Those seeking a feelgood romcom should keep looking.

Elvis is of course a tailor-made subject for Luhrmann, the Moulin Rouge director’s trademark bombast and razzle-dazzle so in tune with the singer’s rattle and roll, which comes through in both his biopic and now EPiC.

California Schemin’ is, in the end, a kindhearted film about integrity, about art for art’s sake, about embracing one’s roots.

It’s an entertaining and sympathetic movie, if a bit route one, and audiences might possibly feel that TV shows like Sex Education and Heartstopper go a bit further and with more contemporary nous. But nice performances from Anders and Small bolster this movie’s likability factor.

I admired a great deal here, though, especially Freyne’s attempt to transport us back to a cinema landscape before it was dulled down by streaming. That’s an afterlife I would happily choose.

It’s an eerie, disquieting experience.

There’s lots of good stuff here, some witty reboots and reworkings of gags from the first film and sprightly update appearances from minor, half-forgotten characters currently residing in the “where-are-they-now?” file.

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

The result comes across like a cross between a buddy movie and a horror movie – a war movie without the war. Ultimately, it all comes down to the core relationships, so it’s just as well that Hoffman and Jonsson are both terrific; their stars are certain to rise further off the back of this.

Things eventually escalate, the pressure valve of pent-up emotions building and releasing. But it’s a long and demanding ride to get there, full of solemn looks and thousand-yard stares.

It’s refreshing for a film-maker to opt for subtlety, and there are good performances from Riley, Martin and Farthing.

The movie reduces Kelley’s psychiatric insights into soundbites, manages to whittle down the proceedings at the Nuremberg trials into the familiar tropes and cliches from classic courtroom movies, and even lets Crowe’s performance surrender its nuances to hammy villainy, all for the sake of reliable entertainment.

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.

A heartbreaking collection.

The Christophers is a talky, at times incredibly funny, comedy drama with plot reversals that make it feel like it’s on the verge of a thriller. It doesn’t end up there, at least not strictly, but it’s unpredictable enough to never make us entirely sure just where it’s heading.

Ballad of a Small Player ends up a little too slight, a sketchy look at a familiarly doomed character.

Zhao is a good fit for the material. She, too, is a close observer of nature and of the many aching, yearning people passing through it. But she has previously not made anything as traditionally tailored and refined as this.

Hikari and company mostly skim over the tension in a movie seemingly built out of highlight reels and lacking connective tissue.

Etzler manages some nasty comedy, sourced from the bracing jolt of watching teacher and student cruelly manipulate one another. And he shows a sturdy technical command throughout.

The film, though eventful enough, does not quite succeed in its tacit claim to be a study of poverty; the author behaves like a student who is stoically accepting some temporary dodgy accommodation.

Another, more textured film might have tried to paint him as more than just lovable rogue but Roofman is too focused on making us feel good rather than bad. I would have settled for conflicted.

There are noble intentions to Good Fortune, in ways related to both the resurrection of the big-screen comedy and its of-the-moment through-line about the increasingly untenable class divide in America, but also not a lot of laughs, the idea of its existence more appealing than the experience of watching it.

It’s as twisty and stuffed with second and third guessing as one would want but its charmingly convoluted nature feels as elegantly composed as it felt in the original, building to a finale that leaves us with a satisfied smile.

It is an intensely disquieting, utterly distinctive film and a superb final panel to his triptych.

The writing might be disappointingly inelegant but The Lost Bus is forthright and frightening regardless.

A drama suffused with gonzo energy and the death-metal chaos of emotional pain, cut with slashes of bizarre black humour.

Christy Martin’s life was filled with devastating blows but in her biopic, we barely feel the impact.

The initially alluring casualness of Ohs’s project fades quickly into a mildly irksome shallowness – lots of unearned and unconvincing staring, docile conversations, should-be evocative images that do not evoke.

The personae and performances of Pacino, Domingo and Myha’la complicate the psychopathic nastiness of the affair, and create something surreal and bizarre and often hilarious: a display of, not heartlessness, exactly, but a shrewd professional sense that pity and fear were emotions that could only benefit the kidnapper.

There is a reckless, ruthless kind of provocative brilliance in what Ben Hania is doing.

The film is very silly and always watchable in its weird way.

Kass and Minahan combine old and new while rubbing suggestively against the grain: the familiar pleasures of watching charismatic young actors meet the novelty of seeing them plugged into situations our period dramas have historically overlooked.

Wilson and Farmiga remain solidity incarnate, capable of enlivening even speculative spiritual dialogue. The film-making pulls no surprises out of the hat, though, and gives no indication that it would if it could.

I watched this film with translucently white knuckles but also that strange climbing nausea that only this topic can create.

