If tenderness is deployed to ease Shmuel’s grieving, those are not the scenes which give To Dust its special pungency, or what make you laugh. This film is at its best when it goes for the gut.

Olivia Munn is quite touching as the title character, and the picture cleverly dramatises the conflicting thoughts that bounce around inside us and, often, dictate our lives.

The movie’s arresting visual conceit has enough flexibility to sustain interest, even if the story’s twists and turns sometimes feel excessively fiendish.

It would be easy to paint him as a tragic figure but Tcheng’s film is more of a celebration than a lamentation, saluting a superstar designer whose life was a triumph of style and substance.

Bouzid’s film is also warm, passionate and sexy in a well-read kind of way – a surefire route to wider arthouse acceptance.

This small, engaging film doesn’t offer much in the way of introduction to Birkin for non-initiates - there’s nothing about her acting career, for example. But for the devoted audience of a star who can – for once – genuinely be called an icon, the film offers a tender and quite illuminating portrait of a mother-daughter relationship seen both within, and far away from, the public sphere of celebrity.

The Assistant is inspired by potentially scandalous material but subverts expectations, asking the audience to consider the broader societal implications of the crime.

Though perhaps lacking in a real sense of dramatic tension; veering towards the schmaltzy at times and needing a far tighter ending, Woman In Gold is still a thoroughly enjoyable story, engagingly told and with a nice line in gentle humour to balance the legal battle structure which can veer to dryness at times.

Resurgence doles out the action and effects work in carefully calculated, incremental doses, which give the film a cumulative tension. Even if it’s hokey and jokey, this is a loud, effects-driven piece, with a driving score. For fans of Roland Emmerich disaster movies, this both hits all the marks, while delivering nothing new.

The film’s magnetic centre is a strong performance from Vysotskaya, working from a base line of initial testiness to rising anxiety and terror in face of the oppression that she realises she has been enabling.

Federico Veiroj’s love of anti-heroes continues with this fifth feature, an enjoyably offbeat period character study wrapped in a thriller and laced with bone-dry humour that charts the rise of a conscience-free money launderer during the 1970s Uruguayan military dictatorship.

The film is led by Maika Monroe’s fragile performance, which grounds the story even when the proceedings start to become formulaic.

Sometimes the convoluted story forces its emotional beats, but Hoppers is a largely successful animation that introduces a refreshingly darker strain of humour alongside its paeans to the natural world.

It’s a jolting race against time when the wave gathers steam far away, as implacable as the tsunami in Clint Eastwood’s Hereafter, minus the pop metaphysics .

Feel free to ignore the nonsensical plot and tortured musings on honour, revenge, loyalty and destiny. All that matters is how director Chad Stahelski concocts his usual litany of flinty fight scenes, and how Keanu Reeves invests the material with his wonderfully spacey stoicism.

Glassland is impressive, although Barrett struggles to give this carefully crafted narrative a coherent resolution.

What The Whaler Boy lacks in story complexity and character depth, it more than makes up in its bone-deep immersion in Lyoshka’s world.

A stripped-down drama built around a powerful and sometimes troubling performance by Christopher Plummer.

This sprawling, meandering compendium of dispossessed people in transit is a profoundly human film, a heartfelt call to empathy, but also something of a politicised nature documentary.

Together Together makes for comfortable viewing elevated by Harrison’s sparky presence.

The Settlers is captivating viewing for the most part. But it’s also muddled in its combination of historical and contemporary storytelling.

An intriguing and absorbing delve into almost alien parts of the United States.

It Is In Us All demonstrates a sure directorial hand when it comes to evoking a sense of place and community, but falters slightly in the writing and the characterisation – for all Jarvis’s intriguingly complex work, the increasingly nihilistic character he plays remains something of a conundrum throughout.

When Raimi is allowed to indulge his weird streak — especially during an audacious third act — the picture pushes past the franchise’s predictably polished sheen to arrive at sequences that are livelier and odder than Marvel normally permits.

Scottish director John Maclean’s ambitious second feature is an intriguing blend of Western and samurai actioner — always close bedfellows — which makes the most of its untamed setting.

Love And Thunder doesn’t always gracefully execute its balance of light and dark but when the film focuses on the unshakeable bond between Thor and Jane, the results can be mighty moving.

What emerges is a history lesson but also a personal journey of sorts for Koch and Schachmann, grandchildren of Jewish immigrants who discover an emotional connection to their cultural roots along the way.

Gabriel and the Mountain offers a moving look at the transformative nature of travel, both on those hopping around the world in search of a new perspective and those they encounter along the way.