The scenes have no fire or lightness and sometimes they are embarrassing. ... Sachs is such a talented film-maker, but this is a baffling misstep.

A luxuriously watchable and satirical suspense drama.

Here’s that Hollywood rarity – a sequel that’s better than the original. It’s wittier, less frenetic and introduces fresh characters and a nice scene of strategic furball vomming.

It never quite catches fire, but it has a curious atmosphere of its own: menacing, pregnant with unease.

Castillo’s talent for spiritually attuned atmospherics could be her USP among Chile’s current crop of directors with idiosyncratic slants on their country’s recent past.

There’s a rare unpredictability that initially proves alluring, at least until that confusion starts to feel less intentional.

Mélanie Thierry does her best in the lead as Duras, but her character is maddeningly flat and dull.

The performers are left with very little to work with and while Hammer does find away of making the most of his haunted alcoholic, Johnson and Zazie Beetz, two wonderful actors, are stranded with hopelessly one-dimensional roles.

It’s a film that’s good enough that you want it to be better, a rare genre example of less not proving to be more.

This is very much a sympathetic fly-on-the-wall with Team Chelsea, but, considering the high drama of Manning’s life, the resultant film is muted and disjointed, and given to impressionistic images – such as landscapes out of car windows – when really the time could have been spent telling us more.

It is lively, colourful and genuinely funny, and doesn’t break what didn’t need fixing about the original.

Quite simply, I just defy anyone with red blood in their veins not to respond to the crazy bravura of Tarantino’s film-making, not to be bounced around the auditorium at the moment-by-moment enjoyment that this movie delivers.

Porumboiu gives us a knotty, twisty, nifty plot that’s quite involved but hangs together well, and there’s an amusing juxtaposition of gloomy, rainy Bucharest and the sunny terrain of La Gomera. We also get a neat and unexpected coda.

It is an involving story, with a strong lead performance.

I felt that we were not permitted much access to the character’s innermost thoughts, and so some of the film’s romance, and its fatalism, did not have the piercing impact as the visual masterstrokes. But there’s no doubting Diao’s style.

Kapadia’s film is a gripping account of Maradona’s playing career until the mid-90s, though it is flawed by a lack of new material of the sort he had for his previous film about Amy Winehouse.

A superbly elegant, enigmatic drama ... I was on the edge of my seat.

The director may want to confront these issues head on – the racism and violence just below the surface. Indeed, raising it above the surface is the point. But much of the drama and humanity get blitzed by the molotov cocktails.

A strange, faintly frustrating but diverting film.

Very few films can make you scared and excited at the same time. Just like the lighthouse beam, this is dazzling and dangerous.

Malick does succeed, to some degree, on his own terms; he attempts to give some (stylised) sense of this man’s inner life: his emotional and spiritual architecture. It is admirably serious but static.

Port Authority is vehement, urgent and sensual – not perfect, and I would have liked to have seen more extended dance sequences. But it is made with storytelling gusto and heart.

Opaque and unrewarding.

The finale is more of a schmaltzy salute to the guide-dog ethos than intimate documentation of the new owners’ stories. The street training sequences, though – shot in swooping knee-high Steadicam – are thrilling; mini kerbside action movies.

The film is fun, but, for all its inventiveness, it’s a bit tame, with its nice-but-dim hero. But Diamantino is never dull.

It’s an immersive and exotic experience. Howard is a revelation.

As ever, Almodóvar has made a film about pleasure, which is itself a pleasure: witty, intelligent and sensuous.

It’s fierce, open and angry, unironised and unadorned, about a vital contemporary issue whose implications you somehow don’t hear on the news.

Compared with Mia Hansen-Løve’s resonant French house drama Eden, or Michael Winterbottom’s kaleidoscopic 24 Hour Party People, these beats sound tinny.

None of this is represented in any compelling dramatic style, and the actors – all very talented and assured – have perhaps not had clear enough direction. It is a mood piece. Whose mood leads nowhere.

It is a really strange film, beginning in a kind of ethno-anthropology and documentary style, becoming a poisoned-herd parable or fever dream and then a Jacobean-style bloodbath. It is an utterly distinctive film-making, executed with ruthless clarity and force.

Technically this is competent if not remarkable film-making.

It is presented with no mystery and scant wonder; instead, we get two hours of flatly professional procedural.

Crispian Mills directs with zip, throwing things together with a breathlessness that largely distracts from the fact that, for a horror-comedy, Slaughterhouse Rulez is neither particularly scary nor especially funny. But it does have an amiable sort of charm.

