It is a lean and likeable, if slight and a little trite, celebration of the legendary Australian-American singer, feminist and anthem-creator Helen Reddy, shot with a rich neo-noirish texture by Oscar-winning cinematographer Dion Beebe.

It’s a very minor victory to report that rather than being bad, it’s merely bland, an adequate milquetoast time-waster for a very young and very undiscerning audience.

An intriguing, somewhat abstract drama about a country descending into chaos.

This documentary makes a pretty convincing case for the admission of the Swedish artist Hilma af Klint into the boys’ club of abstract art, alongside Kandinsky, Mondrian et al.

The film punches out its warped drama with amazing gusto and Clark is lethally assured: not Saint Maud really, but Saint Joan, a spectacular horror heroine.

Dirt Music eventually arrives at a deep, thought-provoking moment – but it takes the entire film to get there.

All said, there are less educational ways to raise your blood pressure for two hours, and the masochistic Twitter-refreshers nourishing themselves with a steady drip of maddening headlines will have plenty to fume over. Starting with the sniggering title, this torturous rehashing of yesterday’s history all seems to be for them.

Given how much CGI has come along since 2010, you’d expect a more convincing presentation of moving animals’ lips and eye muscles mimicking human expressions, but clearly the budget didn’t reach much beyond the tea budget for Tenet.

This debut feature from writer-director Brian Duffield (best known for his screenplays for Underwater, The Babysitter and Jane Got a Gun) has plenty of gallows humour to leaven the gore and tragedy, and plenty of subtexts swimming under the surface like glittering, metaphorical koi.

It is a personal film – and political, too. There is emotion and urgency in that familiar soothing voice.

Without any real stylisation to shake up Nolan’s inner realities beyond bog-standard techno-realism, this sunken place has no strong signature of its own – and little to add to the African American experience.

Sud – with plenty of inexorable tracking shots through the family’s chilly condo – efficiently tightens the screw as the twitchy mother and indulgent father first bicker, then are doomed together by their blood allegiances.

Boyega carries the film with a compelling authority of his own.

This is a very unhurried film (I wondered if it might have been better to lose 20 or so minutes) but it has a distinctive language of its own, and a feel for the city.

It all builds up to a remarkable coup de cinéma: a Buñuelian finale that is startling and moving. This is both an exploratory personal project and a thought-experiment of a film.

This is substantial and rewarding.

This film is such a rush of vitality. It rocks.

Another film might have mined Steinem’s remarkable life for its complications and contradictions, but The Glorias settles for slapdash iconography.

It works for the most part because of Ruben and Cash and the spiky chemistry they share.

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

For anyone who values diverse storytelling, Peoples’ portrait of a hardworking woman on the up is a tale of hopefulness – and a reason to hope in itself.

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.

As with McQueen’s previously premiered Small Axe film, Lovers Rock, there is real fervour and real meaning here: it is film-making with visceral commitment and muscular storytelling.

It is all unexpectedly potent, particularly in the absurdity and petulance and pain that Parsons crams into his performance. It’s a strange, compelling dose of unhappiness.

If there is a tonal uncertainty in this comedy, then that’s because there was a tonal uncertainty in the real-life events, and the movie nicely conveys how they were at one and the same time deadly serious and Pythonically silly.

Slow paced and deploying minimal sound – apart from gentle bursts of voiceover and the sound of wings and planes taking off – this Swiss-set quasi-documentary about a bird sanctuary is relaxing to watch, like one of those machines that plays the sound of waves breaking to help you fall asleep.

He [Sorkin] can also become fantastically ponderous, bloated with finger-waggingly self-important liberal patriotism. Sadly, that is the tone with this exasperatingly dull, dramatically inert and faintly misjudged re-creation of the “Chicago Seven” trial in the US, which Sorkin has written and directed.

Becky’s crazed kills get more and more gimmicky, and there’s nothing in the script to indicate what has turned her into a pint-sized death-dealer.

By Allen’s lamentable recent standards, this fitfully entertaining film could be called adventurous, while the reliably cranky Shawn and a stately, vampish Gershon are clearly having a good time and letting us in on it.

Lovely, heartfelt performances from Stanley Tucci and Colin Firth carry this intimate movie.

It all rattles along amiably enough.

There are some cheerfully amusing moments . . . . But really the banter and the elegance needs some substance in the script and it really isn’t here, or not enough of it, and the serious moments seem glazed in a kind of negligent unseriousness.

Good Joe Bell is a generous film about an outsider travelling across the country realising the importance of listening and learning from others (as well as his own guilty conscience).

76 Days is not a hard-hitting documentary about the centre of the Covid-19 pandemic – maybe such a film will be slower to arrive than the vaccine – but it’s a potent human-interest story, and a portrait of a city under siege.

