There is a simplicity and clarity of purpose here that I responded to and the Dardennes have got excellent performances from their young leads.

Abbasi undoubtedly conveys the brutal attitudes which create victimhood.

This film touches on her keynote themes of sexuality and colonialism, in its 21st-century manifestation, though maybe the romantic passion and duplicity don’t come across as strongly as they might have done with leads who had a stronger chemistry.

I’m not sure this is my favourite Skolimowski film, but it is engaging in many ways: beautifully photographed, sentimental and surreal in equal measure; and also stubborn – as stubborn as its hero – in its symbolism and stark pessimism.

It’s not a movie so much as 159-minute trailer for a film called Elvis – a relentless, frantically flashy montage, epic and yet negligible at the same time, with no variation of pace.

It is not exactly a horror film, despite some spasms of disquiet, but an uncanny evocation of how, when left utterly on our own, we spiral inwards into our memories, dreams and fears.

It’s a movie that is boldly anti-clerical, juxtaposing the spectacle of faith with a hidden reality of corruption and hypocrisy – although in the final act I sensed that it perhaps did not quite have the courage of its satirical convictions.

It functions elegantly as both a victory lap for longtime fans and a belated introduction to the Belchers, a family of lovable misfits and cranks that’s as genuinely close as any on television.

This film has mystery and passion, it climbs mountainous heights and rewards you with the opposite of vertigo: a sort of exaltation.

It’s a gorgeously and grippingly made picture and Tang Wei is magnificent.

A regular beat of tension and release plays out as people get saved only to face new dangers, following the template of disaster films since the beginning of cinema, but it’s done well here. The visual effects are impressive, especially the water, which is so notoriously hard to animate.

It’s a glorious celebratory montage of archive material, live performance footage, Bowie’s own experimental video art and paintings, movie and stage work and interviews with various normcore TV personalities with whom Bowie is unfailingly polite, open and charming.

It’s an extraordinary planet that Cronenberg lands us down on, and insists we remove our helmets before we’re quite sure we can breathe the air.

On the face of it, this film is a commentary on the darker side of globalisation and modern commerce, but for Camilleri who was raised in Minnesota in a Maltese family, it also feels like a pilgrimage back to one’s roots, highlighting the specificities of the Maltese language and culture which are still sorely underrepresented in world cinema.

RMN is a sombre downbeat movie, whose sudden flurry of dreamlike visions at the very end is a little disconcerting. But it is seriously engaged with the dysfunction and unhappiness in Europe that goes unreported and unacknowledged.

In many ways this is a study in anger, and it is an austere and angular picture. Krieps gives an exhilaratingly fierce, uningratiating performance.

This is exasperatingly nonsensical and humourless: it is full of grand gestures, gigantically self-important acting, big scenes (though often bafflingly truncated), big emotions and smirkingly knowing dialogue. Yet I admit there is technique and gusto to the way it is put together.

With remarkable confidence, [Wells] just lets her movie unspool naturally, like a haunting and deceptively simple short story. The details accumulate; the images reverberate; the unshowy gentleness of the central relationship inexorably deepens in importance.

For all its tendency to soap opera, it has a lovely happy-sad sweetness.

Strident, derivative and dismayingly deficient in genuine laughs, Ruben Östlund’s new movie is a heavy-handed Euro-satire, without the subtlety and insight of his breakthrough movie Force Majeure, or the power of his comparable Palme-winning spectacle about the art world, The Square.

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.

It’s a shame that, as it ramps up, this generational tension isn’t dramatised with the sharpness it might have been.

Perhaps this film doesn’t entirely work all the way through, but it is a shard of malevolence that jabs into your skin.

This is undoubtedly a vehement and very watchable drama – far superior to Serebrennikov’s previous film, the sprawling and unrewarding Petrov’s Flu. If there is a narrowness in its emotional and tonal range, that gives it force.

It’s not quite on par with Who Framed Roger Rabbit?, the film it undoubtedly wants to be likened to, but it’s infinitely better than it had any right to be.

