Director Kyle Patrick Alvarez deserves all the praise in the world for the way he cranks up this pressure cooker script. The Stanford Prison Experiment begins with giggles but ends in full psychological break.

The Little Stranger is fluently made and really well acted, particularly by Ruth Wilson, though maybe a bit too constrained by period-movie prestige to be properly scary.

Succeeds as a probing look into the mechanics of an epic lie, and because of the emotion at its heart.

What Meadowland refuses to do, to its great credit, is conform to expectations.

With Hathaway at its centre, The Idea of You is on far surer footing, in small moments almost threatening to be something far greater but settling into being perfectly acceptable instead, a plane movie par excellence.

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

With this startling and sombre documentary, Mexican film-maker Rodrigo Reyes has conducted an experiment in verbatim cinema, or what you might call witness cinema.

Saturation point when it comes to quirkily dysfunctional families in over-soundtracked dramedies was reached long ago.

It’s a thoughtful, honest and touching work, especially for women who love women, and also love canals.

An all-star cast and some showstoppingly horrible hair can’t save Ridley Scott’s medieval epic.

As a formal experiment, Dry Leaf has its own conviction and self-possession and there is a deliberate, if opaque artistry here: one shot shows us a dry leaf under Irakli’s car-tyres, another gives us wet leaves in a waterfall. The soft-edged, pixelated look is, however, interesting and surprisingly watchable, bringing a kind of painterly effect.

Thanks to the breezy chemistry between its largely Inuit cast, Slash/Back has an endearing charm that is hard to resist. From a first-time film-maker, this is a fresh, entertaining update on well-worn tropes.

It’s unfortunate that Byrne’s offering such a tremendous performance in a film that is, to put it as bluntly as possible, so very dumb.

The result would be hilarious if it weren't for its grisly and often deliberately pointed subject matter. There seems little to do but to laugh or retch. The fact that you may well do both at the same time is probably the film's intention. It has a serious point to make about the media's complicity in violence. But, in making it, it may well defeat its own ends with too many absurdist touches. [14 Jan 1993, p.8]

Cine-narcissism like this is always tiresome, and it isn’t any more palatable in a European setting.

It’s no surprise to learn Kostanski has worked as a special makeup artist on bigger budget projects such as Suicide Squad and It, but this proves he has a way with actors as much as a knack for latex and fake blood.

Despite Fine’s conversational interviewing, Wilson is still not enormously articulate or forthcoming, though it’s nice to see him reminisce, however simply, and there are plenty of powerful, telling moments.

Like a lot of topline Korean films, this prestige action thriller is a little too long at 137 minutes, but it’s consistently entertaining throughout, and quite well-suited given the length to being viewed on a streaming platform.

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.

Even if the antics shown here aren’t really your thing, it is still a hoot seeing Gwar members get interviewed by a game Joan Rivers: you can tell that beneath all the latex most of them are sweet, normal folk who remained loyal (mostly) to one another and shared a vision for the group.

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

At all events, [Nemes] undoubtedly brings impeccable craftsmanship, and the performances and production design are strong.

The action is wrapped up with a slightly ridiculous reveal, which doesn’t quite make sense on its own terms, but Perfect Blue has its own kind of cult pungency.

Had the film been contained by its clever premise - the Minions must fight to preserve their place in Hollywood – it might have achieved the crystalline simplicity that is a hallmark of good children’s films. But aiming to both lead the Minions in a newer, smarter direction and appease the gibberish-fest expectations set by the franchise, Coffin bites off more than he can chew.

The film is watchable in its quirky and wayward way, with some funny moments – though shallower than it thinks.

The screenplay by Deric Washburn and Michael Cimino (later to collaborate on The Deer Hunter) and Steven Bochco (of subsequent Hill Street Blues fame) delivers its ecological message with humour and imagination, and Joan Baez sings the appropriate songs.

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.

Jason Clarke is strong as the weak senator, and he wisely goes easy on replicating the unmistakable Massachusetts accent.

Vitthal's film is full of heart, but overly ambitious. He could have made it easy on himself and steered us down a much more familiar route. Instead he delivers a moralistic story that's pure in its intention and a real slog to watch.

The King of Staten Island is not structurally perfect. There is a rather contrived crisis the purpose of which is to bring Claire, Scott and Ray together at last, but there is charm and gentleness in this new stepfamily. Powley’s performance and the final shots of the Staten Island ferry brought back happy memories of Joan Cusack in Mike Nichols’s 80s classic, Working Girl. There are a lot of laughs here.

It's often entertainingly creepy in a twilit world of its own.

This is the second highest-grossing movie of the year in Japan, but unless you’re a teenager, an anime junkie or really, really care about volleyball, you’re unlikely to get much out of it.

This is muscular stuff, with a firm grip on your attention.

To watch Tesla the film is to admire its ambition while regretting its follies. Much like Tesla the man, perhaps?

Anyone who says voting is a waste of time needs to watch this film.

The Perks of Being a Wallflower is a perfect fit for its target audience – the Harry Potter kids who are following Emma Watson through her baby steps towards the stronger stuff.

In the Aisles is a poignant and richly sympathetic film.

This is a fascinating and neatly realised horror riff on the 2020s’ most popular genre.

Love and sex, two things taken so casually for granted in so many different kinds of story, here become totemic articles of faith. Lady Chatterley still has the power to move.

The psychological thriller form has imposed on Dolan some discipline, and brought out his talent and energy.

Vie Privée canters along to a faintly silly, slightly anticlimactic conclusion and audiences might have been expecting a bigger and more sensational twist. Yet Foster’s natural charisma sells it.

Sissy is a deranged pleasure to watch, though a strong stomach and an appreciation of genre protocols is highly recommended.

