There’s zero, nay negative, fun to be had here, a potentially interesting, if not exactly original, sub-Manchurian Candidate idea (pre-programmed victims/accomplices are activated by a phone call) taken nowhere of interest.

There’s nothing markedly necessary about universe expander Army of Thieves, niche fan service that gives backstory to a character who we know dies later on, but Schweighöfer, also acting as director, keeps his frothy caper afloat with a light knockabout tone, never insisting the film as anything that it isn’t.

Moll has given us this audacious, witty and absorbing mystery thriller, a tale of adultery and amour fou with a gamey touch of the macabre.

There is such sensitivity and intelligence in the performances from Thompson and Negga and the cinematography from Eduard Grau and production design by Nora Mendis are both ravishing. It’s a very stylish piece of work from Hall.

The contemporary half of the film is for me less interesting, particularly in the overextended third act.

It’s all very silly, with a few enjoyable moments.

Maybe the Indian influence on the Beatles’ music didn’t last, but India’s own prestige, its soft power in the west, was immeasurably enhanced.

Amid the current explosion of affirmative diversity-driven film-making, there is a kind of strength in such a self-excoriating and uncompromising point of view. Corbine Jr is one to watch.

The production values are a bit too pedestrian to elevate this much above the ordinary.

Too hip for its own good, the film ends up going nowhere. Only of interest, perhaps, to hardcore St Vincent and Brownstein fans.

There’s probably a semi-decent creature feature here and maybe, with a hefty amount of redrafting, a semi-decent human drama but as it stands it fails at both, a satisfying, coherent film buried underneath copious amounts of animal guts.

It all works up to an only mildly surprising “shock” ending, which is bad news for all concerned, a twist that would be more tragic if it were possible to feel sorry for any of them.

Rylance is good casting as Maurice: his delicate sing-song voice and sometimes faintly unfocused gaze fit nicely with our hero’s lovably awkward determination, as well as Flitcroft’s sense as a natural comedian that there is something more than a little absurd in the game of golf.

The acting is daytime-soap standard and the tasteful, softcore sex is shot in such a way as to not look like actual sex. It’s unerotic, unsweaty and performed with expressionless faces. It feels like the film-makers know they have to do the sex bits, but don’t really want to actually do them.

While a certain disarming naivety infuses the work, it nevertheless packs an evocative punch, with a moral message about intolerance and the need to protect more vulnerable species. It’s also one of the few films that could potentially induce a psychedelic trip with its visuals alone.

The movie asks the audience to not look at two elephants in the room, and unfortunately, no amount of soaring music can relieve that heavy a burden.

Night Teeth isn’t quite as dreadful as its truly dreadful title but it’s just as forgettable.

Given the calibre of the voice cast, perhaps the biggest disappointment is how humourless the movie is.

Labyrinth of Cinema is indeed labyrinthine, a maze of jokes, film references, quirky back projections, bargain-basement effects and melodramatic confrontations. But at its centre is something deeply serious: a belief that, as the sole country to have experienced a nuclear strike, Japan has a terrifying exceptionalism. This awful truth is marked by a tonal cymbal-clash, both acidly comic and desperately sad.

Villeneuve is superb at juxtaposing the colossal spectacle with the intimate encroachment of danger and a mysterious dramatic language that exalts the alienness of every texture and surface.

There are moments of inspiration that light up this film like flashes of lightning.

A fog of menace descends on this hauntingly photographed, oppressive and driftingly directionless movie from Lucile Hadzihalilovic. It has the intensively curated atmosphere of body-horror noir – if not the conventional plot structure – and some way into the running time you might find yourself awakened from its reverie of formless anxiety by a sudden, horrifying stab of violence.

Enjoyable and well-crafted as it is, this movie can’t quite decide what to do with the tougher, darker side of Richard Williams.

The supposedly important themes of immigrants and Syria are cancelled by its naive flippancy.

While armed with plenty of social critique, the beauty of Balloon goes beyond this tug-of-war between modernity and tradition.

Covering the Indonesian war of independence through the viewpoint of the occupier, The East is yet another pale addition to the format, rehashing empty metaphors that are barren of emotional complexity, historical poignancy or visual ingenuity.

What a man. Just writing this makes me want to watch the documentary all over again.

An intriguing and drily comic film.

Pure evil is all around in this unnervingly subtle, sophisticated movie; an eerie oppression in the air.

This is another film about a white European mixed up in a Middle Eastern war they barely seem to understand, but on its own terms it’s a story well told.

Though flawed, its old-fashioned movie-making energy commands attention as well as its ingenious, if overextended three-act Rashomon structure, retelling the same story from three different standpoints, mostly without insisting on tricksy discrepancies.

