This is Obama’s own film, so we can’t expect any tough scrutiny.

I would have loved to hear Kennedy on the tricky subjects of fusion cuisine or cultural appropriation. But there’s more than enough here to get your teeth into.

It’s a study in anger and emotional hurt that feels like a work in progress, an unfinished script the director has put before the camera before its complete development. Yet it is absorbing and challenging, as everything from this film-maker always is.

All Day and a Night is a weightier alternative to the average Netflix original and while imperfectly realised and scrappily plotted at times, it’s another promising sign that, away from the easy-to-digest content, there’s room on the platform for much much more.

It’s pacy enough to secure at least our divided attention, competently trotting along in the background revealing surprises that aren’t really that surprising, like a pulpy, well-worn airplane novel that you guiltily devour in a day.

The Half of It is a strong, warm-hearted and quietly progressive addition to the expanding Netflix teen movie pack which treats its target audience with the respect they deserve.

Barnaby’s colonialist take on the formula is far from subtle, and at times a little too bluntly on the nose, but he’s a film-maker with both something to say and the skillset to say it in a distinctive way, offering up an initially engaging alternative to mere guts and shock tactics.

Offering a set-piece every 10 minutes, a twist every 30, it’s pure pulp, but Vega knows how to sell it, and there are pearls of wisdom amid the nastiness. You’ll flinch, you’ll squirm, you’ll learn how to increase your survival chances should you be doused in gasoline and set alight.

The film’s plausibility-level isn’t perhaps as high as all that (it really works best as a period piece from the pre-2008 crash) but Kross brings to it a jaded, corrupted glamour.

Extraction is a little bit hokey and absurd, and the very end has an exasperating cop-out – but it has to be admitted that, in terms of pure action octane, Russo and Hargrave bring the noise.

It takes a good hour or so to get going, but then it builds up some watchable spectacle – although Gray goes way overboard with the moody, fireside lighting, and the rousing orchestral score gets all ceilidh-cutesy for the happy montages.

While The Willoughbys might not boast the slick structure or beating heart of a Pixar animation, there’s enough offbeat charm to make it an easily digestible watch and for any concerned parents, the practice of “orphaning” involves so much work, your kids will likely be scared off.

Why Don’t You Just Die! is an accomplished film that makes the very most of its limited sets, without seeming constricted or stagey.

This film is a time capsule of the 1980s: an era that was crass and excessive in so many ways, but now seems weirdly exotic.

The sweeping, full-throated romance of the last act might not work for some, who could conceivably argue its dominance leaves gaps in Sérgio’s professional life, but it makes for an emotionally satisfying ending.

For all its fantastical vein, this movie has an interesting grasp of what high school is really like – not a Hollywood narrative, neither funny nor tragic, and certainly nothing like that most unreal of genres, the coming-of-age drama. Rather it’s messy, downbeat and inconclusive, without teachable moments – like everything else in real life.

Here’s a modestly entertaining stop-motion family film with a fuzzily retro homemade aesthetic and a warming gentle Englishness: decent enough, but stretched perilously thin.

The writing is utterly involving; with lines like tiny, imagist poems. A rich and delicious movie treat.

The varied ingredients blend together well.

The opportunistic genre-welding holds together thanks to vivid performances. Bolger makes a slightly implausible character arc completely convincing, graduating from panicky improvisation to grim determination.

The film’s drunken lurch into earnest romance near the end, after leaning on bawdy humour for the most part, requires us to see these characters as something other than farcical chess pieces, an uphill battle for all involved.

A sombre, well-acted film about sacrifice and regret.

The Grand Bizarre is a film that will alienate many with its video-artiness but the focus here on looking and looking again with wonder at the everyday stuff around us may strike a chord at the moment.

It’s a low-budget effort with high ambitions, something that’s hard not to admire, and while it often feels like the teaser for a bigger and better movie, it’s perhaps a sign that Hardiman is setting sail for Hollywood next.

It's been a while since I've seen a silly baddie get the seat of his trousers set on fire, run around squawking, and then sit down in a water trough with an ecstatic sigh.

There is something absolutely robotic about Trolls World Tour: the voices, the design, the dialogue, the plot progressions, the break-up-make-up crisis between Poppy and Branch, everything. It’s chillingly efficient, like a driverless car going round in circles.

It’s a strange movie that can seem mildly interested in tackling bigger issues before swiftly backing down.

Gliding close to genre tropes but moving more comfortably as an uneasy drama about the alarming power of blind faith, The Other Lamb is an intriguing mood piece, strikingly made and well-performed if not quite as powerful as it could have been.

