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.

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

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.

Hall, always a joy to watch, shows yet another, more subdued, side of her prodigious craft. But the film fails to build real suspense, and the scary scenes feel rote and often inelegant, like ticking off a college-horror-movie shot list.

It’s a delicate, thoughtful film, moving and real.

Bloody, action-packed and tragicomic all at once, this dazzling coming-of-age tale masterfully contemplates the knotty process of coming to terms with past traumas through a horror-fantasy lens.

Just occasionally, Lyne brings the right kind of flash, brash and trash to this fantastically silly and unbelievable story. But the film plods along in such a disconcerting way: there is no ratcheting up of tension, or plausible psychology.

Dinklage always holds the screen with his natural charisma.

There is a fair bit of sentimentality here, but an awful lot of affection and energy as well.

Streamline’s narrative doesn’t go in the expected direction, with structural and emotional surprises making good on its promise to deliver a different kind of sports story, even if its final stretch is a tad neat.

It’s spectacle coasting on the evergreen draw of time travel paced with beats of occasionally effective human emotion – grief, regret, self-loathing and acceptance in sometimes moving, very manageable amounts.

Paxton’s movie sketches out the sinister dread just under the happy-family surface; she is in expert control of her film, achieving her effects with economy and force. It is really unnerving.

Great Freedom is a formidably intelligent and well-acted prison movie and also a love story – or perhaps a paradoxically platonic bromance, stretching from the end of the second world war to the moon landing.

Gold is a minimalistic production, story and setting wise, with an interesting kind of contextual ambiguity: we know there is a wider world beyond the frame, though we don’t know what it looks like. Sparseness is intriguing, but this film is so damn sparse.

The journey is slick and diverting, and at times incisive, but Turning Red is yet another Pixar film that coasts rather than glides. Hopefully its next offering can turn into something more.

Letts is a brilliant entrepreneur, an inter-disciplinary artist and eloquent speaker about what life was like in the punk era, and despite his (correct) refusal to see things in these tiresomely nostalgist or sentimental terms, there is a pang in recognising the spark of that time.

It’s a thriller by name but less edge-of-your-seat than lounging on the couch, absorbing beats of plot like the ocean tide. A little provocation with slight commitment – that’s not a bad night in by any means.

There’s a propulsive, driving force to the way the film is directed, but there are some things that don’t entirely track.

To me this feels like a silly smirking film with zero insights into abuse or conspiracy theories.

Lemercier’s weirdly grinning, gurning face superimposed on the child’s head creates an unnatural chill that the film fails to shrug off, even after Aline as an adult is supposed to be glammed up with her teeth fixed.

Against the Ice is a Danish story flattened for a global audience.

This film may stretch your patience to the limit and beyond. It’s minor work – but there is always something there, some restless wounded intelligence, a pugnacious worrying-away at something.

For all the amazement at Ball’s tireless hustle and explosive originality, there’s a terminal lack of both in this monument to her memory.

Narrating the film with occasional gonzo outbursts (“We were so fucking stupid”), Krichevskaya is perhaps over-infatuated with her subject, but then Sindeeva seems like quite a character.

This is an engaging ensemble piece, acted with vehemence and sincerity, though it concludes a little melodramatically.

The ending is tiresome and shark-jumping in the extreme.

Pure evil permeates this brief, 80-minute film, whose cold visual brilliance reminds me of the recent movies of Paweł Pawlikowski. It wasn’t until some time after it had finished that I grasped one of the reasons it was so oppressive: there are no women in it at all. There is a chill of political fear.

It’s an airport novel that’s now an airplane movie.

Much of the film’s pleasure lies in the glimpses of Soho over the decades: a wealth of photographs, sound clips and archive footage bring the club and the neighbourhood to life. Free of obtrusive talking heads, contributors feature as voices only, and none overstays their welcome.

Although made on a tiny budget, this highly original exercise in folk horror punches well above its weight with snappy dialogue, trippy visual effects and impressive camerawork.