The screenplay isn’t nuanced enough to switch between modes in a way that feels intentional and the result is the sense that there are a few different films jostling for attention.

It may think it is tilting at the dream factory, but Somnium simply feels tired.

Deeply caught up in decoding this tradition, perhaps Serra is too beholden to it. If only this admittedly riveting examination of dark human compulsions had found a way to also articulate the perspectives of the animals for whom the arena is a lethal experience.

The film does not really permit the various emotional crises and issues to supersede the importance of fighting all that much, and the fighting itself is not transformed or transfigured in the drama.

This is a genuinely strange film, elusive in both tone and meaning, one which deploys the obvious effects and rhetorical forms of irony, while at the same time distancing itself from these effects and asking its audience to sympathise and even admire Lee, because she is not supposed to be the villain.

It’s a lovely slice of life, a heartfelt New York story – and judging from the brief burst of writing that we are permitted to hear, the postman can rest easy whether he is on stage or at work.

The Wizard of the Kremlin just feels pointless in its knowing cynicism, right up to the silly, unearned flourish of violence at the very end.

Basically, there is a contentment and calm here, an acceptance and a Zen simplicity that is a cleansing of the moviegoing palate, or perhaps the fiction-consuming palate in general. It is a film to savour.

I still can’t be convinced that Megalopolis is anything other than an (honourable) failure. But Figgis’s documentary is an absorbing success.

Finally, inevitably, at the end of the protracted tale, we get to the question of which of the two is the “real” monster. The answer, in this high-minded and eventually rather sanctified romance, would appear to be – neither of them.

Korean director Park Chan-wook’s new film brings his usual effortlessly fluent, steely confidence and a type of storytelling momentum that can accommodate all kinds of digressions, set-pieces and the occasional trance-like submission to mysterious visions.

The movie is clenched with its own sense of contemporary relevance and risky blurred lines, saddled with an almost deafening score that often grinds straight through the dialogue; the drama becomes an atonal quartet of self-consciousness.

This isn’t meant unkindly, but Vice Is Broke will be essential viewing for anybody who ever worked there, with its details about who had what job title and when.

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

Yorgos Lanthimos’s macabre and amusing new film has a predictably strong performance from Emma Stone, an intestine-shreddingly clamorous orchestral score from Jerskin Fendrix and, most importantly, a wonderful montage finale – but frankly it’s a very, very long run-up to that big jump.

Maybe this film, concluding as it does on a distinctive note of euphoric sentimentality, does not add up to quite as much as the director thinks; but it intrigues, it exhilarates and it shows that Sorrentino is Italian cinema’s heir to Antonioni.

Caught Stealing is a very enjoyable spectacle.

It’s bold, it’s shocking – and it’s utter nonsense.

The movie has a high gloss and sheen, like something by Nancy Meyers, which creates a diverting disconnect, yet it flinches from the recognisable, tragicomic reality of a bad marriage.

There’s a fair bit to enjoy here, with the club sometimes resembling a kind of senior-citizen X-Men group whose collective superpower is invisibility; old people can do things without people noticing them.

The film is a mildly diverting yet strangely dated caper, a watered-down Tarantino rip-off without a soul of its own.

It’s hard to stay mad at a movie for refusing to add things up, or resolve its mysteries in any traditionally satisfying ways, when getting lost with Qualley can be such a pleasure.

This solid roster of acting talent can’t do much about how frankly uninteresting and unfunny The Toxic Avenger is most of the time. As satire or spoof of both superhero movies and scary movies it is abysmally obsolete, and on its own terms as horror-comedy it achieves neither scares nor laughs.

It’s the audacious austerity of Farsi’s film-making that really makes the material sing.

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

Sex is earnest, but cerebral and challenging.

That Splitsville stays on track to the finish is mostly credit to chemistry – that ineffable, unpredictable thing between two, or three, or maybe four people, with just enough variation for each relationship here. Splitsville may take shots at the loose-boundaried, but they’re laced with truth: partnered or single, open or closed, we’re all working with the same raw material.

Trusty hands help in making the film feel grander especially when the emotion of the story, adapted by Dante’s Peak’s Les Bohem and Don’t Make Me Go’s Vera Herbert, can’t quite get us there.

If this hymn to love’s persistence wobbles occasionally, it’s good to see an independent British film going for broke.

Sadly, this tonally shaky and borderline-sociopathic outing doesn’t have the class or skill to be part of the much-needed renaissance for the genre.

Night Always Comes tries to be both seat-edge action thriller and searing social issue drama and while Caron is able to squeeze suspense out of the early, frenetic moments, there’s not enough emotional weight to the more human final act.

This sequel from Indonesian action director Timo Tjahjanto, co-written by the writer of the original, Derek Kolstad, really doesn’t have much of the humour and the storytelling chutzpah of the first film.

