Little Richard emerges here as an exquisite figure, an aesthete and athlete: a butterfly who could never be broken on any wheel.

The first half is so energetically surefooted as to establish trust in Manzoor’s instincts and hopes for a second feature. But like The Fury’s would-be signature kick that Ria struggles to nail, Polite Society banks on one big swing it just isn’t able to pull off.

Happily, in making the delicate transfer from stage to screen, ear for eye ends up pushing the boundaries of both forms. Here is a blistering experimental film about British and American black experience, rarely seen side by side. The sparest and most unsparing of cine-poems. A play with extras using spoken word, physical theatre, installation and music to verbalise what remains beyond the bounds of articulacy.

It’s a movie made dense and vehement with Julie’s passion for bikes and her angry sense of a death wish which is going to strike her, ahead of anyone else.

Blume doesn’t present as somebody who is remotely besotted with herself. After all, keeping it real is her superpower.

The close-knit ethos might well explain the franchise’s gleefully perverse sense of fun, but the truth is this love-in features too much filler.

Here, the pipeline destroyers are the good guys; an interesting genre twist though one which arguably defangs the film, just a little, removing the addictive flavour of cruelty and chaos, yet not making it any the less gripping and ingenious.

Evil Dead Rise is a decent little splatter movie which contains just about enough to justify the franchise resurrection although perhaps not quite enough to demand that much more of it. For all of its gristle, we’re left very little to chew on.

Ghosted is content dictated by algorithm at its absolute, industry-shaming worst, so carelessly and lifelessly cobbled together that we’re inclined to believe it’s the first film created entirely by AI.

Peedom has now done it again, this time on the subject of rivers with the usual montage of powerful images. Visually rich though it still is, I have to admit to being a bit restless with this kind of globalist Imax-style docu-fantasia.

What a shortchanging of Af Klint’s extraordinary life and work this is.

It is basically droningly reverent, as well as sometimes bland and naive.

There’s a ton of plot crammed tightly into the running time, but director Edward Bazalgette manages the storytelling efficiently, helped by the display of place names at the beginning of each scene explaining which castle we’re at now, as well as how it was known in 900-something, and the name it goes by now.

The apparently depressing twist gives Linoleum’s entropy-defying optimism successful lift-off.

The minute Joseph steps into this disenchanted forest, tripping over every tree root, you can sense the impending disaster, and the horror that Machoian’s movie is moving towards.

Appreciation for the artistry of the John Wick series redoubles frame by crummy frame.

This extraordinarily mundane film – a combination of words I’m fairly certain I’ve never used before – is a tremendous achievement and, in a subtle way, an amazing work of art.

As you’d expect from a movie originated by Robert Kirkman of The Walking Dead zombie franchise, Renfield is also resplendent in gore. Dracula’s grotesque visage – decaying in reverse as he gathers strength – is a prosthetics triumph.

Racing towards its splattery finale, it just about qualifies as lively schlock, and is likely your one chance to see Crowe in flowing robes piloting a Vespa to the strains of Faith No More.

Joaquin Phoenix is on really uninteresting form, playing to his weaknesses as an actor as he gives a narcissistic performance of pain, sporting a permanently zonked expression of anxiety and torpid self-pity at the misery that surrounds him.

The 68-year-old Chan slips down off Red Hare like a limber teenager. But horse aside, he largely retreads old ground here, with a handful of shambolic dustups that, apart from the enterprising use of a wicker rocking chair, are pretty standard Jackie.

There is such superb compositional sense in the still life tableau shots and the almost archaeological sense of time, creating something deeply mysterious and unbearably sad.

This film winds up looking like the most expensive in-house corporate promo in history: shallow, parochial and obtuse. By the time the credits roll, we’re apparently supposed to be euphoric – not so much at individual sporting achievement, but at all the billions of dollars that Nike has been making.

The second film adaptation of the phenomenally successful video game is a disappointment to rival the first.

Somehow it works on every level: as a moving melodrama about maternal sacrifice and grief, as a domestic comedy, and even as a glorious musical.

While its craft is certainly interesting, there’s something decadent and empty at its heart.

Pearlman shows that Capaldi has become even more of a celebrity cliche, the star who’s been on a journey and come out the other side – but you imagine Capaldi, with his indefatigable wryness, is all too aware of that.

It’s made just-about-watchable by Sandler and Aniston again, whose combined movie star charm proves magnetic enough to carry us through the flatter moments, both nailing some effectively chaotic physical comedy and maintaining a warm, relaxed chemistry.

The film offers a fascinating glimpse into the mystery of other people, especially other people’s marriages. Friends and family still look dazed that the Alters – Rita and Jerry! – were behind the theft.

While, yes, TCWSSF is a dreamy magical realist fable with an environmental message, Alegría weaves into her tale an emotionally satisfying, gripping family drama, with singing cows – and fish too.

