It’s an engaging piece of work from Merlant who has a real sense of directing an ensemble of actors.

The last half hour, so finely underplayed, is quietly devastating.

The whole shooting match is pretty bloody, and as cheesy as the dairy aisle, but decent fun to watch.

This film (and Liggett) is likable and charming enough.

The freshness of the approach, combined with the substance of the stories, works the same strange magic on the viewer as on the inmates. It is easy to be swept along.

The tech may be on the blink, but this striking debut makes humanity seem like a beautiful malfunction.

This is an enjoyable rollercoaster of absurdities and poignancy, and a marvellous showcase for Stafiej’s talent.

Here is a film that accomplishes the difficult task of capturing the heroic trials of its subject without overly valorising and mythologising the real person.

It can be overwrought and even absurd but lively and heartfelt.

In narrative terms it never really develops any of its characters or relationships, yet its two utterly heartfelt lead performances make this a grimly authentic spectacle.

No one could doubt the technical mastery of this movie and its formal audacity. But for all that, I found something unliberating in its mercurial restlessness.

I’m not sure that Les Olympiades says anything too profound about any of its cast of characters, but Audiard achieves something very watchable and entertaining in anthologising them. This is a connoisseur date movie.

Nitram is a hypnotically disquieting movie.

In a calmly realist, non-mystic movie language, this director really can convince you that the living and the dead, the past and the present, the terrestrial and the other, do exist side by side.

Dumont’s secular crisis-of-faith drama has much to say about the corrosive effect of our 24-hour news culture. But it is also indecisive and compromised and plays out as a prolonged admission of defeat.

This is a well-intentioned film with some forthright performances, although there’s a fair bit of actorly shouting going on and the smiley spaciness of Bruni-Tedeschi can sometimes feel a bit affected.

It is all presented earnestly and engagingly, though self consciously, and if the political debates are unsolved, well, that could be because they are unsolved in real life. It’s certainly a heartening demonstration that new ideas can flourish in a religious society.

Neither of the two worlds of the film’s English title is illuminated clearly enough

Noé’s extraordinary film unfolds as a tale of murmured terrors and nameless dread, creeping softly around a cramped Paris apartment like a cinematic Grim Reaper.

Janiak has found a way to add new life to old material, gifting us with the rare horror franchise that makes us want more rather than less, the prospect of an expanded universe seeming less like a curse and more of a blessing.

Partly set in the Mumbai underworld, Rakeysh Omprakash Mehra’s boxing drama aims at Raging Bull grit but has an unfortunately irresistible drift towards late-Rocky melodrama.

There is just too much going on, and the movie doubles in hecticness with every minute that passes, which may have you rummaging around for a couple of paracetamol.

Even when it’s trying too hard, the very fact that it’s trying at all makes it hard to dislike. The rules might not make any sense but you’ll have fun playing along regardless.

The core issues of the film – its numbing swirls of rainbow light popping out every which way, the excruciating pop-culture catchphrases passed off as humor, LeBron’s stilted, if game, acting, the half-assedness with which it delivers the dusty moral to be yourself, the fact that it is unaccountably one half-hour longer than its predecessor – all seem minor in comparison with the insidious ulterior intentions that power this fandom dynamo.

With Red Rocket, Sean Baker has given us an adult American pastoral, essentially a comedy, and another study of tough lives at the margin, close in spirit to his lo-fi breakthrough Tangerine.

The graphic novel-inspired world of Gunpowder Milkshake isn’t unique, but it’s admirably committed and Papushado edges his film away from the danger of pastiche thanks to an equally committed cast.

The richness and strangeness of the comedy is somehow simply down to Dujardin’s frowningly serious and haughty face.

It’s tender and poignant, but might be a bit cloying were it not for Norton, who underplays it beautifully with a performance of tremendous depth and empathy.

What is invigorating about The Story of Film is that each new clip, each new comment, is an exercise in back to basics, an exercise in looking, and looking again and looking harder – something that’s even more difficult when it feels like we’re drowning in content.

Odd though the film is and full of peculiar needle drops showcasing classic tunes that don’t especially fit the action, the whole thing looks pretty good thanks to cinematographer Sean Price Williams.

For its sheer silliness and towering pointlessness, Julia Ducournau’s gonzo body-horror shaggy-dog story deserves some points.

Boarders is baggily structured, and feels overlong as a result. But it’s still an absorbing look at day-to-day involvement in a sport that’s a combination of dynamism and hyper-precision as an activity, but paradoxically nebulous and uncertain as a long-term career.

Where once Hamaguchi’s film-making language had seemed to me at the level of jeu d’esprit, now it ascends to something with passion and even a kind of grandeur.

A Hero is an engaging and even intriguing film, but I wonder if its realist mannerisms are concealing a slightly unfocused story.