It’s a gentle, predictable film that doesn’t exactly put any steps wrong in its depiction of adolescence but Orley doesn’t quite do enough right for it to linger in the memory for longer than the credits.

I find myself admiring his visual and compositional sense, while being a bit exasperated by the provisional and coyly non-committal nature of his storytelling.

Lost Girls is sorely lacking and, ironically, one wonders what a Garbus docuseries could have found instead.

The film is, I think, just as Cunningham would have wanted it: cerebral, highbrow and mildly frustrating, with nothing so conventional as talking heads or context.

Lowish-level titters are in evidence – mostly care of Kristen Schaal as Dave’s tech aide – while an analogue finale on a scrappy-looking airfield offers passing respite from the multiplex’s usual VFX-bloated city smashing.

The physicality of this picture is exciting.

Inspiring until the end if not entirely entertaining.

This movie is an absorbing serio-comic flourish.

There are baffling shunts from town to country, while the middle stretch tosses up scenes with no real function or punchline.

A grisly, gripping watch.

The Perfect Candidate is the sort of film I can imagine getting a remake in contemporary America or Britain, with not as many changes as we might assume.

It’s a technically impressive work with some lovely images — and a bit of a sugary taste.

The formula is so well-trodden that it needed a sparkling jolt of energy to justify Penny traipsing his way through it again. Uncorked isn’t exactly corked but it’s definitely flat.

It’s as involving as it is necessary, a rare ray of sunshine on yet another cloudy day.

There’s a brutal efficiency to the storytelling, swiftly, heartlessly propelling us up and down the building, forcing us to bear witness to a great many horrors.

The film is at its most intriguing in its earlier half, when it simply takes you through the growing excitement within the scientific community as the reality of Crispr emerges.

I was sometimes captivated but often frustrated by this epic essay-film, a meditation on Germany and his own family history that is stark, fierce, austerely cerebral and almost four hours long.

Aside from the singular brawn of its leading man, this would-be springboard has nothing much worth launching. It’s a stack of wormed-over action tropes, and to make matters worse, the movie knows it – and yet does not know enough to spare us its missteps in the first place.

In making the worst stereotypes of America’s political poles as extreme as possible, and America’s divide as literal and violent as possible, The Hunt feigns a viewpoint rather than actually having one. It takes aim at everyone, redeeming no one. Which feels circular, and queasy, and right back where we started: some empty talk about a divided nation, and a film thats probably not worth this much conversation.

A clumsy, unfunny adaptation of a much-loved literary crime series

An odd attempt at genre-surfing that ends up well out of its depth.

Beneath the bro-friendly, fantasy-art trappings, Onward finds a little bit of that old Pixar magic.

Oprah Winfrey, Angela Davis and Morrison herself explore her work and legacy in this fascinating documentary completed shortly before the Nobel-winning author’s death.

Kristin Scott Thomas and Sharon Horgan saddled with a by-the-numbers script in a well-meaning but hackneyed Brit flick.

Vitalina Varela stars as herself in Pedro Costa’s bleak but beautiful film about a woman discovering the hidden life of her late husband.

It is a watchable, insouciant love story with some great incidental performances, although there is a sense of the shark being jumped 30 minutes from the end.

It is possible to come away from the film less than convinced, but very impressed by the sheer force of Petzold’s film-making talent (recently so stunning in his drama Transit) but which has been here deployed for something which is a bit flimsy and silly.

Charlatan is a film that does not quite satisfy the curiosity it arouses.

It is a deeply personal drama about culture, family, community and what it means to represent – though it can also be self-indulgent and even a bit self-involved, though this is arguably a function of the story.

Minamata is a forthright, heartfelt movie, an old-fashioned “issue picture” with a worthwhile story to tell about how communities can stand up to overweening corporations and how journalists dedicated to truthful news can help them.

Haley, who last directed the sweet and underseen Hearts Beat Loud, gives the film a stronger aesthetic than most Netflix teen offerings, and Fanning and Smith work hard at charming us into submission, but their hard-to-buy relationship isn’t quite the immersive ride-or-die love connection it needs to be, given the melodrama of the last act.

For all that this film has something exasperatingly opaque and inert about it, it has an uncompromising insistence that ideas matter. These people’s thoughts, although debatable, are not simply presented as absurd. Malmkrog is a long, demanding experience – a real festival event. But that bizarre dreamlike eruption lives on in the mind.

This is not animation which is there to exalt, or soothe, or celebrate human loveliness: it is animation which takes a fiercely miserable satirical stab at the world and itself, a language which is unreconciled, unaccommodated.