Atlantique may not be perfect, but I admired the way that Diop did not simply submit to the realist mode expected from this kind of material, and yet neither did she go into a cliched magic-realist mode, nor make the romantic story the film’s obvious centre. Her film has a seductive mystery.

Rocketman is an honest, heartfelt tribute to Elton John’s music and his public image. But the man itself eluded it.

As per the two previous films, Stahelski cranks up the body count with a string of fight sequences so balletic you might forget you’re watching violence – until Reeves sinks a knife into a man’s eye. But, three movies in, franchise bloat is beginning to set in; the dead dog jokes are definitely wearing thin.

As with so many of Denis’ films, the point is to contrive an overwhelmingly powerful mood and moment, an almost physiological sensation, this one incubated in the vast, cold reaches of space. It throbbed and itched with me long after the film was over.

When The Unseen works it has an interestingly airless atmosphere, a weirdly disconnected, alienated quality that mimics the couple’s fraught emotional state. But the tension and sense of fear were lacking.

The film’s old-fashioned nature is a plus and a minus, delivering us the satisfying beats we’ve come to expect from such a story, yet also giving it a dusty, dated feel, playing like a mid-90s TV movie stumbled upon late at night.

Jim Jarmusch’s undeadpan comedy is laconic, lugubrious and does not entirely come to life, despite many witty lines and tremendously assured performances by an A-list cast.

I felt wrung out at the end of this film. How incredible must it have been for those who were there in person.

A couple of scenes in Destination Wedding fall so calamitously flat I had the disconcerting sensation I was watching the film dubbed in a foreign language or for a spoofed internet meme.

The romantic relationship with the “good Nazi” is a little too glib (quite as it was in the film version of Suite Française) and the camp scenes have a misjudged sheen of romanticism and come perilously close to the bad-taste border. But Stenberg’s performance is good.

It’s an intriguing, startlingly restrained and even cerebral piece of work from Ferrara, an unimpeachably serious homage, with an assured lead performance from Willem Dafoe.

Anne Hathaway detonates a megaton blast of pure unfunniness in this terrifying film.

Wine Country is scrappy and, at times, misjudged but it’s also very, very funny with a cast of women whose collective charm makes the patchier moments forgivable. Watching it with wine helps too.

Cheung shows promise as a shotmaker and stager of blunt-force action. If somebody cares to arm him with a script editor and production grants, we could have a discovery of sorts on our hands.

While it’s nice to see Cardellini nab a rare lead (in the middle of an unusually fruitful time with turns in Green Book, Avengers: Endgame and Netflix comedy Dead to Me), the script fails to provide her with enough meat, despite her predicament, ultimately stranding her with a rather standard shrieking mother role.

With a giddy irreverence and a cavalcade of stupendous comedic performers, Long Shot is outrageously funny.

By their very nature, dog lovers may be more forgiving and enthusiastic, but much of it is reaction shots of trained mutts, right through to the closing-credit snapshots of the crew’s Forever Friends, this movie is almost literally all puppy eyes.

Although this film can be a bit hokey and uncertain on narrative development, the puppyish zest and fun summoned up by Curtis and Boyle carry it along.

A smart, often ingenious, new film ... What’s most exceptional about the end result is just how deftly [the director] weaves the enraging horror of a racially motivated police shooting into a zippy genre piece.

Without Reynolds this would be pretty run-of-the-mill; with him it’s a perfectly acceptable family movie. Given the history, that’s a giant leap for Pokémon-kind.

The Intruder isn’t bringing much that’s new to the table but what it does, it does well, and there’s something to admire about its stark efficiency, dragging us along with full force, even if we know exactly where we’re going.

It’s a star vehicle that starts and ends with its star, the film around him struggling to justify its existence. Efron is wicked, the film less so.

This is a very male world and perhaps the inner life of Edith remains a mystery (as perhaps it might have been for Tolkien), but its earnestness and idealism are refreshing.

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.

This is the sort of British movie that I can imagine being made by Michael Reeves or Robin Hardy back in the 60s and 70s, drama that’s all about strong characterisation and heady atmosphere.

What a commanding performance from Cassidy. And Scott Walker’s orchestral score offers a sinister caress.

Curiously flat ... From the opening few frames through to a clunky introductory sequence, there’s something frustratingly off-balance about Georgetown.

It’s overripe and improbable, but you’d need a flinty heart to resist the message of solidarity, that if you spend time with someone, anyone, you’ll find common ground.

A little more nuance and historical depth would have been welcome, but this will be serviceable entertainment when it gets to streaming, as long as viewers have a supply on hand.

Gavras has seized his chance, staging this uptempo, carnivalesque crime pic with panache and wit.

