Unlike its subject, The Apprentice largely sticks to documented facts. Most of the cheating, lies, greed, vanity and misogyny on display are hardly new or shocking, and rather mild compared to what’s to come.

It’s perfect popcorn fare: the story of a creative genius against the playfulness of a Lego landscape mixed with a boppy tune.

As Sara and Julien bide their time in the barn, escaping into their imagination, Forster keeps himself interested by turning the movie into an ode to cinema.

Why so serious, Phillips seems to be saying, in this follow-up. Relax, it’s all entertainment. The challenge, however, is that Joker: Folie à Deux is more ponderous rather than acting as a riposte. It has its moments of movie magic, but they largely get overshadowed by the weight of this redemption endeavour.

There is an intensity and commitment in Campbell’s work that mesmerizes, even frightens, with its sheer boldness.

Frankie Freako is designed to melt your brain. The only question is whether you might welcome such cerebral liquefaction or not.

This is a movie that so badly wants to be as cool as its source material that it trips over itself, in backward Chevy Chase style, into something so old-fashioned and dully familiar that no amount of retro sheen can boost its cool bona fides.

Leave it to a robot to break our puny human hearts.

Kuras’s film, especially the paint-by-numbers script credited to a trio of writers, seems to oddly object to such a strong spirit, boxing the character into the most formulaic of narratives.

Megalopolis might be Coppola’s decades-in-the-making passion project, an epic of ambition and imagination, but it is also a magnificent mess of a masterpiece, as irredeemably silly as it is sincerely sublime.

Ultimately the film struggles to balance its various commitments, with a screenplay that never seems sure of whether it wants to be a pure comedy, a lore-packed adventure or a peppy children’s film that shuffles kids straight to the toy aisle.

Once the half-clever set-up is established by Watts – what happens when two lone wolves must work together? – the film is content to merely coast on the charms of its stars.

While its celebration of all things fleshly, protrusive, and gloriously ectoplasmic may not be for those viewers too faint of heart, Fargeat’s no-holds-barred, wholly beyond your wildest expectations approach with The Substance will leave genre fans kicking their feet up in glee.

As much a deeply affectionate love letter to eighties-era horror-comedies as it is a synapse-stretching exercise in defiant maximalism, Joseph Kahn’s new film, Ick, is a true ride designed to hold, thrill, kiss and kill you.

Where the horror of 2022′s Speak No Evil feels deeply, almost inescapably cruel in its final moments, Watkins’s film takes a relatively conventional approach, relying more on slasher tropes than producing a deep-seated sense of unease.

Saulnier has returned with a tremendous, high-impact blast of a movie, making any delayed gratification all the more satisfying.

Michael Keaton’s go-for-broke performance is such a possessed work of splatter comedy that he almost proves right the producers who have been advocating for this nostalgia-play cash grab for decades.

The film’s sense of history is hasty, its characterizations crude. And by combining a twinkly-eyed tone with some of the goofiest performances in recent memory, the whole thing constantly threatens to reveal itself as a stealth parody flick.

Incoherent and cheap, with its aesthetic sensibilities seemingly cribbed from an elevator pitch of “John Wick goes goth,” Sanders’s version of The Crow is a truly ugly thing to endure.

Fitzgerald gives a strong performance, especially considering the lack of depth her character is afforded, but her impact is drowned out by the film’s truly rancid attempt at upending the gendered inferences that Mollner has staged her character within.

Though this intricate scenario neatly develops upon its director’s catalogue, Close Your Eyes still feels singular and prodigious – a film that works just as well for those unfamiliar with Erice, moving with the viewer to unveil its secrets.

The film is a fun and unsettling showcase for Kravitz, who proves herself to be an intentional and provocative filmmaker, putting jarring edits, precise framing and a sensational ensemble cast led by Naomi Ackie, Channing Tatum, Adria Arjona and Geena Davis to great use.

Although sometimes dizzying and disorienting, the visual language of Between the Temples is relentlessly alive, with the camera never considering-slash-allowing for the possibility that its audiences’ eyes might wander.

Denied a second act, Shane is recognized with a heartfelt film that celebrates an undersung icon who lived her authentic self, sparkled on her own terms and defied the squares.

Gloriously, every actor and department head is making exactly the same movie, one that looks, feels and sounds simultaneously spare and lush, realistic and fable-like.

Álvarez eventually gets there, with the third act of Romulus impressively nauseating. But otherwise, the filmmaker isn’t developing this cinematic universe so much as he is stunting its growth.

Roth likely deserves much of the blame, though the film is so relentlessly middling that it feels curiously divorced from his typically extreme sensibilities.

Certainly, it’s fun to see Schafer, best known for her work on HBO’s teenage-wasteland series Euphoria, match wits with Stevens, including a gnarly sequence of knife play. But neither actor can figure out where their director is going with all this madness or where he might want to be at any given moment, tonally and thematically. It’s enough to drive anybody, even the king of kook Stevens – well, you know.