Gazer’s atmosphere of looming disaster and dreamlike oppression crowds in on you as the movie progresses; an intriguing, genuinely scary picture.

What emerges from Klayman’s film is how very important Brexit Britain is as a self-vivisecting research animal in Bannon’s experimental thinking.

It’s a film in need of a tighter edit with a script in need of a sharper polish, an imperfect franchise-launcher that nonetheless represents significant progress for DC.

You could say this is all good gory fun, and The Evil Dead remains a triumph of brains over budget. But in retrospect, you can’t help wondering if Raimi and co didn’t have some women issues to work through?

While it is flawed, this film finds an assured place in the quietist tradition of African cinema with beautiful images and strong moments, and with relevant things to say about community, a woman’s place and the climate crisis.

I myself found it as extravagant and engrossing and doggedly mysterious as anything he has done recently, with luxuriously self-aware performances from Julianne Moore and Tilda Swinton, and an undertow of darkness often overlooked by yeasayers and naysayers.

The cast is skillfully alert and Schrader's vision is unencumbered either by sentiment or cynicism.

I don’t think L’Immensità quite encompasses what it’s straining for and I’m not sure that Penélope Cruz is directed towards her greatest strengths, very good though of course she always is. But Crialese has fervency and style and those fantasy worlds might even have a touch of De Sica’s miraculous Milan.

Vesper plays like a cult film waiting to be discovered. It adeptly fuses a compelling YA-friendly story about a teenage girl’s survival in a hostile environment with dense, thoughtful world-building, the sort required to draw in nerdy-minded viewers. That savvy combination creates a narrative that breathes and expands, like one of the freaky mycelium-like life forms that populate the story.

In his first English language film, Quebeçois director Denis Villeneuve has produced a masterful thriller that is also an engrossing study of a smalltown America battered by recession, fear and the unrelenting elements.

A deafening explosion of energy, gruesome violence and chaos.

There are some heartfelt moments, but this is an opaque and frustrating experience.

In the end, Collins emerges as an opaque figure, as resistant to interpretation as her famously 2D fictional heroine Lucky Santangelo.

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.

Hitch would have played it for laughs; this is a little overwrought, but steamy enough. [22 Apr 2006, p.53]

Calling a film-maker a “dreamer” sounds hackneyed, but it does justice to his idealism. Perhaps no other description will do.

All in all, this is a powerful example of a bricolage-like editing technique that relies heavily on exploiting the copyright laws around fair use to create a prismatic, provocative style of cinema that’s very 21st century.

For all the grand gestures of musical theater, there’s an odd flatness to Theater Camp, a half-hearted and lackluster comedy from a group of Hollywood friends set at a summer performing arts community.

What this by-the-numbers approach lacks in artistry it makes up for in an avalanche of facts.

What this solemn and enlivening documentary plunge into the history of Ridley Scott’s sci-fi classic reiterates is the idea of film as a collective art form – not just the wider circle of writers, performers and technicians beyond the director, but in the case of the truly great films, serendipitous access to a deeper collective unconscious to which we all have the keys – even if few know how to use them.

The story The Walk tells is, admittedly, an unbelievable one, so it’s understandable Zemeckis should choose to leave subtlety at the door. Sadly, such an approach strips the film of tension, especially at the crucial moment.

The spectacle of highly competent professionals going about their work is always absorbing, and Simons is an interesting man: reticent, calm, shy, intensely focused but apparently never losing control until the end.

It’s pitiless and pitch-perfect, an existential tour-de-force with shades of Camus’s The Outsider.

This is a poignant and weird film.

For a film about advanced technology, it’s all awfully simple.

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.

Interestingly the story, despite the classic music-biopic tropes that Mangold did so much to popularise, does not conform to the classic rise-fall-learning-experience-comeback format. It’s all rise, but troubled and unclear. You might not buy Chalamet’s Dylan at first; I didn’t, until that Guthrie bedside scene. There is amazing bravado in this performance.

It’s a proper animation buff’s piece of work, and admittedly a little slow to get its yarn ripping, but mesmerising and moving in the later stretches.

There are, arguably, scenes in this film which are less than subtle – and there were times when I wanted something more indirect. But Manville and Neeson have a real empathy and intimacy on screen.

