Everything about this film is genuinely absorbing. The performances are restrained. The locations, many of them seemingly on the Perry Studios lot, are lush. The musical numbers are decadent . . . The storytelling is efficient, the scenes well-paced, the command of social and racial politics ironclad.

The sheer existence of Lou might be a step in the right direction for women over 50 in action movies, but it’s a misstep everywhere else.

The strength of the writing is in portraying Bunny’s reality, allowing us to wonder – like the social workers – whether she really is a reliable parent. This is thoughtful film-making, though I didn’t quite buy into the explosion of drama at the end.

There’s a feminist undercurrent in You Won’t Be Alone, its observations of the patriarchy emerging in ways totally germane to the experience. An odd kind of eroticism also emerges: neither sensual nor entirely gross, and certainly not from the male gaze. Sometimes the film doesn’t even feel like it’s from a human gaze.

The action of After Yang, bizarre and exotic as it is, meditates on what it is to be human and how that may in the future be modified, but it also addresses loss in the present day: our anguished and futile human instinct that death must surely be fixable.

Neither slicing under the genre’s surface, nor dicing the heritage well, this reboot is more an unseemly act of IP cannibalism.

This is a portrait of Monroe that accentuates her suffering and anguish, canonising her into a feminist saint who died for our scopophilic sins, that we might feast on her beauty and talent. Maybe it’s not an opera but a kind of religious ritual for the modern age, visiting the stations of the crosses Monroe bore, the Passion of the Marilyn.

As hard as Cuoco and Davidson try at chemistry – and Cuoco, at least, seems to be really trying – this umpteenth spin on the Groundhog Day time loop is more irksome than endearing, cutesy than actually cute, a downward spiral of uncomfortably performed neuroticism that devolves into a borderline indefensible ending.

Sobel’s direction feels a little lesser when compared with his leading lady, relying on dream sequences to push us to the edge, never getting anywhere close to the iciness of the original or finding anything distinctive enough to separate the aesthetic of his take.

Parker clearly has ideas he’s aiming at, but lets his target slip in the fog of war.

This documentary is a spirited rebuke to the “sellout” narrative which has been allowed to grow up around his career, and a paean of praise to his commitment, talent and heroism.

Khan’s script is one of competency rather than creativity: a sound structure, a propulsive pace and a learned awareness of genre conventions but dialogue that often feels a little first draft, a little placeholder-heavy, zingers not really zinging quite as they should.

There’s an extraordinary story to be told here. It’s just a shame it had to be told in such an ordinary way.

It is a gentle, heartfelt relationship drama about – and for – intelligent adults.

Perhaps Schrader will indeed defiantly return to his accustomed theme for his next film – and this brilliant, restless director might well make it work. Sadly, this one doesn’t.

Training its crosshair on the ingrained prejudice of the military and the question of how well-meaning white allies can best support its undoing, the film compensates for relatively middling action set pieces with a stolid maturity.

This watchable, undemanding drama rolls along capably, enlivened by unmistakably Bennettian gags and drolleries which come along every minute or so.

It’s a chilling little film, avoiding maximalism at every turn, a bold debut from Nighy (whose only real slip-up is a score that can feel dull and uninspired) and a difficult reminder of a difficult experience. The chill will linger for a while.

Its outsized mean girl ruthlessness with a candy-coated shell, led by Mendes and Hawke’s commanding performances, is a biting, if overlong, good time.

Emily is a sensitive and passionate portrait of the author.

A film about the danger of believing without questioning that turns us into full-throated believers in whatever Lelio and Pugh can do.

Like the junk food that the central characters sell in their convenience store, it’s a strangely moreish brew that you enjoy but feel faintly guilty about consuming, like nachos with cheese-flavoured sauce or a blue slushy ice drink.

[Farrelly's] latest commits itself to regurgitating every Vietnam cliche with the laziest possible visual diction, led by an emotionally overextended Zac Efron.

Ticket to Paradise may well do great business to those looking for some escapist fun, and that’s entirely understandable. But I found the wacky double-act of George and Julia slightly hard work.