Part delicious satire of Hollywood culture and part frustratingly muddled thriller. But the good bits are sufficiently impressive it wouldn’t be fair to hold its flaws against it too much. We mustn’t be greedy for perfection.

The movie is saturated with emotion and colour, though its novelistic depth brings with it the slightly effortful running time of two hours and 20 minutes.

There’s a rich confectionery of strangeness, sadness and fear to this very absorbing film.

This dense but witty film is never caught short for a flourish.

Love letters to the past are always addressed to an illusion, yet this is such a seductive piece of myth-making from Branagh.

It’s entertaining, though composed with algorithmic precision, and it winds up suspiciously neutral about whether kids really should abandon digital enslavement in favour of real-life human friends.

You find yourself admiring Madonna’s desire to focus forward artistically and to recast her music as expressly political, while wondering if the songs from Madame X are really good enough to warrant so much of the spotlight.

It’s an impressively contrived film, almost a machine for winning awards, a monochrome reverie of midlife yearning.

Stories involving shocking discrimination and violence are filmed with a conspiratorial understanding, as if the camera is lending a friendly ear.

As charmless as its predecessor, The Addams Family 2 is without an iota of ooky, nor any shred of kooky. Really, it’s just kind of ghastly – and not in the intended way.

It’s not a vanity project (Brühl does not seem in the least vain) but an actor’s project, nonetheless.

Night Drive doesn’t quite have enough time left to build on sharp interlocking performances by Dalah and Bowen and give their characters the full noir shadings the suitcase coaxes out of them. But it’s still an intriguing alternative routeing for LA night-owl cinema.

It’s a bit indulgent but, still, a gentle watch.

Even in terms of its attempted emotional cross-section of the pandemic, Convergence spreads its net too wide.

The head of steam Keeyes endeavours to build up gets drained away by the endless barely relevant flashbacks.

Director Patrick Brice is so distracted with trying to be of the moment that he forgets to make his film base-level fun or at times even base-level coherent, its thesis crammed into a laughably on-the-nose killer speech where buzzwords are clumsily crashed together, trying to make a point about something but ultimately saying not a lot about anything.

Madres never loses a strong underpinning of social conscience that seeps into director Ryan Zaragoza’s considered shots.

Director Axelle Carolyn maintains a pleasingly teasing rhythm so it’s a pity that, as the sprightly nursing-home gothic fun winds up, it descends into Scooby Dooish over-explication.

John and the Hole is well enough photographed and acted, but is really an oppressive and exasperatingly pointless piece of work, without consistency or the courage of its realist convictions.

Thai writer-director Lee Thongkham’s horror feature is a giddy, gory little treat

It’s a fierce, thoughtful drama.

The whole thing is a bit bonkers but very beautiful too.

Every shot, every scene, every exchange from The Harder They Fall is combat-ready and garishly tensed for violence – and Samuel certainly brings the freaky mayhem, with gruesome relish and high energy. My feeling, though, is that there is a diminishing return on it, and the big reveal at the end is slightly silly and somehow retrospectively discloses that we haven’t really found out enough about Rufus Buck’s backstory.

A good-natured love story, doomed to flower and fade in the space of a single holiday, leaving behind the traditional coming-of-age realisation that friends and family are what’s important right now.

This is a Rocky Horror Picture Show of cluelessness and misjudged Judy Garlandification. I can imagine masochists getting together for Diana: The Musical parties, just to sing the most nightmarish lines along with the cast. The rest of us will need a long lie down.

Life can be desperately embarrassing in your first year at university when you are trying out new identities and personalities. This film replicates that agonising discomfort.

The script feels completely devoid of ideas about what the future of AI might look like. But what it does prove is that Pearce adds a basic layer of credibility to any film simply by showing up.

It’s at least a short film, clocking it at around 90 minutes, Serkis chopping off any extraneous fat, but it floats by and floats on without ever causing us to sit up and pay attention. Let there be no more.

It gets turgid in its final third but backed by director Gigi Saul Guerrero’s cartoonish punch, Barraza’s cantankerous grimace and hair-trigger rejoinders are a pure pleasure.

Its history assignment comes out pretty jumbled but this breezy YA vampire flick shrugs “whatever” and gets back to nailing the undead.

Perhaps the ultimate value of Nitram has nothing to do with its qualities as an intensely disquieting tone poem – though on that level the film is brilliant, marking another extraordinary achievement from Kurzel, who has a penchant for evoking gut-sinking emotional atmosphere.

There are imperfections here, especially near the end, but it’s the work of someone striving to stand out, to do something that will linger in the memory rather than fade into the over-populated homepage background.