All of this film’s various moods – erotic, euphoric, tragic – are unearned and despite what is clearly strenuous effort from the performers themselves, the acting is hammy and undirected.

McQueen’s compositional sense is a marvel; the movie’s period and location is evoked with masterly skill, and the romance is wonderful. What a cure for lockdown depression.

Residue is a fleeting and haunting lament for what is lost to gentrification, and other tolls on black life in America. But at the same, it’s exhilarating and monumental, laced with the sensation that we’re discovering a bold and sensitive new voice.

There is much to appreciate in this film; much to like. You don’t just watch it in big bright colours; you remember it in big bright colours too.

Despite being a valuable reminder of Thunberg’s idealism and unselfconscious courage, the film doesn’t entirely work.

With so much intense focus lavished on the action, there’s none to spare for the characters’ emotional lives, and it’s hard to care much about who lives or dies.

There is something weirdly pointless about it all, and there is a kind of tonal gap where, in another kind of film, the humour might go – which would counterweight the nasty violence. But it sure does pack a punch.

A strange, funny, mysterious and rather beautiful film about an activity that’s recherché to say the least.

It’s a handsomely made and sturdy little movie, mercifully devoid of cloying sentimentality, an old-fashioned throwback for families in search of something safe and superhero-free that might not sing quite as loud as it could have but flies just about high enough nonetheless.

Mandibules is a rollicking, rambunctious tequila-dream of a movie.

What a thoroughly wonderful sophomore feature from the British director Ben Sharrock – witty, poignant, marvellously composed and shot, moving and even weirdly gripping.

It’s amiably amusing, and Bill and Ted’s Peter Pannish inability to accept the ageing process is enjoyably surreal, with a weird tinge of not-entirely-intentional tragedy.

This is an old-fashioned father-son story and none the worse for that, but there is something a little slick and subdued about the way the story is resolved.

Pike is astonishingly good, tearing into her role with the same icy menace that made her Oscar-nominated performance in Gone Girl so indelible and like the script she’s working from, there’s such restraint with her venom that it makes her all the more terrifying.

The restored footage is an intriguing relic – an offcut, raw copy. There’s something pleasingly voyeuristic about the experience of being allowed behind the velvet rope to watch these blusterers hold forth, although I expect their charms may be limited to die-hard devotees.

Explicitly, his film shows how a hundred shades of grey combine to make a darkness. Implicitly, it warns that it could well happen again.

The performances are persuasive and watchable, especially Mikkelsen, the guys’ alpha-leader, who ruinously makes being drunk look pretty acceptable until it is too late.

The film and its accusers turn out to be on the same side: Mignonnes attacks the pornification of girls and young women by social media and society in general; it is about the false promise of liberation in this kind of sexualised display. The offending scenes are gruesomely unwatchable – deliberately so.

What a lovely, rousing, finally moving film this is.

What prevents Apples from becoming a simple Lanthimos copycat is its comparative kindness and its abiding direction of travel.

The tale drifts and falters when I wished it would have hit home with more conviction, but that may be partly the point. The struggle is endless, unwinnable. Everybody is compromised.

The World to Come is a ravishingly beautiful love story set in 1850s America, with painterly visuals that nod to the work of Winslow Homer and John Singer Sargent.

Sally Potter’s The Roads Not Taken is a sad, painful, self-conscious vignette of a film with forthright performances; it’s a chamber piece in many ways, but with bold flashback excursions that come close to causing its emotional engine to overheat.

The Painted Bird is a brutal kind of ordeal, but eerie, unearthly and even beautiful sometimes: a bad dream that leaks into waking reality.

Unlike the woozy love at its centre, Summer of 85 doesn’t haunt in the way that it should. It fades when it should burn.

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.

What can’t be faulted is Noce’s sheer boldness and ambition. If Padrenostro winds up as a bit of a mess, it’s a beautiful mess, a glorious mess.

I wish that I enjoyed The Disciple as much as I admired it. The film is a labour of love insofar as it feels overthought and overburdened, with all the rough edges planed down.

It’s a film that understands that humour and horror are not always mutually exclusive and that even the worst moments in life carry an air of the absurd.

Viewed as an acting masterclass, the film is bruisingly impressive in its way. The principal actors raise the roof; each gets to do their big turn for the camera. But it feels a little schooled, a little staged, like a workshop at the Actors’ Studio.

This is undeniably a very theatrical film, but it never hides that – indeed, it makes the most of a certain claustrophobia. It’s an immensely watchable evocation of a moment when black America was on the verge of an upheaval that continues to resonate, in 2020 as strongly as ever. It absolutely puts you – to coin a phrase of the time – in the room where it happened.

Chloé Zhao’s Nomadland is an utterly inspired docu-fictional hybrid, like her previous feature The Rider. It is a gentle, compassionate, questioning film about the American soul.

It is a love story that is also a fascinating artefact: quixotic, romantic, erotic.