The estimable Dave Grohl of the Foo Fighters has bafflingly decided to try everyone’s patience with this insufferable vanity project: a violent gonzo grossout that sadly conforms to the horror-comedy tendency of being neither properly scary nor properly funny.

This engrossing film is a time capsule of London itself – the faces not so very different from those you would see in the 40s or 50s.

Against considerable odds, a very, very low bar has been met and then shuffled over with this mostly effective and incredibly nasty update, a jolting little slasher that should repulse and satisfy those with a suitably depraved idea of what they are clicking into.

Dog lovers eager for a dog movie primarily about a dog will be reassured by the knowledge that Dog does feature plenty of dog but they might be a little surprised about what else the film has to offer, an odd and atonal ramble across the US where the dog comes first and plotting comes a long way after.

Perhaps it’s more for insiders and specialists, but this film is a taste of Italian life.

It is a disturbing and unsettling piece of work, a psycho-pathological moodboard of a film, in which guilt, horror and shame poison the atmosphere.

Perhaps this one doesn’t take Seidl’s creative career much further down the road to (or away from) perdition, but it is managed with unflinching conviction, a tremendous compositional sense and an amazing flair for discovering extraordinary locations.

There is something lighter, almost flippant and French-farcical about this new Von Kant: a man brought low by l’amour, inviting from the audience hardly more than a worldly, sympathetic shrug.

This is a film that doesn’t set out to push your emotional buttons all that hard, or even at all. But it covers a surprising amount of narrative ground and there is always something engaging and tender to it.

The film stands or falls by its claims to deadpan comedy – but this is heavy-handed and unsatisfying.

This film may not have all that much new material but it piercingly asks the right questions about Chaplin’s elusive reality.

[An] engrossing, unnerving but unexpectedly sympathetic drama of family dysfunction.

In a way the film’s best bits are the quiet scenes where the audience is primed to expect something awful is about to happen, only to find the point is not a jump scare but a harrowing emotional insight.

It’s an entertaining, fairly overwrought piece, a little tightly buttoned.

Dario Argento’s return to directing after a 10-year absence has its moments of macabre and melodramatic invention.

Claire Denis’s new film is a seductively indirect love triangle, a drama of the mind as much as the heart. It’s intriguing if contrived and anticlimactic, though acted at the highest pitch of sensual conviction.

All the corny romance stuff is about as intrinsic to the film’s soft appeal as the scrupulously well-made frocks, encompassing late Edwardian lace and flapper-style dropwaist numbers, and dozens of well-turned cloche hats.

The question of whether this is a ghost story or if Laura is experiencing a kind of psychological breakdown twists and turns in ways that lost me by the end. Still, it’s is a very accomplished debut from Gregg, and acted with subtlety and sensitivity by Riseborough.

Flux Gourmet is sometimes funny and always exotic, and every moment has his distinctive authorial signature. But I am starting to wonder if his style is becoming a hipster mannerism with less substance, and a less live-ammo sense of actual danger.

Incredible But True has a wacky premise that Dupieux very possibly had no idea how to develop. And yet I found myself laughing quite a lot of the time. The sheer silliness and zen pointlessness is entertaining.

The threading together of the different stories is overly opaque at times, but Evgeny Rodin’s atmospheric cinematography is a marvel, imbuing a Tarkovsky-esque ethereality to a land that has fallen out of step with the modern world.

While the lurid twists and turns are enjoyable in a 90s erotic thriller kind of way, the sudden shift towards suspense hampers Padukone’s performance.

With his work now migrating online and his jerry-rigged methods increasingly outsourced to post-production effects, Jeunet can’t avoid the impending digitization of cinema, nor life. Still, he’s not going down without landing a few good fingers to the ribs first.

It’s a huge greenscreen action-adventure with a reasonable bang-buck ratio, but a box office algorithm where its heart is supposed to be.

Jennifer Lopez is radioactively humourless and Owen Wilson is robotically bland in this stinker.

Decker infuses Nelson’s screenplay with a potent dose of whimsical fantasy, morphing Lennie’s tortuous bereavement into a lonely house, a romantic musical journey and a garden where other complicated, confusing emotions grow.