Gray has given us tough, sinewy and memorable New York movies in the past such as The Yards and We Own the Night, but this is weighed down with a sentimental and self-regarding staginess.

It’s a film of people telling themselves they’re making a difference without really doing much of anything and it’s hard not to feel similarly unmoved by the time it’s all over.

The Innocents is a nightmare unfolding in cold, clear daylight.

The history that emerges here is of a band yo-yoing between attempts to be taken seriously as artists, then coming back for more boyband fame and adulation. An air of collective self-loathing and regret hangs over them.

The result is something appreciably sillier and more eccentric than the original ... It’s certainly far from the sophistication and gloss for which Hazanavicius became famous ten years ago with his silent pastiche The Artist; it’s closer to his spy spoof series OSS 117. But it’s likeable and goofy.

No one here seems to know what they’re doing and, more importantly, why. A strong contender for 2022’s most pointless movie.

Tonally, it’s all over the place, that aforementioned sap curdled together with Wilson’s trademark crudeness, an R-rated comedy that wants to be both sweet and salty, a balance it never manages to perfect.

There are also good bits in this based-on-a-true-story drama, including the aforementioned performances and a commitment to theology so sincere it’s not afraid to bore an audience with lots of pin-head-fine debates about Godhood. If Gibson weren’t part of the package it might be possible to like it more.

Vortex tells us something else about old age, something which a severe and high-minded movie like Michael Haneke’s Amour would not grasp: death is chaotic, like life. It ends with things undone and in messy disarray. This is a work of wintry maturity, and real compassion.

There’s plenty of rock’n’roll fighter-pilot action in this movie, but weirdly none of the homoerotic tension that back in the day had guys queueing up at the Navy recruitment booths set up in cinema foyers. Weirder still, it is actually less progressive on gender issues than the original film.

However dazzling the vortexes this film shoots us through at supersonic speed may be, they still deposit us somewhere we’ve been before.

The film engages with Cave and Warren Ellis’ creative bond, one that’s produced some sublime work but also self-indulgent noodling (of which there’s a little too much here). Indeed, some might wish the spotlight was on Ellis more, a fascinating character who may be the more musically gifted of the pair, but not as capable of holding the spotlight like Cave – who has his suits, rumbly baritone and carefully coiffed too-black hair.

It is an unsubtle and schematic but very well-acted Brit folk-horror pastiche from the writer-director Alex Garland; it feels like a reverse-engineered version of The League of Gentlemen, with the overt comic intention concealed or denied.

In the carelessness of its slapdash construction, the off-putting flatness of its style, its brazen resistance to basic foundations of logic, and its hostility toward conventional humor that borders on the avant-garde, the new film (a term generously applied to this haphazard sequence of moving images) has far more in common with the hectic, ugly delirium of online obscurities than the newspaper’s funny pages.

There are moments in Along for the Ride . . . where the magic that cements a teen film seems within reach. For a few seconds here or there, you can feel it. The rest of it just passes by like the tide.

While the juxtaposition of different timelines results in occasional clunkiness, the breathtaking cinematography more than makes up for the uneven telling. In the face of global climate change, these images of the glacial otherworldliness of Alaska carry a wistful splendour and a bittersweet urgency.

The multiverse madness is treated with genial high-energy panache, though I have to say that this infinite profusion of realities does not actually feel all that different in practice from the shapeshifting, retconning world of all the other Avengers films. And infinite realities tend to reduce the dramatic impact of any one single reality, and reduces what there is at stake in a given situation. Nonetheless, it’s handled with lightness and fun.

Overall, this documentary is an exercise in frustration – especially during the rushed final half hour, in which we dart about all over the place.

Sophie Marceau delivers the cringe in this clunkingly bad LA dating comedy: tin-eared, cliched, unfunny and misjudged in every horribly unconvincing syllable, sadly sounding as if it has been written by someone who has never been to Los Angeles or met any human beings.