A tense, knotty puzzle ... It’s a drama that moves like a thriller.

Elsie Fisher is magnificent as a vulnerable teenager facing trouble at school and at home in Bo Burnham’s gripping drama.

Birdman is a delicious and delirious pleasure.

I have to admit, in all its surreal grandiosity, in all its delirious absurdity, there is a huge sugar rush of excitement to this mighty finale, finally interchanging with euphoric emotion and allowing us to say poignant farewells.

It’s a flawed, undigested film that, like Sorrentino’s movie Youth, is knowingly indulgent of old men’s foibles. But there is one great scene in which Berlusconi, just to prove he’s still got it, cold-calls a woman out of the blue posing as a realtor and tries to sell her an apartment off-plan.

It really is such a blatant copycat job, ripping off Cars note for note and lifting so many elements – from talking driverless cars to the dim-witted, buck-toothed sidekick – they might as well have called it Carz.

The incessant bloodshed is delivered with imaginative aplomb in this witty reboot of the 90s trash franchise.

With its clifftop bullfights, expansive Pritam songs and squillion-rupee budget, nobody is likely to come out feeling short-changed. Yet the sight of multigenerational superstars navigating a messily unravelling plot suggests Kalank’s lasting value may be as a carefully colour-graded selfie of an industry – and, in this election year, perhaps an entire nation – in flux.

The Fleabag star’s detailed performance in this missing-child thriller makes its myriad implausibilities all the more dismaying.

In all her signature deadpan intimidation, Huppert somehow gives the impression of being an exceptionally intelligent and self-possessed person who has never before acted in a film.

Despite fine performances from Gina Rodriguez and Lakeith Stanfield, the debut film from Jennifer Kaytin Robinson never strays from the genre’s cliches.

Everyone here emotes like they’re acting in an electric toothbrush ad.

This is a long film, but there is something so horribly compelling about its unhurried slouch towards the precipice.

The film itself fails to overwhelm – mostly proceeding along dully familiar lines and anything but radical.

There are scenes that snap together nicely with some sharp and nuanced observations. But the film is saddled with uninteresting surface-level characters. There’s a phoniness exuding from the entire project, made all the more discouraging since the plot-light, shaggy dog story is trying to feel so real.

Under Slee’s direction, even the teensiest creepy crawlies find themselves noted and taxonomized; it’s encouraging to see a format that generally sets audiences to non-specific gawping attempting to focus and refine our gaze.

The eye is caught and sometimes diverted – with its Slush Puppie palette, Wonder Land is uncommonly pretty – but very little about it sticks.

This is the most insidious type of knockoff: the one that sincerely expects you to believe that it’s the real thing. Leave it to Netflix to take the fun out of incompetence.

Buckley provides a vitamin boost in every scene.

But we’re not fooled. This is an elaborate Dadaist joke, the funniest part of which is that it’s not in the least bit funny.

It couldn’t be more boring than this. It seems counterintuitive to say it, but there is something pretty soulless about this new Hellboy franchise.

The comedy is fundamentally hobbled by the split in narrative focus between Jordan and April. We are never sure who is the heroine here, who has the comedy underdog status, who we are supposed to be rooting for.

An opaque, but beautifully composed film.

But the storytelling is unevolved compared with the animation.

Happy As Lazzaro itself is a weightless enigma, an unfathomable promise of happiness, gently tugging you upward, like a balloon on the end of a string.

It’s a supernatural chiller about our fear of death - and our longing for death as an end to this fear. This brutally effective and convulsively disturbing story is something to compare with WW Jacobs’s classic Edwardian ghost story The Monkey’s Paw or maybe even Franz Kafka’s stage-play The Guardian of the Tomb.

The violence was for me almost unwatchable, but it’s a well-made and worryingly plausible film.

It’s a very powerfully performed, intimate piece, perhaps inspired at some level by the classic adventure The Treasure of the Sierra Madre. Mullan is very good at suggesting the careworn wisdom of someone who has to be a father figure, or even grandfather figure to men who don’t have his skill in self-control and self-denial.

Sometimes, a good legend is all the embellishment you need.

This movie is ridiculous.

It’s appropriate that this absorbing, tender documentary has been driven by a surge of fan loyalty and love.

It’s written and directed by Liam O Mochain with the kind of inoffensive hot-water-bottle-laughs you wouldn’t think possible after Father Ted. Well, I say inoffensive, but one of the vignettes – about an uptight bridezilla whose sole character trait is her desperation to get married – is depressingly unfeminist.

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 has been painfully de-tusked.