There is no moment where Byrne dramatically opens up, either on stage or off, but perhaps that’s not the point. It’s a treat for Byrne fans, and could well make converts.

It’s an uneven ride, rocky in places, but it’s one that’s also unquestionably worthwhile, a progressive, witty and timely way of reminding many of us how antiquated women’s healthcare still is while also alerting a younger audience that there’s more to the teen movie than Netflix.

It’s hard to shake the feeling that a genuinely arresting documentary was cast adrift somewhere along the line.

What’s so funny about the film is that it shows how very little divides your early-twentysomething self from your mid-thirtysomething self – you’re never too old to be humiliated.

Look beyond the lifelessly choreographed shootouts and you keep catching glimpses of ghosts: those of American industry, yes, but also those of the American action movie, once manufactured with a skill, verve and wit wholly absent from these painfully long 98 minutes.

It is something of a letdown: a funny but conventional glossy romcom. But there is no messing with Viswanathan, who is undoubtedly the main attraction.

A smart and satisfying movie, although the crashy-bashy deafening score is so loud you can probably hear it in space.

It’s not a reassuring film. But it has a chilling brilliance and relevance.

The performances are terrific, especially from Bening who adds yet another deeply nuanced study to her gallery of complicated, smart women of a certain age.

Kid Like Jake is an earnestly intended, seriously acted film, painful in various intentional and unintentional ways.

Not a word is spoken throughout, which harkens back to an older era of cinematic storytelling. At the same time, the extreme frame-to-frame fluidity of the computer-assisted animation style, composed entirely of fields of subtly modulated colour, no outlines and minimal modelling, looks completely 21st century.

Running at just 71 minutes, Socrates left me wondering if it was slightly underdeveloped as a feature project. But plenty of glossier and more finished films don’t have its beating compassionate heart.

As in Scorsese’s rock docs, there are reams of archive footage and rare snapshots to swoon over (Dylan’s striped trousers from 1967 never get old), all seamlessly edited together by Roher and Eamonn O’Connor.

This film is no masterpiece, but the franchise has mutated, just a little.

There won’t be many viewers who’ll remember it by this time next month but within its swift running time, it just about fits the brief, zipping along at speed buoyed by the charm of its leads, like almost guaranteed instead.

An entertaining if straightforwardly glossy action-adventure from the Disney workshop.

The film would have been more effective if its relentlessly uplifting score didn’t keep figuratively prodding the viewer in the chest, telling us to feel moved, dammit. Likewise, the editing is annoyingly frenetic at times, and you long for a more measured approach that would allow you to appreciate the athletes’ skills, instead of seeing their prowess chopped up into tiny snippets of footage.

An awkward misfire at best and an uneasy and irresponsible one at worst.

With his new film, Charlie Kaufman again proves that if you want something to make you feel trapped in a terrifying claustrophobic nightmare for ever and ever ... well, he’s your guy.

Boyz in the Wood isn’t perfect (there isn’t really a wood in it as such and the title is a bit strained), but there’s likable wackiness and weirdness, one or two sizable laughs and a very bizarre deus ex machina moment.

There’s something grating about a film which insists on detailing its pseudo-science while also conceding you probably won’t have followed a thing. We’re clobbered with plot then comforted with tea-towel homilies about how what’s happened has happened.

Sie elicits mostly spontaneous, credible performances from the younger cast, who deliver their wisecracks and banter with aplomb and only occasionally edge into annoying child-actor pertness.

Nothing really comes to life and the dialogue is plodding and laborious.

If I had a criticism of this film, it is that – like so many historians of spies and spying – the director gets a little overexcited about the archive details. Still, what a riveting story: a grim curtain-raiser to today’s tragedies.

This elaborately contrived story feels as if it has been cobbled together from a dozen others, and it never escapes cliche.

The movie falls apart with some moral handwringing that will likely infuriate genre fans, and for everyone else, feel like a tired airing of the debate around violence in movies – all the more objectionable in a film with its fair share of mutilated female victims.

Rather than a heartwarming family favourite-in-the-making, The One and Only Ivan is just a vaguely watchable cookie-cutter caper thrown together by people who should know how to make something far sweeter and substantial, a fleeting attraction for undiscerning young kids and a whelming waste for anyone older.

It still just about puts the id in Hasidic, thanks to spiritually atmospheric cinematography and a twitchy, expressive performance from Davis, who resembles Riz Ahmed, and wards off evil with that most Jewish of charms: heroic self-deprecation.

Pinocchio is a thoroughly bizarre story; Garrone makes of it a weirdly satisfying spectacle.

Here is a strange, opaque but interesting piece from Vietnamese film-maker Minh Quý Truong: an ethno-fictional essay movie.

Spree is meant to comment on the shallowness of social media culture; the trouble is, it’s a film with the depth of a puddle.