What an uncanny, exhilarating experience.

As hammy, silly, and undeniably entertaining as ever.

A halo of kinship, love and the tenacious power of art is gathered around this film.

At just 72 minutes, this is a brief, intense feature: it’s possible that Wandel envisaged it as even shorter than it actually is, and perhaps its narrative tendons slacken a little after the initial spasm of horror. But what an incredible performance from Vanderbeque: an intuition of fear and pain and moral outrage that goes beyond acting.

There are some entertaining meta-touches here, but the entire Gutierrez plot is strained and borderline dull. Pascal isn’t a natural comic and the movie winds up fudging his crucial bad-guy status.

Most welcome of all is the generous sprinkling of good one-liners thanks to screenwriter Max Taxe’s witty script, solid direction from Christopher Winterbauer, and a cast with nippy comic timing.

The drama mimics Anne’s own sense of denial, her own refusal to remember or imagine the catastrophe. What we get instead are clinical inspections functioning as chilling parodies or inversions of that sexual intimacy that has upended her life.

This is a gentle-going watch, understated – underpowered even – and sometimes a little drowsy. Still, it has real sensitivity and insight into the transition to adulthood, as gradually it dawns on Nang that his parents don’t have all the answers.

What first-time feature directors Alessio Rigo de Righi and Matteo Zoppis seem to be going for here is a Herzogian waking nightmare, but the necessary sense of horror and despair never fully comes off.

At the risk of insulting Benedetta, it’s mostly good, clean, wholesome fun.

[Toby Meakins] doesn’t quite take enough advantage of his reality-shifting game sequences (the Englund voice cameo serves to remind us just how wild Wes Craven made those nightmares way back when) but it’s a cut above the average Netflix genre guff.

This film comes to life in the two scenes when its hushed note of kindly reverence is broken.

Operation Mincemeat is watchable enough, but perhaps can’t find a fictional way into the stranger-than-fiction outrageousness of the scheme itself.

Charli XCX’s drive and heart are infectious, even for non-Angels.

This is all amiable enough, with the all-important dimension of laughs: Tatum and Bullock showing that they are smart enough to know how silly it is, and that they know that we know that they know.

A complex, subtle, tender and heart-rending story of a young girl’s upbringing in a village menaced by the drug cartels and people traffickers.

If you’re coming in with a blank slate, then Navalny is a feast of evermore unbelievable details and a window into a movement against a state of increasingly boldfaced, demeaning lies.

All this is acted with smouldering intensity and authenticity, particularly by Filipovic, although it’s possible to wonder if there is anything unexpected to come in the third act, or if we can roughly guess where it’s all heading.

Here is a really well-made, old-fashioned anti-war epic in a forthright and robustly enjoyable style from director and co-writer Arthur Harari.

Writer-director Brendan Muldowney is better at contriving striking images of horror, filmed with umbral gloom by cinematographer Tom Comerford, than at the character and story stuff.

Samani’s film-making language has consistency and urgency, and there is an interesting streak of atheism that goes alongside this movie’s spiritual aura.

The Northman is a horribly violent, nihilistic and chaotic story about the endless cycle of violence, the choice between loving your friends and hating your enemies – which turns out to be no choice at all, and the thread of fate down which masculinity’s delicious toxin drips. It’s entirely outrageous, with some epic visions of the flaring cosmos. I couldn’t look away.

This unquestionably ambitious film works best as a mood piece: it’s big, bold, cerebral and intensely unsubtle.

It’s a quizzical time capsule of pre-internet fame from the perspective of a troubled but capable young man who knew his way around a camera.

Without that initial fanbase buy-in, Julia feels like a redundant tribute, with something very indulgent about the “foodie” rhapsodising.

Kiah Roache-Turner keeps the camera moving and the cuts regular, setting a cracking energy that’s particularly important for midnight movies like this, concerned more with relishing carnage than telling a story.

