A “clever” film that doesn’t do anything clever at all beyond its Hitchcockian opening credits, Windfall is a disposable and eye-rolling endeavour that will have you re-evaluating your household streaming budget.

I do see one bright future for this film: the Deep Water drinking game, where the Bingo squares read “Melinda’s dress falls off,” “Vic clenches his jaw,” and “Naked breast.” Everyone will end up very, very drunk

The Outfit is not, strictly speaking, a movie about magic. Yet the gangland thriller pulls off a number of nifty tricks, with first-time director Graham Moore playing his hand with equal parts sleight and might.

The first 90 minutes is an audacious shock, petering out with an exceptionally messy and chaotic climax. But while Fresh takes obvious cues from Get Out and Promising Young Woman, it’s something unique, a balm to any singleton that promises to turn you off online dating and red meat forever.

To director Gilles de Maistre’s credit, a story about two astonishingly different animals – who still share a friendship – is rife with footage that puts almost every Dodo video to shame. Yet sadly, nearly all human interactions weigh it down to the point of creating a frustrating, dramatic and heavy-handed film.

If Darshi had truly embraced Mona’s messiness, it might have made for a more meaningful, even if tentative, conclusion.

After Yang is a tightly controlled yet tremendously alive film, powered by the beating heart that is Farrell’s performance.

It is fast-food fantasy, artificially flavoured and quickly devoured.

This is an energetic, heartfelt, poignant and often delightfully subversive story of one young girl’s path into adulthood, and embrace of her cultural heritage.

The sometimes mesmerizing, sometimes frustrating film proves that Stone, ever the professional provocateur, still has what it takes to rile an audience. Or at least make your head spin round so many times that you’ll be backward thankful for the migraine.

The dramatic set-up courtesy of director and co-writer Clint Bentley (whose family has a long history on the track) isn’t exactly novel, but the film’s acute sense of place and specificity of profession lends Jockey an authenticity that is irresistible.

Grimy, slick and genuinely frightening in true horror-movie fashion, Reeves’ new film reassembles the best elements of Batman lore into one overwhelming and epic-length package. Almost everything here works – not despite our current overload of Batman culture, but because of it.

The film manages to showcase Scarborough’s beauty, even when things look bleak.

Wright has created a truly rich and vibrant world, full of dramatic sets. Most importantly, the film is genuinely fun, with enough of an emotional pull to justify some of its bigger swings.

Originally titled Eight for Silver, the film from British writer-director Sean Ellis is brooding, uneasy and fog-filled, with an apprehensive soundscape. Werewolf mythology mixes with biblical allusions and ideas on payments for the sins of elders.

The beauty of a film such as Dog is that it is one of many, omnipresent in its ordinariness and commonplace in its undertaking – a brain holiday, if you will. It’s another notch in the filmography of a crowd-pleasing A-lister, another run-of-the-mill movie to emote with when we can’t feel much else.

In a franchise rife with missteps, this sequel does not dishonour its source. Hats off (and heads off) to the film’s creators.

There is something perversely impressive about a movie that can make globe-trotting adventure seem so relentlessly boring.

Most impressively, Lemercier manages to make Dion/Aline’s not-terribly-dramatic hardships – she has trouble conceiving with her husband, she misses her family while on the road, she feels exhausted by her Las Vegas schedule – feel relatable and compelling. Part of that is Lemercier’s full-throttle commitment to the bit.

Quotation forthcoming.

Soderbergh, once again acting as his own cinematographer and editor, pulls out nearly every cinematic trick he has to elevate Koepp’s material, but the film too often tip-toes when it should run: Every narrative and character beat feels muted, as if the tech-thriller is being apologetic for its own place within the genre.

Parallel Mothers’ twin purposes merge into something just shy of profound. It is a moment, and movie, that just might save your soul, too.

More prickly than David Suchet and more mischievous than Peter Ustinov, Branagh plays Poirot as a tremendously fun nuisance, embracing the character’s cleverer-than-thou righteousness with glee. Whenever Branagh puts himself at the centre of the action, Death on the Nile clicks well enough to justify the whole act of big-budget copy-pasting.

Much as I have enjoyed the actor’s embrace of scuzzy revenge-thrillers, he may have hit the point of diminishing returns. Put it this way: Blacklight is a movie that Bruce Willis would deem below his standards.

While Robinson’s lecture is thought-provoking and his living tour of that same history is illuminating, the Kunstlers don’t add much in terms of directorial vision. Robinson is an apt orator and tour guide, but the literal translation of his lecture to screen lacks life and suffers from the inherent banality that comes with watching a recording of someone – no matter how charismatic – speaking to a live audience we are not part of.

I can sympathize with the skeptics who take one look at Jackass’s cultural durability and shake their heads in disgust over the state of the world. But, as ever, there is a subversive method to Knoxville’s madness: an obsessive, and impressive, drive to tease the forever-blurry lines between comedy and pain.

The 86-year-old director could stand to at least polish the material, which in Rifkin’s Festival is so well-worn that it threatens to disintegrate into nothingness.

Farhadi wrings two magnificently raw performances from both actors, providing A Hero with its one and only honest truth.