It’s a far better version of a romantic comedy than we’re used to streaming of late.

This animated documentary from Danish film-maker Jonas Poher Rasmussen is an irresistibly moving and engrossing story, whose emotional implications we can see being absorbed into the minds of the director and his subject, almost in real time.

Branagh brings something spirited and good-humoured to the role of Poirot, but the film’s attempt to create some romantic stirrings to go with the activities of those little grey cells is not very convincing.

Squint a bit, relax your mind and you might find in it a touching allegory that accidentally corresponds to our own, collective emergence from the oneiric, mesmeric lull of lockdown life, in which sleeping too much and dreaming about dead loved ones could have become the new going out.

It is an intriguing story, although I have to admit to feeling a bit bemused at the arbitrary way the Beast story is inserted into the already tense and interesting situation of Suzu/Belle and her relationships with people at home and school.

Here the formulaic silliness, sometimes part of the enjoyment, is just tiring.

“This isn’t a Mensa convention!” says one player. Is that disingenuous? Isn’t there, in fact, some advanced showbiz intelligence and surrealist savvy in the way Jackass is set up and edited? Either way, it has a horror-comedy impact.

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.

It has the feeling of a short film stretched beyond its limit, with all that early tension dissipating, and while there’s certainly something jolting about the gonzo violence in the finale, it’s otherwise ineffectual.

Nanny, as a whole, packs a rather toothless punch. It feels loosely assembled – chock-full of original ideas, intriguing imagery and plot devices, many of which either oddly wind up as loose ends or get resolved in a hurry.

Nothing Compares is simply more about the Sinéad you already know. But a critic’s original sin is to review the movie you want to see, not the movie that exists. To that end, with expectations managed, Nothing Compares is a quite engaging document.

It’s trite to say a debut performance is a revelation, but the whole film simply does not work without McInerny, who is fully convincing as a girl on an emotional precipice. It’s an astoundingly calibrated turn, one of barely lidded emotions that eventually skitter about

The film allows you to ponder not just the mother-child bond – strong enough to confront fascism – but the way everyone has to let their children be influenced by strangers; the unintended upbringing of being out in the world. What an emotional experience.

It feels like a screensaver, a movie generated by an algorithm, the same algorithm that calculated the likely profit on extending the Sing franchise.

It’s a deft and thrilling conceit, experiencing the highs and lows of life through different people. Stolevski, in a film that feels less like a debut and more a late-stage magnum opus, has found an ingenious vessel to make profound observations on gender, sex and being.

Ford has a knack for making us sweat without relying on an over-egged score or over-stacked stakes. It’s a genre movie with its feet firmly on the ground, small in scale and tight in focus.

Am I OK? is strongest when embedded in the two friends’ well-worn, effusive bond, in sickness or in health – when the fight comes the barbs are believably lacerating, the kind only best friends can wield.

It has risibly cliched dialogue and wooden, poorly directed acting from a B-to-G list cast, but it appears to be shot in one continuous take and strictly as an example of choreography and technical skill it’s pretty nifty.

Call Jane never quite rises to the level of a rousing battle cry, but does offer a studious examination of a past that could, terrifyingly, become our future.

Perhaps Good Luck to You, Leo Grande does not aspire to a piercingly profound analysis of sex and the human condition. It is, however, an amusing, compassionate and humane drama acted and directed with terrific panache.

At a young age, Raiff still remains an exciting up-and-coming film-maker of note and even in his sophomoric slump, there’s enough, coupled with his standout debut, to suggest that better things will come. Hopefully better titles too.

This awkward, misjudged, occasionally sexy film has seeds of a radical, fresh story and flashes of directorial brilliance but is hobbled throughout by the confounding decision to write her 26-year-old main character as either insensitively neuro-divergent or more sheltered child than adult.

A gentle, exquisitely sad film.

Boyega’s performance has an essential sympathy and dignity that are vital to this drama; an unshowy sense of self-worth that keeps it together.

For those who like their dating movies with a bit of gristle, Fresh is a perfect match.