Maybe a little unexpectedly, Amazon Studios have given us a very watchable and classily upscale espionage drama-thriller in the spirit of John le Carré.

Smart, funny and endearingly sweary even when he loses the power to speak without computer assistance, Barkan is a charismatic character who’s easy to like, although one wonders how much the documentary crew resisted showing anything that might dent the halo the film sets round his head.

In light of the strange, brutal ending that’s more foreshadowed than it seems, it’s hard to work out where Weisse wants to land on issues around the best way to coax talent, especially in fields such as music where you have to put in a relentless amount of hours to achieve the highest results.

Wilson and Burke give formidably good performances: a woman who desperately wants to give and receive love, and a man who hasn’t the smallest idea what any of that means.

Despite its flaws, See You Then is an interesting opportunity to see trans talents in front of and behind the camera.

It’s good-natured entertainment, though there is still something weightless and formless about the narrative.

Love for the moving image – and love for artistic creativity – marches hand in hand with the fight for political freedom.

Running a little bit over an hour, it feels like an underdeveloped short that has overstayed its welcome.

This is a film raised a fair few notches by the wonder of geekery, the absolute joy of seeing scientists living and breathing their work.

It takes proper acting talent, boosted by strong direction from Wladyka, to pull the film along the way Reis does. She’s vulnerable, frightening and relentlessly physical.

This could have been a good premise, but the basic idea of the pandemic and bubbling up itself now feels spurious and dated, and there just aren’t enough funny lines to carry this film through its punishing 126-minute running time.

It really is an amazingly pointless and dumb film: the good/bad setup between Morbius and Milo is muddled and cancelled by the not-especially-compelling moral struggle within Morbius himself. Both Leto and Smith have to keep doing the evil demonic face-change growling thing, and it is intensely silly. Let’s hope the extended Spider-Man universe extends far enough to include something more interesting than this.

This is Tarantino for ankle-biters with a bit of Ocean’s 11 thrown in: funny, energetic and just smart enough.

Youth is a great theme of Linklater’s, but presented without any great directional moralising or emotional narrative. Being young just is. This is a film of enormous charm.

It’s hard to deny Fuhrman’s pinch-faced vehemence and the film’s hallucinatory verve.

It all sort of comes together in the end, but there’s no earthly reason that it should all have taken two hours. Maybe the spoiler is the unfeasible length of the running time.

Intense performances by Doupe and Bracken give it a real emotional pulse.

This is a decent, intelligent, well-acted film if a little uninspired until that third act, which packs an almighty punch.

It’s best not to think too hard about it and just let the striking imagery and saturated colours wash over your retinas.

As with most great football stories, there is a tale of redemption underlying all this; you can’t say it isn’t fully deserved.

Right down to its blaspheming finale, The Exorcism of God burns with a subversive desire to rip back the veil on the church’s earthly corruption – but the iconoclasm is somewhat undermined by the daft horror mechanics Venezuelan director Alejandro Hildalgo props it up with.

For all the spectacular action set pieces, there’s something silly and tedious that sets in well before the two-hour mark. It flatlines.

In its unexpected way, this film speaks to the new agony of banishment now being felt by millions of Ukrainians, and to the profound unease and concern and impotence spreading westward across Europe.

Braff and Union have passable chemistry, but Union’s charisma and confidence is magnetic in any context including this one. It’s all breezy – there are no bad actors or malicious intent (other than that one Calabasas woman), so the drama is light and the messes are quickly cleaned up.

There’s never really enough for the underserved trio of actors to sink their teeth into, although they all manage to coast comfortably enough.

A pacifist parable taking a brave stand against nothing, totally removed from the sociocultural landscape of today’s Sweden, it sounds out like one of Caroline’s screams into the howling Scandinavian wind – impassioned, futile, heard by no one.

This is a richly intelligent drama, in which every word and every shot counts.

With its unabashed focus on bodies, luring us in with their nudity before hacking them into tiny pieces, the back-to-basics slasher X arrives as a bold rebuke to all things staid and dignified.