It is an odd, mostly compelling yarn, and acted with gusto and shot with real physical commitment to the wide open spaces and raw chill of the elements.

It’s always good to witness Young’s authentic acoustic presence.

Weirdly, I felt that this odd film might have worked better if it was just about the lonely man and the penguin without the Argentinian tyranny – or just about the lonely man and the Argentinian tyranny without the penguin. The real non-CGI bird itself is very sweet.

The soul of the movie isn’t particularly in the human/creature relationship at its center, but in the stunning craftsmanship that surrounds (and in the creature’s case, creates) them.

Tran and Gladstone keep the movie watchable, mixing prickliness and warmth in a situation that’s more common than movies often acknowledge: a partnership where one person is far more invested in parenthood than another.

Shot in tight closeup, Domagalska’s documentary brilliantly conveys the unseen psychological toll of this social work. At the same time, the film overflows with the joy of activism.

However earnest and heartfelt, the film doesn’t tell us nearly enough, or really anything, about Joe.

Jones certainly shows Mr Burton’s sad and dignified loneliness.

Holy Cow is sentimental in the best of ways, with its warmth and hope in human nature.

If only more nostalgic music documentaries could muster such a fun, fierce and full-blooded take on old, familiar material. One to One, against the odds, makes Lennon feel somehow vital again.

The action is serviceable enough, enjoyment based less on deftly staged choreography and more on the catharsis offered to Davis, as president and actor (she has spoken in recent press about the pleasure and freedom the role has provided).

Interestingly, it has the crowd-pleasing energy of Ridley Scott’s Gladiator films. There is real sinew here.

For many, the movie could as well do without the supernatural element, and I admit I’m one of them; I’d prefer to see a real story with real jeopardy work itself out. But there is energy and comic-book brashness

As for Malek’s performance, his line readings and screen presence are very distinctive, but I have to say the moments when he has to present anguished emotion to the camera do not quite work, and feel eccentric.

Full-throttle star turns from Jack Black and Jennifer Coolidge raise laughs but don’t help the perfunctory plotting in this screen take on the game franchise.

Mäkelä is too in bed with his protagonist’s objectives to develop the kind of perspective that might yield richer insights into the life/art trade-off.

The film is elevated by the tender rapport between MacKenzie and Smith; when a film-maker is clearly captivated by their subject, the film can compel viewers to fall in love as well.

The word “messy” is bandied around by its characters but The Life List is far too clean.

The movie is its own show of force in some ways, surely accurate in showing what the soldiers did, moment by moment, though blandly unaware of a point or a meaning beyond the horror.

Deadwyler remains credibly frazzled, pushed towards monstrousness in ways that will be familiar to anyone who homeschooled during Covid, and the bundled figure closing in on her is genuine nightmare fuel. Yet the rest of this hotchpotch never matches it, and flails in trying to explain it away.

Some of the movie’s cartoon mayhem is fun enough. The rest feels like, well, work.

It’s an interesting, strange film, with a key moment withheld from the audience – and yet its omission, and the resulting ambiguity and mystery, is something we are almost supposed to forget about.

Despite its somewhat diffuse centre, Collins’ film still has a straightforward poignancy, with subtle and dignified performances across the board.

Writer-director Sandhya Suri has made a tense, violent and politically savvy crime procedural set in India: a film about sexism, caste bigotry and Islamophobia that doubles as a study in the complex relationship between two female cops, a cynical veteran and a wide-eyed rookie.

As visions of apocalypse go, it’s rather lovely: a world lush with nature, animals learning to get by together.

Forget the adulterated, Communist party-sponsored attempts at blockbusters of the past, self-taught animator Jiaozi’s film is an utterly self-assured pageant of Chinese mythology that, with head-spinning visuals, is a fine technical advertisement for what the country is capable of, in this case on a comparatively small $80m budget.

This works well just as simple drama, directed and performed immaculately, and as a glorious promise of films to come from Lin.

This fudged, pseudo-progressive approach is so tiring you’ll want to put your head in your hands.

There is a kind of solidity and force to the film in its opening act, but its interest dwindles and we get little in the way of either ambition or moment-by-moment humour.

Unfortunately, Bloody Axe Wound doesn’t have quite enough distraction technique, giving the audience far too much time to start wondering how on earth any of this is supposed to hang together.

Her poems, read by Giovanni herself and the actor Taraji P Henson, made the hairs on the back of my neck prickle.

As a comedy, it stops being funny and as a horror it never starts being scary with Johnson’s direction far too drab and lifeless for something so cartoonish and schlocky. Big swing, bigger miss.

McConaughey may be a capable driver, but this is an unwieldy vehicle – oversized, overlong and altogether way too many parts to run smoothly.

Everyone’s stumbling along in a vaguely defined universe, which really only serves as a backdrop to catchy musical numbers that evolve from folk to pop rock.

