His fly on the wall approach never feels exploitative – in instances, it yields surprising empathy. In spite of his characters’ actions, Minervini miraculously captures traces of profound humanity.

This Faust is part bad dream, part music-less opera: sometimes muted and numb, though with hallucinatory flashes of fear.

An accomplished debut.

It’s not exactly hard-hitting stuff, and isn’t meant to be, but it spins an entertaining yarn.

The film conforms to the coming-of-age template in that romance is followed or superseded by friendship and maturing personal growth. Urzendowsky keeps it all together.

Usually anything this many generations into its evolution is pretty exhausted – but this is pretty good, or at least in parts.

When a writer-director of some undeniable talent throws so much at the wall, it’s inevitable that elements will stick and in Vengeance, there’s just about enough to make us curious to see what happens when Novak learns to tighten his focus. Vengeance is less the film we need right now and more the one he thinks we do but hopefully next time, he’ll figure out how to make something we want instead.

We get some tastily over-the-top acting and some huge rewind POV shifts to explain what has really been going on – and, of course, the heady whiff of gaslight as Millie can’t quite be sure she really understands anything that’s happening. Silly it may be, but Feig and his cast deliver it with terrific gusto; this is an innocent holiday treat.

There’s really not much going on with Roar storywise. But then you take a step back and think about what it is that you’re watching. My viewing of Roar was set to a soundtrack of “Oh my God!” and “Holy crap!”, all of my own making.

Like Werner Herzog, Kier’s German accent lends a deadpan drollery to everything he says, but there is a gooey soft-centre to his film, and Kier carries that off reasonably well, his face becoming almost boyish. Another intriguing persona in the Udo Kier gallery.

It’s a shame that after that killer start, this wimps out of saying anything interesting about death or the adventure on the other side.

Thomas and Pilcher are determined to avoid making a flashy war epic, and stress the sacrifices of everyone involved; the downside of this is that A Call to Spy has a stolid pacing that makes you feel every minute of its two-hours-plus running time. But it’s still an interesting story that’s yet to fully come into the light.

Caught Stealing is a very enjoyable spectacle.

Operation Mincemeat is watchable enough, but perhaps can’t find a fictional way into the stranger-than-fiction outrageousness of the scheme itself.

It is a bit stagey, but heartfelt and well acted.

Mulligan knows how to lead us up and down the garden paths of his bucolic world, and as with Psycho you need a second viewing to appreciate the various skills that have gone into this movie.

Maguire flails around obligingly, happy to trade amiability for a decent fist at capturing the difficult, prickly Fischer. But he can’t quite carry it off, and the way the script dances around the edge of his illness, exploring the surface symptoms without trying for deeper psychology, leaves the actor exposed.

Both of the leads keep it low-key, with 95-year-old Renaud’s unfussy reminiscences dotted with defiant irony, and the initially unforthcoming Boon opening up under her cajoling as naturally as a flower.

It’s entertaining, though composed with algorithmic precision, and it winds up suspiciously neutral about whether kids really should abandon digital enslavement in favour of real-life human friends.

Lambert is too skittish to keep us in her character’s lives for longer than brief, often maddeningly flat moments.

Though it begins as a murder-mystery, Kill Your Darlings may be best described as an intellectual moral maze, a story perfectly of its time and yet one that still resonates today.

Super Hero gamely tries to explain the backstory a bit at the beginning, but trying to keep up as we are plunged into a world of bad guys with outrageous quiffs, super-skilled preschoolers and green-skinned martial arts masters with droopy forehead antennae is quite futile. If, however, you can relax and just let it wash over you, Super Hero’s eye candy animation is mesmeric.

This tense dystopian horror-thriller feels geographically non-specific, almost as if it were taking place in some kind of dream world. That touch of hazy vagueness is just right for SA director and co-writer Kelsey Egan’s cracking feature debut (co-written with Emma Lungiswa De Wet).

The pace, which had been so tightly controlled in the first two films, is a curious mess, starting off painfully slowly, then rushing when it really matters.

The sisters themselves reveal a little, mostly because of Serena's unguarded imperiousness; but as a study of sports supercelebrity it's a tad subdued.