There’s now a well-trodden route for such musical travelogues, laid down by the likes of Buena Vista Social Club and Searching for Sugar Man, and while this lacks the polish or drama of either of those, it’s an engaging and uplifting journey.

This goofy horror comedy, based on an online game of the same name, just goes to prove that if you have a great cast, smart direction and witty script you can just about get away with murder.

Although the main characters in this romantic tale are meant to be just over 18, this Sky Movies release is manifestly aimed at a much younger market with its sex-free storyline and nice-girls-finish-first morality.

By pairing real-life events with their animated interpretations, the film not only offers a fresh approach to documentary style but also draws out the tension between reality and artifice, private and public memory.

How refreshing to watch a film in which the sexuality and desire of women in their 70s is portrayed not as a novelty but simply part and parcel of their lives; and since this French movie is a lesbian drama, there’s two of them – even better.

There is something very heartfelt and committed about Andrea Arnold’s film: a poignancy and intimacy.

Despite the bone-chilling cold of its location in Murmansk in Russia’s remote north-west, there’s a wonderful human warmth and humour in this offbeat romantic story of strangers on a train.

Cage is remarkably restrained (bar one unnecessary scream), delicately deconstructing what we’ve come to expect from him. His trademark tics are gone, his voice that much softer, his swagger replaced by an unsureness, an aggressive blare that’s faded into calm.

It might not be at the very zenith of what he can achieve but for sheer moment-by-moment pleasure, and for laughs, this is a treat.

Plurality could have put a fresh twist on big-budget Hollywood efforts, but falls flat on both the production design and the narrative front.

The dialogue is earnestly on-the-nose, and there is little in the way of visual excitement in what’s essentially a static board meeting (the story was adapted from a stage play).

This is a great documentary about people who are serious about music and serious also about art, and what it means to live as an artist.

It is a lovely-looking, lovely-sounding movie, handsomely designed, meticulously shot and impeccably performed — and it also has interesting things to say about the emotional toughness and the Greeneian splinter of ice in the heart, that is needed by a writer. But I have to admit that, despite my liking for slow cinema, I found something a bit indulgent and classy about the unvarying andante pace.

I am not entirely sure that Haroun entirely absorbs into the drama the shocking act of violence, with all its necessary consequences. But the sheer seriousness and urgency of the deceptively unhurried story give it power.

Another type of drama would put the issue-led handwringing at the centre of things. Not this film. It is just the hinge on which the family drama turns, and the performances from Dussollier and Marceau are quietly outstanding.

As it begins to explain more and more about what drives its leading character, the film becomes less and less interesting and the stridently melodramatic finale, as well as being highly unlikely in ordinary plot terms, feels a little bit self-exculpatory.

There are some pretty broad emotional strokes here and maybe a fair bit of grandstanding. But it’s made with some style.

Verhoeven just presents us with the raunchiness, using the religiosity as set dressing.

This rich and mysterious film is a real achievement.

This is one to forget: a muddled, tonally misjudged, badly acted, uncertainly directed and frankly dubious drama, something that falls into the so-bad-it’s-bad bracket.

Where biopics often end up with a cardboard-tasting blandness, the focus on Jansson’s interior world gives this film moments that really come to life.

Martin Eden is a sad story of a sad man who lacks the capacity for happiness and who is astonished to find that artistic success is as compromised as any other kind. But there is a kind of thrill in tracing his progress from rags to riches to annihilation.

Chao is the standout here. She deserves more – a leading role of her own, at the very least, and a character with an inner life and interests of her own.

No one is a bad guy here, while all of them are also flawed, and the movie keeps the viewer wondering right up to the end what Jess will finally decide.

The kooky premise of Jumbo – a young woman falling madly in love with a fairground ride – might invite bafflement but Zoé Wittock’s idiosyncratic comedy-drama is an entertaining blend of sensory overload and sincere empathy.

Netflix’s flashy RL Stine trilogy continues with a darker Friday the 13th-aping horror that brings more shocking gore and excellent performances.

Annette is a forthright and declamatory and crazy spectacle, teetering over the cliff edge of its own nervous breakdown, demanding that we feel its pain, feel its pleasure and take it seriously.

The overstuffed, better-keep-up narrative suits the film’s purposes, occupying audience attentions to leave them unprepared for the nimble writing’s assorted baits and switches.

Lawrance does a convincing job nonetheless, portraying Charlotte as a reasonable woman in unreasonable circumstances – but it’s Shaw who steals the show, conveying her character as both a heartless monster and a woman haunted by her own past, with that kind of breathy, distracted haughtiness she does so well.

Director Théo Court does a fine job of capturing the barren beauty of this landscape and using it to suggest the broader moral vacuum.

It all feels like a heavy meal, and the action scenes and the creature effects are very derivative.

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

It’s hard to know how seriously we’re supposed to take any of this when it’s so unclear what the makers’ intention is and so the film’s deeper cuts fail to truly wound because so much of it is mired in silliness.

