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

Zahler has a way with action, and the set pieces are inventive and nasty, with an unflinching eye for violence. Such style and confidence is impressive. But after three movies, his increasingly morose characters’ world-weariness is becoming wearying in itself; a little more light and shade here and there would easily take this cult director to the next level. That is, if he wants to go.

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.

It’s a film in need of a tighter edit with a script in need of a sharper polish, an imperfect franchise-launcher that nonetheless represents significant progress for DC.

What makes the film most successful are the four performers. The standout is Baker (better known as rapper Machine Gun Kelly) who plays Tommy Lee with both a sweet naivety and an insidious mischievousness that make some of the darker moments sneak up on you without feeling unearned.

It’s a sentimental film about New York and the way it sees itself: tough, big-hearted, assimilated and patriotic.

This is a fluent, watchable piece of work, though not quite as lucid as it might have been. A poignant tribute, at any rate, to the lost innocence of skateboarding.

Her film reaches the audience-friendly highs of a studio comedy while retaining an indie sensibility, both in its visuals and its tone, and coupled with the script’s rooted awareness of the moment we’re now in, it feels fresh, a film that will be rewatched and quoted, held on a pedestal by those who understand its necessity.

Hare cleverly suggests Nureyev’s mixture of courage, hauteur, emotional damage and cool self-appraisal; the Soviet authorities cannot threaten him through his family because he long ago left them behind. An athletic, confident, undemanding film.

The fascinating story of Elizabeth Holmes and the Theranos scandal is frustratingly underexplored in Alex Gibney’s disappointing new film.

As a film-maker, Larson shows promise, and as a comic actor she shows genuine talent. With a less affected, more genuine script, Larson could star in and direct a great comedy. Unicorn Store is not it.

Captive State is imperfectly constructed, at times frustratingly so, but it’s trying, doggedly, to do something different and given the bland efficiency of so many wide-releasing sci-fi movies, that’s hard to fault.

Their singing is robustly and winningly performed, and the whole thing is heartfelt. Nice also to see Maggie Steed as the local pub’s landlady. It’s pretty goofy but fun.

There’s just one problem. It’s mostly the same jokes over and over: cute kids cursing and not understanding sex stuff.

The sheer sustained intensity of the drama and performances carry it through.

Hamer and Gault won the day in a hail of submachine fire, but even their hagiography can’t hide that they’re history’s losers.

Morris handles a delicate balancing act with an expected ease, the work of a satirist with so much to say yet with an awareness that saying less leads to so much more.

The fiercely charismatic, mesmeric gaze of Lupita Nyong’o holds the movie together, and I have to say that without her presence, the movie’s final spasm of anarchic weirdness might have lost its grip. She radiates a force-field of pure defiance.

Joyous, outrageous and slyly mournful.

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

Gyllenhaal is terrific as a teacher and wannabe poet who exploits a child prodigy in this gripping psychological drama.

At all events, it pays due homage to Edwards as a courageous pioneer.

It’s an enjoyable enough way to spend two hours but without any commentary or real depth, it’s in need of a bit more suspense or conflict to really oil the wheels, the film too often ambling along when it should be racing.

I wanted a clearer, more central story for Captain Marvel’s emergence on to the stage, and in subsequent films – if she isn’t simply to get lost in the ensemble mix – there should more of Larson’s own wit and style and, indeed, plausible mastery of martial arts. In any case, Captain Marvel is an entertaining new part of the saga.

What is interesting about Sauvage is that it shows how savagely boring Leo’s life is, quite a lot of the time.

It is a haunting portrait of emotional undeadness.

The script, inspired by Chomko’s grandparents’ marriage, throws up plenty of authentic-looking observations of life with Alzheimer’s.

It always finds new, invariably cinematic ways to nudge us towards its final leap into the abyss. Cronin feels like a real find for our especially insecure moment.

Foxtrot is a movie from Israeli writer-director Samuel Maoz that is structurally fascinating yet also structurally flawed: its accumulations of ambiguity and mystery are jettisoned by a whimsical final reveal.

Comedy and irony are not allowed to encroach on the film’s upbeat message, and the drama doesn’t reach out beyond a wrestling fanbase.

The result is a stunning project of historical preservation – no narration, no cutaway interviews, no recreations, just original material synced with some music and the occasional diagram.

It’s clear that they want to run it as meritocratically as possible, but what’s interesting is how the criteria for what talent is and who gets to judge it come up for debate.

It’s a conventional film in many ways but one that slowly and effectively builds to a remarkably rousing climax, displaying an act of overwhelming ingenuity that’s hard to deny.

Even without Liam Neeson’s bizarre promotional “rape revenge” anecdote, this violent movie would leave a weird taste in the mouth, lumbered as it is with odd sub-Coen, sub-Tarantino stylings.

Undeniably uplifting, even if the string-laden score strains too hard to tweak the tear ducts, this US-made documentary tracks a running group of recovering addicts and paroled convicts who train for marathons together.

There is passion and compassion here, and Labaki’s film brings home what poverty and desperation mean, and conversely what love and humanity mean.

On the Basis of Sex is a solid, often impassioned film, but too often its worst instincts take over, and cliches stack up faster than legal documents.

Duplass and his co-writer, director Alex Lehmann, deliver this strange concoction – an improv bromance mixed with a tragic love story – with delicacy.

Hu provides no easy resolutions, and evidently found none himself. This epic of futility will have to stand as an epitaph for an extremely promising career cut short.