The final serving of this three-part confection rarely strays from enjoyable, even if it doesn’t match the seductive sweetness of the first bite.

Saving Mr Banks is an indulgent, overlong picture which is always on the verge of becoming a mess. Thankfully, reliable old Tom Hanks snaps his fingers and – spit, spot – everything more or less gets cleared away.

The whole movie is lit in that fascinatingly artificial honeyglow light, and it runs smoothly on rails – the kind of rails that bring in and out the stage sets for the lucrative Broadway touring version.

This is a sympathetic, serviceable but respectfully unintrusive documentary about the Ukrainian dancer Sergei Polunin.

What’s key is that even though this is a movie about a scoundrel, it’s all very optimistic. Forbes and Wolodarsky keep the frame bright and the filmmaking calls attention to itself only when necessary.

The forthright, punchy screenplay shows Kinoy’s TV background, but there is a galloping energy to the whole drama.

A dopey splatterfest that features one-dimensional characters and a draggy first act that’s eventually won over by creatively immature gross-outs and absurd violence.

The film is very capably made, with forceful, potent performances from Waterston and Fassbender. That franchise title is, however, looking increasingly wrong. It is a bit familiar.

It’s a very mysterious and even bizarre film in many ways, shot in what is becoming Nemes’ signature style: long takes, a persistent closeup on the lead character’s face, and a shallow focus that allows the surrounding reality to intrude only intermittently.

It's a resourceful, distinctive film that builds to a satisfying crescendo.

A fun, disposable watch.

In the end, Gully Boy runs on very traditional lines, and maybe comes too close to cliche, but is always engagingly dead set on entertainment.

The plot is nicked from Henri-Georges Clouzot's Les Diaboliques, full of guttering candles, bumps in the night, and the kind of little shocks you hate yourself for jumping at. [08 Nov 2008, p.53]

Deadpool is neurotic and needy – and very entertaining. An innocent pleasure.

There’s a whiff of familiarity haunting almost every scene and while it would have been rewarding to see Cooke and O’Conner take a few chances or add some more emotional depth, it’s a satisfying enough watch, best viewed with little investment and low expectations.

It is an unsubtle and schematic but very well-acted Brit folk-horror pastiche from the writer-director Alex Garland; it feels like a reverse-engineered version of The League of Gentlemen, with the overt comic intention concealed or denied.

The second Lego Movie is even better than the original: a sophisticated new adventure that gives us a new look at how the universality of the Lego universe was more gendered than we thought.

If anyone other than Hawkins were in this film, it would be very hard to recommend. With her in virtually every scene, it is a lovely, tiny character study.

This film has an audience, certainly, but it feels very derivative.

The raffish charisma and sinister, saturnine handsomeness of Javier Bardem is what raises this movie above the standard of soap-opera … mostly.

Wheatley has made High Rise his story, instead of Ballard’s. That’s fine – but, unfortunately, it’s a less interesting take.

A fascinating film.

Does the film tell us anything we didn't know already? And could anyone expect anything but the most straightforward irony in the title? The answer to both questions is no – but there is undoubted technique, and an authorial address to the audience.

White’s decision to focus on human emotion comes at the expense of some loftier concepts bound up in the story.

It’s brand management dressed up as insight and while it’s not not entertaining, it’s certainly far from particularly revealing, playing more like a PR exercise then a festival-worthy feature.

It’s an engaging and garrulous film, and Hockney is now a cheerful, grandfatherly figure, and an object lesson in taking the boy out of Bradford, and not the other way around.

The on-stage moments of Entertainment are revelatory but, unfortunately, some of the in-between meat of the film doesn’t quite connect.

Twisters is a fun film with some big setpiece scenes, and Ramos and Powell make gallant admirers for Kate. I do think though that the movies still haven’t given Edgar-Jones – so excellent in TV’s Normal People – the well-written big-screen role she deserves. Some spectacular stormy weather, though.