Under Callaham’s inelegant pen, the characters all speak in this overexcited 13-year-old’s vernacular, prone to F-bombs and dick-talk.

There’s real, seat-edge fun to be had here, the sort of fun that’s too often missing from modern horror.

Once the bloodletting starts, Calahan interleaves it with witty asides and the pacing picks up a lot, all combining to make this impish if flyweight entertainment.

For fans of Black Widow and everyone else, this episode is great fun and Harbour could well ascend to spinoff greatness of his own.

While The Ice Road might not be quite as cut-and-paste as some of the others (there’s less revenge-taking, skill-listing and name-taking than usual), it’s still familiar enough for it to feel like we’ve seen him do this exact thing before.

As the film crashes to a conclusion, early promise fading away, the film has the feeling of a valiant, but misguided, post-Get Out attempt to infuse social commentary within the framework of well-worn genre territory, aiming high but landing low.

This deafening fantasia of internal and external combustion delivers outrageous action spectacle magnificently divorced from the rules of narrative or gravity. . . . I think we can include Isaac Newton among the people who are getting their asses kicked here.

It all goes off the rails in the worst way in the chaotic final act, as Schlesinger invents a farcical, and increasingly ludicrous, way to wrap things up, the truth of what happened proving far too pedestrian for the framework she’s created.

This film isn’t really sure where it’s taking us and how, or if, it wants to surprise us, and the key scene with Klaudiusz doesn’t work.

Ciorniciuc and his co-writer Lina Vdovîi, in allowing events to unfold slowly in front of the camera, have created a beautifully measured portrait of an amazingly resonant topic.

Given the inherent lack of drama in the kind of unbreakable faith on display here, anyone wishing to tell the story needs to work much harder than this laboured treatment to wring any nuance, conflict or indeed true sublimity from it.

It is opaque, sometimes eccentrically comic, but intriguing.

This underdog, coming-of-age sports movie has a big heart but lacks the competency to execute its aspirational premise.

Like the drilling operation, this was a script in sore need of a clean-up operation.

A lairy, likable film.

The family dysfunction stuff is sensitively handled with some originality.

It all feels very dated and artless, like someone’s grandpa wrote the script 50 years ago and it was found in a drawer, then financed and made with a not inconsiderable budget for extras, vintage tanks and lots of old uniforms.

It’s string-pulling Pixar formula but done with just about enough effectiveness to work (do their films ever truly fail?). It doesn’t have that emotional kicker of an ending we might expect and hope for, it’s far too slight to evoke an ugly cry, but it’s breezily watchable, low stakes stuff, handsomely animated (on dry land, in water less so) and, like Disney’s spring adventure Raya and the Last Dragon, refreshingly free of romantic diversion, prioritising friendship and self-discovery over getting the boy, girl or sea monster.

Hart comports himself with a more dialed-back version of the jittery everyman affability he’s developed over decades in the comedy circuit, a schtick that reads as just that – a pose, a well-honed affectation. There is an immense and documentable falseness at the core of his performance that drags down the salvageable movie all around it, far from the redemption arc clincher his handlers may have had in mind.

In the Earth brings us back to Wheatley’s classic world of occult loopy weirdness and cult Britmovie seediness, with a new topical dimension of pandemic paranoia, and what keeps you watching is its unreadable, almost undetectable thread of black comedy.

It is an intriguing and empathic study, which could help all of us to understand.

To begin, there are a couple of genuinely repulsive horror moments, but things get silly very quickly.

The keynotes are anger, confusion and despair, and to some degree the film could have been opaque or contrived but its malaise ultimately finds expression in a truly horrible #MeToo moment, one of the most brutally plausible and unsettling I have seen in any film recently.

This is engaging, intelligent film-making and Navas’s performers relax into the space that she creates for them.

It’s watchable, but don’t expect your mind to be blown – more gently prodded.

The directing is serviceable, but some rote imagery – especially the ominous crow of death – also likes to hit us over the head. Reddick should have concentrated on giving the characters that kind of treatment.

The deft camerawork showcases a dynamic Ethiopia – from tiny villages to the gritty underbelly of bustling Addis Ababa – and, let’s face it, everyone loves a good training montage.

Director-producer team David Bickerstaff and Phil Grabsky are past masters at putting this kind of film together, and Sunflowers has the usual mix of smoothly impressive visuals and authoritatively informed comment.

It’s a shame that, for all of its unnerving tonal registers, not to mention a gorgeous score, Agony winds up with a painfully predictable ending.

There’s nothing quite so naff and depressing as a British comedy misfire, and Me, Myself and Di is the real deal: a miserably unfunny romcom about Bolton’s answer to Bridget Jones.

This is a documentary about Australian motor sports legend Jack Brabham that aims to finesse the usual greatest-hits highlights by including some darker material: family strife, on-track bad behaviour, behind-the-scenes fallouts.