in savage, boundless landscapes; in stark images of hate and violence; and in disease and blood.

While Disco Boy doesn’t entirely weave all its threads to satisfying effect, the film crackles with ideas.

The Adults is a gift to its actors, allowing them to explore the tensed-up taciturnity of emotional repression but also to go haywire with the voices and the crazily choreographed body language.

Inside is set up as a psychological thriller/escape movie, but evolves into something rather more intriguing: a philosophical interrogation of the value of art to a dying man.

Sweeney never lets you forget that Reality Leigh Winner was just a young woman who believed she needed to act, which is why the picture works so well: her ordinariness makes her seem all the more helpless, and also more relatable. She could be any of us.

Eisenberg impresses in a role which requires him to keep a great deal beneath the surface. But the screenplay locks up some elements of his character rather too tight and, as dramatic motivations for what follows, they are unpersuasive and somewhat cliched.

The combination of a first-rate cast, a rippling, frequently witty score and a highly-strung, madcap plot — which itself wouldn’t be out of place in a comic opera — makes for a quirky, offbeat spin on the relationship drama.

Johnson and co-writer Matthew Miller turn the story of RIM’s brisk rise and meteoric fall into a kind of breathless tech fever dream, a relentless but addictive downbeat human comedy about the struggle to stay on top in a fast-moving industry.

This is a film with some grace and exuberance, but a cavalier attitude to period verisimilitude only adds to the impression that, when it comes to facing ugly historical reality, Kiberlain’s approach is naïvely inadequate.

Quantumania has greater stakes and a grander canvas than the more lighthearted previous chapters of the Ant-Man saga, and the film mostly negotiates the tricky tonal shift — even if the results are more predictable than spectacular

Short on both charm and Chandlerian complexity, this version coasts on Liam Neeson’s engagingly haggard lead, and some spicy character playing from the likes of Danny Huston, Alan Cumming and Jessica Lange.

There are some fun moments in Sharper, not to mention its attractive production and costume design, and Moore is clearly having a blast with a character who is sexy and smart in equal measure. But with the story broken down into obvious individual character-focused jigsaw pieces, viewers won’t need many of their own wits about them to guess where this tale is headed.

Last Dance does not top what came before, lacking the inspiration, freshness and spark of the earlier pictures. But it feels properly measured in its acknowledgement that the dance eventually ends. Mike bows out gracefully enough.

The film refrains from diagnosing or analysing – either Keiko’s psyche or her condition – but describes and evokes her world with subtle detached insight. It does so on a miniature scale that some might find frustrating or non-committal, but that allows director Miyake to give us Keiko in close-up, yet in a manner that’s scrupulously non-intrusive too.

Director M. Night Shyamalan crafts an exercise in tense claustrophobia, teasing the audience with the question of whether their preposterous beliefs are correct — a riddle complicated by our familiarity with this filmmaker’s fondness for third-act twists.

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

The situation of Israel’s Arab population is treated with poised satirical acidity in Let It Be Morning, a film mixing social comedy with a touch of absurdism that, though rooted in real-world conflict, has distinct echoes of Buñuel’s The Exterminating Angel.

While the film’s narrative may run a familiar path from conflict to resolution, Rotem’s light, authentic touch makes it an engaging journey.

Deft performances from Lubna Azabal and Nisrin Erradi add heart and soul to this slender chronicle of a de facto family learning to rely on one another.

It’s a propulsively intense piece of filmmaking – at times a bit like watching a highwire chainsaw juggling act about to go horribly and catastrophically wrong.

A well-executed, unusual and historically-tinged horror [film] ... drenched in the atmosphere of Second World War colonial dread.

Allen-Miller achieves the Holy Grail of all great rom-coms in making us desperate to see the pair get together for good, while simultaneously not wanting this first flush of romance to end.

As with a lot of first-time feature filmmakers, Smith shows a tendency to want to throw everything a her film stylistically – including, at one point, the random use of bright yellow subtitles – which makes certain sections feel unnecessarily skittish.

Boosted by some lovely performances from its young actors, writer-director Christopher Zalla’s sometimes-creaky feel-good film is most affecting when it explores how some children can have their future taken away only too soon.