The British director marries Welsh mythology to more modern ideas about processing trauma, using sound to create a strange and unsettling psychological mood piece rather than an out-and-out horror. The result is engagingly enigmatic if slight in terms of plot and light on chills.

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.

A few mid-section pacing issues not withstanding, this is a satisfyingly gritty addition to Iran’s tradition of humanist cinema.

Marcel The Shell With Shoes On manages to harness enough of what initially made this diminutive protagonist such an unexpected treat; in particular, Slate’s endearing vocal performance.

It’s a film with considerable heart and, in Nighy and Ward, the Tinker Bell sparkle of the true film-star.

The subject matter may be familiar — despairingly so — but writer-director Jason Hall (who previously wrote American Sniper) imbues it with specificity and no-nonsense drama that make the plight of physically and emotionally wounded soldiers sting all over again.

Talpe is excellent in the lead, his tightly-honed physique an increasingly transparent veneer for his troubled emotional state.

While this slow-motion tragedy sometimes risks more than it can deliver, the film’s cumulative effect stuns nonetheless. Ashton Sanders heads a fine cast that forcibly articulates the everyday landmines African-Americans have to navigate in a white society that often seems intent on destroying them.

Del Toro’s undying adoration for his fantastical creatures leaves us hungry to learn more about the inner workings of the man who brought them to life.

Inevitably, this will mean it draws comparisons to The Babadook, the current high-bar for grief manifestation horror, but Daddy’s Head, which premiered at Fantastic Fest, is sharply drawn, well-shot, and genuinely unsettling in its own right.

The template may remain essentially cheesy and the men still appear never to have experienced a dance floor. Yet it would be churlish to argue against a film of such smile-out-loud optimism.

Although conventional in its approach, the film is a forceful reckoning of a broken legal system.

In the end, The Upside is the sum of its good players and dubious politics, wrenching genuine tears from a story that celebrates the rich promise of life in all its shades of joy and heartbreak.

Wilson sometimes struggles to make this feature-length documentary as consistently entertaining as his old series’ half-hour episodes. But he continues to mine surprisingly emotional moments from his wryly comic approach.

The result has a definite voice – even when its protagonists struggle to find their own.

Klein has a strong grasp on all of the material, and editors Jake Keen and Alexander J Goldstein cut it together it carefully so that the past and the present often meet.

Despite high quality performances from Close and Pryce, the film leaves us with question marks over the credibility of the central scenario.

Soul on a String is visually stunning.

As Avis softly underlines, not everything has changed for man’s servants. And although we know the beats of this story, it’s a classic for a reason: Disney+’s Black Beauty gives a great yarn a good exercise.

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

Wong’s indomitable spirit is what lends the film such an appeal.

In a way, the film is its own genre – the found-footage documentary. There are no interviews with other people, no self-described experts. Just Hoon, who – adding to the film’s melancholy sense of waste – comes across as an unspoiled, charismatic and mostly amiable young man.

Us and Them may be too familiar to thoroughly distinguish itself from the spate of similarly themed love stories that have been churned out following the breakthrough success of Zhao Wei’s So Young (2013), but it’s certainly one of the more nuanced entries in the cycle and bodes well for Liu’s future behind the camera.

As fragmented as its title suggests, Pieces of a Woman contains parts of a good film, possibly a great one.

Vaughn brings a tenderness to the role of a man forced into animal violence for the sake of love and the miracle of birth, and the rangy anarchy of Zahler’s deeply kooky film gets under the skin at times. But in the end, you wish some big bad studio boss had been there to cut this director’s cut.

Ne Zha 2 is a distinct fantasy epic and a technical achievement that stands up to the best that Disney, DreamWorks, Aardman or Studio Ghibli can offer, even if it frequently gives in to the same proclivities for excess as its peers.

A rowdy salute to the thankless sacrifices made by modern mothers, Bad Moms has lots of spirit, some funny moments and wonderful chemistry from its three leads. And yet, this so-so comedy can’t shake a formulaic, uninspired construction that often settles for the easy joke or the pat pay-off.

There are plenty of solid laughs in Mascots — everything from jokes about furries to throwaway bits involving obscure cable channels — but what’s disappointing is that there’s not a great overr-iding idea that ties all the gags together.