All the exertion – fleshed out in visuals that veer from Astro Boy-aping cutesiness to interestingly rough closeups, as if the animation itself is fraying in the heat of battle – pays diminishing dividends. The panoply of powers begin to seem interchangeable, the character arcs dim.

This film opens up the storytelling throttle with a throaty growl, delivering the doomy romance of an old-fashioned western and the thrills of a mob drama.

This film is justifiably celebratory and respectful, and it reaches out beyond the rock fanbase.

It’d be easy to dismiss as jaded hipsterism but the film isn’t scared to laugh at itself and the unsustainable lifestyle its protagonists are clinging to.

It’s super fun entertainment, which mostly disguises the fact it’s not going to stick in the mind for long.

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.

It’s a highly entertaining portrait of the two men, and Tucci’s own directorial brush strokes are bold and invigorating.]

Her Smell is built around a performance of near-unwatchable toxicity by Elisabeth Moss, who channels a combination of Courtney Love and Heath Ledger’s Joker with her spiteful, slowly imploding rock star.

The will-they-won’t-they dynamic of the film grips you and it’s almost impossible not to root for Strompolos and Zala, especially when things on set get hairy.

[Black] creates some outrageously contrived and protracted shootouts and one or two good old fashioned action explosions. But he also keeps the dialogue cracking along.

This is a very good-looking film that represents a brave attempt to do justice to a very popular book; it manages it, just.

What a rush of storytelling energy and style.

A solid biopic, with fine performances – though in its sombre tone and attempt to cover too much of Wilde's life, it could be accused of overstating the vital importance of being earnest.

I warmed to its sensitivity; it possesses an insistence that these difficult boys are vulnerable and scared kids (undermined only slightly by the fact that the actors playing them look well into their 20s).

There is some top-quality entertainment value on offer here from a movie which can only intensify the world’s K-obsession.

Hong makes all of this look as easy and fluent as breathing.

An unclassifiably brilliant gem of American independent film-making.

The mystery and beauty of bees emerge strongly enough. But should we be seriously concerned, or not?

It’s an impressive feat of technical film-making, which has now become a hallmark of DaCosta’s work. But she caves to baser impulses in reinterpreting an old and, some might say, crusty play.

[Colman] knows how to oscillate between broad comedy and heart-wrenching drama but the film around her isn’t as adept. Like the dream husband at its centre, Wicker looks the part but there’s nothing underneath.

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.

It can be borderline maudlin and easily teary, though The Friend is grounded enough, and Watts sufficiently understated, to not become outright eye-rolling.

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

Given the bizarro conceit, there’s something surprisingly, and frustratingly, safe about the film.

Assayas uses the same fluent handheld style as Irma Vep, and there's a practised ease with which he draws fine, naturalistic performances from his ensemble. [20 Aug 1999, p.5]

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.

Audiard brings his usual ambition and sweep, energy and attack; although I wondered at certain points if the musical numbers functioned at some level as an alibi, to pre-empt objections about being the film being contrived.

If you have the stomach for singularly focused revenge and some truly graphic, visceral hand-to-hand combat, Monkey Man delivers the goods.

Justin Pemberton’s documentary, based on the bestselling book by French economist Thomas Piketty, tells us a story no less depressing or gruesomely hypnotic for being so familiar – like observing a slo-mo driverless car crash from the passenger seat.

Caton is a perfect fit; he is touching, tender and a little bedraggled, emoting with a worn-out visage that looks like the 71-year-old has been marinated in beer and left in the sun to dry.

There’s a strong basis of originality here, and the warmth and good nature of the movie carries it along.

It buzzes with uncomplicated enjoyment.

Mia Madre is a tremendously smart and enjoyable movie.

Energetic and heartfelt, tipping towards tragedy, Sun Children crawls through the mud and emerges all the stronger. The quest is a red herring; the real treasure is the film.

Duplass and his co-writer, director Alex Lehmann, deliver this strange concoction – an improv bromance mixed with a tragic love story – with delicacy.

In the first movie, an injection transformed wimpy Steve Rogers into strapping Captain America; similarly, this sequel gives the flagging comic-book movie an adrenaline shot of relevance. You've got to hand it to them.