It's an amiable film with some great musical moments and the classic "growing success" montage showing them on the road in south-east Asia. On music, identity and race, the film has a big beating heart in the right place.

Schirman's film (produced by the team behind Man on Wire and Searching For Sugarman) is as gripping as any high-concept Hollywood thriller and as psychologically knotty as Greek tragedy.

Instead of letting the visuals do the talking, the voiceover steps in to verbalise the characters’ feelings, and the need to provide multiple backstories through flashback veers into over-exposition. Still, Departures remains a highly thoughtful exploration of love and identity, and an excellent showcase for northern talents on film.

Levine succeeds in giving some genre tropes renewed sheen. Even a rote-seeming, Rogen-initiated drug trip pays off with the cherishable sight of Theron conducting state business with glitter in her hair.

Crystal Fairy is an acid trip where the frequent bonhomie is doused by sobering introspection.

It’s just a rare joy to see a film-maker scrambling together overused tropes and making something so vibrant and vital as a result, an exciting and unexpected studio movie with a brain, some guts and a heart.

The soul of the movie isn’t particularly in the human/creature relationship at its center, but in the stunning craftsmanship that surrounds (and in the creature’s case, creates) them.

This assured debut tells us teenage girls can – and will – save themselves.

There’s something about the franchise’s earnest investment in its characters that’s quite unique. Its longevity is because it functions as much as a soap as an action flick.

Whannell’s finite reserves of creativity have been meted out in an imbalance, going all in on world-building while giving the fight choreography and the cinematography listlessly documenting it the short shrift.

Ahadu pulls the curtain back on a government that was willing to imprison and torture its electorate.

Despite beings shaky in terms of tone – as well with its occasionally obtrusive handheld camera movements – Lola impresses with its refreshing blend of analogue and digital flourishes.

Patti Cake$ is by no means a hopelessly bad movie, it’s just hampered by its desperate need to be a crowd-pleaser.

The absence of a real point of view, and of any depth of characterisation, prevents the otherwise pleasing entertainment drawing blood.

It’s fun, though GOTG2 doesn’t have the same sense of weird urgency and point that the first film had. They’re still guarding, although the galaxy never seems in much danger.

Try as writer-director Mike Flanagan might, there’s something coldly unmoving about it all, a disjointed and dry-eyed tearjerker that never rises above Instagram caption philosophy.

It's certainly atmospheric and cool in a new-New Wave way, but really, what's the point?

Tran adroitly layers the fight sequences, filmed with fluidity and at least substantially performed by the main actors themselves, between frothy layers of blokey banter.

There are plenty of great moments, but they jump out amid a jumble of strangely flat scenes. This doesn’t feel like the work of a great master; it’s a discordant brew that just doesn’t blend right.

It is a good idea and there are good moments in the film, especially at the very beginning when Anna and Aleks have a bizarre encounter with the old woman herself, Rita Concannon, strikingly played by Olwen Fouéré. But then things begin to slide. There are however some resonant ideas here.

If it's possible for a picture to be at once ideal and imperfect, then Damsels fits the bill.

It is a wildly silly, wildly entertaining adventure which periodically gives us a greatest-hits flashback montage of the other seven films in the M:I canon - but we still get a brand new, box-fresh Tom-sprinting-along-the-street scene, without which it wouldn’t be M:I.

It’s powerfully and pugnaciously acted, and horses are brought in – as animals often are in social-realist movies – as symbols of redemptive nobility. But I felt that in narrative terms it turned into a cul-de-sac of macho violence.

Talley strikes you as a man of sincerity and depth behind all the air-kissing and lamé.

As with the last film, there are bold extravagant gestures of spectacle, while Wright, Coel, Bassett, Gurira and Thorne all supply fierce performances; each of them ups the onscreen voltage simply by appearing.

While Harrison’s performance may never fully reveal the nature of the man beneath these sumptuous layers of organza, silk and self-confidence, it’s enchanté Chevalier, all the same.

This really is a very strange film, and perhaps doesn’t quite cohere the way a more rigorously refined and redrafted screenplay might, but each of its exotic elements suggests a mounting delirium – exactly the kind of unacknowledged, displaced group frustration that grows and metastasises in a police state.

The rock’n’roll bad boy of tennis is watchably if uncritically celebrated in this documentary portrait by Barney Douglas; it is a film that leaves unsolved the riddle, if it is a riddle, of John McEnroe’s confrontational on-court personality.

The whole package is an easily digested guilty pleasure.

In the new film, by literally creating a bust of the bird – as if a clump of stone or plaster could compare with the natural majesty of wings and feathers – the meaning has been accidentally inverted: a story about how something can never die becomes about how it will never live again.

This film is a distinct, articulate pleasure.

It’s a charismatic performance from Adewunmi, and Amoo’s camera often comes in close to his face and his gaze, suggesting that Femi is on the verge of some kind of epiphany or vision – and it’s nothing to do with the drugs.

There are substantial talents involved in this film, but it doesn’t come together.

It uses its supernatural premise to explore some very human behaviour.

Both actors contribute knife-sharp timing and the kind of intensity needed to make this essentially two-man setup work.

It’s a vehement movie, with a driving narrative force and a robust sense of time and place.

This is a powerful and important documentary, though I have one tiny qualification.

Silver Haze is a sombre, thoughtful film about depression and what is (and isn’t) likely to promote emotional healing, performed with openness and honesty.

Power Ballad is about making it and dreaming big, about every busker never giving up on hopes of one day being mega. But as so often with Carney, it’s about something else, usually left unacknowledged in movies about music or any sort of showbusiness: the terrible binary of success and failure.

There are some laughs and it’s always likable.