It’s perfectly adequate for little kids but with little character of its own and a straight-to-download-style blandness.

This is a movie that strains and contorts for its effects; the performances are strong – strong enough to carry the big twist – and Labed might have absorbed Agnieszka Smoczynska’s comparable film The Silent Twins, although that was unselfconscious and heartfelt in a way that this isn’t. It’s a film that feels actorly rather than real.

The film is to its credit much more interested in psychology rather than tech, and the fine lines between avarice, rage and impotence that make the capitalist world go round.

This has cosmic charm aplenty.

Film-maker James Ashcroft has created a scary and intimately upsetting psychological horror based on a story by New Zealand author Owen Marshall set in a care home, a film whose coolly maintained claustrophobic mood and bravura performances make up for the slight narrative blurring towards the end.

German screenwriter Constantine Werner has adapted a story from fantasy author George RR Martin and the resulting dialogue lands like a series of sandbags on a concrete floor; director Paul WS Anderson handles the material with stolid determination.

It’s a great comic turn from Apte who deserves to be better known.

There’s also not really enough fun here, the repetitive nature of the fight scenes – quip, laugh, injury, wince – growing tired fast.

It squanders the talents of its star, especially for this particular brand of unsettling, on a bizarrely paced script that adds up to nothing.

This low-key oddity has the potential for some proper horsepower given the odd but intriguing casting of Peter Dinklage and Shirley MacLaine, but it never manages to build up much comic or dramatic speed – much like Dinklage’s electric scooter, his main mode of transport throughout.

Over-the-top it may be, but Love’s film-making has an attacking force that some of the more respectable Brit films are lacking.

[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.

As a thriller, this is not really thrilling enough. And as a biopic, it’s not necessarily representative of the spirit of the man. But it’s solid enough film-making in a traditional no-frills mode that will always find an audience – even if it’s not particularly trendy.

Peck’s film, in which LaKeith Stanfield narrates a kind of heightened, fictionalised first-person account from Cole’s own writings and diaries, is devastatingly sad. It is the sadness of an artist who becomes estranged, not merely from his homeland, but from his art and his livelihood.

By large, this beastly feature is exactly what you would expect it to be: fashioning itself different but in fact much like the others. A unicorn, this is not.

That’s mostly for the better. The Accountant 2 is a more fun affair than The Accountant, if you’re a fan of very loud shoot ’em ups, nonsensical crime webs and rogue good guys fighting obviously very bad guys, though this outing is sadly missing Anna Kendrick.

It is neither suspenseful nor thrilling, but something else: a movie so confidently ridiculous, so stylishly absurd and so self-aware of its mandate for fun that you can’t help but enjoy it, reasonable wariness – and all reason, really – be damned.

The Electric State is a fundamentally unsatisfying and muddled film, even leaving aside the deja-vu.

Much of it consists of Plankton talking to his frenemies about his marriage. As such, it often feels more like a three-episodes-and-change filibuster than a real movie.

Though the two leads are capably charming – or, in the case of Tiffin, baseline attractive as a nice hometown guy not given much to do – the movie still has the imprint of a tech company’s content assembly line: cheaply made, over-lit, bumpily paced, ludicrously dialed-up characters without much comic payoff.

Steven Soderbergh’s downbeat, affectless tongue-in-cheek spy comedy (“caper” isn’t quite right) is in this new mode, though taking itself to the edge of self-satire, with a few 007 refugees in the cast, efficiently scripted by David Koepp.

Three big names doing a professional job … but the target isn’t found.

Riveting, seamless, at points genuinely shocking, Last Breath exemplifies the possibilities of human collaboration – a feat that has stuck with me and, yes, took my breath away.

It is a strong turn from Anderson, though, whose fans are entitled to wonder if it is she, and not Demi Moore, who deserves this year’s “comeback queen” crown.

Once again, Romanian film-maker Radu Jude has given us a garrulous, querulous movie of ideas – a scattershot fusillade of scorn. It is satirical, polemical, infuriated at the greedy and reactionary mediocrities in charge in his native land and wobbling on an unstable cusp between hope and despair.

The deaths here are neither funny nor scary or even gross enough to linger, we’re all rendered unshockable far too soon.

What could have been a real contender with a few relatively minor tweaks is still a serviceable morsel for those with the right kind of appetite.

It is a mesmeric melodrama, mixing sensuality with a teetering anxiety, balancing on a cliff-edge of disaster.

The subtlety and dignity of Fernanda Torres’s Oscar-nominated performance in Walter Salles’s new film have been rightly praised.

This is an amiably talky film, and yet I never for a moment considered that the central relationship was being presented with anything less than seriousness, and there is much dry comedy to be enjoyed.