1976 is made with thrilling assurance, and the tension and Carmen’s spiritual crisis are superbly conveyed, with a nerve-jangling score by María Portugal. It’s a great example of Chilean antifascist noir.

Like a lot of topline Korean films, this prestige action thriller is a little too long at 137 minutes, but it’s consistently entertaining throughout, and quite well-suited given the length to being viewed on a streaming platform.

The Beasts is a strange film in many ways, difficult to pin down tonally or generically, but it leaves a trail of unease in the mind.

Not only is it as derivative as chatbot-written free verse, it’s also not even pleasant to look at. Walk like an Egyptian very quickly away from the multiplex.

A shiver of disquiet runs right through it.

This is lightweight, forgettable stuff.

The film feels over-determined and self-satisfied.

It has the ruminative lightness, almost weightlessness, the watercolour delicacy and reticence of the emotions, the sense of the uncanny, the insistent play of erotic possibility and that Murakami keynote: a cat.

Memories of Murder actually inspired a solution to its case; perhaps The Night of the 12th could do the same. Either way, it’s a brutally engrossing drama.

The script does a solid job of making it an accessible world to those not already steeped in it although Goldstein and Daley, writing alongside Michael Gilio, are less effective with the film’s many attempts at comedy.

For me it never gets to grips with the real issue for Pornhub, OnlyFans or indeed Facebook: are these sites publishers or platforms? If they derive profit from the content they host, then should they be responsible for it, or not?

The “more is more” approach (hallucinations, orgies, pissing, stabbing, shooting, splitting, piercing etc) is attention-securing in the moment but oddly forgettable after, like waking up from a nightmare you can’t remember. Infinity Pool is too hectic to truly haunt.

If the plot is a little sketchy, the action, conversely, is drum tight.

Somehow it doesn’t all come together, delivering neither the stab of actual fear nor the satisfaction of real, plausible psychological insight.

James’s sleek telling excels at intertwining the personal and the political with illuminating detail.

That sweaty, close-to-a-nervous breakdown tense feeling of being trapped is nowhere in the film. And where the script goes in its pulpy nasty final twist felt to me like a disturbingly misogynist move.

Despite the uneven execution, Condor’s Nest has just enough bite.

Braff puts us through a gruelling “relapse” montage as Allison hits the pills again after an illusory breakthrough and then a “recovery” montage as she gets it together. And the film’s single valuable lesson – the one about not looking at your phone while driving – is all but forgotten.

Abraham Lincoln's second term, with its momentous choices, has been brought to the screen by Steven Spielberg as a fascinatingly theatrical contest of rhetoric and strategy.

It sure as hell got under mine. Jonathan Glazer's sci-fi horror is loosely adapted, or atmospherically distilled, by Walter Campbell from the 2000 novel by Michel Faber. The result is visually stunning and deeply disturbing: very freaky, very scary, and very erotic. It also comes with a dog whistle of absurdist humour that I suspect has been inaudible for some American reviewers on the international festival circuit so far.

It’s heartfelt and sweetly earnest, but humdrum and disappointingly unmagical. The animation doesn’t help: characters speak with blank paralysed faces as if they’ve had botched Botox.

Tetris finds its fun in the details of contracts and the specifics of deal-making, realising that even when it’s not on a screen in your hands, it’s all one big game.

A director like Jonathan Demme or David Fincher would have gone for the jugular on this kind of material, but writer-director Matt Ruskin seems a little squeamish and keeps everything on the right side of contemporary taste. The chill of fear is missing.

This new Shazam film is cordial, with a puppyish good nature and an awareness of its own silliness.

There’s a little bit of fun and interest along the way and Lange has some fun with her eccentric persona, but this feels under-energised.

Those who appreciated the original for its brutal, sinewy agility have another thing coming: a lumbering, stultifying gargantua of a film willing to kill everything except its darlings.

It’s not quite the toxic disaster it’s being treated as but 65 is nowhere near the giddy lark it should have been, crash-landing somewhere in the middle instead.

There is something winning in this calm, walking-pace drama – and the landscape is amazing.

The standout star is the passionate and fierce Karen O of Yeah Yeah Yeahs, a Korean-American musician for whom music was an escape from racism and sexism.

The awful truth is that this is a generic derivative horror script.

It’s the goriest movie of the series so far but without veering into grimness, again that tonal balance perfectly modulated. The last act reveal is as goofy as one would expect but satisfyingly so for reasons impossible to explain without entering spoiler territory.

The film is entirely ridiculous, often quite boring, with a script showing worrying signs of being cobbled together. But even as a longtime Von Trier doubter, I now have to admit it grows on you; there's a mawkish fascination and some flashes of real visual brilliance.

The power of this film creeps up on you by stealth; its dramatic idiom is admittedly mannered in the Leigh style but shy of caricature, and designed consistently to abrade the audience's consciousness without irritating – fingertips down the blackboard, not fingernails.

