A nail-biting, evocative and utterly persuasive crime drama that is very much a part of the country’s burgeoning film output.

Even when the jokes occasionally fall flat, the ideas are killer.

The cumulative stress of the pandemic is everywhere, as pervasive and ubiquitous as the omicron variant. Beth’s lonely home-working set-up; the eerie quiet in the predawn hours; the brittle desperation in the callers’ voices; the sheer volume of cries for help: it all captures the sense of teetering on the brink, the uncertainty, the unfamiliar anxieties of the first lockdown.

While its ideas might fail to fully coalesce, the film is unnervingly beautiful; an immersive and mesmeric aural and visual experience.

Served up with lashings of homoeroticism, Bunuelian satire, a gay love story and an athletic dance number, its uncompromising nature will delight fans of the visionary filmmaker.

This affectionate hoot hardly breaks new ground with its film-within-a-film structure, but the South Korean auteur attacks the material with such good cheer, populating the story with a collection of daffy dreamers, that it’s easy to root for these characters as they reshoot the ending of a picture some of them are convinced is this close to being a masterpiece.

DC takes the multiverse for a spin in The Flash, an entertaining adventure that outruns its familiar narrative trappings thanks to a playful sense of humour and the arrival of an iconic character in a supporting role.

Creed II director Steven Caple Jr. brings a little playfulness and emotion to the series but, unfortunately, the clattering action and self-important tone remains.

Writer-director Carolina Cavalli (with the considerable contribution of Benedetta Porcaroli in the title role) crafts a refreshingly unconventional and acidic deadpan comic portrait of an offbeat female friendship.

While The Boogeyman — based on the 1973 Stephen King short story about a closet-dwelling stealer of souls — is as narratively generic as its on-the-nose (and oft-used) title may suggest, British director Rob Savage brings an innate humanness and playful spirit that lifts this otherwise-rote monster movie.

A stirring follow-up that tops the formidable original, Spider-Man: Across The Spider-Verse draws us deeper into Miles Morales’ saga while offering the same stunning animation, dazzling set pieces and irreverent humour.

Elemental contains hints of the studio’s wit and poignancy while lacking the inspired execution that once seemed so effortless.

This is a remarkable debut feature; provocative, absorbing and mysterious. There are no easy answers to the big existential questions, just a desire to seek them out with a kind heart and good intentions. In the end you just have to have faith.

Narratively spare ... Less substantial and approachable than Hong’s 2022 features The Novelist’s Film and Walk Up, the fragile, fragmentary In Our Day won’t earn Hong any new fans, but avid followers will enjoy its elusive felicities and love puzzling over its enigmatic gaps.

Although Lost In The Night parades certain familiar Escalante obsessions and contains scenes of striking beauty with something of a Mex-Western feel, it is, at its heart, a fairly conventional crime movie.

The Animal Kingdom sets itself up as a brooding chiller, jump scares, freaky coups de cinéma and all, but gradually shifts gear to become more poetic and tender.

A welcome return ... The Book of Solutions is an ode to time-wasting distractions and shelved projects, one that suggests that perhaps it’s here, rather than in the boring finished stuff, that you can find an artist’s soul.

An intimate but ambitiously mounted ensemble piece, The Old Oak ranks among Loach’s foremost state-of-the-nation dramas.

Despite the suitably transgressive nature of the subject matter, Catherine Breillat’s first film in a decade is an oddly muted affair: uncomfortable, certainly, but lacking the disruptive, confrontational jab and genuine shock factor of her earlier pictures.

Anselm is a portrait of eminent German artist Anselm Kiefer, exploring the man’s spectacular – and often spectacularly sombre – work. Wenders also delves into Kiefer’s biography and his political, historical and literary interests, which chime with the director’s own long-term fascinations to make this arguably the director’s most personal – and certainly most German – film in some time.

The result is the depiction of a seemingly sealed-in, quasi-carceral world, revealing how much China’s current economy – after decades, and multiple phases, of Communism – is now built on old-school sweatshop capitalism, with youth a readily available, and very disposable, commodity.

The Settlers shows promise: it’s the work of a daring director intent on developing a distinctive and original voice.

In Tran Anh Hung’s seventh feature, a passion for food becomes a conduit to exploring an appreciation for the beauty and mystery of existence — as well as telling a delicate, complicated love story.

For all its poetic charm, this is a slender work that comes across as something of a ’mindfulness movie’, in a faintly self-satisfied vein.

A handful of bone-crunching, arrow-whirring, neck-slicing battle scenes allow us some time off from trying to follow the convoluted narrative thread.

Kidnapped hides a bleak and bracing message inside lovely old costumes and sumptuous set pieces .

Fallen Leaves may not set the film world on fire, but is guaranteed to cast a warm glow.

Close Your Eyes finally builds a head of emotional steam in its last half hour, while exploring questions of identity and what remains when memory has gone.