One might be tempted to describe West as rocking her huge natural hairdo, but rocking doesn’t do justice to its glorious volume; it is practically a supporting character in its own right, and one that calls to black heroines of yore, such as Pam Grier’s Foxy Brown and Tamara Dobson’s Cleopatra Jones back in the 1970s. Furthermore West has a nice way with a quip and has presence to spare, so while the script doesn’t exactly stretch her acting range, she holds the screen.

It’s eerie, startling — and yet also unexpectedly benign.

Perhaps it is inevitably going to be of limited interest, and as intelligent as the two performances are, neither Whishaw nor Hall is tested very much. But it is an intriguing experiment in recovering the moment-by-moment reality of a lost time and place.

This is a straightforward and edge-free romance for younger teens. The script is laden with examples of what execs will be hoping is authentic Gen Z argot, though lines such as “I am sick and tired of your main character energy” sound like they’ve been plucked from A Handy Guide to Understanding Your Teen.

Hunt, though, gives an excellent performance in the lead role, agilely running the gamut from deadened admin serf and hipster-bar dating veteran, to infatuated young lover, to abuse victim. She brings emotional suppleness and complexity to what is – despite some flaws – a bold and stylish take on the endless samsara of digital romance.

There are touches of above-average streaming craft here, distancing it from the standard Netflix equivalent – an indistinctive yet solid score from Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross, some grand cinematography from Guillermo del Toro fave Dan Laustsen – but the film bears too much of that synthetic Apple feel, as if it was primarily made to show off the abilities of a new iPhone.

Out of agony and chaos, Chinese film-maker Lou Ye has created something mysterious, moving and even profound – a kind of multilayered docu-realist film, evidently inspired by a real-life situation in film production.

Brave it might be, but there’s nothing all that “new” about the world revealed in this latest tired and uninspired dollop of content from the Marvel Cinematic Universe.

Though I was willing myself to enjoy this fourth film, about the heroine’s adventure with a younger man, the Bridget Jones series has frankly run out of steam.

Movements are very fluid, but expressions limited and there are buckets of cartoon gore, in a deep ruddy red that recalls mass-produced tonalities of fake Persian carpets.

If the film is frustratingly nebulous as its layers of reality intermingle, it is a neonatal nightmare that undoubtedly envelops you in its feelbad embrace.

Whatever might have made sense on paper just doesn’t translate to screen, a fun little concept that ends up being something of a drag.

As Valentine’s Day treats go, however, Love Hurts is the cinematic equivalent of a wilted bouquet from a petrol station forecourt.

Overall, this is a likable and well-researched film, but there is something unsatisfying in ignoring the band’s later stages. Perhaps Part II is in the works.

Dog Man is packed with goofy gags that whizz past, with no let up from the hectic pace.

Kinda Pregnant finds its groove in the more grounded and honest. The tiptoeing around big changes in one’s best friendship, the tension between joy and dread, the role of a friend when another is going through something irrevocable all get mentions that hint at something sharper and stickier. But what texture exists gets steamrolled by the loud and extreme.

This is a workmanlike iteration somewhat ploddingly true to its genre, from the style of lighting used for the interviews, to the sweeping, keening strings-led soundtrack, to the almost shocking moments of humour and honesty.

In plot terms there is something unsubtle, unconvincing and even absurd in where it’s all heading.

Mr Nobody Against Putin ultimately stands as both an act of service and a tribute – to a school that once was, to students whose lives were and will be irrevocably changed for the worse by the regime, to a once fruitful job. Talankin has produced a must-watch, indelible document of ideological warfare that echoes far beyond Russia. How’s that for a nobody?

What’s crucially missing is detail, both in the characters themselves and the weight of what they’re going through.

While there’s a cynicism that clearly comes from someone who has done his time in both Los Angeles and the industry, it’s ultimately about something more human, and more unsettling, than just Hollywood. There are, after all, lurkers everywhere.

For a film about advanced technology, it’s all awfully simple.

Chainey is certainly skilled at distracting us, drowning his film in atmosphere and mood to offset the devolving half-baked hokum of his plot.

While the film does happen upon a real, and painful, truth of the problems that come from dating without a label, as things start to devolve, it becomes harder to understand how they ever found themselves here.

There’s bits of misplaced humor, a firm sense of place and promising performances, but frustratingly little magic to be found here.

The aimless and unfunny shenanigans of Atropia never really lead to anything and they certainly don’t lead us anywhere that demands the sudden level of dramatic seriousness that the ending brings about.

The real win here is watching Witherspoon and Ferrell show off, both unrestrained by a harder rating and a more raucous script than the norm and while their escalation of bad behaviour might not be quite as bad as it could have been, they both make for wonderfully petty antiheroes.

As the years go by and the trauma festers, the film grows into something thornier, surprising, beautifully textured and deeply moving.

It’s frustrating to see yet another first-time film-maker overstack their plate in such a way that feels less like the product of impressive ambition and more empty bravado.