It is more of a holiday romance and the well-intentioned performances lead nowhere.

Two hours in this director’s company is a pleasure.

Giovannesi’s movie is watchable enough, but often looks like a smoothed-out, planed-down version of Garrone’s Gomorrah: Gomorrah without the rough edges, like a classy television version.

Instant Family retains the obvious appeal of watching basically nice people attempt a fundamentally decent thing for a few hours. The shamelessly optimistic finale may even leave you with something in your eye, dammit.

It all works pretty well until the abrupt ending lets all the air out of the balloon. The dream-team pairing of Abbott and Wasikowska, two of the most interesting, subtle and risk-loving performers of their generation, is a huge compensation.

Audiences may come to this film expecting the conventional pleasures of a spy thriller – excitement, tension, suspense – along with the additional values associated with the very best of the genre: character nuance, emotional complexity, plausible human dilemma. The Operative utterly defeats all of these hopes, chiefly in being at all times extremely boring.

Mr Jones is a bold and heartfelt movie with a real Lean-ian sweep.

The Kindness of Strangers is one of those terrible ideas for a film: ensemble dramas that are superficially attractive because of all the big names shoehorned into the cast-list.

The movie is not without interest, but I found it mannered, derivative and opaque.

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.

Apart from its grisliness, its hopelessness, and its pointlessness, what strikes you most about this true-crime movie is its brownness.

What begins as a sprightly, shrewd, visually striking satire from Macedonian director Teona Strugar Mitevska deflates in its second act into something unconvincing, sophomoric and dramatically redundant.

Writer-director Isabel Coixet has taken a real-life love story from 20th-century LGBT Spanish history and turned it into something bafflingly passionless, joyless and excessively tasteful, an anti-alchemy assisted by stately monochrome photography that makes every frame look like a postcard from an art shop.

The speeds on such narrow, winding public roads are hair-raising and superbly photographed, the crashes spectacular and the riders far more likable than anyone involved in Formula One. Particularly engaging is the zanily amusing, leathered lunatic Guy Martin, a Lincolnshire lorry repair mechanic by day.

It’s a film jam-packed with very good actors and big names, and suffused with a puppyish willingness to please. But where is the bite?

None of the young stars shine as John Boyega did in ATB, but this movie is sentimental in all the right places, and impossible to dislike.

In the course of a mammoth, horribly absorbing four-hour film from Charles Ferguson we are immersed in a world of milky TV news footage, big lapels, bulbous combovers, dirty tricks, sweat, jowls and guilt.

An arrestingly bizarre experience.

The film’s relative failure to engage with the more quotidian details of Colvin’s behind-the-scenes existence is a shame, because it is here that some real clues to her personality might have been found.

It spends its time among unfeasibly beautiful young people in microscopically tiny swimming costumes, and moves with them in a trance of heightened physicality, drifting across beaches, bars and dancefloors. The mood is dreamy unseriousness qualified occasionally by temporary stabs of jealousy or misery. The sexiness isn’t promiscuous exactly; more directionless.

An inevitable yet staggeringly unnecessary follow-up to the surprise horror hit turns a nifty concept into an exhaustingly convoluted mess.

In a fun, glossy take down of age-old genre tropes, Rebel Wilson wakes up in an alternate universe, dominated by romantic comedy cliches.

In picking at a system until it’s threaded, High Flying Bird is a classic Soderbergh construct.

It’s a film with love at its root, both familial and romantic, and Jenkins fills so much of it with a radiating warmth.

It’s a curiously underwhelming, muted, often plodding two hours that fails to reach the emotional highs and devastating lows one would expect from the material.

After India decriminalised homosexuality last September, many wondered anew: what would a Bollywood romcom look and sound like with a non-straight protagonist? The answer, it transpires, is: much the same as any other Bollywood romcom.

It’s a fiery, flawed, often stunningly made film that provokes uncomfortable discussion, rather like the Richard Wright novel it was based on, although purists might argue over some key changes.

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 competently made but utterly vacant, a forgettable indie fading fast.

The Souvenir is an artefact in the highest auteur register. Its absence of tonal readability is a challenge. But there is also a cerebrally fierce, slow-burn passion in its austere, unemphasised plainness.

The Report is an angry, urgent film that rarely raises its voice, smartly conveying inhumanity and injustice without unnecessary drama. I found it thrilling.

Official Secrets is a well-intentioned retelling of a daunting act of courage and as a vehicle for informing more people of who Katharine Gun is, it’s effective, carefully laying out the incremental stakes as well as her noble intentions. Credit for this however lies almost solely with Knightley.

Arguably the film’s biggest problem is that it’s less laugh-out-loud hilarious and more deserving of the odd casual smirk.

It’s a shaggy, wistful film that acts as a heartfelt tribute to both a city and a friendship and when the cutesy quirk that surrounds it is dialled down, we’re able to appreciate the underpinning earnestness.

Knock Down The House is far more effective when it is about the people and the process, not landing quips.

What this by-the-numbers approach lacks in artistry it makes up for in an avalanche of facts.

It’s a slight film at times but one that builds to a crescendo of emotion.

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.

Alita: Battle Angel is a film with Imax spectacle and big effects. But for all its scale, it might end up being put on for 13-year-olds as a sleepover entertainment. It doesn’t have the grownup, challenging, complicated ideas of Ghost in the Shell. A vanilla dystopian romance.