The Good Nurse remains a good, if not ultimately great, attempt to tell the story of a very bad person.

An elegantly horrible coming-of-age.

Everything about this film means well and it is acted with professionalism and commitment. But there is something too easy about it.

The more characters Selick has to work with, the more room there is for his deliciously strange and comic visual craft.

This is an engrossing, well-acted story – disturbing but also tender and sad.

In Dunham’s hands, the throughline of enduring and discovering one’s worth, however historically imagined, is at once a comfort and a lark.

Without revealing which one wins out, I can assure you that a huge amount of murderous mayhem is unleashed, including death by woodchipper.

Beneath the crazy candy-coloured palette, there is actually some real human warmth in the love story, and the acting ensemble features some great comic performers in supporting roles.

It’s a strange film; it rattles fiercely along, but its relentless cynicism and nihilism leaves a sour taste and opinion may divide as to exactly how funny it is. Podalydès gives an entertainingly blase performance as the worldly image consultant, trying to seduce Alexandre over lunch.

Empire of Light is a sweet, heartfelt, humane movie, which doesn’t shy away from the brutality and the racism that was happening in the streets outside the cinema.

The stinging tragedy of being gay at the wrong time in history is something that will always prove ripe for emotive, painful drama but director Michael Grandage struggles to pull our heart-strings, an easy target easily missed.

There remains a remove though still, Spielberg giving us a slightly too stage-managed version of himself and his family, some gristle missing from the darkest moments.

The Menu might not nail some of the more substantial courses but it’ll do as a light snack.

Johnson’s more extravagant and often indulgent sequel will likely find those who prefer it to the original, it’s so stuffed with so much that it’ll surely prove more fun to those who appreciate getting more bang for their buck. It’s hard not to have fun when Johnson pulls the strings, I just wish he’d not pulled quite so many and quite so hard.

It’s big and clever in a way that so few films of this scale are these days, a pleasure to be shepherded through the easy motions of a romantic comedy by people who know what they’re doing for once, and manages to walk a difficult tightrope without falling, despite the heft of baggage.

The Woman King is a sturdy, rousing piece of studio entertainment, that makes both the new feel old and the old feel new.

Love Life is an inexpressibly tragic and painful human drama about complicated lives, a movie that interleaves the utter desolation with a dry understated comedy and a sense of emotional tangle and chaos, a film that moreover blindsides its leading female character – and us, the audience – with an entirely unexpected coda section.

It’s in the film’s queerest moments that things feel most inventive, narratively and visually, as Bratton steps most firmly outside of the hemmed-in army drama formula and finds ways to make his film sit and thrive in the Venn diagram between military machismo and homoeroticism.

It’s all unavoidably stagey, with talky, tense scenes weighing the pros and cons of the decisions, and while Polley does make some attempts to take us outside the barn, to widen the canvas, there’s still an artificiality to some of the construct that makes us wish we were sitting watching this in the theatre instead.

The action is clumsy. The writing leans on tropes. The dramatic scenes overestimate the artistic range of a charming rapper-turned-actor like Bridges. And director Millicent Shelton makes some curious stylistic decisions along the way, whether it’s amethyst lighting or montages that have the feel of a R&B music video.

Mukerji’s biggest achievement is getting this relationship to flourish, Kapoor and Bhatt being among the precious few real-life couples with palpable onscreen chemistry.

It’s almost too perfectly contoured as a Hollywood narrative.

The film is competently crafted, dutifully acted, clearly labored over with soul, and yet, like its star, lacks a beating heart.

The Son is a laceratingly painful drama, an incrementally increased agony without anaesthetic.

There are depressingly few pleasures to be had here, and one of them is at least, for a while, playing detective trying to figure out just what on earth is buried at its centre.

There’s a very entertaining daftness and theatre nerdery to See How They Run (the title sounds uncomfortably like Run For Your Wife) as director Tom George takes the same approach to The Mousetrap that Ken Russell took to The Boyfriend: playing up the artificiality of it all. The comedy is shallow in the right way, and Rockwell’s bleary world-weariness contrasts nicely with Ronan’s saucer-eyed idealism.