There’s a definite sense that the makers couldn’t keep up with an ever-shifting case but wanted to meet a deadline nonetheless.

No Time To Die is startling, exotically self-aware, funny and confident, and perhaps most of all it is big: big action, big laughs, big stunts and however digitally it may have been contrived, and however wildly far-fetched, No Time To Die looks like it is taking place in the real world, a huge wide open space that we’re all longing for.

The visual brilliance of this film combines with shroomy toxicity and inexplicable moral grandeur: what a stunning experience.

Birds of Paradise, then, settles into a weird, slightly unsettling middle-ground – beautiful yet hollow, intriguing yet distanced, skillfully performed without much of a beating heart. Like its principal dancers, its a portrait of contrasts, though the friction here doesn’t generate much heat.

The movie hits its stride immediately with a taut, athletic urgency and it contains some superb images – particularly the eerie miracle of Birnam Wood coming to Dunsinane, with Malcolm’s soldiers holding tree-branches over their heads in a restricted forest path and turning themselves into a spectacular river of boughs. This is a black-and-white world of violence and pain that scorches the retina.

Even for those who know about the Auschwitz Protocols – a report to which the pair contributed that has a weighty legacy in Holocaust history – the film is still intensely impactful. Inevitably, it is profoundly upsetting and disturbing.

Walken keeps you watching thanks to his inherent charisma, still undimmed in his late 70s.

With Civetta ably dashing off a couple of desperate kidnap attempts, The Gateway manages to scrabble over the line.

The streak of perversity at Intrusion’s centre nudges it above the norm, briefly waking us up before we sleepily click on something else.

The film’s freakiness and wooziness might have been a bit grating were it not for the glacial authority that Ferrara brings to every scene and shot – centred, of course, in the craggy gravitas of Dafoe himself.

The film-makers’ enthusiasm for his clarity of purpose is all well and good, but it does leave the film prone to hyperbole, and perhaps a more measured, sideways look at the weird dropout culture around climbing would have been more interesting.

There are also some well-observed touches, especially concerning the fleeting friendships dog-walkers make with each other and the diversity of London’s population.

Michael Gandolfini is goosebump-inducing as the young Tony Soprano, amid race riots and antagonism towards rival African American gangs.

It’s a poignant and compelling Venn diagram of passion and heartache.

True Things is not a bad film, exactly. The actors play it like they mean it, while the drama itself carries a natural dry charge. But it’s unambitious, sometimes clunky and doesn’t wrong-foot us once.

Mona Lisa and the Blood Moon offers street-food for the senses, served with lashings of hot sauce. It’s hardly nutritious but it tastes fine in the moment, wolfed down on the run.

Old Henry is a determinedly low-aiming affair.

The tone of the film is sometimes a little opaque. There is some slightly cliched 16mm footage of subway scenes and indulgent home-movie material and Huntt’s own voiceover has something of the student graduation piece about it. But there is a rich, dense texture to this very questioning, personal film.

Vigas’s direction is efficient, pedestrian, entirely built for purpose. But he manages to keep the audience on-board throughout the tale’s twists and turns.

Its line of attack is remorseless, an ongoing rain of hammer blows, and yet it never feels especially dour or heavy. If anything, Chupov and Merkulova’s handling of the material is almost playful, choosing to frame Stalin’s Russia as nightmarish deadpan comedy.

The Survivor wins on points, a decent and honourably intended picture about one man’s ordeal in the horror of the Holocaust and the heartbreak that came afterwards.

The joy of live music is in immediate, fleeting sensation, which doesn’t need to get caught on the hide of history. But that sensation is something Carruthers captured brilliantly in 1996.

The broad characterisation, dialogue and scene transitions probably worked better on stage, but they give a bounce to this feelgood Britfilm version.

This is a celebratory film, and it’s easy to agree with its praise for Fauci’s intellectual heroism, especially when reactionary anti-science charlatanism is running rampant across the internet and the political right. But the documentary maybe doesn’t nail the historical paradox at its centre: Fauci has been vilified twice in his life, from different directions.

The result is predictably excessive, noisy and more than a little exhausting. But mostly in a fun way, as long as you’re not bothered by gratuitous violence, incoherence and a deep streak of silly.

This extraordinary documentary by director Sebastien Lifshitz, who has made many films about the LGBTQ+ experience (Wild Side, Bambi, Open Bodies), achieves a remarkable degree of intimacy with its young subject and her family.

This extraordinary story of an extraordinary person is told via bland film-making reminiscent of a public service announcement.

It is a superbly shot, viscerally acted ensemble drama.