This big-hearted underdog sports comedy runs on rails, with no great surprises, but it’s likable.

Ithaka shows us how time and experience have lent perspective to it all, affectingly focusing on Assange’s elderly father John Shipton, and Assange’s fiancee Stella Moris (now his wife), who have doggedly fought for Assange’s rights as an investigative journalist and publisher.

It’s slick in one moment and a little too scrappy the next but Ritchie’s puppyish insistence that you have as much as fun as his stars is hard to resist. The film’s bizarrely reticent rollout might have already killed any chance of further operations but there have been far, far worse franchise-starters in recent years.

There is a gentle and very happy sense of freedom and possibility aboard the Adamant, and there is enormous warmth, sympathy and human curiosity in this film.

There’s a sense everything is up for grabs and the end is nigh: of consensus reality; of cinema and copyright legislation as we know it. Pop culture’s infinite cycle always spits out and reassembles content; here the process is explicit, amplified, and turbocharged.

It’s both by the book and dispiritingly vague.

This is clearly a very personal project for Avilés, and the heartbreak feels very real.

It’s a vehement movie, with a driving narrative force and a robust sense of time and place.

It is a film that does not proceed in the narrative style and the title seems to suggest that we should think of it as a different art form entirely: a constellation of themes, ideas, tropes, moods in which the personae relate to each other as concepts rather than characters.

In the end I felt that the film fully achieves neither the ostensible comedy of the opening, nor the supposed sadness of its denouement.

It’s not that its heart isn’t in the right place, it’s just that its heart has been transplanted from somewhere else.

Another broad, sitcom-bright crowdpleaser, prone to abusing the wacky sound effect button, this latest Mehta comedy has nevertheless been packaged with a professionalism that’s hard to deny.

This, the film says, is what it really feels like to be on the receiving end of the law in a case like this: a calm, professional, technocratic but relentless display of overwhelming power.

It’s all socked over with great and gruesome conviction, but there isn’t the same character-related interest as the TV series could generate.

It is an absorbing, intriguing, bewildering work: often spectacular and beautiful, like a sci-fi supernatural disaster movie or an essay on nature and politics, but shot through with distinctive elements of fey and whimsical comedy.

This movie is a time-capsule of Europe’s recent tragic past.

The Rocky spin-off series continues to dazzle with another knockout drama with the magnetic Jonathan Majors.

Not since Snakes on a Plane has a movie promised so much, but despite a great cast the plot is too tame.

As a war movie, it’s bafflingly dull; as a political-intrigue drama, it’s lifeless; as a personal portrait of Meir, it’s inert and superficial.

Where Teenage Kicks swung for the canon of LGBTIQ+ coming-of-age films, Lonesome is happy to be a provocative talking point, establishing Boreham as a queer film-maker unafraid of making an important or niche work.

Joyland is such a delicate, intelligent and emotionally rich film. What a debut from Sadiq.

The Survival of Kindness has static elements of an art installation, a non-narrative dream state that is part arresting, part frustrating.

British actor/writer Nathaniel Martello-White’s directorial debut nudges at some uncomfortable fault lines of race and class, but tends to over-index unearned suspense for character development or insight.

Italian director Giacomo Abbruzzese makes a really stylish debut with Disco Boy, a visually thrilling, ambitious and distinctly freaky adventure into the heart of imperial darkness, or into something else entirely: the heart of an alternative reality, or a transcendent new self.

It is a strange, enclosed experience: Dafoe’s mastery of the screen keeps it meaningful.

This gentle, authentic-feeling coming-of-age drama from Ukrainian film-maker Kateryna Gornostai premiered at the Berlin festival in 2021. Released in the UK almost a year to the day since the Russian invasion, her film has become unbearably poignant.

It’s a likeable confection, and a pleasure to see Marisa Tomei on very good form.

Atkins uses these settings as pretty scaffolding for otherwise ordinary scenes.

What’s missing is a sense of what’s at stake – we never quite get a feeling for how desperate these men are, and for the most part they feel a bit too familiar from the Britcom playbook. That said, Burrows brings cheeky-chappie warmth to the character of Curly.

A waste of great talent, sadly.

Nearly everything about Epic Tails feels a bit underwhelming, and limited imagination-wise.

At points I wondered if this is a film that tells us anything about anything. Some of its ideas feel a bit thrown together.

The refreshing – and rare – blend of Jewish humour and horror makes Attachment a fun Valentine’s Day watch for those who like their queer romance with a sprinkle of spooky chill.

The film appears to exist in the Venn diagram-overlap between twee and hipster, which isn’t for everyone – but let it grow on you, and there is a real sweetness and gentleness in its absurdity, a savant innocence and charm.

In his more wistful moments Kang would surely understand the main misgiving with this efficient movie product: the MCU marches inexorably onwards, through “phases” and “sagas”, but what’s the point if there’s no time to pause, reflect and enjoy a joke with old friends?