More effective as an earnest, cumulative emotional journey than as a viewing experience made up of rather random parts, La Bola Negra does eventually repay some of the batter

There’s much to admire in Emmanuel Marre’s ambitious second fiction: the lighting choices are thrillingly unexpected; the performances are superb across the board. But whether there’s enough there to justify the running time is another question.

The Man I Love doesn’t feel so much like a portrait of a time and place rather than something more essential and human: a portrait of a passionate and loving character caught in a final performance he didn’t ask for, and which he wishes would never end.

The sheer enthusiasm is at times infectious, and at other times you wish he’d worked with a forthright script editor. Still, it’s diverting to see an authentic and genuine oddity of a project.

In the art-house cinema of enigma, there’s often a thin line between the mysterious and the murky. Arthur Harari’s The Unknown treads this line with varying degrees of daring and discomfort, but ultimately never feels quite confident enough to lead us compellingly through the labyrinth of its bizarre body swap narrative.

Minotaur sees Zvyagintsev set his own deliciously ink-black stamp on Chabrol’s erotic thriller; indeed, for the majority of its runtime, Zvyagintsev deliberately flattens both the eroticism and the thrills – a carefully judged gambit that allows scenes of nudity and murder to land with greater force when they finally arrive.

Nemes takes a much more direct approach in Orphan; a no less challenging film in its own way but one that yields more immediate appeal, even embracing the pleasures of melodrama.

Bitter Christmas remains a cinephile’s film – one whose exploration of emotions ultimately fails to translate into an emotional experience for the viewer.

Heroes are often given big speeches and major acts, but heroism is finally defined in Moulin as saying nothing and doing nothing – resisting with the full force of your body and your mind.

To be sure, there are moments when one can be amused by the shameless showiness of Refn’s pretentious design. But like that mist enveloping the city, Her Private Hell’s charms dissipate fairly quickly.

It opens no major storytelling doors in the Star Wars universe – and is unlikely to herald a new era of Star Wars in cinemas. Indeed, for fans of the series it could feel like several fresh episodes of the streaming show given a major boost of scale, imagination and budget. Still, as a standalone film, it’s perky and good-looking, with rousing set pieces.

Exarchopoulos’s performance is remarkable for being so undemonstratively naturalistic, perfectly in tune with the film’s anti-sensationalistic presentation of its theme.

Its cold precision thaws in a way that is uncharacteristic for Mungiu, leaving us with a thought-provoking drama about conflicting values that feels, in the end, a little bloodless and underpowered.

The running time might prove challenging – there’s only so many handbrake turns, high-powered automatic weapons and skewered supporting cast members you can take before it starts getting repetitive. But then Na flips the perspective, making us question our allegiances and ask who the real monsters are.

Rodrigo Sorogoyen’s superbly acted and dramatically compelling study of generational rifts, gender divides and the deep, unhealing scars in a father-daughter relationship has a muscular, propulsive momentum.

There’s plenty of food for thought here, but the script’s penchant for saccharine touches – one aided and abetted by a lilting string-led soundtrack that turns to treacle a little too often – undercuts the authority of the film’s philosophical musings.

As is often the case with this writer-director, Gray’s film has a dim view of the American Dream but, if some of the script’s contours are familiar, Paper Tiger’s quiet intensity and growing sibling tension make it a compelling experience.

The film is most effective in conveying the sense of life’s foundations and certainties being suddenly undermined, and the doubt and panic that creeps into previously happy memories.

Jordan Firstman’s crowdpleasing queer family drama is a triumph – an acidic, spikily funny portrait of New York’s hedonistic gay scene which celebrates empathy, community and the unconditional love between a father and his son.

All Of A Sudden never stoops to treacly melodrama, instead preferring a restrained approach that allows the film’s most emotional scenes to hit with full force.

When Parallel Tales shifts tones near the end to unveil an unsettling surprise, the film’s confectionery construction cannot bear the jolt. Like Sylvie, Farhadi wants to mine riveting fiction from the flotsam of the everyday, but his imagination proves to be not as formidable as hers.

An uneven mix of melodrama, eccentricity and hyper-male boisterousness never entirely convinces.

Alongside its verbal and intellectual content, Fatherland is immersively evocative, genuinely making us feel as if we are visiting the two Germanies in 1949.

Charline Bourgeois-Tacquet’s intriguing, modest drama keeps its focus tight on Gabrielle but, thanks to a keenly observed screenplay and Drucker’s finely balanced performance, presents a wider view on the female mid-life experience.

In its unassuming way, the film is a celebration of creativity and of emotional connections forged through art. But Nagi Notes is unassertive in its themes and, at times, gentle almost to a fault.

A dizzyingly ambitious meta-satire about Hollywood, IP, hacky horror, and gender and sexual identity, Teenage Sex And Death cannot help but occasionally misstep, but the rush of ideas and the confidence of the filmmaking never waver.

Curry Barker’s astute horror takes the simple, familiar premise of a love-sick man attempting to win the object of his affections and shapes it into an incisive, entertainingly schlocky study of romantic co-dependency, patriarchal entitlement and the all-too-easy subversion of good intentions.

While never quite predictable, The Electric Kiss lacks the knowing brio of recent French period pastiches such as François Ozon’s The Crime is Mine or Cédric Klapisch’s 2025 Colours of Time, similarly set in Paris bohemia.