The Brand New Testament is a peppy, original and (importantly) very sweet story.

It is superlatively well performed and well directed with a real narrative grip.

This knotty psychological study is an impressive debut from Poland-based Swedish director Von Horn.

Kokkali persuasively enacts both the emotional hurt and emotional healing.

Like I say, there’s nothing new here for even casual followers of the food crisis. But it will make you think twice about what you put in your supermarket basket.

Just when we thought it was impossible to say something new about , documentary film-maker Eugene Jarecki pulls it off.

Together Together suffers a little from being too polite, as a comedy it lacks snarl, and as a drama it lacks, well, event. Nothing much really happens – but maybe that’s the point.

The brio and ambition of The Italian Job can’t be doubted and Caine has enormous charisma.

Binoche’s performance and the movie are elegant, ingenious and sexy.

An irritating, baffling, fascinating film.

Preposterous though it may be, this is a terrific family movie in a style audiences may not have seen since Mary Poppins.

This extraordinary story has unfortunately been turned into a handsomely produced but laborious, drawn-out and dramatically inert movie.

Violence and tragedy is where the story is naturally heading, and this trajectory is plain in every scene and every shot: a world where aggression must either be violently and dangerously resisted or accepted.

It’s Nicole Kidman who steals the show. Forced to endure the brunt of Hughie’s attacks, Rae is both cool and desperate, calculating and vulnerable, with a strange energy that feels young and tender but wise beyond her years.

Heavy with grief the film may be, but it’s always a beautiful mourning.

It’s carried through by an all-in Hawke who is really put through the wringer, arguably his most physically gruelling role to date (the upside of a low budget is that his hardships are made to look that much harder), a muscular and entirely persuasive performance that continues his winning streak.

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.

It’s a tremendous film that was ahead of its time on LGBT issues and, in some ways, is ahead of ours.

The atmosphere and performances are sustained at a terrifying pitch, and the movie ends suddenly, leaving the audience to deal with the ideas and emotions aroused.

The tension leaks away in the second half; the film could have done with being snipped by a good 20 minutes.

It’s [Del Toro’s] most strikingly beautiful film yet, a velvety, precisely styled noir with the year’s most impressively stacked cast (two Oscar winners and six nominees, all bringing their A game) but its sleek shell is sadly as duplicitous as its untrustworthy conman protagonist, blinding us with dazzle but leaving us tricked.

There are such great gags, and it is acted with such fanatical gusto by Barratt that it’s impossible not to root for this unlikeliest of heroes.

Silva packs in more penises in five minutes on the beach than I’ve seen on cinema screens in a decade of movie-watching; his representation of hedonistic gay culture feels nicely casual and natural.

It’s stylishly shot by first-timer Louis-Seize, a bit reminiscent of an early Jim Jarmusch movie with its deadpan sense of humour, never trying too hard, just a little bit too cool for school.

Schwarz offsets the camp with a sincere appreciation of both the obvious, larger-than-life personality and this performer's oft-overlooked skills.

An entertaining documentary. Maybe the full story of Studio 54 has yet to be told.

Overall, this is better and glossier than some of the Adams-Poser posse’s earlier efforts, but perhaps not quite enough of an evolution to take their vision to the next level.

Perhaps above everything else, Arnold returns us to the most potent fact about the Cathy and Heathcliff love affair: it is a love affair between equals, not between a woman with coquettish "erotic capital" and a man with property and status.

The story has a moderate charm, but is less baroque and ambitious than many Japanese animations.

Reiner Holzemer has made a film that is intensely supportive and uncritical – as fashion documentaries tend to be – and to those of us who are outside the fashion world, it can be a bit opaque. Yet it is refreshing to hear creativity discussed with such seriousness and commitment.

It is a riveting, dreamlike evocation of this man’s tortured, unhappy life, whose transient successes bring him no pleasure of any kind.

Smith’s performance, honed from the previous stage and radio versions, is terrifically good.

Amstell creates a detailed ecosystem of in-jokes from the worlds of media and film, and from that cynical context he conjures a miraculously heartfelt love story, sweet and poignant in all its awkwardness.