The whole thing looks as if it was dreamed up under the influence of a quality batch of LSD. I laughed out loud at the hokiest bits. But I’ve got to admit I was sucked in and genuinely scared, too.

Dark Waters is a movie that works marvellously well within its own generic terms, and perhaps after the fey disappointment of Todd Haynes’s previous, rather insufferable fantasy Wonderstruck, this tough, clear movie was what Haynes needed to clear his creative palate.

What DAU. Natasha shows is the bizarre way that, in totalitarian societies, the normal and the abnormal, the banal and the grotesque, and the human and the inhuman live together side by side.

As ever with Miike, the sheer profusion of material, the torrent of wacky creativity, means that there is always something to hold the attention. It’s bizarre and very unwholesome. But weirdly inspired.

Somehow Lorentzen shows that it is not the Ochoa family who are the bad guys, but the whole rotten system.

I’m not sure that I was completely on board with this film, which appears to have smoothly carpentered its narrative in the edit. Is it almost too good to be true?

It is a film with its heart in the right place, but the dialogue and characterisation are both plonkingly unconvincing.

The film is gorgeous to look at, all alpine meadow flowers and glorious green mountains. But the drama loses momentum pretty early on.

[A] bafflingly insipid, zestless, derivative film.

It balances what is with what might have been and what could still be, and, although the result is maybe a bit less substantial than Castro intended, there is a certain literary elegance in the way he sketches it out.

It is a sombre, realist study of what day-by-day, moment-by-moment abuse actually looks like.

Vivarium is a lab-rat experiment of a film, with flat, facetious humour and a single insidious joke maintained and developed with monomaniacal intensity. In its way, this film is an emblem of postnatal depression and simple loneliness.

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.

There’s fun to be had here, thanks to Moss and an involving set-up, and given the state of multiplex horror, especially at this time of year, this is a striking diversion. But Whannell gives us just enough to make us want more and despite the stretched 125-minute runtime, he can’t quite deliver what he loosely promises.

Virtually laugh-free, so-so looking with a seriously drippy musical number, it feels like a film slipped into cinemas over summer to sucker parents desperate to do something, anything, to fill a couple of hours.

It is a tremendously engaging story which does something that very few movies do: mention money. Something very palpable is at stake, the jeopardy is real and it’s a question of survival.

It’s so punishingly dull to watch, filled with dry, perfunctory dialogue from Stacey Menear’s consistently uninventive script and shot without even a glimmer of style, that even at a brisk 86 minutes, it feels like unending torture.

How Herbig fails to capitalise on the sheer physical terror of their flight – the balloon’s basket is more a flimsily strung boxing ring – makes you wish someone like Werner Herzog had mounted this mad escapade for real.

Sometimes the casting and staging work well, sometimes not so well.

The result is a bit corny, a bit cheesy and you might feel self-conscious going, “Aww …” at creatures that are not real dogs but laptop fabrications. But it’s a robust and old-fashioned entertainment with some real storytelling bite.

Issa Rae and Lakeith Stanfield can’t save this dreary Valentine’s drama that lacks fizzle and emotional stakes.

Like its fast-moving, attention-deficient hero, this just feels like a rush job.

Untouchable: The Rise and Fall of Harvey Weinstein (BBC Two), directed by Ursula MacFarlane, is a film of halting testimonies, long pauses, lips pressed tightly together and eyes filling with tears.

What Sheen, born in Gwent, makes of Downey’s accent can only be imagined. It really is horribly inert, and every time Downey opens his mouth to say something unintelligible, the film dies a bit more.

The ambition of Horse Girl ultimately gets the better of it, turning what could be a dark but insightful depiction on signs missed in a mental health crisis into an agreement on one’s madness – a game of what’s real, and what’s not, that feels unsettling to play.

To All the Boys: PS I Still Love You doesn’t quite match its predecessor for heart fizzing romance – the first film dealt sensitively with loss and grief – but it’s just as entertaining and charming anchored by a supremely likable central performance from Condor.

The hits comes thick and fast, tightly arranged and slickly performed, but this lineup of well-preserved mostly male musicians gives the show the bland atmosphere of a celebrity tribute band.

It needed bigger laughs and more of the big, ironic comedy that Erskine can clearly deliver.

It’s full of plot holes but compulsively watchable for the first hour, before the whole thing falls to pieces as Mortimer chucks in a load of well-worn horror-movie tropes.

This film is a blitz of bad taste, a cornucopia of crass, and it is weirdly diverting – more than you might expect, given the frosty way Suicide Squad was received critically – and engagingly crazy. Watching it feels cheerfully excessive and unwholesome, like smoking a cigarette and eating a chocolate bar at the same time.