This is not just a visual treat, it’s a rewarding and unexpectedly engrossing piece of female-led storytelling.

Well-acted, it lacks the standout performances or star presences which propelled the tonally-similar Ex Machina to more than cult success. While it will play to fans of cerebral science fiction, it may be less grabby for general audiences.

Goodbye Christopher Robin doesn’t just lack authenticity, it appears to scorn it.

As kinetic as its predecessor — and just as belaboured — Kingsman: The Golden Circle serves up another batch of hyper-stylised action, irreverent humour and sharp threads, resulting in a film that’s not nearly as cool as it thinks it is.

There’s an air of well-oiled, made-for-TV efficiency about the exercise that extends from Lunchbox director Ritesh Batra’s safe hand on the tiller to Stephen Goldblatt’s golden-light photography.

It’s a long, long road cluttered with clichés and stalled in softness, pot-holed by its self-serving use of Alzheimer’s as a narrative convenience.

The film’s lavish production values and a comic register more impish than truly acerbic makes this a surprisingly cosy piece of luxury heritage cinema.

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.

Even if Trier doesn’t have much new to say about oppressive religious belief, childhood trauma or the terror of adolescent hormones, Thelma’s sustained, muted uneasiness gives this genre exercise sufficient gusto.

Although director David Gordon Green commendably opts for a realistic, unfussy depiction of Bauman and his on-again/off-again girlfriend (played with welcome grit by Tatiana Maslany), Stronger feels more perfunctory than lived-in.

Denzel Washington gives a terrifically off-kilter performance in Roman J. Israel, Esq., a fascinating and flawed character study that frustratingly can’t meld all its ambitions into a coherent and satisfying whole.

Writer-director Angela Robinson chronicles a complex love story that investigates kinkiness, social mores and the impetus for art, resulting in a drama that’s far more intellectually intriguing than emotionally engaging.

The considerable chemistry between Kate Winslet and Idris Elba certainly helps sell this tearjerker, but even so the film feels oddly distant and muted, only really coming to life in a denouement that suggests the tasteful passion buried at the story’s core.

The scenes that Chastain and Elba share are enormously enjoyable. There’s a crackling, almost screwball quality to their rapid-fire banter. You rather wish they had more screen time together. But there’s a lot of backstory to explore and many fools to be parted from their money.

A solidly engrossing political drama, anchored by a commanding central performance from Liam Neeson.

A feature that might not always surprise in its story, but succeeds in its authenticity.

The lack of emotional distance between the filmmakers and the subject – producer Jonathan Cavendish is the son of Robin and Diana – might account for the bracingly celebratory approach. This is understandable, perhaps, but it results in a lack of dramatic light and shade, and an absence of texture in the characterisation.

We only see what Loung sees, feel what she experiences but through her ordeal there develops an emotional connection to a country undergoing some of its darkest hours.

Indivisible peers and probes, offering a sensitive, insightful and sometimes even dream-like rumination on the cost of seeking and subverting normality.

Shot and edited with Wiseman’s customary poetry and precision, Ex Libris is structured as a series of forays from the Library’s Fifth Avenue heart to its orbiting satellites, and back again.

Served up with star turns from Emma Stone and Steve Carell, Battle Of The Sexes slams a crowdpleaser across the net.

This is a film which breathes life, as well as alcohol fumes, into history. Like its central character, Darkest Hour has “mobilised the English language and sent it into battle.”

There’s a thin, and very jagged, line between the radical mosaic approach to editing and narrative of a film like Shane Carruth’s Upstream Color and the impressionistic jigsaw vagueness of Woodshock, which simply seems reluctant to commit itself to mere coherence, as if that simply were too unchic.

Writer-director Mike White has crafted a painfully funny and surprisingly moving character piece, but what’s most remarkable is how he and his star empathize with Brad’s feelings of inferiority while, at the same time, pinpointing the arrogance, privilege and callousness that often factor into such soul-searching.

Lady Bird is often screamingly funny but it also has a generous spirit, embracing characters with all their flaws and foibles, virtues and defects.

Anchored by a funny, foul-mouthed performance from McDormand, McDonagh’s daringly-structured dark comedy is rich and layered and often laugh-out-loud funny but trips over constant tonal shifts.

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.

An eye-opening, moving and often shocking film, Motherland is a serious-minded documentary without talking heads, music, or narrative structure.