Limber and thought-provoking, An Unfinished Film is an absorbing portrait of an unfinished era.

For all its unpredictability and nerve, the film too often feels snarky rather than subversive.

Unfortunately, the film often feels as unremarkable as its protagonists, evincing little of the impressive spectacle or snarky wit of Marvel’s best installments.

While its surprising innocence is what makes this film appealing, the franchise is still dependably cheeky thanks largely to Hugh Grant.

The perfunctory martial-arts sequences and convoluted plotting conspire to make this a painfully uninspired proposition.

Hailey Gates’ ambitious debut feature Atropia is full of comic potential that is never quite realised. The mixture of war games satire, deadpan farce and sweet romance provides amusement along the way without cutting as deep as it sometimes promises.

While this expansion of Frett’s 2023 short of the same name may, at times, feel like it’s being cornered into making a political statement, the nuanced central performance from Stephan James largely prevents the message from overwhelming the story.

The multiple scenes featuring family fights feel raw and authentic, sometimes painfully so, because they seem part-improvised: but at times they drag on too long, a sign of a larger problem with pacing and rhythm. What brings it all back from the edge are the performances.

While not seeking to paint all Russians as ‘victims’ and explicitly acknowledging the situation is far worse for Ukranians, Talankin’s footage comes as a reminder of children as the innocent victims of war.

While it’s a remarkable feat, particularly from an editing perspective, there’s also something laboratory-like about raiding the archive from a distance and imposing such an articficial structure on it.

Seeds is a sweet, meditative elegy for a way of life that is fast disappearing.

Many Americans recognise the injustices within the country’s prison system, but the case has rarely been laid out as comprehensively as it is in The Alabama Solution.

Sharp-witted, sympathetic and illuminating, Coexistence, My Ass! successfully runs the gamut from hilarity to heartbreak.

Companion looks fantastic. But, underneath that glossy surface, it makes some biting comments about power dynamics, free will, and what it really means to be human.

There’s much that is brilliant here, although the loss of nuance in translation from page to screen reduces a potent brew of emotions to more literally-depicted stages and consequences of pure, overwhelming, overwrought grief.

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.

Offering an eye-opening insider perspective that comes as a reminder of what conviction politics looks like when it is maintained even under extreme pressure, as well as being a celebration of feminism, Prime Minister holds appeal for audiences well beyond New Zealand’s shores.

Its reflections on modern relationships are engagingly comical, cynical and ultimately tender.

On the surface, Not Alone Anymore is a solid, sweet-natured celebration of a unique artist, but it gradually provides a deeper perspective.

Lurker is sometimes a little too on the mark.

While director Justin Lin’s thriller-inflected approach is periodically absorbing, the scattered structure and episodic nature of the plot works against him as it slides towards an overly sentimental conclusion.

Ewing and Grady want to leave viewers with a heartwarming message about the capacity of people to discover their true selves.

The Dating Game is sustained by the humanity that Du Feng finds in each of the individuals we come to know and understand a little better.

Sometimes overwhelming but always penetrating, the film practically demands multiple viewings to absorb its rich collection of ideas, images and music.

Lacking nuance in its early stages, it matures into a more considered, moving tale that effectively blends the personal and the political.

The actors’ on-screen rapport is sweet and loving, and they lean into deadpan once Together gets bloodier and increasingly more outrageous.

Director Clint Bentley sculpts a sentimental story whose gentle ironies and modest design have a cumulative power.

Delicately segueing from deadpan humour to delicate poignancy, Sorry, Baby is guided by the filmmaker’s graceful lead performance, which captures the guilt, anger and sadness of a woman who once seemingly had a bright future — until, suddenly, everything changed.