Director Stephen Chbosky badly mishandles the material, resulting in an increasingly frustrating experience in which Evan’s inability to come clean leads to a string of emotional manipulations that sometimes border on cruel.

It’s a lean drama that cuts no slack.

Provocative Italian feature Bad Tales is one of those films that aren’t afraid to confront you with the grimmest aspects of the human condition, but yet leave you feeling strangely exalted by the sheer cinematic invention involved.

This tense, memorable study of one man’s breakdown and the unreliable stories it generates may not live up to the promise of its first excellent half hour, but it is still an audacious piece of filmmaking, one that imprints a memorably skewed worldview on the ears and retina.

This is filmmaking which echoes Cohen’s music style – it’s contemplative, searching and stripped back, but it can also be somewhat navel gazing, ponderous and very slow.

Directed with brisk efficiency by Philip Noyce, the mix of adrenaline-rush emotion, manipulative melodrama and moralising is surprisingly entertaining in the moment.

The storytelling ends up a little too murky to be the grand commentary on privilege and exploitation McDonagh intends.

In Pearce’s sure hands, the film sustains its tension, even as it sideswipes the audience with slickly executed change of tone.

Boxily framed, the film tries out several visual looks, wandering tonally through its own aesthetic maze.

It’s an elegant piece of filmmaking, if a little too decorous at times.

The latest picture from Melanie Laurent is a strikingly beautiful production which delves deep into the ugliness at the roots of psychiatric medicine.

Il Buco proves that cinema still has the capacity to astonish in a very innocent, childlike way as a medium in which light illuminates a black screen and creates beauty.

The actors lend sincerity to the proceedings, but the film keeps cheating to achieve its dramatic payoffs.

There’s a slight lack of dramatic tension in much of the lead-up to its harrowing finale, with too much weight placed on the capable shoulders of the French-Romanian actress Anamaria Vartolomei.

This impressive feature from Alexandre Moratto takes the topic of modern-day enslavement as a jumping-off point for a morality tale which gets increasingly knotty and satisfying as it goes on.

Whether it’s the sheer weight of the narrative repetition - which involves rewatching a brutal rape - or the two-men/one-woman perspective, which results in an underwritten character and a strained performance from Comer, The Last Duel is crushed by the weight of its own armour.

A claustrophobic thriller about a disgraced cop trying to undo his past mistakes over the course of one supremely stressful night, The Guilty boasts a clever close-quarters conceit that ends up feeling more like an actorly exercise than a gripping human drama.

Writer-director Bogdan Mirica makes a very assured feature debut, juggling an accretion of sinister clues and slow-burn allegiances at a low-key pace kept humming thanks to attention-getting widescreen panache.

Whatever else could be said about this competent and generally pretty entertaining latest addition to the series, surprising it is not.

More informational than revealing, John Hoffman and Janet Tobias’ documentary makes the case that in times of great uncertainty concerning mysterious diseases, calm reason and unassailable science are our staunchest allies — two assets the 80-year-old immunologist possesses to ample degree.

There are moments when, like the gaudy lights of Acapulco, Sundown flickers into something rather special when seen from the right angle, in the right mood: a film about a goodbye to life which is also a film about a kind of afterlife.

Free Solo wife and husband directors Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi and Jimmy Chin are forensic in the detail they provide and the range of testimonies they have assembled; the result is a tense, absorbing documentary with a strong emotional charge.

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.

Ultimately what makes this an unusually rewarding picture about motherhood is the fact that it shatters the binary distinction between the good mother and the bad one.

To the credit of all concerned, however the one-take approach feels appropriate and organic, rather than gimmicky or stunt-like.

It’s a blast. Last Night In Soho is the kind of good time which isn’t over until someone’s either crying or bleeding. And oh, how we’ve all missed those nights!

This Dune dwarfs most contemporary sci-fi in its scope and execution, ably juggling multiple characters and settings so that it matches the sprawling drama of the original tome.

Its odd meld of drab suburban casinos, wrapped motel rooms, nightmarish Iraqi torture sequences and military correctional facilities where the furniture is bolted to the floor, all build to a video-artist vision that comes bursting surprisingly out of an old-school box – and results in one more male-slanted Paul Schrader script about a haunted man at a crossroads.