The clunky script feels like it’s been re-drafted and re-drafted to the point of incomprehension – blowing any chance of conveying a message. However well-meaning, it makes for a surprisingly dull watch. That said, my five-and-three-quarter-year-old (and clearly a few other younger people in the cinema) were a bit scared by some of the dicier moments of action-adventure peril.

Muddled, anticlimactic and often diffidently performed, this oddly passionless new movie from Paul Schrader is a disappointment.

It may be just more of the same from Fricke, but with his unique process, another incredible-looking lap around the world is more than welcome.

You might argue that there is a kind of hubris in all this, and its very giganticism condemned it to marginal status and a kind of cultural smallness. But what excitement there is in these folies de grandeur.

The Transfiguration is a character study first and foremost, spending all of its time with Milo. Problem is, he’s so opaque that as a protagonist, he’s completely impenetrable.

For cinephiles, this will be effective propaganda in service of a belief they already hold, a reaffirmation of their purist convictions from a simpatico mind. ... [But it] can sometimes slip into slightness, as Ferrara pads an already slim run time.

There is a tenous narrative logic - in which Jodorowsky himself, dressed in cowboy black, must gun down four desert-dwelling killers - which gives the film a measure of watchability. But it's hardly deep.

It’s a very strong performance from Kendrick, who disturbingly conveys the tiny and not so tiny symptoms of emotional abuse.

[Fahy's] dialed-in performance is thankfully matched by an overarching crispness to the proceedings – just enough flourishes, an enjoyable but not unbearable amount of stress, no wasted time, a perfect match of star, script and style.

Perhaps the film could have got under Charlie’s bland surface more. A creepily watchable drama nonetheless.

Magazine Dreams itself, though flawed by a cumbersome flashback structure in which he is talking to a counsellor, has powerful moments and Majors is very good, especially in the bizarre scene when Killian insists on going onstage at a bodybuilding event just after being beaten up.

The film still feels a tad long for the simple narrative it offers, but moments of visual ingenuity and a deep understanding of psychological suspense show that Kempff is one to watch.

Breezy, comically self-referential and totally likable. But its charms nevertheless feel like they came off an assembly line – one that has been engineered to deliver Marvel-like results, in animated form of course.

Developed by China’s Supreme People’s Procuratorate and directed by butt-kicking luminary Donnie Yen, The Prosecutor is a bizarre mashup of courtroom procedural and action flick; it is just as keen on lionising due process and the “shining light” of Chinese justice as it is on reducing civic infrastructure to smithereens in several standout bouts.

Fatih Akin’s mediocre revenge drama In the Fade is the TV movie of the week: feebly uncontentious and un-contemporary.

Some of the wisecracking dialogue falls a bit flat and the narrative line is occasionally uncertain, but Grainger creates a watchable quarterlife crisis.

In light of the strange, brutal ending that’s more foreshadowed than it seems, it’s hard to work out where Weisse wants to land on issues around the best way to coax talent, especially in fields such as music where you have to put in a relentless amount of hours to achieve the highest results.

There is no accumulation of drama or tension or intellectual revelation and the setpiece shootout is ultimately valueless. What exactly is it saying that we didn’t know already? The wait for Aster to recover his directorial form goes on.

Solid first and third acts can’t disguise a so-so middle section stuffed with conventional story beats.

As a bit of anthropology offering a glimpse into Tibetan life today, it’s perfectly serviceable.

At two and a half hours, Oppenheimer’s strange and ambitious deconstruction of human behaviour – with its bleak but adorning visuals and its novel spin on ideas we’ve seen in The Hunger Games and Yorgos Lanthimos’ Dogtooth – can also be draining. Maybe that’s intentional.

This is an attractively unparochial drama with a bracing interest in excellence.

It generally feels secondhand, though the final musical scene has an authenticity and heart that the rest lacks.

Wonderful entertainment.

The film’s big experiment feels only semi-interesting.

This gentle, authentic-feeling coming-of-age drama from Ukrainian film-maker Kateryna Gornostai premiered at the Berlin festival in 2021. Released in the UK almost a year to the day since the Russian invasion, her film has become unbearably poignant.

A flawed, but interesting drama.

Byrkit’s parable about choices and how they make us who we are has an eerie potency.