There’s real intimacy and emotional generosity to this psychological mystery from Joanna Hogg – a personal movie which appears to come from the same universe as her earlier Souvenir films – or one very much like it.

This pious work is clearly designed to send believers into a state of ecstasy, but it may be a bit of a slog for the secular.

This schematic but sweet-natured comedy drama drives down a narrative track as straight and comfortingly predictable as an episode of Thomas the Tank Engine.

In short, this is not very good but there are worse things you could be watching as you fall asleep on the sofa after a heavy night’s drinking, which is exactly what it feels like this was designed for.

Saloum does not stop at simply reinterpreting the tropes of the western but wholly retools its influences with local flavours.

The movie noodles along amiably, but in the cold light of day, its quirks begin to feel like flaws.

Directed by Olivia Wilde, it superciliously pinches ideas from other films without quite understanding how and why they worked in the first place. It spoils its own ending simply by unveiling it, and in so doing shows that serious script work needed to be done on filling in the plot-holes and problems in a fantastically silly twist-reveal.

There are plenty of genuine laughs in this movie, but each of them seems to dovetail into a banshee-wail of pain.

Fraser does an honest job in the role of Charlie, and Hong Chau brings a welcome fierceness and sinew to the drama, but this sucrose film is very underpowered.

It is a thoroughly intelligent production, a film festival event that could not exist in the rough-and-tumble of regular movie distribution but will I hope find a home on streaming services.

In a world marred by political hopelessness, Dry Ground Burning literally and figuratively sets the landscape on fire, and out of the ashes there is hope for a new order free from oppression.

Maybe there is a kind of saintliness in the film which is occasionally difficult to take, but it’s an accomplished, tremendously shot piece of work.

The film itself is terrifically accomplished and horribly gripping, with golden-age movie pastiche and dashes of Psycho and The Wizard of Oz.

Baker, with his scrawny frame and ratty features, can actually act, although he’s consistently upstaged by young Reid, as the stronger performer and the one with the more interesting character story here.

It’s spectacular and immersive, with a sensational opening. But it gets bogged down in its own one-note, one-tempo uproar and open-ended parkour camerawork – impressive though that is – and suffers from a number of sneaky false-flag get-out clauses that feel like a cop-out.

Bones And All is an extravagant and outrageous movie: scary, nasty and startling in its warped romantic idealism.

Black church is all about feeling – the building, the people, the message. But Honk has none of that soul. At best, the film is an abstract commentary on a culture it doesn’t fully understand; at worst, it’s half-hearted creative license. And at this late stage, sadly, not even Jevus could save it.

Ava is made with superb technique and real style.

Pushing its luck at two hours, this eventually collapses in a heap of its own symbolism, barely unpacking the missing-persons intrigue it started out with. Nice views en route, but it’s a tale scribbled in haste on the back of a postcard.

In a way, it is amazing that Flatley is able to fulfil a 12-year-old boy’s fantasy of being a secret agent, with a 12-year-old’s idea of what a secret agent actually does. The acting and writing are like the non-sexy bits that come between the sexy bits in a porn film made in 1985.

It is made with real panache – so much panache, in fact, that you can forgive much of the film’s outrageous narcissism. Iñárritu could, if he chose, tell us an equally painful but less grandiose and auto-mythic story about his own life – but he has exercised his prerogative as an artist and given us this confection instead. It is certainly spectacular.

Love in the Villa is feel-good, not try-hard. Nothing ever rises to the level of unwatchable, but nothing has any distinctive staying power, either – you may catch the whiff of romance here and there, like passing by a bakery storefront, which constitute the most alluring shots of the movie.

Three Thousand Years of Longing is guileless, open-hearted, like an antiquarian bookseller’s dream of The Thief of Baghdad. It’s so defiantly out of step with fashion that there’s finally something faintly glorious about it.

No one but Blanchett could have delivered the imperious hauteur necessary for portraying a great musician heading for a crackup or a creative epiphany. No one but Blanchett has the right way of wearing a two-piece black suit with an open-necked white shirt, the way of shaking her hair loose at moments of abandon, the way of letting her face become a Tutankhamun mask of contempt.