Haugerud has something of Eric Rohmer, and perhaps a little more of Hong Sang-soo; a readiness to simply talk, and talk and talk some more. It’s surprisingly cinematic.

Fixed gets as much mileage as it can out of gags that largely centre on Bull’s gonads, with its entire narrative built around a wild night out when he discovers his owner’s plan to finally give him the snip. But that humour, and its shock value, wears thin in less time than it takes for Bull to satisfy his urges.

Inconsistent but never insubstantial, Materialists is far from perfect, but that doesn’t mean it’s not worthy of a date.

The action sequences, which are what made the original Sonja so indelible (especially since Nielsen had Arnold Schwarzenegger as a co-star), are a bit more rote. But someone somewhere must have done a punch-up on the script, because every now and then a reasonably witty quip arrives out of nowhere before the dialogue reverts to faux medieval speak.

Benesch brings a tough, smart, credible presence.

Cregger might be expanding and improving his arsenal, using his skills more effectively than he did in Barbarian, but there’s still something crucial missing. Something sharper.

Viet and Nam is a film that first feels opaque and elusive, and yet it becomes drenched with emotion.

There are fierce and overwhelmingly authentic performances here from first-timers in Julien Colonna’s terrific mob drama.

This is an engaging and thoroughly worthwhile movie.

It takes work to make Murphy entirely unfunny, and this film manages the job one-handed.

It’s Curtis who embodies the story’s wacky spirit.

Deadwyler’s performance is the driving force here. Without her, the audience’s attention might drift to the predictability of a plotline that hinges on Manny’s adolescent rebellion against his mum.

A likable, admirably intentioned if slightly more predictable entertainment, in which the good guys and the bad guys are more obvious.

It’s all boringly plain sailing until it suddenly isn’t and the film takes a turn from romcom into something more dramatic.

Chernov is armed only with a camera, to the astonishment of many soldiers he encounters, and the film was constructed by editing his footage together with that of solders’ helmet cameras and drone material. Chernov shows us how drones are now utterly ubiquitous in war, delivering both the pictures and the assaults.

Bring Her Back is lighter on thrills and spills for the midnight movie and heavy with thick, abject horror and despair, featuring an intensely disturbing performance from Sally Hawkins.

There is no reason for this new Naked Gun to exist other than the reason for the old ones: it’s a laugh, disposable, forgettable, enjoyable.

I found something a little unfocused and even slightly indulgent or redundant in the way the images are put together (accompanied by a clamorous musical score by Evgueni Galperine) without making it clear to the viewer what we are looking at and where. Yet the film is so striking, especially on the big screen, almost itself a kind of land art.

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

For those who aren’t into golf or weren’t around for SNL at the turn of the century, Happy Gilmore 2 could well sail overhead like a drive from the man himself. But for the generations who still quote summer comedies from eons ago (ahem), Sandler’s second round offers a refreshing trip down memory lane.

There’s more wit and energy this time around, and a genuinely sweet message about friendship. Even the fart joke (every kids’ movie must have at least one) was a cut above and had the adults giggling.

Overall a very silly movie – though it’s keeping the superhero genre aloft.

If following The Unholy Trinity’s various tracks is sometimes frustrating, it’s still rare enough: a red-blooded and essentially satisfying western.

It plays as pseudo-feminist horror for viewers who don’t really like women, or, for that matter, men. Or people of any gender. It’s all curdled but not in an especially interesting way, although there is no denying that Thorne has a basic charisma that holds the screen, and Ryan Phillippe is well cast as a grouchy cop whose agenda doesn’t mesh with Clare’s.

This top-notch cast gives it their considerable all, but to my taste the syrup content was in the end too high.

At a time of nostalgia overload (Clueless, Legally Blonde and Urban Legend are next), Robinson finds a way to make her attempt not exactly necessary but unpretentiously pleasurable enough for that not to really matter. There might not be a next summer but this makes for an entertaining last hurrah.

This very uninteresting and uninspired story plods along for an hour and a half, though there are some almost-interesting surreal scenes when our heroes find themselves in weird alt-universe dimensions.

Even as a fan, I am honestly shocked that what basically amounts to a 97-minute ITYSL sketch stays actually funny throughout, though a good 15 or so minutes of that threaten overexposure to the brand.

A calm and interesting introduction to an important dissident author.

The movie is not lacking in adventure, perhaps what’s missing is a sense of fun.

This lavishly produced and costumed European co-production is handsomely cast – but the range of talent here feels wasted on what is a fundamentally dated and stereotypical drama, whose Bohemian passion is diluted.

Afterwards, everyone smiles reassuringly – then one man pipes up: “Don’t take this the wrong way, but …” and a begins a pretentious intellectual takedown. Like the film it’s a funny-smart moment, witty and grownup.