The package is all tightly assembled but sticks to the traditional talking heads and archive clips format.

Baumbach has landed a sizeable white whale in his tremendously elegant and assured adaptation.

The lowish-budget production values, gestural performances and blunt moralism of the scriptwriting puts this very much in the heightened dramatic tradition of mainstream Nigerian cinema, but Emelonye has an accessible style and has picked the topical subject of cybercrime, an approach which might broaden the film’s appeal.

There’s plenty of white-knuckle footage from the archive, as well as reflections of old muckers. Fiennes says that in his darkest, diciest moments in peril he imagined his heroes – the father and grandfather he never met – watching over him.

The film is grimly depressing in places. I covered my eyes during Google Earth time-lapse sequences showing the pace of deforestation in the Amazon; the violence of it is too much. And yet, there is Bitaté: still a teenager, he’s already a skilled communicator.

Calamy gets to show off her astonishing dynamic range as an actor, adept at comedy, anxiety, maternal rage and kittenish coquetry, all in the space of a single scene.

The film would be in the general neighborhood of irresistible if not for the wonky mechanics of story and character that convey a conflicted impression of Hart’s onscreen persona.

It’s a fresh spin that feels awfully stale, a Samaritan less good and more mediocre.

Jones skilfully cranks up the creepiness a notch at a time with an ominous soundtrack and stylish lighting, until the dial is way past 11 and into grand guignol territory by the end.

At 88, Raven is still performing – perched on a stool – as his alter ego Maisie Trollette. In this affectionate if slight documentary, he tells a story or two, though perhaps not enough to fill a book.

It’s a very funny film, sending-up human absurdities without being too mean. Cruz is a talented comedian, but she smartly plays it straight-ish here. You never doubt for a moment Lola is the real deal. Nor that Cruz is either.

This tale of freelance underworld fixer Akilla Brown, played with careworn wisdom by Saul Williams, doesn’t live up to its sharp tailoring and has too much faith in fatigued beats from the gangster-film locker.

Mr Malcolm’s List has no great ambitions other than to amuse. But that is always harder than it looks.

The director is Christopher Nelius, himself a surfer, who has done a brilliant job with editor Julie-Anne De Ruvo of assembling the archive to capture the sport at a moment in time, all youth and energy. Smartly, he lets this exceptional group of funny, tough, talented women surfers, now in their 50s, do the talking.

This is a well-made film and nice looking, but there’s a tiresome predictability to a few too many scenes. It is a franchise that feels like it’s hit the rocks.

Bonneville’s performance will linger, the film not so much.

August might be a washout so far for the industry but Beast couldn’t be arriving at a more apt time, a thrilling, if throwaway, reminder of the fun to be had while watching a B-movie bringing its A-game.

Super Hero gamely tries to explain the backstory a bit at the beginning, but trying to keep up as we are plunged into a world of bad guys with outrageous quiffs, super-skilled preschoolers and green-skinned martial arts masters with droopy forehead antennae is quite futile. If, however, you can relax and just let it wash over you, Super Hero’s eye candy animation is mesmeric.

Here is a documentary for anyone who’s ever suffered from impostor syndrome or ever fantasised about going back in time to their school days, to reverse all those heartbreaks and humiliations. In other words: all of us.

Its affect is warm and reassuring, its methods for affirming that everything’s gonna be all right are cozy and tame, especially in regards to young motherhood.

This romcom set in a Manhattan publishing house is about as bland and as easily consumed as a cone of soft-serve ice-cream on a hot day. It’s essentially a sticky extrusion of sugar, trans fats and trapped air in cinematic form.

The whole thing is performed with relish and high spirits, and the digital fabrications of the Tower itself, rising out of the ground in stages with hair-raisingly dangerous structural work, are entertainingly contrived.

Fizzy and bubbly, the film feels like a cool glass of lemonade on a hot day, leaving us with a pleasant reminder of the thrills that summer can bring.

What makes the film so engrossing is how much attention the film-makers give to Lee’s complicated life after prison.